With unemployment tickling 10 percent (and likely to rise), Democrats in the U.S. Senate this week are hoping to push through a series of bills designed to encourage job creation. It’s as much a test of the Republicans’ commitment to bipartisanship as it is a gauge of the Democrats’ power to pass legislation in the wake of Scott Brown’s surprise Senate win in Massachusetts last month.

That is, with President Barack Obama reaching across the aisle in ways not seen in modern history — and with Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., insisting on crafting a jobs bill that can win the support of some pretty conservative Republicans, including Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Orrin Hatch of Utah — GOP leaders have little claim to their habitual complaint that the Democrats simply want to ram legislation through Congress without any Republican input.

So if we see stalling this week on a jobs bill, you can bet that it has less to do with the actual policy (all sides agree that struggling states need the help) than it does with the fact that the Republicans’ strategy has, for more than a year, been to delay legislation at all costs. ]]> http://iowaindependent.com/27357/a-week-to-test-the-gop%e2%80%99s-commitment-to-bipartisanship/feed 0 http://iowaindependent.com/22796/grassley-health-care-debate-to-focus-on-gop-alternatives http://iowaindependent.com/22796/grassley-health-care-debate-to-focus-on-gop-alternatives#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:37:02 +0000 Jason Hancock http://iowaindependent.com/?p=22796 When the Senate returns from Thanksgiving break to debate health care reform legislation, the Republicans will push numerous small amendments instead of a singular, comprehensive proposal of their own , U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Wednesday.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (Photo: Lauren Victoria Burke/WDCPIX.com)

“Well, I think the topics of debate will probably be centered on Republican alternatives,” Grassley said on a conference call with reporters. “And we probably won’t have one comprehensive alternative. We’ll probably have a lot of different subsection amendments.”

Those amendments will likely range from adding some sort of medical malpractice reform to improving small business’ ability to pool their resources to get better insurance rates. But the GOP effort will also focus on killing provisions they feel are inappropriate, such as individual mandates, Grassley said.

“Then we will want to do away with the — the first time in the history of our country we’ve ever said — the federal government said you had to buy something,” he said. “So today you got to buy health insurance under this bill.  If you don’t buy health insurance, you’re going to pay more money to the federal government — the IRS, $1,500 per family.  And we think that that’s philosophically wrong, and we think that there’s a better way of doing it through a re-insurance program.”

Debate on the $848 billion health care plan is expected to begin next week, after Democrats united on a procedural vote allowing the bill to go to the full Senate over Republican opposition.

Reitsma wrote two notes before shooting himself. One was to his family. The other was a four-word note to the bank’s local branch manager: “Welcome to the kill.”

When asked to picture farm life, many people envision idyllic settings similar to this fall plow scene painted by renowned Iowa artist Grant Wood. While such images are often accurate, they also obscure the real stresses that make up the daily lives of rural residents. (Photo courtesy Deere Art Collection)

Stories like Reitsma’s are becoming more frequent in states like California, Maine and Colorado. Experts say Midwestern states like Iowa are better prepared to deal with rural mental health problems, but the risks are still high.

“To farmers there is a real kinship with the land and livestock,” explained Dr. Mike Rosmann, executive director of AgriWellness. “Ownership of a family farm — sometimes a farm that has been in the family for generations — is the triumphant result of a multitude of struggles. Losing the farm or the livestock is viewed as an ultimate loss, one that brings shame to the generation that has let down its forebearers and has dashed the hopes of successors.”

The psychological attachment farm families feel for their land and livestock is one of the lessons of the 1980s farm crisis — a time when farmer suicides and rural violence made front page news across the nation. Back then, Iowa and Nebraska, two states severely impacted by the farm crisis, developed crisis hotlines designed specifically to serve the needs of agricultural workers. Today, in the wake of natural disasters and in the midst of economic uncertainty, the hotlines are experiencing a spike in activity, likely helping to prevent more tragedies.

