WashPost Notes 'Small-Business Owners Dread' ObamaCare Tax; Paper Buries Story on A15

"Many small-business owners worry that a new tax on insurance providers in the health-care law will mean higher premiums for them, undermining the law's capacity to lower their health-care costs," Washington Post staff writer J.D. Harrison opened his 15-paragraph May 13 story, "Small-business owners dread impact of health insurance tax." The website headline was even starker: "Health insurance tax ‘scares the daylights’ out of some small-business owners."

Unfortunately for print edition, readers, Post editors buried this front-page-worthy article on page A15. Yes, today's front page was mostly populated with meaty, hard-news stories, but a large photo from last night's Capital-Rangers hockey game dominated the center of the page while London bureau chief Anthony Faiola's "Letter from Britain" feature, headlined, "Eurovision drought feels like a hard day's night," was published directly beneath that [see image following page break].

"Starting next year, the federal government will charge a new tax on health insurance firms based on the plans they sell to individuals and companies, known as the fully insured market," Harrison noted. "Meanwhile, the provision exempts health insurance plans that are set up and operated by businesses themselves (the self-insured market." Harrison went on to explain that "experts warn that insurance companies will pass the costs directly to small businesses, [t]he vast majority" of which "purchase coverage in the fully insured market," as opposed to many "large corporations" which self-insure and hence will avoid the tax.

In 2010, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said we had to pass ObamaCare to find out what's in it. As time goes on and full implementation nears, we're finding out more and more of what's in ObamaCare and the deleterious effects it's having on individuals, families, small businesses, and ultimately the American economy writ large. It isn't pretty, and for the most part it seems the national liberal media are doing their best to downplay the imminent train wreck.

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Untold Story of Small Biz Delay under ACA, Just Déjà Vu from Massachusetts

The revelation that the Obama Administration will delay the roll out of the “choice option” for small

Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) has been credited with advocating for small business employee choice in the ACA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

business until 2015 came as a huge surprise to many, including Joe Klein at Time, however anyone familiar with the Massachusetts experiment will feel a strong sense of déjà vu. In a 2010 paper I authored for the Heritage Foundation, I documented the delayed and failed effort by the Massachusetts public exchange (Connector) to offer real choice and savings to small businesses. My report suggested the experience served as a warning to other states. I suppose I should have targeted  it toward the federal government instead. Small companies should be even more uncertain of the law now that the cost–saving mechanism they were sold is now on the back burner. Yet the penalties for not offering insurance, new taxes on fully-insured plans, and EHB requirements all remain on schedule.

Background from Massachusetts

Governor Romney’s orig­inal health reform proposal envisioned a statewide health insurance exchange that would have offered small businesses a robust choice of plans with a wide range of deductible and benefit levels. His proposal provided for defined contributions from employers, used the exchange as a “premium aggre­gator,” and created a pooling mechanism to allow employees of small businesses to purchase group insurance together to spread risk and provide greater premium stability.

His plan would have helped elevate the individual employee as the primary decision-maker and inject some competition into the system. Even with the policy compromises required to pass the health care reform bill in 2006, the final version still included mechanisms that would have helped small business in the short term—if they had been implemented.

This same rationale was used to garner Democratic support for the ACA in Congress, as Robert Pear from The New York Times documented in his recent article on the delay:

In the weeks leading up to the passage of the health care legislation in 2010, [Senator Mary] Landrieu provided crucial support for the measure, after securing changes to help small businesses.

One problem: The Massachusetts reality didn’t match the rhetoric at the time, and should raise serious questions about the federal experience even after the employee plan choice is launched in 2015, 2016, or 2020.

Massachusetts Vision Altered During Implementation

The 2006 health care reform law tasked the Massachusetts Connector with developing a small business program. The original launch date was July 1, 2007, but coverage was not finalized until January 2009, almost three full years after the health care reform bill was signed. Even with this lengthy delay, the original Contributory Plan (CP), suffered from design and incentive issues. The CP was the Connector’s first pilot program marketed to small businesses with fewer than 50 employees. In this scenario, a company would select a benchmark plan within a benefit-level tier (gold, silver, or bronze), and then the employee would choose a plan within that tier.

