Franken, Bachmann, Walz and Ellison "Bobble Reps"

Asked at Saturday’s Netroots Minnesota conference what blogs he follows, Rep. Tim Walz pulled out his iPhone and rattled off a few sites: Talking Points Memo, Bluestem Prairie, MN Publius and others. Then he showed off his favorite iPhone app — a new one that features his likeness and that of every other member of the House and Senate as shakeable cartoon bobbleheads.

The 99-cent “Bobble Rep” app helps users find out who represents them in Congress, either through a direct search or by using the iPhone’s GPS locator. The caricatures — heads for each of 540 legislators put on one of 12 bodies — were drawn by MAD Magazine artist Tom Richmond to be fun and nonpartisan. But Apple didn’t see it that way: it rejected the application claiming “it ridicules public figures.”

Richmond wrote:

This is truly ridiculous. These caricatures aren’t mean or very exaggerated. They are simple, fun cartoon likenesses of the politicians and the purpose of the app is an informational database. There is no editorial commentary involved at all.

Indeed, related projects, while likewise tame, could probably be construed as far more “offensive,” to use Apple’s word. Sen. Franken, for instance, was rendered as a 3D vampire bobblehead, “The Count,” (along with Norm Coleman) by the St. Paul Saints baseball team in March. And earlier this month, Franken and Coleman were given the MAD Magazine treatment in a spoof ad for “Democra-cialis, ” a cure for the kind of “electile dysfunction” that plagued their 2008 Senate battle, in MAD’s list of “dumbest people, events and things” of 2009.

But last Monday, Apple reversed its decision, green-lighting the app that made its way to Walz’s cellphone.

Walz’s wielded smartphone could’ve been a good prop for another question he answered — about net neutrality. He said he’s “absolutely convinced that we must keep net neutrality,” and thanks to his resolve, “AT&T doesn’t even come to my office anymore” to lobby against it, he added. He said he’s surprised that conservatives aren’t more concerned about the freedom issues surrounding the possibility of corporations controlling what internet users can and can’t access.

“If you want to wave the patriot banner,” he said, “wave it on net neutrality.”

Here’s how each of Minnesota’s Bobble Reps look:

Coleman wrote his own fundraising letter on behalf of Bachmann in September. Franken was a listed co-host for a fundraising event for Clark, a DFL Party state senator, in Minneapolis last week. Maureen Reed is also mounting a 2010 challenge to Bachmann.

Coleman’s comments Tuesday came in response to a question from his Harvard audience about whether “death bed” rhetoric and “Nazi imagery” were hurting the Republican Party. “I don’t think that the signs you mention are part of the party or central to the discussion,” Coleman countered.

In the course of his response, Coleman brought up “the Michele Bachmanns out there.” He disputed a link between extreme rhetoric and elected officials or the Tea Party movement. “Your basic notion is mistaken,” he said. “You’re taking something way out on the fringe and you’re applying it to the legitimate anger that folks have.”

But earlier, Coleman seemed ready to harness anger himself with this line in his speech: “Pity the politician who comes between a citizen and their constitutional Second Amendment rights.”

Coleman, a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, is treading on Franken’s former stomping grounds: the Minnesota funnyman-turned-statesman was a math major at Harvard.

He has cast himself as someone who can bring young people into the Republican Party, showing off his savvy by naming things like travel agents and 8-track tapes that the students in his audience don’t use. Besides, he asserted, young people don’t deal with social issues on a day-to-day basis. “Very rarely are you going to think about what’s going to happen on Roe v. Wade today,” Coleman said.

Coleman said he looks for middle ground on social issues. He advocated “doing those things that support young women so they don’t have to have an abortion.” Gay marriage is “a pretty narrow issue,” he said, citing civil unions as a possible compromise on the more contentious issue of how to define marriage.

“The philosophy of conservatives really is more in line with your generation,” Coleman said. “I just think we haven’t done a good job of articulating it.”

