Saturday, February 20, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Starbucks And Chase End Duetto Rewards Credit Card
The Starbucks Duetto Visa card seems like a relic of another time. A time when everyone thought that both coffee-infused sugar bombs and huge amounts of credit card debt were a good idea. Well, Starbucks is still with us, but the Duetto Visa card's run is over. You can no longer earn Starbucks cards while racking up debt.
Reader Steve writes:
“Well, no sooner had Starbucks revamped their "Gold Card" program, sending gold cards to replace black ones and kill the 10% off each purchase feature...than I got notified just now, via direct-mail piece from Chase, that Starbucks now is killing their Starbucks Duetto Visa card, which they had launched a few years ago with great fanfare. According to the Chase note, signed by Deb Walden, EVP of Cardmember Experience at Chase, "the credit card partnership between Starbucks and Chase Bank USA, N.A. has ended. As a result, in April 2010 your Starbucks Card Duetto credit card account will be replaced with the new Chase Freedom credit card." So odd, given that Starbucks has been doing everything it can to solidify relationships with customers willing to pay top $$ for drinks in the midst of a global recession! I had even put the kids' tuition on the Duetto card to get the "Starbucks bucks" rewards that were redeemable in stores. Bye-bye Duetto...but I'll pass on the Chase card and find something more focused on my particular tastes!”
Here's Chase's e-mailed statement on the matter:
“While customers enjoy the benefits of the Starbucks Card Duetto® Visa® card program, the credit card partnership with Chase has ended effective March 31, 2010. The stored value balance of Starbucks Card Duetto Visa card account holders will be automatically transferred to a Starbucks Card, which Starbucks will send to members by mail. Chase will reissue a new Chase branded Visa® credit card to Starbucks Card Duetto Visa cardholders at their own discretion. It was a mutual decision by both parties not to renew the credit card partnership.”
Health-Care Reform Could Create a Litigation Explosion The recent firestorm over nonbinding mammogram recommendations offers a glimpse of the possible
President Obama wants to convene a bipartisan meeting later this month to discuss health reform—"to go systematically through all the best ideas out there," as he said to CBS's Katie Couric in a pre-Super Bowl interview. "How do you guys want to lower costs?" he said he'd ask Republicans.
If he is sincere, the president should consider how the health-care bills his party has on the table right now will drive up the legal costs that are draining the health-care system we currently have.
By creating new federally enforceable rights and obligations, layers of complex federal regulations, and dozens of new programs and agencies—not to mention 50 newfangled "exchanges"—ObamaCare would guarantee a flood of litigation. That means more money wasted on attorney fees, physicians focused on legal rather than medical considerations, and growing delays in our already-overburdened courts.
The first court battles will focus on the constitutionality of requiring individuals to buy health insurance. Assuming the statute survives, subsequent litigation will put Americans' health in the hands of federal judges who will effectively write health-care policy as they divine the meaning of thousands of pages of statutory language and accompanying regulations.
The sources of litigation will be many, ranging from individual coverage disputes to other constitutional claims explored below. In between, there's enough vague and ambiguous statutory language to keep lawyers employed for decades. One example: the compromise abortion provision contained in the Senate bill. Fervent disagreement over its meaning presages bitter court fights.
Consider also the legislation's prohibition of a deductible for "preventive services" recommended by the United States Preventive Services Task Force. The recent firestorm over the Task Force's mammogram recommendations is but a glimpse of the legal battles that will ensue when such recommendations gain new legal status under the statute.
To implement the legislation currently on the table, federal bureaucrats will necessarily generate thousands of pages of regulations. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, trial lawyers—as well as attorneys for industry, the medical profession, and countless interest groups—will challenge not only the substance of the regulations, but also the procedures used to generate them.
For example, the bills command the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to "define the essential health benefits" that insurance plans must contain. Imagine the mischief trial lawyers can make by claiming that the resulting regulations fail to fully "take into account the health-care needs of diverse segments of the population," as the Senate bill requires. Lawyers will also challenge some of HHS's rule-making as an improper delegation of congressional authority.
The greatest number of lawsuits may come from individuals flexing their new-found right to essential health benefits by challenging insurance companies' coverage decisions in court after internal appeals are exhausted. The Senate and House bills will inevitably produce, but do nothing to mitigate, an increase in the variety and complexity of such litigation.
Now that the federal government is inserting itself between you and your insurance company, we'll also see coverage disputes in which the feds are among the defendants. HHS might even wind up as a defendant in medical malpractice lawsuits.
The Constitution applies to government actions, so the feds' dramatically expanded role in health care promises an explosion of constitutional claims, driven both by financial gain and interest group agendas. Lawsuits claiming equal protection violations will be limited only by the human capacity to feel discriminated against.
