briefly noted
Sep. 7th, 2004 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sisyphusshruggedThe former head of Medicare wrongly tried to keep secret high cost estimates for the Medicare drug benefit and the government should make him pay back his salary for the months of the dispute, the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday.
Medicare's top actuary, Rick Foster, accused ex-Medicare chief Tom Scully of ordering him not to give congressional staff information about his cost estimates of the controversial legislation strongly backed by President Bush.
Foster's estimates ended up $134 billion higher than the $400 billion 10-year price tag from the Congressional Budget Office. Some politicians believe fiscal conservatives would have defeated the bill had they known of the higher cost.
A GAO report found Scully violated an appropriations law by stifling communication between his staff and congressional staff. It said the Department of Health and Human Services should try to recoup a portion of his $145,000 salary.
-----
Pakistan Tuesday dismissed a claim by a U.S. counter-terrorism official that the United States and its allies were closing in on the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden.
Pakistani media Sunday quoted Cofer Black, State Department coordinator for counter-terrorism, as saying that the United States and its allies have put the al Qaeda leader on the defensive, increasing chances of his capture soon.
But Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said Black's remarks were a "political statement."
"We don't have any information about that," Ahmed told Reuters by telephone from Saudi Arabia where he is accompanying Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on an official visit.
Black's comments came just a few days after President Bush, who is standing for re-election in November, said that three-quarters of known al Qaeda leaders have been captured or killed.
-----
An op-ed in today's Washington Post reminds me of something significant that I think has been glossed over: The Schlesinger report on prison abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo contradicts the Bush administration's claim that the infamous 2002 Justice Department memo justifying torture was only "abstract legal theories" that had no effect on policy. In fact, the Schlesinger report notes, the Defense Department "relied heavily" on the legal reasoning in that memo when it drew up a list of interrogation techniques approved for al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Guantánamo. The dots are clearly connected between the White House and abuses at Guantánamo. That the same techniques "migrated" to Iraq suggests, but doesn't prove, a connection.
-----
It's the kind of statement from President Bush that is certain to make its way into the collections of his verbal mixups.
Speaking in Missouri yesterday, Bush was talking about the rising cost of health care, and about frivolous lawsuits.
He told a crowd, ``Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many O-B-G-Y-N's aren't able to practice their, their love with women all across this country.''
-----
According to a list of quotes put out by the Democratic candidate, Keyes said in a radio interview at the Republican National Convention that Jesus would not vote for Obama. The quote was part of a list Obama sent reporters of Keyes' accusations and epithets about him since Keyes became a candidate, NBC5 political editor Dick Kay said.
Kay also reported that Keyes called Obama a "socialist and a liar" on a cable access news show on Monday. Obama said he wants to win big to give Keyes a spanking because Keyes wages a scorched earth campaign. Keyes then went into a very long analysis of the word "spanking" and suggested it might be related to slavery and insulting to African- Americans. He would not answer when asked directly if he was insulted. [that last sentence, parenthetically, is probably the harshest comment I've heard about Keyes thus far]
-----
Almost regardless of what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush is very unlikely to fulfill his promise of reducing the federal budget deficit by half within five years, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said today.
In the last independent assessment of Mr. Bush's fiscal legacy before the elections, the Congressional agency said that if there were no change to existing law, the federal deficit would decline only modestly from a record of $422 billion in 2004 to about $312 billion in 2009.
If Mr. Bush persuades Congress to make his tax cuts permanent, he will fall even farther short of his promise. The federal deficit could reach nearly $500 billion in 2009 and the federal debt could swell by $4.8 trillion over the next decade.
The new estimate is the first time that the Congressional agency has projected that President Bush will not be able to fulfill his promise, made last February, to cut the deficit by half.
Budget projections, by Congress as well as the administration, have been notoriously wrong in the past Ñ failing to anticipate a flood of tax revenue during the last 1990's and then badly underestimating a plunge in revenue after the stock market collapsed in 2000.
But the new report is sobering because it arrives at similar conclusions even when analysts made extremely optimistic assumptions about war costs in Iraq and robust economic growth.