Instead of engaging with a broker community that is geared to small businesses options, the Connector allowed only 20 brokers to sell CP and only to the companies that were already their clients. The Co­nector offered these brokers a 2.5 percent fee, compared to the 4 percent standard commission that they could earn outside of the Connector. (Congress decided to go around brokers in the ACA and hire navigators, and HHS invented “assisters” to fill this role instead.)

The health insurance products offered through the Connector lacked creativity, because the governing board voted to over-standardize plan designs. As a result, the products looked similar to those available outside the Connector and often more expensive.

Not surprisingly, the program drew limited interest from the small business community and failed to draw its initial goal of 100 employers out of the 185,000 in the state. As a result, the Connector launched a new small business program called Business Express (BE) in order to put “its resources into one effort for small businesses,” and froze enrollment for CP.

BE had a grand total of seven plans, and enrollment was largely boosted through a deal with a third-party administrator, the Small Business Service Bureau, to transfer members into the Connector. That contract has since ended.

Small Businesses in Massachusetts Have Voted With Their Feet

After six years, millions of dollars in advertising, hundreds of free media stories on the Connector, and a controversial mailing to all small businesses in the state, the numbers speak for themselves.

 Success of a Public Exchange?

 How Employee Choice Was Added to the ACA

The untold story about employee choice and the ACA revolves around Jon Kingsdale, former executive director of the Connector, who was responsible for implementing the first contributory plan in Massachusetts. Yet after failing to launch a successful program, he traveled to DC to lobby Congressional Democrats and Obama Administration officials to include the same type of program in the ACA.

The media doesn’t understand the full history of this program, so we are left with Jon Gruber from MIT telling a reporter from the National Journal recently, “The main message, I think, is optimistic. Overall it’s [exchanges] going to work, and over time it’s going to work out…” I guess he is still holding out hope for things to turn around in the Connector as a Board member, six years into the experiment.

The open question is whether the federal and state run exchanges can learn from the experience in the Commonwealth.

My advice is to promote defined contributions through the exchange, set up premium aggregators, allow for any willing insurer to sell in the exchange, reduce the number of mandates, and focus on allowing market forces to control underlying health care costs. Finally, if the goal is truly to expand access to insurance, not just retain government control, a paradigm-changing reform should allow for premium tax credits to be utilized in private exchanges. This will test the true value proposition of a public exchange. If they add value they should survive, if not, they should go out of business and not be propped up by government favoritism.

Find me on Twitter: @josharchambault

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Joss Whedon’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ Slut-Shaming, And Hero And Claudio’s Story

I’m hoping to catch Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing at South By Southwest, though it looks like scheduling may not allow for it. But looking at the trailer, I’ve got two thoughts:

First, I love me some Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker, but I think it’s going to be hard for me to see them not in the context of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson’s performances in those roles in from twenty years ago. Acker’s so good at retiring roles that it’s hard for me to really imagine her with a delightfully poisonous tongue.

And second, I’m curious as to how the adaptation is going to handle Hero and Claudio, played respectively by Jillian Morgese and Fran Kranz. Their story, in which Hero’s chastity is called into question, the wedding between the young lovers is called off, and Claudio is made to feel guilty by being told that Hero’s literally died of grief is a much harder thing to bring into the moder era than a clash of wits between a much more contemporary couple like Beatrice and Benedick. There’s very interesting stuff to be done with Hero and Claudio about anxiety about relative sexual experience, slut-shaming, and the anxiety of marriage. But getting there and doing it right in this setting probably means jettisoning the set-up in which Claudio believes that Hero is dead. I’m curious to see how Whedon will work it all out. Giving us modern screwball with Beatrice and Benedick is awfully fun, but it’s the easy lift here. Transforming Hero and Claudio and doing it well will be the much more impressive feat.

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Carney: Te'o girlfriend hoax story 'fascinating'

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday that he found "fascinating" a Deadspin report revealing Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te'o's girlfriend to be a hoax, but had not discussed the story with the president.

