Brian Kanowsky

The Louisville Courier Journal’s Lesley Stedman Weidenbener first pointed out on her twitter account that IBM’s lawsuit against the state (PDF) used Governor Mitch Daniel’s’ own words against him. Sure enough, here’s a bit from the first page of the complaint:

For two years, the IBM Coalition and the State jointly tackled the problems of the old welfare eligibility system, and rolled out a new, modernized system to 59 Indiana counties serving 430,000 social services clients. In public statements by Indiana officials, including the Governor, the State consistently commended IBM for its role in this project and for the improvements it made to Indiana’s previously fraud-ridden and inefficient welfare eligibility system.

And the state continued to praise IBM throughout the duration of the contract:

On August 1, 2008, in a report to the federal government, the FSSA stated that “[t]he Eligibility Modernization Project is in its second year and has already made substantial progress toward its goals and objectives."

And:

In fact, the FSSA attributed its prompt disaster relief assistance to the IBM Coalition’s efforts: “The ability to mobilize multiple state agencies and provide computers and phones for Hoosiers to apply for state and federal assistance was made possible by the infrastructure already in place a s a result of eligibility modernization.”

And:

On October 15, 2009, Governor Daniels held a press conference to announce that the State was terminating IBM’s involvement in the Modernization Project […] During the course of his remarks, the Governor commended IBM for its work, citing a litany of benefits that the IBM Coalition had conferred on the State […]

Reading through the lawsuit, it’s apparent that despite Daniels’ current protestations, the state got exactly what they wanted from IBM – a system that virtually eliminated face to face contact:

In fact, the only things that Governor Daniels offered as reasons for the termination were two “fundamental flaws’ in the basic concept of the Modernization Project: “saving welfare applicants the burden of a face-to-face meeting” and breaking up the determination process into “discrete tasks… done by specialists.” However, these “fundamental flaws” were key objectives of the State identified in its own RFI, RFP, and inter-agency Review Committee report.

So for Indiana to win its case against IBM, we essentially have to argue that Mitch Daniels was lying to Hoosiers and to the federal government about what was going on at FSSA. The alternative isn’t much better – that he’s only lying now to do some political posturing before the 2012 Presidential race heats up.

The Star’s Bill Ruthhart and Mary Beth Schneider report “there may be a political price for Daniels.”

He came to office in 2005 as a champion of putting public business in private hands wherever it seemed to make economic sense. Ignoring critics who argued that welfare wasn’t the right venue for such changes, and the fact that similar efforts had failed in Texas and Florida, Daniels announced the contract with fanfare in late 2006. Now, the episode threatens to be a blot on his legacy as governor, and could tarnish his luster as a potential Republican candidate for president.

It’s also important to remember that this isn’t just a matter of financial mismanagement, incompetent governance, or even political costs. This debacle had a real human cost as well.

Medicaid cut off to a Hoosier who missed her welfare appointment — because she was hospitalized with terminal cancer. Welfare benefits denied to a deaf person — because she couldn’t do a telephone interview. A nun who lost Medicaid benefits and was deemed uncooperative when she missed a telephone interview because she had to play the organ on a Holy Day — though she repeatedly tried to reschedule.

And that’s not even getting into the fact that multiple courts have found that FSSA’s "modernized" system violated the law.

But like my state representative told the Journal Gazette, I hope Indiana prevails in this suit – the last thing we need to do is give more money to IBM after all these years of Mitch Daniels’ financial incompetence.

Rep. Peggy Welch, D-Bloomington, said she is glad the state is standing up for itself: “I don’t want us to roll over. Unfortunately, the state of Indiana rolled over for too long with IBM and let IBM call the shots. We’re not doing that anymore. If that means a legal battle, then so be it.”

In a rambling “Guest Commentary” for the Times of Northwest Indiana, State Senator Mike Delph (R-Carmel) argues for an Arizona-like racial profiling immigration enforcement law in Indiana:

Until we have an administration and a Congress willing to take control of this situation, it will be up to the states to exercise the rights granted to them in federal law as Arizona has done.