Coleman articulated this reason for having lost his re-election battle to Franken last year: his yes vote on bailout bills to stave off a depression in October 2008. “But for the collapse of the economy, I don’t think the race would have been close,” he said.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. Photo: WDCpix

It happens in every recession: Medicaid enrollment leaps at precisely the same time that states are least able to afford the additional costs. The structural flaw has left state lawmakers threatening program cuts, Congress scrambling to find emergency funds to prevent a coverage crisis, and children’s health advocates urging an overhaul in the way Medicaid is funded.

Trouble is, the Democrats’ health reform proposals do nothing to address the problem.

Despite the Medicaid expansion at the center of both the House and Senate bills, neither chamber takes aim at the underlying funding flaws of the program, which is bankrolled by a combination of state and federal money. That decision, policy experts warn, leaves some of the poorest folks in the country vulnerable to losing health care coverage during economic downturns when they’re likely to need it most.

“From time to time, we’re going to have these economic downturns,” Stan Dorn, senior health policy researcher at the Urban Institute, said last week during a kids’ health forum on Capitol Hill. “Rather than react in the same panicked way every single time, is there a way we can rethink how we structure the underlying program?”

The answer is yes — and lawmakers are well aware of it — but Congress isn’t acting on it. Indeed, last November, just days after the Democrats won the White House, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) proposed to create a trigger that would automatically hike the federal share of Medicaid funding when states, which are required by law to balance their budgets, hit tough times.

“Medicaid must be strong and stable so that eligible individuals can rely on it, especially in times of economic distress,” the Baucus paper explained.

Dorn endorsed that approach, arguing that such a mechanism would “provide automatic counter-cyclical relief so that when state conditions decline, federal help is forthcoming, and when state conditions improve, federal help retracts.”

“Not only would that help states,” Dorn added, “it would mean that federal dollars, which are in short supply, … would be much more closely targeted to need.”

Yet less than a year later, when Baucus unveiled his health reform proposal — legislation featuring a Medicaid expansion up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level — the funding trigger was noticeably absent. Baucus’ office did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday, but some health policy observers say it’s likely that cost concerns kept that provision out of the final bill.

Without such a trigger, Congress has been forced to step in twice in the last decade to help states weather recessions without dumping thousands of Medicaid patients. Between 2001 and 2002, for example, Medicaid enrollment jumped 8.6 percent, while tax revenues fell 7.5 percent, according to the Government Accountability Office. The trend led Congress in 2003 to provide $20 billion in emergency funding to stabilize program enrollment.

More recently, the economic stimulus bill contained $87 billion to provide a 6.2 percent increase in federal Medicaid funds, with additional help going to those states with the highest unemployment. The money was conditional: states accepting it could not restrict their eligibility requirements. All complied — with good reason. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported last month that state Medicaid enrollment jumped by an average of 5.4 percent in the year that ended July 1.

But that extra funding expires at the end of 2010, leaving kids’ health care advocates concerned about the future — particularly in high-unemployment states like Michigan, Nevada, Rhode Island and California, where Medicaid rolls are mostly likely to swell most rapidly.

“We could fully expect major cuts in Medicaid if there isn’t some continuation of that fiscal relief,” said Jocelyn Guyer, co-executive director at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.

Some lawmakers have the problem on their radar. The House health reform bill, for example, would extend the additional Medicaid funding through June of 2011 – a provision the Congressional Budget Office estimates will cost $23.5 billion.

Meanwhile, however, the legislative uncertainty is forcing state health officials to craft their budgets as if the funds will expire Dec. 31, 2010 — just halfway through most state budget calendars.

Nate Checketts, head of Utah’s Children’s Health Insurance Program, described the potential effect that expiration would have on the state. Before the stimulus bill became law in February, he said on Friday, state lawmakers had worked out all the details of a plan to cut adults, including medically needy folks, from the Medicaid rolls. The stimulus bill prevented that step, but with the enhanced funding set to expire, “those items are back on the table again,” Checketts said.

