Texas In Red & Blue

Strange, but true … I think I found more votes from the 2010 election. The bad news is that they were in Lubbock County.

One of the even-better things about redistricting years is that the State Data Center has an added push to get election data in from every county in order to make with the redistricting reports and whatnot. Normally, I’d be waiting for this bit of info for another month or two. But I’m presently about 2 days away from finishing up a precinct map of the entire state.

For now, enjoy the regional preview above.

HCDP Blueprint Liveblog

I’m here, I’m ready. Everything else about the meeting is running on Democratic Party time, which means that we’ll probably be kicking off the speechifying in about 20 more minutes.

12:20 … Jeff Weems kicking things off now.

12:22 … just threw a spitball at William-Paul Thomas from Annise Parker’s office. It begins!

12:27 … Bob Stein up first from the panel discussion. His topic: Hispanic voting. He pegs Hispanic turnout at about 5 points under the overall turnout level in the county. He also suggests that there is a registration issue that is more of a barrier to voting than simple turnout. As luck would have it, I spent some quality time with the Census’ Statistical Abstract that lends a lot of credence to that at the national level. You can rest assured that I’ll be posting on that afterwards.

12:30 … Continuing from Stein. He suggests that a large variable for their registration is due to the fact that they move more often. Good point that warrants some research.

12:32 … Keir Murray up now. He’s singing from my hymnal, that 2010 was a turnout election. Dem precincts turned out fairly better than 2002, but many GOP precincts turned out closer to Presidential year levels. There’s a lot of factors that go into determining what created that differential, but that also means that there are a lot of things that get fixed for 2012 due to the simple fact that it’s a Presidential election once again.

12:36 … Kuff is next up. Bullet point takeaway: “Don’t Panic.” It’s a perfect segue from Keir’s point that, as hard as it may seem to believe, there was a lot of good that happened in terms of Dem turnout. But there’s also a demographic element to what holds out hope on the horizon for Dems. That leads to the fact that there are a lot more pockets of Dem voters in GOP State Rep districts.

12:40 … Gerry Birnberg wraps up by telling everyone to get to work at the breakout sessions. As for his presentation, he highlights the fact that Presidential turnout is a very different world than what we had in 2010. Another point Birnberg makes is that nobody on earth was ever predicting turnout of 700k in the county. And the fact was that we had nearly 800k. That’s a big result of the turnout differential and a sign of how skewed those results make the last election.

12:47 … A little bit of a debate going on now about the priority that voter reg work is warranted. Birnberg takes a bit of an issue with Stein’s presentation saying that registering voters isn’t the sole answer and doesn’t fully account for the lack of votes we need. Kuff adds that there is a need to re-register a lot of folks due to the mobility. I’ll get into this a bit after the sessions.

1:35 … It was standing-room only at the Hispanic Outreach table, with Councilmember Ed Gonzalez. Lot of ideas (good and bad). Several reports about the work people did in their precinct to “get people out” in a Presidential election year. No talk about the work that CNN, Fox News, and other local news outlets did to generate that turnout. But never let it be said that success has a thousand fathers, while failure remains an orphan. Not sure a lot was learned, as the one person spotted in attendance with the best track record I know of (name witheld) didn’t say a word. Maybe that’s why he’s the smart one.

1:40 … a moment of silence was held for Congressman Gabrielle Giffords.

1:45 … at the New Media session now.

2:30 … Second session now wrapped up – these are usually not as active as the first session of the day, but we got a lot of feedback from older activists for more training. Of course, that was something the Bill White campaign did pretty aggressively with the Bill White Universities around the state in 2010.

3:00 … making our way through the session summaries from each of the facilitator groups. In other words, everyone has thoroughly vented and they’re still kinda hungry since they haven’t had a real lunch. OK, the last part may just be me. But the crowd has thinned out considerably, that much is true.

Follow-up Point: Hispanic Turnout & Registration.
Below is a screen cap of the Census Department’s new Statistical Abstract, pertaining to levels of voter registration and actual voter turnout among different ethnic groups and races. This isn’t the same as the traditional election analysis and relies on a variety of methods, such as sampling and self-reporting, that make the comparison to raw election numbers slightly hazy. Still, they’re the best available numbers collected at the national level and the whole Abstract is worth wasting some time with on whatever category you like to have your data to go with. To see more on the Elections section, here’s the chapter for that in PDF form.