Of course, Delph glosses over the questions about the constitutionality of such a law, the problems with racial profiling, and the resistance of law enforcement to this kind of law.

He also trumps up the problems in Arizona, ignores the taxes that undocumented immigrants pay, and never suggests increased enforcement against businesses that employ undocumented workers.

At a time when Indiana’s economy is struggling, and our unemployment rate at or exceeding the national average, he ignores the damage that’s been done to Arizona’s economy by boycotts brought on by SB 1070. A bill like this could even threaten Indiana’s chance of hosting the Super Bowl. We all know the league moved the 1993 game over protests about Arizona’s refusal to acknowledge the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.

But I guess it will go farther than Delph’s previous attempt at immigration laws – which “have never won the Legislature’s approval“. Even if this bill doesn’t get out of committee, it will probably get him 30 seconds on Fox News. As Tony Barreda, chairman of the Community Coalition for Immigrants, told the Times, it’s “pure, unadulterated political posturing.”

Just after Dan Burton’s campaign decided to run an ad featuring Ohioan actors posing as real Hoosiers, his campaign got a little more help from out of state.

The Iowa-based American Future Fund – who has made a lot of noise over the past few months – popped in to drop this bizarre ad on the Hoosier state:

As primary challenger John McGoff’s campaign put it, “The AAF [sic] is known for their salacious and knee-breaking advertising campaigns.” That’s stating the case a bit mildly. According to the Iowa Independent, AFF’s legal counsel is Ben Ginsberg – the same Ben Ginsberg who was forced to resign from the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004 when it came out he was serving as the legal advisor to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. And AFF’s media strategist is Larry McCarthy, who produced the infamous “Willie Horton” ad in 1988.

You may remember that AFF targeted Rep. Baron Hill with a TV ad last fall, then targeted Hill along with fellow Congressman Brad Ellsworth in print ads over health insurance reform. While I couldn’t find a good fact check of the ad they ran against Hill, the nonpartisan Factcheck.org wrote that AFF’s last ad against the Affordable Care Act “mixes bits of recycled images and false claims with new falsehoods”.

AFF apparently broke a lot of golden eggs to make and air this commercial. Burton primary challenger Luke Messer repeatedly complained the amount was “over $100,000”, and the Star reported that AFF spent more than $200,000 supporting Burton, including $171,500 on television. And as the Star reported, “It’s unclear why the group is getting involved in the primary.” AFF is no stranger to large expenditures – they dropped over $600,000 into Scott Brown’s Senate race in Massachusetts. (They are also uncovered as the organizers of a massive online attack on Martha Coakley in a new study by two Wellesley University professors.) As a 501c(4), AFF does not have to disclose their donors. But their 2008 form 990 (amended) showed they took in almost $7.5 million and spent more than $4.5 million on advertising, despite having no paid staff. (PDF link)

Despite this kind of advertising, Burton went on to defeat Messer and McGoff in the 5th District’s GOP primary. Meanwhile, actual Democrat Dr. Nasser Hanna lost to “Conservative American Democrat” Tim Crawford in the Democratic primary (a result puzzled over by both Michael Wallack and Chris Worden). And so my old neighborhood in the 5th District is lost for another term, unless a strong independent candidate emerges.

Now, if only I had the budget to remake that 80s “This is your brain on drugs” PSA with exploding watermelons.

Hoosier Congressman Mike Pence took to the floor of the House of Representatives to demand an investigation into what happened on April 20, 2010. But he’s not interested in what caused the Deep Horizon oil rig to explode – he wants to know how he can blame the Obama administration:

“The American people deserve to know why the administration was slow to respond, why necessary equipment was not immediately on hand in the area and why the president did not fully deploy cabinet-level federal officials until he spoke at the White House on April 28th.”

