Lower taxes? Controlling the deficit? Nope. Social investment, in areas like health, education, and jobs.
Over a month ago, I analyzed the Canadian federal voting landscape and came to the conclusion that a huge risk for Harper and the Conservative Party is poor performance in Ontario. What Ontarians want is pretty much on par with the nationwide numbers above and the Conservatives have closed the gap in the polling numbers in the province at 34.9%, compared to the Liberals at 38.0% and the New Democrats at 14.3%.
Harper also ended a study to change the Canadian anthem, “Oh Canada” to a more gender neutral version reflecting the 1908 poem that it is based on. The current line, “True patriot love in all thy sons command,” while the poem has the line ,“True patriot love thou dost in us command.” According to an Ipsos Canwest poll, the Conservatives and Liberals were statistically tied in their support by women.
The Conservatives are in the drivers seat but on thin ice. The policy emphases in the budget are risky, in my opinion, particularly given Ontario’s higher than the national average unemployment rate of 9.2% last month. The anger over proroguing has melted like so much Whistler slush. The Liberals have an unpopular leader in Ignatieff and the Dippers have a relatively popular leader of a relatively unpopular party.
Twitterversion:: What Canadians want: investment in social areas. Harper & Conservatives in driver’s seat but on thin ice. #ThickCulture @Prof_K
Image:: BMO Field, Toronto. Artificial turf being removed to prepare for new grass surface. Dec 2009, Toronto Star.
Should taxpayer dollars be used to finance infrastructures like sports stadia? Economists tend to say no. The implication here is that they won’t get built, as its notoriously hard for private entities to finance them. Peter Magowan was able to do it for the San Francisco Giants due to the region being awash in Silicon Valley money in the late 1990s, but it’s unlikely this could happen today.
The City of Toronto was part of a public/private venture that built and managed the Sky Dome {now Rogers Centre}. Sadly, it was a comedy of errors with huge cost overruns that included the building of a luxury hotel and underpricing of luxury skyboxes and advertising rights. The Sky Dome costs mushroomed to $570M CAN in 1989 and the project was saddled with huge debts. Despite the Blue Jays doing well attendancewise and the venue being booked for large concerts and home of the CFL Argonauts, the revenues weren’t enough. By 1994, the Ontario New Democratic Party government, who inherited the financial headaches from the Ontario Liberal government in power before 1990, paid off the debt and sold the venue for $151M to a private consortium. The venue went into bankruptcy protection in 1998 and in 2005, Rogers Communication bought and renamed the facility for $25M. Talk about depreciation.
In contrast, the Major Soccer League’s Toronto FC home, BMO Field cost $62M CAN with $44.8M coming from public sources in another public/private partnership. Built in 2007, BMO Field is now turning a small profit and Toronto FC attendance has been strong, so strong that there’s talk of expanding the 20,500 seat facility. The capacity was restricted when building BMO Field to maintain an intimate setting that was specifically designed for soccer.
Is there a moral to this story? A big part of the equation is realistic expectations of costs/revenues and good management. Nevertheless, even if it may not make “economic sense” to use public money to build these venues {in terms of jobs, tax revenues, increased business activity}, are there other reasons why taxpayer money should be used to build them?
An argument could be made that Toronto is a better city for having BMO Field or the Sky Dome/Rogers Centre, but for different reasons. BMO Field is bringing soccer to a diverse city, full of people who can relate to soccer. The Rogers Centre, like the Air Canada Centre used by the Toronto Maple Leafs {NHL} and Raptors {NBA}, signify Toronto’s place as a city by being a signifier of North American capitalism. The city is the largest in Canada and seventh in North America. Like it or not, being home to major sports teams gives the city status through media exposure and corporate marketing. The Buffalo Bills {NFL} have played games here, hinting that the first non-US NFL franchise may be Toronto and could use Rogers Centre, although there are potential stumbling blocks. The mega concerts can be accommodated. Despite it now being 21 years old, it still is iconic as place-as-spectacle, with its opening roof and downtown locale.
Freud would have had a field day with the opening and closing Sky Dome/Rogers Centre being next to the phallic CN tower.
Does it make sense for cities to invest in stadia? I don’t think it’s strictly an economic decision and why cities still invest in them is better explained by sociology. While public funds can be spend a myriad ways, how they will be spent has everything to do with the local political and economic actors. This book, Public Dollars, Private Stadiums, shows that these decisions to finance stadia can circumvent the will of the people, showing the power of embeddedness.
