Tole's Take

"Ask not for whom the bell tolls" when it comes to US healthcare

"No man is an island.  entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were;  any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." - John Donne, Meditation XVII

Never were truer words said when it comes to the current healthcare debate in the US.  Watching the action from afar, a few things have emerged over the past month:

• Town hall meetings are a good thing and a healthy way to encourage debate in a thriving democracy (contrast with the situation in Iran, post-election)
• It doesn't matter if the "opposition" is organized (Astroturf, rather than grassroots, in Washington parlance) - that what organizers are supposed to do, and see above.  More debate is better
• It is ironic, however, that the purpose of town hall meetings between constituents and their congressional representatives is being flipped on its head; instead of bringing people together and encouraging them to talk more, opposition groups are being sent forth with the express purpose of stifling debate and shouting down anyone who does not agree with their point of view 
• Will there be a backlash at some point - will the public want to at least hear from those they have elected to represent them?
• It is amusing to see the accusations being tossed about ("read the bill!", "tyranny!", "Obama care") by both sides - while the two most important players in the game, the White House and the GOP, have not put forth a single plan (it is all Dems in the House so far) ...

Conservatives need to realize that the current system is unsustainable.  No one thinks that a healthcare system run by for-profit insurance companies that leaves fifty million uninsured people in the US is acceptable, either from a moral or economic perspective - we are paying for them already in our current emergency room setups, like it or not.

Progressives need to drop the utopian vision of the public option and universal health care.  As Matt Miller phrased it on Left, Right and Center, it would be a major victory for progressives to forge a system in which individuals' health care was not tied to their employers, as the Swiss and Dutch have successfully done.  

Every news article, every photo, every YouTube video of town hall meetings that lack any discussion over the future of the US healthcare system is not a scoreboard of who is winning and losing the debate in the public forum - it is another bell tolling, for each of us as a society, and we should all listen up.

The Cheney-CIA waterboarding issue is starting to smell very bad

The issue over waterboarding and who knew what & when has been hashed over repeatedly.  That said, I can't recall another prominent elected official - in this case, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi - get into a public pissing match with a major bureaucracy (the CIA) and actually come out on top.

Coming on the heels of current CIA director Panetta's testimony this week that the nation's top spy agency concealed information and misled Congress repeatedly over the past 8 years, today we learn that former VP Dick Cheney gave the direct order to conceal the existence of the secret counterterrorism project from the House and Senate.

For a long time, I favored turning the page and simply moving on from the Bush administration issues.  As more facts seep out about torture as an official government policy and the extraordinary efforts to conceal it, however, it forces one to think long and hard about a full-fledged inquiry (perhaps as a South Africa-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission so we can finally move past the issue).

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The fracturing holy trinity of the Republican party

The Republican party has historically had 3 archetypes in its presidential candidates: the social conservative preacher, the fiscal conservative Wall Streeter, and the national defense conservative hawk.  Ronald Reagan was the only candidate in the last 35 years to unite all three wings, which is why every new candidate seeks to cloak themselves in his mantle.

Most GOP candidates in the last 3 decades, though, have represented 2 of the 3 wings.  The current President Bush is an example; his 2000 campaign featured his background as a born-again Christian (the preacher) and a fiscal conservative who had run the state of Texas and promoted tax cuts to spur growth (the Wall Streeter).  To shore up what he lacked in the national defense wing, he brought former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney onto the ticket to give him street cred with the military hawks.  Their administration has strayed far and wide from these initial campaign principles, but that is another story ...

Turning to the 2008 campaign, there are ominous signs ahead for the GOP since this "holy trinity" of the 3 wings has splintered badly, and no candidate unites even 2 of the 3 wings.  Prior to Mitt Romney's exit this week from the race, here is how things stood:

• John McCain commands the national defense wing, but he is despised by the social conservatives (for some socially liberal stands and his past comments about the religious right being agents of intolerance) and by the Wall Streeters (given his self-described lack of knowledge about economics)
• Mike Huckabee has become the standard-bearer for the social conservatives (and in fact he is a preacher), which kept this wing from any thoughts it may have had of coalescing around either Romney or Fred Thompson.  Outside of this wing, he has zero credibility with the other two wings.
• Mitt Romney was the choice of the Wall Streeters, with his long and successful career in the private sector.  But his campaign struggled to rally the social conservatives to his cause, and he made ham-handed attempts to mollify the military hawks (doubling the size of Guantanamo? electing a Democrat would be a surrender to terror?).

