According to Singer, the leading lights of the right-leaning blogosphere are setting up some sort of professional news service. And believe you me, Matt's not the only one anxiously awaiting dispatches from the Iraq correspondent stationed in Toledo, Ohio. More exciting yet will be the Social Security expert who spends half the year on Chile's website and the political columnist reporting directly from Peggy Noonan's hypothalamus. That sound you hear? That's the AP's knees knocking...

You should really read Henry Farrell's post on our unpleasant, barely-even-denied practice of shipping prisoners off to Uzbekistan, land of boiling body parts and forcibly removed toenails. Our actions are a travesty and our government's unwillingness, indeed, straight dishonesty, when confronted with hard evidence of its actions simply underscores the total contempt the Bush administration holds its subjects -- and I use the word advisedly -- in.

David Sirota's wholly right. Now that Bernie Sanders has scared Vt. Gov. Jim Douglas from the race and proven himself able to raise funds, there's no comprehensible reason for Democrats not to unite behind him. I recognize that he's an independent, but he's our independent, and as a lone wolf is able to tackle progressive issues and Republican misdeeds that our party, for reasons of legitimacy and comity, can't. That makes him a huge asset for Democrats who occasionally need a uber-progressive attack dog but don't have anyone willing to do it themselves.

If the party is concerned about the precedent of supporting an independent, they can simply pull out because he's "too strong to beat" and it's not worth wasting money trying to stop Bernie's juggernaut. That'll not only give them an exit strategy, but it'll also make Sanders look unstoppable, and help ensure no serious Republican dares waste his political capital on the seat.

In one of the sicker incarnations of the Christian Right's myopia, they're gearing up to oppose a new vaccine that could protect women from HPV, the virus that causes most instances of cervical cancer. HPV, of course, is often spread through sex, so the God Squad is worried that giving children a vaccination will, years later, be interpreted as a divine "alrighty-then" to lead a life packed with penises. This appears to be what Christ's legacy has come to: the prioritization of abstinence over life.

That's what should be taken away from these comments. Bush likes to conceal his stance on abortion through the inegnious "culture of life" formulation. But these people don't really want a culture of life. Their overriding objective is not protecting women from AIDS and HPV and cervical cancer and potentially deadly childbirth (as in partial-birth abortions) and other potential killers, it's stopping them for having premarital sex. And if a few -- hell, if a lot! -- have to die to make that future manifest, then so be it. So next time you hear someone spout off about the "culture of life", don't be fooled -- this is a culture of puritanism and subjugation, nothing more, nothing less. A culture of life, you can tell them, doesn't kill.

Speaking of Coupling, which I did in the post below, I'm a bit confused. Now that I've watched most of the second season, what the hell happened to the cliffhanger from the first? You know, the one where Susan breaks up with Steve and then appears in his room demanding he propose? The second season acts like it never happened. Or am I missing something?

I'll never understand folks who alphabetize their books. It's not that I don't appreciate the idea of imposing some order on the ever-encroaching floor-monster that is my library, but the method seems so very off. I acquire books at an enormously alarming rate. You think I'm joking, I'm not -- the government has retained a team of highly trained specialists to monitor, study, and reach conclusions based solely on my rate of literary acquisition. One of them had a nervous breakdown, the other two got divorces. It's really quite scary.

Because of my Amazon addiction and my dorm room's lack of bookshelves, my storage system is a bit off. My dorm overflows with tomes. I've taken over all the bookshelves in the main room, filled a closet, littered the floor, stacked my dresser, and generally replaced my roommates with paperbacks. The trunk of my car -- a hatchback, no less -- is layered three deep with books, a bit of unfinished business left over from when I moved out of Santa Cruz last June. My room at home also sports towering stacks of books, in addition to a few unpacked boxes where the lesser-known and seldomly viewed titles live.

The point is that I get a lot of new books. And I'm quite excited, when I have a non-dorm living space next year, to lovingly place each and every one onto the rows of bookshelves that'll turn my flat -- can I call it that if I'm not British? What if I was just watching Coupling? -- into some sort of urban, literate, labyrinth garden. And yes, I hope to have some sort of classification system. Maybe broad categories or something. But alphabetical? It'd never work. Assuming that every shelf save the last will be full of books, I'd never be able to buy anything that didn't begin with Z. Otherwise, I'd have to shift the last book in each shelf down to the next, all the way through to the end of my collection. To be clear, what happens if I buy an M? The M shelf is already full, so I have to move a book out of that shelf. But the next shelf is full too, so I have to place the just-moved book at the front (alphabetical order, after all), and then move that shelf's ending book down a level, and so on. It just wouldn't work, it can't.

Can it?

Spencer Ackerman, in an article laying out Rumsfeld's renewed focus on military transformation, writes:

But what the arrival of the new senior leadership at the Pentagon indicates is that the Pentagon's first-term focus on winning ideological and bureaucratic battles about control over foreign policy is largely over. This time around, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is turning his attention to the priority that brought him back to the Pentagon in 2001--military transformation--and the new team at DOD is designed to help him do it.

Or was it turned for him? Rumsfeld's catastrophic first term didn't result in dismissal, but it seems to have ended in a sort of castration. Even though he easily overtook Powell's State Department, it looks like the Pentagon's time as the primary force behind Bush's vision has ended, and Rice's State Department is now where the action's at.

That's reflected in the personnel changes in both departments. The 2004 staff shuffle has not only ripped some of Rumsfeld's most crucial incompetents (Feith, Wolfowitz) away from him, but State took on both Rice and Bush's long-time grand vizier, Karen Hughes, while dropping the ever distrusted Powell. That's certainly a net gain for the diplomats. And beyond that, the high profile statements and big moves have been coming, lately, from Rice, not Rumsfeld.

So maybe we should be glad that Rummy's turning back to his original mission of fiddling with the military. The Joint Chiefs are more than powerful enough to keep him from doing any serious damage, and the more time he spends trying to upend that bureaucracy, the less time the Bush administration spends planning for new overseas adventures. This is, after all, what we've long hoped for -- Bush's democracy promotion coming by diplomatic plane rather than paratrooper.

Clarification: I'm not actually against Rumsfeld's proposed military transformations. Some of them are quite necessary. At the same time, a fair number seem ill-suited for the job Bush seems to have foisted on us: that of nation-builders and peacekeepers. In any case, I assume some will succeed and the worst will fail, the point of the post is that Rumsfeld's attention is now inward, on the military, rather than outward, on unsuspecting nations.

The new issue of Foreign Policy has a blurb on the increasing anti-Americanism of South Korea's textbooks. To demonstrate, they offered up this question from a teacher's packet on the 1991 Gulf War:

"Which of the following descriptions of Iraq after the Gulf War is incorrect?

1) Infant mortality increased by 150%, and in some areas, 70% of newborns had leukemia due to sanctions.

2) The United States and Britain conducted a bombing campaign against Iraq for 11 years after the war, causing terror among the Iraqi people.

3) Cancer among Iraqi children increased by 700% because of depleted uranium left from the bombing.

4) The infant mortality rate of Iraqi children in 1999 was 300% higher than it was a decade earlier.

5) Not one Iraqi starved to death after the war because of the extensive food relief program."

In case you were wondering, the correct choice -- meaning it's false and the others are true -- is 5. This is what's making it into the textbooks of our allies. I really can't imagine what our enemies are reading about us.

The Oil Drum gets it right:

Simplistically there are two approaches a government can take to a crisis. They can do something about it, or they can do nothing. Back in the days of President Carter the nation tried the first approach when faced with an energy crisis, this time we are trying the second.

For a detailed analysis of why that is, check Michael O'Hare's analysis of Bush's energy proposals. The basic problem is that Bush is abandoning energy reform to the free market, which really isn't going to do the trick. The idea that we can simply drill our way to safety is flat insane, and here's why: No expert believes ANWR, or anywhere else in America, will provide the sort of superwell capacity that'd free us from foreign oil. It just won't happen. That means we've got to discover more foreign oil, even though discoveries are falling, the size of the discovered wells are falling, and many of the sites we currently rely on are slowing their production.

But let's bracket all that for a minute. New oil discoveries don't just need to sustain our mostly flat consumption -- they need to feed the growth of China and India. China, for their part, is using 850,000 more barrels per day. That means, every morning, China's need for oil is 850,000 barrels higher than it was the day before. So while we're trying to supply ourselves with petroleum in a world where discoveries are drying up and production is dropping, China is demanding an absolutely staggering, and ever-growing, amount of crude.

And this isn't just an energy issue, China's needs have serious, and seriously problematic, geopolitical consequences. Because they have to get more fuel, and because most suppliers are tied up meeting our demand, China's having to cozy up to providers who we've left alone, which means countries we've tried to economically isolate. So Iran is now a major trading partner and a key source of China's oil and natural gas. That means Iran now has a non-EU customer that allows them to blunt the economic pressure Europe and America can apply, making our efforts to kill their nuclear program essentially hopeless. Not only that, but China's got a security council veto, which has not only found itself working in Tehran's favor, but also in Sudan's, another important source of China's fuel imports.

Bush's efforts don't move us off oil, they just pretend we can find more. We can't. And even if we did, it wouldn't be enough. There's too much demand emerging for a resource whose supplies are falling -- the economics don't work out. So what we're doing, in the final summation, is essentially nothing. We're hoping things change, or that the market does the work on its own. But the market can't go drop because China and India ensure demand is going to continue skyrocketing. The only sane option is to try and reduce our oil usage, thus freeing up more stable providers for China; and to try creating technologies that can help both us and developing nations exit the oil era. Simply doing nothing, alternatively, is a very, very, bad strategy.

Update: By the way, want to know the easiest test around for judging the seriousness of an energy plan? Watch for whether or not it mentions an increase CAFE standards. If it doesn't, you have another "let the market do its magic" piece of politician pabulum. Bush's didn't.

I think Jon Henke misses a little something amidst his total confusion over Democratic distaste for Bush's attempts to turn Social Security into a welfare program. Democrats don't want everything to be a welfare program. In fact, we don't want anything save welfare to be a welfare program. We like safety nets. That's why we don't just want Medicaid, we want guaranteed health insurance for everyone. That's why we don't want Social Security for the poor, we want it for the population. There's no great appeal in separating the poor from the rich through government programs -- it both demeans the poor and implicitly argues that government's only use is to care for those unable to do it themselves.

So if Democrats are dismissing ideas to turn a general safety net into an entitlement for the old and impoverished, don't act so surprised. Social Security, to us, is exactly what a government program should look like: a floor provided to and paid for by every American. Making it a welfare program is a step in the wrong direction.

Go read Jon Chait's brutal takedown of the Wall Street Journal. Nice to see him using his LA Times op-ed to land some blows.

This Times article on the economy's lower-than-expected growth raises the specter of stagflation. Since the S word has been popping up in a variety of places lately, I think it might be worth a quick definition, as I sure as hell didn't know what it meant a year ago.

Stagflation occurs when the economy has high inflation combined with economic stagnation, unemployment, or recession. So the basic force at work is that prices, through inflation, are rising, but buying power isn't, either because folks don't have jobs, we're in a recession, or the economy's standing still.

It's thought to occur when the economy suffers a nasty shock (i.e, a jump in the price of oil) that the central bank is unable to effectively counter. Often times, there really isn't an effective counter, as hiking interest rates (as the Fed is scheduled to do next week) in order to calm inflation slows down an already too-slow economy, while doing the opposite speeds economic growth but also accelerates inflation. Tough stuff.

As for whether or not we're actually entering another period of stagflation, you'll have to ask some of the economists in the blogosphere -- it seems unclear. The question, in large part, is whether or not oil prices have as severe an effect on the economy as they're reputed to (James Surowiecki, for instance, has a piece in this week's New Yorker arguing that they don't) and whether or not they're going to drop back down in the near future. As a bit of a pessimist on the subject, I think we're in for a bumpy ride (and high gas prices), but I could be -- and hope I am -- wrong.

Looks like the EU's talks with Iran are failing in a big way, with the Islamic Republic threatening to stalk off and restart uranium enrichment a bit later this week. The article's a bit vague on what's killing them -- likely as not, that information simply isn't known -- but my guess is that there's simply not a lot the EU can offer Iran that they're not already giving them.

It's really a tough spot for those trying to stall Iran's weapon programs. Europe, theoretically, could apply serious sanctions and really pressure Iran into sitting at the table and hammering out a deal. But they won't. Worse, Iran's long-term trade prospects are brighter than their short-term ones, as their huge stores of natural gas (Iran and Russia have the most natural gas in the world, more than half the known total) are going to be in demand no matter how much of a pariah we judge them. China and India, frankly, don't much care how we feel towards Iran.

As far as the options go, this may mean that, pace Justin Logan, the only thing to do is learn to live with a nuclear Iran. Awhile back, I spoke to a disarmament expert who argued that there were two directions to go in when trying to control nukes -- nonproliferation and super-proliferation. The former no longer works well, as too many other countries have nukes for the states left behind to accept their lot in life. The latter's more interesting, it basically argues that we should help countries that're going nuclear do so in a safe way, which means building facilities that won't breach, security systems so the bomb can't be stolen, etc. That way, their weapons are less likely to disappear during times of unrest or revolution, and their relationship with America is less oppositional. Assuming that Iran is going to have one of these suckers sooner than later, helping them down that path -- and trying to improve our relationship with them as we do it -- may be our best bet.

I was playing video games, so I just got the James Joyner recap. What'd you guys think?

Derek Rose is right, by the way. Blogs will never replace newspapers*. Newspapers will never give up wood pulp for megabits. My girlfriend is in a serious relationship with a blogger**, reads a fair number of other sites, and gets the paper's headlines in her inbox every day. And despite all that, she'll never give up the paper version. Nor would I. Nor would anyone I know. Tangible reading materials have a comfort, convenience, and charm all their own, and the simple existence of an alternative won't change that.

Will there be more integration between print and the web? Sure 'nuff. But the hysterical, off-the-cuff eulogies Jeff Jarvis is always providing for print media are nothing more than the ravings of a technoguru. Radio's still around, TV's hanging out, books are still printed, and the net's not gonna change all that. It may force some adaptation, but not change.

* And none of this even addresses how dependent blogs are on newspapers. Without them we'd have nothing to report and no one to critique -- it'd be the end of us.

** Me, or so I've been led to believe...

Great post by Matt on parental notification laws. Like Kevin Drum, who he's responding to, I had mixed feelings on the issue, but then my girlfriend unmixed them using almost exactly the same line of reasoning Matt utilizes here. So go get demixed.

I think Kevin Drum gets it mostly right on the Michael Walzer piece:

To a large extent, despite the triumphalism of the right, liberalism has won most of the big debates in this country. Sure, we've only gotten 80% or 90% of what we set out to get half a century ago, but it's hard to bring a lot of passion to the fight for the final 10 or 20%. The reason liberalism seems lackluster these days is that with the exception of the radical left, which is mostly ignored, garden variety liberals don't have all that much to complain about.

That's true, at least on an ideological level (I hasten to confine it to issues of ideology because, as the blogs prove, us garden variety liberals have found plenty to complain about). But I think we're dealing with a second dynamic here, which is that we're no longer allowed to complain, our real complaints aren't viable in political discourse. Increased government control and involvement in private life is, to a large degree, off-limits in the public debate. On the other hand, deregulation and privatization, the cornerstones of conservative philosophy, are wholly in-bounds. The result is that the right can push as hard as they want in pursuit of their goals, but the left has to pussyfoot and sneak around our ends.

Health care is an excellent example. Republicans have happily adopted Health Savings Accounts as their Big Idea, despite the fact that HSA's are an abhorrent invention that exists to shunt risk away from government, away from insurers, and onto the individual. Nevertheless, the idea is allowable in the debate. Liberals, on the other hand, are trying to figure out ever subtler ways to move the country towards government health care, as we're not allowed to do it publicly. Hence Kerry's catastrophic reinsurance plan, hence CAP's expansion of FEHBP, etc. But compared to the level of privatization HSA's represent, these are barely half measures. But we're scared to push for single-payer, scared to signal agreement with Kennedy's Medicare for All, scared to pursue the policies that we know are actually the most logical and effective for this issue.

The weirdest part is that this isn't necessarily a function of the public's feelings on health care. There's little resistance -- at least in polling -- to the idea of government-run health care. Indeed, it's actually a favored solution (though what polls show and what'd happen if we tried to push it may not sync). Nevertheless, we stay silent about it because the last 20 years, from Reagan's "government is the problem" to Clinton's "era of big government is over", have appeared to produce a consensus against the positive utility of government. The pundit class, politicians, and the rest of the tone-setters seem to have accepted this regardless of what the public seems to thing. Much of that has to do with the demise of the Clinton health care plan, but the scars from that refuse to fade only because we keep pointing to them.

So sure, liberals have won a bunch of battles, but at the same time our solutions have been discredited. Communism, which failed in all cases, went on to delegitimize government-run services, which are desirable and effective in some cases. As a result, it's hard to be passionate and forthright since liberals are constantly advocating for mere shells of their preferred policy solutions, and harder still to match conservative ardor considering they get to advocate for the full bore institutionalization of their ideology.

Commenting on the British elections, Sullivan writes:

I also fear that the battering of Blair means a future Brown government will keep increasing spending and so hamper Britain's post-Thatcher renaissance. I'd happily vote Tory this time on those grounds alone. Of course, no one on the Labour left in Britain is proposing the kind of government spending that Bush Republicans are engaged in. In that sense, Bush is far to the fiscal left of anyone in current British politics. What an irony. We used to think that even British Tories were more liberal than America's Democrats. But Bush's and DeLay's massive spending and borrowing makes Blair look like a born-again Thatcherite.

Wha?  C'mon now, Andy must be aware that liberalism is about more than some deep-seated affinity for borrowing-and-spending.  No one reading my blog could mistake my politics for anything but those of a lefty, and yet even I don't spend my nights scheming out how to drain America's coffers through some devious cocktail of borrowing and spending.  Not most nights, anyway.

That's one of the interesting distinctions separating Democrats from Republicans.  Democrats have a social vision, an idea of how government should interact with its citizens and a menu of social programs and initiatives that'll bring it about.  What we don't have is a particular attachment to any method of raising the revenue.  Some of us want to deficit spend, some want to raise taxes, some want to wait for better economic times, some want to divert general revenue from other ends, and some have novel combos of the above.  But it's all cases the funding decisions are means to our ends, how we finance our programs are rarely, if ever, ends in themselves.

That's a pretty stark contrast with the right, which is  more focused on how they fiddle with the government's finances rather than what they do with the money.  That's why so much of their intellectual firepower has been spent convincing Americans that tax cuts are indeed a social program par excellence, an economic prescription for every fiscal situation.  Tax cuts, of course, are not only a way to shrink the government, but through the Laffer curver, a way to raise its revenues.  They're not only, according to Bush,  the only logical thing to do during a surplus, but they're also crucial during a recession.  The entirety of the right's economic philosophy is really the idea of tax cuts as a means to most any end, which has allowed them to not only slice taxes but do so while enlarging and adding new government programs.

In that way, Sullivan's really concentrating on the wrong folks when he tries to define a party by their spending habits.  Liberals don't much care how we get the cash, we're defined by what we want to do with it.  Republicans, on the other hand, are almost solely focused on this single way of managing the government's finances, and because they've concocted all manner of fantastic explanations for why tax cuts are rational in every situation, are much easier defined by the cycle of cut, spend, and borrow because that, not some further end, is what they enter government in order to do.  Saying it's really the left who is identified by it is just a transparent attempt at projection.

Ahmad Chalabi's going to be Iraq's oil minister? You kidding me?

Sigh. The Weekly Standard is right. The gas tax is actually a bad idea. I've advocated for it in the past, and many have done the same recently, but it's a poor way to deal with the energy crisis.

The gas tax fails because it penalizes folks for conditions outside their control. We generally imagine the tax as nailing those morons peering down from Hummers, but most of the affluent, insecure drivers who're purchasing a tank for their morning commute do so fully aware that the gas bill will sting. They can take the hit. But the gas tax disproportionately hurts two other groups who don't deserve it: the poor, and the rural. The former often drive inefficient, older vehicles, and are simply less able to use them when gas prices and taxes rise. The latter don't have public transportation options and often have to go much farther to complete basic tasks, like food shopping or taking their kids to school.

And all that'd be okay if there was some compelling evidence that a gas tax would seriously cut down on driving, but there isn't. Demand for driving is less elastic than we like to think, and it's been proving itself thus in the past few months. People's lifestyles revolve around the convenience of cars, and if they possibly can afford it, they will pay quite a bit to avoid slowing the odometer's daily advance. Unless we jacked fuel up to $7 a gallon, we're not going to seriously dent road habits. And since the only tax that's in any way possible a 25 or 50 cents, this'll be nothing but a regressive revenue raiser -- you're not going to solve the oil crisis.

But when trying to cut our crude consumption, it's important to remember that the problem is less how much we drive and more what we drive. The average consumer, when making a purchase that stretches far into five digits, doesn't usually think about lifetime costs. They're worried about the rebate they can get at the dealer, not necessarily a difference of five miles-per-gallon. So Explorers and trucks suffer very little -- normally, at least -- from their fuel costs because consumers are a bit near-sighted when evaluating costs. But that's what we need to be changing -- we can't wean ourselves off oil so long as Hummers and Explorers sell. And so the trick is incorporating long-term costs into the sticker price.

Now, your friendly neighborhood conservative will point to evidence that sales of gas guzzlers are slowing down already and tell you to sit back, have an iced tea, and let the free market take care of it. Not good enough, we need things to change now. If the government wants to do something to reduce our oil usage, start by slapping a serious feebate on auto purchases. Heavy cars and gas guzzlers get a $3,000 tax tacked onto the price, and hybrids and economy cars get a $3,000 rebate on theirs. Detroit gets a fat sack of money to move quickly and smoothly into the hybrid business, folks see the savings upfront and thus make more energy conscious car decisions, and we use way less fuel. No one, save those who need huge cars for their business, is hurt by circumstances outside their control. But even they'll only be temporarily penalized as the market will beg for fuel efficient trucks and SUVs (like the Ford Hybrid), and automakers will race to place them in showrooms.

So the Standard is right -- no gas tax. What we need isn't to penalize drivers for decisions they've already made or situations they have no control over, but to tweak the market a bit and bring long-term costs to the consumer's attention when they can still do something about them. A nice, fat feebate does exactly that.

So the new Bush energy plan (not, to be clear, the atrocious energy bill). It's not really bad, just kinda lame. I mean, yes, we do need to break through the impasses that are keeping nuclear energy plants and liquid natural gas terminals from being built. And the hybrid car subsidy is certainly a good thing. Neither am I really against constructing a few more refineries. But for a president who prides himself on bold strokes and towering ambition, this is kid's stuff. This is pecking your date on the cheek before drinking a warm glass of milk and going to bed. This ain't, in other words, shit.

The affordable oil's gonna run out, kids. Whether it's now or later, it's riding into the sunset as we speak. Bush says:

"Over the past decade, our energy consumption has increased by more than 12 percent, while our domestic production has increased by less than one-half of 1 percent," he added. "It's now time to fix it."

But even that overstates our abilities, Our production, after all, doesn't feed all our demand, we import vast amounts of energy. So 1% of demand growth is far larger than 1% of production growth -- so we're doing even worse than that quote lets on. Which is why it's so disappointing that, aside from building more nuclear plants and more LNG terminals (which really doesn't matter too much, as we're peppering Baja California with them anyway), Bush's plan does nothing to lessen our dependence on oil. Even the hybrid credit is minor, particularly when you consider the atrocious write-off businesses get for gas guzzlers when they claim them for professional use. Savings on a Porsche SUV top $33,000! Try getting that on your Honda Insight

There's nothing in Bush's speech about conservation, nothing about a major initiative to fund R&D, nothing about the need for Americans to try and cut their usage of gasoline, nothing, in fact, that'll have any long-term impact on the situation. What we have is a politician offering a pro forma response to a high gasoline prices, nothing more. There's no vision, long-term planning, or even new ideas in this proposal, and so it contains nothing to get excited over.

I've said it before, but liberals should be truly grateful -- from a political standpoint -- that Bush isn't a better politician. Where he smart, he'd schedule a major speech, announce that he's letting some of his tax cuts lapse and would be pouring the billions in savings into weaning us off foreign oil and pushing our economy towards a more sustainable perch. Massive subsidies for hybrids, financial assistance so Detroit can quickly develop hyper fuel-efficient vehicles, a well-funded R&D program, financial incentives for conservation, subsidies for renewables (like wind and solar), and so forth. If he did that, his numbers would shoot through the roof. As it is, he'll muddle along, with his deficiency in the vision department screwing not only the country, but himself.

I've really been remiss in not plugging the site's first advertiser, Obey the Pure Breed.  You guys should do me a favor and check the site out, it's really very funny.  And in honor of the dog-theme and the Papillon section, and in expectation of you all visiting the site (preferrably through this link), I'm going to do my first-ever dog-blogging and introduce my -- or at least my family's -- papillon to the world.  Behold, Pappy:

That would be my girlfriend's foot, apparently delivering a kick to my poor dog's ribs.  Not quite sure why she's wailing on him, but I'm sure she's got her reasons.  Maybe if you visit my advertiser, she'll tell you them.

Digby has an interesting response to my rebuttal to Kos (got all that?). Digby's point is that the Republican definition -- smaller government and lower taxes, family values, and a strong national defense -- is a stance, not a legislative agenda nor a statement of class/constituency solidarity. Instead, it lays out a set of principles as the founding blocks of conservatism. As counter, he suggests the Democrats adopt something like: "fair taxes, a secure safety net, personal privacy, civil rights, and responsible global leadership".

I think he's right, and I think I was unclear. The Republican definition isn't just an agenda, it's certainly a statement of principles as well. The genius thing is that it's both -- it's what they believe in, but also what they'll (theoretically) do. That's why it works. One interesting thing about their platform is that it moves in a certain direction -- lower taxes, smaller government, stronger defense. That's why it succeeds: it not only explains what they believe in, but what they want to do. Digby's alternative, alternatively (redundancy ain't no crime), has principles but no direction. What are fair taxes? What are civil rights? What is responsible global leadership? It say where we'd like to go but doesn't reassure anyone that we know how to get there.

The problem with Kos's idea ("Democrats are for working people") and, to a lesser extent Digby's, is that it doesn't explain what we'll do. It explains who/what we're for, but they're not things the right is explicitly, publicly, against. So it sounds good, and even lays out some clear ideas on what we'd like to see, but it doesn't differentiate us. Attaching ourselves to policy goals that the right doesn't support, however, would offer us our own identity. "Universal health care" lays out a clear path forward. "A livable wage" explains where we think the country needs to go. What we need to do is combine principles with direction, or to use another word, leadership. Being for good things is easy, specifically articulating how to achieve them is more dangerous.

While thinking about this, I rooted around Polling Report some and found these numbers, I think they make the case well:

"Do you think the Republicans have a clear plan for the country, or don't they have a clear plan for the country?": 43% say yes, 48% say no.

"Do you think the Democrats have a clear plan for the country, or don't they have a clear plan for the country?"36% say yes, 51% say no.

"Regardless of how you usually vote, do you think the Republican Party or the Democratic Party cares more about people like yourself?" 33% say Republicans, 52% say Democrats.

"Regardless of how you usually vote, do you think the Republican Party or the Democratic Party will do a better job of helping more people achieve the American Dream?" 38% say Republicans, 52% say Democrats.

Americans know who we're for -- them! But they don't know what we'll do. And that's enough to kill the whole deal. Clinton likes to say that the country will prefer a leader who's strong and wrong to one who's weak and right. Similarly, they'll reject a party that's on their side but lacking ideas in favor of one that's got momentum but may be barreling in the wrong direction.

Julia on political centrists:

This is like saying that you drive mid-size cars because you own a Civic and a Hummer. This is like saying that Michigan has a temperate climate because it's 95 in the summer and -10 in the winter. It's like saying you're a moderate drinker because you drink nothing Monday through Thursday and then have 15 pints on a Friday night.

That's about right. Centrism has become a synonym for "maverick". Proving yourself a centrist isn't about moderating your opinions so much as decisively proving you don't hold the same ones as your party. Lieberman, as Julie notes, is hardly in the middle on issues: he's generally quite liberal, or quite hawkish. Which, in the current calculus, makes him some sort of a weird centrist. But the middle should mean the center of the map, not all over it. The political press, we know, is always jonesing for politicians ready to buck their parties, and that's fine. But let's pick a new word for them, one that doesn't contravene the meaning of a perfectly good adjective.

