Where are the pitchforks?

As the old saying goes, if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
I think it's hard to pay attention today when there are so many things being done to us, and by "us", I mean the poor, the elderly, the chronically ill, the  mentally ill, children, unions, voters,college students,  immigrants,the Middle Class, workers and small business owners.
Being done to us 24/7.
Being done to us so fast that the news media cannot keep up with the latest assaults, and we cannot digest them or react to them before the next one comes along.
All we can do is try to focus.
So let us focus now on our Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, the creation and puppet of big money donors, of corporations, the wealthy, the privatize-everything industry and especially of the natural gas industry.
Here are the highlights of what Corbett and his Republican legislature have done to us in the last year or so:
*Kicked 89,000 children off of the state's medical care program for the poor.
*Cut 68,000 adults off of the state's general assistance program that provides a miniscule $205 a month to the homeless, the chronically ill, mentally ill and addicted adults who have virtually no other source of income to help them survive other than begging on the streets and taking sandwiches from soup kitchens.
*Cut state funding by 20 percent for all state medical, mental health, addiction and child welfare programs.
*Reduced eligibility for unemployment benefits by 13 weeks, affecting 30,000 Pennsylvanians or one-tenth of those receiving unemployment.
*Savagely cut state funding to poor public schools two years in a row leaving the Philadelphia, Chester, York, Coatsville and many other school districts on the brink of complete bankruptcy.
*Instituted means testing for food stamps that will deprive poor people who have a couple thousand dollars in savings from being able to use the program.  Food stamps is about the only real welfare system left in this country since the 1996 federal law "changed welfare as we know it" by limiting cash assistance to families with children to five years.
*Slashed funding to the state's public universities and colleges at a time when students are drowning in debt and facing a doubling of the interest payments on their student loans, thanks to the Republicans in Congress who were willing to keep student loan rates down only at the expense of women's health programs.
*Absolutely refuses to raise taxes on the wealthy or to tax the natural gas industry more than a token amount even though it made $3.5 billion last year and continues to happily rape our state of one of its most valuable natural resources. Members of the natural gas industry contributed $2.5 million to Corbett's election campaign and the industry spends more than $1 million a year in lobbying Corbett and the legislature.

It's hard to choose which one of these assaults on the poor and helpless is the most egregious, I have to think it's the cuts to public schools because those cuts affect so many children whose futures are literally being snatched away from them, sending them into the same cycle of poverty, joblessness, crime and addiction that is already overwhelming us.
Last night I went out to dinner and my waitress was a special education teacher in the Chester Upland School District.
It was bad enough that she has to work two jobs to make ends meet, but she told me she had to buy her own printer, toner and paper in order to print out the Individual Education Plan for each of her students students that the state mandates be completed each a year.
"There is no paper," she said. "We have no paper."
And yet Corbett says, the school haven't raised property taxes enough.  They haven't used their "reserves."  what reserves?  Does he think we are fools?  
A lot of Pennsylvanians are suffering in silence and out of sight, and they will continue to suffer this year and next year and the next, while the rest of us seethe in an outrage we cannot find a way to express.
How long are we going to allow ourselves to be enslaved by those beholden to Grover Norquist and his insane idea that government can never raise taxes, ever, for any reason?
As Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "Taxes are good, they buy us civilization."  Our civilization is slipping away, one state, one child, one future at a time.
Where are the pitchforks?

Death of 'death panel' greatly exaggerated

Congressman Pat Meehan has found the "death panel" Sarah Palin claimed was in the Affordable Care Act back and he has struck a blow for freedom by voting to kill it dead, dead, dead!

I know this because Congressman Meehan called me personally to tell me about it a couple of weeks ago. Well, he didn't just call me, he held one of those telephone town halls. You know one of those things where you're sitting in your house minding your own business when out of the blue, you get a call and it's Meehan saying "I'm having a town hall right now, so listen up!"

So anyway, the really, really big thing he wanted to share was that he had voted to repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel created as part of the Affordable Care Act that will begin in 2015 to develop and submit proposals to slow the growth of Medicare and private healthcare spending.

