Transparency and blue sky sunshine would cure many ills for our country. I would like a law that forced all Presidents to post on the White House website a report card that shows all their campaign promises and what the status is for each of them. e.g. accomplishments, future accomplishments planned with target dates, and issues if they are getting stalled, why they are stalled, what they are doing to resolve the issue, who’s assigned to solve it and target date.

Publish this and keep it update. Make it easy for people to navigate around and look up the status–allow us to be updated when a status changes on something that we’re interested in. This allows people to examine the facts and agree or disagree. If they agree, they could call up their representatives and urge them to support the President, and if they disagree, they could write the President and let them know.

I would like to see bills published online and I would like for tools to be developed that allow people to actually read and understand them. This is possible if the government were to focus on this. I than think of two tools that would greatly help:

1. Make a law that creates a single official Glossary that must be maintained and used by both the Congress and Senate. New bills that include new technical words not included in the Glossary are required by law to declare the official definition into that bill with a request to have it added to the Glossary if passed into law. Updates to the Glossary definitions must be a separate bill all to their own, they can include changes to multiple words if the change is all interrelated–and the proposed change must reference all the other bills that use the word and recommend if the change is pending approved adoption of the change to all or some of laws already on the books using the old definition.
2. Provide an online tool that allows people to easily keep their electronic finger (via a bookmark) on a certain place where they are reading and quickly research other places within the bill, other bills, and other laws that are similar. It would be possible to create tool that do this.
3. Expand upon this tool so that our government leaders use it as they work to create bills and resolve issues. This is essentially a specialized document management system on steroids–this could be done, the private sector has created harder computer systems than what I’m describing here. This system would allow staff and elected officials to draft up language and for committees to play with the words and agree upon the final language–it would also track who wrote what and when, who approve or disapproved of certain words. And all this would be visible to the public online in real-time and archived so people can see the sausage made in real-time, or wade through the history of how a bill was made.
4. This system would allow people to compare bills so that it would show what’s different between two of three versions or based upon a certain time. This single invention would prevent people from sneaking things into large bills because you could simply see what has changed since you last looked at it.

I believe if we had a system like this and required, by and open online record of all committee meetings (for non-security matters of course) we would really straighten Washington out quickly. I’ve personally managed hundreds of millions of dollars in large scale computer system projects and so I’m not speaking without experience that such a system as this could be designed.

Libyan leader, Colonel al-Gaddafi at U.N.

The Obama Administration plans to give $400,000 in funding, split two ways, to a Libyan charity’s from the son and daughter of Libya’s Leader Colonel Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi (also transcribed into other Western languages as Qaddafi, Gheddafi, and Khadafi, among others); this is part of the President’s request for $2.5 million in foreign aid to Libya and his two children’s funds.

U.S. Representative Mark Kirk (R-IL) caught this and immediately sprung into action, working to withdraw the plans to grant this money to the very people who publically setup the recent hero’s reception in Libya for Pan Am Flight 103 bomber Abdel Baset Megrahi; the terminally ill prisoner who was released from in Scotland on compassionate grounds. Muammar Gadhafi’s son, Saif Gadhafi was involved in negotiating for Megrahi’s release, accompanied him back to Libya, and organized tearful fan faired welcome of their hero terrorist.

The funds are to be distributed under the guise of “democracy and governance work”.

$200,000 share is set to go to the Gadhafi Development Foundation, which is run by Gadhafi’s son, Saif, and another $200,000 are to go to Wa Attassimou, an organization run by Muammar Gadhafi’s daughter, Aisha.

This funding was setup just a day before Muammar Gadhafi rambled on for over an hour and a half at the U.N. and called President Obama his “son”.

Senator Kirk wrote in a letter to the President, “Just weeks after the Gadhafi family celebrated the return of a terrorist responsible for the murders of 189 Americans, the U.S. taxpayer should not be asked to reward them with $400,000,” and he said, “For the sake of the victims’ families who have endured so much pain these last few weeks, I ask you to withdraw your Administration’s request.”

The President may be waiting to see if the public become outraged or not, or simply considering Kirk’s request, because the U.S. State Department has not issued a response to Kirk’s request.

The Gadhafi Development Foundation is described by the BBC as “a charity which tries to project a new and positive image of Libya.”

This is like the Mike Tyson giving some eight year old bully his lunch money on the playground in hopes that the bully will stop picking on him.