-----
"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.
If Kerry were elected, Cheney said the nation risks falling back into a "pre-9/11 mind-set" that terrorist attacks are criminal acts that require a reactive approach. Instead, he said Bush's offensive approach works to root out terrorists where they plan and train, and pressure countries that harbor terrorists.
Cheney pointed to Afghanistan as a success story in pursuing terrorists although the Sept. 11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden, remains at large. In Iraq, the vice president said, the United States has taken out a leader who used weapons of mass destruction against his own people and harbored other terrorists.
"Saddam Hussein today is in jail, which is exactly where he belongs," Cheney said.
Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards issued a statement, saying, "Dick Cheney's scare tactics crossed the line today, showing once again that he and George Bush will do anything and say anything to save their jobs. Protecting America from vicious terrorists is not a Democratic or Republican issue and Dick Cheney and George Bush should know that."
Edwards added that he and Kerry "will keep American safe, and we will not divide the American people to do it."
-----
Jimmy Carter to Zell Miller: ...Zell, I have known you for forty-two years and have, in the past, respected you as a trustworthy political leader and a personal friend. But now, there are many of us loyal Democrats who feel uncomfortable in seeing that you have chosen the rich over the poor, unilateral preemptive war over a strong nation united with others for peace, lies and obfuscation over the truth, and the political technique of personal character assassination as a way to win elections or to garner a few moments of applause. These are not the characteristics of great Democrats whose legacy you and I have inherited.
-----
President Bush eschewed his customary Labor Day speech to union workers Monday, keeping his focus on national security issues at a campaign rally here as Democratic challenger John F. Kerry tried to turn the election-year debate to jobs and the economy.
Since becoming president, Bush has spent Labor Day with a trade-union audience: Teamsters in Michigan in 2001, carpenters in Pennsylvania in 2002 and operating engineers in Ohio last year. But with the election two months away and labor firmly against him, he observed this Labor Day by taking a bicycle ride at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md., before flying here to address thousands of supporters in this battleground state's rural southeast corner.
-----
There is no excuse for turning away eligible voters at the polls, but that is what apparently happened in Florida's primary elections last week. Under Florida law, registered voters can vote without showing identification. But election officials at some polling places misstated the law and tried to keep eligible voters from voting. In one county, the official sample ballot got the law wrong. Officials in Florida, and nationwide, must improve their poll workers' training and written materials to ensure that this does not happen in the November election.
Florida's voter-identification law is inartfully written. It says photo identification is required at the polls, but it goes on to give voters without such identification an alternative: signing affidavits swearing to their identities. By that reasoning, Florida voters who show up without identification should be told that they can vote as long as they fill out affidavits. But that did not always happen last week.
In Broward and Miami-Dade Counties, poll watchers from People for the American Way saw voters being turned away after being told about half the law - the photo-identification requirement - but not the other half, the affidavit option. In some cases, said Elliot Mincberg, legal director of People for the American Way, poll workers insisted on identification even when they were shown voting-rights leaflets citing the state election law. Some people may never have cast ballots because they were not informed that they had the option to file affidavits.
The misstatement of the law goes beyond a few bad poll workers. Osceola County's sample ballot, mailed out before last week's election, said "Photo and Signature ID Required at Polls," and it did not tell voters they could in fact vote without identification. Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who should be on the voters' side, instead backs this misleading summary of the law. Osceola County's statement is fine, says Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for Ms. Hood. She said the affidavit option in the law was merely a "courtesy to the voter."
-----
Compassionate conservatives focus more on media manipulation than compassion (WSJ):
The Bush administration announced a record increase in next year's Medicare premium for doctor visits -- ahead of a holiday weekend and six weeks earlier than it is typically released.
The increase of $11.60 a month was the largest ever and, at 17.4%, was the biggest percentage rise since 1989*, when an earlier drug-coverage bill was passed and then repealed.
Much of next year's premium increase reflects changes made in the Medicare drug-benefit bill that passed with Mr. Bush's backing. The premium rose 13.5% this year and 8.7% last year.
[...]