I want to make one thing clear: Pence isn’t one of the handful of conservatives pushing the line that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is “Obama’s Katrina.” That would be too moderate for the former talk radio host. Instead, ”Pence asserted that Obama’s response time was slow compared to Bush’s response [to Hurricane Katrina] in 2005.”

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and other Democrats have condemned these kind of remarks – and Pence’s remarks specifically. But it turns out that Mike Pence’s wild allegations are too much for his fellow Republicans.

The most thorough response came from Fox News host Jane Skinner, who was armed with the facts and refused to let Karl Rove get away with baseless allegations about a delayed response from the Obama administration. She told Rove that “the national response team was activated and later that day the President convened a meeting in the Oval Office with all those involved.” (Watch the video of their exchange here.)

Minnesota’s Republican Governor (and 2012 Presidential hopeful) Tim Pawlenty told ABC News that the government “is responding to the best of their abilities.”

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly called the politicization of the spill “insane”, and asked, “What could they have done? Are you gonna put Obama in a dive suit and send him down there with a little rake?”

My favorite, though, was Pence’s former colleague in the House, Joe Scarborough, who called the oil spill-Katrina analogy “completely obscene”, and went on to say, “Anybody that draws that analogy is an idiot.”

I can’t find anything to argue with there.

(Video & text of Pence’s remarks below the cut.)

Read more…

Evan Bayh’s latest statewide email blast (about election reform) starts with the populist headline, “Power to the People.” But like too many things in Evan Bayh’s career, what starts out with such promise quickly becomes a vanity project.

Since announcing his retirement from the Senate, Bayh has criticized the moribund institution’s inane rules and courtesies, and recently started speaking out against the role of money in the electoral process. He co-sponsored and helped introduce the DISCLOSE Act, which is the first step toward restoring some of the limitations on corporate money struck down by the Citizens United ruling.

The DISCLOSE Act, co-introduced by Sens. Schumer, Feingold, and Wyden, is a good law that will increase transparency in the system. Like all bills, it’s imperfect. It doesn’t go far enough in some respects, and it omits some of the reforms that would be more effective. But I support this law, and I was proud of my Senator for being a part of it.

Despite that, Bayh’s email made me cringe. In the email, there’s no call for citizens to contact their other representatives to help support the bill. There’s no petition to sign. There’s no encouragement to talk to your friends & neighbors about the bill. Instead, it’s all about what Evan Bayh is doing to save us poor Hoosier citizens.

Bayh’s message isn’t about power to the people – it’s about more power to people like him. It makes you question his motives in supporting this bill. It brings to mind all the money the Bayh family has made from Wellpoint/Anthem. And it makes the populism ring hollow. It doesn’t help that the full top half of the email is a glamor shot of Bayh, shot from a low angle, with his arms outstretched and palms facing forward.

It’s shoddy messaging like this that lets the GOP get away with taking their marching orders from Wall Street banks and labeling as “a bailout” the Democratic plan to end the bailout culture. It’s hollow, self-aggrandizing language that makes voters question the integrity of Democrats, even when they pursue an agenda to benefit all Americans.

Evan Bayh is a part of the problem. He doesn’t get that phony, self-serving populism like this hurts the Democratic agenda and the democratic process.

Full text of Bayh’s email:

Election season has officially arrived. While I won’t be on the ballot this year, I care deeply about ensuring that our elections are fair and the voices of ordinary Hoosiers are heard.

Unfortunately, due to a recent Supreme Court decision, we are facing an election where there will be no limits on the amount of money that special interests can spend on ads that support or oppose a candidate. Worse, the ruling will allow powerful corporations to hide their unlimited expenditures by secretly funneling money through organizations whose sole purpose is to launch ads that distort the truth.

The majority’s 5-4 decision in the Citizens United case removes limits on how much money an oil company, a Wall Street bank, or even a corporation under foreign control can secretly spend on political advertisements. As a result, those who are beholden to special interests will be elected to defend special interests. The losers in all of this will be you, ordinary citizens.

