The Billings Blog

Talk radio update

billing1 — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:12:58 +0000

I thought there might be something behind this notion when I first read it, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how much it would shape my radio listening on Outpost delivery day. It was a dispiriting experience.

I knew, of course, that it would be all scandal, all day long, but I couldn’t quite grasp in advance just how lame it would all be. Was there even a shred of new information? Not that I noticed. Instead, Limbaugh was arguing that everything wrong with America is the fault of liberalism. Huckabee was juxtaposing random questions with “I don’t know” responses from Eric Holder at a congressional committee appearance. This, I think, is what passes for humor in Arkansas. Glenn Beck was laughing, bitterly, about how easy IRS miscreants were getting off. Hannity was ranting about how evil and incompetent Obama is — in other words, doing exactly what he does every other day of the year.

The Salon article appeared to have it right. When you turn the dial up to 11 on the day a president enters office, it’s hard to raise the volume when actual scandal comes along. To some extent, actual scandal undermines the narrative because a large part of the narrative is that the reason only conservative talk radio is able to perceive scandal every time the president sneezes is because the mainstream media are in Obama’s pocket (right next to his handkerchief). When the media actually grab onto a scandal, that suggests that maybe all of those other scandals weren’t so scandalous after all.

So a fair amount of the day was spent trying to reach 12 on the dial. There was the suggestion (via Michele Bachmann) that the IRS will have unrestricted access to your medical records. There was the suggestion (via Limbaugh) that Obama’s fingerprints are all over the IRS scandal, all without a shred of evidence that either actual or metaphorical fingerprints exist.

Interestingly, there was no mention at all of the largest government scandal of the day: more news about the military’s hideous record of sexual assault and abuse. The military, as usual, must not be criticized.

Hearing that story required listening to NPR, which, unfortunately, didn’t provide as much relief as usual. “To the Point” focused on Angelina Jolie’s decision to have her breasts surgically removed. That was do depressing I switched to Hannity. His fantasies are much more rewarding than reality.

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Grammar police

billing1 — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:22:57 +0000

Why aren’t more people writing about this scandal?

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He’s back

billing1 — Wed, 15 May 2013 20:17:46 +0000

When Ken Siebert and I were judging the Poetry Slam last weekend, he quite properly upbraided me for failing to keep this pitiful blog up to date. Thoroughly chastened, I resolved to do better and headed to the computer the next day — only to find that for some reason my administrative access had been blocked.

Apparently, it was some sort of WordPress thing, which Shan has now fixed for me, and since another busy semester is at long last finally over, I resolve to do better. Right now, I’m mulling over the government’s prying into Associated Press phone records. I don’t know that I have anything particularly bright to say, but my old friend Dennis Gaub asked me what I thought, and my opinion is in some respects probably different from most journalists in that I always have opposed shield laws. It’s not what the government can do to the press that scares me, it’s what the government can do to any citizen.

More on all that later. In the meantime, I’ve been cranking up the column machine, and here are a few you might have missed:

* On the poetry slam.

* On the debate over guns and healthcare.

* On college spending.

And, as an extra added bonus, a column that nobody but me has read. It will be in this week’s Outpost:

Republicans must be getting nervous about their refusal to expand Medicaid in Montana. Last Wednesday’s Gazette published not one but two opinion pieces making the case that the Legislature was right to oppose Medicaid expansion.

Weighing in were Tom McGillvray of Billings, the House majority leader, and Joe Balyeat, a former state senator who is now state director of Americans for Prosperity-Montana.

Rep. McGillvray, it seems, is having bad dreams about the Legislature giving Montanans money to buy Cadillacs. By “Cadillac” he doesn’t mean a car; he means health insurance. In his view, the rising cost of health insurance can be blamed on requirements that insurance companies cover a broad range of conditions instead of a limited menu of options people choose for themselves. If you want insurance that covers maternity care or treatment for autism or mental illness, for example, you are shopping for a Cadillac.

Sounds good, but his plan does turn health insurance into a bit of a lottery. We all go through life full of optimism that we will never have a child with a terrible illness or drug addiction or that we will never need exotic treatments and screenings with long names that we have never heard of and would never think to buy insurance against. But some of us are bound to be wrong about that.

It’s not clear in any case how much money McGillvray’s approach would save. Health insurance is expensive in America because healthcare is expensive in America – twice as costly as in most other industrialized countries, all of which offer some sort of universal coverage.