The comparison to Asians, I think is a bit different here in Texas, where I suspect the numbers may be higher than Hispanic numbers. At a minimum, I don’t think the national trend reflects the communities in SW Houston and Ft. Bend County, who tend to vote like crazy.

The difference between naturalized and native Hispanics is interesting, but makes some logical sense as I think about it. But the difference between White and Hispanic on each of the categories suggests to me that there might be more reasons than the lack of a voter reg program or “lack of engagement” that accounts for the difference.

Saturday Blueprinting

For the partisans out there ….

If you’re free Saturday, the Harris County Democratic Party will be hosting a big confab for activist kvetching. I participated in this in 2004 and while there’s a lot of predictable nonsense that you get with this sort of thing, there’s usually an ounce or two of good that also comes from it if you’re patient enough to sit through enough of it.

I forget if the CWA Hall has wifi. If so, I’ll try to do some semi-live blogging from it. If not, expect a less occasional update or two during the day (assuming I get my phone tethered to the laptop). Someone’s gotta keep track of all the nutty things Kuff is likely to say. If you plan on making it out to this, feel free to shout out a howdy or something.

A Blueprint for a Blue Harris County, is a Democrats-only event scheduled for this Saturday, January 8th from 12:00 – 3:00 p.m. at the CWA Union Hall (1730 Jefferson St. Houston, TX 77003). The Party knows that starting the process now is critical for Democratic success in Harris County in 2012. Join fellow Democrats as we discuss what we’ve learned from the 2010 election and where we go from here.

…

The Party is honored to have Dr. Robert Stein, Keir Murray, Charles Kuffner, and HCDP Chair Gerry Birnberg analyze the November 2010 General Election in an opening panel moderated by Jeff Weems and Sheriff Adrian Garcia and County Attorney Vince Ryan to moderate our closing panel. To learn more about the break-out sessions that will be offered and to pre-register for the event, click here.

Tom Vandergriff, 1926-2010

» DMN: Tom Vandergriff, 84; longtime mayor transformed Arlington, brought Texas Rangers to city

Some sad news from late last week …

Tom Vandergriff – synonymous with nearly everything that is Arlington – died Thursday at Texas Health Harris Methodist Fort Worth hospital.

He was 84.

The former longtime mayor played a leading role in transforming the town he loved from a community of 8,000 people to a city that’s home to the Texas Rangers, a General Motors assembly plant, the University of Texas at Arlington and a thriving tourism industry.

My first knowledge of Tom Vandergriff was after the 1984 election. I had opted to take Government class a year earlier than we were required to in High School in order to take it during a Presidential campaign year. Vandergriff got swept away after one term of office by a then-unknown Dick Armey. It was my first introduction to wave elections and disparity between Vandergriff and Armey in terms of name recognition and significance was instructive.

There’s hardly a facet of Arlington that doesn’t follow from Vandergriff’s vision for the city. Even though he wasn’t mayor when the Dallas Cowboys were looking to relocate, I think it’s safe to say that the only reason Arlington made a good fit for the new stadium was because of the decades of groundwork that had been done to make Arlington a sports and recreation haven. While I’m not one to agree with much of the sports building bonanza of recent years, it still registers as a shame that the old man didn’t hang on long enough to see the Super Bowl played in his hometown.

On the Use of Out-Dated Terminology …

» Chron: Metro extends transfer times

It doesn’t seem that the writer of this article knew a great deal about boarding a METRO bus …

Bus and light rail riders will have more time to transfer from ride to ride on one fare starting Saturday.

The change approved by the Metropolitan Transit Authority board gives riders three hours to board buses and rail cars from the moment of purchase of a fare.

Previously they only had two hours. Any transfer after that time, even if the rider was continuing toward a single destination, required another ticket.

I realize everyone that boards METRO hasn’t bought into the whole Q-card concept since it’s been in place. But during that time, the only means of transferring for free have never involved a “ticket.” Likewise, the concept of “purchase of a fare” goes out the window, save for those who pay with bills and loose change each trip.

That said, someone please alert my co-workers that I will now be dawdling on the bus routes for an extra hour each day now instead of arriving at work bright and early in the morning. I may or may not bring back some souvenirs from the Ship Channel.

Straight Outta Norristown

» Philly.com: Norristown shuns apartment dwelling

Behold, the oddities of Section 8 housing …

The Schuylkill Overlook Apartments – with 49 proposed, professionally managed rental units – sounds like just the type of housing complex many struggling communities would welcome in the midst of the current economic downturn.