Bob Dole, in today's New York Times (italics mine):

In the coming days, I hope changing the Senate's rules won't be necessary, but Senator Frist will be fully justified in doing so if he believes he has exhausted every effort at compromise. Of course, there is an easier solution to the impasse: Democrats can stop playing their obstruction game and let President Bush's judicial nominees receive what they are entitled to: an up-or-down vote on the floor of the world's greatest deliberative body.

From the AP: Frist Say's He's Not Interested in Deals.

Oh. So if he's publicly ruled out compromise, has he fully exhausted every effort at it by rejecting all compromises? Or is he simply unjustified in changing the rules?

In some ways, it's hard to blame Frist for turning batshit crazy in the past few months. Unlike most senators hoping to occupy the Oval Office, the good doctor from Tennessee is majority leader, which means every overpowered, under-medicated constituency in the country is tugging at his pant leg to make him actualize their agenda in the here and now. And they mean to see him do it if he expects their support down the road. Frist has no choice but to kowtow to their demands, rejecting compromises, taking extreme positions, and generally grinding the Senate to a halt because his presidential ambitions don't allow for moderation of any sort.

But this isn't restricted to Frist. This'd be the path of most any average senator elevated to the majority leader's position and harboring hopes for highest office. Running the Senate in a bipartisan, rational way is simply incompatible with the craziness and constituency-pleasing required by the presidential gauntlet. And we should know it. So if future Senates want themselves to function, they should pass a new rule: no majority leader or minority leader is allowed to run for president in the next presidential election. If you hold the position in 2005 and resign in 2006, no go until 2012. If you become majority leader in 2009, you got to bracket your hopes until 2016. You've got to be out of the leadership for four whole years before you can run for president. Hopefully, that'd keep the opportunists from running and help install those who care about, and like, the Senate as an institution. In any case, it'd protect the place from hopefuls mindful that their every breath and word must pay homage to the child-spanker in Colorado Springs -- and that's reward enough.

Sorry Kos, but this is a wholly useless distillation of the Democratic party:

Democrats are the party for people who work for a living

We're also the party of puppies, smiles, things that light up, people who do good deeds, parents who comfort their children, and those cool brown things that you wrap around a cup so you can hold your hot coffee.

And that aside, I wonder what all those folks who work for a living and don't vote Democrat, or don't always vote Democrat, are going to think? And what about students, like me -- are Democrats not for me? After all the times we've shared? What changed? And who works for a living -- is that a swipe at professionals and academics, or just at heirs?

Kos, and everyone else, says you can stop a person on the street, ask them what the Republican party is all about, and they'll say:

smaller government and lower taxes, family values, and a strong national defense.

And while I dispute that most anyone on the street could rattle off that group of responses, there's a reason that we judge them powerful: they mean something. Those responses are policies. They're not code nor platitude, they simply say that, if you elect a Republican, your government will be smaller, your taxes lower, gays won't marry, and the army will kick ass. It's an agenda, and a quickly comprehensible one.

Kos's idea, conversely, isn't an agenda. It's the same sort of thing as Kerry's ill-fated "Stronger at Home, Respected in the World", or his short-lived "Let America Be America Again". It sounds like the sort of blob-like slogan that emerges from consultant meetings -- everybody's for working people! We'll be for working people! Think some Democrat is going to step up to the debate podium, say he's for working people, and get the Republican to say "Yes, well, unlike my opponent, I'm running to represent the rich and indolent"? It'll never happen. They'll run ads attacking our policies, talking about how our environmentalism forces manufacturing jobs overseas, and that's the end of our "definition", simply because it isn't a definition, it's a platitude. And so we won't be defined, we'll be exactly where we are now.

What Republicans have, and what we envy, are a set of agreed-upon policies that comprise the spine of their legislative agenda. If Democrats want to match them, we have to be the party of "guaranteed health care, regulated corporations, a livable wage, universal day care, and a crackdown on nuclear materials", or some such combo. Then, if we want, we can append "in service of the proletariat" onto the end. The important thing is the handful of words that let voters know what we'll make happen.

Campaign slogans don't work. They're nice enough when tacked onto a poster, but they don't define anyone. Nobody voted for Bush because they liked the idea of "turning a corner", and nobody voted for Kerry because they thought "stronger at home" sounded like something they were for. Americans aren't morons -- they recognize when a sentence has no coherent meaning. If we want to define ourselves, we'll have to attach ourselves to some specifics, just like the Republicans have. Nothing else will do. And until our party figures out how to agree on five policies they can, rain or shine, support, we'll never have the "definition" we so crave.

As part of my Get a Job series, I've started having to do a lot of interviews. The problem is that I can't type fast enough to record a conversation. Some I can do online so transcription isn't an issue, but for those I can't is there some way to hook a digital recorder to my cell phone? I can't figure out how, or which ones do it (the guy at Best Buy said none of them do it), but if any of you have the technological chops to point me in the right direction, it'd make my life a lot easier.

Watching David Brooks and John Tierney both race to write the same column extolling the virtues of obesity and mocking liberals for denying themselves cheeseburgers was pretty funny. Did no one warn David that Tierney got there first? Does David not even read his conservative competitor? Seems that the Times token righties need to coordinate a bit better.

But it was also sad to watch two supposedly powerful conservative minds use some of the most read newspaper real estate in the world to misinform their readers in the exact same way and in service on the exact same agenda. So let's get something straight: the study did not tell you to get fat. It did not tell you to get a little fat. It did not, in fact, tell you to do anything at all. We're dealing with observational data that's widely available and the authors are trying to divine a connection between weight and mortality rates from it. We're also focusing on the rate of death, rather than disability and disease (as the Times article on the study -- though not its op-eds -- notes, the connection between excess weight and diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol in undeniable). And what, exactly, did the study find?

Well, folks whose BMI rests in the normal category provided a baseline mortality, i.e, their death rate is considered the "normal" death rate. Folks in the overweight, though not obese nor extremely obese categories, die less than their "normal" counterparts. The obese, the severely obese, and the underweight die more than everyone else. Why?

First you've got to look at the basic measure used, the BMI. The central mistake of Tierney and Brooks is believing that the BMI is a body fat test. It's not. Instead, it's a purely mathematical calculation that takes your weight, divides it by your height in inches squared, and then multiplies the product by 703. So to give an example, my weight is 188. I'm about 72 inches tall (calculate yours here). So my BMI is 25.5, a shade into the overweight category (which goes from 25-29). But am I overweight?

Now things get interesting. I've lifted weights regularly since my first year of high school, making me a fair bit stronger than most folks. I also have a body fat scale, a relic from when I lost 50 pounds as a high school sophomore (I was a fat kid). My body fat is regularly around 15-16%, which'd put me in the "fitness" category, a good 10% under obesity and 3% under the beginning of "average". So I'm not overweight given my body's composition, but I am a bit overweight if judged via my height-to-weight ratio. To restate, I'm not overweight, but I am if the BMI is used.

This is a long way of saying that for many, many people, the height-to-weight ratio comprising the BMI is wholly inaccurate. And most of those people who throw it off are athletes, or fitter than the norm. So right off the bat you've got a group in the overweight category who're likely living healthier lifestyles than many in the "normal" category, but being categorically penalized by the BMI's inadequacies. Whoops.

Moving right along, folks who struggle with their weight, who've not accepted being overweight and are continually fighting to hold the line on 5-15 pounds of flab, are probably watching their eating much more carefully and exercising more regularly than those who benefit from a genetic predisposition to a good weight. I know that my body's constant threats to get fat, and my father's, and my sister's, have forced us all to live healthier, exercise more, and eat better than our naturally slimmer neighbors. So you've got another category now of people battling the scale, and living healthier lives because of it. As the study found, most people in the underweight category, and probably some at the bottom edges of the average category, are naturally slim and don't work to achieve it. Living a sedentary lifestyle is bad for you no matter what your BMI, and many of the slim and average are probably doing exactly that.

Next is the "obesity paradox". Most deaths occur after age 70, so most of what we're dealing with happens in life's twilight years. As it turns out, a bit of fat has a protective effect in old age, likely due to increased muscle and bone mass from toting it around. There's a real health problem in that so few elderly do any sort of weight training, and in fact often haven't for years and years beforehand. Some participate in aerobics, classes, walking -- but many are sedentary, and few pick up weights. It's a really serious health issue, and anything, even a bit of a pudge, that helps reverse the loss of muscle mass will be a boon. But that doesn't make fat the optimal way to gain muscle, it argues for a wider attention to and adoption of techniques to build muscle and preserve bone.

Now, there's countless more going on here. Cigarettes are an appetite suppressant, but we don't know exactly how many people are slimmer because of them. The BMI might simply be too low, or need to adjust better with age. But the above are a number of potentially confounding factors, and you should immediately judge anyone suggesting that you start bathing in tubs of saturated fat a loon. Tierney and Brooks are misappropriating the study in service of some weird, quasi-libertarian agenda to discredit authorities who advise you on what's good and bad for your health. Why the findings of experts that offer folks better information with which to make their decisions piss some libertarians off, I'll never know. But do yourself a favor and don't read right-wingers dead-set on making life a faith-based endeavor. Health is now, as it's always been, a simple affair. Eat well, exercise regularly, try to avoid stress, and get regular check-ups. If some op-ed columnists want to experiment with an all cheeseburger and decaf coffee diet, well, that's their business.

Something glitched in my Gmail yesterday and nothing sent between in the morning and midnight got to me. Everything seems to be working now, s if you sent me anything between those times, do me a favor and resend.

Last night, the girlfriend and I watched Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the 1967 flick about two progressive parents trying to accept their daughter's interracial marriage. The film's a bit dated, though the central struggle of liberals trying to live by their ideals while their guts scream otherwise is still pretty compelling. But midway through, there was a bit of dialogue that struck me. Spencer Tracy, the father, and Sidney Poitier, the husband-to-be, are talking about the chances for Poitier's potential children (and Tracy's grandchildren). The father believes that they'll have none. His daughter, according to Poitier, believes they'll all be president. But his daughter is a naive, flighty girl and even Poitier admits that he doesn't share her optimism. Instead, he jokes, he'll settle for Secretary of State.

Poitier's bride was supposedly utopian for believing mixed-race kids could ascend to the presidency, and Poitier himself was kidding when he said they could become Secretary of State. The whole thing was about how slow progress was likely to be. And yet the movie was made in 1967. Accept its timeline and assume the couple had a child the next year. That kid would be 38 right now. The last Secretary of State was a black man, the current one is a black woman. The brightest star in Democratic politics, and the most oft-mentioned for a future presidency, is a half-black, half-white Senator named Barack Obama.

Seems to me we've done pretty good.

So Trent Lott and Ben Nelson are pushing a compromise that would bring four of the blocked nominees to the floor, kill three of them, and end the Republican effort to kill the filibuster. But according to the new WaPo/ABC News poll, only 26% support "changing the Senate's rules to make it easier for Republicans to confirm Bush's nominees", while 66% oppose it. That's quite a majority firmly in opposition, and it includes almost half the Republicans surveyed. More interesting, from the perspective of who'd win a media war over the issue, is this question: "The Senate has confirmed 35 federal appeals court judges nominated by Bush, while Senate Democrats have blocked 10 others. Do you think the Senate Democrats are right or wrong to block those nominations?" 48% think the Democrats are right, 36% think them wrong. And that's a much softer numerical comparison than the one Reid uses (I think he's got a 195-10 number, or something similar).

So why compromise? Numbers like this ensure that Frist simply won't have the votes. Neither the principled Republicans nor the opportunists are going to feel safe on the nuclear option bandwagon. So let him go ahead and try to force the issue. Let's say, hypothetically, he got the votes. Is this a fight he can win? The Senate comes to a screeching halt, the talk shows focus on the protection/dissolution of minority rights, and folks don't understand why Republicans have broken with years of tradition over 10 nutball judges. Public opinion, already against the GOP solidifies, and Senate Republicans begin to defect, handing the right a HUGE loss and effectively ending Frist's presidential aspirations.

Now, it's certainly true that the outcome isn't as preordained as all that, nothing's ever immutable in politics. But it seems that Reid and Co. could gamble, with reasonable certainty, on killing the nuclear option. And serving Republicans with a defeat on that, right after Social Security and Schiavo, would really solidify perceptions -- and thus the media storyline -- of the right as disorganized and on a downward trajectory, while adding significantly to Democratic momentum. So while I recognize that there's more risk in pushing forward, it seems that the potential rewards are much greater. It codifies GOP overreach, it'll empower Republican moderates, and it'll solidify the power and unity of the Democratic caucus. And I think that's worth the risk.

From my inbox (italics mine):

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That's quite an implication...

Jonah sez:

I really do hate tit-for-tat congressional politics. But if the Democrats really do tear down Bolton on what is, ultimately, rinky-dink nonsense then Republicans will be obliged to make the management style and office demeanor of all future Democratic nominees an issue. This will make Republicans hypocrites in the sense they think what the Democrats are doing to Bolton is wrong in the first place but will do the same thing to liberals later. But this is how Congressional politics must work. If one side establishes a new standard the other side has every right and obligation to adopt it. This is really the only way to get both sides to think twice about establishing precedents which might hurt them if applied to them in the future. I really do wish there was another way. You'd think that liberals would have realized that their introduction of Borking in the late 1980s did not help Democrats very much in the 1990s.

Me thinks Jonah might want to sync his outrage to his opinions a bit better. A tit-for-tat wherein high-level bureaucrats who abuse their employees have trouble getting confirmed is not, frankly, a particularly undesirable outcome. It might disqualify a bunch of potential nominees in the near-term, but over time you'll probably see the politically mobile act a bit more thoughtfully towards their underlings, and I'll shed no tears over that*.

Now, that said, I really do hope Jonah's with us on this judicial thing, because he clearly understands the dynamic in play. When Dems were in power, if both senators from a state objected to a nominee, that was the end of him. Then, Republicans took the Senate, Orrin Hatch changed the rule to require the objection of only a single senator, which derailed a bunch of Clinton's nominees. Then, George W. Bush became president, and suddenly it's two senators again. Then, in 2003, senatorial objection became mere advice, not a way to derail a nominee, so even fewer of Bush's nominees could be stopped. Then Hatch decided that the tradition mandating that at least one senator from the minority had to approve of the nominee in order to get him out of committee was old-fashioned and needed to be done away with. It was, I guess, an archaic rule unsuited for a brave, bold future wherein all Republican nominees would be confirmed.

So surely Jonah understands the need for Democrats to filibuster judges. Tit for tat and all that. He's not been too bad on it thus far, and with this latest insight into his thinking, it'll be mere moments, I'm sure, until he starts throwing roundhouses at those who don't understand the necessity of the Democrats' actions.

*It's kinda weird that Goldberg thinks this is some sort of Democratic escalation. If we were in the majority and were stopping Bolton because of his office demeanor, a case could be made. But Bolton's treatment of underlings has been making Republicans queasy, which is why Voinovich held the vote and Hagel and Chafee have joined the parade. If only Democrats were raging against the Bolton machine, he'd exit committee with no problem. But it just ain't so.

Having spent the last week of my life drowning in health care statistics and system comparisons (the products of which you can read here), I want to make a few wrap-up points on the whole thing.  First, I see why Clintons plan failed.  In an effort to avoid the political baggage of single-player, he tried to emulate Germany's system, which is really the worst of the bunch.  Complicated, bad at controlling costs, and obviously jury-rigged to accommodate an evolution that wasn't necessarily organized.  Bad move.

Employer-based health care, which Germany and Japan's universal systems rely on, is a poor choice.  There's no compelling fiscal or policy reason to use it, and employer's, frankly, should not be in charge of their worker's health care.  It's just a silly way of organizing it. 

Canada's system is too biased against the private sector; some degree of private, supplementary insurance should be allowed.  We do not live in an equal society and we've never had a problem with allowing the richest to benefit from their funds.  But if Canada's problem is that they have a ceiling, our problem is that we don't have a floor.  Liberals shouldn't construct a system that stops Americans from getting ever-better health care, but we need one that guarantees a certain level of care.  In essence, we want a floor without a ceiling. 

France and Britain are more interesting, Britain for their enormous cost control and France for the fact that their health care is really very good.  But Britain's frugalness has a price -- care simply isn't as good, surgeries are underused, medicines under-prescribed, and so forth.  While they still have better outcomes than we do, it's only because so many of our citizens are totally without access to health care.  If you had to decide where to be treated, you definitely want it to be here. 

France is more my speed.  Government provided, ceiling without floor, etc.  The lack of a gatekeeper leads to overuse (i.e, the French go to the doctor's too often), but that's changing their, and it could easily be side-stepped here.  What a shame, then, that France is so off-limits in political dialogue.  But whether or not we can invoke the French, they're the closest thing to a model structure out there, and we should study them for ideas. 

Moving beyond countries and into specifics, our doctors make too much money and we credential too few of them.  The road to an MD is torturous, inefficient, bottle-necked and enormously, enormously expensive.  It's such a terrible path that high pay is the least we can do.  But the AMA has codified this absurd state of affairs, and serious reforms will need to chip away at it.  Doctors either need to make less, or we need to radically increase the usage and training of nurse practitioners.  One way or the other, we need cheaper general providers who don't have crushing debt they need to pay off.  To achieve the last, the government needs to step in and subsidize medical training.  That shouldn't be hard, our public universities do it, to some degree, already.  It's time to radically increase the degree.

What really leapt out at me during this series was how normal government provided health care is.  Other nations have doctor choice, hospital choice -- in France, they don't even have limits on specialist choice.  Americans have somehow fooled themselves -- or been fooled -- into believing that government-run health care is somehow different from what they enjoy now.  I genuinely believe they carry some sort of dystopian vision around with them, of gray waiting rooms and faceless bureaucrats and bread lines with stethoscopes, rather than grain, at the front.  In order to keep that prophecy whole, they've had to mentally classify medicare as some weird, third sort of category -- government paying for private health care. 

Medicare, of course, works great, and its beneficiaries are enormously pleased with the service.  it doesn't seem like government-run health care because, well, it's like normal health care, only the government pays.  We need to use that.  Which is why my vote for health care reform would be a radical expansion of Medicare, almost exactly along the lines of what Ted Kennedy has proposed.  Americans need to be assured that government run health care is not, in some weird way, a wholly different state of affairs.  They need to know that it's the health care they enjoy now, just better, cheaper, and guaranteed.  Medicare, because it's already used and liked, comes with those benefits. 

Lastly, all my comments are on the structure of health care systems.  There are many other problems too, the rapid advance of technology and ever-longer life spans chief among them.  Changing our structure won't solve those issues.  But our dysfunctional system currently makes them worse.  The poor get care, but only once the situation is catastrophic and the costs of healing them have drastically increased.  We pay too much, get too little, and remain tied to bad jobs because we can't sacrifice our coverage,  In the end, our health care system is a lead weight on employers, a shackle on employees, and a great drag on our economy.  It's not the best in the world, it's not near it, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise.  Instead, we should set out on the task of making it better.

Sam says what I wanted to say.

Ron Brownstein's article on the net's potential to facilitate a successful third-party ticket is going to break the buzz-meter, as it plays on everyone's favorite fantasies. But every few years there's a reason the third-party's will finally prove ascendent, be it Perot's personal funds or the net's ability to raise cash or the increasing similarities between the two major parties (not a view I subscribe to, by the way). But it never works. And Dean is a good example of why.

Dean for America followed the Brownstein strategy almost perfectly. It ran against the establishment and used the net to rake in cash from electrified supporters nationwide. It exploited recently developed online organizing tools to unleash a veritable army of foot-soldiers on unsuspecting towns nationwide, and then on suspecting towns when the Iowa caucus was happening. Entering the primaries it had more money and more volunteers than any other campaign, and by a large margin. But it still lost.

There's a tendency from pundits to view elections as very calculable affairs, with candidates requiring specific and predefined views on the issues, a smattering of personal qualities, a monetary advantage, and a clever organization to reach a guaranteed victory. Therefore, or so the thinking goes, if candidates who're even more charismatic and "right" on the issues could unshackle themselves from the chains of party politics and make up the financial disparity through the net, they could win.

It's harder than all that. Ballot access is insane. Getting yourself into the debates is tough. Convincing Americans you can win is endlessly hard. Withstanding accusations of a "Nader effect" is near impossible, particularly if you have a preference for which side should win if it's not you (and your involvement may hurt them). Matching the preexisting organizations the parties' have is a staggering task. Matching the region-specific help they get from candidates who've run there and politicians who've won there is similarly rough. And on, and on.

The party system doesn't just funnel cash, it's an enormous storehouse of expertise and experience, one that allows the candidate to concentrate on macrostrategy and his own campaigning. An independent could rely on none of that, and would face a withering attack from the candidates who could. Which is not to even mention that the major interest groups, from environmental to labor to NRA, aren't going to risk pissing off the parties to flirt with some independent candidacy.

I'm all for the thesis that the net makes insurgent candidacies more potent, because it does. But Brownstein and others trap themselves when they decide it's all about the money the net can raise and the supporters it can connect. The Democrats, through MoveOn, the blogs, and their own sites, have an enormously powerful online fundraising operation. The Republicans, through Bush's voter lists, have a similarly effective operation. And a third-party candidate, while he can now make more cash through the net than he could over the phone, won't be exploiting something the major parties are overlooking, and in any case will quickly find that money is the least of his problems. The two party system, for better or worse, is incredibly resilient, and the maturation of the internet is unlikely to shake it. Those wishing to change the political calculus would be better off using keyboard jockeys to changer their own parties, rather than form new ones.

Armando is all Kossack-gone-wild on this article detailing The Atlantic's move to DC, and DC's efforts to be more intellectual. He mocks the district for being disconnected from reality (more than anywhere else in the world, apparently), for having a dull-as-dirt press corps, and for generally not being the cosmopolitan culture capital that the piece portrays it as.

Huh.

As disconnected as DC might be, at least there are Republicans there, by which I mean to imply no place can be more disconnected from reality than the lefty blogosphere (and all points go for the righty libertarian-o-sphere, just swap in the appropriate names and theories). I'm serious about this, and I include my site in the calculus, but remember our pre-election triumphalism? Remember how Kos and MyDD and, for that matter, me, have called each of the last two elections? Ever taken a look in our comment threads? Ever noticed the massive proportion of readers certain the election fell through thievery and the war was launched wholly and solely for a sip of Iraqi crude? Washington's got its faults, true, but we're hardly justified in critiquing others for being disconnected from the American consensus, or even reality (whatever that may mean).

And Armando should have also read the piece closer -- it was pretty deprecating towards DC, and started out by admitting that the Atlantic's move was motivated by economic considerations, a desire to consolidate the magazine. But beyond that, it's mostly correct. DC suffers from many maladies, not least a tendency to gravitate towards certain conclusions (for that matter, so do the blogs, and partisans in general). But it is a place where folks like to think ideas matter, hence the multiplicity of think tanks churning out endless reports on stunningly specific topics. The ideas may suck and the people may not matter, but they are nevertheless under the shared delusion that that's not so, which is more than I can say for most other places.

Armando also nails the article for this graf (emphasis his):

Louis Menand, the New Yorker writer and Harvard literature professor, who has also worked in Washington, said that while the capital has "this reputation of being wonky and boring," this can be appealing for practitioners of ideas. Washington journalists especially "become suddenly interesting in a way they might not be in New York," where they are competing with artists, actors, restaurateurs, advertising executives and Wall Street moguls for prestige, he said.

But that's true, actually. I know my efforts to compete with the blogosphere's wonkier set have made my writing significantly better, or at least more informative. When I started judging my work according to a more fact-laden metric, I had to up my quality accordingly, and I think you guys have benefitted from it (i.e, the health care series). Were I still measuring myself by late night dorm conversations, you can bet I wouldn't be forcing myself to read on oil depletion and Germany's sickness funds.

Similarly, Washington is a place where wonks gather, so it does force that sort of jump in policy rigor. Now, a perfectly good argument can be made that we've plenty of policy nerds blathering about and what we really need are some political writers judging themselves by the standards of other professions, like fiction and art criticism, to liven things up (Frank Rich is a good example). That's perfectly fine, but Menand was clearly saying, in the quote above, that wonkiness can be a good thing for folks trading in ideas, and that makes DC attractive for said folks. Armando, it seems, is simply dismissing the whole idea that traversing the district's wonky world might up the policy content of resident writers.

Now, don't get me wrong, Armando's perfectly in his rights when he mocks DC. The place is plenty-mockable. It's over-earnest, politically obsessed, has a tendency towards group think, and a slew of other problems I've probably never thought of. But the issue isn't that it's more out of touch than Boston, and it's certainly not farther from whatever reality is than Daily Kos, or my site. Doesn't mean we don't all have our uses, and doesn't mean this humble blog, or Kos, or DC, or Boston, might not indeed have found The Truth thanks to our idiosyncratic environments.

The point, however, is that we're all massively out of touch in our own ways, and we try to produce powerful and fresh writing from that. Some of us immerse ourselves in liberalism (Markos lives in Berkeley [or is it Oakland?], I live in LA), others in the country's political ground zero. Both approaches are open to criticism, particularly of the Ed Kilgore "I-spend-40%-of-my-time-slaughtering-pigs-and-shoveling-snow-in-the-bowels-of-Virigina" variety, but practitioners of the one shouldn't condescend to practitioners of the other for being disconnected from reality. It's too much a glass houses and stones thing.

I, too, apologize for today's dearth of posts. The Munz household spent most of the day consumed with Passover-Related Program Activities, and between the four questions and the thing with dipping your pinky in the wine ten times, I didn't have time to make it to the keyboard.

As a parting shot, I want to direct everyone's attention to this characteristically fabulous Slate piece by Dahlia Lithwick, concerning the fate of one Zacarias Moussaoui:

What's truly distressing about this turn of events is that Moussaoui may just have decided to accept the bizarre government position in this case: that he should be executed for being a poster boy for al-Qaida. Whether he now hopes to become a martyr, or to fast-track his case to the Supreme Court, or whether he's finally been beaten down by everyone else's unremitting craziness, remains to be seen.

I'm trying to muster some cogent legal commentary here, but I think Dahlia just about covers that. Instead, I want to offer a brief observation-slash-bleg-for-comments: The kind of prosecution Dahlia's chronicling here - overzealous and result-oriented - stems ostensibly from the idea that any level of terrorist threat posed by an individual is serious enough to substantially abrogate his legal rights. It is, literally, a take-no-chances policy. This, in turn, seems to require a belief that a terrorist attack is The Worst Thing That Could Happen.

Call me un-American, but I just don't see it. For those who don't know, I live in New York City. On 9/11, I saw the second tower falling from the third-story window of my high school. My aunt was scheduled to be in the Marriott immediately adjacent to the WTC; had she not been home tending to my uncle's minor heart attack, she would likely have been seriously hurt, if not killed. As it is, 3000 of my fellow Americans and fellow NYCitizens were killed, in a violent and terrifying way. But, all that said, I've never been able to muster a sustainable sense of violence or visceral hatred towards the jihadist attackers or their sympathizers. Sure, I'm saddened by their actions, and I grieve for their victims. And I wish like anything that the kind of hatred they had just didn't exist on earth. But, at the end of the day, I just can't muster up an all-consuming hatred of them. I know we have enemies, but I don't feel personally violent towards them. Mostly, I feel a deep sense of sorrow at their existence, and a vague sense that life will mostly be okay anyway. Maybe that's just a coping mechanism, and I'm missing something. Maybe I know, somewhere in the back of my mind, that resisting a sense of hatred or violence is all that keeps Us from being Them. Whatever the reason, I can't bring myself to hate the people who, from the looks of things, hate me pretty deeply.

I don't, incidentally, think I'm the only one. The areas most likely to be targetted by terrorists - NYC, California, DC - went for Kerry by the standard huge margins. And Kerry, whatever his level of competence in fighting terrorism, clearly didn't feel personally violent towards terrorists. I picture George W. Bush waking up every morning, his decision-making process fueled largely by the anger he felt on 9/11; I don't see Kerry ever doing the same. I remember when Peter Beinart first wrote his (in)famous "Fighting Faith" column; he received so many responses along the lines of "sure, but terrorism isn't as big a problem as Communism" that he was forced to write a follow-up dealing specifically with that point.