An article by Steven Brill in Time magazine earlier this year made a detailed case that medical costs vary wildly, based in part on who pays for the care. Medicare patients get a better deal than private insurers, who get a much better deal than individuals paying out-of-pocket costs.

Mr. Brill concluded, “The health care market is not a market at all. It’s a crapshoot. Everyone fares differently based on circumstances they can neither control nor predict.”

Just last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a giant study of hospital costs. An analysis by the Washington Post found that one Washington, D.C., hospital charged more than twice as much for a patient on a ventilator as another hospital in the same town. In Texas, one hospital billed nearly four times as much for a lower joint replacement than another on the same street just five miles away.

Even in Billings, the study found, bills for various procedures can be as much as 70 percent higher in one local hospital than in the other. For example, the study showed the cost of treatment for diabetes at St. Vincent Healthcare at $17,119. Treatment for the same diagnosis at Billings Clinic was $8,876.

On the other hand, major bowel procedures at Billings Clinic were listed at $31,625 but only $25,285 at St. Vincent. To compare for yourself, go to www.cms.gov.

Both Rep. McGillvray and Mr. Balyeat say that Medicaid expansion must be blocked to control “runaway deficit spending.” Yet deficit spending is driven largely by medical costs, and Congress has routinely blocked efforts to rein those in.

For instance, Congress forbids Medicare to negotiate for lower prices on drugs. When President Obama proposed saving more than $700 million over 10 years in Medicare costs by cutting payments to insurers and providers, opposition to the cuts became a centerpiece of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

When a public option was proposed in the Affordable Care Act to help control costs, congressional opposition forced the Obama administration to back off. Just last week, Republicans in Congress announced they would refuse to appoint members to Medicare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board, which is designed to slow the rapid growth in healthcare costs.

Instead, Rep. McGillvray suggests, states could save more than $600 billion over the next 10 years by rejecting Medicaid expansion. But savings to whom? Failing to pay for healthcare does not make the expense go away; it just pushes the costs onto someone else.

None of that would matter if Rep. McGillvray and Mr. Balyeat were right about a point they both make: that Medicaid is a waste of money. No need to feel bad about cutting a program that doesn’t work.

As evidence, both point to a new study out of Oregon. Mr. Balyeat said the study proves “conclusively” that Medicaid is ineffective.

But the study was far from conclusive, and lots of smart people are still debating what it means. A little background: A few years ago, Oregon found enough money to add 10,000 people to its Medicaid rolls. About 90,000 people were eligible, so Oregon held a lottery to pick the lucky 10,000 who were added to the program.

The bad luck for the 80,000 turned out to be good luck for scientists: They could compare the health of those who got in with the health of those who didn’t and see whether Medicaid was actually doing any good.

Results from the second year of that study, which came out May 1, showed that the lottery winners were more likely to have illnesses diagnosed, were less likely to be depressed and were financially better off, with virtually none of the catastrophic medical costs that lead to 60 percent of personal bankruptcies in the United States.

The Medicaid patients also had positive results for blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol, but none of those results were statistically significant. The sample was just too small to find enough people with all of the right medical conditions to measure everything with certainty.

The Washington Post reported that the lead author of the study, Harvard Professor Katherine Baicker, said it might take longer than two years for the positive effects to show up in statistically significant ways. A separate study she conducted found that after five years, three states that expanded Medicaid had lower death rates than neighboring states that didn’t.

Mr. Balyeat probably also had in mind a University of Virginia study that found Medicaid patients had worse healthcare outcomes than even uninsured patients. But the study also reported that Medicaid patients were much sicker when they got medical care than even uninsured patients, who in some cases are in good health and have respectable incomes but refuse to buy insurance.

Balyeat is an accountant and presumably understands how numbers work. But he is not a man to let figures on a calculator get in the way of his ideological certainty.

If he and Rep. McGillvray were serious about finding out how effective Medicaid really is, they could have proposed a Montana experiment: Pay for Medicaid expansion for half of the 70,000 Montanans who would qualify for coverage. In a few years, we would have a good scientific test of how good Medicaid is: just compare the 35,000 who got Medicaid with the 35,000 who didn’t.

If Medicaid flunked the test, Republicans could crow that they were right, pay only half as much as full expansion would have cost and stick the feds with nearly the entire bill.