The IPAB -- once it comes into existence --will be made up of 15 members, doctors, insurers and consumers, who will be confirmed by Congress and served for staggered six-year terms. Its job will be to step in and recommend savings needed to meet the Affordable Care Act's limits on the growth of Medicare spending if other cost-saving measures fail to work to keep Medicare growth down to a limit of 7 percent or less, the average rate of growth for the last decade. 

The IPAB may not make recommendations to ration health care, cut benefits, increase premiums or restrict eligibility for the Medicare program. It can draw on studies and pilot projects to develop cost-effective ways of slowing the cost of Medicare and other health spending instead of imposing across-the-board cuts in payments to providers or increases in beneficiaries' premiums.
It is, as its name suggests, an "advisory" panel that may not even be needed for some time as the increase in health care spending has been running at about 3 percent for the last couple of years.   Congress can override its recommendations, but it is not subject to the intense special interest lobbying that Congress falls prey to.

So after the congressman was done bragging about having voted to kill the IPAB, he then went on to talk a lot about he was how he was all about cutting government spending, saving us money, preserving our freedom, blah blah blah.

What he didn't tell us is that the provision to repeal the IPAB was ensconced in a bill called Protecting Access to Healthcare Act, whose main objective is to put a $250,000 cap on noneconomic, or pain-and-suffering, damages in medical malpractice cases nationwide.

The bill passed the house 223 to 181, pretty much along partisan lines.  It will now go to the U.S. Senate where it will die a quiet death, as it has for the last 15 years or so.  And if it doesn't, President Obama will veto it.
So the vote was pretty much symbolic, or even less than symbolic since it wasted a lot of the House's time that it could have been spending on meaningful legislating, but it gave Congressman Meehan something to brag about when he came home last week to meet with constituents, that is, raise money for his re-election.
He and his colleagues will tell you that he has voted to save Medicare.  He hasn't. 
Measures to cap noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases are really a bad idea, especially at the level of $250,000, which is already proven to be completely inadequate in California and Texas. It means that  if you are the victim of medical malpractice, chances are good you will not be able to find a lawyer to take your case.
Economic damages -- lost wages, medical expenses, home health care -- are what pay for your actual expenses if you are ever unfortunate enough to be a victim of medical malpractice.  Noneconomic damages are where lawyers get paid after they have put up tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in upfront costs to find and hire expert witnesses, take days of depositions, develop trial materials, file motions and in extreme cases (about 2 percent of all lawsuits) go to trial on your behalf.  Of course it would be nice if medical malpractice victims did not have to sue their doctors or hospitals, but they do and their lawyers have to get paid for those suits.
Conservatives think limiting non-economic damages keeps medical costs down by limiting your access to the courthouse door and this bill, should it ever get to be federal law, would do just that.  Actually, your access is already pretty limited as the courts are clogged with suits by businesses suing each other or consumers of every stripe suing businesses.  
What keeps health care costs down?  First of all, making insurance companies cover everyone and making everyone pay for coverage (the individual mandate), as well as practical measures to prevent health care providers from giving you the wrong medication or the wrong dosage, to prevent hospital-acquired infections, to prevent operating room accidents and to prevent health care providers from submitting false claims. 
The Independent Payment Advisory Board could be a big part of that if the Affordable Care Act survives the US Supreme Court and if the IPAB provision is needed.  If it is, it is projected to save taxpayers about $3 billion over the next 10 years with no reduction in Medicare services or coverage.
If the ACA does not survive, we will get vouchers that will lose value each year, instead of the guaranteed coverage that Medicare recipients now receive.  This will cost us each a lot more each year as we get older without any corresponding increase in the level of services.
So if Congressman Meehan really champions cuts to government spending and saving taxpayers money, why isn't he busy voting on legislation that is desperately needed to keep student loan costs low, to fund transportation projects to rebuild our roads and bridges, to cut the massive defense budget and to raise much needed revenues by making millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share of taxes? 
Why did he vote to repeal the IPAB?  And why is he so proud of it? 

The Delco Repubs take a cannon to a rabbit hunt

Did Democrats who made the effort to come out in the Democratic primary in the 162nd House Assembly District on Tuesday cast write-in votes for Republican Nick Micarelli because:

A)     They think he’s such a wonderful public servant he transcends party?

