Al McAffrey

• Home
• Volunteer
• Issues
• Biography
• Blog/News
• Issue Survey
• Links
• Media
• Student Debt
• Health Reform

Blog

• State’s current fiscal crisis requires leadership, not frivolity

  Posted Feb 06 at 1 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  By Rep. Al McAffrey
  Sat. Feb, 6, 2010
  
  This week the State Legislature began the difficult task of keeping the ship of state afloat and on course, despite a $1.3 billion revenue shortfall for the current fiscal year and a gloomy forecast for the next one. One might think the enormous challenge we are facing would keep legislators focused on meaningful legislation to address the budget and other real and pressing matters, but you might be surprised.

  The Legislature is only in session for roughly four months, meaning the time we have to work on resolving our state’s problems is very limited. That’s one reason we are surprised by some of the bills we are being asked to spend time considering during the current legislative session, bills which have nothing to do with our economic crisis and little to do with any real problem.

  For example, one education bill proposed by a Republican legislator, HB 2814, will have no effect other than to waste time that could have been spent considering more useful proposals, because it duplicates requirements that are already in place. The bill would require that the state’s social studies curriculum include instruction on the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and selections from the Federalist Papers, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address and Washington’s Farewell Address. It’s not a bad idea. That is why the Legislature voted several years ago to require that these things be taught every year during Freedom Week, and why they are already included in our textbooks.

  Sometimes, the ideas contained in these frivolous, time-wasting bills are not good ones at all, leastwise not from a legal or Constitutional viewpoint. Such is the case with HB3219. This bill declares that the federal government has no authority within the state to regulate hazardous waste, air pollution, water pollution, oil, natural gas, petroleum or petroleum products, and would prohibit state agencies from enforcing federal environmental laws or regulations. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but on solid legal ground? No.

  The same can be said of HB3218, which states that any product made in Oklahoma that does not leave Oklahoma is not subject to federal law or regulation. That’s an argument that might succeed in a high school debate, but which would be quickly dismissed in federal court.

  Another legally unsound Republican proposal, HJR1063, states that any federal law or regulation could be declared “null and void” by a one-third vote of either the Oklahoma House of Representatives or Senate.

  If these Republican legislators had done their homework, they’d have learned that the courts ultimately decide which level of government will prevail, and they always deem federal law to supersede state law. Measures such as this do nothing but waste the legislature’s time, and when they become laws and are challenged in court, they also waste taxpayers’ money.

  Some of the bills might even invite laughter, if they were not so reprehensible. Such is the case with HJR1064, which calls for the repeal of the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That’s the one that allows state residents to elect their U.S. Senators through a vote of the people. This Republican initiative proposes we return to the era when senators were selected by members of their respective state legislatures, and that a vote by one-third of the state legislature would be all that is required to remove a senator from office.

  It’s interesting that one of their colleagues has proposed an amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution in HJR1056 which would require all Oklahoma courts to adhere to the U.S. Constitution, U.S. Code and federal regulations, along with the Oklahoma Constitution, laws and regulations. Of course, all Oklahoma judges already pledge to abide by these documents when they are sworn in, so the bill is unnecessary. It would also bar our courts from considering any convention or treaty the U.S. has signed and ratified, which would not only contradict federal law, but also the section of this proposed law requiring Oklahoma courts to conform to federal law.

  At a time when lost jobs are counted in the tens of thousands, and Oklahoma is facing what may be the worst fiscal crisis its history, Democrats are concentrating on bills intended to create jobs an strengthen our economy. It is unfortunate our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are willing to waste so much time pandering to the fringe elements of their base while neglecting the serious issues we now face.

• McAffrey: I have no doubt that this ruling will inevitably corrupt our democracy

  Posted Jan 22 at 10 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Oklahoma City - Oklahoma State Representative Al McAffrey (D-OKC) released the following statement in reaction to the United States Supreme Court ruling rolling back campaign finance restrictions:

  "The American people are losing their voice to powerful corporations thanks to the Supreme Court ruling yesterday that rolled back campaign finance restrictions. The conservative majority of the Supreme Court has made a mockery of its claim to judicial restraint. I have no doubt that this ruling will inevitably corrupt our democracy and give corporations and special interests a louder voice than the American people."

• What I'd Like to Hear a Congressional Democrat Say.

  Posted Jan 20 at 10 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  By Paul Waldman
  www.prospect.org
  
  This is what I'd like to hear a congressional Democrat say:

  "We're obviously disappointed about the results of the special election in Massachusetts. But the fact that we have gone from a 20-seat advantage in the Senate to an 18-seat advantage in the Senate doesn't mean that Republicans are in charge. They had eight years under George W. Bush to push their agenda, and they pushed it good and hard. There's a reason that at the end of that eight years, the voters elected Democrats to the White House and large majorities in Congress. That hasn't changed.

  "So for the next nine and a half months, we’re going to do everything we can to improve our country's fortunes and set it on the right course. That includes health care reform – we promised it when we ran, and we're going to deliver it. In their role as the minority party, Republicans will try every parliamentary maneuver they can to stop us. That's no surprise – they've been fighting against reform all year, just as they've been fighting against it for 70 years. As the minority, they certainly have the right to try to obstruct our agenda, and try to make sure nothing gets accomplished. But as the majority – one that still holds 59 percent of the seats in both the House and the Senate – we have both the right and the obligation to do all we can to overcome their obstruction.

  "Republicans would like people to think that because their candidate won one race in one state, the Democratic majorities have somehow ceased to exist. Well they haven't. The need for health care reform is no less great than it was yesterday, and we believe no less strongly in the agenda that got us elected. Our opponents won't like it – they'd rather we surrender to them, and make believe that they're running things, like they were during the Bush years.

  Well tough luck. Come November, the voters can judge us on what we've accomplished and what we haven't, and judged our opponents on what they say they'd like to do. Until then, we're going to keep working."

  That's what I'd like to hear. Anyone? Anyone?

  --Paul Waldman

• McAffrey's Statement on Massachusetts Election

  Posted Jan 19 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Oklahoma City, OK— Oklahoma State Representative Al McAffrey released the following statement this evening in reaction to the results of the Massachusetts special election:

  "Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts changes the political numbers in the United States Senate, but the fact that 45 million Americans still do not have health care coverage and 15 million Americans do not have jobs are the real numbers we must keep our focus on."

  "Tonight, I'm more proud than ever to be a Democrat. I belong to a political party that fought to pass the Nineteenth Amendment that gave women the right to vote, the Social Security Act that lifted millions of Americans out of poverty, the Voting Rights Act that gave African-Americans the right to vote, the Civil Rights Act that outlawed racial segregation in schools, and Medicare that extended health care to millions of elderly Americans"

  "We can't afford to let Sally Kern, the face of the Oklahoma House Republicans, and her followers across the aisle determine the future of our state with absurd policies like banning divorce. After years of controlling the State Legislature, the Republicans have delivered an agenda that has left thousands of Oklahomans without health insurance, without jobs and without hope. When the Oklahoma Legislature resumes our legislative session next month, I can guarantee the folks of District 88 that I will continue my fight to move Oklahoma forward harder than ever."

  ###

• The Silly Season: Election years bring a lot of personal agendas to the legislation table

  Posted Jan 13 at 7 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Oklahoma Observer
  by: Arnold Hamilton
  www.urbantulsa.com

  There is a scientific term to describe the bizarre political behavior that often accompanies election years. It's call the "silly season."

  In the heat of campaigns, incumbents and wannabes alike say and do the darndest things as they pursue the affections of frequently indifferent voters and the attention of mainstream media entranced by grassfires and triple ax murders.

  This election year, though, promises to be even zanier than usual.

  It's not enough that all 101 state House seats and half the state Senate's 48 seats are up for grabs -- or that incumbents won't be seeking re-election for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and state superintendent, just to name a few.

  Toss in the state's migraine-inducing budget crisis--a $1 billion revenue shortfall this fiscal year and bleak prospects for next--and you've created a recipe for wackiness, even by Oklahoma's often low standards.

  Perhaps that helps explain the flurry of recent editorial interest in Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Jari Askins' proposal to create a budget-only session every other year.

  Currently, lawmakers meet every February through May not only to hammer out an annual state budget but also to consider new laws and tweak existing ones. Multi-tasking legislators rarely finalize the budget until the session's final hours, leaving many members clueless about what it contains and the rationale for its priorities.

  Askins, a former state representative now serving as lieutenant governor, thinks Oklahoma would be better off if lawmakers devoted an entire session to studying, negotiating and debating a longer-term -- i.e. two-year -- state spending blueprint, rather than mixing the fiscal discussions with routine legislative sausage-making.

  Which brings us to the 2010 session and campaign.

  As one who's concerned about dangerous bridges and crumbling prisons, dwindling mental health services and overcrowded classrooms, I want our elected state leaders focused on the complexities of today's fiscal crisis--not on sideshow issues like tax-free holidays for gun sales, teaching the Bible in public schools or wresting power from the state's criminal court judges.

  Or as state Rep. Ryan Kiesel, D-Seminole, put it, "This session is a choice between awful and terrible. I start with the assumption that all legislation is egregious at this point."

  Unfortunately, helping right the (fiscally) sinking ship of state isn't as important to some lawmakers as advancing a social agenda or pandering to the redneck masses--in other words, winning re-election.

  Consider Rep. Sally Kern's latest idea. The Oklahoma City Republican -- infamous for contending that gays and lesbians are greater threats to America than terrorists -- now wants to make divorce all-but-impossible in Oklahoma.

  There's room for serious discussion about a serious problem: Why is Oklahoma's divorce rate perennially among the nation's highest? Why do so many marriages break up and so many families disintegrate in a state that fancies itself as a buckle on the Bible belt?

  But Kern's proposal isn't rooted in reality. She would prevent judges from granting divorces on the grounds of incompatibility if there are minor children in the home, the marriage has lasted at least 10 years or if either party objects to the divorce. Sorry to say, but some marriages are so bad that it's worse for children to be trapped in such a volatile home. Further, can't you imagine an abusive, controlling spouse refusing to let the other escape?

  "Frankly, I don't know when Rep. Kern finds the time to dream up this bizarre legislation," said Rep. Al McAffrey, an Oklahoma City Democrat. "Our state is facing a budget crisis and several other significant challenges.
  Given the state of our economy, we need steady leaders in the Legislature that are ready to create serious solutions, not political side shows."

  Guns and God are popular election year topics for lawmakers, as well.

  Sen. Tom Ivester wants to create elective Bible classes in state schools, though the Elk City Democrat is quick to point out that he envisions it as a history--not a religion--course.

  Ivester is playing with fire. We have churches and Sunday schools to teach the Bible the way each denomination sees fit. Oklahoma educators have enough problems without being thrust into the middle of this quagmire. Just ask Texas, where schools have been tied in knots over this issue in recent years.

  Meanwhile, two other Democrats, Sen. John Sparks of Norman and Rep. Wes Hilliard of Sulphur, want to create a "Second Amendment Weekend Sales Tax Holiday" that would give Oklahomans a sales tax break on handguns, rifles and shotguns on a weekend each year.

  My children are grown, but I well remember driving to the outlet malls in north Texas to take advantage of that state's back-to-school, tax-free weekends, a program that Oklahoma has replicated. Helping parents get their children ready for school is a noble idea. Helping hobbyists save a few bucks is not. What's next? A tax-free weekend for golf equipment?

  How about this instead: If you're hell-bent on cutting taxes at a time when the state already is having trouble paying its bills, why not finally give working stiffs and the poor a break by eliminating the sales tax on groceries? That would probably win more gratitude and votes than playing to the NRA crowd.

  What's next? Legalizing the use of silencers? Oh, wait -- Republican Sen. Steve Russell of Oklahoma City has filed a bill that would allow hunters to use the James Bond-esque devices. Think Dick Cheney's hunting partner would approve?

  -- Arnold Hamilton is editor of The Oklahoma Observer; www.okobserver.net

• Report Questions Raises for Superintendents, Some Numbers Misleading

  Posted Jan 13 at 8 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  www.news9.com
  By Rusty Surette, NEWS 9

  OKLAHOMA CITY – A new report finds some superintendents across Oklahoma are getting raises this year despite budget cuts.

  The report, compiled by Oklahomans for Responsible Government, is putting the spotlight on how much Oklahoma school superintendents are making.

  OFRG's report shows that more than 300 districts gave raises to their superintendents of $1,000 or more this school year. Fifty-eight of the administrators now make more than State Superintendent Sandy Garrett, whose salary of $124,000 is set by the state.

  Read the full report from the Oklahomans for Responsible Government.

  The data from the State Department of Education was compiled as a part of the group's continuing effort to improve transparency in government, according to a news release from OFRG.

  "Common education is getting its budget cut like all other agencies this year, but a majority of superintendents got pay raises - some as much as a teacher's salary," said Brian Downs, OFRG Executive Director. "This is money that is not getting into the classroom."

  The report shows that more than $51 million was spent on superintendents' salaries this year, a $1 million increase over last year. The number of superintendents making $100,000 or more is up from 175 last year to more than 200 this year.

  "Someday we'd like to be able to do a report like this on all administrative costs, but with so few districts putting their budget details on their Web sites, compiling that data is difficult," said Downs. "This is the kind of information taxpayers deserve to have at their fingertips so they can give feedback to their elected officials on the school board."

  On paper, the report shows Yukon's superintendent received a $6,500 pay raise, Bethany's a $2,000 raise and Edmond's superintendent received a $4,000 pay raise. But the biggest in the state was in Keota where the superintendent's salary increased by more than $62,000.

  But here's where those numbers and others can be misleading. In Keota, only $24,000 were paid out for a superintendent's salary in 2008 because the superintendent resigned and no replacement was named. When a replacement was named in 2009, that's when a full salary was paid which explains why the report shows there was a $62,000 increase.

  The same goes for Oklahoma City superintendent Karl Springer. The report shows he made $178,000 in 2008 and jumped up to $200,000 the following year. In reality Springer never took a pay raise. The $22,000 increase reflects his benefits such as health and retirement.

  Not all the numbers are misleading. There were plenty of superintendents who, in fact, took raises. OFRG said it's a wake-up call for parents and tax-payers, and a reminder that it's school board members use state money to set the salaries for these superintendents.

• Democratic Powerbroker Whitten Responds to OKGOP Chairman's Lawsuit

  Posted Jan 07 at 10 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  By: Reggie Whitten
  President, Oklahoma Association for Justice

  As you might have heard by now, Gary Jones, the Chairman of the Oklahoma Republican Party, has filed a lawsuit in the District Court of Logan County against 12 different individuals and entities alleging a number of causes of action. Chairman Jones’ lawsuit stems from his failed 2002 and 2006 campaigns for the post of State Auditor. Even though he did not receive enough votes to win these elections (and it’s unclear whether he would have), Chairman Jones alleges these 12 defendants committed fraud and caused him damages, including mental anguish, emotional distress and punitive damages.

  Some have called Chairman Jones’ lawsuit “frivolous.” The Oklahoman even editorialized that both the Chairman of the Republican Party and the Oklahoma courts have “better things to do.”

  It seems to me somewhat ironic that the Oklahoman would throw stones at Chairman Jones for filing a lawsuit. The Oklahoma Publishing Company or “OPUBCO”, the entity which operates and distributes the Oklahoman, certainly has no problem seeking relief in the court system when it feels it has been wronged, which is precisely what Chairman Jones did. For example, OPUBCO filed a federal lawsuit last year, alleging punitive damages, against James Conradt, a Nebraska football fan, for publishing a fake internet article. OPUBCO also filed a bad faith lawsuit in 2003 seeking punitive damages against an insurance company over a disputed claim. Would OPUBCO like Chairman Jones or anyone else to label their lawsuits as frivolous before even hearing the facts?

  I believe that both OPUBCO and Chairman Jones have the right to seek relief in the courts. No one should have the right to prejudge a lawsuit as frivolous. Indeed, in the trial of every case, the court will ask potential jurors whether they have made up their minds already or if they will allow both sides to present all the evidence before they make a decision. What tort reformers do is routinely label everyone else’s lawsuit as frivolous when they couldn’t possibly know all of the facts.

  No matter what your personal beliefs are regarding the merits of his case, Chairman Jones has just as much of a right to have his day in court as any other citizen in this State, including OPUBCO! Chairman Jones has rights under the U.S. and Oklahoma Constitutions that he should be allowed to exercise. If his lawsuit is eventually deemed by the Court to be frivolous, he willpay dearly, just as any other litigant would, due to the laws already in place to deal with frivolous suits. However, he should be given the opportunity to allow his case to play out.

  Unfortunately, the Republican Party, of which Chairman Jones is the leader, does not agree. The Republican Party is still talking about tort reform even though they passed comprehensive tort reform last session! Staunch tort reformers, those who cry about caps and limits on damage awards, would deny the rights of litigants before they are even harmed. There is a little girl or boy out there right now who will be killed or severely injured through no fault of their own. His or her rights will be limited by tort reform measures and the Republican Party is working every day to further limit those rights. ALL citizens of this State deserve their day in Court and Chairman Jones is no different.

  The hypocrisy is evident: the mantra of the Republican Party is that frivolous lawsuits abound. Indeed, when the Chairman of the Republican Party or OPUBCO speak out in favor of tort reform, it appears that everyone’s lawsuits are frivolous. However, when they are wronged and when they seek to have their wrongs addressed, they have no problem seeking relief at the courthouse, implying that at least their lawsuits are meritorious and warrant the imposition of punitive damages.

  This situation reminds me of a cautionary tale I read in a book recently by Stephanie Mencimer. In the Introduction to Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies are Taking Away Your Right to Sue, Mencimer tells the story of Frank Cornelius, one of the leading lobbyists in the mid-1970s who helped push through significant changes to Indiana’s medical malpractice laws. Among these changes was a hard cap on all damages, including medical bills and lost wages, at $500,000.00. Pain and suffering awards were completely abolished.

  Later on in his life, in a great twist of irony, Cornelius was the victim of medical malpractice. He was also a victim of the very laws he pushed through. He injured his knee in 1988, and through a series of subsequent negligent medical treatments, was left wheelchair-bound with a stack of $5 million in medical bills. After Cornelius filed a lawsuit against his doctors, he realized exactly what he had done. Cornelius ultimately was forced to settle his lawsuit for $500,000.00 because this was the most he was entitled to. Cornelius subsequently became a consumer rights activist and fought against tort reform. In 1994, he wrote a piece in the New York Times, admitting that the law he helped pass was not worth it and that it was a sham. Cornelius eventually committed suicide in 1995 and his suicide note consisted of a letter to the Indiana legislature, who was considering further limitations on lawsuits.

  The story of Frank Cornelius is one that all tort reformers, including Chairman Jones, should think about very carefully. Most tort reformers do not have a clue about the impact their actions will cause in the future to innocent victims and hopefully they will avoid the karmic effects that Cornelius suffered.

• McAffrey: Sally Kern has written the new Republican agenda that is working to force Oklahoma backward

  Posted Jan 07 at 9 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  PRESS RELEASE
  From the campaign of Oklahoma State Representative Al McAffrey
  For Immediate Release: January 7, 2010
  Contact: info@almcaffrey.com

  McAffrey: Sally Kern has written the new Republican agenda that is working to force Oklahoma backward

  Oklahoma City - This week, Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kern (R- OKC), a prominent leader in the Oklahoma Republican Party, released a new piece of legislation she will introduce next month. The purpose of her proposed legislation is to limit the freedom of married Oklahomans to get divorced.

  "As a leader of the Oklahoma Republican party, Sally Kern will stop at nothing in her misguided effort to embarrass our great State," said Oklahoma State Representative Al McAffrey (D-OKC). "Rep. Kern's bill limits Oklahomans' rights and restricts freedom to an entirely new level."

  Citing our society as the "root cause" of the destruction of the family, Rep. Kern's bill seeks to amend Oklahoma’s divorce law, making it more difficult to obtain a divorce on the grounds of “incompatibility."

  This is not Kern's first foray into the political spotlight. She made national headlines when she equated gay Americans with terrorists and most recently authored a proclamation on morality that misquoted several prominent historical figures.

  "Frankly, I don't know when Rep. Kern finds the time to dream up this bizarre legislation," said McAffrey. "Our state is facing a budget crisis and several other significant challenges. Given the state of our economy, we need steady leaders in the legislature that are ready to create serious solutions, not political side shows."

  In recent years, Kern has become the standard bearer and face of the Republican caucus in the Oklahoma House of Representatives. Due to her continuing political stunts, Kern has emerged as the most visible Republican in the House.

  "I am not interested in creating divisions but rather building a coalition focused on common-sense solutions," said McAffrey. "Unfortunately, Rep. Kern is using her leadership position within the Republican party to do just the opposite."

  www.almcaffrey.com

  --30--

• State Rep. Sally Kern Seeks Restrictions on Divorce

  Posted Jan 06 at 8 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NEWS 9
  By Charles Bassett
  www.news9.com
  
  OKLAHOMA CITY -- An Oklahoma lawmaker wants to put tighter restrictions on couples seeking a divorce.

  State Representative Sally Kern is seeking to limit the "incompatibility" rule for getting a divorce.

  Read the proposed bill.

  There are several reasons a person can seek a divorce such as adultery or extreme cruelty, but when it comes to incompatibility Kern says there should be some stipulations.

  Sally Kern is no stranger to controversy. She equated gays with terrorists and called for a state proclamation on morality.

  Now Kern is taking on divorce.

  "This bill will just put the brakes on a divorce being granted immediately," Kern said. "It does not say or intend to mean a divorce will never be given."

  Kern has filed House Bill 2279 under the incompatibility provision she says a divorce should not be granted if there are living minor children in the marriage, the parties have been married 10 years or longer or if either party files a written objection to the divorce.

  Kern says her overall goal is to protect children.

  "When minor children are involved, parents need to think a little bit beyond just themselves," said Kern. "They have a responsibility and an obligation to those children."

  Historically, Oklahoma has ranked high when it comes to divorce. The Oklahoma Marriage Initiative works to keep couples together.

  "We have focused not on legislation, but on providing skills, but we certainly commend the lawmakers for thinking creatively about potential strategies as well," Kendy Cox with the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative said.

  But not everyone sees it that way.

  "If this isn't big government, I don't know what it is," Chuck Thornton with the American Civil Liberties Union said.

  The local chapter of the ACLU says Kern's rational for protecting children doesn't fly and they expect there will be legal challenges to the proposed legislation.

  "We're talking about one of the most treasured associational rights that a person has as being married and here comes a so-called conservative trying to stick her nose in the most private of associational matters," Thornton said.

  If Kern gets her way the measure will become law November 1.

• Al McAffrey talks about state budget crunch, MidTown OKC growth

  Posted Dec 21 at 10 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Capitol Beat OK
  By Patrick B. McGuigan
  http://capitolbeatok.playintraffik.com

  Al McAffrey, the Oklahoma City Democrat who represents District 88 at the state Capitol, replies quickly when asked what the top problem facing the Legislature will be when he and his colleagues return for another session, whether special or regular: “It’s the budget of course. We have a financial problem here in Oklahoma. I’ve been here at the Legislature for three years. Prior to this crunch we had tax cuts for the top echelon and that has hurt us, frankly.

  “Some say we can replace the top taxes with fees, with user fees for certain government services. But you know, people are struggling. There is more unemployment and people are losing benefits.

  “The way I look at it, a user fee is just another name for a tax. We can’t raise taxes because that would require a vote of the people, only they can do that. So services are going to have to be cut. That means we’re about to start cutting social programs even more. We’re not going to cut prisons, are we? Maybe furloughs for some cases, to let some of the non-violent criminals out of prison.

  “So it’s probably social programs. Sitting on the human services committee, I’ll tell you, it’s so difficult. I’ve had people say to me, ‘’Do you know where we can place any more fees that won’t hurt people?’ I say I really don’t.”

  In an interview at his legislative office this week, Rep. McAffrey said, “There are folks struggling every day. We’ve spent all our state money. I will say that I’m thankful our governor has not gone along with everything we wanted to do. Last year, some of us in the Legislature tried to give a $30 million increase for state employees, and he stopped it. That would have been such a mistake if we’d done that.”

  McAffrey notes, “Only transportation comes out relatively harmless because of the federal money. I am glad we had that transportation help.”

  McAffrey believes, “The leadership to some extent, I think, figured that oil and gas would carry us through difficult times, through tough times. But even that is not enough now. We’re not in as bad a shape as some of the other states.

  “I have the habits of a small businessman. I know about payroll, taxes, sales taxes, paying for computers and machinery, utilities. We didn’t hold enough money in the back. I’m afraid we’ve not always been good stewards with what the taxpayers sent to us.”

  Concerning the ongoing mandated cuts agencies are already facing, and the anticipated need for legislators to trim even more state spending, McAffrey commented, “We’re looking to cut where we can. There are not really a lot of places to cut. And to get federal money, we have to match it in these programs. In the human services area I believe Director [Howard] Hendrick has done a fine job trying to keep programs alive. It is a time to set priorities. We’re looking at every department.”

  Asked to list any areas he thought could be ripe for reductions in a time such as this, McAffrey replied, “I’ve been pushing to look at maintenance in every single department. Can we defer some expenses without hurting? Are there construction projects that are not yet funded that we can wait on, hold up on, without hurting what is important? I hope we spend even more time talking to department heads and to directors to get their ideas.”

  McAffrey believes department heads and directors are taking the current situation seriously, and looking for possible economies: “We are asking them, and we should, where in their department we can trim with limited or lower impact on services. They all seem to understand where we are, and it’s a tough place.”

  If there is any silver lining, he reflects, “As tough and bad as things are, I am so grateful for what we’ve done in Oklahoma that’s kept us at only 7 percent unemployment.”

  To boost the MidTown Oklahoma City area he represents, McAffrey points to a proposal he has made to allow wine sales in grocery stores: “That would boost sales, help our sales taxes and be good for this part of Oklahoma City. Many of my constituents have asked for us to make that change in the law.”
  Some have worried clerks under the age of 21 could be put in an awkward place if such a bill passed. McAffrey explains: “That was probably the toughest part of the issue. The new bill I’ve got coming is modeled on what they do in Colorado. There, they put the wine in a special room and only an older person can do the checkout for that product. Last time, [Republican leaders] didn’t even hear the bill I was pushing. Some people raised mental health concerns. We’re trying to accommodate the concerns, all of them. And yes, we can protect the minors without ruining the bill. Several representatives, including Republicans, have talked to me about a possible compromise.”

  This year, “I have a sense that it might gain some traction because people think of the tax on liquor sales as a ‘sin tax.’ Any time we tax something like liquor or cigarettes, anything that you don’t have to do, well, that’s a target for possible revenue that people seem more comfortable with. This is a proposal that wouldn’t hurt the poor and middle class. It would help.”

  Focused on the MidTown area, he said, “We have remarkable economic momentum here in Oklahoma City. I was a strong supporter of MAPS 3. I believe the leadership of our city has done remarkably well. The MAPS projects will continue to be good for our city. Our unemployment rate is low here compared to elsewhere. In Oklahoma, it might be only Lawton that is better.

  “With the MAPS process, we will continue our momentum in District 88 and around the city. MAPS 3 will help keep us going. I feel fortunate to represent this district where the job loss has been relatively low.”

  He reflects on those not participating in the community’s successes, “I sent an email to constituents recently congratulating them, applauding the momentum we have. I got a note back from a lady who said she’d just lost her job and has two kids. These are hard times.

  “I must say that one of the good aspects of this job is that when we get letters from people asking for help getting state benefits or with other problems, and we find ways for state programs to relieve some of the stress and their financial burden. That is so rewarding.”

  In other areas, McAffrey wants “to put a limit on the use of pre-existing conditions to deny health insurance to people. It’s the New Jersey model and it would assist many people. Another proposal is a bill for the state health insurance policies to cover gastric bypasses to promote health and help our people who are battling obesity.”

  Asked for his observations as another political campaign season looms after the spring legislative session, Rep. McAffrey says, “I hope I’ve done a good job and that the voters give me another pass [he was unopposed in 2008], but I’m preparing for an election on the assumption I’m going to have one. I have my website up. I’m trying to campaign in a way that is efficient and cost conscious. I have taken my responsibilities seriously.”

  McAffrey concluded with this observation: “Speaking of expenses, I’ve said I would be willing to pay for our own coffee in this office. Three or four weeks ago, KWTV had a report about how much we spend on coffee. Maybe that is something we could cut and save money.”

• Oklahoma City school board passes protection for gay pupils

  Posted Dec 15 at 12 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  BY MEGAN ROLLAND

  The bullying or harassment of gay, lesbian and transgender students in the Oklahoma City School District will not be tolerated, school board members said Monday with a vote amending the district’s policy.

  "This is an opportunity for us to get a little bit ahead of the curve, not very far I’ll admit,” board member Phil Horning said. "You cannot live in central Oklahoma and not admit that there is a tendency to discriminate against gay and lesbian individuals. You’d have to have your head in the sand not to admit it … I’ll die before I vote no.”

  Horning and five other board members voted to add the protected classes to the district’s bullying and harassment policy, while board members Lyn Watson and Steve Shafer voted against the policy change.

  "What do we do with other groups that don’t fit into these classifications? Are we going to create a database and continue to expand this policy?” Watson asked, pointing out that in the parent handbook for schools the policy reads the enumerated classes and then adds "or for any other reason.”

  "I just think that our policy needs to be visionary and inclusive of everybody,” Watson said.

  Tammy Carter, general counsel for the Oklahoma City School District, said the change in policy was necessitated by the federal Matthew Shepard Act, a law passed in October that added both sexual orientation and gender identity to a list of protected classes under the hate-crime law.

  "Courts have begun to hold school districts that fail to protect students from discrimination ... liable for violating constitutional rights,” Carter said.

  The board waived its rules Monday to hear the proposed change to the harassment and bullying policy without the required 30 days of advertisement. Watson and Shafer voted against waiving the rules.

  Horning said the rules were waived because it was a sensitive issue with "nothing to profit us by extending the debate on the policy beyond tonight.”

  Read more: http://newsok.com/oklahoma-city-school-board-passes-protection-for-gay-pupils/article/3425049?custom_click=headlines_widget#ixzz0ZmSZ0vTl

• Veterans cuts alarm legislators

  Posted Dec 08 at 2 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  by Michael McNutt

  The Veterans Affairs Department has not cut any services yet, but they may not be avoided if deeper budget cuts are order, an agency official told legislators.

  The department has been to use carryover money and will delay filling certain positions to make up the required 5 percent cut in state appropriations, said Steven Diffee, the agency’s program administrator for finance.

  The department is holding nonnursing positions open for a longer period before filling them, he said Thursday.

  Deeper cuts probably would result in reducing services, which eventually could lead to closing one of the state’s seven veterans centers, Diffee said.

  “We’re just at the precipice of service reductions,” he said.

  About 85 percent of the agency’s budget is personnel costs; the department cannot cut or furlough nursing personnel without reducing services, he said. U.S. Veterans Affairs Department regulations require the state agency to meet certain staffing requirements.

  A cut of another 5 percent would result in closing several beds, which would cause a “death spiral” that eventually would lead to the closing of a veterans center because the state would lose federal funds, Diffee told members of the House appropriations and budget subcommittee on public health.

  “You start with shutting down 12 beds, and once you shut down 12 beds you lose about $600,000 in federal funds and that causes your budget shortfall to be a little larger and you’re going to have to shut down more beds after that,” he said. “It just starts spiraling until you lose the whole center.”

  Rep. Paul Wesselhoft, subcommittee vice chairman, told Diffee legislators don’t want to see a veterans center close.
  “That’s not going to happen,” said Wesselhoft, R-Moore. “We don’t want to do that.”

• McAffrey Adamantly Opposed to Russell's Proposed Legislation

  Posted Nov 17 at 2 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
  Nov. 17, 2009
  Contact: info@almcaffrey.com
  
  Oklahoma City - Today, Oklahoma State Representative Al McAffrey (D-OKC) announced his strong opposition to State Senator Steve Russell's (R-Del City) plans to introduce a bill exempting Oklahoma from adhering to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

  "Senator Russell is employing the same old tired arguments from yesteryear that have attempted to hold Oklahoma back," McAffrey said. "Preventing crimes against Oklahomans because of who they are is in no way an attack on free speech. That argument is nothing but empty rhetoric used to scare and mislead folks."

