What type of blogger am I?

You guys probably don't need me to interpret this, but suffice to say the much-mentioned troubles McCain faces in the primary aren't made up:

Then respondents were read the following question: "Some people say that McCain would be a good candidate for president because he has demonstrated a great deal of personal integrity… he has a strong military background and he has independent political views; while other people say McCain would not be a good candidate for president because at age 72 (his age in the fall of 2008) he is too old to run for president, he is too stubborn in his issue positions and he does not always represent Republican views on the issues." (In both the McCain and Clinton statements, the orders of the pro and con statements were rotated and sequence of each statement randomized.) "Which of those two statements comes closer to your point of view on John McCain running for president in 2008?"

Among all adults, 48 percent were pro-McCain and 35 were anti-McCain. Among registered voters, 49 percent were pro-McCain and 34 percent were anti-McCain. But among Republicans, just 41 percent agreed more with the pro-McCain statements, while 45 percent favored the anti-McCain arguments. Among Democrats, it was 47 percent pro-McCain, 32 percent anti-McCain. Among independents, a whopping 55 percent agreed with the pro-McCain option and 29 percent agreed with the anti-McCain option.

Interesting stuff. McCain does marginally better among Republicans likely to vote in the primaries, but the numbers remain tepid. With so many other Republicans to choose from, that'll prove a problem.

Matt, in his post on the NSC Iraq strategy, puts his finger on exactly what's been bugging me about the document. It's not a strategy, it's a goalset. Things like:

• Clear areas of enemy control by remaining on the offensive, killing and capturing
enemy fighters and denying them safe-haven.

• Hold areas freed from enemy control by ensuring that they remain under the control
of a peaceful Iraqi government with an adequate Iraqi security force presence.

• Build Iraqi Security Forces and the capacity of local institutions to deliver services,
advance the rule of law, and nurture civil society.

Aren't touted as objectives but steps. The only question is, considering we've shown no facility at doing any of those things, what's to say we do them now. Was all we were missing really a document counseling us to defeat the evildoers?

Update: Man, what a brilliant response! All those Democrats who'd been calling for some sort of realistic strategy really wanted a bullet-pointed picture of perfection. Yes, this is what we've been missing. I am chastened.

Singer's right on this. In a debate on Roe, you'd think Legal Affairs could've rustled up at least one female participant.

Man, Deepak Chopra's got some poor policy ideas (I know! Shocking!). On his list of problems facing us, he includes:

· Radical Islam opposes modernism.
· Religious fundamentalism is growing in almost every society.

His solutions?

· Let Islam develop on its own, without our interference.
· Let Islamic countries take the lead in fighting terrorism, aided by the entire international community.

Yeah, that should fix things. Correct vicious fundamentalism by determined noninterference and then hand over terrorism-fighting duties to nations and governments that often sympathize with the terrorists. Brilliant.

Says Sy Hersh:

Suffice to say this, that this president in private, at Camp David with his friends, the people that I'm sure call him George, is very serene about the war. He's upbeat. He thinks that he's going to be judged, maybe not in five years or ten years, maybe in 20 years. He's committed to the course. He believes in democracy.
[...]
He's a utopian, you could say, in a world where maybe he doesn't have all the facts and all the information he needs and isn't able to change.

I'll tell you, the people that talk to me now are essentially frightened because they're not sure how you get to this guy.

We have generals that do not like -- anymore -- they're worried about speaking truth to power. You know that. I mean that's -- Murtha in fact, John Murtha, the congressman from Pennsylvania, which most people don't know, has tremendous contacts with the senior generals of the armies. He's a ranking old war horse in Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The generals know him and like him. His message to the White House was much more worrisome than maybe to the average person in the public. They know that generals are privately telling him things that they're not saying to them.

And if you're a general and you have a disagreement with this war, you cannot get that message into the White House. And that gets people unnerved.
[...]
You know, Wolf, there is people I've been talking to -- I've been a critic of the war very early in the New Yorker, and there were people talking to me in the last few months that have talked to me for four years that are suddenly saying something much more alarming.

They're beginning to talk about some of the things the president said to him about his feelings about manifest destiny, about a higher calling that he was talking about three, four years ago.

Scary stuff.

Daniel Pipes writes:

Awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Muhammad Ali gratuitously celebrated a man profoundly opposed to Bush’s own, his party’s, and the country’s principles. It represents, I submit, the nadir of his presidency.

Man, wait till he hears about the rest of it!

By the way, you may want to follow the link and scroll down to see pictures of Ali mocking Bush during the ceremony. The President mimed fisticuffs and The Champ called him a nutcase. Twice.

Man, this is just insane:

It seems to the Moose that there should be a brief interval (3 weeks) when our leaders suspend their talk of withdrawal or "withdrawal lite- redeployment" and vocally indicate their support for Iraqi democracy. Progressives certainly should embrace this heroic act of choice and self-determination.

They sure should. Now what does this have to do with withdrawal? If a single Democrat supported Wittman's inane suggestion, we'd lose the entire argument. Withdrawal advocates believe that Iraqis, who overwhelmingly want us to leave, can build a better democracy and a stronger country without our presence. As the argument goes, by exiting, the sections of the insurgency that our Jihadist in nature will calm, leaving only separatists who'll be attacking their countrymen without the excuse of a foreign enemy. For Wittman to tar withdrawal advocates as somehow anti-democracy -- particularly when every poll and every survey shows 80% of Iraqis would vote for us to leave -- is truly reprehensible.

The next front in the war of RU-486 is going to be its deadly side effects, its role as not only a baby killer, but a patient killer. And this guy's going to be the spokesman:

The father of a Livermore woman who died in 2003 after taking the RU-486 abortion pill is going international with his concerns over the drug's safety.

You can't argue with his loss, but let's put this in perspective. Including his daughter, there are four deaths that can potentially be linked to RU-486. But: :

(1996): "Each year, use of NSAIDs (Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs) accounts for an estimated 7,600 deaths and 76,000 hospitalizations in the United States." (NSAIDs include aspirin, ibuprofen, naproxen, diclofenac, ketoprofen, and tiaprofenic acid.)

Medicine kills people. Medical treatment kills people. Being in hospitals kills people. Medical errors kill people. Improper treatment protocols kill people. Now, doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceuticals cure more than they kill, and we as a society have decided easing our headaches and muscle pains is worth 7,600 deaths a year, but pretending that medicine is safe and RU-486 is dangerous is just crap. Particularly considering the sum of the evidence:

Jennifer Blum of the international organization Gynuity, which promotes access to RU-486 and other forms of abortion considered safe, said RU-486 has been approved in about 35 countries, starting with France and China in 1988 and now including England, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Spain, Israel and Russia. It was approved in the United States in 2000.

"There is no record, outside of these four deaths in California and the one in Canada, of Clostridium sordellii deaths anywhere in the world," Blum said. "The Europeans have had a good, extensive tracking service since the very first use of the drug in 1988."

Oppose RU-486 if you want, but it's not a dangerous drug. Not, at least, compared to aspirin.

I can't be the only one who looks at this guy and thinks "Damn, Steve Carell really bulked up."

This post by Nora Ephron (formerly Carl Bernstein's wife) on Bob Woodward is about the funniest thing I've read all day:

I can’t believe that it falls to me to explain Bob Woodward. I can’t believe it for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I don’t speak to Bob Woodward and Bob Woodward doesn’t speak to me. The reason for this is that when I was married to Carl Bernstein, Woodward’s former partner, Carl wasn’t speaking to Bob, so out of loyalty I wasn’t speaking to Bob either.

Then Carl and I split up and I found myself in the odd position of not speaking to one person out of loyalty to a second person I also wasn’t speaking to. Then Carl and Bob became friends again, but I continue not to speak to Bob and vice versa.

Read it all. It's perfect.

Yeah, yeah, blogging's lackluster today. I took a red eye in from California last night and got a grand 90 minutes of sleep. On the bright side, there's some decent Tapped blogging for you. Also, I left my cell phone on the plane. Nuts.

Yeah, I know that title is endlessly inventive and witty. In fact, it's about as original as anything I have to say about Canada. But here are some folks with better points than I could offer:

• Our very own Laura, whose smackdown of right wing triumphalism is truly a beautiful thing.

• The Reaction, a bunch of canucks with opinions.

Go get smart.

Man, via Matt, John McWhorter might want to think this one through a bit better:

Please. One can take a good dose of Talib Kweli, Common, Mos Def and Kanye "Bush doesn't care about black people" West and still see nothing that resembles any kind of "message" that people truly committed to forging change would recognize.

Huh. Interesting point in his discourse on what hip-hop, even its better elements, really stands for. Unfortunately, Mos Def, in Fear Not Of Man, both refuted his message and the premise that hip-hop can be defined with perfect clarity:

Listen.. people be askin me all the time,
"Yo Mos, what's gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?"
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?)
I tell em, "You know what's gonna happen with Hip-Hop?
Whatever's happening with us"
If we smoked out, Hip-Hop is gonna be smoked out
If we doin alright, Hip-Hop is gonna be doin alright
People talk about Hip-Hop like it's some giant livin in the hillside
comin down to visit the townspeople
We +are+ Hip-Hop
Me, you, everybody, we are Hip-Hop
So Hip-Hop is goin where we goin
So the next time you ask yourself where Hip-Hop is goin
ask yourself.. where am I goin? How am I doin?
Til you get a clear idea
So.. if Hip-Hop is about the people
and the.. Hip-Hop won't get better until the people get better
then how do people get better? (Hmmmm...)
Well, from my understanding people get better
when they start to understand that, they are valuable
And they not valuable because they got a whole lot of money
or cause somebody, think they sexy
but they valuable caause they been created by God
And God, makes you valuable
And whether or not you, recognize that value is one thing
You got a lot of socities and governments
tryin to be God, wishin that they were God
They wanna create satellites and cameras everywhere
and make you think they got the all-seein eye
Eh.. I guess The Last Poets wasn't, too far off
when they said that certain people got a God Complex
I believe it's true
I don't get phased out by none of that, none of that
helicopters, the TV screens, the newscasters, the..
satellite dishes.. they just, wishin...

This is a cute line, but is it true?

All the technologies of mass entertainment have, paradoxically, cut us off from the masses of other people. Television, iPods, DVDs, the Internet, e-mail--you can order a date, dinner, or a movie online, and if you happen to work at home, you never have to leave the convenience and security of your four walls. Romantic movies used to be about the difficulty of meeting the right person, or the calamity of meeting the wrong one. Now they're about the hardship and inconvenience of just being with another person, period.

Just scrolling through the current box office, The Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year Old Virgin were both about meeting the sort of stunning human that could snap the protagonists out of their lonely, shallow existences, Shopgirl is about meeting the wrong people, and you all know the plot of Pride and Prejudice, right?

So it's not that I'm against the woe-is-us, alienation meme, but I'm not seeing it in movies. Romantic comedies, by definition, are romantic, they've little to do with the decidedly unromantic work of long-term cohabitation. But if the first part of Siegel's column is wrong, this bit is just cartoonishly cantankerous:

As a result of our pleasurable, isolating technologies, people act in public as if they were all alone in private. Shouting into cell phones. Wearing baseball caps in fancy restaurants. Holding a symposium in a darkened movie theater. The other day I saw a guy at the gym wearing ... flip-flops. But I did not see flip-flops. I saw the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead.

It's not that these people are rude. It's that, in the evolutionary sense, their adaptability to a social setting has atrophied from disuse the way eons ago our flippers and fins dried up and disappeared when we started living on dry land.

He goes on to laud the brilliance of The Boondocks cartoon show, another obviously wrong move considering the colossal disappointment it's proved to be. But that I can forgive. It's tarring all my naive, simplistically idealistic romantic comedies with a cynical brush that's truly wrong.

You often hear that soldiers believe the hated-MSM is misrepresenting the progress being made in Iraq. This post of John Cole's, and particularly the e-mail it provokes, is about the best, and most even-handed, perspective I've seen on that.

I've not the expertise to comment on this post, but you should certainly read it.

Marshall Wittman, in a long meditation on whether bloggers are necessary, makes some obvious points, some important points, and a couple very strange points. Of the obvious ones, of course bloggers aren't necessary, this country somehow survived in the years before Markos Moulitsas (otherwise known as The Dark Days). The real question is whether bloggers are a force for good, and here he tries to offer an answer, but again gets mired in his traditional swamp of reflexive anti-partisanship. And this is what I find so infuriating about Wittman: an obvious bright guy with a keen ear for the quick phrase, his ideology is a strange, reflexive beast, blindly groping through the grooves between Republicans and Democrats with no clear conception of where it actually wants to go:

The Moose's fixation is the creation of a "third force' in politics that transcends the petty partisan divide. That is why he is enamored with a wide range of leaders who follow in the footsteps of his favorite posthumous pol - T.R.
[...]

Fortunately, there is a growing group of bloggers from the vital center - or "immoderate centrists" is the label the Moose prefers. The Moose gives credit to Joe Gandelman over at the Moderate Voice and the folks at Centerfield for promoting centrist voices in the blogosphere.

I like Teddy too, but for his environmentalism, his antitrust work, his populism, his empiricism, his distaste for racism and belief in the universal potential for improvement. And, in some respects, I don't like Teddy, namely for his glorification of belligerent masculinity and the unnecessarily aggressive foreign policy he followed. But Teddy's carefree willingness to bash through party walls and form new alliances was little more than a sideshow -- who cares? The Republicans are still around, the Bull Moosers aren't.

What frustrates me about Wittman is that he's infatuated with centrism for the sake of centrism. He doesn't offer an ideology with greater coherence than the splintered philosophies pushed by the major parties. You'll occasionally watch him justify some international aggressiveness or domestic spending on the basis of its assumed popularity, but never on its merit as policy. He wants a third way, but so far as I can tell, all he's interested in is the building of the road, not where it goes. It's a hollowness that lends itself to bizarre posts like this:

A confrontation with Saddam was inevitable in the aftermath of 9/11. No President would have tolerated the behavior of a madman who had initiated two wars, possessed WMD and was the primary source of instability in the region which was the home of Jihadism.

Say what? That's like arguing no one would tolerate an influx of roaches in an apartment building brimming with malnutrition. Saddam's form of belligerence was a Cold War-relic, it was the opposite of Jihadism. That's why the actual Jihadists routinely advocated his overthrow. As for the sources of regional instability, look towards Jerusalem, not Mesopotamia for that. We could calm that corner by shipping the Jews off to Idaho, but Jihadism, and not instability, is the enemy, and so we shouldn't be taking out its avowed enemies.

But if Wittman's post is incoherent as policy argument, it's a perfect example of his brand of meta-speak. What's important there is his insistence that both parties are equally to blame, that partisanship, not ideology, created the chasm ("No President..."), and his display of tough-minded, martialistic patriotism. Which then leads to this:

The Third Camp stands between the Administration "stay the course" and the "withdrawal now" forces. It includes both supporters of the decision to go to war and critics. Its leaders include John McCain, Joe Biden and Wes Clark.

While they have different victory strategies, all of these men believe that it would be a disaster to leave Iraq in chaos.This camp is highly critical of the President's failures in the post-war period and argues for a new strategy. This force believes that the White House is losing the moral high ground by failing to take a strong stand against torture and the inhumane treatment of prisoners.

However, the Third Camp is united in the belief that America can only leave when Iraq is relatively stable and a government is in place that can defend itself against the terrorist forces. Some favor more troops, at least temporarily. Others believe that current levels are adequate. Most of all, the Third Camp seeks a bi-partisan national unity that rejects the increasingly bitter polarization over the war.

The Third Camp, apparently, has nothing in common save Wittman's affection for them. They're in different parties, vote for different agendas, and offer wildly differing worldviews. On Iraq, they don't agree on strategy, nor cause, nor outcome. They're really only united by a sort of high-polling, sensibly-stated taste for the occupation's continuation, dreams of winning the presidency, and a reliance on the incompetence dodge. And that's the Third Way? The vaunted middle road between the brain dead parties is more enthusiasm for yesterday's failed policies?

And to ensure you don't think I'm quoting unfairly, here's an article Wittman wrote on what was powerful about McCain -- see if anything in there is better described as a policy suggestion than a personality trait. Here's another piece where he lauds Gingrich's emphasis on ideas -- and apologizes for agreeing with Newt when he was ascendant -- without offering any of his own. He promotes ideas in the way he promotes centrism, as a conceptual vessel that can be turned into a campaign tone and filled with anything the speaker wishes. That's some principle.

The problem with Wittman, and politics more generally, is that we've not defined our terms. Partisan isn't a necessarily bad label, the question is whether it's followed by "hack". I've nothing but respect for idea-driven partisans who believe in, and fight for, their ideologies. I've no respect for hackish partisans who sacrifice their ideologies -- when they have them -- on the altar of party loyalty. Wittman is a strange variant of that species, partisan for a certain position -- the middle one -- on the ideological spectrum no matter the ideas of the leaders and organizations occupying it. Why splitting the difference between two sets of bad ideas creates better ones is, of course, anyone's guess.

In my article on Hackett, I argued that the blogosphere valued pugilistic litmus tests above ideological ones. Wittman, in fact, is exactly like all those bloggers he thinks himself antidote to, uninterested in policies but obsessed with positioning. The difference is that where most bloggers demand their favorites throw punches across the aisle, Wittman asks them to knock out both sides. But moderation offers no inherent good, new ideas no intrinsic worth. The left may be wrong and the right wronger, but the third way is only laudable if it does better. Wittman's tried to convince us that, by definition and through distinction, it does. But he's never told us on what. Worse, I'm not sure he's even noticed the omission.

This Guardian feature of book picks by great authors, thinkers, and critics is about as wide-ranging and comprehensive as you could hope. Lots of good gift ideas on there, particularly for those of you looking to buy me something.

Over the weekend, I've been reading The Most of PG Wodehouse, which is just as delightful -- and delightful is really the right word -- as you'd expect. What surprised me, though, was realizing that Douglas Adams, long my favorite author, is really just PG Wodehouse in space. Turns out the influence is admitted, but not on the early portions of his oeuvre:

Douglas was a fan of P.G Wodehouse. I once asked Douglas if Wodehouse had any impact on his own writing, and he said "Yes, a huge impact. But not an early impact. I didn't start reading Wodehouse until I was writing Restaurant at the End of the Universe (I can see the impact starting almost immediately). I think that he, without exaggeration, was a genius on the English language."

So is Wodehouse so pervasive in England that his tone and cadence could seep in without conscious emulation, or is there just a weird synchronicity in their outlooks?

Former Grammar Cop Kriston Capps has been contracted to bring art to the masses via a new, Smithsonian-sponsored blog:

At its core, Eye Level is about art. The image above joins the Stuart Davis in the banner as a mascot for the blog. It was once considered fashionable to carry a miniature portrait of a lover's eye; the trend dates to the 1820s. Photography eventually provided for more visually accurate reminders of loved ones. Today, of course, cellular technology allows your significant other not only to keep a metaphorical eye on you, but also track your precise coordinates—different accessories, but a similar concept.

Anyway, to cite the old cliché, the eye is the window to the soul. If art is a window to a culture, Eye Level is a way to take it in.

Man, these kids and their blogs. Back in my day, we didn't even look at art and we were happy to do so! Anyway, if Kriston is twice as good at art blogging as he is at touch football, this should be a decent site (oh, Snap!). As it is, it's a great one, so adjust your math, and bookmarks, accordingly.

John Dickerson makes a good point on the laughably bungled attempt to mar Murtha:

This is what happens when a party goes into campaign mode without a single opponent. With no specific person to target, the Bush administration ends up taking on all members of the opposition at once. The White House plugged Murtha into an indiscriminate and undifferentiated rapid-response machine and it didn't work. Finally, Democrats have reason to be happy that they have no clear leader.

That's quite right. The GOP has perfected the art of eviscerating individual critics. As soon as a Democratic head peeks above a trench, they snipe him out. War heroes like Kerry are no safer than governors like Dean. Celebrities like Moore are used to smear representatives like Murtha. It's all very efficient and deadly. What we've seen recently, however, is a Democratic Party without a putative leader. Reid is quiet and unassuming, you can't launch an assault on an unknown. Pelosi is rarely on camera, I've forgotten what Howard Dean's face looks like, no one has patience for Kerry, Hillary's uninterested in tying herself to current debates, and so forth.

All of which has left the devolution of Iraq coinciding with a troubling lack of prominent liberals to pin it on. And, as the Bush administration has shown, without someone to smear, they can't change the focus. Recently, they've tried tarring everybody whole parties in place of individuals, a move that created so much backlash that each official speech now merits a disclaimer on the courage, bravery, honor and patriotism of the war critics.

On the one hand, it's comical, the Democratic Party is so weak and faceless that they no longer serve as a worthy target. On the other, it's turned out to be the Bush administration's worst nightmare: with no one to campaign against, all they can do is campaign against no one. And watching them vigorously punch air while their policies continue to rip apart real people has proven the worst media moment imaginable.

This, by Hacker, through Krugman, and behind Times Select, is a great point:

We like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, not like those coddled Europeans with their oversized welfare states. But as Jacob Hacker of Yale points out in his book "The Divided Welfare State," if you add in corporate spending on health care and pensions - spending that is both regulated by the government and subsidized by tax breaks - we actually have a welfare state that's about as large relative to our economy as those of other advanced countries.

The resulting system is imperfect: those who don't work for companies with good benefits are, in effect, second-class citizens.

What we have isn't a small welfare state, it's an inefficient, fragmented one. And thanks to the holes in our patchwork, we end up paying more for less, overspending on the unnecessary, and creating all manner of bizarro-world economic incentives. No corporation would ever run like this, Wal-Mart's great advance has been the coherency and integration of its operations. Nevertheless, we're continually taught that this inefficient atrocity has been blessed by the free market's kiss, and is therefore untouchable. Lady Competition has decreed that a series of World War II-era tax quirks would incentivize employer-based health care and the vagaries of the business cycle would decide who received benefits.

It's bullshit. And it should be labeled as such.

Update: Brad has more, including the numbers.

You have got to be kidding me.

From the disgruntled Kos-spinoff The Booman Tribune:

If you think it has been taken over by some DLC/NDN cabal of corporate interests, if you think that it been stripped of all intelligent life, if you think they are out to get you, if you don't buy into the 'New' Armando, write about it here.