B)      Certain Democratic leaders disliked the Democratic write-in candidate, Ken Harper, so much they secretly ran a behind-the-scenes campaign for the Republican candidate?

C)      Voters didn’t realize that Miccarelli is a Republican and just accepted the first rubber stamp that the nice poll worker thrust into their hands?

Nick Miccarelli

D)     All of the above?

I think it’s “all of the above” and I think that’s horrible for our supposedly democratic (in the small “d” sense) form of government.

It was, after all, a primary election, which means each party chooses its nominee for each seat to run in the November general election, most decidedly not the other party's nominee.
Yet 709 supposed Democrats voted for Miccarelli as opposed to 337 Democrats for Harper, better than two to one.
 I could maybe understand it if it had even been close, but, no, not even then. So my question is why?
 Why did the Republicans go to so much effort to get Miccarelli nominated on both ballots when he didn’t stand a chance of losing in November as a Republican?   Is it just for the sake of a press release or TV ad (“nominated by both parties!”)?  Just to rub the Democrats’ noses in  their ineptitude?

Why did the Democratic Party turn against Harper when it couldn’t find a candidate to run in the 162nd District in the first place and when Harper spent his own money to run as  a write-in in a primary where he surely knew that even if he was nominated, he would be a sacrificial lamb?
I sort of get the Republicans: they saw their opportunity and they took it.
I do not get those 709 registered Democrats who happily took the Miccarelli stamp and went into the voting booth to vote for a Republican, even one they know and admire, in the Democratic primary.
If there are that many Republicans in Democratic clothing in just one House district, that many people who changed their registrations to screw over the Democrats when they had the only exciting races going on in their own primary election, that's truly amazing.
But if that many Democrats did make the effort to come out to the polls in what was a pretty unexciting primary on our side but truly did not know, or ask, if they were voting for a Republican, that's pretty dismaying.

I have been a resident of Delaware County for more than 30 years, every one of them a Democrat, and perhaps that is why I will never understand Delaware County politics.

Actually I’ve never understood Pennsylvania state politics either, as in, cross-over nominations and a 30-day deadline prior to the primary to change your party affiliation.  You do know they don’t have these restrictions and confusions in other states, don’t you?

Somebody in the know, click on the comment box below and tell me why the enormous effort for Miccarelli in a district where he is the sure winner one way or the other.  There must be a reason.  Somebody educate me.

You say 'hello,' we say, 'goodbye'

Kraft Foods, Wendy's McDonald's Coca-Cola, Intuit, PepsiCo, the Yum! Corp. (KFC and Taco Bell), the Gates Foundation and Blue Cross/Blue Shield -- what do these companies have in common?
Other than that most of them make food that is not very good for you, their common element is that they have all dropped their membership in ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, in recent months or weeks or days, or will be dropping their memberships as soon as they expire.  And for that I say, "Yay and here's hoping there are many, many more companies to follow!"
I have been waiting for an onslaught of newspapers and TV, the Mainstream Media, to trap ALEC in the spotlight like the cockroach that it is, to finally expose it for the powerful destroyer of the Middle class that it is, but, alas, except for a couple of editorials in the New York Times, I haven't seen it.

