It was 1968, and my journalism teacher often veered off the textbooks and into arguments about contemporary culture: Vietnam, drugs and anything else which struck his fancy. This particular day it was The Beatles, and the debate was about whether their music was actually art or "just", you know, rock and roll. One of the points he railed about was the last 30 seconds of "Strawberry Fields Forever" and of "Rain."

"How do you call that art?", he asked, pointing to George Martin's simple twisting around of the tape and playing part of the last stanza backwards?

We all thought him hopelessly out of it, of course, because the Beatles were God, leading a generation - and the music industry - into areas no one else imagined. And they did it over and over with each succeeding album: from the sugar pop days of "Meet the Beatles" and and "Hard Day's Night" to "Help!", then from "Rubber Soul" to "Revolver", eventually to "Sgt. Pepper" and finally to "Abbey Road", with a few in between stops with the "White Album", "Magical Mystery Tour", and others.

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Here's an article in the Denver Post which answers most, if not all of the shibboleths about health care in Canada. It's written by a clinical psychologist, who happens to be, well, read it and see:

As a Canadian living in the United States for the past 17 years, I am frequently asked by Americans and Canadians alike to declare one health care system as the better one.

Often I'll avoid answering, regardless of the questioner's nationality. To choose one or the other system usually translates into a heated discussion of each one's merits, pitfalls, and an intense recitation of commonly cited statistical comparisons of the two systems.

Because if the only way we compared the two systems was with statistics, there is a clear victor. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to dispute the fact that Canada spends less money on health care to get better outcomes. 

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Ah, conservatives are all a twitter because of the possibility that Chrysler dealerships are being closed down because they donated to the opposition during the past election. One wingnut makes the unsubstantiated charge, and the rest of the lemmings follow. As one blogger said "Posts at RedState, Reliapundit, American Thinker, Gateway Pundit, Joey Smith and Doug Ross" pointed intitially at the remarkable number of closed Chrysler dealerships whose owners happen to have been contributors to Obama opponents, mainly Republicans."

OK, that "blogger" didn't say it, he, like so many others, just repeated it. Repeated it. Repeated it, in an unending chain of unfounded accusation, without the slightest raised eyebrow or moment's reflection of its accuracy.

Here's news:

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It makes me crazy. People who should know better - don't. Robert J. Samuelson, columnist on economic matters for the Washington Post and Newsweek, writes that he hopes Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt, and the sooner the better.

Well, intemperate though that might be, it's his opinion and he's entitled to it, even if it's so clearly daft. But what's worse is that he buttresses his argument with the same tired statistics of how much longer people life since the Social Security program was enacted:

"In 1940, life expectancy at birth was 61.4 years for men, 65.7 for women; by 2008, the comparable figures were 75.4 and 80." - Washington Post, May 25, 2009

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I'm one who thinks the current health care system is a bit screwy, but I'll leave the details for a possible future column in your favorite local newspaper. In the meantime, I'm certainly not alone in this; there's a debate (of sorts) going on all across the country, and President Obama keeps saying that he's going to propose some sort of legislation later this year. We'll see.

For now what passes for debate goes something like this missive in the current issue of BusinessWeek, as columnist Catherine Arnst opines:

"keep in mind that there are only three ways to pay for universal coverage: Raise taxes, cut payments to medical providers, or ration care."

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I've been following the recent public controversy between former Vice President Dick Cheney and President Barack Obama over national security, torture, the closing of Guantanamo and other issues, and there are a few things that don't make sense to me. Since nearly all of this kerfuffle is in speeches, no one ever gets an opportunity to say, "Hey, wait a minute," so I will do so here:

For instance, Dick Cheney says waterboarding is a valuable tool, one which has produced "a wealth of intelligence" on plans by Al Qaeda and which has kept America safe. What doesn't make sense? That the last time anyone was waterboarded was in 2002. If the technique is so effective, why did the CIA, or Dick Cheney, or whoever not employ it for the past 7 years? They've certainly had "high value" prisoners along the way; more have been added to Guantanamo, more have been captured on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002. Have none of these "insurgents" or "fighters" had any information worth pursuing?

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Gay marriage has been allowed, or is about to be, in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa, Connecticut and Maine, as well as the District of Columbia.

I have completed an in-depth survey with my wife, and after careful evaluation we have decided that our marriage has not been affected.

I will keep you up to date on this developing story.

So Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter has defected to the Democrats, opening a number of vacancies on Republican committees and subcommittees in the Senate. One of the most interesting and perhaps most important is on the Judiciary, where Obama's as-yet-unannounced appointee to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court will be vetted.

In a drama as mysterious and worthy of the succession planning of the Politburo, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) emerged as the winner from among a pack of other Republicans, some with greater seniority, nearly all with more moderate histories. Sessions, denied his own judgeship back in the 1980's, is famous for his more colorful theories about the NAACP, which he called "unAmerican" and "Communist inspired", (because they forced civil rights "down the throats of people") and his forbearance of the Ku Klux Klan, which he said wasn't such a bad outfit until he learned that some of them smoked marijuana.

