This blog is on a light schedule today and tomorrow due to various New Years related program activities, but it's worth quickly responding to Jonathan Chait's post on Israel and Palestine. Chait makes a common claim, which is that all analysis of the Israel/Palestinian conflict has to begin from a place of intentionality. "Hamas has a problem with Israel because Hamas believes Israel has no right to exist," he writes. "Israel has a problem with Hamas because Hamas believes Israel has no right to exist. If Hamas lay down all its weapons, Israel would lift its blockade. If Israel lay down all its weapons, Hamas would kill as many Israelis as it could."

There's truth to this. But it can also obscure more than it can reveal. One important disconnect in Israel/Palestine debate is that Israel's supporters tend to focus on what the Palestinians want while Palestine's supporters tend to focus on what the Israelis do. Israel's defenders, for instance, make a lot of Hamas's willingness to kill large numbers of civilians. Palestine's defenders make a lot of the fact that Israel actually kills large numbers of Palestinian civilians.

To make it more concrete, in July, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem reported that 123 Israeli minors had been killed by Palestinians since the second intifada began in 2000, compared with 951 Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces. Israel's supporters emphasize that the children were not killed purposefully, but were collateral damage of targeted operations. By contrast, Palestinian suicide bombers have targeted children directly. Israelis define their struggle in contrast to the intentions of Hamas. Palestinians define their struggle in terms of the actions of the Israelis.

Without understanding this distinction, it's hard to understand the two sides of the conflict. Hamas survives because Palestinian society is radicalized against Israel. Palestinian society is radicalized against Israel because Israel's operations have devastated their society. Be assured that when Palestinians look at the 1,000 or so children killed by the Israeli armed forces, they do not comfort themselves with the fact that those deaths were accidental. And, indeed, a case can be made that collateral damage from air strikes in dense urban areas are not accidental. They are expected.

Conversely, Chait is correct to say that the Israelis see little hope of negotiation with an enemy that denies their basic claim to existence. They feel rightly threatened by the presence of Hamas, the oppressive reality of terrorism, and the hatred of their Arab neighbors. Israel is far stronger than Palestine, but it judges itself in constant danger.

There's no easy way to bridge the distance between these perspectives. As Aaron David Miller has written, "the prospects of reconciling the interests of an occupied nation with those of a threatened one [are] slim to none." The Israelis see themselves as threatened innocents, not oppressors. They point to the public statements of Hamas, and they are right. The Palestinians see themselves as an occupied people, not aggressors. They point to their death toll and the settlements, and they are right.

There is nothing specifically incorrect in the argument Chait draws. But the intellectual clarity of the distinction is so far from the lived experience from the Palestinians as to be meaningless. He says Hamas would kill more children if they could. The Palestinians say the Israelis kill more children. Which is why Israel's attack on Gaza was so unwise. The Palestinians just watched the Israelis slaughter dozens of children, mothers, and other innocents. Protestations that they deserved it because Hamas threatens to kill Israeli innocents will not make sense to them. And so the battle will continue, with Israel's supporters comforting themselves by looking at Hamas's stated intentions and Hamas's supporters justifying themselves by pointing towards the fresh graves of their dead. I don't know how you reconcile the interests of a threatened nation with an occupied one. But you have to start by recognizing the lived experience on both sides, not just one.

Matthew Holt takes a critical look in the health policy ideas outlined in Tom Daschle's book. I agree with many of his points. Holt believes that "only a big bang reform will be able to solve the core problems of our system," and he's right on that. But the chances that we "solve" the core problems of our system in the first attempt are very slight. Improving the system, however, is rather closer in reach. And if Daschle and Obama can implement a system that secures health insurance for 45 million more Americans, that modernizes the technical infrastructure, that creates a research body able to start extracting savings from better cost-effectiveness data, and that integrates the system such that future efforts to control costs are easier, that would be a good outcome. Not a perfect outcome, but a good one.

Dean Baker has a very nice piece in the Boston Review trying to bring a bit of clarity to the debate over regulation. As he argues, American politics frames the issue as a contest between two sides. One side, the liberals, want lots of rules and statutes that interfere with the free market. The other side, the conservatives, want to leave the free market alone. The argument is between those who want regulation and those who don't.

"In fact conservatives do not necessarily desire less regulation, nor do liberals necessarily desire more," says Baker. "Framing regulation debates in terms of more and less is not only inaccurate; it hugely biases the argument toward conservative positions by characterizing an extremely intrusive structure of, for example, patent and copyright rules, as the free market."

He goes on to offer four examples: The first is government-protected patents on pharmaceutical formulas. This is, in effect, the government regulating and enforcing monopoly on behalf of companies. When conservatives defend these companies from competition by generic producers or bargaining from Medicare, they are protecting an intrusive regulatory structure. He also notes that you could fund drug development without patents, using prizes, or patent-buy outs, or simple direct investment. And he notes that eliminating patents would have some real benefits, including ending the rationale for drug companies to push products in cases where they aren't truly beneficial, closing off the incentive to conceals research findings that demonstrate a drug's poor performance, and placing all drug research in the public realm, which would allow other scientists to quickly build on it and accelerate the process of innovation.

Or take the Bankruptcy Bill, where Baker notes that individual responsibility could apply as easily to creditors as lenders. "Part of being a successful business involves knowing under what circumstances to extend credit," writes Baker. "No one forced businesses to extend credit to the people who subsequently declared bankruptcy. They exercised bad judgment in extending credit to people who were not good credit risks. Why should the government step in to help businesses that fail to assess credit risk?" But now, the government wil step in to help creditors collect. Regulation.

Or the government's adherence to the "too-big-to-fail" doctrine. Having brushed away regulations
on leveraging and derivatives, the government kept the implicit guarantee that major banks would not be allowed to fail. If they'd truly been committed to deregulation, "they would have assured financial markets that financial institutions making bad investments would go out of business and that their creditors would be out of luck." Instead, we had one-sided deregulation: The laws that reduced the financial industry's capacity to take on risk were relaxed, but the protections that shielded them from the consequences of those risks were left in place. This worked out for everyone but Lehman.

The question of regulation, concludes Baker, isn't who supports it, but who it enriches. "The government is always present," he says, "steering the benefits in different directions depending on who is in charge. Accepting this view provides a political vantage point much better suited to the case for progressive regulation. After all, conservatives want the big hand of government in the market as well. They just want the handouts all to go to those at the top."

Dan Conley, a former Daley speechwriter and a Chicago political insider, has a smart take on the Burris appointment:

The appointment of Burris is a pure impeachment-defense tactic from Blagojevich. First, he's making a public case that no crime was actually committed. If Burris was appointed without any quid pro quo (highly likely, since Burris has no great wealth or influence), then Blagojevich can argue that all the talk about other possible appointments were just that -- talk. And talk is not a crime. Is anyone going to buy that? Well, even if only ten percent of Illinois voters buy it, Blagojevich will have doubled his support, so why not? There's a certain freedom in nearly complete unpopularity.

But second, and more important for Blagojevich's survival plans, he's chosen to play the race card. To anyone who thought that the election of Barack Obama would diminish the power of racial politics, today's press conference was depressing -- especially the appalling spectacle of Rep. Bobby Rush using the word "lynch" in reference to criticism of Burris, then Blagojevich repeating the phrase while wagging a finger at the press corp on the way out of the room. For a Governor looking to rally support in the House and Senate to avoid impeachment or convinction, it's a smart move. A combination of African American and Latino Senators could be sufficient to save Blagojevich from a conviction in the Illinois Senate. It probably won't work, but Blagojevich has few options left.

The question is why Rush and Burris are going along.

• Who cares if Johnny can't read? Why we overstate the value of books.

• The Scarlet Lion: Wonderful Africa photography.

• Fannie Mae's last stand.

• Drug Companies and Doctors: A Story of Corruption.

• Children of the Revolution: How the House Republicans got so conservative.

Zbigniew Brzezinski spent some time on Morning Joe today, and grew so exasperated with Scarborough's insipid questions that he finally shot back, "you know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you." Yes it is.

Brzezinski, incidentally, was one of the architects of the detente with Egypt, and as such, is one of the few individuals in history who can claim to have actually made Israel safer.

It's been a big year for weird press conferences, but watching Bobby Rush stand before Rod Blagojevich and endorse his appointment of Roland Burris to fill Obama's Senate seat might be the weirdest spectacle yet. "This is about Roland Burris as a United States senator, not the governor who makes the appointment," said Blagojevich, the governor making the appointment. "I would ask you not to hang or lynch the appointee as you try to castigate the appointor," Rush added. And Burris just stood there. Smiling.

It's ugly stuff. Blagojevich is trying to racialize his problems. Rush's defense was entirely on grounds of skin tone. Burris locates his base among the state's black churches. Blagojevich's is hoping that if the US Senate rejects Burris, they will anger the black community, who will rally to his side. For his part, Burris is all too happy to grind his ethics beneath his ambitions. As Progress Illinois points out, on December 12th, he endorsed the effort to impeach Blagojevich and termed him "incapacitated."

Not everyone, of course, is on board with the Rod Blagojevich Rehabilitation Plan. Reid pronounced the appointment "unacceptable," and said Burris wouldn't be seated in the Senate. "We say this without prejudice toward Roland Burris’ ability, and we respect his years of public service," affirmed Reid. "But this is not about Mr. Burris; it is about the integrity of a governor accused of attempting to sell this United States Senate seat. Under these circumstances, anyone appointed by Gov. Blagojevich cannot be an effective representative of the people of Illinois and, as we have said, will not be seated by the Democratic Caucus." In Illinois, Secretary of State Jesse White (who happens to be, um, black) has said he won't certify the appointment. Obama has not yet weighed in.

I'm a bit late on linking to this, but Paul Krugman is right to suggest that the Obama folks are going to need a bit of that goo-goo -- that is to say, "good government" -- magic if they're to pull off this recovery plan. The fundamental dilemma for liberals now, as Stan Greenberg has argued in this magazine, is that Americans are in favor of our solutions, but skeptical of government's ability to carry them out.

People want government to get serious about addressing the challenges we face as a country. Huge majorities want the government to be more involved in a range of issues including national security, health care, energy, and the environment. To tackle global warming, two-thirds of Americans support stronger regulation of business. When it comes to health care, the results are dramatic. By a two-to-one margin, people opt for a universal health care system rather than separate reforms dealing with problems one at a time. A majority even goes so far as to say it's time to establish a Canadian-style health care system.[...]

But there is a perverse consequence brought about by the scale of conservatives' failure. The problem -- the very substantial problem -- is that conservatives have failed in ways that have undermined Americans' sense of collective capacity. Their failure has communicated not just their own incompetence, but also the message that government in general is incompetent. By failing so dramatically, conservatives have created a significant roadblock for Democrats: They have undermined people's faith in the very instrument that we as progressives want to use to solve problems.

The scale of damage done to people's belief in government is enormous. The results of a February study we conducted for Democracy Corps that assessed people's attitudes toward government stunned us. By 57 percent to 29 percent, Americans believe that government makes it harder for people to get ahead in life instead of helping people. Sixty-two percent in a Pew study said they believe elected officials don't care what people like them think, and the same number believe that whenever something is run by the government it is probably inefficient and wasteful. The Democracy Corps study found that an emphatic 83 percent say that if the government had more money, it would waste it rather than spend it well. The government receives a job approval rating of more than 50 percent on only one issue -- national security. On nearly every other issue, a majority of Americans disapprove of government's performance.

