By Dylan Matthews

My friend and fellow New Hampshire-ite Garrett Nelson raises an interesting point about the Gregg gambit. Regardless of whether Obama eventually appoints him, or whether he eventually accepts, Gregg's reputation among the Republican base has been badly damaged by his statement that he's considering the post. Combine that with his support for Romney in the primaries - which hurt him within the strongly pro-McCain NH GOP - and you've got the makings of a primary challenge here. The most likely challenger would probably be Jennifer Horn (aka "New Hampshire's Sarah Palin"), but any number of obscure state senators could make a decent run at him. Though he'd win the primary, Gregg could be sufficiently bloodied up to give Rep. Paul Hodes - currently behind by only seven points - a good shot in the general.

So it may be that, even if there was little in it for Gregg in this deal originally, he's gone too far to back down. If the choice is between losing a costly election in two years, or gracefully transitioning to retirement through the cabinet, I suspect Gregg will choose the latter.

By Neil Sinhababu

As Mark Blumenthal notes, November polling from Democracy Corps had Rush Limbaugh's favorables at 23 and his unfavorables at 51. Now, no major Republican is doing well these days -- that's pretty close to John Boehner's numbers and only a little worse than Mitch McConnell.

But I like the idea of calling him out and making his corpulent mug the face of the GOP as much as possible. He's a generally unattractive figure who says outrageous things, and the more he's in the spotlight (see Missouri 2006), the more he'll hurt the Republican Party. You don't want him directing his dittohead zombie hordes from the shadows.

By Dylan Matthews

Former Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card thinks Obama is disrespecting the office of the presidency. Guess why:

CARD: I found that Ronald Reagan and both President Bushes treated the Oval Office with tremendous respect. They treated the Office of the Presidency with tremendous respect. And some of that respect was reflected in how they expected people to behave, how they expected them to dress when they walked into the symbol of freedom for the world, the Oval Office. And yes, I’m disappointed to see the casual, laissez faire, short sleeves, no shirt and tie, no jacket, kind of locker room experience that seems to be taking place in this White House and the Oval Office.

by Neil Sinhababu

David Sirota details what I hope is the plan at the top:

Obama can use congressional pressure from the left as a negotiating chip - that is, he can go into legislative negotiations and say that he can and cannot do certain things because there will be a progressive congressional reaction that he must deal with. In this sense, he can portray himself as a "centrist," while also moving the center to the left.

Richard Besser has the conventional good looks of a TV anchorman. That’s a useful qualification for public office. Fortunately, that is not what got him appointed Acting Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I’m pretty happy about this pick, which hasn’t gotten the attention or visibility it deserves.

As I have written before, our nation’s flagship public health agency is troubled. Besser takes the reins of an agency that has endured severe administrative and morale difficulties. CDC was traumatized by the ideological battles of the Bush years, by management reorganizations and budget difficulties, and by new challenges posed by 9/11, anthrax, and (later) Katrina….

Under these circumstances, it is wise to appoint a seasoned person who is actually a public health professional. There is a craft to this stuff that is often denigrated or ignored.

A Wall Street Journal story headlines: “Richard Besser, Terrorism Preparedness Guru, to Head CDC.” That captures Besser’s recent jobs, but it misses a lot, too. Those tending the vineyards within CDC will appreciate that Besser knows the agency, and that he paid his dues in the field. He started out an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officer, serving in the icky-sounding Enteric Diseases Branch of the Division of Bacterial and Mycotic Diseases. He writes in one personal profile:

My first mission was in November, 1991, an outbreak of hemolytic uremic syndrome in Boston. I was able to link the cases to E. coli O157:H7 transmitted from unpasteurized apple cider. It was the first documented outbreak of this disease from this pathogen in cider…. I was in Boston for three months and I met my wife there. I am probably the only EIS officer to go out on an outbreak and come back with a spouse! We were profiled on a TV show called Vital Signs, where they reenacted the outbreak and how it led to our romance.

He’s also been active in global health—an area which for both practical and humanitarian reasons will become central to CDC’s everyday mission. It’s also not surprising that Dr. Besser is a pediatrician, one of a handful of medical specialties closely aligned with the core public health mission.

By all accounts there has been an exodus of good people from CDC. With new leadership, a new president, and even new money from the economic stimulus plan, they now have some good reasons to return.

by Ryan Avent

I just wanted to say thanks to Ezra for having me here this week, and thanks to you, readers, for your insightful comments. If you haven't tired of reading about the economy, and stimulus, and the need to make sound infrastructure investments, you can find me at my home site, at The Economist's Free Exchange, at Grist, where I write a bi-weekly column on transit issues (cleverly called The Transit Authority), and for the next week, over at Matt's place. It would seem that this is the time of the year progressive bloggers take a break.

by Tom Laskawy

If I've hammered home any point this week, I hope it's that addressing climate change and reforming food production are pretty much the same thing. You can't do one without the other. And - as Yogi Berra might say - vice versa. The food and agriculture industries, aided and abetted by governments worldwide (not to mention by consumers), have succeeded in offloading just about all external costs involved with feeding us. Environmental issues, public health issues, natural resource utilization issues, even most economic issues related to food have all been socialized to the extent that the industry is almost totally isolated from the societal consequences of its actions. To this point few have complained as it has led to ever lower food prices in the developed world and thriving export markets in the developing world. But the costs, which for 60 years or so seemed to have been pushed back beyond the horizon, are now beginning to loom.

Many of us have high hopes that the new administration can make serious progress on reform, but it's important to focus on how serious the challenge before us actually is. In this way, it's like the global warming debate was back in the 90s. The science was pretty clear even then. There were visionaries like NASA's James Hansen and, yes, Al Gore, who understood that we needed to act. But for most Americans, hearing about climate change in the 90s was like being reminded to carry an umbrella on a sunny day. Where exactly were the portents of doom?

We're in the same position with food. The portents perhaps are a bit more present, but doom is not yet upon us. On the one hand, as food-safety lawyer (and apparently one time shortlisted candidate for food safety czar) Bill Marler said right here, "the wheels on the food safety bus have fallen off." Food prices spike and crash, which in the end hurts both farmers and consumers. The short-lived run up in fuel prices earlier this year scared the bejeezus out of everyone. On the other hand, we're not experiencing food shortages. Indeed many of us continue to eat too much rather than too little and we're positively swimming in protein. And while the rate of growth in agricultural yields is slowing, yields are still growing.

Which is why the following thought experiment from Fred Kirschenmann, Sustainable Ag expert at Iowa State University is so useful (h/t Jill Richardson). Kirschenmann - like supposed Deputy Secretary of Agriculture candidate Chuck Hassebrook - is on Food Democracy Now's Sustainable Dozen list of progressive food policy folks worthy of consideration for USDA jobs. In an op-ed, Kirschenmann asks the following question of Tom Vilsack:

[L]et’s assume that ten years from now oil will be $300 a barrel, that we only have half the fresh water resources available that we have today for our food and agriculture system and that we have twice the severe weather events. What kind of agriculture should we be designing to put on the landscape that enables farmers to thrive, invites a new generation of farmers to enter farming and that restores the economic health of our rural communities?

He manages to encapsulate the coming crisis better than anyone has yet (and whether that moment comes 10 years hence or 20 is, I think, irrelevant). The problem, of course, is that no one really has an answer. While we may have paths to alternative fuels for transportation, we don't have them for low-carbon solutions for fertilizer and pesticides - not for agriculture on the scale required to feed 7 billion people. And while there are lots of promising sustainable agricultural practices - there is no clear blueprint to get us from here to there on a worldwide basis. This is why we need to start preparing for this near-future right now.

And so we get to unification. The only path toward reform that I see is to force those externalized costs back onto the food system. And the best means we have of reaching that goal is - you guessed it - establishing a market price for carbon along with an end to our ad hoc, pork barrel energy policy. As Kirschenmann points out, "our food and agriculture industry is perhaps more dependent on fossil fuels than any other segment of the economy." So the sooner we get those costs accounted for, the sooner we can start facing the real choices needed for reform.

We can and should get started attacking certain areas of food policy reform. There's no excuse for doing nothing. But the fundamental transformation of food and agricultural policy that we need won't happen without addressing climate change first. I'm willing to be proven wrong, of course. But if I had to bet on which can happen first -- reforming the House Agriculture Committee or passing real climate change legislation -- I'd bet the farm on climate. So that's settled then.

That pretty much wraps up my time here at Ezra's place. Thanks, Ezra. I hope you all enjoyed Ryan, Neil, Nicholas, Dylan and Harold's great stuff as much as I did. And thanks for contributing and commenting - I enjoyed every minute. And though I may be returning Ezra's keys, I'm still around town - at Beyond Green and at Grist. Visitors are always welcome.

by Tom Laskawy

Time for a pop quiz. Who would you rather have in charge of food safety in this country as head of the USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service? Choices provided by WaPo:

1. Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest or
2. former Bush administration FSIS administrator and current Big Ag lobbyist Barbara J. Masters

by Nicholas Beaudrot

Tactically, the idea of giving Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), a post as the Commerce Secretary might be great idea. Commerce isn't exactly the highest pro-file gig in the executive branch, and Gregg is a more conservative Republican than his state ought to tolerate. Far more conservative. In the 110th Congress, Gregg was the 15th most conservative Senator, which is impressive except that he 10th in the 108th, 9th in the 107th, and 2nd (!) in the 109th. His likely replacements are either a Democrat, or perhaps Warren Rudman or Walter Peterson, both of whom ae Republicans but would likely vote much more like their neighbors from Maine, Susan Collines and Olympia Snowe.

Of course, Gregg is up for reelection in 2010, so if Democrats have a candidate with a chance of winning, theyr'e probably better off keeping Gregg where he is in the long run. But if not, it's a clever move.

by Tom Laskawy

No, this isn't another cap-and-trade post. I'm talking about the yummy kind of markets. As we grapple with ways to reform food production in this country, one problem that crops up is the loss over time of the old farm-to-market networks that fed cities before air freight and transcontinental trucking took over. So even if we wanted to - or more ominously - were forced to re-regionalize our food distribution system, the infrastructure no longer exists. This desire, by the way, is not motivated simply by a need to reduce food miles - a misleading measure for sure. I and others have talked at length about the misplaced focus on food miles as a way to guide food distribution. Rail, for example, is an especially good way to move food long distances - especially compared to the option of driving huge fleets of diesel trucks even relatively short distances (which is why rail freight stimulus is such a great idea. Right, Ryan?).

But as we explore ways to reform industrial agriculture and its reliance on fossil fuels in food production, more, smaller farms inevitably come up as an alternative - and for that sort of system to work, they would need to be proximate to population centers. Speaking of the food miles argument, it's likely that, using our existing infrastructure, exclusively procuring produce from farms within, say, 75 miles of urban centers would cause the transportation component of agricultural carbon emissions to go way up. So, there's a lot to do before anything like this could happen.

Meanwhile, someone in comments on one of my gloom-and-doom posts (I guess I broke that promise after all) asked if there was any good news. How's this? A produce distributor that supplies weekend-only farmers markets in Miami has begun opening its warehouse to the public several days a week. Okay, I admit it's not exactly a game-changer, but it does point to a few small positive developments. First, it hints at the potential of old-style, large-scale "greenmarkets" as an alternative to standard supermarket distribution. Second, it's good for the farmers since it eliminates some of the middlemen and allows them to demand a greater share of the retail price. And third, in this case it actually does represent a re-regionalizing of agricultural output, if only on a small-scale.

The distributor I'm talking about is supplied by a single large organic farm, which typically sends the bulk of its produce up to the Northeast. The farm made the decision to divert some of its output to the local market thus saving on transportation costs, of course, while reconnecting more solidly with its nearest urban center. True, it's a long way from this to locally-sourcing a majority of a city's produce. And even in the best-case scenario this sort of thing will be a seasonal phenomenon for most of the US (although parts of the US are guaranteed longer growing seasons, thanks to you-know-what. For example, my home state of PA will soon be the new VA). Still, it gives us a place to start.

Photo by Natalie Maynor used under CC license

by Ryan Avent

Back in December, the Onion headlined a story, "U.S. Economy Continues Campaigning For Barack Obama." This popped into my head as I read through the morning's GDP announcement, wondering whether Republican representatives were anxious to get back home and tout their stimulus "victory." I'd suggest that maybe, deep down inside, some of those legislators are feeling nervous, and perhaps chastened, but more likely they're waiting for the first round of such statistical releases in the wake of the stimulus, when they'll do their best to label any negative reading a failure of the president's stimulus plan.

The economy contracted at a 3.8% annual rate in the last three months of 2008. That figure is both better and worse than it sounds. It's worse, because it would have been closer to the expected 5.5% contraction in the absence of inventory accumulation (which basically means that producers couldn't cut their production levels fast enough to keep up with cratering sales). It's better, on the other hand, because that's an annual rate. The economy will only be 3.8% smaller if it continues to shrink at the current pace for the next nine months (which is possible, but not likely).

I have to say, I've been more pessimistic about the outlook for the economy. We are, for the most part, avoiding past policy mistakes. Monetary policy remains close to as easy as it can be, and Democrats are pressing ahead with a stimulus plan that will be large enough to have an effect. Credit markets continue to thaw. The crucial task of shaping up the banking system remains, and remains difficult, but Obama has convened an extremely talented group of economists to address the problem. Things can still go wrong, but we could be doing far worse.

The important thing to remember is that conditions will continue to look bad, even as we make progress. Many of us have never seen a recession like this, and we will watch in (understandable) dismay as unemployment rates continue to rise through (in all likelihood) all of 2009. That is unavoidable. We have sustained a massive financial shock, and a massive, subsequent shock to global demand. Try as we might, things will get worse before they get better.

But so long as we remain calm and avoid doing anything stupid -- like starting trade wars, or deciding we need to balance the budget right this moment -- we'll make it through this. But as I think about the House vote on stimulus, I have to breathe a sigh of relief that November went as it did. This is a serious time, and there's only one serious party in Washington.

By Dylan Matthews

ABC News has an interesting piece on how an increasing number of those on kidney transplant wait lists are resorting to seeking out donors on Craiglist. For those who get them, it's great; it's faster than traditional methods, obviously, but more easier than finding paid donors has been in the past. But there are hiccups. Most hospitals won't perform the surgeries. A lot of the proposals are not serious, and there's no way to ferret out legitimate candidates. And because federal law prohibits organ sales, there's no legal recourse for those who get scammed.

I've never had a moral objection to organ sales, though I'm nowhere near as passionate about overturning the ban as, say, the gang at Reason. But this strikes me as an area where the morality of the individual act is pretty much irrelevant after a while. As long as rising obesity and diabetes rates drive up the incidence of kidney disease, and as long as the Internet makes it easier and easier to connect donors and recipients, there's going to be an increasing black market for organs. And as long as that market is operating underground, it will be impossible to regulate in a way that prevents fraud and ensures adequate medical care. At some point, we're going to have to decide whether the principle of equity in transplants is worth the risks inherent in an unregulated organ market. Considering as those risks could include death, should organ traders start resorting to back-alley transplants when hospitals won't do the procedure, I think that's a fairly easy call.

by Tom Laskawy

Here's something someone should run with. Via Green Inc. I learned that Sen. Ben Nelson just introduced a bill that would encourage development of the agricultural biogas industry with hopes of including it in the stimulus package. Biogas is a renewable form of natural gas derived from any methane source, like, say, manure. While burning biogas does create carbon emissions, it's more than offset by its effect in eliminating methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas (how much of an offset this process provides I'm not sure and I'd love to find out. [Update] Marc from the Ethicurean explains it all in comments).

In many ways, it's not a particularly high-tech approach and it's currently in common use in China and India - although unlike with the digesters in use in the developing world, the US biogas industry is attempting to significantly increase biogas content to almost pure methane. Because biogas can be produced and used on site as well as shipped via pipeline to power stations, it's theoretically possible for farms to become energy self-sufficient AND deal with excess manure. This isn't a magic bullet, of course, and in the future, farms are likely to use a lot more manure as fertilizer (remember Peak Phosphorus?). But, even in the post-CAFO world we all dream about, there will continue to be excess manure around. Indeed, this is exactly the sort of thing USDA chief Tom Vilsack means when he talks about developing "new technologies and expanded opportunities in biofuels and renewable energy."

Meanwhile, Sen. Nelson isn't generally what you would call a reform-minded guy when it comes to agriculture. Clearly, any biogas subsidies should be tied to something. How about strict enforcement of environmental laws on CAFOs? Now, I don't want to make CAFOs' lives any easier by giving them a way to profit from their lakes of manure and I definitely wouldn't want to pay for this renewable power source at the cost of ensuring CAFOs' survival lest this become the next beef tallow boondoggle. But I also don't want to see such a nifty little proposal become one more ad hoc item slipped into the stimulus without a real strategy behind it. While there's a prime opportunity for a little agricultural quid pro quo here, there isn't a structure in the Senate that really enables it outside of the once-every-five-years Farm Bill (and we know how well reformers fared with that the last time around). Things really would be a lot easier if there were some way to tie energy, the environment and agriculture together that doesn't go through the Senate (or House) Ag Committee. A guy can dream, right?

by Ryan Avent

So, plug time. In addition to blogging at ryanavent.com, I'm one of the brains behind The Economist's economics blog, Free Exchange. This week, the blog is hosting a discussion among economists on IMF economist Olivier Blanchard's suggestion that pervasive uncertainty is at the root of the crisis (check it all out here).

Tyler Cowen is one of the participants. He writes:

First, to the extent that the real problem is fear, this militates in favour of placebo policies. By that I mean initiatives which appear bold and have great symbolic value, but which don't necessarily cost us very much. I haven't seen us make a major attempt to identify such proposals, but it is unlikely that an $800 billion stimulus fits the bill.

But the underlying point is intriguing -- that much of the value of action may be psychological. Even if a government plan isn't directly contributing to public welfare, the idea that something is being done which will improve things will encourage people to spend, businesses to invest, banks to lend, and so on.

This gets at something that another participant, Robert Shiller, calls the "confidence multiplier," of which he says:

The focus has to get off of “what fraction of this stimulus will be spent” to “how does this stimulus affect confidence”.

Perhaps we would be wise to announce that national high-speed rail network now after all.

By Dylan Matthews

Well this post sure sounds dumb now:

Likud Party Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said he would not be bound by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's commitments to evacuate West Bank settlements and withdraw from the territories.

…

He said he would invite Kadima and all the Zionist parties to join his coalition providing they agree to his guidelines - no division of Jerusalem, no return to 1967 borders.

Really, there's is no shortage of non-viable, right-wing "peace plans" out there. If Netanyahu is to bash the API/Geneva/Taba consensus, he should pick one of them and run with it, or roll his own. Otherwise, there's little in his platform but obstructionism. That might work for an opposition party, but it's just insulting for a would-be Prime Minister to run on posturing rather than policy.

By Harold Pollack

What a different elections make. Less than two weeks into things, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats can just about chalk another victory on the board. In case you aren’t up on current events, the Senate passed SCHIP yesterday.

The bill would cover an additional four million children. Since the House passed a nearly identical bill, this one seems bankable. The bill is quite close to those vetoed by President Bush, with one key difference: States would now be able to use federal money to cover legal immigrants without the five-year waiting period that now applies to most immigrant children and pregnant women. During the campaign, I remember debates among health reform advocates about what the fallback position should be if one could not achieve a larger victory. “Cover the kids,” was the most common suggestion. They will need to move these goalposts.

Despite the immigrant provisions, the Senate bill passed 66-32, reminding us that the phrase veto-proof majority is not pertinent these days. The fact that nine Senate Republicans and almost 40 House Republicans crossed over remains noteworthy. It reflects the deep popularity of providing health insurance for pediatric care. Senator McCain opposed the SCHIP expansion (and he voted against yesterday's bill), calling the Bush veto "the right call." I think this cost him votes.

Many families will benefit from this legislation. One small but important affected group are families who earn too much money to receive Medicaid, but who face special financial burdens caring for a child living with chronic illness or disability. A recent paper by Susan Parish and colleagues finds that many caregiving families, not technically poor, endure food insecurity and other hardships one associates with poverty.

