Pie Story II

Pie Story 2:

The day before Thanksgiving I peeled the apples (all by myself since Mary was gone, sigh) and put together the apple pie. True, I cheated a bit and used a store-bought, roll-out crust. Meanwhile Russel was painting my room--a long-overdue-event--and he ran out of paint. So I put the pie into the oven and drove off to Lowe's to get the paint, giving Russel careful instructions to take out the pie when the buzzer rang, if it was a golden brown.

While I was out I decided to call him, just to make sure he heard the buzzer. Which he had. The pie looked perfect he said, and he took it out.

A couple minutes later, I realized that I would be delayed and decided to call him back to tell him to put the pie onto a wire rack, thus avoiding the heat condensation that may make the crust soggy. I explained all this to him and continued my shopping.

I returned home and walked through the door, with the delicious smell of apple pie wafting through the kitchen: I look over happily to see the apple pie. And I do see it, there on the wire rack, looking rather odd. Something is amiss, but my mind does not immediately register what is wrong with the pie; my brain struggles and balks, and then I realize it: Russel has slid the pie out of the pie pan onto the wire rack! I cannot believe it. I stare and blink and stare, and yes I squawk quite loudly and for quite some time.

Even though Russel's mom, in addition to his own wife and daughter, has made countless pies, he seemed to think that sliding a pie out of its pan had been a perfectly logical action, given my request, to put the pie onto the wire rack!!!!!!!!

The story does not quite end there. I slid the pie back into the pan, and frankly it looked better than you might have imagined were you to try the same thing. Then I tasted a little of the apple pie filling that had dripped onto the counter. It tasted . . . rather bland. Since I personally had made the pie and placed it into the oven, I couldn't figure out how Russel could possibly have done anything to affect the taste. Though that seemed to be the only plausible explanation. Then it hit me. I had added flour, but had forgotten to add sugar to the freshly sliced apples.

So I dumped the pie into a bowl, added the sugar, chopped the pie all up, and poured it back into the pie pan. It was destined to be so. Aaron told me the next day that Olive Garden serves something very much like it, called an Apple Crostata. Before serving, I added a few graham cracker crumbs and powdered sugar on the top, and it looked, well, fine-ish. It tasted fine-ish as well, not quite like a real apple pie.

(Pie Story 1 was 7 or 8 years ago when Shelby, our dog, ate an entire pumpkin pie, completely unbeknownst to us until we started looking for it sometime after dinner!--We found a pie plate on the floor earlier, but it was so completely clean, that it did not dawn on me until later that the pan had at one time held our pumpkin pie!)

Note: The picture above with the pie out of the pan, is actually the second time the pie came out of the pan. After I realized I would have to chop it up because it lacked sugar, I slid it out again to take a picture for posterity. I hadn't had the presence of mind to take a picture of it when I first saw it. I just hoped it would look something like a pie after I slid it back into the pan.

Buffet: The rich should pay more

WASHINGTON -- Billionaire Warren Buffett rebutted claims that the Obama administration is unjustly hurting business orders with high taxes by saying that in fact, the wealthy have never had it so good.

"I think that people at the high end, people like myself, should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it," he told ABC's Christiane Amanpour in a clip played on "This Week" on Sunday.

When Amanpour pointed to critics' claims that the very wealthy need tax cuts to spur business and capitalism, Buffett replied, "The rich are always going to say that, you know, 'Just give us more money, and we'll go out and spend more, and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you.' But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on. See the video.

Picture: San Fran

Dear Uncle Sam:

When the crisis struck, I felt you would understand the role you had to play. But you've never been known for speed, and in a meltdown minutes matter. I worried whether the barrage of shattering surprises would disorient you. You would have to improvise solutions on the run, stretch legal boundaries and avoid slowdowns, like Congressional hearings and studies. You would also need to get turf-conscious departments to work together in mounting your counterattack. The challenge was huge, and many people thought you were not up to it.

Well, Uncle Sam, you delivered. People will second-guess your specific decisions; you can always count on that. But just as there is a fog of war, there is a fog of panic -- and, overall, your actions were remarkably effective.

Warren Buffet

Beethoven's Fifth

Ok, so Lloya posted the cute rendition of Jonah and the Whale, so I feel totally within my rights to post the link to The Youngest Conductor. If you need cheering up in anyway at all, this will do it for you. Seriously. Three-year-old Jonathan conducting to the 4th movement of Beethoven's Fifth. Totally worth the view.

Picture: San Francisco, Union Square, 11/2010

Japanese Tea Garden

Well, Russ and I decided to take a quick trip to see the Japanese Tea Garden. It was way cool. We looked everywhere for Lorien, but could not find her there. Makes me wonder if she really went.