Or so developer John Randolph thought.

Not so in Norristown, where some officials have not exactly brought out the welcome wagon.

The $12.3 million project, backed by government low-income tax credits, would require tenants to make less than 60 percent of Montgomery County’s median income – or $54,000 annually.

And that is just the type of income-restricted property Norristown is trying to limit within its borders, said Council President William Caldwell, a Democrat.

I find it a bit confounding that there’s an objection on the part of any city to discourage people in the $50k/yr salary range from moving into town. I’m well aware that the cost of living in the Philadelphia area is substantially higher than here in Houston, but still.

But this story is a decent overview of how you have a program that has actually done a fairly decent job of spreading out the middle class. Among the problems, of course, are findings that the same programs help spread out crime. And that gets a much more visceral reaction than anything else.

The negative reactions like this are becoming more and more common. Whether it represents a more widespread backlash or just allows projects like this to land elsewhere where fewer objections are raised remains to be seen. Hard data would be helpful on this.

The Blue State Digital Acquisition

» TechCrunch: WPP Buys Obama’s Campaign Agency Blue State Digital

I’m sure this is a bit of insider-ey news, but since I’m still recovering from the past two years of working with Blue State Digital tools from the last campaign, this obviously caught my attention in a big way. For the time being, I don’t know if this is a good, neutral, or bad move on the part of BSD being a very capable advocacy toolkit for progressive and Democratic campaigns or if it will lead to the neutralization of the firm’s work, moving it more in the direction of Convio. In either case, I have a hard time seeing them make any severe adjustments before their cash cow of the Obama campaign runs it’s course in 2012. So it’s a long time coming before we’ll know if BSD or another firm is standing as king of the hill for having the best possible system. With the cash/skill infusion BSD just got, I think I’d bet on them still holding the crown by then.

As a way of characterizing the overall industry these guys work in, I’ll simply say that there were a number of us involved with the campaign who were at the conclusion that BSD was the best vendor possible for campaign advocacy tool … but that was saying more about the state of the industry than it was about BSD’s product. While they were good, the work reminds me of a lot of programming work that I’d done in the past: it gets the job done, it’s good, but boy is the organization of the database and overall richness of the product’s “wiring” not that great. There’s some obvious room for improvement, so here’s hoping those guys invest wisely in making them.

Reforming High Risk Reform

» Wash. Post: Health plans for high-risk patients attracting fewer, costing more than expected

There’s a lot to take from this article, so by all means read the whole thing. The lack of enrollment strikes me as somewhat related to a point I made yesterday. But in this case, there were certainly hard numbers to go by for projecting demand for this. And it’s for that reason that I focus on the cost of the insurance as a central point of interest:

… Will Wilson, 57, of Chicago said he is “really, really, really, really discouraged.” After he received an AIDS diagnosis in 2002, he discovered that his insurance at the time paid only $1,500 for medicine each year. His AIDS drugs cost $3,000 a month. He ended up in bankruptcy.

…

Wilson became an activist for health reform, circulating petitions, going to demonstrations. And the day after the president signed the bill into law, a Chicago Sun-Times column quoted him as saying, “I’ve had a grin on my face all day” at the prospect of the high-risk pool he could join. That was before the rates were announced in July and Wilson discovered that the premium – nearly $600 a month – “was almost as much as my rent. It was like, no way! I was floored.”

The law contains rules to make the high-risk pools more affordable than older ones that many states have run; the new ones cannot charge more in premiums than the average premium for other individual insurance in a given state. But “the individual market is expensive,” said Jean P. Hall, a University of Kansas researcher studying the new plans. “From my perspective, it is not a good match for people who have expensive conditions.”

There are several “bridge” programs already enacted as part of the ACA – temporary plans designed to bridge the high cost of ultimately shoving customers into whatever part of the insurance market they belong in by subsidizing them. The Early Retiree Reinsurance Program is a good example – so good that even opponents of it are signing up. I’m not sure why this isn’t done here as it seems like a textbook case for temporary subsidization.

Given the enrollment gap, it’ll be interesting to see how much of the difference can be made up in marketing of the program and how much of it will remain because of the cost. I’d still expect to see a big gap when it all averages out. And bear in mind – the individual cost for this program is presumably lower than market. If so, that should suggest that there might be more than purely economic factors that work on whether people get insurance. And I don’t think it’s because they’re all sitting around thinking “Meh, the government will pick up the tab.”