Ironically—felicitously I should say, since I like to bug my daughters about vocabulary--many more lives will be saved by the accompanying $0.61 increase in federal tobacco taxes than by SCHIP itself.

The tax increase was overdue. Accounting for inflation, federal cigarette taxes have declined by about 40 percent since 1951. In 1964, the year of the first landmark Surgeon General’s report, the federal tax was 30 percent of retail price. By the year 2000, it had fallen to 10 percent. In 2007, the Joint Committee on Taxation carefully estimated the likely revenue impact of the proposed excise tax increase. I admit my eyes glazed over reading the detailed revenue calculations. They don’t glaze over when I read the JCT’s conclusion that the tax increase

…will reduce by 1.9 million the number of individuals who choose to smoke in 2017. We further estimate that those smokers will decrease their consumption of cigarettes by four percent.

Not a bad day’s work, all things considered.

By Neil Sinhababu

People should click over to Feministe for a moment and look at Jill's pictures: Bush signing the Partial-Birth Abortion act in 2003, and Obama signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009. In addition to other things, I like the sheer joy in the second one.

In related happy news, Elana Schor and Lindsay Beyerstein tell us that Democrats plan to pass the stripped-out birth control provision from the stimulus in separate legislation. (Elana has it going into a House spending bill, Lindsay has it in the Senate version of the stimulus legislation, maybe we'll see both.) If that happens, a smart Obama-Pelosi-Waxman team effort will have destroyed the House GOP's bipartisan credibility at no cost.

by Ryan Avent

Progressives in of favor congestion pricing on highways and in central cities tend to argue for those policies on progressive grounds (shock!) -- that such pricing systems reduce emissions, improve air quality, and fund transit improvements, which benefit lower and middle income households. Those are all nice benefits to congestion pricing programs, but we shouldn't neglect the congestion reduction function.

Congestion costs America some $80 billion per year, in the form of lost time and wasted fuel. And as it turns out, commutes extended by congestion have other effects, as well:

There is a strong empirical evidence demonstrating that labor force participation rates of married women are negatively correlated with commuting time. What is more, the analysis shows that metropolitan areas which experienced relatively large increases in average commuting time between 1980 and 2000 also had slower growth of labor force participation of married women.

At the heart of the problems of increased congestion and longer commutes are three related issues. We have focused excessively on inefficient transportation technologies (namely, personal automobiles), we have underpriced the infrastructure supporting those technologies (subsidized or free parking and roadways), and those policy choices have led to poor land use decisions.

We can think about the Washington area as an example. In the center, in the District, Arlington, and Alexandria, there is good access to high capacity transportation technologies -- Metro, and a dense, mixed-use settlement pattern. As such, commute times in these places are the lowest in the metropolitan area. But this density rapidly gives way to low-slung suburban development, which spreads people out over much larger distances, and keeps residential areas well away from jobs centers. What's more, the principle transportation technology in the suburbs is the automobile (personal vehicles can't move nearly as many people along right of way as mass transit), and the roads are almost entirely free to use. The result is that too many people try to use underpriced roads and parking, and too many people choose homes in places that rely on underpriced roads.

And the problem becomes worse in that the most convenient urban locations are limited in scope -- central density rapidly gives way to suburbia -- and these supply limitations generate very high housing costs. In suburbia, the most convenient locations -- nearest to job centers -- are also very limited, and therefore expensive. So increasingly, affordable workforce housing is only found on the outer edges of metropolitan areas. And households there bear the brunt of congestion costs, and the brunt of increases in fuel costs, and, as the research above indicates, struggle most to balance work and family life.

Differences in taste dictate that some folks will prefer low density suburbs while others will want to live in denser neighborhoods. But choices about where we live and how we get around are also heavily influenced by relative costs. Those costs are determined by supply, which is a direct function of public policy. We've chosen to invest heavily in one kind of development for decades, to an extent that's entirely without economic or social justification. And we're paying the price now, monetarily, environmentally, and socially.

By Dylan Matthews

Rod Blagojevich has been convicted and removed from office. Pat Quinn is governor. The Illinois state government is now marginally less corrupt.

by Tom Laskawy

Felix Salmon mused on the subject of Peakniks recently (and what a neologism THAT is!) after reading Ben McGrath's entertainingly morbid piece "The Dystopians" in The New Yorker ($ub req'd). While it's worth observing that "peaknik" has typically referred to Peak Oilers, I think it's safe to say that we're all peakniks now.

McGrath talks mostly about financial doomsayers, i.e. Peak Debt and Peak Dollars, but refers generally, if somewhat dismissively, to the "Peaknik Diaspora" and some of its adherents. These would be folks who "believe" in Peak Oil, Peak Carbon, Peak Dirt, Peak Fish. Personally, I think Peak Carbon is a not terribly useful way to refer to climate change - although "climate change" is itself a not terribly useful way to refer to climate change (something that Gar Lipow has taken it upon himself to fix). Peak Things, in my humble opinion (speaking of which, why did IMHO go out of favor? Is there no longer any humility on the Internet?), should only refer to resource maximums. Switching that around for carbon - i.e. we're trying to stop producing carbon so we can declare/achieve Peak Carbon and continue reducing from there - is just plain confusing. So let's dispense with Peak Carbon.

Peak Dirt (aka Peak Soil), on the other hand, is very real. Or rather the underlying problem of soil erosion is very real. Industrial agriculture with its "fencerow-to-fencerow" monocropping techniques and mass applications of synthetic fertilizer further exacerbates the problem (although there's a peak for fertilizer, too - Peak Phosphorus). Anyway, I happen to think "Peak Dirt" is also confusing - I prefer "The Soil Crisis." Yes, we're losing topsoil at an alarming rate. But we're also expanding the amount of land under the till in many parts of the world. Ironically, we're doing it in most cases via deforestation or through expansion into marginal or ecologically fragile land, which only increases the rate of erosion. Indeed, farmers in the US responded to spiking prices and damaging floods last summer by making a forceful but failed attempt to get government permission to plant on land protected under federal conservation programs.

Meanwhile, development pressures in urban and suburban areas continue to reduce farmland in and around cities - which has nothing to do with erosion. The land is still fertile, it's just more valuable with a house on it. Well, maybe not at the moment - which begs the question, when will we start plowing all those McMansions under and planting organic vegetables on top of them? No one wants big houses anymore, right? And, of course, none of this takes into account the coming conflicts over land use for alternative energy as solar, wind and biofuel development contend with agriculture for acreage around the world. Definitely less of a Peak than a Crisis.

Some even argue that soil is a more precious resource than any of our other supposed peak resources. As food progressives Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson declared in their NYT op-ed on soil, "Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute." Without soil, there is no agriculture, full stop. Does that mean food is a candidate for Peak-hood now?

As for oil, yes, Salmon is right that peak oilers tend towards shrillness. But their number includes the International Energy Agency (a 28 member intergovernmental body that has historically assumed oil production would simply increase with demand. Not anymore) along with several CEOs of major oil companies. Oh, and half of oil company CFOs cotton to the idea as well (thanks for all that, Joe). Are they shrill, too? They seem more like Very Serious People.

Of course, the mother of all Peaks is one that McGrath didn't even mention - Peak Water. Sure, we're surrounded by it - but most of it is too salty. And though we drink, bathe in and flush a lot of it, agriculture uses the most by far. The water cycle doesn't itself increase the amount of freshwater in the world and we're draining most underground aquifers far faster than they are replenished (especially this one). Meanwhile, soil erosion contributes to flooding and leads to less efficient watersheds. And climate change is expected to bring superdroughts. It's enough to make you wonder how we'll have enough of the wet stuff to satisfy the needs of 9.2 billion people by 2050. Let's hope GE is right that soon we'll be able to drink the ocean thanks to clean-powered desalination.

So I will leave to others the worries over Peak Debt and Peak Dollars. I've got enough on my plate as it is.

By Dylan Matthews

Stay classy, Jim DeMint:

"The stimulus bill that is being championed by President Obama…is not a stimulus, ladies and gentlemen; it is a mugging."

Let me spell out the optimistic case for what was achieved by all this apparently fruitless compromise. With Obama's high-profile concessions followed by zero GOP votes for the bill, we have a striking spectacle of Obama trying to be a good bipartisan guy and the House Republicans being the death cult. It's important that Obama do this once at the beginning while the cameras are flashing, because he ran as the post-partisan division-transcender.  It's possible that this image helped him get his high approval ratings, because anybody at 70% is getting the love of some Republicans and right-leaning independents who wouldn't like a partisan Democrat.  But after a scene like this, the fans of bipartisanship will understand when Obama lets Nancy Pelosi do to John Boehner all the gruesome things that the majoritarian institutions of the House permit. 

The pessimistic case, of course, is that Obama is the guy I feared he was back in my Johnny days -- a true post-partisan, whether for its own sake or for the approval of the Washington Post editorial page, who shrinks from using brute partisan force in the many situations where passing progressive legislation will depend on it.  In that case, I imagine the House situation will rectify itself somewhat as Pelosi and Waxman get restless.  Without Obama's support, the things they push through will die or be watered down in the Senate.

By Dylan Matthews

You know when your stimulus package is too cautious? When Marty Feldstein is attacking it from the left:

The proposed business tax cuts are also likely to do little to increase business investment and employment. The extended loss "carrybacks" are primarily lump-sum payments to selected companies. The bonus depreciation plan would do little to raise capital spending in the current environment of weak demand because the tax benefits in the early years would be recaptured later.

This stimulus will still pass in the end, and it's probably better to get something through fast than to repeat the fight in order to get a better deal. But I hope that Obama is taking away the right lesson from this. He tried cooperating. He reached out to John Boehner and Eric Cantor, even though he didn't need their support. And they screwed him. They had their choice between having an input into policy and becoming irrelevant, and they decided they'd rather be irrelevant. So here's hoping Obama helps them stay that way.

By Neil Sinhababu

So I'm just Joe Philosophy Professor watching Krugman & DeLong vs. the Chicago Schoolmen about whether we need fiscal stimulus, with Nobel Prize winning economists* on either side. And I'm thinking: How many fields are there in which a big practical question pops up and the Nobel-level guys are on opposite sides yelling at each other?

It's not that there isn't disagreement in other scientific areas, but the level of disagreement we're looking at here is something really different. They aren't dickering over some minor proposal or detail. They're talking about whether or not we should dump nearly a trillion dollars' worth of stimulus money into the economy. And it isn't a question that should be sitting at the far cutting edge of research, like how many dimensions your string theory needs to have. The raison d'etre of the discipline is to deal with stuff like this.

I'm not saying that individual economists are sleeping on the job -- there are legitimate reasons why this is difficult stuff to do. We have a vanishingly small amount of historical data to work with, and economists can't go into the lab, start depressions in twenty Erlenmeyer flasks, and dump in different stimulus packages to see what works. But that in itself is a reason to be wary of math-heavy, evidence-light economic models and the pronouncements that they produce.

(Big philosophers famously disagree about all sorts of stuff. But we have an excuse -- often when we all agree on something, it stops being an area of philosophy. You could say that we spun off the sciences, which were considered part of 'natural philosophy' up until the 1800s. Newton, for example, called his big physics work "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy." The philosophical arguments are about how to basically set up the area of inquiry -- what are legitimate means of gathering evidence, what sorts of things are we trying to explain, what sorts of explanations are you supposed to offer. Answer questions like that in a satisfactory and productive way, and you've got a science.)

*Alfred Nobel didn't actually set up the economics prize, and it's technically not a Nobel Prize. The Bank of Sweden decided that there should be an economics prize in 1968, tossed some money at the Nobel foundation, and got them to set up a new prize. Maybe we philosophers could've got a prize too if the banks liked us more.

by Tom Laskawy

For those who need a handy case study on the insanity of our agricultural subsidy system, I give you the dairy industry's solution to falling prices caused by a "milk glut": kill the cows. Cows aren't assembly line robots who can be switched off when their output isn't selling. They need to be milked every day. So when you have a subsidy regime that tends to encourage over-expansion when times are good (to cash in on high prices) and over-production when times are bad (through payments that offset losses and provide an incentive for farmers to attempt to recoup as much as possible), you apparently discover that the only exit runs through the slaughterhouse.

Dairy subsidies are further complicated by the fact that the consumer market is heavily regulated (to smooth out price volatility, natch). Unlike most agricultural subsides that tend to depress retail prices, milk prices can remain artificially high at the same time as producer prices are dropping. By the way, if you want to peek into the backroom and see what kind of legislative saugage-making a single dairy operating outside the regulated milk market can touch off, take a look at this WaPo piece from a few years back (when the GOP was still in charge of Congress).

As for the poor cows, Rob Inglis at TNR's The Vine and Greg Sargent have all the details. But suffice it to say that this food-related issue struck some lobbyists as a great addition to the stimulus (although somehow I don't think Tom Philpott would have approved). In the end, Appropriations chair Rep. David Obey stopped Ag chair Rep. Collin Peterson's attempt at including a dairy cow "retirement" amendment in the House stimulus bill while GOP Sen. John Cornyn got it tossed in the Senate (I guess Republicans can still get things done after all). But who put the pressure on? Which representatives of sustainable agriculture rose to the occasion in this potential fiasco? Why the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, of course! That's right. It was a Big Beef vs. Big Milk throwdown. The thought of 300,000 head of cattle getting dumped onto the meat market terrifies me. I can only imagine what it did to the NCBA. Reform, anyone?

by Nicholas Beaudrot

Via Matt Yglesias, the Center for American Progress has a map showing where the stimulus money would end up. "Wow," I said to my self, "that's neat. But wouldn't per-capita figures be more interesting?" They would, and thankfully the internet makes producing those figures quite easy:

Compare that map to this one from the WSJ (via Barry Ritholtz) showing the change in unemployment over the past year:

Many thanks to CAP for publishing their underlying data.

By Harold Pollack

Tuesday's New York Times includes a nice story “The epidemic that wasn’t” recounting the crack baby scare of two decades ago. Quoting distinguished experts such as Brown University’s Barry Lester and Boston University’s Deborah Frank, Times reporter Susan Okie recounts that sorry history, in which real medical uncertainty, media sensationalism, and the race-culture politics of the drug war combined to produce a harmful panic. If you want to get this story, Laura Gomez’s Misconceiving Mothers remains an essential source. There are some interesting byways, such as the pervasive reluctance of juries to convict women prosecuted for their prenatal drug use.

It’s hard now to recall the fear of 20 years ago that crack would produce a generation of damaged children, but the fear was quite real. It brought tragic consequences. The false belief that prenatal cocaine exposure causes permanent neurological damage and other severe defects led many infants to languish in foster care, led many children to be stigmatized as incorrigible by teachers or others, and led many women to wrongly lose custody of their children. In contrast with the use of other substances, prenatal crack use was unusually concentrated among African-American women. This pattern was not irrelevant to the accompanying moral panic and demonzation. Prenatal alcohol use was no less harmful, yet was never depicted in the same brutal terms.

There is one missing nuance in this otherwise solid news story. One might finish reading convinced that the entire “crack baby” thing was simple hysteria. That’s closer to right than the sensationalist cover stories, but it’s not quite right, either. The crack epidemic brought genuine disturbing increases in infant mortality, child maltreatment, and a host of other serious problems.

These problems didn’t arise because of the direct biological effects of crack on the developing fetus, which turned out to be less harmful than was initially feared. The damage arose because crack abuse and dependence hindered the ability of many women to properly care for themselves--before, during, and after pregnancy--and hindered their ability to care for their children. Many crack users increased their alcohol use. Crack exposed many women to increased risk of homelessness, malnutrition, sexually-transmitted infections, and other profound threats to maternal and child health. Such pathways of social and behavioral causation can be profound, even in the absence of the direct biological harms people were initially most worried about.

The crack epidemic required much less hysteria about the immediate and direct effects of prenatal crack use and much more careful and sustained strategies that address varied and chronic threats to drug users’ capacities and well-being. Services appropriate to pregnant and parenting women--such as substance abuse treatment with on-site childcare and parenting services, child protection, and family preservation services--proved essential but hard to provide at-quality on a sufficient scale. These are also the nuts-and-bolts public management challenges the social service, child welfare, and public health bureaucracies struggle with every day.

As we face new problems such as methamphetamine abuse, I hope we have learned the (right) lessons from the crack epidemic.

P.S. MissLaura takes me to task for the following: Prenatal alcohol use was no less harmful, yet was never depicted in the same brutal terms.

She writes: "You might want to read Elizabeth Armstrong's Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder. "

Yup. Darned if I am not caught up here. I know and very much respect Professor Armstrong. She was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research in the same department with me almost ten years ago. It is certainly true that the image of women drinking during pregnancy was not benign and brought its own freightings in terms of gender, class, and ethnicity. Within our own recent historical experience, the demonization of crack-using pregnant women has been much more intense than those attached to pregnant women who drink, but I must plead guilty to oversimplifying a complex subject.

Prenatal alcohol use is a doubly-vexing subject, because it (a) did inspire some ugly moral panic, and (b) it is quite a real, serious, and prevalent public health concern. Just because the wrong people are freaking out about something for the wrong reasons doesn't mean that there isn't a real problem to be addressed.

Good catch.

by Nicholas Beaudrot

This graph from Think Progress shows the tremendous partisan gap in news channel appearances during the debate over the stimulus bill. In addition to giving lie to the notion that MSNBC is somehow a liberal news channel, Republicans outhustled Democrats across the board. I realize a certain number of Democratic members are busy writing the bill, but this borders on inexcusable. In the dark days of 2005 the Senate organized a working group to ensure Democrats at least showed their faces on the teevee. Perhaps in the interest of balance someone ought to get that particular band back together?

by Ryan Avent

Back when everyone was discussing whether or not we should bail out the automakers, some folks were suggesting that saving the Big Three could help Detroit transition into a hub for the production of green technologies. I tended to point out that the Big Three had often fought against policies that would encourage green innovation, so saving the automakers would maintain a major institutional barrier to a Midwestern economic renaissance.

Similarly, folks like Matt Yglesias pointed out that if we were going to hand over a bunch of money to failing automakers, we should at least require that they not continue to fight against green policies. This was pretty sensible. Not only would such a provision have been a decent pro quo for the taxpayers' quid, it would also help us avoid an embarrassing situation in which Detroit uses taxpayer money to fight green policies that would benefit taxpayers.

Um.

By Dylan Matthews

Yes, yes, Matt makes some good points about lobbying, but you really can't write a post about Richard Berman without mentioning that his son David founded the Silver Jews, and just wrote a letter on the band's message board blasting his father's line of work. On that note, the Silver Jews sure are swell, aren't they?

by Nicholas Beaudrot

House Roll call on the motion to suspend rules and pass the DTV transition delay. Because this is a vote to "suspend the Rules and pass", a 290 vote-threshold was required and not met. I see no pattern to the set of Democrats who voted against delay or the Republicans who voted for it.

An estimated 6.6 million Americans are not ready for the DTV transition, so I expect to see John Boehner blaming Barack Obama and big government in a few weeks.

by Tom Laskawy

It's been a bad week for food safety. First, it was the peanut butter, then it was the High Fructose Corn Syrup and now it's deadly antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria (aka MRSA) in CAFO pigs (and their minders). And of course, as Bill Marler - litigious scourge of the food industry - reminds us, we're continuing to lose the fight against E. coli.

Much has been written about the efforts to track down the sources of contamination. And invariably the companies involved quickly close the their doors (which is how we lost one of the largest ground beef distributors in the country virtually overnight and why the Peanut Corporation of America is no more). But what's truly worrisome is that in each case, the USDA and the FDA (who have joint responsibility for food safety) had information at hand about all of these problems.

In the case of the peanut butter outbreak, the plant in question had a long-documented history of health violations - discovered, not by the FDA, but by local Georgia authorities to whom the FDA had contracted out inspection services. In essence, short of allowing self-regulation, the FDA managed to find an entity that enjoys even cozier relationships with industry than the FDA itself has. In theory, the Georgia Agriculture Department should have forwarded on reports of violations to federal officials. There's no word yet on where in the lines of communication the breakdown occurred.

