Across the Great Divide

Saturday Speed Blogging.

I'm falling behind a little, so today we have a speed blogging date.

*****

On the way home from Drinking Liberally, I passed this store window on West Broadway, where Friedman's has managed to hang in there for 100 years as a legitimate clothing retailer, despite the avenue's reputation for crime and decay. (Indeed half a mile further, police cars blocked off the street, although their work appeared to involve a tow truck rather than an ambulance.)

Earlier that day, Edina cops busted a storefront drug dealing operation in more refined precincts — Southdale Shopping Center. Some seemed surprised ("It's a mall!") that drug dealers would locate in a retail palace. But try any of these places on a weekday afternoon and watch the glazed drifters move from store to store and one pile of merchandise to another. If these were alleys and dumpsters, instead of aisles and cosmetics counters, you'd know what to call the customers.

*****

Speaking of crime — not on the streets — two Minnesotans got hauled into court by the  Recording Industry of America (RIAA) as part of the record industry's battle against illegally distributing copyrighted music on the Internet. The RIAA's legal strategy seems aimed at intimidating average consumers who use file-sharing services like LimeWire to download free music. [For the record, I support copyright, but I also acknowledge that "information wants to be free."]

Seeing these cases, you're supposed to think, "Wow, if they're going to sue Jerry Bowman of Deerwood, Minnesota, they could come after me." 

And if that isn't scary enough, they'll expose to the world your musical tastes. Two of the songs that got  Bowman in trouble were "Running From an Angel" by Hootie & the Blowfish and "Black or White" by Michael Jackson.

Damn. That's sort of like finding yourself in the emergency room wearing Flintstones underwear.

*****
We now segue to more serious matters: Tax breaks for corporations.

As Strib columnist Neal St. Anthony points out — writing about a $15 million tax-relief package for Thomson West — deals that reduce taxes or use public money to pave the way for corporate expansions can result in increased jobs that pay more taxes. Of course, you could also say that paying a ransom will result in your kidnapped son coming home with all his fingers. That doesn't make it a good policy.

Offering public subsidies to selected businesses is a method of economic development favored by Gov. Pawlenty. For example, his JOBZ program provides state and local tax exemptions to businesses that locate or expand in Greater Minnesota. It's also a way to make some businesses winners and other losers; some industries are favored while others are on their own.

Thomson, a Canadian information-publishing conglomerate that purchased St. Paul-based West Law Publishing some years ago, is a good citizen and employs a lot of Minnesotans already. It has plenty of good reasons to expand its operations here.

But it would also be stupid as a business not to take advantage of state and local officials' desire to keep Thomson here. What gives Thomson (or Target, Northwest Airlines or the Minnesota Twins) leverage to extract concessions is the credible threat to move elsewhere — to a city or state that offers them a better deal. That sort of clout is simply not available to retailers like Friedman's or to businesses that may not be mobile for other reasons.

[Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank economist Art] Rolnick said the only way to stop bidding wars among states and localities is for Congress to pass a law that declared any company that got such special treatment as out of compliance with the interstate-commerce laws, which preclude state and local meddling, and tax the benefits at a 100 percent rate.

That way, the thinking goes, states and localities would try to keep a competitive business climate for everybody and forget about subsidies.

We'll never erase the inherent advantages capital has over labor or big players have over the little guys, but Rolnick's proposed change to the law might lead states to compete on the basis of attributes that benefited everyone  — instead of who was best at playing chicken with public money.

Talk About a Bully Pulpit.

Some parents in the Farmington School District might be in favor of getting rid of bullying behavior in schools — if the program didn't mention anything about the kids who are among the most likely bullying victims.

Oh, the School Board already scrubbbed mention of "alternative lifestyles" so you wouldn't be offended?  Well, it's still unacceptable, because one sponsor of the curriculum is the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

What a sad world to live in — where you fear learning compassion for people different from you will unleash your worst nightmares.

Read about it here and here.

Uncivil Discourse.

