Higher gasoline tax (and lower tax on wages)

We should tax the things that do us harm and not tax the things that do us good.

Gasoline does us a lot of harm. It warms the atmosphere. It keeps us dependent on the Saudi royal family. It forces us, in part, to send more than 100,000 American soldiers to the Persian Gulf to keep that crude oil flowing.

We don't tax it enough.

This Sun-Times article has two climatologists at Urbana-Champaign making the case for a global gas tax.

The City of Chicago should raise the gas tax, as should all of the counties and the State of Illinois. That will make it easier for our neighboring states, counties and municipalities to balance their budgets by raising their gas taxes. Indiana and Wisconsin like the gas tax differential, but the higher we raise our gax tax, the easier it is for them to raise theirs and still enjoy a differential.

What's up with the Zorn-Steinberg feud?

Tribune columnist and blogger Eric Zorn and Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg have been in a *feud* for months. The latest slap from Steinberg is in yesterday's paper, where he insults all bloggers as well. It's here:

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Speaking of laughing at people. I'm not into writing as a hobby. I don't go home and jot down poems in green India ink and read them to a dozen hipsters at coffee houses. I like to get paid for my work, and I prefer a lot of readers. Scorn me if you like.

Thus I've never gotten into this whole "blog'' business -- the personal diaries of various self-appointed commentators who pour out the tortured musings of their hearts to dedicated handfuls, at least until they get tired and quit. I have tried to read a few of the more popular -- and some of the not-at-all popular -- and found that, in general, the lack of interesting material to be culled buried under huge expanses of vomitous verbiage makes the entire endeavor a waste of time.

Thus I can't answer a question that has been rolling around my mind, ever since a grinning pal at the Chicago Tribune mentioned something to me. Here's the question: If a guy writes a private blog, but it's actually vetted by two or three editors and lawyers within that guy's giant media conglomerate, is it still a blog? Isn't it then a corporate Web site masquerading as a blog? Kind of like those faux micro breweries -- the Old Hog's Head Beer Company -- that turn out to actually be divisions of Miller Beer? Doesn't that make the supposed blog something false and deceptive and shameful? Just wondering.

---
Neil, you insulted me a little bit.

So this puts me firmly in the Zorn camp (his best recent slap at Steinberg was when he noted that Steinberg used his column to essentially beg for some reader to send him opera tickets).

And clearly, he doesn't get it. A blog isn't a diary and more than a column is a love letter. A blog is meant to be read by others. There's no such thing as a private blog. And if Steinberg is trying to make fun of people writing about their personal lives in blogs, why does he spend so much of his columns writing about his wife, or his health club, or the endless Seinfeld-esque observations from his daily routine?

Your daughter's a lesbian! Nyah, nyah!

I can't believe that the Bush camp is trying to say it is a cheap shot to talk about Dick Cheney's daughter in the debates.

The implication is a little sad.

And to spell it out, the implication is that it is something to be ashamed of. And that's the only reason why Kerry and Edwards brought it up: to bring humiliation and scorn onto the Bush/Cheney ticket, and expose their deep, dark secret to the world.

A lesbian daughter.

The really sad part is that for some people, I'll bet that's true.

And so the really, really sad part is that if the Bush/Cheney camp is calling it a cheap shot and a tawdry political trick, it's because part of the GOP base is appalled that Dick Cheney's daugher is a lesbian.

Now that's *really* embarassing -- part of your base considers is so disgusting that your daughter is gay that if your opponent congratulates you on your accepting, tolerant fatherhood, it's a dirty trick.

I tell you, I'd rather have the liberal extremists than the conservative extremists in weeks like this.

Money in IL politics blog online now

Congratulations to Cindi Canary and the staff at the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. They've got a great blog up here at www.ilcampaign.org on up-to-the-minute disclosures.

I used to work in the office (and worked for the organization for a little bit), so I used to get this stuff at the water cooler. Now everyone can get it.

The internet is a pretty cool thing.

Beautiful sentence on the nice part about Alan Keyes' campaign

Yes, Alan Keyes is not fit to be a United States Senator (especially as he has no legislative experience -- see Hull and Hynes supporters, I wasn't just picking on them at the time).

Yes, he did not spark the national dialogue on the definition of morality that I had hoped might occur (a little bit like Senator Kerry's talk on faith and the nation's need to love our brothers more that we do through government investments in people).

But I'm a bit of a softie on Alan Keyes. I think there's something kind of great about the campaign.

He's black.

I know -- the GOP State Central Committee's selection of Keyes had all the grace of a drowning man. He filled a quota of one.

But no matter how inelegant the selection, there's something satisfying about two black candidates each earning the major party nomination for a U.S. Senate campaign from a state with a black population of only 14%.

Eric Zorn put it better than I have, likely inspired from watching the radio debate in person:

And I suspect that if Abe Lincoln's ghost haunts the Old State Capitol where he made such a mark so long ago, it smiled tonight at the sight of two black men debating as the leading candidates for Senate in his beloved state of Illinois.

Tribune endorses Bean and a new congressional map for Illinois

Today's Tribune endorsed Melissa Bean over Phil Crane in a surprising editorial. The Tribune helped to found the Republican Party and it is not an easy thing for the paper to endorse a Democrat.

Sadly, that will probably not be enough to defeat Phil Crane, given the gerrymandered district. I could be wrong (and hope so), but I'm playing the pessimistic role in this debate.

Intriguingly, the Trib also wrote:

Thanks to a redistricting of congressional boundaries that was accomplished with one goal in mind -- protecting both Democratic and Republican incumbents -- few races in the state are seriously contested. Illinois should consider a better way to remap -- one that puts voters ahead of politicians. But that's for another day.

