by Duane N. Burghard
©2015
OK, I need to stop writing about politics soon and get back to science and/or science fiction, because this crap is depressing!
That said, I need to give you at least one more rant from my position as radical centrist. This week, it's my friends on my far left that are driving me nuts. A number of people on social media this morning have rediscovered an article from early June of this year. The article makes a fairly incredible and frightening claim about our nation's military spending. The headline reads, "Report Reveals $8.5 Trillion Missing From Pentagon Budget." Now that's a headline that will get the attention of just about ALL of my "long haired, sandal wearing hippie" friends (and be clear, I have a LOT of them). Unfortunately, despite being very intelligent about a number of things, many of these friends let headlines like this trip what I call the "stupid switch" in their heads. Now, before my conservative friends start laughing, we ALL have stupid switches (and don't start throwing stones conservative friends, because, especially now, you guys live in houses with a LOT of glass). A person's stupid switch is what causes them to say, do or think something because someone else says or does something that fundamentally aligns with a (usually less than totally rational) bias in their head. So when you're fundamentally inclined to be opposed to military spending because you feel your nation's spending priorities are out of whack and because you've been exposed to some legitimate, specific examples of waste, fraud and abuse in defense contracts in the past, and you marry that inclination with a bombastic headline, well, stand back, because the ocean of self-righteous indignation can't be far behind (and again, conservative friends, I encourage you to hold your tongues, because your people have elevated self-righteous indignation to a freaking art form). Unfortunately, I'm easily distracted from the crap I'm supposed to be doing today, so when I saw this headline, article, and the corresponding hullabaloo, I felt the need to comment.
So let me start by noting that, when we're talking about money in government budgets, there's a BIG difference between "missing" (aka unaccounted for) and flat out wasted or stolen (although wasted is a frankly subjective term, so let's stick with what an auditor would define as fraud or theft). With respect to the specific claim in the articles, first, the total dollar figure spans a TWENTY YEAR period. Now, that's still an average of just over $400 BILLION per year, so we're still talking about a LOT of money, but remember, the headline writers want you to be outraged and angry in the streets, ready to fight with your friends. We can't have people walking around calmly saying, "hey, let's have a calm and rational discussion about this potentially disturbing issue," I mean, who would tune in for that? But let's get back to the issue here of the galactically large difference between missing/unaccounted for and stolen/fraud.
A deeper look into this issue quickly reveals that the overwhelming bulk of the money involved here is NOT, in actual point of fact, an example of theft, waste, fraud or abuse (SOME of it very well COULD be, but we don't KNOW that). No, what we're talking about is that there are trillions of dollars worth of government defense contracts that are simply unaudited. That does NOT automatically mean malfeasance or fraud, it means they don't know what happened to the money. I have no doubt that, in and among all of that money, there's probably a good deal of government waste to be found, but the article's title and implication are both VERY misleading in that the reader is meant to instantly conclude that ALL of the money involved MUST have been wasted.
With that having been said, I absolutely do agree that this is a pretty big problem, and pointing the finger of blame for it is pretty easy. You see, the problem began (in my view, very un-coincidentally) with the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990s. Upon taking control of Congress, the Republicans actively took actions (mostly in terms of funding and resources) to discourage the normal level of auditing to take place. As a former military officer, I feel very comfortable saying that this failure to adequately care about, fund, monitor and follow up on the audit processes at the Pentagon was one that frustrated, irritated and just plain pissed off the people inside the Pentagon as much or more than anyone else (they don't like it when contracts don't get audited either and they absolutely DO want to know where the money is going). And it wouldn't take long at all for this backlog of audits problem to balloon completely out of control.
Many of you reading this are probably also relatively unfamiliar with the frankly inconceivable size and scope of what's involved in a military audit. To help you out, allow me to first familiarize you with the military's general rule regarding paperwork: if it moves, make a copy of it, if it doesn't move, make copies of it until it does. Second, let me tell you a brief story about my lone experience with an audit at the Pentagon.
In the early 1990s I was a Department Head at a Navy shore command in Rhode Island. As part of my job, I was in charge of the deck, admin and supply divisions (which is to say that I had fiduciary responsibilities). I was also the Command's Legal Officer. During my time there, another officer filed a formal discrimination complaint against my Commanding Officer. Not long after this, the command's Executive Officer (XO) called me into his office to direct me to assist in the command's defense regarding the officer's allegations. Part of that defense required me to audit a small contract, which immediately looked fishy to me (because the signature on one of the documents wasn't an officer whose name I recognized, and it wasn't a senior officer associated with our command, and it normally should have been). I noted my confusion to the XO. He was grateful that I cared more than he did, happy to assign me to do all the work, and promptly returned to the 12 inch tall stack of junk in his inbox.
I crossed the street to our base's command office and took the odd document in question to the Base Commander's secretary (who, of course, I knew). I asked her about the officer whose name appeared on the document. She assured me that the officer did not exist. I then made the mistake of asking if she was sure. She looked at me with relatively forgiving and only slightly condescending eyes and said, "Lieutenant, I have been in this job for over 20 years, I absolutely guarantee you that, not only is there no Captain by that name attached to any part of this base right now, but there has, in fact, never been a Captain by that name attached to this base in the entire time I have worked here." I lowered my head apologetically and retreated.
Fortunately for me, the Navy has this wonderful tool called the Blue Book. In the Blue Book is the name of every officer who has ever served in the history of the United States Navy. Surely, I thought, I will find this missing officer in the Blue Book and then be a lot closer to finding out why he was involved in the first place, etc.
He wasn't there.
Not only was there not an officer by that name in the Navy at that time, but, in the entire history of the United States Navy, there had NEVER been an officer with the name typed and signed on these orders. Well NOW I had a mystery.
Fortunately, this is the United States Military ... and like the X-Files, the truth is almost always "out there" ... somewhere, you just have to be willing to suffer to get it ... and when I say suffer, I mean paperwork.
The military loves paperwork more than pretty much any other entity on Earth, and a side effect of that affection is that there is almost never a piece of paper in the military that isn't attached, in some way, to lots of other pieces of paper. In this case, the contract I was dealing with included a set of orders, and they in turn were connected to actual payments on the contract. Unfortunately, the events involved were so long ago, that the only copies of relevant documents remaining were in the Pentagon archives. I returned to my XO and told him that the command needed to pay my way down to D.C. so that I could track down the documents in question. I was on the highway to D.C. only a few hours later.
I had never been to the Pentagon archives. In fact, to be honest, I hadn't known that the Pentagon archives existed (probably should have, but I didn't). I drove up to a very nondescript, three story tall, long, thin building in the D.C. area. I was frankly unimpressed with the building and its size, but I was also relieved because, in looking at the building I thought, "how hard can it be to find the right documents here?" I walked in the door, showed my orders to the guard, and was eventually told to go to the elevator, go to level B and wait for assistance. I did as I was instructed, but I was completely unprepared for what happened next.
Level B was several floors below ground (and I'm guessing from the time in the elevator it was at least 4 floors down). When the elevator doors opened, I walked out and my eyes went as wide as possible. I was inside a space that was several football fields large. Directly in front of me, on the well polished tile floor, were painted driving lanes (a mini version of what you'd see on the street). Within seconds an electric golf cart pulled up and a young man said, "Lt. Burghard?" I showed him what I was looking for. He studied the document for a moment and said, "OK, hop in."
We drove for several minutes through the "roads" in this incredibly cavernous space, past endless rows of shelves that were filled, from floor to ceiling, with folders and papers. The size and scope of the space was simply beyond my imagination. Finally, we arrived. My escort parked his golf cart and said, "we have to walk from here." Eventually we found the file on the contract that my documents referenced. The contract however, was for a pest control seminar involving personnel for a command that was nearly 200 miles away from ours. And then, there it was. Attached to the Pentagon records, there were references to TWO checks. One at the correct command, and one at our base.
Since you're probably interested in what happened at this point, before I go back to my main point let me quickly tell you what happened. Upon making this discovery, I immediately knew that we were dealing with an instance of fraud against the United States Government, which meant that I was about to be acting beyond the scope of my authority. So I contacted NIS (the Naval Investigative Service). An agent met with me two days later. I gave him the results of my audit, he thanked me and went away. A few weeks later he returned to my office with security pictures from a local bank and asked me if I could identify the individuals in the picture (the agent had tracked the second check to this bank at this date and time). I recognized the young man (fortunately NOT one of my people, in fact not even attached to my command), and, behind him in the corner, the officer who had filed the complaint against our Commanding Officer. Both men left the building that day in handcuffs. Both men went to prison.
Now, here's why I told you that story.
Think about the size and scope of what it took for little old me to do a simple audit on a small contract ... and now consider the task of auditing trillions of dollars of contracts dating back twenty years. Even if we had the political will (and we don't), the sheer size and scope of the auditing job to be done at this point is beyond what is possible. There aren't enough people or enough hours in the day. You'd have to recall THOUSANDS of people to active duty (and very specific people, people like me, officers with auditing experience) and you'd need to create a literal army of auditors. That alone is NEVER going to happen for dozens of reasons, but even if you somehow could, then you'd have to have some kind of organized and methodical approach to the audits, then you'd have to give the auditors authority to interrupt the current work of hundreds of thousands of troops and contractors and employees (which would be insanely costly to them) and, most importantly, you'd have to have hyper-specific guidelines regarding what constitutes waste, fraud and abuse ... AND, then you'd need a MASSIVE army of lawyers to follow up on the results of those audits ... and remember that, to be cost effective, each of those prosecutions has to make the government more money than all of the above costed (which is INCREDIBLY unlikely).
My point here is that it is incredibly hard for the Department of Defense to keep up with its existing audit responsibilities under ideal conditions, much less under conditions when the resources and manpower needed for the task are being squeezed out of existence. I should also note that I have serious doubts that the Department of Defense is somehow unique in having this problem. My guess is that a specific, intentional effort to reduce the frequency and efficacy of government audits is a government wide issue and that, yes, the blame, if any, for this fact belongs more with Congressional Republicans than any other group.
Since I can hear the stupid switches of my left leaning friends suddenly tripping again, and since I feel the need to try to say something positive about how to "fix" this gigantic problem, let me see if I can address the best way to do that. Basically, right now, it's impossible. Not only do you not have the necessary political will, but you have a party in power that has no interest in solving the problem. And removing them is not going to happen overnight (this leads to a somewhat separate rant about gerrymandering that will have to wait for another day). To "fix" the problem, you need to replace the Representatives causing it. Given how gerrymandered their districts are, you are VERY unlikely to do that by simply trying to run good candidates against them in a majority of those districts. That plan simply won't work (and we know this because it consistently hasn't). You have to travel farther down the food chain, specifically, to the STATE legislatures. Control of the state legislature, in most cases, gives your party control of the redistricting process which, after the next census, in theory, gives you your first rational chance at shifting the balance of power. Sadly, for my left leaning friends, this is spectacularly unlikely. Why? Because, if you haven't noticed from their Facebook feeds, NONE of them are getting all excited and frothy about their state rep candidates. In fact, most of them don't even VOTE for their state rep candidates (for far too many Democrats, voting means showing up once every four years and voting for President, which is why we see the results we see). They ARE, on the other hand, all excited about Bernie Sanders, and convinced that electing him will save and change the world (though if you try to engage them on how that might happen specifically, you'll usually be treated to a rather depressing lesson on the failure of our education system to instruct people on how our government actually works).
But let's suppose we actually did all of those impossible things I list above. After you do that, the idea that we're EVER going to know what happened to most of the money from most of these contracts over the past twenty years is looney. The amount of human manpower needed to go back and perform all incomplete audits just during Obama's Administration would be prohibitively expensive ... which brings me around to my overall point: articles like the one I saw being referenced today prey on people's existing prejudices (ooh, I don't like the military, therefore everything they do MUST be super evil and corrupt and everybody there must be equally evil and corrupt, which is just bullshit). They also sensationalize and get people all pissed off about a problem that's endemic to ANY sufficiently sized bureaucracy (again, you think the Defense Department is alone here?), and finally (and most importantly), they leave the reader mad at the wrong people ... the people in the Pentagon are NOT to blame here (just as the Banks are NOT to blame for our financial crisis). In fact, whether you believe it or not, this problem pisses them off more than you. People interested in actually FIXING the problem should be hyper-focused on seizing and maintaining control of their STATE legislatures and working up from there ... that's EXACTLY how the religious right seized power in this country ... but since that's just not as sexy as yelling about Wall Street and "feeling the bern" and since we can't get people to VOTE for more than one office more than once every four years, basically, we're screwed ... and, as usual, there's really only one way to fix that isn't there .........
Monday, September 14, 2015
Friday, September 4, 2015
PROW: When the Stupid Literally Hurts ...
by Duane N. Burghard
©2015
Sorry I've been away for a few weeks. After my last essay, I returned to working on my second novel a bit, and then on my business, and then on a new business project ... and somewhere in there, I kind of lost my blog voice (which happens) for a moment. Fortunately, as is frequently the case these days, Facebook was there to rescue me today.
So today's Political Rant Of the Week (PROW) comes to us courtesy of the State of Colorado ... not for something they're doing that's particularly stupid, but for something they're doing that's actually quite brilliant, helpful and generally good, but that they're going to stop doing ... and in this case, the stupidity of stopping will quite literally hurt.
In 2009, Children's Hospital Colorado (near Denver) and a number of other hospitals in the state, began an intentional and focused effort to increase the presence and use of pregnancy preventing implants (e.g. IUDs) in teenage females. Their intent was to lower the number of unwanted pregnancies among young people and, simultaneously (obviously) lower the number of abortions performed. Unlike the pill or condoms, IUDs are statistically far more effective at preventing pregnancy (they also don't have to be thought of immediately in advance of sexual contact). Unfortunately, a very small percentage of teenagers use them, and part of the reason why is that, unlike the pill or a condom, IUDs are significantly more expensive (hundreds of dollars) and can only be implanted by trained professionals, adding even more to the cost. To overcome the funding problem, the state of Colorado was given a $23 million grant from the Susan Buffet Foundation (and yes, Susan Buffet is billionaire Warren Buffet's wife).
So what happened? Well what do you think happened?? By 2013, teen births in Colorado had dropped by FORTY percent (substantially more than the nationwide drop for the same period). Statistics for 2014 haven't been officially released yet, but officials have noted that the number has continued to decline. Similarly, the number of abortions performed on teenagers in Colorado has also dropped significantly during the period.
