21 August 09 (am)

Workout notes Nothing yet; swim over lunch. Resting for tomorrows races (1 mile/5K combination)

Posts
Recursivity: talks about the cultural differences between Canada and the US. Interestingly enough, I visited Ottawa and found the Canadians to be very friendly.

Academia: one university is giving a grade that is lower than an F: it is an “FD” which means that the person failed due to academic dishonesty. I applaud the effort, but I can see the lawsuits brewing…

An Illinois right wing group is going after a public school teacher for writing an atheist blog.

It is interesting how offended people get when you reject their pet superstitions!

Mathematics/Science

This is a long, wordy essay on what amounts to the bell curve. But the photo of the machine that produces the bell curve via experiment is worth observing.

Cosmic Variance: this is a bit of a humorous post comparing Galileo to Newton, both in what they did and how they wrote.

Politics Some see President Obama as struggling. On one hand, President Obama is spending too much time trying to split the difference between extremes. On the other hand, he (and we) may have underestimated how difficult it is to achieve “change”, even with 58 so called Democrats in the Senate:

There are a few of Obama’s liberal critics who could stand to recognize this. The Senate, with its filibuster rule, small-state bias, and committee and seniority structure, is a slow-moving, change-resistant, lower-case “c” conservative institution. It’s not obvious that if you put — I don’t know — Dennis Kucinich in the Oval Office that he’d have been able to accomplish a whole heck of a lot more. And Obama’s achievements are not insignificant: he signed an $800 billion stimulus package, expanded children’s health care, seems to have rescued the economy from a complete meltdown (although not necessarily from an extended recession), and has generally gotten good reviews on his foreign policy. And it’s a little early to write the obituary on health care, which is still more likely to pass than to fail.

The more intelligent liberal critique of Obama, however — and the one that Krugman is echoing — is that he’s left too much up to the whims of Congress, and particularly the Senate. Yes, Obama let his “Northeastern and Pacific Western liberal allies” write the health care, climate and stimulus bills. But he also let Blue Dogs and Committee Chairs mark them up. As a result, the climate bill that passed the House was significantly watered-down, the stimulus package was less than what economists like Krugman was calling for, and the public option is in grave trouble in the Senate.

But still, he isn’t doing that poorly; compare this period of his presidency with the similar period of Reagan’s or Bill Clinton’s.

20 Aug 09 (late pm)

Snarky quote
“Faith may not move mountains, but…..
(go here to see the completion)

Science and Frogs

Yes, Jerry Coyne has a frog named after him. No, there is no photo of it here, but there is an adorable frog photo.

Science: take a 26 question science literacy test here. I only got 24 right, but I didn't read one of them carefully. (hat tip to Sandwalk)

Health Care

Robert Reich makes a strong argument for the public option

Without a public, Medicare-like option, health care reform is a bandaid for a system in critical condition. There's no way to push private insurers to become more efficient and provide better value to Americans without being forced to compete with a public option. And there's no way to get overall health-care costs down without a public option that has the authority and scale to negotiate lower costs with pharmaceutical companies, doctors, hospitals, and other providers -- thereby opening the way for private insurers to do the same.

It's been clear from the start that the private insurers and other parts of the medical-industrial complex have hated the idea of the public option, for precisely these reasons. A public option would cut deeply into their current profits. That's why they've been willing to spend a fortune on lobbyists, threaten and intimidate legislators and ordinary Americans, and even rattle Obama's cage to the point where the Administration is about to give up on it.

The White House wonders why there hasn't been more support for universal health care coming from progressives, grass-roots Democrats, and Independents. I'll tell you why. It's because the White House has never made an explicit commitment to a public option. [...]

What's Conrad's response? "The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for a public option. There never have been," he tells "FOX News Sunday." Conrad is wrong. If Obama tells Senate Democrats he will not sign a healthcare reform bill without a public option, there will be enough votes in the United States Senate for a public option.

Robert Reich also talks about Obama supporters:

As I just wrote in The American Prospect, my friend Fred voted for Obama and trusts him to do the right thing. "He's the brightest and most decent person who's occupied the Oval Office in my lifetime," Fred says. His trust for the man extends to Obama's agenda. "I don't have time to wade into the details of the economy or health care or climate change legislation or anything else, but I know he's got my interests at heart."

