Left in the West - Front Page

Molnar opposes NWE powerline plan

Jay Stevens — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:00:15 GMT

On one hand, we need to produce "clean" energy. Montana is uniquely situated to provide American consumers with clean wind energy. There's a lot of wind in the state. To do so, we'd need more high-power lines that run out of the state to the markets that consume energy. Like California.

On the other hand, the power lines would have to cut across the state, and there's a strong possibility Montanans would have to compete with Californians for the energy produced in Montana. That would probably mean higher rates for Montanans.

Brad Molnar - the highest ranking Republican state office holder! - has vowed to kill a Northwestern Energy project to build such a power line. Now, my first impulse is to disagree with Molnar, simply because he's not exactly your most rational public servant. (Seriously. Just check out an interview with Molnar on Montana Headlines.) If Molnar's against something, it's probably pretty good, right? But..sitting here in ol' mom's basement munching CoCo Puffs, I'm inclined to...*gasp*...agree with Molnar. Maybe.

Here's the thing. We hear all the time about making the United States "energy independent." Which essentially means making the country's energy consumption equal the country's energy production. So...why not make Montana energy independent? Can we build the wind farms and ensure service to Montana ratepayers first? (Incidentally, I think there's more that could be done here making the state energy independent. Lease state lands for wind farms...and pursue a bold state lending plan, say, to make Montanans' homes energy efficient. Crank up those building codes! Etc & co.)

Or maybe I'm just a fool. Maybe Northwestern Energy high-power lines are what we need. Harness the free market, right? Use the tools that are there. NWE builds the lines to charge higher rates for power...which means they have incentive to produce more power, which would eventually lower prices. Right? Right?

Who am I kidding...

The CBO scores the public option...

Jay Stevens — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:49:20 GMT

Check it out:

According to a pair of Capitol Hill sources, preliminary estimates from the Congressional Budget Office suggest that a strong public option--the kind that the House of Representatives is putting in its reform bill--should net somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 billion in savings over ten years.

Let's see. A strong public option is wildly popular...and it would actually raise revenue? Something tells me though that Republicans and conservative Democrats will still oppose it...

Links...

Jay Stevens — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:37:33 GMT

Tester is taking some heat over how he's handling a Montana Wilderness bill. Bill Schneider: "Wilderness and forest management are huge issues for most Montanans, and I'm delighted to see Senator Tester finally start to think about fulfilling his campaign promise to protect Montana's roadless lands, but this secretive, exclusive process of developing this major legislation is embarrassing." Even the Missoulian calls him out. I have to admit, I was hoping for a little more boldness from Jon.

John Adams has an interesting post on the fractures in Montana's anti-abortion movement over Rick Jore's "personhood" amendment.

Shahid Haque-Hausrath reminds us that everyone should be a part of healthcare reform, including immigrants.

Conservative House Democrats look to scale back healthcare reform even further.

CIA director Leon Panetta admitted had misled, and withheld information from, Congress since 2001. That's shocking! Before 2001 they weren't lying to Congress?

Glenn Greenwald goes after the Obama administration for continuing the Bush policies of imprisoning detainees indefinitely - even if they've been acquitted at their trial.

Also in the Greenwald piece is a shameful reference to a statement made NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard on why NPR doesn't use the word, "torture," in reference to US interrogation techniques: namely, that the US has "good" reasons. Kevin Drum has the actual quote. Unbelievable and completely ridiculous.

Uh oh: "In normal years the Amazon alone absorbs three billion tons of carbon, more than twice the quantity human beings produce by burning fossil fuels. But during the 2005 drought, this process was reversed, and the Amazon gave off two billion tons of carbon instead, creating an additional five billion tons of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. That's more than the total annual emissions of Europe and Japan combined." Scientists suspect that rising sea temperatures were responsible for the drought - which means we might already have kicked off an irreversible series of events that will bake our planet...

Freeways are even worse for your health than you think.

The Bellows' ryan opines we should have more toll roads, and no, it's not regressive taxation.

