Today’s required reading: GOP primary Presidential front-runner Jeb Bush bloviating on how working class Americans need to work longer hours so rich Americans can amass more wealth. Get the brief but cogent gist from Digby, and some more of the relevant context from Josh Marshall of TPM who gives his piece the spot-on title “We’ve Met the Doofus. And He is Jeb.”

But come on! Missouri GOP pols have been singing the same tune for donkey’s years and, as long as they up the ante on poor-bashing while enabling 2nd amendment creeps to display an ever vaster array of guns in new and unusual places, lots of Missourians don’t give a damn. Wasn’t it former State Senator Jane Cunningham who tried to undermine child labor laws just a few years ago? As I remember she got plenty of support from her GOP cohorts in the legislature before some residual shame set in. Try to top that Jebbie!  Think Progress remarked at the time:

As recently as the day before President Obama moved into the White House, it was difficult to imagine even the most conservative lawmakers breaking with the 70 year-old consensus surrounding child labor laws. Welcome to the post-Tea Party era, where even the most bizarre and disastrous mistakes from America’s past are part of the right-wing’s agenda.

Actually, welcome to Missouri’s Tea Party, which, by the above criteria, seems to still be partying full blast. While granting so many tax gifties to their favorite rich pals that the state can no longer fund basic road repair, Missouri’s GOP lawmakers have tried to add to the gift-basket with a plethora of bills that increase the business bottom line at the expense of workers. To add insult to injury, the lawmakers in question are often so busy cavorting and living high on their lobbyists’ dimes that they permit the businesses in question to write (or at least dictate) the content of the bills. Thank God that Democratic Governor Nixon occasionally remembers that he’s got a veto pen.

Looks to me that Brother Jeb is just trying, in his less than lucid style, to establish the fact that he’s got his far-right economic bona fides in order and can talk economic policy with the rest of the faux-policy wonks the GOP has regurgitated into the primary field. This type of talk is standard. But the rest of us, who aren’t high on whatever it is that the GOP put in that Tea Party beverage better remember what he claims he wants to do to our hard won labor rights. Even if, as Greg Sargent speculates, Bush just garbled his answer to an interview question (which reinforces Marshall’s doofus label), what he said is revealing:

… .I don’t know whether Bush is out of touch with workers or not. But his comments are more important for what they say about his diagnosis of what ails our economy, and the contrast that sets up with the Democratic diagnosis.

It isn’t a pretty picture no matter how you parse it.

In response to a scathing St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial page indictment of her recent shennanigans – holding preschool funding hostage in order to get back at Kathy Thornberg, a functionary of the Dept. of Elementary and Secondary education who dared defy her – state Senator Jane Cunningham shows us her very thin-skin, while ratcheting up her usual level of self-righteous dudgeon. In a letter to the editor (“Saying no to cookie-cutter ratings”, 4/29), she wants us to know the editorial is wrong about her relationship with conservative education reform guru, and former chancellor of the Washington D.C. School district Michelle Rhee; in fact, she claims, “contrary to what the editorial said, I have met Michelle Rhee on several occasions.” Whoopdy-do.

In her letter Cunningham also disavows any but the most noble motives for attacking Thornberg for her efforts to institute the Quality Ratings System (QRS). According to most authorities, the QRS process consists of developing appropriate, local standards which are then used to monitor preschools’ performance. The ratings that the process yields can be used to help preschools improve their performance and to inform parents about how well schools are performing. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

Cunningham, however, claims to be honoring the objections to QRS voiced by “public and nonpublic preschool directors and public school superintendents.” Elsewhere, though, she has indicated that the folks who were objecting most strenuously were mostly from the “non-public … religious or secular” segment of preschool providers. So, what’s the real story? You’re guess is as good as mine and I bet it stays that way.

Cunningham’s major criticism of the DESE version of QRS seems to be that it’s a “cookie-cutter” system that  imposes “one-size-fits-all” evaluative measurements on preschools. Ummm….what am I missing? For fairness sake if nothing else, meaningful evaluative standards need to be uniform. And if they aren’t, of course, they don’t really tell us much. Maybe that’s what some of those folks in the less-regulated “non-public” sphere actually want? Else why object so strenuously to standards that have never actually been tried out here in Missouri in a consistent, across-the-board fashion?

