For those of you lucky enough to have employer-provided health insurance, take note. The Bush Administration wants to take it away :

Emboldened by their success at the polls, the Bush administration and Republican leaders in Congress believe they have a new opportunity to move the nation away from the system of employer-provided health insurance that has covered most working Americans for the last half-century.

In its place, they want to erect a system in which workers ? instead of looking to employers for health insurance ? would take personal responsibility for protecting themselves and their families: They would buy high-deductible “catastrophic” insurance policies to cover major medical needs, then pay routine costs with money set aside in tax-sheltered health savings accounts.

Elements of that approach have been on the conservative agenda for years, but what has suddenly put it on the fast track is GOP confidence that the political balance of power has changed.
[. . .]
Supporters of the new approach, who see it as part of Bush’s “ownership society,” say workers and their families would become more careful users of healthcare if they had to pay the bills. Also, they say, the lower premiums on high-deductible plans would make coverage affordable for the uninsured and for small businesses.

Jeez, Republicans sure do have a boner for savings accounts huh? Since I already blogged about this a few months ago, here’s why this “personal account” stuff is bad, bad news :

I wonder if Bush has ever had to lay all his bills out on the kitchen table and figure out which ones he can pay immediately and which ones can wait until the next paycheck? Or if he’s ever lived in an overcrowded apartment with hand-me-down furniture, eating the same thing six days a week because it’s cheaper? Or if he’s ever had to settle for a job slightly less shitty than the one he had in high school because there weren’t any jobs in the field he majored in? Of if he’s gone through the process of figuring out which generic brand products at the grocery store are as good as the name brands and which ones aren’t?

As most of you know, I’m not just describing poverty here. This is normal life for many Americans. Some live paycheck to paycheck, while others are able to pinch enough pennies to save a few bucks. Either way, most people don’t have thousands of dollars to spare.

Practically speaking, savings accounts for retirement and heath care a huge mistake, but for entirely separate reasons. With the latter, the rub is that health care is expensive. Let’s say you have an medical emergency with costs in the $20-30K range. How long would it take you to save that much? A few years? Even with the vague incentives, we’re still looking at a plan that’s the equivalent of asking every American to buy a new car that he/she may never drive.

Since this new article provides a little more detail, lemme point out some additional problems I have with this plan :

Pay close attention to the language in the article. The plan is to replace employer-provided insurance with “high-deductible” insurance policies. Deductible is just another word for “fees” and in this case, the first step in the plan to screw up your healthcare coverage is to charge you high fees for insurance. Keep in mind that that’s just the first part. We haven’t even gotten to the savings account yet.

While the expensive insurance that you’d be obligated to buy will only cover “major medical needs”, everything else is paid for out of your hypothetical savings account. I’ve already pointed out the problem with creating an account, but what happens if you actually have one? Well, unlike insurance, your savings account can run out of money pretty damn fast. What happens if you’ve got a chronic illness that requires frequent doctor’s visits? Or you get sick a week or two after starting your account. Tough shit, poor boy. That’s what you get for not having a healthy body.

And finally, what’s the point of messing with people’s insurance? In the words of the article, Bush and Co. think “workers and their families would become more careful users of healthcare if they had to pay the bills”. The implication here is that “more careful” means making less visits to the doctor. Having routine medical expenses not covered by the “catastrophic” insurance policies all but guarantees it. Of course, the problem here is that Americans don’t go to the doctor enough already. When you consider the fact thousands of Americans die each year of diseases that could have been caught through early detection, is it really a good idea to give people a financial motive for skipping mammograms, prostate exams, routine physicals, etc??

So, let’s sum up the GOP plan for medical overhaul that will be part of this “ownership society”. First, they want to encourage employers to dump you from your existing insurance plan (and if you read the rest of the article, if doesn’t sound like they need much convincing). Second, they want to force you into an expensive insurance plan that will only cover “catastrophic” medical procedures. Third, on top of the higher cost of your insurance policy, they want you start saving up any extra cash that you probably don’t have lying around. Finally, the whole point here is to ease the financial burden on your employer, make you pay more for less coverage, and encourage you to seek medical help as rarely as possible.

UPDATE : As randomliberal helpfully pointed out in the comments, I was a little fuzzy in my estimation of what was meant by “high-deductible”. (I really need to get into the habit of reading this stuff before I hit “Publish”.) To be precise, the deductibles that are paid up front for healthcare are what will be higher. The actual fees for the insurance, however, will come entirely out of your pocket rather than your employers’. In the spirit of the “self-correcting” blogosphere, my earlier statement should read “higher-deductibles and much, much higher fees.” Doesn’t that make you feel better?

