Vernal Pools and the Trifecta

In case you missed the election of Tea Partier LePage to the Blaine House last November, the Press Herald today wonderfully illuminated the conservative shift Maine has taken.

The top left article describes how Maine’s AG is going to join a Florida-initiated anti-health care bill lawsuit.

The top right article goes into the wonderful relationship the Blaine House is forging with national civil rights groups.

And in the bottom right article, the governor wants to bulldoze vernal pools. 

At Scarborough Downs, we’d call that a trifecta.

For a minute, let’s explore the vernal pools article.  Make no bones about it, this administration wants to remove any barrier to development.   Need to bulldoze Bambi to build a WalMart.  Do it.  Need to steamroll a salamander to build a business park with no bus access miles from downtown.  Get out of the way.  In a LePagian world, developers lay down a hunk of cash and whatever they want is instantly built regardless of its impact to the surrounding community or environment.  Jobs trump everything.

The cool thing about the game Civilization is that you choose what world you want to build.  Choose Genghis Khan and you get a warrior society that scorches and burns.  Pick Caesar and you build temples and get culture.  The point is that our environment is dictated by the choices we make.

The current administration would turn Maine into Florida.  Need a 6 lane highway connecting plazas and gas stations.  Do it.  Need a low density housing development called Woody Corners where everyone has to get in their SUVs to go a tenth of a mile to get to the gate.  Build it.  Pretty soon you have everything the world can offer, and nothing. 

It’s important that we give communities tools to fight rampant development from developers that care very little about the world we live in and very much about the money in their pocket.  And it’s important that we choose our words carefully with groups that help underrepresented people in a state that could use more underrepresented people.  And it’s important that we help Mainers with health insurance, and at the least not fight the efforts of people trying to do the same. 

Anyways, the Press Herald glaringly, and sadly, shows us what elections are about.  So choose carefully.

Deconstructing Diarrhea

I love arguments.  Give me some tenets and some ground to fight and I’ll go to town.   But I was recently handed an argument built on diarrhea, as a lot of Democrats have lately, and now I have no idea what to do.  Here’s how it happens (follow along with the original article here)

First, take a news story that everyone has heard of and use it as a solid lead in to your argument. 

When McDonald's told federal regulators in a recent memo that it would be "economically prohibitive" for its insurance carrier to continue to cover its 30,000 hourly workers unless it received a waiver from the ObamaCare requirement that 80% of premiums for such minimed plans be spent on medical care, alarm bells went off in the White House.

Ok, seems like it’s going somewhere.  The ObamaCare reference is starting to smell a bit though, a little like Mallory after lunch. 

Inject Nancy Pelosi.  This is important because you need a villain.  Someone everyone can hate.  At this point forget policy, or what’s better for the country, or anything of any substance.

Suddenly the "affordable health care for Americans" that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke of when she passed a bill no one had read was revealed to be an unaffordable fraud that threatened to throw untold numbers of young workers into the ranks of the uninsured in an already precarious election year.

I like verbs we’re using so far.  Alarms in the White House.  Revealed.  Like it’s kindred pooh, this article stirs up emotion immediately.  And then inject a hint of socialism.  Like eating six tacos the night before, this is the stuff that can really clear out a church.

Remember the days of sharing the burden and spreading the wealth? These 30 waivers exempt coverage for around a million workers, teachers, farmers and young people who can now go to the polls with a little less angst.

Wait, wait, before we get to the crescendo, I need to try and argue something here so let me get into the meat (no pun intended … really).  If I read this correctly, and it’s hard to read pooh literally, the main argument is that the waiver helps teachers, farmers, and young people and so they want to vote for the people who are helping them.   I’m confused.  Why is this bad?

By the time we get to the end, like the taco induced mess, pooh covered words are just flowing out. Unconstitutional.  Lied to.  Fraud.  And so the reader is left no other conclusion.  Clearly the crap is beautiful and great and telling me something that I need to know.  WTF?

Me?  As someone who loves an argument, I have absolutely no idea what to argue here.  I’m staring at a big pile of festering shit and wondering, why is everyone so mesmerized.

I’ve been hard on the administration lately.  But in truth, the author of this article knows that health care exchanges aren’t scheduled until 2014 to give insurers time to build them.  And without exchanges, there’s no competition or availability for low-cost insurance plans.  And mandates are needed to collect premiums from healthy young people.  Otherwise, you can’t support insurance plans that cover everyone.  And that include preventative medicine, so that we don’t wait to treat someone until they have a Diabetes-induced heart attack because they couldn’t afford a doctor’s visit. 

What’s hard to believe is that people really rally behind this.  Forget that the new insurance plans will be better for McDonald’s workers or that to get to this better environment, the DHHS is doing what the bill said to do to prevent current insurance plans from dropping.  No, it’s so much more in these days to criticize change.  (And it’s so refreshing to hear it from investors.com, who is, after all, for the little guy)

Well, go ahead everyone and clap for your pile of pooh.  Leading up to the election, we seem to be doing a lot of this lately.  I’ll be in the bathroom celebrating the invention of the toilet.

Al-Qaeda recruits Mr. Ed

Well, not really but Amelie would lose it if she watched this video of a bomb squad dealing with a rogue playground pony. 

In other news, watch this thing blow up (my prediction): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/health/policy/12health.html 

And did you know that China spends 9% of GDP on infrastructure, Europe 5% and the US 2.5%.  Why?  Probably because we’re investing so much in techniques to blow up ponies.  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/business/economy/12view.html?wpisrc=nl_wonk

It’s Getting Real

Several cool things are converging in Washington.

1) Obama’s Executive Order in December 2009 which directs departments to make their content more “transparent, participatory, and collaborative”.

2) Stimulus initiatives – like this one on page 136 of the Stimulus Bill (HR1) that directs $40M to be “allocated at the discretion of the HHS Secretary provided, That the funding … shall be used to accelerate the development and dissemination of research assessing the comparative effectiveness of health care treatments and strategies”

3) Health Care Bill mandates (somewhere in here)

Taken together, we’re finally starting to see some of the benefits of a government working on a problem.  Today, the HHS is announcing  http://www.hhs.gov/open/ which provides a central repository for health related data sets, tools, and records including standards on health related data.

It’s not glamorous. It’s data.  But it’s government working.  And that’s cool.