Goldy

As you’ve probably already heard by now, House Blue Dogs and the Democratic leadership have hammered out a compromise on healthcare reform that includes a public option, and according to McJoan and others, very few major concessions to the conservative wing of the party:

In addition to postponing the vote on the full bill until after recess, Waxman and the Blue Dogs negotiated a basic outline including raising the small business exemption raised to payrolls of $500,000 or over. It keeps the public option intact, and allows for HHS to negotiate rates for the public option. It keeps consumer protections currently in the bill intact.

Like everyone else I’ve been nagging my contacts trying to get details and reactions, but apparently, non-Blue Dogs haven’t been told what’s exactly in the compromise yet, so there hasn’t been much detail or reaction to share. That said, Rep. Jay Inslee is holding a telephone town hall tonight at 7:10 PM PT, and perhaps he’ll have more information by then. The public is invited to call in at 877-229-8493 or 877-269-7289; conference code is 13634.

UPDATE:
It seems apparent that reimbursement rates are at the heart of negotiations on the public option, a fact that Rep. Inslee emphasized throughout his press conference Sunday on last week’s compromise agreement on Medicare reimbursements:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1Q2_ZSn2rc[/youtube]

I specifically asked Inslee if we’d get a real public option out of the House, and he emphatically said that we would, while noting that the Blue Dogs have “balked” at tying the reimbursement system to Medicare. This new compromise apparently takes care of this objection by allowing HHS to negotiate rates. (And, in so doing, options the opportunity to move away from fee for service.)

So while Inslee and other non-Blue Dogs apparently haven’t seen the compromise yet, he sure did have some insight into what was coming.

Yesterday the headlines blared “Train Kills Man,” in what the media widely reported as Link Light Rail’s first fatal “accident,” even though it was clear from the circumstances and eyewitness accounts that the man threw himself in front of the train. Well today, the King County Medical Examiner’s Office rules the death a suicide… but does that mollify the knee-jerk, anti-rail zealots? According to the Seattle Times’ comment threads, um… no.

This story still sounds fishy.

They were calling it a “suicide” before much was known.

Let’s see… a man climbs over a Jersey barrier along a non-pedestrian, transit-only corridor, and in cover of darkness, leaps in front of a moving train. Sounds like murder to me!

More amusing is the fact that the Times apparently felt the need to prematurely close the comment thread after only ten comments, seven of which they had to remove, I assume due to offensive or inappropriate content. Geez… and folks think my comment threads are a sewer.

Note to future candidates: Cindi Laws, the campaign manager for mayoral wannabe James Donaldson and City Attorney Tom Carr… I think she may be crazy.

But then, all us Jews do stick together, so don’t listen to me.

My recent post on Rick Steves interest in running for Rep. Jay Inslee’s seat should it come open received an enthusiastic response for bloggers and commenters nationwide. But it also drew a denial from Ashley Sytsma, the publicist at at Rick Steve’s Europe Through the Backdoor:

I think you were right when you wrote that Rick has one of the best jobs in the world. Right now he’s in Europe researching his guidebooks and writing scripts for upcoming Rick Steves’ Europe episodes. If you’re interested, you can read more about it in Blog Gone Europe.

As for any political aspirations, you can be assured that he has no intention of running for office. As a supporter of the Democratic Party, he occasionally contributes his time by speaking at local fundraisers and events.

Okay. I guess I’ve got no particular reason not to take Steve’s publicist at her word. But then, 2012 is still a long ways off, so Steve’s got plenty of time to change his mind.

UPDATE:
Turns out, speculation about a Steves run first hit print way back in December.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyj1DSEQuy0[/youtube]

The thermostat in my livingroom only goes up to 90, so I don’t really know how hot it is, but to put my personal discomfort in perspective, it’s at least 32 degrees warmer than I keep it during the winter.

I know it would be just as silly to blame this particular heat wave on global warming as it is when the science deniers at, say, (u)SP cite an unusually cold day as evidence to refute it, but the climate change models do project warmer, dryer summers for the Pacific Northwest. So at the very least, I guess we better get used to it.