Women's groups will likely sue if HHS requires coverage for erectile dysfunction but not breast augmentation. Gay-rights groups will litigate if they don't like the way HHS defines "family" for insurance purposes. People 30 and over will file suit because only the young are permitted to purchase catastrophic coverage. Hispanics will go to court if they are disproportionately asked to prove citizenship before receiving insurance subsidies. And white folks will sue because of the various racial preferences in the bills.
Death panels or not, greater federal involvement in health care, including end-of-life care, triggers the constitutional requirement that government afford due process when life is at stake. Liberals who complained about the interference of federal courts in the Terri Schiavo case may wind up regretting their push to federalize health care.
Government intervention also elevates privacy issues to a constitutional level. The bills single out smoking as a justification for higher insurance premiums, potentially raising the constitutional issue of how far federal bureaucrats enforcing the new premium rules can go in determining whether you smoke in your home.
Creative trial lawyers will be aided by those activist judges more interested in making than interpreting the law. The four corners of, say, the Senate bill and its accompanying regulations will be just a starting point for a panoply of judge-made entitlements, "rights," and federal obligations that will themselves trigger a further expansion of health-care litigation.
"Litigation has several features at odds with sound health policy—including its cost, its hindsight bias, and its adversarial character," William Sage, Vice Provost for Health Affairs at the University of Texas, warned us seven years ago in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. Under ObamaCare, health care will become even more costly and adversarial, with patients' concerns crowded out as doctors focus on avoiding lawsuits and federal investigations, and insurance companies and regulators blame each other for every problem.
And if you think insurance companies take too long to make decisions when lives hang in the balance, just wait to see the delays in patient care caused by the federal bureaucracy and an overburdened court system.
Supporters of the legislation favored by the president and most of his party point to socialized medicine in Europe as evidence that federalizing health care won't be the disaster that many predict. But European nations are not nearly as litigious as our own. The uniquely American combination of bureaucrats, trial lawyers, and judges running our health-care system will prove more costly and deadly than anyone can imagine.
Mr. Levey is executive director of the Washington-based Committee for Justice.
I'm the President's Trusted Counselor My name is Straw Man, and I've got a direct pipeline to the Oval Office.
Some people get quoted in presidential speeches by writing heartfelt letters to the president about personal loss, or by doing something heroic, like landing a plane in the icy Hudson River.
I just sit in the Oval Office, and mouth off to President Barack Obama, one inanity after the next. And sure enough, my words—word for word, mind you!—show up in his biggest speeches.
Who am I? Sotus—Straw man of the United States. I'm Mr. Obama's most trusted rhetorical friend.
In his speeches, Mr. Obama says there are "those" who suggest we "can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures." He suggests there are "some" who are content to let America's economy become, at best, "number two." He says that on health care, "some people" think we should do nothing.
Listen, there is no "some people." He's just quoting me, Sotus.
Why, just a few weeks ago, I said: "Hey, Mr. President, you know, why don't we just fight tired old battles, run up the deficit, and, you know, just chuck common sense to the wind?" Imagine my thrill when I heard Mr. Obama during the recent State of the Union: "Rather than fight the same tired battles that have dominated Washington for decades, it's time to try something new. Let's invest in our people without leaving them a mountain of debt. Let's meet our responsibility to the citizens who sent us here. Let's try common sense." Ouch, Mr. President, you got me there!
And then there was the nice talk we had right before that historic January afternoon, when he was sworn in. I turned to him and said: "Mr. President-elect, our system of government can really only tolerate small plans, and limited ambitions." Think how good it felt to hear my own words echoing across the Mall: "There are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done." Good one, Mr. President!
A few days later, as we were shooting baskets, I said: "Mr. President, you know, I think that in the face of the biggest financial crisis in three generations, you should really do nothing."
And sure enough, at a press conference on Feb. 9, 2009, he quoted me: "There seems to be a set of folks who—I don't doubt their sincerity—who just believe that we should do nothing . . . I don't think that's what the American people expect, is for us to stand by and do nothing." They don't? Guess I lose again!
And you know, I'm not just about policy. I also care a lot about presidential leadership. My preference: Go slower. Do less. Don't try so hard. Don't care so much. Don't be so bold.
Conservatives cry foul when they hear me quoted. They can't imagine anyone is saying the things that Mr. Obama stands up as arguments that he proceeds to knock down. Of course, they haven't met Sotus.
Some say Mr. Obama should make a stronger case for his opponents' positions than his own. The cynics think straw-man arguments by definition prove that the speaker has no proof or logic on his side. Some would force presidential speechwriters to choose between a nifty setup for a zinger and boring rhetoric that puts audiences to sleep.
