I've never been able to get my cream cheese frosting to explode and other stuff.

I've never been able to get my cream cheese frosting to explode. What am I doing wrong:?


I fail to see what exactly the mouse did that was heroic. Why do we call everybody and every thing a hero for nothing more than proximity to a situation?


Isn't there a difference between a political organizer and a community organizer?


The Keystones Tar Sands Pipeline is not a job creator. Middle class workers are job creators.


Bob Dold is so disingenuous about payroll tax vote that even Crains cannot stand it. He forgot to mention why the Democrats would not vote for the Republican payroll tax cut bill, it contained several "poison pills".  Apparently, Bob is a bit confused about the pipeline, the Keystone Oil pipeline will not bring oil to the US for US use. It's for refining and delivery overseas. Poor confused Bob. He's now admitting to the media that he's not up for the job.


Mark Kirk tweets: "US long ago desig Taliban terrorists. Now Admin is negotiating with terrorists. How valuable are Taliban "promises"? I respond: "@SenatorKirk You said there were WMD in Iraq. In fact, you said you had personal knowledge of same. How valuable is your personal knowledge?"


Joe Cirincione tweets: "This is a very important point. "@mattduss: No, Attacking Iran Won’t Help Iranian Dissidents http://bit.ly/rPcRRM""


Don't believe the Ayn Rand Institute backstory on how she came to the USA. They would have you believe she walked from Russia after fighting the Bolsheviks single-handedly at the age of 12 while starving. The story I was told by people with some personal knowledge is that she did spend some dicey months in Russia in the early stages of the Bolshevik part of the Revolution, but she was never alone. First, she had her parents and sisters, and then she had her Chicago family, my family. Her parents had participated in the earlier White Revolution, happy to be rid of the Tsar as were most Jewish families in Russia at the time. They fled with their children to the Crimea when the Bolsheviks marched into St. Petersburg, their home town, but returned shortly thereafter, probably due to lack of food and housing. When they got back, they found that her father's business was taken from him by the Bolsheviks. He was crushed and never recovered from it. The Revolution somewhat benefited the daughter, Alissa (later Alice and eventually Ayn), however, as it was her only chance to go to college, something that would have been forbidden to a female and a Jew before the Revolution. She adopted the Revolution's atheism and went to college in St. Petersburg, but she ultimately saw that there was no future to be had in Soviet Russia and told her parents she wanted out. She ultimately came over the same way thousands of Jewish refugees came over--though sponsorship by relatives already in the USA. Her parents wrote to my mom's great-grantparents asking if they would please take her in and take care of her. Being nice people and good liberals, they said sure. They housed, fed and clothed her and gave her money to make her way to California. Here's a little oral history as told by Fern Brown, my grandfather's first cousin. My mom's grandfather was the "Ike" referred to in Brown's story. I remember him well although he was very old when I was still a small child. I have no reason to doubt Brown, she was one of my mom's favorite cousins, but my grandmother told a slightly different story--that Rand lived with different parts of the family at different times and the family didn't really like her much because she kept them up all night. The point is that Rand did not make it out of Russia and to California on her own steam. The family was happy to help her out and she was happy to take their help and kindness. Isn't that what Americans generally gladly do for each other, and a far cry from the selfishness Rand later promoted?


On the Gill side of the family, we're busy with long-distance Internet book club. The book is Flowers for Algernon. Algernon is a real heroic mouse, well, the fictional version at least. So far here is my favorite quote: ‎Now I understand one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.


I have absolutely no problem with this holiday message from the President and I like my card with the Bo paw print signature: 

Health Care Reform, Now Just an Industry Bailout (and they're not even under water)

Firedog lake posted about health care reform on Saturday. Apparently, the sole cost savings touted by the Obama Administration, HCAN and MoveOn is now in the dust bin along with the public option. There will be no federal standard for insurance products sold on the exchanges. The states will be able to legislate standards or not. Many Republican state governors are planning to refuse the federal grants give to create the exchanges and will not be setting up any exchanges at all--just like they did with high speed rail. So, it pretty much looks like Obama has decided to cave into red state's governor's rights to harm their constituents for political fodder.

