Friday, July 10, 2009

Having solved all our other problems....

 

We might not have time to hold extensive hearings on the effects of spending hundreds of billions of dollars on TARP, stimulus spending, cap and trade, or funding public health insurance for everyone, but Democratic congressman Representative Bart Sestak of Michigan has held a hearing on the dread dangers facing our country by the proliferation of bottled water.

"I don't think we have to wait for a deadly outbreak of disease!" said Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), holding aloft a bottle of Coca-Cola's Dasani water. Stupak, chairman of the House commerce subcommittee that held yesterday's hearing, titled "Regulation of Bottled Water," called in the deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and others to talk about the terrible threat posed by H2O: "Just because it comes in a bottle, we assume it's healthier," he said, "but it's not the case."

Stupak had found the enemy, and it is Evian. And Poland Spring, and Aquafina and the rest. He even banished from the hearing room the bottles of Deer Park that are usually provided for members and witnesses, in favor of pitchers of iced tap water.

But is it true about this liquid scourge? Or is the chairman all wet? This much is clear, crisp and refreshing: Bottled water has not killed anybody, and it's not even clear that it has made anybody sick. And, as the committee learned, it is already regulated more strictly than other foods.

"With all the life-threatening health priorities facing the FDA, including numerous foodborne-illness outbreaks, complications with acetaminophen and the swine flu pandemic, this issue does to me seem a little secondary," chided Rep. Greg Walden (Ore.), the ranking Republican on the panel.

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) joined in the complaint that "today's hearing doesn't rank on the top of the list" of serious issues. "It shows when you look on your side how much support there is," Barton said, beckoning to the Democrats' seats, empty except for Stupak's.

....Finally, a lone Democrat, Del. Donna M. Christian-Christensen from the Virgin Islands, arrived and came to Stupak's defense. She announced that she "may never" drink a bottle of Evian or Fiji water again.

Patiently, the man from the FDA explained anew that, while the regulations for tap and bottled water are slightly different, bottled water isn't held to a lesser standard. In fact, he said, there is "definitely more" regulation of bottled water than of bottled soft drinks.

This was not going well. A congressional staffer in the audience started to play BrickBreaker on his phone. A small dog escaped from the Democratic staff room and made its way to the witness table before being apprehended. Stupak took a sip from his glass of iced D.C. water.

That's your Congress for you: a hearing in search of a problem that doesn't exist.

Labels: Congress

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:54 AM 3 comments

Labor unions fighting among themselves

 

As the pool of available workers for unions grows smaller, the unions have taken to trying to poach the members of other unions and convince them to join their own. And they're spending millions of dollars to do so.

The Service Employees International Union, union officials say, recently spent millions of dollars in California on organizers and a phone and mail campaign — in one fight to discourage workers from joining a rival health care union, and in another to urge hotel workers to quit their union and join the service employees.

....The feuding has taken many forms: intraunion, between unions and by several unions joining forces against another union.

For instance, five years after the nation’s main apparel union merged with the hotel and restaurant employees’ union, the combined union, Unite Here, erupted into a civil war. The apparel workers’ president, Bruce S. Raynor, declared the merger a failure and asked for a divorce, saying “we can’t be held captive by a bunch of thugs.” The merger was supposed to produce more organizing, but he complained that it was producing less, despite stepped-up spending on organizing.

Opposing the divorce, the head of the hotel workers’ side, John W. Wilhelm, insisted that the merger was a success and lambasted Mr. Raynor, asserting he wanted to undo the merger because he was a dictator who was losing a power struggle.

With Mr. Wilhelm blocking a split, more than 100,000 members of Unite Here broke away and merged into the Service Employees International Union. Soon the service employees were spending millions to persuade members of Unite Here to quit and join them. And soon after that, Mr. Wilhelm was accusing the service employees of a heinous labor sin, raiding another union to steal members.

Of course, they're all in agreement on the big picture of electing Democrats and pressuring for the more deleterious elements of card check legislation. But still, it's delicious to hear of this infighting. If only such battles were a bigger distraction from their other efforts that stagnate our economy and education system.

Labels: Labor

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:39 AM 0 comments

Trying to shirk blame on the stimulus

 

Everyone knows that one of the reasons that the stimulus bill was so poorly written was because President Obama passively allowed the Democrats in the House to craft the bill. He allowed them to pack the bill with their own favored measures and earmarks instead of following his own economic adviser's advice. Larry Summers had stressed that the bill should be immediate, targeted, and temporary. Instead it was filled with all sorts of traditional goodies that the Democrats had always wanted regardless is such proposals would do anything to provide jobs or work fast to get people back to work.

This is the President's style with big bills. In order to avoid the mistakes that the Clinton administration made with health care by not involving Congress in crafting Hillary's bill, Obama has gone to the opposite extreme by allowing the Democrats in Congress to negotiate among themselves to design a bill whether it be stimulus, health care, or cap and trade, and then to swing in to add his PR magic to sell whatever has come out of Congress to the people.

But now the stimulus has failed and become a punching bag for everyone who realizes now what the Republicans said all along about the bill is true. It was a goodie-stuffed bill with much of the spending pushed off for more than a year. So John Murtha is suddenly fleeing the sinking ship of that unpopular bill.

Murtha said he would not have created the stimulus package the way President Barack Obama designed it. He said he would have had more infrastructure projects in the package.

What a rewrite of history. It was Murtha's good pal Nancy Pelosi who had control over the writing of that stimulus bill. And if he wanted more infrastructure projects in the package, where was he at the time?

Murtha tries even more to escape blame by explaining to his constituents that members rarely read bills.

A Perryopolis woman asked Murtha to pledge to vote only on bills he's read. The issue recently came up in the U.S. House of Representatives when members had little time to read a 300-page amendment to the climate change bill.

"None of us have the time to read every bill," Murtha said. "We depend on the committee responsible for it."

Murtha said the House and Senate have a committee system with experts for each committee. That allows each committee to be aware of the legislation before it and explain the legislation to others. He compared it to seeing a doctor for health problems. A patient depends on a doctor for information just as committees depend on each other, he said.

Murtha described the complaint that all bills aren't read as "political obstructionism."