In past years, premiums were announced in mid-October, along with changes in Social Security payments to the elderly and disabled. If the administration kept to that schedule this year, the increase would have been announced just ahead of the November election.
-----
I think those of us who have expressed skepticism about the results of the Time and Newsweek polls can consider ourselves vindicated. The new Gallup poll, conducted entirely after the GOP convention and therefore the first poll that truly measures Bush's bounce, shows Bush with a very modest bounce indeed: 2 points, whether you look at RVs or LVs. His support among RVs has risen from 47 percent before to 49 percent after the convention, so that he now leads Kerry by a single point (49-48) rather than trailing by a point.
But that's it. Contrast Bush's 49-48 lead among RVs in this poll to Time's 50-42 Bush lead and, especially, Newsweek's 54-43 Bush lead in the same matchup. Quite a difference.
Note also that Bush's 2 point bounce from his convention (which, remember, is defined as the change in a candidate's level of support, not in margin) is the worst ever received by an incumbent president, regardless of party, and the worst ever received by a Republican candidate, whether incumbent or not (see this Gallup analysis for all the relevant historical data). In 2000, Bush received an 8 point bounce. And even his hapless father received a 5 point bounce in 1992.
So that's the big story, right--Bush got a disappointingly small bounce and the earlier Time/Newsweek polls got it wrong about the bounce and how well Bush is doing. Nope...
-----
...Chances are, I don't want my next door neighbor running the country. I look at the President like I do a doctor - in America, the goal is that anyone should have the opportunity to become a doctor when they grow up. That doesn't mean that you get to take advantage of that promise when you're 32 and you failed high school biology. You may be a nice person, be culturally in tune with a vast swath of the American population, but real life isn't a Disney movie. No matter the populist affinity we might feel for a fictionalized narrative of an "average person" shunted to the presidency, it is not a job that requires an "average person". It requires an exceptional one, or at least the most exceptional one we can reasonably come up with. I don't want the president to be an average person. I don't care what a president eats, what he watches on TV, what his favorite band is. His or her life should be almost nothing like mine if they're doing their job correctly...[I met Jesse at the Tank. What I did expect: he's charming. What I didn't expect: very, very tall. -er than me, even.]
Medicare's top actuary, Rick Foster, accused ex-Medicare chief Tom Scully of ordering him not to give congressional staff information about his cost estimates of the controversial legislation strongly backed by President Bush.
Foster's estimates ended up $134 billion higher than the $400 billion 10-year price tag from the Congressional Budget Office. Some politicians believe fiscal conservatives would have defeated the bill had they known of the higher cost.
A GAO report found Scully violated an appropriations law by stifling communication between his staff and congressional staff. It said the Department of Health and Human Services should try to recoup a portion of his $145,000 salary.
-----
Pakistan Tuesday dismissed a claim by a U.S. counter-terrorism official that the United States and its allies were closing in on the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden.
Pakistani media Sunday quoted Cofer Black, State Department coordinator for counter-terrorism, as saying that the United States and its allies have put the al Qaeda leader on the defensive, increasing chances of his capture soon.
But Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said Black's remarks were a "political statement."
"We don't have any information about that," Ahmed told Reuters by telephone from Saudi Arabia where he is accompanying Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on an official visit.
Black's comments came just a few days after President Bush, who is standing for re-election in November, said that three-quarters of known al Qaeda leaders have been captured or killed.
-----
An op-ed in today's Washington Post reminds me of something significant that I think has been glossed over: The Schlesinger report on prison abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo contradicts the Bush administration's claim that the infamous 2002 Justice Department memo justifying torture was only "abstract legal theories" that had no effect on policy. In fact, the Schlesinger report notes, the Defense Department "relied heavily" on the legal reasoning in that memo when it drew up a list of interrogation techniques approved for al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Guantánamo. The dots are clearly connected between the White House and abuses at Guantánamo. That the same techniques "migrated" to Iraq suggests, but doesn't prove, a connection.
-----
It's the kind of statement from President Bush that is certain to make its way into the collections of his verbal mixups.
Speaking in Missouri yesterday, Bush was talking about the rising cost of health care, and about frivolous lawsuits.
