President Barack Obama speaks with a foreign leader in the Oval Office on his first day in office 1/21/09. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.

From yesterday’s White House press briefing:

…MR. GIBBS:  Well, look, I think — not surprisingly, I doubt I’m going to enumerate them.  But I think anybody is hard-pressed to look back over a significant period of time like 99 or a hundred days and think you wouldn’t have done some things differently.  I’ve mentioned a decision today that the President would have made quite differently than was made in this White House.  I think it is safe to say that the President spends some time each day reflecting on what’s been done here in the course of any given day, and has asked us and asks himself to figure out how he can do what he does better.

When the President was first elected to the United States Senate, I remember one of the very first staff meetings that we had.  Then-Senator Obama said to all of us that were assembled that he knew that there were certain sacrifices in public service, that we could all figure out how to do something that gives us more time with our families or maybe earns us more in our paychecks, but he thought there were probably few things that we could do that were — be more rewarding if we worked every day to help people improve their lives.  I think that’s what he gets up every day thinking, and thinks each and every day about how he can improve, making sure that that happens.

Q    Do you want to juggle less balls, maybe?

MR. GIBBS:  Say again?

Q    Do you want to throw some of the balls out that you’re juggling; juggling too many?

MR. GIBBS:  No, I — I have addressed this and I think the President will probably get a chance to address this tomorrow — we don’t have the luxury of picking the problems that we address that face this country or face the American people, because we’re in a — we’re in a time period in which there’s a lot on the American people’s plate — whether it’s creating jobs; whether it’s stabilizing the financial system; whether it’s getting credit flowing; whether it’s making a college education more affordable; whether it’s cutting the cost for health care; finding a path towards true energy independence; making our nation safer; rehabilitating our image in the world in order to ensure that we have the greatest leverage and power to push the national interests of this country.  I’m not sure which of those things you would decide as less important in that group.

The President has decided that those are the issues that face this country, and he’s going to work every day to find a solution to move us a step forward toward reaching those goals…

[emphasis added]

President Obama is in Missouri this morning – holding a town hall meeting in Arnold – all with the media “celebrating” the milestone.

The President is popular, just not among what remains of the republican base:

A SurveyUSA poll of 1200 adults in the United States taken on April 27th and released on April 28th, sponsored by KABC-TV, Los Angeles with a margin of error of 2.9%:

Do you approve or disapprove of the job Barack Obama is doing as President?

All

58% – approve

38% – disapprove

4% – not sure

Democrats [39% of sample]

86% – approve

12% – disapprove

2% – not sure

republicans [29% of sample]

31% – approve

64% – disapprove

5% – not sure

Independents [30% of sample]

47% – approve

47% – disapprove

5% – not sure

Considering what other polls (Pew and NYT/CBS, for instance) are telling us about party self identification, 29% for the republican sample seems a little generous. Those poor numbers could explain Arlen Specter.

Not being a fan of the media manufactured and very artificial 100 day label, I’ll just consider this a good start.

Julia Baskin hasn’t done a single damn thing to rid the world of nuclear weapons, nor to stop our government from torturing or to alleviate global warming. She’s just a senior at Washington University in St. Louis who arrived on campus from New York City in the fall of ’05 looking to acquaint herself with social justice issues and pick one where she could contribute to a solution. She quickly settled on joining a small group of students who worked on fair trade issues. When she arrived, the group was a year old and was working to see to it that the coffee served on campus was fair trade coffee. (Instead of taking whatever price was offered by corporate coffee buyers, fair trade coffee growers join cooperatives that deal for them and get them a fair price.)

By the end of her freshman year, the group had achieved its goal, and when its president graduated, Julia … to say “took the reins” would be misleading. She became the nominal leader, yes, but it’s a very egalitarian bunch. My subconscious must have prompted me to pick the word “bunch”. Because their next project was getting the campus to buy only fair trade bananas.

They had settled on that because bananas are one of the most popular fruits in the world, and banana workers are among the most exploited.

Without Fair Trade, fruit farmers often receive only a few cents a pound for their crop, far below the cost of production. In Ecuador, the cost of basic necessities for a family of four is $9.60 a day, but on non-Fair Trade farms, workers may earn as little as $3 a day, according to TransFair USA.