Well, they could stop writing these huge omnibus bills and then add in 300 pages in the middle of the night and then force a vote on the bill as speedily as possible just to make sure that those voting on the bill haven't read it. If they didn't try to do so much in a single bill it wouldn't be so long. If you look back at bills written in the 18th and 19th centuries, they're amazingly brief compared to what we get today. Even the major effort of the New Deal, the National Recovery Act, is only about 12 pages long. These mammoth bills that no one could possibly read are a relatively new incarnation. And now congressmen in the leadership of their parties such as John Murtha and Steny Hoyer are trying to duck blame by saying that they didn't read the bills and that no one could possibly read such big bills. And Murtha is even trying to wash his friend, Nancy Pelosi, clean of responsibility and place the blame on the President. Will we soon see the administration's spokesmen pointing back at the House Democrats and blame them for this bill?

Labels: Congress, Stimulus

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:23 AM 3 comments

Thursday, July 09, 2009

This will do wonders for the housing market

 

What would you think of a government plan that would make it more expensive and time-consuming to sell your house? Would that be a good idea at a time when the housing market is suffering? Would it ever be a good idea?

Well that is part of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill. They threw in everything that was ever on their wishlist concerning the environment including this little provision that Jimmie Bise at the American Issues Project details for us.

See, the Federal Government really wants a country full of energy-efficient homes, so much so that the bill mandates that new homes be 30 percent more energy efficient than the current building code on the very day the law is signed. That efficiency goes up to 50 percent by 2014 and only goes higher from there, all the way to 2030. That, by the way, is not merely a target but a requirement of the law. New homes must reach those efficiency targets no matter what.

But what does that have to do with current homeowners like you? Well, I'm glad you asked. You're certainly not off the hook, no way, no how. Here's what the Democrats have planned for you. The program requires that states label their buildings so that we can all know how efficient every building (that includes residential and non-residential buildings) is and it requires that the information be made public.

Then if you plan to renovate or sell your house, you will have to get it inspected. And to make sure that people will be forced to upgrade their homes to meet the national standards, states will be required to have a certain percentage of their homes pass the standards or they will lose out on gobs of federal moolah. So the states will be forced to mandate that homeowners pay to get their house in compliance with the federal environmental standards. You know that states will alwasy cave when the federal government starts throwing money at them.

So it goes in Shreveport has more on what is in this ugly bill that, just like the stimulus, none of them read in its entirety.

And how will this bill affect you? It has regulations on every single aspect of your daily life. There are light bulb restrictions (no more than 60 watts in your candelabra); in fact there's a whole section that deals with lamps. If you decide to build a new home, it must meet new and specific energy requirements. If you decide to sell your existing home, a federal inspector must inspect your home, determine it's energy rating, and if your home is found to be unacceptable then you must retrofit and make changes before you will be able to sell.

There's an entire section on planting trees including guidelines on "scientific based measurements outlining the species and minimum distance required between trees planted...in addition to the minimum required distance to be maintained between such trees and building foundations, air conditioning units, driveways and walkways...". Do we really need the federal government telling us where we can plant trees?

There's a section dealing with outdoor lighting in which you are given instructions about landscape lights, lights in your swimming pool, lights on artwork and other architectural lighting. The federal government is going to tell you what wattage that light can be and how many you can have. In some cases the lights must be capable of producing two different light levels (100 and 60 watt).

There are new government regulations for water dispensers, hot tubs and other appliances. They're going to regulate water usage, and regulate wood stoves. Any wood stove that does not meet regulation must be "destroyed and recycled."

Just what we need. A federal government mandating how far apart we plant our trees and what bulbs we can use in our yards. And all for a bill that will barely touch global temperatures.

Those who voted for the bill will soon be excusing that vote by saying they just didn't know what was buried in that bill because they hadn't read it. Better to admit that dereliction of duty than to let constituents think that these politicians actually believed that any of this was a good idea.

Labels: Environment

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 8:53 PM 2 comments

Broken promises

 

Almost nonchalantly, the Associated Press remarks on how President Obama has already broken one of his most heralded campaign promises.

President Barack Obama promised to fix health care and trim the federal budget deficit, all without raising taxes on anyone but the wealthiest Americans. It's a promise he's already broken and will likely have to break again. Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress have already increased tobacco taxes — which disproportionately hit the poor — to pay for extending health coverage to 4 million children in working low-income families.

Yes, why don't we hear about that broken tax promise again and again just as we heard about George H. W. Bush's lips?

And the AP goes on to note just how impossible the math is to do what the Democrats are promising with health care without major tax increases.

The health care bill is a long way from Obama's desk, but tax experts say the debate illustrates a stark reality: It is simply implausible for the vast majority of Americans to get a free ride while the nation tackles such an incredibly difficult — and expensive — issue.

"We're all going to have to contribute," said Eugene Steuerle, a former treasury official in the Reagan administration and now vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

Paying for Obama's agenda might be easier, Steuerle said, if the nation wasn't already facing massive federal budget deficits for the foreseeable future.

"The dilemma is trying to do the new while the old is still unpaid for," Steuerle said.

Gee, ya think?

All this spending that the Democrats have been pouring on has a cost. And that cost will be higher taxes. So forget all about that pledge that Obama made over and over and over again during the campaign.

Obama made a firm tax pledge during the presidential campaign, repeating it numerous times in the weeks and months leading up to Election Day: no tax increases for individuals making less than $200,000 a year or couples making less than $250,000.

"Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes," Obama told a crowd in Dover, N.H., last year.

But less than a month after taking office, Obama signed an expansion of child health care financed by 62-cent tax increase on each pack of cigarettes.

Obama also signed an anti-smoking bill in June that grants authority to the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco. To pay for the new program, a fee is being imposed on the industry — and presumably passed on to consumers — estimated to generate more than $5 billion over the next decade.

While not directly increasing taxes, a House-passed version of Obama's plan to reduce greenhouse gases blamed for causing global warming would similarly increase American families' home energy bills by $175 a year on average, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

And we're not even close to what will be necessary for the health care proposals they're kicking around.

The appeal of Baucus's proposed tax on health benefits was the amount of money it could raise. Currently, employer-provided health benefits are not taxed, regardless of how generous they are.

One version of it would tax health benefits that exceed the value of the basic insurance plan offered to federal workers, raising about $420 billion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. But limiting it to individuals making more than $100,000 a year and couples making more than $200,000 would raise only $162 billion.