  Russell said he plans to introduce his bill during the upcoming spring session of the Oklahoma State Legislature. Russell initially considered a way to pass his bill while retaining the $5 million endowed by the federal government to enforce it.

  "I don't know about Senator Russell, but I enlisted in the United States Navy to fight for the rights of all Americans regardless of their skin color, gender or who they are," said McAffrey. "Today, I'm serving in the State Legislature to do the same thing: fight for the rights of all Oklahomans. That's a fight I'll never give up."

  McAffrey has introduced previous hate crimes legislation in the Oklahoma State House of Representatives and is a champion of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act that was signed into law earlier this year.

  - 30 -

• McAffrey: State Budget Crisis a Direct Result of Republican Leadership's Failure to Lead

  Posted Nov 16 at 2 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
  November 16, 2009
  Contact: info@almcaffrey.com
  
  Oklahoma City - Today, Oklahoma State Representative Al McAffrey (D-OKC) announced his opposition to Republican plans for additional funding cuts to state agencies. While a 5 percent cut in funding to state agencies has already been taking its toll on programs like senior nutrition centers, Republican leadership in the State Legislature is proposing more funding cuts.
  
  "The Republican leadership in the House and Senate have successfully granted excessive tax cuts for the wealthy while laying the burden of operating our state on Oklahoma's middle class families," said Oklahoma State Representative Al McAffrey. "Their smooth talking points during campaign season might sound appealing, but the budget crisis we face is a direct result of the Republican leadership's failure to lead."
  
  Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry has proposed using the state's $600 million Rainy Day Fund to meet the demands of the budget shortfall during the current fiscal year. Henry has already warned that deeper funding cuts to state agencies could jeopardize core services.
  
  "I support using the Rainy Day Fund to keep core services, like senior nutrition centers, up and running," said McAffrey. "However, when the legislature comes back into session in February we have to address solutions to the budget crisis that will not jeopardize vital state services that millions of Oklahomans depend on. As for me, I expect more than empty rhetoric from the Republican leadership. I've met with too many seniors in my district who have been negatively affected by these budget cuts. It's time for better solutions that don't put a massive burden on Oklahoma's seniors and working families."

  - 30 -

• Lonely Planet at OSU Center of Performing Arts

  Posted Nov 13 at 10 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  

  Friends,
  
  I was invited to OSU last night to watch this play. The Lonely Planet, an unseen and unnamed killer shadows a pair of friends, decimating their community.

  Playwriter Steven Dietz asserts this the way that tragedy seeps into our lives. it starts at a distance or something we don't have a name for.  then sort of quietly appears in the room.  

  The Lonly Planet was an play setting in 1980s. When aids was on the rampage taking live of young men throughout the United States.  Directed by J Kevin Doolen and a cast that was outstanding J Bryson Baker and Nick Leos.

  It will be showing at Oklahoma State University, Center of Performing Arts.  November 12, 13, 18, 20, and 21st at 7:30 pm. November 15th at 2:30 pm (with a special panel discussion to follow). General: $12.00, Senior (55+): $10.00, OSU Student: $10.00.
  
  I would recommend you take a trip to Stillwater to see one of these preformance.  It will bring tears and laughter.
  
  All my best,

  AL

  CLICK HERE FOR INFORMATION ABOUT PUCHASING TICKETS

• Veterans Day Message from Al

  Posted Nov 11 at 2 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Dear Friends,

  

  When I was little, growing up in Sulphur, Oklahoma, my dad instilled in me the value and importance of public service. Those values stuck with me and after graduating high school, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy where I served as a U.S. Navy Corpsman alongside U.S. Marines.

  As the father of three daughters I did my best to teach them the values of serving our country and community. As your State Representative, I've been deeply committed to fighting on behalf of our veterans.

  

  Last year, a bill was introduced in the Oklahoma Legislature to create the Oklahoma Veterans Health Insurance Program. This program would have ensured that all veterans had access to quality health care when they returned home to Oklahoma. Unfortunately, some of my colleagues chose to derail the proposal. I truly believe that our Country and our State should spare no expense when it comes to caring for the courageous men and women who have so bravely fought for our security and freedom.

  Today, we honor the service of men and women across our country who have risked their lives and livelihood to save ours. Perhaps President John Kennedy said it best: “As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”

  All my best,
  Al

• Senate Holds First Hearing on Inclusive ENDA

  Posted Nov 05 at 11 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  From The Human Rights Campaign

  Today the U.S. Senate will hold its first hearing ever on a fully-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). The measure — in front of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee this morning at 10:00 am – would prohibit workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. In 29 states it is still perfectly legal to fire someone based on his or her sexual orientation, and in 38 states it is still legal to fire someone for being transgender. Watch the hearing webcast beginning at 10:00 a.m.

  Witnesses include:

  • Hon. Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice
  • Helen Norton, Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado School of Law
  • Hon. Lisa Madigan, Attorney General, State of Illinois
  • Virginia Nguyen, Diversity & Inclusion Team Member, Nike, Inc.
  • Mike Carney, a police officer for the City of Springfield, Massachusetts who successfully sued for sexual orientation-based discrimination under Massachusetts law.

  HRC is disappointed that there will be no transgender witnesses on the panel but we’ve made sure trans voices are heard through written testimony, including from HRC Board of Directors Member Meghan Stabler [pdf] and HRC Associate Director of Diversity Allyson Robinson [pdf].

  Said HRC President Joe Solmonese who submitted written testimony on the bill:

  “We applaud the leadership of Senators Merkley and Collins in support of fairness and equality for all LGBT people and thank Chairman Harkin for holding this important hearing. For the first time in history, the Senate is moving forward with legislation to protect Americans from arbitrary discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Like our neighbors and coworkers, LGBT people simply want a fair chance to succeed and support our families.”

  The Employment Non-Discrimination Act would address discrimination in the workplace by making it illegal to fire, refuse to hire or refuse to promote an employee based on the person’s sexual orientation or gender identity at companies with 15 or more employees. The legislation was introduced in the U.S. Senate on August 5 of this year; a House version was introduced on June 24 and the House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing on the measure on September 23.

  An estimated 87% of Fortune 500 companies include sexual orientation in their equal employment policies, and more than one-third also include gender identity. More than 80 companies have joined the Business Coalition for Workplace Fairness, a group of leading U.S. employers that support the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. To view a list of the companies, visit: www.HRC.org/Workplace

  ENDA is supported by a broad range of civil rights, religious, civic and professional organizations, including the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, NAACP, AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union, AFSCME, National Education Association, National Employment Lawyers Association, Anti-Defamation League, Religious Action Center, Unitiarian Universalist Association, United Church of Christ, American Civil Liberties Union, and many others.

  Currently, federal law provides legal protection against employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, age and disability, but not sexual orientation or gender identity.

• Senior meals supporters crowd Oklahoma's Capitol

  Posted Nov 05 at 11 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  BY MICHAEL MCNUTT

  Concerned that thousands of older Oklahomans are going without a meal, about 400 showed up Wednesday at the state Capitol to urge state leaders to restore $7.4 million in funding cuts to senior nutrition programs.

  Marjorie Lyons, volunteer state president of AARP Oklahoma, said many seniors who rely on home-delivered meals may no longer be able to live independently and instead may be forced into nursing homes, which would be more costly to the state.

  Lyons, of Broken Arrow, said 97,744 meals in Tulsa County will not be delivered to 700 senior residents between Sunday, when the cuts took effect, and June 30, the end of this fiscal year. Three meal sites have suspended serving meals.

  "We realize these are tough economic times, but when Oklahoma can fund a tax credit for electric golf carts, surely we can find the money to feed hungry Oklahoma seniors,” she said.

  Oklahoma AARP gave those attending the rally empty paper plates and asked people to sign them and send them to legislators and the governor to illustrate the 790,000 hot meals that won’t be served between now and June 30.

  Some were angry at the start of the rally, but cheers broke out when Sen. Kenneth Corn told the crowd the governor told him about an immediate funding idea.

  Corn, who with another legislator camped out overnight on the Capitol grounds to bring attention to the funding cuts, said Gov. Brad Henry entered their tent about 12:30 a.m. Wednesday to pass on a solution: to restore the senior nutrition cuts, DHS Director Howard Hendrick is willing to use money earmarked for other programs but not due to be spent until later this fiscal year.

  But Corn said Hendrick wanted assurances from legislative leaders in the Republican-controlled House and Senate that the $7.4 million would be taken out of the state’s savings account, the Rainy Day Fund, and given to the Department of Human Services when lawmakers return for their regular session in February.

  Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn Coffee, R-Oklahoma City, called the idea interesting and "one we are willing to consider.”

  Corn said if nothing can be worked out, he supports calling a special session. He and other legislators signed petitions Wednesday asking the governor to call a special session.

  Read more: http://newsok.com/senior-meals-supporters-crowd-oklahomas-capitol/article/3414747?custom_click=lead_story_title#ixzz0W0AHQpSq

• Hundreds of Oklahomans rally at state Capitol for senior meals

  Posted Nov 04 at 4 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  By Michael McNutt
  
  About 400 Oklahomans crowded around the second-floor rotunda of the state Capitol today to ask state leaders to restore funding to senior nutrition programs.

  Gov. Brad Henry, whose office is on the same floor, did not attend. But he spent Tuesday night and early this morning talking to advocates about a possible solution to the financial crisis.

  Charles Campbell, a coordinator of today's rally, said Henry called him Tuesday evening and told him that the state Department of Human Services, which cut $7.4 million from the senior nutrition program because of state revenue shortfalls, is willing to use money earmarked for other programs but not due to be spent until later this fiscal year.

  Campbell, who like Henry is from Shawnee, said the governor told him that DHS Director Howard Hendrick wanted assurances from the Republican legislative leadership that the money will be restored to his department when lawmakers return in special session in February.

  Sen. Kenneth Corn, D-Poteau, who with Sen. Tom Ivester, D-Elk City, camped out overnight on the Capitol grounds, said the governor stopped by their tent about 12:30 this morning and told him about his idea.

  Corn said he liked the idea. But if Republican legislative leaders don't agree, he still supports the calling of a special session. He and other legislators signed petitions today asking for a special session. He has to get two-thirds of the 101-member House and 48-member Senate to sign the petition to get a special session called. Minority House leader Danny Morgan, D-Prague, said House Democrats would not seek being paid for their expenses to keep costs of a special session down.

  AARP Oklahoma gave people empty paper plates to show how Oklahoma's greatest generation — the name given to those who fought in World War II — is now fighting hungry. They were asked to sign their names and give it to their legislators.

  Marjorie Lyons, volunteer state president of AARP Oklahoma, said the funding cut is affecting thousands of elderly Oklahomans.

  "From north to south, east to west, in cities and towns like Edmond, Calera, Maysville, Caddo, Wynnewood, Roff, Commerce, Choteau and Locust Grove, senior nutrition sites are no longer serving lunch," said Lyons, of Broken Arrow. "And you won't find a meal on any Friday between now and the end of the fiscal year in Enid, Ponca City, Newkirk, Blackwell or Billings."

  Sen. Patrick Anderson, R-Enid, called again on Henry to use 5 percent of his $105 million in discretionary federal stimulus funds for the program. The governor earlier said those funds already were committed and they are to be spent on one-time projects.

  The state Department of Human Services cut $7.4 million earmarked for some senior nutrition programs to deal with a monthly 5 percent cut in state funding. Those monthly funding cuts are expected to continue through June, the end of this fiscal year, because state revenue has come in 26 percent below estimates for the first quarter.

  Read more: http://www.newsok.com/hundreds-of-oklahomans-rally-at-state-capitol-for-senior-meals/article/3414588?custom_click=headlines_widget#ixzz0VvjkdIS9

• Oklahoma Senators to camp outside Capitol to protest budget cuts

  Posted Nov 03 at 4 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  By BARBARA HOBEROCK, World Capitol Bureau
  Published: 11/3/2009

  OKLAHOMA CITY - Two Oklahoma senators say they will spend the night outside the Capitol to show their solidarity with seniors who have been left out in the cold due to state budget cuts.

  Sen. Kenneth Corn, D-Poteau, and Sen. Tom Ivester, D-Elk City, plan to camp outside the Capitol Tuesday night to protest a decision by the Commission for Human Services to cut $7.4 million from a program that provides meals to seniors. The cuts were made in response to declining state revenues.

  Corn, who is running for lieutenant governor, said leadership in the Republican-controlled Legislature has failed to address the issue. He has called for a special session to restore the funding cuts.

  "I don’t think it is a publicity stunt," Corn said, adding that he and Ivester are trying to send a message.

  "We don't believe seniors citizens should be shut out in the cold and they should be a priority in state government," Corn said.

  The office of Senate President Pro Tem Glenn Coffee, R-Oklahoma City, was not immediately available for comment.

  Meanwhile, seniors are expected to rally from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesday on second floor of the Capitol to protest the cuts.

• New Web Ad!

  Posted Nov 03 at 3 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Dear Friends,
  
  You have been constant supporters of mine from the beginning and I wanted to share some exciting news with you!

  Today, our campaign is releasing our first-ever web ad! It explains why I'm running for the State House and my commitment to fighting for a stronger Oklahoma economy.

  It is important that we spread our message of moving Oklahoma forward and building a stronger economy. I cannot do this alone, I need your help!

  Click here to view the ad. After you watch it, help spread our message and forward it to your friends and family!

  Our state is facing many tough challenges and Oklahomans deserve steady leadership that will stand up for them in the state legislature. During these trying economic times, I will continue fighting for small businesses and hard working families who are struggling to get by.

  Web ads are a great way to spread our message of moving Oklahoma forward. Click here to view the ad. After you watch it, help spread our message and forward it to your friends and family!

  I truly appreciate your support!

  All my best,
  Al

  

• UCO lunch series features Senator Andrew Rice

  Posted Oct 31 at 10 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  BY SARAH WARREN
  Published: October 31, 2009

  EDMOND — State Sen. Andrew Rice, D-Oklahoma City, will discuss public policy at the University of Central Oklahoma’s Policy Institute’s "Lunch with a Policy Maker” series at noon Nov. 9 in the Cherokee Room of the Nigh University Center.

  The lunch costs $10 for UCO faculty, staff and members of the community; it is free to UCO students.

  This is the second event in the new series, which kicked off in September.

  Economics professor Mickey Hepner, creator of the series, said he hopes lunch with a policy maker will increase dialogue about public policy within the UCO and Edmond communities and will teach how to differentiate between policies and politics.

  "It is only through engagement in the policy conversation that we are prepared to be informed citizens,” Patricia Loughlin, associate professor of history, said. "Therefore, my hope is that participants will come away from this lunch further equipped to engage in our democracy.”

  The American Democracy Project has partnered with the UCO Policy Institute to pay for the cost of lunches for UCO students at all "Lunch with a Policy Maker” events.

  The UCO Policy Institute is a nonpartisan, university-based think tank committed to enhancing the policy debate within Oklahoma.

  Funded by UCO, the institute aims to be a tool for the development of effective state and local public policies, by providing policy makers with the results of the latest research on public policies.

  Space is limited for the "Lunch with a Policy Maker” event, and preregistration is recommended. To register, go to http://busn.uco.edu/forms/policymakerlunch.

  For more information, contact Sarah Warren, coordinator of communication and public relations for UCO’s College of Business Administration, at 974-2822 or send an email to swarren11@uco.edu.

• Graham Colton Thanksgiving Food Drive Show in OKC

  Posted Oct 29 at 8 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Don't miss the Second Annual Graham Colton Thanksgiving Food Drive Show in Oklahoma City to benefit the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma. Graham will be performing a very special hometown show with the full band on Friday, Nov 27th at The Oklahoma City Farmers Market.

  CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS

  

• Nov 4th - Preview Party for the Global Market

  Posted Oct 29 at 8 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  

• President Obama Signs the Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (VIDEO)

  Posted Oct 28 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  President Obama Signs the Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act:

  Obama also delivered some remarks about the legislation later in evening:

• Obama signs first major federal gay-rights law

  Posted Oct 28 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  From: news.yahoo.com
  By Margaret Talev, McClatchy Newspapers

  

  WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama on Wednesday signed the first major piece of federal gay rights legislation, a milestone that activists compared to the passage of 1960s civil-rights legislation empowering blacks.

  The new law adds acts of violence against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people to the list of federal hate crimes. Gay-rights activists voiced hope that the Obama administration would advance more issues, including legislation to bar workplace discrimination, allow military service and recognize same-sex marriages.

  Congress passed the hate crimes protections as an unlikely amendment to this year's Defense Authorization Act. Obama, speaking at an emotional evening reception with supporters of the legislation, said that more than 12,000 hate crimes had been reported the past decade based on sexual orientation.

  He spoke of President Lyndon Johnson signing protections for blacks in the 1960s and said this was an extension of that work. "We must stand against crimes that are meant not only to break bones but to break spirits," Obama said. "No one in America should ever be afraid to walk down the street holding the hands of the person they love."

  Legislation barring firms from firing employees on the basis of their sexual orientation could win passage in the House of Representatives by year's end, gay-rights advocates said. More than half of U.S. states currently allow employers such freedom.

  Obama has promised to push Congress to repeal the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy that prohibits being openly gay while serving. A Senate panel is expected to hold a hearing on that issue next month, and legislation could be debated next year.

  Gay-rights activists also hope for repeal next year of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which would give federal legitimacy to gay marriages recorded in states that allow them.

  The amendment signed into law Wednesday was named partly for Matthew Shepard , a 21-year-old student at the University of Wyoming who died after a 1998 beating targeting him because he was gay, and whose parents were instrumental in leading the fight for such legislation. The law also was named for James Byrd Jr. , a black Texas man dragged to his death in a racially motivated killing the same year.

  The measure also extends protections to those attacked because of their gender or disability.

  Federal hate crimes law already covers race, religion and national origin. The new law strengthened it substantially however, by removing a requirement that a victim must have been participating at the time of the assault in some federally protected activity, such as voting, for it to apply.

  Matthew Shepard's parents joined Obama for the bill signing, as did the family of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts , who until his death in August was deeply involved in pushing the legislation.

  The Shepards' fight took a decade. With recent elections adding more lawmakers who are supportive of gay rights, by 2007 the Congress had sufficient votes to pass the legislation, but then- President Bush indicated that he'd veto it.

  Obama, campaigning last year, promised to sign it.

  Judy Shepard issued a statement saying that she and her husband, Dennis, "are incredibly grateful to Congress and the president for taking this step forward on behalf of hate crime victims and their families, especially given the continuing attacks on people simply for living their lives openly and honestly."

  She also called on Americans to look beyond legislation and work in their own lives to advance acceptance of gays.

  Critics of the legislation, including several Republican congressional leaders, argued that an attack against another person is an attack, regardless of motivation and that no special categories are appropriate.

  Many also voiced concerns about "thought police" and fears that the new legal protections could curb free speech if those who oppose gay rights fear they could somehow be prosecuted for publicly voicing their thoughts. The law punishes acts, however, not thoughts.

  Gay-rights advocates said that the legislation will enable the Justice Department to step in when states can't or won't, and will make extra federal money and resources available to local law enforcement officials who need help preventing or prosecuting such attacks.

  They also predicted that it would affect American society in a meaningful way.

  "It sends a number of messages across America: that hate will not be tolerated, that this Congress and administration value all Americans," said Joe Solmonese , the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay-rights advocacy group.

  Malcolm Lazin , the founder of another advocacy group, Equality Forum , said the legislative progress comes at a time when reported violence against gays is on the rise. Last year, he said, 29 gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender Americans were killed because of their sexual orientation.

  "This is really the first federal gay rights bill," Lazin said. "So it is a literally historic moment. This is America acknowledging homophobia as a social problem."

  Lazin, who helped organize a demonstration outside the White House on Wednesday calling for more protections, said the legislation "really is the beginning of a process of addressing homophobia in our schools, our communities, our culture. We learned from the black civil rights movement: In 1964, there was the Civil Rights Act, but that didn't mean it ended violence or created equality. It was the beginning of a process that's ongoing. That's how we view the Matthew Shepard Act."

• Congressional leaders signaling move to repeal 'Don't ask, don't tell' policy

  Posted Oct 17 at 10 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  From: The Hill
  By Eric Zimmermann and Tony Romm

  
  Congress could move early next year to repeal the "Don’t ask, don’t tell" policy on gays serving in the military.

  The move would play to the liberal base of President Barack Obama’s administration, but could pose risks by introducing a controversial issue into an election year in which Democrats are wary of losing seats, particularly in the House.

  In the Senate, White House advisers have directly discussed repealing the law with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), a key member of his chamber's Armed Services Committee. Lieberman, a hawk on defense, is a staunch opponent of "Don’t ask, don’t tell," and his support could prove influential in winning centrist votes.

  Lieberman's office has confirmed the discussions took place but did not provide further details.

  Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), a leading proponent of gay rights and close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), earlier this week predicted the House would move on the issue.

  “Early next year we will be moving on ‘Don't ask, don’t tell,’ ” Frank told Headline News.

  Frank made the comment a few days after Obama reiterated his campaign promise to repeal the policy on gays serving in the military.

  Obama has disappointed some supporters by not moving more aggressively to repeal the law. He has taken a different road from that of President Bill Clinton, who moved to repeal the ban on gays in the military early in his administration. But that ended up causing Clinton other political problems, including in his fight for healthcare reform.

  Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) on Thursday urged the Obama administration to solicit advice from his military advisers about how and when the repeal of the law should occur. He said the law no longer reflects the reality of society, and that it costs the military critical personnel.

  “As we fight in two wars, it's counterproductive — and, frankly, expensive — to discharge men and women who have critical skills we need to win those wars just because they're gay,” Udall said in an Oct. 15 letter to the president.

  Earlier this month, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) announced she had won a commitment from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to hold the first hearing on the policy in 16 years.

  Levin has signaled he supports a repeal of "Don’t ask, don’t tell" provided it is done “in the right way.”

  Legislation to repeal “Don't ask, don't tell” has been pending in the House since March, and has 181 co-sponsors--nearly 40 more than such legislation has ever garnered before. A Democratic aide noted that another dozen lawmakers who have not co-sponsored the bill have privately committed to voting for it.

  Democrats expect hearings to start up in winter of this year or early next year.

  The latest push on gays in the military comes as gay activists and Democrats alike have grown more skeptical of the Obama administration's commitment to repealing the law.

  Although the president has long promised to end the controversial 1993 ban — a vow he repeated before last week's gay rights march at the Capitol — the White House has taken little formal action, prompting some Democrats to push the issue on their own.

  A day after Obama again promised to repeal the law, tens of thousands of activists marched on the Capitol to push for equal rights, including marriage equality and a repeal of the law.

  Frank dismissed last Sunday's protest, telling The Associated Press it was “a waste of time at best.”

  “The only thing they're going to be putting pressure on is the grass,” he quipped.

  He also defended Obama in the interview with CNN, arguing the president was hamstrung by reticent lawmakers.

  “President Obama has been trying,” Frank said. “The problem is not President Obama. The problem again is getting to the 60 Senate votes."

• McAffrey Fights Denied Health Care (Video)

  Posted Oct 15 at 8 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Family Denied Health Coverage
  From: KOKH FOX 25

  One lawmaker hopes to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage.

  State Representative Al Mcaffrey will propose a bill to ban companies from using pre-existing conditions as a reason to decline coverage.

  Some lawmakers argue the state should not force insurance companies to cover customers they do not want.

  

• Oklahoma City AIDS Walk, run is aiming to raise money, awareness

  Posted Oct 09 at 8 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  by Susan Simpson

  The Oklahoma City AIDS Walk and 5K run are Sunday in downtown.

  For more information, go to: www.aidswalkokc.org

  The run begins at 8:30 a.m. in Bricktown and the walk at 2 p.m. at the Myriad Botanical Gardens. Registration starts 90 minutes before each event.

  The events aim to raise money and awareness about HIV and AIDS.

  Organizers say more than 4,400 Oklahomans are living with HIV or AIDS. Nationally, half of new HIV infections occur in people younger than 25. AIDS is a leading cause of death for blacks, who account for nearly half of HIV diagnoses in America.

  John Greer, president of the board for the Oklahoma City AIDS Walk, said the group hopes to raise $45,000.

  "Any amount is a blessing since the nonprofit agencies who apply for these funds vitally need them to support the work they do for HIV and AIDS with services, direct care and education,” he said. "Funds raised from both events go back directly into the OKC community.”

• McAffrey to Introduce Legislation Eliminating Discrimination Against Pre-Existing Conditions

  Posted Oct 08 at 8 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
  October 8, 2009
  Contact: tyler@almcaffrey.com

  McAffrey to Introduce Legislation Eliminating Discrimination Against Pre-Existing Conditions

  Oklahoma City – Today, Oklahoma State Representative Al McAffrey (D-Oklahoma City) announced plans to introduce legislation during the upcoming legislative session of the Oklahoma House of Representatives that would eliminate insurance companies’ discrimination against pre-existing conditions.

  “As I’ve traveled around our state, I’ve heard too many horror stories from good, decent, hard-working Oklahomans who have been refused health care coverage because of a pre-existing condition,” McAffrey said. “The practice of insurance companies using pre-existing medical conditions as an excuse to refuse coverage must be stopped.”

  A recent national survey estimated that 12.6 million non-elderly adults were discriminated against because of a pre-existing condition in the previous three years. Of those 12.6 million Americans, 36 percent tried to purchase health insurance directly from an insurance company in the individual insurance market. 1

  “It is not surprising that insurance companies are spending $1.4 million a day to oppose health reform,” McAffrey said. “They would rather keep the status quo by denying claims, raising premiums and deductibles whenever they like, taking our personal health care decisions out of our doctors’ hands and denying care because of pre-existing conditions.”

  According to a recent report issued by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, since 2000 alone, the average family health insurance premiums have increased 77 percent in Oklahoma. 2 Also, only two insurance providers in Oklahoma account for 71 percent of the health insurance market. 3 Choice is even more limited for people with pre-existing conditions. In Oklahoma, premiums can vary based on demographic factors and health status, and coverage can exclude pre-existing conditions or even be denied completely.

  “The fact that the insurance companies have enough money laying around to spend $1.4 million a day opposing health reform is a testament unto itself,” McAffrey said. “It’s more obvious than ever – we can no longer afford the status quo, we need health insurance reform now.”

  Even when offering coverage, insurers can exclude whole categories of illnesses related to a pre-existing condition. For example, someone with a pre-existing condition of hay fever could have any respiratory system disease – such as bronchitis or pneumonia – excluded from coverage. 4 McAffrey said his legislation would eliminate insurance companies discrimination by completely banning the practice of using pre-existing conditions as an excuse for refusing coverage.

  “To me, this is a question of morality and decency. Health insurance companies are making record profits because they are able to take your health care decisions out of your doctors’ hands,” McAffrey said. “The practice of using pre-existing conditions as an excuse to refuse health care coverage puts profits before people and that’s not the Oklahoma way.”

  --30--

  _____________________________________________

  1. Doty MM, Collins SR, Nicholson JL et al. Failure to Protect: Why the Individual Insurance Market is not a Viable Option for Most US Families. The Commonwealth Fund, July 2009.
  2. Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends, AHRQ, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey - Insurance Component, 2000, Table II.D.1.
  Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends, AHRQ, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey - Insurance Component, 2006, Table X.D.
  Projected 2009 premiums based on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, "National Health Expenditure Data," available at http://www.cms.hhs.gov/nationalhealthexpenddata/.
  3. Health Care for America Now. (2009). "Premiums Soaring in Consolidated Health Insurance Market." Health Care for America Now.
  4. Pollitz K, Sorian R. How Accessible is Individual Health Insurance for Consumers in Less than Perfect Health? Kaiser Family Foundation, June 2001.

• Oklahoma City Museum of Art presents 'What's the Matter with Kansas?'

  Posted Oct 04 at 9 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Join the Oklahoma City Museum of Art for a showing of

  What's the Matter with Kansas?

  Saturday, October 10, 2009
  5:30pm & 8pm

  Sunday, October 11, 2009
  2pm
  
  With special guests
  Author Thomas Frank & Director Joe Winston
  
  Click here to purchase tickets

  Based on the Thomas Frank's best-seller, What's the Matter with Kansas? shows how Kansas transformed from an outpost of radicalism to a bastion of hard-core conservatism. Unforgettable characters and their stories shed new light on our nation's political divide.

  
  

• Domestic violence as pre-existing condition? 8 states still allow it

  Posted Oct 04 at 12 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  McClatchy Newspapers
  by: Les Blumenthal
  October 04, 2009

  WASHINGTON — Eight states and the District of Columbia don't have laws that specifically bar insurance companies from using domestic violence as a pre-existing condition to deny health coverage, according to a study from the National Women's Law Center.

  The states are Idaho, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming. The study by the nonpartisan, nonprofit center focused on individual coverage, not group coverage.

  Some of the states, particularly North Carolina, argue that other statutes on their books address the issue.

  At least one of the health care bills circulating in Congress includes a specific federal prohibition on the use of domestic violence as a pre-existing condition. Other bills include blanket bans on pre-existing conditions.

  

  Though domestic violence as a pre-existing condition isn't thought to be as widespread as it once was, lawmakers say it's yet another example of the need to overhaul the health care system.

  "This is insane," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who's been trying to convince Congress to address the issue for roughly a decade.

  Murray said she couldn't remember exactly when she first learned of it, but sometime in the 1990s she recalls a private conversation she had with a woman who broke down as she explained that she couldn't flee an abusive relationship because her children were covered under her husband's health care plan and she couldn't get her own. Another woman told Murray that she didn't report that she'd been battered because she feared losing her coverage.

  "It infuriates me an insurance executive can sit in his safe world and decide how to make money," Murray said. "For them it's all about the bottom line. Abused women don't have a voice."

  First lady Michelle Obama also took note, saying in a speech last month that insurance companies continue to practice gender discrimination.

  Much of the evidence that domestic violence has been a factor in denying coverage is dated.

  An informal survey by the House Judiciary Committee in 1994 found that half of the 16 largest insurers in the country considered domestic violence in deciding whether to approve health coverage. The Pennsylvania insurance Department reported a year or so later that nearly one out of four insurance companies factored in domestic violence when deciding whether to issue or renew policies.

  Lisa Codispoti, senior counsel for the National Women's Law Center, said it was hard to know whether insurance companies had changed because they closely guarded their underwriting standards, and battered women had always been reluctant to speak out publicly.

  "We don't know how many insurance companies still have that policy," she said, "but we are talking about an industry that once charged a race-based premium."

  Codispoti said that while insurance companies didn't mention domestic violence outright in health policy applications, they could piece it together from such things as medical records.

  A spokesman for an insurance industry trade group, Robert Zirkelbach, said he wasn't aware of any companies that used domestic violence as a pre-existing condition.

  "We believe strongly that no one should be denied coverage because they are victims of domestic violence," he said.

  Yet Murray and others said there was plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the practice continued.

  "We know there are abuses," said Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger, who heads a health care task force for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Many states have adopted a model law written by the association that prohibits the denial of health insurance because of domestic abuse or other pre-existing conditions.

  "We don't develop models unless there is a need," Praeger said. "It's not a huge problem, but it got the commissioners' attention."

  North Carolina feels it was unfairly singled out in the study last fall from the National Women's Law Center.

  "We certainly don't allow domestic violence to be used as a pre-existing condition," said Kristin Milam, a spokeswoman for the North Carolina insurance commissioner's office. Milam said domestic violence as a pre-existing condition was specifically banned in a statute for group coverage and that a broader statute for individual policies also barred it, though not by name.

  Codispoti said, however, that the North Carolina statute that covered individual policies "at best is not clear. We don't read it that way."