My friend Sally also voted for Obama and still likes him, but she's increasingly upset about his policies. "He's giving away the store," she complains, pointing to his penchant for compromise. "He gave Wall Street $600 billion in bailouts and doesn't even want to regulate it, gave big polluters 85 percent of the cap-and-trade permits, and has promised the American Medical Association, Big Pharma, and private insurers whatever they want in return for their support of universal health care." Sally says she voted for Obama because he promised to change American politics, but she thinks corporate interests are more powerful than ever. [...]

Fred and Sally offer a fairly good sampling of Obama voters at this juncture, almost nine months after Election Day. Fred represents the trusters; Sally, the cynics. Some cynicism is to be expected in the post-honeymoon phase of any presidency, once the idealism of a campaign has crashed into the realities of governing. What seems unusual this time is how popular the president remains even as many of his supporters become uneasy about what he's actually doing. The apparent paradox may be the byproduct of the very qualities that put him into office.

I tend to be a bit more like Fred; I know that President Obama is only human and will make mistakes, but I also know that he is smart, ethical and has a better handle of things that I could ever have.

But Reich makes an important point: if we sit back and say "he's got this", we might not be motivated enough to do our part.

Speaking of the health care debate: The Obama administration is accused of being a bit too "wonky" and not presenting things in the proper (read: more emotional) way:

The PolicySpeak Disaster

PolicySpeak is the principle that: If you just tell people the policy facts, they will reason to the right conclusion and support the policy wholeheartedly.

PolicySpeak is the principle behind the President’s new Reality Check Website. To my knowledge, the Reality Check Website, has not had a reality check. That is, the administration has not hired a first-class cognitive psychologist to take subjects who have been convinced by right-wing myths and lies, have them read the Reality Check website, and see if the Reality Check website has changed their minds a couple of days or a week later. I have my doubts, but do the test.

To many liberals, PolicySpeak sounds like the high road: a rational, public discussion in the best tradition of liberal democracy. Convince the populace rationally on the objective policy merits. Give the facts and figures. Assume self-interest as the motivator of rational choice. Convince people by the logic of the policymakers that the policy is in their interest
.
But to a cognitive scientist or neuroscientist, this sounds nuts. The view of human reason and language behind PolicySpeak is just false. Certainly reason should be used. It’s just that you should use real reason, the way people really think. Certainly the truth should be told. It’s just that it should be told so it makes sense to people, resonates with them, and inspires them to act. Certainly new media should be used. It’s just that a system of communications should be constructed and used effectively.

I believe that what went wrong is (a) the choice of PolicySpeak and (b) the decision to depend on the campaign apparatus (blogs, Town Hall meetings, presidential appearances, grassroots support) instead of setting up an adequate communications system.

What Now?

It is not too late. The statistic I’ve heard is that over 80% of citizens want a public plan, but the right wing’s framing has been overwhelming public debate, taking advantage of the right’s communication system and framing prowess.
The administration has dug itself (and the country) into a hole. At the very least, the old mistakes can be avoided, a clear and powerful narrative is still available and true, and some powerful, memorable, and accurate language should be substituted for PolicySpeak, or at least added and repeated by spokespeople nationwide.

The narrative is simple:

Surf to the article to see the "framing". Yes, the author of this article is George Lakoff, Author of Don't Think of an Elephant.

Jon Stewart rips into Fox News’ hypocrisy, “They’re liberals now” | Media Matters for America

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My Daily Kos post on health care bill splitting and reconciliation

From here

This is from the Wall Street Journal:

The White House and Senate Democratic leaders, seeing little chance of bipartisan support for their health-care overhaul, are considering a strategy shift that would break the legislation into two parts and pass the most expensive provisions solely with Democratic votes. [...]

The idea is to get things like the public option through using reconciliation rules (so there is no cloture vote necessary) and to have the other aspects (such as the regulation of companies in the health insurance exchange) pass via normal procedures:

Most legislation in the Senate requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, but certain budget-related measures can pass with 51 votes through a parliamentary maneuver called reconciliation.

In recent days, Democratic leaders have concluded they can pack more of their health overhaul plans under this procedure, congressional aides said. They might even be able to include a public insurance plan to compete with private insurers, a key demand of the party’s liberal wing, but that remains uncertain.