There's a new Armando? What's he like? What'd Kos do with the old Armando? And, most importantly, does this have anything to do with the mega death ray he was readying to use on the DLC? Like, is the old Armando in a lab somewhere, being turned into a Kilgore-hunting super soldier while the cloned Armando works on the blog?

Kurtz? Gawker? Wonkette? Won't anybody sniff this one out?

By Ezra

Speaking of Black Friday, I hit two malls that day and neither was particularly crowded. And I'm home in Orange County, where we meditate on intensifying our materialism. The Spectrum was so empty I could've parked my car lengthwise and no one would've noticed (nor been inconvenienced), and South Coast Plaza, which had a healthy crush of shoppers in it, didn't leave me with a single bruise. Nevertheless, the media's loving reports of Black Friday barbarity indicate a certain level of mania, so what gives?

My only thought is that the malls are dying -- all the really good injuries seemed to happen in Wal-Marts, Best Buys, and so forth. Are superstores the new malls? Or is that merely a holiday phenomenon, with superstores able to slash prices deeper than the small, separate shops populating your average mall?

The mall is so much more a public space than the Wal-mart. I don't know what kids today are doing, but my friends and I never got shot coquettish glances in our local Best Buy nor endlessly debated (and usually chickened out of) approaching the blond in the stereo section. They invented food courts for a reason, people. Where will my kids go to pretend to talk to the opposite sex!?

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper

Here are some of the silliest stories that emerged from Black Friday: At a Wal-Mart in Mountain View, CA: Police were eventually called to calm unruly shoppers who climbed over a display case and shouted in a desperate effort to get their hands on one of a couple-of-dozen Hewlett-Packard notebook computers -- on sale for just $22 off the regular price of $400.

At a Wal-Mart in Hamilton Township, NJ: Authorities said it took a dozen police officers to control a disorderly crowd in the store's electronics department after shoppers began forcibly removing items from the area and forcing their way past other people at cash registers. It was all part of a violent and chaotic morning that required police from two communities to descend on the Wal-Mart and a nearby Circuit City, after crowds of more than 1,000 people at each store engaged in what police describe as mob-like behavior, which began with a rush to get inside around 6 a.m.

So why are the current headlines calling Black Friday sales "lukewarm"? Do heads have to roll?

Already there's whining about how Black Friday didn't meet expectations:

According to ShopperTrak RCT Corp., which tracks total sales at more than 45,000 retail outlets, the overall sales Friday were relatively unchanged compared with a year ago, despite heavier discounting and expanded hours that drew a surge of shoppers to stores in the early-morning hours. The Chicago-based research group reported total sales Friday at $8 billion, down 0.9 percent from a year ago.

One analyst called sales "a bit flat." CNN echoes the sentiment by calling Black Friday a "flat start."

Based on the early results, only Wal-Mart did well, but that seems to be with a few black eyes and bruises. I'd hate to see what Black Friday would look like if it marked a fizzy start for the holiday season.

I was out on Black Friday with my family, more for sociology than anything else. We walked into a Kohl's to check out the athletic shoes, and we walked to the shoe section, which was at the back of the store. The checkout stands were all staffed, but the line kept stretching ... and stretching ... and stretching to the back of the store, curving along the back wall of the rather large department store. The rage was at a slow simmer, and come lunchtime, no doubt someone got into a tiff. I didn't feel too sorry for these people. One woman was thrilled to find a stuffed frog toy that performed 50 Cent's "In Da Club" when you squeezed its tummy. Alas, this particular shopper was by the shoe section, and the novelty of a frog singing Fifty wore off pretty fast. If she wanted to wait in line until sundown for that frog, then she deserved to wait in line.

If Thanksgiving is the Food Orgy, Black Friday is the Shopping Orgy, during which people buy what they don't need (that darned frog mentioned above) or buy items just because they are brand-spanking new (the 360). And then analysts say that you didn't shop hard enough? Or that you didn't suffer enough broken bones in your patriotic buying frenzy? You don't have to go to war, but by golly you'd better get that XBox! There's nothing good about Black Friday. It makes sense to expect the holiday shopping season to bring good returns for companies, but pinning hopes on one single day sets everyone - shoppers and sellers - up for disappointment.

Ezra

Man, I really have to apologize to my cubicle mates. The only interviews they ever overhear concern health policy, poverty, and congressional races. I'm totally depriving them.

By Ezra

I'm thinking of picking up one of those nifty speaker systems that my iPod can click into -- I'm no audiophile, I don't have much room, and the whole thing sounds pretty painless. My only concern is if my iPod breaks somehow, I'm in real trouble. So here's the question: is the sound quality any different with the docking speakers as opposed to a pair that connects through a headphone jack? And, for that matter, anyoe have some recommendations? I don't want to go much beyond $100.

By Ezra

I'm heedless. Reckless. Rash and unthinking. I shopped, ignoring the warnings, on Black Friday. And despite all the folks complaining about Christmas music, I thought it was great. Mostly because of all the Christmas music. I, after all, spend all year waiting for Christmas music. I spin Christmas Remixed -- which really is one of the best CD's you'll ever hear -- during all manner of non-Holiday seasons, but don't tend to take up the real Bing Crosby stuff till the Big Day is actually upon us. But once the carols become ubiquitous, I'm as stoked a jew as you've ever seen -- I go from mall-o-phobic to an eager shopper.

I write this, though, because I seem to be the only one. Everyone else I know despises Christmas music and wants to go all Seattle-protestor on every retailer who plays it. So, question of the day: where do you stand? Are you, like me, objectively pro-Christmas tunes, or just another scrooge?

Update: Dude! There's a Christmas Remixed 2! This is the best Christmas ever!

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Battlepanda cites a piece from the Tampa Tribune about the aftereffects of Florida's minimum wage increase last year.  Despite the dire predictions of the restaurant and retailing industries, retail employment rose 2.1% over the past year while restaurant employment rose 5.2%.  The understanding of economics among retail entrepreneurs seems to have risen too:

"I don't think it's going to kill jobs because you need the people to do the work no matter what," said Walter, owner of Highland Park Furniture, which has a license to use the trade name Macy's Furniture & Mattress Clearance Center. "But it might hurt profits, and it sounds better to say it's going to hurt jobs than hurt profits."

This is how things usually tend to go after a minimum wage increase.   To quote right-wing economist Stephen Landsburg:

In fact, the power of the minimum wage to kill jobs has been greatly overestimated. Nowadays, most labor economists will tell you that that minimum wages have at most a tiny impact on employment... It is almost impossible to maintain the old argument that minimum wages are bad for minimum-wage workers.

If you're wondering how companies will pay higher wages without an increase in unemployment, the answer is simple -- profits go down.  (Prices can go up too, but this doesn't happen in an especially dramatic way.  The Florida restaurants cited in the article raised prices about 3%.) Labor market monopsonies are regarded as the big explanatory factor here. Corporations have a huge bargaining power advantage over low-wage workers, and minimum wage laws keep them from pressing this advantage all the way to the sweatshops.

There's a lot of ways in which differences in bargaining power manifest themselves. A corporation can, at some cost, leave a factory inactive and shut down for years if conditions are unfavorable. But you can't shut down for years -- you've got to eat and pay the rent. So you've got to accept their ultimatums, while they can reject yours.  Furthermore, in some areas a small group of employers basically have the labor market cornered.  If corporations were allowed to push the downwards bidding war as far as they wanted, they could go a very long way.

People of the charts-with-curves-loving variety can get their fill here.

By Ezra

Over the weekend, my friend and I got into a meaningless dispute on the correct pronunciation of "banal." Turns out we're not the only ones:

Usage Note: The pronunciation of banal is not settled among educated speakers of American English. Sixty years ago, H.W. Fowler recommended the pronunciation (bnl, rhyming with panel), but this pronunciation is now regarded as recondite by most Americans: it is preferred by only 2 percent of the Usage Panel. Other possibilities are (bnl, rhyming with anal), preferred by 38 percent of the Panel; (b-nl, rhyming with canal), preferred by 46 percent; and (b-nl, the last syllable rhyming with doll), preferred by 14 percent (this last pronunciation is more common in British English). Some Panelists admit to being so vexed by the problem that they tend to avoid the word in conversation.

Emphasis mine. I just love the idea of irked panelists leaving a bland presentation only to have no way to describe it. "What a, err, dry performance." In any case, I'm of the "canal" school of thought, leaving me in the plurality -- strength in numbers, baby. However, I'm thinking of switching towards the "doll" usage, if only for the sheer iconoclasm of it. Given that my inability to pronounce words has already reached legendary status (as a friend memorably put it, I speak a language closely related to, but not quite, English), this should make me truly timeless.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Pam Spaulding at Pandagon brings my attention to the Rev. Willie Wilson, who argues for the immorality of lesbian anal strapon dildo action* with the memorable phrase, "Your butt ain't made for that!"  The idea that being anally penetrated by another woman's strapon dildo runs contrary to the true function of the butt is consistent with a significant strand of Christian sexual philosophy.  St. Thomas Aquinas held that the proper function of the penis was as an instrument of reproduction, since God had designed it for that purpose.  Ejaculating into things other than human vaginas -- for example, mouths, anuses, animals, and even one's hand for purposes of masturbation -- was thus regarded as immoral.

Christian philosophers aren't the only people who think that facts about morality are tied closely to facts about function.  You sometimes hear this from people who have gotten a little too excited about evolutionary biology and think that morality is in some way based on biological function.  Either way, there's  no reason to think that the notion of purpose or function has any bearing on morality.  (This seems a completely obvious point to me, but then I spend most of my waking hours around philosophers, and I don't know if it's obvious to normal smart people.)  To offer an illustrative example, the function of a frying pan is to fry things.  But if a burglar breaks into my home and I drive him away by whacking him repeatedly with a frying pan, the fact that it was a frying pan and not some object with a more whacking-oriented function with which I whacked him doesn't contribute any wrongness to the action.

When we say that something has a function, we usually mean that its creator intends it for a particular kind of use or that it can be used effectively in some particular way. But there's not necessarily anything wrong in using objects in a way their creator didn't intend -- see the frying pan case.  And the fact that something can be used effectively in one way doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used in any other ways.  Perhaps you really need to get some other thing done, and the object in question is the best thing you've got for doing that. 

*I foresee that this post is going to be a lightning rod for incoming perv search traffic.  Well, at least the pervs will learn something before they go find some lesbian strapon dildo anal action. 

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Is it me, or did Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry suddenly become much more multicultural in year four? Perhaps Dumbledore embarked on a goals-and-quotas campaign to find more wizards of color with untapped potential?

Use this as an open thread to discuss new Harry Potter flick, and feel free to suggest how your personal political preferences can be read into various parts of the movie.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

So I'm looking at the front page of Pajamas Media (happily renamed away from OSM) now, and the current panel discussion is headlined: What should Pajamas Media be?  Questions of this kind are usually answered before you get $3.5 million in venture capital funding.  But since they're thinking about it, I'll make a suggestion:  Pajamas Media should be a blog whose news aggregator isn't fed in part by the Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government's propaganda arm.  For that matter, is there any reason why you'd want your blog to have a news aggregator?  Are you under the impression that political junkies hardcore enough to read your blog will settle on it as their one-stop-shop for news?  (No, but the venture capital guys are.  And they like the phrase "one-stop-shop" almost as much as they like "open source".) 

This is the point in the post where snark should give way to intelligent thought.  Unfortunately, I don't have any intelligent thoughts to offer.  So let me refer you to Laura Turner, who does. 

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Tony found an old cartoon a few days ago, and I think it's pretty indicative of how most people were thinking in late 2002:

There's a couple things to be said here about how the Bush Administration got Senators to vote for the Iraq War.

I've never worked in a Senator's office before, so I don't know how incoming information is handled there.  But I can't imagine that Senators are significantly insulated from public attitudes.  When an opinion is publicly ridiculed and maligned -- as the opinion that Iraq didn't have WMD was -- I'm sure that the ridicule makes Senators less likely to accept it.  This process need not even involve Senators imagining the ridicule that would be heaped on them, if they accepted it.  It's just a fact about how people think that once everybody says "Oh, it's crazy to think that Iraq doesn't have WMD" you stop giving serious consideration to the contrary hypothesis.  You stop digging for information about that question and start taking "Iraq has WMD" as an assumption. 

Now, this isn't a good thing by any means -- it's the kind of thinking that leads to disastrous wars.  This explanation for Senators' false beliefs isn't one that puts them in a positive light.  But it seems like a pretty plausible explanation, particularly for Senators whose primary focus wasn't Iraq.  I'm guessing that the administration's more official acts of deception -- for example, in withholding contrary evidence from Senators -- wasn't quite as effective in misleading them as its actions in creating an environment in which anybody claiming that Saddam had no WMD would be ridiculed. 

Of course, this wouldn't have been ridicule about some inert issue either.  We had in the previous year been hit by a humongous act of domestic terrorism, and then there was the anthrax coming out of nowhere.  Terrorists can make the world look terrifying, and the public was willing to believe the worst about what Saddam had.  The public simply wasn't ready to believe that the world was so unthreatening as to contain a defanged Saddam.  Anybody who publicly argued for further consideration of the issue would've been disbelieved by the mainstream media and treated as a defender of a murderous and threatening dictator by Fox News.

A good and wise president would've seen this situation, cautioned his aides to refrain from stirring up people's fears in a way that could lead to horribly misguided foreign policy, and shared both sides of the evidence with Senators.  Instead, we had an administration that saw public credulity about foreign threats as a circumstance to exploit in pursuit of war. 

This is truly one of the greatest Oh No You Did Not!'s that I've ever seen.

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper

Over Thanksgiving, I discovered the wonders of CMT - Country Music Television. I'm not a blue-stater making a grand discovery or anything. I used to work at a country music radio station when Garth Brooks was huge, and I see all the new videos when they come out. I'm not a huge fan, but I know my way around the world of country, and not all of it is red-state, Toby Keith crap. (Although much of it is, and Montgomery Gentry, I'm talking to you!)

I don't get CMT on my cable system, but, when I was drunk off Leinenkugels, I found that CMT was perfect viewing for a family of mixed religious beliefs, political beliefs, and sobriety levels.

On Friday, as we ate pita chips and pretzel chunks and recovered from our hangovers with more beer, my whole family was entranced by the original Dukes of Hazzard, which reminded me of how lame the movie redo was. Jessica Simpson is the Tofurky to Catherine Bach's turkey dinner. Seeing Catherine Bach at her peak made my dad praise CMT as "earthy," but I think he had something else in mind.

My favorite CMT show was their "Sexiest Videos of the Year." CMT has a clip-show format taken entirely from VH1 (both are Viacom companies - so VH1 viewers and CMT viewers who think the other group is stupid should know they are watching the same network). As always, a mix of low-level celebs, comedians, and the ubiquitous Joel Stein dish about our favorite videos. It's like Beavis, Butt-Head, and Joel Stein.

Yet again, I received proof of my theory that, despite being the supposed music of the all-American masses, country music is dirty. I've seen many of the sexy music videos at work, but I somehow missed Trace Adkins' "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" and Dierks Bentley's "Come a Little Closer" in which Mr. Bentley attempts to be the redneck version of Barry White. CMT made the videos even dirtier by hiring Blue-Collar comedian Bill Engvall to count down the videos while he lounged around with the Playboy Bunnies at Hef's Mansion. No matter what, the red-staters and blue-staters in the family had a good ol' time. And who says liberals are brie-eaters who can't have fun and party down with the red-staters?

Shakes here...

[For those of you who don't know, I have a particular interest in this story for two reasons, aside from the obvious.  My husband is a British immigrant and I was raped, about which you can read more here, if you're interested.]

Following on the heels of the recent survey, commissioned by Amnesty International, which found that 34% of Britons believe that a woman is partially or totally responsible for being raped if she has behaved in a flirtatious manner, a Swansea rape victim’s case has been dropped, and the jury ordered by the judge, Justice Roderick Evans, to bring in a verdict of not guilty "even if you don't agree,” after the woman said under cross-examination that she was too drunk to remember whether or not she had agreed to sex.

Vera Baird QC, Labour MP for Redcar and a leading criminal lawyer, called the prosecution's decision "outrageous". She said the law had been changed to provide that no one can consent to sex except by choice, with "the freedom and capacity to make that choice". The Sexual Offences Act 2003 states that someone who is asleep or otherwise unconscious will not be taken as having consented, and in such cases the onus shifts to the accused to raise evidence of consent.

Part of the impetus of the Sexual Offences Act is the appalling record of successful rape prosecutions:

The most recent Home Office statistics show that in 2003 an estimated 50,000 women were raped in the UK, although just 11,867 went to the police. Of those cases, 1,649 went to trial but only 629 resulted in successful prosecutions. Some were unsuccessful despite the rapist pleading guilty. If you reported a rape in 2003 you had a 5.3% chance of securing a conviction…

Welsh politicians have called for a further tightening of the law in light of the case so that the onus is placed on the accused to prove consent was given.

Plaid Cymru assembly member Leanne Wood, a former chairwoman of Welsh Women's Aid, said: "A woman should be able to get drunk if she wants to without fear of being raped. Men should not be given the impression that it is acceptable to have sex with a woman who is too drunk to consent."

Of course, the Act, even if strengthened, doesn’t do British women a damn bit of good if prosecutors and judges aren’t willing to apply it.

The victim in the aforementioned case was actually passed out when the guard who walked her to her flat had sexual intercourse with her on the floor of the corridor, yet when the prosecution dropped the case, it noted that "drunken consent is still consent.” Charming.

And what, exactly, constitutes content? Simply not saying no? Unfortunately, the “nice guy” who offers to walk an alcohol-impaired girl home and ends up raping her once she’s unconscious is not exactly a rare tale. In my immediate circle of friends, there are two women who have been victimized in exactly that way, waking up to the horrific realization that the man who offered to look after them is having sex with them instead.

[S]ome contributors to website talkboards suggest that women must take responsibility for their actions, including how much they drink. And that to convict a man of rape is wrong when the alleged victim cannot remember whether or not she consented.

Same old story. Here’s one problem with that story: It requires all women to modify a legal behavior to accommodate some men who refuse to modify an illegal one. Saying, “There are always going to be some men who are willing to take advantage of an impaired woman” is not sufficient reason to expect only women to monitor their alcohol intake to protect themselves against crime, particularly when the legal system is currently providing rapists with a 94.7% chance of getting away with it. Those are pretty good odds. How about, before the onus is put exclusively on women, undertaking a comprehensive attempt at drastically deincentivizing rape?

Another, unspoken problem with that story: If a young straight man were raped by another man while being passed out drunk, would anyone question whether he’d given consent? In fact, a straight man’s sexual history would likely be used in his defense—he’s had sex with lots of women before; he wouldn’t have consented to this—whereas a woman’s sexual history can be used against her in the same instance.

Perhaps the biggest problem with that story, however, is that women who are assaulted while under the influence of alcohol will just remain unlikely to come forward. It not only leaves them without justice, but also leaves rapists on the loose—resulting in more victims in the future.

[A commenter at my place has noted: "Sometimes I think we should all realize that bad thing [sic] can happen, especially when you drink too much," which is always the inevitable response, to which I responded, "Of course. But if someone is walking home from a bar after having had too much to drink and gets mugged, we don't blame them for it, even though a heightened awareness of their surroundings may have prevented it. We still hold the criminal who takes advantage of them accountable, and don't say, "Well, did you tell the robber you didn't want to be robbed?"]

As per my Thanksgiving traditions, the family and I checked out a movie last night. Shopgirl, the romantic comedy based on Steve Martin's novella, was the lucky winner to achieve familial consensus, so off we went. But let me start here: whatever other virtues Steve Martin may possess, he is the world's worst narrative writer. The dialogue is real and witty, the characters fairly believable, but the narrative voice overs bury you in rapid-fire cliches so laughable that every shoulder in the place was shaking. One day, when the screenplay is released onto the internet, I'll quote them for you, and you'll understand. They're the love children of a humorless Jack Handy and a Hallmark card.

But the rest of the movie is strong, if uneven. Martin's character is believable, a rich sophisticate too gentlemanly to be a player but too much of a player to do the right thing. Jason Schwartzman's Jeremy is a bit of a stereotype -- the quirky-yet-cute emo nerd whose trembling awkwardness makes him endearing. The only problem, though, is that it doesn't. And when he returns, reformed, there's no explanation of what about him is substantially better save for his ride.

Claire Danes does a great job, but she's trapped in a sexist role. Her character, thought touted as a sensitive Northeasterner out of touch with this crazy LA life, nevertheless ends up trading entirely on sex appeal. She's got great expressions and body language, a wonderful sensuality, but little in the way of conversational spark or intellectual sparkle. The movie hints that there's more to her, but whether because Martin couldn't write it or hadn't meant it, the more remains a figment of your imagination.

The whole thing, though, is more than the sum of its parts. The Danes-Martin relationship, in particular, works, and works well. And while the end is formulaic, the voice overs corny, and the characters less substantial than they first appeared, the slice-of-life is convincing, and worth the trip. It's evocative in the was Lost in Translation was, and while that movie was much tighter and better built, this one tries to say more, and that's refreshing.

…that I’m not an irrepressible idiot.*

Ousted FEMA director Michael Brown, who was vilified over his handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, plans to make a fresh start in Colorado, selling his expertise about how emergency planning can go right or so very wrong.

"You have to do it with candor. To do it otherwise gives you no credibility," Brown said Wednesday. "I think people are curious: 'My gosh, what was it like? The media just really beat you up. You made mistakes. I don't want to be in that situation. How do I avoid that?'"

I can’t even imagine how he will decide to price his services. Great tips like “Don’t send emails about shopping and dining while in the midst of a crisis where starving people have just lost all of their worldly possessions” are simply priceless.

— Shakes

-----------------

* Fred: Yes you are! / Captain Toke: I beg to differ.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Leave it to me to attack a sector of the American economy on exactly the day that we engage in massive ritual consumption of its output, but wouldn't it be nice if we could beat up on agribusiness more? The number of bad things those guys do is pretty tremendous -- dumping pesticides all over the place, destroying the soil through bad crop rotation, occasionally cheating immigrant workers out of their wages, raiding the treasury, adding to fossil fuel dependence through petrochemical fertilizer use, and worst of all, impoverishing Third World farmers who can't compete with our government-subsidized agriculture. Different but similarly huge problems are caused by factory farming of animals -- I heartily recommend The Meatrix to anyone who wants to learn about this stuff in a very enjoyable way.