It's a real problem. Americans feel caught between the venality of private sector conservatism and the incompetence of public sector liberalism. As Krugman says, that's a problem. "The Obama team faces political opponents who will seize on any signs of corruption or abuse — or invent them, if necessary — in an attempt to discredit the administration’s program." You see it beginning already, with Mitch McConnell warning that Democrats want to blow a trillion dollars "without safeguards, without appropriate hearings to scrutinize how tax dollars are being spent." Obama has said that he wants to make government cool. That would be nice. But for now, I'd settle for trustworthy.

Simply defined, a collective action problem is a dilemma in which the rational actions of individual actors make everyone worse off. What's smart for the one proves to be dumb for the many. Imagine, for instance, that you are a new business entering a field where the major players are decades old. Over time, they've bargained with their workers, raised their pay, offered good health benefits and retirement packages. The rational thing for you to do is undercut their labor costs. Then you can sell the good more cheaply and take away their market share.

That's all fine. But if everyone does it, then you can't have a decent society, because employers cannot offer decent wages. It's a smart tactic for an individual business, but multiplied across a thousand firms, it's the killing blow for a society that wants a healthy middle class. And, as Jon Cohn argues in this fine essay, it's part of what happened to the American auto industry.

For all of Detroit's mistakes, it is also a victim of something it did right: ensuring a middle-class lifestyle for bluecollar workers. When the carmakers, pushed by unions, agreed to provide workers with a steady level of purchasing power, comprehensive health benefits lasting into retirement, and various forms of workplace rights, they were promising something that all Americans covet. And, while the financial costs and managerial constraints associated with that effort have helped bring domestic carmakers to the edge of collapse, ultimate responsibility for this situation lies beyond Detroit.

In a more enlightened society, after all, government would have made those promises and extended them to all workers, thereby spreading the burden of financing them to all taxpayers. That's how it's done in Europe and in Japan--which, not coincidentally, is the home of Detroit's most successful competitors. But the U.S. government never took that step. So, instead of a public welfare state, we got a private one, administered for only some workers and paid for by their employers. Sooner or later, this arrangement was bound to fail.

The corporate welfare state was an elegant idea, but as Cohn argues, it was riven by a fundamental weakness: It was unsustainable. It set up strange sorts of competition: Who could offer cheaper health care benefits? Who could best cut their pension costs? Who could, in other words, adjust their compensation so it was just above the level needed to attract appropriate workers? Anything higher than that was a simple inefficiency. Decency proved a competitive disadvantage.

But you can solve collective action problems with, well, collective action. Which is what other countries have done. If you don't want firms competing to offer the worst health care benefits, you don't leave it up to the firms. This is, of course, how Japan and Germany work, and their car companies are just fine. In the essay, Cohn argues in favor of the Nordic model, where "the government guarantees everybody, even blue-collar workers, most of the things Detroit once guaranteed its workforce--like middle-class wages, full health benefits, and subsidized day care. The government also guarantees nearly full incomes for the unemployed." It's a good model. We are not well-served by an economy where treating workers well is a terrible error, where it represents a competitive innovation to discover that you can attract low wage labor without offering them health benefits, as your competitors do. We don't want an economy where what's smart for the firm is bad for our society.

Charles says:

I am predicting that in a year the New York Times will write one of those irritating "look, things sometimes happen outside of our city" articles about DC theater/art scene. They will attribute the increase in quality to Obama.

Of course romantic comedies harm your love life. They create unrealizable expectations for connection and intimacy. They feature the world's most beautiful people speaking dialogue written by the country's most talented screenwriters. But we didn't need a methodologically shoddy study for this finding. We just needed to read more Emile Durkheim.

Durkheim called anomie “the malady of infinite aspiration”. His central idea was that human beings need regulation – a framework of informal and formal rules that set limits to what they are entitled to expect, for instance, in the form of economic rewards. It is an idea that contrasts sharply with the culture of capitalism, not least its US version.

Durkheim's insight was that there's a flip side to the idea that we can achieve anything we want. It also suggests that we can want everything. And it's in that space between what we desire, and what most of us can achieve, that the peculiar unhappiness of affluence manifests. With unrealistic expectations comes unavoidable discontentment.

Durkheim isn't as well known as he should be, but his theory has been expertly monetized by advertisers and movie producers, who aim their products right at that sore sport between expectation and outcome. They fill that gap, if only for an hour or two. So of course romantic comedies hurt. They appeal to what we want, and thus emphasize what we can't have. Which doesn't stop me from liking them. Go see Role Models!

I wanted to take a moment to thank you for your support and your patience during this long recount process.

Today I've got good news to report: it looks like we're on track to win. The state canvassing board has completed its job of reviewing all the ballots - and at the end of this important step in the process, we're ahead.[...]

We've got a lot of important work left to do together to get this country back on track - and with the recount process almost over, I want you to know that I'm ready to get to work on day one. For now, though, I'd like to thank you for all you've done, and to wish you and your family a Happy New Year. I think it's going to be a great one.

It's not over, of course, until the last absentee ballot is certified, but as Eric Kleefeld says, "Al Franken, who entered the recount down by 215 votes, is currently ahead by a margin of 0.00171% out of over 2.9 million votes." That seems like a whole lot of nothing, but given how few ballots are left, it's actually a relevant lead. Indeed, Franken is currently trading at 90 on Intrade. Coleman is down to 6.

This is an interesting point from Ross Douthat:

Consider, for instance, the way in which the dominance of the Christian story has actually sharpened one of the best arrows in the anti-theist's quiver. In Western society, especially, the oft-heard claim that the world is too cruel a place for a good omnipotence to have created derives a great deal of its power, whether implicitly or explicitly, from the person of Christ himself. The God of the New Testament seems more immediate, more personal, and more invested in his creation than He had heretofore revealed Himself to be. But this arguably makes Him seem more culpable for the world's suffering as well. Paradoxically, the God who addresses Job out of the whirlwind is far less vulnerable to complaints about the world's injustice than the God who suffers on the Cross - or the human God who cries in the manger. For many Christians, Christ's suffering provides a partial answer to the problem of theodicy. But for many atheists and agnostics, it only sharpens the question: How can a God who loves mankind enough to die for us allow us to suffer as much as we do?

Daoub Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist, has a smart piece on the internal politics of Hamas in today's Washington Post:

The lack of international support since the 2006 elections, followed by this rebuff to Gaza's only Arab neighbor, Egypt, compounded the deterioration of Hamas's internal support. By November, the survey showed, only 16.6 percent of Palestinians supported Hamas, compared with nearly 40 percent favoring Fatah. The decline in support for Hamas has been steady: A year earlier, the same pollster showed that Hamas's support was at 19.7 percent; in August 2007, it was at 21.6 percent; in March 2007, it was at 25.2 percent; and in September 2006, backing for the Islamists stood at 29.7 percent.

That's why, as the six-month cease-fire with Israel came to an end, Hamas calculated -- it seems correctly -- that it had nothing to gain by continuing the truce; if it had, its credentials as a resistance movement would have been no different from those of Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah. Unable to secure an open border and an end to the Israeli siege, while refusing to share or give up power to Abbas, Hamas could have had no route to renewed public favor.

For different reasons, Hamas and Israel both gave up on the cease-fire, preferring instead to climb over corpses to reach their political goals. One side wants to resuscitate its public support by appearing to be a heroic resister, while the other, on the eve of elections, wants to show toughness to a public unhappy with the nuisance of the Qassam rockets.

The disproportionate and heavy-handed Israeli attacks on Gaza have been a bonanza for Hamas. The movement has renewed its standing in the Arab world, secured international favor further afield and succeeded in scuttling indirect Israeli-Syrian talks and direct Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. It has also greatly embarrassed Israel's strongest Arab neighbors, Egypt and Jordan.

While it is not apparent how this violent confrontation will end, it is abundantly clear that the Islamic Hamas movement has been brought back from near political defeat while moderate Arab leaders have been forced to back away from their support for any reconciliation with Israel.

You really can't get away from the political logic of the strikes. Hamas is healthiest when it is a symbol of guerrilla resistance against a brutal and murderous Jewish state. Kadima is likeliest to win the February elections if it is demonstrating sufficient toughness to neuter Likud's appeal. And so here we are. The Israeli and Palestinian politicians are both well-served by the strikes in Gaza. The Israeli and Palestinian people less so.

Political scientists have studied pundit predictions and found them to be, on the overall, inaccurate. Indeed, the effect gets stronger as the pundit becomes more popular: "the better known the pundit, the less accurate his or her forecasts." But all this suggests that political punditry has something to do with accuracy. It doesn't. It's entertainment. Just like people who like sports want to be able to watch TV shows about sports and people who like women in bikinis want to be able to watch TV shows about women in bikinis, people who like politics want to be able to watch TV shows about politics. The pundits exist to fill that need. Their role is to make those shows entertaining, so the shows have good ratings, so they can sell time for advertisers, so they can make a profit for networks. Indeed, as everyone knows, a very accurate show with very low ratings will be canceled and a very inaccurate show with very high ratings will become the network's flagship. People tend to stay away from the implications of that, but no one denies that it's true.

The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration plans to rework food assistance programs so that they focus on nutrition, rather than simply calories. That would be a good move: Families that go hungry are more likely to be obese. That sounds contradictory, but it isn't: In times when they can purchase food, they buy maximum numbers of the cheapest calories. And so you end up with the worst of both world. Malnutrition, which destroys the developmental prospects of the kids, and obesity, which destroys the health prospects of the adults.

As you might imagine, J Street is saying sensible things about the crisis in Gaza.

Amidst the e-mails today (including a personal favorite that asked, "WARSAW GHETTO & SUCH. HOW CAN YOU JUSTIFY THAT TREATMENT??? WHAT HAVE YOU TO SAY ABOUT ALL THAT???"), the common thread has been a simple question: What would you have Israel do in response to non-lethal rocketry? How can Israel end the cycle of violence when Hamas refuses to recognize its right to exist, much less the need to disarm?

But Israel cannot be in the business of responding to every act of violent provocation Hamas can engineer. Saying that only Hamas can end the violence is another way of saying that they have total control over the situation. Hamas may never cease mounting violent attacks. They live off Palestinian hatred of Israel. Their currency is the oppression of their people. It is oxygen to their cause. Resolving to meet their every provocation with overwhelming force is akin to a promise of immortality for the organization. Giving them a veto card over the peace process is assuring their triumph.

Mustafa Barghouti is no ally of Hamas. A Palestinian reformer who has long advocated for nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation and frequently opposed both Hamas and Fattah in elections. But he doesn't see Israel's attacks on Gaza as a strike against Hamas. He sees them as the butchery of the Palestinian people. His response should be read in full. Not because it's necessarily right, but because it's important. This is what the process of radicalization looks like. Barghouti is not a member of Hamas. He is not a terrorist. But his countrymen, friends, and family are being killed. He says that "the massacre could presumably provoke a new generation of suicide bombers." If so, will it have been worth it? Having run for office in Palestine, he says that the bombing "will not undermine Hamas." What exactly is being accomplished here?

Indeed, as Spencer Ackerman argues, what we're seeing may be nothing less than the end of the international isolation that has hampered Hamas. Israel is making them into a legitimate and popular resistance -- akin to Fatah under Arafat -- and under those circumstances, few governments in the region will find it tenable to oppose them.

