[This is a transcript of the President's speech this afternoon.]

Good afternoon. I want to start by thanking a few of the folks who’ve joined us today. We’ve got the mayor of Osawatomie, Phil Dudley; your superintendent, Gary French; the principal of Osawatomie High, Doug Chisam. And I’ve brought your former governor, who’s now doing an outstanding job as our Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius.

It is great to be back in the state of Kansas. As many of you know, I’ve got roots here. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Obamas of Osawatomie. Actually, I like to say that I got my name from my father, but I got my accent – and my values – from my mother. She was born in Wichita. Her mother grew up in Augusta. And her father was from El Dorado. So my Kansas roots run deep.

My grandparents served during World War II — he as a soldier in Patton’s Army, she as a worker on a bomber assembly line. Together, they shared the optimism of a nation that triumphed over a Depression and fascism. They believed in an America where hard work paid off, responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried — no matter who you were, where you came from, or how you started out.

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The Los Angeles Times has an op ed by a woman who had been an Obama supporter in 2008 but who turned into an Obama basher later because he betrayed the middle class and all. She even changed her Obama bumper sticker from “hope” to “nope.” But then she changed her mind again.

Why? She was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she has no insurance. But then she found out she could get insurance through the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan.

It’s part of President Obama’s healthcare plan, one of the things that has already kicked in, and it guarantees access to insurance for U.S. citizens with preexisting conditions who have been uninsured for at least six months. The application was short, the premiums are affordable, and I have found the people who work in the administration office to be quite compassionate (nothing like the people I have dealt with over the years at other insurance companies.) It’s not perfect, of course, and it still leaves many people in need out in the cold. But it’s a start, and for me it’s been a lifesaver — perhaps literally.

I didn’t even know about the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan, which is separate and usually less expensive than the high-risk pool plan, which I did know about. The PCIP will be phased out once the Affordable Care Act goes into total effect in 2014,

The PCIPs can be administered by states, but if the state doesn’t want to mess with it the feds will administer it for them within that state. Interestingly, on the whole “red” states seem more inclined to just let the feds do it than “blue” ones.

Not everyone will be able to afford PCIP insurance, but it will be of help to some people, like the woman who wrote the op ed. In other words, it’s better than nothing. A lot of progressives continue to fail to understand that by holding out for single payer or the public option or whatever else they wanted that had no chance in hell of passing even in 2010, never mind now, they were choosing nothing.

Elsewhere, a Brit visiting New York — to take part in the OWS demonstrations — was bitten by a brown recluse spider and thereby gained firsthand experience with the U.S. healthcare system. Fortunately for her, she had travel insurance that seems to have paid for most of her care. She was treated at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, which I understand to be a better than average hospital. But she says, she perceived how “the stranglehold of American private healthcare keeps ordinary people cowed and compliant in the land of the notionally free.”

I do have a quibble with her article. “President Obama’s attempt to reform the system in 2009 roundly failed to remove healthcare as a source of perennial anxiety for most American citizens, or to lighten the dead hand of the market on medical provision in the US.” She doesn’t seem to understand that most of it hasn’t gone into effect yet, although I’d bet money that most OWSers don’t understand what’s in the ACA, either, other than it lacks a public option.

Finally — a few days ago some of you were commenting on Rick Ungar’s article in Forbes about how the ACA’s hitherto little-known regulations of insurance companies’ medical loss ratio would drive insurance companies out of business and usher in the dawn of a national single payer system. Unfortunately, as Sarah Kliff explains, the regulations will not drive insurance companies out of business. It might shave a little off their profits, but they’ll still make profits.

Republicans like to frame their “school choice” proposals as something that would benefit the working class and poor. But like most Republican policy proposals, it’s a scam to benefit the upper classes at the expense of the poor and enrich a private insurance industry.