On Wednesday night, I hope the President will give us an update on his fight to rid professional sports of steroids. I dunno about you, but I’ve lost a lot of sleep over this crisis ever since it was highlighted in last year’s speech. We can rest assured that the President hasn’t let his tough stance on professional athletes get in the way of his photo ops.

This VW ad begs the question : Did they have to exhume Gene Kelly to rape his corpse? (via Waxy) For corporate America’s next trick, they should replace the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz with a pair of Nikes or use Don Corleone’s death scene from The Godfather in a commercial for Sunkist oranges.

I keep wanting to say more about the Iraqi elections, but I’m having trouble connecting all the random comments and questions in my head into some cohesive point. Instead, I’m just gonna throw it all out there and open this up to discussion :

I’m very impressed with the high turnout. Millions of Iraqis literally risked their lives to vote when most Americans can barely stand to risk their lunch breaks to do the same. Iraqi turnout is estimated to be between 60% -75%. By comparison, the turnout in November’s election, which was the highest turnout since 1968, was a dismal 60.7%. Perhaps one day the Iraqi people will be free enough to take their liberty for granted.

Let’s hope the Iraqis are happy when they actually find out who they voted for. And that their anonymous representatives pick a decent candidate to be prime minister. Now would probably be a good time to educate people on the differences between a “democracy” and a “republic”.

As I mentioned in my last post, this election is just the latest in a seemingly neverending series of goalposts for the Iraqi war. Whenever violence flares up, it always seems that the tipping point is only one event away. Based on the last part of this article, my guess is that the next few events will be the selection of the Prime Minister, the drafting of the constitution, and the next round of elections at the end of the year. Every time there’s another violent attack, we’ll be reminded of these plans with an plea for the kind of patience that our leaders lacked in early 2003.

The one thing I can be certain of in regards to the Iraqi election is that the first fiteen minutes of this Wednesday’s State of the Union address will be unbearable crap. Bush’s speech will be full of flowery statements like “The transformative power of liberty is the Almighty’s gift to every man.” Ugghh…

Since the elections are essentially a redo of last June’s spontaneous handover, lemme just repeat what I said then :

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in a few weeks. If our guys are still dying over there, will Americans really be willing to accept the “don’t blame me, they’re sovereign” excuse?

Based on who’s still President, the answer seems to be “yes”.

Now that major combat opertations…umm..I mean, capturing Saddam…uh…handover of power…no, wait…make that ELECTIONS have occured without any incidents with only 25 or so murders, then we can look forward to a stable, senate Iraq. Hooray for freedom!

Downhill Battle, the anti-copyright crusaders behind Grey Tuesday, launched a new project this week to spread the civil rights documentary “Eyes on the Prize”. Here’s their sales pitch :

Eyes on the Prize is an award-winning documentary series that many consider a foundation of our collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s the most vidid portrayal of the civil rights movement and for millions of people, it’s the foundation for understanding what happened. Makers of Eyes on the Prize brought together extensive historical footage from the period and featured ordinary people who helped change the course of history for the better. No other book or movie has comprehensively brought together this much footage or has become a more common reference on the civil rights movement.

So why has Eyes on the Prize been unavailable for the past 10 years? Copyright restrictions. For example, the film includes footage of a group of people singing “Happy Birthday” to Martin Luther King…Eyes on the Prize is made up of news footage, photographs, songs and lyrics from the Civil Rights Movement that are tangled up in a web of licensing restrictions. Many of these licenses had expired by 1995 and the film’s production company, Blackside, could not afford the exorbitant costs of renewing them. “Eyes on the Prize” has been unavailable to the public ever since.

Copyright law has expanded out of control, and its public mission is no longer being served. Copyright was originally designed to encourage creativity and innovation–much like patent law. But for the past 50 years multi-national corporations like Disney and the major record labels have aggressively lobbied Congress to expand and expand and expand the reach of copyright law. Instead of lasting 20 years and requiring registration (like patents do) copyright has become automatic and now corporate copyrights last 90 years.

The problem of course is that these self-appointed defenders of artistry didn’t bother asking the artists they’re hiding behind. As a result, the nephew of the film’s director is justifiably pissed off :

I am heartily in favor of everybody showing their copies of Eyes to as many people as they can. If you have a copy of Eyes that you bought or inherited, great; show it. But please, please, please don’t don’t encourage others to duplicate it and distribute it, and please (above all, as some motherless losers are doing on eBay) don’t sell it.

