The Texas Observer

To localize the previous post, a timely report came out today measuring the state of children’s health care. How’d Texas fair? Down at the bottom, as always.

Via the CPPP, the KIDS COUNT Data Book, a national state-by-state report released today by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, found:

– Texas continues to have the highest rate of uninsured children in the nation. For 9 of the last 10 years, Texas has led this category

– Texas has the highest teen birth rate in the nation, 63 births per 1,000 females ages 15-19.

– Texas has the 7th worst child poverty rate in the nation. One in four Texas children lived in poverty in 2005 (a 14 percent increase since 2000), ranking Texas 44th in the nation. The national child poverty rate also worsened, increasing from 17 percent in 2000 to 19 percent in 2005.

– Texas’ infant mortality rate increased by 11%, although it is still just slightly better than the national average.

More details in the full CPPP report.

Of course, CHIP expansion wouldn’t solve all of those problems, although it could go a long way toward that first one. But it’s hard to see how nothing is better than something, which is what Bush is pushing.

In Dave Mann’s post yesterday President Bush, attempting to explain his obstinate stand against expanding the successful CHIP program, let fly this doozy: “I believe government cannot provide affordable health care,” Bush told the Washington Post. “I believe it would cause the quality of care to diminish. I believe there would be lines and rationing over time.”

You’ve got to be kidding. Against all evidence that CHIP is working, all Bush can conjure up in opposition are the same tired bogeymen invoked by those who oppose something resembling national health care?

Seriously, check out this current ad campaign by Health Care America, a health care industry group whose goal is to convince you that government-run health care is some kind of nightmare, because — the horror — sometimes you have to wait. Surely it’s just a coincidence that Bush is invoking the same demons.

As Matthew Yglesias says, “And, of course, it’s true — in systems with government-run health care systems you sometimes need to wait to see a doctor. Much as in the United States you need to wait on line to see a movie. Or how in the United states you need to . . . wait to see a doctor.”

If you look at the website of Health Care America, you can “Hear the horrors of a government-run health care system.” They gladly provide you with terrifying anecdotes about when the Canadian health care system, in some circumstances, didn’t work well for some sick people.

Just as if you do a little Googling, you can find horrific anecdotes about the American health care system, when insurance delays nearly killed a professor, or when waiting and waiting for an appointment wasted the time of an assistant professor.

Beware, one might surmise from all this that neither health care system is perfect — imagine! And yet, because Bush fears the quality of care might diminish — as opposed to, say, no health care at all? — or that kids might have to wait to see a doctor, that’s reason enough to veto a bipartisan bill expanding their coverage. C’mon.

Drug czar John Walters, star of our previous post, has also been making national headlines with some campaign-trail hijinks, including … well, the fact that he was on the campaign trail at all.

Democratic Representative and muckraker Henry Waxman has been back at it this week, revealing that “White House officials arranged for top officials at the Office of National Drug Control Policy to help as many as 18 vulnerable Republican congressmen by making appearances and sometimes announcing new federal grants in the lawmakers’ districts in the months leading up to the November 2006 elections,” as the Washington Post put it. The California Congressman said he fears the Bush Administration’s politicization of the federal bureaucracy was more widespread than thought.

Waxman unearthed a couple memos — those things are really biting this administration in the ass — that suggest Walters and others gallivanted around the country at taxpayer expense in the service of Republican reelection efforts.

The Post provides the context: “The drug control office has had a history of being nonpartisan, and a 1994 law bars the agency’s officials from engaging in political activities even on their own time.”

During a press briefing at an Austin treatment center today, Walters was asked about attending Waxman’s hearings. He had not received an invitation, he said, but not before adding, “This is the part of Washington that I think people don’t like.” Walters then characterized the appearances as his office simply traveling around the country to announce grants, accompanied by “lawmakers who supported those efforts.”

“Every administration does this,” he continued, “and the effort to suggest that there’s something wrong with this … doesn’t affect the good work people are doing in our communities.” That sentence, in strictly logical terms, is true — the community work is not affected by any of this.

