Health Care Destruction
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/opinion/06krugman.html
if (acm.cc) acm.cc.write();
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 5, 2008
Sarah Palin ended her debate performance last Thursday with a slightly garbled quote from Ronald Reagan about how, if we aren’t vigilant, we’ll end up “telling our children and our children’s children” about the days when America was free. It was a revealing choice.
You see, when Reagan said this he wasn’t warning about Soviet aggression. He was warning against legislation that would guarantee health care for older Americans — the program now known as Medicare.
Conservative Republicans still hate Medicare, and would kill it if they could — in fact, they tried to gut it during the Clinton years (that’s what the 1995 shutdown of the government was all about). But so far they haven’t been able to pull that off.
So John McCain wants to destroy the health insurance of nonelderly Americans instead.
Most Americans under 65 currently get health insurance through their employers. That’s largely because the tax code favors such insurance: your employer’s contribution to insurance premiums isn’t considered taxable income, as long as the employer’s health plan follows certain rules. In particular, the same plan has to be available to all employees, regardless of the size of their paycheck or the state of their health.
This system does a fairly effective job of protecting those it reaches, but it leaves many Americans out in the cold.
Workers whose employers don’t offer coverage are forced to seek individual health insurance, often in vain. For one thing, insurance companies offering “nongroup” coverage generally refuse to cover anyone with a pre-existing medical condition. And individual insurance is very expensive, because insurers spend large sums weeding out “high-risk” applicants — that is, anyone who seems likely to actually need the insurance.
So what should be done? Barack Obama offers incremental reform: regulation of insurers to prevent discrimination against the less healthy, subsidies to help lower-income families buy insurance, and public insurance plans that compete with the private sector. His plan falls short of universal coverage, but it would sharply reduce the number of uninsured.
Mr. McCain, on the other hand, wants to blow up the current system, by eliminating the tax break for employer-provided insurance. And he doesn’t offer a workable alternative.
Without the tax break, many employers would drop their current health plans. Several recent nonpartisan studies estimate that under the McCain plan around 20 million Americans currently covered by their employers would lose their health insurance.
As compensation, the McCain plan would give people a tax credit — $2,500 for an individual, $5,000 for a family — that could be used to buy health insurance in the individual market. At the same time, Mr. McCain would deregulate insurance, leaving insurance companies free to deny coverage to those with health problems — and his proposal for a “high-risk pool” for hard cases would provide little help.
So what would happen?
The good news, such as it is, is that more people would buy individual insurance. Indeed, the total number of uninsured Americans might decline marginally under the McCain plan — although many more Americans would be without insurance than under the Obama plan.
But the people gaining insurance would be those who need it least: relatively healthy Americans with high incomes. Why? Because insurance companies want to cover only healthy people, and even among the healthy only those able to pay a lot in addition to their tax credit would be able to afford coverage (remember, it’s a $5,000 credit, but the average family policy actually costs more than $12,000).
Meanwhile, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most: lower-income workers who wouldn’t be able to afford individual insurance even with the tax credit, and Americans with health problems whom insurance companies won’t cover.
And in the process of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, the McCain plan would also lead to a huge, expensive increase in bureaucracy: insurers selling individual health plans spend 29 percent of the premiums they receive on administration, largely because they employ so many people to screen applicants. This compares with costs of 12 percent for group plans and just 3 percent for Medicare.
In short, the McCain plan makes no sense at all, unless you have faith that the magic of the marketplace can solve all problems. And Mr. McCain does: a much-quoted article published under his name declares that “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”
I agree: the McCain plan would do for health care what deregulation has done for banking. And I’m terrified.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
OK. I do not think that either Candidate understands the problem... but here is their positions on heathcare from the debate.
McCain, Obama Compete to Revamp U.S. Health Insurance System
By Aliza Marcus
Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) -- John McCain and Barack Obama clashed in their second debate over who would do more to provide affordable health care, with each accusing the other of hiding the real costs of his plan.
Republican McCain said Obama ``will fine you'' if you're a parent who can't afford insurance for your children. Democrat Obama said his rival ``doesn't tell you he's going to tax your employer-based health-care benefits for the first time ever.''
Both presidential candidates pledged during their debate yesterday in Nashville, Tennessee, to keep health care a priority even in tough economic times. The $2.2 trillion U.S. health-care system makes up 16 percent of the economy while leaving about 15 percent of the population uninsured.
Senator McCain of Arizona says he would make health insurance more affordable by giving everyone a tax credit to help pay for it. Senator Obama of Illinois says he would bar insurers from turning anyone down because of poor health and provide government subsidies to guarantee coverage as good as Congress gets. Who would benefit from each plan is debated by economists, employers and health-policy experts.
``Obama's plan generally helps people who have difficulty getting insurance because of health conditions or whose incomes make it harder for them to afford coverage,'' said Roberton Williams, a researcher with the Tax Policy Center in Washington. ``McCain's plan is likely to help more those who are reasonably healthy and don't get insurance on the job.''
For 54-year-old farmer Richard Williams of Tipton, Missouri, McCain's plan is the winner. Williams would get a $2,500-a-year tax credit, more than enough to pay the $2,164 annual premium for his individual health plan, although not the $5,600 deductible. Still, he's not holding his breath that either candidate will deliver on revamping health care.
``I'm just going to keep plugging away until I'm 65 and get Medicare,'' said Williams in a telephone interview. ``That's a sure thing.''
The family of 9-year-old Logan Swaim in Resaca, Georgia, might do better with Democrat Obama. Humana Inc. refused to insure Logan because he had seen an endocrinologist and was diagnosed with ``short stature,'' according to his mother, Theresa. Tom Noland, a spokesman for Louisville, Kentucky-based Humana, said in an e-mail that he would look into the case.
