Commentary from Dave Durenberger

AL FRANKEN’S FIRST BIRTHDAY
Minnesota courts resolved the Coleman-Franken campaign for the U.S. Senate in Franken’s favor a year ago this week. Al is still working on defining “Senator Franken (D-MN).” He’s been told so often he had to leave behind the funny-man satirist and the famous something else that he’s personally struggled with the role – taking “senator” lessons from Hillary Clinton. Fortunately, he’s learning to define himself as himself, as he gets to know the players and the game of policy/politics much better, using humor to build some bridges to the right and his gut-liberal instincts to bridges on the left, and listening to Frannie Franken, his very best adviser. I found him much more open to advice than, for example, my friend Rod Grams, who chose to succeed me in 1995 on the humorless far right.

CELEBRATING THE 4TH OF JULY WITH 172,000 AMERICAN WARRIORS
Vice President Joe and Dr. Jill Biden headed to Iraq and General David Petraeus to Afghanistan to celebrate our Independence Day with Americans. Since November of 2001, some 2 million American troops have spent their July 4ths in Iraq and Afghanistan; many of them several times. While Petraeus, who allegedly saved the war President Bush declared won in May 2003, was flying to Kabul, GOP National Committee chair Michael Steele was defining Afghanistan as the war candidate Obama wanted to fight, so let him dig us out. Uber conservative GOP pundit William Kristol quickly replied, “Steele’s comments have put him at odds with 100% of the Republican Party.” Three months from now, U.S. forces in Iraq will be reduced from 77,000 to 50,000, even though, after more than seven years of trying, there is still no government in Iraq.

SUPREME COURT: ARLEN IS ANGRY
Arlen Specter has lived the law most of his adult life. He arrived in the Senate with Ronald Reagan and thrust himself in the midst of Attorney General Ed Meese’s efforts to shape the federal judiciary to what Meese and his boss considered “the time for change.” Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) chaired Judiciary, but Arlen kept working Hatch and Meese toward the ideological middle. I have several nominees to the federal bench in Minnesota who will attest to that. What they will also tell you is how strongly I felt about the president, not the Senate, deciding who best reflected the role of the Constitution, the Congress and legal precedent. If I can influence the president’s nomination, however, I will. The role of the Senate in the consent process is to assure the nominee’s character and experience meet standards for a lifetime appointment.

ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES
In the Senate Judiciary hearings on Elena Kagan, Specter shows his frustration with the nominee’s refusal to get specific about the application of Constitution, Congress and her views of recent precedent changes. Just as his former Republican colleagues have had to settle for making speech about her political and potential judicial “activism” (read “liberal” coming from the far right.) Just as Al Franken has carved an angry niche for himself in taking on the Roberts court’s affection for corporate America and its role in politics, and its alleged disaffection for the role of Congress in making policy that might affect its version of electoral influence. But Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) sagely advises Specter, Franken and the Jeff Sessions (R-AL) gang, “elections have consequences.” Kagan’s going to have the votes.

ROBERT C. BYRD
…was the longest serving member of the U.S. Senate until his death on June 28, 2010. He may well be the senator who loved the Senate so much he would have died for it. As he did. On reflection, it is difficult to know what he loved more, his faith in God and in his dear wife, Erma, the West Virginia that elected him to history, or the Senate which gave him the opportunity to shape the men and women who served there and the nation that they serve. Some of my memories of Bob Byrd I have referred to in past commentaries. His respect for history and tradition and his incredible memory of all he read and re-read from Shakespeare to Mallin.

He has researched and written volumes on the Senate and those who shaped it and our nation. His last book, Letters to a New President, was written in 2008 with Steve Ketterman. He knew well the next president would come from the Senate and the book was subtitled: Commonsense Lessons for our Next Leader, quoting Leo Tolstoy: “Love that in you which is in all of us and you will come one step closer to loving God.” “A president,” he said, “not only must have a spine like steel and a mind that is always reaching for new insight and new wisdom, but a faith that is unerring, unfailing, and unbreakable.”

The book closes with Byrd quoting Confucius: “By three methods we may learn wisdom. First, by reflection, which is noblest. Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is bitterest.” Reflection, says Robert Byrd, must come first because it is the foundation upon which all the other lessons can be built into true wisdom.