But his characterization of the trips doesn’t mesh with a memo (reproduced in full at the Mother Jones blog) written by his office’s White House liason, Doug Simon:

Presidential Personnel pulled together a meeting of all of the Administration’s White House Liaison’s and the WH Political Affairs office. Karl Rove opened the meeting with a thank you for all of the work that went into the surrogate appearances by Cabinet members and for the 72 Hour deployment. He specifically thanked, for going above and beyond the call of duty, the Dept. of Commerce, Transportation, Agriculture, AND the WH Drug Policy Office. This recognition is not something we hear everyday and we should feel confident that our hard work is noticed. All of this is due to our efforts preparing the Director and the Deputies for their trips and events. Director Walters and the Deputies covered thousands of miles to attend numerous official events all across the country. The Director and the Deputies deserve the most recognition because they actually had to give up time with their families for the god awful places we sent them.

I’ll go out on a limb and venture that Simon really wishes he could take back that “god awful” bit — ah, but then we wouldn’t have such a nice glimpse of the contempt for the public we’ve come to expect from the public servants in the White House these days.

Here’s a little more insight into working with Diane Rath, who chairs the Texas Workforce Commission and who President Bush just nominated for a high-level job at the Dept. of Health and Human Services. After reading the news of Rath’s appointment, the Texas AFL-CIO newsletter noted:

The beef that working people have had with [Rath] is that she was basically an employer representative taking what is intended to be a more neutral position as the public’s representative. As such, the Workforce Commission has almost always voted 2-1 against the position of the employee representatives … on disputed matters involving unemployment benefits and job training since the inception of the agency in 1995. The business reps, starting with current Texas Association of Business head Bill Hammond, have always voted, as expected, with the employer positions.

That track record doesn’t speak to a strong history of advocating for the people she should be serving. Nor does it reveal much expertise in her new field: At her pending job with Health and Human Services she would oversee programs like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, Head Start, and Medicaid health care for children. But instead of nominating someone with more specific experience in a field, Bush seems to think every qualified leader of the Republican party has to come from a business background. Because the “CEO President” has been working out so well.

Another Bush administration nomination, another candidate distinguished for her partisan credentials. This time it’s Diane Rath, Chair and Commissioner of the Texas Workforce Commission. She’s up for Assistant Secretary for Family Support at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Rath’s nomination comes weeks after a more blatant political hack, Hans von Spakovsky, was tabbed by Bush to serve on the Federal Elections Commission. If confirmed by the Senate, Rath, who is from San Antonio and whose family has long been part of Republican party politics, would be put in charge of programs like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, Head Start, the Healthy Marriage Initiative and Medicaid health care programs for children, reported the Houston Chronicle.

Rath’s name came up in 2004 in connection with a lawsuit alleging a partisan purge — boy, does that sound familiar — at the Workforce Commission. As reported in a Chron story now available only through Nexis:

Former governmental affairs employee Bruce Homoya in his lawsuit in Travis County district court claims that agency Executive Director Larry Temple purged Democrats from the commission’s legislative liaison department in fall 2003 and replaced them with Republican “must hires.”

 

Homoya said agency executives tried to find out his party affiliation but could not. Homoya said he was retained after governmental relations director Carol Jones decided he was “more Republican than Democrat.”

 

Homoya claims he was fired last January when he refused to help implement Jones’ plan to lobby the Legislature for a conservative political agenda in 2005. Homoya’s suit says Jones’ plan was designed for Temple and commission Chairwoman Diane Rath.

 

“The Jones plan clearly called for lobbying the Legislature by using the agency’s governmental relations department in an illegal manner to further the goals of the executive director and chair,” the lawsuit said.

 

State agencies are prohibited from lobbying the Legislature.

 

The Houston Chronicle obtained a copy of the Jones memo about 10 days after Homoya’s firing in January. The memo described how to turn the agency into a driving force on welfare reform and economic development.

Jones, likely thanks to her over-the-top memo, quickly got the axe. But if the emphasis on economic development (in an agency that handles stuff like welfare-to-work programs) sounds like a misplaced priority, it wouldn’t be the first time. Seems nearly every appointed office in this state just loves bidness — like our Secretaries of State, for instance.

Rath got her start in politics thanks to an appointment to the Workforce Commission by then-Gov. Bush. Before that she worked for voucher-moneybags James Leininger’s Kinetic Concepts, Inc. as Senior Director of Public Affairs. She also named her daughter Reagan after you-know-how, which can’t hurt the resume with these GOP partisans.