I was talking with West Texas native Amanda Marcotte last week, and she explained that there's still ranchers out there who take care of their land and do things very differently from the big agribusiness corporations. The yuppie/hippie types whom ranchers might regard as their cultural opposites are buying their organic produce and helping them make a living. I'm pretty much the last person to go to on the demographics of rural America, so I don't know if there are enough of these people to constitute a serious voting bloc, but I'm excited at the prospect of going after the family farmer / rancher vote by offering to change the criteria for farm subsidy payments.

If farmers earned their subsidies through environmentally sensitive farming practices, we'd be in a much better situation. Cheaper organic produce and free range meat probably wouldn't wreak havoc on the Third World farm economy, since those products would still be pretty expensive even after subsidies. In addition, we'd get all the obvious benefits of sustainable agriculture instead of paying farmers to grow way more stuff than they need to. (Replace subsidies for good environmental management with animal welfare laws stipulating that chickens shouldn't be in cages too small for them to turn spread their wings or turn around, and you've got a plan to win the votes of free-range chicken farmers. Sadly, the latter plan is far more politically dubious, as there's a lot of work to do before people are willing to think seriously about the cruelty of factory farming. But maybe in a few decades...)

This probably isn't a voting issue for anyone besides small farmers, environmentalists, and maybe the odd liberal economist, but as a matter of general Democratic positioning it's the kind of thing I'd like to see our party doing. Family farmers are a much more endearing constituency than agribusiness, and people who like to think of themselves as ordinary folks would be attracted to a party that defended the family farmer from big corporations.

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Jim Kolbe's retirement announcement is likely be the first of many. Kolbe's district is nearly a 50-50 district, so the seat immediately becomes a competitive race. Kolbe was something of a "moderate", and he either got tired of having the leadership twist his arm, or saw that his re-election campaign would be more work than he wanted, or otherwise simply wasn't enjoying himself.

Steven M. Teles of the Reality-Based Community has argued that the shifting of political tides has both "demand-side" and "supply-components". Yes, voters' allegiances change (the demand-side), but that's often not enough to explain the changing fortunes of the two parties. But Teles thinks that in addition to this effect, the quality of candidates can depend on the public's view of the two parties. In a political climate where the party (and President) in power are viewed very unfavorably, the unfavorable party has a hard time recruiting quality candidates, and incumbents in moderate districts decide that they don't want to endure a grueling campaign. Meanwhile, members of the out-of-power party smell blood in the water, and their incumbents are more likely to stay in and fight, while more and more challengers decide that "this is the year". Kolbe's retirement lends some credence to this hypothesis, and may signal the start of an avalanche of retirements.

Good point by Daniel Radosh on being a successful freelancer:

what really worked to my advantage is that nobody stays in one job for very long in this business, so if you start out knowing three editors at one magazine, pretty soon you know three editors at three different magazines, plus a new one at the first magazine. And with each move, they get more power to assign stories. My career has been helped immensely by sitting around waiting for people I know to land better jobs.

Actually, I don't really know if that's a good point, as I'm not a successful freelancer, but it certainly seems right. My freelancing jobs have tended to emerge through people who knew me in real life or folks who read my blog, cold-calling never amounted to much. Daniel Radosh, incidentally, was very helpful with a bad idea I had for an article on Garden State, but, mercifully for both our reputations, I never followed up.

The New Republic likes to send out e-mails, allegedly penned by Peretz, previewing what's in this week's issue. The start of their latest, coming as it does straight from "Marty's" mouth, is a classic:

I suppose everybody has feelings about France. I know I do.

Reminds me of Benson from Garden State, the one who'd gotten involved in a pyramid scheme:

I'd like to talk to you... both...about a good opportunity for you and your loved ones. We all have dreams. I know I do! I'd like to talk to you about an exciting opportunity that people are talking about.

I'm going to be taking issue with his post a bit later, but for now, read Brad Plumer on why nationalized health care won't save GM. There is a tendency to overstate the economic benefits of an integrated health care system, and Brad, while veering a bit too far towards the other side, offers a thoughtful corrective. The point that national health care will still have to be payed for is a very good one, and so long as savings from these plans are theoretical (and potentially illusory), we shouldn't be pretending they will magically heal balance sheets and recapitalize businesses. They will have other impacts on our economy's incentive structure that'll be very powerful, and the simple act of spreading costs equitably will prove a massive help for certain overburdened members of society, but I'll deal with all that in my follow-up. For now, read Brad.

Shakes here...

Over at Shakes, we always do a Question of the Day, which usually has something to do with pop culture - Which movie always makes you cry? or Who's your favorite stand-up? - and the other day, we did one that ended up being so fun, I thought I'd share it here, too.

The question is: Which movie title best sums up the Bush administration?  But here's the catch - you've got to replace one word in the title with Bush's name, so you get something like Bush Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Bush Fiction, or Fun With Dick and Bush.

Failing a title that sums up the administration, you are welcome to come up with a more specific reference, like "What I hope for the future: Bush, Interrupted" or "What I wish Laura would do: Punch Drunk Bush."

All right, Kleinians - off you go!

(Today's QotD at Shakes: What song do you wish you'd written?)

Man, bestselling authors of widely respected books on health policy shouldn't be getting this sort of stuff so flagrantly wrong. Particularly when it plays into the right wing's patiently constructed narrative of malpractice crisis. As it happens, not only does Kate have it right that malpractice awards are far larger in other countries than they are here, but we throw out far more malpractice cases than do other systems, the growth in malpractice payments has been a comparatively anemic 5% (while other countries have been above 10%), and the whole racket ends up a paltry .46% of total health care costs (I summarized the study in question here).

Now, there's no doubt that we could use some malpractice reform in this country, but it's a low urgency question of tweaks. The folks who really need to be regulated are insurance companies who, for reasons of undercapitalization, poor decisions, and losses in other areas of revenue have begun torquing doctors to boost the bottom line. That's why there's such enormous regional variations in costs -- because the driving forces are neither patients nor juries, but insurance companies and the individual situations they find themselves in.

Man, wouldn't it be great if the insurer for all this was the non-profit federal government, like it is elsewhere, who has no interest in gouging doctors and worsening care countrywide? But wait, wait, that'd be socialism, and for a variety of totally unexplained reasons, that'd be bad.

Michael Crowley gets all of this exactly right:

Amid last week's mayhem, I didn't see that Congress accepted another pay raise. This isn't a big deal on its face: Annual "cost of living" raises are written into law and must be specifically rejected if Congress doesn't want them to kick in. Quite remarkably, however, the Senate actually did vote last month to defer the $3,100 they had coming to them. At the time, senators waxed eloquent about it was the decent thing to do at a time of budget cuts, the Iraq war and hurricane relief. But evidently the House didn't feel so magnanimous--gas prices are way up, you know!--and the lower chamber ignored the Senate action. The Senate apparently didn't care enough to actually pick a fight with the House over this (or, quite likely, that was the plan all along), so in the end everyone's getting a raise after all.

Question: Why haven't House Democrats, well, shamelessly demagogued this? Given the symbolism of this moment, I'd think they could get some traction. (Not least because, as the AP put it, "Congress helped itself to a $3,100 pay raise on Friday, then postponed work on bills to curb spending on social programs and cut taxes in favor of a two-week vacation" [emphasis added].) Back in the early 1990s Newt Gingrich would have spent a week talking about nothing else. Indeed, Gingrich probably would have dumped a sack of cash on the House floor, or marched around with a plastic pig under his arm, or something--you get the idea. But for all their determined talk about winning back the majority, House Democrats never quite summon up that Gingrichian killer instinct--especially if it means taking actions that could jeopardize their own comfort and security (or, in this case, paychecks).

I'm one who tends to believe, in fact, that we'd be better off paying members of Congress much more than we currently do, but that's a whole different argument. For now, this silly, sneaky game of publicly denying pay raises than quietly reversing the decision just begs for public denunciation, and various Democrats, the ascetic Russ Feingold particularly, should be happily condemning the offenders.

On another note, I rarely miss Newt's venom, but I do occasionally find myself nostalgic for his theatrics. He had this Napoleonic understanding of politics as pageant that was ,in addition to being effective, fairly fun to watch, and Democrats could learn a thing or two from his carnivalesque attitude towards partisan politics.

Not to reveal too much about my JetBlue TV watching habits, but what's up with the overwhelming lack of hotness on this season's Real World? Aside from the one blond girl, the show is devoid of the beauty that generally renders the participant's terrible personalities and towering immaturity vaguely endearing. Without the fine bone structures and catalogue looks, it's just a bunch of childish egotists going to town on each other. It's bizarre to watch -- are the attractive wannabes all applying for The Apprentice or something?

Man, if true, this is pretty unbelievable. Not that I don't want to leave Iraq, but for the Bush administration to manipulate Iraqi officials into manufacturing a call for withdrawal while they assault domestic opponents advocating the very same thing is truly reprehensible.

It was always clear that Bush dashed into Iraq half-cocked, but I wasn't aware he'd started the mission with a wish list. And I don't know whether I should be glad Blair talked him out of it or appalled that Tony kept faith after seeing the nut commanding the armies. Maybe both.

From Joel Stein, one of those oh-so-awesome columnists currently occupying a slot that Bob Scheer could hold:

I know the high cost of energy takes an unfair toll on the poor because it's a much bigger percentage of their income. Those people are always getting screwed: checking account charges, easy-credit rip-offs, hangin' in a chow line. OK, most of what I know about poor people comes from watching "Good Times."

The rest of the article is a try-hard rant on how oil profits are totally tubular and fair, even though they seem a bit evil, just like that Stewie kid from that Family Guy show the young people watch. You know, the little football-headed guy who always wants to take over the world? I should take over the world. How sweet would that be? I'd make cars run on distilled cultural relevance. And trivialities. Definitely trivialities.

But the government should be helping them more directly with aid programs and public transportation. It's not going to help to slap the oil industry with some special end-of-the-year tax, as some propose. Or begging the oil companies to donate to poor people's heating bills, as Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley did. Helping people in need is the government's job, not something we should rely on business for.

No, I don't see any greater connection between taxing windfall profits and funding aid/transportation subsidies than I do between the pre-Ringo Beatles and Ja Rule. I think we should pay for government through a zany get-rich-quick scheme, like the ones that were always on Saved By The Bell. Man, that was a great show. Kelly was hot.

Not to be all uptight and prudish about it, but isn't deploying your online minions to unmask the author of this personals ad a bit fucked up? Granted, the thought of a gay, successful writer who's still invoking his wrestling days makes for funny copy, but outing him seems a bit beyond the pale.

Daniel Froomkin, while ranking the Democratic Party's potential nominees for president (we're only three years away!), makes a good point:

It may be unfair, but I still remember Senator Clinton as the person who trusted Ira Magaziner in the health care debacle. This tends to show the sort of poor judgment of people that we can't afford in a President (although, to be fair, Ira bamboozled a lot of smart people...).

I highlight this because the most recent Esquire, the one featuring a loving, tender profile of the Big Dawg, mentions that Ira Magaziner is now running Bill Clinton's post-presidency policy shop. Now, Ira's no idiot, but was he really so successful during the health care fight that Clinton wants to stake the coming initiatives that'll define his post-presidency on Magaziner's competence? If so, why?

This, to me, reveals more about the Bush administration's mindset and weaknesses than just about anything else we've seen.

Noy has a great line on Jesus is Magic:

Silverman is the deconstructionist as comic -- if Derrida had held court, she would have been his jester.

True enough.  I saw the movie on Friday and found it brilliant in parts, but mediocre overall.  To be fair, some of the movie's best lines were spoiled  by critics and reviewers who couldn't bear to keep the jokes to themselves, but I just didn't find the act able to sustain itself for the duration of the film.  It's well worth a few bucks and you'll definitely get some laughs, but very little of the humor reaches the heights of Pryor, Murphy, Williams, or Izzard. 

Silverman is funny, sure, but her performance is so layered with ironic winks and cool kids cues that, at a certain point, it looks like the real joke is on the audience who thinks they're in on the gag.  Since she's draped in some weird hipster cred, everyone is desperate to puzzle out her meanings and tease out her genius, but I'm not convinced that what the boosters are spending so much mental energy excavating is actually buried there.

Great point by Josh Marshall:

This is one of those media questions
for which there is no real way to provide a concrete answer. But it is
at least worth asking: How many of the stories coming out now under the
very broad heading of botched or manipulated intelligence could have
been reported and written at more or less any time over the last two
years? I suspect the answer is, the great majority of them. 

They're getting written now because the president's poor poll numbers make him a readier target.

It's unfortunate that our political media has devolved into an institution that steadfastly refuses to classify important topics lacking new developments as "news," and has instead decided that its job is informing Americans on what's happened, not about what's happening.  Thus, wehn Bush's poll numbers go down, the media can report on aspects of his presidency that explain the drop, but they can't write those same stories without the justification of a public opinion drift.  We have a decontextualized media sphere, and our civic life suffers for it.  Don't believe me?  Read this.

This article on the viability, environmental impact, and potential utility of Gov. Schweitzer's coal-to-oil plan is interesting stuff.  The basic argument is that we can convert the unbelievable quantities of coal beneath Montana into an oil source for about $35 a barrel, and do so without destroying the environment.  The major downside is that other countries may not deploy the technology necessary to keep the transition clean.  At any rate, ideas like this do promise to make the changeover from oil less disastrous than some have predicted: so long as we have options, we have breathing room.  In any case, interesting, encouraging stuff.

This is pretty cool:

[Sherrod Brown] also made a series of promises, including a pledge to pay for his
own health care out-of-pocket until Congress passed universal coverage.
For the past 13 years, he’s kept that pledge, turning down the
insurance offered to members and purchasing his own, until recently,
when at the cajoling of his wife, he joined her plan.

Not to mention that he probably couldn't afford the premiums anymore.  The graf comes from Chris Hayes's excellent profile of Brown in the latest In These Times.  Well worth the read.  I don't, however, know about this part:

Brown believes his long progressive record will help rather than
hinder. “For 10 years I won in a congressional district that was
slightly Republican,” Brown says. “I think that voters that don’t agree
with me on some issues will still say, ‘Brown’s on my side.’

His district favored Kerry by 12%, Gore by 11%, and the Cook Partisan Index classifies it as Democratic +6.  I don't know how that qualifies as "slightly Republican" rather than "heavily Democratic," but no matter.  At least Brown's winning in it.  For my part, I have an article on the Brown/Hackett race (and what it says about the netroots) in the most recent American Prospect.  My argument is, basically, that the netroots need to start thinking about who they are ideologically rather than simply flocking to who they prefer pugilistically.  If you've got a Prospect subscription, you can read it on the site.  If not, grab it off newstands.

Man, California's future is a bit of a downer:

The scenario is as simple as what unfolded in New Orleans. The
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is below sea level. It is protected by a
network of earthen levees dating to the frontier era, many built by
Chinese laborers following completion of the trans-Sierra railroad.
Through this delta flow the waters of Northern California, which are
channeled southward to the semi-arid reaches of Central and Southern
California via a network of aqueducts and pipelines representing a
multibillion-dollar investment by state and federal government across
75 years of construction.

Ringing the delta is a rich empire
of agriculture and suburban development. Should a magnitude 6.5
earthquake strike the San Francisco Bay Area — almost a certainty by
mid-century, though it could happen today — about 30 major failures can
be expected in the earthen levees.

About 3,000 homes and
85,000 acres of cropland would be submerged. Saltwater from San
Francisco Bay would invade the system, forcing engineers to shut down
the pumps that ship water to Central and Southern California while the
levees were being repaired. This would cut off water to the State Water
Project and the federal Central Valley Project.

Keep in mind that FEMA, a few years back, released a report arguing the three most likely catastrophes in America were terrorism in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and a quake in San Francisco.  Given the uncanny accuracy of their predictions, we're really in a two-down-one-to-go situation.  In other words, we're waiting.  How much sounder a strategy, then, if we spent the time preparing instead.  Maybe Arnold can offer a proposition on that next year.

Brian, over at his excellent (but unpronounceable) new blog, has a good post on last week's Iraq debate.  For those who didn't read it, I squared off with TNR's Adam Kushner on the subject of withdrawal, which I support and he opposes.  The exchange finished on Friday, and now Brian's entering the fray.  Sigh.  Suckas just always gotta step.

The conflict, as it exists now iooks much more like a job for
an extremely muscular peace-keeping body. Much more muscular than, say,
NATO of the UN has ever offered. The growing numbers of dead Iraqis is
a gruesome testament to that, and to the obvious fact that, as Ezra
points out and as Adam shockingly tries to refute, we're not making
things any better anymore. Sorry Adam. This is as progressive as things
are going to get there without a drastic revision to our strategy.[...]

And even if we pull back and nothing changes, or things don't improve enough, or, God forbid, things get worse,
THEN we can get serious about an international action. A real one. And
perhaps, at last, the casualties and the financial and moral cost of
this travesty won't rest entirely on us.

Oh.  Well that's a very good point.  If withdrawal left the region a seething cauldron of internal strife, that'd prove a reality the international community would be compelled to deal with, if for no other reason than regional stability.  It'd be our fault, sure, but everyone's responsibility.  And once we'd attempted an evacuation, there'd no longer be the excuse that our presence is the problem and our absence the simple solution.  Right now, that's a viable hypothesis, as it'll force the Iraqis to stop relying on Americans for their fighting and peacekeeping and begin dealing with each other in a realistic context.  Shi'ites don't want a civil war, Sunnis know they can't win one.  As of now, both sides realize Americans won't let it get out of hand.  If we remove the backup, however, that comfort disappears, and the actors need to choose between a future they know to be hell and a reconciliation they know will be unpleasant.  Forcing them to make that choice will clrafiy the next step considerably.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

One big reason Bush won the last election, and why he can maintain any support for the Iraq War, is his ability to misdescribe the war as an us-versus-some-enemy-we-shouldn't-embolden problem.  This is the frame that allows him to present withdrawal as cowardly and foolish, while continued occupation is the only sensible and courageous move.  The criticism of cutting and running (can someone tell me what the 'cutting' refers to in that expression?) and the "We fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" nonsense depend on this kind of framing.  The criticism of war critics as enemies of America is probably its most sinister expression. 

As far as the future of Iraq is concerned, what we actually have is a how-do-we-get-everybody-to-play-nice problem.  We need to get a bunch of interspersed ethnoreligious groups to put aside their longstanding grievances and see one another as fellow citizens in a democracy.  Given the extent to which the populations are swirled together and the  bloodiness of poorly supervised partitions (several million were killed when Pakistan split from India, and the countries are still often at each others' throats) dividing the country three ways isn't a great answer.  So we've got to find a way for them to live together. 

There's a bunch of reasons why Bush won't openly present plans to deal with the real issue anytime soon.  One of them is that it would require him to take a big loss on a huge rhetorical investment.  As soon as he starts talking with the American public about the various ethnic groups and his plan for getting them to live peacefully together, it becomes clear that the boldness and firmness that he's cultivated a reputation for is not the quality most essential to success.  What you actually need is somebody who can negotiate a complicated deal that will take everybody's interests into account and give them what they want, so they won't cause trouble.  Bush has never presented himself as the guy to do something like this, at least not since 9/11. 

Once you see the Iraq war as a how-do-we-get-everybody-to-play-nice problem, the emotionally charged reasons that Bush offers for staying in Iraq start to melt away.  Running from a dangerous enemy that you should fight is cowardice, but if silly people are damaging their futures by engaging in irrational and vengeful behavior, it's no great vice to wash your hands of them and leave.  Sure, you try to help them work things out, and you protect innocents from mass slaughter.  But when you see that your efforts are becoming unproductive, you're free to go home and let them fend for themselves. 

There's a path here to a Democratic position that resists being spun as defeatism.  The first step is to make Americans aware of the ethnoreligious situation, and make them see that as what it is -- the real Iraq problem.  I doubt that Americans generally see the war this way at present, but it's more pleasant than seeing it as a war that we're losing, so wishful thinking may dispose them to accept our characterization, even if good reasoning doesn't.  Then we can explain to them how a phased withdrawal plan can be used to
reward Sunnis for peaceful participation in the political process,
and prevent Shiites from thinking we'll be their Sunni-beating-stick
for perpetuity. We'll have a good plan for Iraq, while the very terms of the debate will prevent the Republicans from successfully using the unfair tricks often employed against parties who have to argue that we should pull out of a losing war. 

(I'm getting a weird Lakoff feeling as I write this post.  We have to reframe the war in nurturant mommy terms, so the nurturant mommy party can win.  So let's present the Iraqis as kids in the big Arab sandbox who won't share their toys!  And then the stern father types will support withdrawal, because taking care of kids is women's work!)

Bob Schieffer and company invited Donald Rumsfeld on "Face the Nation" this morning, and Rumsfeld was even less smooth than usual. When Elizabeth Bumiller asked him about the administration's attacks on John Murtha, he said, "Oh, goodness. I've been in Australia. I have not followed the tit for tat, who said what."

So, let's see, there's a war going on in one part of the world, and Rummy travels to Australia to talk about Iraq. Australia has troops in Iraq, and they are right to be updated on what's going on, but why is Australia getting more love from Rumsfeld than the United States? And that mission to Australia seemed awfully diplomatic to me. Isn't that sort of trip supposed to be Condoleezza Rice's job?

The Australia trip is important because Rumsfeld has been using it as an excuse to avoid discussing John Murtha's statement that the United States should withdraw from Iraq. He even said, "I haven't seen any of these reports. I've been on an airplane flying back from Australia. I just don't what you're referring to."

Well, aren't you supposed to be briefed before you go on the Sunday morning talk shows? Are any of you people capable of doing your jobs? And what do people caught not doing their jobs do? They get rude:

Oh, come on. I'm not going to get into all of that stuff. Whatever the president said, I--you quoted him. I agree with the president. How's that?

Then he slipped and indicated that he did know something about the firestorm Murtha set off, along with the House troop withdrawal measure: "Well, we have a president who knows that the war is worth fighting. And it is. And I think that the bulk of the Congress reflected that in the vote. You didn't see many people, Republican or Democrats."

