DaVita, one of the US’s two largest corporate dialysis providers, has plans to move into providing primary healthcare services for dialysis patients according to Michael Booth writing for the Denver Post. Here’s why: “DaVita, with US$7 billion in revenue, manages about US$33,000 a year in Medicare spending for each of its 142,000 dialysis patients,” reports Booth. “But those chronically sick patients spend another US$55,000 a year in Medicare money for other conditions, from diabetes to heart failure.” It’s all about the money—more of it, to be specific—even though those figures don’t include patients—like me—with private insurance who are even more lucrative.

DaVita wants to partner with doctors and hospitals, creating accountable care organizations (ACOs)in order to contract with Medicare. If ACOs meet quality standards while cutting costs, they’re allowed to split the savings with Medicare.

Bill Peckham, of Dialysis from the sharp end of the needle, tells Booth precisely what’s wrong with this picture: “You’re substituting business ethics for medical ethics, and I think that’s a bad deal.” Peckham goes on to note that the ACO model “encourages withholding of care to save money and create profit-sharing.”

Peckham reveals DaVita’s corporate double-speak as indicative of its perception of its patients:

“[DaVita chairperson] Thiry calls himself ‘The Mayor,’ and employees ‘citizens’ of the DaVita ‘Village.’ Where does that leave the patients? We’re the ‘crop.’ We’re the ‘ore’ in the mines. That’s not a fun place to be if you’re the person who needs dialysis.”

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The Star Tribune has published a pretty incredible profile of investigative blogger Karl Bremer by staff reporter Kevin Giles and University of Minnesota student Andrew Johnson. Bremer is most widely known as unveiling the ongoing misdeeds and wackiness of former presidential candidate and Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) on Ripple In Stillwater. He’s so good that the best plagiarize him.

Bremer’s co-authored book, The Madness of Michele Bachmann: A Broad-Minded Survey of a Small-Minded Candidate, was published last December. In a sidebar, Giles and Johnson report “as of a few weeks ago, 15 copies of Karl Bremer’s book ... had sold at Stillwater’s independent bookstore, Valley Bookseller [Stillwater is home to both Bremer and Bachmann], since the book’s publication in December. Only one copy of Bachmann’s autobiography, Core of Conviction: My Story, had sold since publication in November. ... Nationwide, copies of Bremer’s book have outsold Bachmann’s book at ‘indie’ bookstores, 72 books to 37, according to the Independent Trade Retailers group.”

Bachmann twice refused to respond to Giles and Johnson for the Strib piece, but that didn’t stop Washington County Commissioner Bill Pulkrabek, a Republican operative and member of Bachmann’s inner circle, from blasting Bremer:

“He’s just another megalomaniac with delusions about Bob Woodward,” Pulkrabek tells Giles and Johnson. “My experience with so-called bloggers is that they’re mostly introverted dorks who sit around in their underwear eating Doritos all day, making nasty comments about people they don’t know.”

That’s rich coming from someone Mike Mullen writing for City Pages identified as the “alleged drunk, neurotic, cat abusing, girlfriend-hair-dragging former campaign manager for Michele Bachmann.”

Bremer, a stage four pancreatic cancer patient, received second place in the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists 2011 Page One Awards for “Best Use of Public Records.”

Just about three years ago, I wrote about David Jacobs’s paired organ donation solution to the transplant organ shortage. He launched his paired organ donation software at the DEMO conference that year. I assume it’s been in continuous use, but I haven’t heard much about it and note that there’s only a single partner hospital.

Paired organ donation is the process by which a person who needs an organ has a donor that’s incompatible with her but that is compatible with someone else waiting for an organ. Very complex paired organ donations can be accomplished with hundreds—even thousands—of organ donors and recipients.

Paired organ donation doesn’t require a “Good Samaritan” to initiate the chain reaction, only a willing donor that’s incompatible and still willing.

Kevin Sack, writing for the New York Times reports on a 60-person kidney donation chain that started with a single “Good Samaritan.” (The Times‘s multimedia presentation related to Sack’s story is also available.) The donor didn’t have an intended recipient; he merely called Riverside Community Hospital in Riverside, California and asked how he might become a kidney donor, expecting nothing in return. Until quite recently, hospitals routinely turned away “Good Samaritan” donors, thinking them to be unstable. That man’s altruistic action set a chain reaction in order as incompatible but willing donors decided they would still be willing—even for a stranger.