Word on the street about the Illinois is that the exchanges will be split up, separate exchanges for small groups and individuals. This is contrary to the notion folks were sold on back in 2009, that one large pool will make everyone's costs go down. Individual purchasers will still be charged a premium for being outside of a group and all this happening at a time when more and more people are being put out of insurance groups.

The latest word from Illinois is that the insurance companies are wrestling control of the exchanges away from the state. At best, the Illinois exchange will be one of a few state exchanges and pretty much just an aggregating website than a free marketplace for health insurance.

Many are trying to downplay the failure of the Affordable Health Care Act with anecdotal success stories.** They use anecdotal evidence of success because there is no statistically significant success to tout. A few people have been helped, but there will be no general help for the masses, and health care costs are likely to continue to skyrocket.

The false congratulations on health care will continue because of the upcoming elections.

On a call last week with Bold Progressives, IL-10 candidate Ilya Sheyman touted his work on health care through MoveOn. I had given him the benefit of the doubt in my last post which described how Sheyman's MoveOn worked locally against real health care reform, perhaps he was not a central figure in the bullying and silencing of single payer advocates, but now he's taking full credit for MoveOn's health care "reform" effort. 

On the Bold Progressives call, I asked Sheyman what he proposes to do for people like me who are self employeed and paying ever increasing premiums for ever shrinking coverage. Ironically, he answered that he supports Medicare for All. The Bold Progressives salivated at Sheyman's use of the right buzzwords, promised to make thousands of calls into our district from out-of-state and pledged out-of-state cash to him, but I found his answer hollow and their memories short. When he had the chance to work for health care reform, he opted to support anything the Obama Administration wanted to do, and refused to listen to very real concerns which have pretty much all become reality.

Unless something changes drastically, and this is unlikely, the cost controlling exchanges of health care reform will be reduced to state funded websites run by the insurance industry. Insurers will be able to offer plans that cover what they feel like covering with high deductibles going along with high premiums. We got virtually no reform, and for all their fights against the law, insurers have managed to wangle federal grants for website advertising. It's a bail out for an industry that's not failing, for an industry seeing record profits.

If you're going to run as the one progressive savior, it seems to me you need to do progressive things. That is why I have a real hard time taking the Ilya Sheyman campaign seriously. His "proven progressive leadership" only proved that reform would not happen and added to the argument that reform cannot happen. The health care debacle has given those against any reform plenty of ammunition against progressives and against reform. The saddest part of all of it is that the program itself, the shining example of progressive reform failure, is neither progressive nor reform and was never intended to be either. It was a solely political move for solely political benefits and has set back the cause of health care reform indefinitely.

**Note that the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan touted in the link is a temporary plan. Also note that the temporary Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan touted in the link is more on the model of a single payer system than the permanent exchange model plan.

Not to be rushed into a decision

UPDATE:

Ilya was given the opportunity to respond to this post and he declined. On other sites and in other venues, he has taken full credit for MoveOn's work on fake health care reform. So, as far as I'm concerned, he's taking credit for his local MoveOn's work against our local single payer advocates.

*******************************************

Recently, Illinois Tenth Congressional District Candidate, Ilya Sheyman made a You Tube statement about the Occupy movement. He said he supports Occupy Wall Street and pretty much took credit for parts of it through his work with MoveOn.

The video was immediately lauded by progressives. Sheyman Gets It! they proclaimed. My first thought was that I'm not so sure. You see, Ilya's credentials, in fact his only significant credentials are through his work with MoveOn. According to his resume, he was the "Mobilization Director" for MoveOn.org from June 2009 through February 2011. I had an experience with MoveOn during that time and I wrote about it at the time.

