Undernews For 27 July 2009

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27 July 2009
WORD
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier. - Rudyard Kipling
FLOTSAM & JETSAM

WHAT IF OBAMA IS WRONG?
Sam Smith

America has a population of over 300 million. If the only people who really know how to run healthcare, revive the economy or teach our children are our president, the people he appoints and those who work for them, we are in deep trouble.

Even worse, Barack Obama and his appointees are not immortal, so there is every chance that some day they will be replaced by people of the likes of Richard Cheney or Alberto Gonzalez. If the powers that the Obama administration has assumed, or wants to assume, for itself are passed on to those of such ilk, we are in even deeper trouble.

Our founders, some of whom were possibly brighter than Obama's czars, czarinas, cabinet secretaries, and TARP ayatollahs, understood this. That's why they set up three supposed equal branches of government and thought they had reserved to the states and citizens those rights not enumerated in the Constitution.

Obama and his aides don't seem to understand this. Without even entering the matter of whether they are really as smart as they think they are, this purported benefit will last about seven years at best, which is - by way of example - three years short of when we'll know whether Obama's healthcare plan costs what he claims.

There is an underlying theme of concentration of power in Obama's economic, health and education plans. In more than a few cases, the concentration is unprecedented, witness the attempt to dismantle local control of public education. The implicit - albeit unspoken - justification for these changes is that those making them are among the smartest people in our society and therefore will best look after our interests.

I think about this every time I drive the five miles of road between my house and downtown Freeport, Maine. I have never seen the road in such lousy condition and I keep asking myself, where's the stimulus when you need it? All over the state, roads are hurting and though we have spent more money in less time to get the national economy going, unemployment is at near record levels while such basic and once simple projects seem beyond the capacity of Washington to do anything about.

One of the reasons is that while Freeport is shovel ready, Barack Obama isn't. His administration has set up a maze of bureaucratic and technocratic obstacles to getting money to where it can make a difference in a short period - thanks in no small part to the assumption that the federal government is our best guardian of money and quality.

Of course, one need to look no further than the Pentagon or the Department of Housing & Urban Development to know that this isn't true.
In fact, when it comes to money, the feds have always done best moving it from one place to another - i.e. Social Security and Medicare or to the state and local level. There will be inefficiency and corruption at both levels, but they are usually less costly and easier to spot.

One of the reasons we don't realize this - and thus casually lump a bridge to nowhere into the same category as some congress members' bill to help fund a local arts center - is because of the liberal hostility towards devolution.

This didn't used to be the case. The New Deal and Great Society didn't have this hang-up and the left in the 1960s had a strong devolutionary bent. But in more recent years there has been a growing liberal disdain for decisions made at the state and local level.

Part of this, I suspect, has to do with liberalism become an increasingly upscale politics with more of its constituency educated to believe in the exceptionalism of their education. A sort of edocracy has developed, where it is assumed that if you have the right people and the right research, democracy just doesn't matter than much any more.

This view is reflected in the prevailing assumption that schooling to the test is the best way educate our young. Missing from this, among other things, are subjects not often taught like working well with others, gaining consensus, and melding sources of information. How often, for example, does an economist ever listen to a farmer?

And so the road I travel remains unusually bumpy and cracked. If anyone in Washington had asked me, I would have said, just send them the money and worry about something else, like getting out of stupid wars.

And I might point them to an article I did for the Washington Post 22 years ago about how Freeport handles the snow compared to nation's capital. In it I noted

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Al Thompson is superintendent of roads in Freeport, Maine, with a population about one percent of that of the District. But what Maine lacks in people, it makes up in roads, so Al Thompson has about 12 percent of Washington's asphalt mileage to look after.

Now Al doesn't have anything like the equivalent of Connecticut and Wisconsin avenues in his charge, and the local politicians tend to realize that nature often is impervious to memos, directives and policy guidelines. On the other hand, he works without the benefit of Snow Command Centers, Computerized Cancellation Centers and Codes Yellow. What he does have is five trucks with 12-foot dustpans and 11-foot wings.

