The Inquiring Manatee

Obama's Budget: Some Good Ideas

    

The $3.55-trillion budget proposed Thursday by President Obama shows his potential to be a great, activist president in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
      Now all he has to do is get his ideas through a knotted Congress in the teeth of fierce lobbying by every powerful interest group you can think of, starting with health insurance companies, drug companies and private providers of student loans.
      Obama is saying that government should run government programs itself, not buck them to high-markup private firms at a cost of billions to the federal treasury. If Congress approves, Pell grants and other student loans would be handled by the Education Department, not by private firms, saving $4 billion a year. To free money for providing health coverage for more Americans, Medicare payments now going to private insurers under the so-called Medicare Advantage plans would be reduced. It's a move to the advantage of original, "straight" Medicare.
      Let me here talk up my own experience: Government gets a bad rap when it comes to the efficiency of Medicare. Medicare is not your local DMV office. Straight Medicare works well. You can go to any doctor that takes Medicare patients, and most do. Payments are made quickly to the doctors, and you get a report on what's been paid on your behalf so doctors can't readily bill the government for more services than they gave you. Co-pays are reasonable. The people you deal with on the phone at Medicare are really nice, as are the Social Security people.
      Medicare Advantage plans are garbage. They don't give you much more than straight Medicare, in many cases premiums are higher, and the comapanies get too much money from the goverment; Democrats have derided the plan for years as a giveaway to the private sector, done by Republicans who love the private sector dearly (and their campaign contributions).
      I signed up for a Medicare Advantage plan one year but later returned to straight Medicare. One problem: I couldn't find a Medicare Advantage plan that provided any coverage beyond California, my home state. When I spent summer weeks at a cottage my wife owns in Vermont, I had no medical coverage at all; I had to pay all bills out of my own pocket.
      I'd like to see the Medicare Advantage plans eliminated, but short of that, trimming their cost to the government would be a plus.
       And I'm shedding no tears for the student loan providers. Their profits have been enormous and their interest rates have been too high.
       A start on more health coverage, a modest growth for the Defense Department, new investments in energy and education: All these are great goals. My taxes are likely to go up under Obama's plans, but I am ready to pay them if this helps bring universal health coverage to the United States at last.
      It's up to the Obama administration to fill in details with line items, which will happen in a few months. Then it's up to Congress, especially its Democratic majorities, to follow the president's breathtakingly ambitious blueprint. 

Want to Lose Weight? Forget Dieting.

   

There are news reports out today about a research study published online by the New England Journal of Medicine. It concerns dieting, and after years of study concludes that any diet combination of carbs, fats and proteins is equally effective for weight loss provided that you simply cut the number of calories you ingest.
     Unfortunately, the study misses the point. No diet works alone to lose you weight. You have to exercise, too. 
     In fact, the only way to lose weight and keep it off is to run. Yes, get off your butt and run. Fearful of hurting your little knees? Go to a drugstore and buy Spandex knee guards. They work well for protection, and will actually cure knee pains.
     Start by walking around the block. Build up to runs of 50 yards at a time. Keep it up. Before you know it, you'll be running a mile at a time. Then go up gradually to two miles. Then three. Enjoy your first 5-K (3.1-mile) race in the company of hundreds of other runners. Or just run by yourself, always facing traffic if you run on the roads.
     You don't have to run any more than 20 miles a week to get maximum aerobic benefits from running, which are considerable. So work up to that.
     Running will shed the weight off you as if you've had liposuction. It works quickly.
     And it's the only thing that works. The only thing.