Elsewhere, Marc Lynch examines the Arab press. "Almost every Arab media outlet, even those bitterly hostile to Hamas, is running bloody images from Gaza," he says. There are protests roiling the streets from Amman to Cairo, and many of them are aimed at pro-Western Arab governments. In Egypt, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood is leading street demonstrations and shaking the parliament. Syria has cut off its indirect talks with Israel and Jordanian parliamentarians are calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador. Lynch predicts that that the regional environment will not soon recover, Hamas may well be strengthened against Fatah, and we can look forward to "an even more poisoned, polarized and toxic regional environment for a new President who had pledged to re-engage with the peace process."

This is a nice point from The New York Times:

The argument against unions — that they unduly burden employers with unreasonable demands — is one that corporate America makes in good times and bad, so the recession by itself is not an excuse to avoid pushing the bill next year. The real issue is whether enhanced unionizing would worsen the recession, and there is no evidence that it would.

There is a strong argument that the slack labor market of a recession actually makes unions all the more important. Without a united front, workers will have even less bargaining power in the recession than they had during the growth years of this decade, when they largely failed to get raises even as productivity and profits soared. If pay continues to lag, it will only prolong the downturn by inhibiting spending.

I'd only add that the last great leap forward for unions was during World War II, and the last great expansion of the American middle class followed in its aftermath. In contrast, the most recent expansions -- which have largely occurred in the absence of unions -- have benefited America's rich.

Unions do not change economic growth, or at least there's little convincing evidence that they do. The countries with the world's highest growth rates -- the Nordic economies -- also have some of the world's highest rates of unionization. Denmark, Sweden, and Finland all approach 80 percent. Rather, unions change the distribution of economic growth. They direct more of it to the middle class and less of it to the executive class. The past few years have been an economy driven by the executive class. The question is whether that's what we want the next expansion to look like, also.

As expected, my inbox has filled up with e-mails accusing me of anti-semitism, and Israel hatred, and all the rest. So be it. But the danger that confronts Israel in 2009 is not the danger that confronted Israel in 1959. There will be no conventional attack. There will be no coalition of Arab armies that can face the might of the Israeli Defense Forces, much less the American armed forces. Hamas cannot push Israel into the sea. It cannot even disrupt Israel's blockade of medical supplies.

Israel's threats are asymmetric. One man with one bomb. One terrorist group able to lay its hands on one nuclear weapon. One splinter sect able to detonate one biological agent. And this threat endures as long as Israel is hated and the oppression of the Palestinians remains a central ideological cause in the Arab world. The way to secure Israel is not to firebomb the Palestinian people and flood the Arab world with photographs of maimed children and dead mothers and charred schoolyards. It is to end those images.

It may indeed be that many in the Arab world will never content themselves with the Jewish state. But many is better than most, and some would be better than many, and a few extremists would be better than some. I've been asked what an appropriate Israeli response to the rockets would have been: That's my answer. Policies that direct us across that continuum. That are strategic rather than cathartic. Instead, there is no doubt that there are more anti-Israel terrorists today than there were last week, and more plans for vengeance and destruction and death and murder than there were last month. Most of those will fade away. Most of the rest will fail. But what if one doesn't? How many chances can we take?

The common defense of the Israeli attacks seems to be that they "needed" to do something in response to Hamas's provocations. A legitimate government cannot allow its people to be fired upon. But this is an odd justification indeed. They didn't "need" to do anything. Not if the only options were making the situation worse. And this will make the situation worse. Hamas is an entity that feeds off of Palestinian hatred towards Israel. Can anyone seriously claim that Israel's attacks will not amplify Palestinian anger? Will they not be strengthened by pan-Arab, and even international, solidarity? As Spencer Ackerman writes, "Israel is acting astrategically to Hamas's provocations, isolating itself even further internationally, and driving the Palestinians of Gaza -- and, who knows, maybe the West Bank -- into the hands of Hamas, all in the service of unachievable military objectives and delivering unconscionable collective punishment to Palestine."

Indeed, I've actually not yet heard a compelling defense of this on strategic grounds. Hamas engages in asymmetric warfare against Israel. Israel is destroying Hamas's conventional -- which is to say, symmetric -- capacities. They are obliterating Hamas-as-governing-authority and strengthening Hamas-as-popular-terrorist-group. It's mindless. The broader aim seems to mirror that of the blockade: Cause enough pain to the Palestinian citizenry and they will eventually reject Hamas. It's a strategy that has not worked, and will not work. Ask yourself if Abbas is stronger today than he was a year ago.

Which brings us to the final justification: Israel needed to do something, and this is something, so they needed to do this, and thus we should support it. But they didn't need to do this. It was a choice. And in three months, when the retaliatory attack comes, and 87 Israelis perish, then Israel will "need" to do something again. This is why it's called a "cycle of violence." What Israel "needs" to do is break it.

On the bright side, increased Middle East instability will send oil prices rocketing upwards, encouraging people to use less fuel and slowing the pace of climate change. I've remarked before that Israel's response seems fairly illogical: Maybe they're just really, really concerned with global warming.

"Teenagers who pledged to avoid sex until marriage were as likely to have intercourse as other U.S. adolescents," reports a new survey. Which would be fine. I don't much care if your first sexual encounter invalidates a pledge you took in 7th grade homeroom. The problem is, "teens who took the pledge also were less likely to use birth control pills or condoms than those making no promise." As Steve Benen comments, "The difference between teens who make abstinence pledges and teens who don't isn't sexual conduct, it's that those who make the pledges engage in more dangerous sexual conduct."

Right. So the data we have says that abstinence pledges are definitely ineffective and possibly harmful. I'd treat that last as a provisional result: It's not clear that the pledge is leading to more risky sex. It could be that the folks who take the pledge have less access to birth control, or less knowledge about it, or simply love the idea of teen pregnancy. More study needed, etc. And the bottom line remains: Efforts to fund abstinence only education in place of sex education are efforts to fund an increase in teen pregnancy and STD transmission. At this point, the data is too clear, and too overwhelming, to support any other conclusion.

The Israeli Narrative: After the temporary ceasefire ended 10 days ago, Hamas began launching rockets into Southern Israel. This echoed not only Hamas's actions before the ceasefire, but Hezbollah's actions in the weeks leading to the 2006 war. The rockets may have proven harmless, but they posed a continuing threat and were, under any standard, an act of war by the sovereign government of a neighboring territory. Israel's attack on Gaza was a response to this provocation.

The Palestinian Narrative: For the past year or so, following Hamas's victory in the Gaza elections, Israel has sealed the border to Gaza, cutting off both humanitarian aid and commercial traffic. In June, a coalition of eight international non-profits released a report demonstrating that conditions in Gaza were worse than at any point since 1967. 80 percent of the residents were now on food aid, more than 40 percent were unemployed, water and sewage systems were in collapse, and hospitals were suffering power shortages of up to 12 hours a day. The situation has only worsened. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) has been unable to get needed medical supplies into Gaza for more than a year because of Israel's blockade on border crossings. It is this enforced poverty and immiseration that Hamas's rocket fire was a response to.

The point is simple: You can argue, as Israel is arguing, that their air strikes are a response to Hamas's missiles. But to the Palestinians, Hamas's missiles were a response to the blockade (under international law, a blockade is indeed an act of war). Israel, of course, would argue that the blockade was a response to Hamas's past attacks. And Hamas would argue that past attacks were a response to Israel's unceasing oppression of the Palestinian people. And Israel would argue that...

The provocations and cassus belli travel as far back as anyone might care to trace. And whether you believe Israel, the Palestinians, or the international partitioners originally at fault, starting the clock on December 10th, when the ceasefire expired and Hamas's missiles crashed into the fields around Sderot, is merely an Israeli press strategy. This is the latest tactic in an ongoing struggle over land and freedom and security and money and politics and religion and elections and oppression. It did not begin with the rockets, and it will not end with this attack.

The Bush presidency was awesome. Thanks, Ed Gillespie!

Ari Berman's appreciation of Howard Dean is quite right, and well worth a read. I'd add one thing: There can be a tendency to overstate how much of the argument around the 50-state strategy was ideological rather than operational. Take the iconic screaming match between Rahm Emanuel, then chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Dean, then chair of the Democratic National Committee. The issue was not that Emanuel didn't want, in some cosmic fashion, to compete in Alabama. It's that amidst scarce resources and lots of competitive seats, he didn't think it was the best use of money. Dean argued that you had to build the party sometime, and this was as good a time as any.

Dean looks to have been vindicated. But so too was Emanuel, whose efforts at targeting and recruitment won dozens of seats. The 2008 election did not see the victory of the 50 state strategy over the swing state strategy, but a Democratic Party that did not need to choose between them. Obama, the DCCC, the DSCC, and the DNC far outraised the Republican coalition. They had more money than they knew what to do with. The traditional competition for resources -- the competition that leads to scenes where the head of the DCCC and the head of the DNC yell at each other as the Party cannibalizes itself for the same donors -- ended. Obama raised more than $700 million. The DCCC and DSCC raised almost $200 million each. The DNC raised around $250 million, and could invest in infrastructure. You could run the 50 state strategy and pump money into every competitive, and every semi-competitive, race in the country. You could do it all. Lots of money into targeted races, lots of money into party infrastructure. The crucial variable was not Dean or Emanuel winning the argument, but lots of money ending the need for an argument.

Daniel Levy has a good post up on the Israeli attacks, and I'd highlight this portion:

Here’s the bad news folks – America is involved, up to its eyeballs actually. Today, after Israeli air-strikes that killed over 200 Palestinians in Gaza, the Middle East is again seething with rage. Recruiters to the most radical of causes are again cashing in. If Osama Bin Laden is indeed a cave-dweller these days then U.S. intel should be listening out for a booming echo of laughter. Demonstrations across the Arab world and contributors to the ever-proliferating Arabic language news media and blogosphere hold the U.S., and not just Israel, responsible for what happened today (and that is a position taken, for good reasons, by sensible folk, not hard-liners). America’s allies in the region are again running for cover. America’s standing, its interests and security are all deeply affected.

Karen Tumulty asks "whether the surprise intensity of Israel's retaliation is related to the fact that this country is in the midst of a presidential transition." There's a political logic to Israel's timing. The Bush administration is, for Israel, predictable in their support. Indeed, Secretary Rice responded to the attacks by saying, "The United States strongly condemns the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel and holds Hamas responsible for breaking the cease-fire and for the renewal of violence in Gaza."

The Obama administration is less predictable. They may not support a massive air campaign that kills 300 Palestinians. Or they might. But it's a chance Israel is better off not taking. They don't want to begin their relationship with Obama by launching massive air strikes against his express objections. Hence the timing. Conducting the strikes in the final days of Bush means you don't have to conduct them in the first days of Obama. That ensures that the conflict will not take place over explicit American opposition, with all the potential diplomatic consequences that would entail. This way, Israel can accomplish its military objectives before Obama enters office. They can even let him help broker a ceasefire and secure an early international accomplishment.

The other factor is Israel's domestic politics. Tzipi Livni and her allies in Kadima face a tough election against Benjamin Netanyahu and his more aggressively hawkish coalition. But there's no space to the right of this campaign. Netanyahu cannot pledge to kill 500 Palestinians, rather than Kadima's 300. And electorates tend to prefer the status quo in times of war. The vote is on February 10th.