So what do we have here; teen pregnancy is down, abortions are down and births to teens are down. I HOPE that we can all agree that these are all good things. But that's not all. You see, when teen births go down, all sorts of other good things happen too. Colorado's Medicaid expenses have gone down as a result. With fewer teen births there is a savings in government assistance. More of those teenagers are finishing high school and going on to lives where they will earn more, pay more in taxes, and have more opportunities. These all seem like really good things. They also seem like the sorts of things you'd want to see continue, right?
Apparently not.
You see, the money from the Buffet foundation recently ran out, and so Colorado's Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper (yes, that's his real name) went to his state assembly to get the money to continue this program, a program which, had it been using state funds all along, WOULD HAVE BEEN PROFITABLE in that it has saved the state more than the $23 million the Buffet foundation has invested ... and that's where the trouble began. Republican State lawmakers (a generous title indeed given all they do to NOT make laws) say that the program is too expensive and that it "sends the wrong message" to teenagers. Some have raised concerns about the program leading to an increase in Sexually Transmitted Diseases (though there is, to date, not a shred of evidence to support that fear).
It's at this point that several "rant alerts" go off in my head. I'll see if I can get them coherently organized for you (no promises).
First, let's talk about being pro-life. While I'm sure it will not surprise any of you, I am firmly in the camp that has long been known (and somewhat badly named) as "pro-choice" ... which, incidentally, is the same camp that many if not most Republicans belonged to before Reagan. Although you would be forgiven for not knowing this today, it is in fact true that it was the Republican Party that first endorsed the landmark "Roe v Wade" decision back in 1973. They endorsed Roe because it was consistent with their conservative "hands off" approach to government. They recognized that the decision had less to do with abortion and more to do with not letting the government have a hand in deciding what we can and cannot do with our bodies (legally speaking it was about the interpretation of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment ... in any case the decision was and is consistent with an actually conservative approach to governance by a state). Today, sadly, pro-life has come to simply mean "pro-birth" and there is precious little (if any) interest in the life of the individual once they are born. But the one thing that I thought the so called pro-life community and I could universally agree upon, was that lowering the number of unwanted pregnancies and the number of abortions is a good thing. So when we see a program that is empirically lowering the number of abortions (AND SAVING MONEY), it would seem to be a "no brainer" that we could all agree that funding such a program would be a good thing. Alas, no, it turns out that, in this case, logicians need not apply.
So let's talk about sex. One Colorado State Rep said that she thought that funding the program would send the wrong message. She said that the message was, "feel free to have sex with everybody." Now, just so we're clear, I haven't been a teenager in just over 31 years, but I did used to be one, my children are teenagers, and I have been able to keep up on what they're generally like over the years. In my experience, the desire to have sex is a pretty universal desire of the average teenager. Certainly when I was a teenager, I was rather ... focused, on members of the opposite sex. And by the way, if I may run off track into a separate rant for a moment and attack this ABSURD school dress code issue that we're seeing today ... I'd like to be CLEAR that, when I was a teenager, if I thought you were attractive, what you were wearing made absolutely NO difference whatsoever (and if I wasn't that into you, your attire similarly made no difference ... I know this is true for girls too because I dressed the way I did and yet several girls still actually went out with me). Telling girls that THEY are responsible for what guys think or do as a result of what they wear IS in fact a perpetuation of rape culture (not to mention an incredible insult to men who are being told that they're not capable of controlling themselves or acting responsibly). The bottom line is that, regardless of what a girl is wearing, a guy either wants to have sex with her or he doesn't, and either way he IS still fully responsible for controlling himself AND for paying attention in class.
But this is nothing new. Teenagers have been wanting to have sex since before the term teenager was invented. And the idea that we can train people out of this desire (especially in a society whose members do NOT all share the same religious or moral background or beliefs) is without a single example of success. In fact, the states which spend the most and place the greatest emphasis on abstinence only education are the same states that have the highest rates of unwanted teen pregnancies. And according to Advocates for Youth.org (and their website references a number of empirical studies) there is NO statistical evidence that "youth enrolled in abstinence only programs were any more likely than those not in the programs to delay sexual initiation, to have fewer sexual partners, or to abstain entirely from sex." Put simply (in deference to those who apparently need it to be put simply): IT DOESN'T WORK.
So we have a program that, empirically, is lowering teen pregnancy, preventing abortions and saving the state money ... ALL of these things are things that the Colorado Republican Party SAYS they are interested in ... and yet a large number of them oppose funding this program. And this brings me neatly around to my last mini-rant of the day: State Legislatures.
As incredible as it is for me to see on my screen as I type it, this December will mark the 10th Anniversary of my announcement to run for Congress in 2006. One day I will write about that amazing experience and the many good and bad things I learned about our system and how it "really works" (from the standpoint of a candidate), but for now let me say that one of the things that became increasingly important to me during that campaign was ensuring the success of "downballot" candidates (specifically people running for the State House and State Senate seats in my US Congressional District). In fact, one of the things that I am most proud of was that, even though I didn't win that year, a significant number of people within the party credited me with keeping my opponent so busy and spending so much money on defeating me, that he didn't have time to do his normal interfering work (funding and working for downballot candidates) in other races. As a result, to this day, many people in the party give me partial credit for the election of several downballot candidates. Why is that a big deal? Well, despite the lack of money and sexiness in those races, your state legislature is enormously important and, in actual fact, has a far greater impact on you and your daily life than you might think (including the fact that most state legislatures get to draw these ridiculously gerrymandered US Congressional District lines which intentionally protect (most Republican) Congressmen ... and that protection makes them less willing to compromise and more prone to the gridlock we so often see today).
So at the end of the day, what do we have? We have a program that's working, saving money, preventing unwanted pregnancy and lowering the number abortions. It seems to me that ending such a program would be, to quote Stephen Colbert, just about the dumbest f*cking thing I've ever heard (and I would remind my readers that the preceding designation was NOT intended to be a competition ... though it does seem to be working out that way) ... but sadly, that's probably what's going to happen. Yes, Colorado can look forward now to a future with increased abortion, higher teen pregnancy and higher social program costs. And why? Well, mostly because so many of the citizens of the State of Colorado just don't take a greater and more interested role in who is representing them in their state house (I say this because the number of people who vote for state representatives in most districts is decided lower than those who vote for statewide or federal candidates in those same districts). As a result of this lack of interest and participation, we once again all get to live with the will of the majority ... of organized people who vote ... and there's really only one way to fix that isn't there?
©2015
Sorry I've been away for a few weeks. After my last essay, I returned to working on my second novel a bit, and then on my business, and then on a new business project ... and somewhere in there, I kind of lost my blog voice (which happens) for a moment. Fortunately, as is frequently the case these days, Facebook was there to rescue me today.
So today's Political Rant Of the Week (PROW) comes to us courtesy of the State of Colorado ... not for something they're doing that's particularly stupid, but for something they're doing that's actually quite brilliant, helpful and generally good, but that they're going to stop doing ... and in this case, the stupidity of stopping will quite literally hurt.
In 2009, Children's Hospital Colorado (near Denver) and a number of other hospitals in the state, began an intentional and focused effort to increase the presence and use of pregnancy preventing implants (e.g. IUDs) in teenage females. Their intent was to lower the number of unwanted pregnancies among young people and, simultaneously (obviously) lower the number of abortions performed. Unlike the pill or condoms, IUDs are statistically far more effective at preventing pregnancy (they also don't have to be thought of immediately in advance of sexual contact). Unfortunately, a very small percentage of teenagers use them, and part of the reason why is that, unlike the pill or a condom, IUDs are significantly more expensive (hundreds of dollars) and can only be implanted by trained professionals, adding even more to the cost. To overcome the funding problem, the state of Colorado was given a $23 million grant from the Susan Buffet Foundation (and yes, Susan Buffet is billionaire Warren Buffet's wife).
So what happened? Well what do you think happened?? By 2013, teen births in Colorado had dropped by FORTY percent (substantially more than the nationwide drop for the same period). Statistics for 2014 haven't been officially released yet, but officials have noted that the number has continued to decline. Similarly, the number of abortions performed on teenagers in Colorado has also dropped significantly during the period.
So what do we have here; teen pregnancy is down, abortions are down and births to teens are down. I HOPE that we can all agree that these are all good things. But that's not all. You see, when teen births go down, all sorts of other good things happen too. Colorado's Medicaid expenses have gone down as a result. With fewer teen births there is a savings in government assistance. More of those teenagers are finishing high school and going on to lives where they will earn more, pay more in taxes, and have more opportunities. These all seem like really good things. They also seem like the sorts of things you'd want to see continue, right?
Apparently not.
You see, the money from the Buffet foundation recently ran out, and so Colorado's Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper (yes, that's his real name) went to his state assembly to get the money to continue this program, a program which, had it been using state funds all along, WOULD HAVE BEEN PROFITABLE in that it has saved the state more than the $23 million the Buffet foundation has invested ... and that's where the trouble began. Republican State lawmakers (a generous title indeed given all they do to NOT make laws) say that the program is too expensive and that it "sends the wrong message" to teenagers. Some have raised concerns about the program leading to an increase in Sexually Transmitted Diseases (though there is, to date, not a shred of evidence to support that fear).
It's at this point that several "rant alerts" go off in my head. I'll see if I can get them coherently organized for you (no promises).
First, let's talk about being pro-life. While I'm sure it will not surprise any of you, I am firmly in the camp that has long been known (and somewhat badly named) as "pro-choice" ... which, incidentally, is the same camp that many if not most Republicans belonged to before Reagan. Although you would be forgiven for not knowing this today, it is in fact true that it was the Republican Party that first endorsed the landmark "Roe v Wade" decision back in 1973. They endorsed Roe because it was consistent with their conservative "hands off" approach to government. They recognized that the decision had less to do with abortion and more to do with not letting the government have a hand in deciding what we can and cannot do with our bodies (legally speaking it was about the interpretation of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment ... in any case the decision was and is consistent with an actually conservative approach to governance by a state). Today, sadly, pro-life has come to simply mean "pro-birth" and there is precious little (if any) interest in the life of the individual once they are born. But the one thing that I thought the so called pro-life community and I could universally agree upon, was that lowering the number of unwanted pregnancies and the number of abortions is a good thing. So when we see a program that is empirically lowering the number of abortions (AND SAVING MONEY), it would seem to be a "no brainer" that we could all agree that funding such a program would be a good thing. Alas, no, it turns out that, in this case, logicians need not apply.
So let's talk about sex. One Colorado State Rep said that she thought that funding the program would send the wrong message. She said that the message was, "feel free to have sex with everybody." Now, just so we're clear, I haven't been a teenager in just over 31 years, but I did used to be one, my children are teenagers, and I have been able to keep up on what they're generally like over the years. In my experience, the desire to have sex is a pretty universal desire of the average teenager. Certainly when I was a teenager, I was rather ... focused, on members of the opposite sex. And by the way, if I may run off track into a separate rant for a moment and attack this ABSURD school dress code issue that we're seeing today ... I'd like to be CLEAR that, when I was a teenager, if I thought you were attractive, what you were wearing made absolutely NO difference whatsoever (and if I wasn't that into you, your attire similarly made no difference ... I know this is true for girls too because I dressed the way I did and yet several girls still actually went out with me). Telling girls that THEY are responsible for what guys think or do as a result of what they wear IS in fact a perpetuation of rape culture (not to mention an incredible insult to men who are being told that they're not capable of controlling themselves or acting responsibly). The bottom line is that, regardless of what a girl is wearing, a guy either wants to have sex with her or he doesn't, and either way he IS still fully responsible for controlling himself AND for paying attention in class.
But this is nothing new. Teenagers have been wanting to have sex since before the term teenager was invented. And the idea that we can train people out of this desire (especially in a society whose members do NOT all share the same religious or moral background or beliefs) is without a single example of success. In fact, the states which spend the most and place the greatest emphasis on abstinence only education are the same states that have the highest rates of unwanted teen pregnancies. And according to Advocates for Youth.org (and their website references a number of empirical studies) there is NO statistical evidence that "youth enrolled in abstinence only programs were any more likely than those not in the programs to delay sexual initiation, to have fewer sexual partners, or to abstain entirely from sex." Put simply (in deference to those who apparently need it to be put simply): IT DOESN'T WORK.
So we have a program that, empirically, is lowering teen pregnancy, preventing abortions and saving the state money ... ALL of these things are things that the Colorado Republican Party SAYS they are interested in ... and yet a large number of them oppose funding this program. And this brings me neatly around to my last mini-rant of the day: State Legislatures.
As incredible as it is for me to see on my screen as I type it, this December will mark the 10th Anniversary of my announcement to run for Congress in 2006. One day I will write about that amazing experience and the many good and bad things I learned about our system and how it "really works" (from the standpoint of a candidate), but for now let me say that one of the things that became increasingly important to me during that campaign was ensuring the success of "downballot" candidates (specifically people running for the State House and State Senate seats in my US Congressional District). In fact, one of the things that I am most proud of was that, even though I didn't win that year, a significant number of people within the party credited me with keeping my opponent so busy and spending so much money on defeating me, that he didn't have time to do his normal interfering work (funding and working for downballot candidates) in other races. As a result, to this day, many people in the party give me partial credit for the election of several downballot candidates. Why is that a big deal? Well, despite the lack of money and sexiness in those races, your state legislature is enormously important and, in actual fact, has a far greater impact on you and your daily life than you might think (including the fact that most state legislatures get to draw these ridiculously gerrymandered US Congressional District lines which intentionally protect (most Republican) Congressmen ... and that protection makes them less willing to compromise and more prone to the gridlock we so often see today).
So at the end of the day, what do we have? We have a program that's working, saving money, preventing unwanted pregnancy and lowering the number abortions. It seems to me that ending such a program would be, to quote Stephen Colbert, just about the dumbest f*cking thing I've ever heard (and I would remind my readers that the preceding designation was NOT intended to be a competition ... though it does seem to be working out that way) ... but sadly, that's probably what's going to happen. Yes, Colorado can look forward now to a future with increased abortion, higher teen pregnancy and higher social program costs. And why? Well, mostly because so many of the citizens of the State of Colorado just don't take a greater and more interested role in who is representing them in their state house (I say this because the number of people who vote for state representatives in most districts is decided lower than those who vote for statewide or federal candidates in those same districts). As a result of this lack of interest and participation, we once again all get to live with the will of the majority ... of organized people who vote ... and there's really only one way to fix that isn't there?
