Archive for September, 2007

Tomorrow morning, I have an appointment with the U of Montana Law School. Next Monday I am at the University of Idaho. This is my turn to interview schools, as to how they will fit me.What would you ask?

I thought I would take a moment to point out some of the newest innovations we are seeing on some Montana blogs these days.

• Right here at Montana Netroots, Shane has added a 2008 election wiki.  Anyone can register and contribute; no complaining about a bias if you don’t want to get involved.
• Craig has coded up a great little Montana Conservative blog feeder (the link doesn’t make it look pretty, but check it out on his site), not unlike the liberal Leftyblogs feeder.  Shane, I think this needs to be added to this site, since it has a stated goal of non partisanship.  Get on that!
• And I am going to plug myself again here.  I have setup a forum over at my blog with the intention of fostering some substantial debate.  So far, Moorcat and myself has signed up and have just begun a nice 2nd amendment debate.  For those of you who like to argue, or say you want to improve your debate skills, head on over, register, and put out a request for any debate at all (until the demand grows, I’ll even take all challenges).

If you know of any other technological innovations floating around the Montana Blogospher, let us know!

I was pondering my lack of a candidate to support in the ‘08 Presidential election earlier today while on a long road trip. While I find the Republican field a wasteland, I’m not seeing any gems on the left either. I got to thinking about the Democrats and the war. Which of them will pull us out of Iraq quickly after taking office? Which would perpetuate things longer? I really don’t know and am not trying to anger anyone by bringing it up. I’m sure I’ll find out more from this post than I would in many other places. This is a bright group of readers. Enlighten me about the situation. It’s been said (and I’m not arguing) that Bush had/has no plans. What’s your favorite candidate’s plan?

Here is how Democracy is handled in the great state of Texas.

I have written on the GOP’s reticence to take part in the YouTube debates, and Colby has praised Democrats for breaking new ground in the ‘Virtual’ debate. We also saw that the Democratic candidates all showed up for a debate on a Spanish language network.

At a GOP debate last night at Morgan State University in Maryland, which is a historically black college, the four front runners were noticeably absent. Giuliani, Romney, Thompson and McCain all forgot to show up. This isn’t anything new for Thompson, who has yet to attend a debate at all.

Kansas Senator Sam Brownback said the absence of the leading Republican candidates was a “disgrace.”

“I think it’s a disgrace for our country, I think it’s bad for our party and I don’t think it’s good for our future,” he said. “You grow political parties by expanding your base … what they’re doing is sending a message of narrowing the base.”

You have to wonder about this ‘big tent’ we used to hear a lot about. You might remember that though all of the candidates were invited to speak before the NAACP event, only Tom Tancredo showed up. You might also recall that all the Democratic candidates took them up on the offer.

While Rudy said he regretted that he couldn’t show up because of ‘fundraising demands’, the event’s moderator Travis Smiley said that he didn’t believe it:

“When you consistently regret invitations to appear in front of black and brown audiences, I tend to think that’s a pattern and not a scheduling problem”

Rudy’s response is troubling to me for another reason too. At what point in our election system did ‘fund raising’ become more important than getting your message out to the people that you want to vote for you? How is money more important than educating people about what sets you apart from the others and telling the American people why you should be their president?

So, here is how it went down. It seems that a draft of President Bush’s speech was accidentally posted online prior to his address to the UN General Assembly. Wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that it contained phonetic spellings. This isn’t such a big deal, if we don’t expect our president to know how to pronounce the names of countries important enough to make it into the speech. If that were the end of it, no big deal. Here is where it starts to get stupid [STOO-pid].

PERINO: On the speech — your question about the speech, the drafts are circulated, and there was an error made in trying to make sure that interpreters had what they needed. I don’t know how the draft of the speech — it was not final — was posted, but it was, and it was taken down. There’s really nothing more to say about it.

REPORTER: And they were phonetic spellings of various countries — as well, we understand.

PERINO: That’s not unusual. We do that for many speeches.

REPORTER: Does the president have a hard time pronouncing some of these countries’s [sic] name?