The Sowing the Seeds of Hope program provides behavioral health services to uninsured, underinsured and other at-risk farm and ranch families and ag workers in seven states. Despite droughts, floods and ongoing economic challenges to family-sized farm operations, the suicide rate has not increased in states that have these services.

AgriWellness and Iowa State University Extension jointly sponsor the Iowa-based Sowing the Seeds of Hope hotline, which serves rural people in seven Midwestern states. It is the nation’s largest crisis help line for agricultural workers, and the calls are coming more often than they did even a year ago.

Though many of the calls the hotline has received from Iowa have been related to the impact of last year’s floods, Rosmann noted that, “More recently, we have seen an uptick in calls that are related to market prices for swine and dairy.”

“In addition to the 20-percent increase in calls [when comparing the first four months of 2008 with the first four months of 2009], the content of the calls is changing,” Rosmann said. “The callers are reporting much more severe economic turmoil, more mental health symptoms and significant increases in mental stress.”

In times of inclement weather — for instance, severe storms, floods or droughts — the hotlines experience increased activity. The callers in these situations, according to Rosmann, are distraught but do not have the “intensity” of the callers during tough economic times.

“You probably aren’t seeing as many [suicides] in the states, like Iowa, where we have hotlines,” he said. “The hotlines have the effect of reducing the isolation and they create a vehicle people can use to contact someone. We don’t have quite as many suicides in any of the states where we have the hotlines and have other additional support services. [We have heard] that there were two suicides reported out of North Carolina, where there is no hotline. The same is true of California — there is no hotline there — or in Colorado.”

The statistical evidence of suicide reduction creates a good argument, he said, for why Congress should approve funding for the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network that was authorized as part of the 2008 farm bill. The network creates a national crisis hotline for rural workers and also mandates additional behavioral health services in geographically rural regions.

There is insufficient data that examines suicide by occupational group, but several studies have demonostrated that suicide by farmers differs somewhat from suicide patterns by urban residents. The table above illustrates how farmers, if they decide to take their own lives, often align themselves with the cycles of farming. (Source: AgriWellness)

Federal officials, including U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, have signaled their awareness of the ongoing problem, but additional solutions may be hard to come by. “I’ve talked to farmers whose loved ones have committed suicide over this. I do understand,” Vilsack said during a rural community forum this week in Wisconsin.

Despite Vilsack’s recognition of what’s happening in rural communities, he said that he does not see many opportunities for additional federal intervention to turn things around. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which recently approved $760 million in new farm loans, is considering restructuring loans and providing temporarily higher support payments, but ongoing discussions in the halls of Washington, D.C., will provide little comfort for agricultural families who field daily calls from creditors. Even if the idea is implemented, it is unlikely to be enough on its own.

Iowa has not yet seen the brunt of the burgeoning mental health crisis, largely because it remains ahead of the curve on rural mental health issues. The Hawkeye State not only provides an outlet for stress with its hotline, but it also offers follow-up care to agricultural workers who need it. The Iowa hotline has about 37 or 38 providers who have been contracted to give follow-up support to callers, Rosmann said. That means that Iowa residents need only travel 30 to 40 miles to access additional services.

“For many people that sort of distance is actually preferable because some don’t want to see a provider in their own town,” he said. “This usually has nothing to do with quality of care at local mental health centers, but has to do with the perceptions of what others might say if a family is seen going to the local facility or provider. So there is a perception of stigma attached to accessing behavioral health services, but that varies from person-to-person.”

In other states, rural residents tend to have more difficulty accessing mental health care.

“It’s a very complex picture,” Rosmann warned before beginning to explain the problems surrounding behavioral health services in rural America. “We have seen in Iowa the loss of psychiatrists and psychologists in rural areas. There just aren’t enough. But, we are better off than some other states. South Dakota is just terrible, and in Montana there just aren’t any psychologists and psychiatrists in rural areas. Residents there might have to travel 150 or more miles to get a court-ordered neuro-psychological evaluation because of lack of access.