Although Theresa Swaim's husband recently found a job with health benefits for the entire family, they may gain under Obama's proposal that those with pre-existing conditions, such as Logan, could never be turned down again. Logan's parents, raising four kids on about $40,000 a year, also would qualify for help in paying their half of employer-provided coverage that they say costs about $16,000 a year.
McCain's plan would also save them money through its $5,000 tax credit for families. Like Williams, Logan's mother, a substitute teacher, is skeptical either candidate can deliver on his health platform.
``I don't think anybody can promise universal health care,'' she said.
Obama, 47, would mandate that employers provide insurance or pay into a fund to subsidize care for low-income families, require that all children be covered and create a government-run plan as an option for individuals and small businesses.
McCain, 72, would allow insurers to sell policies across state lines, provide federal aid to state pools for people who can't get private coverage because of their health and provide everyone a tax credit to buy coverage. In exchange, he would require that workers pay income tax on health benefits provided by employers.
In yesterday's debate, McCain portrayed Obama's plan as built around ``government mandates.''
```If you're a small-business person and you don't insure your employees, Senator Obama will fine you,'' McCain said. ``Will fine you. That's remarkable.''
Obama responded that small businesses would get a tax credit to help them afford insurance for their workers. He told the audience at the televised town hall meeting, ``If you've got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it.''
The Democrat said McCain's tax on employer benefits would undercut his promised tax credits. ``So what one hand giveth, the other hand taketh away,'' Obama said.
``Do the math,'' McCain responded. Under his proposal, 95 percent of Americans would come out ahead, McCain said.
McCain's plan would cost $1.3 trillion over 10 years, according to the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. Obama's plan was estimated at $1.6 trillion. The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit group in New York, estimated that over the same period, Obama's plan would reduce the projected 67 million uninsured by 34 million, compared with a 2 million decrease under McCain.
While the candidates said in the debate that they would press ahead with their health-care plans, the financial crisis on Wall Street and the government's $700 billion rescue package reduces the chance that either of them will be able to make big changes anytime soon, said Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates in Alexandria, Virginia.
``After what happened over the past month, where's anybody going to get the money?'' he said. ``The chances of health reform happening next year are now about zero.''
To contact the reporter on this story: Aliza Marcus in Washington at amarcus8@bloomberg.net.
By Aliza Marcus
Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) -- John McCain and Barack Obama clashed in their second debate over who would do more to provide affordable health care, with each accusing the other of hiding the real costs of his plan.
Republican McCain said Obama ``will fine you'' if you're a parent who can't afford insurance for your children. Democrat Obama said his rival ``doesn't tell you he's going to tax your employer-based health-care benefits for the first time ever.''
Both presidential candidates pledged during their debate yesterday in Nashville, Tennessee, to keep health care a priority even in tough economic times. The $2.2 trillion U.S. health-care system makes up 16 percent of the economy while leaving about 15 percent of the population uninsured.
Senator McCain of Arizona says he would make health insurance more affordable by giving everyone a tax credit to help pay for it. Senator Obama of Illinois says he would bar insurers from turning anyone down because of poor health and provide government subsidies to guarantee coverage as good as Congress gets. Who would benefit from each plan is debated by economists, employers and health-policy experts.
``Obama's plan generally helps people who have difficulty getting insurance because of health conditions or whose incomes make it harder for them to afford coverage,'' said Roberton Williams, a researcher with the Tax Policy Center in Washington. ``McCain's plan is likely to help more those who are reasonably healthy and don't get insurance on the job.''
For 54-year-old farmer Richard Williams of Tipton, Missouri, McCain's plan is the winner. Williams would get a $2,500-a-year tax credit, more than enough to pay the $2,164 annual premium for his individual health plan, although not the $5,600 deductible. Still, he's not holding his breath that either candidate will deliver on revamping health care.
``I'm just going to keep plugging away until I'm 65 and get Medicare,'' said Williams in a telephone interview. ``That's a sure thing.''
The family of 9-year-old Logan Swaim in Resaca, Georgia, might do better with Democrat Obama. Humana Inc. refused to insure Logan because he had seen an endocrinologist and was diagnosed with ``short stature,'' according to his mother, Theresa. Tom Noland, a spokesman for Louisville, Kentucky-based Humana, said in an e-mail that he would look into the case.
Although Theresa Swaim's husband recently found a job with health benefits for the entire family, they may gain under Obama's proposal that those with pre-existing conditions, such as Logan, could never be turned down again. Logan's parents, raising four kids on about $40,000 a year, also would qualify for help in paying their half of employer-provided coverage that they say costs about $16,000 a year.
McCain's plan would also save them money through its $5,000 tax credit for families. Like Williams, Logan's mother, a substitute teacher, is skeptical either candidate can deliver on his health platform.
``I don't think anybody can promise universal health care,'' she said.
Obama, 47, would mandate that employers provide insurance or pay into a fund to subsidize care for low-income families, require that all children be covered and create a government-run plan as an option for individuals and small businesses.
McCain, 72, would allow insurers to sell policies across state lines, provide federal aid to state pools for people who can't get private coverage because of their health and provide everyone a tax credit to buy coverage. In exchange, he would require that workers pay income tax on health benefits provided by employers.
In yesterday's debate, McCain portrayed Obama's plan as built around ``government mandates.''
```If you're a small-business person and you don't insure your employees, Senator Obama will fine you,'' McCain said. ``Will fine you. That's remarkable.''
Obama responded that small businesses would get a tax credit to help them afford insurance for their workers. He told the audience at the televised town hall meeting, ``If you've got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it.''
The Democrat said McCain's tax on employer benefits would undercut his promised tax credits. ``So what one hand giveth, the other hand taketh away,'' Obama said.