The math illustrates how difficult it is to raise enough money to pay for expensive programs, when tax increases are limited to the wealthy.

"We're living in an era, over a period of 20 years or more, in which the idea that tax rates would actually be boosted is unutterable," said Aaron, the health care expert. "That has to stop."

Of course, there is the whole effect that such tax increases will have on our already weak economy. Everyone, even liberals, agrees that it would be a disaster to raise taxes in the middle of a deep recession. And many states, including my own of North Carolina, are planning to do just that as they face their own budgetary crises. Add in these new taxes and we'll see deeper economic stagnation.

Of course, it was always obvious that there was no possible way that Obama could do all the things that he was proposing on the campaign trail without raising taxes. Anyone who thought about it knew that he was making false promises that could never be kept. But it all sounded so nice and he seemed so cool when he made the promises. So people just fell for it. And now, even the media is beginning to wise up to those broken promises.

Labels: President Obama, Taxes

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 8:40 PM 0 comments

When the police sponsor a school

 

Over at City Journal, Laura Vanderkam has a fascinating article about magnet schools in Los Angeles that is sponsored by the Los Angeles Police Department. It seems like such a win-win idea.

L.A.’s six police magnets—five high schools and a middle school—have only partly fulfilled their original mission of recruiting and training more homegrown minority cops. But with four-year graduation rates that nearly double the LAUSD average, these innovative schools have done something far more important: preparing at-risk minority kids for college and sending the majority of them there.....

So [school board member] Weintraub approached then-mayor Richard Riordan with an idea: magnet high schools, affiliated with the LAPD, where active-duty officers would mentor and help instruct students and where the curricula would reflect criminal-justice themes. The hope was that some of the kids enrolled in these schools would later pursue careers in law enforcement in Los Angeles. With the help of outside grants, the first police magnets opened in 1996; by 2001, programs were running in Dorsey, Monroe, San Pedro, Reseda, and Wilson High Schools and at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa. Today, the program enrolls about 1,300 students, most of them Hispanic.

The high school sounds like a great place to go to school.

The magnets differ starkly from typical urban schools. True, most faculty members are regular LAUSD teachers, and they offer the usual history, geometry, and composition instruction; students must take the classes required for admission to California’s public universities, including four years of English, three years of math, and two years of lab-science classes. Each school, though, has one or two active-duty LAPD officers on site, mentoring students and assisting teachers in some classes. The officers talk to students about what a police career entails, share stories, and even pinch-hit to keep the schools running smoothly (by, say, driving students home after sports practices). LAPD brass, including Bratton, make frequent visits to do student-uniform inspections and give motivational speeches.

The curriculum reflects the law-enforcement theme. Science classes, for example, detour from the usual quizzes and worksheets to emphasize high-tech police work. At Reseda, young CSI fans enjoy the use of a forensics lab. Under the tutelage of forensics teacher Barbara Andrade, students attack different types of glass with hammers to see how they shatter, and they study soil, just as detectives do to figure out if the clumps on a dead body are from the location where the body turned up or from somewhere else. The kids analyze fingerprints under a microscope and hair samples, too—when I visited, Alise Cayen, the Reseda magnet’s coordinator, had recently let students cut off a chunk of her hair to use in class.

Perhaps the schools’ most noticeable curricular feature is a relentless emphasis on physical fitness. Though modern police work requires more brains than brawn, physical stamina helps, and the cadets accordingly take four years of physical training that is a far cry from the halfhearted lap-running that many schools call gym class. At Reseda, the kids’ mile times—mostly seven to eight minutes, some as short as five and change—reflect the drills that coach Fernando Fernandez, a sub-three-hour marathoner, puts them through. The cadets lift weights, dart through obstacle courses, and crank out vast numbers of push-ups, sit-ups, and chin-ups. They graduate in the kind of shape that puts the rest of California schools—in which 35.4 percent of Hispanic children are overweight—to shame.

And the school has an innovative approach to school discipline - put the kids in charge.

Discipline is strict, a communal priority. Reseda organizes cadets into squads of five to eight, each supervised by a student leader. The leaders make sure that their cadets get their work done, keep their grades up, behave in class, and dress neatly. If a cadet falls continually out of line, his squad leader can wind up demoted by a more advanced student leader or—at Reseda—by Sazo, who is the school’s captain (top-ranking cadet). She takes her enforcement duties seriously. “I set them aside and tell them, ‘You haven’t been doing your job, but if you get it together, you have the opportunity to get it back,’” she says. Peer pressure is powerful; the schools have figured out a way to use it for good.

The schools may not be achieving their goal of getting more minorities to join the police force, but they are achieving a more important goal of graduating well-prepared, responsible, and mature students ready for the real world. This seems like an encouraging template for other communities to have partnerships between the police department and the schools. It's a true win-win for everyone involved.

Labels: Education

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 2:20 PM 1 comments

Just what Los Angeles didn't need

 

As the economy of Los Angeles continues to deteriorate and the city faces budget woes, the one thing they didn't need was to spend over a million dollars on the Michael Jackson memorial. There are some who argue that, despite the expense, the memorial was a good thing for the city.

There were those who argued that the Jackson memorial might have brought more money into the local economy than it cost.

Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., said his group estimated that the memorial brought about $4 million to local businesses in the form of food sales, parking, miscellaneous shopping and hotel stays.

"We're a center of celebrity," he said. "You have to be able to deal with it. You have to look at the positives and the negatives. Yes, you have some expenses, but if you handle the whole thing in a smooth fashion, which they did, you get a real positive."

Carol Schatz, president and chief executive of the Central City Assn., said the memorial was actually a mixed bag, economically.

"All the downtown hotels were close to being full as a result of the service," she said. "However, it did not spill over to the restaurants, especially on the day of the service, because so many businesses fearing these enormous multitudes had their employees stay home."

Still, she said the memorial was "worth its weight in gold" for the attention it brought to "the new downtown that we've created in the last 10 years."

Taking that argument a step further, Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow at Chapman University in Orange, said that Jackson's death and memorial helped "brand" the city and would have lasting economic value.

"If there is a positive," he said, "it's that it sort of reconfirmed L.A.'s status as a capital of pop music, celebrity, and lunacy. . . . That's infinitely more important than a one-day event."