The scandal that started when a few U.S. attorneys were unceremoniously sacked has slowly but surely worked its way to Texas. As the progression goes, people started asking questions about why those attorneys were fired. To get answers they requested some emails from the U.S. Attorney General’s office. As evidence emerged of White House political tampering with what is supposedly an independent office, the curious parties asked to see emails from Karl Rove and other Bush Administration officials. Then it turned out that — surprise! — those emails were inappropriately being sent through accounts owned and operated by the Republican National Committee. And — surprise again! — Rove may have personally deleted his emails from right around the 2004 election, in obvious violation of the Presidential Records Act. It didn’t take long for the smart folks at SMU to realize that kind of record scrubbing might put a damper on the Bush Library that the university’s leadership covets.

The same people involved in the email fiasco are also working closely on the presidential library and Bush Institute, a partisan think tank to be run separately from the college that has drawn suspicion and opposition from SMU faculty. The Bush Library Blog states it plainly: “These are the good folks who will be running the Bush Institute, and presumably continuing to do all that they can to keep these and other public records away from the scrutiny of scholars and journalists in the future.” In many ways, it only reaffirms the fears of faculty members that politics would pose as academics, concerns that spawned an online petition and can be viewed in exhaustive detail at the BLB.

Over the course of the past few weeks, the blog has compiled a scattering of examples of the Bush family’s attitude toward historical records. You’ll be shocked to learn that it’s hardly encouraging. There’s the Bush-as-Truman analogy that the administration pursues with signature obliviousness. There’s W.’s favorite historian, as reported in New Republic: “It seems that Bush looks to historians as he looks to his advisers: to be told he’s doing just fine. But to hear that message, he’s had to scrape around for a fifth-rate Rudyard Kipling mocked by almost all serious historians and soaked in slaughter.” And then there’s the disturbing parallels between George H. W. Bush’s library and policy institute at Texas A&M University. Concerns there a decade ago that faculty opinions could be stifled under pressure from Bushies turned out to be true (if later denounced after the fact).

The fallout from this scandal probably isn’t the kind of trickle-down Bush and Co. hoped for in his second term. But we can at least hope that, when all the closed-door wrangling between Bush’s buddies and the president of SMU is resolved, this vital documentary evidence of Karl Rove’s incredible sideburns and massive flop-top figures prominently in the record. (Skip to the 3:55 mark or so to see Rove. Thanks to this commenter for the tip.)

It’s been a quiet month or so since members of the faculty at Southern Methodist University decided that, maybe, just maybe, it’s not a good idea to let the Current Occupant set up a propaganda mill on campus.

So how is that fight going? “Pretty much everyone seems to have lost interest now that the semester is fully underway,” our sources at the school said this week.

To be expected, I guess, when the faculty doesn’t have a direct seat at the negotiating table with Bush’s site-selection committee. Only SMU president Gerald Turner, a staunch supporter of the library, enjoys that privilege.

But that’s not to say that there isn’t important, riveting, slow-motion drama playing out inside the bureaucracy. Okay, maybe not riveting, but the Faculty Senate is taking what steps it can internally to curb the possible damage Bush’s institute could do.

Last week a Senate committee recommended formal hiring practices that require employees who work for both the Bush Institute and SMU to be hired by a specific department and to go through the same screening process as any applicant to that department. The guidelines explicitly “disallow appointments that are University-wide,” said a memo penned by faculty member Tom Tunks. In other words, the committee doesn’t want to someday see Karl Rove collecting paychecks via the SMU Centennial Chair of Truthiness.

Earlier this week, the Senate also called on Bush to relinquish control over his presidential papers. Nearly everyone agrees that the university stands to gain from housing W.’s archives. But those benefits could be negated by Executive Order 13233, which, in effect, gave Bush license to scrub his own record. Aligning with Society of American Archivists, the American Library Association, and the SMU History department, the Senate “calls on President Turner to ask President George W. Bush to rescind Executive Order 13233.” That’s the kind of forceful rhetoric a Democratic congressman would love, but it’s really about all the faculty can do at this point to prevent the library from becoming the George W. Bush Presidential [REDACTED].

Watch for the library to hit the news again this week, with Congressional hearings scheduled on the Presidential Records Act and transparency in funding presidential libraries. The useful Bush Library Blog will be on the case for the blow-by-blow.