Other parts of the Democratic plan would be put to a separate vote in the Senate, including most of the insurance regulations that have been central to Mr. Obama’s health-care message.

At first glace this appears to be workable but I am interested to see what people here think.

Update For the pitfalls of the reconciliation process:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-jim-cooper/reconciliation-rules—no_b_217726.html

Here’s why what’s happening in the Senate worries me so much. If reform gets bogged down, it will have to go through the Senate’s reconciliation process. This is not good news for supporters of health care reform. In fact, it’s awful news.

Reconciliation is just what the trillion dollars of vested interests who want to kill health care reform are hoping for. That’s because they know something that few people in Washington have figured out: the Senate’s very restrictive reconciliation rules will prevent a true health care reform bill from passing.

Has anyone here actually looked at the reconciliation process and the Byrd rule? Every committee would have to report a bill that reduced the deficit by $1 billion in five years. It would have to be deficit-neutral each year after that. It couldn’t include “extraneous” material — like all the vitally important changes to our health care delivery system. Or, if we couldn’t find the savings, our grand health care reform achievement would have to sunset.

As an aside: I am hearing complaints from conservatives that the current plans would force people into health insurance plans that they don’t want; one used this Fact Check article as a reference:

Summary

President Obama has repeatedly said that under the health care overhaul efforts in Congress, “if you like your health care plan, you keep your health care plan.” But he can’t make that promise to everyone.

* In fact, under the House bill, some employers might have to modify plans after a five-year grace period if they don’t meet minimum benefits standards.

* Furthermore, some firms are likely to buy different coverage for their workers than they have now, or simply drop coverage and pay a penalty instead, leaving workers to buy their own private coverage or go on a new federal insurance plan.

The legislation is a moving target, and projections of how many employees would be switched to a federal plan are wide-ranging – from near zero to a high of 56 percent of all covered workers under the most extreme assumptions. We sort through several scenarios.

What they didn’t get from this Fact Check article is the following:

1. Employers change their plans all the time! (mine did; several times)
2. Without action, more might have to change plans anyway.

Fact Check DID point this out.

In short, they are freaking out on what MIGHT happen (and yes, the same fears were expressed about Medicare).

Also, if some wonder why there are mandated minimum coverages in this plan, the following Consumer Report article on junk health insurance is a good resource.

20 August 09 (am)

Workout notes Yoga class, then 5 miles of walking; to the goose loop, 9 laps of 2-1 (38:06; 12:52, 12:36, 12:38), back. Each goose loop “mile” is about 30 seconds long (1/4 miles are marked and 1 full mile is about 30 seconds short of 3 laps, hence my mile splits were roughly 12:22, 12:06, 12:08) Things were ok, though there was some debris from the recent storm.

Health care It appears that some conservatives are fearful (and “outraged”) that the current House Bill would force them from plans that they like into plans that they don’t want. Sure, President Obama says that you can keep your plan if you are happy with it. But one conservative pointed to this fact-check article:

Summary

President Obama has repeatedly said that under the health care overhaul efforts in Congress, “if you like your health care plan, you keep your health care plan.” But he can’t make that promise to everyone.

* In fact, under the House bill, some employers might have to modify plans after a five-year grace period if they don’t meet minimum benefits standards.

* Furthermore, some firms are likely to buy different coverage for their workers than they have now, or simply drop coverage and pay a penalty instead, leaving workers to buy their own private coverage or go on a new federal insurance plan.

The legislation is a moving target, and projections of how many employees would be switched to a federal plan are wide-ranging – from near zero to a high of 56 percent of all covered workers under the most extreme assumptions. We sort through several scenarios.

So now they are so sure that President Obama is lying to them and they are outraged! Well what are they outraged about? They are outraged about what MIGHT happen if he do this reform rather than what is all but certain to happen if we don’t.

For example: my plans have changed over the year, due to the increasing costs of health insurance and I’ve been with the same employer. The Fact Check article admits as much.

The article continues about what might happen if Senate revisions are enacted. It does go on to say that some small firms might opt to pay the penalty than to provide coverage and that would shunt their employees to the health exchange or the public option (if offered).

