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The praise heaped on the late Senator Teddy Kennedy this week reminded me of another man lost to history for most of us. Kennedy, despite his faults, was loved and respected by his conservative, moderate and liberal peers. By his constituency he was known not only for his unbridled compassion but, also as a man who could get things done. How could someone so apparently liberal stay on good speaking terms with conservatives and actually pass legislation?
Ole Teddy stole a page from someone’s playbook whose name I’ll bet you have never heard.
The man’s name was George Mason. Mason was one of the five most frequent speakers at a little gathering held to write a constitution for a new nation. This constitution would be cut from whole cloth. There had been nations and nation-states which were governed with similar values but, this convention would end up constructing a government never before seen. Mason however would not sign the new Constitution of the United States of America.
Mason believed the Constitution gave the government too much power. He lobbied for a Bill of Rights but, was overruled by the federalist including the future president James Madison. Civility, in the face of bitter disagreement was the mark of our founding fathers and especially Mason. Madison was quoted as saying, “was chiefly on occasional visits to Gunston (Mason’s home on the road between Williamsburg, Virginia and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) when journeying to & fro from the North, in which his conversations were always a feast to me.” This was apparently true because in one of his first acts as an inaugural congressman, Madison introduced the Bill of Rights which was very similar to the Bill of Rights Mason penned for the State of Virginia and championed at the Constitutional Convention.
Convention, to be sure, was never Teddy Kennedy’s trademark. He befriended his political foes, took his political lemons and made the best lemonade bill possible. In general, Kennedy was the master of civility and believed fully in the art of compromise. To truly compromise as our founding fathers did, Kennedy understood the value of giving his political foes the benefit of the doubt. He was honest about his dreams for America and expected the same from people like Senator Orrin Hatch who said:
“…And he had more control over the Democrat Party base than anybody else. He’s the only one who could bring them along on issues that were — you know, that were down the middle and really bipartisan, but he could bring them along. They would have to listen to him. And part of that was because he led so many purely liberal battles on the floor, lost a lot of them, but he also won on a lot of them, too.”
Kennedy was much like Mason. He had the conviction of his ideas. He thought he could actually bring even Hatch around. On many occasions Hatch and others did lend their support. He was patient and never missed the chance to make even a rival a friend.
The moderate in me celebrates the life of Teddy Kennedy. Not because I completely agree with his vision of America but, because he practiced the best in the art of the compromise. It worked for Mason on perhaps one of most divisive and important documents ever drafted. I hope, for the sake of our country, Senator Kennedy’s spirit will bless our next generation of leaders. I hope those leaders regardless of political ideology will practice the fine art of compromise.
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This week I attended a town hall meeting in Florence, Alabama hosted by my “Democratic” Congressman Doctor Parker Griffith (D? –AL). I think someone handed him the wrong talking points because for a minute I thought I might have stumbled into a town hall hosted by Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ). It was all there. He promised he would support no public plan. He went on to tell us tort reform and insurance across state lines would fix our healthcare ails. In a nutshell, he told us 85 percent of us were happy with our healthcare and it was a matter of tweaking the system. He said all this after beginning the conversation so beautifully. He began by telling us about a woman he had treated for cancer too late.
As he relayed the all too common story woman with a master’s degree who had lost her job and health insurance, I thought about the good a choice north Alabama had made by electing a doctor to Congress in the midst of a healthcare debate. He told us how she waited because of the lack of insurance as the lump to grew in her breast, I thought he would be tired of dealing with mountains of paperwork from insurance companies. I thought he would be tired of low Medicaid reimbursements and how the healthcare profiteers rob badly needed dollars from the system for obscene profits. I thought he would want to get rid of incompetent doctors who smear his profession. I thought there would be well planned attacks on problems of the uninsured, bad doctors, low Medicare reimbursement and healthcare profiteers.
Instead, we were told our healthcare system needed only to cover a few more Americans with an intellectual appeal only Rush Limbaugh could love. He told us it was Henry Waxman’s fault that we did not have a good house bill.
To be sure, many in the red-state right-wing crowd cheered. He was giving them what they wanted. Those in the crowd had heard weeks of lies and some were still mad about President Obama being elected. He told them exactly what they wanted to hear. It’s what it takes to win elections, right?
Maybe his election as a Democrat was a calculation. Since there was apparently little difference between he and his right wing challenger, maybe he decided the coattails of President Obama were just enough to push him over the edge.
