Kool-Aid vs. Hawaiian Punch

When I was a kid, I often accompanied my late Mother to the supermarket. I would gaze longingly at products like Scooter Pies, KaBoom cereal, Kool-Aid, and Hawaiian Punch. My Mom, a wise woman in the ways of nutrition well ahead of her time, would go for none of it. Cookies were graham crackers. Cereal was Raisin Bran. Beverages were milk and water. Once in a long while, I would prevail upon her to buy a sweet drink. Hawaiian Punch had some actual fruit juice in the assay, so it won. Truth be told, there was that brief interstice when the astronauts seemed to drink Tang, so we got a couple of containers of Tang. If it was good enough for Buzz Aldrin, it made its way into the Rubenstein house at 25 Falcon Place.

I'm taking the long way around to the theme here: Kool-Aid vs. Hawaiian Punch is the analogy for this election. We have a candidate who wants you to drink the Kool-Aid: Don't believe a word he said before, believe the words he says now, like the Etch-a-sketch his campaign manager described. The nutritional assay is that he was "bipartisan," except that he wasn't, vetoing 800 bills in a single term, many of them over-ridden; he is moderate, so don't pay attention to his self-characterization as
"severely conservative"; he was a successful businessman, so he can generate savings and revenue for the Federal Government, except that he won't tell us how, he picked a running mate who has a defective plan which he does not embrace, or does embrace, depending on when you are listening.

On the other side, we have the Hawaiian Punch, an actual Hawaii resident, back in the day, with just enough nutritional value to make him worthwhile. An imperfect candidate, sometimes brooding and aloof, sometimes calculating, but one who has been steady at the tiller even with the most vicious opposition, the most scurrilous and hurtful press ever from the right wing echo chamber.

My Mom was a wise woman: If you have to search for something sweet, go with the Hawaiian Punch. Don't drink the Kool-Aid.

Known Unknowns and Unknown Knowns

Why let a great Don Rumsfeld quote go to waste, when you can use it as your Blog title?

I thought of the great quote from our former Secretary of Defense, while I was listening to Mitt Romney on television yesterday. For me, a great deal of domestic policy comes down to known unknowns. I have to trust the GAO and all kinds of other agencies and non-profits who score budgets and comment on tax policy, and they are very hard to sort out. But it's all part of being an informed voter. I understand the structure and function of government well enough, but my experience with Tax Law ended when I took Tax I in Law School, pass/fail. I passed, and promised my professor never to take another course in his section, in gratitude.

To me, tax is a known unknown. I understand it far better than I did in 1985, because it is real to me now, but I still get lost in projections and computations of corporate taxes, among other things. Insurance, however, is not a known unknown. It is a known known. I have worked in the field, on both sides, attacking coverage, underwriting, regulatory, and indemnity issues since I was first admitted to the New York and New Jersey Bars. The language of insurance is my language, and the problems and solutions manifest themselves on my desk every day.

So when Mitt Romney wheeled on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act on "Day One" of his Presidency, I had to wonder. It was unqualified: He was going to repeal the Act. That was his promise to the American people. I wondered what he would replace it with. I wondered how it could be unwound without disrupting the market, businesses which had planned for it, and how he could cover Americans it was designed to help. I'm still wondering.

The known known is this: The ACA was not a solution in search of a problem. The marketplace was not adjusting to an aging population. It was not adjusting to an environment where price-fixing was essentially legal, because of antitrust immunity for insurance companies. The proof was obvious: In a time of nearly zero inflation, coverages were narrowing while premiums were inflating by 15-25% a year. Businesses could not afford those increases, and individuals certainly could not afford non-group coverages. The poor job market created a pool of 89,000,000 Americans who did not have continuous coverage, and who would thus be exposed to exclusions or limitations on pre-existing conditions.

For a year or more, the GOP ran against the ACA, with absolutely no plan in hand to supplant it. "Obamacare" became a boogie-man, an object of fear. Most Americans, polled on the individual contents of the ACA, supported most, if not all, of its provisions. When handed the collective name of the policies they had just validated, they turned away from it, as if it was something profoundly "other" than the sum of its parts. The vitriol was amazing to me. I saw Tea Partiers holding signs that said, "Get your government hands off my Medicare," as if Medicare was not a government-run benefit plan. And cheerleaders on the far right kept up the din of disinformation, with cartoons about death panels that existed only in the most fevered imaginations.

Yesterday, the mask fell off. Mitt Romney admitted that there were parts of the ACA that he supported keeping, a significant change from "Repealed on Day One." I was always interested in how a President was going to unilaterally repeal an Act of Congress, in any event, but now I don't have to remain puzzled. On Day -133 before Inauguration, Mitt unilaterally repealed his own promise.

