There Is No Plan

let's hope the ambulance is coming because there is no time to waste

In today’s NYT, Paul Krugman wonders why we haven’t heard more about major healthcare reform in the first few days of the new administration. His concern is that the economic crisis will only make the oncoming healthcare catastrophe that much more severe. It’s a very good point. Krugman surmises that perhaps solving the economic meltdown is dominating the agenda to the exclusion of almost everything else.

But Krugman doesn’t go far enough. What he fails to mention is that solving the healthcare crisis will, over the medium term, will dramatically help overcome America’s deep economic weaknesses.

It goes like this. Regardless of the plan adopted, and it’s most likely to be a build on Obama’s idea of offering a competitive government plan that will release the grip on our healthcare held by profiteering private insurance companies, the new system will have a very significant downward pressure on healthcare costs. Read the rest of this entry »

own a prius? cough it up, chump.

In the midst of US preparation for the upcoming Copenhagen Treaty on climate change you’d think that we were all laser-focused on trying to combat global warming for once and for all. Uhh, no.

Despite the fact that the lower fossil fuel demand is a boon for reducing emissions it seems that at lower levels of government, reducing our carbon footprint is thrown out with the bathwater when it comes to paying our lowly state and city bills.

I live in Los Angeles. As I drove to drop off my son at school, I heard two news stories. First, the national story – a stirring presentation at the Senate by Al Gore urging Senate support for the Copenhagen treaty. The second was a local story about how money was so tight that the City of LA would no longer offer free meter parking downtown for Hybrids. The amount of money they’ll save will be negligible, but the message is clear. The City of LA doesn’t care if you buy hybrids anymore. Read the rest of this entry »

Obama is all about popularity. But he forgets that popularity is least important after you’ve just won an election. He went out of his way to court the GOP on his stimulus bill, and despite an awful lot of bipartisan BS, not one voted knuckle-dragger for it.

For a President apparently more politically savvy than most on arrival in the White House, he let himself down badly. He forgot that Bipartisanship BS is only meant to be trotted out for winning elections. After they’re over, you kick the losers when they’re down. But Obama’s flaw is that he hates the idea of being hated. So instead, the President got an earful of whining from the GOP who had ample opportunity to diss the plan, and Obama ends up looking like an unconvincin blowhard, after only a week on the job.

The lesson of the day is pretty simple. The GOP is more right-wing, doctrinaire and disagreeable than ever. They’re MO is very simple. If the President had ignored them they would have bleated on that nobody listens. If the President gives them the time of day, they give him the finger. Neither apporach is without costs, but the former is a far better alternative, considering that right now Republicans are more discredited than at virtually any time since Roosevelt.

Politics is not a pretty business. It never was and it never will be. The sooner Obama realizes that the better, because right now he’s at risk of becoming a victim of his own magnanimity. Most kids learn it in the school yard. There are certain people that are just dangerous to be friends with. Obama apparently missed that memo.

do we look like we're joking?

From a superficial perspective, the idea of diverting US forces to Afghanistan as we draw down troops in Iraq seems like a good idea. But Afghanistan is a deeply inhospitable, corrupt, backward, and highly unstable failed state with an almost feudal social structure. It’s been resisting modernity and foreign control for millenia.

Before we do anything we need to make a strategic decision about our goals. It’s clear that the Taliban must go, but forget democracy, stability is just fine. It’s equally clear that increasing US ground forces by a few combat brigades will not do the job. The war would slog on for many years at great cost in lives and treasure. The Kush would be a graveyard for our grunts. There has to be another way. And there is.

There are two connected ways to beat the Taliban. We need both to win. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s earnings season and a frosty one at that. Every day we hear about this or that mega-company beating or failing to meet Wall Street Earnings Estimates. Stocks rise and fall on the results. Some heads roll, other heads are crowned.

And all because a clutch of Wall Street analysts decided that it was going to happen that way. They’re part of a select brain trust that has sent the world economy into a spiral. What, one might ask, were their estimates on the now-toxic bonds they were so eager to carve up and sell up to a few months ago? And yet we continue to listen to them, ignoring the distinct possibility that they might be manipulating their estimates to boost the sagging bank balances of their institutions.