Carney said he had read the report Wednesday night, but had not mentioned it to Obama in the interim.

"I thought it was a very interesting story," Carney said.

The story, published Wednesday, shook the world of college football and quickly exploded into the national consciousness.

Multiple news outlets had reported during the football season the seemingly tragic story of T'eo's girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, dying of leukemia just hours after his grandmother passed away. But Deadspin reported they could find no record of the girlfriend having existed, and that biographical details — including her death, involvement in a car crash and enrollment at Stanford University — did not check out.

The website also reported that images of Kekua were actually those of a different woman.

Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said in a news conference Wednesday that it appeared T'eo was the victim of an elaborate hoax by someone using a fictitious name.

"On the morning of Dec. 26, very early morning, Manti called his coaches to inform them that while he was in attendance at the ESPN awards show in Orlando, he received a phone call from a number he recognized as having been that he associated with Lennay Kekua," Swarbrick said. "When he answered it, it was a person whose voice sounded like the same person he had talked to, who told him that she was, in fact, not dead. Manti was very unnerved by that, as you might imagine."

Swarbrick said that Notre Dame had hired an independent investigative firm and, upon the conclusion of that investigation, stood by T'eo and his story.

"I want to stress, as someone who has probably been as engaged in this as anyone in the past couple of weeks, that nothing about what I have learned has shaken my faith in Manti Te'o one iota," Swarbrick said.

In a statement Wednesday, T'eo called the incident "incredibly embarrassing."

"Over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online. We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her," T'eo said. "To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating."

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How to Astroturf an Online Cause: the Story of “I Stand with Bill Powers”

From the diaries.

Texas is ground zero in the national higher education reform movement. While the Washington crowd tends to fixate on President Obama’s piddling slap fight with Congressional Republicans over government-secured student loan rates, the real action on fixing higher ed is happening in Austin, Texas. The battle between Rick Perry and the higher ed reformers on one hand versus UT-Austin President Bill Powers and the Ivory Tower status quo on the other hand has been marked by years of grueling and often dull trench warfare that was punctuated last week by a flurry of bombs, beginning with a tuition freeze, followed by rumors of the UT President’s termination, and culminating in a textbook social media public relations campaign that deserves serious examination. And the consequences of this fight? Well, what happens in Texas won’t stay in Texas.

This is the story of “I Stand with Bill Powers,” a remarkably well-executed example of online astro-turfing.

Bill Powers is the President of the University of Texas at Austin. He individually receives an annual income roughly twelve times the median household income of Texas, not counting six figures of deferred compensation or benefits. He commands a robust team of sharp folks internally at UT and has secured the big guns as outside public relations counsel. There is now an ongoing effort– a well-orchestrated social media campaign which appears highly inorganic– to “save” him. Save from what and for what is the difficult part to figure out.

This post aims to 1. provide some context for the UT kerfuffle itself, 2. cast some light on how people and organizations successfully astro-turf social media campaigns, 3. provide reasons why members of the media ought to be a bit more careful in how they report on the online/digital/new media horse race, and 4. offer some thoughts on what comes next.

1. Kerfuffle Context
First, some background on what the heck this “Save Bill Powers” stuff is all about.

There’s the very, very macro context, which is basically that the higher education establishment has become sclerotic and out of touch, tuition has skyrocketed well beyond inflation, and the next major economic shock in America could easily be the higher ed bubble bursting. It’s an iceberg straight ahead and we’re the Titanic, but there’s still time to steer the ship into safer waters. If we don’t, though, yikes.

This is the startling context for this kerfuffle:

Zooming in a bit further, to Texas, we see that tuition at UT went up 39.88% from Fall 2004 to Fall 2011. We also see a Governor, who happens to be a Texas A&M alumnus (that’s UT’s primary in-state rival, so there’s a built-in suspicion among Longhorns), and who has appointed the entire Board of Regents at The University of Texas system, who has committed to making public higher education in Texas more affordable, accountable, and accessible. Specifically, Governor Perry embraced various specific higher ed reforms over the years, including what are known as the “Seven Breakthrough Solutions” as a starting point for reform. Not surprisingly, the higher ed establishment opposed these reforms. Despite UT-Austin receiving more dollars– and more dollars per student– in state funding from the State of Texas than UC-Berkeley gets from California, it seems like the only acceptable higher ed reform to the higher ed establishment is more money.