``Do the math,'' McCain responded. Under his proposal, 95 percent of Americans would come out ahead, McCain said.
McCain's plan would cost $1.3 trillion over 10 years, according to the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. Obama's plan was estimated at $1.6 trillion. The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit group in New York, estimated that over the same period, Obama's plan would reduce the projected 67 million uninsured by 34 million, compared with a 2 million decrease under McCain.
While the candidates said in the debate that they would press ahead with their health-care plans, the financial crisis on Wall Street and the government's $700 billion rescue package reduces the chance that either of them will be able to make big changes anytime soon, said Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates in Alexandria, Virginia.
``After what happened over the past month, where's anybody going to get the money?'' he said. ``The chances of health reform happening next year are now about zero.''
To contact the reporter on this story: Aliza Marcus in Washington at amarcus8@bloomberg.net.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
That is a good investment for USa! US Commercial Paper
Fed to Purchase U.S. Commercial Paper to Ease Crunch (Update2)
By Craig Torres
Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve will create a special fund to purchase U.S. commercial paper after the credit crunch threatened to cut off a key source of funding for corporations.
The Treasury will make a deposit with the Fed's New York district bank to help set up the new fund. The central bank will also lend to the program at policy makers' target rate for overnight loans between banks. The Fed Board invoked emergency powers to set up the unit, the central bank said in a statement released in Washington.
Today's action follows a slide in the commercial-paper market to a three-year low of $1.6 trillion last week as investors fled even companies with few links to the subprime mortgage crisis. Companies from newspaper firm Gannett Co. to electricity producer Southern Co. have been forced to tap credit lines or forego raising debt because of the market's disruption.
The Fed's efforts are aimed at ``stemming the bank-run-like panic,'' said Mark Gertler, a New York University economist and research co-author with Bernanke. ``The immediate threat to the real economy is that large corporations are having difficulty obtaining funds via the commercial paper market.''
Fed officials in a conference call with reporters didn't say how much commercial paper, which hundreds of companies use to finance payrolls and meet other cash needs, it plans to purchase. The central bank's special purpose vehicle will be big enough to backstop the entire market, one official said on condition of anonymity.
Size of Sales
Issuers will be able to sell commercial paper to the Fed up to the average amount they had outstanding in August, an official said.
Policy makers began considering buying commercial paper several weeks ago as the market began to seize up, with borrowers increasingly only able to raise funds on a short timeframe, even just overnight, officials said. The Fed's unit will buy three-month commercial paper, which should help issuers extend the maturity of their borrowing, an official said.
Fed officials anticipate that yields will come down significantly as a result of their initiative.
Yields on top-rated overnight U.S. commercial paper dropped 0.74 percentage point today to 2.94 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Borrowing for seven days increased 1.25 percentage points to 4 percent.
Treasury Deposit
The Treasury's deposit with the Fed's special purpose vehicle will be substantial, officials said. The funds won't come from the $700 billion rescue plan authorized by Congress last week.
Stocks initially climbed and Treasuries sank after the Fed's announcement, while shares later turned lower. The Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Index was down 0.1 percent at 1,055.38 at 10:23 a.m. in New York. Yields on benchmark 10-year notes climbed to 3.51 percent from 3.45 percent late yesterday.
Today's announcement came hours before Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke speaks on the economic outlook at 1:15 p.m. in Washington. He and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson held discussions yesterday as stock markets slid and money market rates climbed as the crisis deepened.
The Fed's new unit will buy three-month dollar-denominated commercial paper at a spread over the three-month overnight- indexed swap rate, which is a measure of traders' expectations for the Fed's benchmark rate.
Fed officials on the conference call indicated that they would like the facility to be a backstop, which would suggest the special vehicle's rate would be set at a slight penalty to normal market rates. They declined to answer a specific question as to whether the rate would be set above current rates, or below, which would constitute a subsidy for borrowers.
Fed to Consult
``The Federal Reserve will consult with market participants regarding appropriate spreads that are consistent with the facility serving as a funding backstop under more normal market conditions,'' the Fed said.
Commercial paper purchased by the vehicle must be rated at least A1/P1/F1, the Fed said. Issuers will pay the unit an upfront fee based on the commercial paper initially sold to the vehicle. The vehicle will cease buying commercial paper on April 30, 2009, unless the Board of Governors agrees to extend it.
The Fed will cap the amount of commercial paper each company may sell to the central bank.
The Fed yesterday said it will double its cash auctions to banks to as much as $900 billion, and telegraphed today's announcement by saying it was looking for other ways to alleviate liquidity strains.
To contact the reporters on this story: Craig Torres in Washington at ctorres3@bloomberg.net. Last Updated: October 7, 2008 10:45 EDT
By Craig Torres
Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve will create a special fund to purchase U.S. commercial paper after the credit crunch threatened to cut off a key source of funding for corporations.
The Treasury will make a deposit with the Fed's New York district bank to help set up the new fund. The central bank will also lend to the program at policy makers' target rate for overnight loans between banks. The Fed Board invoked emergency powers to set up the unit, the central bank said in a statement released in Washington.
Today's action follows a slide in the commercial-paper market to a three-year low of $1.6 trillion last week as investors fled even companies with few links to the subprime mortgage crisis. Companies from newspaper firm Gannett Co. to electricity producer Southern Co. have been forced to tap credit lines or forego raising debt because of the market's disruption.
The Fed's efforts are aimed at ``stemming the bank-run-like panic,'' said Mark Gertler, a New York University economist and research co-author with Bernanke. ``The immediate threat to the real economy is that large corporations are having difficulty obtaining funds via the commercial paper market.''
Fed officials in a conference call with reporters didn't say how much commercial paper, which hundreds of companies use to finance payrolls and meet other cash needs, it plans to purchase. The central bank's special purpose vehicle will be big enough to backstop the entire market, one official said on condition of anonymity.