If they turned out to be wrong, then they would have the consolation of knowing that their policies were only half as cruel and foolish as they now appear to be.

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Talk radio update

billing1 — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 21:49:17 +0000

Lots of talk about gay marriage, of course, but while Limbaugh seemed more interested in the political angle, Mike Huckabee appeared to be in a state of deep mourning — and the case hasn’t even been decided yet.

Huckabee just really, really, really hates gay marriage. Poor guy. I almost felt sorry for me, even though I have never quite been able to figure out why he feels so strongly about it. He thinks the Bible is against it, of course, but the Bible also is against gluttony. But just try to tell Huckabee that the government ought to regulate what and how much food you can eat. What makes gay marriage so different? I doubt that even he knows.

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That liberal media

billing1 — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:59:36 +0000

Some brave anonymous soul mailed me a copy of a column that an attached sticky note called “a good article for your biased liberal newspaper.” A note on the column itself claims that it appeared in the Washington Post, which makes its appearance “a truly amazing event and a news story in and of itself.” I am so biased that I was immediately skeptical, not because I don’t think the Post is willing to criticize Obama but because the tone of the article, by one Matt Patterson, was so shrill.

Attributing Obama’s election to “a baffling breed of mass hysteria” doesn’t sound like the Post’s brand of rhetoric.Nor does the reference to Jeremiah Wright as a “white-hating, America-loathing preacher” sound like the Post’s style. I don’t think the Post would refer to liberalism as “liberal Dom,” and I don’t think it would let stand unchallenged the assertion that “Obama was given a pass — held to a lower standard — because of the color of his skin.” He was, in fact, legally elected.

That was just in the first half of the column. I didn’t read the second half, but I did take a minute to verify that the article had not, in fact, appeared in the Post.

So maybe I am a biased liberal, Mr. Anonymous, but at least I occasionally check a fact or two. And I have never claimed that my work appears in places it doesn’t appear.

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Talk radio update

billing1 — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 20:58:00 +0000

Hannity was mad at Obama for canceling White House tours, which apparently cost the Secret Service some $73,000 a week. Hannity’s theory is that Obama is just trying to make budget cuts as visibly painful as possible, which may be true. But if I were in charge of the Secret Service and required to make an across-the-board cut, going after frivolous luxuries like White House tours is exactly where I would start.

It makes me wonder if Hannity doesn’t have the stomach for the cuts he claims to favor. Or perhaps his criticism was just part of the master plan: force Obama to make cuts, then attack every cut he makes. Sounds like Hannity, doesn’t it?

In other news, Michael Smerconish mentioned that he is moving to satellite radio. Apparently, the market for rational talk is too small on commercial radio. Will he be replaced by another fair-minded voice? What are the odds?

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Notebook

billing1 — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 20:50:35 +0000

The Outpost editor weighs in on college performance standards.

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Fighting tribal coal

billing1 — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 03:47:10 +0000

Down in the Talk Radio Update, I mentioned that Aaron Flint seemed to be off base in suggesting that coal development on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation is being blocked by do-gooder federal bureaucrats who think they know better than tribal members what is good for them.

As evidence that opposition to coal development there persists, and not just from bureaucrats, I offer this news release, which came Thursday:

LAME DEER — Yesterday over 170 Northern Cheyenne tribal members submitted detailed and substantive comments to the DEQ asking for a thorough, transparent and comprehensive study of the proposed Otter Creek coal mine in southeastern Montana.

“We believe our community will bear the brunt of the negative impacts from the Otter Creek mine. Sacrificing the land, water, animal and plant life for mining and money is not worth what our ancestors fought and gave their life. Our group is worried about the crime, accidents, drugs and other social issues that come along with boomtowns that our Tribe is not equipped to handle. We are being asked to deal with this so that a transnational corporation can make billions of dollars shipping coal to Asia,” said Tom Mexican Cheyenne.

The proposed mine’s proximity to the border of the reservation is of particular concern to Northern Cheyenne tribal members. Otter Creek valley, used for thousands of years by tribal peoples contains cultural, historic and burial sites important to the Cheyenne people and many other Plains Tribes and serves as important wildlife habitat for hundreds of wildlife species.

“To preserve language culture and identity you must protect air, land, and water, that’s who we are. Without language and land we are not who we say we are,” said Phillip Whiteman Jr., Northern Cheyenne Sweet Medicine Chief.