Of course, the repeal didn't last long before we again descended into unknown-unknowns. A candidate who insists that the only solution to our economic crisis is growth in the size of the pie, refuses to accept that the corollary solution to our insurance crisis is growth in the size of the pie. We live in a society where young people seldom get sick, and therefore their contribution in premiums during this period will finance the needs of the older and sicker members of our society. They are essentially not just paying it forward, they are assuring that when they get older, their own health problems will be paid for by those younger than them. They are planting an olive tree, to quote the Midrash, knowing that they will not likely get fruit for seven years. But Mitt Romney's spokesman does not favor planting that olive tree. Instead of expanding the risk pool with less risky people, Romney's spokesman declared that the twin solutions of reinsurance and risk adjustment will be applied to those with continuous coverage, to solve the problem of limitations on pre-existing conditions.

With that comment, the Romney campaign departed the realm of unknown-unknowns, the graveyard of tax policy, the limbo of spreadsheets I can't read. He's talking MY language now. The problem is: The language is gibberish. First of all, 89,000,000 Americans won't be in the group with "continuous coverage," because they have either lost their jobs, or had to change jobs, acquiring limited coverage for pre-existing conditions. That's a lot of Americans to exclude from a "solution." But on to the solution: Reinsurance? Wow. Talk about pulling a term-of-art out of the nether regions. Risk pools and Insurance companies already have the right to buy reinsurance, and have always had that right. The cost of reinsurance is part of our failing marketplace, and Romney offers nothing new as a solution. There's no "new kind" of reinsurance out there, and no proposal to make it more affordable or available. They just threw a word out there, hoping that for most of you in TV-land, it would be an unknown-unknown: Not only would you not know about it, but you wouldn't even know what you didn't know about it. And "risk adjustment?" That is a phrase with no meaning at all in the context of this discussion. He had might as well have said that we were going to solve the problem by adjusting the franistan with the perambulator. And so I propose that the great Donald Rumsfeld, the orator who proposed the concepts of the known-known, the known-unknown, and the unknown-unknown, have his awesome trifecta expanded, by one. A new expression must be created, to describe a comment which is just made up. We're going to call it a "unreal unknowns." It will describe a word or phrase, uttered by a politician or spokesperson, which is in the neighborhood of truth, but wouldn't be allowed by residents to stay there, because of its stench.

In a few days, the campaigns will go back to talking about trillions of dollars in debt, balance of trade issues, monetary policy, and sequestration. These are known-unknowns for me. I know about them, but I also know I don't know enough about them to know who is lying about them, without consulting someone else who might be wrong or also lying about them. Today, however, I got to deal with a known-known, a problem I understand, and a proposed solution I know enough to call BS on. It felt really good to know enough to call BS today. That is, until I realized for just how many people it remains an unknown-unknown. Those people are resting their hopes and dreams on risk adjustment and reinsurance, the handmaidens of continuous coverage. And a lot of those people will be among the 89,000,000 helped by the ACA, and to be left uncovered by its repeal.

I will sit here, in front of my TV, until November, waiting and hoping for another known-known. I'm more likely to be hit by a barrage of unreal-unknowns. G-d help us all.

Lies, Liars & And the Lying Liars That Lie About Them


So when was it that we stopped getting mad at people who lie to us? Was there a point on the timeline when a creepy form of national cynicism took hold, and we became so inured toward being lied to, it ceased to be evocative?

I ask this because of tonight's newscrawl, which disclosed that Rep. Paul Ryan admitted that he "misspoke" about his finishing time in a marathon he ran some time ago. My first reaction was that lying about marathon time is this generation's golf score lie, and the previous generation's trout weight lie. The media, of course, had a field day with this: Rep. Ryan admitted to mis-speaking, not lying. Why admit to a lie when you can admit to mis-speaking? It's not like Ryan was seeking absolution for a sin, and had to confess with a pure heart and complete contrition. His press release was for the purpose of containment, which used to have different meaning during the Cold War, a period I find myself yearning for, at least as far as the usage of the word "containment" in politics goes. So he misspoke, and owned up to it. After spouting all manner of blatant lies and corruptions of truth for political gain over the last few weeks, Paul Ryan confessed to a misstatement about the time of his last marathon. We used to call those "puffing," but that's been co-opted by the porn field. Before that we called it "gilding the lily," but that gave way to "putting lipstick on a pig," which had certain misogynistic qualities, and was superseded by "telling a whopper," which again was discouraged by the purveyors of a certain oversized hamburger.