In the summer of 2011, battle lines were drawn, with the “Texas Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education” (a.k.a. “The Coalition”) emerging out of the Burson-Marsteller P.R. shop to support Bill Powers and the higher ed status quo. In October of 2011, Natalie Butler and Keshav Rajagopolan (current and former Student Body Presidents, respectively) launched a “spin-off” group group called Young Texans for Excellence in Higher Education. Various groups formed on the other side (including “Rock the Ivory Tower“) devoted to affordability and reform.

The Governor also called for a 4-year tuition freeze for incoming college students (in January of 2009) and a $10,000 college degree in 2011. The $10K degree idea was met with scorn and incredulity from the higher ed establishment, but it’s now been adopted in public universities across the state. And the tuition freeze? Well, just this month, the UT Regents approved it for two years (not the four that Perry initially called for). Bill Powers lashed out at the tuition freeze idea online and in an email:

If all of this context (and the above context is certainly just the Cliff’s Notes version this story) was the collective geopolitical navigation of the Great Powers in the 1930s, then Paul Burka’s apocalyptic, all-caps Texas Monthly blog post was the bombing of Pearl Harbor: 2. How to Astroturf a Social Media Campaign
This is where it gets interesting. While most of the press coverage has focused on the numbers of people who “joined” a Facebook group called “I STAND WITH BILL POWERS,” at least one member of the press has hinted that something else might be afoot here. The Texas Tribune‘s Reeve Hamilton tweeted a note of caution: While I already suspected that the anonymously sourced, (and still uncorroborated) BurkaBlog post and the apparent organic response to it was all a little too convenient, Reeve Hamilton’s tweet further piqued my interest, so I explored it further. Along with some others in the higher ed movement, it quickly became apparent that a handful of really sharp young folks, working with some powerful organizations with ample resources, synthetically engineered what appeared to be a natural groundswell.

Let’s take the url registration, just 100 minutes or so after the nuclear BurkaBlog post went live, the savebillpowers.com domain name had been secured:

Okay, that’s been known to happen organically, I guess. People just happen to read an unsubstantiated, rumor-mongering blog post at 7:30 pm on a Wednesday night and just happen to buy a domain name that just happens to become the focal point of a public relations campaign, within an hour and a half. And they just happen to buy the domain name anonymously. It just happens all the time.

Meanwhile, the issue positioning, keywords, and instructions went out via Facebook, from Natalie Butler of the “Young Texans”:

And at nearly this precise moment, #saveBillPowers began trending in Austin, Texas: Accompanying the Save Bill Powers Twitter presence was an identically-branded Facebook page, formed at 8:10 pm (just 40 minutes after the BurkaBlog post hit the web): Even with such robust branding, a matching website, matching twitter, implied institutional backing from President Powers himself, and a catchy slogan, the Burson-Marsteller team has only managed to gather mere hundreds of actual fans: It can be frustrating to oversee such a meager social media presence, but luckily there is a solution. Ditch the Facebook page. Go with a Facebook group!

A bit later, two-time Teaching Assistant to Bill Powers Rachel Meyerson founded the “I STAND WITH BILL POWERS” Facebook group:

Immediately after the group was created, Meyerson added two admins to the group: And they all started adding members to the group.

In order to boost its “groups,” Facebook allows individuals to not only invite someone to a group but actually add him or her to it, whether he or she is even interested. Many Facebookers, even young digital natives, aren’t engaged enough to even notice they’ve been added without their permission. And many Facebookers aren’t savvy enough to know how to leave a group after they’ve been “Facejacked.” Some people tend to fear leaving the group and insulting their friends who added them. Needless to say, spam-adding folks en masse to Facebook groups they may or may not agree with is not cool, and it’s definitely not true digital virality in any organic sense. Indeed, this guy showed how easy it is to add all of your Facebook friends to a group in only about 20 seconds.