Bob Byrd was able to overcome his racist past, but not his tendency to have the last word or the best offices in the capital. He was majority leader when I arrived in 1978 who bullied us with all-night stands and threats to our recess periods to get us to closure. Made his successor, Howard Baker (R-TN) all the more respected for his light touch and gentlemanly charm.

by Donnelly

NO FIX IN AFGHANISTAN
Read Michael Hastings’ Rolling Stone article on General Stanley McChrystal and you will come to the obvious conclusion that President Obama has not solved our biggest problem in South Asia: Why are General David Petraeus and 100,000 other Americans in Afghanistan? In his speeches, the president uses Al Qaeda and the Taliban interchangeably as enemies to be defeated. But they are very different. In a Washington Post piece, Henry Kissinger claims “we have a basic national interest to prevent jihadist Islam from gaining additional momentum.”

Naturally, the “always angry American right” argues Democrats haven’t the will to do enough, spend enough and fight hard enough to stamp on the Taliban as a movement, terrorism wherever it is, insurgencies, and set up national governments to replace unstable states wherever necessary in this world to deny the foregoing training and operational bases. See Bush’s UN ambassador and AEI/WSJ “expert” John Bolton.

As I have suggested before, the solution (and Kissinger agrees in part) is to regionalize the problem of jihadist Islam. Make it not President Obama’s problem, but a problem for China, India, Iran, Russia and the Arab states. Pakistan is governable only because of the power of its army and its cultural enmity for India.

Hillary Clinton got a pass from McChrystal because “she had my back,” but there is no agreement in Obamaland about how to judge our national security threats or their resolution in this part of the world. So good luck David Petraeus. If you make a president out of Karzai before 2012, you may get to run in this country!!

GENERAL LARRY SHELITO RETIRES
I called Minnesota National Guard 47th Division commanding General Larry Shelito after he announced his retirement. Shelito, who is a school teacher in NW Minnesota by training, has served with his troops in two wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan and as peacekeepers in Bosnia. “I grew up in the late sixties so I knew what ugly looks like,” he said, referring to the Viet Nam War.

“We are building a foundation in this country’s national security we’ve never had before. Our recruiting is at 115% of our goals and they all have an unprecedented sense of service. The young men and women are sharp and focused; they are more like their grandparents than their parents. Their goals are not to be the best that they can be, but to be part of something good, that everyone can be proud of.”

General Shelito echoed something I recall my father saying often as a teacher and coach at St. John’s, “The beauty of education is that I have a new crop to learn from every year.” Shelito ended our conversation simply with, “We’re here to serve.”

AMERICA MUST GROW UP . . . AND CALM DOWN
Charles M. Blow in the New York Times describes how Americans are dealing with themselves and their leaders these days. The answer is, not very well. At the heart of a recent illustrated public opinion analysis is the insightful conclusion that “our expectations must be better managed.” It is in our nature as people to believe that we live in a world over which we have increasingly little control as individuals. Recent events involving energy price instability, attacks on the homeland and wars against elusive terrorists and the collapse of the housing and home financing markets are scary. For that reason we need leaders we can trust.

Barack Obama was seen to have the most potential to be that leader as our president by Americans and by people around the world and their leaders. He inherited a global financial crisis to which he continued his predecessors’ therapy. He and his congressional majority designed and delivered a trillion dollar stimulus and a restructuring of the auto industry. He launched a “race to the top” education redesign program and a health care coverage program starting with insurance and payment policy reform.

He took on the financial system, consumer credit protection and energy and environment policy reform. He launched efforts at building relationships abroad and tackling insoluble problems in the Middle East. For all this effort, the Swedes gave him the Nobel Peace Prize, the Republicans gave him the cold shoulder, and Fox News, right wing radio and Sarah Palin gave him the Tea Party.

LEADERS WE CAN TRUST
I am trying to remember which speech since his election had the feeling that President Obama expressed whenever necessary in the campaign. When he made me feel that the past that couldn’t last was over, and we were at a new beginning. I knew the old American economy, built on inflated expectations, costs and values couldn’t last. And as of the fall of 2008, it ended. So what’s next? And what’s in it for me and my grandkids and what will be expected of me and of everyone else like me? Presidents are supposed to have this kind of vision at times like this. To be guided by it when assessing whom they ask to do what.

