Government Is Not A Business

Can we please, pretty please, retire that tired old canard that “government needs to be run like a business”? I absolutely despise that little piece of conventional wisdom which politicians repeat each election. It’s bullshit.

Government cannot run like a business because it’s a completely different entity.

As the Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik writes today:

It would be obvious to any business person who had spent a day in public administration that government and business are antithetical. That's not a flaw in the system. Government exists to take on precisely those tasks the private sector can't or won't do.

These include caring for the penniless; maintaining common amenities such as parks, schools, and universities; and creating infrastructure with broad value but unspecific beneficiaries, such as freeways and the Internet (which in coming days undoubtedly will be used by many readers to inform me by e-mail that they don't see how government serves any purpose).

Most of these functions can't be made to "pay" in the sense that a business strategy does. But they can be neglected or privatized only at great cost to society.

Thank you! Jeeebus, nothing annoys me more than hearing how government needs to be run like a business. No, it doesn’t! It can’t! I remember working for a Big Government Agency tasked with operating a National Recreation Area and being told we had to apply for-profit business practices to what we did. I’m sorry, but just how is that supposed to work? How do you make money break even off of maintaining hiking and mountain biking trails, campgrounds, and wildlife habitat? Especially when you have small businesses in the local town complaining about unfair competition from said Big Government Agency? If we operated like a business, then what would be left for the real businesses to do? It was laughable idea. We ended up having to explain that no amount of T-shirt and baseball cap sales and hunting permits would ever make us turn a profit break even. [Note: I hit send too soon on this one, but of course all government is not-for-profit -- another reason why it can't operate as a business. We weren't tasked with making a profit but they did want us to try to break even and they gave us a few years to do it which was just stupid.]

Government and business are separate entities. We need both to function as a democracy. Trying to turn one into the other is what has led to disasters like Soviet-style Communism and Mussolini-style fascism.

Another problem, which I've discussed elsewhere, is that we do not -- can not -- put a monetary value on things that are quite literally priceless. Things like watershed, clean air, clean water or the soil erosion protection which forests provide. As I wrote last spring:

But it’s bigger than that. We also don’t factor in the value of what we’ve lost when we destroy those mountains and streams. We don’t consider that a forest isn’t just a piece of land or something pretty to look at or even the economic value of its timber. It’s a living system and it performs a function. Forests and streams provide water storage, flood management, even reduce the severity of floods. Trees take the Co2 and pollutants out of the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen, earth’s natural breathing mechanism provided to us, free of charge.

And here’s the thing: we haven’t invented a substitute for these natural living systems! When they’re gone, we’re all screwed. We have no air-scrubbers, no one has created the photosynthesis machine. The reason we can’t put a value on this is because it is truly priceless. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

I was writing about the environment but there are a whole bunch of non-easily quantifiable things. The education of your work force. The health of the population. The knowledge and experience of our senior citizens. Anyone who wants to be governor and tells you they plan to operate the state like a business is obviously not factoring in a whole bunch of things for which we cannot attach a dollar value because they are literally priceless.

And it's hard for me to take these business sector politicians seriously. So many of them have little respect for what government does anyway -- many of them don't even vote. As Hiltzik wrote:

Engagement in democracy starts with participation in the ballot box. That's the real significance of Whitman's and Fiorina's well-documented failures to vote over the years. This isn't a "mistake," as Whitman likes to call it. A mistake is getting the address of the polling place wrong, once. Not bothering to vote year after year? That's contempt for the very concept of democracy.

I couldn't agree more. Electing to office someone who not only holds the very concept of democracy in contempt but also misunderstands the function and role of government is the worst sort of mistake.

Ask Your Doctor If Hiatus Is Right For You v. 1,047

I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year. Blogging will be light to nonexistent (I hope) until Dec. 1. Of course, you know me. I’m the idiot who thought it would be fun to take a hiatus during the height of the healthcare debate. How’d that work out?

I’ll allow myself a post-election post, and of course we are traveling at the end of the month so there might be some Graffiti Blogging. But hopefully I’ll be making headway on a new fiction project.

I’m pretty much convinced that the news media has fucked this country over royally and the only solution is to just not participate in the bullshit. So if I’m not watching MSNBC or CNN or reading the newspaper I’ll be a lot happier and have less need to vent.

Visit my friends on my blogroll. See you on the other end.

Shorter ABC News: Online Stuff Matters?

So now ABC News is trying to distance itself from crackpot Andrew Breitbart:

Mr. Breitbart is not an ABC News analyst.