Size of Sales
Issuers will be able to sell commercial paper to the Fed up to the average amount they had outstanding in August, an official said.
Policy makers began considering buying commercial paper several weeks ago as the market began to seize up, with borrowers increasingly only able to raise funds on a short timeframe, even just overnight, officials said. The Fed's unit will buy three-month commercial paper, which should help issuers extend the maturity of their borrowing, an official said.
Fed officials anticipate that yields will come down significantly as a result of their initiative.
Yields on top-rated overnight U.S. commercial paper dropped 0.74 percentage point today to 2.94 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Borrowing for seven days increased 1.25 percentage points to 4 percent.
Treasury Deposit
The Treasury's deposit with the Fed's special purpose vehicle will be substantial, officials said. The funds won't come from the $700 billion rescue plan authorized by Congress last week.
Stocks initially climbed and Treasuries sank after the Fed's announcement, while shares later turned lower. The Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Index was down 0.1 percent at 1,055.38 at 10:23 a.m. in New York. Yields on benchmark 10-year notes climbed to 3.51 percent from 3.45 percent late yesterday.
Today's announcement came hours before Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke speaks on the economic outlook at 1:15 p.m. in Washington. He and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson held discussions yesterday as stock markets slid and money market rates climbed as the crisis deepened.
The Fed's new unit will buy three-month dollar-denominated commercial paper at a spread over the three-month overnight- indexed swap rate, which is a measure of traders' expectations for the Fed's benchmark rate.
Fed officials on the conference call indicated that they would like the facility to be a backstop, which would suggest the special vehicle's rate would be set at a slight penalty to normal market rates. They declined to answer a specific question as to whether the rate would be set above current rates, or below, which would constitute a subsidy for borrowers.
Fed to Consult
``The Federal Reserve will consult with market participants regarding appropriate spreads that are consistent with the facility serving as a funding backstop under more normal market conditions,'' the Fed said.
Commercial paper purchased by the vehicle must be rated at least A1/P1/F1, the Fed said. Issuers will pay the unit an upfront fee based on the commercial paper initially sold to the vehicle. The vehicle will cease buying commercial paper on April 30, 2009, unless the Board of Governors agrees to extend it.
The Fed will cap the amount of commercial paper each company may sell to the central bank.
The Fed yesterday said it will double its cash auctions to banks to as much as $900 billion, and telegraphed today's announcement by saying it was looking for other ways to alleviate liquidity strains.
To contact the reporters on this story: Craig Torres in Washington at ctorres3@bloomberg.net. Last Updated: October 7, 2008 10:45 EDT
I think they meant to say "direct to Internet" .. it is hard for a newspaper to say that WORD
Obama, McCain campaigns create ads that go directly to video
09:22 AM CDT on Tuesday, October 7, 2008
By KAREN BROOKS / The Dallas Morning News kmbrooks@dallasnews.com
AUSTIN – A campaign ad featuring Charlton Heston as Moses and mocking Barack Obama as the "anointed" one was never a TV commercial at all – yet millions of people saw it.
On Monday, Mr. Obama's campaign launched a 13-minute Web video outlining Mr. McCain's ties to Charles Keating, a banker eventually sent to prison for his role in a savings-and-loan scandal in the 1980s and early 1990s. Within eight hours, a half-million people had viewed the preview on YouTube pointing them to the Obama Web site for the full documentary.
And other than production costs, neither campaign had to spend a dime to put these messages before millions of voters.
"That is sort of the Holy Grail" of political advertising, said Aaron Smith, a research specialist at the Pew Center's Internet and American Life Project.
Web videos like "The One," which was picked up as news by the networks after the Obama camp dismissed it as "juvenile antics," and "Keating Economics," which made news before it was even released, have become the norm in a presidential race that has already broken new ground in cyber-campaigning.
They let voters in places like Texas – a solidly Republican state where neither campaign is advertising – stay tuned to what the campaigns are doing and stay in touch with each candidate's message. For campaigns, they create buzz with very little cost or effort.
Honing attacks
And in the final 30 days of the election, they allow the campaigns to hone their attacks with more value for their money. Just for its length alone, the Keating video would be difficult to get on television – and even if it could be done, the cost would be prohibitive.
"What the Internet has done by free-video sites is provided them a way to get their message out to a huge number of people and get it out for free," said Jeff Emanuel, president of Lighthouse Strategies and Consulting and a director emeritus of a leading conservative blog, RedState.com. "Then, when mainstream media or TV stations pick it up, not only does it get seen by a million people on the Internet, but it gets seen by millions of people who watch TV news. You can't get better than free TV advertising in front of 10 million pairs of eyes."
That's what happened with an ad featuring Paris Hilton that took a dig at Mr. Obama's popularity. It aired only a couple of times, but millions saw it on YouTube and in news reports about the controversy it created.
Controversial
Another ad got free airplay because of its controversial message. The McCain camp said Mr. Obama had pushed through a bill that allowed comprehensive sex education for kindergartners. It was widely declared dishonest, as the legislation had a broader focus, and Mr. Obama hadn't sponsored the legislation.
Guaranteeing that the majority of viewers in the Dallas market were to see a TV ad at least once would cost about $150,000 for a weeklong run. Around the state, it would cost at least $1 million.
The major benefits of blending the YouTube age with the most expensive and tech-savvy presidential campaign in history are not lost on the candidates or the parties.
About 35 percent of Americans have watched a political ad online at least once, nearly three times as many as in 2004, studies show. And while made-for-TV ads must appeal to a broad swath of voters, an Internet ad can be sharper to appeal to hard-core partisans, who are most likely to see them.