  On Capitol Hill, Republican aides privately dismiss that flap as a "red herring" drummed up by liberal bloggers.

  "Tell that to a woman who has faced this," Murray said.

  The issue was first reported by The Huffington Post.

  Murray remembers three years ago when the then-Republican-controlled Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee blocked her effort to impose a federal prohibition on a 10-10 vote. All 10 who voted against her amendment were Republicans.

  "Clearly, the insurance industry influenced that vote," Murray charged.

  The Republicans who voted against the measure had received nearly $6 million in campaign contributions from insurance companies, health care providers, the pharmaceutical industry and health care product manufacturers in the years leading up the vote, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign contributions.

  The 10 Republican senators included North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson and Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts.

  The chairman of the committee at the time, Republican Sen. Michael Enzi of Wyoming, said that if it were a problem, more oversight — not a new law — was needed, according to a transcript of the hearing.

  Most recently, Enzi was one of six members of the Senate Finance Committee who spent months trying to negotiate a bipartisan health care bill. The bill that eventually emerged has no Republican support.

  Enzi now supports eliminating pre-existing conditions, including any that involve domestic violence, Michael Mahaffey, a spokesman for the senator, said in an e-mail.

  "Rather than doing this one condition at a time, Senator Enzi is going to keep working to end all discrimination based on pre-existing conditions," Mahaffey wrote.

  Burr said in a statement that his record on domestic violence, including his support for the Violence Against Women Act, "is clear and consistent."

  Burr said states were responsible for regulating insurance markets, but he added that it was "deplorable" to deny coverage to victims of domestic violence.

  "Individual insurance markets are regulated by state governments and are thus subject to state law," he said.

• Oklahoma applies for federal rail funds

  Posted Oct 03 at 8 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  BY JULIE BISBEE
  Published: October 3, 2009

  The state Transportation Department has submitted its application for a high-speed rail fund.

  The state is competing with other states for stimulus dollars set aside for high-speed rail development. The lengthy application was submitted about 11 p.m. Thursday to the Federal Railroad Administration.
  Advertisement

  The Federal Railroad Administration will decide which projects are funded. Agency officials have not set a timeline for their decision, but say it will be after the first of the year.

  The state Transportation Department submitted a preliminary application in July. Since then, the department has performed several assessments to accompany the application, including an environmental analysis which includes two public meetings.

  The Transportation Department is seeking funds for a high-speed rail line between Tulsa and Oklahoma City. The money also would be used to improve the track between Oklahoma City and the Texas state line.

  That section of track is being used by the Heartland Flyer. Improvements would include rail crossing safety upgrades, a passing track, a double track from Oklahoma City to Norman and switch improvement along the route.

  The route is part of the nationally designated South Central High-Speed Rail Corridor.

  The cost of proposed high-speed rail improvements for the entire Oklahoma route is estimated to be about $2 billion.

  Top speeds on the Heartland Flyer route between Oklahoma City and the Texas state line would be 90 mph, with an average speed of more than 60 mph.

  Top speeds between downtown Oklahoma City and downtown Tulsa would be more than 150 mph, with an average speed of more than 110 mph. Construction could start as early as 2010 and would take at least six years to complete.

  Read more: http://newsok.com/oklahoma-applies-for-federal-rail-funds/article/3405981?custom_click=headlines_widget#ixzz0SsHL7BGk

• McAffrey Statement on the Passing of Gov. Bellmon

  Posted Sep 29 at 2 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
  September 29, 2009
  Contact: info@almcaffrey.com
   
  Oklahoma City - Upon the passing of former Oklahoma Governor Henry Bellmon, Oklahoma State Representative Al McAffrey (D-OKC) made the following statement:
   
  “Today, Oklahoma has lost a great leader. Gov. Bellmon was a true statesman who sought to create compromise, not divisions. He led an extraordinary journey and touched many lives along his way. I can say with confidence that Oklahoma is better off because of Henry Bellmon’s leadership. My prayers and sympathy go out to Eloise and the entire Bellmon family.”

• Oklahoma Tourism & Recreation Department to Unveil a Sustainable Travel Initiative

  Posted Sep 28 at 7 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Oklahoma Tourism & Recreation Department to Unveil a Sustainable Travel Initiative

  WHEN:
  Monday, September 28
  10 a.m.

  WHERE:
  Science Museum Oklahoma
  2100 NE 52nd St.
  Oklahoma City , OK 73111

  WHAT:
  Lieutenant Governor Jari Askins, Chair of the Oklahoma Tourism & Recreation Commission, and Hardy Watkins, Executive Director of the Oklahoma Tourism & Recreation Department, will hold a news conference to unveil a sustainable travel initiative.

  This is a first-of-its-kind program involving partnerships between multiple state agencies, an international non-profit, plus businesses across the state, and will impact tourism in Oklahoma for both consumers and the industry.

  CONTACT:
  For more information about press conference:
  Lindsay Vidrine, Oklahoma Tourism & Recreation Department Lindsay@TravelOK.com
  Office 405-230-8414 Mobile 405-761-6887

• Bill Clinton: 'Vast right-wing conspiracy' still going strong in the Obama era

  Posted Sep 27 at 11 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  TheHill.com
  By Aaron Blake
  09/27/09

  Former President Bill Clinton said Sunday that the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that worked against his presidency is alive and well, albeit in slightly reduced numbers.

  “It's not as strong as it was, because America has changed demographically. But it's as virulent as it was,” Clinton said on NBC’s "Meet the Press."

  Clinton went on to say that the things being said about President Barack Obama are “like when they accused me of murder.”

  He said it’s poisonous for the nation.

  “It's not really good for the Republicans and the country, what's going on now,” Clinton said. “I mean, they may be hurting President Obama – they can take his numbers down, they can run his opposition up – but, fundamentally, he and his team have a positive agenda for America. (Republicans’) agenda seems to be wanting him to fail.”

  Clinton said that, despite their politically motivated tactics, Republicans won’t be able to take back their House and Senate majorities in 2010, as they did in the first midterm under him in 1994.

  They would need to win 40 House seats and 10 Senate seats next year in order to do so.

  “No. 1, the country is more diverse and more interested in positive action,” Clinton said. “No. 2, they've seen this movie before, because they had eight years under President Bush, when the Republicans finally had the whole government, and they know the results were bad. And No. 3, the Democrats haven't taken on the gun lobby like I did, and they took 15 of our members out. So whatever happens, it'll be manageable for the president.”

  Clinton also said he would not return to public life or public office, saying that it was his wife’s turn to play that role. When asked if she would run for president again, Clinton noted he and his wife’s advancing ages but didn’t rule it out.

  He said he didn’t fault Obama for anything he’s done in trying to pass healthcare reform, which was a top policy failure of the Clinton administration in the 1990s and remains a tough slog for the current president today.

  The former president said he was counting on Obama’s success on healthcare and other issues like energy.

  “The change is hard, but I think we're going to get a health care bill,” Clinton said. “And I think he can then swing into the energy, and I think he'll get an energy bill. I think he's going to succeed.”

• Online Poll

  Posted Sep 21 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

• McAffrey: Ritze’s Plan Does Nothing to Help Oklahomans; Cost Tax-Payers Money

  Posted Sep 21 at 8 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
  Monday, September 21, 2009
  Contact: info@almcaffrey.com

  McAffrey: Ritze’s Plan Does Nothing to Help Oklahomans; Cost Tax-Payers Money

  Oklahoma City – Recently, State Representative Mike Ritze (R-Broken Arrow) announced plans to introduce legislation that would allow Oklahomans to “opt-out” of any proposed federal health reform. Ritze’s legislation would place language on the ballot to amend the Oklahoma Constitution to declare what types of health care systems could lawfully exist in the state.
  
  “If introduced, Rep. Ritze’s plan would do nothing to help everyday Oklahomans and will just cost tax payers more money,” McAffrey said. “I’ve been paying close attention to the health reform debate in Washington and I can assure you, contrary to the fringe, right-wing scare tactics, health reform isn’t about limiting our choices – it’s about expanding them.”
  
  McAffrey noted that the number of uninsured Oklahomans remains high at 498,000 in 2008. The percent of non-elderly adults without insurance is 20.1 percent. And this number only considers people who are uninsured for an entire year – it does not include people in Oklahoma who have more recently lost coverage through the recession, or who had shorter gaps in their coverage. Premiums for Oklahomans have risen 77 percent since 2000. McAffrey added that through health insurance reform, 423,500 to 505,200 middle class Oklahoma residents will be eligible for premium credits to ease the burden of these high costs.
  
  “Instead of using his time in the legislature to fight for all the people of Oklahoma, Rep. Ritze has chosen to fight for the fringe, right-wing,” McAffrey said. “His plan is nothing but political posturing; a cheap attempt to grab some headlines. With the challenges we are facing in Oklahoma we need serious leaders to take these issues on.”
  
  McAffrey pointed out that just two health insurers in Oklahoma currently hold 71 percent of the market, which limits the choices that Oklahomans have for finding coverage. With a competitive public insurance option, Oklahomans will have more choices and increased competition that holds insurance companies accountable.
  
  “Health reform is about creating more competitive options for Oklahomans that will bring down cost and increase quality,” McAffrey said. “I’m glad Rep. Ritze doesn’t have to worry with the drastic rising costs of health care, but everyday folks across Oklahoma are struggling to pay their bills, feed their families and afford quality health care. These folks deserve more than cheap political tricks, they deserve leaders who are serious about addressing our challenges.”
  
  For more information on health reform in Oklahoma, please visit http://almcaffrey.com/custom?key=1347

  --30--

• McAffrey's Statement on Sen. Rice's Election as Senate Democratic Caucus Leader

  Posted Sep 17 at 9 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Oklahoma City, OK - Following the announcement that State Senator Andrew Rice was chosen by the Senate Democratic Caucus as leader designate for the 2011-2012 legislative session, State Representative Al McAffrey (D-88) made the following statement:

  "I would like to congratulate my good friend Senator Andrew Rice on being chosen for this significant position in the legislature. He will bring energy, excitement, and passion into his new role and I'm looking forward to the great results we will see from his leadership. Andrew's passion for getting young people involved in politics and his ability to energize voters will bring new life to our party. I'm proud to stand with Senator Rice and continue our fight to move Oklahoma forward!"

• OSU Student Newspaper: Conservative politics could ruin our state

  Posted Sep 14 at 6 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  FROM: The Daily O'Collegian
  By Lucas Elwell
  Published: Sunday, September 13, 2009

  Well, I’ve never been to heaven, but I’ve lived in Oklahoma.

  I am shocked when I travel around the country to learn our beautiful state, with arguably the nicest people in the world, has such a serious perception problem. Is this negative opinion of Oklahoma remnants from the Dust Bowl days of the Depression?

  Doubt it. How many people have actually read “Grapes of Wrath” anyway?

  Maybe our stereotype evolved from the musical “Oklahoma!” or Hollywood productions like “Twister” and “Saving Grace” that portray our state only as cowboy-hat-wearing, gun-touting farmers.

  But, Helen Hunt hasn’t been popular in decades, and I’m not sure how many Americans even know who Curly and Laurey are.

  My personal theory has always placed the blame on OU football; we are after all the Sooner state. Can you imagine the horrified look on a Seattle native’s face when they turn on a TV any Saturday in the fall and see 90,000 fans screaming at the top of their lungs for some guy with a mullet and giant paddle on a trailer?

  These examples might play into the unwarranted misconceptions of our state but from my experience, nothing affects Oklahoma’s image more adversely than the sheer stupidity of our politics.

  Oklahoma’s presidential election results made national headlines last year as the most conservative in the entire Union. Rational citizens in Oklahoma are collectively contemplating moving to a more progressive state like Utah because President Obama didn’t carry a single county in our state.

  Far scarier than our actual election results are the people we choose to represent us.

  Of course, every state has its fair share of wacko politicians but, when it comes to Oklahoma, the psychotic statements of our legislators are in a league of their own.

  Congressman John Sullivan, who represents the Tulsa area in Washington, made it clear last month he doesn’t think the president of the United States was born in America. Most of us just assumed he was still drunk but, surprisingly, this was after his tax payer-funded vacation to Betty Ford.

  State legislator Sally Kern created a national firestorm last year when she said homosexuality was a greater threat to America than terrorism or Islam. Obviously, grown-ups with brains across the country were offended, and her statement even made airtime on the rarely political Ellen DeGeneres show.

  Our great Sen. Jim Inhofe takes the cake for embarrassing Oklahoma on a national level. He proudly proclaimed on the Senate floor there had never been a divorce or act of homosexuality in his family. He blamed the Sept. 11 attacks on Americans for not supporting Israel enough and still believes climate change is a hoax.

  I’m not sure if climate change is real, but I do know scientists are.

  Our politicians and extremely conservative ideology will ruin this state. Look up statistics on divorce rates, poverty, abortions, incarcerations, drug use, obesity, education, infrastructure and the environment and Oklahoma ranks at the bottom. The liberal states are at the top of every single important category. Coincidence?

  Lucas Elwell is an international business and finance major.

  VISIT THE DAILY O'COLLEGIAN

• Co-pays for teachers to rise

  Posted Sep 12 at 1 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The higher costs for prescriptions and doctor visits will begin Jan. 1 for most state employees.
  
  By BARBARA HOBEROCK
  The Tulsa World
  Published: 9/12/2009

  OKLAHOMA CITY — Beginning next year, the vast majority of teachers and state employees will be paying more for doctor visits and prescriptions.

  The Oklahoma State and Education Employees Group Insurance Board in August voted 7-1 to increase co-payments for medical services and prescription drugs.

  The increases take effect Jan. 1.

  In addition, state agencies and school districts will see a 7.6 percent increase in premiums paid to cover employees and dependents.

  The board had considered a 12 percent increase in premiums, said Bill Crain, Oklahoma State and Education Employees Group Insurance Board administrator. However, the board discussed how an increase that size would likely require employers to lay off workers, he said.

  Denzel Kesterson, Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association president, said the co-payment increases are "going to hurt in any way and every way."

  "It is going to be just another thing on a teacher's plate to worry about," Kesterson said.

  "Do we go to the doctor or not? It is a way of cutting teachers' benefits."

  Nearly 130,000 active and retired employees in the group's largest plan, HealthChoice, will see co-payments rise to $50 from $25.

  Co-payments for certain lower-cost drugs will rise to $30 from $25 and to $60 from $50 on high-end prescriptions, Crain said.

  Office of State Finance Director Michael Clingman, a member of the insurance board, cast the lone vote against the increases, saying he thought there was a better way to pass on the costs, such as reducing the co-payment increase and slightly increasing the deductible.

  Making changes in the co-payment may reduce the number who renew the policy, Clingman said. In addition, increasing the co-payment is not a good way to promote wellness, he said.

  "The board has no appropriation authority," said Kim Holland, state insurance commissioner and a board member who voted for the increases. "They are responsible to make sure the plan takes in enough money to pay claims.

  "This year, because of declining investment returns and rising medical costs, we have no choice but to increase premium and out-of-pocket costs to make sure the plan was solvent," she said.

  State agencies are required to pay 100 percent of the premium for employees and 75 percent of the dependent premium, Crain said. School districts are required to pay 100 percent of the employee coverage, but nothing for dependent coverage, Crain said.

  Lawmakers are getting better benefits than teachers, said Becky Felts, Oklahoma Education Association president.

  "Legislators not only get their premiums paid, they get 75 percent of their families covered, which amounts to $1,600 more a month than teachers' families are getting," Felts said.
  Co-payment increases for teachers, state workers

  Beginning Jan. 1, participants in HealthChoice will pay more for doctor visits and prescriptions.

  • $50: co-payment for office visits and other services.
  • $30: co-payment for lower-cost drugs.
  • $60: co-payment for higherpriced drugs.

  State agencies and school districts will see a 7.6 percent increase in premiums they pay to cover employees.

• Obama’s school speech did not end the world

  Posted Sep 10 at 8 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  THE EDMOND SUN
  By: WALTER JENNY JR

  EDMOND — Pinch yourself. Then pinch your children. If you both feel the pain, you survived President Obama’s controversial speech to American school children this week.

  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the radical right claimed the president would look their children in the eye and indoctrinate them into his socialist agenda. At least that’s the way Oklahoma legislators Sally Kern, Randy Brogdon and Steve Russell described it, along with Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer. After all, Obama was able to possess the souls of a majority of voters in last November’s election. How could parents protect their vulnerable waifs from the same sinister strategy? Like the swine flu, better to make them miss a day of school than run the risk of exposure.

  The fact is, there is a small, vocal minority of people who are addicted to talk radio hosts who stir this pot of vitriol. They believe it, they feed on it and they can see nothing else as reality. They are the birthers, who have convinced themselves that the president was born in Kenya and is not eligible to be president. They are the closet racists who don’t want a black man in a role of authority telling them or their children anything. They are the paranoids who believe President Obama is part of a liberal cabal to raise taxes, destroy America, take away their guns and nationalize everything in sight. They don’t want nationalized health care, and they sure don’t want Congress meddling with their Medicare or Social Security. Please don’t get me started on that logical inconsistency.

  Fortunately, this is a small group of people. But they are vocal, and Oklahoma has more than its fair share for some reason, enough to sway elections. A few hysterical phone calls to local school board members are all it took to persuade these elected officials to make the president’s address optional, or not available at all. So much for teaching children respect for the Office of the President. That was a great lesson to teach future voters.

  President Obama is not the first president to make a back-to-school speech to America’s students. President George H.W. Bush gave an almost identical nationally televised address in the fall of 1991. President Ronald Reagan made a much more political pitch in the fall of 1988, in which he called taxes “such a penalty on people that there’s no incentive for them to prosper ... because they have to give so much to the government.” He didn’t mention the fact that he’d approved some $162 billion in tax increases between 1981 and 1988, according to The National Review (Oct. 29, 2003). Such is the risk we run by hearing only one side of the story.

  I don’t know how to solve these peoples’ problems. To educate them is to indoctrinate them, proving their assertions that we’re out to get them. They’ve already started charter schools, private schools and home schools so they can control the classroom agenda. For many, their churches perpetuate the myths; if their preachers preach it, it must be Godly and true. To think otherwise undermines their entire concept of right and wrong; hell itself would freeze over first.

  There was a movie released in 1980 called “The Gods Must Be Crazy” that highlighted cultural conflicts between African Bushmen and Western society. The Bushmen knew nothing of airplanes or vehicles or even soft-drink bottles until exposed to these Western staples, and at first attributed them to their gods or magic. They knew only that to which they had been exposed for generations, and found it difficult to grasp what Westerners took for granted. Many of our right-wing friends have the same problems.

  As it turned out, the president’s speech was a good one. He encouraged students to study hard, respect their teachers and set goals for success. His address was well received by students across the country, and no doubt will inspire many students to work a little harder to emulate his success in life.

  Greer, the Florida head of the Republican Party, changed his mind after he read the text of the president’s speech. He announced his own children would be watching the speech, and hoped other children would as well. The same sentiment was echoed by former Speaker Newt Gingrich and former first lady Laura Bush. Had hell frozen over? No; these folks just made informed decisions that were respectful of the president. More people should try it sometime.

• President Obama:

  Posted Sep 10 at 2 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  President Obama's health care reform address to Congress:

• President Obama's Message for America's Students

  Posted Sep 09 at 9 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The President gave a speech directly to Americas students welcoming them back to school. He emphasized their hope and potential but made it clear they will need to take responsibility for themselves and their education to reach that potential.

• Standing against Kern's right-wing fear campaign

  Posted Sep 07 at 10 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Dear Friends,

  Over the past week I’ve received many phone calls and emails from folks across Oklahoma asking what I thought of the controversy surrounding President Obama’s upcoming address to our public school children. To be quite honest, it’s taken me a while to respond because I’ve given this a great amount of thought.

  As I’ve observed the storm surrounding President Obama’s address, I couldn’t help but think of John Kennedy’s election in 1960. During that election I remember my dad, who was a conservative, southern democrat, warned me that if Kennedy was elected President the Pope would be running the country – and I think he truly believed that. The right-wing fear factory had gotten the best of my dad and coerced him into believing something that would never be true.

  Now, almost 50 years later, the right-wing fear factory is up and running again. Even here in Oklahoma I have colleagues in the State House who are working to spread mistruths and fear about the President’s address. One of my fellow State Representatives, Sally Kern, even warned that a speech like this “would be appropriate for Cuba but not the United States of America.”

  I did not vote for President Reagan, but when he addressed the public schools to encourage young people to stay off drugs I thought it was a great idea. Now, President Obama is taking the same action and encouraging our young people to stay in school and graduate. There’s nothing partisan or political about encouraging the future leaders of this country to stay in school – and those who tell you there is are nothing but fear mongers.

  The hoopla surrounding the President’s address is emblematic of the greater issue at hand. Folks like Sally Kern who use fear tactics and spread mistruths to attack our President’s mission of encouraging our kids to stay in school is unfortunate. Sally Kern’s fear campaign is something that “would be appropriate for Cuba but not the United States of America.”

  Franklin Roosevelt said it best, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” I encourage you to look past the Sally Kerns of our great state and search for the truth. Together, we can stand against fear and fight for the truth.

  All my best,
  Al McAffrey

  

• Oklahoma supporters rally for health reform

  Posted Sep 04 at 7 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  BY MATT DINGER
  September 4, 2009

  Health care reform supporters rallied downtown Thursday afternoon in an effort to draw attention to what they called a growing rift between defense and medical spending.

  About four dozen people gathered outside the office of U.S. Rep. Mary Fallin, many of them holding brightly colored signs bearing slogans like "honk for health care” and "support a public option.”

  The Rev. Donna Compton used diagrams and pie charts to show the disparity in spending.

  "For those who are presenting opposition to health care reform as being somehow a Christian response, it needs to be said that Jesus did not ask people to come to him for healing based on how much they had. He challenged his followers to feed the hungry and to heal the sick and to care for the least of these,” said Compton, a minister with the Disciples of Christ.

  Dr. Katherine Scheirman, a retired Air Force colonel and 20-year veteran, relayed stories of her experiences with military medical care and European health care systems.

  "People there cannot believe that the American people do not care enough about each other to make sure that no one goes without basic health care. It is considered completely uncivilized,” Scheirman said. "When you take somebody having a heart attack to an emergency room in England, you’re the only people there. There’s nobody waiting for care, because everyone has their own family doctor in England. And that’s what we need in America.”

  Church Women United national Secretary Lynne Bussell and Dr. Boyd Shook, founder of Manos Juntas Free Medical Clinic in Oklahoma City, also spoke at the event.

  A rally participant, Charlene Morrow, said, "I think it’s time that all Americans have access to good health care as we do good education. We’re a progressive country, and it’s time to act like it. I’ve had times when I couldn’t afford health coverage, and you just don’t go to the doctor.”

  A handful with opposing views held court across Broadway Avenue from the rally. They had asked to speak at the event, but organizer and Peace House director Nathaniel Batchelder — while acknowledging the validity of their opinions and their right to speech — declined to let them take the microphone.

  Batchelder maintained that the event was organized and prepared by supporters of health care reform and urged dissenters to acquire their own permits and permissions for similar public appearances.

  Another rally is set for Sept. 13 at the Capitol.

• Group examines Oklahoma's hunting, fishing license changes

  Posted Aug 27 at 7 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  BY JULIE BISBEE
  Published: August 27, 2009

  Lawmakers are considering ways to simplify hunting and fishing licenses in Oklahoma.

  Some of those proposals call for combining some licenses and in some cases increasing fees.

  Some of the proposals include combining all lifetime licenses, creating a resident deer license by season and creating a "sportsman license” which would combine all licenses for all seasons.

  All changes would have to be approved by lawmakers when the Legislature convenes next year.

  License changes were discussed Wednesday during the first meeting of a 10-member task force created during the last legislative session.

  "Some proposals would increase the price of licenses, but add seasons like holiday hunts,” said Melinda Streich, assistant director of administration and finance for the Oklahoma Wildlife Conservation Department.

  The department gets about $16.6 million in revenue from hunting and fishing licenses each year.

  "Our mission today it to try to simplify the process for the constituents and at least keeping it revenue neutral,” said Richard Hatcher, the assistant director of operations for the department.

  Oklahoma has more than 45 types of hunting, fishing and trapping licenses.

  Proposed changes call for streamlining deer licenses from seven to three, which may increase fees.

  Currently, an adult hunter pays $20 per deer during archery, muzzleloader or gun season. Under the proposal, a hunter would get a single season permit for $35 and would be allowed to harvest the maximum number of deer during a specific season.

  The fee for youth permits would change from $10 per deer during a specific season to $20 for all seasons. Streich said while the fee could increase, hunters could take more deer under one license and encourage the hunting of antlerless deer.

  The proposed sportsman license would include fishing and hunting licenses, deer and turkey licenses, waterfowl stamps and other permits. The package is valued at $354, but would be sold for $150, Streich said.

• McAffrey Statement on Senator Kennedy

  Posted Aug 26 at 8 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  For Immediate Release
  August 26, 2009
  
  Oklahoma City, OK - Today, Representative Al McAffrey made the following statement:
  
  "Today we mourn the loss of a true American patriot; a man who fought for those who could not fight themselves, gave voice to the voiceless and advocated for the rights of those who did not yet have them. For nearly fifty years Ted Kennedy fought to move our country forward, advocating for a more just, equal and free America. Although I'm deeply saddened by the loss of this great man, I have hope because I know that the ideals, dreams and values Senator Kennedy embodied shall never pass away."

  ##

• Oklahoma situated well for rail line

  Posted Aug 25 at 8 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  BY JULIE BISBEE

  Federal funds could be used to build a high-speed rail line between Oklahoma City and Tulsa if an application submitted by the Oklahoma Department of Transportation is approved by the Federal Railroad Administration.

  Officials with the Transportation Department plan to apply for $2 billion in federal aid to build a high-speed rail line between Oklahoma’s two largest cities and make improvements on an existing passenger line between Oklahoma City and the state line. The department has until Oct. 2 to apply for the funds.

  Monday was the first deadline for states to apply for federal stimulus dollars for construction of 11 high-speed rail corridors across the country. Transportation officials across the country have met with the Federal Railroad Administration to discuss the likelihood of rail funding and find out under which section they should apply for funds.

  After talks with officials last month, Oklahoma has been advised to apply for funding that has an Oct. 2 deadline, said David Streb, director of engineering for the Transportation Department.

  Oklahoma is part of the south-central corridor that stretches from Tulsa south to San Antonio, Texas, with an eastern spur from Fort Worth, Texas, to Little Rock, Ark. The corridor would connect the region with passenger rail hubs in the Kansas City area or provide access to the Chicago hub network, Streb said.

  Oklahoma would use the funds to make improvements to the Heartland Flyer rail line between Oklahoma City and the state line to help alleviate congestion between passenger trains and freight trains.

  Federal dollars would also be used to build a rail line that runs between Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The trains on that line would travel faster than 150 mph.

  While officials continue to work on their application, Streb said Oklahoma is well-positioned to receive federal funds because its part of a corridor that would connect several major metropolitan areas to larger rail networks.

  "It’s really positive for us when you talk about connecting all the metropolitan areas of the heartland,” Streb said.

  "We have a strategic advantage to be part of the high-speed rail future of the country,” he said.

  There is no time line for when states will find out whether they qualify for federal funds, Streb said.

• Without Reform, Health Insurance Premiums Could Double By 2020

  Posted Aug 23 at 8 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Huffington Post
  
  Without health care reform, health insurance premiums could almost double by 2020, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a 90-year-old non-profit health care charity.

  According to "Paying the Price: How Health Insurance Premiums Are Eating Up Middle-Class Incomes," employer-sponsored family plans will rise from an average cost of $12,298 in 2008 to $23,842 in 2020 (the same coverage would have cost close to $9,200 in 2003) if health-care costs continue to rise at the current rate.

  The study found that:

  The rapid rise in health insurance premiums has severely strained U.S. families and employers in recent years. This analysis of federal data finds that if premiums for employer-sponsored insurance grow in each state at the projected national rate of increase, then the average premium for family coverage would rise from $12,298 (the 2008 average) to $23,842 by 2020--a 94 percent increase. However, if health system reforms were able to slow premium growth by 1 percentage point in all states, by 2020 employers and families together would save $2,571 per premium for family coverage, compared with projected trends. If growth could be slowed by 1.5 percentage points--a target recently agreed to by a major industry coalition--yearly savings would equal $3,759. The analysis presents state-by-state data on premium costs for 2003 and 2008, as well as projections, using various assumptions, for costs in 2015 and 2020.

  The author of the study, Cathy Shoen, senior vice president of the Commonwealth Fund, said in a news release:

  • "With health spending projected to double if we stay on our current path, middle- and lower-income families are at high risk of losing their coverage or facing long-term stagnant incomes. Employers and employees share premium costs, but we know that take-home pay and retirement savings are being sacrificed to maintain health benefits. Reforms that slow the growth of health-care costs could go a long way toward health and financial stability for working families."

  Employer-based premiums for family coverage increased an average of 33 percent between 2003 and 2008, ranging from a low of 25 percent in Michigan, Texas and Ohio to a high of 45 percent in Indiana and North Carolina.

  Click here to see charts from the study.

• President's Weekly Address: Myths and Morality in Health Insurance Reform

  Posted Aug 22 at 11 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The White House
  
  President Obama debunks the myths around health reform, and discusses the public option proposal in which many of them are rooted. But he focuses his address on the stark moral and historical turning point at which we find ourselves.

  
  

• Oklahomans Believe Health Care Reform Must Include Health Insurance Reform

  Posted Aug 20 at 9 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  OkHealthCareReform.com

  OKLAHOMA CITY – Preliminary results of an ongoing survey show that Oklahomans overwhelmingly believe insurance companies place profits over people and health care reform must include health insurance reform.

  With 54% of the respondents identifying themselves as Republicans and 39% as Democrats, concerns about health insurance industry abuses clearly cross party lines.

  It is apparent, the results of the survey sends a strong message to the insurance industry in Oklahoma:

  • 84% of the survey respondents say government should play a "strong role" in guaranteeing health care access or provide oversight of the insurance industry.
  • 86% report that health care reform should include health insurance reform.
  • 59% responded that the state Insurance Department should have regulatory control over health insurance rates similar to the Corporation Commission's oversight of utilities.
  • 23% have been denied coverage for a medical procedure, treatment or medicine.
  • 33% report seeking employment for health insurance.
  • 25% are underinsured.

  Responses to the survey were tallied from 101 surveys completed by participants at the Oklahomans for Health Care Reform (OHCR) Town-Hall meetings held in Noble and Lawton during July and August. OHCR is scheduled to hold several more town-hall meetings and will add survey results as they are compiled.

  "The results underscore the level of fear that Oklahomans have about their health care. Most are concerned about whether they will continue to be insured and whether their insurance company will drop them if they get sick," said Sen. Kenneth Corn, D-Howe, who has been active in bringing greater accountability to the health insurance industry in Oklahoma.

  Oklahomans for Health Care Reform is a nonpartisan alliance of consumers, small businesses, patient advocates, medical professionals and citizens who are sick and tired of seeing health insurance companies deny care and kill life-saving legislation. Oklahomans for Health Care Reform seeks to draw attention to the need for increased oversight of this under-regulated industry and greater fairness in how insurers treat policyholders.

  Rather than wait for Congress to act on this critical issue, Oklahomans for Health Care Reform has focused on state-specific solutions to healthcare problems affecting Oklahomans.

  To contact Oklahomans for Healthcare Reform and to obtain the schedule for upcoming Town-Hall meetings, please check our website www.OkHealthCareReform.com or email us at email@okhealthcarereform.com.

• New Poll: 77 Percent Support "Choice" Of Public Option

  Posted Aug 20 at 6 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Huffington Post
  By: Sam Stein
  Posted: 08-20-09

  More than three out of every four Americans feel it is important to have a "choice" between a government-run health care insurance option and private coverage, according to a public opinion poll released on Thursday.

  A new study by SurveyUSA puts support for a public option at a robust 77 percent, one percentage point higher than where it stood in June.