To give a more personal anecdote, one of my favorite things about 9/11 (I know, but follow me here) was reading the man-on-the-street reactions to it from Average Noo Yawkers. The first week after 9/11, the responses were what you'd expect: Terrible tragedy, time of loss, grief for our nation, etc. But after that, you started to see more and more comments alluding to how the WTC weren't really that attractive, and maybe now the city would put something nice up. New Yorkers instantly became pragmatic. They realized that if you were one of the people unfortunate enough to actually be threatened by terrorism, the only way to go on living was to see the event in broader perspective. You don't really have the luxury of blustering, therapeutic rage; if you dont laugh, there's nothing else to do but cry.

What I'm getting at here is that we always say that 9/11 Changed Everything - and maybe from a foreign policy perspective, it did - but for me, and I think for a lot of people, it didn't change much at all. In fact, more than anything, what 9/11 did was throw into sharp relief the importance of not changing. For those Americans who live in the shadow of Actual Terrorism, fear isn't a hypothetical that can be evoked by a Bush/Cheney '04 ad and then switched off. For them fear is real, and it doesn't have an off switch; if you let it consume you, you may as well just take a header off the Chrysler Building, because you're doing Bin Laden's work without the man having to lift another deranged finger.

That's what kills me about L'Affaire Moussaoui: I can't afford to be permanently afraid, and that seems like the stance my government is taking. I won't use the phrase "the terrorists win," because I hate it, but as someone who just can't muster a visceral fear/hatred of Moussaoui the way some people can, it should be pretty clear why this whole lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-jurisprudence approach has me pretty spooked.

I see Bush/Cheney supporters sometimes, seething with rage at nearly a continent of people, and I want to get it. I want to feel the hatred; I feel like if I don't, I'm not taking defending America seriously. But then, part of me thinks that those people are the ones using a legitimate tragedy as an excuse to vent, and that the only way to really take 9/11 seriously - to appreciate the challenge it presented to the American psyche - is to just ignore it and go on worrying about school, parents, getting a job, and all the other mundane shit that keeps most people way too engaged in life to ever be afraid of it.

So, commenters, as my Final Question of the weekend, I ask: Is death really the worst thing that could happen?

Thanks for having me.

- Daniel A. Munz

Thanks to the weekend's guest-bloggers. Be sure to check them out at their own places, Dan at Politics and War and Angelica at Battle Panda.

[First of all, an apology to all for falling down on my guest-blogging duties today. It was just one of those warm spring days made for walking the ol' faithful schnauzer in the dappled shade, watching baseball, eating chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven...you get the picture. But now it's time for one last post while I'm still hogging Ezra's eyeball, as it were.]

Alan Greenspan. Maestro? or Hack?

On the face of it, this seems like a ridiculous question. Don't I remember his hacktacular green-lighting of the Bush tax-cuts in 2001? Surely his belated and weaselly admission that <i>maybe</i> mistakes were made and taxes should go up after all shouldn't absolve him (though DeLong cuts him some slack) of his disingenuously cryptic approval back in 2001. Isn't he trying to eat his cake and have it -- to push through the tax cuts on one hand, <i>and</i> escape blame for the consequences on the other?

...Greenspan had warned then in congressional testimony that the forecast might be wrong and he recommended some 'trigger' mechanism that would limit the tax cuts if certain budget targets were not met. Greenspan said he thinks 'it's frankly unfair' for critics to blame him now for the fact that the Congress chose to 'read half [his] testimony and discard the rest.'

He surely knew that Bush's rational for the tax cuts were bunk, especially given the way they were distributed and structured. But he gave his stamp of approval for them anyhow, while making sure his testimonies are well-larded with qualifiers he can point to later when the shit is about to hit the fan (i.e., now. <i>Gulp</i>). Hack.

And yet...

The reign of a Fed chairman is long. It is my belief once upon a time, all the way back in the Clinton days, Alan Greenspan did his job admirably well. Now, I wasn't exactly paying attention to the intricacies of central banking back then (being more absorbed with old movies and [ack!] country music) so I can't do any play-by-play analysis of his performance. But the impression I've got is that he was a voice of prudence and an enormously stabilizing force on the markets. He convinced Clinton to raise payroll taxes to prepare Social Security for the onslaught of retiring baby boomers (oh, the irony.) He even provided the cover Clinton needed to push tax increases through Congress, and thus he was arguably responsible for the very surpluses he helped Bush squander (double irony sundae with cherry on top.)

It's too soon to tell whether history will remember the Greenspan that aided Clinton in his efforts to forge a new brand of liberal-flavored fiscal conservatism, or the Greenspan that abetted Bush in plunging the this country back into the black hole of deficits. But prehaps what he <i>should</i> be is a cautionary tale. With the title of "Chairman of the Federal  Reserve" comes enormous power. Perhaps too much power for one human to wield responsibly. The temptation to abuse that power in the service of one's ideology is hard enough when one's enemy is in power. It might be well nigh impossible to resist when one is in a position to help friends.

-- Battlepanda, signing off. It's been fun, folks.

My new practice of regularly reading NRO’s Corner is paying off in spades. Today, Andrew Stuttaford manages to stop bitching about Cameron Diaz long enough to make this bold assertion:

And as, for those ‘spiritual’ values that Diaz purports to find in picturesque hellholes such as Bhutan, I suspect that, given the chance, most of those bowers, scrapers and chanters would be pleased to junk their shamans, temples and priests in favour of running water, electricity and decent education.

And they would be right to.

Huh, okay. Let’s try that quote again, this time replacing a few words:

And as, for those ‘traditional’ values that Diaz purports to find in picturesque hellholes such as Brownsville, TX [which has a 45.5% child poverty rate], I suspect that, given the chance, most of those bowers, chanters and singers would be pleased to junk their bibles, churches and priests in favour of health care, job security and decent education.

And they would be right to.

So, setting aside your religious values in favor of quality-of-life improvements is the right thing to do. But only if you’re a member of one of those other religions. Fascinating.

Andrew Stuttaford’s book, "What’s The Matter With Calcutta," is available in hardcover from Regenry Books.

- Daniel A. Munz

I think Brad Plumer gets Ann Coulter just right. Also, he owes Chris Chamberlain an apology.

- E to the Z.

Matt, celebrating an apparent breakdown in GOP message discipline, notes in passing that:

Bill Frist has taken this up as his pet cause in a clear effort to become the candidate of the James Dobson crowd.

A lot of Democrats, I think, are rooting for Frist to get the 2008 presidential nomination. He’s a lightweight, wishy-washy moderate, they say - the Republican John Kerry. But statements like this from Matt make me think that Frist could just be the Dems’ worst nightmare. Before the name “Terri Schiavo” hit the airwaves, did anyone think of Bill Frist as “the candidate of the James Dobson crowd”? I sure didn’t. But after a mere four weeks of X-Treme Political Makeover, no less a hardened intellect than Matt Yglesias is regarding him as a crazed bible-thumper on the order of Santorum or Coburn. That kind of transformation takes a special talent. The thing about Frist isn’t that he’s actually moderate but can act like an extremist, or that he’s actually an extremist but can act moderate. The thing about Frist is that he isn’t actually anything. He’s whatever the Median Republican Voter wants him to be. And that’s why he’s trouble.

Of course, as I alluded to before, John Kerry had this same quality and it didn’t seem to help him much at all. Of course, Kerry wasn’t as good at miming beliefs as Frist is, even beliefs he actually held. But more to the point, a crucial difference between the two parties explains why John Kerry gets in trouble for the kind of political wind-testing that earns Bill Frist kudos: As Ezra has noted before, Republicans can afford candidates that are effectively ciphers, because Republican candidates are defined by their party, not vice-versa. The Republican Party really only has two missions: Figure out what they can and can’t sell to 51% of Americans, and find a candidate who can be injected with it without coughing it back up.

Sure, McCain and Giuliani and even Allen might prove popular among Americans, but they all have a key disadvantage: They’re trapped in themselves, at the mercy of the next four years - a lifetime in American politics. They have beliefs and attitudes that define their public persona, and they can’t change those beliefs to accommodate each new RNC blast fax. But Frist can, because his only real belief is in political expediency. In a Senate Majority Leader, a position that turns on one’s ability to appeal to one’s own party caucus, this kind of attitude can prove fatal. But if you’re looking for a presidential candidate whose only skill is being what you need him to be, Frist is perfect. No wonder Rove is taking an interest in him.

- Daniel A. Munz

Daniel Gross at Slate is incredulous that Americans are actually paying down their credit card debt in response to increasing interest rates. Could it be? Consumers actually responding to changes in incentives as if they make their financial decisions with some semblance of rationality?

I must say you can also color me surprised, if pleasantly so. Like witnessing a pack of lemmings preternaturally change directions at the ragged edge of disaster.

-- Battlepanda

The latest Democracy Corps poll found:

Requiring Congress to forego a pay raise in any year the government runs a deficit or raids the Social Security trust fund, and requiring that any future benefit cuts to Social Security should apply to congressional pensions as well.

Matt doesn't like the idea because civil servant salaries are tied to congressional salaries, and this'd hurt them too. But if we can reformulate how salaries are calculated so this'd only hurt congresscritters, Matt says we should give the people the "wacky populism" that they want.

I disagree. It's all well and good to nail Bush for his huge and irresponsible deficits now, but Democrats really shouldn't be in the business of making moderate deficit spending impossible, or at least really, really unlikely. Fact is, we're the social program folks, and once this weird administration with its big-budget conservatism heads back to Crawford, and once our fiscal house is put in a bit better order, there are going to be times when we need to bust the bank in order to fulfill social ends. There are times, after all, when a bit of deficit spending isn't a bad thing.

Now, a deficit that's almost 6% of GDP is a Very Bad Thing indeed, and a proposal like the one above that withheld pay raises when the deficit exceeded, say, 4% of GDP, might be a decent idea. But we really don't want to make a bit of deficit spending against the interests of Congress. Sometimes you need counter-cyclical spending. Sometimes you need a bit of borrowing to make sure entitlements and programs helping those hit by an economic downturn aren't sliced up. Because when the economy goes into recession, government takes in less money. In order to fulfill its entitlement and spending obligations, it runs a deficit. If Congress is dead set against doing so, it's the poor who're going to feel the bite, as health spending and unemployment benefits and other social programs take the hit to make up for the lost revenues. And that's something no Democrat should support.

- Ezra

P.S -- Dan and Battle Panda are rocking the house, huh?

P.P.S -- Happy -- or at least poignant -- Passover!

By now we've all heard about Rick Santorum's bill seeking to prevent the National Weather Service from actually sharing weather forecasts with Americans. You see, that "socialized weather" business has got to stop. It's taking the bread right out of the mouths of private web-based forecast providers who work so hard to make a profit by repackaging that information the NWS just want to give away for free. One such firm is Accuweather, which just so happens to be based in Pennsylvania, just like the good senator. Fancy that.

[T]hroughout 2003 and 2004, both Joel and Barry Myers have donated nearly $2,750 to Santorum's 2006 re-election efforts. Public records also showed that since 1999, the Senator received nearly $5,000 in contributions from AccuWeather executives, raising questions of whether the company attempted to court favor with the Senator through campaign contributions.

Count it up...$2,750+$5,000=$7,750. For a blatant gimme bill introduced in congress? That's what I call value!

-- Battlepanda

This Foreign Policy article by Tina Rosenberg explodes a lot of conventional wisdom about AIDS, and is well worth reading in its entireity. However, what  really surprised me was the fact that patients in poor countries are much, much, better about keeping up with their drug regiments for AIDS than us Americans, where only about 70% take the drugs on time as opposed to well above 90% in places like Camaroon, Uganda and Malawi. Shamefully, I had always unthinkingly bought into the racist trophe that Africans somehow less likely to follow the regiment correctly. At least I didn't go as far as Andrew Natsios, who runs the U.S. agency for International Development by the way, by speculating that African simply lack the western concept of time necessary to take retroviral drugs on schedule.

So why are we so bad at taking our medicine compared to Africans? Rosenberg speculates that there is more community support in Africa, and since AIDS have been so devastating, the consequences of not taking your medicine is much more salient. But she bought up another point -- whereas an American patient needs to take a whole handful of different drugs to get the full cocktail required to stay healthy, Africans have access to generic drugs that combine all those medicines into one pill.

Why are we making it harder for our AIDS patients to get the medicine they need to stay healthy? Yes, I know that the pharmaceutical companies aren't charities and they're not going to give up their sweet, sweet, profits one day before their patent runs out, but you'd think they'd care enough about their customers to get together and make a combination pill that will be easier to take and simply split the revenue. Not only would they be making the lives of AIDS patients easier, they would also cut down on the chance of resistance in the AIDS virus developing because of incorrectly followed regiments. There is no excuse.

-- Battlepanda

Via Laura Rozen, we learn that

The WSJ reports that the US believes North Korea could be preparing a nuclear test. It has asked China to pressure North Korea to prevent it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but doesn't the guy in charge of preventing this kind of thing have a name that rhymes with "Tron Molten"? Why, yes he does. Whoops!

Also: How long before someone on The Corner and/or Michelle Malkin implies that Bolton could have prevented the nuclear test if he hadn't been so busy answering the SFRC Democrats' stupid questions? I'm betting two days, m'self.

- Daniel A. Munz

Thanks to Ezra for inviting me back, and thanks to co-guest-blogger Amanda Angelica for being awesome.

I want to offer my apologies for being a little late on the posting thing, although I guess that's only true in East Coast Time. It took a little longer than usual to get all the bread products out of our house. (Happy Passover!) In honor of this vaguely holy day, here's the latest news on the Ratzinger front:

Spain's parliament is set to pass a bill legalizing a form of gay marriage and gay adoption. Guess whose finely sewn, textured, and lacy Bavarian underthings are in a bunch.

Oy! Benny 16 is definitely not off to a good start. Since his election, I've been trying to put a finger on why, past Nazi sympathies aside, Benedict so irks moderate and liberal catholics. Sure, he's an extreme conservative, but so was JPII - in response to the EU's flirtation with legalizing gay marriage, he denounced the idea as part of "an ideology of evil." The two just aren't that substantively different. But we liberals (mostly) loved JPII, and seem to fairly solidly hate Benedict XVI. Why?

I think his nickname explains it all: "The Enforcer." John Paul II was often called "the people's Pope," and with good reason. He had a deep and abiding understanding of human nature.  Even when he was advocating extremely conservative stances on doctrinal issues, John Paul II always seemed to be expressing a moral intuition, defining for Catholics a kind of spiritual end zone that none might ever reach, but that all should strive for. He accepted, and embraced, the imperfection that marks everything on Earth - all god's creations, if you dig that sort of thing. Benedict, by contrast, is an intellectual; he's much more finely attuned to the dogmatic conclusions of logical proofs than the complex moral universe that's contained within every human soul.  He's not interested in preaching; he's interested in enforcing.

Partially as a result of this, I think we're going to see Benedict abandon a lot of the pet causes that endeared JPII to liberals: Anti-death penalty, anti-war, anti-capitalism, etc. The reason, of course, is that these are all decisions made by governments on a fairly federal level. A Pope can be anti-war all he wants, but unless he gets an audience with an extremely maleable commander-in-chief, actual enforcement is going to be pretty tough. Same with hyper-deregulation of free markets. But issues like homosexuality and contraception are often decided on a much less central, more local and personal level: They're areas where, especially in modern America, a papal decree actually carries some political weight. Benedict is only fighting the battles that have some room for papal doctrine to result in actual enforcement. (Sorry, death row inmates.)

More to the point, I think, this kind of papal strategy devalues faith. The great thing about JPII's strategy is that it completely ignored enforcement: If you wanted to attain the kind of moral perfection that he was advocating, you had to do it by dint of sheer personal improvement. But to Benedict, the point of Catholicism is the destination, not the journey; self-improvement is just a pesky step on the road to Being More Like Him, and the sooner you can just be done with it, the better. He's interested in changing you, not motivating you to change. This attitude, unsurprisingly, has now manifested itself in the advocacy of laws that simply require moral self-improvement.*  But Benedict just takes all the fun out of self-improvement. Redemption is meaningless if it's compulsory.

*Note: For the purposes of this post, "moral self-improvement" denotes whatever Catholic doctrine says it does. I have no personal conviction that abandoning equal rights for gays would in any way be an "improvement," moral or otherwise.

- Daniel A. Munz

Daniel Munz, from Politics and War, and Angelica, from Battle Panda, will be filling in this weekend.  Dan, as you know, rocks, and Angelica, as you may not know, also rocks.  You lucky people you!

[Hi all. 'Tis Angelica, otherwise known as Battlepanda.]

Watergate and Monica. Yeah, they're the same. Don't take my word for it, listen to retiring congressmen Henry Hyde, who lead the <strike>witchhunt</strike> impeachment efforts against Clinton.

The veteran republican is also admitting for the first time that the impeachment of Clinton may have been in part political revenge against the democrats for the impeachment proceedings against GOP President Richard Nixon 25 years earlier.

  "Was this pay back?" asked Andy Shaw. 

"I can't say it wasn't. But I also thought that the Republican Party should stand for something, and if we walked away from this, no matter how difficult, we could be accused of shirking our duty," said Hyde

Lets see, we've got obstruction of justice, abuses of power, and contempt of Congress on the one hand, and White House hanky-panky on the other. I guess they're just about each as bad as the other. If you're a republican.

Oh, and the original version of this story, which ABC pulled, was even feistier. Check it out.

It's Friday, I've got to run to the airport in an hour, and the shower beckons (actually, demands). But before all that -- Japan! Also, in response to popular demand, I've grouped the series into a separate "Health of Nations" category. Collect all five!

Da Basics: Japan's health insurance is another one of these employer-based systems, and has been since 1922. Universal insurance was achieved in 1961, through the National Health Insurance Act. Employers with 700+ employees are required to operate insurance plans for workers and their dependents. The plans are called "society-managed insurance". About 1800 of these employer-run plans exist, with 85% of them being single company programs and the balance being jointly administered by two or more companies. The boards of these plans are 50% company reps and 50% worker reps, much like in Germany. Dependents are required to enroll in the plans and the whole thing is funded through payroll taxes. These employer-based, "society-managed insurance" groups cover 26% of Japan's population.

Employees and dependents in companies with fewer than 700 workers are automatically enrolled in the small business national health plan operated by the government. This plan covers about 30% of Japan and is paid for by both payroll taxes and general fund revenue.

The third category of insurance is the "citizens insurance program", which covers the retired and the self-employed. The plan is administered by municipal governments who levy a compulsory premium on the self-employed in their districts. Further, the employer run health care and the government run small business system are both required to contribute to the citizens program in order to cover the retirees. The contributions from the other two programs cover about 40% of the citizens insurance program costs. Any further amount needed comes from general revenue.

A variety of small insurance programs exist to mop up the folks between the cracks, government workers and various other special occupations use them. The unemployed remain in their employer's program (or whichever program they were in before) with the payroll contribution waived. All plans are required to cover a range of benefits, which include dental care, maternity care, and prescription drugs.

The plans place no restriction on hospital or physician choice and have no preauthorization requirements, i.e, no gatekeepers (save in certain, rare cases). Japan has a much more independent class of physicians, with most clinics and small hospitals being family-owned and operated by independent doctors -- a far cry from our non-profit and private-based care. The government builds and operates the large medical centers, though the distinctions are size rather than care. Small clinics can have hospital beds and multiday care, the distinction between clinic to hospital is simply having 20+ beds.

Hospital stays are longer in Japan but surgery is only 1/3rd as prevalent, mostly owing to a resistance towards invasive procedures. Nevertheless, patients stick around longer -- an average of 33 days in the hospital -- and are allowed to convalesce there.

Payment for both hospitals and clinics is done on a fee-for-service basis. Government regulates the fees, as well as prescription prices, with the help of the Central Social Insurance Medical Council. In Japan, primary care services are often more expensive than specialized care services, an inversion of most countries. Physician visits are often brief, but the Japanese hit the doctor's office 2.5 times more often than do Americans, Canadians, Germans or the English.

Cost Control: Like in the UK, Japanese health care is cheap, clocking in at a mere 7.6% of GDP. Put another way, Japan spends a bit less than $2,000 per capita on health care, America spends more than $5,000 despite not covering 43 million of its citizens. Problems are cropping up, however. Japan's got one of the most long-lived populations in the world, in addition to a quickly-dropping birth rate. By 2020, the proportion of Japanese of 65 should be about 26%, up from 10% in 1986. That's trouble. Americans, by contrast, are only supposed to see a 4% increase in codgers during the same time period.

To stem riding costs, Japan raised their copay from 10% to 20%, though the elderly were exempted from copaying for prescription drugs. Copays, however, are ineffective at limiting costs, they were capped at $500 a month, and so they did nothing to help on the costs -- mainly due to catastrophic illness -- that're hurting the system. So Japan is cheap, but having cost problems.

How Do We Stack Up? Japan is 8-11 (three way tie) on fairness of cost distribution and #1(!) on attainment of health care goals. Their system's performance, overall, puts them at #10. America, to compare, is 54th in fairness(!), 15th in goal attainment, and 37th in overall performance. All that and we only have to spend a bit over twice as much to get it! What a deal!

And that just about brings this little series to an end. On Monday, I'll have some longer thoughts for you on what this says about American health care and what I think we should be fighting for, so stay tuned for that. If you ever want to refer to these posts again, they're all grouped under the "Health of Nations" category, which you can access on the sidebar. Hope you liked.

Last night I went to a lecture by Samantha Power, she of A Problem From Hell fame. If you ever get a chance, see her speak -- she's amazing. And for that matter, buy her book (or buy it for me -- yes, I lack all shame), she's an incredible mind and was somehow able to make an hour on Sudan and genocide an uplifting, informative, and inspiring experience. Anyway, I have some projects on Sudan in the works (some of them pre-lecture!) so stay tuned for that. Right now, I want to talk about humanitarian interventions for a sec.

CW here is that the American people don't much like the idea of committing troops in order to save lives. That, ostensibly, is why Bush had to go through the WMD rigamarole in order to invade Iraq, and why Clinton couldn't deploy to Rwanda. So I did a little bit of research tonight, and I feel safe in calling bullshit.

So far as I can tell, Clinton felt himself unable to intervene in Rwanda, mostly because of the Mogadishu fiasco. But even for Clinton, a draft-dodging president with the Somalia mess on his record, interventions were possible. When he pushed airstrikes against Serbia, Americans were solidly in his corner. In February of 1999, a month before the air strikes began, Americans opposed them 45%-43%. They also weren't paying attention to the issue, 70%-30%.

On March 24th, when the strikes began, Americans supported them, 50%-30%. Quite a switch. In April, poll after poll showed support in the high-50's to low-60's for sending in ground troops if the strikes failed. In May, support dropped, but mainly because Americans thought the war was mishandled (59% thought we had screwed up by announcing no ground troops would be deployed). More interesting, a poll testing a variety of different arguments for and against the war found the most convincing ones were those that mentioned the moral obligation to stop genocide. Everything else -- pleas for self-interest and stability and the preservation of American lives -- was in the low 50's or below, mention genocide and support popped up to the 60's. By June, support has sprung back up with around 56%-60% of Americans believing we'd done the right thing.

Let's move around some. Remember the furor over Liberia a year or two back? 60% favored the deployment of a peacekeeping force. And Sudan? 74% of Americans think the UN should intervene, 60% think the US should contribute troops, but only 42% are confident that the international community will intervene. What's the lesson? Americans believe, at least theoretically, in our obligation to stop genocide. And even if the support we're seeing is soft, the rally-round-the-flag effect is more than enough to make it hard. The polls that show Americans opposing the idea of humanitarian interventions are, if not wrong, then suffering from a structural deficiency wherein Americans support in the specific what they oppose in the abstract.

There's a lot of talk lately about how best to craft a progressive philosophy towards using force. This would appear to be part of it. Creating a clear standard for the use of force -- genocide or grave threat to the country -- would seem a simple way to dispose of a hard question. Solely relying on the functionality of the military to diffuse danger is, I think, an unattractive platform. American might can be a powerful weapon for positive change and taking such a wary stance towards it denies that fact. Being clear, loud and consistent in arguing that that America should militarily oppose genocide and should thus prepare plans to physically end Sudan's slaughter would be a powerful first step.

To preempt some comments, I realize it's not quite as easy as all that, and attempts to stop militarily prevent China from committing genocide probably wouldn't work. But that's okay. Our public philosophy on the use of force need not withstand every hypothetical, it just needs to be generally applicable and easily comprehensible. If China decides to start lopping off Muslim heads, we'll figure out a way to deal with the situation. As that's not a particularly likely scenario, I wouldn't worry about it. What I would argue, however, is that a willingness to forcibly end genocide would give the Christian right a space to ally with us -- they're great on humanitarian intervention -- and would also stand a good chance at ending genocides worldwide. If the next three were stopped cold and it became known that systematic slaughter would attract swift and sure military reprisal, you'd probably see far less of it. And if you can't turn a willingness to end genocide into a inspirational foreign policy, you're doing something wrong.

Note: All polling data from Polling Report.

Some other good blogospheric folks have taken a shine to the series and added on to it. Over at Electoral-Math, Nick has entries on the medical malpractice systems of Germany, France, and England. Meanwhile, Greg at the Talent Show has gone all Kevin Drum on us and reworked some data into a user-friendly graph. Thanks, guys.

Sigh. Silly Santorum -- you can't fight the weather. And trying isn't going to close the 14-point gap between you and Casey...

Maybe I'm overestimating the power of Powell, but I have to think his decision to actively lobby against Bolton effectively kills the nomination. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is notable for its motley collection of Republican moderates -- guess the rest of the caucus wanted to cut taxes or something? -- and they're exactly the folks who listen to the words of Colin, he's one of their own. So now that he's having chit-chats with Chafee and Hagel, and Chafee and Hagel have been wobbling ever since Voinovich forced Lugar to blink, it seems like this little push from someone with so much popular authority should be more than enough to convince one or both of 'em that Bolton shouldn't exit the committee alive. And if Bolton can't get out of committee, and Social Security privatization can't pass, it's really looking like lame duckhood for this president.

That reminds me: Is anyone else thinking Bush term two looks a lot like Clinton term one? Tough fights on nominations, unpopular cultural battles (gays in the military then, Schiavo now), collapse of primary domestic initiatives (Health Care reform then, privatization now), ethical investigations weakening friendly congressional leaders, and so on. The resemblance is quite close.

Via DC Media Girl, Hindrocket's having an aneurysm over this. Not the bankruptcy bill that targets -- and fires on -- the poor, not the leave-the-money-on-the-nightstand ethos that produced the energy bill, but this. A T-shirt. That's what made him wonder "HOW SICK CAN THE LEFT GET?" A T-shirt on CafePress.com. If I had the energy to sign up for CafePress, I could create one saying, for instance, "Hindrocket Loves Big Trunk -- Pass the FMA Now!" and it'd still just be a kid playing with a website, not an official expression of the left's depravity.

These right-wingers, it's all vapors and delicate constitutions with them. Call 'em a name and they cry. Meanwhile, I know exactly how sick the right can get. That's why I don't read Little Green Footballs. Because depravity isn't a kid with a naughty T-shirt design, it's a community with a thirst for blood.

Update: Seems like as good a time as any to link to revive this post...

Krauthammer writes:

Have that independence and supremacy been abused? Grossly. What other advanced democracy would radically legalize abortion by judicial decree rather than by democratic will expressed through legislatures or referendums? What sane democracy allows four unelected robed eminences in Massachusetts to revolutionize the very definition of marriage, the most ancient institution in society?

Matt responds:

Obviously, no nation other than the United States would allow robed eminences in Massachusetts to make decisions about the legality of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in marriage, but provincial Supreme Courts in such far-off lands as Canada have likewise been ruling on such matters. And if you want to know what other advanced democracy would have judicial decrees legalizing abortion you, again, don't need to look further than Canada. All of which would merely demonstrate ignorance on Krauthammer's part were he not, well, Canadian.

Heh.

It's been a long day, I desperately need some coffee, and it's really hot in my room. So you wouldn't believe how excited I am to dive into yet another country's health care structure. Let's just say I love you all very, very much. For those who've missed the previous three days of health wonkery, check out France, England and Canada. Today is Germany which, fun fact, Clinton Care was based off of.