Fall 2009 Health Care Debate

You may recall that the fall of 2009 was the height of the health care reform debate in Washington. I felt, and still feel, that single payer, Medicare for All, is the best health care solution for the country. It saves on administrative costs and puts all of the money into care while our current system, as slightly revised by the Affordable Health Care Act, supported by President Obama and many Democrats, puts a lot of money into insurance, marketing, advertising and paying for people to spend their time denying health care. A lot of very good people worked for single payer before the major health care debate of Fall 2009, during that time, and still work for the tested and true cost reduction plan now. However, during this critical time, around early November 2009, when public opinion was brought to bear on Congress through town hall meetings and in the media, single payer was silenced.

It was frustrating for single payer advocates like me to see single payer taken off the agenda in Congress and mostly because it wasn't the Republicans or the Tea Parties that took it off the agenda. It was Democrats and their supporting organizations, including OFA, HCAN and MoveOn.

I was incredibly disappointed to find that our very own community organizer organization, Citizen Action/Illinois, was taken over by HCAN, an organization dedicated to preserving private health insurance, but softening the blow through something that they called the "public option". HCAN, and OFA,  the morphed version of the President's own candidate committee, were very aggressive in promoting the public option, not so much as against Republicans in Congress, but against those advocating for single payer. Of course, none of this was such a big surprise. OFA was in fact a group made up of Obama campaign workers. HCAN was created solely to sell the public option as the only arguable solution. What surprised me was when MoveOn joined in on the push for the public option, the push that only pushed single payer off the table and out of the discussion.

The Enforcers at Work

A lot of my writing in the Summer and Fall of 2009 centered on the efforts of groups like HCAN and OFA to silence single payer advocates. The HCANNERS specialized in telling people they were for reform to gain support, and then backing off when it came time to fight and then berating those holding out for real reform. OFA threatened to kick me out for holding a house party event where single payer would be discussed in addition to the public option.

Things spiraled a bit out of control, at least to me, when several people speaking for HCAN and MoveOn joined a single payer advocate Internet group claiming agreement on the issue. The Internet group had been set up by single payer advocates for discussions among single payer advocates. It was not a general health care reform discussion group, but specifically for single payer advocates. At one point in early November 2009, a MoveOn worker, not  a run-of-the-mill volunteer, but someone with a title and in a position of leadership, advertised a MoveOn health care event on the Internet group. The response from the group was basically thanks for the invite; we'll be there with our signs and banners. The reply was if you think you're going to mention single payer at our event, you are uninvited. So, the single payer folks were invited to make their crowd look bigger, but not to advocate for single payer. Objections from both sides went back and forth and the conversation got tense. For a week or so the entire group was blasted with emails from the MoveOn person who basically told the single payer advocates, on their own Internet group, to stand down, and a few of the exchanges were rather harsh. I have the emails if anyone is interested in looking at them.

The Point

This brings us back to the present and Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Chicago and similar movements around the country. I think that one of the most important aspects of the Occupy movement is that the participants and supporters are sick of the empty promises and sick of business as usual in Washington. To me it's the anti-HCAN, or anti-Tea Party for that matter, group of people who do not want their work on issues to be sucked into a candidate campaign or astroturf organization that ultimately abandons the issues to benefit a candidate campaign. They want what they want on the issues and will not support the lesser of evils as those of us who work in campaigns are often told we have to do.

President Obama talked about single payer in his original Senate and then Presidential campaigns. He led people to believe that the topic would at least be discussed. Then, as his star rose, he changed his tune, and a good chunk of the progressive grassroots movement went along with him and enforced for him. Not only was the promise to work for a single payer or a similar system unfulfilled, they actively and loudly worked against any discussion of it. The term was "Off theTable!"  We were left with business as usual and these great "progressive" groups, including MoveOn, became enforcers of the status quo.

So, I guess I have a hard time getting all warm and fuzzy from Ilya Sheyman, Mobilization Director for MoveOn, telling me that he and only he gets the Occupy movement. I'm also having a hard time with PDA, the "Healthcare not Warfare" folks endorsing Sheyman, in fact gushing over his progressive credentials, without asking a question about this episode in his MoveOn past.

