I chatted with the Congressman a few hours before the President’s speech on Afghanistan.

The entire saga wrapped up in under 3 minutes…

Context is important here…

I had previously asked him about the racist magistrate that refused to marry an interracial couple. Vitter declined comment and put out a statement saying that judges should follow the law and not make it up as they go along. So I followed up by asking the Senator if he thought the Supreme Court correctly decided Loving v. Virginia – the case that declares state anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. Vitter, a lawyer, said he hadn’t read the case.

Well, today I tried asking him about Bernanke and whether or not he’d be putting a hold on his nomination. Vitter told me he was late for a meeting. I said, “C’mon Senator, that’s a yes or a no”. He said “Your right, it is. And I’m late for a meeting.” At that point, another reporter walked up to Vitter and asked the same question: would Vitter be placing a hold on Bernanke’s nomination? Vitter responded that he was inclined to do so and answered a coupla more questions.

When he was finished with the “real” (his words) reporter, I decided that I may as well ask about Brown v. Board of Education…

Look… in the long term, taxing excessively generous health care plans is probably a good idea. People should feel a bit of a pinch in their wallet when they ask for a brand name prescription instead of accepting the generic. I know from experience that exercise is probably the cheapest medicine on the planet and is an enormously effective preventative. The time I spend working out (and eating right) saves me money on medical costs. If your employer-provided medical plan allows you to take a pill for heartburn when you could just as easily cure yourself by spending twenty mintues exercising every day… well, that’s an expensive choice you are externalizing…

So yeah, I think it’s possible to be over-insured.

With that said, the Senate health care bill contains a tax on “Cadillac” Health Care plans. I’m not sure how it is going to be implemented, but I do know unions are concerned and I think they have a case.

The nut of their argument is that they made wage concessions in order to get better health care plans. When they went through contract negotiations, they valued their family’s health security more highly than the marginal number of dollars they would have taken home in their paychecks. They never suspected that Congress would come in through the back door and raid their bank accounts at tax time.

The answer here is to make the tax prospective – implement it for all health care plans negotiated after the law goes into effect.

I asked Senators Harkin and Landrieu about this. The conversation I had with Senator Landrieu was particularly interesting (sorry, audio only). She said that we may take the House’s “Millionaires tax” AND the tax on “Cadillac” plans. And she agreed with me when I pointed out that it has been the folks making over $250K that have made out so well over the last 8 years (I could have said 40 years, but that seems less relevant somehow). Hell, one in 8 Americans collect food stamps (and one in four kids). We simply cannot take any more from working class Americans. It’s time for the investor class to start sharing the load.

A little editorial comment here…

War for political reasons is wrong when George Bush does it; if anything, it is more wrong when someone you trust takes us down the same path.

Obama has chosen to escalate the Afghanistan conflict by sending another 30,000 troops. Think about that a second… if you took every qualified young man out of Minneapolis (or Orlando, or Cincinnati, or Newark, or Sacramento, or Tuscon, etc.), and sent them to Afghanistan, you’d still fall short.

Sometimes numbers make things too easy. I remember graduating RPI; my class size was about 2,500 or so. At the time, the U.S. death toll in Iraq matched almost exactly.

It took hours for all the graduates to walk across the stage. You get the point…

So we’re doing this… only this time, we’re going to demand accountability. Pardon me while I throw up a little bit…

Hell, we can’t get accountability from the Bush administration. We can’t get accountability from Wall Street fraudsters. We can’t get accountability from Ben Bernanke or Tim Geithner… Ha. Even Tiger Woods walks….

But somehow we’re going to get accountability from Hamad Karzai and the Afghan government.

While we shower money on Hamad Karzai’s narco-trafficking brother.

Count me a skeptic.

Yesterday I spent most of the day on the Senate side (the House didn’t get in until 6:30 PM). Hot topics: Afghanistan and health care.

Videos soon…