What I have seen are countless web sites and small magazines and progressive organizations and now, shareholder activists, applying enormous pressure to ALEC members, corporations that pay $25,000 to $50,000 annually for the privilege of writing right-wing legislation in state capitols across the country, to get out while the getting is good.
Quick primer: ALEC is 98 percent funded by corporations and corporate foundations who pay the aforementioned thousands of dollars in annual dues and 2 percent by (Republican) state legislators who pay $50 a year or so annual dues.  ALEC claims not to be a lobby.  It is even better than a lobby.  It drafts "model legislation" that it hands out to its legislative membersat annual or quarterly conferences to take back to their states and introduce with a few specifics added.
According to ALECexposed.org, it has drafted more than 800 such bills.  A whistle-blower leaked these 800 model bills last July and they are all posted on ALEC Exposed.  Go there to read lists of bills or individual bills, or even bill titles, to get the flavor of this very anti-democratic, very secretive organization.
ALEC claims to be strictly pro-business, but it is very anti-worker, very right-wing and not above pushing bills that benefit its members to the detriment of the rest of the country.
For example, anti-immigration bills (Arizona and Alabama -- the prison-industrial complex), anti public sector employee bills (Wisconsin), school privatization bills (Calif. -- the charter school industrial complex),  anti-union bills (Indiana, Ohio), expanded "castle" or stand your ground bills (Florida, Pa., Wisconsin -- the NRA), Voter ID laws (Virginia, Pa., 21 other states), drug testing of welfare applicants (the medical testing industrial complex) and anti-environmental bills (everywhere).
One site, colorofchange.org, which focuses on issues of interest to black Americans, has led the charge against ALEC ever since it became known that ALEC was behind the Stand Your Ground and Voter ID  legislation adopted in Florida and  dozens of other states.
That 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, was gunned down by a self-styled vigilante in Florida and that Voter ID laws disproportionately disenfranchise minority and Democratic voters are issues of interest to not only black web surfers but also to a great many of us of any ethnicity who believe in fairness, openness and democracy.
In addition to colorofchange.org, ALECexposed.org, ALECwatch.org, Mother Jones and The Nation magazines, Think Progress, the Huffington Post, Daily Kos,  People for the American Way, the Wildlife Defense Fund and a great many other progressive organizations, campaigns against ALEC are beginning to heat up in corporate boardrooms across the nation.
Activist shareholders are introducing proposals calling on corporations to issue annual reports disclosing their legislative and lobbying efforts.  These proposals are aimed directly at exposing ALEC.
UPS will have such as vote at its annual meeting in Wilmington, Del., May 3.  Of course, the corporations are advising their shareholders to vote against such proposals, but they always do try to deep-six such shareholder activism.
For a somewhat outdated list of major organizations that support ALEC big time, go to ALECwatch.org. They still include General Motors, State Farm Insurance, United Airlines, Exxon Mobil, Verizon, Bank of America, American Express, Geico and Boeing as far as I know.  
That the very big corporations listed at the start of this post are deeply embarrassed to be associated with ALEC is the good news.  Let's embarrass the rest.  

Yes, kiddies, the Titanic really sank

So here's a fun thing.  I don't know that it's a fun fact, but it's a fun thing.  There were, apparently 10 or 15 or several thousand people -- I'm going to assume young people -- who were on Twitter yesterday tweeting each other that "Wow, I didn't know the sinking of the Titanic was a real event, I just thought it was a movie!"
The 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is this weekend,  April14-15.  More than 1,500 people died.  You can see the graves of many of them if you are ever in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
I hope this was a silly  joke gone viral and not the ignorance of however many umpteen people being spread around the Internet, but you never know.
I do know that if I were not sure that something had really happened, and I was a young, technologically knowledgeable person, I might just Google that event before excitedly jumping into hyperspace to gleefully admit that I never knew it happened, especially something that really, really killed people.
The image above is a picture of the REAL bow of the Titanic resting miles down on the ocean floor, the same bow that was depicted in the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio pretending to be king of the world. 
Jeez how could you not know that Titanic director James Cameron  has made several dives to survey the actual wreckage of the ship?
How could you not know that Titanic is, in fact, lying there on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, that it has been extensively filmed and photographed, that it has been the subject of countless TV specials, that the artifacts recovered from the wreckage are currently up for a multi-multi-million dollar auction, that descendants of Titanic victims and survivors are at this moment on a cruise retracing its path?  Really? You didn't know any of that?
There were many famous people on board the Titanic.  I won't list them here, but here's a famous survivor on whom another movie and Broadway play were based: "The Unsinkable Molly Brown,." a great pioneer woman and suffragette. Visit her home if you are ever in Denver, Colo.
So here's a few other things you might want to look up before declaring, Lawdy me, I never knew that happened: The 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia (thousands dead and Philadelphia lost its chance to be the capital of the United States), the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986 -- anywhere from 4,000 to who knows how many dead -- people still dying from cancers caused by the meltdown).
The Bophal, India, gas disaster (1984 -- 3,700 dead in one day and thousands of others still dying from the chemical contamination), the Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston (1942 -- 452 dead), the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (1911 -- 146 dead), The Station nightclub fire (East Warwick, R.I., 2003 -- 100 dead), The Ringling Brothers Circus fire, Hartford, Conn. (1944 -- 141 dead, one child's body still unidentified), the Hindenburg explosion (1937-- 36 dead) ... well I could go on and on and on.
But here's something to know -- or learn -- about these horrific disasters; usually something good came out of them so that fewer such disasters happen today.  
Better ship safety and communications systems, safer shipping routes, municipal health departments and water works, scientific research into the causes of disease, stricter building codes, the use of non-explosive helium to inflate balloons and lots of well-marked exits wherever large groups of people gather.
And if you ever hear a circus band play the "Stars and Stripes Forever" march, run for your life!.  Okay, do I have to tell you Stars and Stripes was a code to tell circus folk that something was terribly wrong?
Also, yes it is a good thing for governments to set high standards for regulating nuclear and chemical plants even if it costs those industries and its consumers something to be safe.
 "War of the Worlds," "Clash of the Titans," "Raiders of the Lost Ark"  -- these "events" didn't really happen.
Just so you know. 