Dahlia Lithwick on Sarah Palin: "When America is finally ready to reckon with the phenomenon that was Sarah Palin, I suspect we will discover that whatever she represents actually had less to do with her gender, class, or ideology than we now believe. It's easy to look at the soon-to-be-former governor of Alaska as an iconic feminist, a path-breaking working mother, or noble rabble-rousing populist. But when the dust settles, the lesson may be that she was simply a woman who made no sense."

Suprise! The F-22 is even less reliable than we thought....

It's bad enough John Ensign was schtupping a staffer while giving lip service to marriage and family values. But how pathetic is it that Ensign's parents paid the woman off?

"Fox & Friends" Brian Kilmeade jumps the shark.

Win by winning

Jay Stevens — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:27:17 GMT

From today's LA Times:

Reporting from Waukon, Iowa -- One is a thrifty soybean farmer from Iowa with a penchant for righteous speeches about government waste. The other is a Stanford-educated lawyer from a Montana ranching family who looks uncomfortable leading a debate.
Despite more than 60 years in Congress between them, Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican, and Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat, are outsiders -- loners whose independent streaks make colleagues wary, sometimes even mistrustful.
But unlikely as it may seem, the partnership between these two slightly eccentric men may hold the key to overhauling the nation's sprawling healthcare system -- a legislative grail that has eluded the giants of the Senate for more than half a century.
In the face of strident criticism from colleagues in both parties, Baucus (chairman of the Senate Finance Committee) and Grassley (the panel's senior Republican) are laboring to fashion a series of compromises on healthcare that might win the support of a bipartisan majority on Capitol Hill.

(A) There will be no bipartisanship on health care reform, because the Republican party's goal is to sabotage any and all reform. I'm am completely flabbergasted by Baucus' continued attempts to rope Grassley into the process. It...will...not...happen.

(B) The report kept mentioning the "middle ground" in health care. Let's be frank. A fully accessible and robust public option for health insurance is the "middle ground" - among the American people. The "middle ground" batted so casually around here is the ground between right-wing Republicans and pro-corporate Democrats.

When this happens -

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday ordered Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to drop a proposal to tax health benefits and stop chasing Republican votes on a massive health care reform bill.

- you know you're really banging your head against a brick wall. I mean, it's not as if Harry Reid has been aggressively progressive on this issue...or any other issue for that matter.

A lot of folks who dislike Max Baucus' stance on health care often cite the amount of money our Senator receives from health care industries. I don't think it's the money. I think Baucus was being honest during his interview with John Adams when he said, "Money means nothing to me. I pay no attention to campaign contributions. Nothing. Makes no difference." I think it's who he talks to.

From the Sunlight Foundation:

Lobbying disclosure filings for the first quarter of 2009 reveal that five of Baucus' former staffers currently work for a total of twenty-seven different organizations that are either in the health care or insurance sector or have a noted interest in the outcome. The organizations represented include some of the top lobbying organizations in the health sector: Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Researchers of America (PhRMA), America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), Amgen, and GE Health Care.
The former staffers turned lobbyists include two former chiefs of staff, David Castagnetti and Jeff Forbes, and one former legislative assistant, Scott Olsen. Other former staffers working with health care portfolios include Angela Hoffman and Roger Blauwet.

The murky world of Washington is filled with enemies and lunatics, and I suspect those our lawmakers trust most are those people who have worked with them down in the trenches of political warfare, during their toughest times. The staffers. And these people are very bright, and they know a lot about issues, probably more than Baucus himself does. So when they come a-knockin', Baucus listens.

And I suspect that's why the "middle ground" is staked out on some barren turf, far, far from where everyday Americans stand on the issue.

Ironically, one of the reasons politicians like Baucus listen to these lobbyists and pursue the "middle ground" is that they're constantly running scared, looking over their shoulders at critics and always anticipating the next election. In Baucus' case - who's been in office since the 1970s and survived the long, long Republican infestation of Montana - that's doubly so. Staking out the "middle," thwarting progressives and appeasing business has been a staple in the Senator's electioneering playbook. And to be fair to his political strategists, it's been a winning formula.