  But the numbers tell another story, as well.

  Earlier in the week, after pollsters for NBC dropped the word "choice" from their question on a public option, they found that only 43 percent of the public were in favor of "creating a public health care plan administered by the federal government that would compete directly with private health insurance companies."

  Opponents of the president's agenda jumped on the findings as evidence that backing for the public option was dropping. Proponents responded by arguing that NBC's tinkering with the language of the question (which it had also done in its July survey) had contributed to the drop in favorability for a public plan.

  SurveyUSA's poll, which was commissioned by the progressive group MoveOn.org, a proponent of the public plan, gives credence to those critiques. While arguments about what type of language best describe the public option persist --"choice" is considered a trigger word that everyone naturally supports -- it seems clear that the framing of the provision goes a long way toward determining its popularity.

  In asking its question SurveyUSA used the same exact words that NBC/Wall Street Journal had used when conducting its June 2009 survey. That one that found 76 percent approval for the public option: "In any health care proposal, how important do you feel it is to give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance--extremely important, quite important, not that important, or not at all important?"

  To ensure that its respondent pool was composed of people from similar demographics and political mindsets, SurveyUSA asked respondents a question pulled directly from NBC's August survey. The results were nearly identical.

  Read a description of the president's health care plan, 51 percent of Survey USA respondents said they "favored" the approach, while 43 percent opposed it. In the NBC poll, 53 percent of respondents said they favored the president's plan, 43 percent said they opposed it.

• No special session yet for Oklahoma legislature

  Posted Aug 20 at 6 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  Published: August 20, 2009

  OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Gov. Brad Henry says he and state lawmakers are considering whether to convene a special legislative session in September to discuss the state's revenue outlook.

  Henry announced Thursday that he, Senate President Pro Tem Glenn Coffee and House Speaker Chris Benge have made good progress in their budget talks, but they need more information.

  State officials say the budget shortfall for fiscal year 2010 could exceed the $700 million shortfall experienced in 2003 — the worst in state history.

  After declining revenue in the final six months of the 2009 fiscal year, tax collections came in $120 million less than in July 2008.

  State officials ordered a 5 percent across-the-board cut in state agencies' August budgets, even though 7 percent cuts hit most agencies on July 1.

• Oklahoma lawmakers mulling special session

  Posted Aug 19 at 6 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  FROM STAFF REPORTS
  Published: August 19, 2009

  Top state lawmakers are discussing the possibility of a special legislative session to address budget issues as the state's revenues continue to shrink.

  Paul Sund, spokesman for Gov. Brad Henry, said the governor is "in general discussions with legislative leaders about the state's revenue outlook and (has) made no final definitive decisions on anything yet."

  The governor can call a special session or the Legislature can call for a special session with a two-thirds vote, according to the state's constitution. Possible topics of the special session could include additional budget cuts or using money from the Rainy Day Fund, which has nearly $600 million in it.

  Earlier this month, state agency leaders were told to brace for additional budget cuts after tax collections for July, the first month of the state's fiscal year, came in $75.9 million below what is needed to pay the state's bills. Officials borrowed about $54 million from the state's cash reserves and other funds to make up the difference. The revenue shortfall prompted state agencies to cut their August budgets by 5 percent.

  A special session could be called as early as the end of the month. Sen. Jay Paul Gumm, D-Durant, said while there is no official word, he's not making any other plans for the end of the month.

  "We haven't been given an official notification, but I'm not making any plans for the week of Aug. 31," he said. "None of this is rocket science. We've got to decide if we look to allow automatic budget cuts to happen, or if we should make targeted cuts. It will be interesting."

  House Speaker Chris Benge would not comment on the possibility of a special session. A spokeswoman for Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn Coffee, R-Oklahoma City, said the governor had spoken to legislative leaders but there was no final decision made.

• Barney Frank Confronts Woman At Townhall Comparing Obama To Hitler

  Posted Aug 19 at 5 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  At a Barney Frank town hall meeting in Dartmouth, MA, a constituent asks, "Why are you supporting this Nazi policy?"
  
  Frank responds: "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" He then calls her approach "vile, contemptible nonsense." He closes by saying: "Trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table."

• Health Reform Information Center

  Posted Aug 17 at 7 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  

  I am deeply concerned about the direction of the debate surrounding health insurance reform and I've been paying close attention to the various health care town halls in Oklahoma and across the country. Unfortunately, I have been disappointed by the misinformation about health reform presented at these events.

  The Republican talking points against health insurance reform are full of half-truths, personal attacks, and fear mongering. What they have been saying is irresponsible and has done nothing to help solve one of our nation's greatest problems.

  As progressives, the best way we can counteract the Republican talking points is to simply educate ourselves and others. That's why I'm excited to announce a new addition to my website: The Health Reform Information Center. This center provides the most up-to-date information on health insurance reform and provides links to various organizations that are fighting the myths and misrepresentations of this legislation.

  Click here to visit the Health Reform Information Center.

  In 2006 Oklahoma families paid $10,592 a year in insurance premiums. Three years later this has risen to $12,239. By 2019 the cost is projected to be $20,884. The cost of doing nothing is simply unacceptable and Oklahomans cannot afford the status quo. This is a serious issue that requires a serious debate.

  My hope is you will take some time to explore our Health Reform Information Center. I believe you'll find the answers to many of the questions you may have. If you find the site helpful, I ask that you pass it along to your friends. The best way we can combat the republican talking points is by spreading the truth.

  Click here to visit the Health Reform Information Center.

  I remain committed to sensible health insurance reform that will leave us with quality, affordable, and sustainable health care for all Oklahomans. If you share these goals, consider supporting my campaign and together we can stand up and fight to move Oklahoma forward!
  
  All my best,
  Al

• Kill Grandma? Debunking A Health Bill Scare Tactic

  Posted Aug 14 at 6 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NPR.org
  by Julie Rovner

  The story has spread so fast even President Obama got asked about it at one of his town hall meetings. But no, the health care overhaul bill now working its way through Congress would not require seniors to learn how to die prematurely.

  It's not, however, because people aren't saying it. The most notable spokeswoman for the cause is Elizabeth McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York. McCaughey's last brush with major public prominence came during the debate over then-President Bill Clinton's health plan, when she wrote a highly controversial critique of the proposal published in The New Republic arguing the bill would have bound everyone inside the new system.

  This time McCaughey has been making the talk radio rounds arguing that the latest version of a health overhaul has the government sponsoring suicide education.

  "One of the most shocking things I found in this bill, and there were many, is on Page 425, where the Congress would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner, how to decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go into hospice care," McCaughey said on former Sen. Fred Thompson's radio show July 16.

  That claim won her a "pants on fire" rating for its lack of truth from the nonpartisan Politifact.com Web site run by the St. Petersburg Times. But it has nonetheless spread like wildfire, being repeated not just on blogs and radio shows but by Republican members of Congress as well. Said a joint statement from House Minority leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Republican Policy Committee Chairman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), "this provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law."

  The claims have been highly upsetting to groups like the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, which strongly support what the bill really does — pay health care providers to talk to Medicare patients about creating so-called advance directives, or ways to express their health care desires in writing before they become incapacitated.

  In fact, says Kathy Brandt, vice president of professional leadership, consumer and caregiver services, advance directives need not be about cutting off care at all. "If you want everything to be possibly done; all medical treatment to be done for you until your last breath, that's what advance directives can do for you," Brandt says. "I think most people who are healthy adults, not facing a terminal or life-limiting conditions, would want treatment, and nothing that's in any of the health care reform bills that I've heard or seen does anything that would prohibit that."

  So why have the demonstrably false claims about death gotten so much life? Harvard public opinion expert Robert Blendon says it's because seniors are very sensitive about their health care. "Seniors worry more about their health care than any other group in American life," Blendon says. "They feel more vulnerable."

  Blendon says it's no accident that opponents of the health overhaul chose to single out a provision aimed at seniors to make their case, because if seniors think they have something to lose from the current health care overhaul, "[they] are really going to be very active opponents of this, because that's not what they signed up for," he says.

  And seniors, unlike many younger people, are very likely paying more attention to the health care debate.

  "The seniors are really going to read and listen to everything and be concerned if they think as a result of the bill their current circumstances are going to deteriorate," Blendon says.

• Autism Rate Now at One Percent of All US Children?

  Posted Aug 12 at 6 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Huffington Post
  By: David Kirby

  A pair of federally funded studies on autism rates is about to make news -- big news -- and it isn't good: It would appear that somewhere around one percent of all US children currently have an autism spectrum disorder. The rate is even higher among six to 11 year olds and among boys, according to data from at least one of the new studies.

  If you are an expectant parent, or planning to have a child soon, you might want to sit down before absorbing these staggering statistics, recently released by the National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH), which is supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the US Department of Health and Human Services.

  According to data from the 2007 telephone survey of parents of nearly 82,000 US children, the odds of a child receiving an ASD diagnosis are one in 63. If it is a boy, the chances climb to a science fiction-like level of one in 38, or 2.6% of all male children in America.

  But there was also some surprisingly good news. Enormous numbers of children originally diagnosed with ASD went on to shed their diagnosis as they got older, parents reported.

  Among all children aged two to 17, according to respondents, one in 100 (100-per-10,000) currently have an ASD diagnosis, which is considerably higher than the previously (CDC) estimated rate of 1-in-150, (or 66-per-10,000).

  But researchers were also told by parents that 60-per-10,000 children "had autism, Asperger's Disorder etc. at some point, but not currently."

  This suggests two rather remarkable things:

  1. At some point in their lives, 1-in-63 US children (160-per-10,000) will have an ASD diagnosis and;

  2. Out of every 160 children diagnosed with ASD, 60 of them (37.5%) will somehow go on to lose that diagnosis.

  Among boys, for every 260-per-10,000 male children originally diagnosed with ASD, 90 of them (34.6%) reportedly do not have the diagnosis now. This still leaves a monumentally high rate of one in 58 boys with ASD today, or 1.7 percent (170-per-10,000).

  The percentage of girls who apparently lost their original diagnosis was 44.5%.

  There was a big difference among age groups as well. Among those children who still have the diagnosis, the rate of ASD was 40% higher in 6-11 year olds (140-per-10,000, or 1-in-71) than the current rate of 12-17 year olds (100-per-10,000, or 1-in-100).

  Interestingly, among the youngest children, two to five years old, the rate was only half that of their six- to 11-year-old siblings, (70-per-10,000 vs.140-per-10,000). Most or all of that may be due to the average age of diagnosis, which is below five years, though it does bear watching to see if these younger kids go on to double their rates and "catch up" with the older ones.

  Overall, the 2007 NSCH survey revealed a 100% increase in parent-reported ASD rates compared to the 2003 NSCH survey (which showed a 50-per-10,000 reported rate).

  The survey was conducted by the Data Resource Center of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI) at the Oregon Health & Science University. And though the survey used what is considered to be sound methodology for estimating ASD prevalence, most observers are still anxiously awaiting the release of even more new statistics -- expected soon from the CDC.

  This second autism study, culled from data in the CDC's Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring network (ADDM), has been eagerly anticipated for quite some time.

  ADDM researchers examine the education and (when possible) medical records of all eight-year-old children in selected US cities and states. They look only at eight-year-old cohorts to allow time for all diagnoses to be made, reported and counted.

  So far, ADDM has published data from just two birth cohorts: children born in 1992 (eight-year-olds in 2000) and those born in 1994 (eight-year-olds in 2002). The 1992 cohort revealed an estimated ASD rate of one in 166, or 60-per-10,000.

  For the 1994 cohort, the estimate was revised upward to one in 150, or 10% higher, at 66-per-10,000.

  CDC officials have been analyzing the 1996 birth cohort (2004 data on 8-year-olds) for years. I asked the agency a few months ago about the slow progress in releasing the numbers and was told that the data were currently "under review." No response was given to written questions about data collected from the 1998 or 2000 cohorts (in 2006 and 2008, respectively).

  I also submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the CDC for the raw data it had collected to date. That request is still pending.

  But just the other day, the Adventures in Autism blog reported that CDC was about to release its 1996 birth cohort data, and that those data would also show ASD prevalence rates along the lines of 100-per-10,000, or a whopping one percent of US children.

  The blogger, Ginger Taylor, reported that the CDC's new one in 100 figure had been mentioned at a recent national meeting of the Autism Society of America. So I called ASA President and CEO Lee Grossman to ask him about it.

  It was Grossman himself who brought up the new studies, while introducing the keynote panel at the ASA meeting in St Charles, IL the week of July 20.

  "I told people we were about to get hit by two separate studies that will be published in the near future," he said. The National Survey of Children's Health data will be published in September and the CDC's 1996 birth cohort data will also appear in print -- in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report -- "probably before the end of summer, although that is not yet official," he told me.

  Grossman said his sources were "good people" that he trusts, working within the CDC's ADDM network, which he termed the "gold standard" of US autism epidemiology.

  According to his sources, the 1996 birth cohort will reveal ASD prevalence rates that are "consistent with other national large-scale study figures, and I assume that includes a study from the UK," Grossman said. That study put the UK rate at 1-in-83.

  The CDC researchers also told Grossman that there were "some similarities" to what was found in the NSCH survey, even though NSCH and ADDM are "two extremely different instruments."

  Assuming that the new CDC figures show a significant increase in diagnoses between the 1994 and 1996 cohorts, the overarching question, of course, will be, "why?"

  "Did the numbers really go up, or is it better data collection? I don't know the answer," Grossman told me. "Are we monitoring it better and finding more kids? I suspect we are, though it is hard to say." He added that ASA was working with a few school districts that provide statistics on ASD rates, "and their numbers are closing in on one in 100 as well."

  One possible explanation for at least some of the increase is that ADDM researchers became more proficient at obtaining the necessary records across their analyses of the 1992, 1994 and 1996 birth cohorts. For example, in the 1994 cohort, the ASD rate in New Jersey (where access to both medical and school records was possible) was 93-per-10,000, while in Alabama (where access to school records was not available) the rate was about one-third of that, at just 33-per-10,000.

  Is it possible that CDC researchers somehow gained access to school records for, say, Alabama children born in 1996 that they did not have for kids born there in 1994, thus driving up the numbers? Of course it is, though we must wait for the published report to find out.

  Another plausible explanation for some, if not all of the increase, is the expansion of the ASD classification within the public schools to include not only full-blown autism, but also milder forms of ASD such as Pervasive Developmental Disorder -- Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) and Asperger's Syndrome.

  This has long been the argument of those who do not believe that the real number of ASD cases has increased -- they insist that the rise is simply an artifact of wider diagnostic criteria, greater awareness and/or more ASD services on offer.

  I am certain that the expansion of ASD criteria in the early 1990's contributed to the increase in reported diagnoses during that time, though I am not personally convinced that this can account for the entire growth of cases.

  And I do not believe that autism rates have always been one in 100, or one in 71, as currently reported by parents of six- to 11-year-olds in the NCHS study.

  So, what else could help explain at least part of the ASD increase? I believe that environmental factors are at play. And rising levels of toxic exposures among pregnant women, unborn children and young infants must be fully examined.

  Which leads us to vaccines: Could they be responsible, at least in part, for contributing to the rising ASD numbers?

  "A person with an autism spectrum disorder has a number of underlying and seemingly unnoticed immunological, inflammatory or mitochondrial issues happening, and there could be any number of factors that trigger this," Lee Grossman told me, reflecting a growing consensus among autism groups and researchers. "And it is certainly plausible that vaccines are one of those triggers."

  The whole debate over why the numbers are going up, Grossman added, "is sad." He lamented the fact that "people are trying to limit the debate and the science. But until we know what is going on, we should treat everything as a plausible factor, and study it to the point where we have a much better understanding. For example, why do some people have a severe reaction to vaccines and why do some not have that reaction? To me, it is appalling that those studies have not happened."

  If there is an environmental component to autism, hopefully scientists will want to know which exposures might have increased between, say, 1992 and 1996.

  One possible answer is the Hepatitis B vaccine, (which also contained 25 micrograms of mercury containing thimerosal).

  Introduced in 1991, it was the first vaccine ever given on a population basis to newborn babies (within the first three hours after delivery) in human history.

  But according to the CDC's National Immunization Survey (which also includes parental telephone interviews), only 8% of infant children received the Hep B vaccine in 1992, when that birth cohort showed an ASD rate of 60-per-10,000.

  By 1994, the number of children receiving Hep B vaccine had reached just 27% -- and the cohort showed an ASD rate of 66-per-10,000.

  But the Hep B coverage rate had risen to 82% by 1996, when that cohort's ASD rate exploded to around 100-per-10,000.

  Correlation, obviously, does not equal causation. And no one is suggesting that Hepatitis B vaccine is the singular "cause" of autism. But the uptake rate of that particular immunization is at least one environmental factor that did demonstrably change during the period in question.

  In addition, some recent studies and Vaccine Court decisions have supported the contention that Hepatitis B vaccine can damage myelin -- the nervous system's main insulating component -- at least in certain genetically susceptible adults and infants.

  A study published last October in the journal Neurology found that children who received the Hepatitis B vaccine series were 50% more likely to develop "central nervous system inflammatory demyelination" than children who did not receive the vaccine.

  Most of this increase was due to the Engerix B brand of the vaccine, manufactured by the UK's GlaxoSmithKline. That brand increased the risk of demyelination by 74%, and patients with confirmed multiple sclerosis were nearly three times more likely to develop the disorder.

  "Hepatitis B vaccination does not generally increase the risk of CNS inflammatory demyelination in childhood," the authors concluded. "However, the Engerix B vaccine appears to increase this risk, particularly for confirmed multiple sclerosis, in the longer term. Our results require confirmation in future studies."

  In another Vaccine Court Case, Banks v HHS, the Special Master ruled that a young boy named Bailey Banks suffered from a similar demyelinating disease called "acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) following the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, which "led inexorably" to his development of PDD-NOS, an autism spectrum disorder.

  In Bailey's case, the myelin repaired itself, but the CNS damage was permanent. Most children with ASD do not show current signs of myelin damage, though many of them test positive for antibodies to myelin basic protein, suggesting that demyelination may have played a role at one point, as it did in the Bailey Banks case.

  Another item that will surely spark fiery debate is the reason why so many previously diagnosed children with ASD are currently not holding that diagnosis.

  There are three main possible explanations:

  1) Many children never had an ASD to begin with, and were simply "misdiagnosed."

  2) Some children naturally "recovered" from ASD on their own without treatment, (though Lee Grossman and many others told me they have never seen this happen).

  3) Interventions including behavioral therapy, dietary changes and biomedical treatments actually work, and it is possible to recover a child from the grips of ASD.

  One thing is certain however: No matter what the explanations for the increase -- and for the extraordinary "recovery" rate of children diagnosed with ASD -- the current US ASD level is still somewhere around 1% -- and 1.4% (140-per-10,000) among kids aged six to 11, if the NCHS study is to be believed.

  Let's assume that the 140-per-10,000 rate is the most accurate: This would make the "autism is genetic and has always been with us at these levels" crowd appear to be pathetic, if not downright laughable.

  Why? Because reputable studies from the 1980s showed that the actual rate of autism was about two per 10,000 children, not 140 per 10,000. If those studies were wrong, and if the rate was the same then as it is now (as many scientists contend), that would mean that doctors, educators and statisticians are now 7,000 percent more proficient at diagnosing and counting autism than they were before.

  According to this logic, out of every 140 children who had an ASD in the 1980s, 138 of them went (and continue to go) undiagnosed, uncounted and untreated by medical and educational professionals.

  If I were a medical or public health professional, that is a fact that I would not be keen on broadcasting.

  And if the actual rate of autism in America is truly 1%- or 1.4% - then as ASA's Grossman said: "People ain't seen nothing yet."

  "Everyone is going to cover this story, and the reality is that nobody is doing anything about the increase in autism," Grossman commented. "But when you get to a figure of 1% of the population, hopefully you'll get attention, and have people begin to act to help those with autism today with funding of services and support, and to get a better handle on how to spend research money."

  Grossman said it was "terrible" that research into the causes of autism has been so heavily weighted towards genetics, at the expense of studying environmental factors.

  "But now, many people believe that autism is associated with environmental triggers," he told me. "And my message is: 'Wake up.' But if this doesn't wake people up, then I don't know what will."

  I, for one, concur with Lee Grossman.

  "I'm hopeful that this unfortunate statistic, and the terrible growth in autism, will finally get people to act to do something about autism," he said. "And by that, I mean the fine folks in government who are not responding in the ways that they should."

• State revenue shortfall declared for Oklahoma

  Posted Aug 11 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  By Michael McNutt Capitol Bureau
  Published: August 11, 2009

  State officials today ordered a 5 percent across-the-board cut to all state agencies because revenue collections fell well below the official estimate.

  Budget officials are considering other options, such as using cash reserves and tapping other funds, to make up the shortfall.

  Revenue collections for July, the first month of the new fiscal year, are well below prior year collections and the official estimate. Preliminary reports show General Revenue fund collections totaled $336.7 million, which is $120.4 million, or 26.3 percent below the prior year, and more importantly $74.4 million, or 18.1 percent, below the estimate.

  In response to the shortfall, state Finance Director Michael Clingman has ordered a 5 percent across-the-board cut for each state agency in the month of August. The cuts will total about $21.9 million for August.

  "The cuts would have been deeper, but we were able to minimize the impact by utilizing cash reserves," Clingman said.

  State Treasurer Scott Meacham said he is meeting with Gov. Brad Henry and legislative leaders to discuss options for the coming months.

  The state has several options, including tapping the state's savings account. The Rainy Day Fund has nearly $600 million. The state constitution allows up to three-eighths of the fund, or $223.7 million, to be used upon a revenue shortfall declaration by the state Board of Equalization.

  Oklahoma still has some federal stimulus money that it was planning to use for the next fiscal year.

  "However, I would warn state agencies that additional cuts may very well be coming," Meacham said.

  Most state agencies already have cut their budgets. During the last legislative session, many agencies received budget cuts of varying amounts.

• Oklahoma City's 23rd Street gets closer to former glory days

  Posted Aug 10 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  By Don Gammill
  Published: August 10, 2009

  An effort to spruce up one of Oklahoma City’s most noted routes continues to gain momentum. Here’s hoping it will be successful.

  

  Those old enough recall how 23rd Street used to look. It was — and still is — among the most heavily traveled streets in the metro area, taking residents and visitors through a corridor of businesses, past Oklahoma City University, by the state Capitol, the Governor’s Mansion, to Interstate 35 and beyond.

  There were all sorts of retail shops, movie houses, restaurants, gas stations, office buildings and more. You could gain easy access to other major streets and highways, even on days when traffic was heavy.

  The city’s first major shopping center, Shepherd Mall, was built on NW 23, drawing to it throngs of customers from across Oklahoma.

  Through the years — as new routes were added and many of the mainstream businesses closed or moved to new locations — 23rd lost its glory. It wasn’t attractive, and it wasn’t a great route to take.

  In the past five years, Oklahoma City has invested more than $9 million in changing that. The addition of decorative lighting, road resurfacing, new waterlines, landscaped medians and sidewalks have started revitalizing the thoroughfare. And there’s more to come.

  A recent community meeting with City Councilman Skip Kelly drew more than 100 business owners, developers, residents and others with an interest in the area. Kelly presented his strategies for the revitalization effort. The focus was on the NE 23 Overlay Zoning District, developed by the Oklahoma City Planning staff and presented by Planning Director Russell Claus.

  Kelly said: "Attendees were thrilled to hear about our efforts to rejuvenate NE 23rd Street, particularly those who remember NE 23rd Street during its glory days. We are asking the business community and neighbors to reinvest in their property so we can restore NE 23rd Street as an economic engine for Oklahoma City.”

  Officials in the city Public Information & Marketing Office said the recent meeting included discussion on code enforcement efforts, such as outside storage, fencing guidelines for businesses along the street, signage and property maintenance.

  They said Kelly wants to attract quality retail and new services along the route, "restoring the Capitol’s gateway as an economic hub.”

  The economic potential is great, but returning the route to its once-proud and attractive stature would be a major plus, too.

  By the way ...

  You can go to okc.gov/planning/ne23 to read the NE 23 Overlay Zoning District plans. You’ll find the plans informative and interesting.

  Enjoy your week and drive safely.

• President Obama: Necessary Reform, Absurd Attacks

  Posted Aug 08 at 9 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The White House
  President Barack Obama calls health insurance reform critical to our nations long-term economic strength and dispels the outlandish rumors being promoted by those who are defending the status-quo.

• White House says Oklahomans will benefit from health reform

  Posted Aug 08 at 9 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Tulsa World
  By JIM MYERS World Washington Bureau
  Published: 8/8/2009

  WASHINGTON — Continuing its push for health care reform, the Obama administration issued a report Friday detailing its benefits for Oklahomans and the harm of continuing the current system.

  

  "Oklahomans know that inaction is not an option," the report states.

  "Sky-rocketing health care costs are hurting families, forcing businesses to cut or drop health benefits and straining state budgets. Millions are paying more for less."

  Earlier in the week, U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., posted a video on the Internet warning against President Barack Obama's approach.

  "While I agree that our health care system needs reform that addresses increasing medical costs and the many currently without health insurance, bringing socialized medicine to this country is not the answer," Inhofe said.

  U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the state-by-state reports during a Webcast discussion on what reform could mean to individuals.

  "Today's report shows how health insurance reform will help all in Oklahoma save money, get better care, strengthen their insurance if they already have it, and afford insurance if they don't," Sebelius said in a statement sent later to Oklahoma media.

  Statistics included in the Oklahoma report hit on the 19 percent of residents who are uninsured, the 77 percent increase in average family premiums since 2000, and the 17 percent of Oklahomans who report not visiting a doctor due to high costs.

  "The overall quality
  of care in Oklahoma is rated as 'weak,' " states the report, which also listed specific issues such as obesity rates, the number of women who have not received a mammogram in the last two years and the number of men who have never had a colorectal cancer screening.

  Inhofe used his YouTube posting to say the Obama approach costs too much and fails to address adequately the rising health care costs or the uninsured.

  He zeroed in on the so-called public option included in some of the proposals making their way through the legislative process.

  Supporters say the option is necessary to increase competition among insurers and drive costs down.

  Inhofe warned that approach would empower Washington bureaucrats to make decisions about health care and destroy Medicare Advantage plans and Health Savings Accounts.

  "Both these programs provide Americans of all ages with great choice for their health care needs," he said.

  In an earlier newspaper article, Inhofe expressed support for an approach to empower states to address such local issues, make Health Savings Accounts more accessible and provide tax credits for individuals and families to help them afford coverage.

• Health Care Myths, Mobs & Mayhem- What Can We Do?

  Posted Aug 06 at 11 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Oklahoma County Democrats
  
  As the Health Care Reform debate becomes more and more intense we are witnessing groups of people, filled with anger and hate, disrupting Town Hall meetings throughout the country. These meetings, designed for civil discourse and debate about health care reform, are intentionally being targeted for sabotage. As usual, those opposing change are doing whatever it takes to keep the people of this country misinformed and ill-represented.

  Although some of the "protests" may be legitimate, most are now organized and paid for by Washington special interest groups and insurance companies, while under the guise of a movement of grassroots activists and concerned citizens. Not only are they disingenuous by design, but they are spreading lies and fear to curb the progress of our country.

  Health insurance reform affects everyone and we cannot let the distortions and intimidation get in the way of the Democratic process. We understand that Oklahoma may be less likely to have chaos at a Town Meeting, however, we need to stay diligent, informed, and spread the word. We need to shed light on these malicious tactics and it will take all of us to do so.

  The DNC has passed along these "5 Facts About the Anti-reform Mobs." Please read through them and forward them along to your allies.

  5 facts about the anti-reform mobs

  1. These disruptions are being funded and organized by out-of-district special-interest groups and insurance companies who fear that health insurance reform could help Americans, but hurt their bottom line. A group run by the same folks who made the "Swiftboat" ads against John Kerry is compiling a list of congressional events in August to disrupt. An insurance company coalition has stationed employees in 30 states to track where local lawmakers hold town-hall meetings.

  2. People are scared because they are being fed frightening lies. These crowds are being riled up by anti-reform lies being spread by industry front groups that invent smears to tarnish the President's plan and scare voters. But as the President has repeatedly said, health insurance reform will create more health care choices for the American people, not reduce them. If you like your insurance or your doctor, you can keep them, and there is no "government takeover" in any part of any plan supported by the President or Congress.

  3. Their actions are getting more extreme. Texas protesters brought signs displaying a tombstone for Rep. Lloyd Doggett and using the "SS" symbol to compare President Obama's policies to Nazism. Maryland Rep. Frank Kratovil was hanged in effigy outside his district office. Rep. Tim Bishop of New York had to be escorted to his car by police after an angry few disrupted his town hall meeting -- and more examples like this come in every day. And they have gone beyond just trying to derail the President's health insurance reform plans, they are trying to "break" the President himself and ruin his Presidency.

  4. Their goal is to disrupt and shut down legitimate conversation. Protesters have routinely shouted down representatives trying to engage in constructive dialogue with voters, and done everything they can to intimidate and silence regular people who just want more information. One attack group has even published a manual instructing protesters to "stand up and shout" and try to "rattle" lawmakers to prevent them from talking peacefully with their constituents.

  5. Republican leadership is irresponsibly cheering on the thuggish crowds. Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner issued a statement applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

  It's time to expose this charade, before it gets more dangerous. Please send these facts to everyone you know.

  You can also post them on your website, blog, or Facebook page.

  Below are a few different resources that offer information regarding the meeting disruptions, the groups responsible and the myths being spread-

  http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/health-care/anti-reform-group-takes-credit-for-helping-gin-up-town-hall-rallies/

  http://pr.thinkprogress.org/2009/08/pr20090805/index.html

  http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/05/politics/main5215880.shtml?tag=related;wc5217440#2

  http://healthcarereformmyths.org/HealthcareReformMyths.php
  
  http://www.insurancenewsnet.com/article.asp?n=1&innID=1017894585

  Tell your members of Congress that Democrats will not be intimidated by bullying and threats, to reject mob tactics anywhere they may appear and ask them to pay attention to the health care needs of all their constituents and not just those that support their campaigns with money.

  Here's what you can do:

  • 1. Email your congressional representatives if you have not already, http://www.capitolconnect.com/oklahoma/default.aspx
  • 2. Follow up your email with a phone call. http://www.capitolconnect.com/oklahoma/default.aspx
  • 3. Find a town hall event near you and attend. Be civil not disruptive- it is never productive to interrupt, yell or be belligerent.

  Expect to hear more from us about Health Care Reform and let's hope this lunacy subsides before someone gets seriously hurt.

• Cash for two clunkers

  Posted Aug 05 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  By BRUCE PLANTE
  Published: 8/5/2009 2:22 AM

  

• $63M approved for Oklahoma City Crosstown Expressway

  Posted Aug 03 at 9 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  BY JULIE BISBEE
  Published: August 3, 2009

  A contract approved today by the Oklahoma Transportation Commission allows crews to begin working on the southernmost section of the Crosstown Expressway project.

  The $63 million project will connect access bridges at Lincoln Boulevard and Western Avenue. The project will start near the Producers Cooperative Oil Mill, just south of Bricktown, and head west to Classen Avenue, said John Bowman, project development manger on the Crosstown Expressway for the Department of Transportation.

  The route will affect one track that runs through the Union Station rail yard, located at 300 SW 7{+ }St. Trains that travel through the area have been using a new route since late last year.

  The length of the project awarded today is just over a mile long. Construction will begin in the fall and is expected to be complete by spring 2011.

  Motorists will not be affected by the project since construction is being done alongside the existing Interstate 40.

  The project is part of a $600 million effort to update and realign the Crosstown Expressway. The total project which stretches from May Avenue to Interstate 235 is expected to be completed by 2012, said Transportation Director Gary Ridley. Engineers estimate the project is more than 50 percent complete.