This is the paragraph that I can't get out of my head:

Hamas had in recent weeks let it be known that it doubted Israel would engage in a major military undertaking because of its coming elections. But in some ways the elections have made it impossible for officials like Mr. Barak not to react, because the public has grown anxious and angry over the rocket fire, which while causing no recent deaths and few injuries is deeply disturbing for those living near Gaza.

The rocket attacks were undoubtedly "deeply disturbing" to Israelis. But so too are the checkpoints, the road closures, the restricted movement, the terrible joblessness, the unflinching oppression, the daily humiliations, the illegal settlement -- I'm sorry, "outpost" -- construction, "deeply disturbing" to the Palestinians, and far more injurious. And the 300 dead Palestinians should be disturbing to us all.

There is nothing proportionate in this response. No way to fit it into a larger strategy that leads towards eventual peace. No way to fool ourselves into believing that it will reduce bloodshed and stop terrorist attacks. It is simple vengeance. There's a saying in the Jewish community: "Israel, right or wrong." But sometimes Israel is simply wrong.

Over at the New York Times' Economix blog, Uwe Reinhardt, one of the nation's leading health policy scholars, is writing a series on medical costs. The whole thing is worth reading, but I particularly recommend his post on the danger of physician autonomy.

You could imagine a world in which society was faced with an extremely difficult choice: On the one hand, doctors did incredible things with unlimited resources, with every extra dollar spent bringing a tangible health benefit. On the other hand, we couldn't afford it. There would be a zero-sum choice between health and wealth. But that's not the world we live in. The extra dollars bring no apparent health benefit, yet they are still spent, even though we can't afford it. The choice is between societal wealth and special interests.

In a totally sound post on Chinese food options in DC, Matt Yglesias advises that if you want delivery, look to Great Wall Szechuan House on 14th and Q, and "stick to the Szechuan items on the menu." Agreed. But be careful: The Szechuan items are not the items with names like "Szechwan chicken." Rather, they're the items with "ma la" -- the Sichuan term for "numbingly hot" -- in front of their name.

If you stick to those, though, Great Wall Szechuan is a real gem. The ma la cucumber is a particular revelation: Cold chunks of cucumber sitting in a pool of deep red chili oil and ground Sichuan peppercorns. Start with that. The ma la ma po tofu is some of the best I've had anywhere. Vegetarians should be sure to specify no beef, though. The ma la kung pao is sweet and spicy and smoky and damn near perfect. The ma la double cooked pork is a tasty plate of perfectly spiced bacon. The ma la bean sprouts are startlingly fresh. I've not been impressed by the noodle dishes, but others like them. The only thing I'd recommend off the ma la menu is the hot and sour soup, which is very good. Apparently, with a day of advance notice and a group larger than six, Great Wall will set up a Sichuan hot pot for you. I've not tried it yet, but I will.

At dinner last night with some old family friends, I was asked to give a coherent account of why the Bush administration decided to go to war in Iraq. I've watched the issue for five years now, read countless articles, bunches of books, attended dozens of panels, and even interviewed Iraq experts for various articles, and I still can't do it. I can outline six or seven or twelves rationalization that convinced the war's supporters once the attack was on the table. But I can't lay out the logical chain of events that led the administration to bring up the idea of invading Iraq.

This is a good point by Tyler Cowen:

The ad hoc aspect of the bailout created a precedent for what has come to be called “regulation by deal” — now the government’s modus operandi. Rather than publicizing definite standards and expectations for bailouts in advance, the Fed and the Treasury confront each particular crisis anew. Decisions are made as to whether a merger is possible, whether a consortium can be organized, what kind of loan guarantees can be offered and what kind of concessions will be extracted in return. So far, every deal — or lack thereof, in the case of Lehman Brothers — has been different.

While there are some advantages to leaving discretion in regulators’ hands, this hasn’t worked out very well. It has become increasingly apparent that the market doesn’t know what to expect and that many financial institutions are sitting on the sidelines, waiting to see what regulators will do next.

To be fair, I think the "regulation by deal" label is actually misleading. The bailouts are examples of government response, not regulation. But they have identified a crucial area of regulatory uncertainty: The "too big to fail" problem. The government's standards for responding to the collapse of a "too big to fail" institution are, as of now, nonexistent. They need to be clear. And they need to be harsh. Punitive, even. They should include the automatic elimination of the company's top level executives and board of directors. You can argue that there should be personal liability for those executives if negligence can be proven. Why shouldn't the risks taken by the richest involve the possibility of ruin -- they certainly involve tat possibility for the rest of us. They should include takeover, and a repayment schedule that makes investors a profit before it makes shareholders whole. Sound unfair? Maybe. But the point of regulation -- as opposed to response -- is that it attempts to keep something from happening.

It's now clear that the incentives for caution were insufficient when set against the incentives for profit. The mechanism is clear: Shareholders have short memories, and they were looking for high returns, and firms that did not offer such returns would lose business. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, or so goes the old line. It may be that there's nothing regulation can do about that. In 40 years, this crisis will be forgotten, and the market will have convinced itself that exotic new instruments had eliminated the possibility of downside risk. Or it may be that a regulatory structure that is punitive in the face of collapse to both executives and shareholders will force different behavior, at least among cautious firms, at least during the late stages of a bubble. In either case, the government should be clear on what it will do. Response-by-deal is far worse than a response according to clear rules.

According to Karl Rove, George W. Bush is neither dim nor slow. Rather, he's the readiest reader who ever read. In the past three years, he's polished off no fewer than 186 full-sized books, many of them weighty tomes. That's fewer than Karl Rove, of course, but more than enough to dispel suspicions that Bush is incurious. "Mr. Bush loves books, learns from them, and is intellectually engaged by them," enthuses his lackey.

I think the president doth protest too much. Since when do presidents have to send their message men to assure the country that they "learn" from books? What else would you do with a book? Try and make a raft? But take the statement at face value. Rove and Bush sent years assuring Americans that Bush was reassuringly dim, unimpressed with dense books and condescending intellectuals. Now, as his administration fades into history, Rove trots out his reading list to provide proof of his literacy. It manages to be cynical and insecure, all at once. Like Palin going on Saturday Night Live, Bush is now reduced to selling his political persona down the river in a final bid for elite acceptance. Even sadder, the bid reflects a fundamental misapprehension of what was wanted. No one cares if Bush has read an Andrew Jackson biography. It's his unfamiliarity with his briefing books, not with Founding Fathers porn, that most concerned the nation.

From George Cooper's The Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles, and the Efficient Market Fallacy (Vintage):

Technically, because asset prices generally cannot become negative, when a price gets close to zero the size of the next possible price decline becomes a little smaller than the size of the next possible price rise. By making this adjustment the normal probability distributions, which are discussed in the rest of this book, become log normal probability distributions. For all practical purposes you can, if you have not already done so, forget this piece of information.

Until yesterday, when he took the day off to celebrate the birth of the Baby Jesus, Obama had hit the gym 48 straight days in a row. That's some impressive -- dare I say Bush-esque? -- dedication.

The Christmas receipts are in, and they don't look good. The Wall Street Journal puts the carnage in handy graph form:

Note the big fall in luxury goods. People aren't spending just to spend anymore. Consumption is looking less like a hobby. People are buying more things and less stuff. Felix Salmon comments that "for many years, America's retailers were successful in making people want to go shopping, even if they didn't end up buying anything. Now, shopping is something to avoid where possible, and it's interesting that Amazon -- the shop for people who hate going shopping -- managed another record year."

Salmon may be right that more sustainable consumption patterns will be a good thing in the long-term even if they're painful in the short-term, but boy are they going to be painful in the short-term. The other day, I quoted Krugman saying that "you can have an economy sustained by the big spending of the few rather than the modest spending of large numbers of people." Right now, we have neither. Which is why all manner of economists are advocating an economy sustained in the short-term by massive government spending. Without that, there's nothing sustaining the economy at all.

Tom Laskawy had a nice conversation with paleoclimatologist sister-in-law, who specializes in deep ocean currents, and she assured him that "the oceans will not start spewing poison gas any time soon." Which is good.

I admit, the trailer sort of sucks. But Role Models, despite making nothing at the box office, is actually very good. It's a film with three parts. The main component, and the best, is Paul Rudd, who plays it smart-funny: Lots of ironic asides and snide insults. It's like spending the afternoon with Atrios (in his blog, rather than human, form). Sean William Scott is sort of American Pie-funny, and isn't overused. And the kids -- particularly McLovin -- bring a measure of warmth. It's a delicate balancing act. Too much of Rudd's character would make for too much knowing nihilism, an emphasis on Scott's amiable dunce would be a dumb movie, and too much of the kids would be treacly. But the fim gets the proportions just right, and the latter half revolves around medieval role playing games, and works perfectly. It'll also warm the heart of any geek. A great Christmas film.

Amidst a column meant to talk liberals down from expressing their opinions on things, Michael Cohen makes a point worth examining. "Obama has set out to be President of all America," he writes, "and it's small wonder that a 53% candidate now enjoys 70% approval ratings."

It's worth putting this into perspective. In 2000, while his administration was transitioning into office, George W. Bush, who had lost the popular vote, had a 65 percent approval rating. Eight years before that, Clinton, who had won merely 45 percent of the vote, had a 68 percent approval rating. Which is not to dismiss Obama's achievements, nor the skill with which he's handled transition. But it's easier to be the symbolic president of the country then it is to govern this sprawling, fractious place.

Indeed, the whole "President of all America" descriptor is popular these days, but a bit vague for my tastes. You're president of all America when you win more than 270 votes in the electoral college. Not when people stop disagreeing with your agenda. There's a tendency to downplay the degree to which America is riven by legitimate disagreements over the path forward. Those who think the occasional moment of symbolic outreach to Rick Warren will overwhelm arguments over socialized health care, or taxes, or abortion, aren't paying respect to our essential commonalities so much as dismissing genuine arguments. Few in this country battle to see their policy preferences respected. They battle to see them enacted.

Obama's approval rating will fall. 70+ percent of the country doesn't agree on all that much. They sit atop that peak not because he's managed to defuse the debates that split our country, but because he's not had to engage them yet. But he will. And when that days comes, and he's at 54 percent, or 48 percent, he'll still be president of all America.

Recently, Slate's tech writer Farhad Manjoo asked me to contribute to a column he was writing on "how to blog." Now that his piece is up (along with lots of useful advice from other folks), I'll post the comments I sent him here, as they'll probably be of use to the various folks who write in asking for blogging guidance:

Figure out where you add value. It's a harsh realization that you probably won't be so much better a writer or political analyst that your opinions on Barack Obama will muscle their way through the chaos and cacophony of the blogosphere -- and that's even truer now, with more blogs and more entrenched voices, than it was in 2003, when I began.

So figure out where you add value. Find something specific to follow and follow it deeply. That "something" could be health policy, as it has been for me, or urban policy, or telecom, or congressional procedure, or media structure, or a thousand things I can't name. That's not to say you have to create a niche blog. The specialized posts mix with the generalized posts -- in my case, health wonkery rubs elbows with garden variety political punditry -- and the two cross-subsidize each other. The rigor of the more technical work gives you credibility in the reader's mind and adds weight to the generalist posts. The generalist posts broaden the blog's potential audience and create access points that new readers wouldn't have if you let the blog become a repository of technical commentary.