Health Care Reform--defector spills beans

Yes, the Republicans are going to huff and puff about Health Care Reform and make a lot of noise as if they were going to repeal it, but of course they won't. (But their huffing and puffing will play well for the livid base--the one that can't tell good from bad, but only understands mad.) One reason they won't repeal health reform is that of course Obama will veto the attempt. But you will see below another reason--the special interests in the Insurance lobby won't allow it. And they are paying and have paid the Republicans big time. But at least it will give the Repubs something to do now that they have made it to Congress--because you can bet they won't be working to cut spending or to create jobs.

Repeal and Replace?

Not so fast. An insurance-company defector explains why the most controversial provision of the health-care law will survive.

Michael Reynolds / EPA-Corbis

PHOTOS: How Obamacare Will Affect You

But What Does it Mean for Me?

Conservatives who voted for congressional candidates because they pledged to repeal and replace the health-care-reform law are in for a rude awakening. Once those newly elected members of Congress have a little talk with the insurance industry’s lobbyists and executives, they will back off from that pledge. They will go through the motions, of course. They’ll hold hearings and take to the floor of both Houses to rail against the new law, and they’ll probably even introduce a bill to repeal it with much fanfare—but it will all be for show. That’s because health insurers, one of Republican candidates’ biggest and most reliable benefactors—the industry contributed three times as much money to Republicans as to Democrats since January—can’t survive without it.

Despite all the attacks on “Obamacare,” the new law props up the employer-based system that insurers and large corporations benefit from so greatly. It also guarantees that private insurers will get billions of dollars in new revenue. And the insurers won’t have to share a penny of that windfall with a government-run public option the president once said was necessary “to keep insurers honest.”

I know what the insurers are thinking because, not long ago, I was on their side. I am sorry to admit it, but over nearly two decades I had a hand in planning the industry’s PR and public-policy strategies to either kill or shape any health-care reform proposal that might hinder profits. I was part of the strategic-communications team that planned and carried out the successful attack on the Clinton plan in the 1990s as well as the one that killed the patients’ bill of rights a few years later. I left my job handling communications for Cigna in 2008 because I didn’t have the stomach to be part of yet another spin campaign to cheat Americans out of the reform they needed.

For months before I left my job, I worked closely with my counterparts at the other big insurers to develop the list of must-haves our well-connected army of lobbyists would take to Capitol Hill when lawmakers began drafting reform legislation. Despite their public statements to the contrary, insurance companies really liked much of what was in both House and Senate versions of the bill—big chunks of which they actually wrote behind the scenes—especially the requirement that all Americans buy insurance if they’re not eligible for an existing public program like Medic-aid or Medicare.

During the reform debate, the industry’s deception-based PR strategy had two active fronts. One was a highly visible charm offensive designed to create an image of the industry as an advocate for reform and a good-faith partner with the president and lawmakers in achieving it. The second was a secret fearmongering campaign using shadowy “AstroTurf” groups and business and political allies as shills to disseminate misinformation and lies—like the one about the creation of “death panels”—with the sole intent of killing any reform that might hurt the bottom line.

EVAN THOMAS: We Need to Talk About Death »

Although I was ashamed of many of the things I did during my career, I didn’t plan to speak out about the industry’s devious practices until I saw Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, tell President Obama at the end of his March 2009 White House Forum on Health Reform, “You have our commitment to play, to contribute, and to help pass health-care reform this year.” Then I knew the industry’s disingenuous charm offensive had begun. Soon after that I read that, Aetna chairman and CEO Ron Williams, the driving force behind the industry’s effort to get the individual mandate enacted, had met with the president half a dozen times. I knew Williams was trying to persuade the president to drop his insistence on the public option and to embrace the individual mandate. Sure enough, Williams got his wish.

It is ironic, of course, that the requirement to purchase insurance has become the centerpiece of Republicans’ condemnation of the new law and their court challenge of its constitutionality. Insurers have no reason to worry, however, because they fare very well when the Republicans are in charge. Their profits soared—as did the number of Americans who are uninsured and underinsured—during the Bush years and Republican control of Congress.

The real reason insurers want the GOP leading Congress again is not to repeal “Obamacare,” but to try to gut some of the provisions of the law that protect consumers from the abuses of the industry, such as refusing to cover kids with preexisting conditions, canceling policyholders’ coverage when they get sick, and setting annual and lifetime limits on how much they’ll pay for medical care. Insurers also hate the provision that requires them to spend at least 80 percent of premium revenues on medical care, as well as the one that calls for eliminating the billions of dollars that the government has been overpaying them for years to participate in private Medicare plans. (Be on the lookout for a death panel–like fearmongering campaign to scare people into thinking, erroneously, that Granny and Pawpaw will lose their government health care if Congress doesn’t restore those “cuts” to Medicare.)