• A top OKC PR firm owner emails GOP chairman re: Kern's 'judgmental rhetoric on morality'

  Posted Aug 03 at 8 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Journal Record's Hot Topic
  July 20, 2009

  It is no secret that Brenda Jones of Jones PR is a very proud active republican. She is so serious about her political party that when she writes the word “Party,” she capitalizes it.

  Delegate information: During college at OU, she got an internship at the Republican National Committee that she turned into eight years in the Reagan Administration and four years in the George H.W. Bush Administration.

  We were copied on the following E-mail from Brenda Jones to Gary Jones, the Chairman and Executive Director of the Oklahoma Republican Party. This is communication at what I assume is near the top of the GOP power structure in the metro, if not the state.

  And what does one superconservative say to another, you ask? Well, it is about how ridiculous Sally Kern is:

  From: Brenda Jones
  Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 10:30 AM
  To: Gary Jones
  Subject: FW: Journal Record Editorial - Sally Kern is Bad for Business

  Gary,

  The Republican Party needs to do something about this.

  About a year ago when you and I talked about the future direction of the Party, I stated that the Party needs to stay focused on economic growth, jobs, jobs, jobs, stay true to our anti-tax and pro-business platform. No Party, no group, no any person can ever win new members and sustain its base when the public image is single focused on legislating morality. Especially in these difficult times when people are losing jobs and retirement funds are vanishing, economic growth and a vision for a prosperous future is what will attract young people. This judgmental rhetoric on morality is exactly what repels people away from the Republican Party; and frankly, contracts our core principles for less government and liberty.

  A year ago after Sally Kerns received national coverage on her “terrorist” comment, Oklahoma immediately lost 2 companies who were a week or two away from announcing they were moving to Oklahoma and bringing high-paying engineering and technology jobs.

  I was horrified at the Republican National Convention when I personally witnessed her seeking CNN, FOX News and other national media cameras on the convention floor because I knew she would embarrass not only Oklahoma but the entire Republican Party with her inflammatory decisive rhetoric.

  My great aunt and uncle built Olivet Baptist Church as members since the late 1930s. Now they are 90 years old and were forced to leave Olivet a couple years ago because they were made to feel that they were going to hell because they are registered Democrats, although they are strong conservatives who voted for Ronald Reagan and both Bushes. She and her husband are politicizing God’s pulpit. It is starting to look scary and a bit like that crazy church in Kansas. They are up to something, and it’s not good.

  Gary, we can never build Oklahoma’s Republican Party as long as Sally is the face of our Party. Everyone keeps touting “Ronald Reagan.” As someone who worked for him very closely for 9 years and in The White House West Wing, he rebuilt and grew our Party by attracting Independents and Democrats by standing strong on economic issues and national security. Of course, he strongly opposed abortion and supported many family value issues, but he advocated for these issues from the heart and not a bully pulpit. For example, he strongly opposed the gay agenda. But from concern and compassion about the gay community’s health, he started a Presidential Commission on AIDS to bring healthcare and other leaders to the table to discuss how to stop the spread of AIDS and HIV for the common good of the country. President Reagan understood that his duty was to protect ALL Americans, although he may disagree with their life choices, which is their liberty that does not need government intrusion.

  This is very damaging to Oklahomans, Oklahoma Republican growth, and the Republican Party at the national level.

  Brenda K. Jones, APR

  ————————————————

  As a quick addendum, I do believe there is quite a bit of debate about Reagan’s “concern and compassion about the gay community’s health” when it comes to the subject of action or inaction concerning AIDS. But that will have to be another debate for another blog entry.
  

• Oklahoma child abuse cases fall for third year

  Posted Jul 31 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Tulsa World
  BY BARBARA HOBEROCK
  Published: July 31, 2009

  Confirmed cases of child abuse and neglect are down for the third consecutive year, the state Commission for Human Services was told Tuesday.

  DHS received 1,200 fewer allegations of abuse or neglect, reflecting nearly 6,300 fewer children, during fiscal year 2009 compared with 2008, said Department of Human Services Director Howard Hendrick. An allegation often includes more than one child.

  The number of allegations confirmed by DHS dropped — by about 1,700 — representing about 3,000 children, from 2008 to 2009.

  Hendrick said the drop in abuse and neglect is due in part to more financial security in homes and an increase in adoptions.

  Child support distributed by the DHS is at an all-time high, hitting more than $325 million in fiscal year 2009, Hendrick said.

  "It has gone in 10 years from $100 million to over $300 million,” said Gary Miller, DHS children and family services director. "What that is doing is putting more money into those single-parent homes, to some degree relieving the financial strain they are going through.

  "We all know financial strain or any other kind of strain frustrates parents. They become less tolerant of children and may do something without thinking it through. If we can relieve the pressure and stress, it slows down the incidents of child abuse and neglect.”

  Also, the state leads the nation in establishing paternity, he said. Establishing paternity is needed to collect child support.

  Due to an increase in adoptions, children are out of harm’s way and not the future victims of abuse and neglect, Hendrick said.

  One in four children in Oklahoma also receive food stamps, Hendrick said.

  The state adds more than 700 people to the food stamp rolls every business day, Hendrick said.

  The average benefit is $4 per person per day, which is not a lot of money, he said. The program is paid for with federal dollars, Hendrick said.

• From the nuclear-powered desk: Forget about not being embarrassed

  Posted Jul 30 at 7 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  By Greg Elwell
  Published: July 22, 2009

  Remember a few weeks ago, when I said you shouldn’t be ashamed of Oklahoma? It was a sort of love letter to the state where I grew up and of which I am occasionally proud.

  Well, that was a few weeks ago. Since then, Sally Kern happened.

  Sally Kern never does anything. That would imply sentience. No, Sally Kern happens, like a car accident or incontinence. It’s unpleasant, it’s embarrassing and it frequently requires someone to clean up something very smelly.

  In case you were starting to feel like our state wasn’t a laughingstock, after all that Flaming Lips T-shirt business, let me just burst that particular bubble for you. Why? Because Oklahoma is the state where Rep. Sally Kern (R-You Freaking Serious?) happened to put forth a proclamation claiming all of the country’s economic woes are due to “debauchery.”

  According to her “Proclamation for Morality,” the United States of America has become a “world leader in promoting abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse and many other forms of debauchery.”

  Let’s go down the list, shall we?

  Abortions: You see any abortion clinics around here? No? Didn’t somebody walk into a church and murder an abortion doctor recently? Yeah, we’re promoting the hell out of it.

  Pornography: I guess this is a valid point, since America does make the world’s best porn. But blame it on the fact that we have some of the world’s hottest people, Sally.

  Same-sex marriage: Six of fifty states allow same-sex marriage. There are entire countries that allow it. I wouldn’t call us a “world leader.”

  Sex trafficking: Still against the law.

  Divorce: Have you checked Oklahoma’s divorce rate? Maybe you should work on that at home before you start indicting the country.

  Illegitimate births: See above. Also see tons of pregnant teens, Sally.

  Child abuse: Also still against the law.

  Best of all, she tries to pin it to President Barack Obama, who, to the best of my knowledge, has not had an abortion, married a woman (to whom he’s remained married), doesn’t abuse his kids, star in porn, traffic sex or have a baby with someone other than his wife. Yup. He’s pretty debauched alright.

  Oh Sally, Sally, Sally. I think the jig is up. I’m not sure exactly which game you’re playing, but I’m pretty sure it’s one of the following:

  1.) Sally Kern is actually Sacha Baron Cohen. In his wildest turn since “Borat” and “Bruno,” British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has adopted his craziest identity yet. By pretending to be a rabidly right-wing fundamentalist nutbag, he can expose us all to a few good laughs. This would be his finest satire yet if it wasn’t so ham-fisted. I mean, nobody can be this stupid/racist/homophobic in real life, right?

  2.) Sally Kern is a spy from Texas, working for Gov. Rick Perry. Rick (or Ricky, as he likes to be called), hired international espionage expert Sally Kern to infiltrate the Oklahoma government, where she can undermine the state from the inside. Her mission is simple: Make Oklahomans seem so backwards and unlikeable that when Texas finally secedes, the rest of the U.S. will throw in Oklahoma as a parting gift. Brilliant!

  3.) Or maybe, God help us, maybe she’s serious. Maybe Sally Kern really does think homosexuality is a bigger threat than Al-Qaeda. Maybe she really does think a theocracy (like they have in IRAN) is better than a democracy.

  The real question is, is that what you really think? And if not, isn’t it about time we elect somebody who actually represents the non-crazy, non-backwards, non-Sally Kern Oklahoma?

• Health Insurance “Innovation”

  Posted Jul 27 at 8 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  by baselinescenario.com

  The This American Life crew, once again proving that they can cover any topic they want better than anyone else in the media,* has a segment in this weekend’s episode on rescission of health insurance policies – insurers’ established practice of looking for ways to invalidate policies once it turns out that the insured actually needs significant medical care. (The segment is around the 30-minute mark; audio should be available on that page sometime on Monday.) The story describes a couple of particularly egregious cases, such as a woman who was denied breast cancer surgery because she had been treated for acne in the past, and a person whose policy was rescinded because his insurance agent had incorrectly entered his weight on the application form.

  The legal basis for rescission is that when you sign an insurance application, you are warranting that the information on the application is true; if it turns out not to be true, the insurer can get out of your insurance contract. It’s particularly nasty in practice because the insurer does not immediately investigate your application to determine if it is accurate before selling you the policy (that would be impractically expensive); instead, the insurer waits – years, in many cases – until you actually need expensive health care, and then does the investigation, which at that point is worth it because of the payments the insurer could potentially avoid. Also, you can lose your coverage for innocent mistakes, which are easy to make since the application form asks you if you have ever seen a doctor for any one of a long list of medical conditions that you are certain not to recognize or understand. (In a Congressional hearing, the CEO of a health insurer admitted that he did not know what several of the conditions listed on his company’s application were.)

  This reminded me of nothing so much as all of those “innovations” created by credit card companies, such as universal default, penalty rates, and double-cycle billing, which are really just ways to generate fees that you are unlikely to accurately estimate at the time you sign up for the card. It’s legal; it makes more money for the insurer (or credit card issuer); once one company does it, other companies have to, or they won’t be able to compete; it’s disclosed in such a way that customers don’t understand what they are getting into; it nails you when can least afford it; and it even has a plausible economic justification. Credit card issuers claim that their arsenal of hidden fees makes the cost of credit more closely reflect the riskiness of the borrower, and without the fees they would have to charge higher interest to everyone; health insurers claim that rescission is necessary to deter fraudulent applications, and presumably without it they would have to charge higher premiums to everyone.

  Also, it’s definitely an innovation. I’m sure health insurers have always had fraud investigation units, which looked for red flags on new insurance applications to identify suspicious customers. But the idea that you should (a) target customers precisely because they get sick and need health care and (b) go after them for innocent mistakes is not an inherent part of the insurance business, and is something that some clever person came up with as a way to make more money – not a way to provide more coverage or better service to customers at lower cost.

  And it’s terrible. Basically, anyone who had to fill out a medical underwriting application to get health insurance (this is basically the individual market, not the group market that people are in if they get insurance through their employers) is at risk of finding out that that insurance doesn’t actually exist precisely when he or she needs it most. The insurers claim that rescission is very rare; at the Congressional hearing, two of three industry representatives said it happens to less than 0.5% of policies per year. But that is a deeply misleading number. That means that if you are in the individual market for twenty years, you have a 10% chance of your policy being rescinded; 30 years, and it goes up to 14%. There is a big difference between health insurance and a 90% chance of having health insurance. And remember, insurers only try to rescind policies if you turn out to need them; so the percentage of people who lose their policies when they need them is even higher. (The denominator should exclude all those people who never need expensive medical care, at least not before 65 when they go onto the single-payer system.)

  I know that rescission does not logically prove that some private health insurance system cannot work. For one thing, Congress could simply pass a law banning the practice except in cases of intentional misrepresentation (although the free marketers would complain about increasing government interference in the “free market”). But it is evidence that the private health insurance system we have does not work. Yes, it’s just the individual market, but it’s the individual market that’s growing, not the employer-based market. And the system we’ve got, like the credit card industry, is one where the name of the game is finding ways to make the product you sell worth less to the customer than the customer thinks it is worth. (The more common way this is done is by burying exclusions and limits in the fine print.)

  This is the system that the politicians who are dug in against health care reform – and everyone knows who they are – are defending. I’d like to see them try to defend it openly, instead of hiding behind the tattered banner of fiscal responsibility.

  * OK, that may be a bit of an exaggeration. I am really a huge fan, so I get carried away sometimes.

• GOP Senate leader: Inhofe's comment on health care 'unfortunate'

  Posted Jul 26 at 5 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Tulsa World Washington Bureau
  By JIM MYERS
  Published: 7/26/2009

  WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, who last week earned a compliment from the White House for being honest when putting health care reform in political terms, did not get a similar pass Sunday from one of his own top Republican leaders.

  Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona described comments by Inhofe, R-Okla., and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., as “unfortunate.”

  “I don’t agree with that kind of language,” Kyl said on “Fox News Sunday.”

  Last week, Inhofe had expressed hope on the Hugh Hewitt show that President Obama keeps talking about his health care initiative and trying to rush it through Congress.

  “We can stall it. And that’s going to be a huge gain for those of us who want to turn this thing over in the 2010 election,” Inhofe said.

  DeMint reportedly said if health care reform efforts can be stopped, the issue would become Obama’s “Waterloo,” and it will “break him.”

  Kyl agreed the effort to pass health care legislation should be slowed enough to give the American people a chance to instruct lawmakers when they return home.

  “But I do think that because the language has a political implication, it’s unfortunate,” Kyl said.

  “Both sides talk about the politics of these issues. I don’t think we ought to be focused on that.”

  Last week White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel complimented both Inhofe and DeMint for being honest in viewing the health care debate in political terms.

  “I am not going to criticize them,” Emanuel said in an NPR interview.

  He added, however, a “big political victory”’ for Republicans on health care also would guarantee the status quo remains in policy terms.

• Law cuts Oklahoma lobbyist gift-giving

  Posted Jul 24 at 11 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  BY MICHAEL MCNUTT
  Published: July 23, 2009

  Lobbyists working their first legislative session after their gift-giving cap was slashed by 67 percent targeted the first-ever state Republican Senate leader and freshman lawmakers, spending reports show.

  Speaker of the Oklahoma state House, Chris Benge, R-Tulsa, left, looks on during a news conference in Oklahoma City, Monday, May 11, 2009, as Oklahoma state Senate President Pro Tem Glenn Coffee, R-Oklahoma City, speaks. The Republican lawmakers were unveiling compromise legislation affecting the way Oklahomans file and litigate lawsuits.

  Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn Coffee, R-Oklahoma City, received the most things of value from lobbyists, getting about $976, mostly in meals, reports show.

  House Speaker Chris Benge, R-Tulsa, who completed his second year heading the House, was 23rd among legislators in the amount of meals or gifts given by lobbyists. Reports show lobbyists gave him about $487 worth of items, mostly meals. Seven freshman legislators received more from lobbyists than Benge did during the past legislative session.

  The latest reports lobbyists filed with the state Ethics Commission show lobbyists spent about $49,470 on elected officials and staff during the first six months of 2009, which includes the four-month legislative session that starts in early February and concludes in late May. Most of the money, about $38,587, was spent on legislators; almost all was for meals.

  That compares with lobbyists reported giving of $73,652 to lawmakers during the same period in 2008. During the first six months of 2007, lobbyists reported spending nearly $120,000.

  A big factor for the decline is a law that went into effect July 1, 2008. It cut from $300 to $100 the allowable amount spent on gifts for legislators and elected officials by a lobbyist’s employer in a calendar year.

  The reports also include gifts and meals not covered previously. The law also requires lobbyists to disclose gifts after spending more than $10 on a official or aide during each six-month period. Previously, only gifts that cost $50 or more had to be disclosed.

  Republicans got the most
  The lobbyist reports were due Monday. A check of records filed online by noon Tuesday showed 118 lobbyists had filed reports showing they provided things of value to elected officials or their staff during the first six months of the year. The state has about 375 registered lobbyists. Lobbyists don’t face a fine for not filing their reports by the deadline.

  Rep. Steve Kouplen, D-Beggs, received about $730 from lobbyists, the second-highest amount and the highest among the 23 freshmen — 17 in the House and six in the Senate. Four freshmen were in the top 10. Seven lawmakers in the top 10 are Republicans, and seven receiving the lowest amounts are Republican.

  House Republicans, in control since after the 2004 elections, picked up about half the total of gifts or meals given to legislators by lobbyists. Reports showed House GOP members received about $19,487.

  House Democrats, outnumbered 61-40 by Republicans, received less than half the amount given to their GOP counterparts, or about $8,760.

  Rep. Jason Murphey, R-Guthrie, was the only lawmaker among the 101 representatives and 48 senators shown as not being given anything of value by lobbyists, reports show. Murphey has tried to get legislation passed that would allow legislators to sign up for a "no-gifts list” that would prevent lobbyists from giving legislators any item of value.

  Last fall, he posted a sign on his state Capitol door advising lobbyists not to give him or his executive assistant any gifts.

  In the Senate, where Republicans have a 26-22 edge, lobbyists reported giving about $5,685 in gifts or meals to Republicans compared with $4,653 to Democrats.

  Water was a popular topic
  The reports also show water was a topic when lobbyists bought meals for legislators this past session.

  The Tarrant Regional Water District, which wants to buy water from southern Oklahoma and has filed a lawsuit against the state, reported spending about $648 on meals for 17 lawmakers, including Benge and Dale DeWitt, R-Braman. DeWitt authored House Bill 1483, which since has been signed into law. It requires the state Water Resources Board to ensure enough water is available for Oklahoma’s needs and scrutinize a potential buyer’s need and purpose for the water. The board may not issue a permit for out-of-state water usage without legislative approval.

  The legislation was passed in the final days of the session. A ban on the sale of water out of state, put in place by the Legislature five years ago, was set to expire in November. The trial on the water lawsuit is expected to begin in December.

  The Central Oklahoma Water Resource Authority also talked water with legislators over meals. Reports show it spent about $717 on meals for 34 legislators.

  The group wants to build a pipeline to bring water from southern Oklahoma into its communities.

• Governor Brad Henry seeks federal aid for farmers, ranchers

  Posted Jul 22 at 6 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  BY MICHAEL MCNUTT
  Published: July 22, 2009

  Saying Oklahoma’s farmers and ranchers have endured "about every form of bad weather imaginable” in the past 10 months, Gov. Brad Henry is seeking federal aid.

  In a letter sent to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak, the governor said ongoing drought conditions combined with floods, hail, fire, high winds and freezing temperatures have caused serious damage and losses to Oklahoma’s agriculture and ranching industries.

  Significant losses
  He noted in his letter that the state’s wheat harvest was expected to be far below normal, and that livestock loss caused by a forage deficit in hay and grazing caused significant losses, as well.

  "Our farmers and ranchers endured about every form of bad weather imaginable last year, and their crops and livestock suffered accordingly,” the governor wrote.

  "A federal declaration won’t address all of their losses, but it would be a step in the right direction.”

  In his letter, the governor asked that the Farm Service Agency be authorized to complete damage assessment reports on all Oklahoma counties.

  The period of extreme weather in the state was from Sept. 1 to June 30.

  If the disaster declaration is approved, Oklahoma farmers and ranchers will be eligible for low- interest loans.

• Oklahoma Baptist newspaper apologizes for fake Henry endorsement

  Posted Jul 21 at 9 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  BY CARLA HINTON
  Published: July 21, 2009

  State Rep. Sally Kern said Monday she was the first to alert a Baptist newspaper that it had made an error in printing a copy of her "Proclamation for Morality” with a fake endorsement from the governor.

  The Baptist Messenger, the official newspaper of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma, published Kern’s proclamation in its July 16 edition, making the document appear to be on state of Oklahoma "executive department” letterhead, complete with the state seal and signatures of Gov. Brad Henry and Secretary of State Susan Savage.

  Kern, R-Oklahoma City, said she saw the Baptist Messenger when her husband, the Rev. Steve Kern, a Baptist pastor, brought a copy home last week. She said they contacted the newspaper’s leaders about it and learned that someone had made the mistake unintentionally.

  "Looked like he tried to doctor it up to make it look nice,” Kern said.

  "They tried to make it appear like the governor had signed it.”

  Kern’s proclamation says America’s decline is a result of a decline in moral values and includes a petition for the signatures of people who agree with its premise. Neither Henry nor Savage signed the document, which Kern presented July 2 at the state Capitol. The proclamation is not a proposed piece of legislation.

  Monday, Scott Phillips, spokesman for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma, said the Baptist Messenger’s leaders called the offices of Henry and Savage last week and apologized for the error. He said a retraction is printed in the July 23 edition of the weekly newspaper and another retraction will appear in the July 30 edition. Phillips said the Baptist Messenger’s circulation is 68,000.

  "They apologized profusely,” said Paul Sund, the governor’s spokesman. "We understand that people are human and they make mistakes.”

  In a written statement he issued Monday, Sund said, "The Baptist Messenger editor indicated that a graphic artist has merged the images of an old state proclamation and the Rep. Kern petition without realizing the old, official state document contained the signatures of the governor and secretary of state. Neither official signed the Rep. Kern petition.”

  Kern’s proclamation caused a stir when she presented it at the Capitol, with groups of people chanting and singing both in support and opposition of the document.

• Will health care reform reach rural America?

  Posted Jul 12 at 10 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  CNN.com
  By John King
  CNN Chief National Correspondent

  CLAY, West Virginia (CNN) -- Carl Walls speaks softly and humbly.

  "If life and death depended on money, I'd just have to die," is how he sees things.

  "You would be dead now," his wife, Elizabeth, chimed in.

  With a nod, Carl acknowledged that she had it right.

  "I'd be dead right now."

  He wasn't much for trusting doctors to begin with. ("Legal dope dispensers" is how he puts it.)

  And then there was the financial hurdle: The Wallses sold two small businesses a few years ago to pay for back surgery and other health problems Elizabeth was facing.

  The money is gone, which, thankfully, didn't matter when Carl had a massive heart attack in May.

  The ambulance raced him from his home in remote coal country to a rural hospital about 50 miles away. There, they rushed to give him blood thinners but knew that their facility wasn't capable of doing much more. A helicopter swooped Carl to Charleston, where he had multiple bypass surgery.

  Money wasn't an issue.

  "They treated me with respect, with dignity. In spite of me not having any money, they treated me as if I were a king," Carl said on the porch of a home where the couple lived temporarily after his surgery in Clay, a tiny town tucked into the rolling hills of coal country.

  Temporarily, because the Wallses' home was up on a steep hillside -- too much of a test for his heart at the moment -- so they sold it, lived temporarily in town and now are moving to Georgia to stay with family.

  Carl shrugs at the suggestion that more frequent visits to the doctor might have detected his heart troubles sooner or helped him avoid major trauma through changes in his diet, drugs or even angioplasty or other procedures that, though expensive, are dwarfed by the cost of the helicopter ride and emergency surgery.

  And seated just to his right, Elizabeth is another case study in the health care woes of poor, rural America.

  She is legally blind from diabetes but doesn't go for the periodic screenings that doctors say are crucial.

  "Because I can't pay for them," she said matter-of-factly. "And you know, I could go, and I'd get bills, and I can't pay those bills."

  It is Carl's turn to chime in: The helicopter alone cost $11,000.

  "We got thousands and thousands of [dollars in] bills coming in, and what can you do about them?" he asked.

  I put this question to Elizabeth: "So you would rather not go to the doctor than have a bill come that you can't pay?"

  "Right."

  It is the dilemma Dr. Sarah Chouinard faces every day.

  She runs a community health clinic in Clay, where nearly 30 percent of the population falls below the poverty line and at least 35 percent of the residents lack health insurance.

  "We offer sliding fee payment scales," she said during a clinic tour. "If they are at 100 percent federal poverty level or worse, they owe us $5 only, and the rest of their care is waived."

  Preventive care is the clinic's urgent focus, first and foremost, because it is good medicine. But also weighing on Chouinard and her colleagues is the knowledge that many, if not most, of their patients, because they can't afford it, won't follow advice to see a specialist if their health care needs are beyond the clinic's capabilities.

  "Our hope is to keep people away from needing expensive health care services," she said.

  Chouinard claims steady progress and credits a combination of growing trust in the community and aggressive clinic outreach using an electronic record database brought online with the help of federal grant money.

  Now, she says, the computer alerts the clinic staff when a patient has skipped a follow-up appointment or failed to schedule a periodic screening. It can even alert doctors if, say, a patient who needs a certain asthma inhaler has not been in to get the prescription renewed.

  "So we do a lot of this outreach to drive people back to the health center. ... Our role in a rural setting is key," Chouinard said. "The question is: How do we keep paying for it? How do we keep giving discounted care? How can we afford to keep the doors open?"

  Make no mistake, Chouinard embraces the ideal of universal health care coverage. But as she follows the debate in Washington, she says she has not heard much, if anything, about how critical rural community health centers would be impacted.

  "It will be interesting to see what happens if they come up with universal coverage," she said. "What will our role as a federally qualified health center be? ... How is our role defined after that?"

  What one senses is a conflict between idealism and rural reality; of course, she would like everyone covered, but there is a nagging sense that politicians who don't understand places like this will pass major legislation that changes the funding model for health care -- and clinics like the one here -- and yet somehow doesn't work as advertised.

  "I worry we will have patients here who somehow do not fall into some category and somehow slip through the cracks," is how Chouinard put it.

  Carl and Elizabeth Walls share that concern. They have worked and paid taxes all their lives and say that if the government is going to spend billions on health care reform, then covering people like them "should rate pretty high," Elizabeth said.

  But, like Chouinard, they worry about falling through the cracks.

  "You know, we have worked all our lives and tried, and we can't seem to get any program that works for us," Elizabeth Walls said.

  Their worries might not make sense to those promising universal, or near-universal, access in Washington.

  But that sentiment, maybe polite skepticism is a better way to put it, is commonplace in the tiny coal towns where many of the jobs have disappeared, and whatever is said now is judged alongside the many past promises that help was on the way.

• Opting out: Health care missive mangles the facts

  Posted Jul 12 at 4 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  OKdemocrats.org
  The Oklahoman (Editorial)
  
  The new chairman of the Oklahoma Democratic Party has a problem with bureaucrats running the nation’s health insurance system. That would be big news if Todd Goodman were talking about the bureaucrats Democrats in Congress want to employ for a nationalized health care system.

  Goodman, though, is critical of the "bureaucrats working for insurance companies.”

  "We (state Democratic Party leaders) believe that people should have more options when it comes to health insurance, and that they should have the final say in what kind of treatment they receive ...” Goodman said in a message accompanying his appeal for participation in the June 27 National Health Care Day of Service, a Barack Obama re-election campaign event disguised as community service.

  Goodman laments that so many Oklahomans are uninsured but says nothing about the efforts the Legislature has made to decrease that number through the Insure Oklahoma program. Perhaps that’s because Goodman doesn’t think much of the program or perhaps it’s because the lead in reducing the rate of uninsured has been taken by Oklahoma Republicans.

  Democrats can’t have it both ways. Replacing insurance company "bureaucrats” with government bureaucrats isn’t much of a trade. We’ll take the private sector any day in that contest.

  As for having more options, a single-payer system, which is at the heart of Obama’s desires, would reduce options, not increase them. As for having the "final say” in treatment, ask citizens of Canada and other countries with nationalized health care if their "final say” rights are honored.

• Kerns blames it on the gays

  Posted Jul 09 at 11 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Dallas Voice
  By David Taffet, Staff Writer
  Jul 9, 2009 - 7:45:43 PM

  Oklahoma Republican lawmaker issues proclamation listing same-sex marriage among ‘forms of debauchery’ she says caused recession

  Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern made headlines when she said gays were “a bigger threat ... than terrorism or Islam.” This year, she has issued a proclamation claiming that “moral debauchery” — including same-sex marriage is responsible for the country’s bad economic state.

  Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern, who made headlines last year when anti-gay comments she made at a Republican fundraiser were secretly taped and then posted online, is back in the news after she issued her “Oklahoma Citizen’s Proclamation for Morality” before the July 4 weekend.

  The proclamation blames the country’s current financial woes on a list of moral failings, including same-sex marriage and divorce along with pornography, sex trafficking, child abuse and “many other forms of debauchery.”

  Last year, the Republican from Oklahoma City made national news when she called homosexuality more dangerous than terrorism.

  “I honestly think it’s the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat,” Kern said last year.

  Openly gay Oklahoma state Rep. Al McAffrey, whose district borders Kern’s, this week said, “To blame our economic woes on a national moral crisis is ludicrous. Our economic woes are a direct result of bad financial practices and a lack of regulation on Wall Street.”

  Oklahoma state Rep. Ryan Kiesel also condemned Kern’s proclamation. “According to that logic all those folks who were ripped off by Bernie Madoff should focus their anger at the governor of South Carolina,” he said.

  Kern’s proclamation goes on to criticize President Obama for not attending the annual National Prayer Breakfast and for having issued a proclamation recognizing June as National Gay Pride Month.

  Kern said she and her supporters are “grieved that the office of the president of these United States has refused to uphold the long held tradition of past presidents in giving recognition to our National Day of Prayer,” and are “deeply disturbed that the office of the president of these United States disregards the biblical admonitions to live clean and pure lives by proclaiming an entire month to an immoral behavior.”

  Kiesel said, “The inaccuracies in this proclamation are astounding. For starters, I distinctly remember President Obama observing the national day of prayer. I suppose he is to be admonished for not turning it into a photo opportunity like his predecessor.”

  In her proclamation, Kern includes quotes that she incorrectly attributes to the founding fathers.

  One statement in her proclamation reads: “This great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians (Patrick Henry).”

  McAffrey said, “Sitting at my computer for 10 minutes, I found that two of the quotes she uses that are attributed to James Madison and Patrick Henry were fabricated. These quotes appear nowhere in the writings or records of either man, and there’s no evidence to suggest they ever said such things.”

  According to Snopes.com, the Henry quote is often cited but cannot be attributed to any of Henry’s writings. The line comes from a 1989 book “The Myth of Separation” written by Texas fundamentalist David Barton and is often quoted by the right wing.

  Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) debunked the Madison quote in 1994. They traced that misquote to Rush Limbaugh.

  Another quote used to argue that the founding fathers favored a Christian nation is attributed to Thomas Jefferson. McAffrey points out that Jefferson coined the phrase “separation of church and state” in a letter he wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptists assuring them “a wall of separation.”

  “Mrs. Kern’s complete disregard for American history is appalling and inexcusable. Obviously the author of this proclamation failed to properly research the issues being addressed,” McAffrey said.

  “I’m appalled that Mrs. Kern chose to use a state proclamation to attack the freedom of many Oklahomans who do not share her faith or her views,” he added.

  Jim Roth, a former Oklahoma Corporation commissioner and Oklahoma County commissioner who is openly gay, said, “Sally Kern represents the most unqualified of public officials who has to create distractions by attacking people in hopes of creating a diversion away from her own pathetic record of service.”

  In her three-term legislative career, Kern has authored little legislation. Her bill last year to give students in earth science classes passing grades for spouting “Young Earth Creationism” passed the House and died in the Senate. Her “Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act” included a provision that “students shall not be penalized or rewarded on account of the religious content of their work.” That bill passed but was vetoed by the governor.

  Kern has been stopped twice entering the state capitol with a loaded semiautomatic firearm.

• Oklahoma parents’ addiction problems often change kids’ lives, too

  Posted Jul 06 at 12 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  As a teen, woman saw firsthand that
  ‘drugs destroy families’

  NewsOK.com
  BY SONYA COLBERG
  Published: July 6, 2009

  Her mother’s crack cocaine hits and hurried visits to the Kingdom Hall punctuated Mariah’s young life.
  Featured Gallery

  The turning point came when she was 14 and woke up one morning to discover her mother hadn’t come home. Mariah and her 15-year-old sister were alone.

  Mom’s absence wasn’t unusual. She had been in and out of jail all of Mariah’s life, but this time was different. She’d left no note, no clue.