He is not an ABC News consultant.

He is not, in any way, affiliated with ABC News.

He is not being paid by ABC News.

He has not been asked to analyze the results of the election for ABC News.

Mr. Breitbart will not be a part of the ABC News broadcast coverage, anchored by Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos. For the broadcast coverage, David Muir and Facebook's Randi Zuckerberg will contribute reaction and response gathered from the students and faculty of Arizona State University at an ABC News/Facebook town hall.

He has been invited as one of several guests, from a variety of different political persuasions, to engage with a live, studio audience that will be closely following the election results and participating in an online-only discussion and debate to be moderated by David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg on ABCNews.com and Facebook. We will have other guests, as well as a live studio audience and a large audience on ABCNews.com and Facebook, who can question the guests and the audience’s opinions. 

This whole “clarification” reads to me like a slap in the face to its online audience. You know: “Hey! It’s digital! It’s the internet! We thought you kids loved the crazy shit!”

Jeebus, get a fucking clue or don’t do the internet at all. People don't distinguish between ABCNews.com and "regular" ABC News, you idiots. The digital division isn't some "other thing" "out there" in the hinterlands. It's your same fucking brand. Fucking maroons, what the hell do you think the future of news is? It's the shit that's sent to your iPhone and iPad. You can't downplay a stupid decision by saying, "oh well it's just digital content and so it doesn't matter because no one but a bunch of college kids in their pajamas is paying attention." Are you really that dumb, or do you just think WE are?

Get. A. Clue.

Live From The National Mall

[UPDATE]:

Aerial analysis estimates 215,000 at today's rally.

------------------------------

Live feed of the Rally To Restore Sanity/Fear here.

Some amazing pictures from the event have already been posted online. I think I will regret for the rest of my life not being there.

Some pics via Democratic Underground, here and here. Rumor has it there's a little girl dressed as a princess carrying a sign which reads "I Want My Tea Party Back." Would love to see that!





More from Talking Points Memo:






More from Buzzfeed:

"I Remember"

Wow. Powerful ad.



(h/t, Brilliant At Breakfast.)

So Much For That Anti-Incumbent Wave

Are we witnessing the death of another tired media meme? Yes, I think so:

The New Face of the G.O.P.? Grizzled Veterans

WASHINGTON — Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party favorite and Republican Senate nominee from Delaware, is trailing badly in the polls, but her every utterance seems to win national attention. Meanwhile, John Hoeven, the three-term governor of North Dakota, remains largely unknown even though he is virtually certain to win a Senate seat next week — not to mention that he was recently named a finalist for the American Mustache Institute’s Mustached American of the Year award.

Insurgent challengers may be grabbing all the headlines in midterm elections this year, but most of the Republicans who are best positioned to snap up Senate seats currently held by Democrats are veteran politicians — and most of them have already served in Congress.

[...]

The clear, if little noted, wealth of prior political experience among so many of the likely Republican victors in Senate races this year also highlights why voters often end up disappointed when they head to the polls eager for change in Washington. The overwhelming majority of winners on Tuesday in both the House and Senate races will be sitting incumbents, while relatively few will be neophytes with no background in politics.

Mustached American of the Year award? Okie dokie.

So, the Teanutties got pwned again. And you thought this was the year of the “anti-incumbent” wave. Hah! GOP stalwarts Dick Armey and Karl Rove brought all of the sign wavers into the fold, and it looks like it’s going to be business as usual.

You said you wanted change. You wanted to throw the bums out. You wanted fresh faces in Washington, an end to the status quo. Na. Ga. Ha. Pen.

It’s not just the Senate races. In Texas, "Gov. Rick Perry defying anti-incumbent mood.” Former California Governor Jerry Brown is still leading political newbie Meg Whitman. And let’s not even talk about that embarrassment in New York, Carl Paladino.

Of course, the folks with egg on their faces are the people who created this false “anti-incumbent wave” meme to begin with: the mainstream media. Guess they read something in the tea leaves that was never there.

My Jim Cooper Story

My Democratic Congress Critter Jim Cooper has been running some positive ads to keep his name out there, and I think this is the best one:



It basically talks about how Cooper helped his constituents after the Nashville floods, and delivers a nice “Cooper Cares” message. Now, this is standard-issue political messaging, what one would expect from a sitting Congressman running for re-election. But I just had to share my own “Cooper Cares” story, because I actually think it’s pretty funny.