See, this straw man thing is pretty easy. I just rattled off three of them. Maybe I need to give some of this material to the big guy. He's been saying he needs more material on false choices.
Mr. Neusner is a principal with 30 Point Strategies and was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
What Became of the 'Freedom Agenda'? President Obama can avoid his predecessor's mistakes without alienating the people of countries like Iran.
President Obama's recent drop in the polls has not been accompanied by a corresponding rebound in public opinion concerning the foreign policy of his predecessor George W. Bush. This is particularly true with regard to the promotion of democracy in the Middle East, or what the Bush administration called the "Freedom Agenda." The consensus of foreign-policy experts on the left and right now deems this a naïve initiative that was rightly abandoned by the Bush administration itself shortly after the rise of Hamas in the Gaza elections of 2006.
While Mr. Obama paid lip service to the need for greater Middle East democracy in his June 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world, he has done very little concretely to back this up in terms of quiet pressure for democratic change on the part of allies like Egypt, Jordan or Morocco. Indeed, the administration's ramping up of military support for Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh in the wake of the attempted Christmas day airliner bombing suggests that we've gone back to the traditional U.S. policy of reliance on Arab strongmen.
This would be a big mistake. For the core premises of the Freedom Agenda remain essentially correct, even as its enunciation in the midst of the Iraq invasion undercut its credibility. Mr. Obama runs the risk of falling in bed with the same set of Middle Eastern authoritarians and alienating broad political populations in the region. He may even live to see them blow up in his face for lack of legitimacy, just as the Shah of Iran did in 1979.
The Bush administration asserted a number of points under the rubric of the Freedom Agenda that remain valid to the present moment. Back in 2003, President Bush said that "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom . . . did nothing to make us safe. . . . As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export."
In his second inaugural in January 2005, Mr. Bush went on to say that there was no cultural reason why the Arab world should remain the one part of the world resistant to the broad wave of democracy evident everywhere else.
As a report published last month by the U.S. Institute of Peace, "In Pursuit of Democracy and Security in the Greater Middle East," argues, there are good reasons for thinking that the lack of democracy in the Arab world is political rather than cultural. Arab authoritarians like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt have tolerated—and in some cases promoted—the participation of Islamist candidates in elections as part of a strategy to prove to Western backers that they are the only thing standing in the way of cataclysmic Islamic revolution.
They've also gotten good at a cynical game of state-managed liberalization, whereby they open up their political systems just enough to convince outsiders that they are "transitioning" to genuine democracy, only to clamp down again once their control is threatened.
All of this has led, in the view of the Institute of Peace report, to an increasingly dangerous political, social and ideological gap between rulers and their societies. And in this struggle between state and society, the U.S. is widely seen throughout the region as selfishly propping up an unjust and corrupt old order.
The problem with the Bush administration's Freedom Agenda wasn't its fundamental analysis, but the way that it was articulated in the midst of the highly unpopular Iraq war. Democracy promotion was used from the start to justify the invasion, and in the eyes of many Arabs became synonymous with American occupation.
The high-flown rhetoric of Bush's second inaugural, when he asserted that there could be no difference between U.S. security interests and our democratic ideals, was manifestly hyperbolic and led to inevitable charges of hypocrisy when the U.S. failed to endorse Hamas as the sole representatives of the Palestinians in Gaza. By making Middle East democracy promotion an instrument of the war on terror, the U.S. both tainted the cause of democracy itself and undermined the credibility of its own foreign policy.
Mr. Obama arrived in office with none of this baggage, and therefore had an opportunity to recommit the United States to peaceful democratic change. But the window is rapidly closing as the U.S. draws closer to the region's authoritarian rulers. In Jordan, for example, cooperation on the war on terrorism has been accompanied by the regime's curbing of political freedoms through the passing of nearly 100 temporary new laws. This has not prevented Mr. Obama from telling King Abdullah "Your Majesty, we need to clone you."
The most immediate danger lies in Yemen, which has become the focus of counterterrorism efforts since the abortive Christmas day attack. There is a genuine al Qaeda threat in Yemen, but President Saleh has made his own situation worse by clamping down on popular protest in the south of the country and picking a fight with the Houthis in the north.
Putting family members in key positions, his corrupt regime nonetheless received nearly $70 million from the U.S. in military assistance last year and is scheduled for even more in the future. Rather than aggressively pressing Mr. Saleh to negotiate with opposition groups and broaden his base of support, we are repeating the classic mistake of putting all of our eggs in one authoritarian basket and making cooperation on counterterrorism the primary criterion for economic and political support.
Taking a Middle Eastern democracy agenda seriously does not mean that we should return to the loud trumpeting of promises of support for regional democracy that we cannot keep. Nor does it mean playing the authoritarians' game of affirming fake liberalization as the real article of democracy.