Da Basics: Germany was the first nation to enact mandatory health insurance, doing so way back in 1883. The system is funded through employer contributions, with half the money coming from your paycheck and half coming from your employer. Participating Germans -- about 90% of the country -- are enrolled in "sickness funds", some of which are organized by geographical region, some of which are organized by trade, and some of which are organized by company. The funds are a mix between private and public entities and are all nonprofit. They can't discriminate, and can't charge customers at different rates corresponding to their health/age/lifestyle. That means no cherry-picking.

Various sickness funds have different contribution levels (so some will deduct 7% of your paycheck, others 8%), but all are required to cover a broad range of benefits (including prescription drugs) and demand only a modest copay. These funds, which are conducted through your employer, remain with you even after you lose or retire from a job. So if you're fired, your employer will still have to make contributions for you, but the government will take up your end of the bargain. Same deal if you retire, though in that case the sickness fund covers a bit less of your expenses and your retirement pension makes up the gap. The funds are administered by a board that's half company representatives and half worker representatives.

Insurance is mandatory for all Germans with incomes under $40,000. Those above can opt out, but few do. All told, about 8% of the country opts out of the sickness funds, and most of them are very wealthy. Private insurers pay doctors at much higher rates, and thus the folks they insure get preferential treatment. This way, the rich can pay for better service, unlike in Canada where the only way to attain kingly treatment is paying out of pocket in America. 2% of the country are covered through the armed forces or policy, and .2% of the country -- mostly the superrich -- have no insurance at all.

The financing method is pretty regressive. The sickness funds can vary the percentage of your paycheck they deduct under the rationale that those with larger earnings need a smaller percentage to cover expenses. So the idea is not to have the rich covering the poor, but for everyone to be covered. Eventually, however, this got out of hand and a slight reform was made: Because various sickness funds draw from differing slices of the population, some were requiring quite small percentages to run the fund, as they had healthier, richer enrollees, while others needed quite a chunk because they covered poorer, sicker demographics. So in 1994, Germany created a program that forced sickness funds with richer, healthier members to contribute a portion of their payroll revenues to a national pool, which then distributes it to the poorer funds. That means the financing is still regressive, but less so.

Germany's not traditionally been a gatekeeper system, but that's changing. Nowadays, 55% of their doctors are generalists, compared with 35% of American physicians. Non-hospital (ambulatory) physicians are required to join their regional associations, which pay them from a global fund. If the physicians bill beyond what they're budgeted for, fees are reduced in proportion to the excess spending the next quarter. This seems to present a problem, in that some physicians could over-prescribe and force others to under-prescribe, as no particular physician would know what his colleagues were doing and thus be able to judge what he could do. Whether the associations have a way of evaluating physicians individually I don't know. Otherwise, the system seems flawed as doctors lack necessary cost information.

Cost Control: The 1977 German Cost Containment Act created a body called "Concerted Action", comprised of representatives from the nation's health providers, sickness funds, employers, unions, and various levels of government. CA meets twice a year to set guidelines for hospital fees, physicians rates and so forth. Since 1986, physician's fees have been capped. As a result, their health spending actually feel a bit between 1986 and 1991. But in 1991, costs resumed their march upwards, so the German government tried to make the Sickness Funds more competitive by allowing greater flexibility in choosing them. This heightened the inequality, forcing the aforementioned law transferring wealth from healthy, rich sickness funds to worse off ones. As of 2001, Germany's health spending was at 10.7% of GDP, third highest in the world. America, for comparison, is #1.

How Do We Stack Up? Due to some concerns over the viability of GDP spending and OECD rankings, I'm going to be changing some of the metrics I use here. Per capita, Germany spends $2,817 on health care for its citizens. America spends $5,267 (which in unbelievably high, by the way -- you should really check out how nuts that is, a point well-made by this Excel file comparison). According to the WHO, Germany's health care system is #6 in fairness of financial burden, #14 in overall goal attainment, and #14 in terms of overall performance. America's system is 54th in fairness(!), 15th in goal attainment, and 37th in overall performance.

Sources: Thomas Bodenheimer's Understanding Health Policy, WHO data,

On assignment from political theory class, I've been reading David Boaz's Libertarianism: A Primer. Boaz is the Executive VP of CATO and the sort of guy who finds an idea and crams the world into it. Since I've had to follow him along in his quest to make every historical occurrence, mistake and misstep an argument for free markets and weak states, I figure the least I can do is is highlight some of the stranger parts. So here are my favorite two from the first chapter, which is about why Libertarianism is just about the sweetest thing ever:

First, we are not as prosperous as we could be. If our economy were growing at the rate it grew from 1943 to 1973, our GDP would be 40 percent larger than it is.

In case you're curious, 1943-1977 encompasses the end of FDR's presidency, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. So if our economy were growing at the rate it did during liberalism's renaissance, this country would be better off.

I'm genuinely confused, actually, as to how Boaz thought reference to the days of the New Deal, the GI Bill, the WW II build-up, and Keynesian economics would help the case for libertarianism, but I guess he figured no one would notice and they'd just assume the slowdown since came thanks to big government. That, of course, is insane -- In 1973, the year Boaz stops our growth at, OPEC caused a massive oil crisis, quadrupling the price per barrel of our economy's fuel. In response, Carter deregulated, then came Reagan, the closest thing we've had to libertarian, and then Bush 41, and then a roaring economy under a Democrat. Boaz is either the worst or most disingenuous historian I've ever read. That he tries to blame all this on a larger and more complicated tax code is either laughably cynical or remarkably insane.

Great Britain, which had higher taxes and more socialism than the United States, suffered even more. It was the richest country in the world in the nineteenth century, but by the 1970's its economic stagnation and national malaise were known worldwide as the "British disease".

Boaz has now managed to track Britain's trajectory from preeminent world power to underperforming economy without managing to mention the end of imperialism, World War I, or World War II. Bravo, good sir, a virtuoso performance indeed!

So apologies for the lack of content today. One of those days where I just haven't had much to say. That's the problem with keeping a 5-8 pieces a day posting schedule, when the inspiration runs dry you feel guilty. In any case, I'm working on the Germany Health of Nations right now, so that should be up soon. In the meantime, if any of you have found some particularly provocative articles around, leave them in comments for me.

Via a kind reader, Matt Taibbi's review of the Tom Friedman's new book is, without doubt, the funniest and sharpest-knifed book review I've ever read. Good times.

Michael Berube's David Brooks is pitch-perfect.

Update: The Rude Pundit says:

In today's column, Brooks places blame for the dissolution of national discourse, for the polarization of left and right, for the uproar about judicial activism squarely where it belongs: in the wombs of poor women. There's so many astonishing leaps of logic and ignorance of history in this single column that entire dissertations could be written about all that's absent from Brooks's "analysis" of the state of American politics.

Happy Anniversary to Tangled Bank!

John Cloud, author of Time magazine's cover story on Coulter, sat down with CJR's Brian Montopoli to talk about his piece. It's a train wreck. Either Cloud doesn't know what he's doing, what he's saying, or how it's sounding, but something's going wretchedly awry as his words travel from tongue to tape recorder. I, for one, didn't much mind the Coulter piece. If Time wants to venerate her, she's a cultural figure and this is a magazine that regularly plasters nude models pantomiming back pain on their covers, it's their choice to continue their estrangement from serious reporting. But if they're going to defend her appearance as newsworthy and "new", they're going to have to do better than this:

Brian, Brian, we have put Josef Stalin on the cover. We have made Adolf Hitler the person of the year. We are a news magazine. The cover of our magazine is not glorification. It is news. This whole idea is bizarre to me. If the New York Times did a front-page story on Ann Coulter, would it be glorifying her or would it be covering her?

First of all, allow me a "heh" moment as Cloud compares Coulter to Hitler and Stalin; even I'm not that shrill. But then, I've never had to sit down with the woman. Either way, does Cloud not see the difference between a cover story featuring a B list conservative columnist and those focusing on heads of state? I hate to tell him how his magazine works, but Henry Luce's publication didn't choose cover stories on the basis of douche-baggery levels, it selected on grounds of newsworthiness. And Ann Coulter, whose recent book didn't achieve anything near the infamy her previous efforts garnered and whose influence has been steadily waning, doesn't really qualify.

But that's Time these days -- Ann Coulter doesn't have to be newsworthy, she just has to be entertaining and controversial. And that she undoubtedly is. And that's fine, Time is a business. They put out a magazine that's regularly displayed on the same rack as Star!; if they're worried about losing market share to the tabloids it's not for me to criticize their business strategy. But rather than skulk off and hope for an uptick in sales, Cloud acts like the creationists who loudly declare they're just following the best available science and professes that Coulter is really the most pressing issue facing the nation:

Ann Coulter [it seemed to me] had epitomized the way politics was discussed last year during the election. It was slash-and-burn, on both sides. Her side won, rather decisively, and it seemed the right time to figure out who was this force behind the way our political dialogue was being conducted. Ann Coulter is the person who is shaping the tone of this dialogue in many ways, and I thought it was time to examine her.

Anybody who seriously -- as opposed to cynically, which I think is Cloud's true position -- believes Coulter is dictating the dialogue is an idiot. If Ann sets the pace for the right, Ward Churchill is the driving force behind the left. Except he's not and neither is she. Ann Coulter doesn't even possess a serious platform! She does a lot of guest spots on Fox News, but barring that outlet, she's no widely-watched commentator like O'Reilly, she's a polemicist enjoyed by a certain slice of partisan conservatives. The left has a coterie of similar folks -- though none quite so vitriolic -- but they don't set the tone for our discourse, they set the tone for their discourse.

Time wanted to sell some issues. That's fine, I don't hold that against them. What I can't bear is to listen to this self-righteous schmuck aver that Coulter is some sort of supranational force that newsweeklies ignore at their peril. Coulter is a B list pundit who's put some books on the bestseller lists by attacking her partisan enemies. By this point, who hasn't? But if Time is, as Cloud argues, exploring the devolution of political discourse, a photo-essay of Ann's life -- she loves her mother! she teaches children! she went to high school! -- has no place among the proceedings. Not unless next week will be a meta-issue examining this week's trashy featurette as a window into the fall of serious and informative news content. But even that article would be a lie because, right across the shelf, Newsweek has spent the last four years wiping the floor with Time. They've gotten scoops, they've swarmed critical stories (Abu Ghraib, anyone?), they published the definitive account of the election, and they've proven that a grocery stand magazine can be a thoughtful and entertaining news outlet.

So let Time and its writers dance around the dissonance created when a product like Time begs you to believe they're putting out The Atlantic. But don't watch, watching will only make you dizzy. And next time you're at the market wondering which weekly quick-fix you should grab, guide that hand over to Newsweek. It's the same price and it's not a willing participant -- hell, it's not even a believer -- in the Coulterization of public life.

Okay, now to explain my cryptic link to the Powers' column. I was vague because I was dashing out to class, so apologies for that. As for why you need to read it, there were two reasons: one self-interested, one altruistic. Starting with the second, Powers engaged the sheer cultural cost of all who've fallen in the last year, a task that no one else (that I know of) has been willing to face up to. From Bellows to Sontag to Thompson to Kennan, a truly stunning number of leading intellectual lights have died recently, and few have been brave enough to broach what that means. I've kept wanting to say something about it, but nothing I wrote matched the task, or even came close. Draft after draft of my efforts were discarded, and each time I got more frustrated that no one else seemed to be taking a shot at it. Maybe that's because, from my Gen Y vantage point, intellectual giants don't really exist anymore, save for a few relics whose heyday was 40 years ago, and I find that tragic. That even the superstars of yesteryear were now passing seemed to say something profound, but I wasn't able to say it, and so was desperately hoping someone else would. Powers did, and his piece deserves wide play. So that was reason #2.

As for #1, I'm working with some folks at the LA Weekly to coax, cajole, and convince them into seriously beefing up their online presence. One element of that is proving that these blog thingies are read by real people and can drive actual eyeballs towards stories. Driving your eyeballs towards a story was part of that process. And that's why I'd ask all of you who haven't checked out the piece to do so now, even if it's just as a favor to me. As it demonstrates, the LA Weekly has some phenomenally talented writers banging pieces out, but their reach is limited to whomever grabs the dead-tree version from a coffee shop. That needs to change, and if you all click over, it likely will.

So what're you waiting for? Click!

You know the internet has lost its "new" when Ted Kennedy makes a major entrance into it. But the net is old, he's created a sweet site, and you should look.

As an aside, I don't like the Kennedy condescension that so many seem to exhibit. I assume it's a combination of the guy's distasteful past (adulterer, alcoholic, general weirdness) and the right's unrelenting campaign against him, but I wish we'd stop buying into it. Kennedy's worked his ass off as a progressive legislator for far longer than most of us have been alive, and while he's been wrong on a fair number of important fights, he's also been a lone voice for unpopular, wholly correct causes and radical, necessary legislation. So while I don't like everything the guy has done, I respect much of it, and in any case I wish we'd not let the press and the Republicans browbeat us into disowning one of our own whenever we're in polite company. I'll take Ted Kennedy over Tom Coburn any old day.

In a post attacking nationalized health care, Sebastian Holsclaw says something that's simply wrong:

It takes a lot of work to become a doctor. It takes a lot of time and effort. Few people are going to put the time in if they aren't well compensated.

It just ain't true. In France, physicians make about $55,000 (US dollars), around 1/3rd what American doctors make. So is there an enormous doctor shortage? Not in the least. France has 3.3 practicing physicians per 1,000 residents, America has 2.4.

This is a common and, frankly, inexplicable oversight opponents of nationalized health care make. So let's say it slow: money is not the sole factor dictating occupational choices. Enormous swarms of folks sign up for endless years of education in order to make paltry sums in academia. I'm heading to Washington to -- hopefully! -- make an absurdly low wage as a writer. And you know what? I don't expect that I'll ever make much money in the profession. People go work for NGO's, in politics, as social workers, and on and on, none of it for the money. Lifestyle, internal satisfaction, passion for the profession, and a host of other non-monetary factors weigh heavily on occupational choice.

If doctors were only entering the field for the money, that'd be a shame. But they're not. In fact, many of them are leaving it due to work conditions. Considering the number who complain about the total hell that the medical profession has turned into, I'd guess a pretty high percentage would take a paycut in exchange for an end to haggling with insurance companies and filling out forms (the average Canadian doctor's office spends two hours a week on billing, the average American office spends 30). It's not all about money and we shouldn't assume that just because we pay doctors princely sums, that doing so is an immutable law of sustaining a professional medical class. It just isn't so.

* If you know the song, you know the answer.

I don't think Pope Ratzinger is going to be my favorite person in the world, but going after him for something he did when he was 14 is really a bit much. Ratzinger's 78, if we can find some anti-semitism in, say, his last 20 years, a case can be made. If we could find him criticizing the Pope's decision to apologize for Catholic inaction during the Holocaust, a stink should be raised. But the guy was a 14-year old in Nazi Germany, I don't even hold it against him if he joined the Hitler youth voluntarily. Propaganda, peer pressure, and government coercion are powerful forces, particularly for a kid, and while I expect a certain level of moral leadership from God's earthly emissary, I don't expect it to have been on display before his balls dropped.

Thinking back to the election, what pissed me off most about the coverage of Kerry was the time spent unearthing aloofness and puck-hogging tendencies from his childhood. I can't stand that stuff. So, to me, it wasn't fair when they did it to Kerry, it wasn't fair when they did it to Bush, it wasn't fair when they did it to Clinton, and it's not fair to do it to Ratzinger. Kids are kids, and they do stupid things. When I was 17, I wanted Noam Chomsky (speaking of) to be president, which kinda shows how internally consistent my beliefs were considering the guy's a, if I remember correctly, syndo-anarchist. When I was 14 I was doing stunts inspired by MTV's show Jackass. The point is that I, like my friends, was easily led, and would often gravitate to the poles rather than the center. I like to think I've come a ways in the 6 years since then, and folks wouldn't hold my stupider self against my contemporary self, particularly not 60 years into the future. Ratzinger should get the same consideration.

Update: See, now this I fully endorse. Homophobia, authoritarian tendencies, apologist for pedophiles -- have at it. Just don't ding him for what he did while his voice was cracking.

Read this article. No, don't ask questions, just read it. I'll tell you why later.

Next on our tour of health care systems would have to come Canada. I've been debating whether or not to do them because their setup is so well-known, on the other hand, it's also something of an anomaly that's often romanticized to a degree it shouldn't be, so it seems worth the effort. If you're new to the series, you can find France here and England here. Off we go.

Da Basics: Canada care is unapologetic, no-holds-barred single-payer. The single-payer, by the way, is not Canada as a whole, but each specific province, so it's not quite as monolithic as we think. It's financed by taxes, but the taxes vary from province to province, so there is a certain amount of variation in how the system pays its bills. But I'm going to stay away from that -- keeping you guys still for health policy is dicey enough, if I start throwing in tax policy, my blog will have tumbleweeds blowing through it (and maybe a shoot-out in the saloon, but that's another story).

Like England, Canada's insurance has nothing to do with occupation, age, citizenship, or any other variable. If you're on the grounds of our Northern neighbor, you're covered. The system covers everything, though drug benefits and long-term care vary a bit across provinces. What's interesting about Canada's incarnation of single-payer, though, is how pure it's kept. France and England, as we saw, both have a significant role for supplementary insurance beyond the government's basic offering. Not so in Canada, where add-on insurance isn't even allowed. That makes for a remarkably level playing field. Care varies only according to province (and, assumedly, individual doctors and hospitals), not according to class. Interestingly, low-income Canadians actually receive more care than do the affluent, owing to the higher rates of disease in poorer communities.

To be clear, there is a little bit of supplementary insurance floating around, but it can only be used for certain amenities, like private rooms. Hospitals are simply not allowed to bill private insurers for services covered by the provincial plans. So say nighty-night to the private sector.

Canada is a gatekeeper system, and 55% of their doctors are general practitioners playing that role. Specialists can see patients without a GP referral, but they don't receive the highest compensation from the government and so most won't do it. As that alludes to, Canada's doctors are paid on a fee-for-service basis, so there's no incentive (a la Britain) to withhold treatment. Hospitals, on the other hand, negotiate a global budget with provincial government, which is to say they get a lump sum rather than a fee-for-service. That makes adapting to changing circumstances or varying needs harder than it'd otherwise be, as the money is allocated from the start, rather than in response to circumstances.

Cost: In 1970, the year before Canada's health care system came online, Canada and the US spent about the same on health care, 7.2% and 7.4% of GDP respectively. By 1990, it was 9% and 11.9%. And by 2002, it was 9.6% and 14.6%. So while our health care spending shot up by 7.6% of GDP and still doesn't cover out citizenry, theirs had a 4.5% climb and got everyone in the goddamn country covered (remember: the first number is pre-universal health insurance). During the 90's, Canada's health care costs (as a % of GDP) actually dropped. Dropped! And these differences aren't a result of fewer services rendered. Indeed, Canadians, on average, spend more days in the hospital and have more visits with their physicians than Americans do. The lower costs are accounted for by three things:

1) Lower administrative costs. This one will blow some minds. Despite being a bureaucratic leviathan or whatever, America's administrative costs are 300% greater per capita than Canada's. So much for the vaunted efficiency of the private market.

2) When Canadians do spend a day in the hospital, it's much cheaper. Costs per patient per day are quite a bit higher on our side of the border.

3) Physician's fees and pharmaceutical prices, which are way higher on this side of the border.

The fiscal austerity of the 90's, which helped drop costs of the program, did make for a worse health care system, or at least one that netted less satisfaction. Wait times for elective surgeries increased, though it should be noted that Canadians wait, on average, less time for vital operations such as transplants. Oh, and the "hordes of Canadians rushing across the border for care thing"? Mostly myth.

The only verified cases are a) folks in the US on vacation or b) folks who don't want to wait for an elective procedure and can pay to do it out of pocket. Think about that for a second -- the primary criticism of the Canadian system is the "wait times/they come here" combo, but what's really going on is a prioritization of procedures and a few rich folks deciding not stand in line. So in Canada, it's the rich who can't get the care they want, but everybody can get the care they need. Here, the rich can get all the care they want, and many of our poor and lower-middle class can't simply wait in line for elective procedures -- they simply can't get them. It's all about priorities.

Recently, the Canadian government, In response to the drop in citizen satisfaction, substantially increased the program's funding (by $33 billion, I think) and began some restructuring. The effects of those changes aren't in yet, as they were just passed in 2003.

How Do We Stack Up? In simple ratings, Canada is 30th while we're 37th (according to the OECD). So they're a bit better, but it's not like the giant disparity we had with France, whose system takes the coveted top slot. As noted above, the Canadian system is significantly cheaper as a percentage of GDP than is the American system, despite the fact that the former covers everyone and the latter leaves a fair chunk of its population out in the cold. On the years of life lost metric, American women lose 3,836 years per 100,000 women and the men give up 6,648. The comparable Canadian figures are 2,768 and 4,698 respectively.

Canada's health care system, much more so than the others we've looked at, is a pure single-payer effort. It's really run by the government, private insurance is barred from interfering in any significant way, and so on. And despite the vaunted inefficiencies of government, they manage to cover their entire population with administration costs that're 300% less than ours per capita. Considering that 42 million of our folks aren't even in the system, the difference is even greater than that. Much of it comes from the simplicity of having the government pick up the tab rather than forcing doctors to haggle with insurers, but not all. In any case, that metric blows my mind.

In any case, Canada's got some problems. Wait times for elective surgeries can suck real bad and, according to an LA Times article from April 10th, some folks do cross the border to speed things up. But vital procedures are done quicker and, amazingly, any Canadian can get any necessary surgery done that they want. If elective, it may take some time, but there's never a question over whether they'll be treated. So next time someone goes off on Canadians-in-line to you, remember: the question they're facing is whether to allow the rich to pole vault over the poor. America looked at that calculus and chose the rich; our poor don't have mere waiting times to face, many of them simply can't get any non-emergency medical care. That doesn't happen in Canada, and it doesn't happen because their system is aimed at never letting it happen. Frankly, if our uninsured knew they could do it, it'd make much more sense for to flee to Canada for treatment than it does for the Canadian rich to cut their wait times by paying out-of-pocket here.

Sources: LA Times articles from Lexis-Nexis, Thomas Bodenheimer's Understanding Health Policy, OECD data sets, Matthew Holt.

I know I should be saying more about John Bolton but I'm a bit lost for words. Yesterday was hell of a victory -- though of the battle, not war, sort -- and I never expected it. I admit, I thought Steve Clemons' all-Bolton, all-the-time, work was informing, but quixotic, and I figured we'd score a few rhetorical points in the hearings but the nominee would sail through anyway. Apparently not. And throwing a wall in front of Bolton means more than the delay and possible defeat of an unqualified UN ambassador, it's as much about the nuclear option and the Senate's right to reject nominees as it is about the man himself. So this one's important, folks, and for the first time it looks like we're in spitting distance of a win. If you want to follow the doings (and you should), Steve Clemons over at The Washington Note has been, and remains, your man. There's not been a non-Bolton post over there in months, and though that's been a disappointment, it's certainly paying off. For analysis, Democracy Arsenal is also well worth checking out, and read down a bit for their discussion about What It All Means.

On a Bolton-related note, Steve Clemons tore some pages out of the Josh Marshall playbook when approaching this battle. Where Josh turned his site into Social Security central and acted as a locus for anti-privatization efforts, Steve has done the exact same thing for Bolton. Is this part of the future of blogs? It certainly helps out the hits and raises the site's profile in addition to giving its author a niche and way to coordinate some activism, so it seems like a natural direction. On the other hand, both Steve and Josh, though the latter just moved to New York, are DC-folk well-connected in their community and thus in command of some important eyeballs -- how much that has to do with the success of their blog activism I don't know. But it's interesting to see this sort of ssingle-issue clearinghouse blog emerge, and more interesting to watch it play a significant role in its fights. How long till every serious issue has a site wholly devoted to blocking/promoting it?

From the LA Times:

General Motors Corp. on Tuesday posted a first-quarter net loss of $1.1 billion, its worst quarter in 13 years, due to disappointing sales in the crucial North American automotive market and soaring healthcare costs.
...
Other analysts, though, said GM could be holding back as part of its negotiations on healthcare costs with the United Auto Workers. Last week, the union said it had no intention of revising its current labor contract to help the automaker lower medical expenses but would do what it could within the agreement to help lower costs.

GM has warned that its U.S. healthcare costs could grow to $5.8 billion this year. Making things look as bleak as possible would help GM persuade the union to pass on some of the company's healthcare costs to its hourly workers, analysts said.
...
Although healthcare costs are the company's principal long-term concern, getting its product mix right for the competitive U.S. market is the more immediate concern, he said.

Sounds like some corporations are chafing under the weight of health care costs. Now what to do, what to do...

A few days ago, CAP released their quarterly Taxpayer's Report, assessing America's direction on a variety of metrics. It's really quite a stunning indictment of the administration. Check it out.

If I were the new Pope, I'd be feeling a bit weird right now. In fact, not only now; I'd be downright nervous whenever someone glanced at their watch in my presence. What's the rush? With all the commentary focusing on Ratzinger's status as a transitional (read: likely to die soon) Pope, he's got to be feeling the reality of mortality pretty acutely. You'd think this transitional idea would be something the Cardinals could keep to themselves, but apparently not. Instead, Ratzinger emerged Pope amid ecstatic cries of "He's so old!" and "I bet his health is failing" and, the current crowd favorite, "the real question is who'll be the next Pope when he dies, which will be soon?"

Odd folk, these Catholics are. They take all the fun out of promotion.

Welcome to the second installment of The Health of Nations (though it's the first one to sport a clever title).  I'm your host, Ezra, and I'll be taking you on a deadly-dull tour through England's health care system.  An uninteresting topic set in a country known for its dullness, should be a party.  And speaking of the party, you don't want to show up not knowing anybody.  So if you missed yesterday's edition on France, you might want to give it a look-see.

Da' Basics: Britain's health care system finds its roots in a document called the Beveridge report.  The report argued that the health care system Britain had in the 40's -- which covered about half the country and used political patronage as its sorting mechanism -- should be combined with the rest of the country's fragmented social programs and administered in a uniform way.  Thus the National Health Service was created.

The NHS is mostly funded through taxes -- 82% of it is, to be exact.  Of the remaining, 13% comes from employer-employee contributions (much like Social Security) and 4% is user fees.  Unlike France, Britain's health care system is entirely separate from employment, and there's no distinction between its social insurance aspects (covering those who contribute) and its public assistance aspects (covering those who need it).  The system simply takes care of everyone on British soil. 

Unlike Canada, Britain allows supplementary insurance for those wanting special treatment (shorter waits, private rooms, etc).  It's not nearly so widespread as in France (where 90% have it and the poor get it through public subsidies), but 11% have some form of SI and many jobs offer it as a perk.  To accommodate this, doctors can have both private and public practices, meaning they can treat patients under public rules complete with queues for non-pressing procedures while, at the same time, be performing the same procedures with quick turnaround for those with supplementary private insurance.  This obviously creates a certain degree of inequality in the system, and, indeed, it's a source of widespread discontent.

The NHS has a gatekeeper system in which every person who wants treatment must have a general practitioner (GP) as their primary care physician.  Patients can choose their PCP, and even switch if they don't like their choice.  The GP's get paid via a small monthly sum per patient (capitation), not adjusted for services rendered.  This is basically community rating -- GP's have long lists of patients, most don't need anything in particular during the month, so the small payment is pure profit on the majority of patients, who never come in, and thus covers the losses on the patients who do come in.  Since GP's get more money for more patients, they've an incentive to keep huge lists of people.  Since patients choose their GP, however, the GP theoretically can't cherrypick patients by looking for only the healthy ones.  But GP's can turn patients away by saying their list is full, so it seems possible that some degree of cherry-picking can go on.

Cost Control: I'm giving this it's own category because it's both what's right and what's wrong with the British system.  The NHS is a remarkably frugal operation.  Health expenditures in the UK accounted for 7.6% of GDP in 2002; in America, they were 14.6%, or almost double Britain's expenditure.  The cost differential comes from a few places.  First and foremost, single-payer systems are able limit budgets and negotiate better deals.  Further, the mode of reimbursement, capitation rather than fee-for-service, is much cheaper and carries with it a disincentive, rather than incentive, to treat.  In fee-for-service systems, the doctors get paid more if they run tests, perform surgeries, etc.  That leads to a certain profligacy, a willingness to advocate treatment when the patient may not need it.  On the other hand, capitation brings the opposite problem: an unwillingness to order treatment when the patient may need it.  As a result, the UK rate for coronary artery bypass surgery was only 20% of ours, renal dialysis is performed far less often, and there are significant worries about underprescription.  That's not to say everything is rationed, but much is.