As for success of these public/private ventures, that’s a managerial issue depending on the circumstances, the terms, oversight, local politics, and a city’s long-term prospects.
Twitterversion:: Should public funding be used 4 sports stadia? A look @ the Sky Dome/Rogers Centre history & the emerging BMO Field story. @Prof_K
UC Berkeley Protests at Sather Gate, 4 March 2010 by Tessa Stuart, East Bay Express
Well, that might be stretching it, but social movements and revolutions are often borne of the bourgeoisie. The nationwide protests which started in the University of California system were part of the March 4th National Day of Action for Public Education. Across the nation, students, and in some instances staff, instructors, and faculty, protested budget cuts, rising fees, and mandatory furloughs. Protests over cuts at UCSD, as well as over recent racial tensions stemming from a “Compton cookout” party held during Black History month.
We’re seeing a large cadre of middle-class students protesting rising fees at public universities with rhetoric that makes educational access sound like social infrastructure. Rhetoric that often sounds like the dreaded “S” word, socialism. While students protesting fee and tuition hikes are nothing new, the sociopolitical zeitgeist is, in my opinion, different. Social movements and revolutions are sparked by gaps between an “old guard” and those feeling it is out of touch. If the middle class and the bourgeoisie in particular start to feel disenfranchised by deep structural issues in society and the political economy—look out.
Right now, I feel the socialpolitical zeitgeist is one of dissatisfaction with the status quo, which is beginning to lump Obama into the category of the powers-that-be. The squeezing of the middle class, evident in the rising gini coefficient in the US now over .40{Canada’s was lower at .32 in 2004, on par with much of Europe}, are sensitizing the middle masses to perceived inequities and slights. Public university funding cuts that undermine the acquisition and development of cultural capital, so intertwined with the potential to generate economic capital, is political dynamite in a floundering economy.
If the middle classes feel politically and economically thwarted over time, I can see the youth rebelling. I’ve been having France on my mind, so the question I have is would such a middle-class rebellion be more like Paris, 1968 or The Great Cat Massacre?
Twitterversion:: Seeds of discontent brewing w/student protest movemnt started in Univ. of Calif. sys. Bourgeoisie rebellion in the cards? http://url.ie/59g1 @Prof_K
image:: "Jay Sherman" from The Critic {1994-1995} voiced by Jon Lovitz
It may seem like all I do is bitch about other articles on here, but I am getting old and cranky. Today’s target, I mean subject is an article from The Chronic{le} of Higher Education by Thomas Doherty, The Death of Film Criticism. Doherty laments the rise of blog film critics on the wild expanses of the Internet that don’t have much to say beyond the trivial by scribes who don’t even read books. He does a good job of describing the rise and fall of film criticism in the 20th. century and it’s worthwhile reading. Where he loses me is how he doesn’t see how utterly predictable this all is. The main target market for films is the youth. That’s not to say older people don’t see movies, but for the most part, they matter far less than the teenager. Why? The blockbuster needs repeat viewings by throngs of theatregoers. So, the medium is increasingly targeted towards teen audiences, along with the current infatuation with celebrity culture. The Hollywood machine caters to the “head” of the long tail, i.e., the blockbuster, which is all about delivering spectacle. It’s not about artistry, how Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia {1999} has umpteen layers of symbolism and references couched within, or what Lars Von Trier and the Dogme95 movement are doing with films like Antichrist {2009}. The rise of the bloggers, who could care less about allusion or auteurs, goes hand in glove with where much of the industry is today. These days it’s about horror, action, and vampires.
Where Doherty gets interesting is how he says the Internet is also spawning interesting intellectual dialectic discussion on film by academics. Unfortunately, such work isn’t weighted the same way as publications, bringing up the issue of how institutional logics lag behind the new technologies. I see this as a big problem for two reasons.
First, while I “get” the idea that peer-review publications and books in journals and presses serve a legitimation function, this same function serves dominant paradigms in fields and places academic knowledge behind paywalls. Should academic knowledge be free? I feel that what distinguishes higher education research from applied industrial research is that it serves the public good, so I feel university knowledge should be towards no or low cost to obtain. Even in the areas of innovation, I believe universities can be a catalyst for “open innovation”, where technologies are licensed to multiple entities at a lower cost structure to spur distributed collaborative work. The idea is to speed up the innovation process by allowing knowledge to flow through networks, not silos {within companies or even departments}.