He told a crowd, ``Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many O-B-G-Y-N's aren't able to practice their, their love with women all across this country.''
-----
According to a list of quotes put out by the Democratic candidate, Keyes said in a radio interview at the Republican National Convention that Jesus would not vote for Obama. The quote was part of a list Obama sent reporters of Keyes' accusations and epithets about him since Keyes became a candidate, NBC5 political editor Dick Kay said.
Kay also reported that Keyes called Obama a "socialist and a liar" on a cable access news show on Monday. Obama said he wants to win big to give Keyes a spanking because Keyes wages a scorched earth campaign. Keyes then went into a very long analysis of the word "spanking" and suggested it might be related to slavery and insulting to African- Americans. He would not answer when asked directly if he was insulted. [that last sentence, parenthetically, is probably the harshest comment I've heard about Keyes thus far]
-----
Almost regardless of what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush is very unlikely to fulfill his promise of reducing the federal budget deficit by half within five years, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said today.
In the last independent assessment of Mr. Bush's fiscal legacy before the elections, the Congressional agency said that if there were no change to existing law, the federal deficit would decline only modestly from a record of $422 billion in 2004 to about $312 billion in 2009.
If Mr. Bush persuades Congress to make his tax cuts permanent, he will fall even farther short of his promise. The federal deficit could reach nearly $500 billion in 2009 and the federal debt could swell by $4.8 trillion over the next decade.
The new estimate is the first time that the Congressional agency has projected that President Bush will not be able to fulfill his promise, made last February, to cut the deficit by half.
Budget projections, by Congress as well as the administration, have been notoriously wrong in the past Ñ failing to anticipate a flood of tax revenue during the last 1990's and then badly underestimating a plunge in revenue after the stock market collapsed in 2000.
But the new report is sobering because it arrives at similar conclusions even when analysts made extremely optimistic assumptions about war costs in Iraq and robust economic growth.
-----
"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.
If Kerry were elected, Cheney said the nation risks falling back into a "pre-9/11 mind-set" that terrorist attacks are criminal acts that require a reactive approach. Instead, he said Bush's offensive approach works to root out terrorists where they plan and train, and pressure countries that harbor terrorists.
Cheney pointed to Afghanistan as a success story in pursuing terrorists although the Sept. 11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden, remains at large. In Iraq, the vice president said, the United States has taken out a leader who used weapons of mass destruction against his own people and harbored other terrorists.
"Saddam Hussein today is in jail, which is exactly where he belongs," Cheney said.
Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards issued a statement, saying, "Dick Cheney's scare tactics crossed the line today, showing once again that he and George Bush will do anything and say anything to save their jobs. Protecting America from vicious terrorists is not a Democratic or Republican issue and Dick Cheney and George Bush should know that."
Edwards added that he and Kerry "will keep American safe, and we will not divide the American people to do it."
-----
Jimmy Carter to Zell Miller: ...Zell, I have known you for forty-two years and have, in the past, respected you as a trustworthy political leader and a personal friend. But now, there are many of us loyal Democrats who feel uncomfortable in seeing that you have chosen the rich over the poor, unilateral preemptive war over a strong nation united with others for peace, lies and obfuscation over the truth, and the political technique of personal character assassination as a way to win elections or to garner a few moments of applause. These are not the characteristics of great Democrats whose legacy you and I have inherited.
-----
President Bush eschewed his customary Labor Day speech to union workers Monday, keeping his focus on national security issues at a campaign rally here as Democratic challenger John F. Kerry tried to turn the election-year debate to jobs and the economy.
Since becoming president, Bush has spent Labor Day with a trade-union audience: Teamsters in Michigan in 2001, carpenters in Pennsylvania in 2002 and operating engineers in Ohio last year. But with the election two months away and labor firmly against him, he observed this Labor Day by taking a bicycle ride at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md., before flying here to address thousands of supporters in this battleground state's rural southeast corner.