The acid positively dripped from Schieffer's voice when he replied: "So you got word on that out there in Australia."

Yes, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, that's not a knife, that's a knife!

Shakes here...

[Note: This is a bit of a deviation from the typical content at Ezra's juke joint, but it's honestly just too good not to share...]

Q: What’s crazier than a shithouse rat?

A: The woman featured in this 6-minute excerpt from Trading Spouses, which is one of the zaniest things I have ever seen! Make sure you watch the entire thing (because there’s a classic dénouement at the end you don’t want to miss).

Hat tip Feministe, which links to an MP3 file, if the one at the above link doesn’t work for you. Image via The Malcontent.

(Crossposted at Shakespeare's Sister.)

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

On October 26, 1965, the military lifted its ban on drafting childless married men.

On July 28, 1966, Dick Cheney's eldest child, Elizabeth Cheney was born. That's nine months and two days after the military lifted its ban. This earned him his fifth deferment from the draft.

I'm not saying that Elizabeth Cheney should feel bad about being conceived in draft avoidance. People get conceived under embarrassing circumstances fairly often, and I'd feel pretty good about my existence preventing my Dad from having to fight in a bad war. I do wonder, though, what draft avoidance sex is like.

Shakes here…

If you happened to be strolling through DC last night and heard a strange sound that could best be described as the howling of rabid wolverines slowly circling the drain of their final fate, it was because the House Republicans were engaging in a fine bit of grandstanding that took them to yet a new low.

It started with Democratic Rep. Jack Murtha’s resolution, which was a page long and, following an explanatory preamble, made the following recommendations:

Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of American in Congress assembled, That:

Section 1. The deployment of United States Forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.

Section 2. A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S. Marines shall be deployed in the region.

Section 3. The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy.

The GOP then entered a revised resolution, which, in fairness, tried to be a page long through the clever use of large-sized fonts, and reduced Murtha’s idea to a mere three lines:

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.

1 Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.

I tuned into C-SPAN to watch the ensuing spectacle. The Dems went understandably apeshit, but the GOP was not to be deterred. Now, watching the House on C-SPAN always provides me with some amusement, as I get a glimpse of all the losers Republicans elect to represent them. (I mean, seriously—what a collection of reprobates.) But yesterday, they were in rare form, with Duncan Hunter doing his best imitation of am outraged human, and Jean Schmidt takng the bloody cake by calling the decorated Marine Murtha a coward. Apparently, donning a putrid stars-n-stripes jumper passes for bravery in her circle.

In the end, though the GOP was trying to force the Dems’ collective hand and force them to vote on their ludicrous mischaracterization of Murtha’s clever proposal, they looked like complete jags. The stunt was nothing more than a further demonstration of their hypocrisy. Sure, they say they support the troops, and accuse anyone, who doesn’t march in lockstep in their bullheadedly determined stay-the-course parade, of not supporting the troops, but everything that spews forth from any of their forked-tongued mouths comes down to one thing—being right about this war is more important than anything else, including soldiers’ arms and legs and eyes and ears and guts and very lives. And they don’t just need to be right about the war itself having been the right thing to do; they also need to be right about how the war is being fought. Even if all evidence points to the contrary, they retain their steadfast belief that the number of troops there now is right, and that they are armored (or not armored) exactly right, and that hanging on indefinitely until some yet-to-be-revealed benchmark is reached is right right right. And anyone who tries to dissuade them is a coward and a traitor.

Murtha’s resolution, as originally proposed, deserves at very least the benefit of deliberate consideration, but the GOP won’t even allow a good-faith debate about the parts and pieces of Murtha’s resolution; these chickenhawk pieces of shit won’t even walk onto the battlefield of ideas.

Instead, they just keep babbling reiterations about supporting the troops. Well, this is how much respect the GOP has for the troops: they’ll not only use them to fight a war of choice halfway around the world, sending them to risk their lives over a pack of bloody lies; they’ll also use them as a shield at home, hiding behind the soldiers they refuse to properly armor, using the troops as a shield to deflect criticism. They cower instead behind ribbons and bumper magnets and lapel pins and small flags on sticks, stubbornly insisting that they are right, and caring none for the consequences if they aren’t.

And here’s the topper: having failed at besting the Dems during yesterday’s spectacle on the floor of the House, the GOP is seeking an ethics probe of Murtha. Shameless gits.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Some say that the Iraq War was fought for oil, but I find it more likely that it was fought for straw. Domestic reserves of the latter product have been severely depleted by Republican construction of straw men since the War on Terror began. The latest straw man provided by Iraq is Republican leaders' attempt to make people misattribute Duncan Hunter's sham withdrawal resolution to John Murtha, who had submitted a very different resolution to Congress. Republican representatives and Redstate hacks tried to pass off the resolution as a Democratic offering from John Murtha. I'm not clear whether people figured out the truth, but my less politically inclined friends were asking me about the withdrawal vote last night, and I was the first to explain to them what was really going on.

As the party in power, it's a lot easier for Republicans to misrepresent Democratic positions than vice versa. Except during Presidential elections, we don't have any national figures to clearly and firmly present our positions. So when the President opposes those who want to "cut and run", it's easy for non-plugged-in people to simply think that the Democratic plan amounts to no more than this.

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper

In the 1970s, disaster movies were all the rage: Earthquake, Flood!, Airport, Airport 1975, Airport '77, The Concorde: Airport 1979, The Poseidon Adventure, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and even Rollercoaster. That last one featured George Segal battling a terrorist who was targeting amusement parks. When the genre got too darn weird, Hollywood retired it for a little while. Disaster movies are great pop-culture entertainment in which audiences can enjoy overripe actors like Karen Black and George Kennedy rescuing the world. "If Karen Black can get that plane down on the ground," the ordinary viewer thinks, "by golly so can I!"

Disaster movies haven't exactly gone away, but the causes of the disasters were less likely (Armageddon, Deep Impact, Independence Day). Now they are back in full force with NBC's miniseries remake of The Poseidon Adventure, starring Steve Guttenberg, Rutger Hauer, and Adam Baldwin - who is apparently not one of the Baldwin brothers, but he'll have to do.

The new Poseidon script has a pertinent twist. This time, a terrorist blows up the luxury liner, as opposed to a tidal wave overtaking the original ship. This remake follows on the heels of another television disaster flick, Category 7: The End of the World with Randy Quaid and Shannen Doherty, and the sequel to 10.5, called 10.5: Apocalypse is in the works.

Movies based on 9/11 don't quite count as "disaster movies" for me because they are based on fact, whereas these movies take an incident that has happened and magnify that incident to a genuinely ludicrous level. Take "Category 7" - Gina Gershon as the head of FEMA? Ridiculous, but definitely awesome.

Why is it that the disastersploitation (one IMDB member called it "disaster porn") genre is making a comeback? We're at yet another bleak time in history, an era similar to the 1970s, in which disaster movies run amok, and it's somehow comforting to see bad situations that could happen, but somehow people manage to overcome them. After Hurricane Katrina, we all could have used a little George Kennedy. Heck, Gina Gershon probably could have done a better job with Katrina than Michael Brown did! But why do you think the B-level disaster flick is making a comeback?

As for me, I am all over that Poseidon remake tomorrow night - because, as I wrote about in the Pepper, the return of Steve Guttenberg is a welcome sight!

I've always wondered about studies that show huge correlations between the price/accessibility of fresh produce and childhood obesity.  Fruits and veggies, after all, don't make you lose weight, they've simply got less caloric density than more heavily processed foods.  But do kids eat enough fruits and veggies to make that matter? 

My guess is not.  This link always struck me as an agenda-pusher.  Low availability of fresh produce dovetails with endemic poverty, which also tends to link arms with lack of space (less outdoor play), unsafe neighborhoods (can't play outdoors), low parental supervision, paltry nutritional education among surrounding adults, and so forth. 

It does, however, highlight one of my hobby horses: being poor is expensive.  Chain stores and large retailers drive down prices on a variety of goods.  But those chains -- Wal-mart included -- don't move into truly poor neighborhoods, there's just not a strong enough market.  So the poor are consigned to quickie-marts and bodegas, all of which have minimal selection with maximum pricing.  There are a thousand similar examples, from loan sharking to high health care costs compared to the insured, but it's just one more area where not having money mandates that you'll have to spend a lot more of it.

What this really proves is that Fox News hates America.

Michael Crowley writes:

He led all three evening news broadcasts, I'm told. One Democrat I
spoke to particularly reveled in the way ABC juxtaposed footage of an
angry Dick Cheney wearing a tuxedo (during his Wednesday night Iraq
speech) and Murtha, who looked and sounded for all the world like an
idyllic awesome-grandpa--the kind of character who would do the right
thing and save the day at the end of an old black-and-white movie. (ABC
even aired an extended excerpt from Murtha's press conference in which
he spoke of trying to get a Purple Heart for a soldier who'd lost his
hands and been blinded. "If you don't give him a Purple Heart," Murtha
recalled saying, as he choked up, "I'll give him one of mine.") In
public relations terms, that's not even a fair fight. And such is the
stuff that shapes public opinion.

Right on.  There's a reason Murtha matters, and it's not just because he's a hawk.  Murtha's a crusty old, blue-collarish Democrat.  He's an everyman: patriotic, plain-spoken, and clear-eyed.  His turn is being used as a synecdoche for the larger shift in American public opinion because, unlike Russ Feingold or Maxine Waters, Murtha fits the weird, specific media conception of an American.

I know I linked to Novick's post on Wyden's tax plan yesterday, but this graf is so important I want to highlight it here:

Right now, a teacher and truck driver making a combined $60,000 pay a
25% tax rate on their last dollar of income (that's not their overall
rate, but the marginal rate; if they get a $1,000 raise, they pay
$250.) But if Paris Hilton or Bill Frist buys and sells some
Halliburton stock for a $100,000 profit, they only pay 15%. And those
are not unfair examples. According to a New York Times article last
year, capital gains and dividends make up, on average, 3 to 4% of the
income of people who make less than $100,000 ... but 24.7% of the
income of those who make between $500,000 and $1 million, 37.6% of the
income of those making between $1 and $10 million, and 61.4%
of the income of those making over $10 million. As a result of
favorable tax treatment for these forms of income, as Pulitzer
prizewinning tax reporter David Cay Johnston has noted, the richest 400
Americans pay a lower Federal tax rate than the merely rich, people making, say, $300,000 a year.

Progressive describes a tax code favoring the poor, regressive a tax code benefitting the rich, but what's the term for a tax code that subsidizes the poor and helps out the rich but screws the working class?

I argued, awhile back, that all in all, Clinton probably did the Democratic Party more harm than good by facilitating the 1994 realignment.  It's possible we would've been better off with four more years of Bush 41's benign stewardship and attention to international institutions than the Gingrich revolution and Clinton scandals.  Who knows.  In any case, as I imply over at Tapped, Republicans may soon be making a similar argument about Bush 43.  Read my post there and then tell me something: could it be better that Kerry lost and the Democratic Party didn't have to take responsibility for all the messes Bush created?

Man, you know you're fighting the good fight when Gov. Ehrlich calls you out by name.  Which is exactly what happened to Tom Schaller when he exposed the tales of Michael Steele's Oreo pelting as fraud.  Watching the GOP's desperate attempts to spin the story into a Class A outrage is not only a worthwhile education in how insignificant offenses and comments get blown into major transgressions and stories but in how those trying to stand in the propaganda's way get assaulted at moments when they can't defend themselves.   Take a look.

Steve Novick has the best analysis I've read of Ron Wyden's new progressive tax plan.  This is the sort of thing liberals, Democrats, and generally good people should really be pushing hard on, so do give his piece a read. As I argued yesterday at Tapped, there's no reason Republicans should dominate on taxes, they win because we don't read up, study up, speak up.  Change that.

WTF?

This is an essential point to realize about the new [Medicare drug] benefit -- if you are eligible and don't sign up, you are charged 1% more every month you don't sign up, for the rest of the time you're enrolled in Medicare part D. That means if you wait a year, you will pay 12% higher than the average plan cost. If premiums rise, so will the amount you're penalized. According to the Chicago Tribune, seniors who wait four years before signing up may end up paying almost 50 percent more for the rest of their lives.

And since the overwhelming majority of seniors(my grandparents included) took one look at the labyrinthine new plan and decided to ignore all future mailings on the subject, once the kinks are worked out and enrollment begins in earnest, they'll be stuck with terrible deals.  Which'll make them not enroll.  Which'll kill the program and require that this punitive measure is eventually lopped off in the more sensible benefit that replaces it.

Sometimes it seems that Republicans have decided our health care system needs massive overhaul and have implemented a sneaky plan to hasten its collapse.  If so, they're doing excellent work.

I think speculation that Kerry might be inching towards a call for impeachment may be right.  Leaks, rumors, and e-mails bursting out of Camp Kerry have underscored that 2004 didn't quelch Kerry's desire to be president, it intensified it.  And his fairly pathetic attempt last week to use Bush's reference of him as proof that he's still the most prominent Democratic voice on Iraq was a sad sight to see, but ti proved that he's aware his profile has sagged.  With Hillary and Biden holding hawkish territory, Feingold getting credit for withdrawal, and Edwards being the forthright, error-of-our-ways candidate, Kerry's got no interesting ground to occupy on the subject.  Hinting at impeachment and talking about administration criminality may give him the buzz he so desperately wants.  It won't be good buzz, but it'll be buzz. 

Via Unfogged comes the depressing news that oral sex, through the transmission of HPV, can cause mouth cancer.  Nasty stuff.  But this should be a near-moot issue.  We have developed a fully effective, perfectly safe vaccine for HPV -- unless it mutates, this should be an extinct affliction.  Actually, let me qualify that, unless it mutates, or unless the Christian Right gets their way.  Because James Dobson and Jerry Falwell and all the other knuckle-dragging soul savers (just send $$$) have launched a crusade to keep the medicine from market.  The rationale?  A lower likelihood of cervical cancer will transform their sweet, demure, submissive girl children into raging sex maniacs.  I'm not kidding.  So where most doctors would like to include the injection in the standard raft of shots girls get before puberty, the Christian Right would like to use cancer to control female behavior once girls hit puberty. 

Of course, under Robertson's rubric,  all God-fearing cheeseburger lovers should swear off cardiovascular surgeries.  Gluttony, after all, is a sin.  And judging from Falwell's jowls, he's got some repenting to do.  But if we just hand out statins and angioplasties to all these culinary transgressors, what sort of message are we sending?  Heart attacks, after all, are the punishment for gluttony, and we shouldn't let modern medicine get in the way of that.  But what do you want to bet that when the first bolt of lightning lances across Falwell's chest, he'll be enjoying the world's best medical care quicker than you can say the Lord's Prayer? 

This isn't, of course, the first time the Christian Right has decided health disasters or unwanted bodily outcomes are god's way of telling women to keep their sinful legs crossed.  The debate over perfectly safe, next-day contraception was won by conservatives despite science's bitter protestations, as yesterday's GAO report detailed.  And that's over a medication that's merely an increased dose of currently available birth control pills (hell, Planned Parenthood has a list of how to judge the dosage  when using the birth control pills you already have -- Plan B is simply easier). 

The Christian Right has shown no ability to end intercourse, oral sex, or pregnancy.  All they've been able to do is make the consequences more punitive and the involved more miserable.  Meanwhile, a thousand other sinful health choices ravage the religious community all day every day, but not a word, not an utterance, not a dollar is spent to ensure the gluttons and daredevils and Type A personalities have to endure the biological consequences of their transgressions.  Somehow, that hypocrisy strikes me as much more sinful than a high school seniors sexual dalliance.

(Cross-posted from Tapped so you folks can comment.)

This column by The Washington Post's Steve Pearlstein is just inescapably bizarre. It's one of those depressingly predictable missives on how the Democratic Party is missing a major opportunity by not grinding their boot heels into the foreheads of their constituents, an act which, according to the author, would be both virtuous and politically savvy. It's win-win, so long as you're not a low-income constituent. In this case, the question concerns heightened premiums, deductibles, and copays for Medicaid, which Democrats oppose and Pearlstein somehow thinks they'd get widespread props for supporting.

Rather than falling back into the political set-piece of defending the status quo and demonizing Republicans for another round heartless budget and tax cuts, Democrats might have used the opportunity to change the terms of the debate. With the governors at their side, they could have pushed Congress to take the next step in transforming Medicaid from an entitlement program for the poor into a means-tested health insurer of last resort for all Americans.

A means-tested program pretty much is an entitlement program; it's just got a different name. And God only knows why government should want to run an insurer of last resort. That's gonna be quite a fiscal dream: a mopping-up operation for Americans too sick and disabled for other insurers.

If Pearlstein wants the government to run a means-tested insurance program, he should recommend exactly what the majority of left-of-center pundits, think-tankers, and politicans already advocate: expand FEHBP, the program that currently insures nine million government employees and uses community rating (which means everyone, no matter their health issues, gets charged the same premiums, so nobody is priced out), by opening it to small businesses and individuals. Easy, right? But since Pearlstein wants to really shift the debate, let's take it further.

Kill Medicaid and means-test subsidized access to FEHBP. Once that's done, turn the program into a model for the nation, reorienting it towards a pay-for-performance (and particularly improvement) structure with varying compensation for varying groups, thus making currently untouchable subgroups profitable for participating insurers.

In addition, kill the current system of perversely incentivized insurance by imposing a new regulation/incentive structure on FEHBP insurers. End the fee-for-service structure and its attendant overvaluation of labor and technology-intensive medicine by coupling the FEHBP expansion with the creation of a new national board for health care research and standards (run by the NAS and heavily insulated from lawmakers) that would rank treatments by value, standardize their use, and run comparative research (particularly on me-too pharmaceuticals). The incentive structure shouldn't simply encourage treatment, it should encourage valuable treatments.

Further, create a VA-style IT infrastructure to increase efficiency and quality of care. Use the program's massive size to bargain down the cost of pharmaceuticals -- way down. And don't let the profits get recouped on the uninsured; mandate insurance, as everybody now has a community-rated insurer to use and the poor can be subsidized -- there are no excuses left. Then, once this quasi-national health system is running parallel to the patchwork of private insurers, let Americans make their own choice on what looks most attractive. Let the new FEHBP and the old system compete and see which consumers prefer.

Oh, and you know what else would change the debate? If pundits like Pearlstein would spend their columns publicizing the many plans that are close to this one. Rhode Island Representative Jim Langevin, the Center for American Progress, The Century Foundation, and the New America Foundation are all pushing similar ideas, but the debate remains unchanged because the punditocracy refuses to write about them, preferring to offer superficial, high-minded carping on individual votes. Just like Pearlstein did here.

So you think Congress is ever going to get tired of being lied to and marginalized by this administration or, at this point, have they grown to kinda like it?

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.

In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate "to my knowledge," and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know.[...]

The task force's activities attracted complaints from environmentalists, who said they were shut out of the task force discussions while corporate interests were present. The meetings were held in secret and the White House refused to release a list of participants. The task force was made up primarily of Cabinet-level officials. Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club unsuccessfully sued to obtain the records.

Ouch.  And it really calls this act, highlighted for weirdness on The Daily Show but now looking much more sinister, into question:

The executives were not under oath when they testified, so they are not vulnerable to charges of perjury; committee Democrats had protested the decision by Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) not to swear in the executives. But a person can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for making "any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation" to Congress.

It was always odd that Stevens had loudly rejected attempts to make his witnesses not lie to his committee.  At the time, it just looked like a play for campaign donations, now it looks like complicity in their attempts to mislead.  Stevens, the oil execs, and Cheney all have some 'splaining to do.

It's always cool to get e-mail from readers, particularly when it lets on what a smart, talented bunch you are.  And today's note from  Melody, linking me to a column she did at The Daily Penn, is no exception.  An excerpt from her piece, which envisions superagent Drew Rosenhaus, last seen with Terrell Owens, taking on Samuel Alito.  It's funny stuff:

"Well," he said. "Not exactly. Basically, I've been doing a lot of thinking about what's going on with T.O. these days. Consider the following: He's spent a lot of time warming the bench lately. He has a lot of experience with contracts. He's quite familiar with large checks and balances, as well as oral arguments. And many of his decisions are without precedent."

"What's that have to do with new projects, Drew?" I asked, baffled.

"I'm changing teams, Mel," he said. "The more I thought about T.O., the more I realized that I want to represent the Supreme Court nominees instead of football players.

In me-based news, I'll be debating The New Republic's Adam Kushner this week on withdrawal from Iraq.  He's agin' it, I'm for.  The fight is over at Campus Progress, so check there for updates.

It's taken me awhile to write this post because, well, the topic is just so sad.  But I'm going to try:

Bashing Sarbanes-Oxley, the law Congress passed to rein in corporate-accounting abuses, is popular locker-room banter among executives. But it has gotten out of hand.

On Sunday, Georgia-Pacific Chief Executive A.D. "Pete" Correll suggested avoiding the law was a reason to sell his company to privately held Koch Industries. "You get used to spending your shareholders money" on the law's provisions, he told reporters. "But that doesn't make it right."

That terrible old Sarbanes-Oxley, "Pete"  doesn't even enjoy his job anymore!  Everyday, he trudges to work, sure that proving his company isn't a complex money-laundering scheme is a betrayal of those stockholders who'd lose everything if it was.  The burden has grown so great that he's had to surround his name with quotation marks!  This corporate McCarthysim has simply gone too far.

A recent study by Foley & Lardner LLP found that all the costs associated with being a big public company averaged $14.3 million last year. That was up 45% from the year before, due largely to the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley. But for a company like Georgia-Pacific, it's still not that big a number.

It's substantially less, for instance, than Mr. Correll himself stands to make from the 1.75 million shares of Georgia-Pacific stock and options issued to him by the company as of March 1 and now valued at $48 a share. (That's shareholder money, too, Pete.) And it can't even begin to explain why Koch is willing to pay a premium of nearly $4 billion above market value to take Georgia-Pacific private.

Well, it's always darkest before the dawn, and the inky blackness brought down by Sarbanes-Oxley resists easy illumination -- thank god a philanthropic enterprise like Koch is willing to step in and save the day.  They're like the Make A Wish foundation for white guys with lear jets!  Three cheers for Koch!