What does Justice Kennedy think? Bam! Pow!

JUSTICE KENNEDY:  And the government tells us that's because the insurance market is unique.  And in the next case, it'll say the next market is unique.  But I think it is true that if most questions of life are matters of degree, in the insurance and healthcare world, both markets – – stipulate two markets – – the young person who is uninsured is uniquely proximately very close to affecting the rates of insurance and the cost of providing medical care in a way that is not true in other industries. That's my concern in the case.
          -- Page 104 of 133, transcript of Tuesday's oral argument in Department of Health and Human Services et al. v. Florida et al.
BAM! POW!
This is US Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy hinting that he thinks uninsured healthy young people may, possibly, could come awfully close to affecting interstate commerce.   And if he thinks that something affects interstate commerce, he most assuredly thinks that something can be regulated by Congress.  As I said, Bam! Pow!  It's all over but the writing up of the excruciatingly boring legal opinions to support it and oppose it.
By the way, I read all 133 pages of the transcript of today's oral arguments so you don't have to, but it's linked above if you want to.
The arguments were tough going for the government with justices on both sides, including Kennedy, raising serious questions about how the far government can go in regulating commerce, even  if it means forcing you to exercise, buy broccoli or arrange your own funeral.
But this one comment by Justice Kennedy may be all you need to know about the three days of oral arguments under way in the U.S. Supreme Court about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. The whole issue may very well come down to this one 76-year-old man's opinion.
We're not supposed to infer anything from the questions asked at oral arguments as we could be horribly wrong.  Too true.  I will infer away anyway.
The four "liberal" justices were plainly searching for arguments to justify upholding the individual mandate.  At least one of the four "conservative" justices, Samuel Alito, will overturn it.  Anton Scalia seems to be leaning in the same direction and Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to be pretty skeptical as well.  Of course, as usual Justice Clarence Thomas asked no questions and it is not clear whether he was even awake.
(If it's a 5-4 decision to uphold, Justice Roberts may cross over and make it 6-3 so he can write the majority opinion -- eye on the history books or whatever.)
The whole argument seemed to come down to the question of whether Congress can force those who are not in the market – – in this case healthy young people – – to enter that market before they will have need of health insurance.  Even a lot of the argument on the opposing side seem to raise the question of when, not whether Congress can force people to buy health insurance.
Can it be long before they need it?  Which would lower the health insurance rates for everybody else but force them to buy a product that they do not yet need.  Or can it only be at the point when they enter the health care market, such as when they show up in an emergency room?  At which point health insurance would be prohibitively expensive for them and we would end up paying for it anyway like we do now.
Or, could we just throw them out on their motorcycle-crushed heads and let them die in the street, as some conservatives seem to favor?  As one justice noted, the provision of health care does seem to be a well-established social policy in this country, no matter who ends up paying for it.
Because the court is hearing the issue now, it must issue a decision on the ACA (it's okay to say Obamacare, he owns it) on or before June 30.
Whether the court will make a well-reasoned legal decision (the pro-Obamacare side) or a crazy political one (the right wing nut side), its opinion will have a profound effect on the presidential election.
If the ACA is upheld, that will galvanize the far right base of the Republican Party.  If it is overturned that will energize the left-wing base of the Democratic Party.
I'm sort of secretly hoping for that.  Many on the left, including myself, don't like the idea that the ACA is subsidizing the private, for-profit health insurance industry by forcing people to purchase its products and we don't like  the idea that anybody, except maybe doctors, actually make a profit off illness and death.   We would prefer a single-payer system or, if you will, a real "government takeover" of the health care system, like every other civilized, developed nation in  the world.  Yeah, that's the (socialist) ticket! 
So if the ACA is overturned, I think many of us can live with that, and Congress can find other ways to pay for health care, but only if we re-elect President Obama and do not give both houses of Congress a Republican majority.   If we do that, we can kiss Medicare, Social Security and all of the gains of the 20th century goodbye. 
Just something to think about, all you young, healthy people out there.