Cunningham’s cookie-cutter argument seems flimsy at best, especially when you remember that she’s one of the people in the legislature fighting hardest to impose teacher evaluations that draw strongly on the standardized test performance of a diverse student population. And she wants to talk about “cookie-cutter” and “one-size-fits-all” evaluative systems?

I’m guessing that the real issue depends on whether the cookie-cutter in question comes from Cunningham’s personal drawer. I don’t know about you, but personally, I prefer my education-flavored cookies to come from the stoves of trained educational professionals, not some pol drunk on Tea Party brew.

Cunningham also writes that:

There have been proposals from legislators to allow for competing rating services, much like there are a variety of national and regionally recognized accreditation companies or testing services from which schools choose. All provide valid information and quality control without subjecting pre-schools to the dictates of one individual whom they may not trust and who doesn’t not value the marketplace, which allows quality choices for families.

Gee, what I want when I go shopping for a pre-school is a bunch of diverse ratings that, for all I know measure apples and oranges. Of course, there’s really no danger of such a evaluative tower of babel since, as Cunningham herself has acknowledged in an article in the St. Louis Beacon last October, the legislature can’t get it together to actually do anything:

Cunningham said that for several years, efforts to enact a rating system for preschools in Missouri were debated in both the House and Senate, but the two chambers could never agree on what such a system should include. In the last two years, she said, the issue gained no traction at all.

Do you think maybe the DESE was just trying to impose some best practices in order to fill up the legislative vacuum? It seems, though, that Cunningham prefers to let Missourians founder in the desert while a bunch of ideologues fight about how to micromanage the details of processes that few of them seem to actually understand in the first place.  

Cunningham also, in a nod to to the de rigueur GOP anti-government rhetoric, writes that QRS would impose onerous “resource-draining, duplicative forms and certifications and rules” on pre-school staff. It may be news to Cunningham, but thorough documentation is essential if the evaluative process is to produce results that have any meaning. It’s particularly essential when funding depends on rankings – along with consistent, uniform standards. Everything, in fact, that the DESE was trying to put in place.

One is forced to conclude that Cunningham and her allies really don’t want information about how various pre-schools compare to get out. She actually stated in an interview in the St. Louis Beacon that

If they [i.e., preschools] don’t submit to her [i.e. DESE employee Kathy Thornberg] one-size-fits-all plan,” Cunningham said, “then when money or whatever vouchers become available to give to income-eligible families to choose a preschool, they won’t have a choice. It dramatically reduces the choices for low-income people.

What I want to know is how making sure that parents don’t have reliable, consistently derived information about how schools compare does so much for choice?

* Very slightly edited for clarity.

Today, thanks to a front-page story in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I learned that State Senator Jane Cunningham, in a fit of spite, is willing to gut a program that affects 4000 preschool children. She wants to yank $11.8 million from the Missouri Preschool Project because she thinks that Kathy Thornberg of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (with the backing, incidentally, of the Commissioner of Education and the State Board of Education) has “defied” the legislature and, more to the point I suspect, the rampageous Senator Cunningham herself.

What did Thornberg do to fan Cunningham’s fury? She applied for federal preschool funding that would require the use of a Quality Rating System, or QRS, which the doctrinaire Ms. Cunningham claims is tantamount to “‘social engineering’ on children,” and would force “a ‘Kathy Thornburg one-size-fits-all’ mentality on child-rearing in Missouri.”

According to Cunningham, by applying for a federal Early Learning Challenge grant, “the state Board of Education has slapped us across the face, and we have nowhere else to go but the money.” Don’t you just feel the heat from her white-hot ego? Don’t dare defy crazy Queen Jane or it’ll be to hell with the kids. And all because a federal grant requires evaluative criteria based on what more impartial observers describe as “documented best-practice standards.”