Meanwhile, the HFCS situation would be comical if not for the fact that mercury is, like, a poison. And, according to a report in Environmental Health (pdf, abstract), it might be in that Coke you're drinking right now. As Tom Philpott dryly points out, despite the fact that HFCS processing requires a witch's chemist's brew of industrial solvents and genetically engineered enzymes, the FDA still considers it a "natural" ingredient. As for the source of the mercury, two of the chemicals used in HFCS manufacturing, caustic soda (aka lye) and hydrochloric acid, are still commonly harvested as byproducts from the industrial chlorine manufacturing process. That process involves forcing mercury through seawater - and now it appears some of the mercury is passed on all the way through to HFCS. The research exposing all this states unequivocally that this discovery represents a "significant additional source of mercury" exposure. But, hey, mercury is natural, too!

And who was the brave investigator toiling in obscurity who uncovered all this? None other than a former FDA scientist who performed the mercury tests way back in 2005 while she was working at the FDA. Oddly, the FDA showed no interest in investigating at the time and it was only after she left the agency that she was able to finalize the research and conclusively demonstrate that mercury contamination in HFCS is a real threat. Another case of food contamination, another potential cover-up.

Finally, we get to the pork problem. This one goes back at least to last spring when a researcher released preliminary results suggesting pigs in CAFOs were contaminated with MRSA. At the time, the FDA issued assurances that there was no evidence that pork sold for retail from any source was infected with MRSA. They could say this with great confidence and no cover-up potential whatsoever. Because, of course, the FDA has never tested for it. And surely, now that the study has been released, they'll start testing? Sadly, no.

If this research is borne out, by the way, it represents a significant threat to public health and safety. MRSA is one of those superbugs that the folks at the CDC lose sleep over. If CAFOs harbor MRSA in any significant numbers, the whole industry, which relies on routine doses of antibiotics to keep animals healthy, faces a serious crisis (which some of us think is a good thing). The FDA, naturally, has repeatedly ruled the practice safe, despite objections from public health officials.

It's understandable then, that USDA chief Tom Vilsack is less concerned with creating whole new regulatory structures for food safety and more concerned with making the ones that we have actually work. But continuing to mix boosterism and regulation - as many of our federal agencies including the FDA and the USDA do - will inevitably lead to these kind of breakdowns. And though you can come up with laundry list after laundry list of changes to penalties, enforcement, inspections and agencies that would improve matters, the frequency and seriousness of each outbreak suggests good intentioned reform may not be enough.

That the output of one contaminated peanut processing plant could require the recall of hundreds of varied and unrelated products and could kill 8 and sicken over 400 in more than 40 states across the country suggests we may have reached the limits of consolidation in the food industry. You'd think that such centralization of food production would make regulation easier. Indeed, the ease of regulation, along with low cost, was one of the prime alleged advantages of consolidation. But we're seeing not just production failures, but the wholesale failure of the regulatory structures themselves. Well, food is cheap anyway.

By Dylan Matthews

I'm guessing Danny Boyle really wishes this story hadn't broken until after Oscar voting ended:

Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, two of the child actors in "Slumdog Millionaire," are still living in the slums of Mumbai, despite the film’s $14 million budget and worldwide success. Ali earned 500 British pounds ($710) for one year’s work and Ismail earned 1700 pounds ($2414), "less than many Indian domestic servants".

Perhaps it's too much to ask for studios to use the same day rates when filming overseas as they do when filming domestically, but they should at the very least be obligated to let foreign actors collectively bargain. India's a special case, in that Bollywood actors already have a union from which foreign production teams can hire. Other countries with smaller film industries might not have enough actors to form a strong bargaining unit. What is to prevent an actor in, say, Laos from being exploited?

This is why we've got to get functioning global unions organized. We have federations, yes, but you don't see ITUC negotiating contracts with multinational corporations. Those kinds of negotiations need to happen if we're to avoid loopholes like this. As long as national unions are striking separate deals, and corporations are operating without much concern for borders, labor just won't be able to keep up. If, on the other hand, SAG and FWICE etc. joined into a Global Actors' Union which could then negotiate a global contract with Warners Bros, Sony, and the like, the studios won't be able to skirt off to the third world when they don't want to pay actors at union rates.

by Ryan Avent

The conservative economists who have argued against the stimulus, as a whole or in parts, have generally tried to do so in a reasonable fashion. I mostly think they've got it wrong, but they're at least trying to use theory and data to assemble a coherent story about why the stimulus might be a bad idea.

The conservative punditocracy has not held itself to such high standards. As the stimulus bill gets closer to becoming stimulus law, their arguments seem to be getting worse. They're simply freaking out at the idea of the thing.

The Wall Street Journal today is unloading with both barrels, with hilarious results. Keep in mind that the Journal is supposed to be the nation's business paper of record. Here's a snippet from an editorial:

Some $30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects. There's another $40 billion for broadband and electric grid development, airports and clean water projects that are arguably worthwhile priorities.

Add the roughly $20 billion for business tax cuts, and by our estimate only $90 billion out of $825 billion, or about 12 cents of every $1, is for something that can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus.

This is a freaking joke. It's crank econ of the first order. There's this bizarre conception of free markets at work, where rail and transit are bad investments because they don't turn profits, but highway spending is ok. Gas tax revenues and user fees don't cover highway costs at the best of times; they've come nowhere close over the past couple of years, as miles traveled have fallen. And whatever logic is used to label business tax cuts as "growth stimulus" but the remainder of the tax cuts as chopped liver would be dismissed as hackery by any decent economist on the left or right.

A Journal piece by James Freeman may actually be worse. It endorses a Republican plan to fix the economy with a permanent income tax cut, combined with reduced spending. Again, this is ludicrous. A permanent change in the tax code is the epitome of bad stimulus, which is supposed to be fast, temporary, and targeted. And reduced spending counts as fiscal policy; unfortunately it's of the contractionary sort.

But that's the Journal. Its op-ed page is known as a hub of conservative snake-oil salespersons. Surely others can do better, right?

Unfortunately, no. National Review's Jim Manzi, who is typically at least worth a read, errs badly in a piece labeling the stimulus bill a disaster. He laments its size, but fails to note that at a cost of only 5% of GDP per year over a decade, it's hardly unaffordable. He criticizes the timing, despite the fact that 80% of the spending stimulus is delivered within 30 months, and 98% of the tax cut stimulus within 18 months. Yes, some spending is sustained for several years beyond that. But that's perfectly appropriate given the anticipated output gap. Manzi cites 1990s Japan as a time at which fiscal spending didn't halt a long recession, but he basically just gets the economic history wrong.

As his post continues, the real source of his distaste emerges. The plan isn't a plain old disaster; rather, it's a disaster for the right. He writes:

[T]he net effect of this bill is to shift the distribution of U.S. government spending as a whole away from defense and public safety and toward social programs: for good or ill, to make the U.S. into more of a European-style social welfare state.

The bill represents a policy shift to the left. Given that it's coming in the immediate wake of an electoral rout of the right, I'm not sure that's a real surprise. One might note that it reflects a shift in American public opinion.

And what Manzi doesn't seem to get is that social program funding makes good stimulus. Why do you devote money to things like food stamps, unemployment benefits, housing assistance, and health insurance during recession? Because we can be practically certain that such spending will immediately have an effect on the economy. Food stamp assistance will go directly toward reducing inventory at places like grocery stores, which will directly contribute to continued production at places that supply grocery stores, which means saved jobs and a substantial multiplier. Yes, it's dangerously compassionate. That doesn't mean it isn't good policy.

And he wraps up by pointing at uncited studies which purportedly show no benefit to increased education spending. Well, I'll see that assertion and raise him Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who credit postwar innovations in education policy, including increased public funding, for generating broad-based productivity and wage growth -- trends which have recently reversed themselves; we're now producing cohorts less skilled than their parents. And I'll raise him economics Nobelist James Heckman, who has repeatedly shown the value of increased funding for early childhood education.

This is what the conservative pundits have to throw at the stimulus bill -- crank economics and socialism. And a deep, abiding fear that a piece of Democratic legislation may push American toward a sharp break with the recent Republican past -- and that Americans may like it.

by Ryan Avent

To follow up on the last post, consider this bit of news from the American Society of Civil Engineers -- it would cost some $2.2 trillion to bring our nation's current infrastructure stock into a state of good repair. Now to be fair, the American Society of Civil Engineers has an interest in selling the idea that we need to spend trillions on infrastructure repair. On the other hand, that $2.2 trillion figure doesn't take into account all the new infrastructure we could reasonably build -- new port capacity, new rail lines, new urban transit systems, new power grids, new water systems, new communications capacity, and so on. America could fruitfully spend a great deal of money on its built environment.

Given that, it's a little difficult to see the use in battling over a few billions in the stimulus bill. What's necessary is major institutional reform and new, long-run sources of funding. It's going to take some planning to do this right, and it is much more important to do it right than to do it right this very second.

By Harold Pollack

I’m charged this week to tackle public health. I’m cheating a bit to venture into other health reform issues. Dean Baker over at TPMcafe suggested that the feds abolish the current 2-year waiting period for disabled people to receive Medicare. This is a pet issue of mine. I want to second him on this point.

Because I am a family caregiver, I ended up reaching out to disability advocates as a volunteer supporter for the Obama campaign. I wrote various articles, often for HuffPo—Ezra forgive me, again—on the importance of health reform to children and adults living with serious illness or injury, and to their families. Every time I wrote such a piece, my comment thread would fill up with heartrending stories of people facing challenging medical conditions who were deemed totally disabled, and who were often running up huge bills waiting for their Medicare eligibility. Many faced bewildering problems with Medicaid or with private insurers. Many, arguably the lucky ones, were paying high COBRA premiums they can’t afford. Not a few people die before they finish out the waiting period....

This waiting period goes back to 1972, when Congress expanded Medicare eligibility to include the disabled. Under current policy, people with disabilities must receive Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) for 24 months before becoming Medicare-eligible. Exceptions have been added for end-stage renal disease and ALS. Some states step in to fill the gap. Yet this policy imposes severe problems on many people. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), roughly 1.8 million SSDI beneficiaries are now in the waiting period for Medicare coverage. (See Option 19 in their huge report.)

There are policy-analytic arguments to support current policies—Medicare does not want to assume burdens rightfully borne by private insurers or to finance care for temporary disabilities. The program did not want to strengthen perverse incentives to remain uninsured. A nice Commonwealth Fund report by Stacy Berg Dale and James Verdier details these issues. (In one of those small-world moments, I was Verdier’s teaching assistance nearly two decades ago.) As we move into a world aspiring to universal coverage, increased protection for people with preexisting conditions, and perhaps even some flavor of individual mandate for insurance coverage, original arguments for the waiting period seem outmoded, and outweighed by the resulting human cost.

Berg and Verdier’s 2003 report is now a bit dated, but it remains the best single information source. Their work suggests that up to 400,000 uninsured people with serious disabilities might be helped by changes in this policy.

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society and pretty much every similar advocacy group have spoken out against the waiting period. Pending House and Senate bills propose to phase out the waiting period over the next decade and to grant more exceptions for people with life-threatening illnesses. The House version, HR 154, has 104 cosponsors. The Senate version, S2102, has 23 cosponsors. I am especially heartened that the issue is raised in Senator Baucus’s vaunted white paper on health reform.

CBO has sussed out various proposals to reduce or eliminate the waiting period. Eliminating the waiting period entirely would increase federal outlays by about $41 billion between 2010 and 2014, and would cost about $12 billion per year once it is fully implemented. This calculation reflects a shift in federal spending from Medicaid onto Medicare of about $32 billion between 2010 and 2019, because Medicaid plays an important role in filling the current gap. (This calculation nicely illustrates CBO’s essential role in getting complicated numbers right. Don’t try this at home.)

CBO doesn’t report the billions of dollars that states would save by reducing this Medicaid burden. My perilously rough calculation based on Dale and Verdier’s work suggests that states would save in the neighborhood of $2.4 billion annually, were SSDI recipients made immediately Medicare-eligible.

$12 billion per year is a lot of money. I won't plant a flag in the sand on precisely the best way to do this. Yet America spends more than $2 trillion every year on healthcare, often for many things of less human import. Eliminating the waiting period would raise federal spending by around 0.5 percent. Doing it now would stimulate the economy and would help state governments, too. Given all we are spending on healthcare, we can at least treat people decently when they are facing serious illness and disability.

by Ryan Avent

The passage of an economic recovery package was never going to be a particularly clean or easy process. We have a brand new president and Congress, with a Republican minority prepared to sacrifice good policy for partisan victory. We have the worst economic crisis in decades, which appears to be gathering momentum at a frightening pace. And so we have the pressure to act boldly and very swiftly -- pressure that might have been reduced by the passage of a smaller, stop-gap stimulus bill last session, but of course legislators were preoccupied with the automakers at the time.

Under the circumstances, the proposed stimulus package isn't really that bad. It's of a good size, it combines immediate and sustained spending and tax cuts, and it seems quite passable. We could have done much worse.

But as the pre-passage post-mortems begin to roll out, it does seem clear that things might also have gone better. The potential of a transformative stimulus has not been fulfilled, leaving a bad taste in the mouths of many progressives. And I think we ought to learn a few lessons from the process.

Our infrastructure and energy policies need to be drastically overhauled. This is going to require careful forethought -- and time. New initiatives in the stimulus might well complicate or undermine later attempts at reform. The simplest example is the highway versus transit debate; it's difficult to make headway on goals to reduce emissions and vehicle miles traveled while funding lots of new lane miles. Better to set up new guidelines for local, state, and regional planners, along with new funding streams and standards. But that can't be done in a month.

And it isn't necessary to do it in a month, given the other stimulus avenues available. The combination of tax cuts with a massive plan to support state and local spending -- on benefits, but also on infrastructure projects already in progress or operation -- would likely have provided all the immediate stimulus we require. And this could have (and should have) been paired with efforts to expedite follow-up bills addressing infrastructure needs and energy policy. Those bills could then be tailored to function as stimulus as necessary; initial, planned deficit spending could give way to revenue-supported spending. Adding in efficient taxes to kick in after recovery (and there are options aplenty -- carbon tax, congestion tolling, and increased gas taxes are all options) would ease long-term debt concerns.

In short, the administration should have acted boldly and swiftly, but also pointedly. The moment it became apparent that other priorities couldn't easily be squeezed into the bill given its constraints, they should have been set aside, to be handled later.

But as I mentioned last night, I think the Obama team will learn a great deal from this experience. I expect subsequent legislative pushes, on health care and energy and infrastructure, will be much improved by this trial by fire. And hopefully, progressives will also learn from the experience. We all feel pressure to have our pet issues addressed immediately, particularly given the fact that solutions to many challenges are complementary. But we're going to need patience. It was, perhaps, a bit unreasonable to expect a dramatic infrastructure overhaul in this time-sensitive bill. We need to be able to give the leadership the time to get the policy right.

By Dylan Matthews

If it weren't for intrepid New York Times Magazine reporter Daniel Bergner, I never would have known that Queen's University psychologist Meredith Chivers "favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses". Bergner's article doesn't bother mentioning such trivialities as Chivers' involvement in the infamous Northwestern bisexual erasure study of a few years ago, or about the anti-gay, transphobic record of that study's lead author and her mentor, J. Michael Bailey. But he does let the readers know that Chivers favors high boots, so we've got the relevant details.

By Neil Sinhababu

Hilzoy passes on the hopeful news that mortgage cramdowns are making progress in the house. Tanta, who I only learned of after she passed away, has a nice explanation of cramdowns -- basically, what happens is that a bankruptcy judge reduces a homeowner's mortgage debt. This is how bankruptcy works in general, but when the laws were written, mortgage industry lobbyists got them to put in a special exception on home mortgages, so that the value of those debts couldn't be reduced. So now we need to pass new legislation to allow judges to do this.

Until reading Tanta's post, I hadn't heard of the Mortgage Bankers' Association. They have an anti-cramdown page on their site.  It would be sort of comical in how it tries to cover up the stupidity of their arguments with sheer corporate blandness, if they weren't running an incumbent-buying PAC that threw around a million dollars or more in each of the last three elections.  (When Republicans were in power, they gave mostly to Republicans. Now they're giving 55% of their money to Democrats.) Especially if your representatives are getting money from these people, you might want to call up and check out their position on letting bankruptcy judges lower homeowners' mortgage debt.

One final note. In this economic environment, "Mortgage Bankers' Association" competes with "Puppy Sodomizers' Association" and "People For Giving Mike Tyson An ICBM" on the list of groups with the most politically terrible names. If it looks like a member of Congress took their money in exchange for a vote against poor homeowners' interests, that will not go over well.

by Ryan Avent

Tom Laskawy links to a post by David Roberts over at Grist, on conservative support for a carbon tax as a strategy to derail carbon pricing. It's fiery stuff:

For a brief window of time we have a Congress and president ready to really do something on carbon pricing. What they're ready to do is pass a cap-and-trade bill. They'll face implacable opposition, which will be speaking in a single voice and with a simple message. If progressives don't wise up, they'll enter yet another battle with a cacophony of clashing messages and strategies, and will be easily divided and outplayed. If the progressive grassroots plays a role in scuttling the best hope for climate legislation the nation has ever had, it will be a bitter irony indeed.

This is one reason to be very concerned about the outlook for a serious climate bill this year. Democrats have spent decades building consensus on the question of health care and getting to the point where, electorally speaking, an actual plan seems achievable. The climate change issue is urgent, but not apparently so, such that a mood of crisis prevails. As such, the policy-making process can't easily be rushed. Without serious leadership, it may take a while -- time we can't really spare -- to establish a legislative consensus.

Given this, I wonder whether the Obama strategy on stimulus isn't geared toward learning the lay of the legislative land, with an eye toward the policy challenges he'll need to confront later on. Obviously, producing the best stimulus bill possible is a top priority, but I'm sure he's interested in seeing who can be brought into the fold through legislative concessions, and who is resigned to the role of obstructionist. All the sound and fury over the goal of 80 senators in favor of the bill, over tax cuts, and money for family planning may be about understanding how the GOP leadership intends to play things during this session.

If that's the case, then Obama is likely learning fast. Don't expect the administration to be wrongly taken in by fake conservative support for carbon pricing. Whether the whole of the Democratic caucus (and progressive coalition) can be kept in line is another question.

by Tom Laskawy

Brad Plumer at TNR makes a good point in response to the staggering news from NOAA that, regardless of how quickly we cut emissions, we'll still experience significant climatic disruption. As he observes:

Sometimes you hear it argued that we should postpone action on greenhouse gases until we have snazzier technologies to help us out. But as we pump carbon into the air, we're "locking in" future impacts on the climate system—effects that later cuts won't be able to reverse.

Plumer also runs with the "insurance" metaphor that McKinsey invoked in its analysis of climate costs (i.e. that the costs in GDP to address climate change are significantly less than current worldwide spending on insurance) and suggests it as a rallying cry. Uncertainty will always remain in climate models (though climate scientists swear they are better at assessing risks than financial modelers have been) - what we're looking for at the end of the day is a hedge. Hmmm. Let's stick with calling it insurance, shall we?

I also ran across an interesting post by Dave Roberts at Grist regarding carbon taxes. It's worth noting, first of all, that Roberts is an avowed supporter of a cap-and-trade system in lieu of a carbon tax. That said, he claims to detect a growing network of right-wingers who are unexpectedly jumping on the carbon tax bandwagon. He mentions Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, economist Arthur Laffer, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Sen. James Inhofe "(R-Gamma Quadrant)" and even columnist Charles Krauthammer. Roberts speculates that their goal is to kill climate legislation by teaming up with environmentalists who prefer a straight tax to cap-and-trade's market-based solution. As conspiracy theories go, it's compelling. Republicans do like strange bedfellows, after all. Food for thought, anyway.

by Nicholas Beaudrot

Now comes word from a soon-to-be-unemployed staffer that Cliff Stearns (R-FL) asked Obama to reconsider the decision to delay the DTV transition. So if you live in one of the fourteen million households without cable or satellite, if Cliff Stearns has his way you might not get to see Dancing With the Stars, or the Oscars, or the final episodes of E.R unless you pay for the converter box yourself.