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
PROW: The Mishandling of Bush and Clinton
by Duane N. Burghard
© 2015
Like many of you, I was hoping to avoid this level of involvement in NEXT YEAR'S Presidential Election as an issue for at least 5 or 6 more months, but apparently our national need for goofy political theater has overtaken our desire for peace and quiet, so at the risk of adding my voice to an already annoying chorus, I will again step in to the fray this week with my "Political Rant Of the Week." And in this week's episode, I'm going to focus my attention squarely on the expected nominees; former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and former Secretary of State (and First Lady) Hillary Clinton. Each of these candidates has had a fairly major "wow, they really stepped in it" moment in recent days, and both moments exposed a really serious problem for them. Let's let Jeb go first.
Just last night, the former Florida Governor gave a "major foreign policy speech" at the Ronald Reagan library in California. The locale has often been the backdrop for major policy addresses in which a candidate or office holder lays out a "grand vision" of some kind or another. To be clear, the reviews of Bush's speech from the left and the right were not kind. The speech was labeled "vague" and "shallow" and "a hodgepodge" by critics on both sides, and was certainly not short on revisionist history concerning his brother's administration.
And then came the gaffe.
Bush was blistering in his criticism of President Obama and Secretary Clinton regarding their "fatal" error in Iraq. He criticized what he called the "premature withdrawal" of forces from the area. He said that the Obama Administration "stood by" as our "hard won victory" was "thrown away" in a "blind haste" to leave Iraq. It was a finely crafted, carefully worded, harsh and devastating attack ... with only one teeny tiny problem.
The "Status of Forces Agreement" to which Bush was referring, was signed on November 18, 2008 ... and while President Obama had already won the Presidential election at that point (and was President Elect Obama), the agreement was actually negotiated by, agreed to and signed by his brother, then President George W. Bush. Even worse, the only way the Obama Administration could have legally altered the agreement and stayed in Iraq, would have required a vote of the Iraqi Parliament to allow the troops to stay. And just to put that last little fact cherry on top of this awful sundae, President Obama did in fact send emissaries to Iraq (including members of President George W. Bush's Administration) to request that the agreement be altered so that more troops would be allowed to stay (a request that was turned down). Needless to say, the media has descended on this part of Bush's speech like a school of blunder starved piranha (ironic in a campaign season that includes Donald Trump, who is quite literally a one man blunder machine), but before we talk more about what I consider to be the key underlying problem here, let's check in across the hall at Clinton headquarters.
Just a few days ago, Secretary Clinton was asked to say whether or not she supported the Keystone XL pipeline expansion. Now, in fairness, not getting a yes or a no answer from a politician when they're asked a question that most of us would consider to be yes or no in nature isn't exactly new. Further, asking a politician whether or not they support something has frequently failed to receive a clear answer, and sometimes that's even fair and logical (for example, the candidate might say, "I support this part but not that," or "I can't support it until it includes this"), but even in those cases the candidate's relative position on the topic is generally pretty obvious based on their response.
Clinton flat out refused to answer the question,
The former Secretary of State later "clarified" her non-answer by saying that it was inappropriate to comment or "second guess" President Obama while he was still in office. Now that is very thoughtful of her, but here again is the teeny tiny problem with that answer: to date, Secretary Clinton has had NO problem either commenting on or second guessing a variety of other positions and issues where she and the President both agree and disagree. As a result, that response seems, well, maybe just a bit hypocritical and like she's completely trying to dodge an issue that is important to some of her larger campaign donors (a major image problem for Clinton within her own party).
Now, let's put these two moments together and see why they both have me so annoyed. These two candidates are, statistically, very likely to be the nominees of their respective parties next year ... and that, to me, is highly distressing at this point, and not because I care whether the brother of a former President and the wife of another are running. I want the best candidates that the parties can deliver, regardless of who they're related to (and BTW I am most emphatically NOT either stating or implying that's what we'd have, only that the arguments for not nominating them based solely on who they're related to seem silly to me). No, I'm highly distressed because they are the likely nominees. Further, in many ways, very credible and strong arguments can be made that they are in fact the two most qualified individuals running as well. But given those facts, in my opinion, they should both be way better than to be caught in moments like these. Governor Bush looks like a flat out idiot this morning because of this speech. He should immediately clean house. He should fire the idiot who wrote the speech, fire the idiot who didn't fact check it, and maybe go back to the mirror and have a long talk with himself about what the heck it is that HE actually thinks as opposed to what his handlers are telling him to say. Similarly, Secretary Clinton (who, let's face it, already has credibility issues with a good portion of the electorate) looks like she couldn't be honest with people if her life depended on it. She has simply GOT to learn how to, as they say, "ATFQ," and that's not going to happen until she jettisons whoever it is inside her campaign who is encouraging her to be so careful that it's impossible to be seen as even remotely honest or genuine.
What this comes down to, in my opinion, is that both of these candidates are very obviously allowing themselves to be "handled" by "political professionals" who are not only failing to correctly "handle" them, but are in fact instead making them look like stupid, weak and frightened doofuses. The American people are pretty clear about what they like and don't like, and one thing that they consistently really, really don't like, is a candidate who appears to be packaged and handled and controlled. They like it when they feel like a candidate is being honest with them ... even when that person is an blowhard media-hound buffoon ... and if you need to ask me who I'm referring to there, please don't, I'm already depressed).
Now, for those of you who don't know this about me, I know former Vice President Al Gore. We're not "buddies" and we don't talk on the phone, but we've had several opportunities over the years (via his Climate Project organization) to speak one on one, face to face, and I'm comfortable that he could probably pick my face out of a lineup. Here's why I told you that: Mr. Gore has a public perception issue. Most people who don't know him personally think he is dry, humorless, stolid, robotic, etc. This was a HUGE problem for him during the 2000 election campaign (a campaign during which I was horrified by the degree to which he was "handled"). The frustrating part for people who know him is that he's actually NOTHING like that public persona. In all of my interactions with him, I have found him to be warm, thoughtful, animated and funny. Because of my life experiences (mostly running for Congress a couple of times), I know a number of current and former national politicians, and NONE of them are as completely opposite from the public perception of them as Mr Gore.
My point this week is that the "macro" issue behind the challenges facing the Bush and Clinton campaigns is that they seem to be following the "Al Gore 2000" campaign playbook ... which is to say that they're going way too far in "handling" their candidates. They're so afraid of saying the wrong thing that they're not saying anything of substance. And they're not answering questions in a way that gives their audience a sense of their integrity or clarity on any issue. The end result of this approach is that they are endangering their candidates chances and making it harder for the electorate to make an informed choice. They are, in a sentence, accomplishing the very opposite of their intentions ... and that's bad for my country.
© 2015
Like many of you, I was hoping to avoid this level of involvement in NEXT YEAR'S Presidential Election as an issue for at least 5 or 6 more months, but apparently our national need for goofy political theater has overtaken our desire for peace and quiet, so at the risk of adding my voice to an already annoying chorus, I will again step in to the fray this week with my "Political Rant Of the Week." And in this week's episode, I'm going to focus my attention squarely on the expected nominees; former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and former Secretary of State (and First Lady) Hillary Clinton. Each of these candidates has had a fairly major "wow, they really stepped in it" moment in recent days, and both moments exposed a really serious problem for them. Let's let Jeb go first.
Just last night, the former Florida Governor gave a "major foreign policy speech" at the Ronald Reagan library in California. The locale has often been the backdrop for major policy addresses in which a candidate or office holder lays out a "grand vision" of some kind or another. To be clear, the reviews of Bush's speech from the left and the right were not kind. The speech was labeled "vague" and "shallow" and "a hodgepodge" by critics on both sides, and was certainly not short on revisionist history concerning his brother's administration.
And then came the gaffe.
Bush was blistering in his criticism of President Obama and Secretary Clinton regarding their "fatal" error in Iraq. He criticized what he called the "premature withdrawal" of forces from the area. He said that the Obama Administration "stood by" as our "hard won victory" was "thrown away" in a "blind haste" to leave Iraq. It was a finely crafted, carefully worded, harsh and devastating attack ... with only one teeny tiny problem.
The "Status of Forces Agreement" to which Bush was referring, was signed on November 18, 2008 ... and while President Obama had already won the Presidential election at that point (and was President Elect Obama), the agreement was actually negotiated by, agreed to and signed by his brother, then President George W. Bush. Even worse, the only way the Obama Administration could have legally altered the agreement and stayed in Iraq, would have required a vote of the Iraqi Parliament to allow the troops to stay. And just to put that last little fact cherry on top of this awful sundae, President Obama did in fact send emissaries to Iraq (including members of President George W. Bush's Administration) to request that the agreement be altered so that more troops would be allowed to stay (a request that was turned down). Needless to say, the media has descended on this part of Bush's speech like a school of blunder starved piranha (ironic in a campaign season that includes Donald Trump, who is quite literally a one man blunder machine), but before we talk more about what I consider to be the key underlying problem here, let's check in across the hall at Clinton headquarters.
Just a few days ago, Secretary Clinton was asked to say whether or not she supported the Keystone XL pipeline expansion. Now, in fairness, not getting a yes or a no answer from a politician when they're asked a question that most of us would consider to be yes or no in nature isn't exactly new. Further, asking a politician whether or not they support something has frequently failed to receive a clear answer, and sometimes that's even fair and logical (for example, the candidate might say, "I support this part but not that," or "I can't support it until it includes this"), but even in those cases the candidate's relative position on the topic is generally pretty obvious based on their response.
Clinton flat out refused to answer the question,
The former Secretary of State later "clarified" her non-answer by saying that it was inappropriate to comment or "second guess" President Obama while he was still in office. Now that is very thoughtful of her, but here again is the teeny tiny problem with that answer: to date, Secretary Clinton has had NO problem either commenting on or second guessing a variety of other positions and issues where she and the President both agree and disagree. As a result, that response seems, well, maybe just a bit hypocritical and like she's completely trying to dodge an issue that is important to some of her larger campaign donors (a major image problem for Clinton within her own party).
Now, let's put these two moments together and see why they both have me so annoyed. These two candidates are, statistically, very likely to be the nominees of their respective parties next year ... and that, to me, is highly distressing at this point, and not because I care whether the brother of a former President and the wife of another are running. I want the best candidates that the parties can deliver, regardless of who they're related to (and BTW I am most emphatically NOT either stating or implying that's what we'd have, only that the arguments for not nominating them based solely on who they're related to seem silly to me). No, I'm highly distressed because they are the likely nominees. Further, in many ways, very credible and strong arguments can be made that they are in fact the two most qualified individuals running as well. But given those facts, in my opinion, they should both be way better than to be caught in moments like these. Governor Bush looks like a flat out idiot this morning because of this speech. He should immediately clean house. He should fire the idiot who wrote the speech, fire the idiot who didn't fact check it, and maybe go back to the mirror and have a long talk with himself about what the heck it is that HE actually thinks as opposed to what his handlers are telling him to say. Similarly, Secretary Clinton (who, let's face it, already has credibility issues with a good portion of the electorate) looks like she couldn't be honest with people if her life depended on it. She has simply GOT to learn how to, as they say, "ATFQ," and that's not going to happen until she jettisons whoever it is inside her campaign who is encouraging her to be so careful that it's impossible to be seen as even remotely honest or genuine.
What this comes down to, in my opinion, is that both of these candidates are very obviously allowing themselves to be "handled" by "political professionals" who are not only failing to correctly "handle" them, but are in fact instead making them look like stupid, weak and frightened doofuses. The American people are pretty clear about what they like and don't like, and one thing that they consistently really, really don't like, is a candidate who appears to be packaged and handled and controlled. They like it when they feel like a candidate is being honest with them ... even when that person is an blowhard media-hound buffoon ... and if you need to ask me who I'm referring to there, please don't, I'm already depressed).
Now, for those of you who don't know this about me, I know former Vice President Al Gore. We're not "buddies" and we don't talk on the phone, but we've had several opportunities over the years (via his Climate Project organization) to speak one on one, face to face, and I'm comfortable that he could probably pick my face out of a lineup. Here's why I told you that: Mr. Gore has a public perception issue. Most people who don't know him personally think he is dry, humorless, stolid, robotic, etc. This was a HUGE problem for him during the 2000 election campaign (a campaign during which I was horrified by the degree to which he was "handled"). The frustrating part for people who know him is that he's actually NOTHING like that public persona. In all of my interactions with him, I have found him to be warm, thoughtful, animated and funny. Because of my life experiences (mostly running for Congress a couple of times), I know a number of current and former national politicians, and NONE of them are as completely opposite from the public perception of them as Mr Gore.
My point this week is that the "macro" issue behind the challenges facing the Bush and Clinton campaigns is that they seem to be following the "Al Gore 2000" campaign playbook ... which is to say that they're going way too far in "handling" their candidates. They're so afraid of saying the wrong thing that they're not saying anything of substance. And they're not answering questions in a way that gives their audience a sense of their integrity or clarity on any issue. The end result of this approach is that they are endangering their candidates chances and making it harder for the electorate to make an informed choice. They are, in a sentence, accomplishing the very opposite of their intentions ... and that's bad for my country.
Monday, August 3, 2015
It's AMERICAN to disagree AND get along
by Duane N. burghard
©2015
I was unsure of what to write this week ... and then I found myself talking to my wife this morning about a weekend Facebook interaction with one of her brothers. It was during this conversation that she suddenly said, "Stop! Right there. I think you should write down all of that ... everything you just said." So I'm going to do that ... which means that this week's essay is actually little more than an exercise to find out whether or not you agree with my wife.
My very first post on this blog, nine months ago, was about Facebook and the importance of not "unfriending" people we disagree with. Today I'm going to talk a bit about why I think that's so important.
First, a bit of background. The brother-in-law in question is a white male in his late 50s with a high school education. He is a rural homebuilder (and a very good one) by trade and, not surprisingly (given the data I've already given you), he is politically very conservative. The discussion in question centered on the Affordable Care Act (aka the ACA, or frankly least accurately aka "Obamacare"). My wife had posted a meme correctly noting that calling the ACA "Obamacare" is a bit of a misnomer and her brother took the opportunity to express his profound dissatisfaction with it.