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The only way to do what Railroad Earth does—the only way—is to absolutely, categorically love what you’re doing. Two Saturdays ago (11 Feb) the band closed out its most recent tour—which looks like it started around Halloween—at First Avenue in Minneapolis. The music is best described as amplified string band with drums, although fiddler Tim Carbone calls it Country & Eastern and songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist Todd Sheafer calls it a souped-up string band.

What makes any Railroad Earth show special is that it’s unlike any other Railroad Earth show. In a former life, I worked in the live music and recording industry and most of the musicians I worked with made me promise to shoot them if they ever did repetitive shows each night. I’m not naming names, but more than a few of them are doing just that these days. It’s incredibly difficult to come up with a great new show night after night, back to back, but Railroad Earth is at the top of their game and among the touring acts that does just that each and every night.

The band took root slowly, recording a five-song demo that it sent out to various festivals for consideration. The talent was obviously and immediately there as Railroad Earth was booked into the 2001 Telluride Bluegrass Festival before the band had actually ever played a live gig. They quickly recorded five more songs and released their initial album, The Black Bear Sessions, later that year. They haven’t looked back.

While not abandoning its acoustic roots, Railroad Earth has expanded its sound with new bassist Andrew Altman (who replaced Johnny Grubb in early 2010) who picks up the electric from time to time. And when Tim Carbone puts down his fiddle to pick up an electric guitar you know you’re in for something of a phase shift.

The First Avenue show was a wonderful, if abbreviated, show and is the Twin Cities show to beat for the year so far. But the year’s young and I’m hoping for a Railroad Earth show this summer at the Minnesota Zoo. Torrential rain during last summer’s show drove off all but about 100 or so of us. Interestingly, the first shows of last year—The Radiators’ “Farewell to Minnesota” three-night stand at the Cabooze were my favorites.

Railroad Earth 11 February 2011, First Avenue, Minneapolis, MN.

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Matt Richtel, writing for the New York Times, reports that multiple monitors on a desktop are apparently the latest fashion accessory in the office. “For multiscreen multitaskers, a single monitor can seem as outdated as dial-up internet,” writes Richtel.

Really? I’ve been using a 15-inch laptop—and its native screen—(most recently a mid-2009 MacBook Pro) for the last 20 years or more. I’m plenty productive. When I was writing full time I could easily manage 5,000 words a day. Now I’m supposed to buy that it takes three 17-inch monitors to edit a blog about Facebook.

One of the things that caught my eye in Richtel’s piece was his citation of James A. Anderson, a professor of communications at the University of Utah. He authored a study—commissioned with US$50,000 by NEC—finding “productivity among people working on editing tasks was higher with two monitors than with one.” Anderson, who uses three monitors himself, tells Richtel, “more monitors cut down on toggling time among windows on a single screen, which can save about 10 seconds for every five minutes of work.”

If you’re working on something in only five minute bits, what are you really getting done? Is this a generational thing? I’ll cop to being an old, but I need much more than five minutes just to reflect on something I’ve just read.

I remember being ecstatic when I added a large monitor to my Mac SE, but I’ve been working productively on a 15-inch laptop for years.

My friend Jerry Daniels (also an old) tweets that he’s of the same, minimalist mindset: I got rid of everything and got an 11” MacBook Air for $999. No desk. Use recliner and my lap. SO much less.”

Is there something to this multi-monitor business, or is it a marketing attempt to goose unnecessary consumption?

The New York Times’ CMS Group has released ice.js, a track changes implementation for anything that is “contenteditable.” It requires jQuery for now. Features include multi-user editing tracking and the ability to reject changes.

I hate to write in the browser, but sometimes it’s a necessity and Ice looks like it may be worth a gander.

A demo is available.

The US versions of vastly overreaching anti-piracy legislation—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the Senate—were rightly put down through concerted and coordinated effort on the internet. That the same fate didn’t befall the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) plum amazes me, but maybe we’ll be collectively more intelligent the next time it comes around.

But SOPA and PIPA look like they were created by pikers that took bad dictation from the entertainment cartel compared to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (.pdf; 36Kb) (ACTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) currently being hammered out by the members of the global copyright cartel themselves.