But now there's health care. And Baucus is suddenly a prominent national figure for reform. He's getting a lot of attention, and he's setting himself up to be the one held responsible for whatever comes out of reform. He has a couple of options, as I see it, before him:

- He can fight for the kind of reform most Americans want. That is a public/private model of insurance with a robust public option available to all. Call this, "giving us what we want."

- He can compromise with private insurers, and create a system that accounts for the uninsured, has some minor progressive reforms that dull the edge of the current system, and implement policies to reduce, or slow, health care costs, and ensure that Americans don't feel much bite in the form of higher taxes. Call this, "fixing leaks without pain."

Based on this Ezra Klein post, and what I know about Baucus' plan, I'm guessing he's trying for the latter. No surprise: it's cautious and "moderate."

But the thing is, we're in a crisis. People are miserable. They hate the way they pay for health care. If most people are untouched by reform, reform will be seen as a bust. If you're cautious and "moderate" on this issue, you will be seen as a failure.

This is one of the rare political issues where you can't win by not losing.

The EFCA is about expanding unions

Jay Stevens — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:56:20 GMT

From Dan Testa's report on the Employee Free Choice Act:

But opponents of the bill counter that its main purpose is to boost membership in unions whose size, influence and reach are dwindling.
"Workers are not seeing the benefits of joining a union," Brown said. "I really feel they've lost their way; I think that's why their numbers are declining."
Brown charges that the bill could run the risk of interfering with businesses by mandating a government arbitrator settle disputes, and it could force higher wages out of small companies in an economy where profit margins are already thin. Furthermore, he added, the illusion of higher wages could be mitigated by having to pay union dues.
"It's a sneaky way, I think, of selling something that they can't sell straightforwardly, so they're doing it kind of backdoor," Brown said.

Of course the EFCA is about increasing membership in unions! That's the whole friggin' point! Remove the current worker-unfriendly barriers to unionization (that Testa elaborates on in this report), and more people join. Brown himself admitted that in an earlier Chuck Johnson report when he said, "the last report I saw from the National Labor Relations Board, they (unions) are winning two out of three elections. What do they want?" Er, they want employers to stop harassing workers who want to join a union. And imagine if penalties for harassing workers were actually punitive, and that disputes were quickly adjudicated, and the process couldn't be strung along for weeks or months. Unions would win a lot more than two out of every three elections!

Brown is somehow arguing that businesses should have the right to harass their workers and delay elections because unions are so dang popular...which is an odd argument to make, isn't it?

As for the benefits of unionization, well, ask a union worker. You'll spot them easily enough. They're the ones with decent health care benefits, vacation time, and pay...

And another thing about the Montana Meth Project...

Jay Stevens — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:50:46 GMT

I guess I wasn't so far off about the targeted audience of the Meth Project -- teens -- finding the ads fodder for humor...

Also, I wanted to point out this article by Jesse McQuillen, penned back in 2006. Kudos to J-McQ...

The public option has to be available

Jay Stevens — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:59:06 GMT

So. The Internet today is abuzz with news of Rahm Emanuel's seeming support of the "trigger mechanism" for a public option for health insurance:

Mr. Emanuel said one of several ways to meet President Barack Obama's goals is a mechanism under which a public plan is introduced only if the marketplace fails to provide sufficient competition on its own. He noted that congressional Republicans crafted a similar trigger mechanism when they created a prescription-drug benefit for Medicare in 2003. In that case, private competition has been judged sufficient and the public option has never gone into effect.
Mr. Obama has pushed hard for a vigorous public option. But he has also said he won't draw a "line in the sand" over this point.

Obviously, the trigger option is just another way of denying a public option. No one here believes the legislation for the trigger won't include the usual language and loopholes that will allow the insurance industry to essentially continue to operate as usual and indefinitely. Worse still, if legislation containing a trigger were combined with mandatory coverage, it'll be a boondoggle for private insurers.