Not liking the ACA is fine (for the record I have some serious issues with it myself), but, as with all things, while I don't mind people liking or disliking things and saying so on Facebook (as I have noted many times, it is still a (mostly) free country), it is important to me that people like or dislike things for intelligent, logical and most importantly accurate reasons ... and that is where I often reach the point where I feel compelled to hit the "Reply" button.
My brother-in-law started by noting that "it's Americans that hate Obamacare." This is empirically untrue, and so I found a variety of empirical references from conservative news sources (which I hoped he would react better to) like Fox News and Bloomberg pointing out this factual error and noting various apolitical, unbiased poll results demonstrating the popularity of the program. I also noted the report last week in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), hardly a liberal group themselves, noting the significant success of the ACA as a program.
For the record, here is the exact quote from the JAMA article:
"The ACA’s first 2 open enrollment periods were associated with significantly improved trends in self-reported coverage, access to primary care and medications, affordability, and health. Low-income adults in states that expanded Medicaid reported significant gains in insurance coverage and access compared with adults in states that did not expand Medicaid."
Finally, I again noted (as I frequently do) that I find it odd that so many Republicans have such a vehement opposition to the Affordable Care Act, and the reason I find it odd is because, of course, it was originally their plan! If you look into the legislative history of the Affordable Care Act, you will find it's origins come from a group of Senate Republicans. It was their compromise solution on health care and, at one point, it had the support of the clear majority of Republican Senators in the United States Senate. I have LONG thought that the Republican's opposition to a program that continues to get more and more successful and popular as time goes on is ludicrous. In my opinion, a FAR smarter approach would be to do a 180 degree flip, tout it as a rousing success and remind the American people at every opportunity that it was the Republicans who were responsible for it. Not only would this be the politically smarter course (in my opinion) it would have the side benefit of being historically accurate. Instead, they have responded with efforts to demonize it, repeal it and label it socialism (which is just beyond stupid to me every time I hear it ... how anyone could look at a private insurance marketplace and label it socialism indicates a level of ignorance that just scares the beejeebies out of me).
Note that at no point so far am I trying to get him (or you) to like or dislike the ACA, I'm simply pointing out that saying that Americans hate it is inaccurate. But it's his response to my references and then my response to him again that really gets to the heart of why it is so important to have conversations like this one.
In his next response, he noted to me that he didn't need to get his information from a poll, he knew everyone hated it from personal experience. He then took the opportunity to compare it to Social Security (which he incorrectly referred to as an entitlement program ... Social Security is, of course, most emphatically NOT an entitlement program) and to express concerns about the costs (which is, I think, actually a very legitimate concern and criticism of the ACA, and one I actually share).
I responded to each of these points. I have always been deeply troubled by what I see as an over-reliance on anecdotal "personal experience," especially when reliable, much larger scale data exists to inform or educate us. I am certain, for example, that we all know people who don't like the ACA (and it's certainly logical that he would know more of those people than I would), but the whole point of having empirical polling data from apolitical, unbiased sources is so that we can go beyond what we know from just our own first world experience and have a better, clearer and more accurate view of the world as it actually is (especially when that differs from what we think it is). I also clearly explained what Social Security is and how it is most emphatically NOT an entitlement program and has nothing to do with our budget deficit (other than the government raiding its trust fund so that it can pay cheaper rates on its borrowing). My point in this response was to emphasize that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts, and we have to start from a factual basis before we can make the progress needed to have a more valuable discussion.
(By the way, I also noted that we shared a significant concern about the issue of health care costs and that this concern was the key reason that I and other Democrats resisted supporting the ACA initially. Many Democrats who voted for the ACA "held their noses" in doing so and only voted for it because it, like so many other things in our nation's history, was a compromise.)
Now I know that, at this point, many of my readers are thinking, "jeez Duane, why are you even bothering with this?" Well, I'll tell you: because it's IMPORTANT. In fact, I believe that having and participating in discussions exactly like this is critical to the future of our country. The United States of America is a Republic, and our Republic was quite literally designed and built for the specific purpose of creating a sustainable way for people of good conscience who have differing viewpoints to coexist as efficiently, effectively and harmoniously as possible. This is what democratic Republics do! And they do this through compromise. Our nation's entire history is literally riddled with compromises. The Constitution, our nation's most important founding document, contains a whole series of compromises. The goal of our government has always been to create a framework that allows for people with different views of the same issue to craft a "least worst" solution that often ends up making everyone a little unhappy but is also something that everyone can live with. And we agree to these compromise solutions so that we can continue to live and work together. Anyone who doesn't agree that this is IMPORTANT work, anyone who thinks in "my way (or my side's way) or the highway" absolutes is, in my opinion, fundamentally UN-American. This is a VERY big problem in our society today, something I strongly blame on the gerrymandering of Congressional districts (when you're a Congressman in a district that is drawn to protect you (as a Democrat or a Republican), you literally have a disincentive to compromise and an incentive to become increasingly polarized ... that's a BIG problem in a society that requires compromise to work properly).
The point is that my conversation with my brother-in-law is really just a microcosmic example of trying to make our Republic work. It is a conversation between people of good conscience who disagree (although I'm not entirely sure that we do actually disagree as we haven't yet uncovered the legitimate, fact based reason for his opposition to the ACA ... but I certainly accept that there may be one), and if we simply "agree to disagree" and walk away, well that might work for the two of us in this one instance, but as a society it's NOT working and isn't going to work for us in the long run. We have to find ways to get along and reach the compromises necessary for the core functions of our government to operate.
Compromises are everywhere in our society. Don't want to participate in the ACA? That's OK, you don't have to, but then you have to pay a special tax. That's a compromise. You don't want to vaccinate your children? That's OK, you don't have to, but then they can't come to public school. That's a compromise (individual liberty vs pubic health). You want two houses of Congress? OK, compromise (known in fact as the "Great" Compromise).
If it's not clear why compromise is so important yet, here's a disturbing bottom line to all of my conservative and liberal friends: the people who often strongly disagree with you are NOT going away. There are a LOT of them, and to dismiss them and call them names and worst of all ignore them will only make our situation worse.
In the case of the ACA, yes, I have to say that I'm a little miffed by the visceral animosity that so many of my conservative friends have towards it ... because it was their idea! President Obama only selected it as the legislative solution to advocate because it was the compromise he found that could get the votes to pass. But if you want to compromise the compromise, OK, that's literally why government exists (most of the laws passed by Congress are actually modifications to existing laws!). But we (and that means our politicians, but it also means US) have to be aware of the fact that there are other people who are not, by definition, evil who don't want what we want ... so in order to coexist, each of us is going to have to give up some of what we want. That's not a weakness, that is quite literally our STRENGTH.
©2015
I was unsure of what to write this week ... and then I found myself talking to my wife this morning about a weekend Facebook interaction with one of her brothers. It was during this conversation that she suddenly said, "Stop! Right there. I think you should write down all of that ... everything you just said." So I'm going to do that ... which means that this week's essay is actually little more than an exercise to find out whether or not you agree with my wife.
My very first post on this blog, nine months ago, was about Facebook and the importance of not "unfriending" people we disagree with. Today I'm going to talk a bit about why I think that's so important.
First, a bit of background. The brother-in-law in question is a white male in his late 50s with a high school education. He is a rural homebuilder (and a very good one) by trade and, not surprisingly (given the data I've already given you), he is politically very conservative. The discussion in question centered on the Affordable Care Act (aka the ACA, or frankly least accurately aka "Obamacare"). My wife had posted a meme correctly noting that calling the ACA "Obamacare" is a bit of a misnomer and her brother took the opportunity to express his profound dissatisfaction with it.
Not liking the ACA is fine (for the record I have some serious issues with it myself), but, as with all things, while I don't mind people liking or disliking things and saying so on Facebook (as I have noted many times, it is still a (mostly) free country), it is important to me that people like or dislike things for intelligent, logical and most importantly accurate reasons ... and that is where I often reach the point where I feel compelled to hit the "Reply" button.
My brother-in-law started by noting that "it's Americans that hate Obamacare." This is empirically untrue, and so I found a variety of empirical references from conservative news sources (which I hoped he would react better to) like Fox News and Bloomberg pointing out this factual error and noting various apolitical, unbiased poll results demonstrating the popularity of the program. I also noted the report last week in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), hardly a liberal group themselves, noting the significant success of the ACA as a program.
For the record, here is the exact quote from the JAMA article:
"The ACA’s first 2 open enrollment periods were associated with significantly improved trends in self-reported coverage, access to primary care and medications, affordability, and health. Low-income adults in states that expanded Medicaid reported significant gains in insurance coverage and access compared with adults in states that did not expand Medicaid."
Finally, I again noted (as I frequently do) that I find it odd that so many Republicans have such a vehement opposition to the Affordable Care Act, and the reason I find it odd is because, of course, it was originally their plan! If you look into the legislative history of the Affordable Care Act, you will find it's origins come from a group of Senate Republicans. It was their compromise solution on health care and, at one point, it had the support of the clear majority of Republican Senators in the United States Senate. I have LONG thought that the Republican's opposition to a program that continues to get more and more successful and popular as time goes on is ludicrous. In my opinion, a FAR smarter approach would be to do a 180 degree flip, tout it as a rousing success and remind the American people at every opportunity that it was the Republicans who were responsible for it. Not only would this be the politically smarter course (in my opinion) it would have the side benefit of being historically accurate. Instead, they have responded with efforts to demonize it, repeal it and label it socialism (which is just beyond stupid to me every time I hear it ... how anyone could look at a private insurance marketplace and label it socialism indicates a level of ignorance that just scares the beejeebies out of me).
Note that at no point so far am I trying to get him (or you) to like or dislike the ACA, I'm simply pointing out that saying that Americans hate it is inaccurate. But it's his response to my references and then my response to him again that really gets to the heart of why it is so important to have conversations like this one.
In his next response, he noted to me that he didn't need to get his information from a poll, he knew everyone hated it from personal experience. He then took the opportunity to compare it to Social Security (which he incorrectly referred to as an entitlement program ... Social Security is, of course, most emphatically NOT an entitlement program) and to express concerns about the costs (which is, I think, actually a very legitimate concern and criticism of the ACA, and one I actually share).
I responded to each of these points. I have always been deeply troubled by what I see as an over-reliance on anecdotal "personal experience," especially when reliable, much larger scale data exists to inform or educate us. I am certain, for example, that we all know people who don't like the ACA (and it's certainly logical that he would know more of those people than I would), but the whole point of having empirical polling data from apolitical, unbiased sources is so that we can go beyond what we know from just our own first world experience and have a better, clearer and more accurate view of the world as it actually is (especially when that differs from what we think it is). I also clearly explained what Social Security is and how it is most emphatically NOT an entitlement program and has nothing to do with our budget deficit (other than the government raiding its trust fund so that it can pay cheaper rates on its borrowing). My point in this response was to emphasize that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts, and we have to start from a factual basis before we can make the progress needed to have a more valuable discussion.
(By the way, I also noted that we shared a significant concern about the issue of health care costs and that this concern was the key reason that I and other Democrats resisted supporting the ACA initially. Many Democrats who voted for the ACA "held their noses" in doing so and only voted for it because it, like so many other things in our nation's history, was a compromise.)
Now I know that, at this point, many of my readers are thinking, "jeez Duane, why are you even bothering with this?" Well, I'll tell you: because it's IMPORTANT. In fact, I believe that having and participating in discussions exactly like this is critical to the future of our country. The United States of America is a Republic, and our Republic was quite literally designed and built for the specific purpose of creating a sustainable way for people of good conscience who have differing viewpoints to coexist as efficiently, effectively and harmoniously as possible. This is what democratic Republics do! And they do this through compromise. Our nation's entire history is literally riddled with compromises. The Constitution, our nation's most important founding document, contains a whole series of compromises. The goal of our government has always been to create a framework that allows for people with different views of the same issue to craft a "least worst" solution that often ends up making everyone a little unhappy but is also something that everyone can live with. And we agree to these compromise solutions so that we can continue to live and work together. Anyone who doesn't agree that this is IMPORTANT work, anyone who thinks in "my way (or my side's way) or the highway" absolutes is, in my opinion, fundamentally UN-American. This is a VERY big problem in our society today, something I strongly blame on the gerrymandering of Congressional districts (when you're a Congressman in a district that is drawn to protect you (as a Democrat or a Republican), you literally have a disincentive to compromise and an incentive to become increasingly polarized ... that's a BIG problem in a society that requires compromise to work properly).
The point is that my conversation with my brother-in-law is really just a microcosmic example of trying to make our Republic work. It is a conversation between people of good conscience who disagree (although I'm not entirely sure that we do actually disagree as we haven't yet uncovered the legitimate, fact based reason for his opposition to the ACA ... but I certainly accept that there may be one), and if we simply "agree to disagree" and walk away, well that might work for the two of us in this one instance, but as a society it's NOT working and isn't going to work for us in the long run. We have to find ways to get along and reach the compromises necessary for the core functions of our government to operate.
Compromises are everywhere in our society. Don't want to participate in the ACA? That's OK, you don't have to, but then you have to pay a special tax. That's a compromise. You don't want to vaccinate your children? That's OK, you don't have to, but then they can't come to public school. That's a compromise (individual liberty vs pubic health). You want two houses of Congress? OK, compromise (known in fact as the "Great" Compromise).
If it's not clear why compromise is so important yet, here's a disturbing bottom line to all of my conservative and liberal friends: the people who often strongly disagree with you are NOT going away. There are a LOT of them, and to dismiss them and call them names and worst of all ignore them will only make our situation worse.
In the case of the ACA, yes, I have to say that I'm a little miffed by the visceral animosity that so many of my conservative friends have towards it ... because it was their idea! President Obama only selected it as the legislative solution to advocate because it was the compromise he found that could get the votes to pass. But if you want to compromise the compromise, OK, that's literally why government exists (most of the laws passed by Congress are actually modifications to existing laws!). But we (and that means our politicians, but it also means US) have to be aware of the fact that there are other people who are not, by definition, evil who don't want what we want ... so in order to coexist, each of us is going to have to give up some of what we want. That's not a weakness, that is quite literally our STRENGTH.