President Obama is on the edge of historic healthcare reform and his biggest challenge may be those right-wing wannabes in his own party. I am beginning to understand how consensus is fleeting in Washington, especially when supposedly moderate “Blue Dogs” sound more like right wingers. I would have assumed a Blue Dog would have at least mentioned cost containment.
Griffith’s right wing stands weren’t limited to healthcare. He told us the first consideration in immigration reform would be to “shut down that border”. I am sure he didn’t mean the Canadian border. Oh, wait, maybe he wasn’t talking about immigration at all. Perhaps he referred to shutting the Canadian boarder to drug imports.
It would seem the Blue Dog’s have collectively decided to be a part of the no crowd. Instead of being the moderates they hold themselves out to be and legitimately trying to reduce healthcare costs, they have decided to stop any real reform. I hope they reconsider because the out-year deficits which they crow about so much could be greatly reduced if they decide to be part of the solution instead of the problematic no crowd.
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Talking heads all over the news shows today eulogized healthcare reform. Many were right-wing Republicans with crappy grins on their faces. A few were liberal Democrats who think the President should ram legislation through which includes a public option. They feel this should be done with the reconciliation process designed for votes on budgets. The reconciliation process would allow no debate or amendments and pass with fifty-one votes. Shy of the reconciliation option, liberal Democrats would rather have no legislation at all.
During the President’s vacation I think he should consider a process he talked about in his campaign.
September 8th, President Obama should publicly invite the Speaker of the House, House Minority Leader, House Majority Leader, House Minority Whip, a spokesman for the Blue Dog Coalition, Senate Majority Leader, Senate Minority Leader, Senate Majority Whip, Senate Minority Whip, Chairmen of the five committees who have heard testimony on healthcare legislation and the ranking members of those committees to the White House. He should call C-SPAN and tell them the entirety of the proceedings will be on air. He should instruct both parties to have, in hand, a real plan for fixing healthcare. The plan should include numbered priorities. The meetings should begin on the 10th.
Neither party should have trouble meeting the deadline of the 10th because, according to their interviews, they have all the answers. The President should play the honest broker and alternate from one party priority to the other. No stakeholders like the insurance companies, doctors or pharmaceuticals should be there. They have already spread enough money around to the attendees. The stakeholder voices have been heard loud and clear.
Clearly, this meeting will be manageable because only twenty people will be in attendance. If the President has other pressing business, he should be excused and Vice-President Biden may stand in his place. Otherwise, attendees will be excused only to eat and sleep. No staff will be allowed. Questions for staff and their responses will be read allowed and posted on the internet. No communication with lobbyist should be conducted in the halls during bathroom or lunch breaks and phone call logs should be published while the members are at their residence.
The Blue Dog Coalition will be there in a non-voting advisory capacity only. Each priority will be voted on. All ties will result in both parties returning with alternatives to the proposed legislation which created the tie.
C-SPAN should split screen the person speaking with their top twenty campaign donors. They should also give the topic of discussion along with the speaker’s name and state. Side negotiations should also be televised on one of the other C-SPAN networks. C-SPAN should also rerun the program in its entirety overnight.
No one should be dismissed until a concurrent bill is agreed on.
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Some of the people who have helped form opinion on the healthcare debate apparently do not believe what they are saying.
It makes me cringe when normally reasonable people quote me something said on The Glen Beck Show. I cringe because it is just that, a show. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ed Schultz and Bill Moyers are interested in something beyond the truth. Granted Moyers is more cerebral than the rest but, he pushes an agenda like no other. No one really knows their motivation. I can tell you however, they are not really interested in hashing out the problems of the day. I think the fictional President Andrew Shepherd said it best:
…whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it.
This is not a movie or a sideshow for entertainment purposes. Healthcare spending threatens our economy and our very democracy.
A democracy depends on an educated or at least aware electorate. Do your part. Read the bill(s). Better yet, go to moderate websites like this one and ferret out some real information. Start with the Congressional Budget Office. The problem with some Americans is that they are too lazy to read the charts and graphs. They like their politics simple. The “Liberal good, conservative bad,” absolutist approach is the easy way to take a position on any question. Just be careful who installs your label.