  Mariah didn’t know it then, but she was one face of a national statistic.

  The parents of nearly two million children have been incarcerated, according to the nonprofit group, Every Child Matters Education Fund.

  Even before their mother’s disappearance, the girls led an existence far removed from the model of family life.

  The family downturn started with Mariah’s father’s fascination with drugs. Initially, he was able to continue his construction work. But he changed, said Mariah, 18, who asked that her full name not be used.

  "Dad became a full-grown crackhead. I went five or six years without seeing or hearing from my dad at all,” Mariah said. "I used to be a daddy’s girl. In my eyes he was a man of so much honor and respect; he was my dad! But the crack took him down.”

  Mariah’s mother took the children and left.

  Her mother was eager to raise the children in a wholesome Oklahoma environment. So it was especially ironic that she wound up with a boyfriend who introduced her to drugs and ultimately the very thing she’d run from — crack cocaine.

  "My mom, I didn’t want to see the same thing happen with her. One day she’d be all, ‘Oh, we’re going to the Kingdom Hall (of Jehovah’s Witnesses), and we’re going to do this and that.’ The next day she’d be hitting the bowl,” Mariah said, referring to a marijuana pipe.

  Mariah became yet another statistic. Each year, more than 8.3 million children live with at least one parent who depends on or abuses alcohol or an illicit drug, according to The National Survey on Drug Use and Health Report.

  Life after Mom
  The day their mother disappeared, the girls thought about what their mom had drilled into them: The best way to improve your life is to go to school.

  "My mother, I love my mom to death. That’s what she wants us to do: Stay positive. Be thankful for what you do have. Anything’s better than nothing,” Mariah said with a laugh. "I tell myself it’ll get greater later.”

  Every day they traipsed off to school and came home to an empty house. When a friend told them their mother was in jail again, the sisters took on adult responsibilities and tended to chores and school, a fairly common situation for children of drug abusing parents.

  "I think it’s very difficult,” said Jackie Landler with A Chance to Change. "They can’t trust their parents to provide for them in a lot of cases. Some will become super responsible and parent their parents. Others will act out anger.”

  Things ran efficiently until someone broke into the house and stole the sisters’ food. They moved in with their mother’s friends only to discover a drug problem there. Then the state took her to a local group home.

  "I was crying my eyes out. It was a terrifying feeling. I didn’t know any of these people,” she said.

  Working it out
  She began living with relatives, and on her 15th birthday, she got a job at a root beer stand. The job worked out so well, she said she can still get a free root beer whenever she wants.

  "I had to work ’cause my mom wasn’t there. Anything I needed I had to work for: school, clothes, supplies,” she said.

  Teens need to develop coping skills and diversions from work and the heartache of drug-using parents, said Michael Swafford, a doctor of psychiatry. He said teens can help stay balanced by playing a sport, taking up a hobby and talking to friends or counselors.

  Mariah continued to move in and out of apartments and houses of friends and relatives. She’d barely moved into a relative’s apartment when police busted the occupants for drugs. Mariah had planned to take her ACT test to enroll in college in a couple days, but her eyes were nearly swollen shut from crying.

  "My sister made me get up,” Mariah said.

  "She said, ‘You get up. You’re going.’”

  Mariah took her test and got a very respectable 22.

  "School is my ticket out of everything."

  Waiting for mother
  Mariah is uncertain when she will see her mother freed again.

  "As many times as my mother has been in jail, she keeps missing out on important moments in our lives,” Mariah said, ticking off her plans for college and new babies for both of her sisters and her brother.

  "In her letters she talks about being the grandma they can come to or they can go to Granny’s house,” she said.

  She said she finds comfort knowing her mother is getting counseling in jail.

  "I know a lot about drugs. I know where drugs lead to and that’s why I stay away from them. I see who is using them, and I know the outcome,” Mariah said.

  "Drugs destroy families and lives.”

• New law tough on domestic abusers

  Posted Jul 06 at 10 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Tulsa World Capitol Bureau
  By: BARBARA HOBEROCK

  OKLAHOMA CITY - A new law that took effect t his month cracks down on domestic abusers and bans sex offenders from operating ice-cream trucks.

  Senate Bill 1020, which went into effect Wednesday, makes any person who commits domestic abuse and has a history of physical abuse guilty of a felony.

  A conviction is punishable by as much as 10 years in prison, a $5,000 fine or both.

  In the past, domestic abuse had been a misdemeanor, even if there was evidence of previous abuse, said Sen. Jonathan Nichols, R-Norman, a sponsor of the law.

  "Why should someone who is abusing his wife or girlfriend get the benefit of not having been caught for all the other times he has been punching and hitting her when there is proof of him doing it?" asked Nichols, a former prosecutor in the Cleveland County District Attorney's Office.

  A pattern of domestic abuse is defined as three or more separate incidents on separate days within a six-month period.

  "The prior incidences only need to be proven through direct evidence of any type," Nichols said. "It could include photographs, videotapes, emergency-room reports, a witness or an emergency-room attendant. Direct evidence takes many forms in the law."

  Another section of the bill bans sex offenders from operating ice-cream vending trucks and requires employers to conduct background checks on potential ice-cream truck drivers.

  Sex offenders found operating ice-cream trucks may be punished by as much as 2 1/2 years in prison, a $1,000 fine or both.

  "A sheriff or police officer may arrest without a warrant any person who the officer has probable cause to believe has violated the provisions of this section," the law states.

  Employers who uncover that a sex offender has been operating an ice-cream truck must report it to the district attorney.

  The law also requires employers to conduct annual background checks against the Oklahoma Sex Offender Registry and keep records.

  Sen. Jay Paul Gumm, D-Durant, one of the law's sponsors, said, "There hasn't been a case in Oklahoma, but there have been several in other states," including California, New York, Pennsylvania and Florida.

  "I felt like it was important to put this in place so we don't have that problem here in our state," Gumm said.

  BARBARA HOBEROCK - Tulsa World Capitol Bureau

• Sally Sullies State Image

  Posted Jul 06 at 10 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  OkieFunk.com
  By Kurt Hochenauer
  
  State Rep. Sally Kern’s political stunts and outspoken religious extremism continue to sully the state’s image.

  Kern has become a national spectacle in a sad story of bigotry and narrow-minded religious views. How can it possibly help Oklahoma that so many people outside the state immediately think of Kern and what she has said and done when they even bother to think about the state at all?

  It should anger people here that Kern, an Oklahoma City Republican, is viewed as the face of Oklahoma to a lot of people outside the state. She makes Oklahoma seem like a backwards, intolerant place to live. Her public political and cultural stances, which are given a large venue by the local corporate media, are often hateful and divisive, and more state leaders should step up and say so.

  The representative, who once claimed homosexuality was a worse threat to the nation than terrorism, made national news again last week when she issued an “Oklahoma Citizen’s Proclamation for Morality,” which essentially blamed the country’s economic problems on things like same sex marriage and “other forms of debauchery.”

  Obviously, there are several illogical statements and distortions in the document. It begins by cherry picking quotes from some of the founding fathers and then makes an illogical argument that ties same sex marriage to economic problems. It proceeds to criticize the president and then calls for a “Christian renewal.” It’s a mush of religious extremism and snarky political drivel.

  Many of the founding fathers considered themselves deists and actively worked against religious intrusion in government. Using Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin to promote a theocratic, Christian worldview is simply inaccurate.

  The debate over the religious views of the founding fathers makes for an interesting discussion, but the point is the document uses quotes from some people with far more complicated and nuanced religious views than fundamentalist Christianity.

  The section that ties debauchery to the country’s economic problems doesn’t even mention Wall Street greed or crooked investment bankers, such as Bernie Madoff. Why not? The sections dealing with President Barack Obama represent cheap, partisan politics. Why hasn’t Kern also publicly criticized former Vice President Dick Cheney for supporting same sex marriage? What about the “morality” of some prominent members in the Republican Party, including South Carolina Mark Sanford, who recently admitted he was cheating on his wife. The point is Kern’s document is politically calculated.

  The best responses to Kern’s statement came from State Reps. Ryan Kiesel and Al McAffrey, both Democrats, and a noisy crowd showed up to protest Kern’s “signing” of the proclamation at the State Capitol. But the state continues to suffer image problems because of Kern’s antics.

• Rep. Ryan Kiesel repsonds to Kern's Morality Proclamation

  Posted Jul 02 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Text of Rep. Ryan Kiesel’s prepared remarks in response to Rep. Kern’s proclamation:

  OKLAHOMA CITY (July 2, 2009)– In response to Representative Sally Kern’s call for all Oklahomans to sign a morality proclamation that acknowledges the need for a national awakening of righteousness, Representative Ryan Kiesel, D-Seminole, made the following remarks at the State Capitol today:

  Following today’s political spectacle and a month removed from the lunacy that was this past legislative session, I feel confident in saying if there were to be an 11th Commandment, it would say “thou shalt not use these commandments to get re-elected.”

  The inaccuracies in this proclamation are astounding. For starters, I distinctly remember President Obama observing the national day of prayer. I suppose he is to be admonished for not turning it into a photo opportunity like his predecessor.

  Of the many causes for the global economic crisis (which President Obama inherited), such as complex financial instruments, a vacuum of regulation, and good old fashion greed, it’s embarrassing for a state leader to point the blame at debauchery in bedrooms instead of debauchery in boardrooms.
  Given Oklahoma’s high divorce rate, that statistic alone means we are a state of debauchees. Further, according to that logic all those folks who were ripped off by Bernie Madoff should focus their anger at the Governor of South Carolina.

  I’m also astonished at the intellectually dishonest portrayal of our nations founding.

  Any true conversation regarding the faith of our founding fathers is far more complicated than the version told today.

  Our founders certainly wrestled with matters of faith but I doubt any of them would have met the standards attributed to them today.

  Of our first five presidents, four were Deist, and the other rejected the concept of a holy trinity. Our third president even took to his bible with a blade and carved out the passages that were at odds with his beliefs. If you ever visit Monticello, you can buy a copy of the Jeffersonian Bible in the gift shop.

  To find even a hint of the church-state relationship suggested by Rep. Kern, you have to go back over a century in time before the founding to see an example of the entanglement of faith and government Rep. Kern is attributing to our founders. The first colonial Americans, many seeking religious freedom from the Church of England, did indeed allow for their leaders to mix the law of the state and the church. It was a time when men and women such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were banished from their colonies for daring to promote religious tolerance.

  On the historical heels of colonial America, our founders knew far better than we do today of the division that results when the government takes sides in matters of individual conscience. They knew the flower of faith thrives in the soil of liberty.

  It’s no accident that the United States boast high church attendance and a great percentage of our citizens believe in God. It is not because we have to, or we are forced to, and it certainly isn’t because Sally Kern says so; it’s because in the United States of America, we can.

  In a couple of days we will celebrate our nation’s independence. It is especially troubling that a few zealots would use this day of unity to play the very divisive game of allowing the government to ordain from on high what is and is not good and holy. This is the very division our founders saw as a threat to the future of the then-fledgling democracy.

  Today I am proud to stand with these many individuals and organizations and with our Founders in saying we reject this divisive political stunt and instead celebrate the miracle of the human mind and its ability to believe in a manner each sees fit, the ability to love whom one wants, and the ability to elect a government who will not concern itself with who you love or where you go to church; rather focusing itself on building a strong economy, a world class education for our next generation of leaders and a health care system for all Oklahomans.

  Let me close with a question. It begins with a story I once heard told by a Christian pastor in Tulsa. There is a fourth generation Tibetan Monk. Every morning he milks the goats, takes them to another pasture, works in the garden, says some prayers, burns some incense, never married, doesn’t kill, cuss, fight. He never heard the Christian Gospel in his remote isolated corner of the world and has never accepted Jesus as his savior. One day as he is taking the goats from one pasture to another he slips and falls off a cliff and dies. Is Jesus there to receive that man?

  That question is for you to answer. I know the premise of this question causes debate among Christians of the same denomination, among Christians of different denominations, and the fate of this man will spark debate among the faithful of all faiths and even non-believers.

  Regardless of how we answer that question, we should all be grateful and protective of our nation and our Constitution that allows that answer to be a matter of individual conscience.

  This is the genius of America and the spirit of Oklahoma. A state with a rich history of diversity defeating segregation, tolerance triumphing over hatred. Where being an Oklahoman has nothing to do with your faith, your race, or your sexual preference and where being a good Oklahoman means answering your neighbors call for help and having the determination to persevere through the greatest of challenges.

  * Ryan Kiesel represents House District 28 in the Oklahoma House of Representatives.

• Church lady: Righteousness, Rep. Kern-style

  Posted Jul 02 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Tulsa World
  By World's Editorial Writers
  Published: 7/2/2009

  It appears that the people of the state of Oklahoma aren't a big enough flock for state Rep. Sally Kern. Now she wants to take her message of hellfire and brimstone all across the land, possibly even to the halls of Congress and maybe even the Oval Office.

  Kern, best known for asserting that homosexuality is a greater threat than terrorism, plans to circulate for signatures the "Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation for Morality," a document that would "acknowledge the need for a national awakening of righteousness."

  Certainly we're all in favor of righteousness, though there's liable to be considerable disagreement over exactly how to define it.

  More on that later. First let's get to Kern's new economic theory which, if proven accurate, could win her a Nobel Prize, or at least a chapter in economics textbooks:

  "We believe our economic woes are consequences of our greater national moral crisis," a draft of her proclamation states.

  The Oklahoma City Republican isn't the first to float that theory, but so far no adherents have been able to satisfactorily flesh it out. Maybe she's referring to financial greed and corruption. We'll anxiously await further details.

  Apparently President Barack Obama's proclamation declaring June as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month was among factors motivating Kern to come up with her own, which, if it advances, would have no real official weight.

  The draft version says signers are alarmed that the U.S. government is "forsaking
  the rich Christian heritage upon which this nation was built."

  It also states signers are upset by Obama's disregard for "the biblical admonitions to live clean and pure lives by proclaiming an entire month to an immoral behavior."

  Kern is entitled to her views, of course, just as the rest of us are. And while Kern and others hold that the Bible condemns homosexuality, many other equally spiritual Americans believe otherwise.

  It would appear Kern and her ilk don't embrace an American tradition cherished by most citizens: tolerance of other people's beliefs and faith traditions. That precious freedom — to follow the religious tradition of one's choice — is a hard-won objective that is an underpinning of the American way of life. Apparently that's lost on Kern and company.

• McAffrey Soundly Rejects Kern’s Proclamation; Calls For an Apology

  Posted Jul 02 at 1 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  For Immediate Release:
  July 2, 2009
  Contact: info@almcaffrey.com

  McAffrey Soundly Rejects Kern’s Proclamation; Calls For an Apology

  Oklahoma City, OK – “I completely identify with the deep faith that many Oklahomans hold dear,” State Representative Al McAffrey said. “But Mrs. Kern’s proclamation does nothing but assault the very freedom to exercise our religious beliefs.” McAffrey pointed out the overwhelming evidence that our country was founded on the significant principal of religious freedom. “I’m appalled that Mrs. Kern chose to use a state proclamation to attack the freedom of many Oklahomans who do not share her faith or her views,” McAffrey said. “It’s simply appalling.”

  McAffrey said that Kern made several statements that cannot be substantiated whatsoever. “To blame our economic woes on a national moral crisis is ludicrous,” McAffrey said. “Our economic woes are a direct result of bad financial practices and a lack of regulation on Wall Street.” McAffrey also noted Kern’s misrepresentation of the quotes and factual evidence. “Mrs. Kern uses her proclamation to accuse President Obama of not recognizing our National Day of Prayer; that is an absolute lie,” he said. “On May 7, 2009, President Obama proclaimed a National Day of Prayer and encouraged all Americans to “come together in moments of great challenge and uncertainty to humble themselves in prayer.”

  Aside from the misrepresentations of the facts presented by Kern, McAffrey said he was dismayed at the blatant disregard for American history. “Sitting at my computer for 10 minutes, I found that two of the quotes she uses that are attributed to James Madison and Patrick Henry were fabricated. These quotes appear nowhere in the writings or records of either man and there’s no evidence to suggest they ever said such things,” he said.

  McAffrey pointed out that any studious observer of American History would know that both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were avid supporters of religious freedom. In fact, it was Jefferson who first enumerated the idiom ‘Separation of Church & State,’ which is typically traced to a letter he wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptists, in which he referred to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution as creating a "wall of separation" between church and state. “Mrs. Kern’s complete disregard for American history is appalling and inexcusable,” McAffrey said. “Obviously the author of this proclamation failed to properly research the issues being addressed.”

  McAffrey noted that of the 11 quotes used by Kern throughout her proclamation, six of them were erroneous, taken out of context, or proven invalid due to evidence that the author’s intended meaning was dissimilar to the use of the quote. “I find it embarrassing that an Oklahoma state legislator would produce such an ill-researched proclamation. This was an obvious publicity stunt aimed at grabbing some headlines,” McAffrey said. “It’s pitiable that with all the major challenges facing our great state, some of our state leaders are more interested in making news headlines than making strides toward strengthening the economy, improving our public schools, and ensuring that all Oklahomans have access to quality, affordable and sustainable health care.”

  McAffrey is publically calling for Kern to rescind her proclamation and apologize for the discrepancies and misrepresentations of the facts. “I believe it’s her duty to the people of her district and all Oklahomans to rescind this proclamation and consider researching the facts before rewriting it,” McAffrey said. “She owes Oklahomans of all faiths a sincere apology.”

  Al Mcaffrey is a State Representative, representing District 88 in the Oklahoma State House of Representatives.

  For more information:
  http://okhousedems.com/2009/05/07/kern-ritze-use-false-quote-to-push-bill/
  http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Presidential-Proclamation-National-Day-of-Prayer/

  -- 30 --
  

  Oklahoma Citizens' Proclamation for Morality
  By Sally Kern:

  We the People of Oklahoma, Invoking the guidance of Almighty God, in order to secure and perpetuate the blessing of Liberty; to secure just and rightful Government; to promote our mutual Welfare and Happiness, do establish this proclamation and call upon the people of the great State of Oklahoma, and our fellow Patriots in these United States of America who look to the Lord for guidance, to acknowledge the need for a national awakening of righteousness in our land.
  
  WHEREAS, “It is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand” (John Adams); and
  
  WHEREAS, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by Religion and Morality” (John Adams); and
  
  WHEREAS, “Our Constitution was made only for a Moral and Religious people” (John Adams); and
  
  WHEREAS, “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government…but upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God” (James Madison); and
  
  WHEREAS, “Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God (Benjamin Franklin); and
  
  WHEREAS, “God who gave us life gave us liberty and can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God” (Thomas Jefferson); and
  
  WHEREAS, “Whether any free government can be permanent, where the public worship of God, and the support of Religion, constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state” (Joseph Story); and
  
  WHEREAS, “We hold sacred the rights of conscience, and promise to the people…the free and undisturbed exercise of their religion” (Roger Sherman); and
  
  WHEREAS, “This great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians” (Patrick Henry); and
  
  WHEREAS, “When you…exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed upon your mind that God commands you to choose just men who will rule in the fear of God” (Noah Webster); and
  
  WHEREAS, “The principles of genuine Liberty and of wise laws and administrations are to be drawn from the Bible” (Noah Webster); and
  
  WHEREAS, the people of Oklahoma have a strong tradition of reliance upon the Creator of the Universe; and
  
  WHEREAS, we believe our economic woes are consequences of our greater national moral crisis; and
  
  WHEREAS, this nation has become a world leader in promoting abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery; and
  
  WHEREAS, alarmed that the Government of the United States of America is forsaking the rich Christian heritage upon which this nation was built; and
  
  WHEREAS, grieved that the Office of the president of these United States has refused to uphold the long held tradition of past presidents in giving recognition to our National Day of Prayer; and
  
  WHEREAS, deeply disturbed that the Office of the president of these United States disregards the biblical admonitions to live clean and pure lives by proclaiming an entire month to an immoral behavior;
  
  NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that we the undersigned elected officials of the people of Oklahoma, religious leaders and citizens of the State of Oklahoma, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world, solemnly declare that the HOPE of the great State of Oklahoma and of these United States, rests upon the Principles of Religion and Morality as put forth in the HOLY BIBLE; and
  
  BE IT RESOLVED that we, the undersigned, believers in the One True God and His only Son, call upon all to join with us in recognizing that “Blessed is the Nation whose God is the Lord,” and humbly implore all who love Truth and Virtue to live above reproach in the sight of God and man with a firm reliance on the leadership and protection of Almighty God; and
  
  BE IT RESOLVED that we, the undersigned, humbly call upon Holy God, our Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer, to have mercy on this nation, to stay His hand of judgment, and grant a national awakening of righteousness and Christian renewal as we repent of our great sin.
  
  Signed on the second day of July in the year of our Lord Christ Two Thousand and Nine.

• Alan Colmes names Sally Kern "Wingnut of the Day"

  Posted Jul 01 at 8 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  People for the American Way
  By Kyle
  July 1, 2009

  Alan Colmes had Oklahoma Rep. Sally Kern on his radio program yesterday to discuss her "Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation for Morality" and her militant opposition to gays.

  Needless to say, it did not go well.

  Kern insists that what gays really want is to destroy marriage so that they can legalize polygamy and pedophilia, saying that the push for gay marriage is just the beginning of the effort to "take away the Bible." She claims that the government is "being intolerant of those who hold Biblical views" and that what she merely wants is "laws that protect the most people in all situations" instead of passing laws that make legal "behavior that we know is harmful."

  When Colmes asked her if she thinks that being gay ought to be illegal, Kern responds that "it used to be illegal" but insists that she doesn't want to put gays in jail ... but then insists that "we need to get back to our Judeo-Christian values where we have a sense of things that are right and wrong and we should not have a government that's out there promoting behaviors that we know are harmful."

  Obviously, her insistence that "we need to get back to our Judeo-Christian values" harkens back to a time when gays were thrown in jail, so Colmes asked her again if she thinks that those who engage in gay sex should be arrested, to which she responds "no, unless they are doing that in some way that is illegal, like maybe trying to entice children."

  Of course, trying to entice children is already illegal and will forever remain illegal, regardless of what happens on the issue of full equality for gays - but Kern is so obsessed with the notion that all gays are pedophiles that she just can't understand that obvious point.
  
  Click here to visit Alan Colmes' Website
  Click here to visit People for the American Way

• Wal-Mart, union back employer health insurance

  Posted Jul 01 at 5 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  YahooNews.com
  By CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press
  Tue Jun 30, 9:04 pm ET

  WASHINGTON – Wal-Mart is the latest in a line of traditionally Republican-leaning businesses to embrace key portions of President Barack Obama's bid to overhaul health care, a trend that could complicate opponents' efforts to build a united front when Congress ramps up its work on the issue this summer.

  Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, on Tuesday endorsed the idea of requiring large companies to offer health insurance to their workers. The proposal is central to Obama's hopes of covering the nation's nearly 50 million uninsured and is disliked by some business groups.

  Wal-Mart was joined by a major labor union that sometimes has criticized the company's relatively stingy employee benefits.

  The big retailer is not the only one-time opponent of health care revisions to embrace at least some aspects of Obama's proposals. The major group representing pharmaceutical makers recently said it would reduce senior citizens' costs for prescription drugs by $80 billion over 10 years. And major groups representing doctors, hospitals and other providers have pledged to reduce health care costs by large amounts.

  Nearly all these groups, by varying degrees, opposed efforts to overhaul the nation's health care system during the Clinton administration in 1993-94. Moreover, Wal-Mart and its officials have given far more in political contributions over the past decade to Republicans than to Democrats. The same is true of the pharmaceutical industry and several other health-related groups.

  But with better prospects for a health care bill this time — and the public favoring overhaul, many businesses and industries want to be part of the final legislation rather than left out.

  "We are for an employer mandate which is fair and broad in its coverage," Wal-Mart said in a letter to congressional and administration officials. "Any alternative to an employer mandate should not create barriers to hiring entry-level employees."

  That was a reference to some proposals in Congress to have employers pay the Medicaid costs of new hires. Critics say that would discourage the hiring of low-income people.

  The letter was also signed by Andrew L. Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, which has more than a million members and counts more U.S. health workers than any other union. Also signing it was John Podesta, who headed Obama's transition team and is president of the Center for American Progress.

  As recently as 2006, Wal-Mart fiercely fought Maryland's efforts to force it to contribute more toward its employees' health care coverage.

  The Wal-Mart and SEIU letter could build momentum on two fronts: Wal-Mart's bid to improve its image regarding worker treatment, and Obama's health care agenda.

  In recent years, SEIU and other unions or liberal groups have criticized Wal-Mart for charging relatively high premiums to its employees for health insurance, and forcing them to wait up to two years for coverage.

  Last May, the Federal Election Commission dismissed a complaint by labor groups that accused Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of pressuring employees to vote against Democrats in November's election, though FEC staffers warned the case was a "close call."

  Wal-Mart lately has tried to improve employee relations, and has hired some prominent Democrats to broaden its political base. One of them, executive vice president Leslie Dach, said Wal-Mart feels the current U.S. health care system is unsustainable, and an employer insurance mandate is a cost that businesses should accept.

  SEIU's Stern praised Wal-Mart and said: "Everyone, including employers, must share responsibility in guaranteeing every working American quality, affordable insurance."

  Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, said the Wal-Mart and SEIU move was significant as Congress prepares to debate competing health plans this month. "The rising cost of health care is hurting employers and employees alike," she said, "restricting businesses' ability to grow and keeping workers' wages flat."

  Obama will hold a town-hall forum on health care Wednesday in Virginia. On Tuesday, he phoned Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, a moderate Republican whom Democrats hope to draw into a bipartisan fold on health care.

  Tuesday's letter suggested that Wal-Mart's and SEIU's enthusiasm for an employer mandate might wane if the final legislation does not also include a mechanism to ensure cuts in the cost of delivering health care.

  "Support for a mandate also requires the strongest possible commitment to rein in health care costs," it said.

  Former Senate Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle and others have proposed a federal commission with powers to impose Medicare cost reductions, among other things, if overall health delivery costs do not reach certain targets in a given time. The letter endorsed Daschle's efforts.

• Two in Oklahoma named to ag posts

  Posted Jul 01 at 5 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com
  BY JULIE BISBEE
  Published: July 1, 2009

  Two Oklahomans have been chosen by the White House for federal agriculture posts in Oklahoma, according to a news release issued by the White House on Tuesday.

  Rep. Ryan McMullen, D-Burns Flat, was appointed state director of rural development at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Francie Tolle was named state executive director for the Farm Service Agency at the USDA.

  Tolle currently is legislative policy analyst for American Farmers and Ranchers.

  McMullen, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2004, plans to resign from his seat in mid-July when he begins his new duties. Gov. Brad Henry will then have 30 days to set a date for a special election to fill McMullen’s seat.

  "Representing one of the most sparsely populated regions of the state with the highest agriculture production has prepared me very well for this position,” McMullen said.

  McMullen will oversee the 100 employees and 13 regional offices of the USDA in Oklahoma. The USDA’s Rural Development office coordinates federal assistance to rural areas for projects such as improving waste water treatment plants, telecommunications, increasing broadband Internet access and improving rural housing.

  McMullen said one of the key areas of concern he would like to address is the shortage of housing in rural Oklahoma.

  "We have a hard time attracting developers to rural Oklahoma,” McMullen said.

  Tolle also is co-owner of Tolle Farms in Deer Creek. The USDA’s Farm Services Agency provides direct loans for farm equipment, as well as rural housing loans. The agency also assists families with a food commodities program.

  Tolle has previously served as the director of development at the Oklahoma State University Foundation’s Division of Agriculture Sciences and Natural Resources.

• Oklahoma City lawmaker wants end to ban on homosexuality in the military

  Posted Jun 30 at 9 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Tulsa World
  By RANDY KREHBIEL World Staff Writer
  Published: 6/30/2009 6:24 PM
  
  OKLAHOMA CITY — An Oklahoma lawmaker who attended Monday’s White House reception for gay and lesbian activists says he appreciated the invitation but wants President Barack Obama to live up to his campaign pledge to end the official ban on homosexuality in the military.

  “President Obama campaigned on the pledge that we must repeal the outdated policy – don’t ask, don’t tell,” Rep. Al McAffrey, D-Oklahoma City, said in a written statement. “As a veteran I can tell you firsthand that I believe this policy is hurting our military and hindering our national security. It must be repealed immediately.”

  McAffrey is the first openly gay member of the Oklahoma Legislature.

  Tuesday, in response to an e-mail, McAffrey said he didn’t know how he wound up on the invitation list but was “honored to be invited to such an event and share this historic moment with the President and Mrs. Obama.”

  “The tone of the event was very positive,” McAffrey said. “The President reaffirmed his commitment to repealing 'Don’t Ask - Don’t Tell’ and called on Congress to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. The President also reassured the entire LGBT community that while the process has been slow, progress has been made and even more progress is yet to come.

  Monday’s reception commemorated the 40th anniversary of a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village bar known as meeting place for gays. The raid led to a series of protests regarded as the beginning of the gay rights movement.

• McAffrey Attends White House Reception Commemorating the Stonewall Uprising

  Posted Jun 29 at 6 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  For Immediate Release:
  June 29, 2009
  Contact: info@almcaffrey.com

  McAffrey Attends White House Reception Commemorating the Stonewall Uprising

  Washington, DC – Today Oklahoma State Representative Al McAffrey (D – District 88) attended a reception at the White House, hosted by President and Mrs. Obama, to honor and commemorate the Stonewall uprising. Named for the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York City that was the site of a violent police raid on June 28, 1969, the raid led to a series of protests that engendered the establishment of gay advocacy groups and empowered gay Americans to begin fighting for the recognition of their civil rights.

  “I am absolutely delighted and honored to have been invited by the President to celebrate such a significant moment in American history,” McAffrey said. “Commemorating this event in the White House is an important display of how far we’ve come since that historic day in 1969. Yet, it also reminds us how far we’ve yet to go.”

  McAffrey said that although he was grateful for the President’s invitation and willingness to honor GLBT Americans, he still holds out hope that the President will follow through on several key promises he made during his campaign, specifically Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. “President Obama campaigned on the pledge that we must repeal the out-dated policy - don’t ask, don’t tell,” McAffrey said. “As a veteran I can tell you firsthand that I believe this policy is hurting our military and hindering our national security. It must be repealed immediately.”

  Congress approved the DADT policy in 1993, allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the Armed Forces as long as they do not disclose their sexual orientation. Since then, the U.S. Military has discharged over 13,000 American troops, costing our military over $363.8 million. (1) On November 29, 2007, 28 retired generals and admirals released a letter urging Congress to repeal the law. The group of retired officers offered data suggesting that 65,000 gays and lesbians are currently serving in the armed forces and that there are more than one million gay and lesbian American veterans. (2)

  “President Obama has the power to discontinue this out-dated policy and I urge him to do so immediately,” McAffrey said. “As a proud veteran of the U.S. Navy, I truly believe that if a GLBT American has the courage to fight and defend our great country, then they should have the liberty to do so as who they are.”

  1. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-02-14-dont-ask-report_x.htm
  2. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/us/30military.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

• McAffrey to Attend White House Reception Commemorating Stonewall Uprising

  Posted Jun 27 at 12 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  McAffrey to Attend White House Reception Commemorating Stonewall Uprising

  Oklahoma City, OK – Oklahoma State Representative Al McAffrey has received an invitation from President and Mrs. Obama to attend a White House reception on Monday honoring the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. “Commemorating this event in the White House sends an important message on how far we’ve come since that historic day in 1969,” McAffrey said. “Yet, it also reminds us how far we’ve yet to go.”

  McAffrey regrets, however, that travel to Washington on Sunday will keep him from marching in the annual Oklahoma City Gay Pride Parade Sunday evening. “This will be the first Pride Parade I’ve missed in several years,” McAffrey said.

  Named for the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York City that was the site of a violent police raid on June 28, 1969, the raid led to a series of protests that engendered the establishment of gay advocacy groups and empowered gay Americans to begin fighting for the recognition of their civil rights.