Hopefully there'll come a day when "Pete", in all his wisdom, wealth, and anti-regulatory fervor, is able to once again trust that shareholders would prefer a few million spent to ensure against a second Enron.  But if not, we'll know who to blame.  The government, and all those minority democRATS hell bent on persecuting innocent plutocrats. 

If Paul Bloom (and the sociologists he quotes)  is right on this, the battle lines in American politics are very strangely drawn:

the religious divide between Americans and Europeans may be smaller than we think. The sociologists Rodney Stark, of Baylor University, and Roger Finke, of Pennsylvania State University, write that the big difference has to do with church attendance, which really is much lower in Europe. (Building on the work of the Chicago-based sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley, they argue that this is because the United States has a rigorously free religious market, in which churches actively vie for parishioners and constantly improve their product, whereas European churches are often under state control and, like many government monopolies, have become inefficient.)

So if Bill O'Reilly, James Dobson, and friends get their way and bust through the wall (which is really more of a hedge these days) separating church and state, the result will be an ossified, dumb religious movement that robs the Christian Right of its political power?  Man, I sure see why Republicans are supporting and Democrats are opposing that.

To be fair, I'm simplifying the situation a bit.  Arrangements would have to be made to ensure that evangelicals got the official state nod, which might be tricky considering the impending Catholic dominance of the Supreme Court.  On the bright side, the added work would have the side benefit of breaking up the various odd marriages of ideological convenience currently papering over historical intrareligion tensions and creating a (mostly) unified Christian Right.   

It's gotten no mention today, but the newly-released USA Today poll marks the first time in the poll's history -- and maybe in any poll's history -- that a plurality of Americans have disapproved of the way Bush is handling terrorism. 

As I've argued in the past, numbers on terrorism, since the issue is necessarily out of sight, are a direct reflection of certain characteristics voters either do or do not perceive in the president.  Strength, decisiveness, competence -- all they can do is evaluate how personally able he appears.  And it seems that perceptions on that front are changing, even in Bush's perennial bastions of personal strength.  If he can't rely on terrorism and toughness, he can't rely on anything at all.

THe WSJ has an excellent expose today (I really do encourage you to read the whole thing -- this is what newspaper journalism should be) on "orphan" drugs, treatments for rare and specialized conditions that, in order to spur their development, are given absolute monopoly status once on the market.  Here's how it works and what happens:

Henry Blair had been making an experimental enzyme under government contracts while he was a researcher at Tufts University School of Medicine. The enzyme was developed by scientists at the National Institutes of Health as a treatment for Gaucher disease, a rare, sometimes fatal, condition that causes certain organs to swell and bones to deteriorate.

In 1981, when Mr. Blair co-founded Genzyme, the government transferred the contract to make the enzyme to his new company. At first, the experimental treatment didn't seem to have much commercial potential because of the small market. Before the Orphan Drug Act, investors' "eyes would roll back in their heads when I said there were, maybe, 4,000 patients" in the U.S. with Gaucher disease, he says.

Genzyme hired Henri Termeer from a company that sold a $50,000-a-year product for hemophiliacs. Mr. Termeer envisioned an even higher price for the Gaucher drug. "I never dreamed we could charge that much," says Mr. Blair, who remains on Genzyme's board and is chief executive of another biotech firm developing an orphan drug.

In 1991, Genzyme brought the treatment to market, charging an average price of $200,000 a year per patient.

Genzyme explained the price by noting how difficult it was to produce: Originally, it took enzyme from 22,000 human placentas to make enough medicine to treat one adult patient each year. The company also gave the drug free to certain patients.

Still, the cost was so high that in 1992, the federal Office of Technology Assessment, conducted an investigation into the development of the drug. The report estimated Genzyme spent $29.4 million to develop the drug. It said much of the initial research was done by scientists at the NIH and paid for by the government.

The report said the company loses money on each unit given free but makes far more by charging insurers the full price. Genzyme may have experienced more "resistance to the pricing among patient advocates" if it weren't for the free drug program, the report said. No major legislative change resulted after the report, and the cost of the drug remained the same.

So the taxpayers fund much of the devlopment, the pharmaceutical company brings a drug to market, and the law allows for an absolute monopoly that lets Pharma charge whatever they want.  And, as the CEO admits a moment later, since insurance is paying anyway, what's the difference between $200,000 and $175,000?

Insurers, predictably, are rapidly dropping coverage for these treatments and patients, of course, can't afford them on their own.  Soon, these orphan drugs really will be orphans, to everybody's detriment.

The Wall Street Journal has a crucial poll today: do you think modern video games are as fun as those from 20 years ago?  I'm going to assume they don't literally mean 20 years, and are instead asking about the NES, SNES, and Genesis vs. the Playstation, N64, and X-BOx 360.  2d vs. 3d.  And I'll have to say that no, I don't think modern games hold a candle to the glory days of the SNES.  How do you folks feel?

In The New Republic, Alexandra Starr has found a worrisome trend taking place in Japan, a monstrous activity formerly seen only in particularly disturbed fiction:

I personally suspected something was amiss after Cruise's pitch-perfect performance as a sexist self-help guru in the 1999 movie Magnolia. Cruise's character conducts seminars instructing men in the niceties of manipulating women; he begins his lecture with, "Respect the cock." The entire film dabbles in the absurd, but, when I was in Japan last winter, I discovered the concept of a seduction school isn't pure fiction.

She didn't have to go all the way to Japan.  Resting at #23 on the New York Times bestseller list is Neil Strauss's The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists.  The book is all about, you guessed it, guys who teach seminars full of men how to effectively pick up and seduce women, among them Ross Jeffries, a sort of seduction-oriented hypnotist who Tom Cruise's character was based on.  And neither is it hidden or little-read: it's been reviewed in most of the nation's major newspapers, merited time on The View and Nightline, and hit with surprising cultural impact upon release.

What Starr found in Japan is similar to what I took from the book -- insecure guys who need help talking to women go and get trained in how to do it.  While there's something objectionable about it on the surface, I've not been able to construct any sort of convincing argument for why shy guys should be consigned to perpetual lonesomeness.  There's a cultural belief that connection and progression should happen organically, by kismat, but that really just marginalizes the guys unlucky enough to lack a charismatic father, confident brother, or socially adept friend to learn from. 

As Starr found, these seminars don't attract predators, they're more a magnet for the harmless -- the most helpless of "the nice guys" (in the book, Strauss reveals the subculture's name for these dudes: AFC's, or average frustrated chumps, a verdict that was well-echoed in the blogosphere's conversation on them a few months back).  But unlike in her article, this isn't some isolated phenomena restricted to meek Asian men, it's here, too, and my guess is you'll in fact find it wherever men are sold.  Biologically and culturally, nothing receives more emphasis than love (or at least sex).  The idea that there should be classes for astrophysics but not for romance is, I think, a bit wrongheaded.

Now there's a way to look at it.  Maybe the first testable hypothesis of Intelligent Design is whether or not God lays the smack down on the good citizens of Dover.

Well this is positive news:

After marathon all-night negotiations, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced a comprehensive agreement between the Israeli and the Palestinian governments Tuesday designed to ease the Gaza Strip's isolation by allowing more reliable access for its goods and people to Israel and the outside world.

The deal sets out the terms of operation for Gaza border crossings used to move cargo and people, resolving a deadlock that has frustrated a team of international negotiators for weeks. It also establishes a system of bus convoys to shuttle Palestinians between Gaza and the West Bank, the two territorial components of what is envisioned as a future Palestinian state.

The agreement allows the Palestinians to begin work on Gaza's seaport, and assures donors that Israel will not interfere with its operation. It leaves unclear when the port would open and under what guidelines, but work to get it up and running will take at least three years, Palestinian officials said. The deal says discussions on renovating and reopening Gaza's international airport will continue.

Bush certainly won't be the first leader to glance at an unfriendly domestic landscape and decide it's time to make peace in the Middle East.  But so long as he's pursuing genuinely worthwhile advances like this one -- Palestinian economic development is critical to any sort of long-term stability -- I'm all for supporting his new hobby.

Big news today.  Kate Steadman has ditched blogger and gone pro.  She's now a proud Typepad user with a clean template, and you should all go read, support, and bookmark her.  As background, Kate deserves full credit (or total blame) for getting me into health policy, and no small portion of what appears on the topic here found its start in conversations with her.  Now you can go read at the source.  Her new blog is focused on the subject, and will, like her old blog, get deeper into the topic than I generally do here.  You kids are going to learn so much!  So go read.  One day, when you're older, smarter, and finally able to understand Medicare Part D, you're going to thank me for bugging you to bookmark (or, if you're techier, syndicate) her.

Off you go.

The art and animation of the new Boondocks show have been really impressive (and alliterative!) thus far. The series itself has been a bit of a disappointment to me, but no arguing about how mind-blowingly well drawn it is.

Graham Walker, a Stanford Med student and the proprietor of Over My Med Body, has the best introduction to Medicare Part D that I've yet seen. The money quote?

Seniors are completely confused by this Medicare Part D. (And if you’re even still reading, aren’t you too?) It’s almost to the point that Jeff Foxworthy could do his redneck routine: “If you’re 65 and have recently pulled out your last remaining hairs, you might have Medicare Part D.”

Read the whole thing.

Farhad Manjoo's evisceration of Mark Crispin Miller's Fooled Again is today's must-read, particularly for all of you who still believe the election stolen.  Check it out.

Lines that should set off your "I'm getting old" alarm:

Many kids now consider it as nothing more than a social convention, a mark of popularity, a sign of sexual liberation and a pleasant way to pass the time in the back of the bus on the way to school.

I had my share of fun in high school, but most kids don't even take the bus, much less resort to blowjobs as a way to pass the time in traffic.  Forget decency, potholes and speedbumps make it physically risky.

It's fine to inveigh against the epidemic of oral and, for that matter, anal, sweeping the nation.  As you wish.  But even the most popular kids in school don't get naked in homeroom or regularly pleasured on the bus.  Just as in other time periods, boys and girls spend their time scheming how to get laid, most of them fail most of the time, a couple succeed, and the world keeps spinning.  Condemn all you want, but these sorts of overstatements just make the 99.999% of high schoolers not participating in the x-rated edition of Schoolhouse Rock feel inadequate.  Lay off, their self esteem is bad enough already!

Much has been made of John Edwards' "I Was Wrong" editorial in this weekend's Washington Post.  Since you've no doubt seen the man's mea culpa, I'll constrain my comments to the obvious: this was the right move, both morally and politically.

More interesting, at least to me, is this profile on Edwards from The Nation.  Remember, Edwards didn't start out a populist liberal, he was Burce Reed's guy, the second coming of the DLC Democrat.  It was only midway through the campaign, and particularly after it, that Edwards found his footing in poverty and domestic policy.  As someone in the piece put it, the closest analogy is RFK, who began as an unfocused striver and evolved into a man consumed with econmic despair:

Edwards steadfastly declines to revisit the last campaign. "If you don't mind," he says, "I'd rather talk about the future." But as he touts his antipoverty crusade and dissects the morass Democrats find themselves mired in, it is clear that Edwards has done some hard thinking about the lessons of 2004--and about the political opportunity that presented itself in the terrible wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Lesson One: Stop thinking small. "I think in our effort to be elected, we've become minimalists, tinkering around the edges--Our tax cut is better than yours, or, We'll give you smaller class sizes," he says. "That's not what the country wants. We've got to give the American people something big and important to be unified by. Republicans use big things to divide America. I think we can use big things to unite America."

The test, of course, will be how big Edwards really does think.  I've not seen much that's paradigm changing on the policy front, but that doesn't mean it's not in the pipeline.  And god knows the Democrats need to try running another unabashed populist again.  I don't know that the strategy works, but it certainly deserves a shot.  RFK won both Blacks and Wallace voters, boldfaced populism can create powerful and unexpected coalitions.  Speaking of which:

Edwards has a leg up in a survey that may mean more. According to a Pew Center poll released in late October, his favorability rating among Democrats not only bests Hillary's, 68 to 59 percent, but even that of the original Clinton, Bill, who stands at 64. And while John Kerry's unfavorable rating is a sad 48 percent among the Democrats who just last year nominated him for President, Edwards's "unfavorable" is easily the lowest, at 32--and the survey showed he's the best liked, and least loathed, among Republicans and independents, too.

That is, I think, a double-edged sword.  Edwards is broadly liked but not, I think, much-loved.  Like in 2004, he runs the risk of being everybody's second or third choice, a good strategy if the country used Instant Runoff Voting, but not necessarily a winner as is.  If he becomes the Big Think Democrat, though, the only one to propose major new social programs and take the party's philosophy to its logical extension, that may rapidly change.  Now that he's dispensed with Iraq, he can use the credibility of being last year's VP nominee to mainstream an agenda that's been out of fashion since Clinton.  That, at the least, would make me love him. 

Well, this should pretty much end debate on Alito's true leanings:

Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, wrote that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion" in a 1985 document obtained by The Washington Times.

"I personally believe very strongly" in this legal position, Mr. Alito wrote on his application to become deputy assistant to Attorney General Edwin I. Meese III.[...]

"It has been an honor and source of personal satisfaction for me to serve in the office of the Solicitor General during President Reagan's administration and to help to advance legal positions in which I personally believe very strongly," he wrote.

"I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."

Imagine how much prouder he'll be to take up those fights from the Supreme Court.

This, I think we can all agree, is very good news:

New vaccine technologies are emerging that offer a fresh chance to devise a strategy against smallpox, the most fearsome potential weapon in the bioterror arsenal.

Two companies are reporting rapid progress in developing a new vaccine designed to be safer than the standard one, and a third company, with no government support, is developing yet another new vaccine. That vaccine could offer significant advantages if terrorists were to unleash the smallpox germ in several cities at once, requiring the vaccination of huge numbers of people.

The government stumbled badly in its campaign after Sept. 11, 2001, to vaccinate health care workers who would respond to a smallpox attack. It has since spent millions to fund development of a new, safer vaccine and has already decided to order enough to protect at least 10 million people. It could buy far more if money becomes available.

A smallpox attack is right up there with nuclear assault on the list of doomsday scenarios for the country.  Buying up stock of the safer, more usable vaccine is exactly what money should be available for.  While I. like every red-blooded American, just looove my tax cuts, obsolete military weaponry, bridges to nowhere, corporate subsidies, and abstinence only sex ed, I would really, really appreciate it if the government could shift around some of that cash to snag me a hit of that safe and effective smallpox vaccine that's kicking around.  I know, I know, it's a lot to ask at a time when the GOP is being unfairly obstructed in their quest to cut another $70 billion in taxes (not to mention their righteous mission to eliminate the estate tax!), but I'm difficult like that.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Being an enormous John Edwards fan, I've long awaited the day when he would come out and say that his Iraq vote was a mistake. It was one of the things I wanted to ask him about when I met him, but I decided to ask about health care and global poverty instead. So you can imagine that I'm thrilled to see his op-ed expressing exactly that sentiment in the Washington Post.

I'm quite happy with the content of the op-ed itself. It begins with a straightforward "I was wrong" and blames bad WMD intelligence for his vote. I regard his quasi-explanation of why he didn’t speak out against the war before – “It has been hard to say these words because those who didn't make a mistake -- the men and women of our armed forces and their families -- have performed heroically and paid a dear price” – as bullshit, but it’s the kind of sterilized bullshit that doesn’t pollute the rivers and makes decent fertilizer.

Two things in the article were particularly good to see. Edwards makes exactly the point I was hoping for in my old Ask A Werewolf column: The Iraq War has made us more vulnerable to terrorism. (The recent bombings in Jordan, carried out by Zarqawi and Iraqi terrorists, are a perfect example.) Pushing this point, as much as anything else we can do, will destroy the Republican Party's undeserved national security reputation. Edwards gets into the action:

Because of these failures, Iraq is a mess and has become a far greater threat than it ever was. It is now a haven for terrorists, and our presence there is draining the goodwill our country once enjoyed, diminishing our global standing. It has made fighting the global war against terrorist organizations more difficult, not less.

There’s also a bold call for phased withdrawal in there, justified in terms of building a better Iraq – “We've reached the point where the large number of our troops in Iraq hurts, not helps, our goals. Therefore, early next year, after the Iraqi elections, when a new government has been created, we should begin redeployment of a significant number of troops out of Iraq.” Doing the withdrawal after elections is a good move -- we leave from a position of relative strength, and at that point the future of Iraq will be firmly in Iraqis' hands and out of ours. I’d love to see Edwards explain to America how a plan for withdrawal could be used to motivate various Iraqi factions to live together in a stable government. Clearly explaining nitty-gritty foreign policy matters to America would be a great way to make him look stronger on national security and dispel any misperceptions of him as a lightweight.

There's a nice symbiosis between deceived Dems like Edwards and Kerry on the one hand, and people looking into misleading intelligence on the other. When the investigators point to pre-war declassified versions of intelligence documents that made Iraq look much more dangerous than the classified versions which were not widely circulated, it gives deceived Dems a nice opportunity to officially recant their old positions and talk about how they were misled into voting for war. When Senators complain about how they were deceived, this in turn fuels the push for a thorough investigation. Edwards boosterism makes me almost wish that more Senators wouldn’t get caught up in this virtuous cycle – the more candidates fighting over the roughly three dozen pro-war Democrats who will remain in 2008, the more candidates who won’t be able to block his path to victory. But the sheer political dumbness of staying pro-war and the easy opportunities for recantation provided by the WMD investigation will probably crowd the anti-war field by 2008.

There's going to be plenty of parades for Edwards to march in front of over the next couple months, and I really hope he takes the opportunity. The antiwar movement is bottom-heavy, and lots of people are just looking for some Democrat to stand behind. The sooner Edwards becomes that Democrat, or at least one of those Democrats, the better positioned he'll be for 2008.

By Ezra

Granted, the whole "if feminists get their way, who'll open doors for women!?" argument is riding the short bus from the very start and I should probably leave it alone, but one thing I've always wondered: I hold open the door for a lot of dudes. In fact, I basically hold open the door for anyone entering it less than five feet behind me. Now, that may be because the enormous power rippling out from my pectoral muscles and bulging forth in my biceps simply demands physical labor, but how would that change if women were equal? I'm clearly holding the door out of some odd motivation internal to me, not a deep-seated belief in womanly wimpitude. And do I unknowingly believe other men inferior? Is what the world needs now a masculinism movement to heal unequal power perceptions within the male community?

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper

Like Neil, I'd like to consider focusing more on individuals in the schools. In Newsweek's remembrance of Rosa Parks, Ellis Cose writes,

In the newly published "The Shame of the Nation," Jonathan Kozol sheds a book's length of tears over segregation in schools. He cites research that shows segregation is worsening and notes that three fourths of black and Latino children attend schools with no or relatively few whites. It is a daunting task to convince poor, minority kids they can learn "when they are cordoned off by a society that isn't sure they really can," writes Kozol.

Ezra has covered this topic before, but the questions are worth asking again and again. Is this what the civil-rights movement was for? Fighting against segregation just so it can happen again? It is hard to find opportunity in public schools, harder than ever. The wealthier and whiter families are in the suburbs, where their property taxes go to fund nicer schools.

Don't kid yourself that this is an inner-city problem, either. Rural schools are equally hard hit. Even if it is a mostly white region, you'll see the differences along class lines. We are now in an America where birth and blood mean a lot in terms of how far you will go in life, and that fact doesn't seem American to me.

The schools must be desegregated - racially and economically - so the United States, where everyone should be able to move up in society, doesn't devolve into a caste system (if it hasn't already). How can we be a United States when most of us don't know anything about, to borrow the title of Jacob Riis' book, How the Other Half Lives?

Salon has an interview with Kozol that offers some suggestions on how to solve this problem. I recommend sitting through the commercial and reading the whole piece. I'll excerpt the last lines:

We have a meritocracy in the U.S. but it's increasingly a hereditary meritocracy in which the lines are both lines of class and of race. I didn't write this book simply to provoke another incestuous and interesting debate among inert liberals. I wrote this book to ask my liberal friends to get up off their asses and deal with an injustice which is right before their eyes. There are too many books about the heroic struggles of the 1960s and the courage people showed then. Those books exempt us from summoning up the courage we need to face the injustices from which we still benefit today.

So what do we do to desegregate schools - again? Is it time to start talking about busing seriously? Or would that be too painful to discuss? What happened to Katrina, and what's happening in France is forcing us to talk about it. Is it time to start talking about Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education again? I say yes, we're at the point where it's time to start busing. I don't think schools in lower-income districts will get the money they deserve until parents in higher-income areas have to send their kids over there. Most parents worry about their own kids, and if they worry that their kid will go to a "bad" school, then they might start caring about how other people's kids are educated.

PS - I read about Wake County, but surely it isn't the only place in that nation that has tried this. Anywhere else?

Shakes here…

What’s my progressivism? It’s being pro-choice.

Pro-choice is a phrase most closely associated with abortion, but the belief in giving people choices is really the core of a progressive philosophy, and when I’m asked what I would do to shift power from the corporation to the individual, the employer to the employee, my immediate response is to give workers choices—and in so doing, return to their hands a little bit more of the much-touted freedom that politicians are always talking about.

1. Being dependent on one’s employment for healthcare is no kind of choice, particularly when extended illness legally allows an employer to terminate one’s employment—thereby also terminating one’s healthcare benefits, further exposing an already vulnerable person to further financial and physical distress.  Universal healthcare, on the other hand, opens up a world of choice for workers; not only will employment decisions cease to be contingent upon healthcare coverage, but entrepreneurship becomes less risky and ergo more attractive.

2. Compensation reform is also desperately necessary—a livable minimum wage, restructuring and expansion of overtime categories, mandatory minimum severance for no-fault terminations, job security in case of illness or family emergency, and family leave guarantees.  The lack of these protections is causing nothing less than the chronic abuse and exploitation of American workers, as they have assumed all the responsibility for their continued employment, in spite of a myriad of external circumstances they can’t possibly control.  The conventional wisdom, even among many liberals, is that such responsibility isn’t meant to be shared; that’s what a paycheck is for.  But that isn’t what a paycheck is for—a paycheck is for services rendered.  When an employer and an employee enter into a contract together, the responsibility of making sure both parties are secure in that contract ought to be shared by both parties.  I know that sounds wacky to most Americans, but that’s because we made a devil’s bargain for the fattest possible paychecks instead of the most secure jobs, and now the majority of workers has ended up with neither.