That’s not a movement. That’s a line of code. And even if you don’t use a javascript code (some browsers have blocked scripts like that since the video was made) and have to manually click on each of your friends to invite them, you can still spend just minutes to add hundreds or even thousands of people. To quickly get 10,000 people in a group, you really only need a half dozen young people (who tend to have a lot of Facebook “friends”) spam-adding their contacts.

Pranksters angry about the loss of personal control even began adding Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association) groups in protest. It’s a problem, and it’s bad etiquette at the very least.

Bad etiquette or not, “Facejacking” is how the “I STAND WITH BILL POWERS” group grew and continues to grow. If you go in to the group, click “about,” then click to view members by date added, you can find the screenshots below yourself. Scroll down to the beginning (it’s kind of an annoying process), and you’ll see that nearly everyone was spam-added by just a couple of individuals (these first 120 or so members are in reverse chronological order):

See all of those “added” folks? The overwhelming majority: added, not invited. And all by two individuals.

But surely they just seeded it a bit, and it became an organic, sustaining organism of its own shortly thereafter, right? Not really. Yes, others got in on the spam-adding action, but look at a sample from Friday:

Lots of spam-added folks. Not really much evidence of a true newsworthy movement.

Or the 21 most recent additions:

Again, out of 21 new members, Callie Williams added 1, Shelah Flowers invited 1, Andrew Grant invited 2, Keshav Rajagopolan added 3, and Rachel Meyerson added 14. Rajagopolan and Meyerson alone spam-added 81% of the newest 21 members. In total, 86% of the newest 21 members were spam-added, while 14% were invited.

We’ve established that the response to this kerfuffle was astro-turfed. So what? People astroturf all the time.

Well, it’s one thing to astro-turf, but it’s another thing to actively lie to the press about it.

3. Why More Skepticism is Needed in Reporting on Social Media

Let’s look at Keshav Rajagopolan’s statements to the Houston Chronicle.

Did social media explode with support for Bill Powers? According to the Houston Chronicle, yes:

Explosions!

Some relevant points:

Keshav Rajagopalan, who was UT’s student body president in 2008-2009, said he started the Facebook group last night after Burka’s post was published. He said thousands have asked to be part of the group. He worked with Powers closely during his time as student body president, but thinks that many UT students who did not know him personally recognize him as a leader that cares about them.

Wait. We just saw that Rachel Meyerson started the group, and that nearly all the early members were spam-added by other people. Indeed, Rajagopolan was personally responsible for a great deal of the spam adding. “Thousands have asked to be part of the group” is just plain deceitful.

While the spam-adding continued at a fast and furious pace on the “I STAND WITH BILL POWERS” group, there was no activity overnight and into mid-morning on the “Save Bill Powers” page:

Again, a page (rather than a group) doesn’t allow you to spam-add. People can be invited, but they can’t be added without their permission.

So, the Save Bill Powers page was essentially a ghost town, and essentially the entirety of the social media operation to that point was astro-turfed by a P.R. firm. Jennifer Sarver of said P.R. firm tweeted:

Julie Shussler of the same P.R. firm posted to the group a bit later: Matt Portillo said it was a piece of cake, and, sure enough, he (and Shussler) spam-added members as well: Portillo is also an organizer for the Young Texans, which he calls “a subsidiary of kind of a larger group“: That subsidiary stuff sounds so organic, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, the media drumbeat about how amazing this spontaneous social media movement has kept pounding.

Many uncritical headlines and stories were all over the web this past week. To give credit where credit is due, though, an Austin American-Statesman story did join the Tribune‘s Reeve Hamilton in noting that something wasn’t quite right with the numbers:

By 5 p.m. Thursday, a Facebook group called “I Stand With Bill Powers” had more than 9,800 members, although some whose names were listed said in subsequent posts that they had been included by friends without their knowledge and against their wishes.