Now, what about those “minimum” requirements that are mandated? This is the reason:

Many people who believe they have adequate health insurance actually have coverage so riddled with loopholes, limits, exclusions, and gotchas that it won’t come close to covering their expenses if they fall seriously ill, a Consumer Reports investigation has found.

At issue are so-called individual plans that consumers get on their own when, say, they’ve been laid off from a job but are too young for Medicare or too “affluent” for Medicaid. An estimated 14,000 Americans a day lose their job-based coverage, and many might be considering individual insurance for the first time in their lives.

But increasingly, individual insurance is a nightmare for consumers: more costly than the equivalent job-based coverage, and for those in less-than-perfect health, unaffordable at best and unavailable at worst. Moreover, the lack of effective consumer protections in most states allows insurers to sell plans with “affordable” premiums whose skimpy coverage can leave people who get very sick with the added burden of ruinous medical debt.

Just ask Janice and Gary Clausen of Audubon, Iowa. They told us they purchased a United Healthcare limited benefit plan sold through AARP that cost about $500 a month after Janice lost her accountant job and her work-based coverage when the auto dealership that employed her closed in 2004.

“I didn’t think it sounded bad,” Janice said. “I knew it would only cover $50,000 a year, but I didn’t realize how much everything would cost.” The plan proved hopelessly inadequate after Gary received a diagnosis of colon cancer. His 14-month treatment, including surgery and chemotherapy, cost well over $200,000. Janice, 64, and Gary, 65, expect to be paying off medical debt for the rest of their lives.

Political update there is talk of splitting the health care bill into two parts: one might include things like a public option and one might include things like health insurance company regulation; the latter might garner enough support to not need reconciliation. If you want a laugh, read this from this article:

Sen. Mike Enzi (R., Wyo.) said the Democrats would be making a mistake by forging ahead on their own. “We need to get a bill that 75 or 80 senators can support,” he said. “If the Democrats choose to shut out Republicans and moderate Democrats, their plan will fail because the American people will have no confidence in it.”

Wrong. Medicare was a good example of that.

Anyway, back to the Fact Check article:

That’s true – the government won’t switch your plan for you under these bills. But that’s not exactly the claim the president is making. How many employees could be subject to an unwanted change of insurance is tough to predict. Part of the dilemma concerns the proposed federal health plan and how much cheaper it might be, or not, than private insurance. The House bill as introduced structures the federal plan in a way that would attract more employers than the House bill as amended by the Energy and Commerce committee. A Senate bill is similar to the amended House version. Here’s what could happen under the various bills:

No one “forced” onto federal plan. Obama said “[n]obody is going to force you to leave your health care plan.” That’s true enough. The legislation wouldn’t require anyone to switch health insurance – though, in most cases, plans would eventually have to meet minimum benefit standards. The bills don’t require anyone to join the federal plan. The House bill also has a provision that allows those who purchase their own insurance (those who don’t get insurance through an employer) to keep their plan as long as they’d like, as long as the insurance company keeps offering it. Their policies wouldn’t have to meet the new minimum benefits requirements that will be decided by the Health and Human Services secretary.

Minimum standards. Businesses, however, would have to meet minimum benefits standards and would have a five-year grace period to do so under the House bill. Insurance companies could react in different ways, perhaps modifying any plans that don’t meet the standards or dropping those plans as an option. We can’t predict that. It’s unclear which or how many businesses would possibly be affected by this.

Federal plan, House bill as introduced. A greater factor in the ability to keep one’s plan, however, is the federal health insurance option (what Obama calls the “public plan”). The House bill as introduced would set payment rates to doctors at Medicare rates plus 5 percent in this federal plan. Medicare rates are about 20 percent lower to doctors than payments by private insurance. That would make the federal plan noticeably cheaper than the average for private insurance. Estimates on how much cheaper, and consequently how attractive to those eligible to join the plan, differ.

The Lewin Group estimated that premiums would be 20 percent to 25 percent cheaper under the federal plan. A study by the Lewin Group, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group that operates independently of the health care company, found that under this scenario in the original House bill, 33.6 million would go onto the federal health plan. That number includes individuals who buy their own coverage and employees of small firms with under 20 employees (those eligible in the second year after the House bill would take effect). The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, however, estimated that premiums would be about 10 percent cheaper under the federal plan. The CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation said 11 million to 12 million people would join the federal plan if open to firms with under 50 employees. That’s about a third of the Lewin estimate. Those numbers, too, include both individuals and employees of small firms.

