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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.
Scott Elliott is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He writes about education, city and suburban issues, politics, business, workforce and consumer issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > February > 18
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Martin Gottlieb: Seth Morgan has good reason to seize the moment
If I were Seth Morgan, I’d go for it, too.
The extremely junior Republican state rep from Huber Heights is taking flak for his decision to run for state auditor against the choice of the state party organization.
Kent Moore, chairman of the party in Belmont County (on the West Virginia border) said last week, “I’ll be happy to explain to Seth that the reason he will not receive the support of this chairman at this time is not because I believe in ‘waiting your turn,’ as Seth assumes to be the case, but because he needs to learn to respect the GOP and its elected leaders, before he can expect to earn our support.”
Given the standing of “elected leaders” with the public, opposition like that could put Morgan over the top.
True, Republican primary voters are often presented as hierarchical and conservative people who believe in respect for leaders and believe in waiting one’s turn in line. Big-resume figures such as John McCain, Bob Dole and the first George Bush routinely were nominated for president over more conservative candidates with lesser resumes.
But Morgan’s opponent in the primary is not exactly John McCain, and, anyway… Well, let’s start at the beginning.
With the alacrity of a speed-skater getting off the starting line in a sprint, Morgan made clear his interest in being auditor at the virtual instant that John Kasich picked Auditor Mary Taylor as his lieutenant governor running mate.
At the time, he was the only Republican in the field. But two Republicans were running for attorney general. One was former U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine, a second cousin of state party Chairman Kevin DeWine. And one was David Yost, prosecutor in Delaware County.
A lot of Republicans saw nothing good in a challenge to Mike DeWine, who, on paper, seems an extraordinarily strong candidate in the general election. So Kevin DeWine and Yost worked something out. Yost switched to the auditor race and got the party organization’s endorsement.
Morgan didn’t get to call dibs on auditor, just by being first. That’s fair enough. But look at his political assets:
• He is the only CPA in the race. Incumbent Mary Taylor is a CPA, the first to be auditor. And she was the only statewide Republican to win in 2006 (outside of judicial races). The party got mileage out of her professional credentials, or tried to.
• Yost got diverted off a track that made a certain sense to non-politicians: from prosecutor to attorney general, which is what he really wanted. And that happened as a result of one of those “back room deals” that so often make for campaign fodder for the other side.
The deal was defensible. Kevin DeWine was trying to spread out his candidates in a way that makes sense for the party. It’s what chairmen are expected to do. But, still, there it is.
When Yost was up against Mike De- Wine, he was favored by some flaming conservatives. But now he could become a symbol to the right-wingers of the facilition not only of the more moderate Mike DeWine, but of some sort of DeWine machine.
• Morgan is a natural favorite of the Tea Party movement, the hyper-energized tug on the Republicans to the hard right. He was the only recognizable political name to speak at the local Tea Party’s first public event at Courthouse Square last year. His current spokesman organized the event.
I don’t know much about Yost. If, as seems unlikely, anybody cares, this certainly isn’t an endorsement of Morgan. We’re just handicapping the political situation here. If you’re Morgan, you see a chance worth taking.
He’s willing to give up his House seat. He’s always gone out of his way to say that, however ambitious he might look — and he certainly does, approaching 32 — if he loses an election he’s still an accountant and family man, and that’s fine.
My own sense is that if he has a long-term future in politics, it may be in the conservative movement, as opposed to elective office. You know: at one of those organizations that pushes causes. Those are his people.
They do like to hire former politicians, especially ones who have risen fairly high first.
Permalink | Comments (25) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, Ohio politics
TweetGuest column: Dysfunctional health care system carries huge cost
This commentary was written by Lawrence E. Mieczkowski, an internist who specializes in cardiovascular disease prevention. From 1994-96, he was director of clinical information services for Kettering Medical Center.
I recently saw Jim, who’s 56. His cholesterol was over 300 and his blood fat triglycerides were 2,300, despite being on two cholesterol medicines. With these values, his blood is as thick as a strawberry milkshake.
The nurse had alerted me that I had seen Jim some years ago and he had not returned. “Dr. Mitch didn’t do anything for me,” the two-pack-a-day smoker said.
As I looked through his charts, I noted that he drank six to eight beers nightly. Probably more, now that he is not working, I said to myself.