Cunningham, of course, is all for evaluating performance when the criteria reflects her own personal prejudices. Witness the teacher evaluation mandates in her anti-tenure legislative efforts if you want to talk about imposing external, one-size-fits-all criteria. Take, for instance, this year’s effort to punish teachers and hobble teacher unions, SB806:

The bill also includes numerous mandates regarding teacher evaluation systems, such as requiring at least fifty percent of evaluations to be based on student test scores and prohibiting districts and employees from designing evaluation systems within collective bargaining negotiations.  The also repeals the minimum salary law for all teachers.

So standards are okay when they’re used to enforce Cunningham’s prejudices, but professionally developed educational benchmarks are a problem?

Do you maybe think somebody has a few control issues? Maybe little Janey needs to take a time out until she learns to play well with others.

Fortunately for us all, that’s just what’s going to happen. Cunningham has been redistricted out of office and will be gone after November (although I’m sure she’ll do whatever she can to regain some kind of fiefdom, elective or otherwise, from which she can meddle in Missourians’ lives). It does, however, seem like  even some fellow GOPers in the Senate might be getting tired of her high-handed approach:

Springfield Senator Bob Dixon strongly criticized Cunningham for running the bill [SB806] through her own general laws committee instead of it going to the education committee … “To try to bypass a committee that deals specifically with educations when we’re talking about an education bill … I just think that is … not unlike the substance that is referenced in the book of Nehemiah that was placed in a special part of the city after it is expelled from the back end of a camel,” he said.

So far it’s been a very interesting day in Jefferson City (via the Missouri Secretary of State) as candidates file for office. In the State Senate:

State Senator – District 7

Democrat

Jason Holsman P.O. BOX 480572

KANSAS CITY MO 64145 2/28/2012

11:05 a.m.

Republican

Jane Cunningham 1602 TIMBERLAKE MANOR PKY

CHESTERFIELD MO 63017 2/28/2012

12:43 p.m.

Senator Jane Cunningham (r) is very, very unhappy. She filed in the 7th District. Does that mean she thinks the latest iteration of redistricting will get tossed and she’ll gain the top ballot position when (if) her district on the other side of the state reverts to its original number?

State Senator – District 21

Republican

Mike McGhee 5538 GRUBB RD

ODESSA MO 64076 2/28/2012

2:04 p.m.

David Pearce 123 SE 180TH RD

WARRENSBURG MO 64093 2/28/2012

3:46 p.m.

Okay, that makes this a primary between a birther who loaned his campaign $100,000.00 and one of the last republican moderates (and that’s relatively speaking) serving in Jefferson City.

Decisions, decisions.

State Senator – District 31

Republican

Scott Largent 1904 RUSTIC WAY

CLINTON MO 64735 2/28/2012

10:40 a.m.

Ed Emery PO BOX 123

LAMAR MO 64759 2/28/2012

4:13 p.m.

Sometimes you feel like a nut. Sometimes you feel like another nut.

Those who have been paying attention to facts rather than GOP rhetoric know that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a. Obamacare, has already had a positive impact in a number of areas such as permitting parents to keep their young adult children on their existing insurance policies until they are 26, providing  affordable coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, and strengthening existing and creating new community health centers (which also, incidentally, adds jobs). The primary goal of Obamacare, however, is to  extend insurance to uninsured Americans. As the Kaiser Foundation notes, starting in 2014, it will do so in two ways:

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes two primary mechanisms for helping people afford health coverage. Starting in 2014, people with family incomes up to 138% of the poverty level ($31,809 for a family of four and $15,415 for a single person in 2012) will generally be eligible for the Medicaid program. And, people buying coverage on their own in new state-based health insurance exchanges will be eligible for federal tax credits to subsidize the cost of insurance. Tax credits will be calculated on a sliding scale basis for people with family income up to four times the poverty level ($92,200 for a family of four and $44,680 for a single person in 2012). …

The map below, from a new Kaiser Foundation report, shows the geographic distribution of the nonelderly Americans who stand to benefit from these twin programs:

Using the accompanying zip code based calculator provided by the Kaiser Foundation, one finds that in Poplar Bluff, Missouri 26% of the nonelderly population could benefit from these ACA programs; 20% are eligible for these programs in the Central Missouri area around Columbia. In my own relatively prosperous West St. Louis County zip code, 63011, from 8%-10% of the nonelderly population will benefit from either the Medicaid expansion or subsidized coverage available through the health care exchanges in 2014. Looks like the ACA stands to meet some serious need in much of Missouri, especially, as the map suggests, in extreme Southeastern, Northeastern and pockets in Southwestern Missouri.