It does mean working quietly behind the scenes to push friendly authoritarians towards a genuine broadening of political space in their countries through the repeal of countless exceptional laws, defamation codes, party registration statutes and the like that hinder the emergence of real democratic contestation.
The longstanding risk that true democratization will lead to takeover by radical Islamists remains real; our ideals do not require us to commit suicide in this manner. But the idea that radicalism is the only alternative to an illegitimate status quo is one we need not accept.
Mr. Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is author of "America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy" (Yale, 2006).
The Scalia v. Stevens Smackdown. In President Obama's view, corporations are anathema.
Nothing—not even George W. Bush—has sent liberaldom screaming into the streets more than the Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The Court's ruling that corporations have a free-speech right to express opinions about politicians running for office really let the furies out.
President Obama's in-their-face criticism of the Supreme Court over Citizens United at his State of the Union speech got pundits on every blogger barstool chattering about the propriety of this public smackdown.
That's nothing compared to how the Supremes smack each other inside their public decisions.
Justice John Paul Stevens dismissed the majority's opinion, written by Anthony Kennedy, as lacking "a scintilla of evidence" for its argument and making "only a perfunctory attempt" to root its reasons in the First Amendment views of the Constitution's Framers.
Justice Antonin Scalia then wrote a majority concurrence solely so that he could go mano a mano with Justice Stevens. A mere three sentences in, he unloads: "The dissent attempts this demonstration, however, in splendid isolation from the text of the First Amendment."
While the commentary on Citizens United rightly emphasized First Amendment law, the scrum inside the decision between Justices Stevens and Scalia, over the status of corporations in America, deserves more attention than it got.
Their dispute, and especially Justice Stevens's view of corporations, reveals a lot about why Mr. Obama and liberalism's left wing went nuts. It isn't just corporate political advertising that's anathema. Corporations themselves are anathema.
In his State of the Union swipe, Mr. Obama said the Citizens United decision would "open the floodgates for special interests." The "special interests," of course, is Democode for corporate interests. This week we learned Mr. Obama will try to convey his pro-business sentiments Feb. 24 to the Business Roundtable. Don't buy it.
Justice Stevens offered the historic and psychological basis for this foundational antipathy.
Martin Kozlowski
"Thomas Jefferson," he notes, "famously fretted that corporations would subvert the Republic." A citation quoted by the justice notes that "the word 'soulless' constantly recurs in debates over corporations"; and "corporations, it was feared, could concentrate the worst urges of whole groups of men."
But here's the public-philosophy belief that flows from this view: "The Framers thus took it as a given," in Justice Stevens's opinion, "that corporations could be comprehensively regulated (my emphasis) in the service of the public welfare."
In short, private corporations have not much, if anything, to do with the public good.
In his crack-back concurrence, Justice Scalia ridicules "the corporation-hating quotations the dissent has dredged up." He notes that most corporations back then had "state-granted monopoly privileges" (sort of like Fannie and Freddie today—columnist's footnote) and that modern corporations without these state privileges "would probably have been favored by most of our enterprising Founders—excluding, perhaps, Thomas Jefferson and others favoring perpetuation of an agrarian society."
He ends with a conservative belief: "To exclude or impede corporate speech is to muzzle the principal agents of the modern free economy."
America's Democrats and Republicans, crudely defined, are with this presidency and this Congress living today on opposite sides of a moon that they both call the United States.
In the universe inhabited by Justice Stevens and President Obama, corporations—the private sector—are a suspect abstraction, ever tending toward "the worst urges" which have to be "comprehensively regulated." The saints regulate the sinners.
If you think this way, what one does to the private sector, such as the proposed $90 billion bank tax, can never be wrong in any serious way, so long as the rationale offered is the "public good." Private-sector players are seen as barely more than paid galley slaves on the ship of state. So it is with the health-care bill's mammoth, comprehensive regulation of American medicine and insurance.
Mr. Obama seems genuinely perplexed that the opposition can't just, you know, sign onto it. What's their problem?
Evidently, the voters of Massachusetts have a problem with that and more.
In the past year, Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress passed a $787 billion stimulus, seized banks and the auto industry, embarked on a $1 trillion reorganization of the private health-care system, and passed a fiscal 2010 budget that put spending as a percentage of GDP at 24.1%. These are very large claims for the public good.
This public-private tension is an ancient and never-ending debate in the U.S. But what we are seeing this year, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, is American voters arriving at a tipping point over the scale and role of government. Most Americans still go to work each day inside a private economy organized around tens of thousands of corporations. Their basic view of the world and that found inside Justice Stevens's dissent and this White House are out of sync.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
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