Necessary and Proper

» NY Times: Terrain Shifts in Challenges to the Health Care Law

In case you were wondering what lines of argumentation the SCOTUS might look at the individual mandate on, here’s the smart money pick:

The cases, which are presumed to be headed to the Supreme Court, center on whether Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce is so expansive that it can require citizens to buy health insurance. But as the litigation advances, the “necessary and proper” clause is taking on greater prominence in briefs and oral arguments, with the Obama administration asserting that it shelters the insurance mandate and state officials arguing that it buries it.

It certainly makes sense. The Dem judges who have upheld the mandate have seemingly accepted the premise that inability to purchase health insurance is an action of it’s own nature – that you are acting to have someone else pick up the tab when you ultimately go to the hospital. And they’ve also accepted the point that follows that – that mandating purchase of insurance is within the realm of “necessary and proper” in order to regulate that form of interstate commerce.

Now, I don’t think there’s anything to this that negates the fact that the decision will be made on political grounds – that’s why it’s a safer assumption that Alito, Roberts, Scalia, et al will overturn this portion of the law. We know what color their uniforms are and the fact that some have written opinions that would otherwise stand to be glowing in their support of something like the health insurance mandate … we all know that they won’t rule to uphold it. But even still, they’ll have to base their argument on something and it certainly seems like the biggest opening for a court to rule on grounds that are murky regardless of how clearly Robert Bork thinks that Madison, Jefferson, and the gang addressed all this in the 18th century.

What I’m curious about is this: Of those people who don’t purchase health insurance, how many actually end up going to a hospital and leaving the bill for someone else to pick up? I obviously don’t doubt that several do and that the cost of doing so is painfully real to governments at all levels. But what’s the ballpark here? 90%? … 50%? … 20%? Bear in mind that several people end up paying their hospital bills and that some pay back partially. But this strikes me (even if only me) as central to defining whether or not the method is really “necessary and proper” from a policy perspective.

My inclination is to pick the low end of the range – and possibly lower than any of the options I’ve listed. And that fuels a bit of why I think the mandate is wrong on policy – just because you have the hammer to fix something (the mandate) doesn’t mean that the problem in need of a solution (uninsured leaving govt with health care tabs) is indeed a nail.

What Would You Say You Do Here?

» Orlando Sentinel: Can NASA compete with SpaceX?

If the competition doesn’t test for “bureaucratic wargames” … probably not.

Aerospace-industry executives, NASA contractors and employees all warn that unless the storied agency can become leaner and more efficient in an era of shrinking federal budgets, it could find itself becoming a historical footnote.

“NASA and industry need to partner together to change our approach,” says Jim Maser, the president of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, which has designed virtually every rocket engine used by NASA since the dawn of the space program.

Over the past six years, NASA has spent nearly $10 billion on the Ares I rocket and Orion capsule — its own version more or less of what SpaceX has launched — and came up with little more than cost overruns and technical woes. In October, Congress scrapped the Constellation moon program and ordered the agency to start over to design a rocket and capsule capable of taking humans to explore the solar system.

Maser warns that, without reforms, NASA will simply repeat the Constellation experience.

It’s interesting that the writer uses as a source, someone with a vested interest in keeping the federal money train going as-is. Just with a little partnering and reforms and whatnot.

What’s more interesting as the incoming House GOP is primed to craft their own budget shortly after taking office in January is whether we see any honest discussion over the future of NASA … or just more talk about how school kids are jazzed up for math classes because of its mere existence. Personally, I think it’s the easiest hypocrisy test for the incoming Congressional freshmen.

Here We Go, All Over Again

» NY Times: Obama Returns to End-of-Life Plan That Caused Stir

When parody writes itself …

Several Democratic members of Congress, led by Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, had urged the administration to cover end-of-life planning as a service offered under the Medicare wellness benefit. A national organization of hospice care providers made the same recommendation.

Mr. Blumenauer, the author of the original end-of-life proposal, praised the rule as “a step in the right direction.”

“It will give people more control over the care they receive,” Mr. Blumenauer said in an interview. “It means that doctors and patients can have these conversations in the normal course of business, as part of our health care routine, not as something put off until we are forced to do it.”

After learning of the administration’s decision, Mr. Blumenauer’s office celebrated “a quiet victory,” but urged supporters not to crow about it.