Mitigating Factors

In his defense, I have to say that it was not Ilya himself who sat on the single payer group and yelled at the single payer advocates. I don't know where he stood in the pecking order, and I do not know that he ordered the actions, accepted the actions as incontrovertible necessity, merely tolerated them, or if perhaps he did not even know about them. But, the facts are that he was in this organization, touts a central and supervisory role in it, probably had contact with enough information that he'd know at least as much as I did from outside the organization, and failed to take any sort of public stand against it. Had he read my blog at the time, he'd have known all about it. So, I still have a few questions for Ilya.

Questions

When you were at MoveOn, did you supervise or come into contact with council coordinators? Did you know that they were aggressively working against single payer groups? Did you ever ask the powers that be at MoveOn why they abandoned single payer? Did you fight them on that change or express any opinion that they should stand firm and not just stand with politicians? Did you take a public stand on health care reform in the fall of 2009? Did you feel that single payer needed to be taken out of the discussion? Why or why not? And finally, do you get that the Occupy movement is not about giving up on an issue, ordering its advocates to stand down, in order to support a politician?

Conclusion (for now)

Ilya Sheyman is running as the great progressive hero. I'm just wondering where he was and what he did when we needed a progressive hero and couldn't find one at MoveOn. I'm wondering if his supporters rushed into their decision to support him without studying the facts of this matter. I'm also wondering if there is some connection between progressives standing down on health care reform and our current conversation on the importance of child labor laws. We stand down and stand down, and then wonder why this country keeps moving further to the right.

Ann

When I was a kid, my parents watched, and had my sister and I watch, the Democratic National Convention every presidential election year. It was just part of our lives every four years. I always wanted to be a delegate, but when I actually had the chance, I wasn't really thinking about it because I never thought it was possible. I was never that connected, even when I was connected. How I became a delegate in 2004 is a whole other story which I have written about before. That's not my story here. Here I'm going to tell you about an inspiration that led me to do what I did that ultimately got me to the convention.

Flash forward from my childhood in the 60's and 70's to 1988. Texas State Treasurer, Ann Richards, took the DNC stage and delivered the speech of her life. We were suffering through the Greed is Good Reagan administration, and Richards got up and finally said what a lot of us were thinking, but the news media, in its love for the fake Great Communicator, was not articulating. There was something wrong here, wrong in the economy and wrong in our society excluding women and minorities from power. Richards talked about her childhood during the Depression, and the economic concerns of people in Texas that were being out-shadowed by it's swaggering tough-guy gun-toting image.

The most famous line from Richards' 1988 DNC speech (taken from a 1982 Frank and Ernest cartoon ) is often quoted even today:  [talking about two Texas women in 160 years making it as keynote speaker] "But if you give us a chance, we can perform. After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels." It wasn't the line itself, but her delivery that made it so great. Notwithstanding the famous line, this perhaps was the most meaningful passage of the speech:

They told working mothers it’s all their fault -- their families are falling apart because they had to go to work to keep their kids in jeans and tennis shoes and college. And they’re wrong!! They told American labor they were trying to ruin free enterprise by asking for 60 days’ notice of plant closings, and that’s wrong. And they told the auto industry and the steel industry and the timber industry and the oil industry, companies being threatened by foreign products flooding this country, that you’re "protectionist" if you think the government should enforce our trade laws. And that is wrong. When they belittle us for demanding clean air and clean water for trying to save the oceans and the ozone layer, that’s wrong.

No wonder we feel isolated and confused. We want answers and their answer is that "something is wrong with you."  Well nothing's wrong with you. Nothing’s wrong with you that you can’t fix in November!

Richards was the real Great Communicator of the 1980s. She rose to the national scene after her speech and became Governor of Texas in 1990.

Richards' life is now the subject of a play showing at the old Schubert Theatre in Chicago. The play was written as a one woman show by its performer Holland Taylor. Taylor is known for several movie and television roles, but I most remember her as a Boston circuit court judge from Ally McBeal and The Practice. I saw the show, Ann, this week.