These are much more serious because they’re treaties and outside the reach of our elected representatives. Three years ago, the Obama administration issued a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request denial (.pdf; 444Kb) to Knowledge Ecology International, declaring the contents of the proposed international treaty a national security secret. The previous Bush administration similarly rejected an equivalent FOIA request (.pdf; 108Kb) from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). It’s apparently okay to have a national security secret drafted by the entertainment cartel and shared with Australia, Canada, the 27 member countries of the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Switzerland but not with the American citizenry.

If that’s not bad enough, because it’s being crafted as a treaty, no congressional approval is required. Public Knowledge calls it policy laundering:

“The greatest concern over ACTA is that it purports to ratchet up protections for IP rights holders without even the barest measures to preserve either the balance in IP law or due process rights of citizens. Without going through any pre-existing avenues of legal change—whether domestic or international—this treaty may be considered an act of ‘policy laundering.’ That is, the use of an international treaty to justify the passage of controversial legislation within one’s own country.”

Last month, Kader Arif, the European Parliament’s special rapporteur for the treaty quit, saying the European Parliament and civil society organizations had been excluded from the “masquerade.” Shortly before that, Helena Drnovsek-Zorko, the Slovenian signatory to the treaty, publicly disowned it and the Polish government suspended ratification after politicians protested wearing Guy Fawkes masks. In the US, more than 75 law professors sent an open letter to President Obama criticizing the secrecy surrounding the treaty.

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In the wake of Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) filing, it would appear some percentage of the net woke up to the weak value proposition offered by the corporate content aggregators. And if you want to see just how useless Google has become, search for “Facebook IPO filing.” The returns are filled with a lot of opinionating about the filing, but the filing itself doesn’t appear until midway through Google’s second page. That’s pitiful. Looking for an alternative? Take a look at duckduckgo. The same search query is even less useful, but it’s like Google was before it went off the tracks. If you want truly meaningful search results, we’ll need some updated version of the earliest days of distributed search.

So, now that Facebook is on the verge of going public we’re suddenly hand-wringingly worried about the commons in the form of the open web. “If Facebook’s IPO filing does anything besides mint a lot of millionaires, it will be to shine a rather unsettling light on a fact most of us would rather not acknowledge: The web as we know it is rather like our polar ice caps: under severe, long-term attack by forces of our own creation,” writes John Battelle in the lede for his “It’s not whether Google’s threatened. It’s asking ourselves: What commons do we wish for?”

That should be laughable—Battelle’s article carries a whopping 23 web bugs (or, more commonly “beacons”) that phone home about everything you do on the alleged commons of the open web. Instead it’s accurate (web bugs or no)—and just so very sad.

Battelle is correct when he notes that the open internet is shrinking as more and more people flock to walled gardens like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Apple’s iTunes Store, and all the rest. But it’s been happening for a long time, and hopefully will come around again just like the AOL, Geocities, and MySpace cycles before this one. Like I said, hopefully.

Battelle is also correct when he posits that Google has given up on the open web and is somewhat desperately trying to rebuild its success.

He goes on to make really important points about the no gatekeeping, neutrality, and interoperability being the foundation of the open web, and his is an important read. Even if he does go off into the deep weeds of hypocrisy with “no preset rules about how data is used. If one site collects information from or about a user of its site, that site has the right to do other things with that data, assuming, again, that it’s doing things that benefit all parties concerned.” Really? Just how do your 23 web bugs benefit all parties concerned, John?

More interesting to my eye is Dave Winer trying to clue his friend Robert Scoble into what most of us learned several years ago: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” Apparently Scoble didn’t get the memo. Winer, gamely, tried again.

The earliest articulated reference I remember is from a Metafilter discussion of the Digg 4.0 redesign. (Ed note: If there’s an earlier reference, please enlighten me by reporting an error.) Lots of us were thinking about what Winer historically calls “locked trunks” (last item) for a long time before that, but that clear, simple soundbite is what stuck.

Last Thursday, Apple introduced its first education initiative in quite a long while. The iTunes Store has been expanded to include a textbook section. And iTunes U has migrated into app form.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson—among the largest educational publishers—have all agreed to provide textbooks in Apple’s new iBooks 2.0 format at individual price points of US$15 or less. Schools can bulk-license iBook titles, distributing redemption codes to individual students that can then be individually redeemed through the iTunes Store.