How long does it take his trucks to cover 130 miles? Says Al: "An hour and a half, an hour and three-quarters." Then it takes another three hours for a second "cleanup" trip.

To put it in D.C. terms, that would mean, with the number of vehicles we've got (if properly equipped), you theoretically could sweep through the city in a couple of hours. Since it is clear our trucks are outmoded and not properly equipped, let's look at it another way: 25 good snow plows could, using the Maine standard, run through every street in the city in nine hours.

I picked 25 because that's the number of snowplows D.C. gave the National Guard back in 1980 to help in emergencies but which the Pentagon said it couldn't use because of liability problems. The trucks never were given back and disappeared from sight until Thursday, when it was announced that the National Guard would be using 25 plows to help keep D.C. clear.

Now, before someone at the District Building picks up the phone to tell The Post about "complex urban problems," let me tell you about George Flaherty. He's director of parks and public works for Portland, Maine. Portland is about one-tenth the size of D.C. but has nearly 30 percent of its street mileage. He uses about a quarter of D.C.'s equipment and expects to have the job done in 8 to 10 hours. . .

Here are some figures that will give you a rough idea of the costs of closing down D.C. for a day: the D.C. government spends $3 million a day on its payroll; the federal government spends close to $20 million a day for its D.C. payroll; private businesses spend another $30 million. What did D.C. budget for snow removal? Just under $1 million. Calculate the odds yourself.

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Now Al Thompson has retired as highway director, but I still suspect his successor and people like him all over the country have a better handle on their roads than the president's Small Town Road Czar or whoever is keeping the money from coming this way.

It might help if the Obama people would trade in a few of their pie charts for some humble pie and accept the idea that in this fair land are many who know more about some things than they do, give them some money to help them do it, and then step back and enjoy the resulting success instead of just still more problems.

PAGE ONE MUST
BAIT AND SWITCH ON THE 'PUBLIC OPTION'
Kip Sullivan, Physicians for a National Health Plan - The people who brought us the "public option" began their campaign promising one thing but now promote something entirely different. To make matters worse, they have not told the public they have backpedalled. The campaign for the "public option" resembles the classic bait-and-switch scam: tell your customers you've got one thing for sale when in fact you're selling something very different.

When the "public option" campaign began, its leaders promoted a huge "Medicare-like" program that would enroll about 130 million people. Such a program would dwarf even Medicare, which, with its 45 million enrollees, is the nation's largest health insurer, public or private. But today "public option" advocates sing the praises of tiny "public options" contained in congressional legislation sponsored by leading Democrats that bear no resemblance to the original model.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the "public options" described in the Democrats' legislation might enroll 10 million people and will have virtually no effect on health care costs, which means the "public options" cannot, by themselves, have any effect on the number of uninsured. But the leaders of the "public option" movement haven't told the public they have abandoned their original vision. It's high time they did.

"Public option" refers to a proposal, as Timothy Noah put it, "dreamed up" by Jacob Hacker when Hacker was still a graduate student working on a degree in political science. In two papers, one published in 2001 and the second in 2007, Hacker, now a professor of political science at Berkeley, proposed that Congress create an enormous "Medicare-like" program that would sell health insurance to the non-elderly in competition with the 1,000 to 1,500 health insurance companies that sell insurance today. . .

Hacker predicted that his proposed public program would so closely resemble Medicare that it would be able to set its premiums far below those of other insurance companies and enroll at least half the non-elderly population. These predictions were confirmed by the Lewin Group, a very mainstream consulting firm. In its report on Hacker's 2001 paper, Lewin concluded Hacker's "Medicare Plus" program would enroll 113 million people (46 percent of the non-elderly) and cut the number of uninsured to 5 million. In its report on Hacker's 2007 paper, Lewin concluded Hacker's "Health Care for America Plan" would enroll 129 million people (50 percent of the nonelderly population) and cut the uninsured to 2 million. . .

