By Cam Savage
TheStatehouseFile.com

Cam Savage is a principal at Limestone Strategies and a veteran of numerous Republican campaigns.

Two weeks into a partial government shutdown, Congress negotiated down to the last minute – the night before the treasury department’s Oct. 17 deadline to raise the nation’s debt limit.

These negotiations, though the word “negotiation” seems a charitable characterization of what was happening, always – or at least routinely – go down to the last minute.

So with that behind us, for now, I offer a few suggested pieces of legislation which I believe could unite Democrats and Republicans in both the House and Senate and bring some measure of peace and harmony to the American people.

Packaged together, call this legislative package the “Things that Grind our Gears Agenda for America.”

First, we must address an issue critical to all Americans (at least occasionally). I suggest a nationwide ban on restaurant bathroom doors being labeled with anything other than “Women” or “Men” or “Women/Men,” given the recent trend of unisex bathrooms. Also acceptable will be very standard images depicting obvious symbols for “women” or “men.”

What we have to put an end to is the trendy and covert speakeasy-type labels popping up on bathroom doors in restaurants around the country.

Enough already with the men’s rooms marked as “Room 201: Office of Albert B. Huffandpuff, Esquire” or “Dressing Room of Mrs. Dolores K. Snickerdoodle.” We get it, inside jokes are great for management and staff, but when en route to the bathroom, what patron is interested in cleverness? Give us cleverness in the name of your establishment, the décor, even the menu, but don’t leave us scrambling in our moment of need.

Now, if you’re out at an Italian or German or Mexican restaurant in the good ole United States, this is your problem. It won’t kill you to know two words in a couple different languages and restaurants are well within their rights to mark their bathroom doors in the language of the restaurant’s offered fare. But don’t be silly about it. Yes, I’m talking to you Outback Steakhouse.

Now, because only Congress can address issues of national security, let’s end this ridiculous practice of state troopers accompanying college football coaches onto the playing field for post-game handshakes. These coaches are surrounded by 75 fully padded college athletes, are we really worried about their safety?

Some people think this tradition began with legendary Alabama football coach Paul Bryant, but no one seems to be really sure. Why a guy whose nickname was “Bear” needed a security detail is a mystery, but now every big-time college coach has at least one state trooper at his side.

This does not seem to be the case with women’s college volleyball coaches.

And I don’t care if big college teams reimburse taxpayers for the overtime that state troopers rack up while escorting teams to and from crowded stadiums or even traveling with the teams on the road. I’m okay with that as long as the athletic departments are picking up the tab, but the shadowing of coaches onto the field just looks silly. Ban it!

And here’s an urgent issue Congress must address – those people who stand up on airplanes as soon as the plane arrives at the gate. Where do these people think they are going? There are 300 people in front of you to exit the plane, cool your jets: You aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Standing up and putting your backside into my face isn’t going to get you off this plane any faster.

For this offense to common courtesy, I propose a $50,000 fine and 75 hours of community service as a TSA pat-down agent. Problem solved – immediately.

If Congress cannot unite Americans around a simple package of reforms targeting annoying airline passengers, obnoxious college football coaches, and misleading bathroom doors, what can unite us?

Cam Savage is a principal at Limestone Strategies and a veteran of numerous Republican campaigns and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He is a graduate of Franklin College. He can be reached at Cam@limestone-strategies.com.

By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Abraham Lincoln once told a story about a man who had been tarred and feathered and rode out of town on a rail.

“If it weren’t for the honor of it, I’d rather have walked,” the man said.

In the aftermath of the slow-motion train wreck that was the 16-day federal government shutdown and dangerous flirtation with the economic disaster that would have accompanied a default on the nation’s debt, members of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate know something about the way the man in Lincoln’s story felt.

The honor they’ve brought upon themselves and their institutions is dubious at best.

To most of the world, the whole battle made little sense. A relatively small group of conservative lawmakers decided to try to hold this country’s – and, to some degree, the world’s – economic stability hostage to get a policy victory that they weren’t able to win in Congress, in court or at the polls.

More than a few of them blithely said that a default on our national debt wouldn’t be that big a deal, despite what every economist and credible business person in the country was telling them.