Second, I think that higher education may be at a crossroads. Right now, it has a monopoly on providing the legitimizing totem of the accredited degree, which has a ceremonial function in the workforce. In 2007, I was at an event where a local employer discussed what skills they are looking for from recent college graduates. What were they looking for? Critical thinking? Domain knowledge? Sure. But what came through as highlights were “meeting” skills and knowledge of Microsoft Office. This made me cringe, as I thought this was a harbinger as the university as merely vocational education.
Nevertheless, I’m wondering if with globalization that higher education needs to be relevant more than ever. Relevant to all of its stakeholders, which may mean a swifter adaptation to changes afoot, in terms of the institutional character of higher education and what it rewards and values. Future blog posts of mine will develop my ideas on this and provide a blueprint for the university in Web 2.0+.
Is the film critic dead? Well, no, it’s just her/his audience may be a lot more fragmented.
Twitterversion:: Death of the film critic? WWW killng the profession-also fostering academic dialectic while higher ed scoffs.#ThickCulture @Prof_K
I honestly believe Salon.com needs a laughtrack these days, as I find much of it to be unintentionally hilarious in its gender-war-pot-stirring making sure the culture war is alive and well to its readers. For over a decade, Salon has done articles on sexuality that push liberal minds to the edge by contrasting prevailing mores that are in conflict with more traditional ones or longstanding notions of “propriety.” Ah, living in the postmodern condition of intellectualized discourse in an era when everything is an untethered floating signifier and the rules are nebulous at best. The target audience seems to be those who struggle with being hip and urbane, but having some vestiges of a more socially conservative order keeping them from totally cutting loose and raising their kids in a bohemian hedonifest. In the process, the social conservatives take their shots and pageviews go up.
Last Friday, Kate Harding posted an article on Salon.com’s Broadsheet on “Hook-Up” culture. She links to another article on a study finding that hook-up culture may not be that detrimental, but goes on to cite the Teen Vogue editor, Rachel Simmons, and sociologist Kathleen A. Bogle’s interviews for a book on the subject, as evidence that hooking up might not be such a good thing because women are often left in “relationship” limbo. Harding uses this as a springboard to lambaste the media for promoting a “please your man” culture.
While Harding tries to reconcile this with a utopian pining for a world where a multiplicity of sexualities can co-exist without feeling a pressure to conform to a media-manufactured social orthodoxy, I feel she’s totally missing the boat here. Harding thinks that those caught up in the emotional wreckage that hook-up culture can bring are being taught the wrong things and that women aren’t taught to value their own desires::
“It’s that the girls in question don’t feel comfortable admitting what they want. They’ve been taught that saying ‘I want a relationship’ or ‘I’m falling in love with you’ will terrify any red-blooded American male — that is so not What Guys Want! — so young women who are interested in something more serious are terrified of being alone and completely unwanted if they say so…
If we encouraged girls and women to place real value on their own desires, then instead of hand-waving about kids these days, we could trust them to seek out what they want and need, and to end relationships, casual or serious, that are unsatisfying or damaging to them, regardless of whether they’d work for anyone else.”
I find this ironic condescension towards women wrapped up in empty Dr. Phil-esque emancipatory rhetoric a bit too much to take. Ironic, as Harding assumes her own orthodoxy of desires that’s a polar opposite of what the media, in this case focusing on the likes of Cosmo and Maxim, are portraying. While much of the media have been quick to point out for decades that if you’re not desirable or aren’t in a relationship, you don’t matter, i.e., alone = loser, Harding as an agent of media is advocating what may well be a fiction—longing for the “right” answer of true female desires. Harding implies our real desires are being subjugated by media, but the fact of the matter is that our real desires are intertwined with media and culture. I would argue that much of the rhetoric in the division of values in the US evident in the “culture wars”, well-trodden territory for Salon.com, is about desires intertwined with media and culture.
We want meaning from our desires. We want meaning from our actions and the constellation of products and brands we surround ourselves with to gain identity. So, what is the meaning of the “hook-up”? I think for many youth, there isn’t a lot of meaning and I don’t mean that pejoratively. I think this is more of an issue for those writing on “hook-up” culture as a wedge issue of morality or bitching about media and society.