Obama Acquits Himself Well in the House Chamber

    

What a pleasure it was to hear a smart, articulate president for a change as Barack Obama delivered his first address to a joint session of Congress last night. Call it the State of Obama speech.
      The president's performance accentuated that he is a stupendously good speaker, with a strong and reassuring voice. The first time I heard him, as an obscure Senate candidate running in Chicago in early 2004, he blew me away. And so it was again last night.
      Obama, I thought, struck just the right balance between grim realism and a confidence-restoring optimism as he explained the need for more spending to get us out of recession and then laid out his budget plans with their ambitious approach to energy, health care and education.
      He plainly listened to Bill Clinton's appeals to sound more optimistic. I doubt, however, that the speech will send Americans flocking back to the malls right away. We are in for more tough times. This is the equivalent, in Great Depression terms, of early 1930. The troubles have just begun. I can only hope that Ben Bernanke was right when he predicted recovery in 2010. There sure won't be any in 2009. But Obama's speech gave him some leeway with the public to continue to chip away with a highly partisanized Congress. Obama's popularity is high and will continue that way. He won't be blamed if times don't get better soon.

Don't Listen to the Critics: It Was a Good Oscar Show

    

I don't know about you, but I thought the new producers of Sunday night's Oscarcast did a good job for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and for ABC. Two Los Angeles Times writers the next day trashed the show -- they hated Hugh Jackman, they hated the musical numbers, they hated the dearth of surprise winners and the relative lack of emotion from winners -- but my wife and I must be dummies. We are avid moviegoers, seing more than 50 films a year. And we enjoyed the telecast, which recorded an uptick in ratings.
      I have some background in all this, having covered the Oscars for years for Newsweek and Newsday, mostly when it was at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown L.A. or the massive Shrine Auditorium. Sunday's show stacked up well against those shows I watched from a seat in the theater. "Slumdog Millionaire" director Danny Boyle was right to laud the show -- and he knows theatricality.
      The set and staging were imaginative. Jackman was talented and suave; there should have been more of him. I liked the lowering of the stage nearly to the level of the first-row seats (kind of like John McCain giving his acceptance speech at last summer's GOP convention), though it produced an awkward moment between presenter Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in the first row. Real troupers, they were.
       There were a lot of theatrical touches. The musical numbers weren't as bad as the critics made them out to be. True, the show could have done with a few more clips from nominated films, but the show ran more than three and a half hours as it was. I liked the surprise of bringing on five previous winners in the leading and supporting actor and actress categories to praise the nominees.
       It's not the producers' fault that there were few surprise winners (Japan's "Departures" winning for best foreign language film was the only surprise I can think of, in fact; the film doesn't hit the States until May.) And the snarky sniping about how arty and low-budget most of the key nominated films were is hardly worth commenting on. The Academy Awards honor excellence, not box-office grosses. If the mass audience out there knew only "The Black Knight," which wasn't recognized, that's tough. The object is to encourage people to see meritorious pictures like "Slumdog Millionaire," not to reward studio executives for their lowbrow catering to teenagers with comic-book sequels.
     And then there was the red carpet and all that glamor and decolletage. Best hair, Kate Winslet. Best dress, Anne Hathaway. Best million-dollar emerald earrings, Jolie. Worst outfit and accessories, the unfortunate Amy Adams. Coolest woman there, Heidi Klum.
    What did you think?

In Memory of Socks the Cat

    