This will get stopped. The only thing that could top this kind of buffoonery would be for the great Apologizer in Chief to tell him that he’s sorry that he has to retract the payoff, ‘er (cough), I mean charitable grant and humanity aid.

Today, the Senate backed away from their bill amendment to add some Congressional oversight to these Czars because the Whitehouse pressured them to kill the bill. The proposed amendment was in an Interior Department environmental appropriations bill on the Senate floor, proposed by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who sought to simply restrict federal funds for the expenses of White House-appointed czars unless these two conditions were met:

1. Every czar would respond to “reasonable requests” to testify before Congress on matters related to the office.
2. White House-appointed czars are required to issue a report to Congress twice a year.

It’s tough to comment on this because we need all President’s to have presidential powers so that they can accomplish their ever ambitious, especially if a congress is playing dirty pool while a President is trying openly and legitimately get some campaign promises accomplished. But out Constitution has checks and balances for a reason—they are President, not King for a reason. So I liked Senator Collin’s call for more transparency, and I don’t think she was overboard here with her requests, but I’m cautious with my support of this because I do not want Congress to have too much power either, especially during times where congress would be led by the opposing party to the President. Transparency and blue sky sunshine on all government is always a great preventative to most problems.

It gives a bad appearance for the Democratic Congress to fold sold easily like this and kill the ammendment this way simply because the Whitehouse pressured them; this looks bad and it didn’t need to be, the Whitehouse could have acknowledged that some transparency is needed and offer an alternative idea, that would have been better.

We need to see Congress require some standards that keep these Czars in legal check, especially regarding their job description and mission. I’m seeing too many extreme cases where the word diversity or green is used, but they seem more preoccupied with indoctrinating an progressive (socialist) ideology. It’s not right for the President to hire all this questionable staff without any accountability, so there needs to be some improvement here.

A Czar cannot be allowed to operate outside Article II Section 2 of the Constitution of the United States, which says, “and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.”

This long, single sentence says that the President nominates, but the Senate approves all of the senior leadership positions. In addition to Ambassadors and other positions specifically mentioned, examples of those not stated directly but legislated later would be: Homeland Security, IRS, CIA, FBI, NSA, and NASA, etc.

The President is allowed to hire advisors who will research and prepare a proposal to him. But when you envision an advisor, you would expect them leading a small team of researchers, statisticians, subject matter experts in their field, some writers and maybe some lawyers; and they would research things, attend or host some committee meeting with Congress, and then make recommendations to the President.

But my fear is that we have Czars who are doing something much different, and are embedding their ideology directly into our Bills through the use of Amendments.  Time will prove my fears wrong or right—I hope that I’m wrong.

Glenn Beck of Fox News has received the largest single recognition for publically showing that many of the President’s Czars have radical idea compared to mainstream politics. He carefully and methodically quoted from each person directly using their own words, which were quite extreme and had roots in socialism (often called progressivism now), Marxism, and communism.

Beck was instrumental in raising awareness to Van Jones, who later resign his position after a massive public outcry immediately resulted.

Beck and many others, including myself, fearfully watch the FCC Chief Diversity Officer, Mark Lloyd because of his radical views, especially his whitepaper, “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio”. 

ACORN LEGISLATION THIS WEEK

On Thursday, Republican Senator Mike Johanns of Nebraska introduced a bill (click here for details) to cut all funding to the organization called ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) due to the scandals that have plagued them in recent days.

This is Senator Johanns’ third bill, the strongest yet; on Monday he sponsored an amendment S.AMDT.2355 (click here for details) to the bill H.R.3288 that banning federal ACORN funds in the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development spending bill, which passed the Senate by an 83-7 vote.

Then on Tuesday he sponsored another amendment, S.AMDT.2394 to H.R.2996 (click here for details) prohibiting federal ACORN money in the Interior and environment appropriations bills, which pass by an 85-11 vote on Thursday. Lawmakers have “answered the call to defend taxpayers against waste, fraud and taxpayer abuse,” Johanns said Thursday. You can read more details here on Senator Johanns’ website.

Also on Thursday over in the House of Representatives they overwhelming voted 345-75-2 to pass a GOP amendment to a student loan bill, the “Defund ACORN Act”, which would completely defund all monies to ACORN. The ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Darrell E. Issa, who is the Republican Representative from California’s 49th district reported that “since 1994, more than $53 million in federal funds have been pumped into ACORN, and under the Obama Administration, ACORN stands to receive a whopping $8.5 billion in stimulus funds.”