But the big news is Apple’s 1.0 release of its iBooks Author app for its Mac platform.

iBooks Author is an ebook authoring application that allows an individual to create interactive ebooks that contain virtually any form of media—static or interactive. Apple’s iBooks ebooks on its iPad (with iBooks 2.0; and only the iPad is currently supported) can now come to life with sections that are watched, listened to, interacted with, and yes, even read. With iBooks 2.0, readers can easily highlight text, make bookmarks, and take notes. The notes can later be retrieved as virtual 3 x 5 notecards.

Available exclusively through Apple’s App Store, iBooks Author is offered at no charge. And it’s incredibly rich while being quite easy to use—especially for a version 1.0 release. Drag-and-drop virtually anything into the application—text (formatted text from Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages), images, video, Keynote presentations, and raw HTML—and it’s handled automatically. Best of all, if you’re familiar with Apple’s iWork suite—Keynote, Numbers, and Pages—you already pretty much know how to use iBooks Author.

Templates are included for six media-rich textbook formats (Basic, Contemporary, Modern Type, Classic, Editorial, and Craft), but surprisingly there are no provided templates for relatively simple books. And building a template from scratch looks like it’s quite a bit more difficult than it should be. Almost certainly future versions of the product will contain additional templates for different publication types—magazines, newspapers, novels, and everything else. As will some sort of collaborative workflow. Right now, it’s a great tool for an individual, but most publications don’t get made that way.

That’s the good news.

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MaryJo Webster, writing for the Pioneer Press reports that Minnesota legislators will examine severance payments and payments for unused sick and vacation time made to retiring and laid off state employees. The paper reported in November 2011 that US$57 million in unused sick time had been paid to retiring and laid off state workers. An additional US$32 million had been paid for unused vacation time between January 2008 and June 2011. A few Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MNSCU) employees received six figure payouts. Those figures do not include the University of Minnesota.

Webster reports today that departing University of Minnesota employees received an average of US$4,500 for unused vacation and severance, compared with a US$12,000 average for MNSCU employees. “The Pioneer Press analysis of MNSCU’s payouts did not include the more than US$319,000 paid to outgoing chancellor James McCormick,” writes Webster. “When he retired Aug. 1, McCormick received US$180,000 in severance, plus US$92,965 for unused sick time, and US$46,896 for unused vacation.”

Mark Albert, Mike Maybay, and Erik Altmann for KSTP-TV were even more breathless in their coverage with a definite tinge of denigrating public employees. “For some, it could be a golden parachute—and you’re paying for it,” was their lede.

No, you’re not paying for it. At least not very much. Certainly not anything near what you think you are.

The great state of Minnesota sees fit to fund roughly 20 percent of the University of Minnesota’s budget. That’s a pitiful reflection of how important education is in the current culture, but that’s another argument. Getting paid for unused vacation and severance is earned income and taxed accordingly. It’s not a gift, it’s earned. It’s the institution’s binding obligation.

Make no mistake, I have very little love for the University of Minnesota. I was employed there from 2006-11 as the senior editor and ecommunications manager in the College of Design and laid off in December 2011. When I left, I received payment for unused vacation. My severance pay was initially denied (another argument for another time);  I filed a grievance and almost a year later the University finally paid it.

Work for civil servants at the University is structured such that it’s quite difficult to take vacation—especially more than a day or two at a time. As a result, the University carries a hefty unused vacation liability and long ago instituted a policy that prevented employees from accruing more than two-years’ worth of vacation, something Webster conveniently fails to note in her article. The University also has a wonderful policy allowing employees to donate accrued vacation to other employees that needed it.

Unlike other state agencies—including MNSCU—the University does not pay its employees for unused sick time. After accruing 800 hours of sick time, University employees are allowed to convert half of additional sick time to vacation time.

Severance for University civil servants is paid at the rate of one week’s salary for every complete year of service, up to a maximum of 52 weeks.