There are negotiations ongoing (on and off, but ongoing) to re-issue Eyes on the Prize in DVD format, ideally with additional materials for teaching. Funds are being solicited for this effort, and sponsors pitched. This would allow the production of additional materials and allow Eyes to be distributed to the public and libraries and schools once more, playable on modern equipment and archived on more durable media. Every time the ‘COPY EYES!’ website gets seen by one of the rights-holders we have to negotiate with, however, the chances of us ever getting this done diminishes. This brings me to my second point.

Eyes on the Prize is not about the copyright movement. It is not about intellectual property. It is about the Civil Rights movement, and the Black experience in America. Using it in this way, no matter how noble the intention, will serve to brand it fairly indelibly in the minds of the policymakers as the ’spearhead of the p2p movement’ and the ‘emblem of the anti-copyright movement.’ While I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, I am saying that that will absolutely detract from the teachings and message that Eyes was, in fact, created to get across – teachings of history and messages of racial tolerance and diversity – by irretrievably muddling in a contemporary, hot-button (and entirely unrelated to the original topic) fight.

Whatever the motives, the countercopyright crew are essentially hijacking someone else’s life’s work and appropriating its power and recognition for their own purposes. In the process, they are potentially diminishing and damaging its own effectiveness. It’s not their place to make the decision to throw the weight of Eyes behind this fight.

Finally, I would point something out. They invoke Henry Hampton’s name and legacy on their page, where they advocate downloading and illegally distributing his works. Henry Hampton may have made documentaries, but that doesn’t mean he worked for free. Blackside, Inc. was always a for-profit corporation, and Henry Hampton took home what profits his films were able to generate. So trying to invoke his name while you encourage everyone to trample on the rights granted his works strikes me as extremely hypocritical.

Since that post, Downhill Battle has taken down their download links with the message “we have taken down the torrent links to these videos at the request of lawyers for Blackside, Inc. This sucks!” You know what else sucks? Hiding behind the civil rights movement.

I agree that copyright laws are out of control, but many aspects of these protests seem phony. How many people would have rushed to participate in Grey Tuesday if it were Toby Keith re-appropriating the chorus of an Outkast song? Would people have been as sympathetic to the samplers if it were a unsigned indie band getting sampled in a commercial for a Humvee? That movement was obviously about defending “cool” music (Jay-Z and DJ Dangermouse) against “uncool” music (The Beatles). There was as much rich vs. poor, young vs. old acrimony in that fight, but nobody was willing to be upfront about it. Instead, a fairly complicated issue turned into another childish vendetta against “The Man”.

This time it’s even worse. Without bothering to inquire about the status of the film, Downhill Battle took it upon themselves to defend this fair maiden against an evil corporate dragon. I guess it never occurred to them that not everybody wants to be saved. Then again, the whole civil rights thing was secondary to their real goal of subverting copyright laws. Since they’re so keen on piggybacking their projects on unrelated (but wildly popular) issues, perhaps for their next trick they can spread bootleg videos of Schindler’s List. Somebody needs to spare this masterpiece from Speilberg’s concentration camp of copyright hell.

Kevin’s got a good question about the political maneuvering behind the President’s Social Security plans :

Bush has smart people advising him, and they must realize that the odds of getting Social Security privatization passed is virtually nil. My guess is that it can’t even pass the House, and there’s zero chance of it getting enough votes to cut off a filibuster in the senate. So why expend so much political capital on such a quixotic venture? There’s got to be something else going on.

First of all, I wouldn’t be so quick to pronounce privatization D.O.A. We still have a State of the Union address to look forward to in which Bush will be using his bully pulpit to scare the bejesus out of everyone. For all we know, we could be looking at a situation a month from now in which average Americans are saying to themselves “I hate the idea of privatization, so I’m glad the President met the Democrats halfway with a plan that uses personal accounts instead.”

Secondly, as much as I love the recent trend of senate unity, our coalition is one faux-compromise away from falling apart. Have we become so accustomed to failure that we’re ecstatic when our side is against something that’s obviously a horrible idea? Opposition in this case should be taken for granted. The real question will be whether or not the Dems have the foresight to look at the big picture and oppose this “reform” in any guise that it may take. It’s also still up in the air whether or not our semi-revitalized party members will have the cojones to refuse to compromise with a power-hungry GOP that wouldn’t give them the time of day.

But Kevin is mostly right when he says the writing is one the wall on this bit of “reform” and I share his suspicion that there’s more to this than meets the eye. If they really don’t have the votes for this right now, then my guess is that they’ll use the State of the Union address to switch gears and try to catch Democrats off-guard. I could easily see either tort “reform” and tax “simplification” replacing Social Security as the top domestic priority for the Republican elites.