3. Close corporate tax loopholes.  Duh.  But, I’m pro-choice across the board…so how about offering tax incentives to corporations who adopt worker-friendly policies like flex-time, comp-time, tuition reimbursement, etc.?  How about an incentive for corporations who start each employee with four weeks of vacation, bringing us in line with most of the rest of the world?  Don’t laugh—this is my best progressive policy suggestion.  You see, American workers travel abroad much less than any other first-world workers—and a big part of the reason is lack of vacation time, which we end up using for sick days, the-kids-are-sick days, gotta-take-the-car-into-the-shop days, go-to-the-dentist days, and all that other stuff, because we don’t have proper allowances for such things, and we’ve got less vacation time than anyone else to start.  By the time we get around to taking a vacation, a long weekend on the coast is about all we can do with the time we’ve got left.  (And that's only those who have vacation time as a benefit.)  But the thing is—Americans who do travel abroad (the infamous 17% or so that have passports) are inevitably more progressive than is the general population.  They’re more open as a group to concepts like universal healthcare and family leave than is the general population.  Seeing the world opens eyes.  Give people the choice to explore the world, and they’ll choose progress at home.

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I hate to step on the "New Progressivism" salon, but I've spent the last hour or so putting together a spiffy map of this week's election in Virginia, and I'm sure as heck not going to let it go to waste at this point:

This map shows that the Kaine Kilgore election represents a midpoint between the '96 vintage Clinton urban-suburban coalition and the modern Mark Warner/Paul Hackett urban-rural-smalltown coalition. Not pictured are Kaine's small but noticeable improvements in many small towns throughout Virgina: places like Williamsburg, Staunton, Lexington, Waynesboro, and Danville all showed small blue-tinted shifts in their partisan alignment.

The good news is that the Kaine campaign was able to significantly increase Partisan alignment in major Democratic enclaves; Richmond, Charlottesville, and suburban Fairfax and Arlington all showed increased Democratic performance. The great news is that Kaine was able make solid gains in suburban and exurban Virginia; three populous and fast-growing counties within a 70 mile radius of DC flipped from red to blue.

Kaine's remaining gains were limited to a slight increase in Democratic performance in the metro areas of Norfolk, Newport News, and Virginia Beach, plus aforementioned boost in the states' small towns. Places like Virginia Beach and Staunton flipped from red to blue, while the campaign held down the margin of defeat in the outer DC exurbs.

The bad news is easy to spot: Kaine lost most of Mark Warner's mojo in Southwest Virginia. Now, Jerry Kilgore is from Gate City, along the Tennessee-Virginia Border, so to some extent this outcome was expected. And despite the loss in support, Democrats managed to win a few rural counties here and there:

Still, Kaine will have to work hard to consolidate Democratic support in Southwest Virginia. As the folks over at MaxSpeak point out, control of state legislatures matters, and Democrats will need to win seats in rural Virginia in order to take back the House of Delegates. In addition, continuing to string together 51% majorities will eventually prove untenable, so building a strong cushion in Southwest Virginia or the Virgina Beach area would help the party in future elections.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Ezra has called for more progressive policy ideas, and one that I'd really like to see more discussion of is making publicly funded preschool available to all kids. The most obvious good thing about this is its potential as an educational improvement. The years before kids go into kindergarten are good times for them to learn all sorts of things, and it'd be nice to offer them an environment that will help with learning. If you're worried about inner-city highschool students being unable to do basic math, you might want to help them learn more at the beginning so the whole process of education can move forward. While going to college is in some part a positional good, going to preschool is an absolute good.

Free preschool will also help parents "combine work and family and not go crazy," in Garance Franke-Ruta's memorable phrase, as it'll provide much-needed child care for working families. I also like it as an FDR-style public works program -- it creates preschool teaching jobs while doing useful stuff for the country.

By Ezra

Following up on the post below, what's your progressivism? And none of this vague, Stronger at Home, Respected in the World BS. Give me four or five policies that should define the Democratic Party's agenda and the theme that ties them together. The only constraint? They have to be focused on shifting power from the corporation to the individual, the employer to the employee. It's a new progressivism, but using progressivism's old, and far too neglected, definition. Alright then, thinking caps on.

By Ezra

Folks here know the deep reservoir of affection I have for The Washington Monthly. I love that magazine -- its writers, its editors, its tone, its editorial line, its willingness to do big-think...and so, when I say this, I say this with love. But their package on The New Progressivism is truly, sadly underwhelming.

[T]here’s another, more populist strain of that tradition, one that has sought to use government to empower individuals to protect themselves (think Ralph Nader’s 1960s consumer movement). We’ve been wondering if it might be possible to update that sort of thinking. And so we asked the five writers whose work follows to come up with ways to strengthen the hand of the average American in the 21st-century marketplace.

Sounds promising enough. Particularly since they set it up as the enlightened response to Bush's Ownership Society. God knows a competing vision, preferably one lacking the Republican's green tint but retaining the power of the theme, is needed. But this isn't it. The package is Paul Glastris's hit on the conservative vision, Robert Gordon and Derek Douglas's piece inveighing against hidden credit card fees, Zachary Roth's call for a la carte cable, Karen Kornbluh's argument for widespread use of flextime, and Kevin Drum's piece on identity theft and who should pay. Inspired yet?

These are good articles, make no mistake. And the policies they advocate are worthy. But this is small-bore, Clinton-in-comeback-mode stuff. We can't respond to a vision that advocates a fundamental restructuring of Social Security and a reconceptualization of health care delivery with a brave stand against hidden credit card fees. It's laughable. Progressives can't unite under a banner of inching incrementalism while conservatives bravely promise new directions for society. Even if the right loses every legislative battle, their call will be so much clearer that they'll win every election.

Now, I'm not one who thinks Democrats lack competing ideas, we merely need to choose, assemble, and sell them. But insofar as others believe we need a new vision, they've got to imbue it with scale and sweep, not just tack on a name, an idea, and four tiny changes to irksome issues in the financial industry. We need to be talking about a health care system that empowers workers to seek their employment bliss, not yokes them to whomever offers benefits. We need to talk about ways to even out economic growth, to ensure workers share in their productivity increases, to limit obscene CEO compensation and tidy Board-Director-Executive arrangements, to create and encourage asset development, to end or mitigate the financial and professional disincentives to having a family, and on and on. There's much for a revitalized progressive movement to do, and the small things are part of that agenda. But we can;t do them until we convince voters that we've got the Big Things right.

By Ezra

Over at Kevin Drum's place, a bunch of snotty blue-staters are sniffing about the unquestionable superiority of French cuisine. They make me sick. All the more because they're right. To add my pinch of grievance to the broth, as a liberal, even I don't understand why we can't import or use raw milk cheeses aged less than 60 days (a time period that exempts certain hard cheeses, like parmesan, from scrutiny). Not only are these cheeses significantly more delicious than the pasteurized, bastard versions we eat here, but the likelihood that raw milk will hurt you is almost infinitesimally small.

Other countries, like France, where raw milk rules the roost, are not falling to outbreaks of listeria and salmonella, and, in fact, the most serious recent outbreak of the dreaded listeria came from American hot dogs. Meanwhile, in keeping us safe from this threat that doesn't really threaten, we get meek, mild, comparatively tasteless cheeses. It's really a, ahem, raw deal. Mandate that all raw milk cheeses carry a prominent warning about the (basically nonexistent) dangers lurking in their rinds and folks can make their own decisions, the hypochondriacs sticking with Wisconsin cheddars and the cheese lovers finally tasting a good brie.

For more on this, Salon had a great article on the situation, dangers, and laws awhile back. You can find it here.

This post by CW is about the best thing I've ever read on Intelligent Design. Not on its theorists, founders or believers, but on the world they think was designed so intelligently. Sorry folks, but this world, at time, is not only something less than intelligent, it's hardly intelligible. The fact that some of its superapes can write screeds this funny is a wonder, sure, but it hardly balances out the reality of hemorrhoids.

Because I have to atone for the health car wonkery below.

You are Snoopy!

Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Kevin gets a lot right here. Both Tyler and Matt are correct that massive new expenditures on health care wouldn't raise life expectancy much (although, for the uninsured, of whom 18,000 or so die each year due to lack of appropriate health care, access to services would make a life expectancy difference), but they're barking up the wrong tree. Once you reach a baseline of medical spending, technology utilization, and trauma centers, you've basically done your part to keep folks alive. From there, prevention is really the name of the game, increased spending won't do much at all.

It's easy, particularly in this country, to think of health care as a primarily trauma-based enterprise. That, after all, is where much of the money goes. But of all the various facets in American health services, trauma care is probably the least fucked up. You could argue back and forth on the economic merits of what we do for the very old and ill, but we are delivering those services to almost everyone who needs them.

It is, instead, the young and spry, not to mention the middle-aged but well-preserved, who miss out on a variety of treatments and services that could vastly improve their quality of life not only now, but as they get older (back problems that go untreated and worsen with time, forms of scoliosis, etc). And doing a better job at covering them and opening the pathways towards preventive, smart care, isn't even very expensive. But it does require a system where the gatekeepers aren't compelled to cut costs by cutting corners. It's much easier to ignore someone's lingering, marginal problem and save a couple bucks than to stiff a hospital on their treatment of a guy who fell down the stairs. And so that's exactly what they do.

It's telling that the the report Cowen references to show that health spending doesn't matter uses the RAND Study, which found that copays vs. free care have much affect on the amount of health care used and little affect on the quality. That's quite true. Which is why you don't hear many progressives agitating for more care for the rich. So long as folks have adequate medical coverage (and all in the study did), they can and will get treatment at most all necessary times. The questions with health insurance are whether or not those necessary times should bankrupt less-wealthy individuals, be subsidized for poor individuals, and be made cheaper through cost-containment and coherent delivery strategies, and whether or not the entire system can be run more efficiently. Many Americans are using way more care than they need, but a significant portion are using far less. And all Americans, due to the absurdities, inefficiencies, and perverse incentives of the health care market, are using more expensive care than they must. We can fix that.

By the way: Did anyone else notice that Tyler Cowen's "If I were a Democrat" post on health care basically said, If I were a Democrat, I'd think of health care as if I were a libertarian-leaning economist resigned to a certain degree of statism? In other words, if I were a Democrat, I'd think of health care as if I were Tyler Cowen, who isn't a Democrat. I can't imagine why the party hasn't thought of that yet!

Shakes here, with something semi-frivolous…

Via MediaMatters, O’Reilly has decided to offer San Francisco to Al Qaeda, since San Franciscans passed a ballot measure urging public high schools and colleges to prohibit on-campus military recruiting:

From the November 8 broadcast of Fox News' The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly:

O'REILLY: Hey, you know, if you want to ban military recruiting, fine, but I'm not going to give you another nickel of federal money. You know, if I'm the president of the United States, I walk right into Union Square, I set up my little presidential podium, and I say, "Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead."

And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.

The 210-foot Coit Tower was dedicated in 1933 and contains a museum and murals that depict working life in 1930s California.

Good grief, what a bloviating buffoon. It’s no wonder he hates MediaMatters and the blogosphere so much, since they’ve exponentially increased awareness of the insane spewage that comprises his radio show. He says all the really wacky shit there; the constant circulation of transcripts from his radio program undermine the (dubious) pretense of moderation he uses on his television show. And he’s such a sneaky, lying turd that he’ll rebut items that reference his radio transcripts with footage of his television show. I get the feeling he likes to have his little radio outpost of extremism that doesn’t get tons of attention while he parades himself, even if unconvincingly, as Mr. Pragmatic Everyman on the telly every night.

Wasn’t he talking about retiring soon? When can we expect that, exactly?

And by the way, the mere extension of a hypothetical in which he is president is practically enough to turn my office into a vomitorium.

Posted Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Before we lionize Mark Warner for dragging Tim Kaine over the finish line, bringing an out-and-out liberal Democrat within thirty thousand votes of the Lieutenant governor's seat, destablizing the Republican coalition in Washington, rallying the stock market, turning water into wine, rescuing Katie Holmes from the clutches of scientology, and all manner of other minor miracles, I'd like to throw a bit of cold water on Kaine's win. I promise a more exhaustive analysis later this weekend.

For now, suffice it to say Warner's 2001 victory represented a significant realignment of the state of Virginia. He won slim majorities in a few rural counties in Southwest Virginia, cut the usual GOP margin of victory in others, and piled up modest wins in the usual Democratic enclaves like Fairfax, Arlington, Richmond, and Alexandria. This year, Kaine won by piling up horse-whipping majorities in places like Fairfax, held on to some of Southwest VA with smaller margins than Warner, but lost several counties that Warner carried in the previous election.

A permanent Democratic majority in Virginia will require both Kaine's higher margins in suburbia and Mark Warner's success in the Shenandoah Valley and the rest of the rural areas of the state. Kaine will have to continue to work hard to maintain Democratic popularity in Southwest Virginia to prevent further losses in future elections.

This, apparently, is the plan for the final episode of 7th Heaven:

Creatively, the show also will go out in style, creator Brenda Hampton said.
"I think this is the best season we've ever had, and we're planning a very exciting and heartwarming conclusion to the series," she said. "On the show, we talk about choosing your feelings, and we chose to feel happy and blessed to have been on the air for so long."

Blech. In much sadder news, Arrested Development, which filmed some early scenes at a family member's house, is getting cancelled. Watching that show was like hanging out with a super cool old relative afflicted by a terminal illness -- you knew they weren't long for this world, but it sure was great having them around.

Continuing with the day's trivialities, this point from Julian Sanchez is both frivolous and insightful. Joy!

We think about what we're missing out on in a bounded context, a pool of relevant options: You may be more upset that the cute woman who works in Accounting won't give you the time of day than you are that Halle Berry doesn't seem particularly interested either—even though the latter might constitute the bigger "loss" if you're looking at an unrestricted option set. So you lament the talk you have to miss because work or another event take precedence, but not the one you have to miss because it's in California—unless, perhaps, the one in California is an exceptionally appealing. So, say, you might not expend any thought over the fact that a band you really like is only playing on the other coast this tour, whereas you do if it's a concert festival with a lineup that includes a lot of your favorite bands.

This is a bit of a digression from Julian's point, but hey,, it's frivoility day round here, and logical progression is no longer required. I've always had a real soft spot for Emile Durkheim's critique of capitalism, particularly his focus on the tyranny of choice. Given the ideals of a society promising the potential for unlimited happiness, options, and outcomes, there's a long-standing cultural bias, unrealistic as it may be, against acceptance of merely good outcomes. And I genuinely believe this causal for many, many unhappy marriages.

It leaves a lot of folks in fairly positive situations unreasonably unhappy, as the perfected versions of life injected into us through the media slipstream serves the purpose of implicitly and explicitly diminishing the lives we actually lead. That's why Drew Barrymore or Reese Witherspoon are infinitely more dangerous archetypes than Halle Berry or Jessica Alba. Towering glamour and exquisite beauty sets off enough unreality bells that we realize it out of reach, the girl (or boy, I just don't know the requisite actors) next door, however, is targeted to fall directly in that grey area between potential and impossible.

It's thought-provoking stuff like this that make me love Brad "The Brain" Plumer so much.

Hey, think that nickname will catch on?

And yes, I am celebrating Vets Day by lounging at home and filling the site with vapid, meaningless posts.

I would bet perfectly good money that Liberty U's toweringly regressive social code does nothing but increase the illicit excitement of sex on campus. Now, granted, the implied levels of supervision may make naked time a bit harder to arrange, but can there be any doubt that, once you've built a hidden chamber lined with lead (so Jesus's x-ray vision can't penetrate) and enticed that sexy altar boy/choir girl, the thrill is heightened and the excitement magnified? It's like Catholic School hook ups to the power of 10. The sex must be amazing!

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper

I saw two headlines on the web recently: "Judith Miller to Leave New York Times" and "Desperate Housewives' Actor Fired"

Judith Miller is, well, famous. The actor, Page Kennedy, involved is an unknown. I don't watch the show. There's too much suburban satire out there anyway. But why is it that Judith Miller gets to "leave" while someone else gets "fired"?

What she did is grounds for what I call "firing." If I called myself "Miss Run Amok," ignored my editors, and started making up stuff about music videos, then I would be "fired." If I became "entangled" in any way - and I don't want to know anything about a possible Libby-Miller "entanglement" - I would be fired. Not let go. Not laid off. Fired. "Fired" is an appropriate word for Judith Miller. Now, Aaron Brown is "leaving." He is going to another network now that Anderson Cooper is hot both physically and figuratively. He didn't get canned for blowing one of the biggest stories of all time. What Judith Miller did earned her a firing.

What amazes me is that she got to negotiate the terms of her dismissal. According to Editor and Publisher,

Miller's lawyers and the paper had been negotiating a severance package for the last two weeks, although they had declined to discuss specifics of the deal.

Terrell Owens didn't even get to "negotiate a severance package." He was suspended outright, which is a firing. And, if a person were to compose a list of most disliked Americans, Terrell Owens and Judith Miller would be fighting hard for the top spot. As for the Desperate Housewives actor, who knows? If he had been "entangled" with Scooter Libby, perhaps he would have "retired" from the show as well.

Seems my hometown paper is ridding itself of its two op-ed page firebrands. The LA Times has decided to junk both Robert Scheer, the unreconstructed, populist lefty who represents progressivism on KCRW's Left, Right and Center, and Michael Ramirez, their crypto-conservative editorial cartoonist. Can't say I'm sad to see the latter exiting, ahem, stage right, but the former will be a loss. Say what you will about Scheer, but he had a different perspective than the rest of the media, he was a pre-Clinton liberal, a labor-liberal, and he combined it with an intellectual bent. From his most recent column:

WHO IN THE White House knew about DITSUM No. 044-02 and when did they know it?

That's the newly declassified smoking-gun document, originally prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2002 but ignored by President Bush. Its declassification this weekend blows another huge hole in Bush's claim that he was acting on the best intelligence available when he pitched the invasion of Iraq as a way to prevent an Al Qaeda terror attack using weapons of mass destruction.

The report demolished the credibility of the key Al Qaeda informant the administration relied on to make its claim that a working alliance existed between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. It was circulated widely within the U.S. government a full eight months before Bush used the prisoner's lies to argue for an invasion of Iraq because "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases."

Did you know about DITSUM? Cause I didn't. And what was nice about Bob Scheer was that he'd routinely tell me about it. For now, it'll be interesting to see where the op-ed page goes. It's currently got a couple neocon intellectuals (Boot and Ferguson), some fluff (Morrison and Stein), and Jon Chait. What it needs, however, are idiosyncratic, strong voices. I guess Ramirez's replacement, Jonah Goldberg, might count. Scheer's putative stand-in, Eric Aubry Kaplan from The LA Weekly, is not one of the Weekly's strongest political forces, but given the bent of the publication, I've got hope. He is, however, an LA specialist, not a national commentator like Scheer or Goldberg. Gregory Rodriguez, from the New America Foundation, is coming to focus on Latino and immigration issues, and NPR commentator Meghan Daum will hopefully offer some worthwhile cultural-political comentary.

Maybe it'll work. But for now, I count Boot, Ferguson, and Goldberg as nationally focused political voices from the right, and only Chait as a similarly macro-oriented critic from the left. The move strikes me as a swing right. We'll see.

Update: Here's Marc Cooper:

A couple of noteworthy trends jump out from the list. You’d think with circulation slumping and now a couple of years into futzing with the editorial pages, the mighty Times would pony up to purchase a couple of nationally-known powerhouses.

Unlike the NYTimes or even the WashPo, the LATimes has lacked a signature set of opinion writers. That omission will now continue. With Scheer’s departure, the Times line-up is now bereft of a single, muscular journalist with veteran national and international reporting experience– the sort of experience,by the way, that is pre-requisite for strong local columnizing in a place like L.A.

They didn’t even steal some proven commodity from another paper. The new list is full of wonks and magazine editors along with a self-obsessed comedy writer and a Gen X autobiographer and memoirist. The only hard-core political writers are conservatives: the extremely dull and excessively ideological Max Boot and the terribly annoying and gossamer-weight propagandist Jonah Goldberg (who by contrast, makes David Brooks seem one of the towering intellects of the modern era).

Read this post of Kevin's.  Tyler reminds me of a guy on a roadtrip, navigating by map, who runs into an unexpected mountain and decides that the terrain, not the directions, must be at fault.

This is indeed quite sad.  The Woodward Building, home of The Washington Monthly, never struck me as a nasty place.  Sure, the downstairs businesses were a bit sketchy, with the bikini store and its handscrawled offers for MTV gigs and modeling jobs clearly a front to recruit for seedier sexual enterprises and the little coffee/convenience shop staffed by an impressively surly woman with an admirable disinterest in actually selling me anything, but whatever.  There was marble, the creeky elevators were stately, the staircases were wide and open.  And say what you will about the AC, but there was AC.  Let's keep our priorities straight, folks.

It was also the first place I worked in Washington, and I thought it heady and impressive.  A slew of think tanks and marquee organizations maintained headquarters mere blocks away, while the walk from the metro always forced you to pass, and admire, the beautiful VA building ("To care for the widow...").  I loved it -- it seemed what Washington should be, a little dingy and drab, but simultaneously inspiring and exciting.  Make it too nice and you're in a law firm, make it a well-located closet and you're fighting the good fight.  Square footage, of course, is inversely proportionate to virtue.  We'll see if The Monthly's newer, fancier digs go to their heads.  I'd bet not, but I have trouble believing losing the Woodward and installing themselves in more respectable real estate won't, on some level, degrade the beloved atmosphere of shoestring intellectualism that currently prevails over there. But what do I know -- I thought the Woodward was nice!

This Slate piece on Sarah Silverman gets a number of interesting, fairly subtle things very right:

Silverman's work is a natural byproduct of the high-stakes game of contemporary American identity politics—the emotionally volatile generalizing about our moral right to generalize. But she's not just a critic of PC culture: She's a connoisseur. She handles the complex algorithms of taboo—who's allowed to joke about what, to whom, using what terminology—with instant precision: "Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I'm one of the few people that believe it was the blacks." (The joke exposes not the ancient perfidy of any particular race but the absurdity of blaming entire races for anything.) Her best jokes are thought experiments in the internal logic of political correctness: "I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving." A Playboy interviewer, probing for something salacious, once asked Silverman if she had a nickname for her vagina. She answered "Faggot"—a throwaway joke that manages to kink sexual identity into such an ingenious pretzel it could fuel a doctoral dissertation.[...]