Jim’s heart attack risk is close to 75 percent over the next four to five years.
Elaine is another patient. She’s 70, and I have treated her for nearly a decade. She has chronic kidney disease, but has been able to stay off dialysis. She has been getting frailer every year, but last spring she was doing fairly well, so I told her not to come back until October.
At that visit, her weight was down nearly 20 pounds, and she was more hunched over in her wheelchair. She now has a plastic tube in her stomach to receive food and medicines.
She had been hospitalized at Kettering Medical Center some months previously for dehydration. A cardiovascular surgeon was consulted and, because she had some dizziness, he recommended risky carotid artery surgery to clean out the cholesterol build-up in her arteries.
Complications occurred, and Elaine spent almost a month in a nursing home. I was dumbfounded.
Elaine’s blockages had remained stable for more than five years. No one from the hospital team had called me to discuss her care. Elaine and her husband had just assumed that I knew surgery was being recommended.
I have another patient with recurrent pancreatic cancer. He has not been told that, based on research, the best option at this stage is declining more treatment.
Another course of chemotherapy will cost nearly $7,000 per month, while he has no real chance of surviving beyond six months.
Meanwhile, there’s a local doctor we’ll call Dr. Ed. He has a large primary-care practice and has decided to re-establish his business as a boutique medical practice. His patients must pay an annual fee to receive care.
I see many of his patients for their cholesterol and diabetes management. Many can’t afford my colleague’s costly retainer fee. Hundreds of individuals, many of them elderly, now have had to find another primary-care physician.
The questions common to all of these situations is: What’s the right thing to do and how do we determine it? If we are ever to truly reform health care, how do put in place measures to ensure we do the right thing?
My first patient, of course, bears significant responsibility for his health problems. But, amazingly, there are few incentives — positive or negative — that can be used to change his behavior. There are thousands of Jims just in the Dayton area.
Elaine’s case is very straightforward. The hospitalist movement is fully ingrained in our community, with hospital-based physicians taking care of patients who are admitted. But, in many cities, those physicians coordinate care and consult with their patients’ other doctors.
In my experience, this rarely happens in Dayton, leading to duplication of services and experiences like Elaine’s. A telephone call could have averted costly, unnecessary vascular surgery and a lengthy hospital and nursing home stay.
Should oncologists alone make recommendations to patients about costly end-of-life medical treatment options or should there be a family meeting involving the patient’s primary care physician, as well as a spiritual counselor and a hospice expert?
When Dr. Ed established his boutique practice and made the decision to close his doors to Medicare patients, I doubt he had paid back the federal and state grants that had underwritten his medical education, to the tune of perhaps $200,000 to $300,000.
Every medical school and hospital or university-based residency program receives money to subsidize a physician’s education. Yes, we pay considerable tuition, but no physician pays the full price. Does that matter when doctors set their prices or refuse to see certain patients?
I don’t have the answers to these problems, but not searching for solutions is costing us all dearly. Deciding not to decide how to change our health care system is expensive — even hurtful.
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TweetEditorial: SCLC scandal forces accounting here
If Rev. Raleigh Trammell’s critics at the national Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta hadn’t gone to authorities about his alleged financial improprieties, the civil rights organizations he oversees here would still be receiving — and mishandling — public money.
That’s in large part because Rev. Trammell has a long history of successfully intimidating people.
In fact, the trouble he faces today does not arise because anyone in the Dayton community has stood up to him or called him to account (though an employee has filed a sexual harassment complaint against him).
The list of individuals and institutions — including this newspaper — that could have been, and should have been, scrutinizing him more intensely is long.
Now that the FBI has descended upon and seized records from Rev. Trammell’s home, his daughter’s home and the local SCLC offices, governments and non-profits that have dealt with the Dayton SCLC and the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, of which Rev. Trammell is executive director, are cutting off money.
They are embarrassed and belatedly asking for what should have been routine accountings.
It’s not a proud or confidence-inducing moment.
On Sunday, Feb. 14, staff writers Lynn Hulsey and Tom Beyerlein reported that Dayton’s SCLC and the ministerial alliance received about $3.7 million in public money since 1999; more than $900,000 of that was handed out in just 2008 and 2009.
Among the problems:
— Last year the SCLC received $34,500 from the federal government to operate a battered women’s shelter. For at least the last five months of the year, there was no shelter.