House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) said Thursday afternoon that “the writing is on the wall for ACORN”. Although Senator Issa technically offered the resolution that was adopted by a majority of the House on Thursday, the language was that of a measure that Senate House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio introduced on Wednesday. In less than 24 hours of submitting his stand-alone bill, Boehner had nailed down 140 co-sponsors. Because Senator Issa has really taken the lead on calling for investigations into ACORN’s scandalous practices, Senator Boehner let his colleague offer the amendment, which was overwhelmingly adopted 85-11.

This bill, if signed into law is a strong measure that cuts off all funding to the organization, its state affiliates and individuals related to the community organizers, a number of whom have been found guilty of committing voter fraud. Boehner, Issa and other leading Republicans attribute the massive support to completely defund ACORN, to a decision made last week by the Census Bureau Director Robert Groves, where he severed ties with ACORN on all Census related matters; they were originally going to have an enormous role in collecting the 2010 National Census data. In the letter sent to ACORN President Maude Hurd on Sept. 11.Groves wrote, “Recent events concerning several local offices of ACORN have added to the worsening negative perceptions of ACORN and its affiliation with our partnership efforts.”

Next Steps

The approved bills will be drafted into final legislation using a conference committee, which is typically a difficult time consuming step that spans months to accomplish. However, if Senator Johanns’ recent bill is approved, this should greatly streamline the process because both houses of Congress will have passed amendments that completely defund ACORN.

Then the last step is to obtain the Presidential signature to have it signed into law; until then funds still are, and will continue to, freely flow into Acorn like nothing ever happened.

“This bill indicates that the writing is on the wall for ACORN,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) said Thursday afternoon. When asked what the President thinks of these bills halting funding the President’s press secretary Robert Gibbs said, “the President shares the outraged of what he saw on the tapes and I’d leave it at that.”

Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe on Fox News and BigGovernment.com

Hanna and James Posing as Prostitute and Pimp. Photo: BigGovernment.com

The reason for this swift bipartisan support is surprisingly not because its ACORN has admitted to numerous voter fraud scandals that successfully pumped thousands upon thousands of illegal votes toward President Obama’s election in key states. Sadly, this was not motivating enough to outrage the public and Congress to move toward action.

No, it took two young journalists, Hannah Giles, 20, and James O’Keefe, 25, armed with only a few bucks in their pocket, a video camera, and loads of true American grit, have probably altered history in an enormous way. Halting $8.5 billion and stopping ACORN’s involvement into the 2010 Census, have immeasurably altered history. Two people and a camera, and they have changed American history by bearing light on these shadowed issues within ACORN.

The huge ACORN scandal broke when a series of four secretly recorded videos aired on Fox News during the past several days. Hannah Giles dressed up like a prostitute, and James O’Keefe portrayed himself as her pimp. They traveled the many coastal cities and visited them to see if they could get assistance to help set them up for an illegal prostitution ring that included trafficking and using under-age girls smuggled in from El Salvador for sex-trade use. In each of the public cases Acorn representatives were recorded assisting them in some way with their illegal plans. Assistance ranged from tax and business advice to hide the true purpose of their operation from authorities, to talking about the possibility of assisting with the smuggling operation.

All four videos were published on BigGovernment.com by Mike Flynn, Editor in Chief, and aired on Fox News. The videos outraged the public and both houses of Congress acted quickly to shut down funding for Acorn.

How Congress Voted

Listed below are the Senators and House Members who voted Yes, to continue funding Acorn despite these videos, or did not vote. I would urge you to write or call your representative and ask them why.

SENATE

The two approved Johanns Amendments in the US Senate (#2355 to H.R. 3288) passed 83-7 and (#2394 to H.R. 2996) passed 85-11; both proposing to halt funding of some federal dollars to ACORN, but not all—the third ammendment proposed by Senator Johanns must pass for all funds to halt.

For each of the two Senate ACORN bills that were voted on this week, here below are the US Senators who did not vote (no vote) and or voted NAY to halt ACORN funds—a NAY means YES, keep funding ACORN. A blank indicates that they voted YEA, so blanks indicate they voted to halt funding to ACORN.
It’s important to note that no Senators were a ‘no vote’ for both of these votes, so they are all on record with an opinion either supporting ACORN with a NAY vote or halting their funds with an YEA vote. Notable ‘no votes’ came from Senator’s John McCain and Lindsey Graham who were at a town hall event at the Citadel in South Carolina, and Kay Bailey Hutchinson was in Texas during Monday’s vote; but they got back in town to get recorded as YEA’s for Thursday’s vote.