Well, if it was such a benefit for downtown businesses, why shouldn't they pay the $1.4 million that it reportedly cost the city. And how silly is it for these city boosters to twinkle about how wonderful it was for the city to be "branded" as the pop capital of the world? The city already hosts all sorts of movie and music awards shows such as the Oscars and Grammys. If people didn't already think of it as a pop capital after years of those shows, a one-off memorial service isn't going to change their view. And doesn't the symbolism of it being a memorial for someone who died have just as much a possibility of communicating the message that this is the place where pop dies?

If I were still a resident of Los Angeles, I'd be plenty ticked off that the city pays the bill for private events such as the memorial or the awards shows.

For years, the city has absorbed thousands of dollars in costs for neighborhood block parties, farmers' markets, 10K races, church fairs and parades.

It has also subsidized larger events such as the Academy Awards at the Kodak Theatre, which got a $410,000 waiver from the City Council in January, or the Grammy Awards at Staples Center, which was granted a $124,163 waiver earlier this year.

It is one thing for the city to pay for a church fair or parade, but there seems no reason why the awards shows should get waivers from the city. They make plenty of money from the TV broadcasts of these shows that showcase a bunch of multi-millionaires. They should be able to find a way to pony up for their own narcissistic celebrations of themselves. Just as the Jackson estate or all those celebrities who rushed out to LA to celebrate the deceased could have paid for the additional costs.

UPDATE: And to add to all LA Mayor Villaraigosa's other woes, there is this story of his trying to literally ride in Kobe Bryant's parade.

Bryant, according to multiple news reports, was in a huff because Villaraigosa wanted to hop on the victory float alongside Bryant during last week's downtown victory parade.

Bryant, whose ego clash with Shaquille O'Neal forced the center out of Los Angeles, apparently did not want to share the spotlight with Villaraigosa, who had considered running for governor. Villaraigosa wanted a photo op with Bryant, but Bryant refused to get on the float if Villaraigosa was there.

According to a report at www.nbclosangeles.com, Kobe was witnessed saying, "I'm not going to let him pimp my popularity!"

Come on! The guy is a politician, and not a particularly popular one. Of course, he's going to try to pimp your popularity, Kobe.

Labels: Popular culture

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 1:41 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

I guess it's okay to question our patriotism now

 

Remember when Democrats would get all up on their high horse and claim that Republicans were questioning their patriotism. In those days we'd hear that "dissent was the highest form of patriotism. Well, now that the Democrats are in control, dissent is no longer cool, but disparaging Republicans' patriotism is perfectly fine.

Henry Waxman is convinced that the only reason someone would oppose his atrocious cap and tax bill is because they hate the U.S. and want Obama to fail.

“It appears that the Republican Party leadership in the Congress has made a decision that they want to deny President Obama success, which means, in my mind, they are rooting against the country, as well,” the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman told WAMU.

Gee, couldn't it just be that they think that these are godawful bills?

Labels: Democrats

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:30 PM 16 comments

Hoyer giggles at the idea that congressmen would actually read the boondoggles they pass

 

Different people will laugh at different things. Apparently what amuses Steny Hoyer, the Democratic Majority Leader of the House, is the idea that congressmen should commit to reading the health-care bill before they pass it.

In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.

“Members clearly--and staff and review boards, they read them in their entirety. They go over it with members, and members read substantial portions of the bill themselves, but the issue is--I don’t know who signed this (pledge), but frankly the opposition has been very vociferous, not of the verbiage and bill, but on the concept that it incorporates,” Hoyer said.

Well, yeah. That's what we all knew was happening, but politicians like to pretend that they're actually conscientious about their jobs. Hoyer is so frank that he doesn't even bother pretending. While I appreciate his honesty, isn't it a bit frightening that these guys regularly pass these telephone book-size bills and have no real idea what is in them. They pass these monstrosities under rules that limit debate and amendments so even if people knew what was in the bill, they can't change them. That's why we're still finding out what was in the stimulus bill and what tidbits were hidden in the Waxman-Markey bill.

This is no way to run the country. But I guess it's easier to laugh along with Steny instead of crying.

Labels: House of Representatives

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:17 PM 1 comments

PC silliness trumps common sense

 

A reader sent me this story from a California community whose fire board is all in a tizzy because one member expressed his opinion that 5'2 women weren't qualified to be firefighters.

Some First Amendment experts say the board of the Rodeo-Hercules Fire District exceeded its authority when it excluded one of its members from meetings for saying publicly that 5-foot-2 women are unfit to be firefighters.

But district counsel William Ross says the exclusion of Bill Prather is part of the district's obligation under federal and state law to ensure a nonhostile workplace for its employees.

Prather made his comment during a Feb. 18 open-session discussion of the Pack Test, a fitness test that Prather and former Fire Chief Gary Boyles advocate and that Firefighters Union Local 1230 opposes. Prather opined that some firefighters are unqualified; when questioned whom he meant, he cited "5-foot-2-inch females that can't do the job," according to the meeting minutes. Prather has apologized publicly and repudiated his remark several times since then.

On June 25, board members Walter "Wally" Trujillo, Beth Bartke, John Mills and Chairman J.R. Stafford voted unanimously to censure Prather; they also banned him from attending board meetings for four months.

"The board has no right to exclude a member from meetings on the basis of avoiding a 'hostile work environment,' or on any other basis relating to what the member has said in expressing his or her personal opinion," said Terry Francke, general counsel of Californians Aware. "Mr. Prather's rights are obviously violated as well as those of the public, particularly those who elected him to represent their interests and views."

Gee, how many people are there out there who would want a 5'2 woman firefighter showing up to rescue their elderly father who had passed out from a top-floor fire? Or at least be comforted to know that she had first passed a rigorous fitness test before showing up at your window to carry your dad down?

Stories like this confirm my sense that we are truly living in a Wonderland Lewis Carroll couldn't have conceived of.

Labels: Political correctness

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 9:42 AM 11 comments

Why we should have competition in health care insurance

 

John Stossel stresses why competition is healthy for health insurance.

Insurance, whether private or a government Ponzi scheme like Medicare, means third parties pay the bills. When someone else pays, costs always go up.

Imagine if you had grocery insurance. You wouldn't care how much food cost. Why shop around? If someone else were paying 80 percent, you'd buy the most expensive cuts of meat. Prices would skyrocket.