Here is what the CBO had to say about the HELP committee bill:

The new draft also includes provisions regarding a "public plan," but those provisions did not have a substantial effect on the cost or enrollment projections, largely because the public plan would pay providers of health care at rates comparable to privately negotiated rates – and thus was not projected to have premiums lower than those charged by private insurance plans. (page 3)

Obviously the "public option" in the Senate HELP committee bill (zero enrollees; 34 million people left uninsured) and the "public option" in the House bill (10 million enrollees (maybe!); 17 million people left uninsured) are a far cry from the "public option" originally proposed by Professor Hacker (129 million enrollees; 2 million people left uninsured).
COMMERICAL LOAN DELINQUENCIES UP 585%
Dayton Business Journal - Delinquencies on commercial mortgage backed securities soared $10 billion in June, hitting a 12-month high of almost $29 billion, according to Realpoint Research. California led the nation with the highest amount of delinquent loans, closely followed by Texas and Florida. Late loans across the country are up an "astounding" 585 percent from a year ago when just $4 billion were delinquent, reported the Horsham, Pa.-based research firm. The low point for delinquency was March 2007 when $2 billion
was delinquent.
A DECENT PUBLIC OPTION: ONE BASED ON MEDICARE
Rep. Lynne Woolsey (D), Politico - At least 46 million Americans are uninsured now, more than 85 percent of them in working families. Another 25 million are underinsured. By the end of the day, 14,000 more Americans will lose their coverage. Even those with health insurance are struggling to meet its skyrocketing costs. Annual health care expenses for the average family of four are projected to jump $1,800. Over the past decade, health care costs have risen on average four times faster than workers’ earnings.
These rapidly escalating health care costs are deepening our economic crisis. One in every $6 spent in our economy is spent on health care. . .

Most members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, including me, believe that the best way to provide high-quality, affordable health care to everyone while bringing down costs is to create a single-payer health insurance system. I have joined with a majority of the caucus, however, to support a robust public plan option like Medicare. Our members, in fact, have said that we would not vote for any health care bill that doesn’t include a robust public health insurance plan. Such a public plan should be one insurance option, alongside private health insurance companies. The public plan should compete with the private health companies to get people to enroll.

A robust public plan should be available to anyone anywhere in the country, without co-ops or local plans that dilute the power of the public option to deliver lower-cost, higher-quality care. And it should also be based on the current Medicare provider network, infrastructure and rates set by the Obama administration. This would allow it to start without having to build a provider network and infrastructure or negotiate rates. It also would increase the savings provided by a public plan by reducing start-up costs.

Building on the Medicare provider network would also ensure that providers are available from day one, which would offer the most choice and best access for those who would like to be on the public plan. We would prefer that providers not be able to opt out, at least not in the first few years of the public plan, as this could reduce provider choice and means a loss of $91 billion in cost savings. Having Medicare providers automatically enrolled in the public plan, however, would be a good first step.

A public plan is not perfect, as it isn't single payer, but it will make a big difference in the lives of many.

OBAMA BULLYING SCHOOL SYSTEMS TO GIVE UP LOCAL CONTROL
Washington Post - President Obama is leaning hard on the nation's schools, using the promise of more than $4 billion in federal aid -- and the threat of withholding it -- to strong-arm the education establishment to accept more charter schools and performance pay for teachers.

The pressure campaign has been underway for months as Education Secretary Arne Duncan travels the country delivering a blunt message to state officials who have resisted change for decades: Embrace reform or risk being shut out.

"What we're saying here is, if you can't decide to change these practices, we're not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we're not going to send those dollars there," Obama said in an Oval Office interview. "And we're counting on the fact that, ultimately, this is an incentive, this is a challenge for people who do want to change."

On Friday, Obama will officially announce the "Race to the Top," a competition for $4.35 billion in grants. He wants states to use funds to ease limits on charter schools, tie teacher pay to student achievement and move for the first time toward common academic standards. It is part of a broader effort to improve school achievement with a $100 billion increase in education funding, more money for community colleges and an increase in Pell Grants for college students.