My favorite member of the Clinton administration was Socks.
     I first met Socks outside the Arkansas governor's mansion in Little Rock during the 1992-93 presidential transition that eventually brought the Clinton family to the White House. The friendly, already famous black-and-white feline wandered outside the grounds and was instantly besieged by a crowd of news photographers, sprawling prone on the sidewalk to get the right angle on the cat. Some moved the kitty here and there for a better shot. Resulting photographs running worldwide prompted a decree from the Clintons: "Don't touch the cat." Gray T-shirts containing that message became a collector's item for the journalists covering the transition. In June 1993 I wore my "Don't Touch the Cat" T-shirt in Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, Minn. No other runner knew what it meant. It was my insider secret.
     At the White House, Socks had little freedom outdoors. One of the staff engineers rigged up a post on the South Lawn and secured a long cord to it, connected to Socks' collar. It gave him a pretty wide radius for exercise, but basically he was tethered. He adjusted well, rolling over cutely or simply going to sleep.
     Socks had his favorite indoor places to sleep; he was pretty much confined to the basement. He was Chelsea's cat, but I got the impression she didn't see too much of him though she loved him. "He's so noble," she once told me. Every now and then he was brought into the Oval Office or the East Room to thrill groups of children.
     I bought a Socks coffee mug with his pawprints, and a "Socks -- the First Cat" button. I was a fan, all right.
     One Saturday morning in 1993 or 1994 I was in the press briefing room when the engineer who had charge of Socks carried him in and placed him on the lectern. I petted him and scratched him under the ears for a long time, bragging about it afterward to my boss down at the Newsday Washington bureau. There was another occasion when he was resting on the lawn beside the South Drive that I briefly petted him as we were getting into the motorcade vans. Otherwise, that was it as far as close contact went. But I saw him frequently and was always charmed.
      The Clintons, I'm afraid, exploited Socks to get the cat lovers vote but otherwise ignored him. When they left the White House they gave him away to presidential secretary Betty Currie, who took him to her home in Maryland and gave him a nice life until he died of throat cancer and old age at 18 a few days ago. The Clintons' excuse was that Betty Currie's pet had died. Well, maybe so.
       Goodbye, Socks. I loved you and mourn you.

California's Extra 12-Cent-a-Gallon Gas Tax: A Good Idea, Lost

    

The complicated budget deal that California's dysfunctional Legislature just passed to close a $41 billion gap originally included a 12-cent-a-gallon increase in the state's gasoline tax. That part of the package was tossed out at the insistence of State Sen. Abel Maldonado, the moderate Republican from Santa Maria (the town where Michael Jackson was tried and acquitted of child molestation).
    Maldonado made and won many demands in return for providing the one Republican vote needed for the two-thirds majority to pass any California budget -- a silly and excessive requirement that only two other states impose. The death of the gas tax increase was the biggest fiscal concession. The billions it would have brought in were made up by recognizing that the federal stimulus package would provide sufficient funds.
      This outcome sounds sensible enough -- the stimulus money is real and should flow into state coffers soon -- but at the same time, something was lost in bowing to populist anger over a gas tax increase. (Even Los Angeles Times state government columnist George Skelton called the plan a "gas gouge.") It wasn't a gouge. It was a good idea.
     Gasoline prices, though rising somewhat recently, have fallen precipitously from last fall's $4.69-a-gallon level in California. They're about $2.27 in Los Angeles now. Drivers should be so thankful for the lower price that they shouldn't gripe about a 12-cent increase. Though $4.69 was an outrageous price, a lesser but still reasonable price that is kept stable and on the high side through taxes encourages the purchase of more fuel-efficient vehicles -- more hybrids and electrics, fewer asinine SUVs -- or encourages less driving and more use of public transit and more exercise. These are good things. Al Gore once advocated a 50-cent added gas tax to help stem climate change. A 12-cent tax is tiny by comparison.
     Also, keeping the gas tax increase and using the stimulus money could have avoided billions of dollars of cuts to state services for the elderly and handicapped and for education from kindergarten through university.
     Maldonado may have thought he was doing motorists and businesses a favor by keeping gas prices lower. Surely that's the way voters will see it when he seeks statewide office next year, probably as a candidate for controller. But the state and its future are the losers.

Headline of the Day Making You Want to Read a Bit More

 

SHARK ATTACKS DROP; AILING ECONOMY CITED --  msnbc.com

   Are even the sea carnivores getting laid off and slinking away from the beaches, back to mid-ocean, clutching their pink slips in their jaws? Do they feel so sorry for newly jobless, depressed beachgoers that they're giving them a break? Is this story a tie-in with layoffs at law firms?
    The story turns out to be based on a report that shark attacks worldwide last year dropped from 50 to 41. Attempted explanations are thinly sourced; in fact, they're largely nonsensical. A couple of guys are quoted as theorizing that fewer people are going to beaches because the economy is so bad. Come on. When you're not working, you have more time to hit the beach. It's a better escape than the movies.
     Another hypothesis is that shark populations are down because so many of the fish are being commercially hunted. Now, this makes sense. But what does that have to do with the "ailing economy?" Is shark meat so cheap that people are eating more of it, substituting carcherodon for tuna or Chilean sea bass? The story doesn't say.

