And now for a reality check on the USA

Whatever your political leanings this year, or whatever you may think about General Colin Powell, what he said on Meet the Press Sunday morning is a powerful reminder of what the US of A is supposed to be all about (something that some of us have lost sight of in the heat of the campaign). Ignore the endorsement bit if you must, but I strongly encourage you to read a transcript or watch the interview.

The meatiest part is excerpted at Huffington Post along with the picture Powell talks about. That section of the video runs at about 4:28 into the 2nd segment of Powell's appearance.

Here are his remarks in reference to people dropping hints that Obama might be a Muslim (after saying, for what must be the 8 billionth time in this campaign, that Obama is a Christian)...

"Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That's not America. Is there something wrong with a seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion that he is a Muslim and might have an association with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel particularly strong about this because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay, was of a mother at Arlington Cemetery and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone, and it gave his awards - Purple Heart, Bronze Star - showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death, he was 20 years old. And then at the very top of the head stone, it didn't have a Christian cross. It didn't have a Star of David. It has a crescent and star of the Islamic faith.

And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan. And he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was fourteen years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he could serve his country and he gave his life."



P.S.: I am proud to live in the first Congressional district in the country which understands religious freedom and tolerance enough, and which respects separation of church and state enough, to have elected the first Muslim to a federal office.

John McCain Wants To Take Away My Health Insurance

I'm a political junkie. I love reading about every poll, every campaign ad. I am addicted to Pollster, FactCheck, Media Matters, Politico, and everything they link to. So in my early morning political junkie Internet travels, I run across a new (for me) tidbit of information. The McCain/Palin campaign has been pitching its health care plan over the last few months - a $5,000 tax credit to allow people to buy their own health insurance on an individual basis in a nation-wide insurance market.

(Now I've long been a proponent of a national health care system. Call me a Socialist, a Communist, anti-Free Market, anti-Capitalist, I don't care. There are many things the government has no business sticking its nose into. However, the developed world has run a 120-year experiment with the US as the control. How did it turn out? Well, compared to other developed countries, we spend twice as much and are toward the bottom of the pack in outcomes. Shorter life expectancy, higher infant mortality, less healthy by just about every measure.

We've even run a 40-year experiment in national health care all on our own. It's called Medicare, and pretty much anyone who isn't a conservative commentator or member of a right-wing think-tank wouldn't dream of dismantling it in favor of private insurance for our retirees. The administrative overhead of Medicare is around 2%, compared to average private insurance companies in the 15% range. Pretty good deal, even with the prescription drug giveaway of a few years back. But I digress...)

So as I'm kicking off my day, I stumble across this little nugget: As a non-family I will get a $2500 tax credit. The $5000 is only for families.

A little background on me: I've worked for the same "Small Business" (you know, the kind every politician loves to talk about as elections approach) for over 8 years. The company has been around for almost 18 years, seems to be well run, and they're pretty generous with benefits for only having about 10 people on payroll. We employees pay 50% of our health insurance premiums out of our paychecks and the company pays the other 50%. As with everyone else in the country, we've seen that amount go up about 7% to 10% per year pretty reliably over the past 8 years.

A little background on the tax code: Our employers get to write off the amount they spend on our insurance as a legitimate business deduction. Nice little tax benefit and it encourages businesses to offer insurance benefits to their employees. Given that the majority of people with insurance have it through their employers, it seems like this little bit of the tax code has been pretty effective (although the percentage has been dropping in recent years).

Here's the fun part: The McCain/Palin proposal takes away that tax break. Now I am not privy to my employer's financial statements, but despite what some people would have us think, most small businesses do not clear hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit every year. A few thousand here or there makes a big difference, and my quick math indicates that removing the insurance premium tax break will make a difference of thousands of dollars on my employer's bottom line. I think there's a very real chance that our company would have to reconsider its generous benefit package.