PERINO: I think that’s a offensive question. I’m going to just decline to comment on it.

Now, who is that question offensive to? The president? Look at this:

Urging Congress to re-authorize the No Child Left Behind act, Bush touted a recent report on improved test scores by saying: “As yesterday’s positive Report Card shows, CHILDRENS do learn when standards are high and results are measured.”

Now, I am not sure what bothers me the most. Perino insulting out intelligence by feigning offense at the question, the fact that our president might not be able to pronounce the names of countries that the rest of us are following in the news, that he can’t string a sentence together without some malapropism or other, or the fact that he is being dishonest about what that report actually shows. Look at Andrew J. Coulson’s take on it at the CATO institute:

The story that the media will report will revolve around claims by No Child Left Behind advocates that their law is responsible for these improvements. In reality, NCLB almost certainly has little to do with these results, since they simply continue patterns that date back at least to 1990 — a dozen years before the law was passed.

Had we not spent the billions on implementing NCLB, we would have seen similar results. Noting what children and teachers have been through implementing NCLB, shouldn’t we be seeing results better than what we would have had if we did nothing?

But that’s not the real story. The real story is that none of these improvements have been persisting through to the end of high school. What families and business leaders care about is how well students are prepared for life and work at the end of high school. As the NAEP Long Term Trend results show, the mathematics achievement of 17-year-olds has been flat since 1990, and their reading achievement has actually declined. In fact, achievement among 17-year-olds is flat or declining in math, reading, and science since the first NAEP tests were administered in the late 60s and early 70s — despite the fact that real spending has doubled to more than $11,000 per pupil over that period.

Again, all that cost and wasted time? Maybe we should try something different, or patch up some of the problems in NCLB rather than pass it as it stands?

What that means is that the improvements in the earliest grades simply represent a shifting of when learning is happening, not an increase in what students ultimately learn. We are, in the hackneyed phrase, merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as it continues to slip beneath the waves.

That’s the sad but true story that the American people need to be told.

Thanks Andrew.

WASHINGTON, DC—Almost a year after the cessation of major combat and a month after the nation’s first free democratic elections, President Bush unveiled the coalition forces’ strategy for exiting Iraq.

Enlarge Image Bush announces the pullout of Iraq through Iran.

“I’m pleased to announce that the Department of Defense and I have formulated a plan for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq,” Bush announced Monday morning. “We’ll just go through Iran.”

Bush said the U.S. Army, which deposed Iran’s longtime enemy Saddam Hussein, should be welcomed with open arms by the Islamic-fundamentalist state.

“And Iran’s so nearby,” Bush said. “It’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to the east.”

According to White House officials, coalition air units will leave forward air bases in Iraq and transport munitions to undisclosed locations in Iran. After 72 to 96 hours of aerial-bomb retreats, armored-cavalry units will retreat across the Zagros mountains in tanks, armored personnel carriers, and strike helicopters. The balance of the 120,000 troops will exit into the oil-rich borderlands around the Shatt-al-Arab region within 30 days.

Pentagon sources said U.S. Central Command has been formulating the exit plan under guidelines set by Bush.

Enlarge Image

“The fact is, we’ve accomplished our goals in Iraq,” said General George Casey, the commander of coalition forces in the Iraqi theater. “Now, it’s time to bring our men and women home—via Iran.”

Questions have been raised about the unprecedented size of the withdrawal budget.

“I’m asking Congress to approve a $187-billion budget to enable us to exit as smoothly as possible,” said Casey, whose budget request includes several hundred additional M1A1 Abrams battle tanks, 72 new C-130 cargo planes, and two brigades of artillery. “We’re concerned about the safety of our troops, so we need to have the capacity to deal with insurgent forces all the way from the Iraqi border through to Tehran.”

[Reprint of an article that appeared in Then Onion]

TheGoogle

For those of you who have trouble with the inter-tubes, or know someone who has, TheGoogle might be the solution you are looking for:

When my wife and I went on our honeymoon in Canada 10 years and one month ago, the dollar was worth $1.50 Canadian. I remember that it helped us out on our vacation, we were poor. Five years ago the American dollar was worth about $1.60 Canadian. My how things have changed in the last five years.