That's what health insurance does to medical care. Patients rarely even ask what anything costs. Doctors often don't know. Often nobody even gives a damn. Patients rarely ask, "Is that MRI really necessary? Is there a cheaper place?" We consume without thinking.

By contrast, in areas of medicine where most patients pay their own way, service gets better, while prices fall.

Take plastic surgery and Lasik eye surgery: Because patients shop around and compare prices, doctors work hard to win their business. They often give customers their cell-phone numbers. Service keeps increasing, but prices don't. "In every other field of medicine, the price is going up faster than consumer prices in general," says John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis. "But the price of Lasik surgery, on average, has gone down by 30 percent."

This shouldn't be a surprise. What holds costs down is patients acting like consumers, looking out for themselves in a competitive market. Providers fight to win business by keeping costs down and quality up.

Yet politicians keep telling us the solution is more insurance. And they mean insurance not just for catastrophic diseases that could bankrupt us but also for routine treatments.

The politicians are so oblivious to reality that they are on course to make things worse. Obama would force every business to either give workers health insurance or pay a fine into the public system. Why is that something we should want employers to do? Premiums come out of our salaries, but insurers are accountable to our bosses, not to us.

Why not just have a free market where people can buy whatever kind of health insurance they want? Competition would then bring prices down.

Labels: Health

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:11 AM 8 comments

How "best health practices" works in Britain

 

The WSJ looks at NICE, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the body in Britain that was supposed to insure that only the best practices are used in the publicly insured health care. Just what President Obama has promised that we'll do here to save money.

The British officials who established NICE in the late 1990s pitched it as a body that would ensure that the government-run National Health System used "best practices" in medicine. As the Guardian reported in 1998: "Health ministers are setting up [NICE], designed to ensure that every treatment, operation, or medicine used is the proven best. It will root out under-performing doctors and useless treatments, spreading best practices everywhere."

Doesn't that sound familiar? As he wrote in a public letter President Obama is also interested in the efficient-sounding "best practices."

But I want to stress that reform cannot mean focusing on expanded coverage alone. Indeed, without a serious, sustained effort to reduce the growth rate of health care costs, affordable health care coverage will remain out of reach. So we must attack the root causes of the inflation in health care. That means promoting the best practices, not simply the most expensive.

So it is worthwhile to look at how Britain's system works. It is not an example that we should want to emulate. It has become a rationing board refusing coverage for new drugs that are used regularly here.

In 2007, the board restricted access to two drugs for macular degeneration, a cause of blindness. The drug Macugen was blocked outright. The other, Lucentis, was limited to a particular category of individuals with the disease, restricting it to about one in five sufferers. Even then, the drug was only approved for use in one eye, meaning those lucky enough to get it would still go blind in the other. As Andrew Dillon, the chief executive of NICE, explained at the time: "When treatments are very expensive, we have to use them where they give the most benefit to patients."

NICE has limited the use of Alzheimer's drugs, including Aricept, for patients in the early stages of the disease. Doctors in the U.K. argued vociferously that the most effective way to slow the progress of the disease is to give drugs at the first sign of dementia. NICE ruled the drugs were not "cost effective" in early stages.

The list goes on.

NICE has also produced guidance that restrains certain surgical operations and treatments. NICE has restrictions on fertility treatments, as well as on procedures for back pain, including surgeries and steroid injections. The U.K. has recently been absorbed by the cases of several young women who developed cervical cancer after being denied pap smears by a related health authority, the Cervical Screening Programme, which in order to reduce government health-care spending has refused the screens to women under age 25.

Remember, these are treatments that are usually covered by American private insurance. Do you think that senior citizens would like the idea of a government plan that didn't cover Aricept for Alzheimers?

If we have a national plan unfriendly to new drugs, we won't have the full experimentation to get information on what indeed would be the best treatment.

One virtue of a private system is that competition allows choice and experimentation. To take an example from one of our recent editorials, Medicare today refuses to reimburse for the new, less invasive preventive treatment known as a virtual colonoscopy, but such private insurers as Cigna and United Healthcare do. As clinical evidence accumulates on the virtual colonoscopy, doctors and insurers will be able to adjust their practices accordingly. NICE merely issues orders, and patients have little recourse.

This has medical consequences. The Concord study published in 2008 showed that cancer survival rates in Britain are among the worst in Europe. Five-year survival rates among U.S. cancer patients are also significantly higher than in Europe: 84% vs. 73% for breast cancer, 92% vs. 57% for prostate cancer. While there is more than one reason for this difference, surely one is medical innovation and the greater U.S. willingness to reimburse for it.

The Obama administration claims that they don't have any intention to ration health care, but that is just obfuscation for what will be inevitable if their plans are enacted.

The NICE precedent also undercuts the Obama Administration's argument that vast health savings can be gleaned simply by automating health records or squeezing out "waste." Britain has tried all of that but ultimately has concluded that it can only rein in costs by limiting care. The logic of a health-care system dominated by government is that it always ends up with some version of a NICE board that makes these life-or-death treatment decisions. The Administration's new Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research currently lacks the authority of NICE. But over time, if the Obama plan passes and taxpayer costs inevitably soar, it could quickly gain it.

Mr. Obama and Democrats claim they can expand subsidies for tens of millions of Americans, while saving money and improving the quality of care. It can't possibly be done. The inevitable result of their plan will be some version of a NICE board that will tell millions of Americans that they are too young, or too old, or too sick to be worth paying to care for.

Labels: Health

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:56 AM 5 comments

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Engagement ahead of everything

 

While there might be little that the United States can do to help the protesters in Iran, we shouldn't be giving the Khamenei and Ahmadinejad regime the green light to continue whatever they're doing to crack down on dissent without worrying that Obama won't be willing to "engage" with them.

President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in separate interviews this weekend, said that the accelerating crackdown on opposition leaders in Iran in recent days would not deter them from seeking to engage the country’s top leadership in direct negotiations.

In an interview with The New York Times, a day before his scheduled departure for Moscow on Sunday, Mr. Obama said he had “grave concern” about the arrests and intimidation of Iran’s opposition leaders, but insisted, as he has throughout the Iranian crisis, that the repression would not close the door on negotiations with the Iranian government.

“We’ve got some fixed national security interests in Iran not developing nuclear weapons, in not exporting terrorism, and we have offered a pathway for Iran to rejoining the international community,” Mr. Obama said.