Meanwhile, in the state Senate, a few die-hard anti-Obamacare zealots, like, for example, my own Senator Jane Cunningham (R-7), are standing in the way of the work that is needed to establish the insurance exchanges that the ACA mandates as the mechanism to provide low-cost, federally-regulated insurance to those who need it. They’ve stormed, raged and lied themselves blue in the face about what the ACA will do, and now they’re stalling, hoping against hope that the Supreme Court will uphold their extremist reading of the Constitution.

Bear in mind that if our intransigent lawmakers continue to stall and their trust in conservative judicial activism is not fulfilled, Missouri will not be prepared to submit a plan for an exchange by Jan. 1, 2013 – which means that the federal government will step in do the work that the state refuses to do. Given the general level of functioning that I see in Missouri governmental circles, that doesn’t seem like too much of a problem to me, but I do seem to remember that these folks are the very ones who constantly whine that the federal government can’t deal effectively with local needs.  As the News-Leader points out:

We already have a $20.8 million federal grant for the exchange. It’s not a question of money. It’s a question of political will. The Missouri House passed legislation moving the state-based exchange forward. The Missouri Senate should do the same. And Gov. Jay Nixon should be stepping out front to lead on this important issue.

Hear! Hear!

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, the PBS Newshour rebroadcast a segment originally shown at this time last year in which school children read Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It was, as you might expect, both a charming and moving exercise. As I listened, however, I was suddenly struck by the specific phraseology in one of the refrains where King had begun to develop the variations on the “I have a dream” theme, especially the words I have bolded below:

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” – one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

Let’s see – where I have I heard folks talking about “nullification” before. Could it have been the Tea Party – those folks who pretend to be so outraged when anyone points out that there are often hints of petty racism in their rhetoric? Could it have “dripped” from the lips of some of our own Missouri legislators – Jane Cunningham and Jim Lembke perhaps?

Nullification is a constitutional theory, based on a questionable interpretation of the 10th amendment, that holds that individual states can abrogate federal law; in its most extreme form, it stipulates that states are voluntary participants in the federal union and can withdraw their allegiance as they desire. It formed the theoretical basis for the Confederate secession and should have been laid to rest by the civil war. According to the Constitutional Accountablility Center:

… the tactic was most aggressively advocated for in the 1820s and ’30s by pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun (who started the short-lived Nullifier Party), extended by the Confederate secessionists in the 1850s and ’60s, and then reinvigorated by segregationists in the 1950s and ’60s.

There you have it – a theory utilized by slaveholders and bigots.

But, you say, aren’t Tea Partiers and their representatives like Cunningham and Lembke using nullification to protest laws like Obamacare that affect all races? Indeed. But isn’t it interesting that the Tea Party grew out of opposition to a mild, centrist health care reform law that would bring millions of uninsured into the health care fold, while helping slow increases in health care costs overall. Didn’t you find the violence of the opposition surprising? Don’t you – at least secretly – suspect that the general rage might have had something to do with the fact that the law in question is the signal achievement of America’s first black president?

And, of course, there’s the fact that many on the right are convinced that big government programs benefit brown people at the expense of whites. Just a few days ago, in fact, one of the GOP presidential contenders let the cat out of the bag once again. Rick Santorum, speaking on the topic of welfare in Iowa declared that:

I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.

This in spite of the fact that only 9% of food stamp recipients in Iowa are black, or that most welfare recipients in the U.S. are white.

So was Mr. Santorum revealing his own racism, or pandering to what a 2010 survey described as the “racial resentment”  of his Tea Party leaning audience? Actually, I ‘m not sure it makes much difference. What the revival of nullification talk tells us, among many other things, is that we still have a way to go before Martin Luther King’s vision of the peaceable kingdom is fully realized.  

…like it’s republican glitter. It goes everywhere.