“While we are very happy with the result, we won’t be shouting it from the rooftops because we aren’t out of the woods yet,” Mr. Blumenauer’s office said in an e-mail in early November to people working with him on the issue. “This regulation could be modified or reversed, especially if Republican leaders try to use this small provision to perpetuate the ‘death panel’ myth.”

Moreover, the e-mail said: “We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists, even if they are ‘supporters’ — e-mails can too easily be forwarded.”

I’m not sure Rep. Blumenauer gets the concept of email. Once it’s out there … it’s out there. And asking people to keep a secret is usually a big fat tipoff that there’s something in the email that might be worth your friendly media contact’s interest. Welcome to the new millenium, Earl.

Of course, now that the crazies were given a nice Christmas Day present by the New York Times (they of the so-called “liberal” media) and Congressman Blumenauer, perhaps we can revisit the whole concept of how the so-called “death panels” were intellectualized by think tank partisans and rightwing bloggers far and wide as they tried to rationalize the tweetings and the facebookings of Sarah Palin. The jist is simple: any government cuts to health care represent evil decisions for those likeliest to suffer: “the sick, the elderly, the disabled, of course.” So now that GOP gains have been made in statehouses from nearly-coast to oh-so-close-to-coast, let’s see how that logic holds up as Rick Perry attempts to rationalize his cuts in health care spending cuts, just as we will for Bobby Jindal’s, or for newly-minted Oklahoma Governor-elect, Mary Fallin. Will their cuts be any more humane? Just wait and see what the Palin apologists contort themselves into believing in January. To the surprise of nobody, it will be the exact opposite of what they beleived in June 2009.

The Future is Mobile, But What Do People Do With Mobile?

» techPresident: Politics is Mobile, According to New Pew Report
» Pew: Politics goes mobile [pdf]

Good read here. The headline stats from the survey are as follows:

14% of all American adults used their cell phones to tell others that they had voted.
12% of adults used their cell phones to keep up with news about the election or politics.
10% of adults sent text messages relating to the election to friends, family members and others.
6% of adults used their cells to let others know about conditions at their local voting stations on election day, including insights about delays, long lines, low turnout, or other issues.
4% of adults used their phones to monitor results of the election as they occurred.
3% of adults used their cells to shoot and share photos or videos related to the election.
1% of adults used a cell-phone app that provided updates from a candidate or group about election news.
1% of adults contributed money by text message to a candidate or group connected to the election like a party or interest group.

On the whole, 26% of those surveyed “used their phones in one way or another to connect to the elections around the country.” So there’s some obvious overlap in terms of them taking multiple forms of activity. There’s zero doubt in my mind that 2012 will be a big election in terms of mobile phones being used by campaigns. The biggest question, however, is what that use will be.

Of the items listed above, only one stands out as an obvious inflated number: the 6% that use their cells to talk about conditions at their polling place. Maybe there’s something I don’t know about how people communicate that bit of information, but I’m not inclined to believe that number is above 2%. The big stat that people like me can expect to hear over and over from the sales pitches is the rate of African-American and Hispanic users (61% overall).

The biggest question that I don’t see answered here is the breakdown of people who use their phones for reading email and web (separately) versus those that only use it for viewing/listening purposes. My sense is that the readership portion, excluding those who just check on emails, is very small. A quick check on any bus line during rush hour should confirm this.

The significance is that mobile campaigning won’t catch on until either the percentage of active readers starts to climb or the way in which political videos are created and distributed for campaign purposes changes. Neither seems to be on the launching pad so far.

Reading, of course, is a pretty easy carry-over from the usual methods of campaign communications. You create a mobile version of the website and people read the content. Or you send the usual form of campaign email and people read it. Nothing dramatically different from those who engage the same way via laptop or desktop, just a smaller screen and less chance that the reader is in a position to kick back and relax while reading whatever important message of the day a campaign has to impart.

Video is trickier. The means of creating it are certainly more widespread than before and both Presidential campaigns made good use of the medium in 2008. But you have to ask how those videos will be discovered by end users in order for the medium to be maximized. I do not believe that text messages are the way this will happen. There are simply too few numbers in any database to get any kind of bang for the buck on sending a text message. Aside from that, text delivery is very fleeting. There’s no equivalent of the inbox to search through for favorite texts. If something were to change in the short term, I think it would be to split emails three ways: one for HTML, one for text, and one for mobile. The mobile version can be shorter and more to the point to getting someone to watch the video. That may require some catching up on browser protocols, but it’s very doable within the next year or so.