Through her stand-up, however, Silverman has become an important member of a guerrilla vanguard in the culture wars that we might call the "meta-bigots"—other members include the South Park kids, Sacha Baron Cohen's "Ali G", and the now-AWOL Dave Chappelle. The meta-bigots work at social problems indirectly; instead of discussing race, rape, abortion, incest, or mass starvation, they parody our discussions of them. They manipulate stereotypes about stereotypes. It's a dangerous game: If you're humorless, distracted, or even just inordinately history-conscious, meta-bigotry can look suspiciously like actual bigotry.

Sorry for the lack of posting this morning, was editing a piece.  Normal frequency starts now.  For now, keep yourself busy with the LA Weekly's coverage of the California elections, particularly Meyerson's piece.  This was more than a rejection of Arnold, it was a rejection of a particular and poisonous form of politics, and it was proof that a riven Labor movement can still show epic solidarity under threat.  All in all, a big, and very good, day.

Oliver Willis gets this just right:

One of the most annoying things I’ve seen in coverage of the Virginia race is the near-mythic stature afforded the Rove-created “72 Hour Task Force“. When the polls showed Kaine up 5%, the drumbeat of how superawesome the task force would be was supposed to put fear in the hearts of Dems. And I couldn’t understand it. The Republicans ran a dedicated get-out-the-vote operation, they didn’t cast a voodoo spell. The way to defeat that is to run one of your own, only better. Mark Warner did it in 2001, and Tim Kaine did it tonight. Like the mythmaking of Karl Rove, this stuff isn’t so mysterious, and folks need to stop making it so that you believe the b.s.

The myth of Karl Rove is greatly exaggerated.  He got his boy to almost not lose the election in 2000 and brought an incumbent war president to a three percent victory in 2004.  The guy's got talents, sure, and he's been very smart about a few important things, but he's no superbrain.

Plus, his employer calls him "turd blossom"..

Dean Baker has some suggestions for real pro-growth progressivism, and they all look good to me.  It strikes me as strange that economists spend a lot of time inveighing against trade-related protectionism but have little to say about similar barriers in the domestic economy.  I'd love to see an expanded Medicare compete in the private market, love to see government-run 401(k)'s pass their increased efficiency onto workers, love to see the sweetheart legislative deal drug companies have unravel a bit in taxpayer's favor, love to see the rich stop paying effectively lower tax rates than the middle class (why should they get all those great growth incentives?), love to see schools financed by something other than property taxes so wealthy districts can't entrench their eonomic superiority into generational perpetuity, and so forth.  Look at me, ma -- I'm a pro-fair growth progressive! 

Also check out my post on Tapped about tying the minimum wage to productivity increases among workers.  It's related and, I think, interesting.

There's something of a consensus forming, and very likely a correct one, that in addition to the legacy of Warner, what won the election for Tim Kaine was was his sincere and oft-mentioned faith.  Good to hear it.  But these discussions always worry me a bit.  It's not that I necessarily feel qualified to dispute their conclusions, but the premise, and the implications, are troubling.  It's bad enough that Democrats believe they've got to fake faith these days, transforming casual spiritual commitments into essential components of our beings.  Worse, however, is that these theological costume parties come off as obviously inauthentic, meaning Democrats who want to compete in certain races simply have to be longtime believers, sincere theists like Kaine or Clinton.  That's a worrisome precedent. 

Political office should not be restricted to anyone, not veterans, not believers, not men, and not Democrats.  Quite a few folks in this country have a casual relationship to religion and that shouldn't be a disqualifier for office nor a negative when the DCCC or DSCC goes out scouring the countryside for potential candidates.  Worse then losing some elections is celebrating the idea that we can win them by just nominating enough altar boys who never hung up their frocks.  And while that's not what folks are explicitly saying, it's bubbling just beneath the surface.  Democrats need to find a way to overcome the religion gap by delegitimizing a private issue as a relevant litmus test for success in the public sphere.  I don't know how to do that, and you certainly can't tell anyone that the beliefs they live by aren't important enough to  vote on, but it's something to think about. 

As it is, I can't help feeling Kaine's successful invocation of his missionary experience is much more troubling than heartening.  Celebrating that the a deeply religious Democrat was able to prove his faith strikes me moving the goalposts so far down field that we're scoring in the other team's end zone.  The fact is, he should never have had to do that.  An anti-death penalty position is no more moral if rooted in biblical verse than in a self-constructed or philosophically adopted ethical structure.  That Kaine had to deploy Jesus to deflect attacks is, in fact, a bad thing.   His positions should be able to stand without the son of god propping them up.  Tim Kaine without the church-going background should be as appealing as Tim Kaine with it.  That it's not so is a precedent we should be giving serious thought to.

Matt Singer makes, I think, a good point here:

Two years ago, I went on a rant following Schwarzenegger’s election about how politicians in California were using ballot issues to sidestep the legislative process. There has been an uptick in anti-initiative sentiment in recent years, a natural response to interest groups walking away from the legislative table in order to succeed independent of the system.

Now, to an extent, this is unfortunate. Nominally, even Schwarzenegger’s ballot issues were about reform, even if that reform all happened to structurally favor a single party. And there are good reasons to think that legislators won’t reform themselves, but it seems clearer that this is precisely what they want.

In Ohio, the Governor has a measly 19% approval rating (think Judy Martz) and scandals are present virtually all over the state. Yet the voters rejected four reform measures. In part, this shows how a machine dedicated to staying dirty can fight reform by voters just as effectively as it can fight reform in the statehouse.

But it also demonstrates, I think, that the best way to get reform is to elect reform Democrats.

Picking up your toys and stalking off to the voters really isn't proving itself a workable alternative.  Indeed, there's not much in the way of ballot initiatives, from any side, that seem to be faring well.  In Califronia, neither Prop 78 nor 79, initiatives doing exactly opposite things, passed.  Voters aren't evaluating these individually, they're making blanket judgments on the desirability of wading through long initiative ballots.  At this point, virtually the only initiative I'd vote for is one to get rid of initiatives.  It's not that the voters are bad folks, but they're not trained or experienced legislators, so some of what they approve on face value ends up have subtle and negative impacts down the road.  Happily, they seem to have figured this out, and are now rejecting the whjole process as a tool of special interests.  It's a shame, because legitimate initiative drives are a positive option, but this sort of cynical overuse is killing the whole medium.

Sure is a shame that last night didn't happen next year.  Kaine won by a far-better-than-expected 6%, Corzine easily brought it home by 10%, and every one of Arnold's initiatives failed.  That's a landslide for the Democrat in the blue, an easy win for the Democrat in the red, and a resounding rejection of the Republican trying to crimsonize the left coast.  All in all, a very good evening.  And we shouldn't forget that these results are not mere bellwhethers for 2006 -- they mean progressive government for these states, legislation that focuses on the needy, revitalization of grassroots parties and efforts, leaders willing to experiment and implement liberal policy ideas, and, at least in Virginia, a natural candidate for the Senate down the line. 

This morning is also a celebratory one for three others.  Phil Angelides and Steve Westly, Arnold's challengers in California, have big grins on their faces.  Today would either bring the revitalization or destruction of Arnold's prestige, and morning brought the latter.  And, in Virginia, Mark Warner got up with that goofy grin of his, as last night he won a proxy battle with his potential presidential challenger George Allen.  I'm not yet convinced that Mark Warner is good candidate, but his outsized and enduring popularity in Virginia speaks of a real record and serious electoral touch.  Suddenly, the rationale for his candidacy got a whole lot more likely, as not only can he win in the red, but he can drag others over the finish line too.

Got more than enough names. And assuming those who signed up completed offers, it's all gravy baby.

Thanks folks.

Awhile back, I had an Apple employee reading here.  If you're still out there, could you e-mail me?  I have some questions I'd like to ask you.

On a different, though related note: #&@&#$@ my Powerbook!

Finally, a gas tax proposal I could accept:

Sen's argument is that because the supply of oil is fairly inelastic and production is mostly controlled by a cartel, if we imposed a tax on crude oil rather than gasoline, the overwhelming majority of the cost would be borne by producers rather than consumers.

As a result, a crude tax would raise the price of gas at the pump (thus encouraging fuel conservation) but it would raise federal revenue by much more than it raised consumer cost. That would allow the government to provide a lump-sum rebate to all citizens that substantially exceeds the increased costs of fuel, thus making this proposal much more politically viable than a conventional gas tax.

The only problem is, it wouldn't work.  The point of a cartel is that they control enough of a resource or market that you can't unilaterally impose conditions on them.  If we decide to bleed OPEC and they decide to starve us, they'll win.  America simply cannot produce or import enough oil from non-OPEC sources to satisfy our demand at a reasonable cost for any length of time. 

Moreover, while a decade ago OPEC may have eventually needed to return to us because they needed our business, now, with the accelerating consumption of China and India, a few long-term contracts will alleviate much of their hurt and freeze us out of low-priced oil well into the future.  And trust me, China would be very eager to lock in energy supplies for their next few decades of growth.  So while I'm all for the proposal, even if we could pass it, OPECs responding oil shock would drive prices so high that we'd quickly capitulate.  Unless we coupled the program with a severe and effective set of conservation measures that radically lowered our usage in the period directly before, we just wouldn't have the flexibility on the demand side to stick with the tax.

David Adesnik makes a haha:

That's pretty funny. Kennedy is an experienced member of the Judiciary Committee, but he's suggesting that Christian conservatives know more about Alito than he does. Now that's what I call oversight.

Yep. A real chuckle. Here's James Dobson:

Well, some have called me today, some whose names our listeners would recognize -- not only members of Congress, but Christian leaders and others -- and saying, "You know, you have taken a stand here. You have made some comments about Harriet Miers, and we want to know what that's based on." So I think maybe I ought to take the rest of the broadcast today, or at least a portion of it, to tell our listeners the rationale. Now, I can't reveal it all, because I do know things that, you know, I'm privy to that I can't describe because of confidentiality. And there are some things I can't go into.

Exactly how much oversight power does Adesnik think minority Democrats currently have? And does he think they get a lot of confidential information, many illuminating tidbits they shouldn't even know so they can better carry out their supervisory responsibilities? Yep, I bet Rove's been on the phone with Kennedy all week, giving him the inside scoop on Alito's views on Roe, the commerce clause, gun control, and everything else. Because if there's one thing I trust about this White House, it's the seriousness with which they approach Congress's responsibility to provide independent oversight of the executive.

You know, with the sort of overwhelming military power the US Army wields, you'd think we wouldn't need to deploy incendiary weapons banned by the UN like white phosphorous. More to the point, you'd certainly not think we need it in a place like Fallujah, where our main enemies melted into the countryside and the largest task would always be winning over the citizenry. Scorching and charring anyone caught in our path there seems neither necessary nor wise.

Well, kind of. I will be annoying you all in order to get something cool for myself. But it won't be a normal fundraiser. Via Daniel Radosh comes a fully vetted site where, if I can just get eight of the 3,000 or so of you who read this blog to sign up for a cheap offer (where you actually get something!), I will get a free X-Box 360.

I'm not kidding. A free one. And if some of you who sign up have X-Box's as well, I promise to play you on Live at a time of your choosing. And how sweet would that be?

So, as the week goes on, I will offer more and more pathetic posts, ranging from entreaties to "pay" for this site you enjoy to guilt trips about the three or so hours a day, every day, that I put into creating content here. But -- if eight of you go sign up, say, tonight, you'll never see another post on this again!

So go sign up!

The way it works is simple. You go and register, and then you must sign up for an offer. The offers range from credit cards to magazines to free trials of Real Player Live. If you're a gamer, you can get three years of the official X-Box magazine (with demo DVD's!), if you're a horndog you can get Maxim, and if you're a fitness buff you can get Shape. There's also a bunch of other stuff you can do. The offers range from free to cheap, and in every single one, you walk away with something tangible. And, at the end, as reward for writing this site where you all learn about health care and my weird ability to do flip-ups and all other manner of things, I get an X-Box to love and enjoy. Plus, as a new writer at a nonprofit, progressive magazine, I really can't afford one myself, so you will be subsidizing my ability to fight the good fight.

So c'mon, guys -- just eight of you. And no fallacy of compositions, either. If everybody waits for everybody else to do the offer, nobody will. And then I will be X-Box less and sad. So just do it yourself. It's the menschy thing to do.

I'll keep track of the numbers publicly and stop it when it gets to eight. And you lucky eight will own my thanks, friendship, and dignity -- especially my dignity -- forever. Now how awesome does that sound?

So go sign up! Please! Because then I'll stop bugging you about it!

I love Republicans. If Tim Kaine wins tomorrow, it means...George Allen is awesome!

Important things you should know about my weekend, as told to you by Tommy:

Really, I have only two important things to report. First, Ezra Klein can do that back-flip-to-standing thingy. You know, where you're lying down, and kick your legs, and then BANG!, you're back up. That seems pretty good for a member of the punditocracy, right? Do you think Krugman can do that shit? I'll tell you right now, he can't. And if you've got the choice between two authors writing intelligently about national healthcare, BUT one of them may also be able to do a spin-kick, which one are you going to read? It's obvious. Ezra brings the value-add.

Second, I am a million years old. We played touch football for what, 45 minutes? My limbs were already stiffening up by the end. The next day my legs ached, my abs ached, and I was pretty sure I had turf toe, despite not actually knowing what that is. Apparently the elliptical trainer and the ruthless physicality of the software development game isn't keeping me in as tip-top shape as I had thought. Still, it was a lot of fun at the time.

Days later I am still sore. I played football in high school. Back then, we ran into people. And now? An hour of low impact jogging and huddling and I can't lift my legs.

Can someone explain the rationale of a Daschle 08 candidacy to me?  He's hinting at a campaign, raising money, and now advertising across blogs with a PAC called "New Leadership for America" whose front page is a pledge to bring the troops home by 2007.

Huh?

Daschle was no peacenik, he voted for the war.  And he was no liberal, either.  As senate minority leader, he was a sound parliamentarian but neither a mobilizing force nor an electric personality for the party's base.  He was not associated with any particular issue, like health care or energy, and he was not effective as head of the opposition.  He lost an election to an empty suit and his successor is widely considered to be doing a better job than he did.

Now, I like Tom Daschle.  Always have, always will.  A good public servant with a good heart.  But he had no major accomplishments as a senator, the party lost seats under his leadership, he was nothing even resembling a liberal, he showed no particular electoral skill, and he's never been a governor.  Save for a return to the spotlight or consideration for future jobs in public life, what's the rationale for his candidacy?  What's his constituency? 

I don't get it.

Sorry to be doing so much random quoting today, but I keep running into interesting things that I'm not really qualified to comment on:

In "Bugs in the Brain," he describes a parasite that infects the brains of rats without any effect on their behavior except that they lose their instinctual aversion to the smell of cats and, instead, are drawn to it. Needless to say, such absurdly obliging prey is quickly gobbled up: bad for the rat but great for the parasite, since it can only reproduce inside a cat host. The next generation hitches a ride out on the cat's feces, which are ingested by rats to start the cycle over again.

"This is flabbergasting," Sapolsky writes. "This is like someone getting infected with a brain parasite that has no effect whatsoever on the person's thoughts, emotions, S.A.T. scores or television preferences, but, to complete its life cycle, generates an irresistible urge to go to the zoo, scale a fence, and French-kiss" the meanest-looking polar bear.

Nature is insane.

When then-Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche put out the word, on Sept. 20, 2002, that "Vice President Dick Cheney's recurring wet dreams of a U.S. worldwide Roman Empire are, in and of themselves, the world's greatest single threat to the continuation of civilization in any part of the planet today," and that "these facts demand that Cheney's prompt resignation be sought, and accepted," the majority of Democrats and Republicans were shocked. True, many of them knew that Cheney was the "brains" behind President Bush's war drive, including the National Security Strategy of pre-emptive war, which had just been promulgated. They may have hated him—but they didn't think anything could be done about it. See how events have proven them wrong! Over the past three years, LaRouche's relentless initiatives and flanks, mass circulation of literature, and deployment of the LaRouche Youth Movement on the Cheney question, have emboldened members of both parties, and, most important, those embedded in the institution of the Presidency, to take action to expose, and oust the evil Vice President. At present, conditions for his removal are rotten-ripe. How this happened is an object lesson in political strategy.

Jan. 3: LaRouche's campaign releases the second mass pamphlet, "Children of Satan II: The Beast-Men." This occurs as Congressional investigation of the intelligence fraud on Iraq, and Halliburton's corruption goes into high gear. Although many Democrats and others are initially shocked by LaRouche's "Beast-Man" analysis, their skepticism turns to astonished admiration when the Abu Ghraib revelations hit, showing LaRouche's analysis to be precise.

From the "we're all screwed" department:

Federal spending on the uninsured has not kept pace with the growing number of Americans who have no health care insurance, according to a report. As the number of uninsured Americans increased by 4.6 million from 2001 to 2004, net federal spending per uninsured person fell $546, to $498, during the same period, according to the findings from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. After adjusting for inflation, total federal spending for care for the uninsured increased by 1.3 percent from 2001 to 2004 while the number of uninsured increased by 11.2 percent, resulting in an 8.9 percent decline in federal spending per uninsured person.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman point out that oft-cited pieces of false information about Iraq training al-Qaeda operatives to use WMD were extracted under torture. Examples like this are important for the pragmatic case against torture. People being tortured don't try to say true things; they say whatever they think will make their suffering stop. Using torture will bring us lots of false information, and relying heavily on it may lead our foreign policy into catastrophic errors.

Defenders of torture often bring up movie-perfect ticking-time-bomb scenarios where the information received under torture can be tested quickly and there is no great threat of damage from false information. (It takes some effort to even come up with a good case where torture would be useful. If you were torturing a terrorist for information about where a bomb was in New York City, the terrorist could falsely claim that the bomb was in some obscure and hard-to-search location. By the time the location was thoroughly searched, the bomb might well go off, and the terrorist would get both the end of the torture and the success of his plan.) Situations like this, however, are very different from the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo or any of our foreign prisons, where false information is costly and hard to weed out. It's here where the arguments against torture as a policy are most relevant.

It's not clear to me that a policy opposing torture would actually prevent torture from being applied in the extreme cases that the torture supporters like to bring up. I'm guessing that antiterrorism personnel in extreme situations where torture is clearly the only way to prevent a city from being annihilated will resort to torture whether or not it's permitted. I'd also guess that politicians would be forthcoming with pardons for anyone whose acts of torture were successful in saving thousands of lives. So using a no-torture policy in the usual cases won't weaken us in the unusual and spectacular cases.

An open letter to the President from Res Publica

I have never had any sort of formal training in ethics, beyond a perfunctory overview in an undergrad survey course in philosophy. I’ve learned a lot more about the moral life from novels than from ethicists. The majority of my ethical instincts were probably formed in the contexts of my family, my church, and my friends. In all of this, I am probably like most Americans.

Unless those Americans hold positions at the highest levels of government, apparently.

This week, we learned that the President is ordering his staff to take a ‘refresher course’ in ethics. Now, let’s assume that ethics is in fact something you can learn in a class, even though I don’t necessarily believe that. It strikes me that knowledge routinely practiced is rarely forgotten. Ethical people wouldn’t need a refresher course. Like people who ride their bikes everyday and therefore would never again need to learn how to ride a bike, ethical people have ethical conduct as their first and easiest reflex. But that’s…you know…ethical people. I’m a recovered drug addict and formerly very naughty boy, but I’ve had fewer run-ins with the law in my lifetime than this administration has had in the past few years. From the looks of things, ethical people tend not to have jobs in the White House, and that’s painfully embarrassing for all of us.

Here are a few things I know that the White House apparently does not: 

1. It’s illegal to break the law. This is not an ethical principle per se, since the ranges of action covered by ‘legal’ and ‘right’ are not coextensive, nor are those covered by ‘illegal’ and ‘wrong’. Still, it’s handy to keep in mind. A crime is a crime no matter who commits it, and no crimes are really less criminal than others. Telling the truth to judges and juries isn’t optional, and perjury is an actual crime for which one goes to an actual jail.

2. Speaking of perjury…it’s pretty much always wrong to lie. Sure, one can imagine the occasional circumstance in which a white lie might prevent a greater evil, but let’s face it: we all know that such circumstances hardly ever occur in real life. About 98% of the time, we’re just ginning up an excuse for lying. And lying is wrong. Until homo sapiens are something other than physical creatures whose subjectivity is rooted firmly behind our own eyes, lying will always be a big deal, because we really have no way of knowing about the experiences of others except by trusting their report of what it is like to be them. For us to share a world that is more than a raw war of all against all, most people need to tell mostly the truth most of the time.

3. When you made decisions that affect the well-being of others, it’s important to get it right. This is one of the basic reasons why people who make these kinds of decisions tend to be more highly compensated than those who do not. We want the best people to make the most consequential decisions, and because they will be responsible for outcomes, they deserve some compensation for the risk they incur. The compensation is proportional to the broad consequence involved in the decisions, which is why I, who manage two people and some servers, make only a little more than the rest of my fellow non-profit nobodies. The President, on the other hand, manages the federal government and the entire U.S.
armed forces, which is why he lives in a palace with body guards and a personal chef. If he makes a decision, people might die, and he’s supposed to take responsibility for that, no matter how it turns out.

One gets the distinct impression that the Washington establishment – low-value pundits and nominal “reporters” as well as the elected politicians and political staff skeezers – would smirk and chuckle if you said any of this to them. They would regard this sort of talk as naive and idealistic, pabulum for the rubes of the “base”. Washington is far to sophisticated for such simplistic nonsense, and it’s all far too complicated for any of us to understand.

But we, the people who sent you all to Washington and pay all your salaries, we don’t really think it’s very complicated, nor are we impressed by your attempts to spin moral bankruptcy as sophistication. As another blogger recently put it, “Either you’re a man of your word or you’re just a [edited!] liar,” and “crime is crime and lies are lies, no matter which party is in power.” That’s how most of us live, Mr. President. We expect that most of you will mostly live like that as well.

