Yes, I know it's from Capitol Hill Blue, but it certainly seems compelling:
Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.
Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.
GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
"I don't give a goddamn," Bush retorted. "I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way."
"Mr. President," one aide in the meeting said. "There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution."
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
I've talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper."
Posted by geoff2 at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)
A couple of apparently unrelated things happened earlier this month. First, I went through the annual ritual called Open Enrollment, during which I reviewed all of the optional elements of my Sun benefits (health insurance, dental coverage, health spending accounts, life insurance, and so forth) and selected the coverage that I wanted for the next year. Secondly, Peter Drucker, the man that the Wall Street Journal called "the first philosopher of management", died at the age of 95.
So what's the connection? First, Drucker:
From "Is Executive Pay Excessive?" May 23, 1977: Economically, [the] few very large executive salaries are quite unimportant. Socially, they do enormous damage. They are highly visible and highly publicized. And they are therefore taken as typical, rather than as the extreme exceptions they are.
These few very large salaries are being explained by the "need" to pay the "market price" for executives. But this is nonsense. Every executive knows perfectly well that it is the internal logic of a hierarchical structure that explains them.... Money is a status symbol which defines an executive's place in the corporate hierarchy. And the more levels there are the more pay does the man at the top have to get. This rewards people for creating additional levels of management.... Yet levels of management should be kept to the minimum....If and when the attack on the "excessive compensation of executives" is launched--and I very much fear that it will come soon--business will complain about the public's "economic illiteracy" and will bemoan the public's "hostility to business." But business will have only itself to blame. It is a business responsibility, but also a business self-interest, to develop a sensible executive compensation structure that portrays economic reality and asserts and codifies the achievement of U.S. business in this century: the steady narrowing of the income gap between the "boss man" and the "working man."
Second, health insurance. One of the providers from which I get to choose is United Health. (It's probably a violation of some company policy for me to say this; on the other hand, the concentration of this industry is such that almost every large company offers something from everybody. And I imagine the information is publicly available.) On November 28th, Forbes reported that the salary of William McGuire, CEO of United Health Group last year was $124.8 million. (He cashed in stock options worth $115 million; he currently owns stock options worth $1 billion.) Just to take an area that I know well, a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist makes around $75 dollars per hour; William McGuire makes $115,384 dollars an hour. What on earth can justify this discrepancy? It certainly isn't "market forces"; I'm pretty sure that the board of UBH could find a perfectly competent CEO that would do the job for a mere $1 million.
As Robert Kuttner put it in today's Boston Globe:
Health insurance is the most vivid case of what political scientist Walter Dean Burnham calls a ''politics of excluded alternatives." Polls consistently show that over two-thirds of Americans want universal tax-supported health insurance. Gallup found that 79 percent of Americans want coverage for all, and 67 percent don't mind if taxes are raised to pay for it. Fully 78 percent are dissatisfied with the present system. Medicare, the one part of the system that is true national health insurance (for seniors) is overwhelmingly popular.
There is no hotter political issue, nor one that strikes closer to home. So, if Americans overwhelmingly want national health insurance, why don't we get it? Three huge reasons: political, fiscal, and jurisdictional.
Politically, the immensely powerful private insurance industry would be displaced by national health insurance. Nearly all corporations would rather suffer with the devil that they know (escalating premiums) than the devil they hate (an expanded role for government)....
Fiscally, a shift to national health insurance would require about $700 billion that currently goes through the private sector in charges to workers and consumers and shifted to the public sector in the form of taxes. The result would be a far more efficient and reliable system, but many voters would see the increased taxes but not appreciate the savings in premium costs, payroll deductions, or out-of-pocket charges.
Jurisdictionally, states like Massachusetts can perhaps make some piecemeal progress, but it's hard to do this right in one state without pushing the system toward further fragmentation. Medicare works because it's a national program.
But let's get back to McGuire's $124 million. Obviously the public wouldn't stand for a government official pulling in that kind of money. Instead, that sum would comfortably cover the premiums for all of the uninsured workers here in Massachusetts. As I blogged recently, it's amazing that so many in American business are opposed to single-payer government-administered health insurance, even though it is demonstrably in their best interests (and the interests of their shareholders and employees) that such a program be adopted. And it's a sad commentary on American politics that no political party is willing to stand up for a policy demanded by two-thirds of the people of the USA.
“Our capacity or incapacity of conceiving a thing has very little to do with the possibility of the thing itself; but is in truth very much an affair of accident, and depends on the past history and habits of our own minds.”
Mill, J. S. 1874, A System of Logic, New York, NY: Harper & Brothers
As I was finishing up my last blog entry, I decided to link the final word to Pastor Niemöller's famous "First they came..." quotation. And I stumbled across a page on Niemöller at Liverpool Community College which not only gives the quotation but points out the revealing way in which people have misquoted it over the years - not just casually, but in speeches, and even in memorial inscriptions.