People have watched as North Dakota reservations have experienced dramatic increases in crime, traffic accidents and cultural conflict from nearby oil development. When coupled with environmental impacts of air pollution, water pollution, decreased wildlife populations, many tribal members now are opposing the development of the mine. In addition, many young Northern Cheyenne are being trained in renewable energy.

“A group of us are going to get certified in solar voltaic installation on Pine Ridge at the Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center this month and a couple of us will go on to a larger installation project in Colorado this summer. We want a different future for our children. Coal is a dead end for us,” said Vanessa Braided Hair, Northern Cheyenne wildlands firefighter.

The Oglala Sioux Tribal President submitted a letter to DEQ yesterday in solidarity with the Northern Cheyenne citizens who submitted comments.

This is not some environmentalist fantasy. Opposition there remains genuine.

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Read a book

billing1 — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:09:37 +0000

Spring break is winding down, and I just spent a whole day off on Saturday — an event rare enough, outside of major holidays, that it always feels bloggable.

Even rarer, I spent almost the whole day reading some 250 pages of dense prose in Alan Schom’s biography, “Napoleon Bonaparte.” I just made my composition students read “Billy Budd” and “Crime and Punishment,” which both discuss revolutionary France and Napoleon quite a bit, so he has been on mind, and the book was on my shelf. Just 550 pages to go.

I have this book from Ed Kemmick, who gave it to me not because he is a kind and gentle soul (although he is a kind and gentle soul) but because he hated the book and thought perhaps it wouldn’t be wasted on a Napoleon buff like me.

It was a good guess. The book certainly has the flaws that maddened Ed, including an unusually large number of typos and mangled sentences (carefully marked by Ed) for a book from a major publisher. It also fails to adequately clarify some matters about which my knowledge of Napoleon is sketchy, such as exactly how he navigated the turbulent waters of Revolutionary France and exactly what he did at the siege of Toulon that made him so famous.

But this book has the most thorough account of Napoleon’s disastrous campaign in Egypt that I have ever read, and it says a great deal about his family and about Josephine that I didn’t know. And it was fun comparing his account of the Italian campaign against David Chandler’s magisterial account in “Campaigns of Napoleon.” Plus, I am just a sucker for Napoleon — an extraordinary, wonderful, hideous giant of a man.

One touching detail: In 1800, a couple of diplomats from the infant United States visited France to try to smooth over various concerns. The visit was a success, and when they were leaving, Napoleon offered them a bag of recently excavated Roman coins.

They talked it over, then declined the offer. They weren’t permitted to accept gifts, they said.

That’s just adorable. In turn-of-the-century France, top officials, including Napoleon and his family, were routinely skimming millions of francs worth of loot, supplies and art from the national treasury. When they were caught at it, it was ignored or covered up, for fear of stirring up the masses (Napoleon already had shut down 48 of Paris’ 60 newspapers, if memory serves). Stealing from the public was the whole point of holding public office, wasn’t it?

America really was something different. And that’s why when I hear people complain about how corrupt government is, I always think: Read a book sometime. You have no idea how lucky you are.

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Talk radio update II

billing1 — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 22:49:25 +0000

OK, one more post, and then I really will go and do the right thing and get drunk.

Hannity had on a guy from the Huffington Post and a guy from Breitbart.com — apparently Hannity’s idea of an ideological cage match. They were talking about Hugo Chavez, and the Breitbart.com guy was saying that leftists always support dictators. Look at Stalin, he said. Look at Hitler, he said.

When the Huffington Post guy objected to placing Hitler among the left’s heroes, the Breitbart.com said something like this: “What do you mean? Hitler had ‘socialist’ right in the name of the party.”

Hitler, of course, was a fascist. That’s not even a slur: He was proud of it. He hated the left. He banned the Communist Party and went after communists even before he went after Jews in a serious way. He invaded the Soviet Union, which was, and remained, the poster child of a Marxist paradise. He vowed to eradicate Marxism from the face of the earth.

And yes, it’s true, the Nazi Party was the National Socialist Party. It’s also true that German soldiers wore the words “God with us” on their belt buckles. And it’s true that some concentration camps had the words “Work makes one free” above their entrances. Are there any other Nazi slogans that Breitbart.com would like us to accept at face value?

For a definitive takedown on Breitbart.com, see here.

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