Fair Share, SEIU, WalMartWatch.com
The Fair Share Health Care act in Maryland -- which has drawn the ire of Wal-Mart for daring to require it to spend more money on health care -- has stirred up a lot of interest around the country. The story of how it got passed this year is also pretty interesting. A Baltimore Sun article reports:

Last year, the Maryland Citizens Health Initiative, a group seeking to help those without health insurance, proposed a tax on employers that don't provide health benefits. That idea didn't get far in the legislative process. But an effort to expand health coverage to uninsured Marylanders by taxing health maintenance organizations made more headway, narrowly failing in the state Senate.

"With the failure of that bill on the floor of the Senate last year and the failure to override the governor's veto on the living wage bill, there was a sense in the Senate that they needed to deliver on high-profile working family bills this year," said Tom Hucker, executive director of Progressive Maryland, which worked on the Wal-Mart bill.

Enter the SEIU and its Americans for Health Care network. The Maryland branch, Maryland for Health Care, helped generate grass roots pressure for the bill. That, the prior year's legislative defeats, and the fact that Maryland hospitals can fold uninsured patient costs into their costs for everyone else, made the Fair Share Health Care an attractive proposition to many Maryland legislators. As noted in an earlier post, the support of Giant Foods was also key. The company, which pays comparatively decent health benefits, wanted that not to put it at an unfair disadvantage vis-a-vis Wal-Mart.

For their part, Americans for Health Care aren't stopping with Maryland. From the Baltimore Sun report:

Mueller, the union spokeswoman, said SEIU is working on legislation in Washington and Colorado that would require the states to gather data on how many employees of various companies are enrolled in state-funded health care programs. Once taxpayers realize how much they're subsidizing Wal-Mart, they'll push for legislation like Maryland's, she said.

Meanwhile, SEIU president Andy Stern is also on the board of directors of a great new site, WalMartWatch.com. On the "About Us" page, the organization lays out its goals:

To fight Wal-Mart on the streets, in the media, and in the customer’s mind!

By serving as a virtual meeting place, research hub and strategic “war room” for the growing Wal-Mart reform effort, WalmartWatch.com will:

1. Catalyze disparate opposition into coordinated action (online and off);
2. Facilitate communication and cooperation between existing reform efforts;
3. Increase and share knowledge and expertise about Wal-Mart;
4. Create a common language and demand set thru an aggressive PR campaign;
5. Develop and promote new strategies, policies and legislative strategies.

The jury is still out on the ultimate success of both of these ventures, but they're getting noticed and having some real impact, and that's good to see.

As for the Maryland Fair Share Health Care Act: if you're a Maryland resident, you can help by sending an e-mail to Governor Ehrlich demanding he not veto this eminently sensible bill. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:10:00 AM -- |  

 
Every day is Earth Day
Check out South Knox Bubba for photos of the lovely Smoky Mountains on a "bad air day" and a good one. The bad ones are all too frequent -- thanks in no small part to Bush administration policies making it easier to defer upgrading air pollution controls at power plants and other point sources of pollution in the region.

The good news: an EPA settlement with Environmental Defense is forcing the agency to work out by mid-June how to make nearby polluters reduce emissions under a "haze rule." The bad news: it's going to take 60 years. As Southknoxbubba points out, haze isn't just unsightly -- it means sulfur dioxide is affecting the park's (and the state's) water supplies.

But maybe Mother Nature has struck back. Bush's photo-op visit to the Smokies today -- to tout volunteerism as a cure for environmental problems, trumpet some short-term statistical improvements, and generally waste everyone's time -- was canceled due to thunderstorms delaying Air Force One's landing at Knoxville.

Meanwhile, on page A9 of today's Washington Post, I read that Study Says Antarctic Glaciers Are Shrinking, Sea Levels May Climb:

About 212 of the 244 glaciers surrounding the [Antarctic] peninsula, which stretches north from the southern polar continent toward South America, have retreated as temperatures have risen more than 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1950s, reported the study by Alison Cook and colleagues.

Get me a fiddle, Rome is drowning. Actually, get me a life jacket. Actually, get me a political system that gives a damn. I suppose these pictures -- of giant ice floes banging around at ice shelfs -- and similar reports may be more evidence of the same thing.