As Jennifer Rubin writes,

No fixed interests in democracy or human rights, have we? And no fixed interests in pursuing a policy with a remote chance to bear fruit. How many Iranians must be hanged or thrown in Evin prison before Obama understands that the Iranian government is not interested in “rejoining the international community”? Is there no one in the administration who might point out the significance of the “severe disconnect between their objectives and reality”?

....The president is willing to recognize no set of facts or moral considerations that will dissuade him from pursuing “engagement” with Iran. This is the triumph of blind ideology over reason, facts, history, and common sense.

And this was supposed to be the pragmatic and realist administration that did not run foreign policy based on ideology. Yeah, right. The illusion of meaningful engagement with Ahmadinejad and Khamenei that Obama enunciated in the youtube debate has blinded him to the reality that there is no way he can negotiate with this regime on any of those fixed national issues.

Labels: Iran

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:45 AM 1 comments

Creative destruction is painful, but necessary

 

Kevin Hassett thinks that the Obama administration could learn some lessons from economist Joseph Schumpeter.

Obama and his team seem sharply opposed to the view that creative destruction is a valuable economic force. They seem happy with what might be called destructive destruction – the obliteration of value and wealth without any resulting positive change.

Creative destruction describes the painful effects of innovation and progress. Sometimes great inventions wipe out the existing economy, just as the Internet may be killing print newspapers. In other cases, economic failure clears the way for competition among inventive newcomers. In both scenarios, the nimble and inventive replace the calcified old guard, eventually moving economic welfare to a higher level.

This is the lesson that the administration is ignoring as it props up car companies and other dinosaurs. Such creative destruction is terribly painful, but it is the only way that an economy can grow and prosper.

Labels: Economics

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:41 AM 3 comments

When we talk about cutting spending, this is what we mean

 

In an entry about the Californification of North Carolina, Charlotte blogger Tara Servatius points to spending that the North Carolina legislature is still planning to make even as they plan how much to raise taxes and how much of the education budget to cut. Here is a sample of spending okayed in the budget - nice items, but not the sort of items that would outrank education in taxpayers' minds.

Last month, while teachers here and across the state were getting pink slips due to the supposedly busted budget, Perdue was kicking up her heels at a "sand breaking" for the new state-funded $22.5-million North Carolina Aquarium Pier in affluent Nags Head. When finished, the tourist destination will include a 16,000-square-foot pier house that can be rented for parties. Construction began weeks after Perdue signed a bill funding it this spring.

Last week, she claimed she feels the teachers' pain. But why, then, didn't the state cancel money for the pier or try to claw back the $2-million ACC Hall of Champions in Greensboro? What about the $2.3 million still in the budget for the state symphony? Or the $4.7 million for the zoo fund and adopt-a-trail program? Or the $536,000 for the Ergonomics Center at N.C. State University, which designs user-friendly office furniture? Then there's $1.2 million for the botanical garden at UNC-Chapel Hill, $13.1 million for the state's public television station, $300,000 to resurrect and display Blackbeard's ship, $33 million for new museums/museum expansions across the state, and more than $50 million for the arts and theater programs.

Museums are nice and I like visiting the ones in our state and elsewhere. But if legislators were really as serious as they claim to be about cutting the budget to the bone, the ACC Hall of Champions might have to wait while that money went to keep a few more teachers in their classrooms. Though wouldn't you bet that most of these items are simply earmarks put in by legislators for their home communities?

Meanwhile, as Servatius notes, North Carolina has rocketed to the top of the national ratings on taxes. If the sales tax proposal to raise it to 7% goes through, North Carolina will be second only to California on that scale. But to balance that regressive tax, there is also a proposed progressive tax increase.

It also included a boost to the top two income tax brackets to 8.25 and 8.5 percent. If that passes, only California, Vermont, Oregon, Maine, New Jersey, Iowa and Hawaii have a higher top rate. And we'll have a heck of a time recruiting business here with our new state slogan: "North Carolina -- not quite California and marginally better than New Jersey."

North Carolina: where everyone gets to pay more.

Labels: North Carolina politics

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:12 AM 3 comments

Keep Congress out of college football!

 

William McGurn defends the BCS as he notes that Congress is set today to hold hearings on the whole college football championship controversy.

Today the Senate antitrust subcommittee will hold hearings on perhaps the only American institution less popular than Congress itself: the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). Like an earlier hearing in the House, this one will ask whether the system by which college football chooses its national champion is "fair."

....In terms of popularity, it's a contest more evenly matched than any Rose Bowl. In one corner there's Congress with its 18% approval rating, according to the latest Rasmussen poll. In the other sits the BCS, whose system makes tons of money from television for its members but is preferred by just 15% of fans, according to a 2007 Gallup poll. No real winner here.

Shamefully, this congressional overreach is being led by two Republicans - Rep. Joe Barton of TX and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. Yeesh! Don't these guys get it? Conservatives are supposed to be about lessening the reach of the federal government into every sphere of our lives, not increasing it. I know, I know. That's a practice that is "more honored in the breach than the observance," but therein lies one of the problems with the Republican Party. College football championships, at least, should be an area where most fans can honestly say that they have not been yearning for congressional hearings and governmental mandates.

I'm probably one of the few people in the country who is an agnostic on the whole debate concerning the BCS. But I know that passions on this are deeper than they are on any of the issues that I do get riled up about. Let the passions play out in the living rooms of sports fans and on sports radio. Keep Congress out of it. And here's a suggestion:

College football would be better off if those who run the BCS could recognize that the calls for playoffs are being fed by the precision their system implicitly promises but can never deliver. And Americans would be better off if Republican legislators devoted their energies to reforming our antiquated antitrust laws instead of looking for silly new ways to apply them.

Labels: Popular culture

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:07 AM 3 comments

When will people learn about posting on the internet?

 

When the wife of the head of the British secret service, M16, blows his cover on her Facebook page, you have to wonder if public officials and their families need remedial training on how not to embarrass themselves on the internet.

The wife of the new head of MI6 has caused a major security breach and left his family exposed after publishing photographs and personal details on Facebook.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in November, putting him in charge of all of Britain’s spying operations abroad.

But entries by his wife Shelley on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, their friends’ identities and where they spend their holidays. On the day her husband was appointed she congratulated him on the site using his codename “C”.

