Slick dancing Mitt!

On a lighter note, I've been arguing with friends and family over whether Mitt Romney's Mormonism dooms his presidential candidacy. (I say no; everybody else says yes.) However, I don't think a Romney candidacy could very well survive the widespread use of the phrase "slick dancing Mitt" which pretty much insinuates everything conservatives hate about Democrats, and the modern world in general -- and which comes to us courtesy of his very own strategists.

Republican: "Don't you know that Hillary equals France?!?"

Democrat: "Who told you that? Slick dancing Mitt?"

Doesn't seem like much of a contest.

Sympathy for dentists.

From a Washington Post story about a kid who died from an abscessed tooth:

DaShawn saw a dentist a couple of years ago, but the dentist discontinued the treatments, she said, after the boy squirmed too much in the chair. Then the family went through a crisis and spent some time in an Adelphi homeless shelter. From there, three of Driver's sons went to stay with their grandparents in a two-bedroom mobile home in Clinton.

By September, several of DaShawn's teeth had become abscessed. Driver began making calls about the boy's coverage but grew frustrated. She turned to Norris, who was working with homeless families in Prince George's.

Norris and her staff also ran into barriers: They said they made more than two dozen calls before reaching an official at the Driver family's Medicaid provider and a state supervising nurse who helped them find a dentist.

On Oct. 5, DaShawn saw Arthur Fridley, who cleaned the boy's teeth, took an X-ray and referred him to an oral surgeon. But the surgeon could not see him until Nov. 21, and that would be only for a consultation. Driver said she learned that DaShawn would need six teeth extracted and made an appointment for the earliest date available: Jan. 16.

But she had to cancel after learning Jan. 8 that the children had lost their Medicaid coverage a month earlier. She suspects that the paperwork to confirm their eligibility was mailed to the shelter in Adelphi, where they no longer live.

Brad Plumer, writing at the Plank, has a round-up of readables on the problem of Medicaid and dental coverage. States are currently required by Congress to provide dental services to people under 21 as part of their Medicaid benefit package, but the problem is that dentists in many states won't take Medicaid recipients because they claim the states' re-embursements are too low and the process too complicated.

My first reaction to horror stories like this is to shake my fists at those selfish dentists. But remember, this sort of thing is the real upshot of sausage-making like this and this from early 2006. Capping case-by-case reimbursements of health-care providers results in greater case-by-case losses for dentists who take on Medicaid patients. And that's assuming the patients actually show up and sign on the dotted line. Provisions for higher "cost-sharing" with Medicaid patients mean that cash-strapped patients are less likely to do do so on any given day, leaving their dentists in the lurch. Stricter Medicaid eligibility requirements also increase the risk of no-shows because (like the family in the Post story) they suddenly find out they're ineligible. And then there's the uncertainty introduced by the much-vaunted "flexibility" in state Medicaid standards, which in some cases puts even federal mandated services like child dental service in limbo -- for both the patients and for their dentists.

Public health insurance can only work if health care providers are willing to participate, which means that public insurees aren't too unattractive relative to private ones. This becomes less and less the case as Medicaid costs-cutting, and the chaos created from euphemizing the cost-cutting, shows up on the doctors' bottom lines. The Georgia example Brad links to suggests (informally) that dentist participation in Medicaid is at least somewhat elastic with respect to reimbursement rates. So if you want to keep strictly public health care limited to the poor, states are going to have to pay (or else require doctors and dentists to take on some percentage of Medicaid patients by law). The status quo isn't cheap: keeping more poor kids from dying of tooth infections means bigger state payouts to the health care professionals who can stop it from happening. Even if some of them are in fact selfish jerks.

LWC's very good weekend.

On Thursday I find out there's going to be another Gomez album next year (which means another tour!) Then, today, I see via the Washington Monthly that TNR has ditched its neocon owners in favour of some mild-mannered Canadians:

New York money managers Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt bought their stake in the New Republic from Martin Peretz, who remains editor-in-chief. (Peretz referred a call on the latest ownership change to Foer.) CanWest bought a minority stake in the company in 2006.

Foer declined to discuss the details of the latest transaction, other than to say that CanWest now controls the magazine and that Hertog and Steinhardt are no longer involved.


Micheal Tomasky profiled these guys, and why their stake was so potentially dangerous for the future of TNR, a few years ago. Most important, their exit from the scene means that Marty Peretz isn't the only thing keeping TNR from becoming the new Weekly Standard.

And if that wasn't enough, last night the Galloping Beaver pointed me to a new blog that might help with my Fafblog withdrawals. All hail the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

My ducks are all in a row.

The courage to mouth unpopular cant.

So on Thursday, Tom Vilsack endorses switching from wage to price indexing for social security, shortly before pulling out of the race for the Dem nomination for lack of money. Kevin Drum says:

I'll hazard a guess here: Vilsack proposed this because he believes it's a good idea. It's worth remembering that Vilsack is a former DLC chair and his politics are fundamentally DLC centrist on domestic issues. And it's further worth remembering that reducing future benefits is the kind of compromise position that DLC types have been proposing for years.