Sorry about your jobs, it's just business

Get your cheap oil right here.  Midwest refineries booming.  East Coast, not so much.

Whoever thought that freeing ourselves from foreign oil -- if you don't count Canada -- would be a bad thing? Turns out, it is.
I went to Rep. Pat Meehan's big hearing on the closing of the Delaware River refineries this morning and while the testimony of the four witnesses, two oil industry spokesmen and two government analysts, was anything but clear, here's my take-away:

• The country is awash in oil, particularly from Canada and North Dakota. The problem is, there is no way to get it from there to here, other than a few rail cars.  No ports up there, you know, although the Great Lakes are not that far away.
• Prices are sky high again (though still only half the $8 a gallon Europeans are paying) because supply is way up and demand is down.  This is, of course, the complete opposite of how the law of supply and demand works in the real world, as U.S. Rep. John Carney (D-Del.) tried in vain to point out at the hearing, but never mind.
• We need the Keystone XL pipeline so we can get the oil down to Texas refineries where we can refine it and/or sell it abroad.  This will not help the 36,000 people who are going to lose jobs, homes and businesses here in Delaware County one tiny bit, but it will sure as hell help the global oil industry, which in turn will help our economy, etc., etc., and so forth..
• The problem with the Delaware River refineries (and the Hovensa refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands) is that they've been refining very, very expensive sweet crude oil shipped in from Europe and Africa.
• Whoopee, we don't have to do that any more because we have all that oil flowing south down the middle of the country.  
• There is a role for maybe one of our three Delaware River refineries to play in the future, as terminals to receive the refined oil from the Midwest to distribute here, just as Sunoco's newly reopened Eagle Point refinery terminal, will do.  
• Obama is to blame. That goes without saying.  Well so are all our presidents going back to Nixon, who created the EPA, and those senators and congressmen who enacted the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water act and forced the auto industry to develop high-mileage cars and those cornbelt pols who subsidized ethanol and the tree-huggers who made Detroit invent reinvent electric cars.
• The Republicans are to blame too, with all that "drill, baby, drill" stuff, or, as it turns out, "frack, baby, frack."  We have been freed from foreign oil as we now get less than 50 percent of our energy needs from elsewhere.
• The oil industry is a "resilient" industry, a "flexible" industry, a "highly competitive" industry, but apparently our local refineries were not resilient enough or flexible enough to expand, repair their infrastructure and save themselves from destruction.   
• But don't worry, the oil industry will make sure we get gasoline, diesel and home heating oil here on the East Coast, even if it ends up being refined in India and we have to pay far for it than those lucky Midwesterners.  
• Our U.S. environmental laws are too darn strict and after all, the industry has already cleaned up it's act (thanks to those laws), and India doesn't have the same standards and .... and ....

Well you get the idea.  If you don't, here are the statements of three of the speakers at this morning's hearing.   Howard Gruenspecht, U.S. Department of Energy, Charles T. Drevna, Charles T. Drevna, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and Robert Greco, Downstream and Industry Operations
American Petroleum Institute.  Read them for yourselves.
The fourth speaker, Brandon Wales of the Department of Homeland Security didn't post his remarks but I can tell you, nobody at the hearing seemed much worried about terrorists disrupting our oil pipelines, except Pat Meehan.