The payment I received for my unused vacation is included in the KSTP-TV spreadsheet (.xls; 1.1MB), but is inaccurate. My annual salary was US$59,821 (as evidenced by the severance payout noted below) not the US$62,161.60 reported and the severance payment I received after filing the grievance isn’t included. Here’s how it really shook out:

Gross payment for unused vacation: US$8,260.73
Gross payment for severance: US$4,601.60

So, yeah, I received US$12,862.33 (less about 30 percent tax withholding; double what millionaire presidential candidate Mitt Romney paid, but again that’s another argument for another day) when I left University employment. I also received six months of University contributions to my and my wife’s health insurance.

When Utne Reader was sold in 2006 and I was laid off after almost five years there, I was making a significantly higher salary (even though I was only working three-quarters time), received payment for unused vacation, and received three months salary as severance. As a non-full-time employee, I didn’t qualify for Utne Reader‘s health insurance program.

Today’s New York Times carries an op-ed by the US’ paper of record’s public editor, Arthur S. Brisbane—who, it should be noted, works outside of the Times’ editorial structure—asking if the paper’s journalists should call out lies when they’re encountered.

That the Times would even ask this question is, well, stunning. Like a two-by-four right between the eyes. I had to double-check that this wasn’t an Onion piece.

That Brisbane goes on to actually try to parse how journalists should report lies is doubly stunning. Apparently, pointed questions and calling out false or misleading statements (with a link to supporting evidence) is not even a consideration. Brisbane doesn’t actually write that he’s concerned about journalists’ judgement, but that’s clearly his worry as he writes that readers “worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.” And, if that’s the way the wind is blowing, Brisbane wonders how the Times could reveal the truth “in a way that is objective and fair.” Wringing his hands over the possibility of multiple truths, Brisbane asks, “Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?”

Just think about that for a few minutes. Go ahead, ponder.

Look: Calling out lies, misdirections, and misrepresentations is not a question of objectivity and if one has to ask how to do it, it’s too late. You’ve become a stenographer, not a journalist. Revealing the truth has everything to do with fairness and context, but nothing to do with “balance” or “objectivity.” Nor does it have anything to do with vigilantism; contrary to the hed on Brisbane’s piece. It’s the cornerstone of journalism.

This is purely a consequence—unintended or not—of the rush to what Jay Rosen calls the view from nowhere. Still don’t get it? Read Rosen’s interview with himself about it.

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What would happen if greenhouses were constructed next to, or on top of, grocery stores? Produce would almost certainly be fresher and the transportation problem of sustainable agriculture would be one step closer to being solved. That’s the idea behind BrightFarms’ on-site greenhouses; the company contracts with grocery stores to operate hydroponic greenhouses on their roofs.

Imagine being able to eat tomatoes virtually year-round—even up here on the far edge—that were grown for flavor instead of transport. Imagine being able to buy lettuce that was picked that morning instead of six days ago (half its shelf-life) in California.

According to BrightFarms, “The average item of food in the United States travels at least 1500 miles. Gasoline can account for up to half the value of a head lettuce or pound of tomatoes.”

BrightFarms reports that it has contracted with 10 grocery store chains and is close to signing with three more. McCaffrey’s Markets will host a greenhouse in either New Jersey or Pennsylvania. Brooklyn-based Gotham Greens—with consulting help from BrightFarms—began delivering produce to New York supermarkets in June 2011. And a demonstration-scale greenhouse will be constructed at the Whole Foods Market in Millburn, New Jersey.

After looking at the City Pages’ staff picks for best 2011 concerts in the Twin Cities, it’s clear that I’m on another planet entirely. The only shows they list that I wish I’d seen are (in order):

1. Lucinda Williams at the Dakota, 20, 21, and 22 February
2. Justin Townes Earle at First Avenue, 14 February
3. tUnEyArDs at First Avenue, 12 November
4. Wilco at the State Theater, 6-7 December
5. Middle Brother at First Avenue, 26 March
6. Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson at Mystic Lake Casino, 11 February
7. St. Vincent at the Walker Art Center 2 October

I really wanted to make it to at least one of the Lucinda Williams shows but it was about a month before my valve job and I just wasn’t up to it. The other shows I really regret missing was Steve Earle and Allison Moorer at the Pantages Theater, 23 July and Spider John Koerner and Tony Glover at the Dakota, 7 August. There were others, but those are the big ones.