For a thorough report on global warming, see Elizabeth Kolbert's "Five Minutes Past Midnight" in the April 25 New Yorker -- sadly, unavailable online,⁺ although this interview with Kolbert gives you a flavor. What's alarming to me are the several positive feedback loops she describes, including albedo loss and methane from thawing dead arctic vegetation. For details on the climate science of global warming, see the RealClimate blog. Sure enough, there's a brief discussion of the Antarctic glacier study -- by one of its authors.*

Some people are saying that Earth Day should be a more personal thing, and less of a day for politicians to grandstand. For some ideas on what to do today, this weekend, and beyond, check out "Earth Work," by Janisse Ray ("Ecology of a Cracker Childhood"):

Here's how we'll celebrate: We won't get into our cars, not at all. We won't buy anything -- no planet-shaped chocolates, no strands of green lights, no big blow-up replicas of Earth to tether in our front yards. We won't buy so much as a cup of coffee. We'll start our latter-day victory gardens and call them independence gardens. We won't turn on the television all day. We will force ourselves to be still long enough to think about what our actions and our inactions are doing to the Earth. We'll watch the songbirds leading spring northward.

Well, I'll need my cup of coffee this Earth Day weekend as we run around, and fortunately there's a sidebar to the article listing the usual kinds of Earth Day activities, for those of us in the DC area who like them. But I can't argue with buying less useless junk -- even Earth Day junk -- and I leave the TV off most of the time anyway. Planting our vegetable garden this weekend is a good idea, too.

And Ms. Ray's piece has convinced me to see if I can figure out which birds are singing a few of the songs outside our bedroom window, so I can know what to say thank you to.


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* To be scrupulous, David Vaughan points out "The retreat of these glaciers in itself will have a negligible effect on sea level, since most of the ice that has retreated was in the water already. However, if as a consequence of shortening, the glaciers are also flowing faster, then we would be seeing another (small) contribution to sea level rise." He does see the pattern of glacier retreats as "broadly in line with what we would expect if this was a consequence of the warming that has been measured in this area."

⁺ UPDATE, 5/3: WRONG! The New Yorker is putting Kolbert's series online: The Climate of Man - I, II, III. posted by Thomas Nephew at 8:45:00 PM -- |  

 
Ratzinger's words
The new pope is not one to mince words, it seems. Among other things, he has described homosexuality as an "intrinsic moral evil." Spoken like a true and loving shepherd of souls -- but as a non-Catholic, that can't be my concern.

What can be my concern is Ratzinger/Benedikt's status as a world leader with pretensions to moral authority. In his musings on homosexuality, he allows that it's a shame when homosexuals are violently persecuted, but adds

But the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered.

When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.

In a recent sermon, Ratzinger specifically challenged the world to turn away from the "dictatorship of relativism ... that recognizes nothing definite and leaves only one's own ego and one's own desires as the final measure."

Well, I'll try to rise to that challenge. I'm tempted to excuse Ratzinger's willingness to brand thousands and millions of human beings as evil because of their sexual orientation. He has long-held beliefs and doctrines that he, in his weakness and pride, has confused with the will of God. He may be a nice man other than that. He may even be kind to dogs.

But I'll pay Mr. Ratzinger the respect of avoiding that kind of relativism. Instead, I'll say unequivocally: this is a man whose cruel outlook on homosexuality calls into question the very moral judgment he is presumed to embody. Such views do not deserve respect or emulation by the civilized world. Nor does their author.

Of course, that may change. Maybe Mr. Ratzinger's new job will inspire him to surprise Catholics and the rest of us with fresh, sane views on homosexuality, or priestly celibacy, or birth control, or the ordination of women, or social justice, or the spread of AIDS. In that spirit:

Gott schenke dir Weisheit, Liebe, und Barmherzigkeit, Benedikt XVI!
Sie haben es noetig. Wie wir alle.

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EDIT, 4/22: Second Ratzinger quote expanded ("But...claim is made and" added, "consequently" replaces "...") for completeness , blockquoted for emphasis. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:30:00 AM -- |  

 
Those rule-bound suckas
Publius (he thought he was out, but they pulled him back in) preaches the Word, and the Word is Good:

If I’m recalling my Sunday School classes correctly, Jesus’s whole point was to emphasize love and tolerance, and to show the ridiculousness and spiritual bankruptcy of blind adherence to a rigid set of moral codes long since divorced from the more basic values of love, forgiveness, and tolerance. The hapless Pharisees – those rule-bound suckas – were always the butt of Jesus’s jokes.