Thursday, July 23, 2015
PROW: What's Wrong With Bernie Sanders? Nothing. His supporters OTOH .....
by Duane N. Burghard
©2015
Just when I thought I wasn't going to have a politics based blowout this week, Facebook struck again this morning, and I am off to the races.
My target this week is once again the Democratic Party's Presidential Race. I'd pick on the Republicans, but frankly that's WAY too easy, plus, they're doing a much better job of making themselves look ridiculous than I could ever do, so I'll pass on that job, at least for this week. And just to remind everyone where I'm coming from, I was born and raised a moderate, "Rockefeller Republican" ... a group of people who were very unceremoniously exorcised and kicked out by the religious right/neo-conservative movement because, well, basically because we weren't batshit crazy enough for them. There are quite a few of us, and we're now called conservative Democrats but, as you can imagine, it's a marriage that isn't without its disagreements ... which brings us nicely to this week's PROW (Political Rant Of the Week).
The supporters of Bernie Sanders are, at the moment, riding high and being quite "loud and proud" about their candidate in the race. I'd like to first go on record as saying that, like most Americans, I like Senator Sanders. He has a kind of "America's nice grandfather " quality to him. In this way, Sanders is not unlike our current Vice President, although Biden is more like America's slightly crazy Uncle. You know the one, he's the one you love dearly and always want to sit next to at Thanksgiving and whose heart is always in the right place, but who also occasionally says things that are "off the reservation" in strange and usually hilarious ways (which, let's face it, is a big part of why you want to be sitting next to him). But, with no disrespect to Biden, Sanders is different; he's far more of a policy wonk. He also comes off as smarter and, more importantly, he combines that intellect with an overt passion for his ideals. Agree with him or not (and I actually agree with him quite a bit), there is much to like and respect about Bernie Sanders as a politician and a person.
But with that said, I have a real problem with the Sanders campaign. Well, no I don't. I don't have a problem with the Sanders campaign, I have a problem with a lot of the campaign's supporters. What bothers me is how a candidate who is obviously this smart can have supporters, many of whom are otherwise also thoughtful and intelligent people, who can somehow simultaneously be so naive, ignorant and just plain stupid when it comes to the political realities of how our system works. This is especially strange to me because, again, many of them are otherwise pretty bright folks who hold well thought out and logical positions on a variety of issues that we actually agree on. But when you put them in a room with Sanders, or you place them in front of a news feed story showing Sanders addressing a crowd of thousands, it's like they all switch off a huge part of their brains.
To be specific, I'm already incredibly tired of hearing about how Sanders could win and how much Secretary Clinton is "just like those big bad Republicans." Is it possible for Sanders to win? Of course it is. It's also possible that I could decide to run and win. But in order to get from "could" to "will," you need something that America's political left has been short on lately; votes.
Elections are about who gets the most votes. Fortunately, there's not a single Sanders supporter I know who would argue that particular point with me. Now, as I noted in last week's PROW, the 2016 Election comes down to 270 electoral votes, and given that New England and the west coast will certainly go all blue and that the "heartland" and deep south will certainly go all red, in order to be the next President, Sanders would need a majority of the votes in enough of the remaining swing states to reach 270. And here we see the biggest problem the Sanders campaign faces: they lack the money, the organization, and most importantly, they lack the VOTES to win in those states. And, in some cases, it's not because there aren't enough potential voters out there, it's because the overwhelming majority of those potential voters DON'T VOTE. In fact, only about half of the eligible voters in this country bother to even register, and only about half of those people vote. Remember Reagan's win in 1984? Biggest Electoral blowout in history. Well, keep in mind when you think about that victory that about SEVENTY PERCENT of America's eligible voters DIDN'T vote for him. So the bottom line is that those people got the government they deserve (sadly, so did the rest of us, but that's another rant).
The fact is that our system ISN'T broken, at all. It CAN function just fine the way it is. It too often DOESN'T function properly due entirely to the manner in which it is taken advantage of (or, much more accurately, the manner in which it is NOT taken advantage of) by the people.
Since we don't disagree that elections are won with votes and that most people don't vote, hopefully we can all agree that it follows that politicians, in order to get elected, have to appeal to the majority of people who ACTUALLY VOTE. They DON'T have to espouse certain policies so that they will excite the public and get them to vote, that's LITERALLY BACKWARDS to how the system works. This may feel counterintuitive to the way things are or "should be" to many people (including a lot of my Sanders supporting friends), but here in the real world and not in the make believe, fictitious world of how things should be, in order to get elected and change anything for the better (and that doesn't mean all the way, that's in increments, that's "two steps forward, one step back", THAT is how Republics WORK), you have to get a majority of the "highly likely" voters to turn out and vote for you. THAT is what politicians have to do.
The problem facing the Sanders campaign right now is that the people who show up to rallies and cheer on Sanders and complain about Clinton are not in these swing states and are not high likelihood voters (if they were, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in). And the problem for the Democrats as a whole is that the Sanders campaign, contrary to the stated (and I believe VERY sincere) wishes of the candidate himself, stands a far better chance of dividing the party than uniting it. My liberal friends are ALWAYS upset and always complaining about having to "hold their nose" and/or going with the "least worst" option when voting ... but that's literally a necessary reality of living in a society like ours ... because not everyone thinks like we do (and/or not enough people who do think that way vote). Also, while I'm ranting on this particular subtopic, let me add that the argument that "people don't vote because they don't feel they have anything to vote for" is about the dumbest f***ing thing I've ever heard and is a 100% GUARANTEED way to end up in a dictatorship.
So this is what we get back to: liberals want to change the world, but they refuse to understand that elections are about votes and Republics are about compromise. They also have a HUGE problem with understanding that voting once every four years (which is what far too many of them do ... and you can "not like" that fact all you want, but statistics and election results don't lie) and winning the White House is, in the grand scheme, a LOT less important than controlling City Councils, School Boards and, most importantly, State Legislatures (you know, the ones that are currently gerrymandering the shit out of our Congressional districts and are responsible for the lopsided and dysfunctional mess we currently call Congress). The Republicans figured that out a long time ago, and that is how they're screwing up our country. I spent a LOT of time during my last run for the US Congress in 2006 screaming about how important it was to take the State House (and I remain especially grateful to those who credited me with helping some of those people who were "downballot" from me and won while I did not), but the Democratic Party has consistently showed that, when it comes to arrogance and ignorance, the Republicans aren't the only game in town.
Anyway, where liberals go SERIOUSLY astray is when they get all whipped up by the idea that Sanders can win. Senator Sanders has very little chance of winning the nomination and essentially ZERO chance of getting elected. And that's not because of ideas or rallies or anything else, that's because, in order to be President, you need to win 270 electoral votes, and to do that you have to win the majority of votes in battleground states ... and (again, as I went over last week) there's NO political mathematician (e.g. Nate Silver, who called 49 of 50 states correctly in 2008 and FIFTY of 50 states correctly in 2012) out there who thinks there's a snowball's chance in hell of that happening. Sanders DOESN'T now have and isn't ever likely to have the money, the organization, the support or the VOTES (of the majority of high likelihood voters) to win in those states.
So the problem for the Democrats is that when the Sanders supporters eventually get smacked in the face by reality, many of them will become disillusioned and depressed and say "Clinton is no different from the Republicans" (a statement which is, incidentally, about the biggest load of bullshit I've heard lately ... Secretary Clinton is FAR from my ideal candidate and she has some very real negatives that her campaign seems to have a dangerous blind eye about, but she's certainly not in favor of turning our nation into some sort of twisted oligarchical theocracy, and I am CERTAIN that we would be FAR worse off with whichever Republican nominee emerges). And then, as the completely dysfunctional and backwards result of their reality induced depression, they quiet down and stay home ... and then, before you know it, you really are living in a dictatorship.
So, if you want to support Sanders for the nomination, vote your conscience, go for it, have a great time ... but be ready to hold your nose later and support Clinton as the party's nominee. She IS, statistically, VERY likely to be your nominee, she IS better than the alternative, and failing to get on board with those facts WILL leave you worse off than you are now.
I feel like Kevin Bacon in A Few Good Men; these are the facts, and they are not in dispute.
©2015
Just when I thought I wasn't going to have a politics based blowout this week, Facebook struck again this morning, and I am off to the races.
My target this week is once again the Democratic Party's Presidential Race. I'd pick on the Republicans, but frankly that's WAY too easy, plus, they're doing a much better job of making themselves look ridiculous than I could ever do, so I'll pass on that job, at least for this week. And just to remind everyone where I'm coming from, I was born and raised a moderate, "Rockefeller Republican" ... a group of people who were very unceremoniously exorcised and kicked out by the religious right/neo-conservative movement because, well, basically because we weren't batshit crazy enough for them. There are quite a few of us, and we're now called conservative Democrats but, as you can imagine, it's a marriage that isn't without its disagreements ... which brings us nicely to this week's PROW (Political Rant Of the Week).
The supporters of Bernie Sanders are, at the moment, riding high and being quite "loud and proud" about their candidate in the race. I'd like to first go on record as saying that, like most Americans, I like Senator Sanders. He has a kind of "America's nice grandfather " quality to him. In this way, Sanders is not unlike our current Vice President, although Biden is more like America's slightly crazy Uncle. You know the one, he's the one you love dearly and always want to sit next to at Thanksgiving and whose heart is always in the right place, but who also occasionally says things that are "off the reservation" in strange and usually hilarious ways (which, let's face it, is a big part of why you want to be sitting next to him). But, with no disrespect to Biden, Sanders is different; he's far more of a policy wonk. He also comes off as smarter and, more importantly, he combines that intellect with an overt passion for his ideals. Agree with him or not (and I actually agree with him quite a bit), there is much to like and respect about Bernie Sanders as a politician and a person.
But with that said, I have a real problem with the Sanders campaign. Well, no I don't. I don't have a problem with the Sanders campaign, I have a problem with a lot of the campaign's supporters. What bothers me is how a candidate who is obviously this smart can have supporters, many of whom are otherwise also thoughtful and intelligent people, who can somehow simultaneously be so naive, ignorant and just plain stupid when it comes to the political realities of how our system works. This is especially strange to me because, again, many of them are otherwise pretty bright folks who hold well thought out and logical positions on a variety of issues that we actually agree on. But when you put them in a room with Sanders, or you place them in front of a news feed story showing Sanders addressing a crowd of thousands, it's like they all switch off a huge part of their brains.
To be specific, I'm already incredibly tired of hearing about how Sanders could win and how much Secretary Clinton is "just like those big bad Republicans." Is it possible for Sanders to win? Of course it is. It's also possible that I could decide to run and win. But in order to get from "could" to "will," you need something that America's political left has been short on lately; votes.
Elections are about who gets the most votes. Fortunately, there's not a single Sanders supporter I know who would argue that particular point with me. Now, as I noted in last week's PROW, the 2016 Election comes down to 270 electoral votes, and given that New England and the west coast will certainly go all blue and that the "heartland" and deep south will certainly go all red, in order to be the next President, Sanders would need a majority of the votes in enough of the remaining swing states to reach 270. And here we see the biggest problem the Sanders campaign faces: they lack the money, the organization, and most importantly, they lack the VOTES to win in those states. And, in some cases, it's not because there aren't enough potential voters out there, it's because the overwhelming majority of those potential voters DON'T VOTE. In fact, only about half of the eligible voters in this country bother to even register, and only about half of those people vote. Remember Reagan's win in 1984? Biggest Electoral blowout in history. Well, keep in mind when you think about that victory that about SEVENTY PERCENT of America's eligible voters DIDN'T vote for him. So the bottom line is that those people got the government they deserve (sadly, so did the rest of us, but that's another rant).
The fact is that our system ISN'T broken, at all. It CAN function just fine the way it is. It too often DOESN'T function properly due entirely to the manner in which it is taken advantage of (or, much more accurately, the manner in which it is NOT taken advantage of) by the people.
Since we don't disagree that elections are won with votes and that most people don't vote, hopefully we can all agree that it follows that politicians, in order to get elected, have to appeal to the majority of people who ACTUALLY VOTE. They DON'T have to espouse certain policies so that they will excite the public and get them to vote, that's LITERALLY BACKWARDS to how the system works. This may feel counterintuitive to the way things are or "should be" to many people (including a lot of my Sanders supporting friends), but here in the real world and not in the make believe, fictitious world of how things should be, in order to get elected and change anything for the better (and that doesn't mean all the way, that's in increments, that's "two steps forward, one step back", THAT is how Republics WORK), you have to get a majority of the "highly likely" voters to turn out and vote for you. THAT is what politicians have to do.
The problem facing the Sanders campaign right now is that the people who show up to rallies and cheer on Sanders and complain about Clinton are not in these swing states and are not high likelihood voters (if they were, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in). And the problem for the Democrats as a whole is that the Sanders campaign, contrary to the stated (and I believe VERY sincere) wishes of the candidate himself, stands a far better chance of dividing the party than uniting it. My liberal friends are ALWAYS upset and always complaining about having to "hold their nose" and/or going with the "least worst" option when voting ... but that's literally a necessary reality of living in a society like ours ... because not everyone thinks like we do (and/or not enough people who do think that way vote). Also, while I'm ranting on this particular subtopic, let me add that the argument that "people don't vote because they don't feel they have anything to vote for" is about the dumbest f***ing thing I've ever heard and is a 100% GUARANTEED way to end up in a dictatorship.
So this is what we get back to: liberals want to change the world, but they refuse to understand that elections are about votes and Republics are about compromise. They also have a HUGE problem with understanding that voting once every four years (which is what far too many of them do ... and you can "not like" that fact all you want, but statistics and election results don't lie) and winning the White House is, in the grand scheme, a LOT less important than controlling City Councils, School Boards and, most importantly, State Legislatures (you know, the ones that are currently gerrymandering the shit out of our Congressional districts and are responsible for the lopsided and dysfunctional mess we currently call Congress). The Republicans figured that out a long time ago, and that is how they're screwing up our country. I spent a LOT of time during my last run for the US Congress in 2006 screaming about how important it was to take the State House (and I remain especially grateful to those who credited me with helping some of those people who were "downballot" from me and won while I did not), but the Democratic Party has consistently showed that, when it comes to arrogance and ignorance, the Republicans aren't the only game in town.