Without further comment, here are my picks for the best 2011 live shows in the Twin Cities:

1. The Radiators “Farewell to Minnesota” at the Cabooze, 12, 13, and 14 May
2. The Tedeschi Trucks Band at the Minnesota Zoo, 26 and 27 August
3. David Hildalgo and Louie Perez at the Varsity Theater, 18 November
4. Rickie Lee Jones at the Big Top Chautauqua, 30 July (Bayfield, WI; close enough)
5. Bela Fleck & The Flecktones at the Minnesota Zoo, 3 August
6. Dean Magraw’s Red Planet at the Artists’ Quarter, 10 December
7. Dean Magraw with Bruce Kurnow and Michael Bissonette at the Aster Cafe, 27 October
8. Dean Magraw with Bruce Kurnow and Michael Bissonette at the Black Dog Cafe, 5 July
9. Pieta Brown at the Dakota, 30 January

Bob Collins of Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) is one of my favorite corporate media reporters in the Twin Cities. He’s usually quite careful and articulate and generally has a point of view (as opposed to the view from nowhere). That’s why I was genuinely curious about his use of “fib” multiple times, in multiple forms in his “What did they know and when did they know it” piece this morning. After all, the head for the package of unrelated stories is “Credibility is early casualty in Koch probe.”

Collins’s usage of “fib” was in relation to Minnesota State Senator Geoff Michel‘s (R-District 41) comments to the press regarding the resignation of Minnesota State Senate Leader Amy Koch (R-District 19) over an “improper relationship” with a colleague.

Upon being asked when the four Minnesota State Senate leaders knew about Koch’s improper relationship, Michel told reporters—on the record—“the allegations about Koch’s behavior were first reported to them a few weeks ago.” That was not true, and Michel knew it. Tom Scheck and Catharine Richert, reporting for MPR, note Koch’s former chief-of-staff, Cullen Sheehan, revealed details of the improper relationship to the Minnesota State Senate leadership three months ago. “Three months ago, I became aware of a potential relationship between Sen. Koch and a staff person,” Sheehan told Scheck and Richert. “I then spoke to the staff person and he confirmed the relationship. We both then met with Sen. Koch and she confirmed the relationship. The next day I met with Sen. Koch to discuss the situation. I subsequently met with the Deputy Majority Leader” [Senator Geoff Michel]. Sheehan left employment at the Minnesota Senate in November, refused to identify the staff member, and refused to tell Scheck and Richert why he left the Minnesota Senate.

I was really curious why Collins chose to use “fib” to describe Michel’s outright lie to reporters asking what the leadership knew when. So I asked him, both in a comment on his piece, and in a tweet. Collins responded similarly on both Twitter and in a comment to his original piece. He finds “fib” a more interesting word. Fair enough. Except in his initial comment on his MPR blog, partially in response to another commenter, Collins writes, “Because everyone expects the word ‘lie’ when writing about politics. It has the same impact now as ‘Nazi.’ I don’t like writing words that go in one ear and out the other.”

Whoah, conflating “lie” with “Nazi” seemed way over the top to me, so I became even more curious. I looked up the definition of “fib” and according to the Oxford American English Dictionary, the word means “a lie, typically an unimportant one.” I referenced the definition in Twitter and in another comment on Collins’s article, asking if he was saying that what Senator Michel said was unimportant. Collins dodged the question in a subsequent comment on his article and told me in a tweet that I was “free to use whatever definition you wish.”

Wait. What?

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So, the US Republicans in both houses of Congress want to reduce the duration of unemployment benefits while imposing strict new qualifying requirements. Just as they adjourn without getting anything done this session.

US Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)—the senior Republican on the Finance Committee—tells Robert Pear, writing for the New York Times, “I don’t see why you have to go more than 59 weeks. In fact, we need some incentives for people to get back to work. A lot of these people don’t want to work unless they get really high-paying jobs, and they’re not going to get them ever. So they just stay home and watch television. I don’t mean to malign people, but far too many are doing that.”

Well yes, Senator, you clearly did mean to malign people.

We need a national referendum to reduce congressional salaries to 10 percent less than the nation’s median income. That would be about US$26,000, Senator Hatch. Think of the 10 percent as an incentive. Then we’ll see who’s sitting around watching television. Fact is, there are no jobs—high-paying or otherwise.

The problem, Senator, is that you can no longer get any work done or even budge because so many of the one percenters have crawled up your ass and nested. Right out of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.

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