Nate Garvis, Target's Vice President of Governmental Affairs, speaks Feb. 7th at Walker Art Center on a topic near and dear to this blog: "Uncivil Discourse and the Rise of the Outrage Industry." [Sponsored by the Citizens League; registration required.]

I'll be attending and likely writing about it, but if you want a foretaste, read the interview with Garvis at Minnesota Campaign Report.

[T]he anonymity of talk radio and the web allow us to not only be very angry, we've become angrier — I not only find it very easy these days to say "what a dumb idea" but it's easy to say "what an evil person with a dumb idea," because you're not going to run into them.  So that happens on an individual basis. Institutionally, I would imagine that every major instutition in our lives, whether it's governmental, or commercial, or faith-based — every institution structure in our society has a spectrum from those that want to advance the common good to those who want to be part of the problem. 

On a related note, I've been doing some groundwork to develop a cross-divide dialogue for this blog. It's been on the back-burner until recently and will start as an experiment in working around — on the Web — the challenge Garvis describes.

Plan for Reforming Healthcare Must Address Prevention.

The President's State of the Union laid out his "comprehensive agenda" for health care reform, which called for:

• Expanding Health Savings Accounts (HSAs)
• Making Health Insurance More Portable
• Improving Information On Price And Quality To Make Health Care More Transparent
• Leveling The Playing Field For Individuals And Small Business Employees
• Passing Medical Liability Reform
• Improving Access To Health Information Technology
• Assisting Vulnerable Americans

Talk to any doctor involved in primary care about reforming the health care system, and you'll hear some version of this:

But a lack of insurance is only one of the two huge problems with health care. The other is the perverse system of incentives that nudges doctors and patients toward expensive tests and procedures when cheaper preventive measures might actually produce better results. Partly as a result, costs are rising rapidly for the 250 million people who do have insurance.
[...]
[C]linics that focus on preventing heart disease are struggling to survive, Dr. Richard Pasternak, a Harvard Medical School cardiologist and Merck & Company executive, says. Family doctors, doctors who treat back pain and doctors who treat diabetes all face similar challenges.

It’s important to note that the economic gains from preventive care are sometimes exaggerated. Sadly, the cheapest patients are often the ones who receive no care whatsoever, because many die before they reach their medically expensive golden years.

But the political case — the moral case — for prevention is unassailable. And to the extent that drugs and lifestyle changes replace surgery, rather than merely supplement it, preventive care can help pay for itself.

– "What's a Pound of Prevention Really Worth?," New York Times

Preventive care can help pay for itself. It just doesn't pay doctors for practicing it. As the article points out, even prevention-focused providers get paid more when patients have more complications than when they show better results.

Solutions that involve paying doctors for performance or quality outcomes are also problematical. Look how difficult it is for coaches to get consistent results from professional athletes. Now imagine yourself a physician given a random collection of people you see no more than a few times a year. You're told you'll be compensated based on how well you improve their health scores. Long term, the only way to keep your job is to motivate them to change their behavior.

It's not an outrageous idea to try incentives, but that kind of medicine takes more time, relies heavily for results on variables the doctor can't control, and requires skills that aren't emphasized in medical training. Transparency of price and quality sounds good, but it still addresses only the procedure-centric side of medicine.

Borrowing from business-style schemes to measure and reward results looks appealing on the surface. But applying the ideas in medical clinics or public schools is not as simple as it looks.

Graduated Gas Tax? Now, THAT Would've Been a Centerpiece!

Bush made reducing gasoline consumption and expanding health insurance coverage the centerpiece of his speech, in a bid to salvage some domestic policy successes in the twilight of his presidency.
[...]
“Changing the tax code is a vital and necessary step to make health care affordable for more Americans,” Bush said.
–New York Times

Via Sky Blue Waters, Ray Magliozzi of NPR's Click and Clack has a proposal worthy of a President who was really serious about reducing fuel consumption — especially one like Pres. Bush, who thinks change comes through the barrel of the tax code.

It’s time for — are you ready for this? — the graduated gasoline tax.