Maybe this president hasn’t had time to think about that speech. After all, he also inherited a couple of wars he didn’t believe in, military leaders who hadn’t won much of anything since 9-11-01, the instability in many nations of religious and tribal terrorism, a totally dysfunctional U.S. Senate, and on top of all that the guy’s snake-bit. Everything that can go wrong seems to have chosen this time to do it. Sixty thousand barrels of oil a day has been pouring into the Gulf of Mexico since April 23 because one of the richest corporations in the world is so busy feeding our appetite for domestic crude oil and its appetite for profits that it can’t figure out how to stop it.

The Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, has all the answers to the problem, including don’t stop drilling, but he wants the president of the United States to stop the leak and pay for the damages. The Republican chair of the House Energy Committee apologizes to the corporation because the president wants the leaker to pay for the damages. A majority of Americans believe BP is responsible for the spill in the gulf and its consequences, that government costs too much, produces too little, but must protect us from oil spills.

Barack Obama is stuck being CEO of a government that has at least three cabinet members and 16 agencies responsible for off shore deep-sea drilling, plus 5,000 other agencies responsible for every other potential problem no one expected, half of whose appointed heads can’t take responsibility because some petulant U.S. Senator has a “hold” on his or her appointment.

Why would anyone want to run for president of this mess? More importantly, why do I want to hold him responsible for all these unanticipated events and the consequences of the polarization of politics in America and the breakdown in accountability abroad? Because he’s the only guy that I presume knows there is light at the end of the tunnel, that it’s not another train, and that he knows what we need to do – together – to get there.

So here’s my problem: When I see my president doing burgers with Medvedev in Arlington and hamming it up with the G-8 in Canada, it’s like I know he’s cool. But does he know why these guys are critical to my grandkids future? If so, when’s he going to tell me?

YOU JUST DON’T WANT TO BE CAUGHT BEING BIPARTISAN
Congressman Sander Levin (D-MI) is the new chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. He is also the brother of Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), who came into the Senate with me in 1978 and is chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. After a recent tax mark-up in his committee, when Republicans were offered repeated opportunities to vote for tax breaks to create jobs and turned them down, chairman Levin suggested that bipartisanship on anything must be a thing of the past.

by Steve Sack

ARE CORPORATIONS PERSONS ENTITLED TO FREE SPEECH PROTECTION?
A 5-4 decision, Citizens United, by the U.S. Supreme Court interprets the Constitution to say they are so entitled. The Minnesota Supreme Court agreed in a case brought by the MN Chamber of Commerce. As one who has participated in elections and policy-making for 45 years, I wish they’d both come to a different conclusion.

The influence of fund-raising on policy-makers and of corporate money on elections has made the kind of leadership we need in government today just about impossible. I thought the Court was wrong in the Buckley v. Valeo decision in 1976, which provided wealthy persons the opportunity to buy elections and has subsequently made legislative efforts to restrict its impact on opponents of the wealthy unconstitutional.

I am frequently asked to compare the people I served with in more productive times under Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton, with the seemingly contentious, acrimonious and unproductive people who serve today. Judging only by the number of times I am told that current Senate and House members I served with say they wish I were back there, I’d have to say we did better in “the old days.” It’s not that good people aren’t willing to run. It’s that they can’t get elected. Issues, and they way they are marketed to the electorate, win elections.

As the cost of televised campaigns has risen to astronomical levels, the price we pay to have corporate interests (both business and the abortion and gun lobby corporations) present voters with what their choices are gets stronger. As election campaigns are fought out on single issues, the level of acrimony rises and we are driven to the polls by all the wrong emotions, and by people with no real interest in us as other than as commodities. Tell me, who gave a person who didn’t serve one term as governor of Alaska the power to decide what’s best for your state?

CAMPAIGN FINANCE FIXES
There are two that make some sense until the Supreme Court changes its mind. The first is public disclosure that works. Every corporation that participates in elections in any way, its officers, directors and legal address for purposes of service of legal process must be clearly identified. Individual and corporate financial contributors to the corporation over a certain level must be identified and website access made available. All contributions similarly available as of the time they are made. Second, David Broder of the Washington Post, who has been at this game longer than I, recommends that the first $100 or $200 of an individual’s contribution in any campaign be matched (he likes 6:1, as in New York City) by public funds from a tax levied solely for that purpose.