Wall Street built itself a veneer of respectability and knowledge based on very little. We believed in their cult.  And yet even after they’ve possibly hold the US economy below the water-line, journalists still hang on their every word. Our faith in them has taken us to the edge of the cliff. Are we going to jump?

i want to be loved...

Obama is leading like a President who wants to be loved. In case he hasn’t noticed, he’s about as loved and admired as anyone can be without levitating.

It’s time to try something a little different. Like leading.

This morning the President announced that he’d ordered the EPA to ‘review’ the block on California’s strict emission regulations.

Everybody knows what that review is going to do. It’s going to remove the block on California’s strict emission regulations. By delaying he just gives his enemies a chance to rally their lobbyists.

Last week, Obama met with GOP house leaders and asked for their input on the economic stimulus package.

Everyone knew what was going to happen. The GOP did give Obama their input. It consisted of a single finger. With America on the brink in so many respects, we really don’t have time to chit chat, especially with a Republican party that’s on the verge of marginalizing itself. What they say isn’t important. We need to ignore them. That will make them look even more truculent and outmoded than ever.

The trend here is simple. Obama wants his enemies to be his friends. That’s very sweet, but it’s going to get frustrating real fast.

I’ve been hearing an awful lot of talk these days about how Obama is using bipartisanship as a Trojan horse to get good policies through the quagmire.

Not going to work. There isn’t a quagmire. We run the show. With the help of Senators Spector, Collins, and Snowe, and a strong whip in the Senate, we have total filibuster-proof control. The days when preventing the tyranny of the majority are gone. Bipartisanship is only good when the other side agree to what you want to do your way.

Now is not the time for offering compromises. We won. They lost. It’s our turn to lead. And if the people don’t like it. They can vote us out next time.

It’s called democracy.

I once directed a feature film. The experience taught me more about leadership than anything I’ve ever done. These are the rules; 1. Keep your mouth shut unless it matters. 2. Be decisive. 3. Keep it brief. 4. Never ask for advice. Keep your game face on. 5. Forget about being liked.

Great film directors are not nice people on set.

Presidents are always on set.

it's not easy being royalty

And ironically, not with a bang but a whimper.

After generations of dramatic exits, it’s ironic that Caroline Kennedy’s withdrawal from contention for the open Senate seat in New York should be so lacking in it.

It was so obviously a ruse (and a self-serving one at that) to use the timely collapse of her beloved uncle at the Inaugural luncheon as a way out of a hasty and ill-considered decision to seek the seat, that it makes a mockery of the Kennedy reputation for bravery and grit.

Of course, there was much talk of nannies with no papers, and a few other hiccups along the way, such as Caroline Kennedy’s apparent struggles with the English language, but in the end, the idea just petered out. And Governor David Patterson of New York ended up being the last person ever to pander to a Kennedy, and badly denting his reputation in the process.

Because the myth is finally over, Ladies and Gentleman. It seems, that the cult of personality, or in this case, the cult of family, indeed has a limited shelf life. Perhaps the American obsession with aristocracy is finally coming to an end. And not a moment too soon.

supermax. nice little place you got here.

It’s wise to close Gitmo, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. There are may prisoners there who might be innocent, but after seven years of humiliation at the hands of the US, they will now be radicalized and if they’re released, may not be innocent for long.

Bush unwittingly created the new poster children for Al Qaeda. Living martyrs to the cause. The problem is that if we try these ‘martyrs’ on the shaky, rushed evidence they were arrested on, we probably won’t find them guilty. When we let them go, we’re just inserting new jihadist leaders into the system.

But if we don’t try them, we’re just exacerbating the problem that Bush created, and making Obama look like a hypocrite in the Muslim world, as well as turning the US Constitution on its head.

There’s no good answer. Locking them up in Supermax and throwing away the key will be a publicity nightmare. But there might be a silver lining here. If we track the people we release – they might end up leading us right into the terror networks we’re trying to break.