Here’s what I’m proposing: this year, we start with a fifty-cent per gallon per year increase in the gasoline tax. So, after six years, we’d have a three-dollar increase in the gas tax.

Before you say, that's crazy!, go read his proposal.

By the way, also via Sky Blue Waters, six years covers all the State of the Union speeches in which Pres. Bush has been promising to deliver the country from energy independence. With Magliozzi in office during that time, we might be somewhere by now. And it wouldn't be Iraq...

Buzz.mn Has 20-pt. Lead Over Minnesota Poll.

Brian Lambert notes that the Strib's Minnesota Poll director Rob Daves has been assigned to take on the role of project manager of the paper's buzz.mn community blog through the end of March.

Does this signal the demise of the poll's research and reporting?

As Lambert reports, not according to Strib managing editor and rumored editor-apparent Scott Gillespie.

The Minnesota Poll will live on. Rob's a really versatile editor who's handled many temporary projects for us over the years while also running the poll. I'm not going to get into internal budget figures or frequency issues with you because we have competitors who would love to know what we're doing and when. But I can assure you that the Minnesota Poll will continue to be an important part of our news report.

But then, this wouldn't be the first time in last month or so that a Strib editor's reassurances fell a little short of actual events, would it?

The Minnesota Poll has long been pilloried — and mischaracterized as unfailingly inaccurate — by the Red Star haters. (Here's a post from Capt. Ed about how ridiculously wrong a July poll is in reporting that Amy Klobuchar had a 19-point lead over Mark Kennedy in last year's Senate race. Klobuchar won by 20.2 points.) They'd see the poll's disappearance as a great victory.

And hey, imagine you're a new owner looking for places to cut costs. You'd start by getting rid of an expensive pain in the ass, right?

So what'll be? Minnesota Poll ... or Sid Hartman?

The Dark Side of Energy Independence: Where the Deer and the Antelope Pay.

Supporters of energy development are fond of describing the compact footprint of rigs when defending domestic drilling. Environmental awareness and protection group SkyTruth begs to differ, and shows what this development really looks like, using digital mapping, video and the Web.

As portrayed in their 10-minute tutorial, Upper Green River Valley: A View from Above, drilling impinges on wildlife well below the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Wyoming's Upper Green River Basin is Dick Cheney country, but it's also home to elk, antelope and other migrating species.

It's also similar to land near me in Colorado, which is also undergoing more intensive energy development. There, town watersheds are also threatened. Under the more permissive purview of the Bush Administration, the message to local communities tends to be, "trust us."

So far, not so good.

Although you wouldn't want one in your back yard, the problem isn't one drilling pad, which with its holding ponds might cover only a couple acres. It's the proliferation of sites gouged out of tender land, plus the associated access roads and traffic from crews, support vehicles and riggers throughout a field.

The video (made up largely of panned aerial photography and satellite imagery) shows how development collides with migration routes, recreation areas and other uses of public lands. The narration stays instructive — not demonizing development or calling for exploration in the region to end.

Rather, it points out how public lands bearing these gas formations have not been managed consistently, and that local communities, ranchers and wildlife advocates have been left out of decisions that increased density. In the Jonah gas field shown above, for example, lands were opened to development with the understanding that wells would be spaced out over 80-acre parcels. The video shows in time lapse how the spacing shrank to one well every 10 acres, and before long nearly 4,000 wells will fill an area opened under the Clinton Administration for several hundred.

The production values may make Earth in the Balance look like a Hollywood blockbuster, but the use of visual tools like this can drive the points home to those of us far, far from the range.

SOTUS: A Post-game Review.

What a relief not to watch Dennis Hastert exert himself by standing three dozen times during the President's state of the union speech. His absence cut in half the chance of cardiac arrest occuring on the dais this year.

Daybydaycartoons.com

Since the speech is guaranteed to be a litany of platitudes and abandoned priorities under the best of conditions for the President and his party (remember: America is addicted to oil), I watched new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for clues to policies that might attract some bipartisan support when Congress goes to work. There were 62 interruptions for crowd applause according to NBC. I focused only on the times the Speaker was moved to her feet.