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Yesterday, Toyota Motor Corp announced its operating results for its fiscal 4th quarter: a loss of $7.7 billion, leading to a loss of $4.4 billion for all of 2009. That's a more than $20 billion swing in the wrong direction from the previous year.

Looking towards the next 12 months, management at Toyota said thing would probably be even worse.

Senator Bob Corker said he knew how to fix it: "Just get Toyota to reduce salaries of employees down to less than what the UAW makes. The trick is to keep cutting wages until workers in America can compete effectively with peasants in China, working in sweatshops for $4 a week without health insurance or pesky environmental regulations."

OK, he didn't really say that. But remember just a few weeks ago when he held out Toyota as the model of the car company that GM should aspire to be, and that the way to get there was to chop American wages? Maybe there's just a little more to it than that.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but in GM's most recent quarter they lost $6 billion. In Toyota's they lost $7.7 billion. I'm sure Senator Corker has noticed, but the funny thing is, I can't find a single quote about it from him.
 

Remember a couple weeks ago when Texas Governor Perry said that Texans were sick and tired of being pushed around by the Federal government, and if it didn't stop they might just leave?

Well, it's happened again.

Oh, wait, this time it's their own State Government doing the pushing:

The Texas Senate approved legislation on Monday that would limit tuition and fee increases to no more than 5 percent a year for most large universities.

The legislation would also permit schools -- but not require them -- to establish a separate program allowing incoming college freshmen to lock in tuition rates and pay the same amount for four years.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/6407209.html

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Apologists went on high alert at the idea of prosecuting Americans who engaged in the torture of captured enemy combatants, or in some cases non-combatants, or in some cases just people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. After all, the defenders said, it wasn't really so bad, and it worked, and above all it was legal. And more than that, it wasn't even torture!

Well, we know that some of the things which were done were, in fact torture. The Red Cross says so. The Geneva Conventions say so. Heck, the American government has repeatedly said so over the past 60 years. The idea that "it was legal" rests on the shaky foundation that somebody said it was legal, which is rather thin gruel given that you can find someone who will say almost anything about anything.

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It seems like only a few months ago, doesn't it? Interstate 40 was closed so that some ill designed and decades old engineering could be reworked, exits made safer, the road widened, and traffic ameliorated.

When I first heard of the plan I was surprised, shocked, actually, that engineers would put up barricades, cleave the road and prohibit traffic for over a year. I'd not heard of that before, and I've done a fair bit of reading on the Interstate system.

[I'm enamored of it, respectful of Eisenhower for proposing it and pushing it through, and have used "The Interstate System" several times against the argument that "people always know how to spend their money better than government does." The Interstates did not magically fall from the sky, and this use of government muscle and money created the best - and most expensive - infrastructure project in the history of the world, with the attendant benefits for all including cheaper products and better jobs across America. But I digress.]

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My sister-in-law is planning to retire from government work next month. She
went to work in Health and Human Services (then called HEW, I believe) in Washington, D.C. during Richard Nixon's administration, and she's been there ever since, working through Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and most recently Bush II.

Hopefully the list emphasizes that it's been Republicans and Democrats of every stripe across 40 years, and during that time she has worked her way up through the bureaucracy. Exactly what she does I wouldn't know, but she has led seminars and conferences at the White House, so I guess that's some measure of success in public servant world.

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So I have laid out my basic complaints in Part 1 of this series, that the Society of Professional Journalists' meeting at Knoxville's new Howard Baker Center was too elementary and too structured, and didn't deliver on the promise "Talk Back to the Media." Since my analysis is simply my own impression and not evidence based, I could be wrong about this, or everything, actually, but then that's what makes for a food fight.

"Too elementary", for example: it appeared to me that most of the people in the room were somewhat press savvy. I have no way to prove that, except that several of the people who did throw up questions were "recognized" by the panelists, so they must have had some reasonable exposure to the media. But the hypothetical "You get a tip on a story, do you rush it onto the air?" was just silly, even if it did foment a few minutes discussion on tweets and twittering.

Anyway, when the floor was finally opened to general questions, four or so were asked in the 11 minutes which the moderator reserved for the purpose. I had one of them. The questions, I mean, not the minutes. Well, the minutes too, now that I think of it.

I wanted to know if any of the panelists had thought very hard about "the future". It was another dippy question, I admit, (it didn't hew to the issue of "credibility", for one thing) because of course the panelists have considered what's coming, if only for their own survival. They must have, mustn't they? When I was in the media my company would get a group of us together at irregular intervals to brainstorm and speculate on such things, and I hoped that someone else had - and that they might have some thoughts on it, mere scribblings perhaps for those of us on the outside concerned about what is going on. I note that Westinghouse didn't fly us across the country out of journalistic altruism, the meetings were more "Where is the business going?" although the get-togethers served multiple purposes.

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A new survey shows a correlation because a person's religiosity and their willingness to employ torture.

"The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey." - quote from the CNN story.

The survey shows that the group most willing to torture is "evangelicals." The group least likely to allow it is "mainline Protestants." Right behind them, saying it should never be used, is the group called "unaffiliated."

Asked why there seems to be a greater willingness among those with greater church going habits, one wag said "Well, we all know God's policy on torture, don't we?"