— The ministerial alliance has also received federal money for a food pantry that isn’t operating.
— Montgomery County awarded the SCLC and IMA $184,260 for assistance to needy families during 2008 and 2009, but there’s little documentation that meaningful services were provided.
— Part of Montgomery County’s award to the SCLC and IMA included a $40,000 grant to provide home-based meals to nine people. Spending on that program, too, lacked good record keeping.
— The state gave money to the SCLC in 2009 for a battered teen program, but held back on $53,000 for 2010 after administrators became concerned about the group’s books. Moreover, the SCLC got the 2009 and 2010 funding even though a local committee that vets grant requests had not ranked its proposal high.
— After the county health department gave a $50,000-plus grant for an HIV/AIDS outreach program in 2008 to another entity, the SCLC sued — unsuccessfully, though it’s appealing.
Perhaps the saddest thing about such a long list is that it undermines public confidence in the many social service programs that are consistently run responsibly.
Montgomery County Administrator Deborah Feldman has acknowledged that Rev. Trammell threatened to withhold support for the human services levy renewal in 2003 unless the county funded organizations he supported. That explains a lot about Rev. Trammell’s relationships.
The prospect of being called racist or being boycotted at the urging of Rev. Trammell and others he brought along was enough to make people in and out of government blink, turn a blind eye or avoid confronting Rev. Trammell.
The SCLC name and the black ministers’ group were seen as carrying weight with a lot of people.
Meanwhile, back in Atlanta, the allegations — no criminal charges have been filed — are that Rev. Trammell and the SCLC’s national treasurer haven’t accounted for over a half-million dollars.
There, as well, Rev. Trammell’s behavior has been threatening. He became national chairman in 2004 after an ugly power struggle in the organization, most pointedly with the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who helped form the SCLC with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In that fight, Rev. Trammell engaged in profane name-calling, even committing one vicious rant to writing.
Rev. Shuttlesworth is a civil-rights icon who invited Rev. King to Birmingham to protest and bring attention to the violent and even murderous treatment of blacks there. When Rev. Trammell was put in charge, Rev. Shuttlesworth told the SCLC’s directors that he hoped historians didn’t write that they ushered in “Trammell’s Folly” or “Trammell’s Tragedy.”
The national SCLC’s bitter, embarrassing internal strife and its struggle to make itself relevant to a new generation of blacks long pre-dates Rev. Trammell’s leadership. But there’s no question that the latest controversy is rocking a storied institution that, if it dies, deserves a more dignified death than one precipitated by scandal.
However the controversy is resolved at the national level, it is, at the same time, having the consequence of forcing overdue soul-searching and accounting in the Dayton community.
Permalink | Comments (30) | Post your comment | Categories: Civil Rights, Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Locals in national affairs
TweetEditorial: Anti-bonus rage matures in Brown proposal
A year ago, news came of incredible million-dollar bonuses being paid to AIG executives in the wake of that company’s collapse and the federal bailout. Within a few days, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a 90-percent tax on the bonuses.
Then second thoughts set in about such a high rate and about using the tax code punitively and “surgically” against a specific group after these people had already received money legally; and about doing all this because of an enraged public. Congress was getting scary.
The bill disappeared in the Senate as public anger about the AIG headlines died down — a little.
Now Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has a calmer proposal that goes in the same direction.
It would impose a 50-percent tax on bonuses over $25,000 paid in 2010 to executives at businesses that received bailout money.
And he would direct the money to a specific cause. Typically — but not always — tax money goes into the general fund.
Sen. Brown says that meetings around Ohio have convinced him that there’s a specific problem hindering economic recovery: the inability of small businesses to get loans. He says he hears the complaint wherever he goes.
President Barack Obama and many others note the same problem. The president has proposed using repaid bailout money to create a small-business lending fund. Republicans have criticized that, saying the money should be put against the national debt.
The Brown proposal would actually increase the debt in the short run, a little. Under current law, the controversial bonuses would be taxed generally at 35 percent, and the money would go into the general fund. Under the Brown proposal, the entire 50 percent would go toward small business loans.
Sen. Brown’s office estimates the bill might raise $8 billion to $10 billion, enough to allow for thousands of loans. Nonpartisan government experts haven’t made an estimate yet.