I miss the rain.

The Seattle Times editorial board argues today that bipartisanship is needed on healthcare reform, and I don’t necessarily disagree that bipartisanship would be the preferable course of action… that is, depending on what one means by bipartisanship.

If by bipartisanship one means representatives and senators from both parties working together with the genuine interest of the American people at heart, well then, I suppose that would be a good thing. So too would world peace. But if we mean bipartisanship in the way it was understood during the eight years of the Bush administration—essentially, the D’s caving and voting with the R’s—well then, fuck that.

Now, I don’t expect the opposite, but the truth is, elections matter. Just this past November voters gave the Democrats control of the House and the Senate and the White House, and by comfortable margins. So while serious Republicans deserve a seat at the table, they have to understand that the broad outlines of this healthcare reform plan will be shaped by the D’s, not the R’s. And any such plan without a robust public option is simply unacceptable.

If reasonable R’s and blue dog D’s want to use what leverage they have to help shape the details so that the public option really is just an option, and that it doesn’t duplicate some of the same problems that already exist in Medicare and Medicaid, then have at it. But if Republicans draw the line and say they will not support any plan that includes a public option, then bipartisanship is simply out of the question. They lost the last election, and they simply don’t have the right to expect such demands to be met.

After all, the whole purpose of healthcare reform is to actually reform healthcare, not just to claim you have.

President Obama has already proven himself more than willing to bend over backwards in the service of bipartisanship, more so than he should be, and the Republicans have yet to reciprocate in kind. Instead, they seem to be counting on their obstructionism as a winning political strategy for 2010 and beyond.

So while I don’t blame the Times’ editors for demanding bipartisanship—it’s totally consistent with their rhetorical ethos—I find it silly to demand it in such a bipartisan fashion. For if we’re to have true bipartisanship in shaping healthcare reform, it is in the end, up to the Republicans to unilaterally embrace what would be for them, a complete reversal in their approach to the issue thus far.

“Uh-oh,” I thought as I saw the headline in the Seattle Times: “Sound Transit light-rail train kills man on tracks in Seattle.” All those anti-rail zealots will crawl out of the woodwork disingenuously arguing that at-grade light rail (traveling at the same speed as the surrounding cars and buses) is an inherently unsafe technology. And then I read the article…

The victim, identified only as an adult male, was struck along a transit corridor between Fourth Avenue South and Sixth Avenue South a few blocks south of Safeco Field. Police spokeswoman Renee Witt said early information from traffic-collision investigators indicates that as the southbound train approached, the man — for unknown reasons — climbed over a concrete Jersey barrier south of South Holgate Street and “jumped into the path of the train.”

That’s right… the man was struck along the non-pedestrian transit corridor after climbing over a barrier and jumping in front the train. The headline implies “train kills man,” when in reality it should have read “man kills self.”

And for this, John Niles and his so-called Coalition for Effective Transportation Alternatives argues Sound Transit should be legally and financially liable?

UPDATE:
Clearly, rendering trucks are an inherently unsafe technology:

Washington State Patrol troopers say a rendering truck that lost its load scattered dead animal parts across the northbound lanes of Interstate 5 in Tacoma.

Of course, I suppose that’s preferable to scattering the freeway with live animal parts—that would have been eerie—but icky nonetheless.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
Souped up 1974 Chevy Novas are an inherently unsafe technology.

UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE:
Merce Cunningham dead at 90. Clearly, modern dance is an inherently unsafe technology.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RADPnKE2Uak[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1o1p_ly7Yw[/youtube]

Mike Stark is at it again, this time ambushing Republican congresspersons to ask them whether or not they believe Barack Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, and thus constitutionally eligible to be president.

Some of them, like our own Dave Reichert (WA-08), simply obfuscate (his inarticulate and poorly illustrated response is particularly amusing), while others, like Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA-05) actually run away from the camera… though not before admitting “We’re all going to find out… I’d like to see the documents.”