I’ve met Cooper once, at a bloggers’ coffee a year or two ago. I was with a group of people, and I introduced myself under my nom de blog. Now it’s true I call and write all of my Congress Critters pretty regularly about issues before the House and Senate, but when I do so I use my Citizens’ name, not my blog name, and most of the time I talk to whichever poor Beleaguered Intern has been tasked with answering the phone that day. So I’m pretty confident that Rep. Cooper doesn’t know me from Adam; I could be wrong but if anything his office knows me as the nutcake who calls all the time to ask when the hell we’re bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan and why haven’t we closed SOA/WHINSEC?

So, last year -- I think it was when he was promoting his own healthcare reform plan -- I called his office to voice my concerns about healthcare reform. I left my name and number with the Beleaguered Intern and expected that to be that and went about my day.

Now, let me interject here and say: I am not a telephone person. I despise the telephone. I have a cell phone, which I rarely use; if I remember to have my cell phone with me, half the time it’s not even turned on. Which is fine because if it is turned on, I can never hear it ring. I also perpetually forget to check messages on the landline. Anyone who wants to reach me knows not to call me. Send me an e-mail. That’s just how I roll; I’m a writer not a talker.

Okay, so here I’m doing my civic duty calling my Congress Critter about healthcare reform and then I leave the house for errands or whatever. And it must have been eight hours or so later -- heck, it might have been the next day -- that I realized my house phone line was messed up. So I turn on my cell phone to call BellSouth and that’s when I discovered Jim Cooper had left me a message! Now, how he got my cell phone number I have no idea, and frankly I was pretty astonished he had called because, again, he doesn’t know me from Adam, I’ve never given his campaign any money, and I was really just accustomed to leaving my little citizens’ message of concern with the Beleaguered Intern and being done with it.

So I called Cooper back on the number he had left. He said he’d tried to return my call several times, and became concerned when my phone appeared to be disconnected. So somehow he was able to get my cell phone number -- I don’t really want to know how, but let me guess it’s through perfectly normal Tennessee Democratic Party channels and not something requiring security clearance -- and tried to reach me that way. He said it more than once: “I was concerned when I couldn’t reach you.” I mean, dang. My own family doesn’t get concerned when they can’t reach me: half the time I think they call when they know I’m not at home.

Anyway, this story actually warmed my heart. I thought, if anything happens to Mr. Beale and I’m all alone and something awful happens -- God forbid -- I won’t have to worry that my body will go undiscovered until the smell alerts the neighbors. As long as I keep calling Coop’s office, I’ll know he’s concerned about me, too. I know this sounds corny, but I’m not sure there are too many members of Congress out there so fired up to talk to a constituent who doesn’t give them tons of money but just wants to nag about peace, healthcare and solar panels.

Shocking

Well, clearly the solution to this problem is more deregulation:

As early as February, oil-field service giant Halliburton was getting poor results in lab tests of the recipe for the cement it was planning to use, according to evidence collected by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

Three separate tests suggested that the mixture would be "unstable," according to a commission staff letter released Thursday.

Halliburton notified BP by e-mail about only one of the tests before the well explosion, according to the commission. The two companies went ahead with the cementing job anyway. Its failure became the first in a cascade of factors leading to the accident.

The results of a fourth Halliburton test - the only one indicating that the cement slurry might have been able to contain the high-pressure pool of oil and gas at the bottom of the Macondo well - were not available until the night of April 19 at the earliest and perhaps not until after the cement was poured, the commission staff said.

[...]

At the commission's request, Chevron recently carried out independent lab tests of a cement slurry that Halliburton said was the same as that used in the Macondo well. The commission staff said Chevron reported that "its lab personnel were unable to generate stable foam cement in the laboratory using the materials provided by Halliburton."

The commission staff said in the letter Thursday that the Halliburton tests before the Macondo well blowout and the new lab tests conducted by Chevron show that "Halliburton (and perhaps BP) should have considered redesigning the foam slurry before pumping it at the Macondo well."

Well, I’m sure the free hand of the market will take care of that. I mean, this is Halliburton, y’all! The company which fleeced taxpayers with its Iraq reconstruciton corruption, overcharged the U.S. government for fuel, tried to cover up a female employee’s alleged gang rape. The company which got fat off U.S. government warmongering then moved to Dubai to avoid paying taxes. Such a patriotic group of people.

So now BP can share some of the liability for the country’s worst oil spill with Dick Cheney’s old company. This should be fun to watch.