That’s why I introduced a bill last week to close the floodgates opened by the Court’s ruling. My legislation would force shadow interest groups to disclose all of the major donors who fund their attack ads. It would require corporate CEOs to appear on camera to stand by any claims and say they "approve this message," just like candidates have to do now. And it would close loopholes that allow foreign corporations to influence the outcome of our elections.

I announced this bill on the steps of Supreme Court, and I recorded a video of the event to share with you. (Click here to take a look.) The goal is to enact these reforms by July 4th, in time to deter and expose the onslaught of misleading, negative ads that will air before the November elections. Hoosiers have a right to know the motives and agendas of those trying to influence their votes.

When it comes to removing the corrosive influence of special-interest money on politics, sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Is it pride? Ideology? Pandering in pursuit of his ambition?

Whatever the reason, Mitch Daniels is refusing to double-check Anthem’s request to drastically increase health insurance rates for Hoosiers. I guess all that talk about being fiscally responsible is – once again – just talk.

Just last week, Anthem was forced to withdraw their request for a major rate hike in California after "an independent audit determined the company’s justification for raising premiums was based on flawed data." And the mistakes weren’t exactly a matter of opinion – they included basic mathematical errors:

• Error #1: Double counting of aging in the calculation of underlying medical trend for the projection of total lifetime loss ratio.
• Error #2: Anthem overstated the initial medical trend used to project claims for September 2009 for known risk factors.

Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health & Human Services, sent a letter to other states where Anthem/Wellpoint operate:

"In light of this recent finding, I urge that, to the extent you have authority to do so, you re-examine any WellPoint rate increases in your state to determine whether any mistaken assumptions similar to those made in California were made in your state," Sebelius wrote to the governors. "Even small errors can mean unaffordable premiums for policyholders."

Replying through his spokesperson, Gov. Daniels declined to check Wellpoint’s math:

"When we feel the need for advice about health-care costs, we won’t start with the people who just passed this disastrously expensive and backward federal legislation," Daniels said in a statement…

(Through my spokesperson, I replied that maybe we shouldn’t be taking advice on health care costs from a man who said back in 1994 that health care costs had peaked. Or who said the Iraq War wouldn’t cost more than $60 billion. Or…)

The timing of this couldn’t look worse for Mitch Daniels – Reps Baron Hill and Andre Carson asked the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to review the costs to Indiana of the recently-passed Affordable Health Care act. Unfortunately for Mitch Daniels, while his talking points on the issue may play well to 2012 Presidential primary voters, they don’t hold up well to the facts. In their report, CMS wrote that “Health insurance reform will bring relief to the Indiana budget.”

Hill and Carson added, in a statement:

“The governor is certainly entitled to his political viewpoints on the health care reform law — and he’s made those opinions very clear,” Hill, D-9th District, said in a statement he issued jointly Thursday with U.S. Rep. Andre Carson, a Democrat who represents the Indianapolis area’s 7th District. “But now that this historic legislation is law, it’s important that Hoosiers have factual, accurate information about the health benefits made available through these new provisions,” the statement said.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, host David Gregory interrupted Rep. Mike Pence’s rant about immigration to point out that it was Republicans who killed immigration reform in 2007. Seriously, how inane do your talking points have to be for Dancing Dave to knock you down?

Watch – the video gets good at about 1:40 (partial transcript below the cut):

(Unfortunately, this video cuts off Pence’s response. For a differently-edited clip, see the Crooks & Liars piece, “David Gregory Points Out Mike Pence’s Hypocrisy on Border Security”)

I’ve been very critical of Gregory since he took over Meet the Press – for example, I’ve knocked his refusal to fact-check guests, his obsession with polls and ignorance of policy, and his lack of any accountability for the flaws of his show – but this was decent journalism. Gregory was armed with the facts, and Pence had only his talking points.