“The numbers of appropriately-trained providers of psychology, psychiatry and substance abuse counseling in rural areas is half that of the same professionals in urban areas — and it is worsening.”

Further complicating the access issue for rural Americans is that there are very few medical educational tracks currently available that train health care professionals about the specific concerns that are often seen in more rural settings. And, outside of the rudimentary knowledge provided within those few agricultural medicine courses, there is no national curriculum in place for behavioral health professionals who intend to service rural areas.

“You simply can’t provide the information these professionals will need during a two-hour lecture,” Rosmann said. “We need a whole textbook and curriculum on agricultural behavioral health, and that is one of the things that we are now undertaking at AgriWellness.”

The organization plans to offer a six-hour course to professionals as a part of its upcoming biennial convention next month in South Dakota. Rosmann said that while recent discussions regarding mental health parity in conjunction with national discussions of health care reform are “a noble goal,” they don’t necessarily translate to actual access in rural areas.

“Having it on the books doesn’t mean that it is going to be adequately implemented,” he said. “I don’t know if it is a goal we are going to be able to achieve easily because parity requires the distribution of professional providers in ways that are quite different then where we are at currently. So, we are going to have to somehow get providers into the rural areas, and we’re going to have to change the reimbursement structure. Both of those are hard to change, but they are proper goals in my opinion.”

Des Moines Register Political columnist David Yepsen staked his credibility on the claim that “The fix is in” — that the state’s sale of the lottery was “a done deal” — last Thursday.  That’s because “Powerful people such as Gov. Chet Culver, Iowa House Speaker Pat Murphy and Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal are saying nice things about the idea.”  (Or maybe it’s because Civic Skinny said so.)

Never mind the fact that, at least as of last Thursday, there were too many unanswered questions in the capitol to assess whether the idea has legs at all.  Never mind the fact that “saying nice things” entailed speaking noncommittally, in generalities, after being pressed by Des Moines Register reporters on the subject.  Never mind that Jason Clayworth, the paper’s own captiol reporter, said “I don’t believe it has serious consideration this session” in a web video debate with Yepsen on Friday (below).

Even the announcement from the governor’s office Saturday that its proposed budget would not include selling the lottery failed to convince Yepsen to change the subject.  He wrote not one, but two columns about selling the lottery over the weekend.  The Register newsroom also pushed out two breaking news text message alerts to its list of mobile phone subscribers regarding Culver’s announcement that he was not going to sell the lottery, as if it was shocking, front page news.  (And then, in the Sunday Register, it was.)

The Register may see this as a victory for themselves.  They lambasted a proposal to sell the lottery that no elected official was willing to put his or her name behind, and Culver ultimately rejected it.  But not before GOP legislators were able to use Yepsen’s work as a springboard to launch their own media offensive.

This was a manufactured controversy from beginning to end.

(Of course, if the proposal becomes more serious even after Culver’s decision to exclude it from his budget, we’ll be watching it as closely as anyone.  We just prefer to wait for more hard information than our ink-stained colleagues before we unleash a series of critical articles and columns about a particular subject.)

“Iowans are not yet ready to support gay marriage completely, but they are clearly ready to legally acknowledge same-sex relationships,” said David Redlawsk, associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa. “For many the idea of marriage may still be a step too far, but at the same time they are willing to recognize committed relationships.”

The Iowa Supreme Court will hear arguments in the legal challenge to the state’s same-sex marriage law on Dec. 9. The poll, which was drawn from the Big Ten Battleground Poll, found that support for same-sex marriage will get a boost if the state’s high court rules in favor of it, jumping 7 percentage points.

“Clearly opinion on the issue of gay marriage will change if the Iowa Supreme Court rules that the state’s constitution requires it,” Redlawsk said.