  “I’m thrilled that the President thought of me and extended this invitation,” McAffrey said. “The events that night at Stonewall have been the bedrock of GLBT activism in our country and I’m honored to celebrate GLBT achievements at the White House.”

  The reception will be held at the White House on Monday, June 29, 2009. Shin Inouye, a White House spokesman, said, “Next Monday’s event is a chance for the White House to recognize the accomplishments of LGBT Americans. Invited guests include families, volunteers and activists, and community leaders. This event was long planned as a way to applaud these individuals during Pride month.”

  “I’m looking forward to attending this historic event,” McAffrey said. “I’m truly grateful for the President’s invitation and look forward to sharing this experience with he and the First Lady.”

  -- 30 --

• Change Oklahoma: Day of Service

  Posted Jun 27 at 12 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  
  Saturday, June 27, 2009 9:00 AM

  State Capitol (south parking lot) | 2300 N. Lincoln Blvd., Oklahoma City

  Meet local supporters of health care reform - get together, serve in your community, save a live - GIVE BLOOD! To show our commitment to health care reform, we will be fanning out all over the metro. Please join us to bring change to Oklahoma and America! We will meet in the south parking lot of the Oklahoma State Capitol for the day's project information, plus food, drinks, and fun!

  For more information, please contact Susan McCann at 405.203.8927.
  

• Oklahoma eyes stimulus fraud

  Posted Jun 25 at 8 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  NewsOK.com

  BY MICHAEL MCNUTT
  Published: June 25, 2009

  A hot line has been established for residents, contractors and government employees to call if they suspect fraud, waste or abuse involving the more than $2.6 billion in federal stimulus money in Oklahoma, officials said Wednesday.
  Featured Gallery

  The toll-free number is (877) 259-7337.

  "There are unprecedented levels of federal funding coming into the state of Oklahoma as a result of the stimulus plan and with such unprecedented levels of funding comes understandably tremendous risk for fraud, for abuse and for waste of those monies if we’re not careful,” U.S. Attorney John Richter said at a news conference.

  One of the best sources of detecting fraud is reports from the public, he said.

  James Finch, special agent in charge of the FBI in Oklahoma, said calls to the hot line will be answered by agents. Callers may remain anonymous.

  "We are looking more at the substance of the information provided,” Finch said.

  State Auditor and Inspector Steve Burrage, assigned by Gov. Brad Henry to ensure stimulus money is being spent correctly, said he and his auditors will visit state agencies and look at operations in the field.

  "We began tracking stimulus money as soon as it arrived,” Burrage said.

  The three recipients of the largest amounts of stimulus funds are the Oklahoma Health Care Authority, the state Education Department and the state Transportation Department, he said.

  Oklahoma hasn’t yet received the bulk of its stimulus money, Burrage said. He estimated about $550 million will come into the state by June 30, the end of this fiscal year; most of the money will be spent in the next two years.

  Burrage said he also has advised public officials and private auditors to follow federal guidelines and reporting requirements.

  Richter said a federal law will protect hot line callers from retaliation. Oklahoma has a similar whistleblower protection law, Burrage said.

  U.S. Attorney Sheldon Sperling, based in Muskogee, said most people are honest, but violators of the law will be punished.

  U.S. Attorney David O’Meilia, based in Tulsa, said economic crimes are crimes of opportunity.

  "With those billions of dollars in stimulus funding coming to Oklahoma, even a small percentage of fraud would result in substantial taxpayer losses,” he said. "One percent is $26 million worth of fraud.”

• Oklahoma Students Get Break

  Posted Jun 22 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  OkieFunk.com
  By Kurt Hochenauer

  Many Oklahoma college students will get a break on tuition this coming school year, but student loan debt continues to be a problem.

  Those colleges, which have announced they are freezing tuition for this coming school year, include the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, the University of Central Oklahoma, Southwestern State University, Northwestern State University, Oklahoma City Community College and Langston University.

  The freeze comes after consistent tuition hikes over the last few years. Those students who have been in college the last four or five years have been hit especially hard. Higher education administrators recognized the problem and gave students a break. The recession had to be a contributing factor as well. Higher education was given a slight increase in funding this coming fiscal year because of federal stimulus money.

  But Oklahoma colleges will probably need to raise tuition the following year unless the state appropriates more money for higher education. This seems unlikely given declining state revenues in recent months.

  Another issue facing a new generation of students is student loan debt. Neal P. McClusky, who works for the Cato Institute, writes in The York Times:

  According to inflation-adjusted College Board data, in the 1990-91 school year the average, full-time-equivalent undergraduate received $2,640 in grant aid and $1,548 in inexpensive federal loans. By 2007-08, the former had risen to $4,656 and the latter to $3,650.

  As the cost of college goes up, so do the loan amounts. It’s not uncommon for students to graduate with $30,000 or more of loan debt. These former students then face financial security issues unless they go into a high-paying profession.

  There has to be a solution to this problem. How can the culture make college affordable for everyone, not just the rich, and prevent students from assuming staggering debt?

  Amy Benfer, writing in Salon.com, frames the issue this way:

  …Everyone benefits when the population of a university, especially the best ones in the nation, are made up of the kids who are there because they earned their place based on their own work, not the education or income of their parents. This is democracy 101, folks. You'd think that the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps conservatives would be the first ones to concede that giving smart kids the means to join the educated class is the swiftest route out of poverty. What's more, universities are the place where, hopefully, future politicians, lawyers, writers, activists, judges, journalists, social workers and everyone else who will grow up to be in a position to make policy and interpret culture for everyone else learn the way the world works. And it sure as hell helps the discussion in any poly-sci or literature or American studies class if you have members of the group in question right there next to you, debating as your equal.

• Dueling Headlines

  Posted Jun 20 at 9 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Oklahoma Democrats Blog
  By: Karina Henderson

  Last Thursday, Oklahoma's two major newspapers had dueling headlines.

  From the Oklahoman:
  "In recession, state faring well: New report ranks Oklahoma City, Tulsa among top performing cities in nation"

  But then this was in the Tulsa World:
  "Number of food-stamp recipients sets record again"

  Two very different stories examining to very different indicators, and depending on which one you believe, Oklahoma is doing either a great or a terrible job weathering the economic turndown.

  So which is it? Let's look a little more closely.

  The Oklahoman story that states Oklahoma City was second and Tulsa ninth on a measure of economic performance since December, when the now nearly two-year-old recession was officially declared.

  That study, conducted by the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program, measured cities on six indicators: "employment, employment change by industry, unemployment rates, wages, gross metropolitan product and housing and foreclosure rates" – certainly these are solid measures to determine economic health.

  The Tulsa World story, though, states that, "As of May, 474,971 people were receiving food stamps" – an all-time record number, according to the Department of Human Services (DHS).

  One key to clarifying this muddy conundrum lies in the fact that the Brookings study compares these Oklahoma towns to other cities across the nation, while the food stamp numbers are relative only to our state.

  A DHS spokesman seems to affirm that:

  "Still, Oklahoma has not seen the dramatic increases that other states have seen, DHS spokesman George Johnson said."

  Regardless of how Oklahoma may be faring compared to other states, it is clear that this economic downturn is affecting us now – and may worsen before it gets better.

  What we can do to soften future blows is to push our lawmakers to make smart investments in our state now. Investing in education, health care, and small businesses now will pay dividends down the road. Changing our energy economy to promote energy alternatives, such as wind and biofuels, will insulate us from another energy "bust" in future years.

  Democratic lawmakers, from the House and Senate to the Governor's office, pushed this past legislative session to keep our state's long-term interests in mind and to make investments in our working families. In the meantime, the House Republicans continue to hold on to a $6.9 million surplus, and legislation that will significantly bloat government agencies will be resurrected next year by Republican leaders.

  These dueling headlines should cause every Oklahoman to pause and take note – and to think about which party is truly fighting for everyday Oklahomans, and for our state's future.

• Key Administration Advisers, Officials Discuss Levers of Change

  Posted Jun 20 at 7 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  American Constitution Society Blog
  
  At the 2009 ACS National Convention, current and former executive branch officials discussed the latest issues of the day, including the priorities for the current administration. Among the panelists were Chief of Staff to the Vice President Ron Klain, the founder of the Center for American Progress John Podesta, and Staff Secretary to the President Lisa Brown, the former executive director of ACS. Questions from the audience ranged from national security law to LGBT issues. In his final statement, Klain also discussed ACS's unique role in law and policy fields.

  For full video of the panel. go here.

• The Cost Conundrum

  Posted Jun 16 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The New Yorker
  By Atul Gawande
  June 1, 2009

  It is spring in McAllen, Texas. The morning sun is warm. The streets are lined with palm trees and pickup trucks. McAllen is in Hidalgo County, which has the lowest household income in the country, but it’s a border town, and a thriving foreign-trade zone has kept the unemployment rate below ten per cent. McAllen calls itself the Square Dance Capital of the World. “Lonesome Dove” was set around here.

  McAllen has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns.

  The explosive trend in American medical costs seems to have occurred here in an especially intense form. Our country’s health care is by far the most expensive in the world. In Washington, the aim of health-care reform is not just to extend medical coverage to everybody but also to bring costs under control. Spending on doctors, hospitals, drugs, and the like now consumes more than one of every six dollars we earn. The financial burden has damaged the global competitiveness of American businesses and bankrupted millions of families, even those with insurance. It’s also devouring our government. “The greatest threat to America’s fiscal health is not Social Security,” President Barack Obama said in a March speech at the White House. “It’s not the investments that we’ve made to rescue our economy during this crisis. By a wide margin, the biggest threat to our nation’s balance sheet is the skyrocketing cost of health care. It’s not even close.”

  The question we’re now frantically grappling with is how this came to be, and what can be done about it. McAllen, Texas, the most expensive town in the most expensive country for health care in the world, seemed a good place to look for some answers.

  From the moment I arrived, I asked almost everyone I encountered about McAllen’s health costs—a businessman I met at the five-gate McAllen-Miller International Airport, the desk clerks at the Embassy Suites Hotel, a police-academy cadet at McDonald’s. Most weren’t surprised to hear that McAllen was an outlier. “Just look around,” the cadet said. “People are not healthy here.” McAllen, with its high poverty rate, has an incidence of heavy drinking sixty per cent higher than the national average. And the Tex-Mex diet has contributed to a thirty-eight-per-cent obesity rate.

  One day, I went on rounds with Lester Dyke, a weather-beaten, ranch-owning fifty-three-year-old cardiac surgeon who grew up in Austin, did his surgical training with the Army all over the country, and settled into practice in Hidalgo County. He has not lacked for business: in the past twenty years, he has done some eight thousand heart operations, which exhausts me just thinking about it. I walked around with him as he checked in on ten or so of his patients who were recuperating at the three hospitals where he operates. It was easy to see what had landed them under his knife. They were nearly all obese or diabetic or both. Many had a family history of heart disease. Few were taking preventive measures, such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, which, studies indicate, would have obviated surgery for up to half of them.

  Yet public-health statistics show that cardiovascular-disease rates in the county are actually lower than average, probably because its smoking rates are quite low. Rates of asthma, H.I.V., infant mortality, cancer, and injury are lower, too. El Paso County, eight hundred miles up the border, has essentially the same demographics. Both counties have a population of roughly seven hundred thousand, similar public-health statistics, and similar percentages of non-English speakers, illegal immigrants, and the unemployed. Yet in 2006 Medicare expenditures (our best approximation of over-all spending patterns) in El Paso were $7,504 per enrollee—half as much as in McAllen. An unhealthy population couldn’t possibly be the reason that McAllen’s health-care costs are so high. (Or the reason that America’s are. We may be more obese than any other industrialized nation, but we have among the lowest rates of smoking and alcoholism, and we are in the middle of the range for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.)

  Was the explanation, then, that McAllen was providing unusually good health care? I took a walk through Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, in Edinburg, one of the towns in the McAllen metropolitan area, with Robert Alleyn, a Houston-trained general surgeon who had grown up here and returned home to practice. The hospital campus sprawled across two city blocks, with a series of three- and four-story stucco buildings separated by golfing-green lawns and black asphalt parking lots. He pointed out the sights—the cancer center is over here, the heart center is over there, now we’re coming to the imaging center. We went inside the surgery building. It was sleek and modern, with recessed lighting, classical music piped into the waiting areas, and nurses moving from patient to patient behind rolling black computer pods. We changed into scrubs and Alleyn took me through the sixteen operating rooms to show me the laparoscopy suite, with its flat-screen video monitors, the hybrid operating room with built-in imaging equipment, the surgical robot for minimally invasive robotic surgery.

  I was impressed. The place had virtually all the technology that you’d find at Harvard and Stanford and the Mayo Clinic, and, as I walked through that hospital on a dusty road in South Texas, this struck me as a remarkable thing. Rich towns get the new school buildings, fire trucks, and roads, not to mention the better teachers and police officers and civil engineers. Poor towns don’t. But that rule doesn’t hold for health care.

  At McAllen Medical Center, I saw an orthopedic surgeon work under an operating microscope to remove a tumor that had wrapped around the spinal cord of a fourteen-year-old. At a home-health agency, I spoke to a nurse who could provide intravenous-drug therapy for patients with congestive heart failure. At McAllen Heart Hospital, I watched Dyke and a team of six do a coronary-artery bypass using technologies that didn’t exist a few years ago. At Renaissance, I talked with a neonatologist who trained at my hospital, in Boston, and brought McAllen new skills and technologies for premature babies. “I’ve had nurses come up to me and say, ‘I never knew these babies could survive,’ ” he said.

  And yet there’s no evidence that the treatments and technologies available at McAllen are better than those found elsewhere in the country. The annual reports that hospitals file with Medicare show that those in McAllen and El Paso offer comparable technologies—neonatal intensive-care units, advanced cardiac services, PET scans, and so on. Public statistics show no difference in the supply of doctors. Hidalgo County actually has fewer specialists than the national average.

  Nor does the care given in McAllen stand out for its quality. Medicare ranks hospitals on twenty-five metrics of care. On all but two of these, McAllen’s five largest hospitals performed worse, on average, than El Paso’s. McAllen costs Medicare seven thousand dollars more per person each year than does the average city in America. But not, so far as one can tell, because it’s delivering better health care.

  One night, I went to dinner with six McAllen doctors. All were what you would call bread-and-butter physicians: busy, full-time, private-practice doctors who work from seven in the morning to seven at night and sometimes later, their waiting rooms teeming and their desks stacked with medical charts to review.

  Some were dubious when I told them that McAllen was the country’s most expensive place for health care. I gave them the spending data from Medicare. In 1992, in the McAllen market, the average cost per Medicare enrollee was $4,891, almost exactly the national average. But since then, year after year, McAllen’s health costs have grown faster than any other market in the country, ultimately soaring by more than ten thousand dollars per person.

  “Maybe the service is better here,” the cardiologist suggested. People can be seen faster and get their tests more readily, he said.

  Others were skeptical. “I don’t think that explains the costs he’s talking about,” the general surgeon said.

  “It’s malpractice,” a family physician who had practiced here for thirty-three years said.

  “McAllen is legal hell,” the cardiologist agreed. Doctors order unnecessary tests just to protect themselves, he said. Everyone thought the lawyers here were worse than elsewhere.

  That explanation puzzled me. Several years ago, Texas passed a tough malpractice law that capped pain-and-suffering awards at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Didn’t lawsuits go down?

  “Practically to zero,” the cardiologist admitted.

  “Come on,” the general surgeon finally said. “We all know these arguments are bullshit. There is overutilization here, pure and simple.” Doctors, he said, were racking up charges with extra tests, services, and procedures.

  The surgeon came to McAllen in the mid-nineties, and since then, he said, “the way to practice medicine has changed completely. Before, it was about how to do a good job. Now it is about ‘How much will you benefit?’ ”

  Everyone agreed that something fundamental had changed since the days when health-care costs in McAllen were the same as those in El Paso and elsewhere. Yes, they had more technology. “But young doctors don’t think anymore,” the family physician said.

  The surgeon gave me an example. General surgeons are often asked to see patients with pain from gallstones. If there aren’t any complications—and there usually aren’t—the pain goes away on its own or with pain medication. With instruction on eating a lower-fat diet, most patients experience no further difficulties. But some have recurrent episodes, and need surgery to remove their gallbladder.

  Seeing a patient who has had uncomplicated, first-time gallstone pain requires some judgment. A surgeon has to provide reassurance (people are often scared and want to go straight to surgery), some education about gallstone disease and diet, perhaps a prescription for pain; in a few weeks, the surgeon might follow up. But increasingly, I was told, McAllen surgeons simply operate. The patient wasn’t going to moderate her diet, they tell themselves. The pain was just going to come back. And by operating they happen to make an extra seven hundred dollars.

  I gave the doctors around the table a scenario. A forty-year-old woman comes in with chest pain after a fight with her husband. An EKG is normal. The chest pain goes away. She has no family history of heart disease. What did McAllen doctors do fifteen years ago?

  Send her home, they said. Maybe get a stress test to confirm that there’s no issue, but even that might be overkill.

  And today? Today, the cardiologist said, she would get a stress test, an echocardiogram, a mobile Holter monitor, and maybe even a cardiac catheterization.

  “Oh, she’s definitely getting a cath,” the internist said, laughing grimly.

  To determine whether overuse of medical care was really the problem in McAllen, I turned to Jonathan Skinner, an economist at Dartmouth’s Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, which has three decades of expertise in examining regional patterns in Medicare payment data. I also turned to two private firms—D2Hawkeye, an independent company, and Ingenix, UnitedHealthcare’s data-analysis company—to analyze commercial insurance data for McAllen. The answer was yes. Compared with patients in El Paso and nationwide, patients in McAllen got more of pretty much everything—more diagnostic testing, more hospital treatment, more surgery, more home care.

  The Medicare payment data provided the most detail. Between 2001 and 2005, critically ill Medicare patients received almost fifty per cent more specialist visits in McAllen than in El Paso, and were two-thirds more likely to see ten or more specialists in a six-month period. In 2005 and 2006, patients in McAllen received twenty per cent more abdominal ultrasounds, thirty per cent more bone-density studies, sixty per cent more stress tests with echocardiography, two hundred per cent more nerve-conduction studies to diagnose carpal-tunnel syndrome, and five hundred and fifty per cent more urine-flow studies to diagnose prostate troubles. They received one-fifth to two-thirds more gallbladder operations, knee replacements, breast biopsies, and bladder scopes. They also received two to three times as many pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, cardiac-bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and coronary-artery stents. And Medicare paid for five times as many home-nurse visits. The primary cause of McAllen’s extreme costs was, very simply, the across-the-board overuse of medicine.

  This is a disturbing and perhaps surprising diagnosis. Americans like to believe that, with most things, more is better. But research suggests that where medicine is concerned it may actually be worse. For example, Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic dominates the scene, has fantastically high levels of technological capability and quality, but its Medicare spending is in the lowest fifteen per cent of the country—$6,688 per enrollee in 2006, which is eight thousand dollars less than the figure for McAllen. Two economists working at Dartmouth, Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, found that the more money Medicare spent per person in a given state the lower that state’s quality ranking tended to be. In fact, the four states with the highest levels of spending—Louisiana, Texas, California, and Florida—were near the bottom of the national rankings on the quality of patient care.

  In a 2003 study, another Dartmouth team, led by the internist Elliott Fisher, examined the treatment received by a million elderly Americans diagnosed with colon or rectal cancer, a hip fracture, or a heart attack. They found that patients in higher-spending regions received sixty per cent more care than elsewhere. They got more frequent tests and procedures, more visits with specialists, and more frequent admission to hospitals. Yet they did no better than other patients, whether this was measured in terms of survival, their ability to function, or satisfaction with the care they received. If anything, they seemed to do worse.

  That’s because nothing in medicine is without risks. Complications can arise from hospital stays, medications, procedures, and tests, and when these things are of marginal value the harm can be greater than the benefits. In recent years, we doctors have markedly increased the number of operations we do, for instance. In 2006, doctors performed at least sixty million surgical procedures, one for every five Americans. No other country does anything like as many operations on its citizens. Are we better off for it? No one knows for sure, but it seems highly unlikely. After all, some hundred thousand people die each year from complications of surgery—far more than die in car crashes.

  To make matters worse, Fisher found that patients in high-cost areas were actually less likely to receive low-cost preventive services, such as flu and pneumonia vaccines, faced longer waits at doctor and emergency-room visits, and were less likely to have a primary-care physician. They got more of the stuff that cost more, but not more of what they needed.

  In an odd way, this news is reassuring. Universal coverage won’t be feasible unless we can control costs. Policymakers have worried that doing so would require rationing, which the public would never go along with. So the idea that there’s plenty of fat in the system is proving deeply attractive. “Nearly thirty per cent of Medicare’s costs could be saved without negatively affecting health outcomes if spending in high- and medium-cost areas could be reduced to the level in low-cost areas,” Peter Orszag, the President’s budget director, has stated.

  Most Americans would be delighted to have the quality of care found in places like Rochester, Minnesota, or Seattle, Washington, or Durham, North Carolina—all of which have world-class hospitals and costs that fall below the national average. If we brought the cost curve in the expensive places down to their level, Medicare’s problems (indeed, almost all the federal government’s budget problems for the next fifty years) would be solved. The difficulty is how to go about it. Physicians in places like McAllen behave differently from others. The $2.4-trillion question is why. Unless we figure it out, health reform will fail.

  I had what I considered to be a reasonable plan for finding out what was going on in McAllen. I would call on the heads of its hospitals, in their swanky, decorator-designed, churrigueresco offices, and I’d ask them.

  The first hospital I visited, McAllen Heart Hospital, is owned by Universal Health Services, a for-profit hospital chain with headquarters in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and revenues of five billion dollars last year. I went to see the hospital’s chief operating officer, Gilda Romero. Truth be told, her office seemed less churrigueresco than Office Depot. She had straight brown hair, sympathetic eyes, and looked more like a young school teacher than like a corporate officer with nineteen years of experience. And when I inquired, “What is going on in this place?” she looked surprised.

  Is McAllen really that expensive? she asked.

  I described the data, including the numbers indicating that heart operations and catheter procedures and pacemakers were being performed in McAllen at double the usual rate.

  “That is interesting,” she said, by which she did not mean, “Uh-oh, you’ve caught us” but, rather, “That is actually interesting.” The problem of McAllen’s outlandish costs was new to her. She puzzled over the numbers. She was certain that her doctors performed surgery only when it was necessary. It had to be one of the other hospitals. And she had one in mind—Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, the hospital in Edinburg that I had toured.

  She wasn’t the only person to mention Renaissance. It is the newest hospital in the area. It is physician-owned. And it has a reputation (which it disclaims) for aggressively recruiting high-volume physicians to become investors and send patients there. Physicians who do so receive not only their fee for whatever service they provide but also a percentage of the hospital’s profits from the tests, surgery, or other care patients are given. (In 2007, its profits totalled thirty-four million dollars.) Romero and others argued that this gives physicians an unholy temptation to overorder.

  Such an arrangement can make physician investors rich. But it can’t be the whole explanation. The hospital gets barely a sixth of the patients in the region; its margins are no bigger than the other hospitals’—whether for profit or not for profit—and it didn’t have much of a presence until 2004 at the earliest, a full decade after the cost explosion in McAllen began.

  “Those are good points,” Romero said. She couldn’t explain what was going on.

  The following afternoon, I visited the top managers of Doctors Hospital at Renaissance. We sat in their boardroom around one end of a yacht-length table. The chairman of the board offered me a soda. The chief of staff smiled at me. The chief financial officer shook my hand as if I were an old friend. The C.E.O., however, was having a hard time pretending that he was happy to see me. Lawrence Gelman was a fifty-seven-year-old anesthesiologist with a Bill Clinton shock of white hair and a weekly local radio show tag-lined “Opinions from an Unrelenting Conservative Spirit.” He had helped found the hospital. He barely greeted me, and while the others were trying for a how-can-I-help-you-today attitude, his body language was more let’s-get-this-over-with.

  So I asked him why McAllen’s health-care costs were so high. What he gave me was a disquisition on the theory and history of American health-care financing going back to Lyndon Johnson and the creation of Medicare, the upshot of which was: (1) Government is the problem in health care. “The people in charge of the purse strings don’t know what they’re doing.” (2) If anything, government insurance programs like Medicare don’t pay enough. “I, as an anesthesiologist, know that they pay me ten per cent of what a private insurer pays.” (3) Government programs are full of waste. “Every person in this room could easily go through the expenditures of Medicare and Medicaid and see all kinds of waste.” (4) But not in McAllen. The clinicians here, at least at Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, “are providing necessary, essential health care,” Gelman said. “We don’t invent patients.”

  Then why do hospitals in McAllen order so much more surgery and scans and tests than hospitals in El Paso and elsewhere?

  In the end, the only explanation he and his colleagues could offer was this: The other doctors and hospitals in McAllen may be overspending, but, to the extent that his hospital provides costlier treatment than other places in the country, it is making people better in ways that data on quality and outcomes do not measure.

  “Do we provide better health care than El Paso?” Gelman asked. “I would bet you two to one that we do.”

  It was a depressing conversation—not because I thought the executives were being evasive but because they weren’t being evasive. The data on McAllen’s costs were clearly new to them. They were defending McAllen reflexively. But they really didn’t know the big picture of what was happening.

  And, I realized, few people in their position do. Local executives for hospitals and clinics and home-health agencies understand their growth rate and their market share; they know whether they are losing money or making money. They know that if their doctors bring in enough business—surgery, imaging, home-nursing referrals—they make money; and if they get the doctors to bring in more, they make more. But they have only the vaguest notion of whether the doctors are making their communities as healthy as they can, or whether they are more or less efficient than their counterparts elsewhere. A doctor sees a patient in clinic, and has her check into a McAllen hospital for a CT scan, an ultrasound, three rounds of blood tests, another ultrasound, and then surgery to have her gallbladder removed. How is Lawrence Gelman or Gilda Romero to know whether all that is essential, let alone the best possible treatment for the patient? It isn’t what they are responsible or accountable for.

  Health-care costs ultimately arise from the accumulation of individual decisions doctors make about which services and treatments to write an order for. The most expensive piece of medical equipment, as the saying goes, is a doctor’s pen. And, as a rule, hospital executives don’t own the pen caps. Doctors do.

  If doctors wield the pen, why do they do it so differently from one place to another? Brenda Sirovich, another Dartmouth researcher, published a study last year that provided an important clue. She and her team surveyed some eight hundred primary-care physicians from high-cost cities (such as Las Vegas and New York), low-cost cities (such as Sacramento and Boise), and others in between. The researchers asked the physicians specifically how they would handle a variety of patient cases. It turned out that differences in decision-making emerged in only some kinds of cases. In situations in which the right thing to do was well established—for example, whether to recommend a mammogram for a fifty-year-old woman (the answer is yes)—physicians in high- and low-cost cities made the same decisions. But, in cases in which the science was unclear, some physicians pursued the maximum possible amount of testing and procedures; some pursued the minimum. And which kind of doctor they were depended on where they came from.

  Sirovich asked doctors how they would treat a seventy-five-year-old woman with typical heartburn symptoms and “adequate health insurance to cover tests and medications.” Physicians in high- and low-cost cities were equally likely to prescribe antacid therapy and to check for H. pylori, an ulcer-causing bacterium—steps strongly recommended by national guidelines. But when it came to measures of less certain value—and higher cost—the differences were considerable. More than seventy per cent of physicians in high-cost cities referred the patient to a gastroenterologist, ordered an upper endoscopy, or both, while half as many in low-cost cities did. Physicians from high-cost cities typically recommended that patients with well-controlled hypertension see them in the office every one to three months, while those from low-cost cities recommended visits twice yearly. In case after uncertain case, more was not necessarily better. But physicians from the most expensive cities did the most expensive things.

  Why? Some of it could reflect differences in training. I remember when my wife brought our infant son Walker to visit his grandparents in Virginia, and he took a terrifying fall down a set of stairs. They drove him to the local community hospital in Alexandria. A CT scan showed that he had a tiny subdural hematoma—a small area of bleeding in the brain. During ten hours of observation, though, he was fine—eating, drinking, completely alert. I was a surgery resident then and had seen many cases like his. We observed each child in intensive care for at least twenty-four hours and got a repeat CT scan. That was how I’d been trained. But the doctor in Alexandria was going to send Walker home. That was how he’d been trained. Suppose things change for the worse? I asked him. It’s extremely unlikely, he said, and if anything changed Walker could always be brought back. I bullied the doctor into admitting him anyway. The next day, the scan and the patient were fine. And, looking in the textbooks, I learned that the doctor was right. Walker could have been managed safely either way.

  There was no sign, however, that McAllen’s doctors as a group were trained any differently from El Paso’s. One morning, I met with a hospital administrator who had extensive experience managing for-profit hospitals along the border. He offered a different possible explanation: the culture of money.

  “In El Paso, if you took a random doctor and looked at his tax returns eighty-five per cent of his income would come from the usual practice of medicine,” he said. But in McAllen, the administrator thought, that percentage would be a lot less.

  He knew of doctors who owned strip malls, orange groves, apartment complexes—or imaging centers, surgery centers, or another part of the hospital they directed patients to. They had “entrepreneurial spirit,” he said. They were innovative and aggressive in finding ways to increase revenues from patient care. “There’s no lack of work ethic,” he said. But he had often seen financial considerations drive the decisions doctors made for patients—the tests they ordered, the doctors and hospitals they recommended—and it bothered him. Several doctors who were unhappy about the direction medicine had taken in McAllen told me the same thing. “It’s a machine, my friend,” one surgeon explained.

  No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not. You must pay attention to insurance rejections and government-reimbursement rules. You must think about having enough money for the secretary and the nurse and the rent and the malpractice insurance.

  Beyond the basics, however, many physicians are remarkably oblivious to the financial implications of their decisions. They see their patients. They make their recommendations. They send out the bills. And, as long as the numbers come out all right at the end of each month, they put the money out of their minds.

  Others think of the money as a means of improving what they do. They think about how to use the insurance money to maybe install electronic health records with colleagues, or provide easier phone and e-mail access, or offer expanded hours. They hire an extra nurse to monitor diabetic patients more closely, and to make sure that patients don’t miss their mammograms and pap smears and colonoscopies.

  Then there are the physicians who see their practice primarily as a revenue stream. They instruct their secretary to have patients who call with follow-up questions schedule an appointment, because insurers don’t pay for phone calls, only office visits. They consider providing Botox injections for cash. They take a Doppler ultrasound course, buy a machine, and start doing their patients’ scans themselves, so that the insurance payments go to them rather than to the hospital. They figure out ways to increase their high-margin work and decrease their low-margin work. This is a business, after all.

  In every community, you’ll find a mixture of these views among physicians, but one or another tends to predominate. McAllen seems simply to be the community at one extreme.

  In a few cases, the hospital executive told me, he’d seen the behavior cross over into what seemed like outright fraud. “I’ve had doctors here come up to me and say, ‘You want me to admit patients to your hospital, you’re going to have to pay me.’ ”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “The amounts—all of them were over a hundred thousand dollars per year,” he said. The doctors were specific. The most he was asked for was five hundred thousand dollars per year.

  He didn’t pay any of them, he said: “I mean, I gotta sleep at night.” And he emphasized that these were just a handful of doctors. But he had never been asked for a kickback before coming to McAllen.

  Woody Powell is a Stanford sociologist who studies the economic culture of cities. Recently, he and his research team studied why certain regions—Boston, San Francisco, San Diego—became leaders in biotechnology while others with a similar concentration of scientific and corporate talent—Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York—did not. The answer they found was what Powell describes as the anchor-tenant theory of economic development. Just as an anchor store will define the character of a mall, anchor tenants in biotechnology, whether it’s a company like Genentech, in South San Francisco, or a university like M.I.T., in Cambridge, define the character of an economic community. They set the norms. The anchor tenants that set norms encouraging the free flow of ideas and collaboration, even with competitors, produced enduringly successful communities, while those that mainly sought to dominate did not.