The Republican National Committee and the McCain campaign, which had lagged behind the Obama camp in Internet fundraising and social networking, have raced to get out front in the video arena with quick-response Web videos that go straight to YouTube or his site at the rate of several a week.
Mr. McCain's Web ads are highly partisan – more so, as a general rule, than his TV ads are – and can run much longer than the standard 30-second TV spot.
The three-minute "Obama Love" video, for example, features pundits talking about the media and throws plenty of red meat to conservatives who chafe at what they perceive to be bias in favor of the Illinois Democrat. And in contrast to Mr. Obama's videos, which are typically simple spots encouraging action or footage of rallies and speeches, the McCain productions resemble actual advertisements or highly produced mini-documentaries.
Prepared for TV
"The McCain campaign has skillfully taken advantage of the phenomenon of ghost videos, which are designed and intended for potential television release, and they may actually run once in a market some place," said Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of TechPresident.com, which tracks the effect the Internet has on the campaign. "They put them online knowing full well that supporters will distribute them for them, regardless of whether the campaign continues to promote them or not."
Mr. Obama's video streams, both on YouTube and on his site, are largely personal messages from the candidate and his family members and supporters, and videos of speeches that voters can go back and watch.
Calls to the Obama campaign seeking comment were not returned. But the McCain camp says they've found a great way to communicate with voters.
"We would definitely say we've found success with using the Web videos as a method of communicating our message, and we fully intend to continue to use them for the duration of the campaign," said McCain campaign spokesman Tom Kise. "We'll have to evaluate how successful they were from a tactical purpose afterwards."
09:22 AM CDT on Tuesday, October 7, 2008
By KAREN BROOKS / The Dallas Morning News kmbrooks@dallasnews.com
AUSTIN – A campaign ad featuring Charlton Heston as Moses and mocking Barack Obama as the "anointed" one was never a TV commercial at all – yet millions of people saw it.
On Monday, Mr. Obama's campaign launched a 13-minute Web video outlining Mr. McCain's ties to Charles Keating, a banker eventually sent to prison for his role in a savings-and-loan scandal in the 1980s and early 1990s. Within eight hours, a half-million people had viewed the preview on YouTube pointing them to the Obama Web site for the full documentary.
And other than production costs, neither campaign had to spend a dime to put these messages before millions of voters.
"That is sort of the Holy Grail" of political advertising, said Aaron Smith, a research specialist at the Pew Center's Internet and American Life Project.
Web videos like "The One," which was picked up as news by the networks after the Obama camp dismissed it as "juvenile antics," and "Keating Economics," which made news before it was even released, have become the norm in a presidential race that has already broken new ground in cyber-campaigning.
They let voters in places like Texas – a solidly Republican state where neither campaign is advertising – stay tuned to what the campaigns are doing and stay in touch with each candidate's message. For campaigns, they create buzz with very little cost or effort.
Honing attacks
And in the final 30 days of the election, they allow the campaigns to hone their attacks with more value for their money. Just for its length alone, the Keating video would be difficult to get on television – and even if it could be done, the cost would be prohibitive.
"What the Internet has done by free-video sites is provided them a way to get their message out to a huge number of people and get it out for free," said Jeff Emanuel, president of Lighthouse Strategies and Consulting and a director emeritus of a leading conservative blog, RedState.com. "Then, when mainstream media or TV stations pick it up, not only does it get seen by a million people on the Internet, but it gets seen by millions of people who watch TV news. You can't get better than free TV advertising in front of 10 million pairs of eyes."
That's what happened with an ad featuring Paris Hilton that took a dig at Mr. Obama's popularity. It aired only a couple of times, but millions saw it on YouTube and in news reports about the controversy it created.
Controversial
Another ad got free airplay because of its controversial message. The McCain camp said Mr. Obama had pushed through a bill that allowed comprehensive sex education for kindergartners. It was widely declared dishonest, as the legislation had a broader focus, and Mr. Obama hadn't sponsored the legislation.
Guaranteeing that the majority of viewers in the Dallas market were to see a TV ad at least once would cost about $150,000 for a weeklong run. Around the state, it would cost at least $1 million.
The major benefits of blending the YouTube age with the most expensive and tech-savvy presidential campaign in history are not lost on the candidates or the parties.
About 35 percent of Americans have watched a political ad online at least once, nearly three times as many as in 2004, studies show. And while made-for-TV ads must appeal to a broad swath of voters, an Internet ad can be sharper to appeal to hard-core partisans, who are most likely to see them.
The Republican National Committee and the McCain campaign, which had lagged behind the Obama camp in Internet fundraising and social networking, have raced to get out front in the video arena with quick-response Web videos that go straight to YouTube or his site at the rate of several a week.
Mr. McCain's Web ads are highly partisan – more so, as a general rule, than his TV ads are – and can run much longer than the standard 30-second TV spot.
The three-minute "Obama Love" video, for example, features pundits talking about the media and throws plenty of red meat to conservatives who chafe at what they perceive to be bias in favor of the Illinois Democrat. And in contrast to Mr. Obama's videos, which are typically simple spots encouraging action or footage of rallies and speeches, the McCain productions resemble actual advertisements or highly produced mini-documentaries.
Prepared for TV
"The McCain campaign has skillfully taken advantage of the phenomenon of ghost videos, which are designed and intended for potential television release, and they may actually run once in a market some place," said Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of TechPresident.com, which tracks the effect the Internet has on the campaign. "They put them online knowing full well that supporters will distribute them for them, regardless of whether the campaign continues to promote them or not."
Mr. Obama's video streams, both on YouTube and on his site, are largely personal messages from the candidate and his family members and supporters, and videos of speeches that voters can go back and watch.
Calls to the Obama campaign seeking comment were not returned. But the McCain camp says they've found a great way to communicate with voters.