Also, the House bill says that more businesses could become eligible to participate in that federal plan over time. If all businesses were eligible to participate, not just smaller firms, then Lewin’s numbers jump way up, with 103.4 million joining that plan. Lewin further estimated that 88.1 million people would shift from employer-sponsored coverage to the federal plan. CBO didn’t give an estimate for such a scenario. And of course, we can’t say whether or not the administration would actually make larger companies eligible.

Under Lewin’s estimate of the worst-case outcome, 56 percent of all workers covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2011 under current law would instead have coverage through the federal plan. But if the federal option remained open only to small firms, the percentage switching would be 14 percent under the Lewin estimate, about 7.6 percent under CBO’s estimate.

ConsumerReports.org – Junk Insurance

This is why the House bill contains minimum requirements for employer supplied insurance.

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19 August 09 (pm)

Workout notes Form swim over lunch (2200 yards); form 100s, swim/drill (fins), 50s on the 1 (form), 5 x 100 IM, cool down. If the anticipated storms arrive and I can’t do my meet, I’ll do a run on the treadmill at about 5:30.

From Huffington Post: a tea bagger sign that I can partially agree with:

19 August 09 AM

Mathematics notes I spent much of last evening fiddling with my program to obtain graphs of functions defined as convolutions. I’ll continue with that today.

Workout notes Rest, maybe some stretching prior to lunch. Public track meet tonight and I want to have no excuses! Goal: break 7 mintues for a flat mile. Yeah, I know…that is super slow; my life time PR for the mile is 5:30 (back in 1980) and I ran 5:41 for the 1600 in 1998 and 5:55 for the mile (1609 meters) in 1999. That was the last time that I broke 6 minutes.

Posts

This is the Hayes flowchart that gives a rough idea of how the House bill works. From Donkeylicious.

The White House was unprepared for how much the base supported the public option.

The president has maneuvered gingerly around the issue of a public plan, largely maintaining that he prefers to include the public option in a new insurance marketplace. He often argues that competition from a government plan — without high executive salaries and the need to post profits — could keep big insurance companies “honest.”

But Obama and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have also signaled a willingness to consider other avenues. Addressing a joint session of Congress in February, the president made no mention of a public insurance plan.

At a White House summit in March, he said: “If there is a way of getting this done where we’re driving down costs and people are getting health insurance at an affordable rate and have choice of doctor, have flexibility in terms of their plans, and we could do that entirely through the market, I’d be happy to do it that way.” [...]

Groups pushing for a public plan urged the White House on Tuesday to stick to its guns.

“They made a decision in June to be more public in their support for the public option,” Kirsch said. “I think that was the right decision. They should stick with that, because it keeps their base with them.”

One Democratic Obama ally lamented that the push for a public plan has become synonymous with victory on health-care reform.

“In the last 90 days, it has taken on an aura much more pronounced than it did the first four months of the year,” said the activist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss White House strategy. He said Obama’s advisers have stoked the controversy this week by creating the perception they were abandoning the public plan.

“If they made a mistake, it does go back to what I consider some inartfully framed phrases from the president and some other administration officials,” the activist said. “To get where they had to go, they didn’t have to depart too much from the language of June and July.”

Yes, it appears that winning or losing is now defined as whether or not this plan has the public option in it:

Look, it is possible to have universal care without a public option; Switzerland does. But there are some good reasons for the prominence of the public option in our debate.

One is substantive: to have a workable system without the public option, you need to have effective regulation of the insurers. Given the realities of our money-dominated politics, you really have to worry whether that can be done — which is a reason to have a more or less automatic mechanism for disciplining the industry.

The second is what the option debate says about Obama.

If progressives had real trust in Obama’s commitment to doing the right thing, the administration would have broad leeway to do deals. But the president doesn’t command that kind of trust. [...]

Add in the dealmaking as part of the health care process itself, and progressives can be forgiven for having the impression that Obama (a) takes them for granted (b) is way too easily rolled by the other side.