The great comparative advantage of blogs is that we're freed from the essential scarcity of print: Space. Deep content need not fight for pages with broad content, and so you can have the advantages of both. You can go deep without alienating readers and go broad without sacrificing depth.

One sidenote here is that I find the question of "specialization" is interesting. Health care is not the thing I write the most about: Somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent of my posts are health care related. During periods of political drama, that number drops further. Far more of my posts are on the Obama administration, and politics more generally. But people define blogs by what they produce that's different from their competitors, not by what they offer that's the same.

An agent involved in the trade went into more detail. This particular warlord was in his 60s, and had four younger wives. The pills were explained, and offered. Four days later, the agent say, "He came up to us beaming. He said, 'You are a great man." Only one question. As my friend Jesse Singal e-mails, is this hard power or soft power?

I'd missed Mark Liebovich's profile of Obama's communication director, Robert Gibbs, when it hit last week. But this paragraph is worth thinking about:

Staff members were encouraged to ignore new Web sites like The Page, written by Time’s Mark Halperin, and Politico, both of which had gained instant cachet among the Washington smarty-pants set. “If Politico and Halperin say we’re winning, we’re losing,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, would repeat mantralike around headquarters. He said his least favorite words in the English language were, “I saw someone on cable say this. . . .”

My personal experience of the Obama campaign is a bit at odds with this. Politico was treated like royalty by the Obama camp, which lavished a steady stream of leaks on the upstart website. Politico got more love from the Obama camp than the liberal blogs did, for instance -- even though the liberal blogs were going after John McCain way more aggressively than Politico was.

And I remember Obama staffers getting pretty worked up about what did and didn't appear on The Page.

Which staffers? The role that Politico and The Page play is the same inside campaigns and outside campaigns: They're for information junkies. And plenty of folks inside campaigns have far less information than they'd like. So it's possible that some levels of the staff were deeply dependent on the Page, while the campaign's strategic class dismissed of their relevance. It was certainly Conventional Wisdom in DC that the McCain campaign was much more focused on "winning the day" than was the Obama campaign, though it was never quite clear to me how one differed from the other.

Even so, it's good if the principals around Obama have some mental distance from these outlets. Mark Schmitt has noted -- but keeps not writing -- that one of the signature changes in campaign journalism is how much more is intra-Washington as compared to a decade ago. In 2000, there were fairly few outlets that mainly transcribed communications between journalists and political professionals and rival campaigns. Inside Politics had that reputation, and maybe The Hotline. Now there are a dozen of them. The Page and the Note and the Playbook and Politico and Election Central a handful of others are conduits for political communication that cater to audiences largely centered around the professional and quasi-professional political class.

Their crucial insight is that politicos want a lot more political news than there actually is. And so they produce more political news. Small conflagrations -- a nasty ad, say, or a flack's gaffe -- become daylong, or maybe only afternoon-long -- stories. That couldn't happen before because no outlets had a production schedule that could support a story that updated 12 times in eight hours and then faded away. If the beginning of rapid amateur political commentary was Instapundit, these are Consta-pundits. And a campaign can easily get caught doing nothing but responding and retaliating and jockeying for those instant bursts of feedback. It's a way of seeming to win when no one is voting. But you don't actually win that way.

Julian Sanchez's musings on dead technology metaphors are a good read, but he's too quick to to dismiss the series of beeps and static bursts that the old modem handshake protocol made your lightning fast 14.4 kpbs was calling into the mothership. "Most people under about 25 wouldn’t have any reason to be familiar with that sound in real life," he says.

Well, first, I'm 25, and I remember my modem dialing in for that sound. But I'm a nerd, and was using Mosaic to hunt down leaked Mortal Kombat pictures fairly early. More importantly, that sound will live on until businesses give up their fax lines, and the rest of us stop accidentally dialing them. The two protocols are aurally indistinguishable, at least to me, and the latter still pops up fairly frequently when I accidentally read the wrong number of a company's web site. So, for now, the static and beeps live on, I think.

Related: What if the show "24" took place in 1994?

This is a nice point from Paul Waldman:

There is no doubt that the insurance companies and their Republican allies in Congress will fight the inclusion of a public option with every bit of power they can muster. They'll call it "socialized medicine" -- but by now we should all have realized that Republicans will call any health care reform Democrats propose "socialized medicine" (that's what they said about Clinton's 1993 health plan, whose chief cost containment measure was enhancing the role of HMOs). They'll scream about "government bureaucrats getting between you and your doctor." But anyone who has tried to get reimbursement for a medical service from an insurance company that didn't want to provide it knows that government bureaucrats are pussycats compared to insurance company bureaucrats.

One underappreciated difference between 1993 and 2008 is how insurers have neutralized, or at least changed, the question of choice. In 1993, the promised restrictions of the Clinton proposal promised a real, and unpleasant, change. But those restrictions were not, in fact, the result of government taking over health care, but of government giving health care over to HMOs. The threatened consequences of CLintonCare were in fact the promised innovations of managed care.

Clinton's plan failed, of course. But the managed care revolution did not. HMOs ripped across the land, creating networks and denying treatments and imposing "gatekeepers" and generally doing exactly what they promised: Managing care. Which meant restricting choice. HMOs proved as unpopular in private practice as they were in the Clinton plan. They did much to cut spending growth, but consumer backlash had partially neutered them by the turn of the century. Now they annoy rather than deny. They make health care unpleasant, and they restrict choice, but they don't hold down costs.

These are not, in other words, the innocent days of the early 90s. Your insurer is not your friend and your doctor is rarely your choice. In 1993, government really was selling a more restrictive, technocratic system. In 2008, government is a plausible counterweight against those who implemented that system anyway. This has changed the politics of health care reform in ways that I don't think many appreciate quite yet.

Ann Coulter's column declaring Sarah Palin Human Event's "Conservative of the Year" will prove a rich document for historians trying to understand the death of America's conservative majority. Palin is not named for her winning ways amongst the electorate nor for her innovative attempts to inject new thinking into American life. Rather, she merits the honor because she sent "the left into a tailspin of wanton despair," because she "drove liberals crazy," because "she made liberal heads explode." Indeed, says Coulter, "Who cares if Palin was qualified to be President?" Yes, who cares indeed?

There was a time when liberals seemed to be toeing around the edges of a conservative country. This was Bill Clinton's great talent: Subverting fundamentally conservative goals for moderately liberal ends. His great domestic accomplishments shrank the government, ended the deficit, and reformed welfare, all in ways that liberals could, if not necessarily like, at least live with. But now it's conservatism that feels increasingly derivative of liberalism. It's conservatism that feels like a strategy of affirmation rather than governance. Palin is the year's most important conservative not because she won, or because she came close, but because she provoked the most outrage among liberals. And Coulter's column presents all of this as triumph. There's no sorrow over Palin's loss. Rather, the column is suffused with glee for the lark of it all. Remember that time Palin made that joke about lipstick?

This is not the metric of anything so fearsome as a bully. It's the measure of a mere pest. And the hard question for conservatives is, what if Coulter is right? What if Palin really is the leader of modern conservatism, the best representative of its modern mission? "Palin was a kick in the pants," Coulter says. And right now, that's enough.

Happening now at the Internet Food Association.

As more pictures filter out of the Obama's at the beach, HuffPo puts things in perspective with a, uh, slideshow of shirtless presidents. Never has the office been so dignified.

It's much as you've heard: Milk is a very good movie. I haven't seen Mickey Rourke in the wrestler yet, but it's hard to imagine that Penn doesn't take the Oscar for best actor. He disappears into the role. I don't have any interesting thoughts on the movie, though it certainly made me want to read The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. The movie's one flaw -- and it's a failure of the form rather than the film -- is that it's not able to offer much insight on the broader questions of the early gay rights movement. For instance: Why did the gay rights movement diverge so aggressively from its forerunner, the civil rights movement? The latter worked assiduously to appear non-threatening, to conform. Protests were conducted in suits and dresses. Order was paramount. The strategy was to assert normalcy. Much of the early gay rights movement took the opposite tack. The protests and parades played up difference, and asserted its legitimacy. That was the movement Harvey Milk came out of, and the movie emphasize his continued adherence to its ideals, but it doesn't shed much light on where they came from.

Related: Read Eli Sanders' review of Milk, and analysis of what it says about gay rights today.

Via the PB&J campaign comes this New York Times chart showing the carbon cost of various foods:

Not surprising stuff -- save maybe for the carbon cost of cheese -- but well-presented. As usual, you're dealing with a simple inefficiency. Growing grain and eating grain is more efficient than growing grain to feed to animals. Animals, after all, will use the only part of the grain to make us food -- the rest of it will go to bone, and fur, and eyes, and breathing, and teeth. As such, the total energy cost of animal is far higher. Meanwhile, animal is getting far more popular:

The carbon implication is that vegetarianism is best, but if people insist on eating meat, chicken is far better than beef. This puts the carbon argument at odd with the animal rights movement. For them, chicken is far worse than beef. It takes a human being years to eat a cow but only a single dinner to consume a chicken. The death toll of a poultry diet is far higher than a beef diet. And chicken are treated far worse than cows.

A Peanuts Christmas mix:

Out in Beverly Hills, a plastic surgeon named Craig Allen Bittner pioneered a new way to cut fuel costs: Human fat. He would convert the excess fat from liposuction operations into biodiesel that fueled his Ford SUV and his girlfriend's Lincoln Navigator. Indeed, a gallon of fat will get you about the same mileage as a gallon of fuel, provided your car is properly outfitted to burn it. Gross, but certainly environmentally friendly. Forbes reports that the Bittner is under investigation by the public health authority, as it's "illegal in California to use human medical waste to power vehicles."

Seriously? Is there literally a law saying that, or is it just illegal to use human waste for any purpose save disposal?

Over e-mail, Dean Baker offers an explanation why so few economists accurately saw the trembling instability beneath the economy, much less sounded the alarm. "They didn't know" is not an operative explanation. The analysis was public, written by people like Nourel Roubini and Paul Krugman and Robert Shiller and, yes, Dean Baker. But few faced up to its implications:

Just apply economics to economists.

The honchos in the profession (Paul Krugman excepted) said everything was fine. Agreeing with the honchos will never get you in trouble. You will never lose your job or even miss a promotion because you made the same mistake as all the leading lights in the profession.

On the other hand, if you go against the honchos and end up being wrong, well you should be prepared to be sent to oblivion. You are obviously a raving lunatic who has no business being taken seriously as an economist. Even when you end being right against the honchos you can't count on any great reward, since the honchos so control the profession and the media that "nobody could have seen" will be repeated at least frequently as the fact that some people did see.

Anyhow, what would an economist expect to happen in a situation in which option one carries no risks and reasonable expected rewards and option two carries enormous risks and only moderately higher expected rewards? In short, the incentives in the economics profession, just as in finance, strongly encourage a lack of original thinking.

With James Steinberg officially receiving the nod as Deputy Secretary of State (along with Jacob Lew), I spent some time poking around the Brookings web site to see what he'd written for them during his fellowship there. And hey, paydirt! On November 1, he published a book entitled Difficult Transitions, arguing that "presidents have no honeymoon when it comes to foreign policy" and exploring and setting down an outline for how the "incoming president [should] prepare for the foreign policy challenges that lie immediately ahead." Should be a good guide to his thinking.