-----
There is no excuse for turning away eligible voters at the polls, but that is what apparently happened in Florida's primary elections last week. Under Florida law, registered voters can vote without showing identification. But election officials at some polling places misstated the law and tried to keep eligible voters from voting. In one county, the official sample ballot got the law wrong. Officials in Florida, and nationwide, must improve their poll workers' training and written materials to ensure that this does not happen in the November election.
Florida's voter-identification law is inartfully written. It says photo identification is required at the polls, but it goes on to give voters without such identification an alternative: signing affidavits swearing to their identities. By that reasoning, Florida voters who show up without identification should be told that they can vote as long as they fill out affidavits. But that did not always happen last week.
In Broward and Miami-Dade Counties, poll watchers from People for the American Way saw voters being turned away after being told about half the law - the photo-identification requirement - but not the other half, the affidavit option. In some cases, said Elliot Mincberg, legal director of People for the American Way, poll workers insisted on identification even when they were shown voting-rights leaflets citing the state election law. Some people may never have cast ballots because they were not informed that they had the option to file affidavits.
The misstatement of the law goes beyond a few bad poll workers. Osceola County's sample ballot, mailed out before last week's election, said "Photo and Signature ID Required at Polls," and it did not tell voters they could in fact vote without identification. Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who should be on the voters' side, instead backs this misleading summary of the law. Osceola County's statement is fine, says Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for Ms. Hood. She said the affidavit option in the law was merely a "courtesy to the voter."
-----
Compassionate conservatives focus more on media manipulation than compassion (WSJ):
The Bush administration announced a record increase in next year's Medicare premium for doctor visits -- ahead of a holiday weekend and six weeks earlier than it is typically released.
The increase of $11.60 a month was the largest ever and, at 17.4%, was the biggest percentage rise since 1989*, when an earlier drug-coverage bill was passed and then repealed.
Much of next year's premium increase reflects changes made in the Medicare drug-benefit bill that passed with Mr. Bush's backing. The premium rose 13.5% this year and 8.7% last year.
[...]
In past years, premiums were announced in mid-October, along with changes in Social Security payments to the elderly and disabled. If the administration kept to that schedule this year, the increase would have been announced just ahead of the November election.
-----
I think those of us who have expressed skepticism about the results of the Time and Newsweek polls can consider ourselves vindicated. The new Gallup poll, conducted entirely after the GOP convention and therefore the first poll that truly measures Bush's bounce, shows Bush with a very modest bounce indeed: 2 points, whether you look at RVs or LVs. His support among RVs has risen from 47 percent before to 49 percent after the convention, so that he now leads Kerry by a single point (49-48) rather than trailing by a point.
But that's it. Contrast Bush's 49-48 lead among RVs in this poll to Time's 50-42 Bush lead and, especially, Newsweek's 54-43 Bush lead in the same matchup. Quite a difference.
Note also that Bush's 2 point bounce from his convention (which, remember, is defined as the change in a candidate's level of support, not in margin) is the worst ever received by an incumbent president, regardless of party, and the worst ever received by a Republican candidate, whether incumbent or not (see this Gallup analysis for all the relevant historical data). In 2000, Bush received an 8 point bounce. And even his hapless father received a 5 point bounce in 1992.
So that's the big story, right--Bush got a disappointingly small bounce and the earlier Time/Newsweek polls got it wrong about the bounce and how well Bush is doing. Nope...
-----
...Chances are, I don't want my next door neighbor running the country. I look at the President like I do a doctor - in America, the goal is that anyone should have the opportunity to become a doctor when they grow up. That doesn't mean that you get to take advantage of that promise when you're 32 and you failed high school biology. You may be a nice person, be culturally in tune with a vast swath of the American population, but real life isn't a Disney movie. No matter the populist affinity we might feel for a fictionalized narrative of an "average person" shunted to the presidency, it is not a job that requires an "average person". It requires an exceptional one, or at least the most exceptional one we can reasonably come up with. I don't want the president to be an average person. I don't care what a president eats, what he watches on TV, what his favorite band is. His or her life should be almost nothing like mine if they're doing their job correctly...[I met Jesse at the Tank. What I did expect: he's charming. What I didn't expect: very, very tall. -er than me, even.]
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-07 09:37 pm (UTC)