Bottom line: the widely reported “I stand with Bill Powers” Facebook effort was not an organic display of support. It was, however, publicly held out by the organizers as organic.

It’s one thing to astro-turf, as that happens sometimes in the public relations field– it now ought to be clear how easy it is to do that. But it’s another thing to astro-turf and lie and say it was organic, then not only passively allow the media to inaccurately portray it as organic but actively feed that inaccuracy with untrue statements.

As for members of the media, more of them should turn a far more critical eye to claims of social media prowess based on what could very well be pure astro-turf.

4. What’s Next?

Moving forward, the higher ed reform movement will continue, and the status quo guardians will continue as well. The UT faculty this week voted to support their boss, although one professor abstained:

English professor Snehal Shingavi was the only member who abstained from voting at the meeting. Shingavi said it was dangerous for the faculty’s support of Powers to be coupled with tuition increases.“There is an unfortunate narrative in Texas that presents faculty as living off the fat of tuition,” Shingavi said. “It’s important not to connect these two. I abstained from voting because I understood the importance of having a unified vote.”

Meanwhile, the target of most of the negative social media content on the “Save Bill Powers” page(s) and “I STAND WITH BILL POWERS” group, Governor Perry, is not going away quietly on this issue:

“I don’t think it’s any big secret that I’m for keeping the cost of education down, so my suspicion is that no one in Texas thinks that I’m for tuition growth,” Perry said. “It’s a good message to send to the citizens of the state that we’re not going to just have tuition increasing with no regard for what’s happening economically for the citizens of the state.”

And, ultimately, that’s why this “movement” smelled so fishy from the get-go. You’re telling me that students are rallying around the guy who wants to raise their tuition? Yeah, no. It was always a fabricated social media cause via public relations firm. It was well done, no doubt– a great example of why my alma mater pays them so much to do what they do. But it was never a truly viral or organic cause.

As for Bill Powers, can someone please explain to me what exactly are his accomplishments, or, alternatively, what exactly are his goals, ideas, values, or policies that are worthy of support?

UT Professor Rob Koons bravely asks this very question:

Under President Powers, tuition has climbed over 23% in just 4 years (15% over inflation, as measured by the consumer price index). Average net cost per student (taking into account financial aid) has gone up 33% from 2005 to 2009, from $4534 to $6052 (the System stopped reporting this figure in 2010). In the same period, spending on administrative salary has gone up 86% at the university level, 55% in the College of Liberal Art and 45% in the College of Business, to take two typical examples of the Colleges. Spending on faculty salaries have gone up 21% in the same period (13% over inflation), with no increase in student learning, as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment (in which UT ranks in the 23rd percentile of its peer group).President Powers’ hand-picked student ‘advisory’ panels (whose discussions and votes have not been released to the public, despite the Open Meeting act) have simply rubber-stamped the views of Powers and his allies. For example, two years ago, after key lawmakers (including Senator Ellis) announced that any increase in tuition above 4% would lead to a reconsideration of tuition deregulation, Powers’ panel miraculously determined that UT “needed” an increase of exactly 3.95%. Amazing coincidence!

Change in rankings:
US News #44 in 2008, #45 in 2012. A drop of one position, paid for by at least a 33% increase in costs to students!

Four-year graduation rate
2005: 46.4%
2008: 47.7

Six-year graduation rate
2005: 74.8
2008: 77.5

Nursing exam pass rate (UT graduates):
04-05: 97.0
2008: 92 (A drop of 5%)

Engineering exam pass rate:
04-05: 90.2
2008: 89

Exactly what are his accomplishments?

More on that dismal learning percentile figure:

On March 14, Washington Post reporter Daniel de Vise, in his piece “Trying to assess learning gives colleges their own test anxiety,” reported that the University of Texas at Austin ranks very low in achievement of student learning. “For learning gains from freshman to senior year,” writes de Vise, “UT ranked in the 23rd percentile among like institutions. In other words, 77 percent of universities with similar students performed better.” The Post obtained this data through a public records request. The standardized test was conducted by the Collegiate Learning Assessment.Prof. Richard Arum, a New York University sociologist, “reviewed UT’s results at the request of the Post.” He found that “seniors have spent four years there, and the scores [on student learning] have not gone up that much.”

