Well, it was 95° and humid here yesterday, and it’s supposed to be about that again today (maybe a little hotter, even), but nothing’s burning, so I’m not going to complain. We don’t have a very long pool season here (as attested to by that Tearjerkers tune Web lined to the other day), but it was definitely a nice luxury to have yesterday. I only wish the dogs would jump in, but they won’t even go in their little kiddie pool (except to stand in it and get a drink).
If you’ve ever watched Bill Maher, then you already know that Darrell Issa is a dick (I’d use the technical, medical term for that, but I don’t want to risk offending any Michigan Republicans). Well, Darrell continues to be a dick as he vies with Dana Pigfucker for California Republican Dick of the Year. I’m sure everyone knows by now that Issa and his cohorts on the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.
As Stephen Colbert said, it was shocking.
“Shocking, that they found someone who didn’t already hold Congress in contempt.â€
FL Governor Rick Scott has been trumpeting the job growth in the Sunshine State. Mitt Romney is not amused.
Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign asked Florida Governor Rick Scott to tone down his statements heralding improvements in the state’s economy because they clash with the presumptive Republican nominee’s message that the nation is suffering under President Barack Obama, according to two people familiar with the matter.
[…]
What’s unfolding in Florida highlights a dilemma for the Romney campaign: how to allow Republican governors to take credit for economic improvements in their states while faulting Obama’s stewardship of the national economy. Republican governors in Ohio, Virginia, Michigan and Wisconsin also have highlighted improving economies.
Don’t worry, Mitt. Things still suck around here.
We are in Pennsylvania, having a good time, but so far really really crappy wifi which makes it impossible to post Gail Collins op Ed about privatizing. If we get better Internet, the kind that actually works, I’ll do it later.
Political Private Practice
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: June 20, 2012
Let’s talk privatization.
I know this is not a thrilling topic. I recently wrote a book in which I tried to juice up the subject by suggesting that readers might want to imagine a privatizer as a cross between a pirate and a sanitizer — a guy with an eyepatch and a carpet steamer. This was a desperate attempt at, um, humorization. I am so ashamed.
In the dreary world of the real, privatization means turning over a government function to the private sector. It has such a long history that it’s a wonder we still have any public sector left. The Ancient Greeks did it. The Han dynasty did it. Birds do it. Bees do it. Even Harvard Ph.D.’s do it.
Let’s do it. Let’s privatize.
I have been thinking about this a lot, mainly because of a recent series of Times articles by Sam Dolnick, which examine the wondrous outcome of a pioneering effort by the State of New Jersey to privatize some of its prison functions, particularly a halfway house program for people on the way in or out of the criminal justice system. The program costs about half as much per inmate as a regular jail. This may be in part because the prisoners keep escaping. More than 5,000 have run, walked or wandered off since 2005. That placed a sometimes tragic burden on the victims of the crimes the escapees later committed, but it must have definitely reduced upkeep. Perhaps you could call it inmate self-privatization.
Politicians of both parties are privatization fans, although the Republicans are more so. Mitt Romney has flirted with the idea of privatizing veterans’ health care. He goes steady with the Medicare privatization forces and is believed to be secretly married to the folks who want to privatize public education through the use of vouchers.
“When you work in the private sector and you have a competitor, you know if I don’t treat the customer right, they’re going to leave me and go somewhere else, so I’d better treat them right,†Romney said in a round-table discussion with veterans in South Carolina. This is the exact road he was going down on the dreaded day when he said he enjoyed firing people.
In honor of the campaign season, maybe this is a good time to point out some examples of privatization disasters. Texas tried to turn eligibility screening for social services over to a private company, creating all sorts of messes until it gave up the experiment. The most apocryphal story involved a privately run call center that told applicants to send their documentation to a number that turned out to be the fax at a warehouse in Seattle.
The hottest new wrinkle for private companies eager to tap into public school funding is charter cyberschools. A study at the University of Colorado’s National Education Policy Center found that only about a quarter met federal standards for academic progress.
Here in New York, we have been experiencing a long-running privatization adventure in which an attempt to streamline employee timekeeping that was supposed to have cost the city $63 million wound up with a slightly unsleek tab of $700 million.
John Donahue, the faculty chairman of the master’s in public policy program at Harvard, says the best candidates for privatization are functions where performance is relatively easy to evaluate, like construction or food services. On the worst-case end, he points to “having mercenaries run your war for you,†which we know something about, given the fact that our military effort in Iraq and Afghanistan sometimes involves more people working for private contractors than actual members of the military.
Republican governors are big privatization fans. (Did I mention that some years before he became governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie was a lobbyist for the company that’s the biggest player in that halfway house system? Well, I have now.) Rick Perry tried to build a humongous highway through Texas in a public-private partnership that would have severed the state with a toll road as wide as four football fields. He dropped the idea after his own political base revolted under the theory that the road was going to be part of a “Nafta superhighway†that would strip the country of its sovereignty and turn us into citizens of the North American Union. Really, it’s always something.
As to former Republican governors who would like to be Romney’s running mate — there are no words for the privatization passion. Except those of Tim Pawlenty, who recently said that “if you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn’t need to be doing it.â€
There are plenty of private prison operators on the Web, although they like to be called “re-entry services.†Also mercenaries, although Academi, which used to be called Xe, which used to be called Blackwater, prefers the term “security solutions provider.â€
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rug cleaner.
From the Caulifownya hits reel…
🙁 :knit2:
Side note to OKCat, once I start pulling for a team, it usually isn’t a good thing. Someone should slip a message to Jerry West (44) that they shouldn’t rename the team the San Francisco Warriors once they move back.
We were most disappointed with the finals. 🙁 Think the new schedule was not at all helpful to our young team. The ref-ing stunk too. But no matter, we all love our team and I have a feeling there will be a huge welcome home when they land at OKC World Airport (couldn’t use the word “International” so that’s what they came up with to give us that oh so cosmopolitan feeling).
Our weather has been quite nice. The 100 degree temp is starting up this weekend, however. They say we will be in a pattern for at least the next several weeks of hot hot hot no rain. :fire:
I have not been able to get. Any decent connection to the Internet so I haven’t been able to post Gail Collins column or even send an email. I have an iPad but the keyboard is difficult to work on and copying and pasting is too frustrating. We’ll be home in a couple of days which will please the cats and I will be better able to deal with this intent stuff.