I can read the table of contents for Difficult Transitions online. I can read seven pages of the first chapter online. I can see that the book only has 150 pages of actual content. But to actually read the book, I'd have to pay $26.99, and wait a couple of days while it ships. But why? Surely they're not making much money from Difficult Transitions. The book's Amazon page has no reviews and gives it a sales rank of 214,877. It has no backlist potential, nor any relevance after the first year of the administration. This isn't a lucrative enterprise.

Presumably, Brookings would defend their decision to publish the book on grounds of influence: It's important that those who want to read it and could benefit from it have that opportunity. But then why not make it maximally and rapidly accessible? They have the technology: They posted a sample chapter online. There are few overhead costs to recoup when producing a pdf. And it's not like this model hasn't been tried: The Center for American Progress does it regularly, most recently with the book The Health Care Delivery System. So c'mon Brookings: Set your content free!

Over at BoingBoing, Clay Shirky engages in a bit of self-congratulatory schadenfreude for predicting the collapse of the newspaper business model back in 1993. And no doubt: He was prescient. But like a lot of folks (many of them named Jeff Jarvis) who write these posts, there's an odd lament laced through the triumphalism: If only they'd listened. As Shirky says, "we said so, over and over again, all the time. We said it in public, we said it in private. We said it when newspapers hired us as designers, we said it when we were brought in as consultants, we said it for free. We were some tiresome motherfuckers with all our talk about the end of news on paper. And you know what? The people who made their living from printing the news listened, and then decided not to believe us."

What's never quite explained is what would have happened had everyone treated lay Shirky's utterances like aural treasure. Because I believe in Shirky's original analysis. "The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now, it will continue to fall long before it hits bottom, and when it does whole categories of currently lucrative businesses will be either transfigured unrecognizably or completely wiped out, and there is nothing anyone can do about it," he wrote. And he was right then. There was nothing anyone could do about it. More content aggregation and web chats and transparency would not have altered the fundamental force ripping apart the industry. Newspapers were built on local advertising monopolies. The internet deprived them of those monopolies. Less important than an individual's ability to access the BBC's news feed was his ability to access Craigslist's classifieds. In the internet age, midsize newspapers are an inefficiency. And they are being eliminated.

Jarvis had no answer for this, and nor, so far as I know, does Shirky. More prescient managers might have made for better news products but not sufficient revenue models. Most of the commentary on dying newspapers has been about making their news product better. But the salable product of newspapers was not news. It was local advertising and classifieds. Classifieds are now free and online advertising is a weak revenue stream. Meanwhile, the internet gives individuals have access to more news, not less. Much is lost amidst this, particularly in terms of local coverage. Which is why, aside from journalists losing their jobs, few are actually upset over the changes roiling the industry. Which is why, as Shirky presciently said in 1993, "there is nothing anyone can do about it."

Image used under a CC license from Inju.

The New York Times reports that Hillary Clinton means to "expand" the role of the State Department, imbuing the agency with "a bigger budget, high-profile special envoys to trouble spots and an expanded role in dealing with global economic issues at a time of crisis." The key to all that is enhancing the budget, which is why she's appointing Jacob Lew, a longtime budget guy who headed the OMB under Clinton, her deputy. As a general point, giving State a few billion more to work with is a much better idea than giving the military 90,000 more troops, as Obama promised to do and as a recent editorial in the Times demanded. The mpre troops we have, the easier it is for armchair pundits to theorize about the great wars we can win. Conversely, the more diplomats we have, the more diplomacy we can actually engage in.

In the comments to the previous post, anon writes:

I think we'd rather here your views on the Yglesias controversy itself.

How filtered is the blogging medium for folks like Matt and yourself? He clearly doesn't have complete editorial independence, do you?

Yes. But more than that, there's not much evidence that Matt lacks complete editorial independence. Indeed, I think folks should cut the Center for American Progress some slack here. Jennifer Palmieri's actual message, oddly delivered though it was, says something quite banal: In case it wasn't clear, CAP does not agree with Matt's contention that Third Way, CAP's coalition partners, are proponents of "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit." Or, at the least, they wouldn't phrase it that way (however, as compared to CAP's policy agenda, Third Way's offerings are inarguably hyper-timid incrementalism).

CAP is not a blog publisher. They are a think tank. They are the nerve center of the Democratic governing class. Their president has led Obama's transition effort. It's fairly uncharted territory for a think tank of that prestige -- indeed, of any prestige at all -- to hire a young progressive blogger and let him retain his voice on their site. Brookings doesn't do it, and nor does EPI, or Heritage, or the Urban Institute, or the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. But CAP is following a model in which they provide income support to promising progressives so their work isn't lost to law school or the commercial sector. That requires giving them a fair bit of editorial freedom, which will inevitably lead to conflicts and uncomfortable moments. As Ben Smith says, there are real consequences if Third Way is seen to be disfavored by CAP. And CAP has to balance that against their desire to support bloggers.

The fact that Palmieri's message was public is, I think, a good sign. It's transparent. They could have called Matt into the president's office, explained that he would never ever write anything like that ever again, and the editorial intervention would have been simultaneously invisible to readers -- no one would be criticizing CAP -- and much more pernicious. They did not do that.

There might have been a better way for them to phrase that post, or at least less heavy-handed (letting Matt publish Palmieri's response, say), but their fundamental instinct -- distance themselves from Matt's everyday commentary without shackling his writing -- is probably the right instinct. And as a general point, everyone is still trying to figure out how to deal with unedited bloggers, and CAP is far ahead of most outlets. Think Progress, the Wonk Room, and Yglesias's blog have all been successful ventures, and the only ones of their kind. I think it's fair to assume good faith here.

So there's some sort of fight going on about whether Third Way is incrementalist or not. Or whether you're allowed to describe them as incrementalist. Or something. I guess it all depends on what the meaning of the word "incremental" is. For instance: I ran a search through their policy shop's health care offerings and all I found was "Bridging Health Coverage Between Jobs," which proposes a temporary insurance benefit as workers transition between different employment situations. I think there's a fair chance that that actually doesn't rise to the level of an incremental solution because it's not an incremental step towards any solution in particular, so maybe they're not incrementalists.

To understand this debate, though, you need to go back to November 11th, 2004, when Third Way was announced. This was a week after John Kerry lost the presidential election, and the young organization was sold as a DLC for the next-generation. "As Democrats continue to stagger from last week's election losses, a group of veteran political and policy operatives has started an advocacy group aimed at using moderate Senate Democrats as the front line in a campaign to give the party a more centrist profile," wrote The Washington Post.

In other words, Third Way was formed under the theory that the Democratss problem in 2004 was that they were too far to the left, and as such, had lost middle class voters. The organization focused on upper middle class voters and followed the Mark Penn strategy of machine gun bursts of small, bite-sized policies meant to attract professional whites and rural voters. This meant, in practice, making the party more conservative, because these voters, which Third Way defined as central, were more conservative. They also tried to make an issue of internet porn.

But the politics of the moment passed Third Way by. This year, Barack Obama was, on domestic policy, the most moderate of the major Democrats, which put him substantially to the left of every major Democrat running for president in 2004. His health care plan was more universal than Gephardt's, his Iraq plan was more aggressively focused on withdrawal than Dean's, and he was a black liberal from an urban center. Clinton and Edwards ran on similar platforms. None of them bore any obvious resemblance to the office park bait Third Way advocated. Indeed, the health plans all looked more like EPI's offering than Third Way's.

So Third Way carved out a niche with a focus on messaging and complicated survey data. And in that, they were useful. But there's no debate over their ideological orientation. They were built as the vessel for a particular argument about the path to a Democratic resurgence, and their side of that debate lost. The moment did not favor small policies or a rightward shift. Quite the opposite. Which put Third Way in something of a bind.

Obscuring the leftward trend in the electorate led to odd episodes like their attempts to prove that the 2006 election proved affluent whites the swing demographic and proved the need for a renewed Democratic centrism. But the key voters were not the rich, as Tom Schaller pointed out. They were, well, everybody.

Third Way was an organization began atop the numbers-based insight that Democrats lost the middle class and that was now working to juke the stats in order to seem relevant. And then came 2008, where Democrats improved their vote share across the board even with a more populist agenda, and then came the financial crisis, and the utility of Third Way's affluent incrementalism grew yet murkier. The problem for Third Way is that it's not clear what their role is now that Democrats have won atop something like the opposite of their advice and very different from their predicted majority coalition, which may explain why they're acting so defensive. Indeed, this fight over some offhandedly dismissive comment on a blog is actually the first thing I've heard out of Third Way in quite some time. And it's not exactly an example of affirmative agenda-setting or policy thinking.

Related: See this extremely smart post from Mark Schmitt the Third Way's "New" and Old" rules..

The New York Times' analysis of the role the Bush administration's relentless efforts to increase homeownership played in the financial crisis gives you a lot to chew on It's not a solid indictment, but nor is there much evidence of a prescience. Which is true for most everyone in the political system. In general, bubbles aren't a product of partisan irrationality, but broad irrationality, and that's what we saw here.

John Judis:

I have tried to steer clear of controversy about whether Caroline Kennedy should be appointed to succeed Hilary Clinton as senator from New York. I’m not shy about my opinion, but I’m worried in this case that I will show my age. I was in college when John Kennedy was president. I was never a big supporter. I probably preferred Fidel Castro at the time.

Oh you've given me a number
and you've taken off my name
To get around this campus
why, you almost need a plane
And you're supporting Chang Kai-Shek
while I'm supporting Mao
So when I've got something to say, sir
I'm gonna say it now

I find it hard to really conceive of the ideological range of that period. Even at Santa Cruz, support for Chavez was rare, and support for someone like Ahmedinejad was inconceivable.

Malcolm Gladwell recently penned a snappy article comparing quarterback recruitment to teacher hiring. The common thread, he argued, is that just as you can't effectively predict a college quarterback's NFL performance from college metrics, you can't predict a teacher's classroom performance from background indicators. Andy Rotherham, proprietor of Eduwonk, managed to find an absurdly well-placed duo to respond. Tim Daly, head of the New Teacher Project, happens to have a brother, Brendan Daly, who is an assistant coach for the Minnesota Vikings. They write:

the NFL is highly sensitive to indications of performance. When a star player proves his worth, no ones cares any longer where he was drafted. The New England Patriots, having been pleasantly shocked by Tom Brady’s emergence as a star substitute for Drew Bledsoe in 2001, did not put Brady on the bench when Bledsoe returned from injury. Despite Bledsoe’s pedigree (#1 overall pick) and Brady’s lack thereof (#199 pick), it was immediately clear that Brady was destined to be the superior player. And Bledsoe was a three-time Pro Bowl selection in the prime of his career, not a washed up journeyman.

Researchers tell us that similar things are true of teachers. Outstanding teachers might come from high profile programs like Teach For America or The New Teacher Project… but they might also come from any number of other pipelines. If a teacher is among the top performers relative to other novices, he/she is likely to remain a top performer in future years. Just like Montana… and Warner… and Brady.

Professional football and teaching diverge when it comes to addressing unexpectedly poor performance. In the NFL, ineffective players have short careers, even when they are highly touted (and well compensated) draft picks. Cade McNown, the twelfth pick in the 1999 draft, was out of football after the 2002 season, having burned through three teams and having thrown fewer touchdowns than Brady threw in his first year as the starter for the Patriots.