That’s right. For the first time in 30 years, the American dollar is worth about $1.00 Canadian.

After sinking steadily for most of the year, the US greenback hit a record low against the euro and declined against the yen on Tuesday. But nothing hits closer to home, literally, than seeing it fall to a 31-year low against the Canadian loonie, so nicknamed for the bird pictured on its coin.

This is the really scary part of this article though:

The dollar’s slide is affecting every corner of American life, from corporate earnings to vacation plans. But, more disturbingly, it also has the potential to punish the very mortgage holders that the Federal Reserve intended to help with its aggressive interest rate cut last week.

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That is because a low-value dollar makes long-term Treasury bonds less attractive, and new data from the Treasury Department indicate that China and other big investors in these bonds are beginning to sell their holdings. That helped send the 10-year Treasury price down and its interest rate up in the last week. Mortgages - particularly jumbo and adjustable-rate loans - are tied to this rate.

Yes, you read that right. Not only has China bought us, but now they are selling us. What started this slide? Increased borrowing? For what? What else started 5 years ago and is causing our debt to spiral out of control? What was that one guy asking for $200,000,000,000 for yesterday? Hmm. I’ll have to get back to you on that.

It is true that many of us on the left have been critical of Max Baucus recently, particularly his vote in the resolution against MoveOn.org. However, rumors of his demise in the eyes of the left have been greatly exaggerated by Montana bloggers on the right.

Occasionally Max does something to remind me that I genuinely like the guy. As Don pointed out at Intelligent Discontent, he has recently followed Jon Tester in posting his daily schedule online. That’s something, however small, it is something. Then a little piece of ‘Max Mail’ showed up in my inbox today. According to the press release, Max is the first Senator to address dealing with travel generated carbon emissions.

(Washington, D.C) – Montana Senator Max Baucus is putting his money where his mouth is when it comes to climate change.
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The senior U.S. Senator today offset his carbon emissions for air travel between Montana and Washington, D.C., paying $1,152 dollars for a year’s worth of travel to begin to help establish a “carbon-neutral footprint.”
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Baucus today became the first U.S. Senator to use services provided by Native Energy, a privately held Native American energy company, to offset his official Senate travel.

Essentially, NativeEnergy is a firm that will invest your money in the production of renewable energy to offset your carbon emissions. Here is how is works:

• Under federal law, renewable generators can force utilities to buy their power.
• For efficient grid operation, if the utility has to buy the project’s power, it is going to use it.
• As a matter of physics, if the utility uses the renewable project’s power, it must, for any given level of demand, use less from other sources.
• For efficient grid operation, they use less from those generators that have the highest fuel costs – fossil fuel plants.

While I am intrigued by the notion, I am not instantly sold on this idea. It feels a little bit like a papal indulgence. I do understand the equation

more renewables = less fossil fuel

I also like the idea of changing the way that energy works and I appreciate that Max is trying to be a leader in change while bringing personal accountability to the table.

I find this one kind of funny, but a reminder of how vast the gulf between beliefs and values. Remember David Vitter? The Republican “Family Values” Senator from Louisiana that was exposed for visiting prostitutes on two separate occasions (with at least one additional accusation)? In 2002 he dropped out of the Governor’s race and in this year it was revealed that he had used the services of the DC Madam.

Now he is back in the news for securing a $100,000 grant

in an upcoming labor, health and education financing bill for the Louisiana Family Forum, which The New Orleans Times Picayune reports has “taken the lead in promoting ‘origins science,’ which includes the possibility of divine intervention in the creation of the universe.”

So, this Louisiana Family Forum group is quiet interesting, in an of itself.

The group was founded by Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana state lawmaker who now leads the conservative Family Research Council. The Louisiana Family Forum works to “present biblical principals” on public policy issues, and until a reporter questioned them about it, the group’s Web site included a “battle plan to combat evolution,” which argued the theory “has no place in the classroom.”