Duncan has used the Race to the Top fund, created through the economic stimulus law, as leverage to drive the president's education agenda in Rhode Island, Tennessee, Colorado and elsewhere. Never has an education secretary been given so much money by Congress with such open-ended authority, according to current and former federal education officials. Margaret Spellings, Duncan's predecessor under George W. Bush, had a tiny fraction of that amount at her disposal.

[Note: The Washington Post apparently thinks that decentralized school systems hamper education. In fact, public education began to fall apart with the centralization that occurred following the launch of Russia's Sputnik - led, incidentally, by Harvard president James Conant - a sort of 1950s Larry Summers]

In trying to reverse those trends, he faces the same decentralized educational system and resistance to change that hampered Bush's No Child Left Behind law, which required annual testing to hold schools accountable for closing achievement gaps. Like his predecessor, Obama is using the federal treasury to power through the obstacles.

DISTRUST OF GOVERNMENT AT HIGHEST LEVEL IN FIFTY YEARS
McClatchy Newspapers - If President Barack Obama got anything indisputably right at his news conference, it was this: The American people don't trust the federal government. . .

In the 1930s, they looked to the government for help in the Great Depression, and Franklin D. Roosevelt used that trust to drive through the New Deal program, creating Social Security and a host of government programs.

In the 1950s, they trusted Dwight Eisenhower when he wanted to build the Interstate Highway System.

In the early 1960s, they did, too, and Lyndon Johnson used it to create Medicare and to enact civil rights legislation and the rest of his Great Society agenda.

No longer, however.

From Vietnam through the Watergate scandal, the Iraq war and the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, Americans have soured on the very thought that the government can do things well. That makes it immensely difficult to convince them - or their members of Congress - to go along with anything that even looks like a government takeover of health care. . .

In a recent survey for CBS and The New York Times, just one out five Americans said that they trusted the government to do the right thing all or most of the time, rivaling the lowest marks since the question was first asked in 1958.

GREAT THOUGHTS OF ROBIN GIVHAN
Robin Givhan, Washington Post - The public's recent fascination with the unfortunate dungarees President Obama wore to throw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game in St. Louis reveals how conflicted folks can be about the silent symbolism of the commander in chief when he is not in formal Oval Office attire. Few people want him to look like he spends his afternoons thumbing through his subscriber editions of GQ. But most folks would like to think he has at least heard the phrase "dress for success."

The overarching aesthetic problem with Obama's jeans was they seemed to have only a passing acquaintance with the dimensions of his body. They were too short; one could see the tops of his sneakers and a hint of white socks when he was at a standstill.

They were baggy -- but lacking in old-school urban swagger or beachcomber, loose-limbed ease. To be technically correct, the jeans sagged. It wouldn't be surprising to discover that the jeans were "relaxed fit." This is the silhouette stores such as the Gap sell online -- because a shopper can find anything on the Internet including acid-washed jeans -- but not in its stores because space is at a premium and there's the company's image to consider.

Adding to the jeans' unattractiveness: They had creases. They were light blue. Practically stonewashed.

Obama's jeans sat relatively high on his waist and so some have referred to them as "mom jeans" because they managed to make the lanky Obama look . . . well, not so lanky. But really, these are the jeans of middle-aged dads who have thrown in the towel and decided that when they get home from the office and take off their suit, all they care about is comfort. Because they cannot wear their pajamas in public, their 20-year-old jeans are a viable alternative. And by God, they still fit!

This is all fine and good for those middle-aged men who do not fly on Air Force One and rule the free world. But on men who travel with a posse that includes sharpshooters, we can impose a higher standard.