Lady Sawers had put virtually no privacy protection on her account, making it visible to any of the site’s 200m users around the world who choose to be in the open-access London social network on Facebook.

Somehow I don't think that James Bond or M would have ever had Facebook pages.

UPDATE: And here's another reason to maybe limit what information you put on social networking sites.

For all the concern about identity theft, researchers say there's a surprisingly easy way for the technology-savvy to figure out the precious nine digits of Americans' Social Security numbers.

"It's good that we found it before the bad guys," Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh said of the method for predicting the numbers.

Acquisti and Ralph Gross report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they were able to make the predictions using data available in public records as well as information such as birthdates cheerfully provided on social networks such as Facebook.

For people born after 1988 — when the government began issuing numbers at birth — the researchers were able to identify, in a single attempt, the first five Social Security digits for 44 percent of individuals. And they got all nine digits for 8.5 percent of those people in fewer than 1,000 attempts.

For smaller states their accuracy was considerably higher than in larger ones.

The researchers recommend that the Social Security Administration adopt randomization of the numbers and, finally, the SSA acknowledges that, unrelated to this study, they are planning to randomize the numbers.

Labels: Foreign news

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 5:51 AM 2 comments

Monday, July 06, 2009

Approaching the nadir of society

 

People are hawking their tickets to the Michael Jackson memorial. For reasons that elude me this apparently excites quite a few people.

Lucky fans celebrated when they got an e-mail saying they had scored the hottest ticket in town. "Congratulations, your application was successful," said the message sent to Deka Motanya, 27, of San Francisco.

She immediately Twittered: "OMG OMG OMG OMG i got tickets to the michael jackson memorial service!!!"

On eBay, bids were reaching as high as $3,000, though it was impossible to verify the seriousness of those offers. Others on Monday were submitting bids more in the $100-$200 range.

Imagine going public with four OMG's to celebrate going to a memorial. It's beyond me.

Labels: Popular culture

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 4:04 PM 8 comments

Blogger call with Senator Sessions

 

I just finished participating in a blogger conference call with Senator Jeff Sessions about the upcoming confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor. Senator Sessions sounded the expected notes about doubts about her judicial philosophy. The Republicans are also expressing concern about her work as, the New York Times terms it, a top policy maker for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, at a time when the Fund was filing complaints in cases such as in Hispanic Society of the Department of Sanitation v. N.Y.C. Dep’t of Sanitation, the Fund represented the plaintiffs "in regard to a claim that the Supervisor Examination has a severe disparate impact upon Hispanic test-takers." In a case with echoes of the Ricci firefighters case, the Fund claimed that "Hispanics comprised 5.2% of the test-takers and only 3.8% of the passers" and that this was proof of discrimination. The PRLDEF claims that Sotomayor didn't have an active role in these cases.

The Fund's pres. and general counsel, César Perales, told the AP yesterday that Sotomayor was simply on the litigation board of the Fund and didn't participate in cases. He said she set broad policy and guidelines.

"She was on the board of directors, she was not a member of the legal staff," Perales said, "so she was not directly involved in the legal arguments that we presented. Her role was to help us raise funds, set policy, hire the person who would run the organization."

I don't think that, even if she'd participated in litigating these cases, that it would make any difference since clearly that is a position held by liberal judges. Just witness that the four liberal justices who ruled against Ricci in this most recent disparate impact case.

In addition to her positions on disparate impact, there are clearly other issues where Republicans can use the hearing to shed a little light on positions that she's taken that are out of the mainstream of American opinion. One blogger asked about her dissent on a felon voting rights case. I don't think that the majority of Americans believe that felons have a constitutional right to voting based on concerns about the racial disparity among convicted felons despite the clear wording of the 14th Amendment that allows the states to restrict the voting rights for convicted felons. Another issue that we can expect be brought up is her position on the incorporation of the Second Amendment.

Expect to also hear question about her views on using the reasoning from foreign sources in making Supreme Court decisions.

However, the Senator denied that a candidate should be denied confirmation solely on the basis of her or his ideology unlike Senator Schumer who had endorsed that view when the president was a Republican. But there are enough issues with her judicial philosophy and approach to key issues to oppose her confirmation.

I asked whether the Republicans on the committee had organized the logistics of which senator would press on which issue and he denied that he had the authority to influence what other senators asked. I just hope that there is more going on behind the scenes to make sure that the Republicans use their time wisely so that they make sure that each issue they want to bring up at least gets asked and that we don't waste time, as the Democrats often did with senators like Joe Biden talking so much that a question didn't even get asked. There is plenty of material to bring up that Republicans should minimize the time spent wasting their breath in bloviation. But they're senators, so perhaps that is too much to expect.

What none of us expect is for her to be denied confirmation. She'll probably get all the Democratic votes and several Republican ones. But this also the time when the Republicans can use center stage to air their judicial philosophy and positions on issues where they are more in line with the majority opinion than the Democrats are.

Labels: Supreme Court

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 2:54 PM 1 comments

The Puerto Rican firefighter whom Sotomayor would have denied a promotion

 

The New York Times profiled the one Hispanic firefighter who was denied a promotion by the appeals court decision that Sotomayor signed on to that allowed New Haven to throw out the results of their promotional exam. He sounds like quite a guy.

When the Hispanic firefighters’ association and its members — including Lieutenant Vargas’s brother — refused to publicly stand behind him, he quit the organization.

Lieutenant Vargas, who posted the sixth-highest score on the exam, was ridiculed as a token, a turncoat and an Uncle Tom — all of which, he said, “made my resolve that much stronger.”

When the United States Supreme Court ruled this week in the firefighters’ favor, Lieutenant Vargas, 40, the son of Puerto Rican parents, found himself celebrating amid an awkward racial dynamic: As the lone Hispanic among the 18 plaintiffs who had challenged an affirmative action policy, he had also challenged an appeals court decision joined by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic nominee to the Supreme Court.

“She’s from Puerto Rico, and I’m from Puerto Rico,” he said. “She obviously feels differently than I do.”

I guess she didn't have empathy for his situation.

Labels: Supreme Court

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:52 AM 5 comments

Painting the puppy poop pink

 

Officials in a community in Scotland have come up with one colorful way to force dog-owners to pick up their doggie waste.