Huh. She sure does sound like a birther to me. Even while Ann Coulter, of all people, is calling the birthers “cranks.”

When Coulter has become the GOP’s voice of reason, you know the party is in trouble.

One story I never got around to covering over the weekend was Saturday’s signature gathering deadline for R-71, the church-backed referendum to repeal Washington’s recently expanded domestic partners statute. R-71 backers claimed they turned in about 138,000 signatures, almost 18,000 more than the 120,577 needed to qualify for the ballot, but as Sec. of State spokesman Dave Ammons says, that slight cushion still only puts this measure in the “iffy range.”

On average, about 18% of signatures are disqualified due to duplicates, mismatched signatures, incorrect address information, or simply because they didn’t come from registered voters; historically, invalidation rates in Washington have ranged from as low as 8% to as high as 25%. (In some states, blatant acts of signature fraud have driven invalidation rates well over 50%.)

Assuming the 138,000 signature estimate is accurate, that means R-71 would fail to qualify for the ballot if a mere 12.7% of signatures are ruled invalid.

So what are R-71’s chances? Tim Eyman recently qualified I-1033 with a 12% invalidation rate, but that’s unusually low for him, and he does have more than a decade of experience running professional petition drives. Perhaps the R-71 petition drive was more centralized and organized than I thought, but I’d be slightly surprised to see them pull this one off with such a small cushion.

Regardless, there should be some fun coming out of Olympia later this week as the Sec. of State’s office goes through the tedium of matching every signature to the voter registration rolls. First they’ll count (and recount) the signatures to give them a starting point, and then they’ll go through the petitions line by line, reporting the number of valid signatures versus the number of invalid ones, giving us a running total of the invalidation rate up to that point, and thus the ever shifting odds on R-71’s ballot prospects. Once enough signatures have been qualified or disqualified to determine the outcome, the counting stops.

Stay tuned.

A lot of other blogs and newsy sites tend to shut down over the weekend, but not HA, because we’re writers, and write is what we do. So in case you missed it, here’s a summary of the some of the more important stories, commentaries and observations posted over the weekend:

Is the public option a “slippery slope” to single-payer?
Gov. Howard Dean spoke about healthcare reform at Town Hall Friday night, and as he was finishing signing books, I asked him if Republican critics are right when they claim that the public option is merely a slippery slope to a single-payer system. And his answer…? Listen to the audio for yourself.

Stars and Steel Bars
King County Initiative 100, whose aim was to prevent the building of a new jail, fell short of the number of signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. But as Lee reports, the campaign did raise an important question as to why “we’re considering such a costly infrastructure investment that hardly anyone wants and is not necessary”…?

U.S. Rep. Rick Steves?
Those righties who just hate travel writer Rick Steves for his outspoken advocacy for ending our prohibition on marijuana, and who spit up bile watching his humanizing PBS travelogue of Iran, will go absolutely nuts at the thought of Steves running for Congress. But word is, that’s exactly what Steves plans to do when Rep. Jay Inslee steps down to run for governor.

Inslee announces agreement on Medicare reimbursement
And speaking of Rep. Inslee, the WA-01 Democrat held a sparsely attended press conference Saturday to announce a major healthcare agreement he helped broker, that nobody in our local press seems interested in covering. I’ll have more later today.

I went looking for my usual Monday morning fodder on the Seattle Times editorial page, only to be confronted with these headlines from the Times’ home page:

Huh. I suppose that’s one way to deal with the Nightmare on Fairview. If only it were that easy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7684tTVUeI[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAkg6G8iXQI[/youtube]

Rep. Jay Inslee (WA-01) held a press conference this afternoon at Seattle’s Childrens Hospital to announce an agreement struck to correct the dramatic regional disparities between Medicare reimbursement rates, disparities that have penalized Washington’s relatively efficient healthcare delivery system to the tune of tens of of millions of dollars a year. It is also an agreement that, as I will explain later, helps pave the way to a public option.

Above is raw footage of Rep. Inslee’s announcement. Stay tuned for additional footage, selected clips and further analysis.