It was a lie. I heard a commentator on Fox News (yes, I have thus far failed in my attempts to figure out how to disable my remote control from access to that channel, much to my chagrin and self-loathing) say that it really doesn't indicate anything about the man or his character. I kept waiting for the talking head to let slip that his phony budget actually does indicate something about the man and his character, but then none of the other indicator of the coming of the Messiah were there, so the other Fox shoe never dropped on that issue.

So again I ask: When did we stop getting mad? When Richard Nixon was unmasked as a filthy and corrupt liar, racist, anti-semite, hijacking our political system out of hubris, when his landslide was already in the bag, the polity got mad. His own party got mad. His defenders ran from him, and he was alone with his lies. What was it about Nixon lying about Watergate, covering it up, and lying about his knowledge, that elicited real anger from Americans, while Iran-Contra, sending cakes to Ayatollahs, and lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq did not? And when Bill Clinton had his dalliance with a libidinous intern, and lied to us, was the anger of men like the House Impeachment Managers real, or feigned? After all, his scolds, like Newt Gingrich, were cut from the same cloth, which I am reliably informed was the type of cloth from which one makes fine lingerie. Newt was outraged, while carrying on himself. DeLay was outraged, while stuffing his pockets with money that landed him in prison. And so on.

Paul Ryan is a liar. He's a pious family man, religious, a protector of the unborn, and a believer in limited government. What he isn't a believer in, is truth. His narrative is false. What's worse, he supports a wider narrative that lambastes President Obama for a lack of private sector experience, while he has never worked in the private sector at all, outside of summer jobs. He furthers a narrative about welfare work requirement waivers that he knows is not true. It isn't a misstatement. It's a lie. He knows it is a lie, and even after it was exposed as a lie by all manner of media, he continued to repeat it, with that boyish gleam and that innocent smirk.

When we're done with prevaricating, lying, misleading, misstating, gilding the lilly, puffery, fibbing, and exaggerating, we now have recourse to a new term for the new millennium, a fit euphemism for containing the damage that should flow from a lie. With a tip of the hat to Senator Al Franken, I now announce the creation of a new word: Disinfocontainment. You heard it here first. And if it doesn't make you angry, you've either not been paying attention, or you've been paying too much attention for too long.

Whine Country

There's  nothing worse than taking a long-awaited vacation in the middle of the Republican National Convention. It's like getting a reservation at the French Laundry, while under doctor's orders to lose weight. I know it isn't good for me to watch the carnage in Tampa, hour-by-hour, but I just can't help myself. I've tried to take short-cuts, like just watching Jon Stewart's version of events, but it's no  more than an amuse-bouche.

It started with David Brooks' recent column in the New York Times, which was widely misunderstood as a take-down of Mitt Romney. The reason why it was widely misunderstood as a takedown of Mitt Romney, was because any fair reading of it took down Mitt Romney. It wasn't just tongue-in-cheek. In order for someone to apprehend that Brooks was not serious, one would have to have roomed with him at University of Chicago, or shared a bed with him, or given birth to him, perhaps. When I read it, I thought someone had either kidnaped Brooks and taken control of his keyboard, or returned his previously unused soul to him.

Gothamist, an on-line snark merchant, apparently broke the news that Brooks was going for satire in that bizarre column. The closest cognate equation to Brooks=Satire was when Tom  Lehrer was once asked why he no longer wrote funny political folk songs, and he replied that when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, there was no longer any need for satire. So here we are. Not only has Apple created complete technological convergence in 2012, but the GOP has merged satire, serious political commentary, and their convention, to create total political convergence. We no longer need political satire: Politics is now satire. Perhaps it began when a bow-tied Tucker Carlson criticized comedian Jon Stewart for not being a fair journalist, apparently missing the unsubtle point that Stewart is, indeed a comedian. The contagion of journalistic, political, and satirical convergence is now complete: Rand Paul has reiterated to  cheering masses his continuing dissent, that the Supreme Court's opinion on Constitutionality is irrelevant, and those that handed him the microphone not only knew he would say it, but expected it. The same masses who lionize American Exceptionalists do not believe that the Supreme Court had anything to do with forging this nation's historic greatness. It must have been States' rights that did so, or the lack of an income tax for the first century. Or something. They're always whining about some time that never was, or something they never actually had, that's been taken  away.

This all reminds me of Woody Allen's ageless quip that Commentary merged with Dissent, and formed Dysentery.

So here I sit, in Forestville, Ca., watching afar with a goblet of American wine, watching a political chain-reaction car accident. It's horrible to see, but I just can't look away. Or maybe I've just spent too many years working on car accident cases. . . .