True enough, but don't give Vilsack any points for courage. Switching from wage to price indexing of the PIA is, as Matthew Yglesias explained a year ago, really a code for a slow phase-out of social security. It's not that a progressive justification a slow phase-out of retirement benefits to free up resources for more targeted redistributive programs and for health care is unimaginable (though it's worth remembering that social security is a packaged program that also comprises disability and survivor benefits, which typically do keep the lion's share of their recipients out of abject poverty). But Vilsack didn't even begin to make this sort of argument. (Hilzoy has the actual Vilsack quotes.) Instead, he first hid behind some standard DLC bullet-point wonkery and the standard phony cant about long-term solvency of social security as a stand-alone program. Then, in his gruesome "clarification" he seemed to claim that, in switching to price indexing of the PIA, he could still "maintain the purchasing power" of social security -- which is a totally bogus confusion of real and nominal economic growth. This hardly counts as going out on the untenable strength of your convictions or trying to generate discussion of unpopular ideas. It's just bullshit.

How screwed are the Big Three?

From Jon Gertner's NYT Magazine piece on the success of Toyota:

The biggest-selling vehicle in the United States is not the Camry (448,445 sold last year) or the Accord (354,441) but Ford F-Series trucks (796,039). Not far behind in sales are the full-size trucks from Chevrolet. These are among the most lucrative consumer products around, yielding anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 in profit for every unit sold. “To the American automakers, that’s their bread and butter,” Jeff Liker, from the University of Michigan, explains. “They break even on passenger cars, lose money on small cars. But all their profits come from large S.U.V.’s and trucks. For the American auto companies, this is the last hill that they dominate.”


And if the new model Toyota Tundra breaks through? And if Americans really do stop buying big trucks?

The other thing I note about Gertner's article is that it contains almost nothing about Toyota's labour situation, other than to mention that its factories aren't unionized and it has only 1600 American retirees (hardly surprising since its first US-made car hit the market in 1986). Toyota's relatively progressive environmental R&D program and customer-service-oriented mentality are important, but what's the cost in terms of worker benefits? Maybe negligible or at least worth it, but Gertner's article doesn't give much information to base an opinion on. They never do.

Texas Loco.

Via Kos, here's the wackiest thing I've seen from the GOP for awhile. If you follow the links in Rep. Chissum (Chair of the Texas House Appropriations Committee)'s memo, you end up here. Burnt Orange Report notes that the same guy, just like a bad parody of himself, currently has a bill pending in the House that "would strip about $6 billion from general revenue to fund a big hunk of a massive 2008-2009 property tax cut for the wealthy." In fact, here are a list of other things on Rep. Chissum's legislative agenda -- abortion, sex ed, tax cuts. A winger's winger.

Ye olde homosexual agenda.

Here's a fun ("fun" in a sad, scary way) story from Sarah Posner at TAP about how Ted Haggard (refresher) has become another model for the movement to "recruit" people back to heterosexuality after they've been clutched by the gay agenda. My favourite part:

This week CNN’s Anderson Cooper featured Melissa Fryrear, a Focus on the Family employee who claims to have been converted to heterosexuality after ten years as a lesbian. (H.B. London, a Focus on the Family executive, was one of the facilitators of Haggard’s alleged conversion.) As if to reinforce the point that only gay people are obsessed with sex, Fryrear insisted that "when I lived homosexually, everything in my world resolved around being a lesbian. And you know, when we say 365, 24/7. So it was all of my thoughts, my behaviors, my attractions." And now?


And now, of course, she spends her time going on CNN to talk about sex. And issuing statements condemning the improper use of the word "love" (i.e. as a euphamism for homosexual sex). And issuing hilarious biographical statements about her discovery of "womanhood" (Goodness!). And serving as Focus on the Family (or, as Pam calls it, Focus on the Anus)'s Gender Issues Analyst. You know, another word for "gender"? Sex!

I don't mean to suggest that the religious right in the U.S. isn't scary. But they're really damn funny too.

Beautiful U.S. data.

Navigating the wonderful, indespensible Panel Study of Income Dynamics website, I'm reminded yet again of how the U.S., which Canadians consider so right-wing and small-government, actually provides and maintains really top-notch microdata sources -- from the extensive, intelligently presented summary stats in Statistical Abstracts right through to U-Mich's detailed household panel surveys. No wonder so much social sciences scholarship is based on U.S. experience, even among researchers outside the U.S.

One theory I've heard when I broach this subject is that Americans are sufficiently distrustful of government that federal agencies and the institutions that work with them feel the need to be extremely transparent, and make their work publicly available, in a way Statistics Canada just doesn't. I don't claim to be any kind of expert on the privacy issues involved. But in terms of generating social science research on your country, the U.S. public sector's need-to-please, if that's what it is, definitely has national benefits.

Browsing...

And, via Lawyers Guns and Money, your Friday afternoon is simply incomplete until you've read the recently deceased Molly Ivins ream Camille Paglia. (This Camille Paglia.)

The shitty political press.

John Kerry may be old news -- but Eric Boehlert does due dilligence in limning the hatchet job the press corps made of Kerry's not-running announcement speech on the Senate Floor. Lazy journos can get away with this nonsense to the grounds that most Dems are just happy Kerry won't be in the 2008 race and won't call them on the fact that they turned his sentiment about U.S. soldiers in harm's way into sentiment over his own frustrated ambitions. It's not only unfair to Kerry personally, it's yet another way of undermining the liberal view of public life as a noble calling. To the press corps, Kerry can't be genuinely upset about soldiers, but about his own failure to represent them. Politicians are slick and self-interested, always. At least the conservative agenda is more honest about it. Etc. etc. etc.


On the subject of the perfidity (classism, sexism etc.) of the pundit class, The Daily Howler has also been on a tear this week.