Why Dean is better than Bush
| June 13th, 2003Via Unmedia - Dean isn’t perfect, but he could be worse. The news from Vermont:
Vermont ranked eighth overall among the states in the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s annual KIDS COUNT report, to be released today. Vermont ranked ninth in last year’s report. [...]
The report said only 7 percent of Vermont children lack health insurance - compared to a national rate of 12 percent. Vermont’s high marks for child health care are often attributed to Dr. Dynasaur, a state program instituted by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean that provides low-cost or free health insurance to children.
Compare that to the news from Texas:
The 2003 Kids Count Data Book compiled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation of Baltimore shows Texas lagging behind most other states in a range of indicators of child welfare.
Texas ranks 50th with 22 percent of its children lacking health insurance compared with 12 percent nationally.
When he promised to “leave no child behind,” he was being ironic.
June 13th, 2003 at 11:42 am
You don’t have to convince me that Dean is better than Bush. So are Edwards, Mosley-Braun, Kucinich, Sharpton, Kerry, and Graham. Rather, try convincing us that Lieberman would be better than Bush. As the Daily Show’s John Stewart recently remarked, “Lieberman is for people who don’t think Bush is Jewish enough.” Flippant, yes; but not far off the mark.
This comment was written by Kevin Moore.Report this comment to the moderators
June 13th, 2003 at 2:13 pm
I don’t doubt that you’ll have many other reasons to prefer Dean over Bush, but isn’t it possible that the reason you list here is influenced just a wee bit by 1) the fact that 24% of Texas’s population are Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, and 2) the fact that there are almost no immigrants (or indeed, any other relatively impoverished minority) in Vermont?
This comment was written by Joe.Report this comment to the moderators
June 13th, 2003 at 2:36 pm
No doubt. But it’s not as if Texas is the only state with immigrants; the fact is, Texas is worse than ALL of them.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
June 13th, 2003 at 5:00 pm
OK, but you’ll notice that states with large Mexican immigrant populations — Arizona, Nevada, California, New Mexico — are all among the worst as well. Point is, you’re comparing apples and oranges.
This comment was written by Joe.Report this comment to the moderators
June 13th, 2003 at 7:32 pm
(rolleyes)
The Mexicans do it on purpose. They’re still mad about the Alamo.
This comment was written by Amy S..Report this comment to the moderators
June 13th, 2003 at 8:05 pm
Good stats on Texas. Expect the media and the Dems to be all over this story.
This comment was written by John Isbell.Report this comment to the moderators
June 13th, 2003 at 11:20 pm
Kevin, Lieberman would be better than Bush because the Republicans know how to act like an opposition party. He wouldn’t get away with half the stuff Bush is.
Better by default is better nonetheless.
This comment was written by Raznor.Report this comment to the moderators
June 14th, 2003 at 9:38 am
Hold it. Those statistics are a crock. One in four Texans is an illegal Mexican immigrant, and one in four Californians, and one in five Arizonans? No. Absolutely not. No way is that even vaguely correct. Those have got to be the figures for the total Hispanic population in those states. Hang on, let me check that. …
Found it! Here’s a U.S. Census Dept. map showing Hispanic population as a percent of total population per state. As you can see, the numbers are a pretty close match.
Referring to that population as “Mexican immigrants” in the context of the rest of The Globalist’s discussion there is a very slick little piece of misrepresentation. Not your fault, Kevin. Just bear in mind in the future that that site is not a reliable source of information.
Let me break this down. Only a small fraction of the Southwest’s Hispanic population consists of immigrants, legal or otherwise. Most Hispanics are native-born American citizens, many of whose families have been in the United States for generations. In a historical sense they’re Mexican immigrants, but that’s like calling Minnesotans Scandinavian immigrants. And the original Hispanic population of the Southwestern states never immigrated to the United States at all. They were already here. They’d been living here in settled communities for centuries before the Anglos ever showed up. The Norteños were the ones who immigrated into their area — which at the time was not part of the United States.
The Southwest’s Hispanic population gets very irritated at being referred to as immigrants. It happens to them a lot.
But back to the discussion of schoolchildren in Texas and Vermont.
What I’d originally had in mind to say, when I entered this thread, is that Texas has vastly more natural resources than Vermont. Texas has oil, seaports, cattle, natural gas, more oil, a bunch of major industries, a long growing season, and a lot of good agricultural land.
Vermont’s a place that got stood on end and scraped down by glaciers. In a lot of areas the soil’s so thin and rocky that it’s only good for grazing a few cows. The growing season’s short, the winters are ferocious, it takes a major construction project just to put in a mile of road, and the bilingual border population isn’t interested in becoming maquiladoras.
Vermont’s a resource-poor state that manages to do what it does in spite of the natural difficulties. The state of Texas is rich in comparison. It’s just its children that are poor.
This comment was written by Teresa Nielsen Hayden.Report this comment to the moderators
June 14th, 2003 at 3:46 pm
And all they will call you will be–:
This comment was written by Electrolite.Commenting on this post on Alas, a blog, Teresa spotted this bit of misdirection at The Globalist (”For Global Citizens.