Asking an entertainer to label an idea is dangerous and beneath the American people. We have reached an age where popularity has been confused with wisdom and knowledge. Because an entertainer says so, some have attended town hall meetings with doctored pictures of the President of the United States sporting a Hitler mustache. Does anyone really believe Obama is/was/want’s to be Hitler? He is trying to solve a problem. He needs our help.
The President seems to be getting little help from Capitol Hill. I have a feeling there are a few lawmakers who are less certain about their absolutist approach than Glen Beck. I think, as I have blogged before, many are motivated purely by political self preservation and campaign contributions. Those lawmakers need our help too. They don’t need Hitler pictures and shouting matches. They need a real effort, on our part, to understand the issues and discuss them intelligently. They certainly won’t be helped by a citizen regurgitating the view of an entertainer who may not believe his own propaganda.
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Healthcare, Chess and Unintended Consequences
Go Check it out!
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Today, my six year-old daughter told a lie. It’s pretty easy to catch her in a lie at her age. The funny thing is how her mom and I give her an opportunity to tell the truth and faced with no TV, desert or not having friends over, she unexplainably sticks to her guns. She continues to tell the lie at her peril. It’s almost as if she believes her telling the same lie over and over will make it the truth. There are politicians in the health reform debate who also seem to have my daughter’s mentality. The problem with their lies is that so far these politicians have not gotten as much as a “time out.”
The problem with giving the former Lieutenant Governor of New York, Betsy McCaughey, the time out she deserves is there will be too many others in the time out chairs. It will be more like party.
A time out is supposed to be a time of quiet reflection on breaking the rules. A child’s life is so full of other things; a parent must slow the child down and make him or her think about the rules and why they are important. McCaughey needs a time out because she told a whopper on Senator Fred Thompson’s radio show on July, 16th. According to factcheck.org she said:
“the Congress would make it mandatory … that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner, how to decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go into hospice care … all to do what’s in society’s best interest … and cut your life short.”
The bill said none of that hogwash. The bill was designed to only pay for end of life counseling if someone wanted it. The bill went on to explain what end of life counseling was. AARP was kind enough to call what McCaughey said a “misinterpretation.” At my house, we call it a lie. Moderates everywhere applaud discussion and debate but, this lady apparently subscribes to the “let them eat cake” brand of healthcare we have today. Moreover, she will obviously tell any lie to keep the status quo. It is hard to have a discussion with someone who we can not trust to tell the truth.
My theory of telling a lie enough times to make it truth is also in play in this discussion. Representative John Boehner (R-OH) and Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) have also parroted many of the same lies McCaughey began in July. They tell us the legislation “encourages” doctors to force seniors to literally sign their lives away. Why didn’t they just tell the truth and say McCaughey’s assertions were inaccurate? Why perpetuate complete lie?
I have not yet figured out why my daughter tells a lie but, I think I know the motivation of the three public liars I have pointed out in this article. The intent is to create mayhem, cut off legitimate debate and finally, to kill reform. If you have watched TV news lately you might agree they have done a pretty good job.
Even though my daughter feeding the cat is not that big a deal, around here, a lie is a lie. In a family, we rely on telling the truth. In Washington, they call it something else like spin or misinterpretation. Around here, you get the TV taken away, no dessert or a time out. Maybe McCaughey and the others should have an old elementary school time out. Maybe some time to think about integrity and why we as a society reward truth tellers while dismissing liars will do her some good. Apparently, she knows we give all politicians a pass on lies so there wouldn’t be much to think about.
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Republicans in Congress had a 28 percent approval rating last week according to a CBS News/New York Times poll. Pundits and the media have had a pretty good time at the party’s expense lately and for good reason. Beltway insiders of all stripes have given the party advice on how they might return from the wilderness.
Regardless of the advice, Republicans seem bent on giving their party to the right wing.
Any possibility of moderating the party seems to have been dismissed out of hand. This was reinforced by three actions this week. First, 37 Republican Senators voted against the 2 Billion dollar Cash for Clunkers extension. This insanely popular program gave Americans up to $4,500 toward new cars and was so popular the first billion was gone in a week. The program seemed to be the exact kind of stimulus Republicans could support. Instead, partisans like Richard Shelby (R-AL) joked about the program asking if there would be a “cash for shoes” program next.