The Standard and Poor index estimated that the government shutdown and pointless dance with potential default drained $24 billion out of the U.S. economy.

And for what?

The tea party conservatives who started us down this road said they wanted to kill the Affordable Care Act. In the end, after wasting $24 billion and throwing the entire country into upheaval, what they got was a commitment for income verification – a provision that already was in the law.

Along the way, they managed to do severe damage to the Republican Party’s reputation. Polls revealed that the GOP’s standing had reached record lows. Some polls showed that Americans now prefer Democrats to Republicans by more than 20 points.

Worse, the tea party “wacko birds” – as 2008 Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called them – drew increasing fire from the right as well as the left. The American Conservative magazine ran a piece that blistered the tea party wing of the GOP and said:

“There is no serious argument for Republican governance right now, even if you prefer conservative policies over liberal ones. These people are just too dangerously incompetent to be trusted with power.”

This is bad news for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is this: No political party in this country – Republican or Democratic – can be trusted to use power wisely without the check of credible opposition.

Right now, at the national level, Republicans aren’t credible.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this sorry episode in American history is that the far right-wingers don’t seem to have learned anything from the experience.

Five members of Indiana’s congressional delegation voted against a deal to raise the debt ceiling and for derailing the American economy. They included two members who had worked their way into the national consciousness by bits of buffoonery – Rep. Todd “Loverboy” Rokita, R-Ind., (who flirted with a CNN anchor on national television by calling her “beautiful”) and Rep. Marlin “Grab Bag” Stutzman, R-Ind., (who told The Washington Examiner that Republicans had to get something out of the shutdown even if they didn’t know what it was that they wanted).

They were defiant to the end. Just before the vote in the House to reopen government and avert economic catastrophe, Stutzman issued a statement:

“Hoosier families are struggling under the weight of Obamacare’s job-killing mandates and the nation’s crushing $17 trillion debt.  This bill does nothing to provide relief of those issues or end special treatment for Members of Congress under Obamacare and therefore I will oppose it.”

Perhaps the Stutzmans of the world can’t learn anything from this debacle. As they retreat back to heavily gerrymandered districts, their biggest fear is being “primaried” – facing a challenge from within their party from someone whose views are even more extreme than theirs.

This means that, regardless of the defeats they suffer and the damage they do to their party and country, a core of right-wingers likely still will be in a position to defy reality and court disaster.

A century ago, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives was Rep. Joe Cannon, R-Ill. A contemporary said that Cannon was so conservative that, if he’d been alive at the time of creation, he would have voted against God and for chaos.

If Cannon were alive today, he might be the poster boy for the tea party.

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 FM Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

Amid all the tussling over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling, a couple of bombshells went off in the blogosphere that may prove of more enduring importance.

They suggest that there is a nontrivial possibility that Obamacare may implode.

The first bombshell went off on Tuesday, from Ezra Klein of the Washington Post’s Wonkblog.

Klein was one of those young writers who formed JournoList a few years ago so that like-minded Obama fans could coordinate their lines of argument. It was like one of those college sophomore clubs, not really necessary in an age of ready contact through email, but it shows him as a guy inclined to play team ball.
So it’s noteworthy when he writes, “So far, the Affordable Care Act’s launch has been a failure. Not ‘troubled.’

Not ‘glitchy.’ A failure.”

Klein notes that the rollout of the Medicare prescription drug program was also rocky two weeks into the process. But later it got smoothed out.

Klein fears Obamacare won’t. It’s not just a problem of overloaded servers. Everyone knew there would be lots of traffic in a nation of 312,000,000 people. Information technology folks say it’s easy to add servers.

It’s harder to get software systems to communicate. And as Klein quotes insurance consultant Robert Laszewski, “the backroom connection between the insurance companies and the federal government is a disaster.”

The reconciliation system isn’t working and hasn’t even been tested, Klein reports. Insurers are getting virtually no usable data from the exchanges.

Bloomberg.com columnist Megan McArdle, who unlike most Obamacare architects actually worked at an IT firm for a couple of years, sees the possibility of even more trouble ahead.