Whether you’re a Christian, atheist, or anything in between, if you actually sit down and read the four Gospels, I suspect you’ll see that Dobson fits the role of “Pharisee” pretty well. He’s everything that Jesus opposed. That’s why it’s so utterly ridiculous for him to claim the mantle of the values of love and tolerance espoused in the Gospels – values that do not, by the way, require a belief in the divinity of Jesus or even in God at all.

Publius seems to be starting "PhariseeWatch." Good for him. If you're like me, you'll need a refresher on the relevant New Testament passage: Luke 18: 9-14. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:02:00 AM -- |  

 
sometime, maybe this summer
Peter Praschl has found his swing again. At least, he has from my point of view; I sometimes can't do much with a week or two's worth of fairly cryptic one-liners. Right now, though, he's hitting one piece after the other up the middle for solid base hits:

Going, going, gone --- memories of New York and the Plaza Hotel, summer of '94:

After two weeks we drove into Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge, and with every intersection, every honk, every news kiosk and every taxi, with every door man in front of a condo, and with every woman who waited for the light to turn in a gray business outfit and shiny stockings but in tennis shoes, I felt as if I'd finally arrived.

[1 / Basilisk] --- how badly we can behave, how clearly we remember that:

It was obvious that I was waiting, lurking, calculating. One more hour, let's go, let's go back to the tent, just one more Guinness, that kind of thing. I had become someone else, someone shabbier. What a disappointment I must have been.

Cambodia --- lingering oppression in memory and fact:

...you see how one of the Angkar people heads towards your father at the other end of the mess hall, yells at him to get up, goes out with him, you watch him out of the corners of your eyes, even though you know you shouldn't, it will be the last time you'll ever see him, you know he'll be killed at the edge of the village with some hoe or spade, because a bullet would be too expensive to waste on an enemy of Angkar.

where are they?, we asked.

oh, amongst us, they said. still here

Those of you who can read German should take the half hour or so and read these. They make me wish I could recapture some of my own past feelings and lives. But I'd likely just wind up crumpling up three trashcans worth of pixels and feeling like I'd wasted my time.

Earlier this month, Praschl may have touched on what's triggered some of his writing lately when he wrote that sometime, maybe this summer, because stuff like this can only be done to beat the heat, I want to write an essay, in which I'll describe how surprised I am, in my mid-forties, to keep getting the feeling that I'm growing into the novels that I read once when I was eighteen, twenty, twenty-five years old...

Maybe it's time to read a few novels worth growing into. Sometime; maybe this summer. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:30:00 PM -- |  

 
Bad advice
If you have an effective tactic in fighting a powerful foe, there's a rough way to tell who your allies aren't. They're the ones who counsel you to forswear using that tactic for one odd reason or another. Sometimes it's because it doesn't solve every problem they can think of; other times, it's because they feel it was once abused by the other side. As a frequent, smarmy bonus, they'll profess to have your deepest interests and ideals at heart.

But if there's nothing else wrong with the tactic, then what you're hearing is your opposition's fondest wish masquerading as friendly advice. And whether that advice is malicious or merely foolish hardly matters as much as the size of the bullhorn amplifying it.

Recent examples -- in the well amplified Washington Post and New Republic -- concern the Maryland Fair Share Health Care Act (a measure requiring large businesses to make up health benefits short of 8% of payroll to a state Medicaid fund), and the looming abolition of the filibuster process in the Senate (the right of 40 Senators to prevent a vote on an issue by continuing debate indefinitely).

Fair Share Health Care
Here's Steve Pearlstein, business writer for the Washington Post, criticizing the Maryland Fair Share Health Care Act :

If, as a society, we decide that everyone ought to have health coverage within the context of an employer-based system, it is a mystery to me why anyone thinks small businesses should be exempted. [...]

Of course, the only reason the Maryland legislature got involved in this issue in the first place is because the federal government has done bupkes about falling health coverage and rising health costs. [...]

I also doubt that local politicians would be so eager to join efforts to contain and punish the country's largest employer if the National Labor Relations Board hadn't effectively abolished the right of Americans to join labor unions. Wal-Mart is hardly the only company to thumb its nose at the Wagner Act, but it is one of the biggest and most brazen in its anti-union techniques. If faced with a credible threat that employees might unionize, Wal-Mart would have no choice but to offer better wages and health benefits.