WHO IS RUNNING THE MEDICARE PROGRAM?
President Obama has been advised to appoint Dr. Donald Berwick as acting administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) while the Senate is in recess. Berwick is among the most qualified persons ever to hold this position, but he is being handed all the bad politics of the current health reform process to deal with, plus the biggest health insurance programs in the world because Republican senators are using his appointment to capitalize on reform and because the Senate Finance Committee hasn’t figured out how to let Berwick defend his record against a bunch of quotes taken out of context by senators who wouldn’t know good health policy if it hit them in the face.

Facts are that someone has made some bold moves to staff up the health reform side of HHS and CMS, mostly with former congressional staffers of substance and repute. These are very good people. But, the Berwick nomination to run CMS has been in the works since before President Obama took office. White House politicians have jerked him around for 20 months while they basically did the same thing with reform legislation. The president announced his intent to nominate Berwick days after the reform legislation became law in March, then allowed the appointment to sway in the political winds while Finance did their usual 1,000 political questions – the same process by which they killed Tom Daschle as HHS Secretary. Berwick now looks as “snake-bit” as the president himself.

REMEMBERING SMELL
Most of us recall at some time in our youth being asked, “Which of our senses could we do without if we had to?” Invariably, the answer is smell. Check the workers compensation disability data and you’ll find the same consensus. My next door neighbor on Crocus Hill in St. Paul is Bonnie Blodgett, who writes “The Garden Letter” available nation-wide and writes locally about her garden, which is right next door to mine. It’s a garden which is constantly on the go. Not the kind you’d ever try yourself. Because it’s all Bonnie…with some help from her old pick-up truck named “Veterans for Obama.”

Guess what? Shortly after we moved in next door – near the end of 2005 – Bonnie Blodgett lost her sense of smell. I couldn’t believe it. A gardener who can’t smell must be like a chef who can’t. I was right. When your olfactory receptor neurons go, you get anosmia – lost sense of smell. Actually in the first few months you get phantosmia – the olfactory equivalent of phantom limb syndrome – the worst smells imaginable. Then nothing. Nothing but the lost connection with taste, the loss of satiety – you can’t tell when you’ve eaten enough, lose memory of the association between smells and memorable events in your life, and you lose your toxicity warning system.

Bonnie Blodgett is an editor by profession who has taken her loss seriously enough to prove she’s a thorough researcher and an entertaining writer. Remember Smell is very personal and yet it touches on the struggles with basic research on an underappreciated disability. This book is a 224-page read which includes a 130-year-old home, the dog Mel, a famous Chicago chef, Rush Limbaugh, the FDA, and a surprise ending featuring Cam Blodgett and Dr. Margaret Hamberg.

MAKING HEALTH REFORM WORK FOR MINNESOTA
Republicans in Minnesota have declared war on the new health reform law and sent General Pawlenty to the 2010-12 campaign trails to accomplish it while Tom Emmer and legislative colleagues work to undermine public confidence in MN. The governor recently appointed an “Implementation Committee” of friends who have found something to dislike about much of the new law. . . On the other hand, leaders of Minnesota physician and hospital associations have decided to do all they can to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They see the new law as built on a bipartisan foundation, although it received no GOP votes. Much of it is designed to reward state initiatives for value-based health and health care. Moving toward universal coverage subsidized not by state taxes and cost-shifting, but explicitly through a reformed Medicaid program.

HEALTH INSURANCE CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST
I’ve watched the ups and downs of health insurance products and “markets” since involving myself as an employer in the 70s in a community-wide effort by large employers to provide employees with a choice of health insurance plans, including the nascent HMO. Our goal was reducing health care costs through informed employees and accountable health plans, creating, in effect, new forms of insurance and competitive markets for insurance and medical services at the community level by using available information and consumer choices to facilitate behavior change.