If this happens, Democrats might too busy scratching their heads or patting themselves on the back to catch the GOP’s head start in convincing the public to gut the legal system or destroy any remaining vestiges of progressivity in the tax code. These two issues are just as important to the Republicans as privatizing Social Security in the sense that they both highlight fundamental differences between the parties. Any success by the GOP would be disastrous for the Democratic party (and the American people, for that matter), so it’s probably a good idea to prepare ourselves for a partisan war on multiple fronts.

Another hack caught with his hand in the cookie jar. The Administration spent $88 million on “public relations contracts” in an election year. The “Stop Government Propaganda Act” is a good idea, but this stuff is most likely already against the law. A better idea would be to enforce the laws we already have on the books. Can we get a Justice Department investigation already??

Stolen from my friend Brian :

I forgot to mention that The Talent Show has two Koufax Award nominations for Most Humorous Post. If you enjoyed either The Five Stages of Bushism or Bush’s Debate Notes, feel free to throw a vote in our direction. There’s a lot of funny stuff linked from there as well, so you should definitely check it out.

Go read the Johnny Carson tribute cartoons on this page. You’ll laugh your ass off, I promise.

I’m really starting to warm up to the fact that Condoleeza Rice is the new Secretary of State. “What the hell?!”, you may ask. Bear with me on this one, folks. It’s not what you think.

First let’s take a look back at Colin Powell’s tenure. While added to the Bush/Cheney ticket in 2000 to give them some instant cred (and help allay fears that Bush was an incompetent retard), once he was confirmed by the senate, his role took one of three forms : the “good cop” to the neoconservatives’ “bad cop”, the amiable frontman for an insane policy, or the shunned little brother who’s better seen and not heard. Is it any wonder why Powell was always at odds with the decision-makers in the White House and Pentagon?

Now let’s take a look at the job description. Traditionally we think of the Secretary of State as the nation’s “chief diplomat” and we rightly assume that the person who fills this role should possess all the values and gravitas that we’d want to present to the international community. But this is the Bush Administration we’re talking about here. Just as the role of Vice-President has transformed from tie-breaker to lie-maker, a SoS under Bush has one duty : selling the war.

That’s where Powell’s problems began. As someone who’s actually been to war, everyone understood him to be weary about invading other countries unless it’s a last resort. Although he talked a good game about the United States being “committed to diplomacy”, everybody knew that it didn’t truly reflect the President’s desires. Regardless of any diplomatic overtures that Colin made, if Junior wants to blow shit up, then he’s gonna blow shit up. The result of this schism between Powell and the rest of the Administration was four long years of mixed messages directed towards the international community.

Which brings me back to Condi. I’ll grant to you that she’s uniquely unqualified to run the State Department, but you’ve gotta give her credit for one thing : The lady can stay on message with the best of them. Indeed, her questioning before the senate reminded me of the “Have you made any mistakes?” cat-and-mouse game the press likes to play with Bush every few months. Even after hours of torture strong interrogation methods, I’m sure Condi would still stick to the script.

And what about mixed messages? Not only will Condi say exactly what she’s told to say, but the choice of her sends an even larger message of its own to the world. While I’m as disappointed as you are that the message seems to be “The United States rewards failure and celebrates mediocrity, so fuck off.”, with Bush being “re”-elected with three million more votes than Kerry, you’d be hard pressed to make the argument that it doesn’t truly reflect the will of the American people.

As much as it sucks to admit, Condolezza Rice does accurately reflect the Bush Administration’s goals and values. While my instinct would be to fight her nomination, in the back of my mind I can’t help but think I’d just be re-fighting a battle we’d already lost. Rice is a nearly perfect choice to lead the diplomatic efforts of a far, far, far from perfect administration. Sure, I’m disappointed that her appointment was assisted by the effusive praise and (more importantly) unnecessary votes of 32 senate Senators¹, the only real alternative here would have been a slightly less awful Secretary of State who’s completely ignored.

^{1: On a far more exciting note, the Alberto Gonzales nomination sailed through committee without garnering a single senate vote. His nomination is a much more important fight for Democrats and it’s a good sign that they’re all sticking together on this one.}

Sometimes you can find political messages in places where you least expect them. Here’s a couple of examples that are similar enough (and struck me in the same way) that I thought I’d throw them together into a post. The first comes from the blog of television chef Alton Brown reacting to the movie “Supersize Me” :

What shocked me about the movie wasn?t what it said, or. Heck I already new most of that stuff. What shocked me were the gasps I heard from the audience, most of whom seemed generally surprised that big business could be so?well?business like.