Secondly, Republicans chose the radical right instead of taking the opportunity to mend fences with Hispanics. They tell us they applaud bootstraps and instead of rewarding an accomplished jurist who pulled herself up by her own, they tried to beat her with them. Judge Sonya Sotomayor, by all accounts, was the kind of law and order judge and former prosecutor a good Republican could love. They however, chose to only placate the radical right. I can only guess they did this mostly to make abundantly clear they would never support a Democrat in the White House. They chose appearance over pragmatism.
Finally, they ran Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) out on a rail 18 months before the end of his term. He and three other retiring Republican Senators (Kit Bond, Judd Gregg and George Voinovich) all voted for Sotomayor. Is this the changing of the moderate guard in the party? It could be most telling in Martinez’s case. Florida is almost 21 percent Hispanic. Florida is also a perennial swing state which has predicted the winner in 9 of the last 10 Presidential elections. Republicans still seem to feel the radical right trumps a 21 percent Hispanic vote every time.
I wonder if the Republicans are right. Can a few motivated right wingers who represent 20 or 30 percent of the population keep the Republicans in power? If this week’s “demonstrations” at town hall meetings on healthcare reform are any indication, they might be right. Again, I think the moderate middle has been silent on the subject. We are in the process of allowing a shouting match. In this shouting match we have lost our voice. Reason and pragmatism are losing to absolutism and greed. The same is happening to the Republican Party. “You’re either with us or agin us,” is a great sound bite but, will do little to help govern our nation. It could also marginalize a party with a few pretty good ideas.
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When you introduce yourself to your child’s new teacher this week and she (or he) seems exhausted, you might want to give her a break. If you find yourself in Wal-Mart gathering school supplies, you might want to take a breath before lighting into the teacher who wrote the list. If you see the signup list for room mother/father or see a wish list of school supplies for your child’s room, you might want to reconsider the giving of your time or money.
You might want to give your child’s teacher a break because she is probably at the school supply store right now putting another $400 on her Visa card so your child will have a more perfect learning environment.
She’s spending her own money because her 200 dollars worth of room money ran out about $3,200 dollars ago. In addition to making purchases for your child which she will be paying off around Christmas, she has worked 16 hour days for the last two or three weeks arranging your child’s room and starting on a part of the overwhelming paperwork which will be required to prove she taught your child. Believe me, “No Child Left Behind” only exacerbated the paperwork. In many systems, part of those days were spent moving all of her stuff back in place classroom because many systems move it all into the hall in the summer. The stuff in the halls includes rugs. Teachers, not custodial staff, usually rent steam cleaners and clean the rugs during the two or three weeks of preparation before school starts.
It’s not that schools don’t have janitors, copiers or laminators. The problem is school boards would prefer to hire their friends to be the Assistant Superintendent for External Affairs than buy laminator film, copier paper or hire enough custodians to assist teachers at a critical time before school. Some of these positions are due to unfunded mandates from Washington, but many are due to good ole homespun politics. Most teachers use up their allotment of 200 copies and four feet of lamination before they get your child’s name on their desk. Those same friends of the school board also conduct the performance evaluation on your child’s teacher. Many of the evaluators were ineffective teachers and were promoted due to politics, nepotism and meddling of school boards. Many evaluators don’t really understand the modern classroom, so evaluation usually begins with how the teacher’s room looks. Those ABC’s which performed their job brilliantly last year may have to go. Your child’s teacher has replaced many of the visuals you will see next week.
Teachers have been forced to participate in a kind of arms race which does absolutely nothing to improve your child’s education. Moreover, politically appointed administrations often seem to go out of their way to make your child’s teacher spend time doing things and spending their own money on items which will not help your child. By the way, those political hacks also control the teacher’s ability to get tenure.
So, if you see dark circles under the eyes of the teacher who will be in charge of your child’s education for the next nine months, just remember she has gone through a gauntlet over the last several weeks and survived. In most cases, she has moved furniture, ripped everything off the walls, spent thousands of her own money to replace it and written a new lesson plan because some bureaucrat changed the rules. Around midnight she began her final and arguably most important task. She printed your child’s name on labels she bought, with inkjet cartridges she bought and put it on a folder she got on sale at Wal-Mart. She wrote a note to you about the next nine months of your child’s life and how she planed to make your child smarter, more socialized and generally a better person. Each time she stuck a new name on a folder she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and wondered for just a minute what kind of student this child would be and if she might be able to inspire him or her. With the anticipation of child on Christmas morning, she wondered if she could help this child change the world. When she gives you this folder, you might try to share with her the promise and hope it represents.