| Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty February 28, 2014 The first two months of 2014 are nearly done. The Obama Administration vs. Home-Health Services Sean Higgins of the Washington Examiner wrote in with a thought or two on why, as detailed in yesterday's Jolt, Kathleen Sebelius's Health and Human Services is slashing Medicare's payments for home health-care services. "The Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees -- both big Obama backers -- have been trying to organize these home health care workers, mostly by leaning on states to declare people who receive the subsidies state employees," Higgins writes. "The states then hand over the workers' contact info to unions. That is the basis of the current Supreme Court case, Harris v. Quinn: whether these workers *really* are state employees… A problem the unions have run into is that the rates are set by the feds so there is little to bargain with the states for -- and therefore little reason for the healthcare workers to join a union. It is hard to get somebody to sign a union card if they don't think the union can actually do anything for them." | CPAC is now only DAYS away! With National Review sponsoring CPAC, NRO readers can save $25 off an individual ticket off by using promo code "SPONSOR" 
| | | Back in January, covering the legal fight, Higgins wrote: In 2003, then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich declared that home workers for the physically disabled were now state employees. Anyone who does this work now has to join the Service Employees International Union, or at least pay it monthly fees. I wanted to ask Blagojevich about this decision but was prevented by the fact that he is currently serving a 14-year sentence in federal prison on 17 counts of corruption related to his duties as governor. In 2009, current Gov. Pat Quinn declared home workers for the mentally disabled were also state workers. Tellingly, both declarations stated that they were not public employees for the purposes of state pensions, health benefits or protection from civil liability. Just unionization. A puzzle piece falls into place, in some way; here's a group of workers that is paid for through Medicare, resisting membership in the big public-sector unions. If they won't get with the program, they've got to be punished. As Obama said early in 2009, "Don't think we're not keeping score, brother." So Who's Running Crimea This Morning? Here's the bad news: Dozens of armed men in military uniforms seized an airport in the capital of Ukraine's strategic Crimea region early Friday, a report said. Witnesses told the Interfax news agency that the 50 or so men were wearing the same gear as the ones who seized government buildings in the city, Simferopol, on Thursday and raised the Russian flag. The report said the men with "Russian Navy ensigns" first surrounded the Simferopol Airport's domestic flights terminal. The report could not be immediately confirmed. Here's the good news, according to ace national-security reporter Eli Lake: U.S. intelligence estimates conclude that Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine. This, despite the launch of a massive, new Russian military exercise near Ukraine's border – and despite a series of public warnings from top American and NATO officials, suggesting serious concern about possible Russian military action. On Wednesday Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, ordered 150,000 troops to take part in a military exercise his defense minister said was a routine test of
combat readiness. A senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast that the timing of the military exercise, coming only days after the Ukrainian parliament voted to oust the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was suspicious. But nonetheless, U.S. intelligence agencies have collected no information suggesting the training exercises were preparation for an invasion. "The mere fact of the timing when you consider what is going on in Ukraine and you see the sudden nature of the exercise would cause concern," this official said. "From an intelligence perspective we don't have any reason to think it's more than military exercises." I hope they're right, but recent history has left me a little wary of the "oh, it's probably nothing" position. Then there's this little detail: The assessment is based in part on the fact that not enough medical units have been ordered to accompany the Russian troops to the Ukrainian border to suggest preparation for war, according to one Congressional staffer who has seen intelligence on Russia. This source also said no signal intercepts have detected plans for an invasion. And it's not like the Russians have recently picked up some American expert on how the NSA intercepts signals in foreign countries, right? 
"Hi, remember me?" Oh. The Challenges of Conservatives Influencing the Culture, Part XXVI One other note from that Franklin Center gathering last week… One of our guest speakers was Adam Guillette of the Moving Picture Institute, discussing the importance of storytelling in communication. The Moving Picture Institute provides grants to help complete documentaries that tell some aspect of a free-market or pro-liberty philosophy. Two of their recent projects include Battle for Brooklyn, which documents how eminent domain was used by the New York City government and big developers to throw people out of their homes to build a new arena for the Brooklyn Nets. (I had no idea.) Another was Dog Days, about a novice entrepreneur and a former-refuge immigrant hotdog vendor who attempt to start a small business in Washington, D.C., and the hurdles they encounter. As a speaker, Guillette is so animated, he makes me look like Ben Stein. He begins by pointing out that way too many conservative documentaries feature graphs, charts, and interviews with Grover Norquist in his office. "I have nothing against Grover Norquist. I have nothing against offices. But that's not storytelling." He said something along the lines of "a lot of conservatives think that if they just pile up enough facts and evidence and statistics, making their argument, people will have no choice but to agree with them, and that's just not how people change their minds." This is probably simultaneously true and infuriating. Because facts and evidence and statistics should count for something! But the chat left me wondering back to that question of whether conservatives find themselves having great difficulty influencing the culture because they've chosen paths that have left them with too little capital (broadly defined) to do so. As noted in an earlier Jolt, conservatives have been pretty successful in the worlds of talk radio, blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos . . . all relatively inexpensive forms of media. Movies, television shows, and to a lesser extent, pop music are forms of art or storytelling that are usually extremely capital-intensive. (You can always strum on a guitar, but putting on a concert with enormous spectacle the way the big-name acts do requires a lot of resources.) And as I listened to Guillette and saw the fascinating stories his group had manage to spotlight, I realized that conservatives face the challenge of another finite resource: time. I don't mean the usual "time is running out, America's future is at stake" lines you hear in all the fundraising e-mails. I mean the time that our conservative grassroots, rank-and-file, and every self-identified Righty out there has to devote to this underdeveloped craft of storytelling. Most folks have day jobs that don't include promoting conservative ideas, and while the number of full-time jobs in the conservative movement has grown dramatically in recent decades, there's still lots of folks who can't find those jobs. Then there are the other claims upon our time. It's too broad a generalization to say that conservatives are married with kids, and liberals aren't. But there's some evidence that getting married makes a person more conservative (and divorce, more liberal). Certainly polling data indicates that married people are more likely to vote Republican. Parenthood is spectacular, but it is also spectacularly time-consuming. For the average American who's conservative in their thinking and worried about the future of their country, a full-time job and parenthood are likely to leave them with a very limited amount of time left over for activism or an outside project to influence the culture. Making a documentary, making a film, making a painting, composing and performing a song -- that all takes time and energy. The couch, television, and the Internet always offer the siren's call… Obviously, this is not insurmountable; a decent number of folks find the time. But if you're the Left, and large chunks of your ranks include the under-employed, college students, grad students, and the tenured professors, you have a lot more usable labor and potential creativity and intellectual capital at your disposal. Sure, large chunks of all that potential energy end up being poured into ridiculous displays like marches with giant puppets, but the point is that they've got those deep reserves of activist energy and time to spare. ADDENDUM: Oh, look, thousands of pages from the Clinton Library that were mysteriously not released "even though the legal basis to withhold them under the Presidential Records Act ran out in January 2013." 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