Photo by Flickr user Paul-W used under the Creative Commons License.

by Tom Laskawy

Of course, I'm referring to Tom Vilsack, newly minted head of the USDA. There's been quite a bit of attention paid to Mr. Vilsack round these parts, so I thought I might check in and see how his first week went. The answer: not bad.

Via La Vida Locavore we learn that he stopped a couple Bush administration midnight regulations, extended a comment period on a crucial new rule that will restrict high-income farmers from receiving subsidies, canceled a proposed $3 million cut to a block grant program that supports research into so-called "specialty crops" (that's USDA-speak for fruits, vegetables, nuts and flowers) and is hard at work on drafting new "Country of Origin Labeling" regulations. What a busy little bee.

But what really has sustainable agriculture advocates in a tizzy are the rumors that Vilsack might pick Chuck Hassebrook, currently the director of the Center for Rural Affairs, as the number two guy at the USDA. Aside from the fact that he would be the highest ranking progressive food figure in government since, well, ever, the significance lies in the importance of the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture (his potential new gig). Deputy Secretaries are the operational folks - the people who actually run the departments (a COO to the Secretary's CEO). So Hassebrook, if appointed, would represent far more than a bone tossed to the sustainable ag community. He'd be more like the camel's nose. Their excitement is therefore understandable.

Vilsack has already whet the appetite of food reformers in the choice for his own chief of staff. Via Obamafoodorama, we learn that Vilsack's pick, John Norris, is a former farm activist (and former chair of Iowa's Utilities Board) and beloved by the Iowa sustainable ag community. And, get this, Norris' wife is chief of staff to the First Lady. Pillow talk, indeed. Feel free, by the way, to raise eyebrows at the growing influence of Iowa in our national affairs. But, then, that caucus happened which did kinda sorta help Obama win the nomination. So I guess we'll just have to live with it.

As for Vilsack's priorities, they mostly reflect Obama's Rural Agenda (which is a good thing). But buried in the USDA press release lauding his early efforts was this nugget:

Vilsack said it's important that farmers and ranchers play a role with USDA in efforts to promote incentives for management practices that provide clean air, clean water, and wildlife habitat, and help farmers participate in markets that reward them for sequestering carbon and limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

So that's good news for the train lovers in our midst.  For my part, I was pleased a few days ago when I saw her experimenting with new same-sex positions that were frowned on in the small-town area she came from.  This makes me feel optimistic that she's going to represent her new liberal constituents well. 

by Ryan Avent

Yesterday, over at TAPPED, Tim Fernholz commented on a Joel Kotkin piece from the Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section. Kotkin writes about cities a lot, despite the fact that he doesn't seem to like them very much. And based on his Sunday piece, he really seems to dislike Washington. I think Fernholz is on the right track in his understanding of the piece, but I think Kotkin deserves a little more criticism than he got.

Big error the first in Kotkin's piece is the idea that Washington only grows at the expense of other places. He is right that in the past few months, there has been a direct transfer of power from places like New York and Detroit to Washington (though it's not as if Washington forced itself on industries in those cities; rather they came to the capital cap in hand). But for the most part, Washington has grown because the country has grown, in size and influence. This is entirely appropriate; perhaps there are libertarians out there who would argue that the nation's regulatory and administrative apparatus should have kept its 19th century dimensions through the remarkable American ascendence of the 20th century, but that is, in the main, a fairly extreme position.

Even were Washington siphoning off power from other major American cities, it would have a long, long way to go to catch up with other prominent capitals. Places like London and Paris dominate the scene in their respective countries in a way that is entirely unimaginable in America. As much as I love Washington, I have to say that if Kotkin believes that "the transfer of cultural power to Washington will also accelerate," then he needs to get out more. Yes, Washington is cooler now than it was when the most hated man in the world was its public face. It will never be more than one node among many in the nation's vast cultural network.

Kotkin's blind spot to the virtues of cities also leads him astray. He notes that Washington is one of the country's most educated cities (the metropolitan area has the largest percentage of adults with college degrees in the nation), yet he sees the city's growth as parasitic. But Washington's growth fits a pattern that applies nationally; over the past three decades, highly educated cities have seen proportionately large increases in the capital stock. Smart cities have gotten smarter, in other words.

In Washington, growth in human capital has come, in part, from the demand for skilled bureaucrats (it's difficult to gather data on or regulate the pharmaceutical industry without detailed knowledge of the science behind the drugs), but also from other sectors entirely -- tech and medical research agglomerations in Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland. Skilled workers attract firms, and firms attract skilled workers. This is a process that has unfolded in Silicon Valley, and the Research Triangle, and in New York City. The presence of the government in Washington may have set the stage for current metropolitan growth, but that doesn't mean that software firms in Virginia aren't adding value to the economy.

And while there are parasitic aspects to the federal government, Kotkin fundamentally misunderstands the city when he writes:

Over time, those of us in the provinces may grow to resent all this, seeing in Washington's ascendancy something obtrusive, oppressive and contrary to the national ethos. But don't expect Washingtonians to care much. They'll be too busy running the country, when not chortling all the way to the bank.

My first job in this city was at the Bureau of Labor statistics. I worked as an industry analyst, helping to put out the Producer Price Index, a key measure of inflation that's used by policymakers, academics, and businesses to improve the quality of the decisions they make. In all probability, Kotkin has used BLS data at some point in his career. Probably BEA data too, and DOT and DOE research, and Census information, and CBO reports. This stuff isn't just useful, it's information that's critical to the functioning of a modern economy.

The idea that government is the enemy is a tired cliche, bandied about by conservatives whose inability to understand the value of government led them to abuse it, harming the American economy in the process. America gets the leaders and the policies it deserves; if there is blame to go around for the state of things, then it should start in thousands of ballot boxes all around the nation, not in the office buildings of the District. And if the return of responsible leadership to the capital is good for Washington's image and its growth, well, so much the better.

By Dylan Matthews

I see Jeff Goldberg has gotten into the habit of comparing well-respected professors to terrorist leaders. To recap: John Mearsheimer holds an endowed chair at the University of Chicago, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was chosen by his colleagues in the field as the fifth most influential, and third most interesting, international relations scholar alive. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah is a international terrorist leader, anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Regardless, Goldberg thinks it perfectly acceptable to refer to the former as "Sheikh Hassan Mearsheimer" and label him an "al-Manar commentator" when the Hezbollah station merely reprinted an earlier article of his. Charming.

Now, none of this is surprising. After all, this is the same guy who wrote a 7,100 word screed in The New Republic calling Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt anti-Semites (sorry, "negative Judeo-centrists") and comparing them to Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh,, Louis Farrakhan, David Duke, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and bin Laden. And this isn't even the only subject where he's resorted to ridiculously aggressive character assassination; remember when he compared Robert Wright to Holocaust deniers for not thinking a 15-year-old massacre was sufficient cause for the Iraq War?

What is surprising is that people still take this guy seriously. Marty Peretz pulls these kinds of hijinks with similar frequency, and got forced off The Plank and is ignored except as a target for occasional ridicule as a consequence. While Goldberg is an actual reporter (albeit not a particularly honest one) and not a flaming anti-Arab racist, both of which give him a leg-up from Marty, his output is about as reliant on juvenile pot-shots and casual accusations of anti-Semitism. So why does David Bradley let him undermine the reputation of The Atlantic on a daily basis? And why do otherwise smart reporters - like his colleague Marc Ambinder, Jon Chait, and Noam Scheiber - insist on validating his "insights"?

by Tom Laskawy

On the front page of today's NYT, we learn that Midwestern Democrats hate the climate. Or something. The ostensible point of the article was to highlight the geographical split between the climate change policy makers from the Obama administration and in the House - who are predominantly from the East and West Coasts - and the moderate Midwestern and Plains state Democrats in the Senate who, according to the NYT, actually care about jobs. For the record, the article, while admitting that President Obama is, you know, Midwestern, ignored the fact that Ray Lahood and Tom Vilsack, Secretaries of Transportation and Agriculture respectively are 1) also from the Midwest and 2) will have a significant role in devising an economy-wide solution to climate change.

And this is not to underplay the legitimate concerns that representatives from coal-dependent manufacturing states have. But this mostly just points to the greater weakness of the article - the way it plays into the idea that addressing climate change will be some kind of job-killing catastrophe. This from the same newspaper that could write a feature on the tremendous job creation underway in Iowa related to wind-turbine manufacturing - a serious growth industry given that the nearby Plains States are considered the "so-called Saudi Arabia of wind." Keep in mind that enormous wind turbines will likely never be imported from abroad since one of these monstrous steel blades can barely fit on an oversize tractor-trailer much less be flown around the world on a 747. Indeed, the industry's potential for the Midwest led President Obama to visit a turbine factory in Ohio just the other week.

The economic upside to addressing climate change isn't just a fevered dream of environmentalists, mind you. The McKinsey Group has actually done a lot of work on this subject through its McKinsey Global Institute. Back in June, they published a report on just how much it would cost to maintain atmospheric carbon below 500ppm - the cutoff for avoiding Doomsday. Here's the key takeaway (h/t Joe Romm):

The macroeconomic costs of this carbon revolution are likely to be manageable, being in the order of 0.6–1.4 percent of global GDP by 2030. To put this figure in perspective, if one were to view this spending as a form of insurance against potential damage due to climate change, it might be relevant to compare it to global spending on insurance, which was 3.3 percent of GDP in 2005. Borrowing could potentially finance many of the costs, thereby effectively limiting the impact on near-term GDP growth. In fact, depending on how new low-carbon infrastructure is financed, the transition to a low-carbon economy may increase annual GDP growth in many countries.

So, I'm not concerned about the cost in jobs of saving the climate. What does concern me is the extent to which members of this Senate "Gang of 10" climate moderates are smelling fear rather than opportunity. The low-carbon economy offers the chance to remake the automakers and actually revive manufacturing in the Midwest since (at least in much of the alternative energy world) manufacturing proximity actually matters again. Perhaps the Gang of 10 should talk directly to Ed Markey - Democrat of Massachusetts and the person who will be writing the House legislation - rather than to a NYT reporter. Markey would probably say the same thing to them that he said to John Broder.

Every single wind turbine takes 26 tons of steel to construct... A lot of new jobs will be created if we craft a piece of global warming legislation correctly, and that is our intention.

by Harold Pollack

The current stimulus package includes some funds for family planning services provided to Medicaid recipients. Republicans are predictably upset, and the Obama administration may decide to pull this provision. Lindsey Beyerstein has a nice little article over at the Washington Independent recounting the dispute.

Family planning is no pork barrel item. By any reasonable public health measure, these services are more important and cost-effective than many other health expenditures nobody is fighting about. Contraception is central to maternal and child health. Proper birth spacing and preconceptional planning are especially key for low-income Medicaid recipients. Preventing unintended pregnancies seems like a pretty good thing, too. One more thing: Contraception is a nontrivial expense for many women. Better Medicaid coverage for these services provides a timely implicit tax cut for needy women.

I appreciate the delicacy of the Administration's political calculations here. I don't understand why so many people are so screwed up in their thinking about this issue.

PS: Yeah, I should have noticed Nicholas's post right below mine. Sorry about that.

by Nicholas Beaudrot

Let's walk through the apparent decision to drop the family planning provision from the stimulus bill. At present, if a state wants to fund family planning service through Medicaid, they have to apply for a "Section 1115 Waiver". If the House provision passes, states will not need to apply for a waiver, but will still need to take affirmative steps to fund family planning through Medicaid. In one sense, there is no "money" to be "dropped" from the spending bill, contra this AP headline. Presumably the likely impact of eliminating the waiver is that more states would use federal money to fund these services, which would lead to increased outlays. Without it, we're stuck with the status quo; states will have to apply for a waiver, and even with a pro-choice administration that will result in delays.

Public opinion on this issue makes Barack Obama's decision look like a mistake. You can try to twist the numbers and make a case that while public opinion shows the country is mostly pro-choice, among people for whom choice is a top voting issue things are less clear cut. But you cannot make that case with birth control. To take one example, 67% of Americans support giving birth control to teenagers, something that you might think would be controversial. Almost everyone who can afford it uses birth control; it's popular, effective, and people think others should have access to it. The short-term politics in Congress are less clear; if there are votes to be gained by dropping this provision, it would be worth doing if you can kill the waiver requirement in a separate bill. I count sixty pro-contraception votes in the Senate even without Arlen Specter's shaky not-exactly-pro-choice but not-exactly-pro-life record; only Ben Nelson is truly anti-choice among Democrats, and Snowe and Collins are solid pro-choice Republicans. So to recap, if there is in fact a pot of votes under the bus at the end of this rainbow, and if Democrats are willing to fight for a standalone bill in the Senate, then it makes some sense. But otherwise we're still living under rule by Republican hissy fit.

By Dylan Matthews

It's instructive for people my age who are thinking of careers in foreign policy to know that you can back death squads in Central America, deny mass atrocities, brazenly defy Congressional dictates, get convicted of withholding information from Congress, back a covert coup d'état, actively undermine the peace process in Israel, and be in charge of implementing the Bush administration's "freedom agenda" and end up with a senior fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations and an offer to be CFR's president should Richard Haass leave. I believe the term for this is "perverse incentive".

I can understand that there are many problems in the financial system that we're not going to be able to regulate effectively, because we can't predict what sorts of new financial products will cause future crises, and because people are going to find sophisticated ways of getting around our regulations. But surely we've got some way of ensuring that large financial enterprises aren't just Ponzi schemes. 

by Harold Pollack

And he drank of the wine, and was drunken, and he was uncovered within his tent. Ham saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren who were without. And Shem and Japeth took a garment, and laid it out upon both their shoulders, and went backward, covered the nakedness of their father, and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.

Noah was not the first person to go astray due to his alcohol use. He certainly wasn't the last. For millennia, problem drinking had harmed many drinkers, their families, and the wider community. For sure, tobacco kills more people, but by any other measure, alcohol poses far-and-away America’s most serious drug problem. A University of Washington team estimated that harmful drinking caused almost 64,000 deaths in the year 2000....

Alcohol-related road accidents are the most obvious cause. Some of these deaths can be reduced through harm-reduction interventions such as designated drivers and through stronger DUI enforcement. Unfortunately, these interventions are less effective in reducing alcohol-related homicides, liver failure, and other diseases. Alcohol use by pregnant women remains the most preventable cause of cognitive disability. Alcohol is a factor in many domestic violence cases, and in child maltreatment. The list goes on.

Medical interventions for alcohol disorders can help, and require greater support and funding, especially within the domain of primary care. These measures, alas, will also fall short. Try as we might to detect problem drinkers and refer them to care, most drinkers who cause or experience alcohol-related harm will remain outside the treatment system.

Policies that reduce social and economic incentives for harmful drinking get less attention, but are no less important.

Today’s mail includes the inaugural issue of the American Economic Journal--Applied Economics. (Ezra is no doubt curled up by the fire with his own copy away in Santa Cruz.) The journal includes a nice article by two solid researchers, Christopher Carpenter and Carlos Dopkin. Their article bears a forbidding title: “The effect of alcohol consumption on mortality: Regression discontinuity evidence from the minimum drinking age.”

“Regression discontinuity” connotes the search for breaks in the data whose most likely explanation matches particular policy interventions. I could write a lot of words to clarify here, but the below picture tells the story better than I can. (The figure is reproduced by permission of Dr. Carpenter and Dr. Dobkin. It may also be the only worthwhile Powerpoint I will see all week.)

The authors produced a simple graph that illustrates the impact of the current minimum drinking age of 21. The bottom (red) curve shows self-reported alcohol consumption by young adults who participated in the National Health Interview Survey, one of the largest annual surveys we have to study health behaviors.

Carpenter and Dobkin then electronically examined the death certificates of every 19- to-22-year-old who died in the United States between 1997 and 2005.

Young people’s alcohol consumption increases by over 20 percent as they hit their 21st birthday. Meanwhile, death rates increase by 9 percent exactly at age 21. Carpenter and Dobkin traced this further, finding that the mortality jump was largest for motor vehicle accidents, suicides, and other causes plausibly linked with alcohol use. The correlation isn’t a slam dunk, but it is close. The authors estimate that reducing the minimum drinking age by one year--as some propose--would cause 408 additional deaths every year among 20-year-olds.

Of course the minimum drinking age is only part of the issue. Most problem drinkers are comfortably over the age of 21. We must do other things that discourage problem drinking.

Philip Cook has spent years arguing that alcohol excise taxes would save lives. His 2007 book, Paying the Tab: the economics of alcohol policy reflects this effort.

I’ve previously argued the case for tobacco taxes in this space. The argument for increasing alcohol taxes may be stronger. The strongest argument for tobacco taxes is that such policies will save smokers’ lives. These taxes are gently paternalist policies trying to discourage people from trying or habitually using a product that will often kill them. It’s at least arguable that tobacco taxes are high enough for smokers to pretty much cover the economic costs their smoking imposes on others.

Alcohol taxes are a different story. Over the past 50 years, Cook reports, the inflation-adjusted value of federal liquor taxes declined by a factor of six while the inflation-adjusted value of federal beer taxes declined by a factor of 3.6. Both taxes are well below what is required to recoup the alcohol-related “externalities” problem drinking imposes on the community.

This is crazy. Cook argues that a 10-cent tax per ounce of ethanol (the amount contained in two drinks) would reduce ethanol sales by 12 percent and would reduce motor vehicle fatalities by about 7 percent. An estimated 80 percent of these taxes would be paid by the 13 percent of American adults who are heavy drinkers. I’m not happy to impose this burden. Yet this is the very group which causes great social harm.

Alcohol is our most costly drug problem. It’s time we responded accordingly.

by Tom Laskawy

To top off all the environmental excitement of the day, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton introduced her new Special Envoy for Climate Change, Todd Stern. We can applaud this move not simply because, of course, our most recent former president didn't have one of those himself. But more importantly because it signals the significant role the State Department will have in any political solution to climate change. As for Stern, he was lead negotiator for the US at the Kyoto talks under President Clinton and, naturally, he's another alumni of the Center for American Progress. Which should serve as a reminder that we should all stay on good terms with Matt Yglesias.

Meanwhile, this goes way beyond Stern being the guy who shows up at the climate talks in Copenhagen at the end of year. As Joe Romm likes to say, saving the planet is all about making a deal with China - now the world's number one emitter of carbon and having shown no sign of losing its love for coal. If Stern can't bring China along - and that will undoubtedly be one of his prime responsibilities - we're never going to reduce worldwide emissions enough to stave off that 5°C-7°C warming we're facing (am I the only one who has to remind myself that °C are a lot bigger than °F? We're talking about a 9°-12°F increase in world temperatures - that's hot!) Interestingly, Romm recently uncovered a telling exchange between Sen. Evan Bayh and Energy Secretary Stephen Chu during the latter's confirmation hearing explicitly suggesting that climate legislation wouldn't make much progress in the Senate without a clear sense of cooperation from China. And if Bayh thinks that, it's likely that other moderate Senators agree - no China, no US climate deal. Mr. Stern, you have your marching orders.

by Ryan Avent

No doubt you've already heard the news; Barack Obama has continued to demonstrate that elections matter by asking the EPA to reconsider its Bush-era position on tough emissions rules in California, and by pushing ahead measures to increase automobile fuel economy standards. This is unquestionably good news, but there are a few things that need to be said about the changes.

First, it's a shame that Obama continues to rail against dependency on foreign oil. For one thing, it's not like domestic oil is all that much cleaner. For another, oil is a globally traded commodity, so to get us off foreign oil is to get us off oil, full stop. That's a fine goal, but no one dares explain that that's the actual implication of the "foreign oil" statement, since that suggests that Americans may need to change some of their nasty habits.

Next, while it's true, as the Center for American Progress' Daniel Weiss has it, that Obama "has done more in one week to reduce oil dependence and fight global warming than President Bush did in eight years," that's not exactly a high bar to clear. I understand that expectations are low, and that makes it easy to praise the new president, but if we hope to meet the energy and climate challenges that confront us, we're going to have to ask for a lot more.