Here we learn that we must unravel all the imperfections of the world before we can solve the one in front of us. Why we can't solve Wal-Mart's freeloading one way, and solve the (different) small business issue a second way, is "a mystery to me," to borrow Pearlstein's phrase. Not only that, we need to redesign or reconsider employer-based health care, too; Pearlstein probably just forgot to include abolishing the Electoral College. And why should Maryland politicians wait for a restored federal NLRB and labor laws worth the name, instead of getting after Wal-Mart's "cheating, not competing" business practices in their state right now?

Filibuster
Similarly, we have Jonathan Cohn arguing in the New Republic for giving up the filibuster. The heart of his argument is discomfort with the past history of the tactic -- not so much that unpleasant business of Dixiecrats thwarting civil rights, mind you, but that

...since the 1970s, there have been hundreds, plus many more "silent" filibusters in the form of threats that simply prevented legislation from coming to the floor. As a practical matter, the Senate now passes most major laws only when 60 of its members agree.

Suddenly, this essentially esthetic objection is what needs fixing, not the urgent matter of thwarting judicial nominations that would derail 70 years of American jurisprudence and social policy:

But, while the whole point of the U.S. government is to thwart "tyranny of the majority," the filibuster has arguably gummed up the works too much, making shifts in public policy so rare that voters have grown increasingly angry at the apparent unresponsiveness of government--an emotion Republicans have proved particularly adept at exploiting lately. The majority party shouldn't get to be tyrants, but they should get to be legislators. That is why the filibuster needs to be severely curbed or even junked altogether, and not just for judicial nominations.

In pseudo-reasonable fashion, Cohn continues,

This isn't to say Democrats should simply forfeit the fight over conservative judges or any other matter. But, in the long run, it is a mistake to make such battles about legislative process rather than public values. Excessive appeals to parliamentary fairness merely reinforce the public's sense that Democrats care more about legalisms than the difference between right and wrong.

But it's hard to see how the Democrats do anything but forfeit the fight over conservative judges if they let the filibuster go. Even if the filibuster has "arguably gummed up the works too much" in the past, Democrats shouldn't now selflessly wave good-bye to it just so Mr. Cohn can watch his idealized government gumball machine execute some cool public policy shifts.*

I don't think every conceivable political tactic is acceptable. I think that Democratic state legislatures should not engage in extra redistricting to juice up their state's representation in Congress -- let's leave capricious voter disenfranchisement to the DeLays of this world. (On the other hand, I think threatening retaliation in kind for future Texas or Georgia-style redistricting shenanigans is fair game.)

Philosopher kings 'Rn't Us
Someday, in a wonderful world in which the only remaining political arguments are "vanilla or chocolate?" and "paper or plastic?", the filibuster will have outlived its usefulness, we'll have health care that leaves no patient behind, and the lion will lie with the lamb. But until then we'll need imperfect tools like Fair Share or the filibuster to get us a little closer to where we want to be (or keep us from losing our way even more).

Incredibly, Cohn opens his argument with these words:

Things look relatively good for the Democrats right now. Social Security privatization is practically dead, Tom DeLay is actually on the defensive, and President Bush's approval rating is below 50 percent in many polls.

Cohn sees a way out of that mess: dump the filibuster! No more American public angrily drumming its fingers, waiting for the minimum wage to be declared unconstitutional! Cohn -- writing from the leafy academia of Ann Arbor, Michigan -- seems to have mistaken politics in the U.S. for an abstract chess match between philosopher kings.*

Senate Democrats are not wielding the filibuster threat for mere issues of legal process. Maryland legislators aren't leveling the health care playing field to amuse themselves. Anyone who truly counts himself as a friend of Democrats, of labor, or of the working classes generally should know that. Anyone else shouldn't pretend they're offering sincere advice.


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* For a checklist of the policy shifts a-comin', see Jeffrey Rosen's NYT Magazine article on the "Constitution in Exile" crowd ("Unregulated Offensive"). Social Security, minimum wage, National Labor Relations Board, Endangered Species Act -- all unconstitutional via expansive or narrow (as convenient) interpretations of the Article I "commerce clause," and the 5th and 11th Amendments, among others. That is, if enough troglodytes like William Pryor are railroaded through after Frist's "nuclear option" blows open the pass. Rosen's article, incidentally, shows up Clarence Thomas for a liar in his confirmation hearings and a plagiarist in his court opinions.
** Cohn's rarefied outlook seems more endemic than usual within TNR. In another recent New Republic article, Noam Scheiber inexplicably supports some Democrats inexplicably "closing ranks behind legislation that would allow federal courts to review cases in which end-of-life choices are murky and the family is divided." As Patrick Nielsen Hayden put it,

"...oh, I get it. The ruling right-wing coalition has one area of serious political vulnerability: people suspect they’re busybodies far too interested in nosing around their neighbors’ morals.