Taylor bears a remarkable resemblance to Richards. She had met Richards, was a friend of a friend, and played the role affectionately. As the play begins, Richards is speaking at a fictitious college graduation. She kids around with the offstage president of the college, and tells the students how she got to be Governor from her days as a housewife who entertained a lot to break up the boredom, and drank too much. She tells stories about her parents, her loving, but bawdy father and her difficult-to-please mother. She told one of her fathers less smutty jokes and described her mother's approach to teaching her daughter to sew. She could not please her mother, but she pleased her father who always told her she could do and be anything she wanted, a very modern notion for a girl in the 1930s. 

Richards went to Baylor University and excelled in debate. She married young and she and her husband became politically active. She taught school and had her children. Eventually, her drinking took a toll on her marriage and she divorced in 1980.

Taylor describes Richards' dilemma when she was asked to run for Governor. After all, she was a woman, divorced and a 10 year sober alcoholic. But she had the nation's attention from that speech and Texas just wasn't that bad in those days, before it was gerrymandered into right wing lunatic oblivion. 

The scene then moves to Richards office in the governor's mansion. She's busy trying to set up the family's Thanksgiving, a fishing trip complete with turkey, ham and pies, with her 3 now adult children She's also trying to decide whether to stay the execution of a man who killed a nun, but had a terrible childhood that never made it to the court record. The execution was being protested by the Catholic church and the nuns who knew the murder victim had forgiven the murderer. At the same time, she's trying to get a first draft out of her speechwriter for an event she's attending that night. Then, she finds out she has to personally pay for an $8000 travel bill because one of her staff made a mistake in the vendor hired for the job. She's on the phone constantly and calling out to her secretary in between calls.

Taylor's play takes a poignant turn as Richards explains to her secretary and staff that few in Texas understand that as Governor, she is only able to temporarily stay an execution. She had no authority to pardon the perpetrator or grant any sort of clemency. As the Texas law was written, it was very likely that he would be executed in 30 days no matter what she did. As an aside, she comments that Texas cannot continue on in this way, but the audience knows that Texas decided to take a different path and now proudly executes the guilty and innocent alike without looking back.

Taylor then brings Richards to her election loss in 1994. Richards waxes philosophical stating that if it was her stand against conceal carry, then so be it. While never mentioning Bush by name, she then talks about her hopes for her successor, hopes that we know she knows will never be met and we know never were. Notwithstanding the unlikelihood, she hoped her successor would realize that the actions he would take as governor would have a real effect upon the lives of the people in Texas.

The play ends with Richards talking about her active life after the governorship and her ultimate battle with cancer.

I found Richards' 1988 speech inspiring. Here was an older woman (with Republican hair as she quipped), who cut through the meme of the time, that greed is good, profits are the only thing that's important and that Americans' duty is to shop for cheap goods increasingly made overseas. She talked about the poor in a time when it was fashionable to only talk about the rich and people did everything they could afford to emulate them. She also talked about inclusion, bringing women and minorities into the political process. Her proudest achievement was in making her government resemble the demographics of the state. That was the Richards who inspired me to get involved in politics. She described what I was seeing in everyday life in the 1980s when many others were seeing, or at least only willing to admit they were seeing, the riches of the popular television programs of the era, Dallas, Dynasty and Falcon Crest.

The play was a nice look back. It showed Richards grit and humor, but I would not call it particularly powerful piece of art. Holland Taylor's performance was good; she played Richards truly, but I think her difficulty in writing the play, described by her note in the Stagebill, showed in her performance. It must be hard to capture the essence of a person you admire, almost a contemporary, who died before her time from a difficult disease.

I give Ann 3 cat treats for helping us remember a woman who should be remembered for her compassion, toughness and humor in a time and place when humor and toughness meant picking on less fortunate people when they were down while brandishing a gun in their faces, and compassion was only a word used to win elections.