And finally, it's remarkable that in all this ado over our new commitment to ending oil dependence and addressing climate change there is no mention of land use patterns or the transportation choices that shape them. Why no mention of reduced transit funds in the stimulus bill, or the fact that the House is planning to give highways $30 billion to transit's $10 billion? Why no pressure placed on Senate Democrats, who are busy revising transit's share down even more, in their version of the stimulus bill? The bottom line is that if you increase efficiency and increase vehicle miles traveled, well, you've just spun your wheels. If the administration is going to get serious about these issues, it needs to take seriously the option of helping Americans to drive less.

by Tom Laskawy

I thought I might respond to some comments regarding the role of a carbon tax vs. cap-and-trade vs. regulation in addressing climate change. Certainly, there are a lot of folks advocating a carbon tax and it may yet end up playing a role (Larry Summers is a big fan). But at the same time, there's a strain of thought that says we can't simply expect price signals of one kind or another to lead to a zeroing out of carbon use, which is where we need to go. Speaking of which, a lot of people think of carbon taxes and gas taxes to be interchangeable, but in fact a carbon tax would have to be very very high to generate a significant tax on gasoline. From Kevin Drum, "In Europe, for example, gasoline is taxed at around $2-3 per gallon, which is equivalent to a carbon tax of about $1000/ton." That's a pretty hefty tax and it only gets you a couple bucks more at the pump. It's also been argued that carbon taxes are a less precise instrument generally for reducing emissions. As commenter Rob_k put it:

[T]he cap system produces a fixed and predictable level of carbon output, and a variable price. The tax system produces a fixed price, and variable/unpredictable output. When it comes down to it, cap and trade squares better with the real policy problem we're trying to solve.

A carbon tax won't automatically lead to the introduction of super-low or zero emissions vehicles, for example. It won't build the mass transit infrastructure or the electrical grid necessary for a low- or no-carbon economy. True, an ad-hoc system (which is what we have now and why ethanol is subsidized so much more than wind or solar on a per ton/C basis) is not what we want either. But government regulation (like CAFE and efficiency standards or zero-emissions electricity generation standards) will be central to creating real emissions reduction schemes. Of course, you still need a cap-and-trade system in order to establish a market price for carbon and build flexibility into the economy. But neither will it or a carbon tax - which is really just putting the price signal on carbon in a different place - in and of itself lead to the steep emissions cuts we require.

By Ezra Klein

I've said often on this blog that my favorite political book is an elegiac ode to labor called Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back. The writer of that book is a tall, polite guy with a soft voice and an understated manner named Tom Geoghegan. And he wants to replace Rahm Emanuel in the United State Congress.

A Chicago labor lawyer and author, Geoghegan is best known for his books on, well, law and labor, most notably the aforementioned Which Side Are You On, which Rick Perlstein called not only "the best political book of the last 15 years," but "also the best book of the last 15 years." Geoghegan has also been penning a column for The American Prospect for some time, and his writings for us are wonderfully impassioned and quirky. Page through the pieces here, and marvel.

What makes Geoghegan different than your ordinary liberal intellectual running for office that he never left Chicago to become a liberal intellectual. He could have. He could have retired to book contracts and column gigs. He could have gotten a fellowship or a teaching slot. He could have moved to DC and had people applaud him at panels. Instead, he's remained in the gritty world of labor law in Chicago, trying an unending series of sad and hard cases, most of them on behalf of individuals, and a fair number against corrupt elements of organized labor. For a period, the Teamsters would send heavy, angry looking enforcers to Geoghegan's readings and talks. They'd sit and glower, a warning to cease his work on behalf of reformist elements in the union. The upshot is that one of Labor's most prominent national advocates will likely be denied their support in the upcoming election.

All of which makes him a fairly odd entrant in a Chicago dominated by politicians like Richard Daley and Rod Blagojevich. But given the mood of the electorate, it also might render him a potent one: He's a reformer, and he's clean in the most obvious and almost ostentatious of ways. He's a liberal intellectual in a town where there's a well-funded network of such people. He has support from the progressive community, which should give him some access to fundraising (and it's a short election, which means it's a cheap one). Plus, it's just a weird election: 17 candidates running in Emanuel's district in Daley's Chicago in Blagojevich's Illinois in Obama's America. Why shouldn't the literary labor lawyer emerge on top?

For more, read James Fallows, Rick Hertzberg, and Digby. For much more, read Kathy G., who's sort of acting as the campaign's official blogger.

By Dylan Matthews

Responses to Russ Feingold's proposed constitutional amendment requiring special elections to Senate vacancies are generally unanimous on two points: one, this is a good idea, and two, this will never pass. And they're both right. But rather than the shoulder-shrug fatalism that Feingold's proposal has been greeted with, the correct reaction is support for changing our absurd Constitutional amendment procedure. In the grand scheme of things, the Feingold amendment is a pretty small bore example of why the amendment process sucks. If the Constitution did not necessitate near-consensus around any alterations, we could have abolished the Electoral College, the emoluments clause, lifetime court terms, and a whole range of other procedural flaws, and we would have passed the ERA a long time ago. While I suspect they still would have failed, attempts to implement proportional representation and even abolish the Senate could have at least been entertained with a more reasonable amendment process.

The risk, of course, is a California-style scenario where the Constitution becomes a slightly harder to change version of federal law, with amendments - like the flag-burning or victims' rights ones - that have no place in the document. Certainly, switching the system for ratification-by-referendum, as per California protocol, would be a terrible move. But a more measured change, like eliminating the involvement of state legislatures, or requiring a 3/5 rather than 2/3 supermajority, would probably rule out the most egregious attempts at making social policy through the Constitution while simultaneously making it easier for needed - but currently blocked - reforms to get through.

by Ryan Avent

As a big supporter of rail and transit, the creation of the OneRail coalition is quite heartening. It is, in a nutshell, a group of rail advocacy organizations which have banded together to lobby for rail investment. The Hill reports:

Several trade and issue advocacy groups are part of OneRail, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Amtrak, the American Short Line & Regional Railroad Association, the Association of American Railroads, and the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership.

If I have a complaint, it's this: a broader coalition is necessary. When highway funding is on the table, the heavies get into the game—the oil companies, automobile companies, and chambers of commerce. Rail activities should also work to exploit the economic spillovers generated by rail investments. Transit-oriented development has proven lucrative for city governments, as well as many commercial and residential developers. Producers of products from steel, to electric and diesel engines, to upholstery could benefit from new transit projects. Power companies, which helped develop the first generation of streetcar networks a century ago, might conceivably benefit from an increase in electricity demand or from the grid improvements that could accompany creation of improved national rail corridors.

The point is this—rail investment is good environmental, energy, and economic policy, but it's also good business. And if OneRail can get business on board, then we can expect real legislative progress.

By Dylan Matthews

Reihan Salam claims Animal Collective for Rod Dreher and the Crunchy Cons based on the lyrics to "My Girls". Fair enough; the last verse ("I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things like a social status / I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls") certainly seems to point in that direction. That said, the last line of the first verse - "I only want a proper house" - indicates a belief in universal home ownership that I think Dreher would find distasteful. He has written, somewhat callously, that the financial crisis came about because "our good intentions about expanding home ownership to more Americans led us to foolishly overextend our financial system." While Panda Bear's modest ambitions for his adobe home jibe well with crunchy conservatism, I don't know that Dreher would approve of him getting a home at all. In any case, I think we can all agree that Merriweather Post Pavillion is best interpreted as a work of economic policy analysis and that we should reorient the stimulus package around it. Larry Summers, Avey Tare - get on it.

By Ezra Klein

Remember when people took "Straussians" seriously?

Also: Kristol just lost his column at The New York Times. (He is, of course, failing slightly downward to a monthly slot at The Post, further proving that the "market" is a hilarious joke). Greg Mitchell pens an "appreciation." Who should replace him?

by Tom Laskawy

Before I start, I just want to thank Ezra for inviting me over to talk about environmental and food policy. I promise to keep the doom and gloom to a minimum.

Speaking of doom and gloom, I was pleased to see the environmental policy-related dark cloud over Matt Yglesias lift somewhat over the weekend. The reason? First the EPA halted two new coal-fired power plants that were on the verge of construction - plants that had been opposed for years by environmentalists - and then President Obama announced that California (along with 13 other states) could start regulating tailpipe emissions. In his glee, Matt observed:

Cap and trade or carbon tax legislation will, I’m convinced, be an integral element to any serious climate policy. But... there’s quite a lot that responsible regulatory policy can do.

Which is a problem since climate scientists keep raising the bar we need to overleap in order to maintain anything approaching a normal climate. NASA's James Hansen shocked a lot of people recently when he declared that the emissions targets we've been using for the last decade are way too high. When you do the math (or when you watch someone else do the math), it looks like we'll need to cut worldwide net carbon emissions to zero by 2030. Meanwhile, President Obama's plan, as aggressive as it is, only gets us back down to 1990 emissions levels by 2020. That leaves not a lot of time for a whole lot more cutting.

So it's worth taking a look at Europe, which has the only functioning cap-and-trade system currently in existence, to see what we can expect from cap-and-trade. I'm afraid it's not pretty. Central to the system, in fact the only way to reduce emissions right now, is the ability of carbon emitters (i.e. power companies) to buy "carbon credits" by paying companies in the developing world not to emit carbon. I'm sure you will be shocked, shocked to discover that these companies are gaming the system to the tune of billions of dollars in credits and very little in the way of cuts. As an AP investigative report documents, the system that's supposed to "validate" these projects, i.e. determine if a given project is truly supplanting something dirtier (e.g. building a hydroelectric dam instead of a coal-fired power plant), simply doesn't work. No one's arguing, by the way, that payments to the developing world for help with emissions cuts won't be a part of the climate solution. But it would be nice if the payments were linked to actual cuts in emissions, which is simply not the case now. So far, so bad in the world of carbon markets.

The point of all this is that, with the stroke of a pen - by not building coal-fired power plants (since it certainly appears that we now have an effective moratorium on any new plants in the US), and by allowing a group of states representing half of the domestic automobile market to legislate large increases in gas mileage starting with the 2011 model year - the government will likely be taking more carbon out of the atmosphere in that period than the European cap-and-trade system will. Cap-and-trade will certainly help smooth the bumps in the road to a low-carbon economy. But it will be governments - through mandates, efficiency requirements and infrastructure spending - that will pave the way.

By Ezra Klein

Or possibly Health Care Agreementfest. Or Mutual Respect-a-thon. In other words, Jon Cohn and I did a Bloggingheads on reform:

by Ryan Avent

As fellow guester and Ligon Middle alum Neil Sinhababu notes, now is a good time to be borrowing if you're the American government. And while some of the forces that have reduced American debt costs (central bank demand for Treasuries and a general flight to safety) may ebb a bit in 2009, increased domestic saving will be there to help pick up the slack. (And suddenly high domestic savings rates are another reason why fiscal spending, as opposed to tax cuts alone, may be necessary; consumers are too spooked to do all that much with their windfall).

But there is another reason to want to accelerate needed infrastructure investment as much as possible. Mainly, everything is cheap right now. In recent years, the heat of the housing boom combined with rapid emerging market growth to generate upward pressure on a lot of prices. Everything from lumber, to petroleum (and petroleum derivatives, including asphalt), to metals (including steel), to shipping, to construction labor saw large increases in price. This was bad news for public infrastructure projects. Budgets burst as governments competed with private interests at home and abroad for scarce resources.

That's no longer the case. The well-documented collapse in oil prices has been mirrored across commodities markets. Raw materials for construction are now cheap, cheap, cheap. Shipping costs are near zero. And one no longer has to bid against tens of developers for the services of an engineer or architect or builder.

Infrastructure investment is something we should take seriously as a nation and devote resources to in good times and bad. But the bottom line is this: when the economy recovers, resources will again approach full utilization. And when that happens, governments will have to pay more to build needed projects, and government investment will crowd out some private investment. Fiscal stimulus skeptics focus their ire on the potential for government waste in spending, and that potential is there. A full accounting would also consider the opportunity cost of failing to invest now while costs are low and there's plenty of slack in the system. There's a very good case that the best way to save taxpayer money over the long-term is to build as much infrastructure as possible right now.

by Nicholas Beaudrot

This again [emphasis mine]: "Republican strategist / anti-EFCA consultant Mike Murphy writes: ... If the AFL-CIO/Hart Research team re- tests the same ballot question they have released to the media, but adds the critical phrase "which would eliminate the secret ballot workers now utilize in most union organizing elections" to their question and then release the findings from this more accurate question to the media, I'll chip in $5,000 toward the cost of the conducting this more poll."

That's generous of Mr. Murphy, except that the sentence would make the poll less accurate, EFCA doesn't do any such thing. Unions can still organize a workplace via an election. Today, if the employer agrees, they can even form a union via card check. The impact of EFCA, at least in terms of initial workplace organization, is to let workers make the choice instead of management. Concerned about non-existent union intimidation? Not a problem: we'll let you have a vote by secret ballot. Tired of endless captive audience meetings and firings of union-sympathetic employees? Go with card check and get your collective bargainers to the table post-haste. Whatever the goals of anti-EFCA forces, surely they ought to be able to win the issue without resorting to outright lies.

by Ryan Avent

Let me first say thanks again to Ezra for having me back to guest blog. Thanks, Ezra!

Now, to business. As details of the stimulus bill have trickled out, it has become clear that funding for transit priorities is not at the level that many progressives desired. It seems that about $10 billion is included for rail and transit. That's less than the $17 billion proposed by Democratic representative James Oberstar, and considerably less than the total identified transit investment backlog (the executive summary of the stimulus package indicates that some $78 billion in spending might have been warranted).

The logic behind the omissions seems to have been twofold. First, transit projects may not have been shovel-ready enough for the tastes of the bill's authors. And second, it seems that some funding may have been pushed aside to make room for tax cuts.

There are several things to be said about this. While some tax reductions can be effective as stimulus, it's not at all clear that the last $10 or $20 billion in cuts, for which the transit funding was nixed, are going to have the marginal boost that infrastructure spending would have. And while it's important to get funds into the economy immediately, it's also probable that this recession will be long and sustained stimulus necessary. So it's not a big deal if some projects don't come online until late 2009 or 2010.

But the most important thing to note is that stimulus money could be spent very effectively on transit, simply by stepping in to prevent damaging fare hikes and service cuts. Transit ridership, which grew tremendously last summer as gas prices spiked, has remained at historically high levels, in part because households are looking to economize where possible. But systems around the nation are being forced into austerity budgets by sharp declines in tax revenues. This means service cuts, which force some households to return to driving and others (typically those with lower incomes) to reduce travel. It means fare hikes, which reduce disposable income and consumer spending on other goods. And it means layoffs.

Transportation For America has put together a Google map detailing transit budget cuts around the nation. Have a look; each system cut is an opportunity for the federal government to save jobs and support households budgets in a progressive fashion, all while helping to reduce gas consumption and emissions. That's a lot of bang for a stimulus buck.

By Neil Sinhababu

Steve Benen catches this Post article on how al-Qaeda is increasingly flipping out over the Obama presidency, calling him a "house negro", a "hypocrite", a "killer" of innocents, an "enemy of Muslims", and trying to blame him for Israel's Gaza bombings, which ended before he took office.

Extremists depend on the other side's extremists to increase their power within their own side. With Bush gone and Obama closing Guantanamo, al-Qaeda has to be worried about the flow of donations and recruits drying up.

By Dylan Matthews

This may just be an empty campaign promise, but it's encouraging nonetheless:

A Likud-led government would not build new settlements in the West Bank but would allow for natural growth, Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu told Quartet envoy Tony Blair Sunday, in an apparent attempt to calm the international community before this week's arrival of George Mitchell, the newly appointed U.S. envoy to the Middle East.

by Harold Pollack

If you are serious about Illinois public policy, progressillinois is an essential source. Hat's-off to Josh Kalven for today's story on overcrowding at Cook County Jail. While we are at it, hat's-off to Alderwoman Toni Preckwinkle for raising this issue on television this morning. It's heartening that local elected politicians are willing to tackle this subject, and that they are willing to step up on behalf of a despised group of citizens who need help.

Prisons and jails should be great assets to American public health. After all, we have a uniquely high-risk population literally under lock-and-key, in a setting where we might address a wide variety of public health concerns ranging from infectious disease transmission to psychiatric disorders and substance abuse. Instead, a toxic combination of overcrowding, serious management challenges, and lack of resources conspires to make bad public health problems even worse.

President Obama would be wise to place correctional health at the top of the list as he reinvigorates our nation's public health efforts. Come to think of it: A few hundred million dollars in stimulus money, allocated through HRSA or CDC, might do wonders.

I'm not convinced that we need to incarcerate--for as long and as harshly as we now do--many of the offenders Preckwinkle mentions. Mark Kleiman and others propose swift, certain, but more modest punishment for many offenders. Such policies are likely to prove more effective and more humane.

That's a subject for another day. For now, I will just say: Since we have chosen to be our brothers' keepers, we should at least do the job as it needs to be done.

By Dylan Matthews

When Congolese rebel General Laurent Nkunda was arrested by his former sponsors in the Rwandan military this past week, it looked like a promising instance of cooperation between Kigali and the Congolese government, which just six years ago were fighting each other in the bloodiest war since World War II. Then again, this is East Africa we're talking about, so it looks something could go terribly wrong instead:

[T]here is a growing fear that General Nkunda’s arrest may end in an unsatisfying way and that Rwanda may not hand him over, partly because he knows too much. On Sunday, the Rwandan military acknowledged for the first time that General Nkunda was not being kept in jail but at an undisclosed “safe” location in Rwanda.

…

General Nkunda is Congolese but is widely seen as an agent for Rwanda’s extensive business and security interests in eastern Congo. Like Rwanda’s leaders, he is an ethnic Tutsi and he began his military career as an intelligence officer for the Tutsi-led guerilla force that now rules Rwanda.

He was there in Kigali when the jet carrying Rwanda’s president was mysteriously shot down in 1994, setting off the genocide. He was there in eastern Congo when countless Hutus were massacred in reprisal killings, many of which have never been investigated. He was also there in the early 2000s when, according to United Nations reports, the Rwandan military created a criminal network that exploited Congo’s vast mineral resources.

By Harold Pollack

It’s a pleasure to guest again. I am a public health researcher at the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration, where I am faculty chair of the Center for Health Administration Studies.

The Obama team has been rightly tight-lipped about the internal mechanics of its campaign victory. I hope the big shorts forgive me one war story. I say “war story,” advisedly; imagine Studs Terkel covering the Normandy invasion by interviewing the guy in the back room distributing candy bars and post-it notes. I like this story because it involves me, but also because it provides one window into how healthcare became central to the campaign.

I performed odd jobs in the spring, summer, and fall. Professor Paula Lantz and I co-chaired a volunteer advisory public health group that assisted the Obama campaign. April 15, we got a hush-hush email asking to help with something. I figured they wanted a 45-minute sit-down with the Candidate so I could broker a compromise with the Clinton folks on the individual mandate. Maybe he wanted my early take on possibilities for the pending VP pick. Not quite....

Actually, they wanted us to draft a piece on the Obama health plan for Contingencies, the professional magazine for actuaries. Manan Trivedi, Georges Benjamin, Paula Lantz, and I got to work. I felt a little huffy when the campaign micro-managed the project. I have a PhD from Harvard, man!

Anyway, we sent the thing off, and I quickly forgot about it. Our McCain counterparts likely did the same. The issue came out mid-September. To my knowledge, no human being has read our piece. I know people read the McCain one. Because it said:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation….

That sounded good back in April. Too bad Contingencies appeared as Lehman Brothers was going broke. A friendly person noticed the passage and passed it to Paul Krugman, who wrote a killer column. Emailing up the chain with a message modestly titled, "Christmas/Chanukah has come early," I got enthusiastic replies from some normally laconic heavy-hitters who rarely said more than “got it” in response to my missives. The campaign had ads up all over Florida with remarkable speed.

With that article and some bigger things, the McCain campaign solved a puzzle for us we had struggled to solve for ourselves: They credibly linked the health debate to the limits of deregulation and the blindspots of free-market ideology.