It would also be helpful to understand how people view video on a mobile phone as opposed to how they do this when in front of a screen. Timing for screen viewing is usually about 60-90 seconds for optimal messaging. I’d expect that to be lower for mobile. That could mean that creating multiple forms of the same message to fit the medium will be required.

It’s already common to think of email messaging in terms of how you want an HTML version to look and how you want the text version to look. It’s not uncommon for some parts of the message to be buried in text where they may jump out in HTML. In a perfect world, there would be slight modifications to the message to alleviate that problem. But it rarely happens since the text version will only be viewed by around 5% of the universe. If the overall numbers are there for mobile, it may force the issue. And forcing the issue with video is a bit more time-consuming than just moving words and paragraphs around.

The first step of this process has already been seen with the advent of online video ad placements. With those ads, an admaker now has to think in terms of editing a :15 second version of the ad they were just paid handsomely to do for :30. Invariably, there are tradeoffs and it’s not unheard of to lose parts of an ad that are otherwise deemed critical for the :30 version.

Whether the copy or video that’s optimized for mobile readers/viewers is something of an after-thought or gets the attention it’s likely going to be warranted in 2012 will be more worth watching than whether the mediums get engaged by Presidential and other campaigns.

In Response to Galston

» TNR: No Labels, No Apology (William Galston)

I have to admit, this doesn’t read like Bill Galston’s usual work. He’s usually above the pattern of smacking down the stawmen of others only to lean heavily on those of his own making. At issue are the weakest parts of Frank Rich, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olberman, and George Will. But what does Galston, himself, open with?

Polarization, they say, is a wonderful thing, and those who would weaken it are at best deluded and naïve. Civility is a euphemism for the prissy repression of uninhibited democratic discourse, and the self-appointed speech police should butt out. Parties exist for a reason, and if right now that reason is to beat each other’s brains out, who are we to object?

Nary a direct quote among those sentences, you’ll note. The crux of Galston’s defense of the NoLabels movement, however, is contained here:

How are we to proceed when the two political parties are more polarized than at any time since the 1890s and either party can hope to get its unfettered way for very long? Our real choices reduce to two: gridlock, or the kind of sustained and open-minded conversation between the parties that we haven’t seen in a long time. The proponents of gridlock aren’t paying attention to our country’s decline, at home and abroad. They think that time is still on our side and that we can afford to waste the next two years in partisan fighting. It isn’t, and we can’t.

That leaves compromise, which can be achieved only through negotiation. To negotiate is not to leave one’s principles behind; it is to behave the way serious politicians must. It is to adopt what Max Weber called the “ethic of responsibility”—a concern for the consequences of one’s actions—as opposed to the “ethic of intention,” which focuses on maintaining the purity of one’s principles and the spotlessness of one’s soul. Taking responsibility for the wellbeing of the country as a whole means acknowledging that on occasion the demands of partisanship must give way. That proposition—which is neither vacuous nor trivial—is at the core of No Labels. I’d be happy to debate it with Mr. Will, anywhere, anytime.

Where to start? The fact that then-President Clinton passed through the single biggest initiator of economic progress without a single Republican vote in 1993? Or more recently, with the fact that the signature bipartisan accomplishment of the post-election period – the “tax cut stimulus” – only came about after the GOP leadership pitched a fit over tax cuts being more important than national security.

Galston notes that negotiation does not require one to leave their principles behind. What’s lacking is a description of what it looks like to defend those principles. And what distinguishes something from being “gridlock” versus an “ethic of responsibility” is not defined by those acting with said ethic. Instead, it’s defined most loudly by the media proponents of gridlock.

Lastly, it’s not like there’s been a shortage of Democratic electeds to sit down and exhibit that “ethic of responsibility.” Think back to the health care debate. It was President Obama who insisted for the longest time that the only bill he wanted was a bipartisan bill. It was Max Baucus who negotiated with Charles Grassley to make that happen. Did Obama or Baucus change course? No, it was Grassley. So it’s all fine and well to want to sit down and chat with everyone on all sides of the issue. But when one side either doesn’t want to do so, or only does so with the intent achieve gridlock, the bigger question seems to be why there is a willingness to either create a false equivalency in equating Olberman with Limbaugh and also why there’s an unwillingness to address the real problem: that there is one side that is worse than the other on this.