Anyway, where liberals go SERIOUSLY astray is when they get all whipped up by the idea that Sanders can win. Senator Sanders has very little chance of winning the nomination and essentially ZERO chance of getting elected. And that's not because of ideas or rallies or anything else, that's because, in order to be President, you need to win 270 electoral votes, and to do that you have to win the majority of votes in battleground states ... and (again, as I went over last week) there's NO political mathematician (e.g. Nate Silver, who called 49 of 50 states correctly in 2008 and FIFTY of 50 states correctly in 2012) out there who thinks there's a snowball's chance in hell of that happening. Sanders DOESN'T now have and isn't ever likely to have the money, the organization, the support or the VOTES (of the majority of high likelihood voters) to win in those states.
So the problem for the Democrats is that when the Sanders supporters eventually get smacked in the face by reality, many of them will become disillusioned and depressed and say "Clinton is no different from the Republicans" (a statement which is, incidentally, about the biggest load of bullshit I've heard lately ... Secretary Clinton is FAR from my ideal candidate and she has some very real negatives that her campaign seems to have a dangerous blind eye about, but she's certainly not in favor of turning our nation into some sort of twisted oligarchical theocracy, and I am CERTAIN that we would be FAR worse off with whichever Republican nominee emerges). And then, as the completely dysfunctional and backwards result of their reality induced depression, they quiet down and stay home ... and then, before you know it, you really are living in a dictatorship.
So, if you want to support Sanders for the nomination, vote your conscience, go for it, have a great time ... but be ready to hold your nose later and support Clinton as the party's nominee. She IS, statistically, VERY likely to be your nominee, she IS better than the alternative, and failing to get on board with those facts WILL leave you worse off than you are now.
I feel like Kevin Bacon in A Few Good Men; these are the facts, and they are not in dispute.
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
How I lost 50 pounds and kept it off
by Duane N. Burghard
©2015
I had no idea what to write about this week, and then a friend of mine suggested that I tell this story. For those who don't know me personally, while I have never been obese, I struggled with my weight for many years and was rarely happy with my appearance. Fortunately for me, like many young people, I could simply work out more and work out harder to keep my weight under control (and merely be classified as "slightly overweight" for my height etc.). That plan worked well for me until my late 20s (which is when my metabolism slowed down and I learned the painful lesson that we all learn about having to start giving a crap about what we put in our bodies). To give you exact numbers, I maxed out my height just barely short of 6' 2" (I'm now, thanks to age and compressing discs, back to 6' 1") and, at my heaviest, I weighed in at about 232 pounds. So, to be clear, I was not in anywhere near the condition that too many Americans find themselves in today, but I was far from healthy too.
I was further "lucky" in that I needed life saving surgery at 32 (early 1998). The "lucky" part of this was that the illness which preceded my surgery caused me to fall to just 187 pounds. Following that surgery I managed to mostly keep my weight under 200 for the next 13 years.
In 2011, I traveled to Europe to have multiple, Artificial Disc Replacement (ADR) surgery (this surgery followed a long and very painful few years as Degenerative Disc Disease first destroyed my L5/S1 disc (2008) and then my L4/L5 disc (2010) ... but that, is a different story all on its own).
As I laid on the cart waiting to be wheeled into the Operating Room for surgery that morning, I came to grips with the small (about 1 in 200 apparently) chance that I might die during the procedure (ADR surgery is pretty amazing stuff and requires slicing you open, removing all of your internal organs that are in the way (so they can access the spine), then putting everything back in ... hopefully in the right places and in the right order ... I assume they make a list or something). Anyway, one of the thoughts that crossed my mind that morning was wondering what I would regret if today was "it" and I didn't survive the surgery. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but my mind can be a little goofy, and it's big on using humor as a means of alleviating stress. As a result, one of the first thoughts that came to me when I asked myself that question was, "man, I wish I'd had more milkshakes." The thought amused me and lightened my mood in those last minutes of consciousness, and I resolved that, if I survived, I would take the time to have more milkshakes.
Obviously, I survived the surgery, and my "time of milkshakes" began (the hospital nurses in the UK were really wonderful and even made a makeshift one as best they could for me before I left).
Flash forward to a conference I was at in Minneapolis the following spring (May 2012). I woke up early and headed to the conference center's fitness room and got on the treadmill. I had noticed that it had been getting more difficult to do some things (like put my pants on) in the last few months and frankly I was starting to feel some pain in my artificial discs and associated areas (I would later learn that this was directly related to my weight gain). When I finished my workout, I went over to the scale and found that I was tipping the needle at about 215 pounds. I wondered for about half a second how that was possible and then, in the back of my mind, a voice said, "you're kidding right? Time of milkshakes. Remember?" Well, it was suddenly obvious where that was getting me, and I knew I needed to knock that shit off right now.
Now, all of us have moments in our lives where we say, "no more." Many of us mean it too. I'm different (in many ways obviously), and what I mean by different is that I'm one of those driven, focused, disciplined "A type" personalities who can and has made 100% shifts in lifestyle or habits in a single moment (there are, of course, other adjectives to describe this ability of mine ... these include stubborn, anal, maniacal ... but these are merely semantical differences).
So my first steps towards weight loss were the easiest. No more milkshakes, reduced frequency of desserts, portion control, obvious things to lower my caloric intake (my back limits the amount of caloric burn work I can do, but I found ways to increase my burn later as well). I also started doing research into losing weight. One of the "tricks" I employed early on (that really seemed to work for me) was to eat an apple about 20-30 minutes before lunch and dinner meals. The article I read noted that the bulk of the apple in your stomach essentially tricks your brain and body into believing that you're already more full than you are when mealtime comes around. Basically, the apple performs like an artificial portion control assistant. A month later, with virtually no other effort, I had lost just over 5 pounds.
Like many parents, I am blessed in that I have wonderful kids. My kids have been very supportive and helpful with everything I do, and losing weight was no exception. They saw me make the effort, and for Father's Day they went out and bought me a special, "Biggest Loser" scale that measures height and weight, tracks what your caloric equilibrium should be for that weight, etc. etc. Well this was the "Game On" moment for me. I am German by descent. In fact, my wife calls many of the characteristics I refer to above as "the German in me." And if you give that part of me something to measure and track? Oh boy, get out of the way, because here come the spreadsheets and I am into it now!
Suddenly, my effort to lose a little weight became a series of hyper-specific, quantifiable goals with timeframes and schedules (these things make me happy in a very strange way). My diet got addressed first. In March of 2009 my "cooking gene" turned on, quite literally overnight (with NO prior cooking experience or real interest in the field, I very suddenly began waking up in the middle of the night, every night, after dreaming of preparing elaborate meals ... I quickly took to sleeping with a pad of paper and pen at my bedside so I could turn the light on, write the meal idea out, and then go back to sleep ... it was the only way I could go back to sleep). I had always enjoyed baking (cookies, my brownie recipe), but suddenly I went from kind of being afraid of regular cooking (and, when I had to, militantly following recipes and instructions in great fear of doing anything wrong) to frankly needing to cook (and in fact getting grumpy when I didn't) every day. I would read through and then mercilessly change recipes I'd never made before because I just suddenly knew how to amend them in ways that would be different and fun and better. I also just plain made stuff up based on groups of completely different recipes I would find online.
Understandably, my wife was thrilled. To this day, her joke is that she got to do the cooking for the first 20 years of our marriage, and now I have the next 20, which makes both of us very happy.
It was in this time that I started to realize that there were things in my diet that I thought were healthy that might not be (e.g. soy milk), so I eliminated them. I was also cognizant that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, but I was frequently in too much of a rush at that time of day to eat adequately. I stumbled on a brilliant solution that I use every morning to this day. My breakfast is
1 Banana (sliced)
4-6 Strawberries (sliced)
1 handful of frozen blueberries (fresh when cheap enough and in season)
1 small Apple or half of a large one (in slices)
(in season I add raspberries or peach or other fruit here)
1 glass of orange juice
A splash (several tablespoons) of Bolthouse Farms "Blue Goodness" (which, incidentally, is an AWESOME post workout drink for me, I can literally FEEL the nutrients plowing through my body)
2 *large* spoonfuls of lowfat vanilla yogurt
3/4 cup (roughly) of Kellogg's SmartStart cereal
1 Sprig of Kale
1 small handful of walnuts
NOW, put all of that in a bender and blend the beejeebies out of it. This is your complete breakfast, now in an "easy to take with you" liquid form.
For lunch, I would have an all veggie salad (lettuce, tomato, mushroom, cucumber, carrot) with an either low fat or no fat dressing. And for dinner, a light and small serving of protein (never beef or pork, always bird or fish) and a non-starch veggie medley (frozen green beans, peas, spinach, cauliflower, etc., all cooked in about a tablespoon of butter with onion salt, black pepper, and McCormick's Veggie Delight spice mix sprinkled in while cooking). For snacks, I had extra carrots or a small bowl of dry SmartStart (which I would munch on like nuts or chips).
I militantly avoided processed foods (I cooked my own food using fresh or frozen ingredients (NOTHING pre-prepared), steered away from breads (though wraps were OK), and anything that was high in artificial fats (candy, ice cream, etc.). NO FAST FOOD EVER (in fact, I rarely eat out ever anymore). I drank ONLY water, at least 80 oz per day (which was about right for my height and weight). And for exercise, I walked every day (usually twice/day), and I swam at least 3 miles/week (which I also still do).
Now, let's be clear about this next fact; the first six weeks of this routine were really hell. I was very grumpy and hungry basically 24 hours/day. I frequently felt like actually gnawing on my own desk at work sometimes ... but I stayed with it and I did so for one incredibly obvious reason; I began consistently losing weight. My original goal had been to lose 20 pounds and get safely under 200, with a stretch goal of losing about 25 and getting back to the weight I had when I had surgery in 1998. But by the end of the summer (Labor Day), I was blowing through even my stretch goal and suddenly I had visions of losing 30, maybe even 40 pounds (to get back to a weight near where I was in the Navy ... that, I thought, would be cool).
I need to note one other thing about the late summer. My body reached a point where I had been treating it well enough for long enough that a lot of the bad stuff that it had been holding on to for a long time needed to go ... including a significant amount of bile that my liver had apparently been storing for God knows how long. I include this detail only to prevent others from being afraid of a large, one time expulsion from the body that is decidedly, well, green in nature. If that happens regularly, see a Doctor right away because it can be an indicator of a very serious problem, but if you're dieting and losing a significant amount of weight and it happens once, and after that your whole body seems to be telling you, "damn! I feel better now!" then it's a good thing.
As summer became fall, my weight fell into the low 180s and then, in November, into the high 170s, a weight I hadn't seen since shortly after graduating from college. I maintained a fairly militant adherence to my diet (I did have a nice meal at each holiday, and a piece of pie etc.) and by New Years, I was in the low 170s.
For many years, one of my companies had a store on the Big Island of Hawaii. One of my wife's sisters and her husband also lived there, so we had business and personal reasons to visit every year. As was normally the case, my wife and kids would stay for a shorter time than I would (and I would stick around to do additional work for the company and to enjoy a couple of extra weeks on the island after the kids had to return for school. While in Hawaii, not surprisingly, my caloric burn rate took off (there's good news and bad news about working on a mainland business while in Hawaii ... the bad news is that you have to be up and working by 6am, because that's already 11am on the east coast and 10am in the midwest (where our HQ was) ... but the good news is that, by 2pm every day, the business basically shuts down and you have half the day to go swimming, diving, etc.). With my diet in tact and my caloric burn going off the charts, my weight continued to drop until I reached a low point of 162 pounds, literally lighter than my high school graduation weight ... and this was the moment when my body said, "umm hey, this is too far." I began to feel pain again because I was now at the lower limit of what my weight should be to be healthy. Fortunately, that was pretty obvious, and it led very quickly to the pattern I've been living with for the last two and a half years; maintaining.
The first thing I did when I reached the lowpoint and my body clearly reacted badly, was to significantly increase my caloric intake (eat more). Fortunately, that's a pretty easy thing to do, and I gained 6 pounds (to168) very rapidly.
Once you've hit your weight target, maintaining your weight is easy, and you can "cheat" (have a donut, have some ice cream, have some fries) whenever your weight is on the low end of your range, and then simply dial back to your diet routine when you hit the high end of your range. I have a four pound range (two pounds on either side of a center line) that I have been sitting in since I lost the weight that I did. And I have found recipes that allow me to enjoy things (tastes) that I used to love without the caloric or fat overhead (e.g. a cauliflower crust pizza ... where you cook a cauliflower head in a microwave for 4-5 minutes, then put the florets in a cuisinart with a couple of eggs and some spices and whip it into a dough like mixture (that's your crust ... a carb free and healthy crust BTW) cook it, then add sauce and fresh toppings (mushrooms, zucchini, spinach, tomato, onion, etc. etc. ... and yes, cheese), and cook it).
I understand that weight loss is far more difficult for some people than it was for me, and I have great compassion and understanding for those who have pituitary gland issues or other genetic issues that make weight loss extremely difficult ... but for the significant majority of us, at the end of the day, losing weight comes down to a pretty simple formula; you have to burn more calories than you take in. Most of us have a limit to the amount of exercise we can do (we're constrained by time or age or, in my case, the limits of my artificial parts), but we should do what we can do, and for the rest, we simply need to adopt a diet that's less than the amount of calories burned, and if we do that then we WILL lose weight.
There's no feeling in the world like the feeling you get when you step on a scale and see the number you've been working for, or look in the mirror and see the person you want to see. If you're reading this essay and you want to get there, I have good news; for the vast majority of people, you can do it! Please feel free to comment or write me. I'm happy to be your cheerleader and happier still to see your success. All you need to do is start.
©2015
I had no idea what to write about this week, and then a friend of mine suggested that I tell this story. For those who don't know me personally, while I have never been obese, I struggled with my weight for many years and was rarely happy with my appearance. Fortunately for me, like many young people, I could simply work out more and work out harder to keep my weight under control (and merely be classified as "slightly overweight" for my height etc.). That plan worked well for me until my late 20s (which is when my metabolism slowed down and I learned the painful lesson that we all learn about having to start giving a crap about what we put in our bodies). To give you exact numbers, I maxed out my height just barely short of 6' 2" (I'm now, thanks to age and compressing discs, back to 6' 1") and, at my heaviest, I weighed in at about 232 pounds. So, to be clear, I was not in anywhere near the condition that too many Americans find themselves in today, but I was far from healthy too.