Today, at the Missouri Ethics Commission:

C000223 01/03/2012 CUNNINGHAM CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE Rex and Jeanne Sinquefield 244 Bent Walnut Westphalia MO 65085 self 12/31/2011 $20,000.00

[emphasis added]

$20,000.00 here and $20,000.00 there, pretty soon you’re talking serious money.

It is a commonplace among progressives that many GOP politicians serve the interests of a wealthy minority, and do so by exploiting the not necessarily wealthy, low information segment of the population. The right’s almost religious opposition to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides an interesting case study that seems to illustrate the truth of this contention.

To start with, consider the release today of the annual survey prepared by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Health Research & Education Trust. One finding is that by 2021, if the current cost trajectory continues, employee-based health insurance premiums will increase from an average of $15,073 today to $32,175, more than doubling over 10 years. Those poor souls who must enter the insurance market on their own, without the benefit of an employer’s benefit plan, will pay even more.

Then take into consideration that, according to the latest census data, the ranks of the uninsured in Missouri amounted to 14% of the population, or 826,600 individuals at the beginning of 2009. Since we’re dealing with a deteriorating employment picture that may not improve any time soon, those numbers are undoubtedly higher now and will continue to increase. Not a pretty picture- at least not until 2014 when, under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), insurance exchanges should become operational.

You remember insurances exchanges don’t you? Each state is required to set up an exchange that would give individuals and small businesses a unified place to shop for affordable and, for the neediest, subsidized health insurance plans. Exchanges can be developed by states in order to take into account local conditions, although if states fail to act, the federal government will step in and implement an exchange.

Anther good thing about exchanges: They prohibit insurance company price-gouging. For instance, insurance plans in the exchanges have to demonstrate that 80% of the premiums they receive are used to pay for health care, and participating plans would have to provide stringent justification before increasing prices. Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Makes insurance affordable for those in the market all by their lonesome, while holding health care costs down for all of us.

Got all this down? Good. Then watch this video of state Senator Jane Cunningham  going ballistic. She snorts, bellows, and paws well-trampled Tea-Party constitutional ground, charging the governor with violations of the same because he seems to have taken it for granted that it would be in the interests of citizens of the state to accept a  federal grant to help establish the exchanges. Bear in mind, we’re talking about our tax dollars coming back to Missouri. And of course, in spite of her histrionics, Senator Cunningham is dead wrong when she suggests a lapse of propriety on the Governor’s part.

Some further facts to chew on:

— The Missouri House approved, with almost no controversy, legislation that would have led to the formation of an insurance exchange in Missouri

— Anti-ACA crusader Jane Cunningham filibustered the House Bill in the Senate.

— As a result, a Senate Interim Committee has been tasked with exploring “Missouri’s options on the establishment of a health insurance exchange and to study the effect of existing state law on same.”

— Prominent among the Committee members – six Republican Senators and two Democrats – is the bellowing diva above, Jane Cunningham, who, along with a majority of the GOP members of the Committee, have long been on the record as virulently opposed to any government role in health care delivery.

— To all appearances, Senator Cunningham and her fellow-travelers on the Committee are attempting to use the hearings to sabotage the establishment of a Missouri Insurance exchange. Scores of witnesses who wish to speak in favor of an exchange have not been allowed to testify in hearings where insurance industry spokespeople and others opposed to the exchanges dominate.

To recap: We have federal legislation that has a good shot at providing insurance for many who lack it now, while helping to control costs for all the rest of us. Although, the ACA hinges on private insurers, many speculate that it could lead to a greater government role in health care delivery at the expense of the private insurance industry. On the other hand, we have a bunch of posturing ideologues who, as in the case of ALEC darling, Jane Cunningham, have cast their lot with millionaires. As for the folks who vote for them, Jonathan Bernstein sums it up aptly:

… they don’t care very much about the ACA. They strongly oppose the health care plan that Barack Obama and Nancy Peloci and  Harry Reid crammed through Congress against the will of the American people, and they think it’s an unconstitutional power grab that amounts to a government takeover that’s going to bankrupt the nation by cutting Medicare and death panels and all. But they don’t know or care anything about the exchanges, or the cost-cutting efforts, or most of the rest of it.