The tax would be a one-time-only source, which is not the most useful kind of tax. But it’s for a one-time-only purpose: to get small businesses over the current bump. Similar efforts are coming out of other congressional offices in both houses. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., has proposed a tax on bonuses over $400,000, with the money going to the general fund.
The good thing about the Brown approach is that it clearly takes the tax out of the realm of punishment or “class warfare” and makes it more about meeting a pressing national need of this particular year.
There are thorns on Brown’s plan. Congress cannot get in the habit of looking around for unpopular rich people to tax and justifying that with a popular spending program.
And yet today’s circumstances are exceptional. Executives who are now getting bonuses from hugely profitable banks that are repaying their bailout money can thank taxpayers. Meanwhile, unemployment is expected to remain very high for years in the wake of the largely self-induced financial-sector meltdown. And the newly profitable banks are being very slow to do business with small businesses.
The Brown proposal lifts anti-bonus anger out of mindlessness and puts it to good use. Still, the right way to proceed would be to levy the tax and, in other legislation, find a way to address the special small-business problem, one that is recognized by people in both parties.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Locals in national affairs, Martin Gottlieb
TweetScott Elliott: Super Nanny has it right that good discpline requires self control
“SuperNanny” is one of my guilty pleasures. Watching it just makes me feel better about my own parenting, as the poor overmatched moms and dads on the show get pushed around by their bratty kids. At least I’m better than them, I tell myself.
But as Jo Frost, the kindly and smart British nanny who stars in the show, goes about teaching effective strategies for dealing with unruly kids (beware of the “naughty chair”), there is one place she will never go. Nobody is going to bend a kid over their knee for a spanking on her watch.
Like Frost, I am a spanking non-believer. So I pursue more effective strategies. Or so I’ve told myself.
I cheered last year when Ohio finally outlawed spanking as a punishment at schools. We were the 30th state to institute such a ban, even though only six districts still allowed it. In fact, the whole state had only 110 school spanking cases in 2007-08.
The shift away from spanking has been pretty dramatic. In 1984, 68,000 Ohio children were paddled at school and only five states banned the practice.
The change is also cultural. While spanking is still strongly approved of in opinion surveys, fewer parents actually employ it.
Yet, differences in attitudes about spanking are oddly connected to political ideology. Surveys show conservative and deeply religious parents are more inclined to spank than those who are less religious and more liberal. This inflames the debate.
So you might expect that when a study by a researcher at Michigan’s Calvin College, a religiously affiliated school in a politically conservative part of that state, found last month that spanking might have positive effects on kids, the forces on the left and the right loaded up and fired away.
For the study, 2,600 people were asked about how they were disciplined. The findings concluded that those who were spanked, but not physically abused, from ages 2 to 6 performed better in school and volunteered more as teenagers.
Stories soon popped up hailing spanking’s effectiveness in the conservative press and critics on the left were quick to pounce, insisting that spanking is harmful and attacking the study as small and unpublished.
While it’s true that the bulk of the research from the last decade advised parents to move away from spanking, there are some interesting nuances.
One of the difficulties for researchers is distinguishing acceptable discipline from abuse. Generally, a hit that leaves a mark is considered crossing the line; one reason so many people advise against spanking is because it is easy for angry parents to get carried away. Spanking is usually treated as a last resort, which can mean the parent has run out of patience. That’s when the situation can get dangerous — when the parent loses control.
But this effect isn’t limited to spanking. In October, The New York Times magazine wrote about a new phenomenon in child discipline — abusive yelling — which it termed “the new spanking.” The story described (mostly liberal) parents who were philosophically opposed to spanking but found themselves, instead, regularly screaming at their kids. Experts in the story worried that intense shouting could have similarly harmful effects reminiscent of physical abuse.
Interestingly, there is some research to support the Michigan study’s suggestion that spanking might be effective for young children, but only in limited cases and with a very high bar for parental control. Some studies found if parents remain calm, spanked as a last resort and only in a fast, non-abusive way (such as with two quick taps on the rear) the technique was effective in getting children to comply.
Notice this high bar is required both for spanking and raising your voice, and that things can go bad when the parent loses control either way.
That’s another thing I like about “SuperNanny.” Frost’s techniques are methodical and focus on getting the parents to disengage their own emotions as they correct their children. I like to think I follow her example, but I’m sure glad there aren’t any cameras around when a naughty kid needs a “time out.”
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