The current Medicaid funding scheme also creates dilemmas of moral hazard. Checketts noted that, before the stimulus bill passed, Utah had considered creating an emergency Medicaid fund, to be fed in the good years and tapped in the lean ones. “When the stimulus funds continue to come in the bad years,” Checketts said, “it sort-of undercuts that concept of needing to have a Medicaid rainy-day fund.”

“States are beginning to act as if these funds may always come,” he added. “There needs to be a decision about whether that’s really going to happen [in the future]. If not, states need to change their behaviors.”

The saga highlights the central dilemma facing Democratic leaders as they push forward with their sweeping health reform proposals: how to cover tens-of-millions of uninsured Americans while keeping new federal costs to a minimum. The expansion of Medicaid, an essential component of both the House and Senate bills, has been an attractive way to extend that coverage precisely because it’s cheaper than other alternatives. But the low cost comes at a price.

Indeed, according to a September survey conducted by the Center for Studying Health System Change, only about 40 percent of physicians accept all new Medicaid patients — versus 58 percent for Medicare patients — and roughly 28 percent don’t accept any new Medicaid patients at all. For dental care, the figures are even worse. Less than 27 percent of dentists surveyed by the American Dental Association in 2007 said they treat Medicaid-insured patients, leading to severe access problems surrounding oral health. The trends have raised questions about the value of an insurance program that few providers accept.

The House bill tackles the reimbursement issue head on, increasing Medicaid rates for primary care services to 100 percent of Medicare rates by 2012. Initially, the federal government would pay for the entire rate hike, though states would assume 9 percent of the increase beginning in 2015. The reform doesn’t come cheap. That provision alone would cost taxpayers $28.7 billion over the next five years and $57 billion over the next 10, the CBO estimates.

In the eyes of many experts and advocates, even if the House reimbursement changes don’t pass as part of the final bill, the expansion of Medicaid represents a step in the right direction. “As bad as Medicaid reimbursement is, it’s better than zero,” Dorn said. “For low-income folks, it will certainly be better than being uninsured.”

Yet Checketts said that Utah health officials — like those in many states — are wary of the expansion, which they estimate could double Utah’s Medicaid population.

“I don’t think [doctors and dentists] would be able to handle that with the current reimbursement rates,” Checketts said. “Some sort of change will have to be made.”

Rep. Tim Walz and Allen Quist

Quist’s announcement at 1 p.m. in the Rochester City Council chambers will settle a candidacy question that only a month ago he told the Minnesota Independent was “a big if.”

Quist gained the GOP endorsement in 1994 but failed in a run at becoming governor, losing in the primary to incumbent Arne Carlson, who went on to win re-election. Quist was elected to three terms in the state House in the 1980s.

His wife Julie is Bachmann’s district director.

Walz is a DFLer who has held the southern Minnesota district since unseating Republican Gil Gutknecht in 2006.

In addition to Bachmann, the ads are targeting Republican Reps. John Boehner of Ohio, Denny Rehberg of Montana, Lee Terry of Nebraska, Roy Blunt of Missouri, and Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri, as well as Democrat Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania.

“Stain,” as the ad is titled, “highlights the cash from Big Oil and other special interests taken by Members who voted against the American Clean Energy & Security Act, a comprehensive clean energy and climate plan that will put America back in control of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet,” according to a statement from the Sierra Club.

Here’s the full ad:

My Washington Independent profile of WorldNetDaily made the case that the conservative website, which opinion-makers brush off as a conspiracy hub, is actually incredibly influential on the right. Here’s some evidence for that argument.