US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

The US House of Representatives voted 345-75-2 in agreement to stop Acorn’s funding as well.

This is a much stronger than the Senate bill, it completely bars Acorn from getting any federal funding.

You can see the results of the official US House of Representatives vote by clicking here.

Representatives who voted NAY to halt funding, which means YES to keep funding them are:

Representatives who rode the fence and only voted “Present” rather than Yes or No were:

And those Senators not voting were:

Healthcare Basics

Healthcare does have some complexities, but there are some basic fundamentals that the industry is founded upon, which unfortunately get clouded up in the news media, and sadly by politicians.

Insurance Pool

The most important concept to healthcare insurance is the Insurance Pool. It’s so obvious that people miss it—but this is vital if we’re serious about keeping costs low.
It’s a simple concept: vast numbers of healthy people pay into a system for the few who become sick and the handful who become catastrophically sick. We all hope that we won’t need it, but it’s there if we do.
If there are high numbers of sick people with high medical costs, then the average cost per member, per month (PMPM) will be high, which forces high premium costs;  and if the PMPM costs are low then we can have low premiums. The only way to accomplish low PMPM is to have large numbers of healthy people and to lower costs for those who become sick.

Multiple Pools

There is a misconception where people, especially politicians and editorial columnists, want to break out different insurances pools for various “good ideas” that they dream up—it’s not a good idea. Here are a couple examples that sound good, but are not:

• Let’s offer a 3-tier pricing system based on how healthy you are; discounted rates for really healthy people, average rates for most people, and a higher rate for those who have high medical costs.
• Let’s offer big discounts to large groups of insurance; e.g. large unions, companies, coops, state employee, etc.
  If you do this, it’s called Diluting the Pool, which rapidly drives up the costs for those who are sick or don’t belong to a large union or group.

Let’s take the first example. The healthy people will enjoy cheaper premiums, but the sick people would not be able to afford the premiums that it would require to support their huge PMPM costs.

Anyone who wants to break up separate tier structures just doesn’t understand the simple premise for insurance: we all pay a small premium to pay for the few people who are sick—it’s something that we pay and hope that we don’t need, but we’re happy that it’s there if we need it.

The healthy pay for sick, and there’s no way around that, other than kick sick people to the curb to die because you want cheaper health premiums, or magically for someone else to pay the bill.

What about the person who says, “I represent XYZ union, with 20,000 members, we want a deep discount.” The insurance company has a pool of a million people or more! Competition drives each insurance company to charge the cheapest rate that they can for everyone or they will go out of business. If they give too many discounts to large groups then they will have to offset those revenue losses by charging more for the unfortunate individuals who don’t belong to a large group—in essence the individuals will be subsidizing the large union’s premiums. That doesn’t sound fair.

What Does This Mean

The best, fairest way, is for each insurance company to keep their PMPM costs down for one large insurance pool. It also means that we need to lower our PMPM costs, and that’s accomplished through the following:

• Increase competition by allowing insurance companies to easily do business nationally
• Work with the states to create more uniformed laws in the healthcare industry, especially with tort reform
• Streamline electronic medical records into a single format
• And SUCCESSFULLY come up with prevention concepts that work—we save money and people live better live when we prevent sickness in the first place

Public Option

There was a lot of fear regarding a Public Option because there was talk that the federal government could, over time, do things that started to put insurance companies out of business. And these fears were very real because the government could easily charge lower prices, subsidized by the taxpayers, who then simply put the insurance industry out of business.

Droves of people realized this fear and spoke up during the town hall meetings and so the likelihood of the public option is quite low. The only real risk of the public option now is for one of the more radically liberal Democrats to try and sneak it into the bill at the last minute—we’ll have to wait and see.

Mandatory Insurance

We do have uninsured people in this county and that is a very real and serious problem for taxpayers because they are paying the bill for them every time they go into the ER with no ability to pay. We can’t sweep this under the carpet, but that doesn’t mean that the solution is a public option. What it means is that we need to get these people affordably insured so that the costs are known, not hidden and nearly impossible to track.

Because of these reason I whole heartedly believe that we need all citizens to have some form of affordable insurance—because we’re paying for it anyway, let’s make it official so that we can figure this thing out and manage it correctly. However, having said this, I am a conservative person and I only favor a mandatory insurance option under the following conditions:

• There is not a public option—no triggers, nothing. Our government has proved to us in the last few months that they are power crazed lunatics and I don’t want them having a trigger for a public option, especially if insurance is mandatory.
• There are different quality tiers of insurance, low-cost, mid-cost, premium-cost and luxury plans available for people to choose from based upon their financial choices.
• The taxpayers supplements the low-cost insurance to the poor.