"We would definitely say we've found success with using the Web videos as a method of communicating our message, and we fully intend to continue to use them for the duration of the campaign," said McCain campaign spokesman Tom Kise. "We'll have to evaluate how successful they were from a tactical purpose afterwards."
Monday, October 6, 2008
Saturday, October 4, 2008
I have not been busy enough... but I could not pass on this one.
Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/opinion/05rich.html
if (acm.cc) acm.cc.write();
By FRANK RICH
Published: October 4, 2008
SARAH PALIN’S post-Couric/Fey comeback at last week’s vice presidential debate was a turning point in the campaign. But if she “won,” as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate.
With a month to go, the 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race — about “the future,” as Palin kept saying Thursday night — and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.
To understand the meaning of Palin’s “victory,” it must be seen in the context of two ominous developments that directly preceded it. Just hours before the debate began, the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan. That state is ground zero for the collapsed Main Street economy and for so-called Reagan Democrats, those white working-class voters who keep being told by the right that Barack Obama is a Muslim who hung with bomb-throwing radicals during his childhood in the late 1960s.
McCain surrendered Michigan despite having outspent his opponent on television advertising and despite Obama’s twin local handicaps, an unpopular Democratic governor and a felonious, now former, black Democratic Detroit mayor. If McCain can’t make it there, can he make it anywhere in the Rust Belt?
Not without an economic message. McCain’s most persistent attempt, his self-righteous crusade against earmarks, collapsed with his poll numbers. Next to a $700 billion bailout package, his incessant promise to eliminate all Washington pork — by comparison, a puny grand total of $16.5 billion in the 2008 federal budget — doesn’t bring home the bacon. Nor can McCain reconcile his I-will-veto-government-waste mantra with his support, however tardy, of the bailout bill. That bill’s $150 billion in fresh pork includes a boondoggle inserted by the Congressman Don Young, an Alaskan Republican no less.
The second bit of predebate news, percolating under the radar, involved the still-unanswered questions about McCain’s health. Back in May, you will recall, the McCain campaign allowed a select group of 20 reporters to spend a mere three hours examining (but not photocopying) 1,173 pages of the candidate’s health records on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Conspicuously uninvited was Lawrence Altman, a doctor who covers medicine for The New York Times. Altman instead canvassed melanoma experts to evaluate the sketchy data that did emerge. They found the information too “unclear” to determine McCain’s cancer prognosis.
There was, however, at least one doctor-journalist among those 20 reporters in May, the CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta. At the time, Gupta told Katie Couric on CBS that the medical records were “pretty comprehensive” and wrote on his CNN blog that he was “pretty convinced there was no ‘smoking gun’ about the senator’s health.” (Physical health, that is; Gupta wrote there was hardly any information on McCain’s mental health.)
That was then. Now McCain is looking increasingly shaky, whether he’s repeating his “Miss Congeniality” joke twice in the same debate or speaking from notecards even when reciting a line for (literally) the 17th time (“The fundamentals of our economy are strong”) or repeatedly confusing proper nouns that begin with S (Sunni, Shia, Sudan, Somalia, Spain). McCain’s “dismaying temperament,” as George Will labeled it, only thickens the concerns. His kamikaze mission into Washington during the bailout crisis seemed crazed. His seething, hostile debate countenance — a replay of Al Gore’s sarcastic sighing in 2000 — didn’t make the deferential Obama look weak (as many Democrats feared) but elevated him into looking like the sole presidential grown-up.
Though CNN and MSNBC wouldn’t run a political ad with doctors questioning McCain’s medical status, Gupta revisited the issue in an interview published last Tuesday by The Huffington Post. While maintaining a pretty upbeat take on the candidate’s health, the doctor-journalist told the reporter Sam Stein that he couldn’t vouch “by any means” for the completeness of the records the campaign showed him four months ago. “The pages weren’t numbered,” Gupta said, “so I had no way of knowing what was missing.” At least in Watergate we knew that the gap on Rose Mary Woods’s tape ran 18 and a half minutes.
It’s against this backdrop that Palin’s public pronouncements, culminating with her debate performance, have been so striking. The standard take has it that she’s either speaking utter ignorant gibberish (as to Couric) or reciting highly polished, campaign-written sound bites that she’s memorized (as at the convention and the debate). But there’s a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.
This was first apparent when Palin extolled a “small town” vice president as a hero in her convention speech — and cited not one of the many Republican vice presidents who fit that bill but, bizarrely, Harry Truman, a Democrat who succeeded a president who died in office. A few weeks later came Charlie Gibson’s question about whether she thought she was “experienced enough” and “ready” when McCain invited her to join his ticket. Palin replied that she didn’t “hesitate” and didn’t “even blink” — a response that seemed jarring for its lack of any human modesty, even false modesty.
In the last of her Couric interview installments on Thursday, Palin was asked which vice president had most impressed her, and after paying tribute to Geraldine Ferraro, she chose “George Bush Sr.” Her criterion: she most admires vice presidents “who have gone on to the presidency.” Hours later, at the debate, she offered a discordant contrast to Biden when asked by Gwen Ifill how they would each govern “if the worst happened” and the president died in office. After Biden spoke of somber continuity, Palin was weirdly flip and chipper, eager to say that as a “maverick” she’d go her own way.
But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a “consummate maverick” again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being “raped and murdered.” If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.
After the debate, Republicans who had been bailing on Palin rushed back to the fold. They know her relentless ambition is the only hope for saving a ticket headed by a warrior who is out of juice and out of ideas. So what if she is preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years? She looks and sounds like a winner.