For months — really since it was announced at the How to Take Back America Conference — WND has backed a campaign to send “pink slips” to members of Congress. Upon the sending of the five millionth pink slip, WND held a press conference yesterday on Capitol Hill, drawing actual GOP members of Congress, including Rep. Michele Bachmann, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.). A photo of Bachmann (above) and Gohmert (below) with WND Editor Joseph Farah, one of the driving forces of the “birther” movement.

A 60-year-old Port Huron, Mich. woman called up the Kentucky-based customer service center for the Gannett-owned Times Herald of Port Huron to express her anger over the editorial, which criticized Republican U.S. Rep. Candice Miller for attending the rally. The Nov. 12 editorial called out protest signs that depicted Obama as “Sambo” and others that showed the Holocaust imagery, as well as protesters who chanted “Nazi, Nazi.”

The editorial concluded by calling on Miller to apologize for attending the Bachmann-organized event, which it characterized as a “GOP festival of hate.”

No charges have been filed against the woman, but an investigation is ongoing.

CREW’s Matt Jacob told the Minnesota Independent that House members aren’t supposed to use their congressional websites to urge public action on behalf of or against pending legislation.

In its letter (pdf) CREW cited this House rule:

The content of a Member’s Web site … [m]ay not include grassroots lobbying or solicit support for a Member’s position.

Bachmann’s website, CREW says, urged “[t]he people” to travel to Washington, D.C. “and tell their Representatives to vote no to a governmental take-over of one-fifth of our economy.”

Bachmann announced the Nov. 5 “House Call” rally on Fox News on Oct. 30. That left enough time for Bachmann to meet the five-day lead time required to apply for a permit for an event on the Capitol grounds, according to a U.S. Capitol Police guidelines that CREW includes in its supporting documents (pdf).

CREW’s complaint doesn’t cover another apparent aspect of Bachmann’s official efforts as impresario of the Capitol-steps anti-health care rally. According to the Savage (Minn.) Pacer newspaper, Bachmann’s staff helped a man not from her congressional district to find a nearby bus from Eden Prairie, Minn. headed to Washington, D.C. for the rally:

So he called the Savage Chamber of Commerce trying to get a carpool together of other interested business owners. No one contacted him, so he began asking friends and other business owners and then contacted Rep. Michele Bachmann’s office where he found out about the buses leaving Eden Prairie.

The OCE is a newly formed body that has been on the receiving end of sniping from the longer-in-the-tooth but slow-off-the-mark House Ethics committee. Jacob told MnIndy the tally of CREW’s complaints to the OCE is so far “not a huge number.”

“[I]t seems these days that the American dream is fading,” the Minnetonka resident wrote. “And without responsible, accountable, and informed leadership in Washington, this dream is in serious jeopardy for future generations. I am running for congress to restore these qualities to leadership, to raise up the middle class, and to make sure our children and grandchildren have even better opportunities than we had. I am running for Congress to revive the American dream and I ask for your support to do this.”

Last week, the Cook Political Report listed the seat as “likely Republican.” Early this month, fellow DFLer Jim Meffert also filed to run for the CD3 seat.

In July, the Madison, Wis.–based Freedom From Religion Foundation filed suit over plans to inscribe the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” motto prominently in the Washington, D.C. center, charging that to do so would be unconstitutional and not representative of all Americans, including 15 percent of the population it says are nonbelievers.

Today’s brief (pdf), filed by the American Center for Law and Justice with the U.S. District Court in Madison, calls the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s cause a “crusade,” stating that it “serves no purpose other than to waste judicial resources at a time in our Nation’s history when those resources are needed in cases involving real threats to American liberties.”

The slogans in question “in no way violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. These expressions simply echo the sentiments found in the Declaration of Independence and recognize the undeniable truth that our freedoms come from a source higher than the state…. While the First Amendment affords atheists complete freedom to disbelieve, it does not compel the federal judiciary to redact religious references in every area of public life in order to suit atheistic sensibilities.”

In addition to Bachmann, fellow Minnesota Republican Rep. John Kline and Iowa’s Steve King were also represented in the brief.