If we do what I describe in‘National Healthcare Debate 101′to lower costs then having everyone insured is a good thing because everything is above board, we can actually start to manage this better because all of the hidden costs that we are currently paying are now measurably tracked into the legitimate system. Also, a larger insurance pool is always the better management choice.

Illegal Aliens

Taxpayers are paying for illegal aliens when the go to the ER as well—this is especially troubling when children are involved. Do you want to turn away some desperate mother with her sick child just because she’s an illegal alien? Of course not and I don’t either. But it’s still a problem that is easily solved. Open up our immigration to make it faster and easier for immigrants to get work visa’s here. We simply need to require the employers to purchase some very basic, and cheap, major medical coverage for themselves and some low-cost insurance for any minors.

I want to see the illegal part go away! So do what it takes to get these workers in here legally and cheaply! This is not that hard to do—politics is getting in the way and if you look deep you will see that the labor unions are behind this because you can push illegal aliens around and they won’t complain; politicians look the other way on this as well. We need to stop this and figure out how to make it so that it’s easy for young, healthy, hard working immigrants to work here legally. We obviously have the need and a workforce willing to work cheaply, so do what it takes to make it happen legally—this will radically shut down the illegal aspect, and it will incent people to become legal immigrants.

This also solves many border patrol problems because reduces the traffic illegally coming across the border so that the only one’s sneaking over are the people that we really don’t want over here.

Oligopoly

Allowing insurance companies to conduct business more freely across the country is going to pressure some smaller businesses to be bought out as the largest firms evolve into a few behemoth oligopolies. I would like to see Congress provide ways that allow smaller firms to join forces more easily in an effort to try and compete rather than being swallowed up. There are industries that operate more efficiently with oligopolies because the economies of scale work well in their favor. Regarding healthcare insurance, they have similar efficiencies that banking does when they become large because the costs for their technology services can be spread over a large pool of members to cut costs. Because of this we will see many mergers and acquisitions in the industry similar to what we saw in banking when that was deregulated nationally.

Costs

Lastly, I want to talk about quality of insurance. I believe that all US citizens deserve high quality insurance no matter what their income level is—so I do not sub-standard coverage for the poor, or even good insurance, I want everyone to have high quality care. Having said that, if someone can afford premium care or luxury care that exceeds an already high quality coverage, then good for them, that’s the part of the American dream that we all have a chance to chase after.

I say this because many people these days seem to forget that money doesn’t grow on trees—everything has costs, and we don’t have unlimited money, even the government. The government doesn’t spend money that they didn’t tax or borrow! It’s not limitless, and medicine does cost money.

We have a new issue before us that is very difficult to navigate through and I’m very interested in researching and thinking more on the topic. But let me give you a taste for what the debate is:

What if a homeless drug addict staggers into the ER, is dying, and it will cost the American public $100,000 to keep them alive in agony for another 30 days—was that a wise choice? At what point do we simply acknowledge that death is a part of life? When does society say, ‘we will provide you with great coverage, just not Bill Gates or Warren Buffet coverage because we just don’t have the money.’?

I’m very interested in this topic because I am a Christian man, who is prolife, and I greatly value every life that God has created. So I’m not anywhere near the views of liberal extremists who are willing to let people die to save a few bucks on healthcare costs. But I also realize that we have finite resources and $50K spent to buy just 1 extra day of struggling life for someone is tragic when compared with what other good that could have done instead. So where is the line for compassion, for solid affordable healthcare coverage that values all life, yet is reasonably economical?

I ponder these questions because no matter how much we spend on healthcare we can’t cheat the inevitable… death and taxes; so what is compassionate, values life, but is reasonable and not insanely burdensome on those who remain to pay the bills? A very interesting topic that will someday impact us all, more to come on this.

I just want to be fair and honest in life, work to save for retirement, freely worship God, and enjoy the journey along the way with friends and family. And I’m not alone, I think nearly all Americans feel the same way—and so I’m starting this blog to talk about what I find along my journey. Staying with the nautical theme, I’ll call the general items Ship’s Log and my personal editorial journals as the Captain’s Log.

It will be fun. Come along and enjoy the journey with me by visiting often or subscribing to a RSS Feed.

Le bon voyage, retourner encore!

Mark Main