There Were Giants on the Earth, In Those Days. . . .

I grew up in a world of heroes and villains. As a child, I lived in a household inhabited by images of Thor and Batman, JFK and FDR, Adolf Hitler and Stalin, of a dialectic of good and evil. My late Mother was a skeptic on religion, but a believer nonetheless, in enlightenment, and music, and art, and the power of words and images. My Dad, who fought his way through life from an orphanage to World War II under Omar Bradley, the GI General, led a tempestuous life until he settled down at forty to have a family, adding to my Mother's instant family when I was born.

Shades of grey weren't entirely absent from our lives. My mother was an artist, with a keen appreciation for subtle tones and brushstrokes. Born left-handed, her superstitious, immigrant Mother forced her only to use her right hand. She overcame that radical rewiring to develop gifts at rendering, design, perspective, and composition. We theorized that it made her a little crazy, but she painted so beautifully, it seemed almost an even exchange, at least after I moved out of the house at 18, seldom to return.

I grew up hearing my parents' tales of heroes and villains. My Dad, who never got past the ninth grade, was a voracious reader of history with a terrific memory. He told me stories of Eugene V. Debs, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, of General Bradley, and the Ardennes Forest. My Mother skipped a grade, only to leave school before she got much past 10th Grade, marrying at 17 to get out of a house usurped by her mother's second husband, half-orphaned herself at 15. My mother's heroes were composers, opera singers, painters and sculptors, writers like S. J. Perelman and Saul Bellow, and Flannery O'Connor.

My early heroes were Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and Joe Kubert and Robert Kanigher, Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil, who made my world bigger and clearer and gave it structure. I knew who the heroes and villains were, at 10. A little Roosevelt, a little JFK, some Spiderman, and a smatter of Sgt. Rock. I crafted an ideology of bravery, selflessness, sarcasm, and wonder. A hero was a little smarter, a little more courageous, with power and responsibility. He saw things others couldn't see, and he took hits others couldn't bear. My Dad's heroes were mine, and my Mom's heroes, too.

Joe Kubert died yesterday, at 85. His style was so unmistakeable, I could pick it out of a thousand pages of imitators. He called it a "realistic style of drawing, " but to me it was more than realistic. It cut like a laser through to the essence, the truth of his characters. His stories of war didn't glorify violence, they taught about human dignity, and courage, and fragility. There was a pathos and an ethic to his storytelling. When a talented writer like Bob Kanigher scripted a war story, Joe transformed that script into a vehicle to show the depths of despair, and the zenith of heroism. Every shadow, every expression, was crafted with such delicacy and deliberation, and yet was so natural and unforced.

G-d gifted Joe Kubert with many years to enrich all of us with his tales of Sgt. Rock, Yossel, and the Enemy Ace, of Prophesies and Faxes from Sarajevo. And G-d gifted those of us who knew his inimitable character with the feeling that there were still Giants on the Earth, who number fewer and fewer. He left wonderful children full of character and the bountiful life-force that made him a creative power in this world for more than seventy years. He left thousands of students who hold a spark of the G-d given gifts he displayed. And he left heroes for us all to read about, and wonder over, and villains to revile. We lost one hero yesterday, but we will share in his achievements for many, many years to come.

Saving Public Ryan

This is one of those mornings when you wake up with a great title and then need a blog entry to fit the title. Sometimes the material is lacking. Other times, the material is there, and you are lacking.

I've spent the morning reading pundits from the far left to the far right, gathering a lot of heat and a little light about Paul Ryan. Alternatively, he's proof that small-government Conservatives have captured the GOP; he's proof that Romney is desperate; he's proof that Romney is a self-assured, mature candidate, who made his choice in naming a running mate who reflects his true ideology; he is the best hope of the Democratic Party; he's the hope of the GOP, because he will deliver Wisconsin; he's the second VP candidate in a row chosen by Bill Kristol; he's the most relevant indicator of from where Romney will govern; he's utterly irrelevant, because the only relevant VP in the last hundred years was Dick Cheney, and he's no Dick Cheney; he's amazingly relevant because Romney is just as weak as George W. Bush was on policy and ideology, and like Cheney, Ryan is strong on policy and ideology.