It’s hard to remember now how nervous we were late summer, before the economy really tanked, before Sarah Palin imploded, and before Senator McCain pulled his erratic bailout maneuver. Some Democrats were skittish about hard to hit healthcare as a central theme. Some political pros thought it was a bit dangerous to have Barack Hussein Obama pushing a huge-dollar, big-government liberal cause. The Hillarycare debacle was fresh in many people’s minds.

Things worked out better. ‘Turns out, healthcare is a meat-and-potatoes issue for millions of people. Working the phones and knocking on doors, I encountered many, many people who probably disagreed with me on Iraq, gay marriage, or affirmative action, but who were terrified for themselves or a loved one about getting needed care or about some big hospital bill.

I have written about my encounter at an Indiana garage sale that featured the sign: "All proceeds go to liver transplant patient." I had similar encounters from the first day to the last.

Before the Iowa caucuses, I and many others helped road test the new phone system which thousands of volunteers would later use to call millions of people. I trekked past the Sears Tower to a union training hall and spent an evening making calls. Most people I spoke to were low-income African-American voters in rural South Carolina. These were my first calls, and I was nervous.

I spoke to one elderly man who couldn’t have been happier to speak with me, or more supportive. He also related his tough circumstances. Both he and his wife were disabled and could not afford many essential things. He asked with a disarming and innocent directness: Will Barack Obama really help us? This hit me like a punch to the stomach.

Many months later, I spoke to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society as a surrogate for the Obama campaign. (I was so important that my one major surrogate event occurred two days after the election. Perhaps if there had been a recount, I would have been sent back to the dugout.) I met dozens of NMSS members grilling me on stem cells and the details of health reform. An elegant middle-aged man leaned on a mahogany walking stick, his limbs gyrating in all directions as he asked precise questions about Senator Obama’s plans to reimburse experimental medications.

For him and so many others, the fierce urgency of now is more than a slogan. We can’t let them down.

Quick site update: I'm technically on vacation this week, walking the beaches (and, uh, giving a health care talk) in my ancestral school-land of Santa Cruz. That said, I'm a blogger, and an obsessive one at that, so I'll still be posting. But hopefully, posting somewhat less. To aid in that, I've asked a coterie of fine guestbloggers to join the site for a week. Ryan Avent, of the Bellows, will be writing on economic and urban policy. Harold Pollack, of the University of Chicago, will be teaching you all about public health. Tom Laskawy, of Beyond Green, will be covering food and environmental policy. And Nick Beaudrot and Neil Sinhababu, both of Donkeylicious, will be joining Dylan Matthews, formerly of TAP, to talk politics. And everyone, presumably, will post whatever else comes to mind. Meanwhile, I'll be popping in and out too. Frankly, the blog is going to be quite a bit better this week than it normally is.

• Be nice to China. They lend you money.

• The touching story of one politician, his car, and a telephone pole.

• What to watch for at USDA.

• Is the Divided We Fail coalition dividing?

David asks:

I've been wondering this for a while. Have you read David Broder's book on the Clinton Healthcare plan and is it any good? My (well-founded) prejudice would be to dismiss it as Broderish nonsense, probably containing an analysis to focused on people and their character and not enough about institutions etc. But I figured you would be well-placed to judge its merit if you have read the book.

The System

That said, analytically, it falls down. It's not good on policy or theory. It doesn't make judgments, or leave you with a sharp grasp of the ideas at the core of the process. Read Brad DeLong's review of the book, and reflection of his own experiences in health reform, for more on that.

If you're looking for an analytical take on the Clinton wars, start with Jacob Hacker's book The Road to Nowhere, which is indispensable, and Theda Skocpol's book Boomerang: Health Care Reform and the Turn Against Government. And if you want to learn more about the lessons of 1994 but don't want to read a whole book on it, read this article.

I've not spent much time on the weird kerfluffle over the secret CBO report showing that most of the stimulus wouldn't be spent before 2010 because, well, we didn't get to see the CBO report. And now Tim Fernholz reports that there was no CBO report, but instead a preliminary analysis of the spending schedule for one portion of the bill. And it was performed before January 15th. A full CBO analysis will be coming next week, and so too will an OMB analysis, and there will be plenty to debate then. (The OMB, incidentally, is already saying that their estimates show that 75 percent of the stimulus will be in the economy before 2010. I've posted their letter to Senator Kent Conradfor download">.)

Then there's the question of whether it's a problem for the stimulus spending to continue past 2010. And here the answer is, well, no. In fact, we're going to need it. Dean Baker comments:

It is important to remember that fiscal year 2010 ends on October 1, 2010. The Congressional Budget Office projects a year-round average unemployment rate of 9.0 percent for 2010, with unemployment rising at the beginning of the year and falling at the end. This projection implies that CBO expects the baseline unemployment rate to be around 9.0 percent in October of 2010, at the end of the fiscal year, nearly two percentage points above the current level. If the CBO baseline projection is accurate, then we should be glad that the stimulus package will sustain spending into the 2011 fiscal year.

As a follow-up to my earlier post on TNR and Israel, it should be said that I was talking mainly about journalists. Barry Deutsch is right that congressmen and potential political appointees have more problems. Just ask Rob Malley and Zbigniew Brzezinski what happens to your access in Obamaland after the Israel Lobby decides you're on the wrong side.

The obvious rejoinder is that she will have to run for reelection. The voters will have time to vet her. And, indeed, that's the very meat of why she was chosen: Her upset against the noxious John Sweeney impressed Rahm Emmanuel, and her subsequent fundraising prowess and campaigning ability caught the attention of Chuck Schumer. She's considered someone who can win both in New York City and upstate New York, and as such, she's likely to hold the seat for the Democrats.

That may all be true. But the argument is not that if Kirsten Gillibrand had run in a New York Democratic primary, that she would have won the primary, and then the election. Rather, the argument is that having been chosen by the New York Democratic Party, the state Democratic Party's institutional support and fundraising machinery will protect her from primary challenges and she will prove good at running against the Republicans. It's a weird way to pick senators.

And it's not the fault of Schumer or Paterson. It's a collective action problem. Democrats can't start calling special elections to fill vacancies if Republicans will keep appointing Republicans when they arise. And vice versa. Neither party wants fewer senators. Rather, we need a norm of special elections, so both parties win some and lose some, and the whole thing, in theory, equals out, but is democratically legitimate rather than the product of gubernatorial whim. Gillibrand is a weird pick, but she's only weird because she was picked by the governor, and thus his accounting of her policy positions and political attributes is relevant. You can check his work. Had she been legitimately elected, there'd be nothing weird about her at all.

That's why the federal role is important, and why it's crucial that the stimulus contain quick funding to expand and sustain Medicaid. But it's also time we changed the program pretty significantly. The popular perception is that Medicaid is health care for the poor. It is not. It covers some poor people, and some pregnant people, and some young people, and some disable people, and some other people. Oh, and who fits in those groups varies from state to state. Quoth the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services: "Medicaid does not provide medical assistance for all poor persons... [or] even for very poor persons, unless they are in one of the designated eligibility groups."

For instance, 18 states, including DC, provide comprehensive coverage to working parents in families with income at 100 percent of the federal poverty line or higher. 33 don't. Change any of those variables -- say you're a married working adult with no children -- and the number shifts again. And the variations among states are huge. Alabama cuts off unemployed parents at 25 percent of the federal poverty line. 25 percent. If you're a working parent making more than $366 a month, you're too rich for Medicaid in Alabama. In Arizona, the threshold is 200 percent of the poverty line -- $2,933 a month.

As you can imagine, this makes Medicaid a bitch to sign up for, and humiliating to boot. There are asset tests and a thousand categories and a million forms. And now we're in a deep and likely enduring recession. So, enough. This is an excellent time to reform and simplify Medicaid. Open it up to all individuals and families making beneath 250 percent of the federal poverty line. Increase the reimbursement rate to doctors slightly (stimulating!). Make it a primarily federal program, with states able to use state money to expand categories or add services. Fund it with federal stimulus money. The spending will pump cash into the economy and fill an acute need. People think we have a program that provides health insurance to the poor. We don't. It's long past time to fix that.

Update: And by the way, MSNBC, posts like this demonstrate exactly why the 10 P.M. Ezra Klein Hour will get tremendous ratings. Jay Leno's got nothing on ending categorical eligibility in Medicaid.

Anna asks:

Can you talk about the missile strike in Pakistan on Friday? The first such thing under an Obama administration...talk about its effectiveness...this, to me, is a huge huge deal, a continuation of a controversial bush policy.

The full report is here, and it's a very useful analysis for those interested in Pakistan. Katulis argues that we should "preserve U.S. capabilities to conduct military strikes in Pakistan, but use these strikes as a last resort, recognizing their negative impact on U.S. –Pakistan relations."

The argument for the military strikes is fairly simple: Pakistan often lacks the capability or will to hunt down terrorists hiding in the mountainous border with Afghanistan, and given the danger posed by al Qaeda and Taliban safe havens, the U.S. must maintain the capacity to strike when Pakistan cannot. That said, the strikes should only be used when absolutely necessary. Katulis and his coauthors continue:

The use of unilateral military strikes by the United States has also created a backlash among people in the tribal areas and throughout Pakistan. The United States had previously taken sporadic independent military action in Pakistan, using unmanned Predator drones and missiles to target Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But in 2008 it has escalated the use of this tactic as a result of a strengthened insurgency in Afghanistan.

The United States has conducted at least two dozen missile strikes during 2008 alone, compared to 10 in 2006 and 2007 combined. And in September 2008, U.S. Special Forces allegedly entered Pakistani territory to conduct raids against suspected Al Qaeda-linked militants.

These strikes have had negative consequences for the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. They are deeply unpopular in Pakistan and inflame an already volatile domestic political environment. Insurgent groups use these attacks to bolster their anti-U.S. propaganda through arguing that they are fighting Americans who launch attacks on Pakistani territory. The military and the people feel deeply threatened by the strikes and may be more resistant to cooperation with the United States and to reorienting their military toward counterinsurgency. Pakistanis believe that these strikes violate state sovereignty, and their leaders have threatened retaliatory action.

In other words, not the sort of thing you want to take lightly.

Jackson Diehl's weary analysis of George Mitchell's return to the Middle East makes some fair points, but doesn't actually draw out its own conclusion. The fact that Mitchell's recommendations were not implemented by George W. Bush does not mean his approach did not work. Rather, it wasn't tried. Indeed, the implication of Diehl's article that the power in the conflict lies not with the envoy but the President.

Mitchell is a famously evenhanded -- almost too evenhanded! -- negotiator who can be depended upon to articulate the most sober version of America's consensus position on Middle East peace. The question is whether the President transforms Mitchell's product from a recommendation into a policy. America has plenty of carrots and sticks for both sides. Israel cannot get by without our aid and international support, and the Palestinian Authority's only hope for resurgence is to be seen as extracting genuine concessions from the Israelis, which means they're dependent on us to secure those concessions. The importance of Mitchell's appointment is that his plan for the conflict is well-known, and Obama is presumably signaling that he means to use American power to implement it. Whether that proves true is not, at the end of the day, in Mitchell's control.

If you've ever wondered what people mean when they say that China is "manipulating" their currency, James Fallows has a nice explanation here. I'd just add that the fix implied is usually that China "manipulates" its currency somewhat differently so that the dollar is weaker against the yuan and American exports become cheaper while Chinese imports become more expensive. This would have the practical effect of generating more jobs for American workers (we'd make more stuff for export) but also increasing the prices of goods for American consumers. That may be good or it may be bad, but it's a tradeoff. A different Chinese exchange rate doesn't fix our economic problems, it just advantages some portions of our economy rather than others.

You've got interests. I've got a blog. Let's work together.

Chait notes the case of Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard University, and so will I. Walt is the co-author of The Israel Lobby, a book that has some problems but a whole lot more truth than its critics admit. The thesis of The Israel Lobby is simple, and much of it verges on the obvious. It holds that American policy towards Israel is the result of interest group politics. Just as there is a sugar lobby that shapes sugar subsidies and a Cuba lobby that sustains the embargo, there is an "Israel Lobby" that works assiduously to shape our policy towards Israel. And this lobby, like many other lobbies, has been successful. And the resulting policy hasn't been optimal for either America or Israel.

This book, as you may have heard, attracted some measure of controversy. But it was hardly fatal to Walt's career. Chait says that, as a result of this book, Walt "has been hired to write for Foreign Policy and now enjoys more prestige than ever." That's correct. But it elides certain key events along the way. For instance, The New Republic, Jon Chait's magazine, published an acrobatic cover story by Jeffrey Goldberg that likened Walt and Mearsheimer to Osama bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, Patrick Buchanan, Louis Farrakhan, and David Duke. It is true that Walt's career survived, and even prospered, in the aftermath of this broadside. But it wasn't for lack of trying on the part of Chait and his colleagues. How were they to know that comparing Walt to Osama bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, Patrick Buchanan, Louis Farrakhan wouldn't prove particularly injurious to his career?

Goldberg's article was a particularly weird piece of work, but it fit neatly into the "anti-anti" Israel genre. The thing about criticizing Israel is that you get called an anti-Semite rather a lot. This doesn't happen when you criticize sugar subsidies or come out against the stimulus bill. And make no mistake: Anti-Semitism is a serious charge. A genuine anti-Semite would be, should be, drummed out of political journalism, just as a legitimate racist should find no home at a serious opinion outlet. For that reason, being called an anti-Semite by hobbyist Zionists who happen to own and control prestigious domestic political magazines seems like it would be a bad thing. But the charge has been rendered tinny through overuse.

The first time I got called an anti-Semite by Marty Peretz and friends, I was pretty distressed. By last month, when Peretz was pitying "pipsqueaks" like me for my "hatred" of both my Jewish and American inheritances, I was just happy to indulge the daily routine of an aging eccentric (and hey, at least I didn't come in for the nasty treatment he gave his longtime writer John Judis). And then he started calling me and my friends "the Juicebox Mafia," which has, frankly, been a delightful turn of events. I want a logo, and shirts. (I'm serious about this. Any graphic designers with time on their hands?)

So Chait and I agree. Criticizing Israel is not an act of courage because it's not actually dangerous for your career. This is despite the best efforts of Chait and his magazine, and, I'd submit, arguably because of them. I was drawn into the Israel debate when Walt and Mearsheimer were being pilloried as anti-Semites. Accusations of "anti-Semitism" are an attack made, effectively, in my name, and I wasn't comfortable having my heritage deployed in service of that defensive backlash. And then, of course, I got called an anti-Semite (all that Hebrew school tuition for nothing!), as did plenty of the other folks, many of them proudly Jewish and profoundly concerned about Israel's future. And, at some point, people stopped noticing when you got called an anti-Semite for suggesting that Israel should not launch a strategically incoherent bombing campaign in a densely populated urban area, or that America should take seriously its stated policy on the conflict. The term was cheapened by overuse. In this way, TNR has actually made it much safer to speak critically about Israel, and for that, I guess I applaud them, and look forward to our continuing and increasingly productive dialogue.

China just decided to spend $123 billion by 2011 to build a universal health care system for its $1.3 billion people. So they'll likely have universal health care before we will. This American exceptionalism thing is getting out of hand.

But it's worth zooming in on why the Chinese are making this a priority right now: Chinese economists see universal health care as a way to induce consumption and economic dynamism. The Chinese have a high savings rate -- indeed, an absurdly high savings rate, between 30 percent and 40 percent of income -- and one of the reasons is fear of medical expenses. China lacks a safety net, and so people spend less because they need to plan for catastrophe. And if catastrophe doesn't befall, then they've simply spent less. Which is a problem when you're facing down a potentially long recession. And so China is trying to make it safe for its citizens to spend, which means making future expenses more predictable, which means offering health care coverage.

The American situation is, of course, somewhat different. We spend, or at least spent, plenty. But if the Chinese save because they're worried about paying for medical care in the future, Americans yoke themselves to bad jobs or dying industries or hollowed-out regions because they're afraid of losing their health care coverage in the present. That's never exactly been a good thing, but it's more worrying now. We're about to have to adjust to an economy that's not powered by bubble-charged consumption. That's going to force a number of unpleasant changes in our standard of living. But one way to mitigate the harm is to free workers from the more useless drags on their productivity, and the instability of our health care system certainly counts.

Forget Tim Geithner's tax returns. I'm interested in his policy on the dollar. Dean Baker notes that the nominee for Secretary of the Treasury articulated two opposite positions during his Senate testimony this week. Asked if he supported a "strong dollar" policy, Geithner said that he did. A strong dollar -- a dollar that can be traded for a larger amount of foreign currency -- "is in the national interest," he said. But then he complained that China was "manipulating" its currency by keeping its value low against the dollar, which is to say, by keeping it so the dollar trades for a larger amount of currency. As Dean writes, "the complaint against China implies that Geithner wants a lower-valued dollar which is directly opposite to wanting a strong dollar." So which is it? And if it's some sweet spot between the current and hypothetical exchange rate with China, where is that sweet spot?

This is the best response I've seen to trolling in some time.

Last night, at dinner, Dave Weigel and I were talking about the momentum of the first 48 hours. Impressive stuff, we agreed. The conversations, as it often does when I'm in it, turned to health reform. "That's harder," I said. "Why?" asked Weigel. "How can Democrats not succeed at health reform? They've got 59 seats. There are no Dixiecrats. Obama is wildly popular. Republicans are confused and scared."

I probably mumbled something about health reform being tricky. And it is. But maybe Weigel is right. It's often said that the history of health reform is a history of legislative failure. But it's not all the same type of legislative failure. FDR never tried. Truman proposed health reform after he became deeply unpopular and voters had given him a Republican Congress. An unpopular Nixon proposed a health reform plan that Democrats ignored because they figured they could get something better after they retook the White House. So too with Carter, whose effort was scotched by Kennedy on the left.

But we have short memories. And so it is Clinton's failure that looms largest. Clinton, who proposed health care with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate. But much went into Clinton's failure. Clinton was not a strong president from the outset. He won a plurality of the vote and faced a Republican Congress that rightly sensed a public drifting in their direction. Bob Dole, the Republican Senate leader, was planning a presidential run and Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was an ineffective intellectual who loathed the Administration and didn't want to do health reform at all. The Clinton health policy process was unschooled in the ways of Washington and the policy proposal it produced wove the unfamiliar and untested twins of managed competition and managed care into a bill that scared the public and irritated the Congress.

Which is all to say that it's good to remember the past, but you can remember it too well. Barack Obama also has a Democratic House and Senate, but he has more seats, and a more united party. The Dixiecrats were felled in 1994. His coalition extends no further right than Ben Nelson, and 2010 looks like a rather safe year for Democratic senators. Obama won a strong majority and has considerable political momentum. Republicans are weak and disunited and the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee wants desperately to pass health reform and secure his legacy. There is something approaching rough consensus of what a reform bill should look like and Obama has assembled an impressive team to help help guide the legislative process. And that doesn't even get into the rise of the progressive media, the Obama administration's capacity for grassroots mobilization, the depth of the recession, the unity of the progressive advocacy groups, or the deterioration in the American health care system. Most people, myself included, expect the sort of uphill battle faced in 1994. But what if Dave Weigel is right? What if health reform is likely rather than unlikely? What does that imply for strategy and ambition?

Forbes is right. I am certainly one of the 25 most influential liberals in the media, and if you take out people on that list who aren't actually liberals, I'm one of the 22 or 23 most influential liberals in the media which, I think you'll agree, is pretty impressive.

In related news, MSNBC is looking for a new liberal voice to put in their 10 p.m hour. Not to brag, but I've recently been named one of the 22 or 23 most influential liberals in the media, and beyond that, I'm quite young, meaning I can stay up till 11 without getting very tired at all, which gives me a large advantage over many of the other applicants MSNBC may or may not be considering. The term, I think, is shoe-in.

• But I thought, in the U.S, we don't have waiting lines!

• A new approach to foreign policy: Doing less of it.

• Why does the government have such crap computers?

• Yes, the Democrats won.