So, in hopes of easing life for Ecuadorian or Guatemalan Okies, Julia set to work. She approached the director of campus food services with some trepidation, expecting anything from indifference to hostility. What she found instead was a man with an open mind. Once they had agreed that Bon Appetit, the food service, would use fair trade bananas if she could supply them, she set about locating a banana co-op for the university to do business with.

And hit one dead end after another. Co-ops in the banana business are still few and far between, which is all the more reason for people like Julia to persist and encourage their growth.

Even as she became more discouraged about that part of the job, her group was doing all it could to make students aware of the issue. They showed a movie about the problem, they passed out lit, they had an event in the coffee shop, attended by forty or fifty people, where they served banana fondue. But no co-op surfaced.

She finally went to the director of food services to talk about the problem, only to find that he had appointed one of his employees to look for sources and that the person had been successful. Knotty problem solved. The additional good news was that the food service department could afford to absorb the small extra cost.

When the first box of fair trade bananas arrived, Julia was so excited that she peeled a sticker off one of the bananas and put it on her cell phone. From then on, by posting placards around campus, the group made sure that Wash. U. students knew the bananas they ate were fair trade bananas. Implanting consciousness of fair trade issues is, to Julia and her cohorts, contributing to the student body’s education.

And the group moved on to its next project: getting the campus bookstore to stock only “sweat shop free” items. That’s a long term goal. The other long term goal is to spread the news of what can be accomplished to other campuses–starting with campuses also served by Bon Appetit. OK, they’re not about to put Dole and Chiquita out of business, but persistent effort will someday make the giants aware that another business model is competing against them.

In a couple of weeks, Julia will be gone from campus for good, moving on to a job with the Jewish Service Corps, AVODAH. She’ll be assigned to the Cambodian Assn. of Illinois, based in Chicago, working with Cambodian adolescents to promote the arts in city schools and to make students aware of worldwide genocide problems.

It’s going to be awhile before she rids the world of nuclear weapons, but anytime she might happen to hear Belafonte wailing, “Hey, Mr. Tally Man, tally me banana,” she can remember with satisfaction a small job well done.

This posting is the fourth in a regular series about activists that I’m writing with the assistance of the St. Louis Activist Hub. The first three postings are here, here and here.  

Senator John McCain posted on Twitter about his vote against confirming Kathleen Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services:

voted against Sebelius – already moving towards socialized auto companies, we don’t need socialized medicine! about 4 hours ago from web

Socialized medicine? You mean like this? [pdf]:

[September 2007]…Members of Congress and retired Members are entitled to participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) under the same rules as other federal employees. Members meeting minimum enrollment period requirements who are also eligible for an immediate annuity may continue to participate in the health benefit program when they retire. For an additional fee, incumbent Members can receive health care services from the Office of the Attending Physician in the U.S. Capitol; in addition, Members may purchase care from the military hospitals using their FEHBP benefit. Members must also pay the same payroll taxes as all other workers for Medicare Part A coverage…

…Financing. The federal government and enrollees jointly pay for the cost, or premiums, of the FEHBP plans. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (BBA 97, P.L. 105-33) established the current formula for determining the government’s contribution, which became effective January 1999. The government’s share is an amount equal to 72% of the average premium of all participating plans (weighted by the number of plan participants) but no more than 75% of the premium of any individual plan. This formula is applied separately to self only and family plans. Participants pay an average of 28%, but no less than 25% of premiums…

…Private Sector Comparability

For individual coverage, the employer’s contribution in the private sector is generally more generous than the federal government’s FEHBP contribution for its employees. According to the Department of Labor, private sector employers’ share for coverage is 81% for individual coverage and 71% for family coverage (compared to FEHBP’s payment of 72% of the average premium of all participating plans).

FEHBP’s family coverage includes all families of two or more, while private sector plans may have different premiums for family plans depending on the family size. Under FEHBP’s family coverage, a family of two pays the same premium as a family of four.