A Great New True-Crime Book

     

Author Lisa Sweetingham, whom I met at the Michael Jackson child-molestation trial in Santa Maria, Calif., in 2005, has a new nonfiction book out: Chemical Cowboys. Four years in the research and writing, it's the story of how a determined American sleuth busted a vicious Israeli Ecstasy-selling ring. The cast of characters is right out of Damon Runyon (if Runyon had been Jewish), and includes a beautiful girlfriend who becomes a drug dealer in her own right.
     Reading the book will send you into ecstasy, if not into Ecstasy. I highly recommend it, even though I got only a C in chemistry at Hamilton High.

Burris Must Go

    

What is up with "Senator" Roland Burris of Illinois, the man who changes his story more often than Ferdinand Waldo DeMara, The Great Impostor?
     First he says he has virtually no contact with anybody before impeached Gov. Rod Blagojevich named him to fill Barack Obama's Senate seat. Then he says he made or received a few phone calls from aides to Blagojevich (forgetting to mention that the governor's brother was one of those associates), but says he refused to do any fundraising for Blagojevich because it would look as if he were trying to curry favor for the appointment. Then he says he talked to the brother, too. Now he says he did try to do some fundraising, but was unsuccessful.
     What it looks like: Burris went all-out to get that Senate seat, prostrating himself before whomever might help him and promising to be helpful in turn. Much of this information was not shared with state legislators empowered to ask him these questions as Harry Reid looked on from the U.S. Senate, debating whether to pull the plug on the guy.
     Now Burris says he welcomes more investigation. He should put us all out of our puzzled misery by resigning before Reid and Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois have to put this matter before the Senate Ethics Committee at taxpayer expense.
     The initial exclusionary instincts of Reid and Durbin were correct: Anyone who would accept this appointment from the execrable Blagojevich was ineluctably tainted. And Burris has further tainted himself with his questionable memory and strange daily shoe-dropping revelations.
     Dear Senator: Take a hint and quit. Today.

Pakistan Gives its Women a Swat

       

Why was Babe Ruth called "the Sultan of Swat?" The monicker was based on the then-Indian region called Swat, whose reigning prince was called the Wali of Swat. (An even better title than the Nizam of Hyderabad, or, my Nigerian traditional favorite, the Sardauna of Sokoto.)
      Nobody should be joking about Swat anymore. On Monday, the region, now in Pakistan, became a glaring symbol of abject appeasement. Like Neville Chamberlain's pact with Hitler at Munich in 1938 giving the Nazis Czech Sudentenland, the decision of the weak Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari to let Swat be ruled by Muslim Sharia law was a victory for dark forces that will merely embolden them to make more and more demands from the forces of modernity and reason. The outcome could be as grim as Munich's was.
      Zardari's government capitulated to a Taliban-led campaign of beheadings of police officers and destruction of schools for girls. To get a cease-fire in the Swat fighting, the government sacrificed the women of Swat -- and soon, perhaps, of all of Pakistan -- who will be denied an education and any human rights, just as the women of Afghanistan were under Taliban rule. Hands and heads will be cut off. The official regional anthem of Swat will be "Everybody Must Get Stoned," sung by a chorus of adulterers.
      Let's not paint this development as anything other than a forboding victory for terror and 7th Century ignorance. All we can do is hope that brave women will start underground schools for girls.
      Ironically, even fundamentalist Wahhabi Saudi Arabia has been showing signs of progress. King Abdullah has appointed a woman to a deputy ministerial position, a first in Saudi government. Gee. Next thing you know, they'll allow women to drive.
      Pakistan is going the other way. As India progresses, Pakistan regresses. And it has nukes.