A majority of Iowa voters under age 30 are already in favor of gay marriage, suggesting that support for it could grow as time goes on. Less than one-fifth of younger voters oppose any legal recognition of same-sex relationships.

In addition to the numerous slam poetry competitions and spoken word awards he has won, Bamuthi is a Broadway veteran and was the featured artist on Russell Simmons’ “Def Poetry” on HBO. Despite all of his performance accolades, Bamuthi’s proudest work has been Youth Speaks, where he mentors 13- to 19-year-old writers and serves as the artistic director of The Living Word Project, the resident theater company of Youth Speaks.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph (center) poses with Michael Harrington (The Arts Farm representative pictured second from left), some members of West High’s literary magazine, “Favonius,” and newly formed slam poetry team

Bamuthi’s dual roles as an arts activist and educator are what brought him to Iowa City to engage high school students. Bamuthi’s visit was made possible by The Arts Farm, a new organization in Cedar Rapids dedicated to enrichment through the “promotion of arts through arts education, innovative performance, and creative discovery by and for young people.”Marc Bamuthi Joseph Performs at Iowa City West High School
(filmed and edited by Iowa Independent’s Adam Burke)

Barmuthi wasted no time, hooking his audience with a spoken-word piece that personified race, hate, racism, ignorance, capitalism, slavery and a slew of other -isms. As he walked the aisles of the auditorium, Bamuthi occasionally paused to “spit” his poetic magic couched in expert wordplay. And when he wasn’t using his words to speak, he let his feet do the talking.

Using a blend of straight narrative, hip-hop, spoken word and dance, Bamuthi told the audience about his introduction to tap-dance at age 9 and how this introduction ruptured his relationship with his Haitian-born father. “In 1984, I got my first pair of tap shoes, and my pop was not cool with this. I reeked of America,” Bamuthi said while tap-dancing on stage. “Coming from Haiti, he loved American culture, but he shunned American culture. What my father did not realize is that tap-dance is African drum.”

Bamuthi told the audience that Africans that were new to the New World had to use alternative means of communication. “The colonies made it an offense, punishable by death, for anyone to be in possession of any noise-making device,” Bamuthi said. “However, they had enough business sense not to devalue their own private property (points at dancing feet). And that gave us just enough space to bring back our rhythm, and that’s where tap-dance steps in. My pop stopped listening to me, so I engaged in a call and response between my feet and the floor.”

Iowa Independent: You said you are a child of hip-hop culture. What do you mean by this? What’s the difference between hip-hop culture and, say, MTV hip-hop culture?

Bamuthi: You can’t buy hip-hop in a store, just like you can’t buy punk music in a store. The music in the stores is just a manifestation of a culture, but you cannot buy a culture. Hip-hop to me is about form. It’s about approach and attitude.

Iowa Independent: What motivated you to get involved in the educational aspects of the arts?

Bamuthi: I love the classroom. I would much rather be in the classroom than up on the stage. I’m not a fighter. I’m not a guns-and-ammo person. Education is the way that I wage revolution. I think the planet can be better, and I’m really turned on by the circus of ideas that are possible in the classroom. I’m also very conscious of all the things that inhibit the carnival of ideas. In the context of a classroom, where I can discuss ideas with a smaller number of students, being an agent or facilitator of change in that mix is my cultural contribution. I have a spiritual relationship to the call-and-response ethic. My mom and grandmother are great teachers, so I’ve cultivated a spiritual relationship with teaching. Fate also played a role in revealing my destiny to me, so here I am.