--

Not bad. Looks like someone (I'm guessing Bruce Dold or Steve Chapman) understand that power of the single-member districts to lock in results, but couldn't get the rest of the board to really back it, since they don't really get it yet. But that's progress.

We can do two things. One, we can redraw many of the white districts to make them roughly 50-50 between D and R voters (at least, we can do that with Mark Kirk's district, Jerry Weller's district, maybe Henry Hyde's district and in a stretch, Phil Crane's district). We can't really make the three black districts and the Latino district competitive, because there are too many D voters. This can be done with a partisan remap in Springfield (like what the Republicans did in Texas under Tom DeLay), but with the goal of creating more competitive districts instead of locked-in Democratic districts. Maybe that will be seen as OK by the Republicans, especially if the Trib provides some cover.

There was an attempt to do so this year in the General Assembly, led by the legislature's most prolific lawmaker John Cullerton. SB 2127 started the discussion, but Speaker Madigan nixed the plan. Maybe this editorial will help to change the Speaker's mind.

The second thing we can do is abolish single-member districts and use a type of proportional representation in multi-member districts. The most competitive system we could use would elect the 19 Members of Congress from Illinois statewide, where 1/19 of the vote elects one Member of Congress. That would avoid our current situation in Blue State Illinois, where Democrats always win, and we have 10 Republican Members of Congress and 9 Democrats. That's the power of the single-member district -- it distorts the votes.

Somewhere in between would be having three big districts -- one for Chicago with 5 Members, one for the collar counties and suburban Cook with 5 or 6 Members, one for Northern Illinois with 4 Members and one for Southern Illinois with 3 or 4 Members. That way, 1/5 of the vote in Chicago elects someone, 1/4 in Northern Illinois, etc. We could provide for cumulative voting rights, like we did in the Illinois House until 1982 in 3-seat districts, to create more competitive elections. And a great benefit would be representation from the political minority. Chicago Republicans should have representation. DuPage Democrats should have representation. Now they don't. That's not representative government. For more, see the Midwest Democracy Center.

Get health care costs off employers' backs with Medicare for all

This TIME magazine article lays out the case for government-funded health care, instead of for-profit insurance company funded health care, as 30 times more administrative efficient than the way we do it now.

Here's how they lead the article:

This is the picture of health care in America. We spend more money than anyone else in the world — and yet have less to show for it than other developed countries. That's one reason we don't live as long. We don't adequately cover half the population. We encourage hospitals and doctors to perform unnecessary medical procedures on people who don't need them, while denying procedures to those who do. We charge the poor far more for medical services than we do the rich. We force senior citizens with modest incomes to board buses to Canada to buy drugs they can't afford in America. We clog our emergency rooms with patients because they can't get in to see their doctors. We spend more money treating disease than preventing it. We are victims of rampant fraud and overbilling. We stand a good chance of dying from a mistake if we are admitted to a hospital, and we kill more people with prescription drugs than with street drugs like cocaine and heroin. We have an endless choice of health-care plans, but most people have few real choices. We are forced to hold bake sales, car washes and pancake breakfasts to pay the medical bills of family members and friends when a catastrophic illness strikes.

Americans tend to believe they have the best health care in the world, but in truth it is a second-rate system and destined to get a lot worse and much more expensive.

--- a quick description of the cheaper alternative, Medicare ---

We already have universal health care and a single-payer system for everybody age 65 and over: it's called Medicare. For years, researchers and health-care professionals have advocated a similar plan for the rest of the population, but no plan has ever got far in the legislative process because of fierce opposition by the health-care industry. To discredit the single-payer idea, insurers, HMOs, for-profit hospitals and other private interests play on Americans' long-standing fears of Big Government. In truth, it is the private market that has created a massive bureaucracy, one that dwarfs the size and costs of Medicare, the most efficiently run health-insurance program in the U.S. in terms of administrative costs. Medicare's overhead averages about 2% a year. In a 2002 study for the state of Maine, Mathematica Policy Research Inc. concluded that administrative costs of private insurers in the state ranged from 12% to more than 30%. That isn't surprising because unlike Medicare, which relies on economies of scale and standardized universal coverage, private insurance is built on bewildering layers of plans and providers that require a costly bureaucracy to administer, much of which is geared toward denying claims.

--- and my favorite snippet at the end ---

America's privately funded system puts U.S. companies at a disadvantage to their competitors in the industrialized world, where health care is funded by government. GM says the cost of providing health care to its workers and retirees totals $1,400 for each vehicle sold in the U.S., more than the cost of steel.

---

WOW! So in other words, without government-run health care, we shoot our manufacturing industry in the foot by putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage to every other Western nation's manufacturing companies.

Can we get the Manufacturers' Associations on board the government-funded health care train, so that we don't saddle businesses that are competing in a global market with the cost of providing health care to their workers? If we can't, they should stop listening to the parasitic insurance companies.

Does "I have a plan" really work?

That's one of John Kerry's favorite lines. It must work if his campaign insists on using it all the time. "I have a plan."

And I like that he asked people to 'join me' in asking to roll back the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest top 2%.

Did George Bush just say "internets"?

Yeah, I think he did.

"I hear there's these rumors on the internets . . . about the draft."

I read that on the webs. Thanks, Mr. Presidents.

(Does that mean President Bush doesn't check the web at all?)

Did John Kerry just say "straight up"?

I think he did.

I think he just said "let me tell you straight up"

O.K., home dog. You tell me straight up. Word.