Senate Republicans killed this bill. And they weren’t alone – a certain Hoosier Congressman named Mike Pence wrote a special comment for the Washington Times about why he opposed the “amnesty bill”:

I opposed the Senate immigration bill because of its core fallacy that millions of illegal immigrants could get right with the law without having to leave the country. For most Americans, and me, that is amnesty and I cannot support it. (Washington Times, June 10, 2007, page B3 – via Lexis search)

And even if the bill had gone through the Senate, Hoosier Republican Mark Souder was there to stop it in the House:

Mark Souder, the top Republican on the House sub-committee on border security, yesterday warned that the legislation would be "dead on arrival" in the House. (Financial Times, June 27, 2007, page 12 – via Lexis search)

But Gregory didn’t go far enough in debunking Pence’s tired talking points.

In both clips, Pence throws out a lot of numbers about “enforcement budgets”. But those numbers aren’t about enforcement or fences, they’re about the failed “virtual fence”. Media Matters debunked this a few days back, citing tons of statistics about the costs overruns and failed tests by this specific project.

Finally, Pence asserts that, “Phoenix, Arizona, is, is the kidnapping capital of the United State of America.” He neglects to point out, as Phoenix police do, that the victims of these kidnappings are almost always drug dealers or other crime figures. And, contrary to what Rep. Pence implies here, “ICE says the spike [in kidnappings] stems from tighter enforcement on the porous Arizona-Mexico border in recent years.”

Read more…

Hope all my fellow Bloomington residents picked up a copy of April’s The Ryder magazine. (They seem to be a few months behind on posting the issues online, unfortunately.) Along with a smart piece by the great Hoosier songwriter Tom Roznowski, there’s an essay by WFIU jazz host David Brent Johnson titled, ”The Year the Yankees Won the Pennant: Confessions of a Devoted Fan”.

Johnson spends his first grafs trying to explain why Yankees fans are so reviled. He lists Halberstam’s October 1964, the musical Damn Yankees, and Steinbrenner, along with the team’s unreal record of success, as reasons. He relates his personal story of a friend discovering his secret, shameful fandom. I can’t speak to it with any empirical evidence, but the disdain for fans of the Yankees seems to be amplified when it’s directed at non-New Yorker fans.

As a native of the great city of Indianapolis, I grew up without a major league baseball team. Sure, we had the triple-A Indians, a team with great fan favorites like Razor Shines. But minor league baseball is never quite the same, especially when you’re a farm team of the Expos.

The Cincinnati Reds are the closest team (in terms of miles) to Indianapolis. But I never knew anyone who was a Reds fan growing up – and this was before the Pete Rose scandal. Northern Indiana has always been Cubs territory, and many of my friends gradually drifted into the masochistic cycle of hope and despair they’ve perfected in Wrigley. A few friends later became White Sox fans during the excitement around the young phenom Frank Thomas. And around Evansville, where most of my family lives, it’s St. Louis Cardinals territory – something that’s only intensified since local boy Scott Rolen made the team.

Between the Pacers and the newly-arrived Colts, I didn’t actually think much about baseball. I never played it as a kid – I was too busy switching between basketball, soccer, and football. When I got together with friends, we played basketball, soccer, or touch football. But the tribalism of boyhood means that, eventually, you have to pick a team.

My family led me, in a roundabout way, to the Yankees. My aunt had been a year behind Don Mattingly at Memorial High School in Evansville. He occasionally stopped into my grandfather’s music store, and I ended up with a signed baseball card. And then another. And a poster. A glove. A bat. And I identified with this guy – not only was he from the same place as my family, he had a goofy long neck like me. And he played for the Yankees.

The Yankees appealed to me, despite their utter lack of success in the 1980s. They were a team that had reinvented themselves in era after era. They weren’t just vehicles for star players, but strong ensembles that enabled superstars to emerge. This was the team of Ruth, of DiMaggio, of Mantle and Maris. Being a Yankees fan gave me a sense of historical grounding – something missing in an Indiana upbringing. (That sense of missing Hoosier heritage is, appropriately enough, one of the subjects of Roznowski’s essay in The Ryder.)