By my count — the network feed left two occasions ambiguous — Pelosi stood 23 times, although four were during garbage time when the President goes to the Gallery to recognize exemplary citizens, trying to conclude this stultifying ritual with some dignity and emotion. Pelosi initiated 9 of her 19 policy-related standing O's. The following were the subjects for which she led the applause, though sometimes the subsequent details received tepid-to-none of her visible approval:

• Balance the federal budget
• Make healthcare more affordable
• Comprehensive immigration reform
• Reduce energy use
• Our devoted anti-terror forces
• Fight terror with all means (including diplomacy and coalitions)
• Support our troops in the field and on the way
• Increase our nation's military reserves
• Darfur, you know, just Darfur

Generally, Vice President Cheney joined her, though at a more Hastert-like velocity. He declined to leave his seat for renewable energy, and Pelosi stayed seated while Cheney rose for approving federal judges and succeeding in Iraq. When the President discussed energy policy, he looked almost giddy

But not as giddy as Minnesota's Sixth District Congresswoman Johnele Klinemann, who had positioned herself along the aisle the President used to enter and exit the chamber. She hailed him on the way in with the hyperventilating joy of a game show contestant plucked from the crowd by the venerable host. On the way out, she was the only official to lay hands on him, clamping a grip on the President's shoulder that began inappropriately and lingered long enough to cast out demons.

So he bought you custard once, Johnele. Get over it.

This speech had the subdued, semi-conciliatory tone of a lame duck president lacking a majority in Congress or a consensus in the country. Still, he could not help himself when he began to detail his big initiative for affordable healthcare — payroll tax credits.

"Changing the tax code" — i.e., lowering taxes — is the conservative solution for everything. It grows the economy, stimulates innovation and produces more revenue, all the while preventing government from getting too big. It will send children to college, make healthcare accessible to all, and I am sure there are some things I am forgetting. As with most ideological solutions, it can only appear to succeed because the necessary spending occurs anyway, the unpurged government servants continue to do the right thing despite the political nonsense, and business goes about doing what it tries to do under any conditions, which is make money.

Bush did quote some numbers about how a payroll tax exemption on a family's first $15,ooo of income could be used to purchase private health IN-surance. That may help some people, and they may actually apply their savings to insurance premiums. But it's beyond me how the working poor, who scarcely pay any taxes to begin with, will be helped by tax cuts on subsistence pay.

By the next SOTUS, I suspect, it will be beyond everyone.

SOTUS: The Pre-game Show.

I try to be positive, I really do.

I would like there to be a solution in Iraq that we could take ownership of, but America can't solve all things. That we precipitated the mess makes us feel obligated, and that's honorable. But we went in there to combat a phantom threat to our way of life and ended up unleashing a bigger one, threatening even more people, this time for real.

We cannot right it, with our treasure or remorse.

Bush was right to talk to the country about Iraq separately, before his state of the union speech, but it still hangs over him and his agenda like an uncompleted sentence. He is less our president today than a convicted man addressing his victims in court before he is hauled off forever.

I will watch tonight's speech with no intention of picking it apart. That seems pointless. I will watch with no hope and some dread, like a father facing the drunk driver who killed his child. I would like to be above blaming, beyond bitterness. It will not help to say, you shouldn't have drunk! you shouldn't have driven! There is no comfort to be gained from an insurance settlement, an apology or a punishment. But those things must be endured.

This man has wrecked so much, and now I have to listen to how he will make things right.

Grand Canyon is Allowed to Act its Age.

I didn't run this item when it originally surfaced, but I could have.

According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) in a report released this week [PDF], Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.

And you may have seen it somewhere else, you should know — as Alternet now reports, tain't so. Here's an article that sets the story straight.

The Bush administration may still sport an religion-infused, anti-science bias, but it has not penetrated the Park Service after all.

[via Eyeteeth]