Further, the capitation system has led to a severe shortage of doctors, with only 2 for every 1,000 people, far below the OECD average of 2.9 and the EU average of 3.3.  The lack of doctors and the paucity of funds have also led to long waiting times; 38% of patients wait more than four months for elective surgeries.  The basic issue is that, as Blair has admitted, the British health care system is severely underfunded, partially because Britain's got a low GDP per capita (though I don't think he admitted that part).

Interestingly, the NHS has become a major political football.  Check out the Labour splash page.  Every voter who heads to the Labour website is first greeted by a scare ad showing how much the Tories want them to pay for hospital procedures.  The main site prominently touts the improvements Labour's made to the speed of the system and the number of doctors, particularly specialists.  So, though cheap, the NHS is underfunded and providing relatively poor service and Britons know it. 

How Do We Stack Up?:  As noted above, America's health care system is much, much more expensive that Britain's, but also less generous.  But does that affect the outcomes? 

Yes, but only if compared to a functioning health care system.  When stacked up against ours, Britain's broken system still comes out on top.  American women lose 3,836 years of life per 100,000 while our men lose 6,648.  By comparison, British women lose 2,947 and their men sacrifice 4,815 (go here to see how this is calculated).  On the other hand, they have longer wait times and fewer doctors.  The disparity comes because America's system works okay for most, but not at all for many.  Britain's, by contrast, offers mediocre service but offers it to everyone in the country.  If they injected their health care system with the sort of cash we pump into ours -- which'd mean spending the equivalent of 7% more of their GDP on it, it's safe to say we'd be beaten quite handily. 

Sources: I stupidly closed some windows and so don't have as full an accounting of my sources as I did yesterday.  But I mainly used Thomas Bodenheimer's excellent Understanding Health Policy, OECD data sets, and the British government's websites. 

Harry Reid sent Mitch McConnell a letter on "the nuclear option" today. It's good enough to reprint in full, text below the fold:

April 19, 2005
 
The Honorable Mitch McConnell
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Mitch:
 
            Thank you for your letter yesterday regarding judicial nominations.  I assume that your reply to my March 15 letter is not a substitute for Senator Frist’s promise over a month ago to offer a compromise for resolving this issue.  Democrats anxiously await that proposal.
 
            I wholeheartedly agree with you that there is much important work to be done in the Senate.  That is why it is so baffling that Republicans would precipitate this destructive confrontation over the Senate’s decision to reject a small number of judicial nominees.  As you well know, the Senate has confirmed 205 of President Bush’s judicial candidates and turned back only ten, a 95% confirmation rate.  Ten rejected judges – only seven of whom are currently before the Senate – does not seem reason enough for Republicans to break the Senate rules, violate over 200 years of Senate tradition and thereby impair the ability of Democrats and Republicans to work together on issues of real concern to the American people.
 
            For example, you are absolutely right that “our transportation infrastructure needs improving.”  That is why I issued a public call last week for the Senate to take up the highway bill.  Once we finish the supplemental appropriations bill, the Majority Leader has a clear choice: if he moves to proceed to the highway bill he can allow us to do the work that the American people sent us here to do.  If, on the other hand, he chooses to launch what Senator Lott dubbed “the nuclear option,” it will be clear that the Republican agenda is not based on the needs of the American people but rather on the demands of radical ideological elements in the Republican Party base.
 
            I am committed to resolving the dispute over judicial nominations amicably.  The first step in that process should be for the Majority Leader to abandon his proposal to break the Senate rules.  We should not negotiate under a nuclear cloud.
 
Sincerely,
 
HARRY REID
Democratic Leader

Well ladies and gents, looks like we have a new Pope. German frontrunner Joseph Ratzinger was chosen today, taking the name Benedict XVI. So who is he? Well we've got this profile from the Washington Post, which says:

He wrote a letter of advice to U.S. bishops on denying communion to politicians who support abortion rights, which some observers viewed as a slam at Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry. He publicly cautioned Europe against admitting Turkey to the European Union and wrote a letter to bishops around the world justifying that stand on the grounds that the continent is essentially Christian in nature. In another letter to bishops worldwide, he decried a sort of feminism that makes women "adversaries" of men.
...
He is a lightning rod for church liberals who see the hierarchy as reactionary. Ratzinger was active in stamping out liberation theology, with its emphasis on grass-roots activism to fight poverty and its association with Marxist movements.

He once called homosexuality a tendency toward "intrinsic moral evil" and dismissed the uproar over priestly pedophilia in the United States as a "planned campaign" against the church.

The apparent rationale for choosing the 78-year old Ratzinger is that he can act as a short-lived (literally) transitional pope, consolidating John Paul's gains while not creating an radical upheavals of his own. That view's backed up by Erica Walter's TNR piece arguing for his ascendance on the grounds that he's humble. I found her piece unconvincing, but your mileage may vary. In any case, this isn't exactly the guy I'd like to see get the job, indeed, I fear he'll just continue the rightward politicization of the Vatican. But then, nobody asked me, and I'm not even a Catholic, so my thoughts on the matter don't much count.

Update: EJ Dionne has some thoughts, Andy Sullivan is markedly unhappy, The Corner is typing so fast that the magazine is going to be sidelined with a staff-wide case of carpal tunnel, Giblets doesn't much like his new Pope costume, Ed Kilgore thinks the "conservative" label is misplaced, and Sam Rosenfeld asks the operative question: Where's Gary Wills?

Jesse's got a great swipe at those who'd deny women the morning after pill:

Does anybody here know why the morning-after pill has a 72-hour window? Anyone? Well, you see, when the mommy half and the daddy half get together, it's a process called "fertilization". The problem is, however, that unless that fertilized mommy-and-daddy bit is implanted in the mommy's tummy, it can't ever become a baby nine months later. Unless it's implanted, it's a combined bit of regularly produced bodily secretions that in its then-current state cannot develop any further.

I'm not going to speculate on why there's a contingent of Americans dead-set against allowing women avoid pregnancy even before implantation has occurred; it's enough to simply say they're wrong. And while I know this stuff is supposedly icky -- particularly talk about fertilization! -- morning-after pills and condoms and the like are really quite popular.

American parents aren't running around worrying their daughters will abort, they're worried that they'll get pregnant. That, after all, is the last thing any parent wants to face. A wider variety of products that promise to forestall that conversation long before the talk turns to abortions and adoptions will be a political winner because, let's face it, the guardians are mainly interested in the continued viability of plausible deniability regarding their daughter's sex life. Anything that keeps the happy illusion whole will win the day.

The New York Times has a tidy little editorial on the train wreck that is the House Energy Bill. Read it. But midway through, the piece gives in to the sort of fresh-faced naivete that makes you wonder who put a newborn in charge of writing opinions for the nation's preeminent paper. Witness:

The House is moving quickly and with sad predictability toward approval of yet another energy bill heavily weighted in favor of the oil, gas and coal industries. In due course the Senate may give the country something better. But unless Mr. Bush rapidly elevates the discussion, any bill that emerges from Congress is almost certain to fall short of the creative strategies needed to confront the two great energy-related issues of the age: the country's increasing dependency on imported oil, and global warming, which is caused chiefly by the very fuels the bill so generously subsidizes.

And unless drug dealers take a stand against drugs, kids will continue to use! Watching the Times scratch the dandruff from their hair and wonder why the Republican-led House is pushing such a myopic snarl of industry giveaways and poor policy is bad enough, reading their pleas for Bush to sweep in and save the day is unforgivable. This bill may as well be authored by the President himself. He's not going to dive in and save it, hell, he probably thinks the environmentalists got too much out of the deal.

The editorial identifies two main problems in our energy use -- dependence on foreign oil and the onset of global warming. I'd change the first to "dependence on oil", but why quibble? Either way, for them to ask the heavens why Bush isn't demanding a bill that better addresses those issues is frankly insane. Here's a guy who made his fortune as an oil man, who's got a legendarily snug relationship with the Saudis, who's made no effort to wean America off oil and in fact helped kill the revised CAFE standards which would've done it. And as for global warming? Are you kidding me? The President is generally unwilling to admit it exists, and when he does allow for some form of it, he advises Americans to enjoy their increased Summers. He killed Kyoto and replaced it with a voluntary -- yes, voluntary -- policy that sought to reduce greenhouse gas intensity, not total emissions. So even if companies took his advice and stopped raiding the cookie jar because they're good folks, they'd still be taking cookies. That's because a reduction in intensity still means an increase in total emissions. Thanks, Dubya.

But I don't expect anything better from George. What I do expect is that the New York Times, which has offered excellent coverage of the policies in question, won't pretend Bush has an enlightened view of the environment when his actions have been troglodytic. Leave that crap to Greg Easterbrook, and do what you're supposed to -- hold Bush accountable for the tone he's set. If reasonable energy policy mattered to him, he'd force Congress to create it. It doesn't, he hasn't, and he should be held culpable for the failure.

DHinMI's obituary for Marla Ruzicka, the aid worker murdered in Iraq yesterday, is an essential read, remembering her is the least we can do. Actually, that's not true, learning from her is the least we can do. Because Marla lived a lesson that many of us desperately need to learn. She understood that great good could come in the aftermath of great evil, and that the perpetrators of the latter could be your best allies in achieving the former.

Ruzicka was no fan of the war, that much is sure. But once it had been engaged, she saw that the chaos it left had to be filled with something more positive, more beneficial, more sound. And so she set about trying to actualize that, and did a hell of a job right up until her death. She enlisted all available allies, from NGO's to liberal organizations to the Senate right up to the US Army. No group, no matter how culpable, was off-limits in her quest to heal the country. And every group, no matter how culpable, joined her in her efforts.

The roadside bomb that killed her was a murder, a cold-blooded execution that lacked any moral justification whatsoever. Whether it was aimed at the troops who had no say in the decision to enter war or whether it was a simple strike meant to tear apart the fabric of normalcy, it was just one more of the insurgency's indiscriminate attacks. Shrapnel makes no differentiation between sinner and saint, and those who use it don't either, which makes them nothing but killers. And let that be the discussion on that.

After the war, Marla believed that the space Saddam needed to be filled. She brought together Americans and Iraqis, soldiers and civilians, and set about filling in the hole. And she worked on that project right up until her death. So if you want an indictment of the insurgency, here it is: they killed Marla Ruzicka. And if you want a reason for hope in Iraq, here's another: there was a Marla Ruzicka, and because of her, there will be more. Some will be American, some will be the Iraqis she personally touched, but there will be more. Marla Ruzicka may have been murdered yesterday, but those she met comprise her memorial and the example she set should serve as her epitaph. All we can do is try and follow.

America is very, very stupid if they keep opposing the natty gas pipeline between Iran and India. Aside from the points Perkovich and Prasad bring up in their op-ed (clean gas for India, cooperation between India and Pakistan, development of Iranian natural gas, rather than nuclear, resources), tying Iran to so much Indian revenue would create another point of pressure that can be brought to bear when Iran wants to misbehave. If we can make a deal with India that we'll throw our support behind the venture (and maybe help them out in some other venues) so long as they pledge to use their economic influence to keep Iran in line, we'd have a best of both worlds situation. India would have some clean energy that wouldn't destroy their -- and our -- environment and Iran would have a partner who they'd need to remain in good standing with and who could thus demand some degree of responsible behavior from them. Blocking this pipeline out of simple spite would be the most myopic, short-sighted move imaginable.

Because the blogs are populated by that rarest of above-ground breeds, the policy nerd, there's been a lot of talk lately about the health care structures of various other countries, how they stack up with ours, and why we lose. What there hasn't been is much information on how these other countries actually work, save for "better" and with "more government". Since I have a very peculiar idea of what "fun" is, I'm going to try and correct that. Each day this week I'll be writing a bare bones guide to another country's health system so when you're discussing say, France, you know how it works rather than that it simply works better than ours does. Speaking of France, I'm going to start with them, because they've gotten the most attention recently. Tomorrow I'll do England, the next day Germany, Thursday will be Australia, and Friday we'll do Canada. It'll be fun, I don't promise. Alright then, off we go:

France:

Da' basics: France has a basic system of public health insurance that, as of January 2000, covers everybody in the nation. Before then, portions of the population lacked insurance. The reimbursement rates are wholly uniform, despite the fact that there are actually three health care funds, a main one covering most workers, and then one for the self-employed and one for agricultural workers.

As that hints, the health care is occupationally based. It's paid for through employer and employee contributions (much like Social Security), in addition to personal income taxes. The latter have been increasing in recent years.

The funds are private entities under the joint control of employers and unions, which are in turn supervised by the state. As might be expected, that doesn't work particularly smoothly, and there's a constant battle for authority and control. Creative tension, one might kindly call it. The funds are mandatory, no one may opt-out, and they're not allowed to compete with each other nor micromanage care.

The public system covers around 75% of total costs. Half of the rest is paid out-of-pocket and the remaining is made up by supplementary insurance companies. About 85% of the French have some form of private insurance, which pays for the various procedures and equipment the public insurance doesn't wholly cover. This of course led to inequality, so in January 2000, a means-tested public supplementary insurance program came online in order to ensure that the poor got top care.

France is the only country where access to care is unlimited. Patients can see as many doctors as they damn well please. They don't need referrals to see specialists, and there's basically no gatekeepers at all (this is going to change, recent reforms mandate a principal doctor -- a gatekeeper -- if you want full reimbursement).

The health care system is mainly under state control. The state plans out hospitals, the allocation of specialized equipment, etc. Some of this is done at the regional level, a trend which seems to be increasing. The hospitals offer about 8.4 beds per 1,000 people (America, btw, offers 3.6. Ouch.) The public sector provides 65% of the beds, private hospitals -- which operate on a fee-for-service basis -- make up the rest, and primarily concentrate on surgeries. French citizens choose which one to go to and get the same reimbursement at either. How's that for choice? Not good enough? The French also get to choose their physicians, their physicians get to choose where they practice, and there's patient-client confidentiality.

Problems: France still has class and geographical disparities in their health care outcomes. They're not nearly what ours are, but they exist nonetheless. In addition, various hospitals offer varying levels of care, health costs are rising (again, not as much as here, but still significantly), and physicians often don't feel they're paid enough for their services, leading to a number of recent strikes. As it is, French physicians only make US $55,000, about 1/3rd what their American counterparts pull in.

Yes, but are we better? Right, you say, that's all very not interesting. But how do we stack up with France? Better? Worse?

Yeah, the second one. France's health care system bodyslams us on most every metric. Beyond the beds per 1,000 stat mentioned above, France has more doctors per 1,000 people (3.3 vs. 2.4), spends way less, has 3.2 more physician visits per capita (6 in France vs. 2.8 in America, which probably accounts for the better preventive care in France), has a much higher hospital admission rate, and beats us handily on the most important measure: potential years of life lost. American women lose 3,836 years per 100,000, while American men give up 6,648 in the same sample size (yes, we get screwed). In France, the comparable numbers are 2,588 years for the women and 5,610 for the men. Still not great, but quite a bit better.

So France spends less, gets more, and does so through a public-private hybrid that's heavily, heavily public. Socialized medicine sure is scary.

Sources:
A Conservative Convert to Socialized Medicine by David Burgess. Link.
OECD frequently requested data. Link.
The Health Care System Under French National Insurance: Lessons for Health Reform in the United States by Victor Godwin. Link.
The French Health Care System. Link.
French Health Care Reform: A Step in the Right Direction by Claudia Broyer. Can't find the link.

Update: Big ups to the new readers finding this post. We'll be doing different countries all week, so y'all come back now, y'hear?

The LA Times has an interesting article on the hit fuel prices are handing small businesses. Makes sense, particularly if your work has a roving component (gardener, pizza delivery, etc). Nevertheless, this strikes me as quite a non-story. Gas prices are higher, but not that much higher. We're dealing with an increase of around 30 cents a gallon (at least here in the Southland), seems to me that small business has larger fish to fry, it's just the LA Times that didn't.

It will, on the other hand, be pretty fascinating to see what happens when oil becomes really expensive, $4 or $5 bucks a gallon. Considering the lifetime costs of that, you're likely to see a lot of investments in new, more fuel-efficient capital. That means everything from hybrid cars to window insulation to white paint for your roofs (did you know that if LA painted its roofs white it'd save about 1,500 megawatts of power on cooling, or about 3% of California's Summer load?) to thicker copper wires (retain electricity better). Little changes that make a huge lifetime difference.

This is the sort of thing we did during the OPEC shock in the 70's, and we tore OPEC apart with it. Fuel-efficient cars (through CAFE standards), regulation mandating more efficient air conditioners, and so forth were all forced to market, all did better jobs than their gas-guzzling forebears, and all contributed to lifetime savings and profit increases for the companies involved. But we did our job too well, and Saudi Arabia decided OPEC had lost and so they flooded the market with super cheap oil, thus ending all need to conserve. And so we stopped conserving.

Oil prices aren't so high now that we're being forced to act responsibly, but they will be soon. And then it'll be interesting to watch us rise to the challenge -- many of these investments can be a long-term boon for small businesses, not to mention the economy as a whole. During the California energy crisis -- a man-made one -- there was an enormous scramble to bring more power capacity online. Huge amounts of money were invested, power plants forced into operation, and so forth. But by the time they hit the market, their capacity was no longer needed. Why? Because Californians had cut their power usage by 10% in a matter of months. They had created their own extra capacity and lowered fuel costs. So I'm not too worried about the small businesses -- today's bitching to newspaper reporters is tomorrow's conservation and capital investment. And we need that to happen.

Kevin does some digging and finds that the poor and the elderly -- the two groups that rely primarily on government-run program for their health care -- are way more satisfied than the rest of us. He finds this confusing, puzzling even. I think it's somewhat explained by an anecdote from The Choice. The authors are walking through an airport with John Breaux when an old woman runs up to him and says:

Senator, don't you dare let the government get its hands on my Medicare!

Without missing a beat, Breaux replies:

Don't worry madam, I won't.

I think that about explains it. We've so fully demonized government-run health care that we won't even believe it can work when it already is. The totality of propaganda's triumph over not just the facts, but our subjective interpretation of the facts (i.e, how satisfied we are with our health care) is truly stunning. Ugh.

In light of all this health care talk, I'll be working on a little feature this week. Every day, I'm going to profile a different country';s health care system. Not just how well it works but how it works. I constantly hear about France and Germany and Britain and Canada but, when I think about it, I really don't know much beyond the fact that they have more government involvement than we do. So I'm going to learn about their structures and report on what I find. Should be fun, if you have a really weird idea of what fun is. Anyway, France will be up later today, so check back for that.

Looks like Clark is readying himself for 2008. Good. Longtime readers know I was a big Clark-booster in 04 and I think all the same arguments will apply this time around, so I'm glad to see him taking it seriously. Looking back, there's little doubt in my mind that, had Clark entered the primaries when Dean did, he would've won them. I'm also convinced that Kerry/Clark rather than Kerry/Edwards would have taken home the presidential bacon. Kerry thought his resume enough to prove his national security cred; he was wrong. I remain certain that the reason John lost was because it was easier to imagine Bush traipsing through Vietnam than it was to see Kerry do the same -- appearances, unfortunately, matter.

Happily, Clark oozes military. It's impossible to imagine the guy anywhere else. And that's the key thing for a Democrat right now. We've got a persistent advantage on domestic issues and the credibility we've built there is attached to the party, any nominee can use it. What we don't have is a party-wide credibility on national security issues; that needs to be brought my the nominee. Luckily, Clark brings it. And since Scott unearthed my posts on this from last time around, let me be the first to take up the call again -- Clark/Sebelius 08.

By the way: Clark, Dean, Angelides, Westly -- seems like this years CA Dem convention didn't suck. I covered last year's as press and found it a horrible depressing affair. A procession of ambitious, backbiting politicians cycling anonymously over the stage while taking potshots at each other because Arnold was still too popular to hit. Made me want to be a Republican. Wish I'd gone this time around, though.

Brooks' column today is, well, very good. Break out the party hats and noisemakers, it's a perfectly sound meditation on the paradoxical relationship between an increasingly sexual culture and a decreasingly sexual youth that doesn't pivot into insane ravings in the last paragraph. Huzzah! This culture stuff, by the way, is exactly the sort of column Brooks should stick to. He's quite entertaining and often profound when evaluating the contours of American life, it's when he tries to enter the political trenches that his pen loses its individuality and his fairness becomes a cynical ploy.

Anyway, I'm digressing. Brooks is right that culture is actually getting better, though he focuses only on the sexual aspect of it. My experience would back him up -- UCLA is a stunningly virginal campus, and many I knew in high school kept up impressively chaste profiles (many did not, but the orgies were rarer than the prayer meetings). Santa Cruz was much more sexually active, though it had an almost wholesome, adventurous ethos to it; it reminded me of nothing so much as a conscious effort to recapture the feel of the sexual liberation. So even there, more lovin', but it wasn't dirty or raunchy -- the campus was hyper-feminist and the overt objectification and sexualization of women you see in many venues wouldn't survive an instant there.

I'd take Brooks' theory a step farther though. It's not just the sex that's getting better -- or rarer -- the head is improving too. This is a kinda half-baked idea of mine, but think about the shows to achieve major popularity in the past few years. There's some unobjectionable fare, like Everyone Loves Raymond, some objectionable fare, like the reality shows, and then there's some pretty encouraging stuff -- West Wing, the Gilmore Girls, CSI, Law and Order, etc are all shows that, to varying degrees prize intellectualism. Sorkin's series venerates a bunch of policy savants who work in politics, the Gilmore Girls is a literary lovefest, CSI prizes the creative application of forensic science, and Law and Order shows attorneys some love. It's not a wasteland out there by any means, you're seeing smart, dialogue-based shows succeed with characters who are unabashedly, even definingly, intelligent. Pop culture is improving, or at least it looks that way to me.

Thoughts?

Brad Plumer's post on Sudan reminded me of a point I've wanted to make. Despite the Bush administration's criminal negligence of the issue, they've actually been among the most attentive to genocide in memory. Save Clinton's eventual intervention in Kosovo -- and that was different because it was in Europe -- the level of indifference and cynicism American politicians exhibit towards African atrocities is stomach-turning. Bush, to his credit, has been willing to call it a genocide (a surprisingly large step), support various measures to stop it, and actually work to keep some degree of attention on the situation. Should we be doing more? Yes, much. But Bush's failures are nastily endemic to the American government, they're not specific to him.

The one Western leader who does care about Africa in a serious, sustained manner is Tony Blair. Indeed, he's actually sent troops to stop a genocide (Sierra Leone), and many observers think that he'd do the same in Sudan if his position in Britain wasn't so weak. With England set to chair a number of international coalitions in the coming years, Blair's single-minded focus on Africa is a primary reason I heavily, heavily support him.

But the point of this post isn't to defend Bush or rehabilitate Blair, it's to note that these two represent the best we've seen in attentiveness to African crises in years. This despite their oft-shown inattentiveness to African crises. Somewhere along the way, much of the world grew used to hearing about genocide and slaughter and murder and war on the African continent -- such reports became background noise, an expected feature of the area. Therefore they stopped shocking us, the political will to interfere in them evaporated (how often can you interfere?), and now the continent hosts shocking slaughters on a basically biyearly basis.

Africa, to its everlasting regret, lacks the natural resources to render its stability internationally important. Partially because of that, it also lacks the trade that'd make its continued stability economically important. And partially because of that, it lacks the stability that'd make its instability journalistically important, and so the continent repeatedly gets the shaft. It's a truly terrible situation and finding a light at the end of the tunnel is far, far beyond my powers of foresight. But the villains here aren't just Bush, or Blair, or anyone in particular (save Khartoum and the Janjaweed). They're a mix of corrupt African leaders, a pan-African ethos that discourages serious intra-continent policing, a total lack of development, and a developed world that's given up. Hopefully Blair can change some of that.

Hopefully.

Update: On rereading, I fear this post overstates the American response to genocide in other countries. I don't mean to paint us as, ahem, white knights everywhere save Africa -- it's not so. But our interest in turmoil is far, far greater when it roils Latin America, or Europe, or the Middle East. That's understandable from some perspectives -- trade, resources, neighbors and geography make those countries more important in a purely numerical calculus. But even in them we're often negligent and always far too late.

Africa is just our myopia and lack of moral will squared, and the reason, I believe, is a sort of geographical racism that simply assumes Africans will kill each other and nothing we do will make them stop for any period of time. Much of the problem comes from looking at Africa more as a continent and less as a collection of separate countries, so when similar problems pop up in various nations, it seems like a failure of the whole and not a situation emerging in individual places.

Also, read Kristof on Sudan today. Whatever other issues you have with the guy, he's done more than just about anyone in the country to raise the profile of the Darfur genocide.

So I spent a good chunk of my Saturday blowing through Season 1 of Coupling (the BBC version). That's a really, really, really funny show -- props to those who kept recommending it. But guffawing aside, three questions:

• Did anyone else find the fifth episode, the one where Jeff hits on the absurdly attractive Israeli who can't speak a word of English, completely impossible to get into? It's a general problem for me. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief fairly often, but I somehow can't clear the mental hurdle erected when situational comedies beg me to believe that stunningly attractive girl X is madly attracted to schlumpy, borderline-retarded character Y. I try, but just can't.

For that reason, I think it'd be impossible to watch King of Queens. I've seen it on airplanes and, aside from the not-funny issue, the premise of a fat, irritating, socially-awkward UPS delivery-man marrying, yes, a super hot and put-together woman just doesn't fit. And being unable to buy the foundation of the show makes every episode, which all seem to be about him screwing up, completely unbelievable. If I were him I'd be on best behavior all the time.

• Apparently Jeff leaves the show. Why?

• And what happens with the proposal? Inquiring minds want to know!

Speaking of alarmism, this Marburg virus sure is scary. Big ups to Angola for doing nothing. Big ups to the tribal chiefs for inciting violence against epidemiologists who are risking their lives to help. Big ups to the radio speeches accusing hospital heads of creating the virus through witchcraft so they can get a promotion. Big ups to tribal superstition and customs which won't allow the sick to be quarantined nor the dead to be isolated. It's much more than tragic to watch such a ravaged country bring so much more pain on itself -- it's just unbelievably sad.

But I'm inspired by the epidemiologists and WHO workers and others who've parachuted into one of the most inhospitable countries and climates earth has to offer in order to confront one of the ugliest, deadliest diseases we've ever seen. That's not just dedication, that's towering courage. They're all heroes. And I sure hope they stop this thing.

Matt Yglesias and Brad Plumer are talking about oil's impact on the collapse of the Soviet Union. Piffle. Those discussions are so 1993. The real cutting-edge blogger-alarmism is over natural gas, of which over half the known reserves are in Russia and Iran. Which is why we should be so remarkably unhappy that Tehran and Moscow have been slowly, carefully, and happily drawing closer to each other -- that's bad stuff. We're going to be needing natural gas, more than anything else it has the potential to soften the changeover from oil -- many call it a "bridge fuel". But America's natural gas reserves have already peaked, and while there's an enormous amount of the stuff out there, it is, if anything, in worse spots than oil. Concentrating so much of it in autocratic Russia and anti-Western Iran is really a recipe for trouble. It gives Russia cause to defend and protect Iran because the two together can dictate the market, and it gives Iran room to be, well, Iran.

In all the criticism of the Saudi-American relationship, few realize quite how well it's served us. By acting as guardian for the world's primary oil producer, we've been able to control, to a large degree, OPEC's vicissitudes, because the only country with enough oil to counterbalance the others believes their survival rests primarily on our good intentions. Replace Saudi Arabia and Kuwait with Iran and Russia and things get hairier. Neither country owes us anything, Russia is far too big to kick around, and Iran's government hates us with a fury few can match. So not only can't we push around the market but neither of the major producers have our best interests (even if for selfish reasons) in mind.

Better yet, watch China real close here. On oil again, we've always had favorable terms and the best deals because of our special relationship with Saudi Arabia. But hold just a second -- Iran and China, pretty chummy, no? Russia and China, no bad blood there, right? China's a massive customer who can be easily played of the US to enrich Russia, Iran and to force us to buy on their terms. Over the last few decades we've been such a crucial consumer of oil that the market reacted to us as much as the producers. OPEC had limited leverage (we broke them in the 70's) against the US because there was no massive buyer to run to if you stopped selling to us. With China's development moving ever quicker, they're going to want some electricity over there. Which means some natural gas. Which means a lot of it. Which means we're not the only game in town anymore.