Natalie Hopkinson writes,

IF you want to see the direction that education reform is taking the country, pay a visit to my leafy, majority-black neighborhood in Washington. While we have lived in the same house since our 11-year-old son was born, he’s been assigned to three different elementary schools as one after the other has been shuttered. Now it’s time for middle school, and there’s been no neighborhood option available.

Meanwhile, across Rock Creek Park in a wealthy, majority-white community, there is a sparkling new neighborhood middle school, with rugby, fencing, an international baccalaureate curriculum and all the other amenities that make people pay top dollar to live there.

Such inequities are the perverse result of a “reform” process intended to bring choice and accountability to the school system. Instead, it has destroyed community-based education for working-class families, even as it has funneled resources toward a few better-off, exclusive, institutions.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

Polls show Newt taking the lead in Iowa polls, with Ron Paul moving up into second and Mittens dropping to third. Nate Silver says (with a number of caveats),

If I were setting odds as of this morning, I might assign Mr. Gingrich about a 45 or 50 percent chance of winning Iowa, followed by Mr. Paul at 25 percent and Mr. Romney at 15 percent, reserving a small possibility of a comeback by Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry.

Conventional wisdom says Newt’s campaign organization is a mess, however. Mittens has the muscle on the ground.

But Paul Krugman writes,

Mr. Gingrich has some advantages none of the previous challengers had. He is by no means the deep thinker he imagines himself to be, but he’s a glib speaker, even when he has no idea what he’s talking about. And my sense is that he’s also very good at doublethink — that even when he knows what he’s saying isn’t true, he manages to believe it while he’s saying it. So he may not implode like his predecessors.

I have to say, this warms my heart — President Obama will speak in Osawatomie, Kansas, on Tuesday. Osawatomie is where Theodore Roosevelt delivered his great New Nationalism speech to a group of Civil War veterans in 1910.

“Just over one hundred years ago, President Teddy Roosevelt came to Osawatomie, Kansas and called for a New Nationalism, where everyone gets a fair chance, a square deal, and an equal opportunity to succeed,” the White House release states.

“The President will talk about how he sees this as a make-or-break moment for the middle class and all those working to join it. He’ll lay out the choice we face between a country in which too few do well while too many struggle to get by, and one where we’re all in it together – where everyone engages in fair play, everyone does their fair share, and everyone gets a fair shot,” it states.

Teddy would agree.

Continuing the Survivor metaphor from the last post — Herman Cain just voted himself off the island.

Although it’s possible he believes he has a shot at the nomination, my suspicions are that Jon Huntsman’s ambitions aren’t so much about the White House as about the future direction of the Republican Party.

The GOP pendulum may have swung about as far as it can swing on the crazy/not crazy scale. Its descent into clown show lunacy reached new depths this week at the news that Donald Trump would moderate a GOP debate. Truly, the next step down would have been to sign the candidates up as contestants on Survivor: South Pacific. (Or even better, Survivor: The Bronx. Turn ‘em loose at the Grand Concourse with no cars, cell phones, cash, IDs or credit cards. I’d watch.) Of course, they could still opt to skip the debates and just slug it out in a virtual gladiator game.

The GOP establishment is probably hoping against hope they can keep the nomination up in the air long enough to pick Anybody Else in a brokered convention. I can’t think of anyone the establishment would choose who would be an improvement, though. Their idea of a great candidate is Haley Barbour.

Anyway — Nothing remains static for long, The only way the Republican Party can sustain itself on its current trajectory would be a complete takeover of government by K Street and the .01 percent — some would argue this has already happened — followed by a general clamping down of all civil and voter rights — we’re well on the way there, too. That way the Galatian Overlords can rule openly, with impunity, and not even have to go through the motions of winning public favor. And then they would have no more need for the clowns.

I’m speculating that Huntsman thinks the Republican Party has got to start clawing its way back to sanity, sooner or later, and he’s positioning himself to take a leadership role in that process. And I wish him sincere good luck with that.