The “hook-up” can be reduced to a consumer behaviour, a mode that fits us all like a glove, whether we want it to or not.. We consume things to satisfy our desires, but out desires are never satiated. Is it media? Is it culture? Both. The fuss is that relationships shouldn’t be an act of consumption and that sex shouldn’t be cheapened by commodification. These concepts are just a tad too close to mail-order brides and prostitution, no?
Image:: Amoxicilina, procured in Tijuana, MX, Spring 2004 for Consumer Behaviour course. Typically, antibiotics can be obtained at a 20-30% discount when compared to US prices, although quality and legitimacy can be concerns. Photo by Kenneth M. Kambara.
While the healthcare reform debate rages, there much emphasis on the costs. Warren Buffett has decried US health care as a “tapeworm eating our economic body”. The interesting thing is that when you look at the numbers that Buffett cite, the US is spending plenty on healthcare and has quite a few healthcare practitioners per capita. This post on the Innovation and Growth blog states the problems aren’t about the costs, but the lack of results. People are paying more, but less aggregate care is being delivered, in terms of actual better health. The blogger, Mike Mandel, also has a post posing the question of whether the US is overweight on healthcare R&D expenditures. As Ron Burgundy would say, “Compelling and rich.”
Where’s the spending going? It’s going towards the current healthcare infrastructure, insurance companies, and the research-intensive pharmaceuticals. Healthcare reform needs to address the industrial organization of the interfirm networks of the US healthcare system, so policy needs to not only have an understanding of economics, but also of organizations, strategy, and marketing. This challenges an entrenched and embedded structure of doing business, with an emphasis on business.
Real Healthcare Reform
In order to truly reform healthcare, it’s important to look at the system. Here’s a dramatically simplified representation for working Americans::
healthcare providers -> hospitals, medical groups, & insurers -> patients
Currently, employers and employees both pay for healthcare, with indigent care programmes and Medicare taking up the slack. Health care reform threatens how things are currently done, albeit expensively and lacking in aggregate health benefits. At some point under reform, costs will need to be addressed, which will limit total expenditures to force efficiencies out of the system. Policy aimed at squeezing efficiencies out of the healthcare system will force the players in the healthcare economic ecosystem of firms to maintain their margins to satisfy shareholders, although it should be noted that there are non-profit players in the mix. How will this impact the system?
Hospitals and medical groups will be forced to cut costs, making general medicine much less attractive as a career, due to pressure to contain wages and working conditions focusing on cost efficiencies. Already, there is evidence of this, as health providing organizations feel pressure on both ends, revenues from insurers and the high costs of labour. Under National Health in the UK, there’s increased competition amongst hospitals [1]. I see this as fostering specialization and differentiation within a government-funded system, which sheds light on how hospitals in the future may position themselves, as they compete for patients. Rural health may suffer without proper incentives in some areas, although publicly funded health may create markets for health which are current underdeveloped in others.
There will be considerable pressure to reduce pharmaceutical expenditures, which, in turn will limit the amount of pharmaceutical R&D. The pharmaceutical industry will say that this will kill future innovation, as the high prices in the US are fueling R&D expenditures, given that most of the world has price controls on pharmaceuticals. But, for all of the investment in health R&D, as noted above, it’s not as if it’s having a profound impact on aggregate health. I’m of the mind that the problem is with the traditional approach to drug development that the pharmaceutical industry engages in. A rival paradigm is one driven by medical biotechnology in the areas of using genetics in the drug development process and bioinformatics. It would be naïve to expect technology to deliver solutions in the future, i.e., that the US will innovate itself out of this healthcare jam, but what’s clear is that the current pharmaceutical model isn’t working. More is spent per revenue dollar on marketing than on R&D, so the US research-intenvive pharmaceuticals are differentiating through branding, not theraputic benefits.