Culver’s first executive order in office, signed Jan. 27, recognizes and honors all of Iowa’s soldiers who paid the ultimate sacrifice while serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Culver’s order stipulates that Iowa’s state flag and the flag of the United States of America are to be flown at half-staff on all properties under the state’s jurisdiction when:

Noncompliant flags fly full-staff in parking lot of Iowa Deptartment of Public Safety, which is located just southwest of State Capitol

The governor’s executive order also encouraged individuals, businesses, schools, municipalities, counties and other government subdivisions to fly the flag at half staff on Saturday as well as a sign of respect for the fallen soldier. This recommendation presents a problem, however: How does the governor’s office effectively communicate this directive to the aforementioned entities?
This communication gap was highlighted in an August column by Des Moines Register columnist John Carlson, who related the incident of a “borderline disgusted” caller, who was upset by the number of flags that were not at half-staff in honor of Marine Sgt. Jon Bonnell, Jr., 22, of Fort Dodge, who was killed in Iraq on August 6, 2007.

P.J. Sesker Green, the aunt of Sgt. Daniel Sesker, an Iowa National Guard soldier killed last year, wondered why a number of businesses were not flying their flags at half-staff on the day of Bonnell’s funeral. So Sesker-Green stopped at a few places and asked questions. “I told them the governor asked everybody to do it on the day of a funeral as a sign of respect,” she told Carlson over the phone. “Some people told me they’d never heard such a thing. Some told me they didn’t know anything about the Marine being buried that day. I think all of them were embarrassed.”

To help address this communication gap, the governor’s office added a new feature to its refurbished web site, which allows people to sign up for e-mail updates regarding flag notifications. The e-mails are a start, but on Saturday, the majority of Des Moines’ businesses’ flags were not lowered in recognition of Hick’s sacrifice. While patrolling the downtown area in my car, the only businesses and institutions I observed flying their flags at half-staff were the Principal Financial Building, WHO television station, and Central Campus.

Granted, it was Saturday, a day when most government buildings shut down for the weekend holiday. Unfortunately, for those government employees serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war does not take a holiday.

U.S. flag flies half-staff Nov. 24 2007 in honor of Sgt. Adrian Hike, who was killed while serving in Afghanistan

The Michigan Legislature meets Monday and may consider an amendment to the primary law that would force four major Democratic candidates back onto the ballot.

Just after Michigan announced its move to Jan. 15, all six leading Democrats signed a pledge not to campaign in any states that violated the Democratic National Committee’s official calendar order of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina.  Four candidates — Joe Biden, John Edwards, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson — took that pledge a step further by taking their names off the Michigan ballot.

The proposed legislation would force those candidates back on the ballot unless they sign an affidavit swearing they are not running for president. Ballot Access News also reports that, while Republicans have settled on the primary, Democrats still haven’t and may yet opt for a caucus.

In a post worth a read, Iowa blogger Cyclone Conservatives urges Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin to confront his colleague, Michigan’s Carl Levin.  Levin has long argued for an end to Iowa and New Hampshire’s first in the nation status, and has been the driving force behind Michigan’s leapfrogging this year.  Levin has suggested a Michigan Democratic caucus on Jan. 8 — New Hampshire Primary Day.

Meanwhile, the Huron Daily Tribune reports, the biggest losers in the Michigan battle may be local election officials.  They were legally barred from making primary preparations while two state courts held the primary law unconstitutional.  But the state Supreme Court reversed the lower court rulings Wednesday, and now county clerks have to expedite their efforts.

Joe Biden, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson all took their names off the Jan. 15 Michigan ballot on yesterday’s deadline, leaving Hillary Clinton to face Chris Dodd as the “anybody but” candidate, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel as the “what the hell” choices, and Mickey Mouse on the write-in line.  (Note: seems Team Kucinich tried to drop out but botched the paperwork.)

In New Hampshire, the Democratic Party hinted this may affect New Hampshire’s date decision.  “Today’s turn of events only further amplifies the fact that the Michigan primary is irrelevant,” said party spokesman Ray Buckley. “Our Secretary of State, Bill Gardner, now has more flexibility in his scheduling decision because the Michigan event is no longer a ’similar event’ to the New Hampshire primary.”