Insurers are not waiting for all their new members of Congress to be sworn in to get what they want. They and their big-business allies are already pressuring the Obama administration to waive or delay the implementation of provisions they don’t like, all the while working behind the scenes not only to protect the individual mandate but to have the government enforce it with much greater gusto. The one thing the industry didn’t like about the mandate provision was that the penalties for not buying their overpriced products won’t inflict nearly enough financial pain.

Retiring Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who once had been a part of the repeal-and-replace brigade, provoked the wrath of conservative pundits shortly before the midterm elections when he said, in a moment of unguarded candor, that repealing the law was not realistic. Instead, he said, the GOP should focus on “retooling” it. You can be certain that insurance-industry lobbyists will be helping their newly expanded congressional caucus determine what needs retooling. As my former Cigna colleague Bill Hoagland, the company’s top lobbyist, told the Associated Press a few days ago: “If you ended up repealing [the individual mandate], the whole thing blows up. It doesn’t work. The cost would explode.” In other words, feel free to repeal those pesky consumer protections, but keep your hands off our mandate.

Potter is a senior analyst at The Center for Public Integrity. This piece is based on his book Deadly Spin, published this week by Bloomsbury Press

Marie Osmond on Oprah

Just saw Marie Osmond on Oprah. (Not too late for you West Coasters!) I hadn't really kept up on her life, so I was surprised about a number of things. Not the least of which, she sings great opra!

Utah: the Promised Land

Newsweek 11/15/10

Promised Land

How Utah became the new economic Zion.

Newscom

The Salt Lake City skyline

It’s said there are no bad jobs during a recession. But there are depressing ones—like trying to recruit new business. That was Jeffrey Edwards’s task as head of Utah’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), a publicly funded carnival barker for new and emerging companies. Every state has a comparable office. But while nearly every local economy succumbed to the frozen credit markets, failing to grow much during the last two years, Utah has flourished. With Edwards’s help, it set its own records for new companies (more than 40) and capital investment (nearly $2 billion). That has helped sustain an average of 3.5 percent annual growth during the last five years, more than any state other than energy-rich North Dakota. “It’s a weird countercyclical phenomenon,” says Edwards, “but we’ve been busier than we’ve ever been.”

Why Utah? Founded by Mormon pioneers, the state, which has been called “a quasi theocracy” by the editor of its largest newspaper, is overwhelmingly white (93 percent) and Mormon (60 percent). Those demographics make for a socially conservative mind meld—no gay marriage, mixed acceptance of women in the workplace—that might seem hostile to the idea-swapping associated with a go-go economy. Mix in a thin coffee-and-booze culture, and you might expect Utah’s economy to be listless as well.

But the opposite is true. Greater Salt Lake City, the 75-mile corridor stretching from Ogden in the north to Provo in the south, has absorbed massive new data centers for eBay, Twitter, and Oracle; splashy new offices for Disney Interactive and EA Sports; and, just last month, a commitment from Adobe—the makers of Flash and Acrobat—to build a thousand-person software-development campus, where the minimum average salary will be $60,000.

Homegrown tech is booming as well. The University of Utah recently tied MIT for creating the most companies out of its patented research: more than 80 since 2005. Provo, home to Brigham Young University, has the most high-growth companies per capita in the country, according to Inc. magazine. Expressing a shared sentiment among many businesspeople who go to Utah these days, Sequoia Capital venture capitalist Michael Goguen said at a Salt Lake City business conference last month: “We’re noticing.”

From EDC’s Salt Lake City offices, with their view of the snowcapped mountains and horizon-to-horizon blue sky, Edwards delivers a compelling sales pitch. It includes facts like cheap energy, low taxes, and top billing from list makers like Forbes. And it follows a night on the town, where Edwards proves that “you can indeed get a drink,” and “a good cup of coffee isn’t that hard to find.” But the close is almost bumper-sticker simple: cheaper than Washington, cooler than Texas, as outdoorsy as Colorado … andnot California. Last year the EDC opened a recruiting center near Riverside, Calif., and Gov. Gary Herbert touts how he is “making the state business-friendly while California is doing the opposite.”

Defining itself against the liberal left coast is an act of jujitsu. Utah’s biggest potential liability—its conservative, religious populus—becomes an indisputable strength. Utah’s people are, indeed, an employer’s dream. They are healthy, hard workers (pouring in 48 hours a week on average), and exceedingly stable, with the highest birthrates in the nation. The large number of young Mormons who spend two years on a conversion mission also means a huge swath of the population earned its sales stripes in hostile terrain. This might not offer an easily replicable path for states looking to follow Utah’s economic lead. Then again, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is always looking to expand.

With Mckay Coppins