Approximately three-fourths of all workers in private industry had no choice in medical insurance plan, either because they were not offered a plan (30%) or because they were offered only one plan (44%), while many FEHBP participants have the advantage of a wide choice of plans.

The number and percentage of people covered by employment-based health insurance has been decreasing. In the private sector, coverage dropped from 69% in 2000 to 60% in 2007. In particular, retiree health coverage has been hit the hardest. Sixty-six percent of all large firms (with 200 or more workers) offered retiree health coverage in 1988, compared with 33% in 2007. FEHBP is available to federal retirees at the same cost and with the same benefits offered to active employees.

In terms of premium increases, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that starting in 2003, FEHBP premium rate of growth was generally slower than for other purchasers. According to GAO testimony, since 2003, the average growth rate of FEHBP premiums has been 7.3% compared with 10.5% for the employer-ponsored plans surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research Educational Trust. Premium rate growth for the 10 largest FEHBP plans (based on enrollment), that accounted for about three-quarters of total enrollment, ranged from 0% to 15.5% for 2007…

Nice work and good benefits, if you can get it.

Last week when House Republicans dropped their previous spending plans and announced their intention to spend $1 billion of stimulus money on a tax cut, Chris Kelly derided it, not for being illegal, but for being histrionic:

“We’ll have a parade and some clowns juggling,” said Rep. Chris Kelly, D-Columbia. “It’s all show.” Kelly said it was too late to forge a consensus on a tax cut.

He’s right, of course. This nonsense will pass in the House, then the Senate will put the kibosh on it. But far be it from the House leadership to let reality or the legislative rules crimp their style. Ron Richard knows this plan won’t fly, but he’s willing to indulge in parliamentary shenanigans for a chance to play to the tea partyers.

Knowing that the tax cut provisions would have to clear the House by the end of this week and that Republicans would never get the new plan out of the Budget Committee that fast, he put the tax cut provisions into HB 22 and sent it to Rules. But since tax cuts are an appropriations matter, transferring it to Rules is not only a silly charade but also an abuse of the legislative process.

Now, it’s not like Democratic members of the Rules Committee didn’t get the memo about this bill being dead on arrival in the Senate–no matter which committee it came out of–but they know kabuki theater when they see it and they just flat ran out of patience Monday with the grandstanding. They walked out of the committee hearing.

Jake Zimmerman says that playing hide and seek with this bill by shifting it to Rules shows a lack of respect for the Democratic (not to mention the Republican) Budget Committee members. Rachel Storch, according to Zimmerman, is very good at poring over budget figures. She and her colleagues spent hard weeks working on the budget that the Republican leadership is now trashing. And Zimmerman objects not only to that disrespect but also to being put in costume and asked to play a part in this little drama whose sole purpose is to rile up the wingnuts with lines like: “‘We think Missourians’ hard-earned dollars belong in Missourians’ pockets.'”  

As if eight years of Bush tax cuts did anyone but the wealthy any good. No, it’s galling that they can spout such fatuous cliches when you consider that:

Rep. Jeanette Mott Oxford, D-St. Louis, said estimates showed that the GOP’s plan would send 70 percent of the $1 billion in tax relief to the wealthiest one-fifth of the state’s taxpayers.

[emphasis mine]

So enough already. Democrats on the Rules Committee decided to do a little grandstanding of their own and they walked out.

And got one upped:

After they left, Majority Leader Steven Tilley, R-Perryville, deleted money slated for construction of a new Ellis Fischel Cancer Center in Columbia. Tilley diverted the funds to community colleges, Southeast Missouri State University and the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

What? Is this junior high school?

Tilley noted that the Democrat who represents Ellis Fischel — freshman Rep. Stephen Webber of Columbia — had left the meeting.

“My job is to represent my district,” Tilley said after the meeting. “His job is to do the same, and he went AWOL.”

He forgot to add, “Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.”

Cancer victims in Columbia had better hope that when the sane Senate restores the budget the House just gutted, that the upper chamber also sees fit to restore the funds for the cancer center.

Too bad it’s not within the grasp of Senate Republicans to restore some semblance of sense or moral authority to their puerile counterparts in the House.