1 Boring Old Man

False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots
New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG and JACKIE CALMES
August 13, 2009

The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama’s health care proposals would create government-sponsored “death panels” to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks. Advanced even this week by Republican stalwarts including the party’s last vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, and Charles E. Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator, the nature of the assertion nonetheless seemed reminiscent of the modern-day viral Internet campaigns that dogged Mr. Obama last year, falsely calling him a Muslim and questioning his nationality.

But the rumor — which has come up at Congressional town-hall-style meetings this week in spite of an avalanche of reports laying out why it was false — was not born of anonymous e-mailers, partisan bloggers or stealthy cyberconspiracy theorists. Rather, it has a far more mainstream provenance, openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey, whose 1994 health care critique made her a star of the conservative movement [and ultimately, New York’s lieutenant governor].

There is nothing in any of the legislative proposals that would call for the creation of death panels or any other governmental body that would cut off care for the critically ill as a cost-cutting measure. But over the course of the past few months, early, stated fears from anti-abortion conservatives that Mr. Obama would pursue a pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda, combined with twisted accounts of actual legislative proposals that would provide financing for optional consultations with doctors about hospice care and other “end of life” services, fed the rumor to the point where it overcame the debate.

On Thursday, Mr. Grassley said in a statement that he and others in the small group of senators that was trying to negotiate a health care plan had dropped any “end of life” proposals from consideration. A pending House bill has language authorizing Medicare to finance beneficiaries’ consultations with professionals on whether to authorize aggressive and potentially life-saving interventions later in life. Though the consultations would be voluntary, and a similar provision passed in Congress last year without such a furor, Mr. Grassley said it was being dropped in the Senate “because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly”…

“I guess what surprised me is the ferocity, it’s much stronger than I expected,” said John Rother, the executive vice president of AARP, which is supportive of the health care proposals and has repeatedly declared the “death panel” rumors false. “It’s people who are ideologically opposed to Mr. Obama, and this is the opportunity to weaken the president”…

I was never in Private Practice as a Medical Physician, though my initial Specialty was Internal Medicine. I was either in academic medicine or serving my time in the Air Force. I changed to Psychiatry and later to Psychoanalysis in the late 70’s, and stayed in the University/Medical School world until the mid to late 1980’s. During that couple of decades before I went into Practice, Medicine changed. It got business-i-fied. I skirted that myself since my practice was largely long-term therapy that was uncovered by insurance. So I charged what people could pay [meaning I wasn’t ever a "rich doctor"]. Frankly, I left public medicine partly because by that time, the funding had been so trimmed that it couldn’t be done in a way that was personally satisfying to me.

That was newscaster Paul Harvey’s line. Well, even though I’ve said it before here, I want to tell the rest of the story about my last post [again]. Sometime after 9/11, my high school class [Class of 60, Best in Dixie] sent out an email list and people began to reconnect in anticipation of our 45th reunion. In retrospect, it was a strange time to be graduating from high school, 1960. It was still General Eisenhower in the White House. There had been some sit-ins at the 5&10 stores downtown, but the Civil Rights Movement hadn’t really coalesced, at least not in Chattanooga Tennessee. The world was only as complicated as Rock and Roll, hot rods, a few Beatnicks, and the constant specter of thermonuclear destruction of the planet could make it. John Kennedy was a name we were barely learning. None of us had ever heard of Viet Nam.

So, in late 2002 when this email list came out, a lot of us who had left for college and never looked back began to chatter. There was a huge history between 1960 and 2003 – huge. Well, a retired Navy guy began to send around those emails with the wavy flags and get tough anti-arab talk. One classmate complained [a former pilot who had had a change of heart and become an anti-nuclear activist]. A few emails went back and forth, then an idiot [me] suggested we have a debate about whether we should go to war with Iraq or not. One fool [me] opined that we had no case for war. Error! Error! I got blasted for months. I didn’t keep the responses but some weren’t pretty. It was kind of chilly at the 45th reunion except for the like-minded.