I don’t claim to have watched the entirety of the bland-arama that was the NoLabels launch. But what I did catch didn’t seem to acknowledge that last point. As one who’s actually burned some shoe leather in politics, I fully recognize that the vast majority of Democratic voters aren’t yearning for more partisanship. But there’s also not a great yearning for someone to open a big ol’ can of compromise on the other party. Indeed, there are specific things that both parties want to accomplish that are mutually exclusive of each other. And what the NoLabels movement fails to address is what happens when those aren’t reconcilable. After all, standing up for compromise isn’t the same as standing up for an idea.

The Conduit Bond Piggy Bank

A four-parter by the FW Star-Telegram on Tarrant County’s “sideline business” of financing projects throughout Texas …

» Part 1: Thanks to Tarrant County, risky deals for projects statewide gain financing
» Part 2: Assisted-living facility made possible by tax-exempt bonds fell into ‘anarchy’
» Part 3: Conflict-of-interest concerns raised about advisers in bond deals
» Part 4: Conduit bond defaults have officials talking regulation, greater disclosure of risk
» Sidebar: Conduit bonds are lucrative for arsenal of advisers

An amputated handful of thoughts on this:

- It’s interesting to see the Star-Telegram get some insight into the issue from outgoing Harris County Commissioner Sylvia Garcia. Tarrant County isn’t the only one doing this line of work. As the sidebar article points out, Harris County has even gone somewhat out of the norm of financing assisted living centers and helping to expand the NASA space center. One of the reasons I suspect that Commissioner Garcia was approached was due to one of the Tarrant County projects being one that Harris County declined to back. Needless to say, there might be some questions here for the local paper to pick up on. Like: are our county’s conduit bonds doing a better, worse, similar job of backing out-of-county projects? That’s one aspect that’s not fully spelled out in the Star-Telegram series. While it does certainly open the door to a lot of questions, it might be worth a few more aimed at finding out the reasons why such out-of-county projects are backed. One tidbit from the sidebar of the first article is this: “If the project is in another county, officials there must vote their agreement.” That tells me that Harris County voted to support the project they declined to back, but Tarrant County did. I’m curious if there were any yellow or red flags waived on this particular deal, but it should be noted that the Baytown project in question is not technically in foreclosure – yet.

- It’s not unusual that this method is employed to back things like nursing homes, hospitals, or even schools. I’ll play agnostic for the time being on whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. On the surface, it would certainly seem to me that it makes more sense to just have a single county, municipality, or taxing entity back projects that ultimately are backed by said county, municipality, or taxing entity. Does the resulting situation of multiple sources of tax-free funding offer any particular benefit? I’d like to hear, if so.

- Obviously the reason this is in the news – to the very minor extent that it actually is – is that there is a push to have the sales regulated in some form or another (Part Four gets into this). There’s also the ranking of Tarrant County as a bigger-than-normal player in this field. The early amount of homework I’ve put into the topic seems to indicate that there is a higher level of default for this type of bond than other municipal bonds and that the various types of bonds are sometimes lumped together to show a greater risk of muni-bonds in general. That’s clearly not good for the standard, garden-variety of muni-bonds. The most visible suggestion I’m able to find for what type of regulation would be to have these bonds registered and disclosed in the same manner as they would if they weren’t issued without municipal backing. That still leaves the bond to be issued tax-free and with the same quasi-backing of the government entity they now possess. I’m curious to know what the objection to that would be.

- The conflict-of-interest issues, I’m not familiar with. Certainly, there’s plenty in this series that doesn’t seem to pass a smell test. For the time being, I’d rather have all those fees disclosed and encourage county government to more fully publicize what debt risks are on the books via this and any other bond issues. My hunch is that the magnitude of this type of bond isn’t the biggest ticket item on the books. But it would still be nice to know what we have on the books, what the default rates look like, who’s managing oversight, and what kind of legal exposure there might be. Assuming that there’s honest interest in “running government like a business,” I’d expect no problem with that.

While You’re Waiting for the Tea Party Reports of Election Fraud in 2010 …

» Charlotte News-Observer: Reliable registration is key to voting (John Tanner)

John Tanner is a former Justice Dep’t official who helped work to get Vietnamese translation instituted in Harris County during the Bush administration. He tends to turn up in a lot of ways, sometimes making news for good things and sometimes not. So think of him what you will. For now, I’ll merely point out the right-leaning tilt of his snarkiness in this op-ed and the fact that he served as head of the Voting Rights department at Justice under George W. Bush. And with that said, much (though certainly not all) of what he writes in this op-ed rings true to my way of thinking.