Therefore, Democrats and liberals should emulate them in this. That will make us more popular.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 7:10:00 PM -- |  

 
The sincerest form of mockery
All right, class, settle down. Today we'll take up imitation as perhaps the sincerest form of mockery in the blogger's toolkit. It's particularly effective in the case of hacks writing lazy prose for our nation's so-called "MSM" (note to self: seek class response: yes, "Mediocre Sycophantic Media").

In our first example, Roy Edroso ("alicublog") takes a page from "Crazy Jesus Lady", a.k.a. Peggy Noonan, who treated her readers to an imagined conversation among cardinals in Rome to select the next pope. Using the same conceit, Edroso opts for the rapier-like thrust to puncture his target's pretensions.

Noonan cardinal's first line: I had a thought. When the crowd kept applauding during the Mass--to me, looking out at them, it seemed as if they were saying: 'We're not just observers anymore, we're the Church, Hear us!' It seemed to me possibly quite significant.

Edroso cardinal's first line: More young boy, Cardinal Umlaut?

I've now cleaned the coffee stains off my monitor.

The second example is that all-too-rare phenomenon, anticipatory mockery. Back in April of last year, eRobin ("fact-esque") tried her hand at being as sycophantic as New York Times White House correspondent Elizabeth Bumiller, with a tour de force paean to Dubya's background in playing at baseball executive. eRobin as Bumiller:

From his first game at the Polo Grounds to his days working as the managing general partner of the Rangers from 1989 to 1994, to his successful introduction of the T-Ball program at the White House, Mr. Bush has been a fan of the sport which, he told Mr. Shannon, is "an integral part of the fabric of our society." [...]

Friends, who declined to be identified because it would be inconvenient, say that is in the offices of the last place team that the president honed the signature management style he uses so effectively today.

With Bumiller's typically fawning White House Letter today, eRobin has been shown to have got it pitch perfect. Bumiller as Bumiller:

When he was a child, the game was an obsession and a link to his father, the captain and first baseman on the Yale team. When he became an adult, the game made Mr. Bush a multimillionaire and helped start his political career, and now serves as an escape from the pressures of the White House. As Mr. Bush told sportswriters from The Washington Post, USA Today and The Washington Times last week, he spends "a fair amount of time" reading the box scores each day because it is "one way to take your mind off your job." [...]

Anyone who knew Mr. Bush as an owner of the Rangers invariably described a man who was not just promoting a team but also building the image and political skills necessary to win the Texas governorship and the White House.

eRobin has offered her own reflections on a triumph that deserves to be celebrated as an unassisted triple play of blogging: imitating mockingly, well, and in advance. She notes -- with characteristic humility -- that she stands in awe of Ms. Bumiller's talent for knocking every one of the undoubtedly Ketchum-approved myth-points out of the park. But she also suggests that the truly enlightened anticipatory mocker must understand the deeper motivations of her target. Generously, one should even say incomparably, eRobin shares the Bumiller Rosetta Stone:

The whole point of the White House Letter column is to remind us that BushCo was destined to lead us.

It is rare to achieve perfection while still so young. May eRobin continue her achievements on the highest planes of mockery, or at least sell out for a high six-figure book deal. Class dismissed, grasshoppers! posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:50:00 PM -- |  

 
Weekend update
After getting our taxes done Friday night (hey! that's doing pretty well, by my standards) the rest of the weekend was great: beautiful weather, spaded and raked my vegetable garden, took Maddie to ballet rehearsal practice, cleaned up the house, had guests, ate out Saturday night, raked magnolia blossoms, managed substitutions at Maddie's Sunday soccer game (2-0! woo-hoo! Maddie scored one!), had a cookout with the neighbors featuring a beer and, I'm afraid, two glasses of wine.

I therefore fell asleep early each night. Hence no blogging, sorry. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:00:00 PM -- |