While experiments like this across the country have been tried with varying success, we are now on the verge of doing a “back to the future” adaptation of our lessons learned. The health reform law (ACA) provides for state-based health insurance regulation, health insurance exchanges and a new emphasis in assisting “smart buys” by employees. Recall what happened to the HMO: It became large national “managed care organizations” like UnitedHealth Care (UHC) who lost community support for their behavior change because savings never stayed with those who earned them.

The success of privatization of the HMO and for-profit medical practice corporations like the PHO movement led many of the 80-plus old-fashioned non-profit Blue Cross Blue Shield plans to go public and sell their community trust to Wall Street short-term profit-takers. Then along came Pat Rooney with his Golden Rule individual indemnity plan and the medical savings account. He sold the idea to Republicans who needed simple solutions that fit with a belief in consumer choice and insurance markets and tax-spending, and to the solo practice AMA community that hated the prospect of informed consumer medical care policies.

As simple solutions to complex problems caught on, Pat sold Golden Rule to United HealthCare for $800 million, UHC and managed care companies began raising their prices back up to double digit annual increases, fought off competitive bidding for private Medicare, feinted at informed consumers with Definity models, and persuaded the Republicans in 2003 to pay them $1.13 on the $1.00 of traditional Medicare to provide beneficiaries with “private insurance.” It’s all in the toilet now that the prospect of real insurance competition is here.

HEALTH INSURANCE VALUE
For many years MN health insurance companies like BCBSMN have been trying to convince members that they can provide more value for the premium prices they charge, because they can give members access to higher value health care services. This is what the HMO has been about for three decades and “data on docs” and the creation and sponsorship of the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (ICSI). For example, Health Partners Medical Group reports key clinical outcomes of more than 400,000 patients classified, since 2004, by socio-economic status, race and ethnic group because more than 90% of their patients will trust them with that kind of information.

Jeremy Olson, St Paul Pioneer Press, writes about an interesting new chapter in this effort. A 38-year-old leukemia patient is concerned that BCBSMN requires her to go to the Mayo Clinic for a bone marrow transplant rather than to the University of Minnesota where she has received all her care. “It breaks my heart,” the patient says. But BCBSMN has the local and national data to show that Mayo’s transplant outcomes for cases like hers are better than the UMN. The response from UMN is: “We treat the toughest cases that others won’t.” This is the kind of response we’ve become used to hearing when outcomes research is used to inform and to direct pre-paid patient decisions.

It doesn’t hold water. When lives are at stake, and reputations are on the line, research data must be as precise as possible. There are those in the medical industry who love bashing insurers and managed care even more than President Obama does. Traditional insurance plans will tell you that hospitals with less than the best outcomes may be motivated by their finances in taking on cases for which success is less likely. I will always recall the two neurosurgeons involved in the development of the cyber-knife telling me about a Miami colleague who bought two and was making a mint off “hopeless” tumor cases.

When the UMN says their cancer transplant cases are “tougher” than Mayo’s and therefore their success rate is lower, they need to be asked first to prove it, and then whether admission decisions can be affected by reimbursement which is unrelated to outcomes. What I would love to knowis, were I this patient, is which cancer centers, or which oncological surgeons, in this country have even better results for people like me than Mayo. Maybe one is right here in Minneapolis?

TAX CUTS FOR HEALTHY PEOPLE
The American Beverage Association won an important (for them) victory in preventing the New York Assembly from voting in Gov. Patterson’s proposal for a tax on unhealthy beverages. New York, like all states, already taxes beverages with alcoholic content because they can or because they are considered to varying degrees unhealthy.

Health related taxes have two public purposes: One is to raise money for public purposes; the other to reward those who do not smoke, drink to excess, or drink beverages which contribute to non-health for their healthy habits which, of course, reduce the costs of treating illnesses for all of us.

HARD RIGHT CATHOLICS HARD ON CATHOLIC HEALTH ASSN
Sister Carol Keehan, president of the CHA and former CEO of Divine Providence Hospital in D.C., spoke to graduates at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C. Protesters with aborted baby protest signs showed up, one accusing Gonzaga of inviting a “pro-abortion nun.” A number of American Bishops protested Notre Dame’s decision to give President Obama an honorary degree in 2009. CHA supported the health reform law and the U.S. Catholic Bishops opposed it. CHA’s annual meeting in Denver last week was themed “Strengthening the Ministry Through Turbulent Times

WHAT DOES THE DOCTOR – PATIENT RELATIONSHIP REQUIRE OF THE DOCTOR?
There is a Sen. Chuck Grassley inspired provision in the PPACA reform bill requiring drug and device companies to disclose payments they make to surgeons over a certain monetary value and the purpose for which they were made. This kind of transparency is “sunshine” on a bad habit. But ethical behavior cannot be legislated. Once it is in the culture of the doctor-industry relationship, neither will admit they can be influenced by money. Denial is antithetical to the patient’s best interest.