Cheers!

Regarding Daniel's point on child poverty and the promise the internet has for linking kids to a world that'd otherwise remain inaccessible, I want to tell a quick story. Grant, one of my closest friends, works with Amnesty International going into urban areas of Chicago and teaching the students about human rights. A recent lesson plan of his focused on Abu Ghraib and American attitudes towards torture. Towards the end of the lesson he noted that further pictures, documents and information could be found on Google. One student raised his hand and, not joking, said:

"What's a google?"

He wasn't the only one in the class not to know. We take it for granted that the information revolution sweeping through our lives has, to some degree or another, rippled into every crevice of America. It hasn't. And while modems aren't a silver bullet to poverty and despair, they do provide those hoping for a better life but sequestered in an impoverished one with the opportunity to tap into worlds beyond what they know. Using the net, you can look at colleges, e-mail admissions officers, read blogs, scan the news, meet new people, read new things, and on and on. Will everyone use the computer for that purpose? Of course not, most will hone in on the porn. But for those who do want to expand their horizons, giving them that opportunity is a moral imperative.

Ever wanted to learn about your friendly neighborhood majority leader and all the congressional Republicans who're friendly with him? Sure you did.

I'm downright intrigued by the new effort to paint the filibustering of judges as a broadside against Christians everywhere. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. Part of it, of course, is Bill Frist's understanding that his presidential hopes rely wholly on his reputation as a Christian crusader, a term I use carefully. Because that's what keep pinging my radar on all this -- more and more, you're seeing the Christian Right adopt a policy of confrontation and, indeed, aggression against the non-religious elements of American life. Culture, politics, even community -- the clash of civilization does seem to be in the offing, but it's not with the Islamists a world away, it's a homegrown conflict for the direction of the country.

That was always the flaw in the Clash of Civilizations concept. The war between Shari'a and modernity was taking place in Islam's backyard, it was no worldwide conflict threatening to wash up on America's shores. No matter how many gaskets Hitchens blew on route to his repetitive conclusion -- they hate our way of life! -- Islamists never wanted to change our way of life, they wanted to define their own. Now, I believe we should be proactive in stopping them from imposing their vision on the Middle East (though being proactive means much more than cocking guns), but the scores of battle-ready pundits demanding we fortify our cities against Koranic influence were prima facie ridiculous.

Not so in the apparent confrontation between Colorado Springs and San Francisco -- and that's the right's rhetoric, the rhetoric of real America vs. coastal elitists, not mine. Where the Islamists posed a threat to our ability to continue living life but could never pervert the way we went about it, the opposite is true here. Now, let's be clear, I'm not accusing anyone of a crusade, nor predicting armed uprisings. This isn't a civil war. But it's an ideological struggle that's turning uglier by the day.

All I see lately is Tom DeLay calling for retribution against judges, Cornyn justifying him, the government moving as one to uphold a quixotic quest to raise the dead simply because an army of believers demands it done, and Frist painting battles over public appointments as the latest front in the war between secular elites and theist Americans. More and more, the language across the aisle is alluding to a war I never noticed. And more and more, I'm believing that just because I never noticed, doesn't mean it's not raging.

But that's not what worries me. There'll always be political groups demanding that the ship of state turn round and steam backwards. I'm more concerned when I see the uninvolved choosing sides. Years ago, Reagan said the Christian Right couldn't endorse him, but he could endorse them. That was fine, it was rhetoric. But now? Frist isn't a theocrat. He's a lot of things, but not that. But what does it say that he believes he must turn into one? Why is DeLay using the evangelicals to shore up his position? Why is Bush bringing up Dredd Scott in presidential debates? Why is Dobson a marquee figure? And why -- and this is most important -- has no one yelled "stop!" yet?

I don't know how much more divided we can get. Already we've got a major constituency possessing overwhelming political power believing itself locked in a mortal struggle for survival and, indeed, dominance. And already, we've got the leaders of our government echoing the sentiment. Tom Delay's talking about "the syndicate" that wants to destroy what he and the Family Research Council believe in. Frist is making judicial nominations into a war on Christianity. Bush's reelection effort was anchored by a massive movement to mobilize the churches.

How long can we do this? How long can these opportunists reinforce the worst of conservative paranoia before something truly terrible happens? Look again at that picture on the top -- we've got a government packed with Christians and still the FRC is asserting a divide between faith and government. And if the leaders of faith are saying it's true and the (Christian) leaders of government are saying it's true, how long till the idea obsesses some believer and these demagogues all end up with blood on their hands?

Words have power. And these are powerful words. I just don't know how much longer this can go on.

Saying Wal-Mart is antiunion is slightly less shocking than calling Tom DeLay unethical, or noting that I have an elbow*. Nothing could be better known. But I think most are confused, like I was for a long time, over how Wal-Mart can actually stop the unions. So one day, I called up an organizer buddy of mine and asked. The answer was so simple that it barely qualified as an answer at all. If workers unionize, or threaten to unionize, or feint at unionizing, or think about unionizing, or see a union hall on their way to work one day, Wal-Mart shuts down the store.

Oh.

Nevertheless. it seemed a bit odd to me. Pretty drastic measure, knocking down a whole store because they formed a union, can they really do that? Indeedy-do, they can and they have. In fact, they just did it in Canada. The workers in Jonquiere, Quebec, signed the cards creating a union and, immediately thereafter, everyone lost their jobs and the town lost its Wal-Mart. Now the city's got deep divisions between those who wanted the union and those who blame the union-wanters for destroying their jobs, Quebec's other Wal-Marts -- which are a focal point for the union movement there -- are rejecting the organizers because some job is better than no job, and every Wal-Mart manager can, if their employees try to organize, sit them down in a coercive meeting and go through the sad case of Jonquiere, Quebec, where the union would have just been too expensive and Wal-Mart simply had to close the store.

And they don't want that, do they?

That's the beauty of the Wal-Mart strategy. They don't have to stop employees from organizing. Make an example out of a few stores and employees will vote down the unions on their own, which gives Wal-Mart more ammo to paint future organizers as unwanted, alien influences disrupting the loving societies that are their stores. Well-played, Walton, well-played. And following Charles Morris's strategy (which Nathan Newman likes) of simply organizing individual sets of workers (meaning you could unionize 30% of a Wal-Mart and the store would have to bargain with them, you don't need a majority of the workforce) seems to play into their hands. Then they can just fire individual employees entering the union** and make an even clearer example of what befalls those who want a pay raise.

After all, it's much easier to fire an employee than close a store, and I have a feeling no manager will forget to mention that to workers sporting that starry-gaze that comes only from a vision of labor standards. Further, why should Wal-Mart negotiate with a 30% union? Why not ignore all their demands and let them quit? It's not as if Wal-mart enters many tight labor markets or requires a specific skill set. Turnover is life for them, and so is foiling unions -- seems like Morris's strategy would just let Wal-mart indulge its hobbies.

* Actually, I have two elbows!
** Technically, they can't do that. They'll get fined. And if you want to know why that doesn't matter, read this.

While reading some post-mortems of the just passed Screw The Poor Bankruptcy Bill, I came across this sneaky little stat:

"With 90% of bankruptcies attributable to job loss, divorce or excessive medical bills, it is clear that better economic policies, social services and affordable healthcare is the way to reduce bankruptcy," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma).

Most of us already knew that about half of bankruptcies are precipitated by crushing medical emergency, though I'd no idea such innocuous and understandable trials as job loss and divorce made up for the rest. But isn't it weird that the answer to bankruptcy from medical bills and job loss was to make it, well, harder to declare bankruptcy?

If the Bush administration had wanted to end bankruptcies, they could have offered federal reinsurance for catastrophic medical costs. You would've ended half the bankruptcies right there. If they'd wanted to do more, they could have instituted better unemployment insurance and transitional services and shrunk the crowd of spurned creditors to negligible numbers. But they didn't. When given the choice of achieving X (where X is reducing the costs of bankruptcies) through helping Americans or helping industry at the expense of Americans, they chose the latter.

It's fascinating, though, to look at how often and reliably the make that choice. Think back to Bush's constant mention of the shortened life expectancy for black males. Clearly he thought it a public policy program, but not in the way a normal person would. Rather than putting money towards addressing the causes of the shortened life expectancy, he tried to privatize Social Security on them.

Huh?

It goes on. We've got a surplus, so we need tax cuts for the wealthy. We're in a recession, so we need tax cuts for the wealthy. Democrats wanted to target the cuts so as to spur middle class investment, but no, make 'em for the wealthy. We've got a problem with terrorism, let's invade Iraq. And that's why, when some of the conservatives on the site ask me why I don't support this or that policy from Bush when I likely would from a Democrat, I can only answer that I don't trust the guy.

Bush's presidency is means-based, he wants to institute certain policies and he'll do it no matter what the facts on the ground are. It's a mistake to conceive of him and his advisors looking at a problem, groping for a solution, and just getting it wrong. It's much more a case of the administration deciding on a policy and then groping for a problem with which to justify it. And since their policy shop is a gathering place for every industry lobbyist in the country, the folks profiting from their a priori solutions are not the ones who need the windfall.

Kevin Drum dismisses Kunstler's book The Long Emergency on the grounds that he tries to explain most everything through entropy. Well sure, the blatant misappropriation of physics concepts is one reason to dismiss the guy's post-apocalyptic predictions, but why stop at just one? How about the fact that Kunstler really isn't an oil expert? He was a staff writer for The Rolling Stone, published a string of (self-described) bad novels, and then wrote a few books on the crushing soullessness of suburban architecture. Hearing him confidently predict the end of civilization definitely has a crazy-guy-on-Venice feel to it.

But no, you say, Rolling Stone published excerpts from the book, and if RS thinks they have merit, they probably do. Or at least they would, if Kunstler hadn't worked for RS, thus pulling that appearance into question. But maybe pseudo-physics and lack of credentials aren't enough for you. Maybe you still need one last piece of evidence that it's not quite time to head for the hills. Well, here's how Kunstler ended his piece in Rolling Stone:

These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.

It's like a Hallmark card to a luddite. There's plenty to worry about with oil, from economic turmoil to war over resources. But anyone confidently predicting the dispersion of the human species into a set of agrarian communities that survive only through hope and the uplifting power of song, well -- you can probably find yourself some better sources...

According to Jason Spitalnik, the House is planning 30 minutes of debate before passing the Bankruptcy Bill tomorrow. 30 minutes! I spend more than 30 minutes picking out movies at Blockbuster. I spend more than 30 minutes deciding on takeout with my friends. I spend more than 30 minutes on the treadmill. You're telling me I spend more time on the treadmill than the Senate spends debating major legislation?

Jason calls this fundamentally anti-Democratic. True 'nuff. But it's also a basic affront to the idea of deliberative democracy. Good government is laying in the mud with the Republican Leadership's foot digging into its throat. and I'm sure it'd appreciate it if the press noticed, or if media populists like O'Reilly found a mere 30 minutes of debate on an anti-family bill half as deserving of airtime as some elementary school teacher saying a naughty thing about Bush. But we've reached a point in this country where the major offenses are too toweringly repugnant to wrap our minds around so we occupy ourselves with more comprehendible irritants. We sleep better that way.

Update: Whoops, it's actually a full hour of debate, with no amendments allowed. Yippity-doo-dah!

I keep trying to summon up some rage and bile over the practice of Congressmen employing their families, but I just can't. Businesses employ family members all the time. Politics is an all-consuming occupation. If families can find ways to involve the clan, all the better. Dana Rohrabacher paying his wife $40,000 to manage his campaigns doesn't bother me (and he's my congressmen, by the way). In fact, I'm glad he does it -- hopefully it makes the process a bit less grueling for him. Tom DeLay paying his wife and daughter $500,000 over 4 years also isn't too shocking, that's an average of $62,500 per year per family member which, assuming they actually did jobs, isn't particularly excessive. Now, if there are congresscritters paying their wives and children princely sums in return for occasionally decluttering the congressman's desk, I'll call for the guy's head. But simple nepotism at fair prices is too pervasive, too understandable, and too unthreatening to really raise my blood pressure. The LA Times article on it, however, is pretty interesting; give it a read.

Clarification: In case it's not clear, these are general comments on political nepotism, not Tom DeLay. If he's simply funneling lobbyist money to family, well then that's bad. And if he's simply paying his family members rather than having them work, bad as well. But I kinda assume that he's a bad dude, which is why I spend a fair chunk of time raising my (and your) blood pressure over it. It's the widespread practice of nepotism, rather than DeLayism, that I'm not excised over.

I realize you guys have been hearing about "peak oil" a lot lately -- kinda like when everyone began talking about Social Security bend points and wage-indexing and ZZZZzzzz. But though you might be bored, you don't have to be confused. At least, not if you go read this quick and dirty primner on the subject.

Via The Oil Drum.

Update: So long as I'm doing oil links, this tsunami analogy is pretty spot-on. As Grouch & Eligh would say: Time -- time is of the essence.

Update 2: I'm just going to condense today's oil-related posts into this thread, even though they're not all related. Matt, I think, misunderstands something in his piece on Cartel economics:

if every OPEC member cut production by 20 percent they'd all be better off. But any given OPEC member would be even better off if the whole cartel agreed to cut production 20 percent, but then your country went around and cheated on the quota. So if you cut the quota, everyone will just cheat, and everything will stay the same. This is easy to see if you look at how the quotas got so high in the first place. What happened is that they used to be lower, but everyone was cheating, so OPEC raised the official quota up to what everyone was, in fact, producing in order to maintain the illusion of control. So the profit-maximizing case for deliberately provoking a peak oil scenario is a non-starter.

No no no. The problem, now, is that other countries don't have the output capacity to undercut their competitors (partially because the quota, as Matt says, is so high). That wasn't true 15 years ago when Saudi Arabia could flood the market in cheap oil. Back then, a fair number of oil producers could counterbalance any spigot-tightening by their buddies. For instance, when Iraq tried to hike the price of oil to fill the coffers Saddam depleted fighting Iran, Kuwait flooded the market so as to keep their neighbor weak. That was the whole "economic warfare" thing Saddam used when justifying his invasion.

The problem is that the Saudis and Kuwaitis and the rest no longer have the ability to drown the oil market. Their production capacity has significantly dropped, the current output is too high, and their reserves are depleting. They're not going to try and deplete them faster so they can make less money on their crude, and they don't, in any case, have the pumping capacity to completely balance out a 20% cut by Iran or Venezuela. Worse, they may not even have the capacity they thought they had. The Saudi's superfields, which account for 90% of their oil, are depleting much quicker than was thought. That'd be okay if the Sadis were finding new superfields. They're not. In any case, the Saudis are pumping at 10.5 mbd. Over 12.5 will damage their fields. They just don't have the excess capacity to deal with oil shocks.

What that means is if Iran or Venezuela decided to cut production, the Saudis would be able to mitigate the shock somewhat, but Matt's wrong to think they have the pumping capacity to stop it. Further, increased concerns over oil scarcity would ensure that the skittish market proved itself resistant to Saudi comfort -- any major upset right now would roil the long-term valuation of oil, because oil, currently, is seriously undervalued. Markets know the peak is coming and future prices are going to soar, so any hint of instability is going to have an outsized effect on prices, as it'll take into account not just the current scarcity but also expectations of future, more serious, and unending production cuts -- in other words, the passing of the peak. So Kevin's right, it would be $100+ a barrel no matter what the other producers did.

That said, I still don't believe that Iran, Venezuela, or any other country will provoke an oil shock. But it's not because the OPEC cartel can undercut itself -- it's precisely because they can't. Read my post from this morning for more on that.

And this is why effective sex education and widespread access to birth control are overriding moral issue:

Nationally, the teenage birth rate fell 30 percent from 1991 to 2002, the most recent year for which such statistics are available.

If the rate had not dropped during the decade, 1.2 million more children would have been born to teenage mothers in the United States. Of those, 460,000 would have been living in poverty and 700,000 would have grown up in a single-parent household, according to the analysis.

460,000. Children. In. Poverty. That's a lot of misery and pain we've prevented, not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars saved in emergency room visits and social programs and, frankly, crime prevention. This impoverished children would be the ones on the public dole and, for many of them, the ones in the public jails. We know that. Keeping young women from getting pregnant is one of the most cost-effective approaches to poverty-reduction, so what a shame that we're moving more in the direction of "pregnancy can be transmitted through sweat and tears" than "speak to your pharmacist about the pill".

Kevin's explanation of why oil prices are cause for severe concern is vintage Drum: informative, well-written, and containing a graph. Read it. But I think he gets something wrong in his evaluation of OPEC's incentives:

OPEC has the capacity to supply about 30 mbd. Question: what incentive do they have to continue pumping this amount? Economically, they have very little. If they cut production by 20% (6 mbp), that would reduce global supply to 78 mbd. Prices would immediately double to around $100/barrel, maybe even higher, since there would be no other source to make up the shortfall. As a result, OPEC's revenues would skyrocket — not all at once, since most oil is delivered under futures contracts, but soon enough. In addition, most Middle Eastern fields are being overproduced right now, so cutting production would have beneficial long-term effects as well.

Kevin goes on to argue that Saudi Arabia used to be a buffer against this because they could simply flood the market with cheap crude, but they don't have such powerful production capacity anymore and so aren't as able to regulate the industry*. In addition, Iran and Venezuela could care less about a recession in the West, so they might go for the short-term profits over our economic stability. The counter-argument is our capacity for a military response, but we can't really do that right now thanks to our deployment in Iraq, so what's to stop them?

Well, lots. Despite the skyrocketing costs of oil, the market hasn't priced oil commensurately with its finiteness. That'll change reasonably soon (as Kevin notes, the question is whether that happens gradually or suddenly), but it hasn't yet. That undervaluation of oil has allowed most economies to stroll along without really worrying about what comes after petrol or getting serious about reducing their reliance on it. An oil shock changes all that. Suddenly, life after cheap oil becomes a policy reality -- which is the worst possible scenario for OPEC, though probably one of the best for America.

There are a lot of ways to reduce our economy's reliance on oil. We can't yet end our dependance (at least, nobody but Amory Lovins seems to think we can), but we can reduce our usage in a hurry. There's precedent for that -- when OPEC tried to jack up prices in the 70's, they, not we, turned out the losers. Between 1977 and 1985, we cut our oil usage by 17% while growing our GDP by 27%. Not too shabby. During that period, oil imports fell by 50%, and imports from OPEC by 85%. It hurt, sure, but them more than us.

So though it'd be painful, we could break OPEC. Arab economies are too reliant on oil to shut off the spigot entirely, and the American economy is too energy inefficient (meaning we've got room to decrease demand) for OPEC to believe they can take us. The truth, though counterintuitive, is that we have more flexibility in our demand than they have in their supply. A serious, multibillion dollar initiative to increase public transportation and strongly encourage the widespread adoption of hybrid cars could probably take care of what OPEC could throw. To be clear, it wouldn't be fun, but we'd win that confrontation -- Arab economies are simply too oil dependent**.

But there's a more serious reason OPEC doesn't want an oil shock. Peak oil, depending on who you listen to, is -1 to 30 years away. Somewhere in that time period, industrialized and industrializing countries are going to have to figure out how to create a post-petrol economy. There's some question as to whether this is possible (I think it is), but there's certainly a chance that a massive investment in finding new energy sources and a huge push to reduce demand will create a successful changeover. OPEC can't take that chance a day before it has to. The moment we get serious about energy independence, long-term demand plummets. It'll do that anyway, but OPEC wants that to happen when supply is plummeting too, not while a bunch of accessible and sellable crude remains in the ground. Essentially, they want us to move on only once their reserves runs out, they don't want a skittish world market to flee from oil and find other solutions thereby rendering OPEC's underground petroleum worthless.

So OPEC's long-term incentive is to keep oil prices stable and delay the reality-check for as long as possible. All things considered, that's a bad strategy for the rest of the world -- the more crude still in the ground when we decide to change our energy economy, the more time and breathing room we have to come up with solutions. That's why energy independence is a "the sooner the better" kinda thing. Not only do we want OPEC's buffer, but with non-OPEC oil either peaking or already peaked, the quicker this changeover happens the less it needs to happen on OPEC's terms.

Politicians don't want to make the hard, painful choices that will lead to energy independence, so they don't. But if OPEC created an oil shock, the pain would have already come, the public would be clamoring for solutions, and Washington would have a lot more room to craft tough policy. So an OPEC led oil crisis would only hasten their economic obsolescence -- it's the worst economic move they could make. And while Venezuela and Iran will never be mistaken for superbly-run economies, they're not suicidal, either. Ending cheap oil, for them, would be suicidal. Considering the benefits of moving from petrol sooner than later, some (though not too much) demonstration of OPEC's instability would actually be a boon for our economy because it'd force us to evolve while we can still do it on our terms. Nevertheless, I don't think it's going to happen.

* He also mentions terrorism which, unfortunately, I've got no optimistic counter-argument to. A single act could throw the world economy into recession -- it's really very scary. Head here for more on it.

** It's possible that OPEC could make up some of the slack in China and India, but neither can currently come close to our demand.

Rush Limbaugh, in his characteristically insane manner, commented today on Al Gore's new televisions station:

When does he start up this stupid little network? August? Yip yip yip yahoo. You know what Gore said about this? It's going to be liberal. It's going to reflect the point of view of young people.

What the hell is that, Al? What the hell is the point of view of young people? Blow jobs, that's what they're doing out there. They're out there getting oral sex all day long, that's what they're talking about.

Yeah, it's a tough life, I gotta say. Why, just this morning I was all "If anyone gives me another blowjob, I'm going to scream!" But then I remembered that I'm getting blowjobs all day and really should just relax and go with it. Anyway, I'd like to stick around and talk about the oft-divorced Limbaugh's oral obsession, but there are blowjobs to be enjoyed.

Drop the Hammer, one of the premier anti-DeLay sites, gets mail. Oh boy do they get mail. And some of it even comes from elected officials, like this one from Councilman Kevin Cole of Texas:

Hey ass hole [sic]. Tom Delay happens to be my congresman [sic] and I am happy with the job he does for me and my district. Why don’t you get the F@&* out of our district and leave us alone. Better yet, come speak to me personally and I will show you what I think of you.

Kevin Cole
Pealrand [sic], TX
[Cell Phone # Redacted]

Mr. Cole, in addition to being a councilman and all-around nice guy, is also a Baptist deacon, which explains where he get the idea for this letter:

And Jesus said unto the Pharisees, "Fuck thee, and all that thee stand for. Thou art hypocrites whose presence at my door would merit a divine ass-whipping. Get thyselves away from Nazareth, lest the Son of Man leave you his bitch." (Matthew: 37:12)

But biblically based or not, this is Tom DeLay distilled. Our Majority Leader, unfortunately, is little more than a bully, who ascended up the ladder by doling out cash, stepping on throats, and being infinitely more ruthless and unconcerned with ethics than the next guy. So is it any wonder that those he's inspired show themselves to be little more than thugs? And doesn't it make you wonder what sort of men -- and they've almost all been men -- Tom DeLay's cash has elected?

That's why this isn't about DeLay so much as DeLayism. In all this talk of Abramoff and Reed and junkets and casinos, I don't think enough attention has been given to the spread and reach of the illness itself. So let's talk about that for a second:

DeLay's central innovation was incorporating industry lobbyists into the power structure, realizing that they could act as footsoldiers in his personal revolution. How he did it was, frankly, brilliant. Each lobbyist represents an industry or interest group of varying importance to each congresscritter. So tobacco lobbyists are crucial to congressmen from North Carolina, but less so to those from New Jersey. A textile lobbyist can hold a lot of power over a congressman who's got a textile plant in his district, but less over an urban representative whose constituents don't look to the textile industry for jobs. And so forth.

Now, lobbyists generally leap into action only when the bill or amendment at hand directly affects their industry. That may mean an effort to get a tax break, a subsidy, looser regulations, a commemorative day, whatever. But crucially, they'd relax when the legislation didn't affect them. DeLay ended that. In exchange for full and total support for industry demands, DeLay demanded that the lobbyists twist the arms of the congressmen dependent on their industries on bills wholly unrelated to their industry. So a coal lobbyist would go after a Pennsylvanian congresswomen on Medicare Reform, not because the lobbyist cared about Medicare but because winning the Congresswomen over would assure the coal industry the legislation it wanted later on.

That was the central mechanism of DeLay's takeover of K Street. From there, it got substantially more sophisticated. Lobbyists were only allowed to write their legislation if they were effective and helpful on unrelated issues, which meant they were now lobbying on behalf of the Republican agenda at all times. Soon, lobbyists weren't allowed to lobby the leadership at all if they were Democrats, or if their organization donated substantial sums to Democrats. So industries simply stopped hiring former Democrats and contributing to current ones. The whole thing was a giant trade -- the industries got all influence and power they wanted in exchange for putting their lobbying and political operations at the beck and call of Tom DeLay. To restate, the industries achieved their legislative goals if they helped the Republicans achieve their legislative goals. DeLay, then, had a veritable army on mini-whips he could control, not to mention unending amounts of industry cash that could be funneled to Republicans, both new and old, who Tom wanted to elect and put in his debt.

That right there is DeLayism, a whole new way of structuring and running the Congress. But it's no longer limited to DeLay. Now it's practiced by the leadership he brought into power, by the vast number of fellow Republicans he got elected, and by scores of powerful lobbyists conditioned to serve Republican interests in order to further their industry's interests. It's made Congress into an institution wholly ignorant of the public good, where dissension is no longer tolerated and deliberation is no longer allowed. Why, after all, should they allow it? DeLayism has made the House of Representatives into a well-oiled machine. When votes matter, Tom's got them. When elections come, Republicans are funded. When arm-twisting is needed, Republicans have industry-trained twisters targeted to the needs of each congressmen's district. Why should they waste time on debate and minority amendments?

Congress is broken and Tom DeLay broke it. But simply removing him won't cure the cancer. So far as I can see, nothing short of a Republican purge or a return to Democratic dominance can clean the place. The former might bring in more ethical Republicans who want to restore the traditionally deliberative nature of Congress and the latter would make it impossible for industries to get what they wanted simply by batting for the right. Otherwise, the DeLay machine will continue apace, and Congress will continue to deteriorate. For that reason, we can't limit this to Delay nor laud the Republicans who abandon him -- this is about the entire structure they've put in place and nothing but its wholesale destruction will restore the institution's dignity.

It's becoming a bit trite to accuse Tom DeLay of snapping his tether to reality, but I'm not going to stop noting it until Tom stops doing it. Yesterday, he gave a short presentation to the GOP Senate caucus, where he unveiled what should be called the "Stoner Defense", a combination of "chill out" sentiment and massive paranoia:

As DeLay left a 90-minute luncheon with his party's senators, he told reporters that his basic message was "Be patient; we'll be fine."

Giving a preview of the approach he is likely to take when he appears before reporters this afternoon, DeLay dismissed questions about his travel and his relationships with lobbyists as "the Democratic agenda."

Attendees said DeLay, in extremely brief remarks, told the senators that, if asked about his predicament, they should blame Democrats and their lack of an agenda. The attendees said DeLay thanked Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) for supportive comments on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday.

Yeah man, it's like, nothing. So stop fucking up the rotation. And make sure Roy's keeping watch for Democrats, they're everywhere.

Headlining the New York Times today was a little ditty they like to call "Sharon Asks U.S. to Pressure Iran to Give Up Its Nuclear Program", and it goes something like this:

Spreading photographs of Iranian nuclear sites over a lunch table at the Bush ranch in Texas on Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel urged President Bush to step up pressure on Iran to give up all elements of its nuclear program, according to senior American and Israeli officials.

Mr. Sharon said Israeli intelligence showed Iran was near "a point of no return" in learning how to develop a weapon, the officials said. However, Mr. Sharon gave no indication that Israel was preparing to act alone to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, a prospect that Vice President Dick Cheney, who was at the lunch, raised publicly three months ago.

In a conversation lasting more than an hour, Mr. Sharon argued that European nations negotiating with Iran were softening their position and may be willing to allow it to hold on to technology to enrich uranium.

