Masson's Blog
At the risk of angering the War on the War on Christmas warriors, but out of respect for the various traditions of folks who might be reading, I want to wish everyone Happy Holidays. Also, I wanted to mention that blogging will probably be very light over the next week or so.
And, remember, Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say on a bright, Hawaiian Christmas day.
I’m posting this just because I like the original song (“Don’t Take Your Guns to Town), and we watch a lot of Sesame Street around my house. Johnny Cash, with Big Bird, sings “Don’t Take Your Ones to Town.”
Senate Minority Leader, Richard Young, a Democrat from Milltown has announced he is running for Governor in 2008. The Democratic caucus in the Indiana Senate isn’t exactly an auspicious platform, but I’ll be happy to let him make his case.
I’m sort of a glutton for this stuff, but I’m still tired from the 2006 elections. I’m more interested in upcoming legislation, and now that I was looking into Sen. Young’s background, I see that some introduced legislation has been posted. So thank you Senator Young!
I am pleased to announce that I am Time’s Man of the Year for 2006. Oh, sure, read one way — the slavishly literate may even say, “the correct way” — the magazine is referring to a collective “you.” But I prefer to think that Time Magazine was just embarassed at the extent to which its perspective was influenced by one scrappy little Indiana political blog with a fixation on Daylight Saving Time. So, when it said “you,” it created the smokescreen of the collective “you,” when presumably it really it meant “me;” Doug Masson.
Here is what the magazine said. But I will leave it to you, dear reader, to read between the lines:
We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.
Because, you know, my fixation on online quizzes:
So, Google continues its march toward world domination simply by providing products I think are really cool. Today’s installment is the Google Reader. It is a news reader with some nifty features. I really enjoy my current news reader that plugs into Firefox, but the Google Reader has a feature that will probably have me using it more. It allows me to mark stories as “shared” and then gives me a piece of code I was able to plug into my side bar that provides links to the stories I shared. So, lots of times, I think a story is interesting but don’t have the time or inclination offer much in the way of commentary. Sometimes I create a “go look here” post, and sometimes I just keep it to myself. Using the Google reader, I can just click share and it’ll show up in my “news of interest” widget on the sidebar. I’ll try it out for a while and see how it works.
Chris Rahe, writing a column in the South Bend Tribune, opines that Gov. Daniels health care proposal doesn’t go far enough. Daniels has suggested increasing taxes on cigarettes to pay for insuring those who can’t afford it but who do not qualify for Medicaid. Rahe says band-aids and babysteps are simply too little, too late for the health care disaster we face today. We need to admit the system we have now is just flat broken.
Rahe suggests a single-payer system where the government essentially acts as an insurer, but the health care providers remain private actors, not government employees. While single-payer might be the answer, I don’t really buy the spin that this is essentially still the free-market. If you have only one source of money, that source wields a tremendous amount of power. Of course, our current health care system bears little resemblance to the free market.
Let’s say you have a cough, a fever, debilitating headaches, and a little numbness in your left hand. How much is it going to cost you to get that fixed? Go ahead, try calling around and trying to get a price. Not going to happen. First of all, they don’t know what’s actually wrong with you until you’re in the shop. By then, you have sunk costs and an incentive not to go shopping elsewhere. And that completely skips the fact that prices are all over the board depending on who the customer is. Medicaid gets one price, Medicare gets a second price, Insurance Company “A” gets yet another price, and the uninsured get the full sticker price.
So, anyway, the single-payer solution, may not exactly be market capitalism; but what we have now isn’t either. Rahe suggests that we pay for universal healthcare already, we just aren’t getting it. As Mike Sylvester pointed out last month, the United States pays the highest percentage of GDP on healthcare. The free market aside, Joe Flower pointed out 8 conservative, good-for-business reasons for a single payer healthcare system. (Short version: 1. Transaction costs; 2. Employer funding; 3. The basic idea of insurance; 4. Value; 5. Risk cost of receivables; 6. Service quality; 7. Efficiency; 8. Patriotism.)
And, anectdotally, I have learned that our current system has an adverse effect on the free market in non-healthcare areas. I was speaking with a woman this morning who recently left her former employer, in large part, because the new employer could offer her health insurance. Once she was able to secure insurance, her husband was finally free to start his own business for which he had long been qualified and long had a potential client base. He had just been unwilling to risk becoming an entrepreneur solely because of fear about obtaining adequate health insurance. I don’t imagine this sort of thing is uncommon.
This is the 65th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese Imperial Navy. Wikipedia has a pretty good entry.
The Imperial Japanese Navy made its attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, was aimed at the Pacific Fleet of the United States Navy and its defending Army Air Corps and Marine air forces. The attack damaged or destroyed twelve U.S. warships, destroyed 188 aircraft, and killed 2,403 American servicemen and 68 civilians. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto planned the raid as the start of the Pacific Campaign of World War II, and it was commanded by Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who lost 64 servicemen. However, the Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers were not in port and so were undamaged, as were oil tank farms and machine shops. Using these resources the United States was able to rebound within six months to a year. The U.S. public saw the attack as a treacherous act and rallied strongly against the Japanese Empire, resulting in its later defeat.
When you think about it, it’s pretty remarkable that it took us only 1,347 days from being sucker punched on 12/7/1941 to having defeated the combined might of the Axis powers by VJ Day – August 15, 1945; a span of 3 years, 8 months, and 8 days.
This is pretty cool: A list of Indiana Governors with dates of service and links to a portrait and a brief biography. For example, we have Henry Lane of Crawfordsville who served two days as Governor. Seems he had a deal with Oliver Morton, (a lawyer, Wayne County native, and Miami University alum — hmm, sounds like somebody I know) the other main Indiana Republican leader. Back in those days, the state legislature elected the state’s members to the United States Congress. Senate. Morton was originally a Democrat, so Lane was more palatable to the conservative old-line Whigs. So, Morton and Lane agreed that Lane would run for Governor and Morton as Lt. Governor. If they were elected and the Republicans gained control of the legislature, Lane would be elected to the U.S. Senate, Lane would then resign the Governorship, and Morton would succeed him. And that’s what happened.