Though there are certainly exceptions, education tends to work quite differently. Ineffective teaching is rarely addressed, despite evidence showing that it has a long term impact on kids. Principals are known to seek transfers for problematic teachers. They might even relegate their riskiest staff to grade levels where testing does not occur. Nonetheless, in almost all cases, the teacher continues to teach, too often with the same results.[...]

Why? Why does the NFL aggressively respond to evidence of performance while the teaching profession does not? The main reason lies with the decision-makers. Head coaches in the NFL are extraordinarily accountable for results. They are judged by the performance of the players they put on the field, and they cannot afford to risk losses by sticking with poor players for too long. A coach has every incentive to pull the plug as soon as it is clear that the second stringer is a better bet than the starter. As fans, we demand it.

In the NFL, results are very clear. Wins and losses tell the story...educators have trouble agreeing on which metrics should be used. There is doubt about whether individual contributions can be disentangled from those of colleagues.

That all makes sense. But one thing the Daly's say does not make sense. They deride the "tendency to blame families and society for student performance" as "the equivalent of the quarterback pointing to a porous offensive line." But a quarterback facing down a porous offensive line...will get sacked. And I say that as a former offensive lineman. Without the time ensured by a talented offensive line, a good quarterback can't throw. And without the raw skills and developmental leaps ensured by a decent upbringing, even a good teacher cannot teach. As it happens, you need both good quarterbacks and good lineman. Just as you need a focus on social and family factors and on teacher quality. It's a shame that ,in the contemporary education debate, these things have been set in opposition.

After all our talk of pricey, locked academic jorunals last week, it's worth noting that some journals are doing some really great work enriching the intellectual commons. The RNA Biology journal, for instance, has released new submissions guidelines saying that you have to submit a Wikipedia article on your research before they'll consider a scholarly piece. Good for them.

From the year in photographs.

Running a search for something else in the archives, I came across this old OECD graph laying out the structure of our health care system. Tell me again how national health care would be layered and complex as compared to the sleek elegance of our current composition:

Man I love that graph.

All this week. First up, Ray Charles and Betty Carter sing "Baby, It's Cold Outside."

Maggie Mahar is more pessimistic on these issues than I am, but her commentary on what we don't know about "Medicare for All" is worth reading. Opening Medicare is commonly considered the "safe" route to single payer because it's a known quantity. But when you take a program with 44 million beneficiaries, all of whom are in the same age range, and scale it to 300 million beneficiaries across all age demographics, a lot of uncertainty is introduced Medicare. For instance: low reimbursements to primary care providers have made it so 30 percent of Medicare patients report problems finding a physician willing to see them. Does that number go up? Down? And how much is the tax assessment for the new program? Do we continue with scheduled rate cuts? And so forth.

That's not to say that Medicare-for-All is a bad idea. Any universal plan will face these sorts of questions. But don't be fooled into thinking that Medicare is such a known quantity that there'll be nothing to demagogue. Indeed, one wrinkle of this is how the elderly would react. It's not hard to imagine widespread elderly opposition to opening Medicare to the general population, as they worry that an open Medicare will produce political pressure to orient the program to the average beneficiary (who is cheaper, younger, and healthier), rather than the average elderly beneficiary.

Arthur Brooks is a conservative researcher and the incoming president of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He's also the author of a book on charitable giving, called Who Really Cares, that cites data showing that "households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals." Every so often, his findings are trumpeted as proof that conservatives are more genuinely compassionate than liberals. And that's exactly what Nick Kristof did over the weekend.

But the difference can be explained in one word, and it's not "compassion." It's "religion." A recent survey from Google similarly found that self-identified conservatives gave more to charity than did self-identified liberals. But they also found that "if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do." Indeed, religious congregations are far and away the largest recipients of charitable gifts: In 2006, they made up 32.8 percent of all giving. But is that charity, at least charity as Kristof and Brooks are defining it? For instance: Utah is among the most Republican states in the nation, largely because of its heavily conservative Mormon population. Mormons tithe 10 percent a week to their church. But is that charitable giving? Or is it a membership fee? How much of it goes to anti-poverty programming? How much to church administration?

Saying that conservatives give more to charity is another way of saying that conservatives are more religious. Which is not to say that interesting insights don't lurk amidst the data on charitable giving. But uncovering them would require thinner slicing of the numbers. For instance: What is charity? Endowing a named chair at Harvard is not, to me, an example of charitable giving. It's monument construction. But the money required to create the Marty Peretz Chair in Yiddish Literature at Harvard -- yes, that's real -- is folded into the same number as donations to fund soup kitchens. Does tithing count as charity? Do gifts to Princeton count as charity? To the Sierra Club? The New York Philharmonic? None of those causes bears a particular relation to whether a poor family can eat tomorrow. And what of income? As a class, the rich tilt right, and they also give more to charity, both because they have more, and because they benefit from the tax break. What happens when you control for income?

The answer is that I don't know. But I'd like to. Brooks, however, isn't doing much to tell us. And using charity to score political points seems somehow against the spirit of the enterprise.

Last week, I agreed with Kevin Drum that "One way or another, there’s really no way for the economy to grow strongly and consistently unless middle-class consumers spend more, and they can’t spend more unless they make more." Paul Krugman replies:

This is a widely held view, and I’m as much in favor of a strong middle class as anyone. Nonetheless, I’d say that in terms of strict economics it’s wrong. There’s no obvious reason why consumer demand can’t be sustained by the spending of the upper class — $200 dinners and luxury hotels create jobs, the same way that fast food dinners and Motel 6s do. In fact, the prosperity of New York City in the last decade — largely supported off of super-salaried Wall Street types — is a demonstration that you can have an economy sustained by the big spending of the few rather than the modest spending of large numbers of people.

Got to go down to the courthouse this morning and see if I'm really going to be called for 25 straight days of grand jury service (seems....excessive). Hopefully, posting to resume later in the day, rather than sometime in late January.

Update: Blogging resumes!

Quick question: Can anyone remember a regional quota being applied to a presidential cabinet in the past? Did George W. Bush have sufficient Northeasterners? Clinton sufficient Westerners? Did Eisenhower pay proper deference to the Mid-Atlantic?

Related thought: For a group that tends to pride itself on toughness, this is a lot of whining.

Related related thought: Why stop at quotas? Maybe we can start busing southerners to the cabinet meetings.

I agree with this guy: Pie is much better than cake. And if chefs put half the effort into producing innovative pieces -- why can't we have a layered filling between flaky crusts? -- that they do in producing inspiring cakes, the world would be a better, more delicious place.

Image used under a CC license from Cobalt123.

Over at The New Republic, John Judis argues that Labor is proving a low priority for the Obama administration. The choice of Hilda Solis for Secretary of Labor is a good one, he writes, but "these were his very last cabinet picks, and they came after second level White House aides and agency heads. The order of picking means something. It was no accident that Obama introduced his economic and his national security team first." He also argues that Hilda Solis, though an admirable person, was a second-tier House member. She's not a proven political heavyweight by any stretch of the imagination. "If you think these are important jobs, what you want is someone of national standing who can sell your and their program to the public and to Congress--and particularly to the Senate, where the Democrats are going to need 60 votes on some key issues," says Judis. I'd add that the Secretary of Labor could have been named as part of the economic team, sending the message that Obama believed a strong union movement an integral element of a strong economy. That would have made her a heavyweight. But he didn't do that, either.

Today at Tapped, Tim Fernholz responds. Noting that Joe Biden was just named chair of a new White House Task Force on Working Families, Fernholz asks, "Did the VP just become labor czar? And if you were going to pick someone to find 60 votes for EFCA in the Senate, wouldn't you want that person to be Joe Biden?"

I think this conflates "middle class" with labor, and "labor" with "Labor." Judis didn't argue that Obama was insufficiently concerned with working families. The economic team, which came first, was aimed at working families, as they need a healthy economy. So too was the health care team. And so too is Biden's new venture, which will be tasked with "raising the living standards of middle-class, working families in America." The task force has no formal power, and the press release says that the president's goals for it are "Expanding education and lifelong training opportunities, Improving work and family balance, Restoring labor standards, including workplace safety, Helping to protect middle-class and working-family incomes, and Protecting retirement security." There's no formal mention of big-L Labor.

That doesn't mean Biden cannot prove a potent force. If he ends up walking the halls of Congress whipping votes for EFCA, that would be a ringing rejection of Judis's claim. If his support of Labor's agenda is limited to the occasional encouraging comment, rather than the application of political capital, that will be confirmation of Judis's anxieties. But the fact that he'll chair a task force charged with producing a report on raising middle class wages -- a report that may suggest strengthening unions, but will not be focused on the issue -- isn't evidence one way or the other. You can do a lot to strengthen the middle class without doing anything to strengthen unions, and the worry among some is that that's Obama's preferred approach.

On Friday, I wrote a post trying to explain the importance of the Congressional Budget Office to health reform, and arguing that their new books of health care policy analysis and options were actually critical documents -- not because they laid out scoring methods that agreed with the opinions of reformers, but because they gave reformers insight into how the CBO would score a bill. (Yeah, I know this is getting deep in the weeds.) Their analysis might still be a minefield, but at least reformers now had a map. The example I used was 1994, when the CBO's score put the final nail in the coffin of the Clinton plan. Out in California, Anthony Wright gives another:

During California's reform debate earlier this year, the state's CBO-equivalent, the LAO, was asked to evaluate AB x1 1 (and then later, SB840) [the health reform bills]. It was expected--after all, anything that goes on the ballot is required to have an LAO analysis in the voter guide. When nobody knew what the LAO would say, because there was no previous engagement with the drafters of health reform. It's like turning in a test, and having no idea what criteria the teacher would be using to determine a grade. (We had a problem with the analysis--of what was asked: risks without context, without benefits--and what was not asked: the comparison with the status quo.)

What the CBO has published is like getting the teacher's manual to the class textbook. We may not like the answers, but at least we know what their assumptions are. There is a more transparent process, which also allows us to perhaps challenge some assumptions: Can we count savings from preventative care efforts? What are the assumptions of the rate of growth of health costs over five years? What is the CBO's understanding of the status quo?

It's sort of boring, but important. The difference between trying to sell a bill that is revenue neutral -- or even, in the long-run, positive -- and trying to sell a bill that adds hundreds of billions to the deficit is immense. That's true for talking to the public, and true for getting votes: Blue Dogs and fiscally conservative Republicans are far likelier to sign onto a bill that has the CBO's Seal of Good Housekeeping.

When Henry Waxman ran against John Dingell for chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee, it was a race for control of one issue: Climate change. Dingell, the Congressman from Detroit's auto industry, was an impediment to pricing carbon emissions. Waxman, and many others in the House Democratic Caucus, thought that unacceptable, and decided, correctly, that saving the planet should take precedence over preserving seniority.

The campaign was contentious, and hard, and Waxman won in a very close vote. But Dingell remained on the Committee, and so too did his many allies, and the prospect that Dingell would burn with a quiet resentment and quietly sabotage, or simply refuse to put his considerable weight and power, behind Waxman's agenda remained a concern.