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June 15th, 2003 at 4:53 am
Teresa, I get irritated as well whenever it comes to “immigration issues”, and I am glad you summed it up so precisely (something I personally couldn’t do, being of immigrant descent, but in a European country, hence quite unfamiliar with American realities).
However, I think you mistook Kevin Moore, author of the first comment on this entry, for Joe, who was the one linking to The Globalist in the second comment.
(Kevin actually drew a very impressive cartoon on Mexican immigration a few weeks ago:
http://www.incontemptcomics.com/051903.html)
This comment was written by Jimmy Ho.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2003 at 9:55 am
Wow, did that one slip past me. How embarassing. Many, many thanks, Teresa.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2003 at 3:16 pm
Teresa — nice post. But the point is, however you define immigrants or minorities or any other relatively impoverished and disadvantaged group, Texas has a LOT of those people and Vermont has hardly any. Children’s Defense Fund figures claim that only 3% of Vermont’s juveniles are minorities, and the state’s own figures put the number at 3.16% of students. By contrast, Children’s Defense Fund figures claim that 53% of Texas’s juvenile population are minorities.
In other words, Texas has a child minority population that is 17.7 times Vermont’s child minority population, in relative terms. If minorities are disadvantaged in this country — and surely they are — how could such disparate levels of minority populations not have an effect on how many children get health insurance?
And you don’t have to resort to speculation about natural resources either. Look at income tables, such as this one from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (That’s a liberal outfit, in case that matters to you.) In 1994-96, the bottom fifth of families with children in Vermont had incomes of about $13,000, while the bottom fifth in Texas had incomes of $8,600. (Scroll down to Table 2.)
Think that extra $4,400 per year in the bottom fifth didn’t make a difference in how many Vermonters got health insurance?
Whether you look at the numbers of disadvantaged minorities or at income levels, Vermont is more likely to have a “good record” on health insurance than Texas is, no matter who the governor was of each state.
You can have a debate all you want about Bush’s policies when he was governor of Texas compared to Dean’s policies in Vermont. My only point is that it is simplistic just to say, “Look at the better figures on health insurance,” as if that alone demonstrated Dean’s superiority. Like I said, it’s comparing apples and oranges.
This comment was written by Joe.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2003 at 3:54 pm
And incidentally, just so you know, this is why the social sciences have generally come up with the idea of “controlling for” other factors. When you want to know whether one thing (i.e., Bush) caused another thing (i.e., high rates of uninsured children), you have to “control for” all other possible factors that might be causing high rates of uninsured children. There can be complications if you add in too many factors (i.e., multicollinearity), but no serious thinker would try to ignore all the potential complicating factors.
This comment was written by Joe.Report this comment to the moderators
June 15th, 2003 at 11:03 pm
Joe,
From 1990-2000, my state (Minnesota) has experienced a boom in immigration, legal and illegal, Latino and Somali especially. Yet if you look at the chart, for those same years, we have *improved* our scores on almost every one of the child well-being indicators: http://www.aecf.org/cgi-bin/kc.cgi?action=profile&area=Minnesota
On the other hand, during his time as governor of Texas, George Bush dropped the ball in securing federal money for the CHIP program (which provides health care funding for low-income children). http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=714 (So did California, one of the other states you cite above).
That’s a pretty direct link. There’s also this, from the same article:
“Texas is one of five states that has kept three barriers to Medicaid enrollment in place. As a consequence, 600,000 Medicaid eligible children in Texas are not enrolled. The Texas IAF delegations asked legislators to follow the lead of other states by removing the assets test, eliminating the face-to-face interview and lengthening the enrollment period to twelve-months instead of the current six.”
You may also want to read Molly Ivins’s recent column (creators.com seems to be down at the moment so I can’t give the URL) on the current attitude toward children in the Texas legislature.
This comment was written by Stefanie Murray.Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2003 at 4:35 am
Instead of squabbling about who lives where and where they were born, why don’t you buckle down and get yourself a proper National Health Service that ensures that EVERYONE has medical cover, when they need it, for free.
It would actually be cheaper.
This comment was written by Larry Lurex.Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2003 at 6:07 am
Stefanie:
Great — you, for one, are actually talking about facts that might be relevant and helpful in explaining different rates in health insurance coverage. And maybe you’re right — maybe it’s all Bush’s fault. My only point is that it’s intellectually dishonest for people just to say, “Look how Vermont is better than Texas,” without taking into account that Vermont has higher incomes than Texas, many fewer disadvantaged minorities, etc.
And now — to change the subject a bit — why does everyone care so much about rates of health insurance coverage? Health insurance isn’t an end in and of itself. It is just a means to an end — the end being actual health care. And does anyone know whether Texas’s children get better or worse health care than Vermont’s children? Isn’t that what you should really care about?
And on that score, it is exceedingly interesting to note that Texas actually beat Vermont on infant mortality rates. According to the article Amp cited, “Texas had a rate of 5.7 infant deaths per 1,000 live births. The national average was 6.9 deaths per 1,000 births.” Yet when I go to the Annie Casey Foundation’s “Kids Count” page for Vermont, it shows that Vermont’s infant mortality rate is 6.0.