I get the emails from the class [50th reunion coming up]. But I didn’t get the one posted below, only the one another classmate wrote in protest. The lady that coordinates the emails [sensibly] didn’t send it to me [she’s still beautiful, inside and out]. Someone else forwarded it. But as much as I hate that kind of rhetoric, I’m glad I got it. I had asked yesterday what they were afraid of, and this letter seemed to address the answer.

I also worry about the pent-up rage expressed in town hall meetings. I now believe it’s more than the republicans’ hand-picked teams of agitators who just try to disrupt anything that might reflect well on the democrats. The republicans have stumbled upon a substrate of fear, expressed as rage. They exploit it to the hilt trying to precipitate Obama’s “Waterloo.” Tell me Charles Grassley can’t read and understand a House bill that contains nothing about “death squads!” Yet there he is, a cornerman to Sarah Palin. I don’t know what to do about it, or how to counter it.

Obama – bless his heart – has so far tried to “nice” his way among the brambles and briar thickets, forever trying for bipartisanship, gamely, doggedly trying to take the high road in spite of the boatloads of calumny and ridicule and vicious personal attack he gets.

I want him to be willing to finally stand up and face it head on. I keep hearing the words of FDR, running for reelection in 1936:

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.

What a guy. No wonder they elected him four times. I hope Obama can stand up like FDR when he has to.

So, I wrote yesterday about these Town Hall demonstrators and asked, "what are they afraid of?" Then today, I got a forwarded email with a letter to the editor written by a High School classmate of mine in response to some other letter in his local paper. I post it as Exhibit A. I’ve highlighted certain phrases that may bear on "what are they afraid of?"

[It was forwarded as an example of the superior writing taught at my school in the 1960’s]…

UPDATE: One of my classmates complained about this letter being forwarded, and the author responded to the complaint [to his credit]:

It sort of snuck up on us, the ads that said, "Ask your doctor if <some drug> is right for you" [followed by a race to get all the side effects and disclaimers covered as quickly as possible]. When I was in Medical School in the 1960’s, such a thing would’ve been unheard of, but now it’s everywhere. Madison Avenue Ad Agency meets Health Care creates an illusion of beautiful people dancing and running on beaches, free of the aches and pains of living. Sally Fields does calisthenics [you can almost see her strong bones through her clothes]. Older couples travel to exotic vacation spots for romantic getaways. Depressed people play tag with their grandchildren. Beautiful simulated Doctors with empty Waiting Rooms walk the halls with their equally beautiful patients discussing the joys of some medication [revealing that they take it themselves].

Then, there’s the other side of the coin. If you write a prescription for one of these designer medications that the patient asks for, the pharmacy calls later and says, "This medication isn’t covered  by the patient’s Insurance Plan. You need to get pre-approval." So either you write a prescription for some other medication that’s now "generic," or you call the Insurance Company who turns it down because the patient hasn’t been tried on a less expensive drug first, and you write a prescription for some other medication that’s now "generic." The patient then feels that they are taking some lesser drug – which is usually not the case.

Yesterday, I walked by the television set as one of the town hall protesters was being interviewed. I say interviewed, but that’s not quite fair. The reporter was asking the man what he was so angry about. And the man was screaming, "Obama’s lying to us!" The reporter asked the guy, "Lying about what?" The man turned on the reporter. "You don’t know? Well you need to get yourself informed buddy," he screamed. The reporter persisted. The man obviously had no clue what the bill was about. He was just yelling. Later, there was a woman screaming, "You’ afraid of us!" "You" being the President. Two weeks ago, it was the "birthers." Now it’s the "deathers," – fabricating fears of government euthanasia out of counselling about living wills. The signs at the protests warn of Socialism, of Communism, of Fascism. I posted some pictures below from the fifties – the crowds protesting integration from the time of my adolescence. I recall a similar kind of protester from the late 1960’s. The earlier non-violent protest of King or the anti-War protesters were peaceful. That was, in fact, the point – demonstrating how many  were opposed to something. Showing that the opposition was made up of rational people with a just cause. But then things turned nasty, and the demonstrations became anger fests [and became ineffective].