You can understand why they believe that. She has more testosterone than anyone else at the top of her party. McCain and his surrogates are forever blaming their travails on others, wailing about supposed sexist and journalistic biases around the clock. McCain even canceled an interview with Larry King, for heaven’s sake, in a fit of pique at a CNN anchor, Campbell Brown.
We are not a nation of whiners, as Phil Gramm would have it, but the G.O.P. is now the party of whiners. That rebranding became official when Republican House leaders moaned that a routine partisan speech by Nancy Pelosi had turned their members against the bailout bill. As the stock market fell nearly 778 points, Barney Frank taunted his G.O.P. peers with pitch-perfect mockery: “Somebody hurt my feelings, so I will punish the country!”
Talk about the world coming full circle. This is the same Democrat who had been slurred as “Barney Fag” in the mid-1990s by Dick Armey, a House leader of the government-bashing Gingrich revolution that helped lower us into this debacle. Now Frank was ridiculing the House G.O.P. as a bunch of sulking teenage girls. His wisecrack stung — and stuck.
Palin is an antidote to the whiny Republican image that Frank nailed. Alaska’s self-styled embodiment of Joe Sixpack is not a sulker, but a pistol-packing fighter. That’s why she draws the crowds and (as she puts it) “energy” that otherwise elude the angry McCain. But she is still the candidate for vice president, not president. Americans do not vote for vice president.
So how can a desperate G.O.P. save itself? As McCain continues to fade into incoherence and irrelevance, the last hope is that he’ll come up with some new game-changing stunt to match his initial pick of Palin or his ill-fated campaign “suspension.” Until Thursday night, more than a few Republicans were fantasizing that his final Hail Mary pass would be to ditch Palin so she can “spend more time” with her ever-growing family. But the debate reminded Republicans once again that it’s Palin, not McCain, who is their last hope for victory.
You have to wonder how long it will be before they plead with him to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/opinion/05rich.html
if (acm.cc) acm.cc.write();
By FRANK RICH
Published: October 4, 2008
SARAH PALIN’S post-Couric/Fey comeback at last week’s vice presidential debate was a turning point in the campaign. But if she “won,” as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate.
With a month to go, the 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race — about “the future,” as Palin kept saying Thursday night — and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.
To understand the meaning of Palin’s “victory,” it must be seen in the context of two ominous developments that directly preceded it. Just hours before the debate began, the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan. That state is ground zero for the collapsed Main Street economy and for so-called Reagan Democrats, those white working-class voters who keep being told by the right that Barack Obama is a Muslim who hung with bomb-throwing radicals during his childhood in the late 1960s.
McCain surrendered Michigan despite having outspent his opponent on television advertising and despite Obama’s twin local handicaps, an unpopular Democratic governor and a felonious, now former, black Democratic Detroit mayor. If McCain can’t make it there, can he make it anywhere in the Rust Belt?
Not without an economic message. McCain’s most persistent attempt, his self-righteous crusade against earmarks, collapsed with his poll numbers. Next to a $700 billion bailout package, his incessant promise to eliminate all Washington pork — by comparison, a puny grand total of $16.5 billion in the 2008 federal budget — doesn’t bring home the bacon. Nor can McCain reconcile his I-will-veto-government-waste mantra with his support, however tardy, of the bailout bill. That bill’s $150 billion in fresh pork includes a boondoggle inserted by the Congressman Don Young, an Alaskan Republican no less.
The second bit of predebate news, percolating under the radar, involved the still-unanswered questions about McCain’s health. Back in May, you will recall, the McCain campaign allowed a select group of 20 reporters to spend a mere three hours examining (but not photocopying) 1,173 pages of the candidate’s health records on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Conspicuously uninvited was Lawrence Altman, a doctor who covers medicine for The New York Times. Altman instead canvassed melanoma experts to evaluate the sketchy data that did emerge. They found the information too “unclear” to determine McCain’s cancer prognosis.
There was, however, at least one doctor-journalist among those 20 reporters in May, the CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta. At the time, Gupta told Katie Couric on CBS that the medical records were “pretty comprehensive” and wrote on his CNN blog that he was “pretty convinced there was no ‘smoking gun’ about the senator’s health.” (Physical health, that is; Gupta wrote there was hardly any information on McCain’s mental health.)
That was then. Now McCain is looking increasingly shaky, whether he’s repeating his “Miss Congeniality” joke twice in the same debate or speaking from notecards even when reciting a line for (literally) the 17th time (“The fundamentals of our economy are strong”) or repeatedly confusing proper nouns that begin with S (Sunni, Shia, Sudan, Somalia, Spain). McCain’s “dismaying temperament,” as George Will labeled it, only thickens the concerns. His kamikaze mission into Washington during the bailout crisis seemed crazed. His seething, hostile debate countenance — a replay of Al Gore’s sarcastic sighing in 2000 — didn’t make the deferential Obama look weak (as many Democrats feared) but elevated him into looking like the sole presidential grown-up.
Though CNN and MSNBC wouldn’t run a political ad with doctors questioning McCain’s medical status, Gupta revisited the issue in an interview published last Tuesday by The Huffington Post. While maintaining a pretty upbeat take on the candidate’s health, the doctor-journalist told the reporter Sam Stein that he couldn’t vouch “by any means” for the completeness of the records the campaign showed him four months ago. “The pages weren’t numbered,” Gupta said, “so I had no way of knowing what was missing.” At least in Watergate we knew that the gap on Rose Mary Woods’s tape ran 18 and a half minutes.
It’s against this backdrop that Palin’s public pronouncements, culminating with her debate performance, have been so striking. The standard take has it that she’s either speaking utter ignorant gibberish (as to Couric) or reciting highly polished, campaign-written sound bites that she’s memorized (as at the convention and the debate). But there’s a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.