Here?s what it comes down to kids. Ronald McDonald doesn?t give a damn about you. Neither does that little minx Wendy or any of the other icons of drivethroughdom. And you know what, they?re not supposed to. They?re businesses doing what businesses do. They don?t love you. They are not going to laugh with you on your birthdays, or hold you when you?re sick and sad. They won?t be with you when you graduate, when your children are born or when you die. You will be with you and your family and friends will be with you. And, if you?re any kind of human being, you will be there for them. And you know what, you and your family and friends are supposed to provide you with nourishment too. That?s right folks, feeding someone is an act of caring. We will always be fed best by those that care, be it ourselves or the aforementioned friends and family.

We are fat and sick and dying because we have handed a basic, fundamental and intimate function of life over to corporations. We choose to value our nourishment so little that we entrust it to strangers. We hand our lives over to big companies and then drag them to court when the deal goes bad. This is insanity.

Feed yourselves.
Feed your loved ones.
And for God?s sake feed your children.

Don?t trust anyone else to do it?not anyone. I?m not saying that you shouldn?t go out to dinner every now and then?that is after all one of the great joys of life?but it isn?t life itself and that?s what I?m talking about.

Is MacDonalds food bad for you? What do you think? Does that mean you shouldn?t eat it? No, it just means you shouldn?t live on it or anything else made by someone you wouldn?t hug.

The second quote is from Troma Studios founder Lloyd Kaufman’s book All I Needed To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From “The Toxic Avenger”. In the chapter detailing the process of getting their cartoon “The Toxic Crusaders” onto the small screen, Kaufman makes this alarming discovery :

The Cartoons Most People Under 25 Have Grown Up With Are Actually Infomercials

By the early 1908’s, the FCC, under the Reagan administration, had relaxed its regulations on TV. A host of children’s programming that was primarily commercials for toy lines, from GI Joe to Thundarr the Barbarian to He Man, were allowed on the air. Not long after, “barter syndication” became possible; that is, a toy company or animators would give their half-hour cartoon toy commercials to television for next to nothing or free, to the benefit of both companies. In the mid-1980s, Lorimar Telepictures broke new ground with Thundercats, actually paying TV stations a percentage of the sales of the toys would reap in the broadcast area. TV stations became merchandising parters, saturating afternoon TV with kiddie brainwashing, while simultaneously selling commercial time within these commercials. Classic animated efforts like Woody Woodpecker, Mighty Mouse, and the old Looney Tunes were gone forever. The elites had infiltrated the entertainment industry in secret ways to the permanent detriment of quality.

[The book adds the following footnote : "Most of this information is from Carnival Culture (1992), by the great pop-culture historian and theoretician James B. Twitchell."]

With all the outrage over evil corporations being evil corporations, we should all make sure there’s some blame left over for parents too lazy to properly raise their children. If Ronald McDonald is your chef and GI Joe is your babysitter, don’t be surprised when your kid grows up to be an unhealthy moron.

What does it say about an organization when the guy in charge has to publicly order his employees to stop breaking the law?

Tell me if this ever happened to you when you were a kid : You get dragged along on a church retreat, family reunion, boy scout “jamboree”, or other such trip in which you’re stuck in a single location for a few days and you know that you’re gonna be miserable. Hoping to turn lemons into lemonade, you cling to the coolest person that you can find. Although this person still isn’t very interesting, he/she is a genuinely good person that you can’t help but like. By the end of the trip, the two of you have formed an unusual, but strong bond.

When you get home, however, you start to realize that your relationship with this person wouldn’t last long in the “real” world. “It’s nothing personal”, you tell yourself, “we’re just very different people.” At best, the relationship could end up one in which you have a strong bond over a specific common interest, but are uncomfortable discussing anything else. Unfortunately, the other person doesn’t feel the same way, which makes various attempts to stay in touch feel awkward. You wish you could just leave the relationship in the past rather than clumsily try to reignite the tiny spark that brought you together in the first place.

Well, that’s how I feel every time I get an email from John Kerry. Not that I’m knocking his recent “Kid’s First” petition (which you should all sign), it’s just that every time I see his name in my inbox, I keep expecting the message to be “Dude, remember that time I ran for President? That was awesome!” I certainly don’t want him to go away or anything (this is where my analogy falls apart), it’s just that his attempts to transform himself from establishment candidate to grassroots organizer feel forced.