I was further "lucky" in that I needed life saving surgery at 32 (early 1998). The "lucky" part of this was that the illness which preceded my surgery caused me to fall to just 187 pounds. Following that surgery I managed to mostly keep my weight under 200 for the next 13 years.
In 2011, I traveled to Europe to have multiple, Artificial Disc Replacement (ADR) surgery (this surgery followed a long and very painful few years as Degenerative Disc Disease first destroyed my L5/S1 disc (2008) and then my L4/L5 disc (2010) ... but that, is a different story all on its own).
As I laid on the cart waiting to be wheeled into the Operating Room for surgery that morning, I came to grips with the small (about 1 in 200 apparently) chance that I might die during the procedure (ADR surgery is pretty amazing stuff and requires slicing you open, removing all of your internal organs that are in the way (so they can access the spine), then putting everything back in ... hopefully in the right places and in the right order ... I assume they make a list or something). Anyway, one of the thoughts that crossed my mind that morning was wondering what I would regret if today was "it" and I didn't survive the surgery. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but my mind can be a little goofy, and it's big on using humor as a means of alleviating stress. As a result, one of the first thoughts that came to me when I asked myself that question was, "man, I wish I'd had more milkshakes." The thought amused me and lightened my mood in those last minutes of consciousness, and I resolved that, if I survived, I would take the time to have more milkshakes.
Obviously, I survived the surgery, and my "time of milkshakes" began (the hospital nurses in the UK were really wonderful and even made a makeshift one as best they could for me before I left).
Flash forward to a conference I was at in Minneapolis the following spring (May 2012). I woke up early and headed to the conference center's fitness room and got on the treadmill. I had noticed that it had been getting more difficult to do some things (like put my pants on) in the last few months and frankly I was starting to feel some pain in my artificial discs and associated areas (I would later learn that this was directly related to my weight gain). When I finished my workout, I went over to the scale and found that I was tipping the needle at about 215 pounds. I wondered for about half a second how that was possible and then, in the back of my mind, a voice said, "you're kidding right? Time of milkshakes. Remember?" Well, it was suddenly obvious where that was getting me, and I knew I needed to knock that shit off right now.
Now, all of us have moments in our lives where we say, "no more." Many of us mean it too. I'm different (in many ways obviously), and what I mean by different is that I'm one of those driven, focused, disciplined "A type" personalities who can and has made 100% shifts in lifestyle or habits in a single moment (there are, of course, other adjectives to describe this ability of mine ... these include stubborn, anal, maniacal ... but these are merely semantical differences).
So my first steps towards weight loss were the easiest. No more milkshakes, reduced frequency of desserts, portion control, obvious things to lower my caloric intake (my back limits the amount of caloric burn work I can do, but I found ways to increase my burn later as well). I also started doing research into losing weight. One of the "tricks" I employed early on (that really seemed to work for me) was to eat an apple about 20-30 minutes before lunch and dinner meals. The article I read noted that the bulk of the apple in your stomach essentially tricks your brain and body into believing that you're already more full than you are when mealtime comes around. Basically, the apple performs like an artificial portion control assistant. A month later, with virtually no other effort, I had lost just over 5 pounds.
Like many parents, I am blessed in that I have wonderful kids. My kids have been very supportive and helpful with everything I do, and losing weight was no exception. They saw me make the effort, and for Father's Day they went out and bought me a special, "Biggest Loser" scale that measures height and weight, tracks what your caloric equilibrium should be for that weight, etc. etc. Well this was the "Game On" moment for me. I am German by descent. In fact, my wife calls many of the characteristics I refer to above as "the German in me." And if you give that part of me something to measure and track? Oh boy, get out of the way, because here come the spreadsheets and I am into it now!
Suddenly, my effort to lose a little weight became a series of hyper-specific, quantifiable goals with timeframes and schedules (these things make me happy in a very strange way). My diet got addressed first. In March of 2009 my "cooking gene" turned on, quite literally overnight (with NO prior cooking experience or real interest in the field, I very suddenly began waking up in the middle of the night, every night, after dreaming of preparing elaborate meals ... I quickly took to sleeping with a pad of paper and pen at my bedside so I could turn the light on, write the meal idea out, and then go back to sleep ... it was the only way I could go back to sleep). I had always enjoyed baking (cookies, my brownie recipe), but suddenly I went from kind of being afraid of regular cooking (and, when I had to, militantly following recipes and instructions in great fear of doing anything wrong) to frankly needing to cook (and in fact getting grumpy when I didn't) every day. I would read through and then mercilessly change recipes I'd never made before because I just suddenly knew how to amend them in ways that would be different and fun and better. I also just plain made stuff up based on groups of completely different recipes I would find online.
Understandably, my wife was thrilled. To this day, her joke is that she got to do the cooking for the first 20 years of our marriage, and now I have the next 20, which makes both of us very happy.
It was in this time that I started to realize that there were things in my diet that I thought were healthy that might not be (e.g. soy milk), so I eliminated them. I was also cognizant that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, but I was frequently in too much of a rush at that time of day to eat adequately. I stumbled on a brilliant solution that I use every morning to this day. My breakfast is
1 Banana (sliced)
4-6 Strawberries (sliced)
1 handful of frozen blueberries (fresh when cheap enough and in season)
1 small Apple or half of a large one (in slices)
(in season I add raspberries or peach or other fruit here)
1 glass of orange juice
A splash (several tablespoons) of Bolthouse Farms "Blue Goodness" (which, incidentally, is an AWESOME post workout drink for me, I can literally FEEL the nutrients plowing through my body)
2 *large* spoonfuls of lowfat vanilla yogurt
3/4 cup (roughly) of Kellogg's SmartStart cereal
1 Sprig of Kale
1 small handful of walnuts
NOW, put all of that in a bender and blend the beejeebies out of it. This is your complete breakfast, now in an "easy to take with you" liquid form.
For lunch, I would have an all veggie salad (lettuce, tomato, mushroom, cucumber, carrot) with an either low fat or no fat dressing. And for dinner, a light and small serving of protein (never beef or pork, always bird or fish) and a non-starch veggie medley (frozen green beans, peas, spinach, cauliflower, etc., all cooked in about a tablespoon of butter with onion salt, black pepper, and McCormick's Veggie Delight spice mix sprinkled in while cooking). For snacks, I had extra carrots or a small bowl of dry SmartStart (which I would munch on like nuts or chips).
I militantly avoided processed foods (I cooked my own food using fresh or frozen ingredients (NOTHING pre-prepared), steered away from breads (though wraps were OK), and anything that was high in artificial fats (candy, ice cream, etc.). NO FAST FOOD EVER (in fact, I rarely eat out ever anymore). I drank ONLY water, at least 80 oz per day (which was about right for my height and weight). And for exercise, I walked every day (usually twice/day), and I swam at least 3 miles/week (which I also still do).
Now, let's be clear about this next fact; the first six weeks of this routine were really hell. I was very grumpy and hungry basically 24 hours/day. I frequently felt like actually gnawing on my own desk at work sometimes ... but I stayed with it and I did so for one incredibly obvious reason; I began consistently losing weight. My original goal had been to lose 20 pounds and get safely under 200, with a stretch goal of losing about 25 and getting back to the weight I had when I had surgery in 1998. But by the end of the summer (Labor Day), I was blowing through even my stretch goal and suddenly I had visions of losing 30, maybe even 40 pounds (to get back to a weight near where I was in the Navy ... that, I thought, would be cool).
I need to note one other thing about the late summer. My body reached a point where I had been treating it well enough for long enough that a lot of the bad stuff that it had been holding on to for a long time needed to go ... including a significant amount of bile that my liver had apparently been storing for God knows how long. I include this detail only to prevent others from being afraid of a large, one time expulsion from the body that is decidedly, well, green in nature. If that happens regularly, see a Doctor right away because it can be an indicator of a very serious problem, but if you're dieting and losing a significant amount of weight and it happens once, and after that your whole body seems to be telling you, "damn! I feel better now!" then it's a good thing.
As summer became fall, my weight fell into the low 180s and then, in November, into the high 170s, a weight I hadn't seen since shortly after graduating from college. I maintained a fairly militant adherence to my diet (I did have a nice meal at each holiday, and a piece of pie etc.) and by New Years, I was in the low 170s.
For many years, one of my companies had a store on the Big Island of Hawaii. One of my wife's sisters and her husband also lived there, so we had business and personal reasons to visit every year. As was normally the case, my wife and kids would stay for a shorter time than I would (and I would stick around to do additional work for the company and to enjoy a couple of extra weeks on the island after the kids had to return for school. While in Hawaii, not surprisingly, my caloric burn rate took off (there's good news and bad news about working on a mainland business while in Hawaii ... the bad news is that you have to be up and working by 6am, because that's already 11am on the east coast and 10am in the midwest (where our HQ was) ... but the good news is that, by 2pm every day, the business basically shuts down and you have half the day to go swimming, diving, etc.). With my diet in tact and my caloric burn going off the charts, my weight continued to drop until I reached a low point of 162 pounds, literally lighter than my high school graduation weight ... and this was the moment when my body said, "umm hey, this is too far." I began to feel pain again because I was now at the lower limit of what my weight should be to be healthy. Fortunately, that was pretty obvious, and it led very quickly to the pattern I've been living with for the last two and a half years; maintaining.
The first thing I did when I reached the lowpoint and my body clearly reacted badly, was to significantly increase my caloric intake (eat more). Fortunately, that's a pretty easy thing to do, and I gained 6 pounds (to168) very rapidly.
Once you've hit your weight target, maintaining your weight is easy, and you can "cheat" (have a donut, have some ice cream, have some fries) whenever your weight is on the low end of your range, and then simply dial back to your diet routine when you hit the high end of your range. I have a four pound range (two pounds on either side of a center line) that I have been sitting in since I lost the weight that I did. And I have found recipes that allow me to enjoy things (tastes) that I used to love without the caloric or fat overhead (e.g. a cauliflower crust pizza ... where you cook a cauliflower head in a microwave for 4-5 minutes, then put the florets in a cuisinart with a couple of eggs and some spices and whip it into a dough like mixture (that's your crust ... a carb free and healthy crust BTW) cook it, then add sauce and fresh toppings (mushrooms, zucchini, spinach, tomato, onion, etc. etc. ... and yes, cheese), and cook it).
I understand that weight loss is far more difficult for some people than it was for me, and I have great compassion and understanding for those who have pituitary gland issues or other genetic issues that make weight loss extremely difficult ... but for the significant majority of us, at the end of the day, losing weight comes down to a pretty simple formula; you have to burn more calories than you take in. Most of us have a limit to the amount of exercise we can do (we're constrained by time or age or, in my case, the limits of my artificial parts), but we should do what we can do, and for the rest, we simply need to adopt a diet that's less than the amount of calories burned, and if we do that then we WILL lose weight.
There's no feeling in the world like the feeling you get when you step on a scale and see the number you've been working for, or look in the mirror and see the person you want to see. If you're reading this essay and you want to get there, I have good news; for the vast majority of people, you can do it! Please feel free to comment or write me. I'm happy to be your cheerleader and happier still to see your success. All you need to do is start.
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Political Rant Of The Week: The 2016 Election, The Democrats, and Jim Webb
by Duane N. Burghard
© 2015
So I've been thinking about doing this sort of thing with my blog for some time now, and today is the day. Periodically I see or hear something on the news or on Facebook (or in this case, both) that really gets me going for a few moments, and I have to say something in response. It's not REALLY related to the sorts of things that I write about on my blog, but it needs to be said. To make it easier on my regular readers, I'm going to call these posts "Political Rant Of The Week" (which I will almost certainly eventually shorten to "PROW" ... because I was in the military and we're contractually obligated to abbreviate almost everything for the rest of our lives). It is my intent to make these posts "in addition to" my regular writing, but we'll see how that goes.
So what sent me over the edge this week? The 2016 Election. Now I know that many of you were hoping that we could avoid this topic until, oh say, NEXT YEAR, but obviously the media is having none of that so I'm conceding defeat and hopping in.
The first thing that sent me around the bend was an article about how one particular group of voters (in the case of the article in question, black voters) was likely to be the critical factor in the 2016 Presidential Election. This statement/assertion shows a depressing lack of understanding of how Presidents are elected, so, at the risk of boring the crap out of the rest of you, let me be clear about the ONLY thing, and by that I mean, quite literally THE ONLY THING that is important in a Presidential election.
270.
That's it. There's nothing else. The candidate that gets 270 electoral votes or more wins the Presidency. Period. There are no other measures, NOTHING else matters. Now, with that as "2016 Election Fact #1," let's move on to Fact #2: Pretty much no matter what happens between now and Election Day 2016, the outcome of the Presidential election in MOST of the United States is essentially a foregone conclusion (it's VERY unlikely (statistically) that the outcome isn't already known). To be clear, you could essentially run a used beer can as a Republican or Democrat as your candidate in most states and that beer can would defeat the nominee of the other party. And why? Because the politics of the majority of people in that state are such that they will NOT elect a candidate from the other party in 2016.
Those are the facts, and if you're going to dispute them then you should stop reading right now and go do something else because we already have a zero percent chance of having an intelligent conversation on this topic (because you're out there with climate deniers and people who think Adam and Eve were out riding dinosaurs 6K years ago).
As a result of these facts, we can conclude that, for all intents and purposes, the 2016 Election IS ALREADY OVER in the majority of the United States. It's "turn out the lights the party is over" done. The Democrats are NOT going to win in states like the Dakotas, Idaho, Oklahoma or Alabama, and the Republicans have ZERO chance of winning basically any state in New England or the west coast.
So the path to 270 is already well underway, and when you look at the cold, hard political realities, the fact is that the Democrats already have a significantly easier (though far from guaranteed) path to 270 than the Republicans do. And THAT, is where the facts end. Now, there's nothing wrong with political speculation and opinion (per se, although it's a little troubling that the industry around this field seems to be so heavily populated with idiots), but to me, speculation that doesn't start with the above facts and work outward from them is FAR more likely to quickly veer into the stupid or absurd ... so I'm going to work my way out from what we know and see where that leads us.