As the presumptive nominee, the big problem for McCain is that the vote against him in nearly all the Super Tuesday states far outweighed the vote for him -- it wasn't like he had one main rival who was siphoning votes, he had two.  It's unlikely that he will be able to pacify the Wall Street crowd (see his reception of cheers and jeers at the CPAC this week), so in order to unite at least one of the other wings to his cause, he will have to tack dramatically to the right and risk losing his strength with independents.

Conceivably, he could pick Huckabee as a running mate to shore up this support.  But that seems increasingly unlikely; Huckabee is the youngest candidate in the GOP field, and his surprisingly strong showing in this year's campaign has given him a new level of name recognition on the national stage as the undisputed leader of the social conservative movement.  He may very well decide to cultivate support in one of the other two wings to craft a presidential run in 2012.  Romney is likely thinking the same thing, broadening his support  beyond fiscal conservatives into one (or even both) of the other wings.

The prediction here is that McCain won't be able to rally enough conservatives to his his side to prevail, and Huckabee and Romney fight it out for the nomination in 2012.  After all, the GOP is a party of primogeniture and the candidate who came in second last time often gets the nod the next time around (see, e.g., Reagan's losing efforts in the primaries of 1968 and 1976 before finally prevailing in 1980).

Question on "the vegan paradox": do hard-core vegan mothers breastfeed their babies?

It was a completely random question that came up in conversation today.  Is breastmilk an animal product, and therefore not suitable for vegans (hard-core ones, e.g., them + baby), or is it acceptable -- are humans a different sort of "animal" in this context?

Not looking for any hate mail, just thought it was a something to ponder ... Kind of reminded us of the Kobayashi Maru of Star Trek fame.  Here's a sample of one of the many funny, yet rather strident responses to this topic on Yahoo! Answers:

Breastmilk is vegan because it's completely consensual and there was no exploitation involved. Similarly, other bodily secretions (hint hint) of humans are also vegan if consensually given.

Cows' milk is for calves, not humans. However, in farms cows are treated as nothing more than milking machines. They are constantly kept pregnant and their calves are taken away at birth and if male, are slaughtered in a matter of weeks for veal. There's a saying that goes "Every glass of milk has a little bit of veal in it".

Humans are the only animal that drinks the milk of another animal... and past infancy too. It's funny that a lot of adults think drinking human breastmilk is completely gross but it's acceptable to drink the milk of another animal. I never really understood that cognitive dissonance.

Veganism opposes all animal exploitation. It is not about purity as many omnivores like to think, it is about resisting exploitation and commodification of sentient beings.

Why Hillary will win the Democratic nomination going away

Those who know me, know that I am a bit of a political junkie.  There's never been a better year to be one either, with both the Democratic and Republican nominations showing signs of going to a brokered convention for the first time in 20+ years.

Democrats have an easier time of it.  They have the political wind at their backs -- any one of the 3 candidates looks positively sparkling compared to the current administration -- and the economic as well now that the economy looks to be teetering on the brink of recession.

Barack Obama has garnered the lion's share of the press in the past week, with his decisive win in South Carolina, bitter infighting in the Clinton camp over Bill's role in SC, and the twin endorsements of the Kennedy family evoking comparisons to JFK.  He's got a lot going for him and he is a great candidate, and he may very well get my vote in California's primary next week (nice to have an election where we finally matter out west!).

That said, we're going out on a limb with the first Tole's Take political prediction of 2008: Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination handily, wiping out Obama months before the convention. 

Why?  There has been a lot of ink spilled on this already and there will surely be a lot more in the coming months, but in all the coverage I've seen there has been scant mention of the fact that the Clintons haven't lost an election in 25 years.  That's 2 terms as Arkansas governor, 2 terms as US president, and 2 terms (and counting) as US senator, all the time with ~50% of the country completely & utterly detesting their very existence.  In case your memory has faded on this, think Rush Limbaugh and Ken Starr as the standard-bearers ...

The point is that the Clintons know how to campaign, and how to do it well.  Tony Blankley eloquently expressed it when he said Bill Clinton is a "world-class message-deliverer [for the Democrats]; every time he turns a little red in the face the media rushes to cover his every word."  Keep it in mind next time you hear the media wring their hands and ruminate over whether Hillary can recover from this latest slight, or whether Obama's momentum makes him unstoppable with the broader Super Tuesday electorate -- Bill might just be planting the seeds of a message and the media won't realize they were unwittingly delivering it until it's too late.

Just a thought.  Until then, enjoy the political theater!

Basso's explanation sounds like "I never inhaled"

File this one under "Convoluted, and definitely written by his lawyers".  Ivan Basso, Italian cycling star and the heir apparent to Lance Armstrong on the Discovery Cycling Team, was caught red-handed last year in the Operacion Puerto doping affair just before the Tour de France (he was kicked out of the Tour), and Monday he finally admitted his guilt. 