So, it is pretty clear that the earmark was to to battle against evolution in the classroom. While I am extremely uncomfortable with the fact that the groups chairman was paid over $17,000 to work on Vitter’s campaign in 2004, I am not surprised. What really bothers me here is that this is a complete misuse of public funds. This group is clearly a religious group with an agenda and a “battle plan to combat evolution” in the classroom. How is this a positive expenditure of public funds?

How long do Republican’s get to call themselves the party of fiscal responsibility and family values?

I wrote a little piece the other day pointing out that Denny Rehberg so often talks up the free market but only when it is beneficial to certain industries. The words ‘free market’ must have hit and alarm in Dave Budge’s text filter, because he showed up straight away and went to town telling me that I don’t know anything about economics.

So, after a long back-and-forth, I grew weary and I promised Dave that I would answer a question in a post of it’s own. Welcome to that post, glad you could make it. The central issue was allowing Medicare to negotiate on prescription drug prices. While we argued back and forth on whether Medicare was a monopsony ( a market with only one buyer ). Dave refused to concede that this was not the case and that I had failed to show a “dominating list of buyers that would push the industry past monopsonistic competion”, even though I pointed to insurance plans and the fact that France and Germany both spent more on drugs than Medicare, not to mention a long list of countries that purchased high fractions of Medicare’s budget. Dave just answered by making this point and demanding that I answer it:

U.S. pharma produces roughly 70% of all pharmaceutical innovations in the world. According to a report by the AMA last year, U.S. consumers subsidize roughly 20% of the price of exported drugs to countries that impose price controls _ pretty much the list that you mention above. In the same report the AMA urged the Dept. of Commerce to pressure those countries to “share the burden of innovation” buy opening up the markets so it wasn’t entirely on the backs of U.S. consumers.
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What you’re proposing will eviscerate the development of new drug technologies. So, when I ask you who it will help and who it will hurt you fall back on a superficial argument of the short run. In the context of this market - which funds the vast majority of clinical research and innovation, the U.S oligopsony is real as to practical effects inasmuch it’s the last relatively free market that exists and the source of profits that fund innovation. But I guess you don’t give a shit about that.

I thought that this might take me a bit of time to research and answer appropriately, but it turns out that my Google-foo is still pretty good and I came up with this piece [website, PDF ] that answers the question well enough for me. What Dave is saying here is that if the government pays less for drugs by negotiating in the free market, then it will “eviscerate the development of new drug technologies”. The answer to that:

Fact 1: Drug companies are already spending more than twice as much on marketing
and advertising as on R&D.
In 2004, pharmaceutical companies spent, on average, nearly one-third (32 percent) of revenues on marketing, administration and advertising, compared with 14 percent on R&D.
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Fact 2: The drug industry is one of the most profitable industries in the country.
In 2005, the pharmaceutical industry kept 15.7 percent of revenue as profit, making it the fifth most profitable industry in the country. The industry’s high rates of return leave enough room for a significant reduction of drug prices without harming R&D.3
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Fact 3: New ‘breakthrough’ drugs, the costliest to develop, actually account for only a small proportion of medicines produced by drug companies.
The majority of drugs that the pharmaceutical industry develops each year are so-called “me too” drugs—modified forms or new uses of existing drugs, which incur lower R&D costs, such as the development of similar drugs following Gleevec, a breakthrough cancer drug.
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Fact 4: The industry exaggerates the role of private drug companies in the R&D of ‘breakthrough’ drugs.
Taxpayer-funded research, particularly by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), forms a significant foundation for R&D by private drug companies. Most of the important new drugs introduced by the drug industry in the past 40 years were developed with some contribution from the public sector. Only 5 out of the 21 most influential drugs introduced between 1965 and 1992
were developed entirely by the private sector.
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Fact 5: Lowered drug prices would likely spur demand.
Public Citizen cites a study indicating that cutting drug prices by 40 percent for people with Medicare would have a minimal effect on profits due to increased demand. Furthermore, lowered drug prices would induce companies to boost R&D for new drugs to sustain themselves, since the industry depends on research to come out with new and “potentially lucrative” medicines.6

All of these make a lot of sense to me. I find it patently absurd to suggest that lowering the price that Medicare pays one of the most profitable industry in the world would somehow make them shutdown and stop making new product. Note that Dave pointed out the fact that big pharma claims that they must charge us higher prices because they are selling drugs at lower costs to other nations. Do Dave and big pharma expect me to buy that argument when their profit margin is a matter of public record?