To me, all this yelling and screaming goes nowhere. It might help the Republicans stop the Healthcare reform, or dilute it. But it doesn’t address anything about the health care problem that has become a monster in our country. It does nothing to help the man in that picture when he gets sick and shows up in an emergency room where he’ll accrue an unpayable bill padded with absurd charges. The point of healthcare reform is to rein in entrepeneurship in medicine, and return it to being heath care rather that the "Healthcare Industry."

Cheney Uncloaks His Frustration With Bush
‘Statute of Limitations Has Expired’ on Many Secrets, Former Vice President Says
Washington Post Staff Writer
By Barton Gellman
August 13, 2009

In his first few months after stepping down, former vice president Richard B. Cheney threw himself into public combat against the "far left" agenda of the new commander in chief. More private reflections, as his memoir takes shape in slashing longhand on legal pads, have opened a second front against Cheney’s White House partner of eight years, George W. Bush. Cheney’s disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.

"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming. It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times – never apologize, never explain – and Bush moved toward the conciliatory."

The two men maintain respectful ties, speaking on the telephone now and then, though aides to both said they were never quite friends. But there is a sting in Cheney’s critique, because he views concessions to public sentiment as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end. Cheney’s post-White House career is as singular as his vice presidency, a position he transformed into the hub of power. Drained of direct authority and cast aside by much of the public, he is no less urgently focused, friends and family members said, on shaping events…

What is new, Hannah said, is Cheney’s readiness to acknowledge "doubts about the main channels of American policy during the last few years," a period encompassing most of Bush’s second term. "These are not small issues," Hannah said. "They cut to the very core of who Cheney is," and "he really feels he has an obligation" to save the country from danger. Cheney’s imprint on law and policy, achieved during the first term at the peak of his influence, had faded considerably by the time he and Bush left office. Bush halted the waterboarding of accused terrorists, closed secret CIA prisons, sought congressional blessing for domestic surveillance, and reached out diplomatically to Iran and North Korea, which Cheney believed to be ripe for "regime change"…

The depths of Cheney’s distress about another close friend, his former chief of staff and alter ego I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, have only recently become clear. Bush refused a pardon after Libby’s felony convictions in 2007 for perjury and obstruction of an investigation of the leak of a clandestine CIA officer’s identity. Cheney tried mightily to prevent Libby’s fall, scrawling in a note made public at trial that he would not let anyone "sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder." Cheney never explained the allusion, but grand jury transcripts – and independent counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald – suggested that Libby’s false statements aimed above all to protect the vice president.

Last month, an account in Time magazine, based on close access to Bush’s personal lawyer and White House counsel, described Cheney’s desperate end-of-term efforts to change Bush’s mind about a pardon. Cheney, who has spent a professional lifetime ignoring unflattering stories, issued a quietly furious reply. In the most explicit terms, he accused Bush of abandoning "an innocent man" who had served the president with honor and then become the "victim of a severe miscarriage of justice." Cheney now says privately that his memoir will describe their heated arguments in full…

George W. Bush is not a favorite of mine. But a lot of what I didn’t like about him was put there by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. In some ways, I respect Bush for finally saying "no" to Cheney directly. Bush knew that Cheney had done a sleazy thing [a lot of sleazy things] and he stood up to him in the end. They were a malignant pair, George Bush and Dick Cheney – sicker as a team than as individuals, and they were pretty sick one at a time.

More reminders: This article is from two years ago. Recall that in April 2006, Karel Rove gave a speech at the Republican National Lawyers Conference listing places where he claimed there was a lot of Voter Fraud. Those places also happened to be "swing voter" places he hoped to add to the ranks of the Red States. And imagine our surprise that they were the States where the U.S. Attorneys were fired. The scenario of Mark Thor Hearne, major dirty trickster is covered in this article, as are the antics of  the super-nerd Bradley Schlozman, the "the interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City" mentioned below. This whole show was an attempt to sway the vote by voter intimidation. And these recent revelations are damning. Whether they’re prosecutable or not, this was the sleaziest of the Rove sleaze:

Was campaigning against voter fraud a Republican ploy?
McClatchy Newspapers
By Greg Gordon
July 1, 2007

^{A New Mexico lawyer who pressed to oust U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was an officer of a nonprofit group that aided Republican candidates in 2006 by pushing for tougher voter identification laws. Iglesias, who was one of nine U.S. attorneys the administration fired last year, said that Albuquerque lawyer Patrick Rogers pressured him several times to bring voter fraud prosecutions where little evidence existed. Iglesias believes that he was fired in part because he failed to pursue such cases.}

^{He described Rogers, who declined to discuss the exchanges, as "obsessed … convinced there was massive voter fraud going on in this state, and I needed to do something to stop it." Iglesias said he only recently learned of Rogers’ involvement as secretary of the non-profit American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund – an activist group that defended tighter voter identification requirements in court against charges that they were designed to hamper voting by poor minorities.}

^{Rogers, a former general counsel to the New Mexico Republican Party and a candidate to replace Iglesias, is among a number of well-connected GOP partisans whose work with the legislative fund and a sister group played a significant role in the party’s effort to retain control of Congress in the 2006 election. That strategy, which presidential adviser Karl Rove alluded to in an April 2006 speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association, sought to scrutinize voter registration records, win passage of tougher ID laws and challenge the legitimacy of voters considered likely to vote Democratic.}

^{McClatchy Newspapers has found that this election strategy was active on at least three fronts:}

• ^{Tax-exempt groups such as the American Center and the Lawyers Association were deployed in battleground states to press for restrictive ID laws and oversee balloting.}
• ^{The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division turned traditional voting rights enforcement upside down with legal policies that narrowed rather than protected the rights of minorities.}
• ^{The White House and the Justice Department encouraged selected U.S. attorneys to bring voter fraud prosecutions, despite studies showing that election fraud isn’t a widespread problem.}

^{Nowhere was the breadth of these actions more obvious than at the American Center for Voting Rights and its legislative fund. Public records show that the two nonprofits were active in at least nine states. They hired high-priced lawyers to write court briefs, issued news releases declaring key cities "hot spots" for voter fraud and hired lobbyists in Missouri and Pennsylvania to win support for photo ID laws. In each of those states, the center released polls that it claimed found that minorities prefer tougher ID laws.}

^{Armed with $1.5 million in combined funding, the two nonprofits attracted some powerful volunteers and a cadre of high-priced lawyers. Of the 15 individuals affiliated with the two groups, at least seven are members of the Republican National Lawyers Association, and half a dozen have worked for either one Bush election campaign or for the Republican National Committee. Alex Vogel, a former RNC lawyer whose consulting firm was paid $75,000 for several months’ service as the center’s executive director, said the funding came from private donors, not from the Republican Party.}

^{One target of the American Center was the liberal-leaning voter registration group called Project Vote, a GOP nemesis that registered 1.5 million voters in 2004 and 2006. The center trumpeted allegations that Project Vote’s main contractor, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), submitted phony registration forms to boost Democratic voting.}

^{In a controversial move, the interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City announced indictments against four ACORN workers five days before the 2006 election, despite the fact that Justice Department policy discourages such action close to an election. Acorn officials had notified the federal officials when they noticed the doctored forms. "Their job was to confuse the public about voter fraud and offer bogus solutions to the problem," said Michael Slater, the deputy director of Project Vote, "And like the Tobacco Institute, they relied on deception and faulty research to advance the interests of their clients."}

^{Mark "Thor" Hearne, a St. Louis lawyer and former national counsel for President Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, is widely considered the driving force behind the organizations. Vogel described him as "clearly the one in charge." Hearne, who also was a vice president and director of election operations for the Republican Lawyers Association, said he couldn’t discuss the organizations because they’re former clients. But in an e-mail exchange, he defended the need for photo IDs. "Requiring a government-issued photo ID in order to vote as a safeguard against vote fraud and as a measure to increase public confidence in the fairness and honesty of our elections is not some Republican voter suppression effort," Hearne said. Hearne called photo IDs "an important voice in election reform."}

