Five miles in 42:56 — an 8:35 pace. I still have a bit of the cold, as I said yesterday, but my energy is back and my lungs seem good. Just need to get my legs back to where there were.
Music: Richar Hell & the Voidoids, Blank Generation
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Robert Scheer, one of the best liberal columnists out there, offers a different view of The New York Times story on John McCain that stirred things up last week.
McCain was a big player on that Commerce Committee at the time, and I expected a Times revelation as to just how Iseman got McCain to help gift the media barons with their dream legislation.
The revelation never came, because the annoying reality is that McCain was one of the rare Senate opponents of the telecom bill that Iseman was pushing—as opposed to The New York Times, which like every other major media outlet pushed for the legislation (in the case of the Times, without ever conceding its own corporation’s financial bias in the matter). McCain was one of five senators (and the sole Republican) who, along with Democrats Russ Feingold, Patrick Leahy, Paul Simon and the great Paul Wellstone, voted against the atrocious legislation, which President Bill Clinton signed into law.
He then adds
It’s not easy to maintain an evenhanded appraisal of McCain as he appropriates the Bush mantle. Of course, I wouldn’t vote for him; he is willing to let the Iraq war go on for a hundred years and, at the rate of at least $200 billion a year, that makes a mockery of his efforts to defeat earmarks and other wasteful government spending—beginning with the massive waste in the Pentagon budget that he has done so much to expose. His capitulation on President Bush’s use of torture is even more appalling. But it is absurd to attempt to pigeonhole McCain as a patsy for corporate lobbyists when he has been in the forefront of key efforts to challenge their power.
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I’m not sure yet what to make of this idea for universal health coverage, though it probably deserves some debate, at least along the lines of the discussion surrounding the Clinton and Obama plans.
The plan — sponsored by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and U.S. Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) — decouples insurance from employment, calls for wage hikes to offset the lost benefits.
Employees, in turn, would be required to purchase private health coverage with their higher wages. To ensure that it’s affordable, the plan would fully subsidize the premiums for those who live below the poverty line. Those people between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty line would also receive subsidies on a sliding scale to help pay their premiums.
I’m not ready to comment on the plan aside from saying that it seems similar to the plans offered by the Democratic presidential candidates and to also say that I remain committed to single-payer coverage.
Single-payer, however, isn’t coming anytime soon so we’d better take a serious look at the more incremental approaches being floated in the hopes that some reform is better than none and, maybe, just maybe, these small steps can be the beginning of big change down the road.
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I didn’t have a lot of time yesterday to blog on Gov. Corzine’s proposed state budget — I was mired in it so that I could draft a column on fiscal reform for tomorrow’s paper.
But now that the Post is nearly put to bed, I can offer some thoughts:
This is a painful budget that should have surprised no one. The governor has been warning that a day of reckoning was coming and he deserves credit for putting out such a painful plan and being willing to take the heat.
After 13 town hall meetings at which he heard little more than anger, he said he understood the “public’s frustration and anger generated by too many years of overspending, borrowing, and false rhetoric.”
The budget he unveiled yesterday, he said, was designed to address this.
The time is long past for the State, its Governor, and its Legislature to end imprudent spending and borrowing that exceeds our means. This budget does just that.
He went on to say that
the public understands the State has a fiscal crisis — but they want us to understand they have one of their own.
It is with this perspective that I present a sobering budget for fiscal 2009 …a budget, I believe, that represents a “turning point” in the fiscal management of our State — a turning point away from the patterns of overspending and tortured borrowing.
A turning point toward spending restraint and spending cuts that genuinely address our financial emergency.
That said, this budget still labors under the weight of years of unfunded commitments, court mandates, bad decisions, and declining federal dollars.
So he stood before the state Legislature and told its members — and the public — that things would have to change. He proposed rather deep cuts — in aid to towns, hospitals, the arts and colleges, in the workforce — that will be felt in a variety of ways around the state.
The Record is right when it says that there is a lot in this budget to anger just about every constituency in the state. The paper also is right — unlike The Asbury Park Press, which called for deeper cuts and ignored that the governor has actually made payments to the pension system over the last two years that had not been made in years — that the budget shows Corzine is “serious and sincere” and that the budget should serve as the opening salvo of negotiations.
Expect the various interests who have benefited over the years from state money to raise their voices (remember Gov. Jim McGreevey’s first budget?). Some of them will have good arguments as to why their funding should be restored. In some cases, those arguments should be heeded — but only if a corresponding budget cut can be found.
Budget growth has to be reined in, but that will not be enough. The state needs to find new revenues to offset its costs and find a way to pay down its debt. The governor’s toll-hike plan was badly flawed, but at least it was an honest attempt and its goal was noble.
That said, we should have started this process much earlier by dropping the charade that is the rebates, hiking the gas tax and income tax to raise revenue, eliminating waste and cracking down on corruption and so on down the list. One of the reasons this did not happen is that the governor was afraid to push the Legislature during the 2007 election year, meaning that the modest steps made toward reform in 2006 (and they were modest) were stopped cold once the calendar changed.
This has been the general problem with Corzine. He has been too willing to let the Legislature dictate the agenda and has been too conscious of the political fallout that might follow (another example is his lukewarm commitment to same-sex marriage). This might be viewed as a positive trait by some, but I am one of those people who are tired of politicians governing in that way.
I am hopeful that this horribly tight budget is evidence that the governor plans to take a tougher stand this year on fiscal matters, that he intends to push the Legislature to change the way it does business. I am hopeful, but not optimistic — this is New Jersey, after all.
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Did four today in 34:36 — not too shabby given that I still have a bit of the cold.
Music: Patti Smith, Horses
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Hank Kalet 