Shetland Islands Council is recruiting an army of volunteer "poo spotters" to scour the islands for signs of fouling. To highlight where owners have failed to clear up after pets, they will be armed with canisters of bright pink dye, which they will spray on the unwelcome deposits the dogs leave behind.

Despite fines for not cleaning up after their dogs and rewards for doing so, some dog owners continue to let their dog poop without picking it up. Tsk tsk. As if spraying pink paint will deter them when fines failed to do so.

And another community is even more devoted to the paint solution.

Shetland is not the first local authority to tackle dog fouling in this fashion. In Cheltenham, dog wardens have been armed with cans of dye. On initial discovery of dog mess, they spray a circle around it. If it is still there a week later, a yellow circle is added and, after another week, a white one.

Only after it has been left for two weeks is it cleaned away.

Cheltenham Borough Council claims the amount of dog mess left on the streets has declined.

Instead of hiring dog wardens to come around three times to paint targets around the doggie waste, wouldn't it be cheaper to pick it up the first time? And if you fear that would increase owner laziness, increase the fines substantially. Somehow, I don't think that the people who got away with not cleaning away the poop the first time is going to be so shamed after a target has been painted around it to change their evil ways.

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:42 AM 3 comments

The teachers union messing up a good thing

 

We've seen example after example of charter schools that have succeeded partly by requiring longer work weeks for the students. They come to school earlier and leave later and often have Saturday school. Such a regime requires, of course, teachers to work longer hours. And the unions can't stand for that. Jay Mathews writes of the plight of a high-achieving KIPP charter school in Baltimore that the teachers union is threatening.

Sometime last year, while negotiating a teacher contract for the KIPP Ujima Village charter middle school in Baltimore, founder Jason Botel pointed out that his students, mostly from low-income families, had earned the city's highest public school test scores three years in a row. If the union insisted on increasing overtime pay, he said, the school could not afford the extra instruction time that was a key to its success, and student achievement would suffer.

Botel says a union official replied: "That's not our problem."

Such stories heat the blood of union critics. It is, they contend, a sign of how unions dumb down public education by focusing on salaries, not learning.

Yup, you can't have teachers working longer hours, even if they're willing to do so and even if they are getting paid more than other Baltimore teachers. mathews reports that teachers got an 18% bonus for their longer work week, however, that still isn't enough for the unions. Because of the union demands, the school is going to have to cut back on its nine-hour day and Saturday school. As Mathews points out, there are other forms of compensation besides the monetary one and the union ignores the value to talented teachers of working at a school surrounded by other dedicated teachers and with a supportive administration that helps create an environment of learning.

[Baltimore Teachers Union President Marietta] English and the Baltimore union's outside counsel, Keith Zimmerman, convinced me they are sincerely committed to making Ujima Village and all other Baltimore schools wonderful places to learn. But they did not once mention an important motivator for union members such as Brad Nornhold, 31, a star math teacher at Ujima Village.

"I appreciate what the union has tried to do for me," Nornhold said, "but we weren't necessarily contacted before they started these negotiations. This is a school of choice for teachers, too. I knew what I was getting into." Ujima Village teachers were already the highest-paid in Baltimore for their experience level, and the union's demands seem to overlook the appeal of what Nornhold called "the freedom to teach the way I want to teach." The union ignores the lure of a school that supports teachers and structures their day so they can raise student achievement to levels rarely seen in their city. "To teach in a school that works, that's nice," Nornhold said.

I asked English what she thought of Botel's argument. By forcing Ujima Village to cut back its nine-hour school days and Saturday classes, is she making her members at that school less effective? "I disagree with that," she said. "Effective teachers can get the same results in a seven-hour-and-five-minute day."

To that I say: Show me.

Exactly. If it were that easy, we'd be seeing similar results in all of the Baltimore schools. But KIPP charters have shown around the country that their template of longer school hours coupled with a focused teaching environment that doesn't put up with students wasting class time in misbehavior has achieved results that regular public schools can't touch.

This is such a shame to see the unions being able to mess with a successful program and to hear the union president spout such nonsense. But then, what would you expect of teachers unions after you read stories like the 700 New York City teachers who are paid to do nothing while they wait for sometimes years for their cases to be adjudicated.

Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that's what they want to do.

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its "rubber rooms" — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.

"You just basically sit there for eight hours," said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05. "I saw several near-fights. `This is my seat.' `I've been sitting here for six months.' That sort of thing."

Ramos was an assistant principal in East Harlem when he was accused of lying at a hearing on whether to suspend a student. Ramos denied the allegation but quit before his case was resolved and took a job in California.

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

Lovely. And the same sort of union that negotiated that these teachers are paid for years to sit around and paint, do crosswords, or read until their cases are resolved now want to prevent willing teachers from achieving success with low-income students in Baltimore. It is so very infuriating.

Labels: Education

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 5:37 AM 6 comments

When government runs a business

 

Washington State had a liquor shortage these past few weeks due to a computer mess-up at the government run distribution center. It's taken them over a month to get close to catching up. Meanwhile, the delays have played havoc with bars that can't get certain alcohols delivered for specialty drinks.

State workers are scrambling to fix a distribution problem that has crimped the flow of alcohol to customers across the state, as liquor stores and restaurants are gearing up for one of the busiest weekends of the year.

"For us, the timing is really brutal," said Anthony Anton, president and CEO of the Washington Restaurant Association, who said some restaurants have been unable to get key ingredients for their most popular cocktails. "For a small-margin industry like ours, where every sale counts, that's an issue."

Dozens of "temporarily out of stock" signs dot the shelves of some state liquor stores, and store managers say they're not sure when their complete product line will again be available.

State officials blame the difficulties on a glitch in a new software system that controls the movement of 18,000 cases of liquor a day through the state's distribution center on East Marginal Way South in Seattle.

In addition to shortages in June and July, alcohol drinkers in Washington are also facing higher taxes in August.

Hanning said the pinch is compounded by the fact that a state alcohol surcharge takes effect Aug. 1, which will force bar owners to increase prices.

The surcharge, which will add between $1 and $3 to the price of most bottles of booze, was enacted to raise about $80 million to replace money legislators took from a liquor-reserve fund to balance the state budget.

One more reason why states shouldn't be in the alcohol business. Or, for that matter, why we don't want the government running health care either.

Story via The Pegu Blog which has cool pictures of the distribution system. Link via Instapundit.

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 5:26 AM 2 comments