The Republicans, by most educated guesses, have NO path to 270 that doesn't include winning the state of Ohio. Now, obviously this is national politics we're talking about, and things do change, but these numbers don't change THAT much and, right now, there's not a single mathematician in the country that I'm aware of that has ANY (realistic) Electoral College map for the Republicans reaching 270 in 2016 that does NOT include the GOP taking the state of Ohio (it's obviously not impossible, just statistically very unlikely as there are far fewer realistic combinations of states). The majority of Republicans these days are many things (and I should quickly add that, for many of the early years of my life, I was one of them and, as a result, I'm particularly critical of the neo-conservative, religious right, theological oligarchs who have, in my opinion, destroyed the party). You could (and I occasionally do) argue that they are short sighted, sold out ideologues who are hell bent on nothing less than the end of our Republic as we know it and replacing it with some sort of twisted, disgusting theological oligarchy. HOWEVER, they ... which is to say their political strategists, are NOT stupid. They are VERY aware that they have basically NO chance of winning back the White House in 2016 without Ohio ... and they, like the rest of us who can look at polling data and add, have known this fact for some time. That's why the GOP convention in 2016 is going to be in Ohio, and that's why the party is (and we switch here from fact to my opinion again) carefully grooming Governor Kasich (a reasonably popular Ohio Republican with massive statewide name recognition) to be the Vice Presidential pick of virtually anyone who becomes the nominee (and, on the topic of the nominee, let me quickly quiet all the "harumphing" going on about Donald Trump ... I'm sorry to disappoint all the paid Trump fans and late night talk show hosts out there, but it isn't going to be Trump ... don't get me wrong, I love what Trump is doing to divide, polarize, disrupt and cost the Republicans money right now, but it can't and won't last).
On the other side of the race, unlike the Republicans, the Democrats CAN win the Presidency without winning Ohio, it's just harder (there are a higher number of possible combinations for the Democrats to reach 270 without Ohio than there are for the Republicans). Like the Republicans, the Democrats are also many things (and you'll hear me use words like disappointing and frustrating a lot here), but they (and by "they" I again mean their high level, intelligent political strategists) are also NOT stupid. They have been staring at the same political maps that their Republican counterparts have been staring at for a long time too, and they know that Ohio is going to be an incredibly expensive and close slugfest, and one which, particularly given its importance to the GOP, they could definitely lose. Since losing Ohio is a legitimate possibility, without conceding that race in any way, it makes a great deal of sense for them to be working hard on a backup plan.
And this is where Jim Webb comes in.
Webb's entrance into the race (and some of the things he's said to separate himself from the left wing of the party) have already caused many in the party to cast aspersions at him. Many are calling him names, saying he's a "DINO," calling for him to drop out, etc. This reaction is, to me, beyond stupid and shows again that many Democrats also lack the kind of pragmatism that is NEEDED in any successful Democratic Republic. For the record, I think that, like Gov Kasich, Senator Webb's entry into the Presidential race is largely symbolic. It's about generating name recognition and putting him in a position to be the Vice Presidential nominee (in fact, I would argue that Webb is already the de facto VP pick for whoever the Democratic nominee is). Why? Because Webb is a popular southern Democrat who can likely deliver Virginia (which is REALLY important if the Democrats lose Ohio) and places North Carolina squarely back in play (in case any of the only 5 people left on Earth who don't know how to use Google are reading this article, Obama barely won NC in 2008 and Romney barely won it in 2012). So left leaning Democrats can call Webb names as much as they like, but when they do, they should be prepared to add "Vice President" to the list.
Webb is particularly important to the Democrats if Secretary Clinton is the nominee as he can pick up at least some support with middle aged, Democratic leaning southern white males (a group that is something of an endangered species at this point, but they're out there and they are "high likelihood" voters, and in a very close state like North Carolina, if enough of them vote for the Democrats, that could change the outcome) ... and this brings us back to the original article about constituencies. As I hope I've demonstrated, the question of whether or not black voters or women voters or "insert demographic group here" voters come out for one candidate or another IN GENERAL is largely irrelevant. For example, if every black voter in Massachusetts stayed home, Clinton (or, again, a used beer can running as a Democrat in that state) would almost certainly still win MA. This is not, of course, to say that black voters are irrelevant. In fact, black voters in Ohio (if they turn out and vote in significant numbers) could VERY easily all but guarantee a Presidential victory for the Democrats. My point is that this election isn't about ANY demographic group overall, it's about a BUNCH of those groups IN (and ONLY in) key battleground states. So the REAL question is whether or not enough historically lower turnout voters (whether that's black voters, women, hispanics, whatever) come out in the very few key battleground states and vote.
So what have we learned today. Well first off, we've learned that, if you live in Ohio, you should either be preparing to move out of the state or at least be canceling your cable subscription and removing your mailbox now ... because you are about to be at "Ground Zero" for the biggest, most expensive and most intrusive political war of our lifetimes. So stock up on dry goods, get those "No Soliciting" signs plastered all over your property, get a Netflix account and know that the rest of us (with no offense) are just happy it's you and not us.
The second thing we've learned is that people (in this case, Democrats on my left) who get all riled up about ideological purity fill me with a mixture of amusement and depression. I am amused because their ignorance (willful or otherwise) of the pragmatic realities of our political processes, especially when combined with the fact that this is a democratic REPUBLIC, which means that EVERYTHING is about COMPROMISE and NOT about getting what you want, causes them to advocate things that will almost guarantee that they will lose more than their "side" would gain if they would simply pursue a more pragmatic solution. And I am depressed because, to be honest, I often find at least some of what they seek to accomplish as laudable and worthwhile, and it's depressing to watch them fail (for themselves and those they advocate for) because they allow their religious devotion to their ideology to interfere with the accomplishing of at least some of their goals ... and the fact that this makes them similar to the people they most despise is just an extra bit of ironic pain to throw on the top.
/End PoliticalRantOfTheWeek
© 2015
So I've been thinking about doing this sort of thing with my blog for some time now, and today is the day. Periodically I see or hear something on the news or on Facebook (or in this case, both) that really gets me going for a few moments, and I have to say something in response. It's not REALLY related to the sorts of things that I write about on my blog, but it needs to be said. To make it easier on my regular readers, I'm going to call these posts "Political Rant Of The Week" (which I will almost certainly eventually shorten to "PROW" ... because I was in the military and we're contractually obligated to abbreviate almost everything for the rest of our lives). It is my intent to make these posts "in addition to" my regular writing, but we'll see how that goes.
So what sent me over the edge this week? The 2016 Election. Now I know that many of you were hoping that we could avoid this topic until, oh say, NEXT YEAR, but obviously the media is having none of that so I'm conceding defeat and hopping in.
The first thing that sent me around the bend was an article about how one particular group of voters (in the case of the article in question, black voters) was likely to be the critical factor in the 2016 Presidential Election. This statement/assertion shows a depressing lack of understanding of how Presidents are elected, so, at the risk of boring the crap out of the rest of you, let me be clear about the ONLY thing, and by that I mean, quite literally THE ONLY THING that is important in a Presidential election.
270.
That's it. There's nothing else. The candidate that gets 270 electoral votes or more wins the Presidency. Period. There are no other measures, NOTHING else matters. Now, with that as "2016 Election Fact #1," let's move on to Fact #2: Pretty much no matter what happens between now and Election Day 2016, the outcome of the Presidential election in MOST of the United States is essentially a foregone conclusion (it's VERY unlikely (statistically) that the outcome isn't already known). To be clear, you could essentially run a used beer can as a Republican or Democrat as your candidate in most states and that beer can would defeat the nominee of the other party. And why? Because the politics of the majority of people in that state are such that they will NOT elect a candidate from the other party in 2016.
Those are the facts, and if you're going to dispute them then you should stop reading right now and go do something else because we already have a zero percent chance of having an intelligent conversation on this topic (because you're out there with climate deniers and people who think Adam and Eve were out riding dinosaurs 6K years ago).
As a result of these facts, we can conclude that, for all intents and purposes, the 2016 Election IS ALREADY OVER in the majority of the United States. It's "turn out the lights the party is over" done. The Democrats are NOT going to win in states like the Dakotas, Idaho, Oklahoma or Alabama, and the Republicans have ZERO chance of winning basically any state in New England or the west coast.
So the path to 270 is already well underway, and when you look at the cold, hard political realities, the fact is that the Democrats already have a significantly easier (though far from guaranteed) path to 270 than the Republicans do. And THAT, is where the facts end. Now, there's nothing wrong with political speculation and opinion (per se, although it's a little troubling that the industry around this field seems to be so heavily populated with idiots), but to me, speculation that doesn't start with the above facts and work outward from them is FAR more likely to quickly veer into the stupid or absurd ... so I'm going to work my way out from what we know and see where that leads us.
The Republicans, by most educated guesses, have NO path to 270 that doesn't include winning the state of Ohio. Now, obviously this is national politics we're talking about, and things do change, but these numbers don't change THAT much and, right now, there's not a single mathematician in the country that I'm aware of that has ANY (realistic) Electoral College map for the Republicans reaching 270 in 2016 that does NOT include the GOP taking the state of Ohio (it's obviously not impossible, just statistically very unlikely as there are far fewer realistic combinations of states). The majority of Republicans these days are many things (and I should quickly add that, for many of the early years of my life, I was one of them and, as a result, I'm particularly critical of the neo-conservative, religious right, theological oligarchs who have, in my opinion, destroyed the party). You could (and I occasionally do) argue that they are short sighted, sold out ideologues who are hell bent on nothing less than the end of our Republic as we know it and replacing it with some sort of twisted, disgusting theological oligarchy. HOWEVER, they ... which is to say their political strategists, are NOT stupid. They are VERY aware that they have basically NO chance of winning back the White House in 2016 without Ohio ... and they, like the rest of us who can look at polling data and add, have known this fact for some time. That's why the GOP convention in 2016 is going to be in Ohio, and that's why the party is (and we switch here from fact to my opinion again) carefully grooming Governor Kasich (a reasonably popular Ohio Republican with massive statewide name recognition) to be the Vice Presidential pick of virtually anyone who becomes the nominee (and, on the topic of the nominee, let me quickly quiet all the "harumphing" going on about Donald Trump ... I'm sorry to disappoint all the paid Trump fans and late night talk show hosts out there, but it isn't going to be Trump ... don't get me wrong, I love what Trump is doing to divide, polarize, disrupt and cost the Republicans money right now, but it can't and won't last).
On the other side of the race, unlike the Republicans, the Democrats CAN win the Presidency without winning Ohio, it's just harder (there are a higher number of possible combinations for the Democrats to reach 270 without Ohio than there are for the Republicans). Like the Republicans, the Democrats are also many things (and you'll hear me use words like disappointing and frustrating a lot here), but they (and by "they" I again mean their high level, intelligent political strategists) are also NOT stupid. They have been staring at the same political maps that their Republican counterparts have been staring at for a long time too, and they know that Ohio is going to be an incredibly expensive and close slugfest, and one which, particularly given its importance to the GOP, they could definitely lose. Since losing Ohio is a legitimate possibility, without conceding that race in any way, it makes a great deal of sense for them to be working hard on a backup plan.
And this is where Jim Webb comes in.
Webb's entrance into the race (and some of the things he's said to separate himself from the left wing of the party) have already caused many in the party to cast aspersions at him. Many are calling him names, saying he's a "DINO," calling for him to drop out, etc. This reaction is, to me, beyond stupid and shows again that many Democrats also lack the kind of pragmatism that is NEEDED in any successful Democratic Republic. For the record, I think that, like Gov Kasich, Senator Webb's entry into the Presidential race is largely symbolic. It's about generating name recognition and putting him in a position to be the Vice Presidential nominee (in fact, I would argue that Webb is already the de facto VP pick for whoever the Democratic nominee is). Why? Because Webb is a popular southern Democrat who can likely deliver Virginia (which is REALLY important if the Democrats lose Ohio) and places North Carolina squarely back in play (in case any of the only 5 people left on Earth who don't know how to use Google are reading this article, Obama barely won NC in 2008 and Romney barely won it in 2012). So left leaning Democrats can call Webb names as much as they like, but when they do, they should be prepared to add "Vice President" to the list.
Webb is particularly important to the Democrats if Secretary Clinton is the nominee as he can pick up at least some support with middle aged, Democratic leaning southern white males (a group that is something of an endangered species at this point, but they're out there and they are "high likelihood" voters, and in a very close state like North Carolina, if enough of them vote for the Democrats, that could change the outcome) ... and this brings us back to the original article about constituencies. As I hope I've demonstrated, the question of whether or not black voters or women voters or "insert demographic group here" voters come out for one candidate or another IN GENERAL is largely irrelevant. For example, if every black voter in Massachusetts stayed home, Clinton (or, again, a used beer can running as a Democrat in that state) would almost certainly still win MA. This is not, of course, to say that black voters are irrelevant. In fact, black voters in Ohio (if they turn out and vote in significant numbers) could VERY easily all but guarantee a Presidential victory for the Democrats. My point is that this election isn't about ANY demographic group overall, it's about a BUNCH of those groups IN (and ONLY in) key battleground states. So the REAL question is whether or not enough historically lower turnout voters (whether that's black voters, women, hispanics, whatever) come out in the very few key battleground states and vote.
So what have we learned today. Well first off, we've learned that, if you live in Ohio, you should either be preparing to move out of the state or at least be canceling your cable subscription and removing your mailbox now ... because you are about to be at "Ground Zero" for the biggest, most expensive and most intrusive political war of our lifetimes. So stock up on dry goods, get those "No Soliciting" signs plastered all over your property, get a Netflix account and know that the rest of us (with no offense) are just happy it's you and not us.
The second thing we've learned is that people (in this case, Democrats on my left) who get all riled up about ideological purity fill me with a mixture of amusement and depression. I am amused because their ignorance (willful or otherwise) of the pragmatic realities of our political processes, especially when combined with the fact that this is a democratic REPUBLIC, which means that EVERYTHING is about COMPROMISE and NOT about getting what you want, causes them to advocate things that will almost guarantee that they will lose more than their "side" would gain if they would simply pursue a more pragmatic solution. And I am depressed because, to be honest, I often find at least some of what they seek to accomplish as laudable and worthwhile, and it's depressing to watch them fail (for themselves and those they advocate for) because they allow their religious devotion to their ideology to interfere with the accomplishing of at least some of their goals ... and the fact that this makes them similar to the people they most despise is just an extra bit of ironic pain to throw on the top.
/End PoliticalRantOfTheWeek
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)