American officials said the evidence Mr. Sharon presented, including aerial photographs of sites in Iran, was neither startling nor new to Mr. Bush. But they said the prime minister was clearly pressuring Mr. Bush not to allow the European negotiations with Iran to drag on.

Look, I'm no expert on the region and I'm only occasionally included on the president's daily intelligence briefings, but could we at least try not to make our actions toward Iran look like a Zionist plot? Sharon's data is likely correct and his concerns clearly warranted, but couldn't this be hashed out privately over e-mail, rather than explained in great detail to America's most prominent newspaper? It just seems that if we want to put pressure on the Iranian government, the easiest way to help them resist is to make it seem that our actions are the result of pillow talk with Israel. Optics matter, dammit.

It's time like this that I want to join with Heather Hurlbert and draft Karl Rove to State. Between him and Karen Hughes maybe someone could figure out how things'll play in the media. Maybe.

I'm tired of invading Iraq for oil, encouraging coups in Iran for crude, futzing around in the Middle East for petroleum. Every time we do it it's the same old map on CNN, the same old cartoons about swarthy dictators, the same old sandy landscapes. Why not be a little inventive? Which is why I'd like to be the first to advocate invading Guatemala for its precious, precious, wind. I mean, that's not really why we'll invade -- it'll be weapons of mass destruction or human rights abuses or something -- but, mmmm, 7,000 megawatts of wind power. Truly, we can't let that fall into the hands of the terrorists.

Drezner writes:

Will I still be blogging in five years? I honestly don’t know, but my suspicion is that if I do, there will be plenty of sabbaticals thrown in. One undeniable effect of having a successful blog is the inculcation of a sense of duty to keep up regular posts. Even the thought of blogging on a regular basis for half a decade exhausts me. However, the thought of not blogging about the interesting ideas or information that comes my way bothers me even more.

The will-I-be-doing-this-in-a-decade thought experiment is a favorite parlor game of mine and I have to say, Drezner gets it exactly right. Blogging -- particularly solo-blogging -- is an intense sport, and I have trouble imagining this level of output stretching off into the future. But the trouble I have with that absolutely pales in comparison to the cognitive disruption I get when I try to imagine not blogging at all.

You're probably wondering where I come down on the Amy vs. Matt cultural cage match. Admit it. You're desperate to hear my penetrating insights on whether we should attack over-the-top culture (a la Amy) or leave it alone (a la Matt). Well, I'd like to offer some but it'd be redundant because Daniel Munz wrote what should be the definitive post on the subject. Read it -- it's glorious*.

Beyond Munz's contribution, I think Matt's spending too much time reiterating the data showing that GTA don't hurt nobody when that, unfortunately, is worlds away from the question. Were scores of 14 year-olds taking to the streets to carjack cops and whip old ladies with Playstation controllers it'd be a different story, but the absence of anarchy has little bearing on whether or not GTA (or Sin City, or whatever) is evidence that kids can't -- and shouldn't -- negotiate the media world they're increasingly being left to. And the place for the party in that discussion isn't throwing around crime statistics but laying out a stance. Sister Souljah probably wasn't going to get any white folks killed, but then Clinton's swipe at her wasn't a last-ditch effort to halt the legions of whitey-eating zombies she controlled, it was about defining himself. And that's what this conversation is about -- rejecting the party's image of laissez-faire morality and being pro-family in a way that appeals to parental guts.

Matt does, however, make a point worth seriously considering. All in this discussion agree that censorship itself is a Very Bad Thing and we shouldn't have it. Simply attacking GTA and Sin City, however, makes it likelier that future Congress's will do some legislative boundary-drawing. That's no good. And because of it, any Democratic critique of games or movies must be explicitly and overtly tied to solutions. We can't have cultural condemnations just floating around in the ether, they've got to anchor a larger point about the struggles faced by two-job families and the answers have to revolve around helping parents ensure their kids are supervised, be it through Universal Day Care or other means.

This isn't about video games, it's about an economy where both parents have to work, where their incomes are slipping, where their hours are increasing, where their benefits are eroding, and where kids are paying the price. And so signaling our understanding that kids aren't able, and shouldn't be able, to traverse this world alone is crucial to completing the critique. GTA and the rest are low-order examples in a large phenomenon -- they should be invoked, a la Daniel, to lend a concreteness to our argument, but they can't become our focus.

* Glorious. Now that's an underused word. And also a massively good Eddie Izzard video.

Update: Link fixed. Gah.

Via Atrios, the Ultimate Warrior -- yes, the guy who choo-choo'd around wrestling rings while pumping his hands in the air and wearing bicep tassles -- has actually retired into a more ridiculous old age. Go read his attempts to sue Something Awful, they're hilarious.

So as you can see on the right, I'm starting up with BlogAds. Rates are pretty low, $25 a week or $80 a month, so, as an uninterested financial advisor, I highly suggest you place some. My hits, by the way, are about 3,400 visits from smart people desperate to click on your ad every day, so not too shabby. E-mail me if you have questions.

As a sidenote, any of you bloggers out there have advice on the BlogAds thing? Do you wait for advertisers to contact you, or do you try and sell yourself to advertisers? I've never done this before so I'm flying a bit blind.

This man date thing strikes me as way overblown. Lee's article basically says that casual acquaintances feel a little weird doing things traditionally reserved for dates. Well, yeah. I go to movies and museums and nice restaurants constantly with my friends without a hint of embarrassment, but I wouldn't invite a guy I just met in my class to a candlelit dinner. It's not because I'm afraid of looking gay so much as the setting is incongruous for the interaction, the expectations don't fit what we're going to do. I also wouldn't invite a girl I barely knew to the opening night of a Broadway play. My choice of event wouldn't fit the context of my interaction, and we'd both feel off-balance.

Lee's piece, to me, is no different than arguing that showing up at operas dressed in jeans and an undershirt makes people uncomfortable -- social events have certain norms, and when you step out of them you, feel a bit odd. If Lee wanted to write an article on that, I wish her the best. But saying that it's some sort of homophobic phenomenon seems wrong. It's not that men have trouble doing these things, it's that men who don't know each other well have trouble doing these things. Same would happen to men and women who didn't know each other well -- I'd be markedly uncomfortable inviting a girl I barely knew to a gallery opening.

There's a different, and more troubling, issue underlying this concerning how tough it is for men to form new and close friendships, in part because of the complex rules governing the evolution of a relationship from occasional drinking to daily calls. But it's not homophobia dictating the initial interactions so much as a historical and socially imposed cap on the intimacy of male-to-male interactions, one that was around long before homosexuality became a snap diagnosis. But that has to be looked at on a male-by-male basis. My upbringing and experiences have left me, as the kids say, willing (even eager) to "share", and that trait generally serves me well in constructing friendships. On the other hand, it leaves some folks a bit uncomfortable. But that has to do with how they were taught to sync their internal life with the reality around them, not whether they'll be judged gay for admitting that they fought with their girlfriend last night.

Thoughts?

EJ Dionne's firing on all cylinders today with a blistering column on the Paris Hilton Benefit Act, otherwise known as the estate tax. You guys probably know Bush's tax cuts eliminated it, but they just shoved it in an overstuffed closet and it's slated to pop back out, strong as ever, in 2009. So tomorrow, Republicans are sitting down to reform -- read: eliminate 00 the tax permanently and ensure that all those rich heirs will never pay a dime on their estates. Time for the left to call bullshit.

Dionne argues for explicitly tying the tax to the Social Security shortfall. According to the CBO, even a reduced estate tax would cover fully 1/2 of the program's deficit, which means Republicans are going to have to decide between protecting Paris Hilton's inheritance and paying Grandma Millie's Social Security check. Democrats should be all over that choice, making sure it's made as publicly as possible. Go git' em.

Update: Heh.

Brad Plumer's thoughtful, Galbraith-inspired post on the Democrat's lack of economic vision deserves a response and, indeed, a discussion. So I hope the blogosphere's economist-kings (bet Plato never saw them coming) will pick up on it. Until they do, I will.

To start, I think Brad's got two things going on here. One is the need for an economic vision, and the other is a need for a set of policy principles that get us there. And I thin, at times, that Brad conflates the two. As I read Neoconomy, conservatives want to keep growth roaring along and prices stable because the advancement of business is an end in and of itself. So pro-growth policies aren't the vision, they're the means. That's because the right sees an almost Platonic good in productivity increases, unending innovation, higher profits, etc, etc. So the success of business, for them, is the end.

The opposite would be the so-called "European Dream", which prizes quality-of-life far above efficiency of business and has shaped an economy that, while somewhat less vibrant, is immensely more pleasant. If you want the starkest statement of the difference, it's that since 1980, average hours worked has fallen in France while increasing 40% in America. 40%! The French economy would be in better shape if all their people worked 40% more hours, but their people wouldn't be as happy, and so it wouldn't serve their economic vision.

What should Democrats have? Not quite sure. But I think it should oppose further increases in the workweek. If I were to hazard a guess -- and I think this is more general than what Brad's fishing for -- we want a worker-centric economy, which means an economy that's aimed at creating a positive market for labor. What we've got now is this race to the bottom where shrinking pensions, costs that are rising quicker than incomes, and skyrocketing health care premiums are trapping folks in jobs they don't like and forcing new entrants in the labor market to take poor-quality positions (WalMart). Looks to me that traction can be found in shaking the landscape up a bit so workers occupy a better bargaining ground. Government guaranteed health care and pension benefits offer that by untying benefits from employers. Universal day care helps too. So too would, asset building programs. That, at least, is a vision for what the government's role in shaping our ideal economy should be, and I think it offers a compelling counterargument to the conservatives while fitting nicely with our policy priorities.

Now, I think Brad might be looking for a debate focused more on the innards of fiscal policy -- Full employment and deficit spending and all that. I'm not entirely sure that's the right order of this. We need to decide what kind of economywe want to see and then figure out how to make it manifest. That, to me, was the lesson of Neoconomy and for that matter, much of the literature on modern conservatism. They decided what they valued -- limited government, enhanced economic liberty, rocking private sector -- and went after it. Turned out their methods didn't quite work, but that wasn't so much the fault of their methods as their politicians -- they had the courage to talk about starving the government but could never actually pull the feeding tube. Progressives, somewhat paradoxically, have the opposite issue -- it can be tough to argue for the expansion of government, but it's damn possible to do once in power. So let's figure out our Utopian economy, be it the worker empowered to traverse the post-industrial landscape or something else, and go from there.

The subvert-the-dominant-link-hierarchy blogroll (also known as "Deserves More Attention") got a new entry this morning -- the immensely good Battle Panda. Not only is the site great, but I have a special affinity for blogs with panda in the name. Take a look.

Matthew Holt scores an interesting find. Turns out that HMO competition makes them less, not more, efficient. Apparently, if you gather a few HMO's in a town, they'll mainly compete over who can insure the most people who need insurance the least. In other words, it becomes a race to the healthy. Fascinating stuff.

Kash has a great post comparing America's health care with those of other developed nations. As you all know by now, our system's report card lands us in the remedial classes. There's virtually no metric that, when compared to other wealthy nations, we don't languish on the tail-end of. Kevin follows Kash with another great post comparing our house-of-horrors system with the far-superior French model. France is the way to go if you want to sidestep the (way overblown) pitfalls of Canadia Care (as I like to call it) and the total mess that is Britain. But it also shows why we're having such trouble in the health care debate. We've lost all our examples. The right took hold Canada and, despite the fact that their system scores far better than ours and spends much less doing it, painted a nightmarish and wholly false scenario of elderly refugees streaming to Vermont for hip surgery. O'Reilly and friends have spent the last few years striking the word France off the map and crayoning in "UnAmerican Land", so we can't quite laud France. So what have we got? Sweden? Tiny and homogenous. Britain? Uh, best not to mention them. Germany? Yeah, but not really a single-payer system. And so forth.

It's not that folks don't like the idea of government-run health care so much as we've let the prominent examples of how it works get turned against us. So now we mention single-payer and the return volley is full of sick Canadians being strechered into Detroit and uppity Frenchmen in stinktastic waiting rooms. Making single-payer safe for public discussion will require some rehabilitation of its international incarnations. Invoking France's doctor choice and lower spending is a good way to begin, but we're really going to have to tie France to Canada (as they're the most frequent counterexample), make the case for why both are better than what we've got, and then wonder why Republicans don't think American terrifictude can improve on these versions. Because that's really the disconnect here. Other countries aren't perfect, but we're much worse. The argument should then be that we can better the improvement they represent. We are, after all, America; shouldn't we be able to teach the world how health care's done?

As a final point, Kevin's post touches one of the deep fissures in the health care debate. 43,000,000 Americans lack health insurance. That's 70% of Bush's total vote. Now, a bunch of them are children, but even so, that's an enormous constituency. Were they voting as any sort of a bloc, which you'd expect a group tied to the enactment of a certain policy to do, they'd own the political system. But since they're mostly poor and disproportionately young, nobody listens. Add that to the fact that most folks with insurance are reasonably happy with their plans and you've got an overwhelmingly urgent issue perfectly primed to be ignored. And so it is ignored. Later today I'm going to talk a bit more about how vision really means simplicity, and matching the 30-word Republican platform merely means talking about only thirty words of our platform. At least fifteen of those words better be the health care, stupid, because if we can demonstrate that remaking the American system is our primary domestic goal, we'll have both a radical vision and a couple percentage points of new voters ready to tout. As Josh Marshall would say, more later.

Update: See? Now that's the problem with this blog thingie, you spend two weeks talking about nothing but health care plans and, seven days later, no one remembers you ever mentioned them at all. Anyway, root around here if you want some policy to go with your politics.

Update the Sequel: Brad Plumer has more on the structural forces that make the press report on other countries as if they lock their sick up in a room and poke them with sticks. His points are right and, to be clear, I don't mean to say it's all been a massive disinformation campaign by the right. Republicans don't like how things work in other countries so they're wholly justified in emphasizing long waits, less choice, simpler technology, and every other nasty anecdote they can dig up. It's the press's job to cut through that, and it's yet another place where they've failed. But the fact stands that Democrats haven't been assertive on our end of the debate either, and we've spent little-to-no time emphasizing other methods of health care delivery. That's largely because the 1994 debacle traumatized us, but it's time accept our pain and move on.

So I was about to sign up for NetFlix tonight when I learn that it has not one, but two cheaper competitors running round town. Both WalMart and Blockbuster have their versions of the movies-to-mailbox service, and both undercut NetFlix on the cost issue. I'm still going for NetFlix based on pure lefty instinct (support the upstart, not the corporate juggernauts playing Johnny-come-lately), but if any of you know a super-compelling reason I should consider Blockbuster*, leave it in comments.

* And if any of you are about to evangelize for WalMart, I hope you're reading this site ironically.

Ooooh...I love this idea. Get out your stamps and envelopes, folks.

Looks like BattlePanda and I tapped into the same thought-waves the other night. Gotta love metaphors so obvious that everyone gets them at once.

I'm no Horowitz fan, but holy hell, I didn't think the guy was this intellectually dishonest. Challenging someone to a written debate, editing their answers down, and then publishing the exchange with comments that you wish your opponent had participated more fully -- when he did and you cut it! -- is a rarely realized peak of argumentative weakness. I guess this is just one more of Horowitz's never-ending contradictions -- to reach this highest point of dishonesty he had to sink lower than we ever thought he could. Why Berube wastes his time on this guy I'll never know.

I love this Rude Pundit post. Just perfect.

Kinsley:

[T]he U.S. presidency is an ego-inflating machine. The president moves in a vast imperial cocoon, unsurpassed in grandeur since the pharaohs. It would take a level of humility incompatible with running for public office in the first place for a president not to think, "Hey, I'm a pretty cool guy." Every time George W. Bush hears "Hail to the Chief," the odds go up that some unsuspecting country is going to find itself getting violently democratized.

It's a funny paradox that Americans so often allow their leaders to be halo'd and tucked away for safekeeping. Every four years, voters enter the ballot box determined to elect the guy who looks the down-homiest, as if somewhere along the way we mistook presidential elections for a high school "most likely to be found on a hay bale" contest. And then they spend the interim listening to rightwing pundits explain why presidents should be saran-wrapped and kept in vegetable crispers far, far away from any news that might upset or criticisms that might offend. Unless, of course, they're Democrats (but they rarely are). But somehow, the American urge to pick a president whom you might accidentally punch in a bar somewhere doesn't conflict with the impulse to let him ascend to some realm above criticism.

Leaders need to be attacked simply so they don't forget that they, and their decisions, are vulnerable. I've given up on them remaining in touch with the heartland, I just don't want them floating up above their species. Because give them too free an ego and they run off to destroy Social Security and knock down unsuspecting Arab countries -- they lose the ability to perceive their limits. And that's the functional utility of a culture of dissent -- leaders who know they're under the microscope, accountable to a somewhat merciless public and thus careful not to make rash decisions that'll unleash the electorate's nasty side.

Republicans, having divorced the idea of limited government and kept the Christian Right in the custody agreement, have forgotten that Messianic movements generally make criminals and maniacs out of their leaders. And now they're working overtime to do the same to our presidents. Democrats should take it as our sacred duty to make sure they don't succeed. Not because the ideals of Jefferson demand it, but because no one likes a big head.

* By the way, I've taken Kinsley radically out of context here. His column is really a rather sweet and wise meditation on Charles and Camilla, and you should read it rather than rely on my self-serving excerpting.

Sam Rosenfeld's got a terrific rundown on the eternal frustration of the evangelical voter which argues, basically, that there will be no payback for the GOP footsoldiers, it doesn't poll well. He's right, of course. But I want to hone in on something he says midway through:

the atmosphere was suffused with a sense of anger and despair at the way the vast majority of Republicans they helped to put in power -- with the notable exception of a certain House majority leader locked in an existential bid to keep his career alive -- inevitably betray or ignore the religious conservative cause.

And that right there explains why Tom DeLay won't go quietly into the sweet night. The Bugman has been a pretty silent actor over the years, essentially unseen and unheard to those of us in C-SPAN land. That's because we were never his audience. DeLay's spent his time among the conservative base -- the fringe conservative base -- cultivating and schmoozing and fundraising for power. Because DeLay's position never came from natural popularity or a recognition of skill. No, it came from industry money and activist donations that Tom used to elect a fair portion of the Republican caucus.

But industry money is pragmatic cash, it stops flowing when the target enters the liability stage. DeLay is long past there and he can expect little help from his business buddies as his problems progress. But the base? They love DeLay, he's never let them down, never taken them for granted, never turned his eye towards anything but matching their wishes up with Republican success. They're not going to let him down precisely because everyone else has let them down. If they lose DeLay, their only all-weather friend, they've got nothing left.

All of which should make Democrats very happy. This is creating an excellent chance for a split between big business and the base. Tom DeLay, at this point, is like a smallpox carrier who refuses to leave the communal cave. And so long as he and his opponents, even if they're just rare independents like Chris Shays, are tussling over his ethics, it'll make every Republican who hasn't joined the denouncements look complicit. The bugman's poisonous, and the GOP's most important constituencies refuse to believe it...

I think I speak on behalf of all lefty bloggers when I congratulate Ed Kilgore for his courageous stand against slavery. Bravo!

More seriously, most of us smug blue-staters would probably be shocked to meet the hordes of Southerners who still think the Confederate cause was Good and Just and True. And it's not all hicks with gun racks; when I was working at the Dean campaign, one of my coworkers was obsessed with his Texan heritage and absolutely unyielding (and incessant) in his defense of the Confederacy. Even when no one was attacking it. The remarkable inferiority complex some Southerners tote around is really unexplainable to those who haven't run afoul of it. To this day I don't understand how it works, and I spent a Summer hashing it out in a Vermont flop house. So while Kilgore's impassioned attack on slave-holders movement surely strikes some of us as a lecture on the stunning roundness of the earth, there are a surprising number who haven't heard the lesson.

I just don't know if any of them read the New Donkey blog.

Read this in the Galbraith book and found it a remarkable example of "what might have been". You hardly need my commentary on it, the power of what this party could have meant is obvious on its own:

Supremely adept at maneuvering, and aware that he was actually trailing in the polls, Roosevelt privately took a new tack. His frustration with conservatives in his own party by then was at the boiling point, and he resolved on an unprecedented strategy to be rid of them. He decided to approach Wendell Willkie -- the republican he'd defeated four years earlier -- to see whether together they could create a new liberal party made uo oif progressive Democrats and Republicans and shorn of the antediluvian elements in the South. "We ought to have two real parties," FDR told his aide Samuel Rosenman, "one liberal and the other conservative." When Rosenman, on FDR's instructions, broached the idea to Willkie at a secret meeting in New York, the Republican responded instantly. "You tell the President that I'm ready to devote almost full time to this, " he said. "A sound Liberal government in the U.S. is absolutely essential." But the news of their plan then leaked out, and both men, greatly embarrassed, were forced to back off, though they secretly agreed to take up the issue immediately after the November elections. American politics for a brief moment seemed poised to head in a remarkable directions, but then Willkie suddenly died in the fall of 1944 and Roosevelt himself was gone the following spring.

Wow. I hate these moments -- the Willkie-FDR alliance, the bullet that hit MLK Jr., the bullet that hit JFK,. the bullet that hit RFK., the 500-odd votes in Florida. Our country could have gone in a very different direction many, many times. Seeing the possible paths in such stark, historical relief, however, really gives you a sense of loss.

Apropos of my book meme completion below, I must admit to being a fraud. I am frankly unfit to be responding to that survey. I wish it weren't true, and every few months I resolve to make it less true, but that doesn't change the basic honesty of the claim. I'm a bad book-reader. Non-fiction, sadly, has basically taken over my life. I've got a list of unread, fantastically fascinating books that's grown to two bookshelves long. I've got 10+ books in various stages of doneness now. And because I'm constantly being confronted with how much I don't know on this-or-that topic, I'm perennially playing infojunkie catch-up. Jeff Bezos sends me Christmas cards.

The result, unfortunately, has been an almost complete abandonment of fiction. Not only haven't I read the canonical greats, but I've no authority on the contemporary stuff either. It's not that I don't want to, or that I don't enjoy it, but my non-fiction obsession leaves me no time to inject anything that lacks direct relevance to my next post. It's really quite horrible. And don't even get me started on poetry. I'm all for the great work Roxanne's doing, but if it's not Saul Williams, I lack any ability to appreciate it. Not sure why this is -- I love hip-hop, I love slam, and I respect rhyming poets, but anything prose-based just flies right over my head.

So Digby's tagged me on the book-meme thingie. Off we go:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be [saved]?

Since so many other folks have saved the Big Important Pieces of Serious Literature, I'm going with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. It all comes in one binding, so I think that's fair. And to lose Douglas Adams' literary contribution would break my fool heart.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

I constantly have crushes on fictional characters. Just don't tell my girlfriend.

The last book you bought is?

Kinda did a spree at Barnes and Nobles yesterday, and picked up Norman Mailer's The Fight, Paul Roberts' The End of Oil, and Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time. I'd easily recommend the Mailer and the Roberts, but skip Nelson. I thought I was getting a smart and fun meditation on being a read-a-holic, but what I really picked up was a mostly banal trip through her opinions on reading. Did you know books can make you remember a certain time/place in your life? Did you know books can help you escape the real world? Did you know the books your friends recommend can say something about their personalities? Etc.

What are you currently reading?

Bad question. I've got, at any given time, about 15 books open, so I'll try and limit this:

Robert Parker's biography of John Kenneth Galbraith (amazingly good, but absolutely endless);
Joel Slemrod's Taxing Ourselves;
The aforementioned Mailer and Roberts titles;
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment,
The Right Nation;
The United States of Europe;
The New America Foundation's State of the Union;
Chris Matthews' Kennedy & Nixon;
Robert Dallek's biography of JFK;
The list, unfortunately, goes on.

Which of those will get finished, I just don't know.

Five books you would take to a deserted island?

I should stay away from the cheap How to Make Fire answers, right?

I'd probably go for the longest, densest stuff I could find. We're talking Rawls, Proust, a set of encyclopedias, that history of The Reformation everyone likes so much, and probably, again, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Brad Plumer, because he was an English major and will thus offer much more erudite answers than you got here;
Jesse Taylor, because I want to know, also because he sent me Lethem's Fortress of Solitude which is now one of my favorite books;
Praktike, because I want to know more about the man behind the psuedonym.

Your must-read of the day, courtesy of Democracy Arsenal: Top 10 Myths Progressives Need to Let Go Of to Regain the Upper Hand on Foreign Policy.

Over at Dymaxion World, John has written an excellent rejoinder to "The Long Emergency", the Rolling Stone excerpt on the apocalyptic world an oil crash is about to bring. The oil crisis is bad enough without going into full on scare mode, so I highly suggest you read John's more balanced portrayal. For what it's worth, I've been looking into these things pretty heavily lately, and John's view strikes me as closer to the truth, but I'm still no expert, so take my recommendations with the proverbial grain of salt.

So long as I'm linking to excellent piece, go read Matthew Holt's myth-busting comparison of the Canadian and American health care systems. Great stuff.

One day, and I like to think it soon, politicians will muster their will and Americans will call forth their outrage and we'll finally fix our broken health care system. And when we do, and the histories of the epic battle to guarantee coverage are written, these folks will be the villains:

One of the most talked-about new plans is Tonik, launched a few months ago by the California Blue Cross subsidiary of WellPoint Inc., the nation's largest health insurer. Directed toward people in their 20s, Tonik seeks a coveted group insurers call the "young invincibles" because they are rarely sick.

The company's marketing campaign looks nothing like the button-down image the Blues have long presented. Silhouetted snowboarders careen across Tonik's website, on which medical plans have hipster names such as the "calculated risk-taker" and the "part-time daredevil." Its monthly premiums are as low as $64, with out-of-pocket deductibles as high as $5,000 (the "thrill-seeker").

The most controversial feature of Tonik is its exclusion of any maternity coverage.

Blue Cross says Tonik serves a niche of the uninsured market — people who are put off by high premiums because they rarely see a doctor. "Because of their age, attitude and culture, this group wasn't interested in paying for maternity coverage," said Michael Chee, a Blue Cross spokesman. "Maternity is one of the higher-cost items to price a policy for, so taking it out allowed us to price it lower."

Critics say such plans allow insurers to cherry-pick the healthiest consumers but offer skimpy benefits. "The market is likely to turn PPOs from the Cadillac of plans into Pintos that might cost less but have much less protection," said Jerry Flanagan, a spokesman for the Santa Monica-based Foundation for Consumer & Taxpayer Rights.

"The problem when you exclude benefits like maternity coverage is you don't have fair risk pools in the marketplace anymore," said Astrid Meghrigian, a lawyer for the California Medical Assn. "People have babies on [an HMO plan] and then go back into a cheaper PPO."

This plan-hopping has pushed a rising tide of people with costly health problems such as diabetes, morbid obesity and heart failure onto HMOs, whose costs are capped.

That, right there, is our whole health care problem in a few simple paragraphs. You can time travel back to the beginning of Blue Shield, where they created a one-size-fits-all plan with true community ratings that could've been the model for a perfectly efficient health care sector, right up until start-up competitors saw an opportunity and began cherry-picking the healthy out from under them. That was early in the 20th century. Since then, the same tactic has replicated itself over and over, and now it's bringing us to the breaking point.

This is why health care is not a market. Because in a market, you limit your liabilities. In health insurance, your liabilities are the sick. In health care, the aim is to cover the sick. In private health care, the aim is to turn a profit, and thus you have to ignore the sick and cover the healthy. It just doesn't, it just can't, work.

If you've ever wondered why I give David Brooks such a hard time, today's column should be filed in your records as Exhibit A. It's a perfect, almost archetypal example of everything he does wrong. The Republican party, he'd like us to know, is a great party full of transformational thinkers and lofty idealism and a creamy nougat center. But perfection and virtue, sometimes, are not enough for the American people. The American people, you know, are stodgy and small-minded. They like evolution -- not the darwin kind! -- rather than transformation.

Take Terry Schiavo, where "Republicans charged boldly forth to preserve her life", or Social Security where they offered Americans chances to control their retirement accounts (benefit cuts? What benefit cuts?). Despite the right's wings and halos, the American people opposed their plans because, well, they were too good, too brave, too virtuous. Ever had a rich chocolate cake that you couldn't finish because it was just so damn good and tasty that polishing it off would've made you ill? Yeah, it's kinda like that.