This was first apparent when Palin extolled a “small town” vice president as a hero in her convention speech — and cited not one of the many Republican vice presidents who fit that bill but, bizarrely, Harry Truman, a Democrat who succeeded a president who died in office. A few weeks later came Charlie Gibson’s question about whether she thought she was “experienced enough” and “ready” when McCain invited her to join his ticket. Palin replied that she didn’t “hesitate” and didn’t “even blink” — a response that seemed jarring for its lack of any human modesty, even false modesty.
In the last of her Couric interview installments on Thursday, Palin was asked which vice president had most impressed her, and after paying tribute to Geraldine Ferraro, she chose “George Bush Sr.” Her criterion: she most admires vice presidents “who have gone on to the presidency.” Hours later, at the debate, she offered a discordant contrast to Biden when asked by Gwen Ifill how they would each govern “if the worst happened” and the president died in office. After Biden spoke of somber continuity, Palin was weirdly flip and chipper, eager to say that as a “maverick” she’d go her own way.
But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a “consummate maverick” again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being “raped and murdered.” If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.
After the debate, Republicans who had been bailing on Palin rushed back to the fold. They know her relentless ambition is the only hope for saving a ticket headed by a warrior who is out of juice and out of ideas. So what if she is preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years? She looks and sounds like a winner.
You can understand why they believe that. She has more testosterone than anyone else at the top of her party. McCain and his surrogates are forever blaming their travails on others, wailing about supposed sexist and journalistic biases around the clock. McCain even canceled an interview with Larry King, for heaven’s sake, in a fit of pique at a CNN anchor, Campbell Brown.
We are not a nation of whiners, as Phil Gramm would have it, but the G.O.P. is now the party of whiners. That rebranding became official when Republican House leaders moaned that a routine partisan speech by Nancy Pelosi had turned their members against the bailout bill. As the stock market fell nearly 778 points, Barney Frank taunted his G.O.P. peers with pitch-perfect mockery: “Somebody hurt my feelings, so I will punish the country!”
Talk about the world coming full circle. This is the same Democrat who had been slurred as “Barney Fag” in the mid-1990s by Dick Armey, a House leader of the government-bashing Gingrich revolution that helped lower us into this debacle. Now Frank was ridiculing the House G.O.P. as a bunch of sulking teenage girls. His wisecrack stung — and stuck.
Palin is an antidote to the whiny Republican image that Frank nailed. Alaska’s self-styled embodiment of Joe Sixpack is not a sulker, but a pistol-packing fighter. That’s why she draws the crowds and (as she puts it) “energy” that otherwise elude the angry McCain. But she is still the candidate for vice president, not president. Americans do not vote for vice president.
So how can a desperate G.O.P. save itself? As McCain continues to fade into incoherence and irrelevance, the last hope is that he’ll come up with some new game-changing stunt to match his initial pick of Palin or his ill-fated campaign “suspension.” Until Thursday night, more than a few Republicans were fantasizing that his final Hail Mary pass would be to ditch Palin so she can “spend more time” with her ever-growing family. But the debate reminded Republicans once again that it’s Palin, not McCain, who is their last hope for victory.
You have to wonder how long it will be before they plead with him to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.
Friday, October 3, 2008
My cousin found a couple in East Texas... where is the rest of the body? I have always wondered....
Hurricane Ike leaves mammoth toothin scientist's backyard
By Daily Mail ReporterLast updated at 3:32 PM on 03rd October 2008
Discovery: Paleotologist Jim Westgate holds a fossil tooth of a mammoth that he found in Texas in the debris from Hurricane Ike
A paleontologist whose beachfront home in Texas was destroyed during Hurricane Ike has found a mammoth's tooth in the debris.
Scientists Dorothy Sisk and Jim Westgate discovered the football-sized fossil in Sisk's front yard in Caplen on the devastated Bolivar Peninsula.
Westgate believes the fossil, which looks like a series of boot soles or slices of bread wedged together, is from a Columbian mammoth common in North America until around 10,000 years ago.When Lamar University professor Dorothy Sisk returned to her devastated beachfront home, she searched through what few belongings were strewn about - a bowl, a broken vase, a scrap of fabric.
“She picked up a couple things,” said LU colleague Jim Westgate, who had volunteered to drive her to the site in his pickup.
All that remained of the home were scraps of concrete and splintered pilings.
“It was while we were looking at the house, or at least what was left of the foundation, that I saw it lying there with lots of shell debris in what had been the front yard,” Westgate said.
Westgate, a trained paleontologist and a research associate with the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory at the University of Texas Memorial Museum, recognized the fossil tooth of a mammoth.
“This is the first one I’ve found in 19 years,” Westgate said. “People bring in pieces and parts from the beach for me to identify, and I haven’t seen one in this good a condition.”
The 6 lb (2.7 kg) tooth, which resembles a series of boot soles or slices of bread wedged together, is most probably that of the Columbian Mammoth, a species common to North America until around 10,000 years ago, Westgate said.
At that time, mammoths and mastodons, which are ancestors of the modern elephant, roamed the continent in large numbers.
Their fossil teeth are easily distinguished from one another by the grinding surface, Westgate said.
Mastodon teeth are bumpy, and resemble a series of steep mountains and deep valleys, whereas mammoth teeth are flatter and well-suited to grinding.
It is believed that mastodons ate leaves, bark and fruits, whereas mammoths were predominately grazers.
Like modern elephants, mammoths grew a total of six sets of teeth during their lifetime, ejecting worn teeth “like a shotgun, loading a newly formed tooth in its place,” Westgate said.
The discovered tooth is unworn, so it was either newly erupted or a “tooth in waiting” when the animal died, Westgate said.
It is expected that the tooth will be sent to the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin.
More than 1 million people fled the Texas coast because of Hurricane Ike.
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