Okay, fine, that would hurt, but at least I'll get that $2500 to buy my own insurance on the Free Market. Except for the part where my insurance premium right now is a hair under $4800 per year. That's me, a single male, non-smoking, light-drinking vegan (i.e. zero-cholesterol diet) who has been to a doctor exactly 4 times in 15 years. I'm an insurance company's dream customer, and I'd have to find insurance for half of what it costs today. If I can't do that, I'd be out an extra $2300 this year which, as it turns out, I can't really spare right now. There doesn't seem to be any indication on McCain's website that this would be indexed to inflation, so it's probable that I'd fall even farther behind in the years following. Now hopefully our company would bump our paychecks a little to reflect that they're not paying their 50% anymore, but even if they gave us every penny of the difference, that money goes from tax deduction for them to taxable income for me, still leaving me about $700 short.

Maybe I can swing an extra $50/month or so in the direction of my favorite insurance company. I'm pretty good with money and I'm sure I can figure something to cut back on. However, the average family's health insurance costs $12,000/year. The $5000 McCain and Palin are offering families goes even less far toward covering their insurance costs than $2500 goes for me. And it's a whole lot easier for me to cut back on Netflix or my cel phone usage than it will be for them to buy less food and clothing for their kids.

If this is "Maverick" I'll gladly stick with Washington as usual.

Reflections on the Stadium Tax

On the morning of Saturday, May 7, I was merely upset that last week the Hennepin County board had volunteered those of us who live, work, eat, drink, and play in our most populous county to assist in buying a new stadium for the Minnesota Twins to the tune of $85 Million. According to Forbes.com, the owner of the Twins has over $2 Billion in assets and is currently climbing upward through the 200s on the list of the worlds richest people. A quick trip over to ESPN.com and one finds that the combined salary of the Twins players this year is approaching $57 Million, and that is one-third of the way from the bottom of the Major League ranks.

Usually a brisk walk around one of our beautiful city lakes makes me feel better about living here even when our elected officials seem to be selling me out, so my darling and I headed off toward Lake of the Isles. It has been a little unnerving in the past year sharing one narrow path with dozens or, on nice days even hundreds, of other walkers, runners, bikers, skaters, and their dogs. I've seen a good thunderstorm push the lake well past the parkway and into the front yards of the houses surrounding it, blocking the paths and roads completely. The majority of the grassland between the road and the water is currently usable to neither person nor beast because of the temporary gravel fill meant to rapidly compress the underlying soil. And the parkway itself is a bone-jarring drive because the weight of the trucks hauling the gravel fill is destroying the road surface. These supposedly temporary issues occupying my vision as we rounded the north end of the lake, I wondered aloud what the current prognosis was for completing the much-needed shoreline stabilization and flood control project that was originally supposed to be finished later this summer.

With the full force of the universe's wonderful and ironic sensibility, my question was answered upon returning home that same hour. I cracked open the most recent issue of my neighborhood paper to discover that while the gravel fill will be removed this year, the project will proceed no further than that for the indefinite future because the recent state bonding bill removed $2 Million that was promised for the project in 2005. While repaving some footpaths may (thankfully) be one of the more pressing issues facing the Isles neighborhood, there are certainly other more important matters our city, county, and state could be addressing. I do hope that the missing $2 Million went to fund some road or bridge repair, or facilities maintenance at the U of M campus. Perhaps a new municipal building, or the wonderful Central Library approaching completion downtown.

All that said, it wasn't either the delay in the Isles project or the proposed stadium tax that moved me from upset to incensed this week. It is wondering how we in Hennepin County are finding $85 Million dollars in new revenues to subsidize a private enterprise when all of the jurisdictions in which I live, from the city to the county to the state, can't seem to find an extra penny to teach the generations of our future. It is marveling as we raise bus fares and cut service because somehow public transit is expected to be self-supporting, but a business of billionaires can get handouts. It is feeling like we are being starved by state cuts to public safety, local government aid, and infrastructure, while we turn around and give up more of our hard-earned money to help those who are already rolling in it. It is worrying about the tens of thousands being cut from Minnesota Care – many of whom will be paying for the stadium every single day and will almost certainly never glimpse its interior. It is remembering how the return of hockey to St. Paul was supposed to be such good business for the city, and then seeing how quickly we have forgotten that the total absence of a hockey season this year made no appreciable difference in tax revenue for our sister city. (It seems that we will spend the same amount of money to entertain ourselves whether or not professional sports are an option.) How we can put $85 Million into a stadium that, at current ticket prices, will cost a family of four a minimum of 35 additional dollars to park (or ride) and enter, but can't find $2 Million for a greenspace every one of us is free to enjoy, including two couples from Georgia and California we met that morning sitting on a bench by the lake, without reaching into our wallets for yet more money.