I have no idea what the candidacy of Paul Ryan means. I only know what I want it to mean. I want it to mean to voters that they have the right and responsibility to make him relevant. The public has a choice to believe what candidates say, and hold them to it. When Paul Ryan spends more than a decade doing his damnedest to dismantle social programs, believe that he will go further if elected. When Paul Ryan votes against every single environmentalist initiative, believe that he will go further if elected to the Executive Branch. When Paul Ryan promises to privatize Social Security and Medicare, not just as an accounting trick, but because he believes the private sector will do it better, believe him. First read, "Too Big To Fail," "Liars Poker," and "No One Would Listen," and then place your medical treatment options if old or disabled, as well as your nest-egg, in the hands of an unregulated private sector. Paul Ryan has spent his forty-two years on this Earth struggling to be ever more relevant to you. Let him win: Make him relevant, and believe, against all cynicism, that he will do what he promises to do.

I often feel that we have left the Enlightenment in America, and re-entered the Era of Belief. Rather than learn from even recent history, many of us simply choose to believe in all manner of stuff. I have a friend on Facebook who wakes up every morning, and republishes every right-wing editorial in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, ostensibly as a patriotic act. Forget, for a moment, that the latter is owned by a mad Korean cleric who presides over arranged mass-marriages of his acolytes and has been convicted of tax fraud. Forget that the former is owned by an Australian plutocrat whose entire news empire has been tainted irreversibly by ethical lapses that border on the absurd. Her belief is that our Founding Fathers find modern expression through the pens of people who owe more to Hayek than Hobbes, and more to Pat Buchanan than John Stuart Mill. Me, I take my lessons about limited government, checks and balances, and civic responsibility from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. I tend to avoid investment advice from them, however. Their knowledge of credit-default swaps and derivatives was sorely lacking. They did feed their slaves adequately, though. Soon we'll find out from a WSJ Editorial that their slaves had longer life expectancies than freeholders, so therefore slavery was a benefit that our hallowed Founding Fathers conferred on them.

But back to belief. Paul Ryan's raison d'etre for government service was a coded message from Ayn Rand. Mitt Romney's was a coded message from the Angel Moroni, and a fierce commitment to win the Office his father lost, perhaps because he as a bit too genuine and too honest about who he was back in 1968. George Romney's unguarded moment conceded to brainwashing on Vietnam, by Generals and Congressmen. From that uncoded message,  a young Mitt drew the lesson that he should simultaneously vigorously and publically campaign for the war, and seek a deferment through his ministry as a missionary in France. His heroic attempts to win converts in France failed, so he returned to America, infused with the new gospel of venture capital. I have no doubt that Barack Obama received a few coded messages from his late father and his Minister of many years, but he seems to have ignored those messasges assiduously in favor of those of John Maynard Keynes and two Roosevelts.

Ayn Rand wrote fiction, and as we've learned from Das Kapital and Mein Kampf, fiction is a poor foundation for government. Adam Smith's, "The Wealth of Nations,." although a work of non-fiction, is only slightly better as a foundation for government, because it wasn't meant to be about government, after all, it was meant to be about money. I'm not sure what to make of "The Road to Serfdom," quite frankly: I'll call it an exercise in  Truthiness, neither fact, nor fiction.

In the end, both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are united in belief. It is their belief that government and money are as one. It's a balance sheet, and all policy is just an entry on a balance sheet. If you can show a profit to your shareholders, then  you have succeeded. We are all equal shareholders; but in Romney and Ryan's world. . . . some shareholders are more equal than others. After the safety net is dismantled, "we'll think of something," perhaps in one of Mitt's "quiet rooms," where serious people discuss issues too serious for the unserious public to witness or participate, apparently.

In the next three months, Paul Ryan will be marketed to the public as an affable, intellectual, serious thinker with a compelling personal story. He is none of those things. He has a BA in Economics, with no post-graduate studies. He has less formal learning in Economics than I do, which is pathetic for a man who is claimed to be the intellectual leader of the economic wing of his Party. He has never worked outside of a summer job in the Private Sector (consultant to his family business for two years? Give me a break.). The lesson he took from investing his Social Security Survivor Benefits in a private college education was that Social Security would work better through privatization, a lesson he doubled down on after the entire financial sector crashed during his watch in Congress.

Public Ryan is a handsome, steely-eyed ideologue, a poster-child for Belief, over Experience. Experience would restore Glass-Steagall, roll back institutions too big to fail, overhaul the SEC, FTC, and other market watchdogs to efficiently regulate our markets. The forces of Belief revise history to tell us Roosevelt was wrong (hell, both of them!), Cheney was right (If only I had invested my FICA with Bernard Madoff instead of the Federal Government, I'd be set for old age) and the next coming boom will raise all boats, if only we let the bubble inflate.

The media will spend the next three months Saving Public Ryan. He's attractive, glib, specific, and new, unlike his running mate. Me, I hope he does well as a private citizen.