Boffoblog

Wrong Crisis

Sure, there's an entitlement crisis looming, just not the one Bush wants us to obsess over.  The World Health Care Congress is meeting in Washington, and one of the speakers today was CBO chief Douglas Holtz-Eakin.  Reuters reports that the message he gave to health care industry bigwigs and mediumwigs was that Medicare, not Social Security, poses a looming fiscal crisis.  Whaaa...?

Worse, he was so off-message that he might as well have been speaking Manx.  He said that current efforts by HHS to lower health care costs and reduce the program's burden amounted to "baby steps."  He also said that, well, let's listen:

There is not a single item -- technology, disease  management and tort law reform -- that is the answer.

Tort reform isn't the answer?  But that's the magic fairy dust that will cure everything from health costs to the current accounts deficit!  Can't trust a nonpartisan economist to say the right things anymore, can you?

Oh, those darn facts are ever the more inconvenient!

Addendum: On Wednesday, the Senate Finance Committee holds hearings on Social Security and Holtz-Eakin will testify alongside SSA Chief Actuary Stephen Goss.  This will be one to track.

Civil Service Defense

It looks like Bush has hit yet another snag in selling his agenda to fellow Republicans on the Hill.  Recall a few days ago we heard about proposals to further erode civil service protections beyond Homeland Security to the entire federal civilian workforce.

It looks like the two chairs with responsibility over such a change are not hot on the idea.  CongressDaily reports (and Government Executive reprints) that Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and Tom Davis, chair of the House Committee on Government Reform, see no need to rush headlong into the restructuring.  Collins see the rules at DHS as an "experiment" rather than a blueprint.  It helps that, as Republicans go, Collins and Davis tend to be among the reasonable ones most of the time.

Waxman, ranking Dem on Govt Reform, notes that Bush's original rationale for the civil service exceptions -- the needs of defense and quick response for anti-terror efforts -- do not apply to, say, the Bureau of Land Management or the Office of English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement and Academic Achievement for Limited  English Proficient Students (now that's a mouthful, even for native speakers!).

Darn those inconvenient facts yet again!

A New Day

The big story, of course, is the Iraqi elections.  I have been busy for the last three days, first with my wife's birthday and then with work (yes, on a weekend), and so I have not looked at my usual blog haunts at all.  Tomorrow I get back to my sorta-normal routine.

What this means is that I can give my judgments unsullied by the blog echo chamber; put another way, I have not benefited from the wisdom of others who no doubt have been able to follow this much more closely than I.  And so will keep this short and simple until tomorrow.

It appears as though turnout was higher than expected, with the Guardian estimating it at 57% and the New York Times potentially above 60%.  That sounds very good, especially in comparison with the US where we didn't have to worry about bombs.  (While it doesn't excuse the ten-hour lines, it does put them in perspective a bit.)  What is more important than the total figure is the variation in turnout among major groups and across regions.  This is the kind of news that will take a little longer to trickle in.

The Times reports that turnout in Sunni areas might have been 40%.  This is, of course, the key since any government must account for possible Sunni resentments.  Even if they win a disproportionately low number of seats due to lower turnout than among Kurds and Shiites, it would be prudent for the new government to listen carefully to Sunni concerns in drawing up the new constitution and not dismiss them.  This is, after all, merely an intermediary step, though an important one.  Before people get all self-congratulatory about the results (I'm looking at you, George!) all players need to start planning carefully for the next stage.

The elections were an important and, it appears, positive step, but it was only a step.  Nor, just because the bombings weren't quite as devastating as many feared, does it mean the security situation has suddenly become Mayberry RFD.  I'm very happy it wasn't a bloodbath today and that so many Iraqis voted.  Now let's see what those elected do with this power, and how strong a hand the U.S. shows in directing them.

Maine Rx Clears Another Hurdle

Not since the days of Taft and Hoover has anyone been able to say, "as Maine goes, so goes the nation."  While FDR swept aside the state as an electoral bellwether, it is the decidedly New Deal flavor of Maine's prescription drug discount program that is causing the rest of the country to look down east.