Now look back at Dave’s statement and note this:

In the context of this market - which funds the vast majority of clinical research and innovation, the U.S oligopsony is real as to practical effects inasmuch it’s the last relatively free market that exists and the source of profits that fund innovation.

I actually am privy to a bit of knowledge that this is not the case, and it was pointed out in the PDF referenced above. The simple fact is that the government puts a lot of money into drug R&D each year.

A National Institutes of Health (NIH) internal document, dated February 2000 and obtained by Public Citizen earlier this year, showed that all the top five selling drugs in 1995 received significant taxpayer backing in the discovery and development phases. Investigations by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Boston Globe also have examined samples of medically important and top-selling drugs and found that a vast majority of drugs in each group received government support.

I’ll end with the one point that pisses Dave off more than any others. You see, Dave hates the ‘rule of the masses’, or Democracy as I like to call it. One reason to allow Medicare to negotiate for prescription drug prices is because 86% of Americans think that it should.

Now, if you grow weary of this debate, go over to Left in the West and read Matt’s take on the argument.

[UPDATE: I had left out a link to the PDF document from The Medicare Rights Center I referenced above. Those links are now in place.]

Before the week slips away, I’d like to share some wisdom after the fact - a lesson in news management. The Republicans are experts at it, the Democrats neophytes. The object is to knock bad news off the front pages with other news. The classic example of this is when Reagan invaded tiny Grenada five days after more than 200 marines were killed in Lebanon - marines the U.S. public did not even know were there.

The Senate had a debate on Thursday about a Move On advertisement in the New York Times that called Bush’s latest lackey-in-charge “General Betray Us”. It was free speech, and none of the Senate’s business. The debate grabbed all the headlines, filled the echo chambers of right wing talk radio and FOX News and CNN and all the rest of the yakkers.

Lost in the tempest were two other Senate debates - two that exposed the Republicans (and Joe Lieberman) for the non-troop-supporting anti-democratic hacks that they are. They filibustered and killed a bill to limit troops stays in Iraq, and to allow for representation in the U.S. House of Representatives for the District of Columbia.

It almost makes me think Karl Rove is still advising them - bury bad news in other news, distract the media. This often happened on his watch - oddly-timed terror alerts and the like - you can pretty well expect that if there was bad news, there would be other news timed for release at the same time.

So, we’ve been snookered again. Well done, Senate. Well done.

Free market voters are being lied to. Denny Rehberg has been a vocal proponent of ‘the free market’, but I am not so sure that his record really backs that up.

Healthcare

Denny Rehberg called the government ran SCHIPs program an “extremist political ideology” to expand government-run health care, ostensibly because it is not a free market solution. He has made the claim several times that free market principals are the answer to our health care problem. However, Denny Rehberg voted no on allowing Medicare to negotiate on prescription drug prices, just like any entity in the free market would do to keep prices low. Instead of voting to allow Medicare to adopt some policies that would make it operate more like every free market entity out there, he chose to vote against free market style reforms.

Energy

When it comes to talking points, Denny Rehberg likes to say things like “free market-economy hinges on open and competitive markets”, he voted no to a bill that would have ended subsidies to oil companies. When it comes to alternative fuels though, I see that he voted no to raising CAFE standards and providing incentives to for alternative energy. How is that an ‘open and competitive market’? On one hand, he supports subsidies to big oil (going against the idea of a ‘free market’) but on the other hand has repeatedly rejected offering incentives for alternative fuels.

to be continued…

If you don’t know already, Craig from Montana Politics announced the birth of their fourth child today. That makes them C^6 now. Go over and wish them well.