^{Hearne and Rogers appeared at separate hearings before the House Administration Committee last year in Ohio and New Mexico. They cited reports of thousands of dead people on voter registration rolls, fraudulent registrations and other election fraud schemes. As proof, Hearne, offered a 28-page "investigative report" on Ohio events in the 2004 election, and then publicly sent a copy to the Justice Department, citing "substantial evidence to suggest potential criminal wrongdoing."}

^{So far, no charges have been filed. Earlier, in August 2005, the Legislative Fund issued a string of press releases naming five cities as the nation’s top "hot spots" for voter fraud. Philadelphia was tagged as No. 1, followed by Milwaukee, Seattle, St. Louis and Cleveland. With a push from the center’s lobbyists, legislatures in Missouri and Pennsylvania passed photo ID laws last year. Missouri’s law was thrown out by the state Supreme Court, and Democratic Gov. Edward Rendell vetoed the Pennsylvania bill.}

^{In an interview with the federal Election Assistance Commission last year, two Pennsylvania officials said they knew of no instances of voter identity fraud or voter registration fraud in the state. Amid the controversy, the American Center for Voting Rights shuttered its Internet site on St. Patrick’s Day, and the two nonprofits appear to have vanished. But their influence could linger. One of the directors of the American Center, Cameron Quinn, who lists her membership in the Republican National Lawyers Association on her resume, was appointed last year as the voting counsel for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The division is charged with policing elections and guarding against discrimination against minorities.}

Madoff Aide Reveals Details of Ponzi Scheme
New York Times
By JACK HEALY and DIANA B. HENRIQUES
August 11, 2009

On Tuesday, Mr. DiPascali stood in a federal courtroom in Lower Manhattan and admitted that, for at least the last 20 years, he had helped Mr. Madoff carry out one of the biggest frauds in Wall Street history. Indeed, he detailed for the first time how he and unidentified others helped Mr. Madoff perpetuate the crime — using historical stock data from the Internet to create fake trade blotters, sending out fraudulent account statements to clients and arranging wire transfers between Mr. Madoff’s London and New York offices to create the impression that the firm was earning commissions from stock trades…

A few hints of how helpful his cooperation would be emerged on Tuesday, when he offered one of the most detailed accounts yet from inside the Midtown Manhattan office tower where Mr. Madoff ran his decades-long Ponzi scheme. Mr. DiPascali described how he, Mr. Madoff and unidentified “other people” created fake account statements, shuffled money between bank accounts and perpetuated a years-long fairy tale that they were making money for clients of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. “No purchases or sales of securities were actually taking place in their accounts,” Mr. DiPascali said. “It was all fake. It was all fictitious. It was wrong, and I knew it was wrong at the time”…

And, from his account, keeping the scheme afloat and investors and regulators duped was a full-time job. To give the appearance that Mr. Madoff’s firm had mastered the markets, Mr. Madoff and his employees would track stock prices and then simply pretend to buy stocks whose trajectories matched the firm’s investment goals, Mr. DiPascali said. They created and mailed out reams of account statements and trading slips for trades that had never taken place. Prosecutors said that the ruse extended as far as designing a fake computer stock-trading platform and using a random-number generator to assign times and amounts to trade records, so that no one would detect any pattern…

But “at least as early as the 1980s,” the S.E.C. asserted, Mr. DiPascali was helping Mr. Madoff create fictitious trades to generate phantom returns for particular accounts — specifically, accounts set up by some early feeder funds, which steered money from other investors into Mr. Madoff’s hands…

In the end, Bernie was just a flim-flam artist – nothing more, nothing less. End of the month, pick the winners, make up a stock history, run off statements. What a grind!  Mr. DiPascali said, "I knew it was wrong at the time" but…  "blah, blah, loyal, blah, blah, thought he would pay it back, blah, blah, sorry, blah, blah…"

It’s ironic to me that Bernie did no investing – nada. Why put all of this perfectly good money in the market? You might lose it. Just put it in the Bank and pay dividends out of the principle [and make sure the investors kept signing on].

Involved Administration Officials who Resigned