Ouch.

Again, what are Bill Powers’ accomplishments? Somehow vastly higher tuition with academic ranking and performance stagnation doesn’t seem like an accomplishment.

That all being said, the faster we can bring this back to a discussion about ideas rather than a quarrel between players, the better. For students. For parents. For alumni. For employers. For taxpayers. For everyone. Right now, the easy fixation is on Rick Perry vs. Bill Powers, but the ideas they are talking about are important. Tuition. Affordability. Accountability. Opportunity. The American Dream. Texas as America’s shining state on a hill.

Do we accept the broken status quo, or do we reform our higher education system in Texas? At stake: far more than parochial Ivory Tower politics.

Will Franklin is a proud graduate of UT-Austin. He also formerly worked for Governor Rick Perry. This post was adapted from an original WILLisms.com post.

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Washington Post Story On Romney Begins To Unravel

Dispatches from the Meme Wars.

So this morning the Washington Post runs a story detailing what kind of a jerk Mitt Romney was in high school. This is a surprise, right? A high school kid being a jerk. This has never ever happened before. Why, you might well ask, would the Washington Post devote valuable time and space to writing about this event? And why, you might well follow up, is this worth posting about when everyone should be talking about the environment?

The answer is easy. It builds a meme and it translates Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage from a liability into a perceived strength.

If you missed this is the graf that has the left exercised:

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

Of course the story gets much sadder with Romney presumably responsible for the guy’s failed life and death from cancer.

He came out as gay to his family and close friends and led a vagabond life, taking dressage lessons in England and touring with the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion riders. After an extreme fit of temper in front of his mother and sister at home in South Bend, he checked into the Menninger Clinic psychiatric hospital in Topeka, Kan. Later he received his embalmer’s license, worked as a chef aboard big freighters and fishing trawlers, and cooked for civilian contractors during the war in Bosnia and then, a decade later, in Iraq. His hair thinned as he aged, and in the winter of 2004 he returned to Seattle, the closest thing he had to a base. He died there of liver cancer that December.

He kept his hair blond until he died, said his sister Chris. “He never stopped bleaching it.”

There are unanswered questions here, like what this has to do with anything, how a high school dropout bummed around Europe taking dressage lessons and, my favorite, how getting an “embalmer’s license” led to a culinary career? But the Post doesn’t address them.

The main source for this vignette is a former classmate of Romney’s named Stu White. According to the Washington Post:

“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and has long been bothered by the Lauber incident.”

But ABC News reports

“White was not present for the prank, in which Romney is said to have forcefully cut a student’s long hair and was not aware of it until this year when he was contacted by the Washington Post.”

From this it is pretty clear that the Lauber incident did not unfold in the way the Washington Post describes, if, indeed, it happened at all. (h/t to the Daily Caller)

Why this and why now?

As we’ve mentioned before this is all part of a process to brand Romney as a vicious, thoughtless, out-of-touch rich guy. It is really Obama’s only hope as he can’t possibly win if he runs on his objective accomplishments.

This story has obviously been in the works for a while but the news value of it is questionable. It is the basic oppo dump material that the Washington Post obediently churns out on Republicans. As Major Garrett reports in National Journal, the whole Biden-evolving postion idea was a scam to allow Obama to support gay marriage:

Did Obama sacrifice huge swaths of swing voters? Probably not. The polls have shifted to net favorable on the question of same-sex marriage and independents are unlikely to punish Obama for a policy position consistent with everything else he’s done on gay issues. Social conservatives will, of course, be aggrieved. But they were already.

Also, consider this on the gay-marriage pronouncements: Biden was first, Obama second. That the two happily reversed the common order of things ought to tell you something about their relationship (solid), their understanding of tactics (advanced), and how they can play Washington’s chattering class for fools (easily).

