Deaf And Dumb

It should be no surprise to anyone who knows our staff members, or anyone who read our commentary Wednesday, that we far prefer the substance of the new detailed study about Mitt Romney's tax plans, over the ridiculous noise of the Chick-fil-A brouhaha.

In short, our opinion on the Chick-fil-A mess is simple: If a CEO's job is to make their company successful, rule # 1 should always be don't alienate ANY potential customers with your personal beliefs. That includes not donating corporate funds to hate groups of any kind. Any executive that  violates their professional duties so blatantly with personal opinions has committed professional malpractice, and should expect the negative reaction of shareholders and offended customers alike.

That said, anyone who expects corporate CEOs to like and respect all the same people that they do needs their head examined. Corporations don't care who you love. They just want your money.

Now that we've warmed up by taking on those more concerned with the image of their chicken vendor than taxes, it should be noted there are people who continue beating their own drum - loudly - about another subject with significantly more substance: health care in America.

In case you missed it, a study released by the University of Nebraska Medical Center this week found that the number of uninsured Nebraska residents grew significantly - by 67% - from 2000 to 2010, before the Affordable Care Act had truly taken effect. During that same time, Nebraskans with employer-based health insurance dropped by nearly 10%.

For anyone who is more concerned with the substance of responsibly managing their health care needs instead of obsessing over the politics of image, the results of the UNMC study confirm that the President's health care law came to be when Americans and Nebraskans needed it most.

What's more, according to the latest poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation,  Americans also believe - by a double digit margin - that President Obama is more qualified and more able to control the cost of health care than Mitt Romney. Two-thirds of Americans would also like to see Obamacare used to significantly expand Medicare.

All this data came down just as the next phase of the Affordable Care Act clicked into effect on Wednesday.

The next phase of the law requires insurance companies to refund millions of dollars that those companies had previously been wasting on frivolous costs like "administrative expenses", instead of spending customer premiums on patient care.

The next phase of the ACA law also requires insurance companies to finally treat women's preventative health services equal to that of men. Unsurprisingly, activating that part of the ACA law didn't prevent some religious zealots from continuing to fight the pyrrhic battle that we've discussed previously (more than once), with insane comparisons between allowing women access to birth control being on the same level as 9/11 or Pearl Harbor.

To those idiots who continue to bang their fearmongering drum, deaf to facts and dumb to the world, we have the same level of contempt for you that we do your chicken sandwich-focused brethren.

Americans - including your fellow Nebraskans - need access to health care. Thanks to President Obama and the Democrats, they now have it. Put down your drum, shove your chicken sandwich in your mouth, and when you need to go to the doctor, be glad your fellow citizens can now afford to do so too.

Image And Substance

There was plenty of news from the Olympics yesterday, including gold medals for our women's gymnastics team, and more medals from the pool - including the all-time record for most medals, now held by Michael Phelps. As we noted Monday, NBC's public image goose has already been cooked, due to how they've handled the live coverage of the games, as well as how they've handled criticism by other journalists.

In short, NBC fell on their collective faces - hard. Even if they get back up and win a medal for quality Olympics television production - which we have no doubt they can do - their initial failures and attitude problems will be the enduring image of NBC that will stick with many Americans when they think of these games.

NBC isn't the only one having a problem focusing on the difference between image and substance, however.

For example, that "old" problem of the housing and real estate market that we never seem to hear about in the media any more? That problem was never solved. Yet some analysts are cheering what they call solid signs that the real estate and housing industries have reached bottom and are growing again - like home prices rising for the fourth month in a row.

Many Americans who aren't financial analysts also believe the growing image those analysts are attempting to paint, that the worst parts of America's housing and real estate collapse are mostly behind us. In fact, that image could have come far closer to matching reality if Ed DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency hadn't tripped up the Treasury Department and Secretary Geithner on Tuesday.

For much of the last three years, most sane economists have agreed that the big Wall Street banks - along with the guarantee companies that hold up those troubled banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - should be allowed to reduce principle loan balances for some lenders, while the banks would take temporary losses.

The informed opinions of those expert economists don't seem to matter to DeMarco, who refused Secretary Geithner's request - and also refused to abide by the HAMP law passed by Congress and signed by the President. Instead DeMarco told the Senate that the FHFA would not be following the HAMP law, and would not give any debt relief to homeowners, as the HAMP law directs him to. That kind of destructive action could blow away any small positive image the housing and real estate markets have gained in the last three years.

There are many examples lately of those more concerned with image - like the Romney campaign, who recently came out against tax credits for wind power, because of the support of their coal and oil benefactors, like the Koch Brothers.

Then there are those concerned with substance, like the thousands of Iowans who depend on the growing wind power industry for manufacturing and power management jobs. Wind energy continues to be getting cheaper and more profitable, while coal power is getting more expensive and less profitable. Additionally, as the massive energy blackouts in India have proven this week, every nation needs as much energy as it can produce.

These three stories are perfect examples of the difference between image and substance.

One keeps you in the light. One puts you in the dark.
One lifts a burden from all of us. One makes keeping ownership of our homes more difficult for everyone.
One is about not seeing Olympic moments live. More than 600 million residents of India don't even have electricity right now.

When we look at the substance of it, a seven hour delay on televised Olympic coverage doesn't seem all that bad, now, does it?

Early Celebration Penalties

We hope our readers today will notice that we're not following the lead of some other media organizations who are focused solely on the Olympics - or blaming their problems delivering live video feeds of the Olympics on their viewers - or on Mitt Romney's continuing international gaffe tour.

We're focusing on something they still should be - and you probably should be too.

Yesterday, in a courtroom in a suburb of Denver, the man responsible for killing twelve people at a showing of the new Batman movie was officially charged with 141 felonies, including 116 counts of attempted murder, and 24 counts of murder. There have been further tragedies stemming from that horrible event, and sadly, further shootings in other places in the U.S..

There has even been a very small amount of change in public opinion - nearly negligible - towards supporting more sensible gun ownership laws.

What has not happened, however, is any significant and serious movement  towards sensible gun control laws - especially by Republicans.

In fact, in the wake of the Aurora shootings, background checks for people wanting to buy guns in Colorado actually jumped more than 41 percent.

Nationally, it seems that only a very small group of Democratic members of Congress are concerned enough about the mass shooting in Colorado to actually do anything. It does not surprise us at all that New York Rep. Carolyn McCarthy and New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg have been pushing forward new legislation to try and restrict - if nothing else - anonymous, unlimited online ammunition sales.

What did surprise us were the words that Supreme Court Justice Scalia spoke this past weekend on the subject of gun control.

Scalia has become known over the years for his leanings towards severe and sometimes extremist conservative views - like his opinion that 'handheld rocket launchers' could be Constitutional. In the midst of that extreme rhetoric, however, were some words that that should at least give those of us tired of hearing about gun massacres in the U.S. a bit of hope.

As the Christian Science Monitor noted on Monday, Scalia also made it clear that there is a legal opening for legislators to act and bring forward new gun control legislation - one that he appears to be willing to consider.

We know that this ray of hope may seem small and dim in light of the fact that too few legislators are willing to take on the massive lobby of the NRA - so we're certainly not celebrating, or saying that the issue of gun control is settled.

It is, however, a ray of hope that goes all the way through to the highest court in the land.

We hope that before this opportunity slips away - and before another massacre takes place - a majority of our lawmakers will take advantage of the moment and enact sensible gun control that even law-abiding gun owners support.

If our lawmakers don't use this opening properly, the penalties most likely won't fall on elected officials, but on the next group of innocents, who didn't need to be victims at all.