Meanwhile, mistermix writes,

As Benen and others point out, white lower-middle class males are not a monolithic block, and plenty of them can separate rhetoric from the economic realities of their situation. No Democrat has been trying to replace Medicare with a voucher or invest their Social Security in the stock market, and lots of lower-middle class white males know that. But what about the others—those who will vote for Republican against their economic interests to further some other ill-defined interest? What even motivates these voters?

A social theorist, or a think tank researcher, would have a number of explanations centering around tribalism, false consciousness and perhaps a wee bit of racism. I don’t have any of those credentials, so I’ve got no theories, but I do get the distinct impression that chasing after any group of voters whose main motivation is essentially irrational is a pointless exercise if there’s any alternative.

I learned a long time ago that you cannot appease crazy people with rationality. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having to deal with someone who is genuinely mis-wired — someone in the workplace or your family, so you couldn’t just walk away — you learne that the only way to interact with them is to meet them somewhere in Crazyland.

For example, if your Aunt believes she is Queen Elizabeth I, and you want her to climb down off the roof, you will probably resort to telling her that Sir Walter Raleigh has arrived and requests an audience. And really, it’s no different with somebody who is neurotic or paranoid or psychopathic; you don’t deal with the person, you interface with the pathology.

So some years ago the GOP decided the cheap and easy way to dominate politics was to cultivate crazy and appeal to worst instincts. So now they’re locked into campaigning in Crazyland, because that’s where their base is. And the result is that their nomination process has turned into a clown show.

And it really isn’t sustainable. I’m not saying the GOP will implode next week; there’s enough money behind it to keep it on life support for a long time. As a political front for special interests, some parts of it probably will keep going for many years, no matter what. But it also wouldn’t surprise me to see it make some kind of massive shift, eventually; either to break apart or to rebuild itself as a serious political party.

Yeah, the quote Junior Bush couldn’t get right. Kay at Balloon Juice writes that Indiana is still busting unions relentlessly. after taking down the public sector unions, Mitch Daniels and the legislature have been pushing right-to-work laws to bust the private sector unions. And the song and dance is that busting unions will attract business to Indiana and grow jobs and increase wages, blah blah blah.

That was what they said about dismantling rights of the public sector unions also. There’s no evidence that it worked.

I’d say an unintended consequence of racial (as in white) preference is that a second-rate hack like George Will gets a job writing for the Washington Post

For 33 years, the court has been entangled in a thicket of preferences that are not remedial and hence not temporary. Preferences as recompense for past discrimination must eventually become implausible, but the diversity rationale for preferences never expires.

I’d say that the diversity rationale for preferences is justified as long as the non-diversity rationale for preferences that keeps Will in his privileged position is still operative.

Face it, Will, if this were a meritocracy, you’d be lucky to be selling insurance someplace.

Moonbat already pointed this out in comments, but do see “How Republicans Are Being Taught to Talk about Occupy Wall Street.” Of course, the head should say “how to lie about Occupy Wall Street.”

And then there are the lies people tell themselves. In “Three Inconvenient Truths About Occupy Wall Street,” Nick Schulz of the American Enterprise Institute is not really addressing OWS. He is reassuring the 1 percent that they don’t have anything to feel guilty about. See also Zandar, “Apparently The Cause Of Income Inequality Is Poor People Existing.”

On the other hand, Nicholas Kristof writes that at least one banker has admitted his (and his industry’s) guilt.

I find it fascinating that the Wall Street Journal published an op ed by Andy Stern saying that the free-market economic model is being thrown onto the trash heap of history. Stern says while we cling to our economic myths and fables of the past, China is building the economy of the future. But you know the only reason WSJ published that article is so they can call Stern a Communist.

Good CEOs don’t necessarily make good governors, but bad CEOs are even worse. Rick Scott of Florida has decided one way to save the state money is requiring college students born in Florida to pay out-of-state tuition unless they can document their parents are legal residents. He don’t need no steenking 14th Amendment, apparently.

Finally, don’t miss Gene Lyons, “Politics Makes People Stupid.”