So on one hand, Vermont is a lily-white state where everyone has health insurance, and its infant mortality rate is 6.0. Texas is a half-minority state where a lot of kids don’t have health insurance, and the infant mortality rate is 5.7. How do you explain that, if “health insurance rates” are the be all and end all? What other factors could be involved?
This comment was written by Joe.Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2003 at 12:18 pm
However, I think you mistook Kevin Moore, author of the first comment on this entry, for Joe, who was the one linking to The Globalist in the second comment.
Not a mistake that either of us would feel honored by…. :)
This comment was written by Kevin Moore.Report this comment to the moderators
October 9th, 2003 at 2:06 pm
Nice Site!
This comment was written by Lolita.Report this comment to the moderators
October 10th, 2003 at 2:12 am
Nice Site!
This comment was written by Lolita.Report this comment to the moderators
October 10th, 2003 at 7:21 am
Whoa, it’s the legendary LoLo, made recently famous on Jen Lee’s blog !!! Amp, pick me up some diet pills, astrology books, and V**gr*, will ya’ ? I’m running low, as it were. :p
This comment was written by alsis37 (fka Amy S.).Report this comment to the moderators
October 12th, 2003 at 10:08 am
You asshole !!! That “Viagra” you sent me was goddamn Orange Tic-Tacs spray-painted blue !!! I want my seventy-five bucks back !!! Grrrrrrrr !!!!
This comment was written by alsis37 (fka Amy S.).Report this comment to the moderators
January 5th, 2004 at 7:52 am
just chill ther trying to make a life for themselves
This comment was written by cody.Report this comment to the moderators
January 6th, 2004 at 3:03 pm
Even better is a more recent commet Stewart had about Liberman—he once compared the rest of the Demos to various kinds of college teachers. His take on Liberman? “Narc!”
This comment was written by pdm.Report this comment to the moderators
February 18th, 2004 at 2:53 am
the whole thing irks me to no end. Dean was fucked by the media. he said he wouldn’t let the lame ass direction capitolism is going continue….and he was flogged mercilessly
This comment was written by damian.Report this comment to the moderators
February 19th, 2004 at 6:48 pm
How was Dean screwed by the media?
This comment was written by Quadratic.Report this comment to the moderators
February 19th, 2004 at 11:57 pm
The Scream comes immediately to mind. My impression of it was definitely not what the media put forth (shrill, out of control guy). And I’m not a big Dean fan. I would imagine that Dean followers could give a longer list.
But, as I’ve said elsewhere, Dean ran a horrible campaign. He ran a great pre-campaign & has certainly blazed a new trail for fundraising. And, overall, he’s had a beneficial effect on the primaries. But he ran a terrible campaign.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
February 22nd, 2004 at 10:45 am
True. His worst mistake was not hiding what he is, a radical. If he’s not, he sure pandered to the radical left. Lesson #1 for true liberals…never let them know you are a liberal!
Mainstream voters don’t respond well to angry candidates.
Oh yeah! Lying about being invited to attend church with Jimmy Carter (he invited himself and Carter said as much) was irretrievably stupid.
Say what you will about the media painting “the scream” the way they did…Dean has nobody to blame but himself. A presidential candidate needs to be more savvy about how they act in public. He should have saved that speech for when the cameras weren’t rolling. Howard was not ready for prime-time.
I’m sad to see Howard go. I would have loved to see him try to run against George Bush.
This comment was written by Quadratic.Report this comment to the moderators
February 22nd, 2004 at 4:51 pm
I appreciate your debunking of the 1/4 immigrant idiocy. However, I would like to add one additional point to your remarks. A large number of Americans with Mexican ancestry are not only not immigrants, they were here first. Remember, until the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the SW and much of California was part of Mexico. We invaded Mexico and forced them to “sell” a huge portion of their territory. As many of these people whose ancestry precedes the Anglos in their region say, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.”
This comment was written by Kija.Report this comment to the moderators
February 22nd, 2004 at 10:04 pm
Quadratic,
I don’t think Dean IS a radical. I believe he is to the right of Kucinich and Sharpton. I believe he is to the right of Kerry & Edwards on many issues. He talked the anti-Iraq war talk & the pro-civil union talk, but look at his record. The major minority in his state really dislikes him. He signed the civil union thing because he had no choice. Fiscally the guy has proven to be pretty conservative. More so than GWB (but what candidate isn’t?).
But, yeah, Dean’s gotta shoulder his portion of the blame. Which is most of it.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
February 23rd, 2004 at 1:38 am
But then Dean really energized the mainstream democrats, away from the 2002 strategy that seemed to be “Bush is really great, but please like us too.” to a more “Bush is a fucking asshole, get him the hell out of Washington.” Which you need. Take advantage of teh fact that this is the most polarizing president ever. At least since John Adams and his Federalist party.
This comment was written by Raznor.Report this comment to the moderators