Glenn Greenwald is not an easy guy to please. And he's very pleased indeed:

Barack Obama will have spent his first several days in office issuing a series of executive orders which, some quibbling and important caveats aside, meet or actually exceed even the most optimistic expectations of civil libertarians — everything from ordering the closing of Guantanamo to suspending military commissions to compelling CIA interrogators to adhere to the Army Field Manual to banning CIA "black sites" and, perhaps most encouragingly (in my view): severely restricting his own power and the power of former Presidents to withhold documents on the basis of secrecy, which has been the prime corrosive agent of the Bush era. As a result, establishment and right-wing figures who have been assuring everyone that Obama would scorn "the Left" (meaning: those who believe in Constitutional safeguards) and would continue most of Bush's "counter-Terrorism" policies are growing increasingly nervous about this flurry of unexpected activity.

On a similar tip, Obama has thrilled journalists by releasing a memorandum directing agencies to "examine Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with a bias toward release of the documents." Under the Bush administration, Ashcroft directed the government's agencies to to err in favor of non-disclosure -- a fairly remarkable statement, when you think about it. Government information was on a need to know basis: If you didn't work for the government, you didn't need to know. That just changed.

But more reassuring than even these orders is the philosophy behind them. In his statement on transparency, Obama said that "Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset." That's in sharp contrast to the Bush administration's belief that information maintained by the Federal Government should be classified, hidden away, and then sealed -- or possibly shredded, or maybe burnt, or shot into outer space -- upon exit. What we're seeing here is the difference between an administration that does not expect to be engaging in an array of unethical and possibly criminal activities and an administration that knew full well that it was engaging in an array of unethical and possibly criminal activities. The Obama administration can insist on transparency because it believes it has nothing to fear from disclosure. And having set down these rules, they need to keep it that way.

Former Senator Norm Coleman took a new job this week, signing up as a paid adviser to the Republican Jewish Coalition. This, presumably, is in preparation for the fact that Al freaking Franken is going to take his old job.

Mr. Lynne asks about "Schumer's transit hopes" and links over to BlueMassGroup where we learn that the gentleman from New York is rightfully displeased with the funding for transit in the stimulus bill:

Senator Charles Schumer said that he was unhappy about the amount of stimulus money set aside for mass transit and rail. He indicated that several other Senators from highly urbanized states were also unhappy about this portion of the stimulus, and that when the legislation reached the Senate, they would be jointly pushing for an increase in money set aside for mass transit and rail. The current amount for mass transit and rail in the stimulus bill is only $10 billion.

The question is what other forces can come into play. Environmental groups, presumably, could step up to the plate here. A greener country is a more transit-dense country. Pundits and intellectuals can argue that the stimulus shouldn't save the economy at the expense of the planet. But the obvious transit advocates were President Barack Obama, a Chicagoan who frequently argues for the need to act swiftly on global warming, and well-known Amtrak enthusiast Joe Biden. But it's unclear they ever put much muscle behind transit. Representative Jim Oberstar said that funding for transit and other infrastructure priorities was cut because "the tax cut initiative that had to be paid for in some way by keeping the entire package in the range of $850 billion." If true, this makes a hash of Obama's claims that he was doing all he could for transit and that the tax cuts were a function of his having maxed out transit spending.

This is a nice point by Yglesias:

If the FBI has reason to believe a terrorist is holed up in an apartment somewhere in Philadelphia, we don't bomb the building -- we arrest the terrorist. The same thing is generally true abroad -- we need to work with friendly law enforcement to unravel plots against targets in Europe and Canada and other Western nations. But we don't fire mortars or drop bombs in friendly cities -- we seek cooperation with local governments.

Herschel wants my thoughts on this weeks Atul Gawande piece in The New Yorker. Here they are. But this gives me a chance to respond to something that Wisewon wrote in comments:

People are comfortable with Medicare because it pretty much does one thing: it pays the bills. It has close to no utilization controls, provident payments have been heavily controlled the medical specialty societies-- its been everything to everyone, except that stubborn cost thing. Saying that "Americans like Medicare" is a little disingenuous-- there is nothing not to like, because Medicare really doesn't do that much. Its the sugar daddy of the health care system. The moment the sugar daddy runs out of money, Americans won't like it nearly as much.

But, you might argue, the choice isn't between Medicare and Aetna. It's Medicare and a regulated private market with lots of enrollees along the lines of the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program. You'd be right. So let's compare apples-to-apples:

Same story. Medicare holds costs down better than its competitors. The mechanism here is no secret. Medicare uses it massive bargaining power -- most all seniors -- to essentially decide its pay rates. And they set them lower than physicians would like. This saves Medicare money and pisses off physicians, which is why they sometimes applaud each other for refusing to take Medicare patients because that's "the only thing that will teach Medicare that no they cannot pay well-below market." This doesn't save enough money, but it saves more money than anything the private sector has been able to do. And if all Americans were in Medicare, rather than just 45 million Americans or so, this strategy would save yet more money, because their bargaining power would be near total (this will not happen, obviously).

So why does Wisewon call Medicare "a sugar daddy?" Well, Medicare extracts savings from providers rather than patients. So patients don't feel much hurt even if doctors do. The prevailing conservative idea right now is the opposite: High deductibles and increased cost-sharing and similar policies extract savings from the patient. Where Medicare makes health care less profitable for the doctor, the conservative approach makes health care less affordable for the patient.

Gore/Feingold '16 (really?) writes:

Find out if Tuesday was the largest gathering of humanity ever. That would be a significant piece of info.

More impressive for our purposes was April 5th, 2004, when more 30 million Hindu pilgrims from all over the world travelled to Hindu holy city of Ujjain in India for Simhastha Kumbh Mela. Then comes the 1969 funeral of C. N. Annadurai, a former Chief Minister of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which attracted an estimated crowd of 15 million people. And so it goes. The list seems rather incomplete to me: Too many of the events are from the last 10 years for comfort. And then there's the problem of definition: How do we define "one place?" If everyone comes to a fity, is that one place? Or do they all need to be on the same lawn?

But the larger point is that no, Obama's inauguration was probably not the largest gathering in human history. Still pretty big, though.

A team of researchers from Brigham Young and Harvard University just completed a landmark survey with a fairly intuitive finding: Clean air makes you live longer. In the case of urban residents, cleaner air -- the product of both technological advances and, yes, government regulation -- has added more than five months to average life expectancy in recent years. That's huge. In fact, it's hard to think of a recent medical intervention of comparable efficacy.

But you can think of other regulatory interventions of comparable efficacy: Ripping lead out of walls, for instance. Taxing cigarettes certainly qualifies. Conversely, the proliferation of cheap sweeteners has done more to harm the nation's health than Vioxx could ever dream of.

One of the problems with the health care debate in this country is that it's called "the health care debate." But it's not. It's the "health spending" debate. It's an economic issue. Successful health reform would do less to reduce illness than to reduce medical bankruptcy. Which is why it would be nice to cleave the debate in two. Continue health spending reform. That's urgent. Without it our national finances go the way of Citibank's balance sheet. But also have a health policy.

There's much the government could do to make people healthier: To help them live longer, more active, more able lives. Harold Pollack has some ideas for how to do it the stimulus. Health Affairs has some ideas for how to do it outside of health policy. Phil Longman had a nice article on this topic back in 2004. Matthew Yglesias has a nice graph breaking down the determinants of health:

Part of the reason our health care is so expensive is that we tend to think health is the sort of thing that happens inside a doctor's office. But it's not. It happens when you breathe the air outside, when you decide whether to walk or drive, when you figure out how many friends you have, when you choose what to eat for dinner. What happens in the hospital is not health care, it's disease response. It's what happens when something has gone wrong in the other spheres of your life that make up your health. And the cheapest health reform of all would be the one that keeps us out of the health care system entirely.

Let's write some blog posts about some topics!

Over at The Next Right, Gary Andres has a revealing post examining Obama's efforts to sustain grassroots activism during his presidency:

This past Saturday, President Obama formally announced the formation of "Obama for America," an effort to harness and mobilize the millions of activists who worked on his campaign to help advocate for his legislative agenda....It's also a little ironic that a president who consistently criticized the practice of "lobbying" during the campaign is now mobilizing an army of his own grassroots advocates.

That said, the piece does contain some interesting reflections on the potential pitfalls of Obamas grassroots strategy. "One of Mr. Obama's biggest challenges will be how to bring these activists into the policymaking process and still retain the kind of flexibility necessary to negotiate with Congress," writes Andres, and he's correct. What separates the grassroots from the lobbyists -- aside from foreclosure rates -- is that the grassroots are there, at least in part, because they believe in issues and solutions. When they have to face down the late-game horsetrading from Obama there'll be inevitable discontent and disillusionment. If the compromises are small, it won't matter much. If they're large, it might matter rather a lot. It's much trickier to anger supports who are paying attenton and who feel that their work and money is powering the process.

Karen Tumulty has a nice timeline of the bizarre events leading to Caroline Kennedy decision to withdraw from the Senate appointment race. Hard to say what's really going on here, but I'm pleased with the outcome. Appointing Kennedy was uncomfortably dynastic, related neither to the will of the people nor the obvious merit of the candidate. And she did herself no favors during the pseudo-campaign. Indeed, there's a sense in which the outcome, though rough for Kennedy, is sort of neatly symbolic: In one year, we have seen the likely ends of the Bush, Clinton, and Kennedy dynasties. That is not to say members of those families will not serve in the future. But the electorate has shown, resoundingly, that they must win office, they cannot simply expect it.

If you were told an animal was "naturally raised," what would you imagine that meant? Is it evidence that they wandered a field? Felt the touch of sunlight? Ate their normal diet? Well, no. At least, that's not what it means if you see "naturally raised" on a package of meat. The USDA released their guidelines for the marketing term this week. Grass, sunlight, and open space don't enter into it. Rather, animals are "naturally raised" if they "have been raised entirely without growth promotants, antibiotics (except for ionophores used as coccidiostats for parasite control), and have never been fed animal by-products."

Got that? No growth promotants or antibiotics -- except, of course, for ionophores used as coccidiostats -- or eating the ground-up remains of other animals. That's what counts as a natural upbringing in our food production system. We have not medically accelerated your growth nor made you into an inadvertent cannibal nor crammed you into such unhealthful conditions that you needed to be pumped full of antibiotics to stay alive.

The problem with this label is not specifically how the animals are raised. Excising antibiotics and growth promotants from their diet is a good thing. The problem is what the USDA's new guidelines say about, well, the USDA. These guidelines are a simple act of collusion with the marketing teams in the livestock industry. When a consumer sees "naturally raised," they almost certainly don't say to themselves, "Terrific! This chicken was raised entirely without growth promotants, antibiotics (except for ionophores used as coccidiostats for parasite control), and has never been fed animal by-products!" The implication of "naturally raised" is that the chicken lived the natural life of a chicken, not the life of a widget. But USDA has defined it as living the life of a widget, just not a particularly heavily medicated widget. And why have naturally raised" at all? The shrinkwrap enclosing a chicken breast has room for "No growth hormones or antibiotics!" They're using "naturally raised" because it's more efficiently misleading to consumers who want to do good by eating well, and the USDA is just gave its seal of approval to the practice.

See the Ethicureans for more.

Image used under a CC license from NukeIt1.

Joe Klein puts this nicely:

And let it be recorded that Obama's first act as President was to correct Chief Justice John Roberts, who managed somehow to mangle the 35-word oath of office, misplacing the word faithfully, as in "faithfully execute the office of President ..." Roberts then mangled it a second time, Obama raised an eyebrow, and Roberts moved on, a bumpy beginning and something of a metaphor: one of the new President's functions will be to correct the mistakes of George W. Bush's benighted tenure. Obama made that very clear in his sharply worded address, which contained few catchphrases for the history books but did lay out a coherent and unflinching philosophy of government. Nearly 30 years after Ronald Reagan heralded the onset of his conservative age by saying "Government is the problem," Obama announced the arrival of a prudent new liberalism: "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified." Conservatives assume such tasks — employment, health care, retirement — are the province of the market. We have had 30 years of paeans to the wonders of free enterprise, but Obama made it clear that markets are not an unalloyed good: "This crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous."

Rite Aid insisted on an election, and the date was set for March 2008. Once again, the company did what it could to persuade workers to vote against the union. HR staff conducted mandatory hour-long sessions with employees once a week. They would lecture at length on why unionization would be damaging to workers. They would warn employees that the union would require high dues and stand in the way of healthy communication between management and labor. They would show videos about plants being shut down after becoming unionized. Meanwhile, by Warner’s count, more than 100 union supporters had been dismissed since June of 2006—although never, of course, for the explicit reason of having supported unionization. "We had a list of our people," she says. "And one by one we kept watching them get fired." By contrast, Warner says, only about ten non-union-supporting employees were let go in the same stretch.

That's insane.

There is no excuse for more Americans understanding the provisions of a hypothetical bill than understanding what a modern organizing campaign looks like. People get fired. Employees are forced into captive meetings where they are threatened and intimidated and warned of plant closures. Union supporters get brutal shifts, unpredictable schedules,and cruel workplace treatment. Those things are happening. Universal card check is not, at the moment, happening.

As such, there is no excuse for the conversation centering on the hypothetical actions of unions under some future legislative regime rather than the ongoing abuses of corporations under the current law. Towards the end of the article, T.A Frank notes that card check may be one of the least important portions of the card check bill. I don't agree with him: The unions and the corporate community are unlikely to both be wrong on the import of card check, which would completely short-circuit the employers ability to counter-organize. But he is right that there is much more in the legislation that matters. Frank continues:

Why did Rite Aid take so many chances with the law? Perhaps because it made economic sense. While the company’s actions may have been illegal under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, they were also nearly cost-free. If a company illegally undermines a union campaign by threatening to fire workers, or by spying on them, or by promising to shut down the facility, the most serious penalty it can expect to face is being ordered to post notices in the workplace promising not to engage in such activities in the future. If a company illegally fires a worker, and the worker can somehow prove his or her case, the penalty is a requirement to reinstate the employee with back pay—minus whatever the employee has earned elsewhere in the meantime. And if a company negotiates in bad faith, it can perhaps expect an order from the NLRB to start negotiating in good faith. Such punishments are the equivalent of punishing shoplifters by asking them to put the merchandise back.

This is what lawmakers have sought to remedy in devising the Employee Free Choice Act. For all the controversy, EFCA is a surprisingly modest bill, with provisions aimed at strengthening existing labor laws rather than altering them substantively. Under EFCA, if Rite Aid had been found guilty of making illegal threats or of spying or of intimidation, it could have faced a monetary penalty—up to $20,000 per incident in cases of repeated violations. If Rite Aid had been found to have illegally fired a union supporter, it would have been required to pay not just the back wages, but three times the back wages. And if contract negotiations were being conducted without results, either party could seek federal mediation after ninety days. If, after thirty additional days, negotiations were still stalled, then an arbiter would be able to impose a contract settlement that would last two years. This would prevent employers (or employees) from running out the clock with bad-faith talks.[...]

What most undermines the secret-ballot process is that employers can violate the law in numerous ways without consequences. Under EFCA, however, every illegal action has the potential to be costly, so firings, spying, threats, or other forms of intimidation would be less likely. Also, there is an alternative way to preserve the secret ballot while guarding against company malfeasance: expedited elections. Under current law, months can go by between when NLRB announces the results of a card check vote and when a secret-ballot election is held. If, however, this campaign window were reduced to just a few days, employers would have less opportunity to intimidate union supporters into changing their minds. Workers I spoke to in Lancaster seemed content with this alternative. And some savvy people in the labor movement I spoke to feel the same way—provided that employers either refrain from captive-audience campaigning or else grant union members equal access to the workplace during a campaign.

As Frank argues, there exists a universe of possible solutions. But Labor cannot simply assume that the political system and the broader public are convinced of the problem. The issue isn't passing card check. It's ending corporate abuse and intimidation. That's what Labor needs to build a consensus for.

One of the fun things about the new Obama administration is that I'm signed up for pool reports. And this one seemed worth posting.

At 735 pm, Roberts administered the oath of office again to obama in the map room. Robert gibbs said the wh counsel, greg craig, believes the oath was fine Tuesday, but one word was out of sequence so they did this out of a "an abundance of caution."

"We decided it was so much fun..." Obama joked while sitting on a couch.

Obama stood and walked over to make small talk with pool as roberts donned his black robe. "Are you ready to take the oath?" Roberts asked.

"I am, and we're going to do it very slowly," obama replied.

Oath took 25 seconds.

After a flawless recitation, roberts smiled and said, "congratulations, again."

Obama said, "thank you, sir."

Smattering of applause.

"All right." Obama said. "The bad news for the pool is there's 12 more balls."

Incidentally, all that stuff Obama did between yesterday and today? Doesn't count.

• The Social Determinants of Health.

• What union organizing is REALLY like.

• Department of Agriculture Fail.

• Anthony Bourdain spits fire at Alice Waters.

• The Lefty press in the age of Obama.

Kartik asks:

Is there any hope for a sane (i.e. vaguely balanced) U.S. foreign policy towards Israel? It seems unsustainable to have a government that does not nearly reflect the attitudes of the American population at large on such an issue, but it seems to have been sustained for an extremely long time.

This has long been US policy. George Mitchell, who is likely to serve as Obama's Middle East peace envoy, called for a freeze on settlement expansion. He wrote that "Palestinians are genuinely angry at the continued growth of settlements and at their daily experiences of humiliation and disruption as a result of Israel's presence in the Palestinian territories. Palestinians see settlers and settlements in their midst not only as violating the spirit of the Oslo process, but also as an application of force in the form of Israel's overwhelming military superiority, which sustains and protects the settlements." And he was right.

But Israel has continued to expand the settlements. It continued expanding settlements during the Camp David peace talks, after the Second Intifada began, and after the road map was announced. And America has done nothing. Israel gets the plurality of our foreign aid and defies our most basic requests and America has done nothing. That should end. Money is fungible. When we fund the Israeli government -- which we do to the tune of some $3 billion a year -- we are funding settlement construction, which goes against our stated policy. If Israel would like to keep expanding the settlements but stop receiving our aid, that is their choice. But they should have to make that choice.

And that would not, for the record, be a change in America's official position on the conflict. It would simply be a change in our willingness to enforce our stated position on the conflict. Which is exactly what many in Israel fear. That's how you get absurd spectacles like Abe Foxman opposing George Mitchell on the grounds that "Sen. Mitchell is fair. He’s been meticulously even-handed...[and] I’m not sure the situation requires that kind of approach in the Middle East.” America knows what fair is, at least by our lights. Israel knows what we consider fair. It's all been clearly stated in official government documents. The question is whether our leaders will have the political fortitude to listen to, well, themselves.

From the smarties at the Mayo Clinic Health Policy Center:

Developing and using interoperable information technology (IT) also is key to facilitating coordinated care within a fractured delivery system. A cancer patient who participated in our Health Policy Center activities emphasized this point: “I have to see a lot of specialists, and I have to wait many months to get an appointment with them. If my medical records aren’t there when I’m there, then they can’t really determine how to best treat me.”

Key to interoperability will be moving forward with the standards now emerging from the private-public Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP). Participants at a recent Mayo Clinic Health Policy Center forum also advocated for a single, voluntary patient identifier to enable tracking of records from one provider to another. This would enable those concerned about privacy to opt out of any data-sharing system.

That would seem to deal with many of the thorny privacy concerns quite nicely.

From Felix Salmon comes this chart tracking the change in market value of various banks between the second quarter of 2007 and January 20th, 2009. The blue circle is the 2007 number. The green dot is the 2009 number. Click on the image for a bigger version. I'm going to go hide under a desk now.

Update: As various commenters noted, the original chart was, well, crap. It mapped market capitalization on the diameter of the circles rather than the area. Weird decision. Salmon's commenters noted the same, and one of them made a betterer graph, which is the graph you're now looking at.

I didn't much like the poem that closed out the inaugural ceremonies. But Mark Schmitt did, and he weaved its message into a beautiful meditation on the role words have played in Obama's career, and the way yesterday's speech fit into that broader context.