  Powell suspects that anchor tenants play a similarly powerful community role in other areas of economics, too, and health care may be no exception. I spoke to a marketing rep for a McAllen home-health agency who told me of a process uncannily similar to what Powell found in biotech. Her job is to persuade doctors to use her agency rather than others. The competition is fierce. I opened the phone book and found seventeen pages of listings for home-health agencies—two hundred and sixty in all. A patient typically brings in between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred dollars, and double that amount for specialized care. She described how, a decade or so ago, a few early agencies began rewarding doctors who ordered home visits with more than trinkets: they provided tickets to professional sporting events, jewelry, and other gifts. That set the tone. Other agencies jumped in. Some began paying doctors a supplemental salary, as “medical directors,” for steering business in their direction. Doctors came to expect a share of the revenue stream.

  Agencies that want to compete on quality struggle to remain in business, the rep said. Doctors have asked her for a medical-director salary of four or five thousand dollars a month in return for sending her business. One asked a colleague of hers for private-school tuition for his child; another wanted sex.

  “I explained the rules and regulations and the anti-kickback law, and told them no,” she said of her dealings with such doctors. “Does it hurt my business?” She paused. “I’m O.K. working only with ethical physicians,” she finally said.

  About fifteen years ago, it seems, something began to change in McAllen. A few leaders of local institutions took profit growth to be a legitimate ethic in the practice of medicine. Not all the doctors accepted this. But they failed to discourage those who did. So here, along the banks of the Rio Grande, in the Square Dance Capital of the World, a medical community came to treat patients the way subprime-mortgage lenders treated home buyers: as profit centers.

  The real puzzle of American health care, I realized on the airplane home, is not why McAllen is different from El Paso. It’s why El Paso isn’t like McAllen. Every incentive in the system is an invitation to go the way McAllen has gone. Yet, across the country, large numbers of communities have managed to control their health costs rather than ratchet them up.

  I talked to Denis Cortese, the C.E.O. of the Mayo Clinic, which is among the highest-quality, lowest-cost health-care systems in the country. A couple of years ago, I spent several days there as a visiting surgeon. Among the things that stand out from that visit was how much time the doctors spent with patients. There was no churn—no shuttling patients in and out of rooms while the doctor bounces from one to the other. I accompanied a colleague while he saw patients. Most of the patients, like those in my clinic, required about twenty minutes. But one patient had colon cancer and a number of other complex issues, including heart disease. The physician spent an hour with her, sorting things out. He phoned a cardiologist with a question.

  “I’ll be there,” the cardiologist said.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was. They mulled over everything together. The cardiologist adjusted a medication, and said that no further testing was needed. He cleared the patient for surgery, and the operating room gave her a slot the next day.

  The whole interaction was astonishing to me. Just having the cardiologist pop down to see the patient with the surgeon would be unimaginable at my hospital. The time required wouldn’t pay. The time required just to organize the system wouldn’t pay.

  The core tenet of the Mayo Clinic is “The needs of the patient come first”—not the convenience of the doctors, not their revenues. The doctors and nurses, and even the janitors, sat in meetings almost weekly, working on ideas to make the service and the care better, not to get more money out of patients. I asked Cortese how the Mayo Clinic made this possible.

  “It’s not easy,” he said. But decades ago Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. Mayo promoted leaders who focussed first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible.

  No one there actually intends to do fewer expensive scans and procedures than is done elsewhere in the country. The aim is to raise quality and to help doctors and other staff members work as a team. But, almost by happenstance, the result has been lower costs.

  “When doctors put their heads together in a room, when they share expertise, you get more thinking and less testing,” Cortese told me.

  Skeptics saw the Mayo model as a local phenomenon that wouldn’t carry beyond the hay fields of northern Minnesota. But in 1986 the Mayo Clinic opened a campus in Florida, one of our most expensive states for health care, and, in 1987, another one in Arizona. It was difficult to recruit staff members who would accept a salary and the Mayo’s collaborative way of practicing. Leaders were working against the dominant medical culture and incentives. The expansion sites took at least a decade to get properly established. But eventually they achieved the same high-quality, low-cost results as Rochester. Indeed, Cortese says that the Florida site has become, in some respects, the most efficient one in the system.

  The Mayo Clinic is not an aberration. One of the lowest-cost markets in the country is Grand Junction, Colorado, a community of a hundred and twenty thousand that nonetheless has achieved some of Medicare’s highest quality-of-care scores. Michael Pramenko is a family physician and a local medical leader there. Unlike doctors at the Mayo Clinic, he told me, those in Grand Junction get piecework fees from insurers. But years ago the doctors agreed among themselves to a system that paid them a similar fee whether they saw Medicare, Medicaid, or private-insurance patients, so that there would be little incentive to cherry-pick patients. They also agreed, at the behest of the main health plan in town, an H.M.O., to meet regularly on small peer-review committees to go over their patient charts together. They focussed on rooting out problems like poor prevention practices, unnecessary back operations, and unusual hospital-complication rates. Problems went down. Quality went up. Then, in 2004, the doctors’ group and the local H.M.O. jointly created a regional information network—a community-wide electronic-record system that shared office notes, test results, and hospital data for patients across the area. Again, problems went down. Quality went up. And costs ended up lower than just about anywhere else in the United States.

  Grand Junction’s medical community was not following anyone else’s recipe. But, like Mayo, it created what Elliott Fisher, of Dartmouth, calls an accountable-care organization. The leading doctors and the hospital system adopted measures to blunt harmful financial incentives, and they took collective responsibility for improving the sum total of patient care.

  This approach has been adopted in other places, too: the Geisinger Health System, in Danville, Pennsylvania; the Marshfield Clinic, in Marshfield, Wisconsin; Intermountain Healthcare, in Salt Lake City; Kaiser Permanente, in Northern California. All of them function on similar principles. All are not-for-profit institutions. And all have produced enviably higher quality and lower costs than the average American town enjoys.

  When you look across the spectrum from Grand Junction to McAllen—and the almost threefold difference in the costs of care—you come to realize that we are witnessing a battle for the soul of American medicine. Somewhere in the United States at this moment, a patient with chest pain, or a tumor, or a cough is seeing a doctor. And the damning question we have to ask is whether the doctor is set up to meet the needs of the patient, first and foremost, or to maximize revenue.

  There is no insurance system that will make the two aims match perfectly. But having a system that does so much to misalign them has proved disastrous. As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.

  Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.

  This last point is vital. Activists and policymakers spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about whether the solution to high medical costs is to have government or private insurance companies write the checks. Here’s how this whole debate goes. Advocates of a public option say government financing would save the most money by having leaner administrative costs and forcing doctors and hospitals to take lower payments than they get from private insurance. Opponents say doctors would skimp, quit, or game the system, and make us wait in line for our care; they maintain that private insurers are better at policing doctors. No, the skeptics say: all insurance companies do is reject applicants who need health care and stall on paying their bills. Then we have the economists who say that the people who should pay the doctors are the ones who use them. Have consumers pay with their own dollars, make sure that they have some “skin in the game,” and then they’ll get the care they deserve. These arguments miss the main issue. When it comes to making care better and cheaper, changing who pays the doctor will make no more difference than changing who pays the electrician. The lesson of the high-quality, low-cost communities is that someone has to be accountable for the totality of care. Otherwise, you get a system that has no brakes. You get McAllen.

  One afternoon in McAllen, I rode down McColl Road with Lester Dyke, the cardiac surgeon, and we passed a series of office plazas that seemed to be nothing but home-health agencies, imaging centers, and medical-equipment stores.

  “Medicine has become a pig trough here,” he muttered.

  Dyke is among the few vocal critics of what’s happened in McAllen. “We took a wrong turn when doctors stopped being doctors and became businessmen,” he said.

  We began talking about the various proposals being touted in Washington to fix the cost problem. I asked him whether expanding public-insurance programs like Medicare and shrinking the role of insurance companies would do the trick in McAllen.

  “I don’t have a problem with it,” he said. “But it won’t make a difference.” In McAllen, government payers already predominate—not many people have jobs with private insurance.

  How about doing the opposite and increasing the role of big insurance companies?

  “What good would that do?” Dyke asked.

  The third class of health-cost proposals, I explained, would push people to use medical savings accounts and hold high-deductible insurance policies: “They’d have more of their own money on the line, and that’d drive them to bargain with you and other surgeons, right?”

  He gave me a quizzical look. We tried to imagine the scenario. A cardiologist tells an elderly woman that she needs bypass surgery and has Dr. Dyke see her. They discuss the blockages in her heart, the operation, the risks. And now they’re supposed to haggle over the price as if he were selling a rug in a souk? “I’ll do three vessels for thirty thousand, but if you take four I’ll throw in an extra night in the I.C.U.”—that sort of thing? Dyke shook his head. “Who comes up with this stuff?” he asked. “Any plan that relies on the sheep to negotiate with the wolves is doomed to failure.”

  Instead, McAllen and other cities like it have to be weaned away from their untenably fragmented, quantity-driven systems of health care, step by step. And that will mean rewarding doctors and hospitals if they band together to form Grand Junction-like accountable-care organizations, in which doctors collaborate to increase prevention and the quality of care, while discouraging overtreatment, undertreatment, and sheer profiteering. Under one approach, insurers—whether public or private—would allow clinicians who formed such organizations and met quality goals to keep half the savings they generate. Government could also shift regulatory burdens, and even malpractice liability, from the doctors to the organization. Other, sterner, approaches would penalize those who don’t form these organizations.

  This will by necessity be an experiment. We will need to do in-depth research on what makes the best systems successful—the peer-review committees? recruiting more primary-care doctors and nurses? putting doctors on salary?—and disseminate what we learn. Congress has provided vital funding for research that compares the effectiveness of different treatments, and this should help reduce uncertainty about which treatments are best. But we also need to fund research that compares the effectiveness of different systems of care—to reduce our uncertainty about which systems work best for communities. These are empirical, not ideological, questions. And we would do well to form a national institute for health-care delivery, bringing together clinicians, hospitals, insurers, employers, and citizens to assess, regularly, the quality and the cost of our care, review the strategies that produce good results, and make clear recommendations for local systems.

  Dramatic improvements and savings will take at least a decade. But a choice must be made. Whom do we want in charge of managing the full complexity of medical care? We can turn to insurers (whether public or private), which have proved repeatedly that they can’t do it. Or we can turn to the local medical communities, which have proved that they can. But we have to choose someone—because, in much of the country, no one is in charge. And the result is the most wasteful and the least sustainable health-care system in the world.

  Something even more worrisome is going on as well. In the war over the culture of medicine—the war over whether our country’s anchor model will be Mayo or McAllen—the Mayo model is losing. In the sharpest economic downturn that our health system has faced in half a century, many people in medicine don’t see why they should do the hard work of organizing themselves in ways that reduce waste and improve quality if it means sacrificing revenue.

  In El Paso, the for-profit health-care executive told me, a few leading physicians recently followed McAllen’s lead and opened their own centers for surgery and imaging. When I was in Tulsa a few months ago, a fellow-surgeon explained how he had made up for lost revenue by shifting his operations for well-insured patients to a specialty hospital that he partially owned while keeping his poor and uninsured patients at a nonprofit hospital in town. Even in Grand Junction, Michael Pramenko told me, “some of the doctors are beginning to complain about ‘leaving money on the table.’ ”

  As America struggles to extend health-care coverage while curbing health-care costs, we face a decision that is more important than whether we have a public-insurance option, more important than whether we will have a single-payer system in the long run or a mixture of public and private insurance, as we do now. The decision is whether we are going to reward the leaders who are trying to build a new generation of Mayos and Grand Junctions. If we don’t, McAllen won’t be an outlier. It will be our future. ♦

• Shift in Oklahoma City Council's mood could keep pools afloat

  Posted Jun 15 at 11 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Oklahoman
  NewsOK.com

  BY BRYAN DEAN
  Published: June 15, 2009

  Oklahoma City’s practice of closing unpopular city swimming pools could be coming to an end.

  Ward 7 Councilman Skip Kelly talked his colleagues Tuesday into reversing a decision to close Douglass Pool this year.

  Popularity of traditional pools has waned in the last decade. The city has slowly closed pools as they are replaced with spraygrounds, which let children control jets of water, buckets, water cannons and other features.

  Spraygrounds are far more popular than traditional pools and are cheaper to operate. Water drains immediately, meaning the city doesn’t have to hire lifeguards.

  Kelly said he has nothing against spraygrounds, but he doesn’t think they are an adequate replacement for traditional pools.

  "The spray parks, I think they serve their purpose, but not for the 12- and the 13- and the 14-year-old children,” Kelly said. "You might as well just call a bunch of kids to your front yard and spray them.”

  Kelly said teenagers can’t learn to swim at a sprayground and are left out by the city’s new approach to aquatics.

  "I’m really perplexed with this spray park comparison,” Kelly said. "You can’t compare a senior citizen who can get in the shallow part of a pool and participate in some activity or water aerobics program and a child who may just want some water sprayed on him.”

  A change in current
  Douglass Park already has a sprayground next to its traditional pool, and the city voted in April to close the pool along with two other underperforming pools that were replaced by spraygrounds.

  It will cost the city $24,968 to operate the pool in 2009, or nearly $7 per visitor, officials said.

  A 2005 study recommended closing underperforming pools and relying on spraygrounds and the city’s two family aquatics centers, which have large slides and other features.

  Several council members said they are uncomfortable with that idea.

  "I believe strongly in swimming skills for youngsters,” Oklahoma City Ward 6 Councilwoman Meg Salyer said. "I think it’s a safety issue.”

  The Douglass Pool is scheduled to open Tuesday along with four other traditional pools. The family aquatics centers and spraygrounds opened Memorial Day weekend.

  Kelly said he is confident people will continue using the Douglass Pool.

  "I will personally do as much as I can to promote the pool,” Kelly said. "We can make these programs work if we market them to the right people and make them see what we have.”

• Americans Who've Used Canada's Health-Care System Respond to Current Big-Lie Media Campaign

  Posted Jun 14 at 4 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Huffington Post
  By Bill Mann
  
  The scare ads and op-ed pieces featuring Canadians telling us American how terrible their government health-care systems have arrived - predictably.

  There's another, factual view - by those of us Americans who've lived in Canada and used their system.

  My wife and I did for years, and we've been incensed by the lies we've heard back here in the U.S. about Canada's supposedly broken system.

  It's not broken - and what's more, Canadians like and fiercely defend it.

  Example: Our son was born at Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital. My wife got excellent care. The total bill for three days in a semi-private room? $21.

  My friend Art Finley is a West Virginia native who lives in Vancouver.

  "I'm 82, and in excellent health," he told me this week. "It costs me all of $57 a month for health care, and it's excellent. I'm so tired of all the lies and bullshit I hear about the system up here in the U.S. media."

  Finley, a well-known TV and radio host for years in San Francisco, adds,

  "I now have 20/20 vision thanks to Canadian eye doctors. And I haven't had to wait for my surgeries, either."

  A Canadian-born doctor wrote a hit piece for Wingnut Central (the Wall Street Journal op-ed page) this week David Gratzer claimed:

  "Everyone in Canada is covered by a single payer -- the government. But Canadians wait for practically any procedure or diagnostic test or specialist consultation in the public system."

  Vancouverite Finley: "That's sheer b.s."

  
  I heard Gratzer say the same thing on Seattle radio station KIRO this week. Trouble is, it's nonsense.

  We were always seen promptly by our doctors in Montreal, many of whom spoke both French and English.

  Today, we live within sight of the Canadian border in Washington state, and still spend lots of time in Canada.

  Five years ago, while we were on vacation in lovely Nova Scotia, the Canadian government released a long-awaited major report from a federal commission studying the Canadian single-payer system. We were listening to CBC Radio the day the big study came out.

  The study's conclusion: While the system had flaws, none was so serious it couldn't be fixed.

  Then the CBC opened the lines to callers across Canada.

  Here it comes, I thought. The usual talk-show torrent of complaints and anger about the report's findings.

  I wish Americans could have heard this revealing show.

  For the next two hours, scores of Canadians called from across that vast country, from Newfoundland to British Columbia.

  Not one said he or she would change the system. Every single one defended it vigorously.

  The Greatest Canadian Ever

  Further proof:

  Not long ago, the CBC asked Canadians to nominate and then vote for The Greatest Canadian in history. Thousands responded.

  The winner? Not Wayne Gretzky, as I expected (although the hockey great DID make the Top 10). Not even Alexander Graham Bell, another finalist.

  The greatest Canadian ever?

  Tommy Douglas.

  Who? Tommy Douglas was a Canadian politician - and the father of Canadian universal health care.

• The "hidden health tax"

  Posted Jun 14 at 4 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Oklahoma Democratic Party
  www.okdemocrats.org

  In this morning's Oklahoman, one editorial pointed out some of the biggest cost problems in health care - and what some Oklahoma leaders are doing about it.

  David Blatt, who serves as the director of policy for the non-partisan Oklahoma Policy Institute, discussed the major flaw in having a large uninsured population: no matter if you have insurance or not, you still get sick and need health care. Many of those costs get passed on to those with insurance, raising everyone's premiums by more than $1,000 in 2008 (according to Families USA).

  From Blatt's editorial:

  During the past two years, a broad group of health care industry representatives, policy experts and leaders from state government, under the guidance of Insurance Commissioner Kim Holland, have participated in the State Coverage Initiative (SCI). The group has worked to develop a plan that would extend health insurance coverage to a sizable segment of the 640,000 Oklahomans who are currently uninsured, thereby easing the cost-shifting that is driving up the costs for everyone. [...]

  The principal SCI recommendation is to generate new revenues by assessing a dedicated fee on all health insurance claims paid by health insurers in Oklahoma. It is estimated than an initial 1 percent fee would generate $78 million that, along with matching federal funds, could insure an additional 80,000 Oklahomans.

  Blatt emphasizes a critical point in discussions on health care reform: it's not going to come free. But in the end, we can save money for our working families while covering more people and lowering the chance that you might face bankruptcy just because you get sick.

  Blatt sums it up this way: "There is no doubt there will be real opposition from some key legislative leaders and interest groups to implementing the new revenue assessment. Yet if solving the uninsured crisis through adoption of new revenue streams will be hard, solving it without new revenue is impossible."

  Posted on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 by Karina Henderson.

• The Best and Worst

  Posted Jun 11 at 7 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Capitol Bureau
  NewsOK.com

  The Best and Worst
  Posted by julie bisbee
  on June 11, 2009 at 4:55 pm

  If only we could make such a list.

  I’d have a few lists from the legislative session. Best dressed, best debate, who has the best candy in their offices, etc. Those are the inane things that come to mind sometimes after a long day of listening to bills move through the floor.

  But, The Oklahoma Observer can use it’s mighty pen to name the ten best and the ten worst House and Senate members of the Legislative session that ended in May.

  If you’re unfamiliar, the Observer’s politics are no mystery. The publication tends to be left-leaning. Founding editor Frosty Troy, a fixture in the Capitol press corp, is often touring the country and speaking on the importance of public education and other issues. And in a red state like Oklahoma (at least in the last national election), his stance can be refreshing to loyal readers and fans who subscribe to the publication. And heck, Frosty even has a Facebook page.

  Since the Observer requires a subscription, I won’t spoil their whole best and worst list of the session, to get that information you’ll actually have to get your own copy. But some highlights should whet the appetite.

  Among the best in the Senate, Observer writers Troy and Editor Arnold Hamilton had this to say: Sen. Richard Lerblance, D-Hartshorne is an “oddity — apparently one of the few senators who reads all the bills on the agenda, then asks meticulous questions.”

  The article also praises Sen. Harry Coates, R-Seminole. Observer writers call Coates “one-of-a-kind, refusing to march in lockstep with the majority of Republicans…” Coates was the lone Republican that opposed the chief information officer bill and refused to change his vote. He also voted with Democrats on other issues throughout the session.

  Among the worst in the Senate, The Observer called Senate President Pro Tempore Sen. Glenn Coffee a “bitter partisan,” who “blew it as the first Republican president pro tempore in state history.” Ouch. He did get tort reform legislation passed into law, though.

  The Observer also said Sen. John Ford, R-Bartlesville, the author of the worst bill in the session. Ford wrote Senate 834, which sought to deregulate public schools. The Observer said the bill would have “turned every school district into an old plantation.” Observern founding editor, Troy spoke out against this bill at a rally of educators earlier this year.

  In the House, Rep. Ryan Kiesel, D-Seminole earned praise from Observer staff who said Kiesel wasn’t afraid to “speak truth to power…he challenged one GOP sacred cow after another.” The publication also lauded Rep. Doug Cox, R-Grove, calling him an “independent thinker in the all-too-often lockstep world of the House GOP.”

  Those drawing criticism in the House included Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City, who the Observer says “continues to baffle, astonish and amuse.” The Observer also called Rep. Dan Sullivan, R-Tulsa “a walking conflict of interest.”

• Stimulus funds go to work in Oklahoma

  Posted Jun 09 at 11 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Tulsa World
  NewsOK.com
  
  Federal money helps take disabled Oklahomans off waiting list

  
  BY MIKE AVERILL - Tulsa World
  Published: June 9, 2009

  The state Rehabilitation Services Department recently got $7.6 million in federal stimulus funds, opening up service to hundreds of people who were on a waiting list.

  The department works to expand opportunities for employment, independent life and economic self-sufficiency by helping people with disabilities.

  The one-time stimulus injection is expected to keep services available to all eligible Oklahomans for the next 12 to 15 months.

  In an effort to control costs, the agency in January 2007 had to put on hold service to about 440 eligible applicants whose disabilities are categorized as less significant.

  "Reopening services to those on the waiting list is bringing people to our doors that our staff has wanted to help for a long time — individuals who generally need fewer services over a shorter period of time in order to successfully go to work because their disabilities are less severe,” agency Director Mike O’Brien said.

  Per federal law, the agency divides clients into three tiers based on the severity of disabilities.

  When the agency doesn’t have enough funds to serve everybody, it is required to serve those with the most significant disabilities on a priority basis because they need the most help with employment, said Jody Harlan, agency public information administrator. Harlan said the goal is to use the stimulus money to provide faster turnaround on job placement.

  Economic stimulus money will be put directly in the hands of local employers and nonprofit groups to provide on-the-job training and permanent employment to people with disabilities.

• Young Democrats Convention

  Posted Jun 05 at 7 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  
  Saturday, June 20, 2009 1:00 PM

  State Senate Chamber, Oklahoma State Capitol
  2300 N. Lincoln Blvd, Oklahoma City, OK

  Chapter presidents: Each chapter can bring 15 voting delegates to the convention. You can pre-register or register at the convention. E-mail info@ydoklahoma.com.

  YDO members: If you are affiliated with a chapter, get with your president to obtain delegate credentials.

  If you are not affiliated with a chapter, you can still be a voting delegate. Send an e-mail to info@ydoklahoma.com.

• Oklahoma Democrats Friday Luncheon Series

  Posted Jun 04 at 9 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Friday, June 5, 2009 12:00 PM

  Boulevard Cafeteria | 525 NW 11th St., Oklahoma City

  Featured speaker: Iris Lochner, Former OCDP Volunteer of the Year

  Iris will speak about the Voter Activation Network Program
  

  For more information, please contact Karina at karina@okdemocrats.org or call (405) 427-3366.

• General appropriations bill signed by Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry

  Posted Jun 02 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Oklahoman
  www.newsok.com

  OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Gov. Brad Henry has signed legislation that will fund state agencies and services during the fiscal year that begins July 1.

  Henry signed the state's general appropriations bill on Tuesday. He also signed 40 other bills into law, many of them dealing with appropriations to state agencies.

  The state's $7.2 billion budget plan for the upcoming year uses $631 million in federal economic stimulus dollars to increase spending for education and health care, while cutting other agencies by 7 percent overall.

  It represents a 1.9 percent increase over last year's budget. Without the stimulus money, spending would be $494 million, or 7 percent, below last year's $7 billion appropriation.

  The state budget does not dip into the state's constitutional Rainy Day Fund, which stands at almost $600 million.

• OK expected for efforts on homeless in Oklahoma City

  Posted Jun 02 at 10 PM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  The Oklahoman
  www.newsok.com

  The Oklahoma City Council is expected to approve a partnership today with the United Way to build a campus and provide services for the homeless at NW 3 and Virginia.

  Along with some money from the state, the city is getting about $2.8 million for the project from the Federal Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, city officials said.

  The campus will include a homeless resource center and a homeless day shelter.

  The city also is getting $2.1 million from the 2009 federal economic stimulus package to help the homeless and place homeless people in housing.

  The council will meet at 8:30 a.m. at City Hall, 201 N Walker Ave.

• Failure to adjourn exposes failure in GOP leadership

  Posted May 23 at 9 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Oklahoma House Democrats
  www.okhousedems.com

  Oklahoma City (May 22, 2009) State Capitol – After months of pressing bills supposedly designed to promote efficiency in government and fiscal responsibility, Republican leadership in both chambers failed to adjourn the 2009 session by their set date because they could not pass one bill.

  “One bill’s failure to pass in the Senate will end up costing the state about $110,000 a day,” said Democratic Leader Danny Morgan, D-Prague. “I’ll say it one more time because the Republican leadership still hasn’t heard it: fiscal discipline starts at home.”

  When Senate leaders couldn’t get enough votes to pass SB980, a bill radically changing the information technology structure of state agencies, they declined to close the vote for most of the day rather than admit defeat.

  “That’s one of the worst examples of inefficient government I’ve ever seen,” Democratic Floor Leader Mike Brown, D-Tahlequah noted.

  Though Republican leadership attempted to point fingers toward House Democrats during consideration of a bill to extend the deadline for sine die adjournment, Democrats reminded them exactly who is in the majority party.

  “They nearly put in jeopardy funding for BRAC and funding for REAP because the Senate sat idle for most of the day,” stated Rep. Scott Inman, D-Del City. “If they could have comprehended the notion that one of their pet bills failed, we would be out of session right now – with all agencies fully funded.”

  “I guess it’s a good thing Speaker Benge held on to his slush fund yesterday – or else maybe we wouldn’t have the money to come back into session next week,” Rep. Brown said.

  “The first year that the Republicans have control of both chambers, and they throw us into this circus,” Rep. Morgan added. “What happened on the floor today is a shining example of what Republican leadership in the legislature really looks like.”

  After SB980 shut down the Senate for most of the day, the House took up an identical bill later in the evening – HB1170, which was rapidly changed to match the language of the other bill. Six Republican conferees hastily signed off on a new Conference Committee Report in order to push the bill through.

  Both bills would consolidate information technology services to all state agencies, with the exception of higher education.

  “This is a prime example of legislative abuse at its worse, and I have to ask what are the real motives driving this issue,” said Rep. Ryan Kiesel, D-Seminole.

  Democrats pointed out the fact that the people who stand to benefit most from this legislation are large businesses seeking plum state contracts.

  “We locked this place up for big business, and it’s going to cost taxpayers a few hundred thousand dollars so they can line corporate pockets,” Rep. Brown added.

  Similar legislation has been passed in states like Texas and Virginia, and House Democrats stated during debate that the legislation has cost millions more than expected and had been a failure, with even the Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry decrying serious problems with the consolidated system.

• Funding for autism coverage quashed

  Posted May 23 at 9 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Oklahoma House Democrats
  www.okhousedems.com

  Oklahoma City (May 21, 2009) State Capitol – House Republicans continued to display an uncompromising refusal to provide relief for families of children with autism whose insurance companies do not cover treatment.

  “It’s not many times we have a chance to make a real difference in people’s lives, but when we do, I believe we ought not take it lightly,” said Democratic Floor Leader Mike Brown, D-Tahlequah. “These families are struggling, and their health insurance is no help – we ought to stand with them.”

  House Democrats submitted a motion on SB216, the general appropriations bill, to reject the Conference Committee Report (CCR) and return the bill to conference with instructions to use House surplus monies to fund public safety, the military and a limited autism insurance mandate.

  The instructions would have asked for $1,219,258 to the Oklahoma Employee Benefit Council (OSEEGIB) to provide insurance coverage for state employees with autism disorders. The money would have come out of a $6.9 million slush fund that House Republicans claim is needed for “remodeling.”

  However, the majority of House Republicans quashed the effort, though a few crossed over to offer bipartisan support to the effort.

  “The Republicans have been debating the costs of mandatory coverage for autism treatments for years, and I think this could act as a pilot program so we can find out for certain what the cost would be,” Rep. Brown stated.

  “Even if some of my colleagues don’t want to require all insurance companies to cover these treatments, I think our state employees should not have to worry about going bankrupt because a family member has autism.

  “If we can’t find money to give them a raise, we should at least provide this relief,” he added.

  Republican leaders have previously stated that the money in the House surplus fund is being stockpiled for possible future renovations to office space. Recently, the Republican House leadership has purchased several large-screen televisions for and supplied cable TV lines to Republican leadership and staff offices, as well as installing large flat-screen monitors in committee rooms.

  Rep. Brown questioned whether the hoarded House funds will be well spent, given these kinds of large and frivolous purchases in a tight budget year.

  “I guess they would rather buy big-screen TVs so they can watch soap operas in their offices than help children and families facing serious financial straits to pay for medical care,” he stated. “It’s shameful to see where their priorities lie.”

• GOP chooses remodeling over public safety, military

  Posted May 23 at 9 AM
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  
  

  Oklahoma House Democrats
  www.okhousedems.com

  
  Oklahoma City (May 21, 2009) State Capitol – After asking most state agencies – including the Department of Public Safety and the Department of Military – to absorb substantial budget cuts, House Republicans on Wednesday refused to let go of a $6.9 million slush fund they claim is needed for “remodeling.”

  House Democrats submitted a motion to reject the Conference Committee Report, with instructions to split the $6.9 million in House surplus monies among three agencies with more vital priorities. The motion proposed adding $880,742 to the military department for the 45th Infantry; filling in the $4.8 million shortfall in the Department of Public Safety to fully fund highway patrols (OHP); and supplying $1,219,258 to the Oklahoma Employee Benefit Council (OSEEGIB) to provide insurance coverage for state employees with autism disorders.

  “I would have hoped we could all agree that these are higher priorities than remodeling offices,” said Rep. Glen Bud Smithson, D-Sallisaw, who submitted the instructions. “Their refusal is a slap in the face to the 45th Infantry, the OHP and our state employees.”

  Democrats also noted the hypocrisy of several Republican members who have been willing to gut other agencies to fund these other priorities, but refuse to use the slush fund that they’ve squirreled away.

  “Earlier this week, several Republican legislators were railing against spending money on public television and the arts rather than fully funding public safety and the military,” Rep. Smithson stated. “Turns out we could still fund all those things just by taking away the House Republicans’ slush fund.”

  “I don’t know how many times we have to say it, but fiscal responsibility starts at home,” said Rep. Lucky Lamons, D-Tulsa. “How can we expect other agencies to sacrifice their spending if we’re sitting on a stockpile of taxpayer money?”

  On Wednesday, Rep. Rex Duncan, R-Sand Springs, and Rep. Mike Thompson, R-Oklahoma City, called on Gov. Henry to fully fund the military. Rep. Mike Reynolds, R-Oklahoma City, debated in favor of defunding the Human Rights Commission to fully fund the military.

  Reps. Duncan and Thompson both repeatedly voted to quash the Democrats’ attempt to make these agencies whole and voted in favor of the Conference Committee Report (CCR). Rep. Reynolds, though, was one of three Republican legislators who voted to reject the CCR.

  “I know that there are renovations that need to be done, but not this year – not at the expense of public safety and our men and women in uniform,” Rep. Lamons added. “Not when there are families of children with autism going bankrupt from medical expenses.

  “This is the choice that the House Republicans made on how to spend the money we have right now, and they chose to continue to squirrel it away rather than take care of Oklahoma families. I think that choice is incredibly reckless, and I applaud my 41 colleagues who stood up for the people of our state.”
  

• Autism awareness plate doesn’t reflect Republican priorities

  Posted May 20 at 9 PM
  •