But suddenly, the nothingburger story developed by the Post had a hook. In fact it had a hook that could effectively frame the entire story to fit into the overarching Obama campaign. Obama was against gay marriage, but then he met parents of friends of his daughters who were gay and the subject was discussed at family dinners and he changed his mind. Another “gutsy call” in which he took an unpopular position after carefully weighing everything, and, of course, consulting his deeply held Christian faith.

Romney, on the other hand, when he went to an elite private school for elite rich kids relentlessly bullied a kid who was gay and continues his bullying and homophobia to this day by not supporting homosexual marriage. It all fit. And the Post was able to make good on its investment.

The ABC story makes it clear that there are other Romney classmates lining up to dish on him, presumably after they sign with a literary agent:

One former classmate and old friend of Romney’s – who refused to be identified by name – said there are “a lot of guys” who went to Cranbrook who have “really negative memories” of Romney’s behavior in the dorms, behavior this classmate describes as “evil” and “like Lord of the Flies.”

The classmate believes Romney is lying when he claims to not remember it.

“It makes these fellows [who have owned up to it] very remorseful.  For [Romney] not to remember it? It doesn’t ring true.  How could the fellow with the scissors forget it?” the former classmate said.

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The Funniest Story of the Day: Eric Cantor’s Implausible Deniability

In what may be the funniest story of the day, Eric Cantor is throwing his own super PAC under the bus.

His denial is implausible once the facts are in full view, but given the blow back he has gotten for his super PAC coming out for a host of squishy candidates who’d spend their time in Washington sucking up to Cantor instead of actually fighting for limited government, Cantor must now urge everyone to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

The Young Guns Action Fund was set up by Cantor’s Deputy Chief of Staff John Murray, top aide Rob Collins, and several other Cantor staffers are involved. When Cantor’s press secretary, Brad Dayspring, was involved in an office altercation a few months ago, Dayspring was removed from the office and placed into the Super PAC.

Certainly, as Cantor partisans note, because the Young Guns Action Fund is a Super PAC, legally Cantor’s role must be limited. But considering John Murray’s role in Cantor’s office was, as the Politico reported at the time, “to increase Cantor’s image outside the Beltway by getting him in front of influential audiences across the country”, it’s a bit silly to pretend there is no relationship.

Now, as Cantor seeks to distance himself, even reporters are having a hard time believing his denials.

It would be a stretch to say that Cantor has nothing to do with the YG Action Fund. The PAC is headed by two top former Cantor aides, John Murray and Brad Dayspring. And the majority leader has donated money to the group, appeared at its events and even helped it raise money.

I await Eric Cantor’s public decision to denounce this Super PAC and publicly say he’ll never help them again.

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Destroys last of the Media credibility Trayvon Martin story

I don't really know what happened between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. What I do know is that this story led at least one manslaughter – the murder of self-inflicted media the last shreds of credibility has to. And it's not just conservative blogs that brands-even straight news sources have started noticing the shame with which the media has showered during this whole sad saga. The Washington Post reported Friday that NBC's blatant editing Zimmerman the 911 call will be "reviewed internally," which is as close as you ever screw up an admission of a very serious of a major news organization will get.

The most stunning admission still came from something called a Touré, which apparently is a contributor MSNBC. Touré apparently got tired of being on a TV channel nobody watches so he went on to take last week Piers Morgan to task for the journalistic crime of getting both sides of the story Piers:

You know, at NBC, in the corridors, we were laughing at you today, "Touré told Morgan. "We wouldn't take [Robert Zimmerman]. Standards and practices on NBC wouldn't let him get through the door. And you had him on the air and the hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands thousands or regardless of number of people watching your show listen to what he had to say allowed.

This is the first time I can remember an alleged news figure which it is expressly stated that his network has a policy against allowing one of the major players in a national news story to give his side had. My favorite part of Touré of hysterical rant was his outrage over the fact that people would hear what Zimmerman had to say. One thing is clear – the way the media has been about this story really told the truth far validates that Touré. Journalistic standards and practices apparently not possible for a cover story that would suggest that the race Trayvon Martin pimps who currently are hustling it doesn't correct this story.

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