Which is why it's hard to abide the commentary suggesting that celebrants were wrong to cheer Bush's departure. That was part of the day. Arguably, it was, if anything, underplayed. K-Lo writes that "my inaugural good feelings were definitely spoiled a bit by the “Na Na Hey Hey … Goodbye” outburst on the Mall just now. How shamefully disrespectful. Keith Olbermann even thought so!" (Man Keith, you used to be cool.) David Remnick calls the moment a "sour note." I'm with the mob. Bush was a shameful president. His actions led to deaths of hundreds of thousands, the displacement of millions, and the impoverishment of more than we're likely to know. He will never go to jail. He will never be tried in Court. He will never be poor or hungry or homeless or drafted. And this country, sadly, has done away with the stocks. But he can be shamed.

And he should be. Forever. The self-delusion of his administration is startling. Last week, Chris Beam crashed the celebratory barbecue of the outgoing Bushies. It was hugs and kisses and high-fives all around. It was like watching Lehman's executives reminisce about the good times. Josh Bolten took the stage and emotionally toasted his colleagues. "If ever there was a group to leave government with their heads held high, this is it," he said. Yech. They can tell each other what they want. But they should have to hear from the country they harmed. Bush's awful, unpleasant, disrespectful post-presidency should serve as a warning to executives who would follow his path. Shaming him is not just appropriate. It's important.

Via Paul Krugman comes a bit of advice to policymakers from the chief economist of UBS:

But they need to ensure that their best plans are neither half-hearted, nor hostage to the opinions of those with vested interests, or with an enduring but dangerously naïve belief that government intervention is intrinsically bad. For, if truth be told, there will have to be more full-scale nationalisation of weak or basically insolvent banks anyway - in addition to those that work with government support - and the sooner we get there, the better, and the less costly it will be.

Want to talk nationalization but haven't been following the debate? Read Steve Waldman's post and follow his links.

In the Great Nationalization Debate, it's important, as Felix Salmon argues today, to keep in mind the alternatives to nationalization. For instance: It is a big step to nationalize the banks. But is it a bigger or smaller step than nationalizing the bank's losses? I'm not sure the answer to that is clear.

The logic of nationalization is, at the least, straightforward. As Stephen Waldman puts it, "The reason to nationalize a bank is because the bank has failed and its former owners have no legitimate claim to its assets. The government has been forced to offer support with public money, thereby purchasing the corpse fair and square. We take the bank into public ownership because taxpayers who have been conscripted to accept extraordinary losses are entitled to whatever gains follow the reorganization they finance." And that means the incentives, too, are straightforward: If you don't want to lose your bank, don't take on such risk that it fails.

The logic of nationalizing losses is rather less clear. The reason you nationalize losses and bad assets is that the bank is "too big to fail" but not so big that it can survive without government help. The incentives of this are less clear. if the government won't permit you to fail, there's less reason to fear risk. And why should taxpayers be buying the bank's losses rather than the bank? Why should the government believe it can price assets better than the market can?

To put this slightly differently, the question does not seem to be whether we nationalize, but what we nationalize, and what the implications are. And it may well be that the implications of nationalizing a full bank are less radical than the implications of nationalizing a bank's losses. But so long as we're going to have banks that are "too big to fail" -- and absent a whole different set of interventions, we will -- the nationalization debate is settled: These banks are, on some level, already nationalized. The question really becomes whether we nationalize them to the benefit of taxpayers or shareholders.

New answers for a new era.

The first press release from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs highlights Obama's early efforts to engage with Gaza:

"This morning, the President placed phone calls to four Middle Eastern leaders: President Mubarak of Egypt, Prime Minister Olmert of Israel, King Abdullah of Jordan, and President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. He used this opportunity on his first day in office to communicate his commitment to active engagement in pursuit of Arab-Israeli peace from the beginning of his term, and to express his hope for their continued cooperation and leadership. In the aftermath of the Gaza conflict, he emphasized his determination to work to help consolidate the ceasefire by establishing an effective anti-smuggling regime to prevent Hamas from rearming, and facilitating in partnership with the Palestinian Authority a major reconstruction effort for Palestinians in Gaza. He pledged that the United States would do its part to make these efforts successful, working closely with the international community and these partners as they fulfill their responsibilities as well. The President appreciated the spirit of partnership and warm nature of these calls."

In some ways, the conversation goes rather like you'd expect: Woolhandler makes a lot of sharp points on the policy questions but has no real answers on the politics. Pressed on how single payer becomes a reality, she says things like, "If you’d asked me five years ago, what was more likely, passing single-payer or electing a black president, I probably would’ve said single-payer and you probably would’ve, too." It's a fair argument, but it doesn't light the way forward. Indeed, likening single payer to exceedingly unlikely political events that require an almost unique alignment of personalities and demographic forces and technological advances is actually an argument to do something else in the meantime. After all, Democrats didn't refuse to support candidates until they could elect a black president. And people need health care coverage now.

Kirsch, by contrast, makes a lot of sharp points on the politics but gets a little fuzzier on the policy. In particular, he heavily emphasizes the need for a public insurance option to keep costs down. That, in fact, seems to be much of the cost control theory behind his plan. But he doesn't have much of an answer for what happens if the public option fails for the same reason single payer would fail. And I'm not convinced that a public plan, on its own, will do much to restrain cost growth at all. Medicare is not exactly a model of restrained spending.

Thought The First: It was much easier to get into a second-row seat -- a seat 15 feet from the president-elect -- at the inaugural than it is to get on an airplane. For instance: No one cared about my shoes. Or my belt. Or whether I had four ounces of contact solution on my person. This is also true when trying to get into Congress: It takes seconds rather than minutes. We value our politicians much less than we value our planes. That, or the current stack of airport security regulations is a mixture of the paranoid and opportunistic and everyone knows we need to roll them back but no one wants to be responsible for easing security and being blamed for a future attack. Also, read Jeffrey Goldberg.

Thought the Second: It's hard to say whether the event was well-planned or poorly planned. Some folks got onto the Mall with ease and some were trapped in the Purple Tunnel of Doom. The metros overloaded, but they overloaded because there were too many people, not because they didn't expect lots of people. Which is all to say that if some sort of terrorist attack required the rapid evacuation of the Capitol, we'd be screwed. If this was the best we could do planning for the orderly movement of huge masses of people, it's scary to imagine the chaos that would result from the panicked fleeing of huge masses of people.

Good news out of Israel where judicial activists the High Court overturned the legislation barring Arab political parties from competing in the upcoming elections. Enlightened stuff. It's important for the survival of Israel that it be seen as a Jewish state rather than a discriminatory state. It's a fine line to walk, but so long as demographic trends don't bring the two into direct conflict -- right now, Arab parties pose no threat of actually taking power -- it's a very bad idea for Israel to willingly cede it claims to being a pluralistic, Western democracy.

To continue with the days Whitehouse.gov blogging, Marc Ambinder noted that the Bush administration's White House web site wasn't so positive about Bill Clinton. It "makes no mention of the economy's performance in his terms," writes Ambinder, "but refers to 'the failure in his second year of a huge program of health care reform' and 'issues surrounding personal indiscretions with a young woman White House intern.'"

Conversely, the George W. Bush biography is deification with a federal face: "On the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists attacked our Nation. President Bush took unprecedented steps to protect our homeland and create a world free from terror." Most impressive! What else? "President Bush worked with the Congress to create an ownership society and build a future of security, prosperity, and opportunity for all Americans." Good work, George! How's that Ownership Society looking right about now?

The total absence of class and grace will not be remembered as among the Bush administration's worst flaws. But it certainly said something about the character of the White House's occupants, and played no small part in the toxic relationship they came to have with not only the Congress, but the country.

I'll be on NPR's "On Point" at 10am Eastern. I'm going to be discussing some guy named...Obamo? Obema? Something like that.

Speaking of White House technology, have you checked out the new White House web site? The new White House blog? Spiffy! And functional! Kottke points out that the Bush White House site had almost 2400 lines of code barring search engines from indexing. and thus searching, the site. The new Whitehouse web site has no such lines of code. This stuff is small, yes, but it matters. It also bespeaks an administration that, at this point, doesn't think it needs to hide its words and actions from the people it governs.

In less good news, the Office of Management and Budget's snazzy new web site doesn't yet have a blog. Cmon, Orszag! Get cracking!

An off-line Obama isn't just bad for Barack. It's bad for all of us.

The president's ability to reach outside his inner circle gives him access to fresh ideas and constructive critics; it underscores the difference between political "victories" and actual solutions; and it brings the American people into a battle we can only win by working together.

And beyond the Blackberry's obvious utility for soliciting feedback and criticism and ideas, connectivity is simply a feature of modern life. And retaining some connection to modern life is the sort of thing we tend to demand in our presidents. If Obama's Blackberry was outfitted with a special program that delivered the daily prices of a gallon of gasoline, a quart of milk, and a dozen eggs, could he keep it then?

But Podesta's op-ed suffers because it's not clear on the culprit. There's not some nefarious and shadowy "them" trying to grasp Obama's Blackberry. Rather, there's a nefarious and shadowy "it." More specifically, the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which was written 24 years before the Blackberry was brought to market. If Obama is to keep his Blackberry, Congress needs to reconsider the act. The speed and agility of the White House is too important to be hamstrung by a post-Watergate law that never considered the importance of cell phones, text messaging, IMs, or even e-mail.

Tom Ricks writes that the first major foreign policy decision won't be about the Afghan war or Pakistan's instability. Rather, "the first question facing him will be whether to continue the Bush administration's covert programs, foremost being the campaign reportedly underway to undermine and sabotage Iran's nuclear weapons program." Support or opposition to covert programs isn't really the sort of thing you can ferret out of politicians. But that's sort of a problem. There's a long history of covert efforts leading to conventional confrontations as the target country rudely refuses to recognize our efforts as secret, responds publicly, and then we act as if we have just been attacked and need immediately to respond.

The New York Times reports on the first flood of TARP money:

Most of the banks that received the money are far smaller than behemoths like Citigroup or Bank of America. A review of investor presentations and conference calls by executives of some two dozen banks around the country found that few cited lending as a priority. An overwhelming majority saw the bailout program as a no-strings-attached windfall that could be used to pay down debt, acquire other businesses or invest for the future.

Speaking at the FBR Capital Markets conference in New York in December, Walter M. Pressey, president of Boston Private Wealth Management, a healthy bank with a mostly affluent clientele, said there were no immediate plans to do much with the $154 million it received from the Treasury.

“With that capital in hand, not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride out the recession,” he said, “but we also feel that we’ll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out.”

So TARP is doing a neat job strengthening the banking industry but not all that much to strengthen the economy. Releasing the second $350 billion of TARP funds was important to Obama, but early statements by his advisers say that they'll use it to get cash to consumers and businesses rather than buttress the balance sheets of random banks. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office just released a first report on the TARP funds. Remember that, at base, these are loans and investments, and there's the expectation that the healthy banks will pay them back or offer eventual returns. They estimate that the government will recoup about three-quarters of its investment -- in other words, that the $750 billion TARP program will actually cost around $185 billion.

Mr. Mitchell, 75, was appointed in 2000, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, to lead an international commission to investigate the causes of violence in the Middle East. He released a report in the spring of 2001, during the early days of the Bush administration, that called for a freeze on Israeli settlements in the West Bank and a Palestinian crackdown on terrorism.

Other Middle East specialists said Sunday that if Mr. Mitchell was named to the job, he would be seen by both sides as a tougher but more balanced negotiator than recent envoys, which could make some Israelis nervous. Mr. Mitchell has Lebanese as well as Irish roots: his father, Joseph Kilroy, was an orphan adopted by a Lebanese family whose Arabic name had been anglicized to Mitchell, and Mr. Mitchell was raised a Maronite Catholic by his Lebanese mother.

The appointment of Mr. Mitchell would be a strong suggestion “that Obama is going to free himself of the exclusive relationship that we’ve had with the Israelis,” said Aaron David Miller, a public policy analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center.

“This is the clearest indication to me that they’re trying to inject more balance into the Israeli-U.S. relationship,” he said.

If you're interested, you can read Mitchell's report here. It's one of the wiser documents on the crisis, full of such startling common sense as Israel should freeze the settlements and the PA should crack down on terrorism at the same time rather than waiting for the other to go first. This would be a great pick, and evidence that Obama really does want to approach the Israel-Palestine conflict in a more credible and aggressive fashion.

Staying true to form, I managed to forget to charge my camera before I set off for the mall, and so I only snapped six or so pictures before the tired little guy croaked out on me. But still: Multimedia!

First, the National Mall. And Imagine, all these people turned out in 20-some degree weather to take part in the national political process Its extraordinarily inspiring.:

Roland Burris gives me the thumbs-up. The dude is shameless:

Bloggers don't use datelines, so here's proof of my presence:

It's true, I did make these incisive, witty, television-friendly comments to Rachel Maddow at one of the pre-inaugural parties (the same one, incidentally, where Tom Colicchio ceased being a simple celebrity chef and became a hero). And in case any of Maddow's producers are reading this, I have many similarly interesting thoughts on an array of politically salient issues. Call me!

There was no internet on the Mall, no cell service, no Twitter functionality, no nothing. So my slightly belated take is this: The speech was good. Not great. But then, it couldn't be a great speech because this is not the time for great speeches. Obama has already extracted what benefit he can from pre-presidential oratory. He has made his points. This is the time for governing, and he knew it, and we knew it, and the speech -- as opposed to the swearing-in -- had a vaguely perfunctory appeal.

Which is not to take anything away from the content of Obama's inaugural. The Mall erupted into cheers when he skewered Bush, saying, "we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." He bravely acknowledged the presence of "non-believers" in the American community and he spoke eloquently and directly to the Muslim world. If I had a criticism of the address it would be that, if anything, it was overly pessimistic. Hearing the first paragraphs you would think our cities lie in ruins and our countrymen consume rats for sustenance.

But you could also understand Obama's focus on the "gathering clouds and raging storms" as part of a larger governing strategy. Moments of great progress in American politics often come in response to periods of peril. Part of Obama's inauguration speech -- the strategically important part, I'd say -- was situating his presidency as a period of rapid change rather than competent maintenance:

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions - who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage. What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

This is, in other words, no time for moderation. And on the Mall today, you could believe it. The press was seated directly before the podium -- I had a second-row seat to history, you might say -- and behind us stretched the long lawn. And all we could do was gape. It was a sea of people. Millions of people. A mass of moving, yelling, dancing, joyous humanity, filling every patch of green and surrounding the Washington Monument. The image richly recalled the iconic photographs of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. And the assembled politicians knew it. Up on the podium, you could see senators snapping pictures on their digital cameras, pointing at the crowd, shaking their heads in disbelief. They weren't pretending to be blase about the scene. This was different. This was dramatic. It was a screaming, laughing, cheering rejoinder to those who would constrain the scale of Obama's ambitions, or question his political assets.

George W. Bush is not our president anymore.

The Capitol was a scene today. People everywhere. Hordes of vendors. (If Barack Obama really is a secret Marxist, he's got to be appalled by the quantity of commerce taking place in his name.) Families of all colors. Everybody cold. Kids holding fast to their father's hands, pointing at the big white buildings, demanding commemorative flags, asking to go to the bathroom, standing unhappily in line to tour the halls of Congress. Their parents whispering to each other, pulling them back from the street, exasperated by the burden of entertaining kids in the DC winter but glad they could be there. Not because it was pleasant, or fun, or because you received a free juicer for attending. But because it was important. Because they wanted to be part of wat was happening in Washington this week.

People are proud of their politics again. They can sense that their country has done something that future generations will be proud of. They can sense that they have done something that future generations can be proud of. They were the generation that elected an African-American to the presidency! You can roll that sentence around on the tongue, imagine how it will read in tomorrow's textbooks. Obama's election feels like history. Reads like history. Is history.

For that reason, though, tomorrow will be a strange day. It marks the end of Obama's transition from candidate to president. And president will be a very different role. Obama's campaign was as much about the idea of Obama as the presidency of Obama. There were dry policy plans that sought to reform our tax code and soaring speeches that traced the moral arc of our politics. And the latter, frankly, proved more important than the former. The latter is the only reasons anyone even cared that a first-term senator from Illinois had a tax plan.

The night Obama became president-elect, he was almost pure idea: The celebrations that took hold on America's streets were not a joyous affirmation of his statements on entitlement reform. They were an explosion of pride at what America had just done, the barriers it had just broken, the boundaries it had just obliterated. For a few weeks, Obama was hardly even a partisan figure, much less a tawdry politician. He was living history. His election was proof that hope is not always unrealistic.

The past two months have marked his slow transition from idea into president. What Obama meant is increasingly submerged beneath what Obama does. The fact that we elected a black man says little about how we spend the TARP dollars, or mediate the conflict in Gaza, or stimulate the economy. Tomorrow, our politics will be at its highest point in memory. We will have elected an African-American. We will be inaugurating a president with higher approval ratings than any other incoming executive since the advent of polling. But then politics will quiet, for a little while at least, and governance will take over. Obama will stop representing things and start doing things.

Obama's next task, then, is harder. To recast governance much as he recast politics. Success would look different, to be sure. Good governance is often more technical than inspiring. It need not feel like history. But nor should governance deject Americans, or disgust them, or appear impervious to their input. The power of Obama's election is that it felt like the country's accomplishment. That is easier in an election: The country votes. Such a direct connection may not be possible in governance. But if governance can feel again like it works on behalf of the public, like it takes seriously their concerns and works daily to meet their expectations, then that would be something better than hope. That would be change.

Laptops are big and sluggish and hard to carry around. Also, people frown on you whipping out your Macbook to comment on what they just said. hence, Twitter. For the next day or two, I'll be doing a lot of Twittering from inaugural events, parties, balls, and tomorrow, the swearing-in. I'll be posting, too, but if you want the atmospheric stuff, you should be checking, or following, my Twitter feed. I'll also put a Twitter display here:

follow me on Twitter

This is some high quality snark from Chris Orr.

One of the odd aspects of being on a press list is that you often get the administration's response to a scandal or gaffe before you knew of the original. For instance, a statement from vice-presidential spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander just landed in my inbox:

"Like anyone who followed the presidential campaign this summer, Dr. Jill Biden knew there was a chance that President-elect Obama might ask her husband to serve in some capacity and that, given his background, the positions of Vice President and Secretary of State were possibilities. Dr. Biden's point to Oprah today was that being Vice President would be a better fit for their family because they would get to see him more and get to participate in serving more. To be clear, President-elect Obama offered Vice President-elect Biden one job only -- to be his running mate. And the Vice President-elect was thrilled to accept the offer."

You all saw Bruce Springsteen and an 89-year-old Pete Seeger lead the 700,000 celebrants on the National Mall in a stirring rendition of "This Land Is Your Land," right? And you noticed that it was the original version, with embedded leftie radicalism, right? Well, if you didn't, here it is:

Even so, it's meaningful that Matt Cooper, formerly of Time, Newsweek, Portfolio, and the Valerie Plame trial, has signed on to head Talking Points Memo's new DC blog. On the one hand, Cooper's involvement legitimizes TPM as a mainstream outlet. His presence is an MSM Seal of Approval on their reporting. A statement that a progressive outlook can improve good journalism, rather than impede it.

But the more interesting exchange runs in the opposite direction: TPM legitimizes Cooper. They offer him something he can't get at the newsweeklies or the periodicals: A chance to participate in an outlet fluent in today's technology and constantly adapting to tomorrow's. An opportunity to change along with the industry, to figure out how the shifts in technology and medium can make journalism better, rather than trying to write against the tide. And it's meaningful, too, that this exchange is largely occurring at progressive outlets. As many conservatives have lamented in recent months, their side has not used the last few years to integrate ideas and technology and journalism. As such, there's a rapidly evolving progressive media sector that's quickly winning acceptance and wresting influence, but nothing comparable across the aisle. And as Pajamas Media showed, it's not the sort of thing that can be corrected overnight, or with a simple infusion of money, or with the presence of Joe the Plumber. TPM's expansion is the product of an increasingly impressive body of work. Cooper is no fool, and he's not desperate. He's moving to the online outlet that's likeliest to win a Pulitzer. There's just nothing of equal prestige on the Right.