And I became a Yankees fan, despite growing up in Indiana and having no significant connections to New York. It’s not necessarily a decision I made consciously, but it’s one that I have no regrets about. No amount of teasing from my friends who root for the Cubs, or seasonal derision from my friends who root for the Red Sox, is going to change it. I am a Yankees fan. As Johnson notes in his piece, there is a bit of a confessional tone to that sentence; there’s also a fair bit of defiance.

Then again, it’s a bit more complicated for me. I’m married to a Red Sox fan.

Cool, overcast morning with an intermittent slight drizzle. Managed 3.3 miles for my morning walk.

It took a few minutes for my ears to adjust to the sound this morning. The red-winged blackbirds drowned everyone else out, even the mournful killdeer and the song sparrows, whose large voices never quite seem to fit their tiny bodies. One brave robin tried to outsing the blackbirds, winning through perseverance if not volume. Four evenly-spaced steel posts, marking the aspirations of some future homeowner, were each topped by a blackbird. Their red epaulets lined up in perfect military formation, a stunning symmetry of nature and artifice.

I stopped to watch the acrobatic chipping sparrows leaping from branch to branch, seemingly never unfolding their wings. Sleek tree swallows darted across the path above my head. The cardinals seem to have retreated from their sentry positions of early spring, ceding ground to the blackbirds and robins. But their orange beaks and bright chip notes still poked through the increasingly green banks of the creek. A single blue jay clucked as he looked me over, then decided I wasn’t interesting enough, he turned and flew to the other bank.

The beavers have altered the flow of the creek in such a dramatic way over the past year or so. With all the recent rains, the water was running high and quick — until it hit the curve just before the dam. Suddenly, the creek tuned smooth and calm enough for a single mallard to float peacefully in place. The thicket of trees near the dam, usually host to some of the more reclusive birds around here, held only a single downy woodpecker and a timidly mewing catbird.

The park was full of robins gorging themselves on the buffet of worms forced to the surface by the rains. The weather has also brought out the eerie, gelatinous tendrils of cedar-apple rust on some of the trees. Aside from the robins and a few cowbirds, though, the park was empty. It was just me and a single mockingbird, taking up his usual place as greeter at the entrance to the park.

On the way back, I saw a crow nab a french fry from the side of the road. He flew low and fast to the other side of the road to eat, suspiciously eyeing a curious killdeer who darted closer.

There’s still no sign of the green herons, either in their usual hunting spots or their nesting site of the past 2 years. I think it was May before they showed up last year, so I’ll have to keep waiting.

Not much in the way of non-avian life this morning. The loop around the park, usually full of loud and aggressive squirrels, was strangely quiet this morning. I did see one red squirrel hopping down a residential sidewalk, and a large muskrat in one of the ponds.

Walked about 3.1 miles this morning – overcast, but not too cold despite the dusting of snow last night.

Happened across a flock of juncos flittering about a clearing, and noticed a purple finch watching them from a nearby bush. A couple of titmice flew from branch to branch overhead, and a nuthatch bobbed down the trunk of one of the larger trees.

Saw the fat cardinal in his bush again, and the cluster of bushes behind him was blazing with the bright red feathers and neon orange beaks of other cardinals, cheeping background vocals to his loud song. The cardinals were out in force this morning, singing loudly from tall branches and chirping from the underbrush.

The mud was frozen enough that I could walk out by the beaver dam, which has seemingly doubled in size since I last saw it. Lots of fresh deer tracks in the snow around the banks of the creek, and a skittish bluebird tried to stay one tree ahead of me as I walked forward.

Then I walked down to the park, and saw a couple of enormous chattering crows preening themselves on branches over the creek. A blue jay, seemingly annoyed with the cavorting squirrels, did his best hawk impersonation, screaming and swooping down in their direction. The squirrels scurried for cover, while another blue jay nonchalantly went on digging through the dead leaves on the ground. I heard a red-bellied woodpecker, and when I finally spotted him, I noticed that the tree to his left held a small downy woodpecker, while the tree to his right hosted a couple of nuthatches.