Senator Schumer, on the other hand, said, "Make no mistake about it, the president is for this strongly. There will be a public option in the final bill." Of course, as to what form a public option will take is of paramount importance...

In response to the outrage over the threat to the public opion, Ezra Klein opines that the public option may be a distraction:

But [the public option] has captured the process. Its existence, or lack thereof, is how the left and right are both benchmarking their success. The only problem is that it's not necessarily a very good benchmark. The left may win a political victory by including it in the policy but find that it hasn't won a particularly large substantive victory at all. The right could give up a lot to block the public plan only to find their concessions worth more than their triumph.

In the post (which you should read), Klein identifies five elements of reform that "deserve a lot more specific attention than they're receiving." Among them is the "health insurance exchange." Klein explained it in an earlier post:

The central problem facing health reformers is a simple one: America's health-care system is a mess. But a lot of people rely on it very heavily. But how do you merge the need for root-and-branch reform with the public's fear of rapid change?
The answer, put simply, is that you don't institute rapid change. You don't take what people have. But you give them the option to trade up to something better. As the theory goes, if the current system really is so inefficient, and your alternative really is so much better, then the lure of lower costs and better quality will persuade Americans to switch to the new system of their own accord.
This was a little-noticed wrinkle in President Obama's speech to the American Medical Association yesterday. Traditionally, reformers promise that if you like what you have, you'll be able to keep it. Obama echoed that vow. But he also said that "if you don't like your health coverage or don't have any insurance, you will have a chance to take part in what we're calling a Health Insurance Exchange." That is, in effect, the opposite promise: If you don't like what you have, you'll be able to change it.
The vehicle for that promise is the Health Insurance Exchange.

Basically, it's in the exchange where we'd be able to purchase public insurance. Then it follows that the qualification for participating in the exchange is important. Allowing everybody to participate seems logical, and would no doubt be politically popular. After all, you'd be simply giving everyone more options for health insurance: a no-brainer, right?

But the numbers I've heard so far - and sorry, I can't find a link - imply that not so many folks will qualify for the exchange. You have to unemployed or have your employer-based coverage cost a certain percentage of your pay. (Twelve percent?) Which means that most of us would be stuck with the "coverage" we already have.

So not only do we need a robust public option, we need it to be available to all...

Does the Meth Project work? And should we spend taxpayer money on it?

Jay Stevens — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:45:36 GMT

Excellent report by Ed Kemmick on the Montana Meth Project, which raises some serious questions about the program's efficacy. Believe or not, the meth project has been the subject of some debate on the Montana Intertubes for...years?...now, thanks in large part to the coverage of the Missoula Independent and folks like Intelligent Discontent's pogie, who has quite a lot to say about the project.

The question boils down to this: does the Montana Meth Project actually have much affect on teens' use of meth? The evidence that exists suggests that the media campaign didn't. And what's so surprising about that, anyway? Today, we all laugh at "Reefer Madness," isn't it likely that teens are already laughing at the meth ads? They're certainly salacious and overblown. I mean, the "just once" ads aren't all that effective if a teen does try meth...and doesn't start whoring herself out immediately after, right?

Of course, that's not to minimize the effects that meth has on users. It's a problem drug. But any program touting education should also highlight recovery. A better way to spend state money, IMHO, might be on treatment programs, and to be fair to the Meth Project, that's apparently what Project founder Tom Siebel thinks, too...

Are shape-shifting lizards to blame?

Jay Stevens — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:25:22 GMT

An oldie, but worth bringing to your attention.

CBS News:

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

Gasp! Shades of Bush, suppressing science at the EPA for political reasons! Are they all the same???

Don't worry, citizens! Senator James Inhofe is there, and demands an investigation!

"It's clear that the data EPA used were outdated and inconsistent, as the report's authors have revealed," Senator Inhofe said. "Making scientific decisions while ignoring key data politicizes the scientific process and shows that important policy decisions are being made in a black box. The Agency's actions fail to meet the Administrator's commitment to transparency and openness."
"The Agency's commitment to transparency must be more than just words. The EPA cannot put a gag order on sound science," Barrasso said. "Folks' livelihoods are on the line."