She points out that the administration delayed writing major rules during the 2012 campaign to avoid giving Republicans campaign fodder.

The biggest contractor did not start writing software code until spring 2013. They were still fiddling with the healthcare.gov website in September.

Instead of subcontracting the responsibility for integrating the software of the multiple contractors, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services decided to do it in-house — “a decision,” she writes, “equivalent to someone who has never even hung a picture deciding they should become their own general contractor and build a house.”

“If the exchanges don’t get fixed soon,” she writes, “they could destroy Obamacare.” You need the exchanges to enroll enough young healthy people to subsidize those who are sick and old, which is one of the central features of Obamacare.

Otherwise, premiums shoot up and up, pushing others out of the system — a death spiral that can continue year after year.

“At what point,” she asks, “do we admit that the system just isn’t working well enough, roll it back and delay the whole thing for a year?” She suggests that if the system can’t enroll 50 percent of its users by November 1, such a hugely drastic step would be in order.

That sounds like a nightmare of the first order — for individuals, for insurers, for employers and for the Obama administration. A far worse nightmare than when Congress in 1989 repealed the Medicare prescription drug plan it passed the year before because of widespread dissatisfaction.

By: Michael Baron

Of course it’s possible this nightmare will not happen. Things will get ironed out somehow.

But if they don’t, who’s responsible? First, a president who is not much interested in how government works on the ground. As a community organizer he never did get all the asbestos removed from the Altgeld housing project.

Politico reports that his “universal heath care” promise was first made when his press secretary and speechwriter needed a rousing ending to a 2007 campaign speech to a liberal group.

Second, lawmakers and administrators who assume that, in an Information Age, all you have to do is to assign a task to an IT team and they will perform it. Cross your fingers, and it gets done.

Third, government IT procurement rules are kludgy. Apple didn’t bid on this. The IT work went to insider firms that specialize in jumping through the hoops and ladders of government procurement rules.

Unfortunately, the consequences of a meltdown are enormous when a system is supposed to be used by everybody. If a private firm’s software fails, it can go bankrupt. No one else much cares.

But if Obamacare’s software crashes, the consequences will be catastrophic — for the nation and for the Democratic Party.

Source: RCP

INDIANAPOLIS – State Rep. Gail Riecken (D-Evansville) said a town hall she has scheduled for Evansville this Saturday (October 19) will focus in part on gaining public input on ways to improve the lives of children across Indiana.
The town hall will begin at 10 a.m. Saturday at the First Presbyterian Church, located at 609 E. Second Street.
Riecken’s plans to gain information come as part of her service on the state Commission on Improving the Status of Children, a group that grew out of efforts the lawmaker helped lead to reform the delivery of services to neglected and abused children across Indiana.
“In our meetings so far this year, we have focused upon specific areas of service,” Riecken said. “Two of those areas are Infant Mortality and Child Health and Data Sharing and Mapping.
“I believe the success of our commission will depend greatly on the input we receive from individuals and groups of our area who can bring a local perspective to identifying problems and finding solutions,” she continued. “I intend to give those individuals a chance at Saturday’s town hall to discuss what can be done to help.”
Here are the issues of concern within the two areas identified by The Commission:

INFANT MORTALITY AND CHILD HEALTH
– Improving Medicaid access and coordination for children and youth    released from detention.
– Addressing Medicaid barriers for youth released from detention.
– Increase well-child visits for preventive care/monitoring child development.
– Create policies to improve child health indicators such as infant mortality, obesity, underage smoking/drinking.
– Enforce lead-based paint prevention standards.
– Address Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS).
– Increase public education on child health policy, especially Medicaid issues.
– Improve public education around Internet safety for children.
– Develop a plan to decrease high incidence of child fatalities.
– Improve public education/awareness of NAS.

DATA SHARING AND MAPPING
– Identify gaps in the array of mental health services, especially in rural areas.
– Identify gaps in the array of substance abuse services, especially in rural areas.
– Implement technology initiatives to improve data collection and create capacity for sharing data for all systems serving children.
– Develop a repository linking all relevant data relating to children in multiple systems-for transparency and accountability.
– Identify barriers associated with confidentiality requirements.