Got Leviticus?

I walked into the Knoxville's Howard Baker Center last night at 6:45, my first time in the place since it opened. The Society of Professional Journalists had an "open to the public" meeting, billed as "Talk Back To The Media", which I thought might be interesting. Jack McElroy, Knoxville News Sentinel Editor, noted in his blog that the event would form an intersection between traditional journalism, citizen journalism, blogging and plain old reader comments, all with an air towards "credibility", so it sounded promising.

On the panel were Jack McElroy, editor, KNS, Bill Shory, news director, WBIR-TV (local NBC affiliate); Glenn Reynolds, UT law professor and founder of Instapundit.com (right-leaning political blog); and Michael Grider, interactive producer, VolunteerTV.com (WVLT, local CBS affiliate).

The evening got off slowly, as the moderator, an executive from CNN posited a hypothetical scenario: a plane crashes at McGhee Tyson airport, you get a "tweet" on Twitter, do you rush onto the air with it? (Hint: if you get a phone call saying Martians have landed on the Sunsphere, do you interrupt Law & Order with a bulletin?) OK, I'm exaggerating a bit, if only to entertain myself, mostly because the answers were so predictable.

We did find out from the panel that "everybody" Twitters, although I suspect if we had asked for a show of hands in the room instead of the dais,  the number of Twitterers would have been a pretty small minority. (No mention of the recent Nielsen report which shows that 60% of Twitter users never return after the first month. This has all the makings of CB Radio! 10-4 good buddy!) Still, it's an additional input to newsrooms, and one that "ordinary people" can listen in on, unlike the "News Tip Hotline" that was so popular at radio and TV stations a few years ago.

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So I wrote about "The First 100 Days", but instead of looking at Obama during that time as everybody else would, I thought to detail the accomplishments of the Republicans during those 14 weeks. Wow. And even with that litany of sorry achievements, I spoke too soon, for just 24 hours later Arlen Specter jumped ship and joined the Democrats.

I know, I know, and many Republicans are saying "good riddance" even though Specter voted with them 80% of the time. Well, that's what the new religion of ideological purity will do for you. So what's going on? What has happened that the caucus of moderate Republicans can now be held in a Photomat booth? That one of the two remaining Republican moderates goes public in an op-ed in the New York Times, and is reviled by the party purists and Fox News for it? [Fox has since removed the story.]) How does this come to pass?

Well, working diligently for the past several years, a political PAC, aka the "Club for Growth" has managed to put the Democrats over the top. The have near-singlehandedly put several  Republican Senatorial seats into Democratic hands.

The amazing thing is that the Club for Growth is a PAC which alleges to be Conservative, supporting Republicans. The Club for Growth may only have 40,000 members, but they are a fund raising juggernaut, and lead the charge to make the Republican party ever more conservative.

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The American Lung Association has released its latest analysis of air quality across the country, and Tennessee comes up among the worst in the country. While not every county is graded, those which are get straight F's in "ozone pollution", a not very admirable record. I clicked on about a dozen states, and the only other one which did this badly was New Jersey, a state heavy with industry and chemical factories.

There's another grade, this one for "particulate" pollution, and Knox County gets another F, although other, more distant counties in the state do a bit better.

The national report is here; just click on the state you'd like to see.

And for convenience, the Tennessee report, in detail, is here. For those who wonder what the "orange, red, and purple" days are, you can read about the methodology of the survey in the link provided. Suffice it to say that "green" is good, and as you go up the rainbow, things get increasingly worse, particularly if you are an asthma sufferer. So we find that in Knox County there were 70 "orange" days last year (bad) and one "purple" day (really really bad).

Overall, in particulate pollution, Knox County gets the worst grade in the state (tied with Loudon, actually), followed closely by Hamilton, Roanne, Blount, and McMinn. Curious how they're all packed right in the same clump around us, eh?
 

I don't know how authoritative this is, nor how often updated, but I found it interesting - a tracking of Swine Flu cases on a map of the US. Actually, you can see the whole world if you zoom out far enough. Asia seems to be a big no-show, I suspect more due to lack of reporting than lack of cases.

(The map seems to take a bit longer than usual to load.)

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&gl=us&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=106484775090296685271.0004681a37b713f6b5950

Comes word this morning that Arlen Specter, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania is about to switch parties.

Holy smack! Specter has long been a thorn in the side of the Republican party, although he did pretty much lay down for things that shocked me during the past administration, particularly the bending of the law until it splintered. Specter is, after all, a lawyer; you would think he would have known better. But then in the hysteria following 9/11, perhaps he was swept with the madding crowds. He wouldn't be the only one.

Having worked in Pennsylvania for 10 years in radio where we covered him in depth, having sat in his Washington office for several hours across multiple visits, I was surprised, no, shocked at his forbearance of Bush's tactics. I considered writing him a letter, but thought "What's the point? I'm no longer a constituent, and all I'd get back is some note written by an intern."

Specter has always been moderate, even liberal on some issues and conservative on others, and I don't take this change of affiliation as some "principled stand" so much as a political maneuver, albeit an adroit one (we shall see, anyway.)

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