His take here on voter registration is pretty useful. While Harris County voter rolls have been scrubbed of much of the problem that Tanner writes about for a North Carolina audience, I think there’s still a great deal of merit to centralizing the process of adding accurate information to election officials with the click of a mouse rather than from a pen-to-postcard-to-post-office-to-election-office-to-data-entry-person-to-election-computer method that’s presently employed. That is … if we’re really interested in eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse from the budget, right?

For all the nonsensical yammering about the problem of too many people voting that comes from the right, it would seem that there would be some interest in streamlining and perfecting the process. I’ve yet to hear any of that and Tanner makes some pretty practical recommendations for accomplishing this.

About That Tilde …

It’s hilarious seeing where GOP bloggers see “media bias.” Case in point:

PerryvsWorld:

First, notice that liberal bloggers have made it a point to always use Pena instead of Peña. What word did Slater use repeatedly?

Texas Republican Party:

Before a standing room only, packed house of reporters, officeholders and party officials, RPT Chairman Steve Munisteri today led off a press conference announcing that State Rep. Allan Ritter and State. Rep. Aaron Pena were switching to the Republican Party.

In fact, the Texas GOP site goes on to use the tilde-less Peña in the title and four instances within their post. I guess we’ve once and for all proven the liberal bias of the Republican Party, now?

Personally, I use the tilde version when time permits (example) and tend not to sweat it being omitted when I’m trying to crank something out in a hurry (example) on my gringo-only keyboard. It just strikes me as typically inane to see the GOP types looking for bias where there isn’t any.

The Real Meaning of Cutting Government

» TNR: The GOP’s Strange Ideas About Helping the Poor

Two highlights from this:

Medicaid may not provide great access to care. But it does provide access — access its recipients very much need and that, according to research, has measurably improved their health. In what may be the most well-known study of its kind, economists Janet Currie and Jonathan Gruber found large expansions of Medicaid during the 1980s and early 1990s “significantly increased the utilization of medical care, particularly care delivered in physicians’ offices,” leading to “significant” reductions in both infant and child mortality.

Words to remember when you hear a Republican talk about being “pro-life.”

And then there’s the broader point …

Like every health insurance program in the country, private and public, it could do more to promote the management of chronic disease. Fraud demands more vigilance, particularly from the states. But, by far, the best way to improve Medicaid would be to give it more money per beneficiary — so that it pays providers something closer to what Medicare and private insurance pay. Do that and those Medicaid patients in Baton Rouge would get care that looks more like the treatment people with good insurance receive.

Is this what Cassidy, Perry and the other Medicaid critics want to do — to spend more money on the poor? It doesn’t appear so. In general, the people attacking Medicaid want to spend less on the program. And while critics sometimes argue private insurance could deliver coverage more cost effectively, the claim is hard to fathom. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KHN is a program of the Foundation), Medicaid spends on average $2,500 per year for non-elderly adults — roughly half what a single person pays today for a private health insurance premium. (That’s the upside of a program that pays doctors and hospitals so little. It’s very cheap to run.)

Cutting government is all fine and well when it’s expressed in the hypothetical. If the State of Texas were to opt out of Medicaid, the costs don’t go away. And they certainly don’t get zeroed out. In fact, the likelier scenario is that costs go up as they shift from the state to the county. It’ll be real interesting to hear what some of those new GOP County Judges think about the cost being shifted to them.

This is one of the central fallacies with conservatism, of course – the belief that you can just wish away societal costs. The reality is that someone still picks up the tab. So you can’t just wish everyone into the limited classroom walls of a KIPP Academy while ignoring that there’s a reason for educating all children. And you can’t wish away Medicaid costs (or, if you’re the doctor, wish away the skinflint reimbursement rates) while ignoring that there’s a reason for providing basic and emergency care at some level. Now, if the GOP has a list of doctors that are willing to make up the cuts with pro-bono work and produce a list of qualified teachers willing to work for less than what current teachers are offered, by all means, let’s see it happen. Otherwise, the only real cost-savings will be if we refuse to educate kids and keep people healthy.

More Bad to Come?

If you think Citizens United is the worst that the Roberts Court can do … or if you think the impending haircut of health care reform is the worst … it’s not. They’ll eventually take up the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act as well.

There. Let that simmer.