And now the Legislature is leaning toward letting any municipality raise taxes with a referendum. If Woodbury wants more cops or better education for their children, it certainly seems they should be able to pay for it out of their own pockets. And if the people of Hennepin actually wanted to pay for a new stadium, why not? Having been raised in Minnesota by Minnesotans, I was under the impression that we all worked together to make life better for all of us. Moving K-12 education funding to the state level was not just to reduce property taxes, but to give every Minnesota child an equal chance to get the best education available in the country. Apparently the time has come for us to regress to mine-is-mine and yours-is-yours. I moved from incensed to angered.

But the push to outrage came from reading that Mr. "No Tax Increases" himself, Governor Pawlenty, agreed to sign off on the new tax almost as soon as it was proposed. Is this the same governor who wants public referenda on almost everything from property taxes to anti-gay constitutional amendments? He has sworn to veto any gas or cigarette tax increase no matter how small or how popular, so what is his reason for giving this one a free pass? Could it be that he can conveniently forget this new tax in his next run for office? There are certainly enough issues where I find a lot of distance between my position and Pawlenty's, including taxation, and I don't enjoy paying taxes any more than anyone else. I have paid them since the age of 16 with little complaint, and I continue to support the idea that their collection by our governments is acceptable because of the promise and hope that they will be used for the common good. Public money channeled directly to the benefit of a single private interest isn't even in the ballpark of common good.

An Introduction

Just three long days ago, 30% of the eligible voters in America made a decision that the rest of the country and the world will live with for not only the next four years, but the effects of which will be felt for the next several decades. Whether you believe this decision was correct or misguided, manipulated or "free and fair", it is undeniable that statesmanship, thoughtfulness, and altruism have been drowned by political gamesmanship and expediency in the landscape of American governance.

This is partly the fault of our leaders, our two dominant political parties, the pundits, and the media. But they have only responded to our psychology in this decline. We, as the voting populace, react to the headlines, the soundbites, the attack ads, and the stump speeches just as quickly as our candidates react to the opinions of focus groups and the latest poll numbers. Few people take the time to watch more than the 1/2-hour evening news, much less read through to the end of a newspaper or magazine article. And now that many media outlets do nothing more than regurgitate the poll-tested quips of the campaign spokesperson, the cycle is complete.

We are being fed what we seem to desire. We may protest that we want better information, more balanced media, candidates of a higher caliber. But the choices we make in the voting booths speak to the dominance of our gut-level reaction over our intellect.

The gut-level. The instinct. For millions of years, it is what has kept us out of the mouths of tigers and out of the bumper of the car in front of us. Successful in the survival of the species, but not so effective at visions for a brighter future or aspirations for a better Us. For a time - the last several centuries perhaps - some people with the education or the luxury, or maybe just some gift for thoughtful consideration, held in their minds' eye a picture of this better world.

Over time they were able to communicate this vision to others, and eventually some majority of us were working toward something that we often could not touch or experience for ourselves. It was nothing more than a hope for our children or our grandchildren. But the hopes and dreams of slaves freed, of children wisely taught, of women enfranchised and empowered, of nations and continents liberated from tyranny by negotiation or force, were more than sufficient to keep the bulk of us working toward these distant, but not unattainable goals.

We have stumbled. We have tripped on our own instinct for self-preservation. We are so concerned about what we can touch and control in our immediate lives that we are no longer willing to sacrifice our immediate gratification in the service of dreams of a better future for all.

It is my goal in this forum, and with this life, to combine a generous portion of our visionary past with a healthy complement of modern research and thought, and with new dreams our forebears might never have conceived. If I am the least bit successful, then we might possibly not only give lip service to ideals, but use plausible, practical persuasion to shape the headlines, the soundbites, and the entire political framework.

Friends and strangers, I invite... no, I implore you to add your own carefully considered comments to my own at every opportunity. It is my intent to, over the course of time, develop our collective thought into a platform that we can each, and all, use to hold our elected and appointed leaders accountable. With enough participation we will slowly and surely change the underlying currents of public discourse. The surface waters and the ship of state can do nothing but be carried with us.