Or did he?  In a nutshell, his statement says "I was the second-best cyclist in the world behind Lance in 2005.  After he retired, I beat all my rivals in the May 2006 Giro d'Italia by over 9 minutes without doping, but at that point (and never before) I decided to attempt to dope to win the July 2006 Tour de France."

Does this strain the limits of credulity?  Not sure if he thinks the public is so dumb as to believe this excuse (that the best cyclist in the world simply woke up one day and decided to dope) or he really was the dumbest cyclist in the peloton and deserved to get caught.

Either way, the evidence against him is damning, truly damning, including phone calls, payments and blood doping schedules going back to 2004.  For example:

1. The code name 'Birillo' that appeared on the June 27, 2006, Guardia Civil dossier. This document was a product of the investigation known as Operación Puerto (started May 23, 2006, in Madrid) and in it Birillo was linked with the number '2.' Basso had historically denied Birillo as being the name of his dog, he insisted in his original CONI summons that his dog's name was 'Tarello'.

2. Two telephone recordings from May 13 and 14 made by DS Ignacio Labarta to Fuentes. "Birillo had arrived with Simoni at sixteen seconds,"was said on May 13 according to La Gazzetta dello Sport. This referred to Giro d'Italia stage seven, won by Rik Verbrugghe, where Basso finished 16 seconds back with Gilberto Simoni, Davide Rebellin and Serguei Gonchar. The next day another recording, "A certain Ivan Basso won." Basso was now first overall with José Enrique Gutierrez (Phonak) second. "Friend, you have... a first and a second."

3. A fax, outlined in page 15 of the dossier, that was sent from Fuentes to Nelson Giraldo Flores (in Colombia) in the days leading up to the "festival Mayo" (or Giro d'Italia). Fuentes wrote, "As per our agreement, I am sending a list of collaborators and participants in the festival that takes place in May;" going on to ask Colombian Flores for "help and collaboration." It listed riders Basso, Marco Serrano, Michele Scarponi, Gutierrez and Jan Ullrich (spelled with one "l" in the fax) without the use of code names.        

4. An agenda with a schedule of blood extractions and transfusions since 2004. In the agenda the pseudonyms 'Birillo' and '2' are used.

5. Payments in 2004 of around €35,000 and another €6000 for the freezing the blood (or "gastos de Siberia"), and an advance payment of €70,000 in 2006 'to be defined individually'; there was also a message received from Fuentes in Italian which talks of a Zurich bank account.        

6. Guardia Civil intercepted messages from Basso to Fuentes after the 2006 Giro.

7. The analyses of blood, which could have been done in November 2005 in Madrid, with haematologist Merino Batres, a collaborator of Fuentes. The Spanish Guardia Civil suspect that the cyclist visited Madrid at least three times but he had always denied being there.

In memoriam: Vince Giovannotto

Vince Giovannotto was a rare combination of things to me: friend, former CEO (at Rentals.com, before it was acquired) and former landlord (through Vittoria Management), and, for a period, all at the same time -- stop and think for a moment if anyone outside of your parents has simultaneously occupied so many important roles in your daily life (and then ask if you are still good friends with them!). 

Vince Giovannotto passed away unexpectedly two weeks ago at only 38 years old, and his family and friends gathered for a memorial to honor his life yesterday.  It is a true measure of how many people's lives he touched when a standing room only crowd of over 500 people showed up to pay their respects, including Frank Quattrone, property managers, local politicians, firemen, policemen, Internet CEOs, star engineers, etc.  While there were many intense and heartfelt moments (there wasn't a dry eye in the room after his father Sal's cri de coeur), ultimately it was a celebration of Vince's life, times and his impact on everyone around him.  He leaves behind a wife and three young children and will be dearly missed.

Below is the Palo Alto Weekly obituary.

Run for your life if you see this sign

Run, don't walk, in case you are ever walking through the mall and see this sign. Don't wait for the Homeland Security threat level to go up!

Thanks to Amr for pointing me to this.

The Dems Are Kicking Again!

Even though I'm a lifelong Democrat who interned on the Senate Finance Committee under Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan during school, politics has definitely taken a back seat to building a startup these days.  That said, I still take a keen interest in Washington affairs, so it was gratifying to see the Democrats rebound so strongly just 2 years after one of the most thorough ass-kickings in history in 2004.

My fond hope is that they learn the lessons from recent history and not overestimate their mandate -- dust off the cloak of bipartisanship and get down to the job of moving the country forward.