And Tom DeLay? Tom DeLay is in trouble not for being unethical, but for being aggressive and controversial. The American people are scared of leaders with strong convictions and a sense of daring, so they're abandoning Super DeLay long before he's saved them from the evils of modern life. Sigh. Poor Tom DeLay, a great man born in an era poorly disposed towards greatness in men.

But none of this should be misconstrued as helpful for the Democrats. They are in a "death spiral", for reasons far too complex for me to explain to you. White people hate them, and their leaders, "highly educated and secular university-town elites", scare white people all the more. Non-biblical books make Patio Man and Home-Depot Homey uncomfortable. To the great Caucasian race that populates this nation's suburban sprawl, these secular elites are Black Panthers with PhDs. The Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for resurrecting such a tough and troubling period from our history. And please, don't recall my column from mere days ago that demanded Democrats rediscover their intellectual heritage if they wanted to be viable, that's completely inoperative in the context if this piece.

So to sum up: Republicans are too deliciously fantastic for their own good, Democrats are gutter dwellers who hate the common man, and I'm David Brooks, that rare columnist with the courage to criticize both parties.

Ever wondered what would happen if Lisa Frank and Peggy Noonan collaborated on a music video? Wonder no more.

Via Greg.

Matt misinterprets my post from this morning (although I do like the constant blog wars we're having). Terming it "fuck the center" isn't quite correct, it was much more "fuck the imaginary center" (hence the title: "The Imaginary Center"), the point being that this magical land of moderation exists only in the mental landscape of the pundit class. That, of course, accounted for my foray into what Matt calls "polling literalism". Policies supported by the American people lay far outside what one would assume centrist politics allows -- they profess to want government-run health care, a hyper-progressive tax system, etc., which proves, I think, that achieving "centrism" isn't as binary and simplistic as some assume.

Of course, we do have a representative democracy, so if Americans really wanted these things, they wouldn't keep voting in the schmucks who demagogue the bills aimed at achieving them. That's why I didn't recommend that Hillary fight for single-payer health care or a whopping increase in top-bracket taxes, I don't think the American people would end up springing for it. That's also why I've been arguing for the regressive VAT (rather than holding out for more progressive solutions) and against single-payer (rather than middle-way universal options). There may be no all-powerful center, but there's sure as hell no omnipotent left and you go after what you're likely to sell. All that said, Hillary won't find much salvation in the glorious kingdom of centrism. Because that really is where the polling literalism that Matt deplores springs from -- uncertain politicians thinking that if they eavesdrop on enough voters they'll find this magic package of middle-way proposals that no one will ever disagree with. As Bush pere would say, "Not gonna happen".

And that, finally, brings us to my argument about the American people dragging the "center" to wherever they are. Reasonable proposals are anything they like, even if they're flat out contradictory. Flat tax and progressive tax? Bring it on! Deficit reduction and tax cuts? Yes please! Respected in the world and belligerent abroad? Why not? So syncing electoral whims with good policy-making requires a host of leadership and communicative abilities, not least the impression of strength and certitude in your decisions. Hillary would be best served focusing on cultivating that image rather than some Bayh/Breaux/Kerrey/Lieberman-like centrism that's only recognized when she screws over a loyal constituency. That doesn't end up getting you very far because Americans don't have some Platonic form of centrism they're just waiting to see achieved. That idea is a misread of Clinton, who tapped into some nice anti-party, anti-interest group sentiment and won an election. But rejecting institutions Americans don't like is different than this mindless search for moderation to many politicians go through. Finger-in-the-wind leaders who lack convictions, or at least look like they do, get rejected no matter how well their positions hew to the imagined middle. John Kerry with all the same proposals but the ability to speak in declarative sentences would've won the election. Real life John Kerry loses -- simple as that.

Matt's comments about polling literalism, by the way, are good and you should read them. The point is that they don't quite apply to my post. If the center is where the majority resides then, according to the American people, no such place exists. Or, more to the point, many such places exist, which is precisely the problem. So Matt's right to condemn polling literalism, but his post is actually complimentary, not opposed, to mine. If polls were returned with rational results that translated into predictable legislative and electoral outcomes, then there would be a center and I'd be the first to suggest politicians quickly figure out how to appeal to it. But they don't, and so I stick by my original point -- fuck the imaginary center.

Pam and Shakespeare's Sister are right. Nothing shows how completely unprepared America is to fight a war better than our willingness to kick heroic homosexuals out of the service. Doesn't matter if they know Arabic, doesn't matter if they're the real-life manifestation of Rambo, doesn't matter if they shoot lasers from their eyes and make things explode through mental effort, if they prefer dudes to chicks the Army doesn't want them. And it doesn't need them at the exact same moment that it desperately needs more troops.

During Vietnam, the thirst for bodies superseded the country's casual bigotry and dudes in dresses were sent as surely as the conscripts who showed up in fatigues. We were fighting a war. Presently, we're forcing perfectly good, able, and willing fighters from advancing the national interest because they pursue a lifestyle that is in no way illegal. That point can't be overstated. Being gay is no less legal than being brown-eyed, or long-limbed. The Supreme Court, in fact, not only ratified the constitutionality of being gay, but of doing gay things. So neither homosexuality nor the sodomy that often comes with it is in any way contrary to the law. And yet, somehow, this wholly legal lifestyle is reason enough to be ejected from the Armed Forces.

Imagine that. The defenders of liberty, the toughest, strongest, most deadly-dangerous aspect of the world's superpower gets the vapors when gays ask to join. All these macho men, all these Navy SEALS, all these front-line defenders of freedom are, we're supposed to believe, rendered so queasy by the thought of dudes kissing that they could no longer protect the country. And the right accuses us of being unserious?

Actually, it goes far beyond seriousness. It hits straight at the heart of efficiency:

A recent congressional study on the impact of "don't ask, don't tell" said that hundreds of highly skilled troops, including many translators, have left the armed forces because of the rule, at a cost of nearly $200 million, mostly for recruiting and training replacements for 9,500 troops discharged between 1994 and 2003.

$200 million. So the soldiers tasked with defending our country will never be exposed to the danger of guy-on-guy action. You have got to be fucking kidding me.

There's a lot of justified celebration among progressive California watchers today. Arnold's invulnerability has finally cracked, and now he's scuttling away from pension reform as quick as his musclebound legs can take him. As a victory, it's more important than we might expect -- CALPERS has been an enormous force for corporate responsibility, throwing their cash behind companies with good practices and using their shareholder pull to spur reform in those that failed.

But I wouldn't jump too high. Arnold's back-off is pure calculation. He's got a herd of semi-popular, hyper-controversial ballot initiatives up for vote. Unlike his bond measure, which posed the no-brainer of whether or not Californians would like to bury their children in debt so they didn't have to add a cent to the sales tax (YES!), it's going to be an uphill climb for the governator come the next ballot. Stepping out of the gate with every public sector employee, every family member of a public sector employee, every friend of a public sector employee, and everyone dating a public sector employee leaving their houses specifically to vote against Arnold's proposals pretty much would doom all his initiatives to failure. A backlash that heavy would be deadly before the election. He's smart to pull the pension reform from the ballot, but that doesn't mean he won't put it back.

Arnold's backing down so he doesn't mass all imaginable opposition at the same time. This is divide and conquer, if he passes his ballot initiatives this year, he'll go back for pension reform. And California's public sector shouldn't forget it.

From my political theory professor today:

"You can't impregnate all future autonomous decisions through your actions with a first autonomous decision. You have to make love to each autonomous decision separately."

Heh.

Via Political Wire, pollster Scott Rasmussen, annoyed at his post-2004 election irrelevance, has created the Hillary Meter, an enormously useless waste of webspace tracking, twice monthly, how close to the political center Americans think Hillary is.

The obsession with centrism is, to me, the single most puzzling thing about presidential politics. It's as if the strategists and pollsters and commentators all sat down over Scrabble one night, decided the work they did was too hard, and unanimously agreed that, from then on, the middle would be the ideal and everybody could simply work off that. Then the pollsters would know what to poll, the strategists would know what to strategize, the commentators could pen their critiques, and everyone could hit the bars by seven. They did all this in a century where none of the great and effective leaders were middle-of-the-road kinda men. FDR, Kennedy, Johnson (got an enormous amount done), Reagan -- there was no obsession with moderation directing their compasses, and had there been, they'd be consigned to dust-gathering biographies in particularly well-stocked libraries, not still injecting themselves into political discussions.

Whether Hillary hits dead middle is far less important than whether she connects with the American people. Because, surprise surprise, the nation doesn't quite rest in the magic center either. They like class warfare, soaking the rich, government-run health care, preserving the environment, and participating in all manner of international treaties. Of course, Hillary's move to the center will be judged on how well she rejects these American priorities -- how quickly she gives up the ideal of universal health care, how blithe her dismissal of international treaties is, how much she protests against a progressive tax code.

But then it's not the American middle she'll be moving to, instead, she'll by traveling to a hypothetical center that exists only in the heads of the commentariat. And to get the secret key that opens up the hidden door to that electoral treasure room, she'll have to gut punch what she believes in, deny good policy, and show herself willing to bleed her supporters. Being judged viable in politics has the distinct oder of a frat hazing, where not only do you have to demean yourself, but for entry, they love it if you offend and even cause pain to your former friends. And so, If Hillary were smart, she'd take her husband's advice, not Scott Rasmussen's.

Strength and certainty will do her much more good than meaningless, muddled moderation. Her current attempts to frame her positions in massively appealing and concrete terms are exactly right, so much so that they've even sent her marching towards the center in Scott's polls without changing her positions a bit. Because, in the end. the American people judge the center to be where they are, and so long as they like what's being said, they'll drag the middle over to is. Hillary should just keep on keepin' on, no matter which direction these meaningless polls point in.

Via Atrios, it looks like Arnold ain't doing so well:

Swept into office in an unprecedented recall election in 2003, the Republican's approval rating fell to 43 percent from 59 percent in January, according to a Survey and Policy Research Institute poll released on Thursday.

That's a bad approval rating for a Republican in a Democratic state, and it's coming at a bad time for Arnold. The past few weeks have seen challengers enter the race for governor, public employees mount an almost-armed uprising against him, and forced him to cave to the pressure and eliminate "pension reform" from the agenda. Arnold looks -- dare I say it? -- vulnerable.

Speaking of polls, the WSJ/NBC released one (warning: PDF) that asked whether the Democrats should help Bush pass his proposals in bipartisan fashion or oppose the right to keep them from going too far. The answer? Oppose the right, 63%-30%.

Lindsay Beyerstein has a thoughtful response* to my post on Lakoff from a few days back. Yes, I said from a few days back. Which is kinda important because blog posts have the lifespan of fruitflies** -- come each dawn, the bell is tolling for all those words you wrote the day before, which kinda sucks. So it's nice to see one achieve some shelf life. But I digress.

She takes issue with my lashing of Lakoff's "nurturant parent" model which, she explains, isn't meant to be a frame so much as a way of conceptualizing how the two parties view themselves. Fair enough. But that doesn't, as I see it, much change the critique. Whether it's the wellspring our frames emanate from or the frame itself doesn't much matter; in the end, whatever emerges will always be pointing to the nurturant parent v. strict father choice, a a match-up we'll lose.

That's because, in the the American polity, the idea of the strict father is stronger than the idea of the nurturant parent. That's how Republicans win elections -- not on health care and education and Social Security, all places the nurturant model functions best, but on scaring people over foreign threats. The nurturant parent will never win on terrorism. It's no coincidence that the only presidential recently won by Democrats fell between the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11. With domestic issues dominant, nurturant parent won; when foreign policy returned, it lost. So while nurturant parent is a fine starting place for explaining how we take care of our fellow citizens, it's no good for protecting them from alien dangers.

This means that the way we conceptualize and articulate ourselves at present doesn't work. Whether we're actually saying nurturant parent or just operating off its tenets, we need to change it. We need to understand that, as Clinton says, the American people prize strength above all else. Now, we may be able to combine strength with values more natural to our worldview, but we're going to have to figure out how, on terrorism, to be a tough dad rather than a nurturing parent. And I fear that viewing ourselves through this inherently unworkable prism is not the best way to start that evolution. NP may have a use for part of our philosophy, but I don't see any way it can possibly contribute towards a successful foreign policy philosophy.

* Seriously, go read it.
** Actually, it's 1/37th the lifespan of a fruitfly, as they live only 37 days. Still, you get the point.

With the Schiavo memos proven to be from a Republican source and Powerline not apologizing for their truthless innuendo and slander, it's time to break out the popcorn and see if Big Trunk and Hindrocket can clear the shark. Odds are on massive carnage, but they might just end up laughing stocks. For that, see August Pollack on "Powerline-was-completely-fucking-wrong-gate" (Best. Gate. Ever.). It's not just that they have no shame, it's that they once met shame on a street, beat the shit out of him, rolled him up in a carpet, and threw him off a bridge. And don't even ask me about the nightmare they put truth through. To paraphrase Marv in Sin City, after what they did to poor honesty, hell must have seemed like heaven.

Powerline, we must begin to understand, has no fucking idea what they're talking about at any given moment. Once upon a time, some GOP operative sent by the Ghost of Nixon got something right for them in the Free Republic comments section, and ever since then the homo-erotically named bloggers over there have thought his success their own and tried to get a bunch of other Important Stories About Treasonous Democrats right too. But they don't. Reading their site is like watching a blind child in a dog park -- you keep trying to warn him not to step in the piles of shit, but you're never able to get there quite quick enough. They want to make a point on Carter and end up calling him a traitor -- ooh, all over your shoe! They want to attack the AP but end up proving themselves utterly ignorant of how cameras work -- damn, you got it on your sock! They try to accuse Democrats of faking the Schiavo memo until an aide to current Republican Senator and Bush's former HUD Secretary Mel Martinez admits to writing it -- Agh, it's all over you!

They get nothing right. Their fact-checking skills are atrocious. They neither report nor call experts, it's just whatever they invented twenty seconds ago. Watching them work is like attending a high school debate match in the impromptu event. Arguments are created on the fly, accuracy is unimportant so long as the product accuses the "MSM" or Democrats of some cardinal sin that'll leave Powerline's sycophantic readers moaning with the exquisite pleasure that comes only from having one's biases expertly stroked. The plausibility of their claims ranges from pathetic to laughable (has Big Trunk debated PZ Myers on the biological uncertainty of evolution yet?) and their traffic and credibility is entirely predicated on the work someone else did, success they've been totally unable to replicate. They have failed.

So enough's enough -- can we please stop taking them seriously? They've exhausted their purpose, which was proving that the blogosphere isn't self-correcting and, in fact, offers rich rewards to opportunists with a polygamous relationship to the truth. Powerline's not useful anymore. They're not funny, like Glenn, or intellectually interesting, like Tacitus (old school Tacitus, anyway), or rhetorically talented, like Sullivan. They're just there, hopping up and down and begging someone to take their latest theory -- thought up seven seconds ago on the can -- seriously. Don't oblige them.

Looking at the latest DeLay scandals in the continuing excavation of DeLay's immorality, Hilzoy writes:

Why can't these people just live on their salaries? Tom DeLay has an answer: “I challenge anyone to live on my salary.” Reportedly, when he said that, his salary was $158,000 a year.

Despite the obvious fantasy world DeLay lives in, we might want to take his point more seriously. $158,000 is a lot of money, bit it's not that much money. Particularly not when you live in DC and your home district, when you fly back and forth constantly, and when all your friends are lobbyists and lawyers who live like kings. To put it another way, it's a Passat salary in a Beamer world.

Now don't get me wrong, $160,000 is plenty of cash, but considering the rarified realm of sycophants and rich kids inhabited by our congressmen, it's not all that surprising that they let themselves be bought dinners, be flown places, be done favors. Most of these guys are lawyers, doctors, businessmen -- folks with much higher earning power than $150,000 a year. In their minds, accepting a few gifts is probably a perfectly rational trade for operating much beneath their earning potential in order to advance the public good -- you know, allowing usury and launching wars and thinking Iraq's still got weapons and stuff -- a few gifts and junkets are the least the American voters can give them.

I'm not sure what, if anything, you do about that. Many of them would probably remain corrupt at $250,000 a year. But I have no problem with the idea that we should pay our government leaders handsomely. To some degree, that'd probably attract more and better talent to the positions. Right now, if you've got a moderately padded bank account, running for office is a massive cut in your lifestyle, and thus the lifestyle of your family. If you're massively wealthy, you can live off your savings, but if you were just making a lot, rather than a ton, you don't have that option. Hiking congressional pay would soften that tradeoff, and hopefully spur better people to run for office. As it is now, I think the idealists don't often survive their climb up the latter, so you're mostly left with the very rich and the very power-hungry. Maybe a few more bucks could shake that calculus a bit.

Update: Matt S. has a little challenge for Tom Delay...

Pelosi's really on the right track here (See Matt? I show the love). If Bush is denying the legitimacy of US Treasury Bonds, then that, not Social Security, is the real issue here. What's happened that America cannot pay back its debts? If our situation was truly so dire, shouldn't our president have known that and not pushed for deficit-worsening tax cuts or Medicare expansions? If we can't pay for the trust fund, can we pay the Chinese? Is there any chance they'd try to extract payment militarily? What about corporate investors? What about individual investors? Exactly who are we going to stiff? And if we're not going to welch to any of those investors, why are we not paying the trust fund back? Bush is like a kid with a mouth full of crumbs and a stomach ache who, when caught putting the lid on the cookie jar, turns and says "Cookies? We didn't have any cookies." This is either his fault or it's not happening.

If Democrats are smart, Republicans will rue the day they adopted this fake trust fund defense. The questions it raises about how our government is being run are much more serious than the doubt it casts on Social Security. The trust fund is, in essence, simply a government debt. The government runs thousands of different debts payable to millions of different sources. We've been doing that since the country's inception, and it works because we always pay back our debts. If we stop paying what we owe, our economy will crash. Bush and friends have thus adopted a line of attack that, far from nailing Social Security, is targeted right between their lying eyes, about six inches above their lying mouths. Debt repayment is the function of the government. Bush is the leader of the government. If the government can't pay back its debts, he better explain why, and quick. To paraphrase Alexis Bledel from Sin City, "Don't look now cowboy, but you're running out of valley".

Yahoo News has an AP headline entitled "French Secularists Criticize Pope Observance".

Wow. I mean, really, wow. From O'Reilly's mouth to their ears.

This is scary -- oil production in most on the non-OPEC nations is already in accelerating decline, and OPEC looks to be nearing it's maximum. Ouch. So, by the way, is this Rolling Stone excerpt from the The Long Emergency that's been flitting through the blogosphere. Hell, that one's not scary, it's totally terrifying. It also strikes me as a bit alarmist. The author isn't an energy expert, he's a professional author who used to be a staff writer at Rolling Stone. And while that doesn't mean he's wrong, the difference between his apocalyptic vision and the more moderate (though still nasty) collapse scenarios envisioned by energy experts leaves me a tad skeptical.

I'm trying to get some of those said experts to drop a guest-post evaluating The Long Emergency for us, so, in true Marshallian fashion, more later. But whether the future looks hellish or merely dangerous, energy is obviously getting more important and fast. To that end, I'm adding an "Energy" category to the blogroll and popped in some places to start learning. If you guys have links for it, let me know.

From here on out, I'll be doing a biweekly column for the folks at Campus Progress called "Get a Job". The idea came from all of you who e-mail me wondering how to break into writing/think tanks/government/etc. The way it'll work, basically, is that I'll interview and profile cool young progressives in good jobs so you can see how they got there, and maybe figure out how to follow along. First one's up today, and it focuses on Matt Yglesias. I'm still kinking out the style, so don't be too harsh in the eval. But go read it anyway.

Matt's right. The DeLay scandals are cresting too quick, little would be worse than watching the right sacrifice their figurehead, install Roy Blunt Jr., and move forward untainted by ethical issues. On the other hand, I'm not sure this is in the power of "liberal advocacy groups" anymore -- the press smells the blood and I get the feeling that they're circling on their own, no one's having to herd them. The only thing liberal groups can do now is try and widen the attack, to demand that the press pay attention to the larger issues of Republican corruption and pay-to-play ethos.

This moment is as good as it gets, with the press already nailing Delay for transgressions, they're as likely as they'll ever be to pick up on stories implicating the whole caucus and it's way of doing business. The front room lobbyists, the corporate cronyism, the breathtaking shamelessness with which industry shills form legislation -- those are the real scandals, it's not just one bad apple, it's a caucus that's disgustingly bold in allowing and enlarging the nexus between cash and Congress. In the ideal hierarchy of things, what the Republicans do today is infinitely worse than what Nixon did during Watergate. His actions were just aimed at screwing his enemies, the Republicans have turned their sights towards their constituents. But the way the press works, you can't indict business as usual, you can only nail individuals for the unusual. DeLay's carelessness has thus opened the door for these stories, are job now it to push the larger issues into the front yard.

I agree with basically all of this. And it's one of the things I find most galling about Blair's support for Bush, and Bush's complete unwillingness to moderate key policies to help Blair. Tony has been one of the left's brighter lights in recent years, leading a resurgence of Labour and creating a clear and compelling model for liberals. And then he went and threw it away on our unconcerned leader and his incompetent and immoral wars. Now, with election coming, he's battered and bloodied because he tried to be a liberal hawk in a neocon war and got burned for it, and so, I fear, will the left.

Now, I've no reason to believe that Blair's support for Iraq was anything but sincere. Some backed the war on gut, anti-tyranny grounds, and right or wrong, their convictions led them. Blair seems to be one of these. But he's destroying his government and derailing his agenda by refusing to admit the mistake, and he's isolating himself from ideological allies by allowing the Iraq War to define him. Now maybe it'll just lead to a Liberal Democrats-Labour hook-up, something I'd find defensible if not necessarily ideal. But in any case, by weakening himself, he's hastened the end of the Labour project. Don't believe me? Check out this Luntz focus group. The guy threw away the third way to go to war the wrong way. Clinton lost control of his attempt thanks to his own sexual appetites (and an obsessive right-wing Congress). It'd be nice if just one visionary liberal would put the movement ahead of themselves for awhile so other leaders could have a model untainted by disgrace...

Saul Bellow has died. Just a day or two after Prince Rainier of Monaco. Who passed just after the Pope. Who faded right after Terry Schiavo, whose feeding tube was pulled not long after a host of other luminaries and bright lights were extinguished. Maybe it's just me, but I can't remember so much death dotting the news ever before. I can't pull up the morning papers without seeing the Arthur Miller or Susan Sontag or Ronald Reagan have passed on. It's unbelievable. Why all the death?

Kevin and Duncan* both point out that the VAT (see post below) is somewhat regressive. True 'nuff. So why do it? Mostly because it's safer than the alternatives. Reasoning below the fold.

The two main ways of raising revenue are increases in the income tax and hikes (or implementation) of a variety of small bore taxes (estate, gasoline, tobacco, etc). Kevin recommends the latter route. Generally speaking, I'm for it, but not when we're creating a dedicated source for a specific program. When a variety of mini-taxes are around, it's easy for Republicans to pick off just one or two unpopular ones and thus destabilize the whole endeavor. They did it with the estate tax, but that, at least, was just general revenue. What if it had been supporting only health care? A gasoline tax would prove, I fear, similarly vulnerable.

Option number two would be an income tax hike. Problem there is that the income tax covers so many things (general revenue, after all) that it's easy to cut it simply by invoking a handful of unpopular programs and accusations of government waste.

So to be clear, I'm all for raising revenue those ways -- a gasoline tax is especially crucial -- but I don't think they're functional or secure as dedicated sources of revenue. In contrast to their fluctuations, look how stable the payroll tax has been. Despite being the most in-your-face of the taxes, it's rarely been mucked with. Mostly, I think, because it's supremely clear about what it does. As a single tax with no other targets that pays for a program with no other sources of revenue, it's much tougher to attack. The VAT would enjoy similar clarity of purpose.

As for the regressiveness of the tax -- it's true, it is a bit regressive. You could create exemptions for basic food stuffs and the like, as they have in Europe, but I don't quite think you need to. A 3-4% VAT wouldn't be so regressive as to pose a serious financial problem to the vast majority of folks, and those who did feel it would end up quite a bit ahead thanks to the health care the tax provided.

* Duncan's probably right on his quibble with me re: the application of the tax. He is, after all, an economist. So go read him on it.

Movement conservative Bruce Bartlett has penned one of those responsible Republican op-eds Democrats are coming to know and love; and he's written a real one, not a Brooksian poison pill. He argues that Republicans have neither the will nor the desire to seriously shrink government spending, in fact, they've proved themselves as bad as Democrats. With that known, he says, the idea of starving the beast is dead, the gig up, the game over; now we need to figure out how to deal with the coming health care crunch, mindful that politicians haven't the courage to slash health care. To that end, he recommends the Value Added Tax.

A bit of background: The VAT is used by every industrialized nation save America. It's essentially a sales tax levied on manufacturers during each step of the production process. As an example (stolen from Taxing Ourselves), assume this simplified life cycle of bread: A farmer grows and grinds wheat, then sells the resulting flour to a baker for $1. The baker makes dough and sells the bread for $2. And let's assume the VAT is 10%. The farmer, when he sells to the baker, pays 10 cents to the government, because he added one dollar to the product. The baker, when he sells to the consumer, pays 10 cents to the government, because he added one dollar to the product. Had he sold the bread for $3, he would have paid 20 cents, because he added two dollars to the product (.1*2=.2). The tax is paid on the value each added to the product.

Next assume we're baking a rare and expensive bread that takes 15 steps to make. The VAT, of course, is tacked on by the company paying it at each step down the chain. So if each company adds a dollar of value to the bread, by the fifth company, 40 cents have been added to the price (four dollars of value added and taxed at 10%). Every company down the line can deduct what they pay of the VAT off their tax returns, so the fifth company could deduct that 40 cents, the eighth company could take off 70 cents, etc. This'll matter in a moment.

So the VAT, basically, is a sales tax that sounds a bit more complicated because it's collected in stages rather than all at once. So why has virtually every nation that's ever had a serious sales tax converted to a VAT?

In a word, enforceability. Running a sales tax is, for a variety of reasons, ridiculously tough to do. As a product moves through the production process, it's still taxed at most every step, including when sold to the consumer. When the sales tax is high, this can distort the price upward very, very heavily, particularly on products with lots of manufacturing steps. The VAT simply taxes the added value on each step in production (and it taxes only the businesses, never the consumer directly, though the added cost is generally passed on to the consumer), it doesn't tax both the production chain and the customer, and so no products are penalized more heavily than others, eliminating a major source of discontent.

Beyond that, tax evasion is easier to control, both because companies doing it only cheat the government out of a small proportion of the tax (remember: they only pay the tax on the value they themselves added to the product, so they're welching on a fraction of the total tax rather than the whole thing, as would be the case if a store withheld a sales tax), but other companies have an incentive to make sure the tax is paid down the line so they can claim it on their returns. Remember the rare bread? Companies get to deduct the tax added on at each step of the process, so if they forego their own portion they can't deduct any of the others -- if you're a company far down the production line, that leaves you paying more than if you had just ponied up the tax. So if producers up the line try to weasel out of paying it, you're going to make sure they put up the tax so they don't screw up your tax returns and cost you money down the line. It becomes, to some extent, self-policed.

Now, why am I spending so much time on this? Readers who remember my health policy wonk-out from a few weeks back might also recall that the CAP health plan I was obsessing over wanted to pay for itself with a 3-4% VAT. And here we have Bruce Bartlett proposing a VAT to pay for health care spending. Stodgy Republican warhorse Bill Thomas (the one who judged Bush's privatization plan a "dead horse") also wants one. This, I think, is about as good as it gets for liberals. An emerging consensus on a new, dedicated revenue source to guarantee the financial solvency of health care. And if, while we're moving this through, we can't create a hybrid universal plan along the lines of CAP's proposal, we're completely useless as a political party -- this is the best, and maybe only chance we've had since 1994. So go forth and spread the word -- there should be bipartisan Brookings events on using a VAT to pay for health care spending, op-eds authored with allies across the aisle, educational initiatives aimed at converting legislators, and on and on. Bartlett's op-ed might mark a powerful opportunity for passing a progressive priority -- it's up to us to capitalize on the moment.

Any questions?

Judging by the size and ferocity of these protests, it looks like he just might be.

Via Singer.

Is there a reason comments have been so dead the last two days? I mean, the hits are doing just fine, but you're all keeping silent. You guys take a vow or you just feeling quiet?