But...wait...

...the emails reveal little more than a rather tedious employee-management dispute. Carlin's boss, Al McGartland, tells Carlin that his report won't be included in the EPA's official findings and asks him to get back to work on other issues. EPA Press Secretary Adora Andy noted that Carlin's education and work expertise are largely in economics, not climatology. That's why his comments on climate science were not included.

Apparently the economist was given lots of opportunity to voice his opinion and sit in on various committees that dealt with climate change. So why was his opinion suppressed? Because of politics?

Er, no. Because of science.

If you read the story of how the emails came about in the first place - an economist, with climate change science as his "hobby" submitted an unsolicited opinion that took four days to research and write, and cited, among others, an astrologer - and you realize who "leaked" the emails to the media, the whole story looks ridiculous. CBS News should skulk offstage, shame faced.

Unbelievable. I'll never understand how someone could actually work for an organization like CEI. Maybe they belong the race of shape-shifting lizard men from outer space, or something, because I don't understand how you do work like this, manipulate the media with what are clear lies, when so much is at stake...

Links...

Jay Stevens — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:34:05 GMT

Just a short and random series of links... Happy 4th!

From a New York Times profile of Max Baucus: "He conceded that it was a mistake to rule out a fully government-run health system, or a 'single-payer plan,' not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama's proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position."

Matt Yglesias: "The 60-vote threshold, by contrast, is important because that's how many votes it takes to break a filibuster. But while the Democratic caucus presumably could get together and collectively commit to refrain from joining any filibusters, there's no sign that they actually will. This means that to move legislation in the modern era, the majority party still needs to painstakingly assemble 60 votes. And it's going to be a difficult task.

"For example, considerably more people live in the Bronx than live in Montana. But while the Bronx's 1.4 million people need to share Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand with 18 million other residents of the Empire State, Montana's cozy crew of 960,000 people has Max Baucus all to themselves. And not only does Baucus' vote count as much as Schumer's or Gillibrand's, he actually has dramatically more power than the senators from New York (or, for that matter, California) because as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, all health-care legislation absolutely must meet with his approval. The fact that Obama only secured the support of 47 percent of Montana's voters is the kind of thing that must weigh on Baucus' mind."

jhwygirl: "We - we who want to see health care reform - we who want to see single-payer or a strong public option - don't need to be convincing ourselves with all these heart-tugging stories. I'm sorry...that might sound harsh, but until we start translating the cost of not doing reform into the cost to the economy - in real dollars....we aren't going to budge over this line in the sand that has been drawn by our elected officials in Washington and industry and PhRMA that was drawn to protect them from us."

McJoan, writing for New West, notes that Chuck Grassley is letting Baucus hang out to dry on health-care reform. Will Baucus let him? McJoan: "He did make some headlines with that collecting of campaign contributions, particularly last weekend in the form of a lobbyist party back home in Montana, hosting a bunch of lobbyists and political supporters for his Fly-Fishing & Golfing weekend in Big Sky at $2,500 a pop, $5,000 for a political action committee. He's going to do it again at "Camp Baucus," at the end of July. One activist characterized this all as 'unseemly,' since he is at the center of the most critical reform debate of the session. Unseemly? Not in Max's mind. 'There's no problem. I've been doing these events for more than 10 years.'

"This all should raise some key questions for folks back home, where Baucus's constituents, and lots of them, need real, substantive reform. Particularly the more than a third of Montana's residents under age 65 who are uninsured. Who matters more to the Senator? Senate Republicans, lobbyists, or the people of Montana who need his help?"

Obama on Honduras: "'We do not want to go back to a dark past,' Mr. Obama said, in which military coups override elections. 'We always want to stand with democracy,' he added." Apparently the WSJ feels differently.

Governor Sanford to leave office with tail between legs after his Argentinian jaunt and news of his affair? Not so, says God.

Joe the Plumber to run for office? Not so, says God.