The above scenario is akin to the German public/private system of health carewith 82M people versus 304M in the US, so there is the issue of scalability. Nevertheless, Germany has a system with 90% opting for a public option, but here are the key points [2]::
Both systems have providers employed in the private sector {not socialized medicine, as in the UK}
German healthcare is financed through payroll taxes at rates that are similar to the US’ {around 15% split by employer and employee}
German wages for physicians are half of that of US physicians at $80K, but there are wide variances in terms of hours worked and wages by specialization
The German government sets fixed reimbursement rates and obtains price concessions from pharmaceutical companies due to its market power
Fewer uninsured patients in Germany mean less incidence of expensive emergency care
German hospitals don’t splurge on the latest technology, such as MRIs
There are income barriers to enter private healthcare & older Germans cannot go back to the private system once they leave the public option
Unemployed in Germany who have never worked still may obtain care through a social fund, the sozialamt [3]
The German system isn’t perfect and there’s questions of what the future holds, given the rapid changes in medical technologies and who will gain access to them. I don’t see the US system in its current incarnation as viable in the long term.
What about the poor insurers under health reform, I’ve blogged about in the past? If I were an insurer, I would be shifting my business model towards being what is called a “value net integrator”, a variant of systems integrator. Such an entity would focus on facilitating the data and information flows between patients, physicians, pharmacists, etc., and mining the data to help medical and policy decisions. For example, a patient’s electronic record would be in a database that could be accessed by physicians. Additionally, the “insurance company” no longer makes decisions on care, but facilitates payments from the government to the providers.
Plenty is being spent on health per capita here in the US, but I see reform in some form or another to be inevitable. Why? The private actuarial model {risk-based} of healthcare in the US is expensive, not providing enough health benefits for those covered, and too many {more and more from the middle class} are finding it hard to obtain coverage. I don’t see this as politically tenable, particularly as the economy languishes. The costs are astronomical, but the more pressing issue is that the current system is bulky and dysfunctional to say the least. Policy needs to address the entire “ecosystem” of healthcare provision, including a look at rethinking the organizational sociology, innovation, and technology when it comes to the future of healthcare in America.
Twitterversion:: Healthcare reform in the US? Are costs the focal issue or is the system fundamentally broken? #ThickCulture
A few years back, I taught entertainment marketing courses with the sly Walter Benjamin subtitle of “The Work of Art in the Age of Infinite Reproduction,” which always brings up the tensions between art and commerce. Now, I’m involved in a social media startup and issues of intellectual property and users use, repurposing, and remixing of it is central to the value proposition.
I’ve thought about intellectual property {IP} issues for almost a decade now and how value is created and economic rents {profits} are captured. The music industry is changing, so that the actual music is becoming secondary to the music experience. The CD or MP3 is the loss leader, but the mainstream music industry has a hard time of letting go of the idea that IP rights need to be defended at all costs, even if it means suing college students and moms.
News of this documentary, Copyright Criminals {Amazon.USA}, came to me via Flavorpill {see link for video excerpts}. It’s about sampling in hip-hop and brings up some interesting points about IP, copyright infringement, and the musical creativity. Here’s the trailer::
I’m looking forward to screening this. I’m not sure what the answers are in this area, but I think it requires a rethinking of intellectual property rights and creation of value that consumers will spend their money on. So, a lot of this is in the realm of marketing. I feel that rigid IP enforcement that isn’t contextualized is one of the problems with the music industry and serves to further alienate consumers/fans, as well as putting a damper on artistic creativity. Of course, the market could care less about creativity, just like so many consumers could care less about IP laws that are sporadically enforced or easy to circumvent.
Vancouver Olympics Freestyle Skiing Gold Medal Winner, Alexandre Bilodeau
Notes from north of 49ºN
I’ve been immersed in Canadianess on several fronts this week. There’s the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, of course, and I went to an innovation talk by the CEO of Porter Airlines, an emerging Canadian success story, at MaRS here in Toronto.
I’ve heard about some backlash about Canada’s “Own the Podium” programme, which I’ve dubbed “pwn the podium,” but I find the whole spectacle fascinating. The first Olympics I remember, which will date me, is Montréal-1976. I remember watching, on a B&W TV in the kitchen, Nadia Comăneci dazzle the world, as well as Gilda Radner’s impersonation of her on Saturday Night Live. I remember the US hockey gold medal in 1980 and the US-led boycott of the summer games in Moscow. I was in Westwood near UCLA during the 1984 Olympics in LA and still recall the pastel iconography and the feel-good pervasiveness that just didn’t jive with my own brand of teenaged angst. Over the years, I’ve followed the Olympics, as I’m interested in spectacle in the Debord sense, but not soooo cynically. So much hinges on the dramas, albeit often hyped by the media. Although, the story of the first Canadian to win gold on Canadian soil, Alexandre Bilodeau, is quite compelling. Alexandre took up skiing, as his mom wanted her kids to take up a more family-oriented sport, which could include his older brother with cerebral palsy, Frédéric.