But Gardner disagrees, telling the Manchester Union Leader, “If one party has a primary, just as the Republicans in South Carolina are, then it still matters and it’s a similar election. Even if all the Democrats come off the ballot, the Republicans in Michigan are having a primary on that day.”“Similar event” is the phrase that pays in New Hampshire’s first in the nation law (um… what if some other state passes the same law?) written by state representative Jim Splaine.  At the Blue Hampshire blog, Splaine makes his case for a December primary, before Iowa:

If Iowa does go January 3rd or 5th, the problem with setting our date for Tuesday, January 8th would be that for the entire Holiday Season, the Presidential candidates of both parties may well camp out in Iowa. 

A NH Primary on or around December 11th would mean that after our event, the “winners” and those “exceeding expectations” would be exposed to a great deal of nationwide analysis during the Holiday Season as to just why they did so well, or not, and how their showing in New Hampshire will affect the next race in Iowa and other states beginning the first week of January.  That contributes to the respected “impact” of the NH lead-off primary, and sets us in good position to remain first and relevant for 2012 and beyond.

Meanwhile Gardner, the New Hampshire secretary of state who holds the date in his hands, is a little concerned that the Iowa GOP is moving forward on a date, according to MSNBC.

Around the blogosphere, reactions are predictable.  Iowan iPol grumbles at Clinton and Dodd and Bleeding Heartland has a concise, R-rated headline.  Iowa hater Kos thinks this will have a November impact:

Whoever the nominee is will have to go back to Michigan during the general — a swing state, let’s not forget — and explain why they gave them the big “f’ you” during the primaries.

But do Real People who aren’t geeks about nomination rules trivia going to remember or care in a year?  And are the party activists going to be so mad at, say, Obama or Edwards that they would vote for Romney or Giuliani?  Didn’t think so.

Back in Michigan, the Republicans were debating last night, and Brian Dickerson of the Detroit Free Press predicts mischief:

In an eyeblink, Republican presidential candidates who’d come to Dearborn to court the GOP base found themselves confronting a diverse primary audience that might also include liberal supporters of Obama and John Edwards, independents turned off by the reduced Democratic field and mischief makers determined to sow confusion in the Republican camp… crossover voters may be drawn to mavericks like Ron Paul or Tom Tancredo.

And at the Politico, a early commenter notes the risk Clinton has taken: “What if she ends up head to head with Kucinich and only pulls 65% of the vote?”  Add “Dodd” to that sentence, but the point stands: Michigan is a yes or no vote on Clinton.

GOP Congressmen Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter couldn’t buy a top-three finish at the Straw Poll, nor could they buy any R-E-S-P-E-C-T from Fox News.

Fox News also failed to mention their names in its online news story, yet they gave a nod to the three GOP candidates who weren’t even participating in the fund-raising event.Ironically, Fox’s 2008 presidential news coverage, “You Decide 2008,” has helped voters decide by deciding not to include all of the participating candidates in its fair and balanced reporting.

On the campaign trail in Iowa, a number of Ron Paul supporters have told me that their candidate has been ignored by the mainstream media – as reported in the Iowa Independent:

During Thursday’s campaign stop in Cedar Rapids, not everyone was interested in seeing former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for the same reasons. While GOP supporters squeezed into the Spring House Family Restaurant, a group of Rep. Ron Paul faithfuls gathered across the street and held up signs proclaiming support for Paul and disgust with Giuliani. “We’re here to help get the word out on Ron Paul, because he’s not getting any of the media attention,” said Iowa City resident Pam Wagner.

I’ve also heard people contend that Paul supporters may be a little hypersensitive to the lack of national media campaign coverage and face time in the televised debates. While the latter claim can be substantiated with clock time, the former will be left to the viewers, pundits and media analysts as they surf the television, internet and traditional news media sources for bias and unbalanced coverage.

Meanwhile, it’s up to voters to develop their media literacy, while simultaneously holding the media accountable for its coverage and should always ask: “Is this report fair and balanced?”

That’s for You to decide.