So progressives have their backs up over one provision in health care reform that’s easy to monitor. The public option has become not so much a symbol as a signal, a test of whether Obama is really the progressive activists thought they were backing.

And the bizarre thing is that the administration doesn’t seem to get that.

I can understand why President Obama doesn’t get it: he is very rational; he has some objectives to meet (universality, people who don’t have insurance now being able to get it at affordable rates) but his base appears to have an emotional attachment to the pubic option. Basically my left-leaning friends see this as a battle between the super profitable insurance companies (“who wants to b forced to buy their crappy products?”) and us (the public) and we want so much to be able to give the middle finger to the health insurance industry. If we don’t get a public option, “they” would have won once again.

Yes, a system that tightly regulates the insurance companies would be a victory but many won’t see it that way. But here is what I am talking about:

In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false. Like every system, the National Health Service has problems, but over all it appears to provide quite good care while spending only about 40 percent as much per person as we do. By the way, our own Veterans Health Administration, which is run somewhat like the British health service, also manages to combine quality care with low costs.

The second route to universal coverage leaves the actual delivery of health care in private hands, but the government pays most of the bills. That’s how Canada and, in a more complex fashion, France do it. It’s also a system familiar to most Americans, since even those of us not yet on Medicare have parents and relatives who are.

Again, you hear a lot of horror stories about such systems, most of them false. French health care is excellent. Canadians with chronic conditions are more satisfied with their system than their U.S. counterparts. And Medicare is highly popular, as evidenced by the tendency of town-hall protesters to demand that the government keep its hands off the program.

Finally, the third route to universal coverage relies on private insurance companies, using a combination of regulation and subsidies to ensure that everyone is covered. Switzerland offers the clearest example: everyone is required to buy insurance, insurers can’t discriminate based on medical history or pre-existing conditions, and lower-income citizens get government help in paying for their policies.

It will be interesting: if President Obama reaches a “no public option” program that is a major improvement on what we have now, I’ll back it but many of my fellow liberals won’t.

But there is one very encouraging sign: the Democrats have realized that nothing we can do will appease the Republicans.

Top Democrats said Tuesday that their go-it-alone view was being shaped by what they saw as Republicans’ purposely strident tone against health care legislation during this month’s Congressional recess, as well as remarks by leading Republicans that current proposals were flawed beyond repair.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said the heated opposition was evidence that Republicans had made a political calculation to draw a line against any health care changes, the latest in a string of major administration proposals that Republicans have opposed.

“The Republican leadership,” Mr. Emanuel said, “has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama’s health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day.”

That’s good, but most of us knew this a long time ago; it is us (the Democrats) versus the blue dogs (Conservatives who live under the Democratic Party tent)

Of course, these negotiations won’t be easy, but at least we got a bit of the political theater out of the way.

Other posts

Yes, even DNA evidence is not fool-proof.

An amino acid was found on a comet!

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The amino acid glycine, a fundamental building block of proteins, has been found in a comet for the first time, bolstering the theory that raw ingredients of life arrived on Earth from outer space, scientists said on Monday.

Microscopic traces of glycine were discovered in a sample of particles retrieved from the tail of comet Wild 2 by the NASA spacecraft Stardust deep in the solar system some 242 million miles (390 million km) from Earth, in January 2004.

Samples of gas and dust collected on a small dish lined with a super-fluffy material called aerogel were returned to Earth two years later in a canister that detached from the spacecraft and landed by parachute in the Utah desert.

Comets like Wild 2, named for astronomer Paul Wild (pronounced Vild), are believed to contain well-preserved grains of material dating from the dawn of the solar system billions of years ago, and thus clues to the formation of the sun and planets.

The initial detection of glycine, the most common of 20 amino acids in proteins on Earth, was reported last year, but it took time for scientists to confirm that the compound in question was extraterrestrial in origin.

O’Reilly: Netroots Nation attendees “don’t much like America” | Media Matters for America

O’Reilly doesn’t get it: is the tea-bagger conservatives that hate America AS IT IS. What we don’t care for is the tea-bagger vision of what America should be.

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Daily Kos: Barney Frank to Protester: “On what planet do you spend most of your time?”

Now THIS is how you handle the moronic teabaggers.

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