The coverage of the Olympics is a perfect example of mediascapes, as described by Arjun Appadurai::
“‘Mediascapes’, whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places.”
So, what made me laugh out loud was Salon.com reporting they got hammered for the snarky remarks made by writers on their site on articles on the Olympics. Oh, Salon, desperately trying to be relevant by stirring the pot, which I find it often does with gendered issues—oh cruel fates, why can’t Roman Polansky get arrested monthly?! Salon writers are like ironic hipsters who aren’t quite clued in to how planting “tongue-in-cheek” with one’s writing doesn’t preclude you from looking like an idiot for missing the forest for the trees.
Heather Havrilesky and Steve Almond both poked fun at Vancouver Games. Heather’s “D’oh, Canada!” piece was a play-by-play on how the opening ceremonies were cheesy, boring, and with poor production values—a colossal fail. She ends with a reiteration of her take on how the bland NBC is, along with how they are complicit in not accurately depicting the ceremonies as an embarrassing mess::
“And do Costas and Lauer acknowledge what a big mess it is? Hell, no. Instead they’re happily prattling along as Wayne Gretsky rides to the real outdoor Olympic cauldron in the rain. Why didn’t they just have one cauldron? Sadly, this outdoor one looks just like the malfunctioning heap inside.
Oh, Canada. You may among the friendliest and most welcoming people on earth, but sometimes friendliness, politeness, and “making it be” just isn’t enough.”
Almond went through the various gaffes and SNAFUs of the first few days of the games.Bitch bitch bitch. He concludes with this trenchant observation::
“We’re really sorry it had to go this way, Canada. We love your health care system and your uncomplaining tolerance of sub-freezing weather and your almost freakishly low-key attitude. But when it comes to mindless, over-hyped spectacles of late model capitalist excess, you should probably leave the driving to us.“
While NBC provides a mainstream mediascape, Salon is providing a cynical, urban-liberal hipster variant, slathered in a fatty gravy of pseudointellectualism and punctuated by cheese curd five-dollar-turns-of-phrase, like so much poutine.
In my opinion, this is nothing to get in a lather about, since it’s so utterly predictable. Mediascapes are all about persuasion, promotion, and, in Salon’s case, pageviews. Their depiction of Canada as bumbling bumpkin cousins to the north is really just the flipside of NBC’s mainstream message of pro-US feelgood candy. Hand in glove. I can just hear George Peppard say, “I love it when a plan comes together.”
Salon should have more compassion for Canada. Salon has spent 15 years trying to be an über-hip West coast New Yorker, but are still just bumbling bumpkin cousins to the West.
Apologies if this dips too far into the metaphysical, but I think this sentiment is an essential aspect of critical theory as I read it:
Sin is evasion of time. In giving way to nostalgia, for example, we flee from time into the past. Evading time is accomplished mainly, however, by constructing worlds — orders of life in which everything has its assigned place, and all events are foreknown if not willed. There are personal worlds, occupied perhaps by only a single individual; and there is also ‘the world,’ the surrounding order of society, treated as objectively knowable, humanly controllable, and morally final. A world is always a kind of fortress against time.
Jonathan Chait at the New Republic has an interesting post up Concerning Obama’s political style. Rather than capitulate to Republican demands as his critics on the left suggest he is doing, he’s using the rhetoric of bipartisanship to draw out the Republicans.
One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that’s not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists — it’s a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It’s how you deal with people with intractable demands — put ‘em on a committee.
Since I’m a soccer fan, the Republicans remind me a whole lot of a team playing 10 men (or women) “behind the ball” in the hopes of preventing the other team from scoring. It’s kinda like a prevent defense in American football for those misguided souls who think soccer is boring. How do you break a “bunker” defense in soccer? You’re patient. You pass the ball around in the hopes of “drawing out” the other team from their goal area. You try to force them to make a mistake that frees you up for a shot on goal. It doesn’t always work but it’s the only chance you have. This health care summit is Obama’s version of trying to force the Republicans into a mistake. Let’s see what happens.
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