Everbody loves to quote Martin Niemöller’s lines about moral failure in the face of the Holocaust: 'First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me.'
But interestingly, people use the quotation to imply different meanings – even altering it to suit their purpose. When Time magazine used the quotation, they moved the Jews to the first place and dropped both the communists and the social democrats. American Vice-President Al Gore likes to quote the lines, but drops the trade unionists for good measure. Gore and Time also added Roman Catholics, who weren't on Niemöller's list at all. In the heavily Catholic city of Boston, Catholics were added to the quotation inscribed on its Holocaust memorial. The US Holocaust Museum drops the Communists but not the Social Democrats; other versions have added homosexuals.
What could make Niemöller's point more eloquently than this selectivity? UPDATE Wikipedia gives the original German text and some of the variations.
This seems to be an accurate transcript of Bush's recent town-hall meeting in Florida where he went to sell his "fix" for the nonexistent Social Security crisis. Please read it carefully. Don't just glance at it, roll your eyes, and go on to the next blog. If you pay taxes in the US, this guy works for you:
WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: I don't really understand. How is it the new [Social Security] plan is going to fix that problem?
BUSH: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.
-- President G. W. Bush, Tampa, Florida, Feb. 4, 2005
Thought for the day:
"Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous."
David Hume, 1739
I was reading a story in the Guardian about the British government's reaction to the latest IRA announcement*, and I read: "No 10 has never resiled from its view that the IRA was involved in the bank robbery"
resiled?! What's this? Is the Grauniad** up to its old tricks? Apparently not: to resile is, inter alia, "to abjure: formally reject or disavow a formerly held belief, usually under pressure". Dates back to 1520-1530, from the French resilir and before that the Latin resilire, to spring back. Same root as resilient. And I'd never seen it before. Neat.
* The IRA is throwing a hissy fit because it was caught robbing banks, so it's withdrawing its commitment to decommission its weapons. Makes perfect sense....?
** I think it was Private Eye that dubbed the Guardian "the Grauniad" on account of its frequent typos.
From Andrew Sullivan: "A MANDATE FOR CULTURE WAR: That's Bill Bennett's conclusion. He won't be the only one. What we're seeing, I think, is a huge fundamentalist Christian revival in this country, a religious movement that is now explicitly political as well. [...] But the intensity of the passion, and the inherently totalist nature of religiously motivated politics means deep social conflict if we are not careful. Our safety valve must be federalism. We have to live and let live. As blue states become more secular, and red states become less so, the only alternative to a national religious war is to allow different states to pursue different options."
UPDATE: Amy Sullivan has a different take on this: "the "huge fundamentalist Christian revival" took place about thirty years ago, not last month, and it has always been explictly political". Worth reading, but flawed. Yes, the revival took place years ago, and Reagan and Bush Snr. courted the religious right and then ignored them. Dubya did pretty much the same in 2000. This is the first time that religious wedge issues have been so nakedly and cynically exploited as part of a GOTV effort, and it coincides with (1) the election of a new crop of Republican congressmen who are as rabid as Newt's crowd were but are explicitly religious in their allegiance, and (2) the likely opening of 2-4 Supreme slots. I think that it is going to be different this time.
I've been trying to track this one down for 30 years. (I don't even remember why.) I spotted a link to the reverse dictionary over at Alec's blog and that led me, via cerulean, to the two dictionaries that also had cerulescent.
A correspondent on the Al Stewart mailing list asked for suggestions for a poem to use as part of his son's Eagle Scout ceremony. I suggested my favourite lines from Walt Whitman:
This day before dawn I ascended a hill, and look'd at
the crowded heaven,
And I said to my Spirit, When we become the enfolders
of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of
everything in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied
then?
And my Spirit said, No, we but level that lift, to pass and
continue beyond .
[Leaves of Grass, 1871-72 edition, page 322]
This afternoon my wife was sitting in her doctor's waiting room. She was reading Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies; the only other patient, a man, was reading Ron Suskind's book on Paul O'Neill, The Price of Loyalty. They started talking, and the man said that he was reading the book because a friend had told him to do so, saying [approximately] "I voted for Bush last time, but after reading this I could never vote for him again." My wife asked if the book was having the same effect on him. "Yes," he replied, "we knew that Bush wasn't very smart, but we didn't realise that he didn't care."
"Now we know that no other president of the United States has ever lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably ... The presumption now has to be that he's lying any time that he's saying anything."
(Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and friend of Bush's father, quoted by John Pilger in the New Statesman, November 20, 2003.)