Dude

I mean, seriously? This is what you guys got from last night?

• CNN’s Kieran Chetry:

"First of all, Jon Stewart called the leader of the free world ‘Dude,’ which was kind of a surreal moment...”

...to which NPR's media critic David Bianculli replied:

“President Dude might have shown a little more respect…”

• Wall Street Journal:

Should Jon Stewart Have Called the President ‘Dude?’

• Washington Post’s Dana Milbank:

Dude. The indignity of a comedy show host calling the commander in chief "dude" pretty well captured the moment for Obama.

Sure, because calling the President a Nazi, Socialist, racist, Fascist, etc. is so much more respectful.

God our media discourse is so stupid. C'mon, Democrats. Read my post from this morning about entertainment. This is what gets the media's attention. Use it.

Jon Stewart & The Celebrity Ball

Wow. How the hell did that happen?

How did Jon Stewart become the only liberal who can get the national media’s attention?

For years we Lefties have decried how the media ignores liberals, liberal rallies, liberal messages. Hundreds of thousands of people protest the Iraq War and the media can barely bother to mention it. The national news media descends on Nashville’s Tea Party convention -- one reporter for every three conventioneers -- and reports dominate the news cycle for over a week. But Netroots Nation draw twice as many attendees? Crickets. Glenn Beck’s D.C. rally gets covered ad nauseum, while the One Nation rally a few weeks later is barely noticed. There’s wall-to-wall coverage of the CPAC convention every year, but liberal conferences are ignored.

Heck, even CNN has cut away from President Obama’s events, though they covered every campaign appearance by President Bush.

With this in mind it’s been really interesting to see the mainstream media’s embrace of Jon Stewart. Obama’s appearance on The Daily Show dominates the news this morning -- even getting covered on my local news stations. The Stewart/Colbert rally has been covered in the national newspapers for days. What all this tells me is that, at least in the eyes of the national news media and punditry, liberals have a leader and his name is Jon Stewart.

As an observer of our politics and media I have to say I find this fascinating. How did a New York comedian get elevated to “influencer” status -- beyond even the President of the United States, or past presidents like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter? Is it because Stewart is an entertainer, like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck? Does our media pay more attention to entertainers than they do policy makers and politicians? It would appear so.

I mean, thank God. Thank God the Left finally has someone who can get the attention of the corporate media because, as I’ve said often enough, it seems like most of the time we’re shouting into the wind. And unlike Limbaugh and Beck, whose unyielding defense of all things conservative often requires them to stretch into absurd ideological contortions, Stewart calls bullshit on the Democrats as often as he criticizes the right.

I just find this fascinating. If I were ever to interview Jon Stewart I would want to ask him if he’s even aware of his influencer status, how the hell he thinks this happened, and what he plans to do with this responsibility.

I also don’t get liberal talkers such as Bill Press who have criticized Stewart and Stephen Colbert for holding their rally right before the election, as if everyone who is going to be on the National Mall could instead spend the weekend knocking on doors and phone banking. That just misses the point, doesn’t it? The point is the very last thing the folks attending this rally would do is spend their weekend campaigning. They’d be attending kids’ soccer games and watching college football.

No, this rally is garnering national media attention -- finally we get some fucking attention! Thank you, Jon Stewart, for accomplishing what actual door knockers/phone bankers and other activist-types have failed to achieve. You're getting the word out. And this can only be a good thing.

This tells me something important. I guess what we Lefties have missed is that, basically, this is how it works these days. If you want the media’s attention you have to be an entertainer. You have to dress up in funny costumes, say crazy things, and basically put on a show. I don't mean a street theater show, which liberal groups like Code Pink have been doing forever. I mean a real show.

So now that we know this, I expect every liberal gathering, press conference, rally, policy conference, legislative battle, candidates' forum, etc. to be an entertainment extravaganza. This should be easy for us, we apparently specialize in all things Hollywood after all. Think about it: the Tea Party has Pat Boone and Ted Nugent. We've got pretty much everyone else. This should be a no-brainer.

So come on, Liberals. It's show time. Want cap-and-trade legislation? A public option in your healthcare bill? Net neutrality, Wall Street reform, and an end to the endless wars? Then get the best writers you have in a room and storyboard it. Write the theme song. Cast it as you would a blockbuster movie. Roll it out with all of the promotion of a new Bruce Springsteen or Madonna album. Do it like they did in "Wag The Dog.”

I mean, apparently this is the secret. This is what it takes. We can do this.