THE RISE OF THE DIGITAL NOMADS
Washington Post - Frank Gruber's workstation at AOL in Dulles could be in any cubicle farm from here to Bangalore -- push-pin board for reminders, computer on Formica desk, stifling fluorescent lighting. It's so drab there's nothing more to say about it, which is why the odds of finding Gruber there are slim. This Story

Instead, Gruber often works at Tryst in Adams Morgan, at Liberty Tavern in Clarendon, at a Starbucks, in hotel lobbies, at the Library of Congress, on the Bolt Bus to New York or, as he did last week, beside the rooftop pool of the Hilton on Embassy Row. Gruber and Web entrepreneur Jen Consalvo turned up late one morning, opened their Mac laptops, connected to WiFi and began working. A few feet away, the pool's water shimmered like hand-blown glass. "I like the breeze," Consalvo said, working all the while.

Gruber and Consalvo are digital nomads. They work -- clad in shorts, T-shirts and sandals -- wherever they find a wireless Web connection to reach their colleagues via instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, e-mail and occasionally by voice on their iPhones or Skype. As digital nomads, experts say, they represent a natural evolution in teleworking. The Internet let millions of wired people work from home; now, with widespread WiFi, many have cut the wires and left home (or the dreary office) to work where they please -- and especially around other people, even total strangers.

For nomads, the benefits are both primitive and practical.

Primitive: Tom Folkes, an artificial intelligence programmer, worked last week at the Java Shack in Arlington County because he's "an extrovert working on introvert tasks. If I'm working at home by myself, I am really hating life. I need people." He has a coffee shop rotation. "I spread my business around."

Practical: Marilyn Moysey, an Ezenia employee who sells virtual collaboration software, often works at Panera Bread near her home in Alexandria even though she has an office in the "boondocks." Why? "Because there is no hope for the road system around here," she said. Asked where her co-workers were, Moysey said, "I don't know, because it doesn't matter anymore."

Nomad life is already evolving. Nomads who want the feel of working with officemates have begun co-working in public places or at the homes of strangers. They work laptop-by-laptop in living rooms and coffee shops, exchanging both idle chitchat and business advice with people who all work for different companies. The gatherings are called jellies, after a bowl of jelly beans the creators were eating when they came up with the name.

Although the number of digital nomads is intrinsically difficult to measure -- they are constantly in motion and difficult to pin down for polling -- evidence of a real shift in where Americans work is mounting. Dell reports that its digital nomad Web site is getting tens of thousands of hits a month. Panera, a popular spot for people working wirelessly, logs 1.5 million WiFi sessions a month.

DIGITAL NOMAD SITE

RECOVERED HISTORY; WHERE LINCOLN SPENT HIS SUMMERS
NPR - Even with air conditioning, Washington, D.C., is a hot and humid place in the summer, and when Abraham Lincoln was president, the summers were even worse: On top of the heat and humidity, there was the Civil War.

So for his three summers in office, starting in 1862, Lincoln moved out of the White House to a not-too-distant cottage on a hill just off Georgia Avenue, one of the capital's main thoroughfares.

Tucked away from the road on the grounds of the Soldiers' Home, the cottage sits on one of the highest points of the city and offers a nice breeze, tall trees and swaths of sloping green lawns. Lincoln spent about one-quarter of his presidency there. . .

Frank Milligan, the director of the Lincoln Cottage, says much of the information about the former president comes from soldiers who guarded Lincoln when he was in residence there. . .

The soldiers describe Lincoln's walks around the grounds, as well as his tendency to pop his head into their tents in the evening to see his soldier "boys." He also sat on the veranda, rocking and taking in the view of the incomplete Capitol dome to the south.

Milligan calls the porch "Lincoln's escape" - but it wasn't a total escape. Ambulances would pass by carrying the war's wounded, and the first national veterans' cemetery was on the cottage grounds.

Still, Lincoln could enjoy the hillside breezes while he jotted notes for the Emancipation Proclamation or thought through major policies. And it was a refuge from the White House routine - which, Milligan says, Lincoln didn't like. . .

Many mornings, David Derickson, the captain of Lincoln's cavalry guard, had to pry the president out of the cottage library to get him to go to work.