The program gives the state the power to negotiate prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies on behalf of those too poor to have prescription drug insurance of their own.  From the start it was the target of lawsuits by Big PhRMA, including a case that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court in 2003.   You can check out the time line here.  Though the state won the case, it made some revisions -- largely involving an income cap for beneficiaries and elimination of open enrollment -- and relaunched it at the start of 2004, when it ran into a new set of legal challenges.

The Portland Press-Herald a year ago gave a rundown of the relaunched program.  Several other states have programs in various stages of development and legal challenges, including Michigan, Georgia and California, but the consensus is that the Maine version is the model.

Friday the state won yet another round in federal court, as the Press-Herald reports again.  The sticking point has been a provision which permits the state to punish drug companies that fail to provide discounts by requiring doctors to get prior approval from the state to prescribe drugs from such companies to Medicaid patients.  In order to avoid that bureaucratic hurdle and the potential losses that would result, companies have an incentive to negotiate discounts with the state.  As it is however, the state has been able to meet its targets without invoking that provision.

Women in Office

The Washington Post has a story today about results from municipal elections in the West Bank last month, the other important elections in the Middle East.  A trend in Palestinian elections noted is the rise of women in office, some in conservative communities and with the support of Hamas.

I won't pretend to know the details of Palestinian politics, and so my eye was drawn to a comparison with the U.S.:  In the municipal elections, women won 52 of 306 open seats, or 17% of them.  Yes, that's a higher proportion than in the House (68 or 15.6%) or Senate (14 or, er, 14%).  I think that's wonderful for the Palestinians, and not so great for us.

Yes, there are important institutional differences that contributed to the rise of female candidates there.  For one, they used a gender quota for some seats, however the number elected was 2 1/2 times the quota.  For another, and certainly more important, for many of the 306 seats they used a party list system which almost always makes it easier to elect women into office than in the single member district system we and and the Westminster world use.  Even so, for a democracy as old as ours one would think we could do better.  Well, good for them.

Fixing the Language: Super Bowl Edition

As we count down to the Super Bowl, let me make one big point and one small point about the language describing the breast-baring incident from last year's halftime show.  I feel these things must be said because, as though enough hasn't already been said, it's reaching a crescendo again as the game approaches.  I'm not the first to make these points, but nevertheless I need to get them off my chest.  (Er, sorry.)

First, let's please stop calling this the Janet Jackson incident.  Yes, it was (and is) her breast, but it seems to me that Justin Timberlake was the one who grabbed her costume and tugged.  Shouldn't it be the Justin Timberlake incident, if we have to discuss it at all?  Now, I could go on about the sexism of the media and society, the symbolism of blaming the victim, and the politics of sexuality, but I'll assign that for homework.  Nor do I necessarily believe she had nothing to do with it -- presumably she had some agency over the choreography and costuming.  I don't know how to apportion blame, but I also know that practically no one else talking about it does either.  So, if we go only by what we observed, it makes far more sense to say that the balance of responsibility lay with Justin Timberlake and the tug of his hand rather than Janet Jackson and her breast just sitting there, and therefore it ought to be his name that comes up every time someone talks about it.

Second, the smaller point, a moratorium on the use of "wardrobe malfunction" in everyday language.  It was already tiresome an hour after last year's game and should go the way of "dy-no-mite!" and "talk to the hand."

Now, back to our regularly scheduled pre-Super Bowl media frenzy.

Shaking Up the Civil Service

The Washington Post reports today that the Bush Administration has revealed its plan to restructure the civil service within Homeland Security, and has made suggestions that it wants to extend the same blueprint throughout the civilian federal workforce.  Recall that a large objection raised by Democrats over the DHS bill was that it stripped civil service protections from the workforce of the new department.  Now we se what shape that will take.

Those of you who are federal employees or just care about the ins and outs of pay grades can read about the details in the Post story and in this story at Government Executive (I know, you subscribe already).  For the rest of us who simply care about good government, let me cut to the chase.  The central change is that employee pay and promotion will be based in part on evaluations made by superiors, who will have much wider latitude than under current rules.

Hey, that doesn't sound so bad!  Isn't that what everyone in the private sector has, and shouldn't government be made more efficient like firms have to be?  Leaving aside the broader questions about the role of government, a serious danger with this scheme is that it opens the door to political manipulation of bureaucratic performance.  While it's still a far cry from the bad old days of patronage which got President McKinley killed, it does mean that we move from a model of neutral competence -- the very basis of bureaucratic decision making, in the good sense -- into one beset by partisanship and favortism.  Just take a look at the pressure put on SSA employees these days as the debate over privatization gears up and you can see what might become commonplace under the new rules (read TPM here and here).