Which brings me to my point. The news reports about the upcoming “ethics refreshers” at the White House all say that the classes will focus on the handling of classified information. Mr. President, that’s not ethical training. That’s teaching people not to violate the law, which covers my first item, but I think I made it clear that compliance with the law is hardly the major substance of a truly ethical life. 

We are not impressed, Mr. President. We expect our elected officials to be better than “good enough to not get indicted”.

Let’s be clear about this, Mr. President. Most of us have come to accept the juvenile, manipulative gaming that passes for political campaigns today. It is loathsome and humiliating to us, but we accept it because no one has yet figured out how else to do politics on TV. Neil Postman was right; TV was made for entertainment, and when you put politics on TV, it becomes entertainment. 

But governance is not entertainment. When the campaign is over, we expect you to quit dicking around and act in a manner appropriate to the authority with which we have vested you.

Is it too much to ask that you hold the White House staff to a standard of moral excellence rather than merely doing what it takes to get away with it?

The answer to that question may be “Yes, it is”, but you should know that no one will be satisfied with that, and it would explain a lot about your poll numbers.

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger blocked Warren Beatty and Annette Bening from entering one of his campaign rallies.

In his heyday, Schwarzenegger fought off all manner of bad guys and always made a big show of being exactly the same as his stage persona. Unlike other actors, who didn't want to be stereotyped, Schwarzenegger reveled in being the tough guy both on and off the screen. He shouldn't have done that. Because Schwarzenegger has just demonstrated that he is afraid of the same guy who was in Ishtar.

If Schwarzenegger is so afraid of Beatty, what would he do if Rob Reiner, another Hollywood heavyweight who has considered throwing his hat into the ring, showed up? Reiner is a big guy who hangs out with Howard Dean. All Reiner would have to do is give a Dean yell, and Mr. Tough Guy will go scurrying right back to his hotel suite in Sacramento.

I may sound dismissive of Beatty because I think that Hollywood has done more than its fair share of hurting the liberal cause (Are you listening, Jane Fonda and Ben Affleck?). That said, Beatty's wife, Annette Bening, got in a soundbite worth sharing:

"You have to have a wristband to listen to the governor?" Bening asked. "He represents all of us, right?"

Thank you. The stage-managed Republican Dickery is about to stop, at least in California. As long as it doesn't turn into Democratic Dickery. Pam makes a good point about Schwarzenegger and Beatty: "Boy, this got ugly. What egos...oh, wait, they're actors."

Shakes here...

I really dislike John McCain. It’s not just his politics, which are enough to make me dislike him as a probable presidential candidate, but it’s who he is, which make me dislike him as a person, too. Watching him campaign for Bush during the last election, after his wife and child had been targets of the Rovian smear machine, was enough to make me puke. That he showed up on The Daily Show making wink-wink nudge-nudge comments about Bush, designed to bolster his image among liberals as The Republican You Can Like, in spite of his decision to campaign with his arm across the president’s shoulders, was enough to convince me this snake oil huckster was as disingenuous and dangerous a specimen as the one we’ve got in the White House now.

And like our current president, McCain relies on myths, and it’s no more true that Bush is an everyman cowboy than McCain is a maverick moderate. Maybe he was at one time, but he isn’t anymore. With his eyes firmly fixed on the Oval Office, he has plotted his course straight through the GOP’s most decidedly conservative territory, and has so far stopped at Intelligent Design Outpost, Fort Homobigortry, and now appears to be resting his feet at Falwell Depot. Meanwhile, his new new PAC, Straight Talk America, lists his reform agenda that includes the following (among others):

…supporting the health, strength and dignity of the American family and culture across the span of generations…energizing American leadership in science, technology, medicine, education, training and mastery in the skills of the future to secure the nation's prosperity and serve the upward march of humanity…

The health, strength, and dignity of your family…unless you’re gay. Energizing science…unless it’s politically expedient to undermine science by endorsing the teaching of intelligent design in classrooms. It’s simply more of the same wink-wink nudge-nudge shenanigans that he pulled on The Daily Show, courting the wingnuts with one hand while waving away such kooky conservatism with the other. “Straight Talk” indeed.

This crap isn’t the bold trailblazing of a maverick, but the tired posturing of a desperate old sod who wants his shot at the White House and is willing to sacrifice principle to get there.

There’s little doubt McCain will announce his candidacy at some point, and, when he does, I hope this picture goes up on every liberal blog in the blogosphere:

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Peter Levine, my Favorite Blogger that Nobody Reads but Everybody Should, has posted the text of a speech he gave called "Education for Democratic Citizenship". I'm not much of an education wonk, but it sure looks to me like we've become caught up in the rush to improve our children's reading, math, and science skills, without stopping to ask whether our school system is helping children become good people. Peter is part of a band of folks who are concerned about such things.

As they say, Read The Whole Thing.

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot at Electoral Math

Kevin Drum has been trying to score some contrarian points while tracing back through the march to war in Iraq. He points out that as of September 2002, there was widespread agreement that Saddam Hussein had an active WMD program. This, I suspect, was not a subject of dispute. The Clinton administration had a difficult time forcing Saddam to abide by the terms of the post-Gulf War UN resolutions, going so far as to order bombings on two occasions. House and Senate Democrats who voted for the war weren't doing so out of a desire of democracy promotion, but because they thought, or at least said they thought, that Saddam was a threat. Here's Tom Daschle in 2002: "The threat posed by Saddam Hussein may not be imminent. But it is real. It is growing. And it cannot be ignored." This was the angle most pro-war Democrats took: Saddam would continue to try and rebuild his chemical and biological programs, and we'd just keep trying to knock them out, plus he's a bad guy anyway, so let's stop playing games and take him out now.

There was no doubt about Saddam's continued efforts to develop chemical and biological weapons. Where there was doubt was about Saddam's ability to develop nuclear weapons, and to deliver those weapons to the United States. Now, outside of the "16 words" I don't really remember how hard the Bush administration tried to sell the nuclear threat, but as Matt Yglesias points out, the real selling point of the war was that Saddam's weapons would be used against US civilians. On this point there was good reason to doubt the administration's claims, since inspectors found minimal evidence that Saddam had any capacity to deliver weapons beyond a range of 600 miles. Hans Blix's January 2003 testimony suggested the possible presence of a modest amount of chemical and biological agents, but no means to attack the US directly with them, while this October 2003 testimony on the Iraq Survey Group's work shows little evidence of any WMD and no way of delivering any payload beyond 1000 kilometers. While missles with a range longer than 110 kilometers did violate the terms of Saddam's disarmament, they could easily have been destroyed without invading the country.

I'm all for being honest about history; we should admit that the pro-war Democrats bought into much of the WMD hype. But they didn't buy into all of it, and lumping Saddam's ground-war-ready chemical weapons (which lots of people agreed on) with the hype of mushroom clouds over Saint Louis (where there was considerable public disagreement) conflates too many distinct forms of "weapons of mass destruction".

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Thanks to Harry Reid’s pwnage of Bill Frist, we’re facing Bush’s most extreme nominee with the filibuster in hand and a credible threat to throw the Senate into chaos if the Republicans go nuclear. I won’t go into the many problems with Strip Search Sammy here. I’ll give the political argument that if it comes down to a question of filibustering or not filibustering, a filibuster we must have.

If we bring Alito down with a filibuster, the next nominee is likely to be more moderate. With his approval ratings in the 30s, Bush can’t hope to keep throwing right-wing nominees into filibusters and then beat us with the obstructionism argument in the 2006 election. He’ll probably meet with Harry Reid and find himself some Reid-approved moderate without Miers’ incompetence issues so that he can get the whole Supreme Court mess off his hands. Depending on how this goes, we may be able to generate another Miers-like fissure in the Republican base.

Mark Schmitt says that “one thing is for sure: the prospect of a "final showdown" in which Alito is confirmed by the Nuclear tactic is just not going to happen in a Senate effectively run by Harry Reid.” Lots of Republicans who have a stake in Senate business moving forward don’t want to blow up the filibuster and face Reid’s Senate-paralyzing retaliation. So if we can get the filibuster going, the Republicans won't stop it. Alito will be defeated, and a more moderate nominee will take his place.

Even if Schmitt is wrong and the Republicans find 50 Senators willing to go nuclear, Reid's retaliation will be awesome enough in itself. More procedural moves like Reid's closed session on WMD intelligence this week that at once tie up Senate business and point to Republican malevolence will be greatly appreciated. Given that in many cases we'll be interrupting some very bad business (like this week's awful budget reconciliation package) more disruption would be something to cheer. Matt Yglesias has argued that liberals are better off long-term with the filibuster destroyed, since it might prevent us from passing nice social programs someday. While the Republicans are, as I understand it, planning only to eliminate judicial filibusters, it's not clear that the impact of a move like this can be contained.

Getting 41 Democrats to stand up and filibuster will, most likely, be the major hurdle. If you’re lucky enough to have a Democratic Senator or even a moderate Republican, it might be time for a phone call or a letter telling them that Strip Search Sammy must be stopped, by any means necessary. Addresses and phone numbers can be found here. With my Pennsylvania registration and cell phone number, I’m going to give Arlen Specter’s office a ring right now. (Sure, he’s not likely to join the filibuster, but we want him on our side.)

By Ezra

For all you Californians (and particularly Angelenos) bewildered by next week's ballot measures and elections, The LA Weekly is swooping in with a cape and a pen (a pen of TRUTH) to give you a hand. Thus, they've kindly released their endorsements. I looked over their list a couple times and couldn't find a single recommendation to disagree with, so I'm proud to announce that I, Ezra Klein, wholeheartedly endorse The LA Weekly's endorsements. Good luck next week, Golden Staters, good luck and godspeed.

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper

It happened to Laura Bush, and now it's happening to Maria Shriver. Sooner or later, one of these women has to ask why they are being forced to sit at the children's table for the holidays.

A recent LA Times article asks where Maria Shriver has been while her husband Arnold Schwarzenegger stumps for his ludicrous special-election initiatives. Some think she isn't honoring the Kennedys. Some think she isn't honoring her husband. I just wish she's find her spine and say something. But both Shriver and Queen Laura have been shunted off to deal with "women's issues" as defined by the Republican party. To the Republicans, "women's issues" means "children's issues."

The LA Times describes how Maria has been relegated to hanging out with the little ones while Big Daddy does his job:

On a recent morning, Maria Shriver had a roomful of admiring listeners hanging on her every word. Unfortunately for her husband ... none of them was old enough to vote. Shriver was addressing a fourth-grade class at Charles W. Barrett Elementary School in South Los Angeles as part of a campaign to improve disaster preparedness among children.

-snip-

In this election, she has been mostly absent from the trail, devoting herself to other causes, including highlighting the role of women in California history and raising awareness of obesity in children.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to brighten a child's day, but why oh why must First Ladies in general stick to the "it's all about the children" script so closely? Mix it up for a change! Her fights don't even have to be about abortion or feminism. It hasn't occurred to conservatives and to the Republican Party as a whole that women might be concerned about fair wages, or better preventitive health care. Why is it that people have to assume, "Oh, she's a woman. She must be interested in children." These days, politicians no longer have to kiss babies to win because their wives do it for them.

And, I'd also like to ask, do you think this problem applies to both liberals and conservatives? Do female politicians tend to get stuck at the children's table?

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I couldn't help that notice that every person featured in a photo of Rosa Parks mourners was either African-American, an elected offical, or both. The only white speaker I could find listed at her funeral was Bill "first black President" Clinton.

This is either a mild indictment of the media or white America. If the tribute to Rosa Parks was a multi-racial affair, the press ought to show that to us. But if only a handful of white folks took the time to pay their respects, it would show us just how much more work there is to do to bridge racial divides in this country, even in the 21st century.

Interesting study out from Health Affairs comparing the care experiences of patients in six countries.  The lucky lab rats are Australia, America, Canada, Germany, England, and New Zealand.  The results, for Americans, are not comforting.  I'll quote you the interesting parts:

"Concerns about transition care extended to medications. Patients in all countries   were often given a new medication when discharged, with U.S. patients the most   likely to report new medications. Yet in all but Germany, at least one in four   patients said that nobody had reviewed the medications they were taking before   their hospitalization.[...]

  On a composite variable including three types of errors—medication or   medical mistakes or lab errors—U.S. patients were the most likely and   U.K patients the least likely to report errors. Driven up by relatively high   medication and lab or test errors, at 34 percent, the spread between the United   States and the countries with the lowest error rates was wide as well as statistically   significant. Yet in all countries, more than one of five sicker adults reported   at least one of the three types of errors, with patients often reporting more   than one type of error.[...]

Asked about waits to see their doctors when sick, sicker adults in Canada   and the United States were significantly less likely to report rapid access   and more likely to wait six days or longer for an appointment than patients   in the other countries. The percentage receiving same- or next-day appointments   ranged from a high of 70 percent or more in Germany and New Zealand to below   half in Canada and the United States.

  Ease of access to care after hours or on weekends also varied widely, with 70   percent or more New Zealand and German patients and more than half of U.K. patients   saying that access is “easy.” In contrast, more than half of sicker   adults in the United States, Canada, and Australia said that it is difficult   to get after-hours care.

  Canadian and U.S. patients were the most likely and German patients the least   likely to report emergency room (ER) visits in the past two years, with rates   notably low in Germany. Moreover, one-fifth of Canadian and one-fourth of U.S.   sicker adults said that they went to an ER for a condition that could have been   treated by their regular doctor if available—rates significantly higher   than reported in other countries. Also, Canadians stood out for long ER waiting   times.[...]

  As found in past surveys, the United States is an outlier for financial burdens   on patients and patients forgoing care because of costs. Half of sicker adults   in the United States said that they did not see a doctor when sick, did not   get recommended treatment, or did not fill a prescription because of cost. On   each access/ cost question, the U.S. rate was 1.5 to double the forgone care   rates reported in the next-highest country. Moreover, the percentage of U.S.   sicker adults forgoing care because of costs was much higher on all three indicators   compared with the 2002 survey of sicker adults.¹²   Despite these high rates of care forgone, one-third of U.S. patients spent more   than $1,000 out of pocket in the past year, a level rare in the other countries.   Insured and uninsured U.S. patients were about equally likely to report expenditures   this high (34 percent insured and 32 percent uninsured; data not shown). U.S.   patients were also the most likely to pay $100 or more each month for medications[...]

Asked to rate their country’s care system overall, the majority of sicker   adults (66–85 percent) in all countries saw room for major improvement.   Sicker adults in Germany and the United States were the most negative, followed   by Australia.[...]

Our findings also indicate that insurance and delivery systems affect patients’   experiences beyond basic access and waiting times. Symptoms of inadequate insurance   coverage and more fragmented care in the United States emerged throughout the   survey. The United States outspends the other countries, spending 14.6 percent   of national income compared with Germany’s 10.9 percent, Canada’s   9.6 percent, Australia’s 9.1 percent, New Zealand’s 8.5 percent,   and the United Kingdom’s 7.7 percent.²⁵ Yet   the United States often ranks last or tied for last for safety, efficiency,   and access. With one-third of U.S. patients reporting medical, medication, or   lab errors and a similar share citing duplicate tests or medical record delays,   our findings indicate widespread performance deficiencies that put patients   at risk and undermine care. Moreover, a recent study finds that the United States   is not systematically a leader in clinical outcomes.²⁶
 
  Confirming spending data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and   Development (OECD), the United States also stands out for its patient cost burdens,   with consequences for access.²⁷ U.S. physician   visit rates are already low by OECD standards.²⁸   To the extent that U.S. insurance continues to move toward higher front-end   patient deductibles, these rates could go up, as increasing numbers of insured   patients become “underinsured,” lacking access or adequate financial   protection.²⁹ Contrasts between the United States   and Germany, in particular, indicate that it is possible to organize care and   insurance to achieve timely access without queues, while ensuring that care   is affordable at the point of service. There are clear opportunities for the   United States to learn from other countries’ insurance systems."

It's not, to say the least, a comforting picture.  It's Friday afternoon, so I'm not feeling in-depth analysis.  For that, you should go to Matt Holt.  But if you've read the excerpts, there's really not much explanation required.  We get worse care that's less convenient and leaves us less satisfied than most everyone else, meanwhile, we pay much more than anyone else for the priviledge.  Keep in mind, here, that we're dealing with five single-payer systems, not only Canada.  ClintonCare, by the way, was modeled after Germany.  Sure glad we decided against that boondoggle of efficiency.

This sort of superstition, cultural resistance, and denial of modern science will, if the bird flu erupts across the globe, be a primary mover in the disaster:

When the half-starved chickens started dying this summer and the barefoot children developed fevers here in this village of thatched huts and emerald rice fields, residents were terrified and deeply divided about the cause of their misfortune.

Some blamed bird flu and took their weakened children to a clinic in a nearby provincial city, where a medic diagnosed human influenza instead. But other residents said it was witchcraft by the only village resident not born here, 53-year-old Som Sorn, who moved here eight years ago when she married an elderly local farmer.

When Mrs. Som Sorn's husband went into the jungle to cut wood one afternoon and she began cooking rice over a fire on the dirt floor of her hut, a local man with a machete took action and later collected $30 in donations from grateful neighbors, a month's wages.

"The assassin grabbed her hair, pulled her head back and cut her throat," said Ya Pheorng, the village leader. "Her neck was almost completely severed."

Much like AIDS, where local witch doctors and government leaders alike told afflicted Africans that their troubles stemmed from magic, unless the WHO and local governments work to convince villagers of the viral nature of bird flu, we're going to have no chance of stopping its spread.  Thanks to transportation advances, globalization, and a host of other movers, the poorest and most backwards Indonesian peasant can, with but a few degrees of separation, pass her illness onto you or I.  I've no solutions, but it's a huge problem.

Man, bad week for Arnold.  First every poll in the state shows his ballot initiatives dying, then his first unscripted, heavily-televised voter forum turns into a live assault against him and his ideas.  Props for poise under fire, but the guy and his propositions can't seem to catch a break.  His poll numbers are so bad you'd think he was, well, George W. Bush (and how awesome is it to be able to say that)?  And while special elections are fluid and turnout dependent, it's not a good sign when so many intuitively appealing ideas are being sunk by association with you.  Much like Bush's strange penchant for talking people out of the Social Security plan he was trying to talk them into, Arnold's become his own worst enemy.  A variety of polls have now found that the more he advocates for the propositions, the more voters oppose them.  That's gotta hurt -- who wants to be kryptonite to their own agenda?

If you, like me, have a thing for cookbooks, this LA Times article lovingly detailing the season's best offerings will be right up your alley. 

Wal-Mart, in a fairly admirable move, sponsored a conference on their economic impact on communities and, to ensure its honesty, turned it over to an independent planning organization who selected the papers on scholarly rigor.  Whoops:

At least two concluded that Wal-Mart stores' pay practices depressed wages beyond the retail sector. Another found that states on average spent $898 for each Wal-Mart worker in Medicaid expenses.

One study concluded that Wal-Mart's giant grocery and general merchandise Supercenters brought little net gain for local communities in property taxes, sales taxes and employment; instead, the stores merely siphoned sales from existing businesses in the area.

Not all the news was bad for Wal-Mart. Several of the studies noted that its stores led to lower prices throughout a region. Two suggested that Wal-Mart increased a county's total employment, with one pegging that long-term gain at 1% to 2%.

David Neumark, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, found that "residents of a local labor market do indeed earn less following the opening of Wal-Mart stores."

Worse yet, he wrote, is Wal-Mart's influence in the South, where it has its greatest concentration of stores. There, Neumark and his coauthors found, Wal-Mart has decreased retail employment and total employment.

Michael Hicks of the Air Force Institute of Technology and Marshall University found that each employee of Wal-Mart caused "the average state to expend just under $900 a year in Medicaid benefits."

What's interesting here is that Wal-Mart's willingness to turn over the event bespoke a true confidence and belief that critics of their company's economic impact were wrong and would be proven so here.  That the exact opposite is happening must be sending forth some ripples of cognitive dissonance within the retailer's walls.  That's not to say the behemoth will change its methods, but coming on the heels of so much bad press for the company, the leaked memo on their plans to game the health system, and the upcoming release of Robert Greenwald's documentary "The High Cost of Low Prices," it'll be interesting to see how the corporation begins to react.  Within their walls there's certainly an understanding that negative press is taking a toll on the company's expansion opportunities -- hence the new environmental consciousness and health plans.  Now, with this conference's conclusion that there's a damn good reason for the negative press, there might emerge some elementswithin Wal-Mart's management that actually want to change the company's behavior for the better, that actually want to lead the way into a worker-positive service economy the same way GM led America into a labor-friendly maufacturing economy.

Hey, a boy a can dream.

Gotta say, Rick Warren, megachurch pastor and author The Purpose Driven Life (the best selling book of all time), is a pretty impressive guy.  Unlike so many in his profession, he's not parlayed his success into political power or social demagoguery, instead, he's trying to refocus the church on poverty issues and AIDS prevention.  It's amazing stuff.  I've pulled some excerpts from an interview with him, they're after the jump.  But try to read the whole thing -- it's truly interesting stuff.:

"I just know that God is calling on my life, that three years ago when the book came out the three major things that happened were the success of the book and the affluence and influence that came with it. In one quarter it earned $9 million (in royalties) alone. So I’m going, "OK, God, I don’t need this money... What are you doing with this? I don’t need this. I’m a pastor." And I certainly don’t think God gives you money or fame for your own ego.

I went to scripture and God gave me two passages, 1 Corinthians 9 and Psalm 72. In 1 Corinthians 9 Paul is talking to pastors about money and their salary and he says, "Those that teach the Gospel should make a living by the Gospel." In other words, it is OK to pay your pastor. "But," he says, "I will not accept that right because I want the free rein to serve God for free so that I am a slave to no man." And when I read that, I said that is what I want to do. I want to serve God for free so that I am a slave to no man. So three years ago, [my wife] Kay and I made five decisions.

First, we decided we would not change our lifestyle one bit no matter how much money came in. So I still live in the same house I’ve lived in for 15 years and I still drive the same Ford truck, have the same two suits, I don’t have a guest home, I don’t have a yacht, I don’t own a beach house, we just said that we aren’t going to use the money on ourselves.

Second, I stopped taking a salary from the church.

Third, I ad