The doctor-patient relationship has always been built totally on trust, not on good information or informed decisions by patients. Every research study tells us patients delegate to their doctors the choices they should be making if they were fully informed by their doctor of all the consequences and all the alternatives. This is especially true of advice from surgeons on the need for surgery. It is especially true of lower back pain diagnoses and the thousands of unnecessary spinal surgeries in this country every year. Good for the ortho device business. Maybe we could tax devices installed in medically unnecessary surgery!!

UCSF CHANCELLOR SELLS STOCK IN TOBACCO COMPANY
Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, an oncologist, was named chancellor of UC San Francisco a year ago. In a required public disclosure, she and her AIDS doctor husband listed a portfolio of more than 133 stocks including $100,000-$1 million in Altria. When recently informed she owned Altria stock, she quickly agreed to order their investment adviser to sell tobacco stocks and to do “values screening” for holdings in tobacco, alcohol and firearms. The University of California divested itself of tobacco stocks in 2001.

Dr. Desmond-Hellmann made her fortune during 14 years at Genentech. At UCSF she has responsibility for one of the nation’s leading tobacco control centers, which is why the New York Times asked her why she would invest in tobacco. The sale of Altria stock netted Desmond-Hellmann $134,000 which she donated to the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. Given the UCSF medical school’s reliance on medical technology company contributions for the facilities in its brand new medical school campus and for their operations support, might it not be best for the chancellor to include med tech stocks in her “values screening” process as well? QUOTES “I mean good God man, go read a book. Watch ESPN.”….Jeb Bush, former Governor of FL giving advice to Barack Obama.

“The economy is growing, but not fast enough.”….Ben Bernanke, Chairman Federal Reserve to Congress

“I’m now on Twitter and Facebook. Stay tuned for updates.” President George W. Bush known as @GeorgeWBush

“Everybody sees the world from where they sit.”….rtd Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who pulled President Bush’s chestnuts out of the Katrina water and may be the man to do the same for President Obama.

“You just don’t want to be caught being bipartisan do you?”….House Ways and Means Chairman Sander Levin to Republicans who turned down his repeated opportunities to vote for tax cuts to create jobs in a House tax mark-up.

“We prefer shuffling paper to making widgets.”….Andrew Redleaf, CEO of Whitebox Advisors, a $2.7 billion Minneapolis hedge fund, as he bailed out of the wind energy business.

“We are a great nation immobilized at the moment by navel-gazers and poseurs and flackmeisters, and when you visit Washington, you see this clearly. Here are all the little marble palaces of the AFL-CIO and NEA and NRA and AARP and AMA and PhRMA and the trial lawyers and realtors and plumbers and the chemical industry and the nursing home operators — everybody but bank robbers and newspaper columnists has a mouthpiece in Washington –and it’s a lot of high-priced schmoozing and yipping and yakking by thousands of overeducated schnooks pumping out hogwash and hokum that is easily ignored by bureaucrats and elected officials who do the actual work.”….Garrison Keillor as the old scout 6-12-10

“Even nostalgia isn’t what it used to be”….Joe Graba, E-volving education

Government is a broker of ideas” . . . Martin Sabo

“You’re Commentary reeks of candor”….Eric Black, MN Post

“Regardless of how much blather you hear about the two (political) parties bickering in Washington, the Beltway is really a monoculture that accommodates the two poles of a debate, but very little in between”…David Carr, NYTimes Media critic, on the firing of Washington Post blogger David Weigel after a hacker revealed his private blog opinions.

“The pay to play culture in Washington has once again proved hard to suppress.” Adam Liptak and Ron Nixon in NYTimes story on Congress members who swear off earmarks for “private companies,” encouraging them to reemerge to receive our money as not-for-profits.