There is one narrow way the policy is good and that is to provide uniformity across government.  Another objection raised about the DHS bill was over defining a special set of rules just for those employees.  Government Executive reported in early December that the GAO and the National Academy of Public Administration said having uneven application of civil service rules across agencies undermines management and performance.  One agency can raid another's employees by offering more attractive benefits, producing a "Balkanization" of the bureaucracy.  So uniformity is good.  But not if it's uniformity of bad rules.

Not surprisingly, the federal unions are unhappy with the changes, not least because they are also limited more stringently on when they can engage in collective bargaining, further tilting the balance of power in favor of managers.  You can tell the proposal has real problems when even the Joementum isn't behind it (Post again):

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), one of the law's key sponsors, said yesterday that the new system is an improvement over earlier drafts but still "will undermine key employee protections that prevent workplace abuses and improve employee performance." He also called the limits on collective bargaining "excessive."

Yes, this is the kind of issue that makes one's eyes glaze over, but it also defines the balance of power in the bureaucracy and is therefore an issue we ought to care about.  Especially since it concerns far more than just DHS.  Rewards for merit and performance are good, and there are certainly reasons to rethink the old, calcified pay grades, but the Bush scheme does not seem the proper way to go about it and might introduce real danger and political trouble into our civil service.

Counting Iraq's Security Forces

Sometimes all you need to do with this administration is let them talk themselves into their own hole.  Problem is, they're bringing us down there with them.

Conatus has a thorough list of quotes from various administration sources about exactly how many Iraqis have been trained to serve as security forces.  Moreover, once you dig beyond the highly inconsistent estimates we also see that they are highly inflated.  While the number is greater than zero, it is much closer to zero than the 200,000 they have sometimes claimed.  As you know, until Iraqis can manage their own security, we are kind of stuck there.  (Wasn't this what Bernard Kerik was sent there to manage?)

What Bush Thinks of Seniors

Read Americablog to hear Bush's latest insult to seniors.  Literally.

We always knew there was the brash, flippant Bush, the frat boy just beneath the surface.  During the first term and especially post-9/11 his handlers did their best to keep it under wraps.  Now, after he's had his "accountability moment," it's time for him to cut loose.  And it illustrates exactly why his handlers needed to keep that side under wraps.  What one issue, more than any other, has the potential to rip Republicans asunder and cause them real trouble in the '06 midterms?  Why, Social Security privatization, of course.  Electorally, who is the most important voice on that topic?  Seniors, who vote in higher proportion to the rest of the population.  That's exactly who he's decided to start pissing off, in the most trivial and avoidable ways possible now.  Bravo!

Hatch Plays the Ethnicity Card

Reuters reports that Senate Judiciary approved the Gonzalez nomination by a 10-8 vote, with all Democrats voting against.  Good to see such unity, but that wasn't the most interesting thing to me.

CongressDaily (sorry, subscription only) reports the indignation of chair Orrin Hatch that anyone dare oppose him:

Senate Judiciary member Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, scolded Democrats for opposing Gonzales, who would become the first Latino attorney general. "You may not agree with Judge Gonzales," he said, "but, my gosh, this man deserves to be confirmed.  Every Hispanic in America is watching how this man is being treated."

Kennedy's response was that if the committee were voting on the "story" and not the record, then he would have been approved unanimously.  Nice response, and they'll need some variation of it during the floor debate when Republicans again try to play the ethnicity card.

Am I surprised Hatch did so?  Dismayed, but not surprised.  Not just because Gonzalez is part of Rove's strategy to bring Latinos into the GOP coalition, but because this kind of hypocrisy is par for the course.  Just recall their attempt to tar Democrats with being "anti-Catholic" for opposing the William Pryor nomination for the 11th Circuit bench.

Yes, I'm sure Trent Lott and Rick Santorum, among others, can tell us precisely how the GOP is the party of inclusion.  But to make the claim that opposition to Gonzalez is somehow related to his ethnicity?  It's all just too offensive.