"Typically, [Derickson] said, he would find [Lincoln] here reading Shakespeare or the Bible or military strategy," Milligan says. "And Derickson would get him up and into the front room for his coffee and egg, and on his way down to the White House."

Lincoln's long workdays made for some interesting stories. A Kentuckian's diary entry for July 20, 1862, notes being invited to the Lincoln Cottage for the evening but finding no president present. Disappointed, the diarist and his friends started to ride back to town. En route, they had an unexpected encounter.

"They see this lone horseman galloping toward them, and they describe his coat flapping in the breeze and the top hat on his head," Milligan says. "It's Lincoln, riding alone, galloping back [to the cottage] on a Sunday evening.". . .

By the fall of 1862, Lincoln's military guard and cavalry guard had been assigned to protect him on his commute. Meanwhile, the Civil War got closer. Artillery fire from various nearby battles was heard on the hill. By 1864, Confederates had attacked the capital, and Lincoln's guard was called to the front to defend the city. Mary Lincoln, mad with fear, begged for help.

"Think of it," Milligan says. "The first family of the United States protected by 125 soldiers, and there are 17,000 Confederates a mile away. . .

IF YOU DON'T LIKE FACEBOOK, YOU CAN BE FRIENDS WITH BILL GATES
AFP - Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said he was forced to give up on the social networking phenomenon Facebook after too many people wanted to be his friend.

Gates, the billionaire computer geek-turned-philanthropist who was honoured Saturday by India for his charity work, told an audience in New Delhi he had tried out Facebook but ended up with "10,000 people wanting to be my friends".

Gates, who remains Microsoft chairman, said he had trouble figuring out whether he "knew this person, did I not know this person".

"It was just way too much trouble so I gave it up," Gates told the business forum. . .

Gates also confided to the audience that he was "not that big at text messaging" and that "I'm not a 24-hour-a-day tech person".

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HANDWRITING?
Time - People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, but Steve Graham, a special-education and literacy professor at Vanderbilt University, says that's not the case. The simple fact is that kids haven't learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. "Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore," he says.

Cursive started to lose its clout back in the 1920s, when educators theorized that because children learned to read by looking at books printed in manuscript rather than cursive, they should learn to write the same way. By World War II, manuscript, or print writing, was in standard use across the U.S. Today schoolchildren typically learn print in kindergarten, cursive in third grade. But they don't master either one. Over the decades, daily handwriting lessons have decreased from an average of 30 minutes to 15. . .

GALLERY: CONFUSING WARNING SIGNS
GATES GOT OFF EASY
A new report by The Sentencing Project finds a record 140,610 individuals are now serving life sentences in state and federal prisons, 6,807 of whom were juveniles at the time of the crime. In addition, 29% of persons serving a life sentence (41,095) have no possibility of parole, and 1,755 were juveniles at the time of the crime.

The report's findings reveal overwhelming racial and ethnic disparities in the allocation of life sentences: 66% of all persons sentenced to life are non-white, and 77% of juveniles serving life sentences are non-white.
The dramatic growth in life sentences is not primarily a result of higher crime rates, but of policy changes that have imposed harsher punishments and restricted parole consideration.

For Black males in their twenties, 1 in every 8 is in prison or jail on any given day. These trends have been intensified by the disproportionate impact of the "war on drugs," in which three-fourths of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color.

BREVITAS

GUESS WHAT THIS BUILDING IS USED FOR

EVERY WORD ON THIS SIGN SAVE 'EXIT' IS SPELLED WRONG

BUSH REGIME HID PHOTOS OF ARCTIC SEA CHANGE

HOUSING BUBBLE TOLD IN THE TALE OF ONE HOUSE

'You grownups say you love us, but. . ."
A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS ON THE ENVIRONMENT

BUSH DISCUSSED SENDING MILITARY TO MAKE CIVILIAN ARRESTS

THREE QUARTERS OF BRITS SUPPORT RIGHT TO DIE

REAL UNEMPLOYMENT HIGHEST SINCE DEPRESSION

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