I just read in the St. Louis Beacon that the Missouri Senate has just about “fixed” the sections of Jane Cunningham’s Amy Hestir Davis Student Protection Act that would have restricted or even banned student-teacher contact via the Internet. I am relatively comfortable that there is much in the bill that will assist school districts to deal with teachers who have been proven to be sexual predators, something that most of us can support. However, when it came to the supposed menace posed by evil social networking sites, the framers went totally off the wall. The legislation was so poorly written that lots of people were concerned that they couldn’t figure out what behaviors the bill actually prohibited.  

I was amused but not surprised that the sponsor of the bill, Senator Jane Cunningham, is one of our current Tea Party darlings. Tea Partiers, as you no doubt know, are folks who like to rant about freedom, the primacy of personal responsibility, and, over and over again, the encroachment of the “nanny state.” Yet, when it comes to anything to do with, among other things, sexual behavior, they never fail to come out with a great big stick of the sort usually hefted only by the meanest of nannies – the sort of stick that can do lots of collateral damage.

Of course, the Amy Hestir bill’s Internet prohibitions offered Tea Partiers a threefer.  The bill not only raised the specter of sexual misbehavior – and in a form involving predatory exploitation of children, something that few would defend -but it took on teachers, currently a favorite bête noire, since teachers are, for the most part, happily unionized. The bill certainly suggests that they are all always under suspicion of improper motives and must be monitored in all communications with minors.  Finally, the bill went after social networking with a bazooka.

In my experience the typical middle-aged or elderly Tea Party type is often a little disturbed by the chaotic world of the Internet, whether or not they admit it. The Internet isn’t – yet – easily controlled by centralized authority. Additionally, the concerns that many right-wingers express about the World Wide Web often seem to center on, once again, sex, specifically the somewhat sensationalized belief that the Internet is mainly used to promulgate pornography and lure women and children into unregulated sexual behaviors.

The fact that neither of these possibilities are exclusive to the Internet goes unremarked as conservative religious leaders rant and rave about its dangers. Oddly the same people are often the first to proclaim, when it comes to gun control, that guns don’t kill people, people do. Yet they have real problems with the parallel proposition that Facebook doesn’t lure young girls into illicit activity, … well, you get the idea.

I remember listening to a call-in radio program on NPR when a self-identified Tea partier was asked by the host what she meant by nanny state.  Her examples?  Michelle Obama’s suggestions that folks eat greens, and congressional efforts to set energy standards that could affect one’s choice of a light bulb. And she was ready to go to war about it all. Her comments do, however, suggest to me the difference between the type of social control – which is what conservatives mean when they talk about a nanny state – that liberals might advocate and that proposed by many on the right.

For the most part, the liberal nanny state is motivated by actual knowledge – greens are verifiably good for you after all. Liberals recognize that we have a collective social life and they want to make it better, or at least keep it from degenerating. Energy standards that affect light bulbs help to reduce energy consumption and contribute to a more stable environment, ergo, a better collective life. Encouraging people to eat in a healthier way not only improves the individual’s life, it makes our collective life better by helping cut overall health care costs.

The conservative nanny state, though, seems to be motivated by over-weaning fear. It is true that we need to make sure that we keep teachers who abuse children out of classrooms, but we don’t have to strike out blindly to do so. Often it seems that the real fear behind so many conservative prohibitions borders on the irrational. Many have argued very effectively that behind the general social hysteria about child abusers, is the fear of loss of control. It is even more obvious that behind the hysteria about abortion is the fear of sexually empowered females; behind the frothing about Muslims lies the never-ending fear of the other. These folks are scared silly.

It is important to understand this fact: We all want some kind of control over our social lives and everybody has their ideal “nanny” to achieve that end. Don’t believe conservatives when they tell you they are against government interference in personal life. Most right-wingers are desperate to maintain an orderly and static social environment. But beware – the nanny that the conservatives want to hire to keep under control all the chaotic impulses that so frighten them is a bully who will have no compunction about slapping your hands with a ruler and sending you to bed with no dinner if you so much as make a peep.