Which is why Waxman's decision to make Dingell the effective chairman of health reform is such a savvy play. And it's not an empty gesture: Just as the Finance Committee has primary jurisdiction over health care in the Senate, Energy and Commerce has jurisdiction in the House. And Dingell is a longtime warrior on this issue, for reasons of both ideology and legacy: His father, also a Congressman, introduced legislator for national health care in 1943. Dingell himself played a key role in 1994, and considered the bill's failure a personal tragedy. According to the agreement reached with Waxman, "Congressman Dingell will be the lead sponsor of the national health care legislation that the Committee will consider and play an integral role in the negotiations with the House, Senate, and Obama Administration...and will have a suitable staff to assist with his work on Committee business." Emphasis mine. Not only is Dingell guaranteed the staff to pursue health reform, but the bill will also bear his name.

The human upshot here is that Waxman just managed to ensure that Dingell's loss of the chairmanship didn't mean the destruction of his legacy. In doing, he assured Dingell's support and effort on not only health reform, but most committee business. Waxman is sacrificing some of the glory -- that bill could have bore Waxman's name -- in order to better the chances for success. It's a very smart, and very admirable, move. And it's why Waxman is arguably the House's greatest living legislator: He gets things done. Sometimes that means making power plays, as when he ran against Dingell, and sometimes that means ceding power, as he's shown here.

(Via Neil Sinhababu.)

• The clean energy scam.

• How Milan Kundera changed my life.

• How Bush failed Somalia.

• U.S. schools can learn from Singapore, Finland.

The Employee Free Choice Act fight is happening backwards. The argument is over the particular characteristics and implications of card check -- the proposed solution. But you hear very little about the underlying the problem. This is the opposite of how most reform battles go, where there's a focus on the problem -- 47 million uninsured, or climatological catastrophe around the corner -- and the solutions are left vague. The better to build support and consensus on the need for reform rather than splitting your coalition on details. If you can win the argument for reform, you get some sort of solution. If Labor loses the argument over EFCA, do they get anything?

It's hard to see what they'd get. The discussion is almost entirely around the effects card check would have workplace democracy. Most of the union efforts are on defending card check's procedures and provisions. But the problem is getting lost: "Employers routinely harass, intimidate, coerce and even fire workers struggling to gain a union so they can bargain for better lives. And U.S. labor law is powerless to stop them." That comes from the AFL-CIO's new web page on card check, which also reports the findings of Cornell scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner, who surveyed hundreds of organizing campaigns and found:

• Ninety-two percent of private-sector employers, when faced with employees who want to join together in a union, force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda; 80 percent require supervisors to attend training sessions on attacking unions; and 78 percent require that supervisors deliver anti-union messages to workers they oversee.

• Seventy-five percent hire outside consultants to run anti-union campaigns, often based on mass psychology and distorting the law.

• Half of employers threaten to shut down partially or totally if employees join together in a union.

• In 25 percent of organizing campaigns, private-sector employers illegally fire workers because they want to form a union.

This is the problem. It's possible there are other solutions than EFCA. But it needs to be solved, one way or the other. EFCA has its problems, but pretending that it's somehow a perversion of workplace democracy as compared to a world in which 25 percent of organizing campaigns see a worker fired is absurd. It's as if political candidates had the power to revoke your citizenship and take away your Social Security if you voted the wrong way. Would that really be a form of democracy worth preserving?

We've been talking over the past few days about the primary care crisis, which is driven, in no small part, by the relative income and lifestyle benefits of medical specialties. Given the disparity, it makes little sense for aspiring doctors to choose the long hours and relatively lower pay of primary care. My commentary has focused on how to deal with this on the primary care side. But in comments, Wisewon takes on the other end of the problem: Cutting payments to specialists.

Specialist salaries aren't just determined-- they are based on volume of procedures and payments rates for their procedures. The "best" specialties are fluid, as are the best salaries (with exceptions, like Neurosurgery) primarily because physician payment reform is not keeping up with the changing practice of medicine. Specialties typically have a couple of bread-and-butter procedures that change based on changes in technology, diagnosis and clinical practice. Typically, these bread-and-butter procedures start small, are paid well per procedure, and physician groups figure out out they do a ton of those procedures to drive salary.

Opthamologists used to make a lot more money than they do now. Why? Because cataract surgery used to get paid a lot more. 2-5x more per case than they do now. These docs figured out how to be more efficient so they could do more cases per day, and it takes a while for payors to say-- you're doing one every 20 minutes instead of every 90? Then we're cutting back fees accordingly. In the meantime, Ophthalmologists rake it in and are a "top" specialty for medical students. Eventually, payors and Medicare figures things out and start putting pressures on rates. But it takes a while.

The same story is now true for Gastroenterologists, Radiologists and Derm. Radiology was one of the easiest fields to get into 15 years ago. You work in the dark, have little contact with patients, its frankly a weird field for people who went into medicine looking to help people. You used to have a couple of nerdy introvert types who liked being in the dark that chose the field. Now because of the explosion of imaging, and practice efficiency, these guys are reading 3x the images they did 15 years, and making three times as much. Payments will eventually come down for them too. But in the meantime, Radiology is now one of the hottest fields for medical students. Fixing this perverse dynamic is a key question.

PS. General surgeons are the wrong specialty to pick on. What specialty has had vacant spot in the residency matching process the last few years? General surgery. Its a pretty tough life-- in terms of lifestyle impact, they deserve the $75-100K more than the PCP. Its the Radiologists and Dermatologists that have PCP hours but are making 300-400K that are the problem.

I agree with most all of that. I'd just add that we need ways to control volume as well as price. There's a lot of research showing that, in medicine, supply drives demand. if you live in an area with more specialists, you're going to end up getting a lot more care. And your health outcomes will be no better for it. Your health spending, however, will be much more expensive. This is where better evidence of treatment effectiveness and value comes in, to help us make these decisions. Paying rationally is part of the battle, but so too is prescribing rationally.

"I will fight until my last breath. I'm dying to answer these charges. I am dying to show you how innocent I am," says Rod Blagojevich. Yet something seems to be stopping him. Maybe he'd feel more at ease if he gave us a call? I could make clicking sounds if it would help.

The job market might be sort of crap right now, but The Prospect is committed to doing its countercyclical part and hiring amidst the downturn. And so I ask: Who wants to be an Assistant Web Editor?

The American Prospect seeks an Assistant Editor of The American Prospect Online who will maintain the high quality and relevance of its Web site, www.prospect.org, including its award-winning blog, TAPPED.

The ideal candidate has a strong knowledge of and interest in politics and policy, and is familiar with the Prospect's brand of journalism and our competitor blogs and publications. S/he has experience managing a Web site or blog, with working knowledge of content management systems, blogging software such as MovableType, Adobe PhotoShop, and HTML.

The ideal candidate also has editing experience, is familiar with AP Style, and is incredibly detail-oriented. S/he works well with writers (both staffers and freelancers) and other editors to craft high-quality Web content that is timely and widely read.

The Assistant Editor is supervised by the Web Editor. This position is based in our Washington, DC office. To apply, please mail or email a cover letter, resume, two writing samples (clips preferred), and two references to:

Emily Parsons, Managing Editor

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Greg Anrig rounds up to the top 12 conservative insights of 2008. Unsurprisingly, they're all self-flagellation, along the lines of David Frum saying, "Sarah Palin symbolizes a party that has decided that we just don't care about making the government work anymore." But I'd be more interested in seeing the forward-looking insights: What conservatives should do, rather than what they shouldn't do.

But maybe there's no need for it. The RNC, after all, has started up a think tank "aimed at reviving the party's policy heft," which is sort of like Donald Trump promising to bring back the modesty and emotional empathy that has always been so crucial to his success.

But This is the sort of thing that parties do after defeats. There was a lot of it among Democrats in 2004. Lot of soul-searching and hollow statements about a policy platform suitable for the "information age." Yet in 2006 and 2008, Democrats won, and won big, without any discernibly new ideas. They did not jettison their health care programs or throw gays under the bus or means test the safety net. The environment changed. Iraq looked worse. The economy got worse. The GOP majority grew more entrenched and corrupt. The electorate turned to the alternative.

What Republicans want to do here is exert more control over their own fate, and that makes sense, but the reality of the situation is that they're in bad shape until the public sours on Democrats or the set of policy problems changes and emphasizes dilemmas that Republicans are more comfortable with (i.e, crime or a heavy tax burden). For the moment, though, their affirmative agenda is close to irrelevant. Their power is in obstruction, and their hope is in Democrats exhausting or overextending themselves. It's not the sort of thing any party likes to hear, but for the moment, their path to restoration is in the hands of the Democrats.

Kennedy's office sent out a press release. The New York Times ran a story. The Wonk Room wrote up the findings. This is not how Congressional Budget Office reports are usually greeted. But the release of their two books on health care -- Key Issues in Analyzing Major Health Insurance Proposals and Budget Options, Volume I: Health Care -- is a big deal. Indeed, the books are unprecedented. But the coverage thus far isn't quite getting at their import.

To understand why these books matter, consider the first sentence of my profile of Peter Orszag, former head of the Congressional Budget Office and incoming director of the Office of Management and Budget. It's a quote from Senator Ron Wyden, one of Congress's most involved and aware reformers. "The history of health reform," he says, "is congressmen sending health legislation off to the Congressional Budget Office to die."

This is not part of the normal history. The CBO's rulings don't make much news. But they can be decisive.

To understand why, ask yourself this question: How do we decide how much a government program costs? It's an essential question. Programs need prices, because the government has to produce a budget. But pricing legislation in advance is impossible. Consider the challenges of a health-care plan that only exists on paper. What medical technologies will emerge in coming years? Will there be a recession that forces more Americans onto government subsidies? Will the next flu season be a bad one? No one knows.

But you still need a number. So Washington operates amidst a tacitly agreed-upon imprecision. What the CBO says, goes. "In this town," says Henry Aaron, a senior economics fellow at the Brookings Institution, "it's not infrequent to hear people say it doesn't make any difference what it really costs. It only matters what CBO says it costs."

The CBO's most famous -- or infamous -- intervention in a legislative battle was its estimate of the 1994 Clinton health-care proposal. "The major issue," recalls Robert Reischauer, then director of the CBO, "was not how much it cost but whether the premiums that you were charged as an individual were governmental in nature and would thus be in the budget." Reischauer and the CBO decided they were. The premiums paid by every American would be included in the Number. This meant the Number was huge -- vastly larger than the price tag previously affixed to the proposal by the Clinton administration. Hearing the news, one senior administration official moaned to The Washington Post, "The Republicans will jump all over this and say we're increasing the budget by 25 percent and putting through the biggest tax increase in history." The New York Times editorialized that "the opponents of President Clinton's health care bill think they have struck political gold in an analysis of the bill just released by the Congressional Budget Office."

They were right. Donna Shalala, Clinton's secretary of health and human services, called the ruling "devastating." But through all of this, Clinton's bill never changed. Nor did the amount individual Americans would pay. Only the Number changed. And it wasn't an obvious decision that the CBO made. Indeed, even some of the CBO's leading lights questioned the judgment. "In all honesty," says Rivlin, who by that time was head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, "I wasn't sure my colleagues had done it right. I mean there are mandated expenditures such as if you have to put a handicap ramp in front of your building. That's a mandatory expenditure, but that's not a tax." But it didn't matter. That was the Number, and it helped kill the bill.

The books that the CBO released this week are essentially a guide to the CBO's scoring process. They tell congressmen, in advance, how the Number will be built. The Wonk Room and The New York Times are focusing on the equations. But they're not what's changed. Rather, the difference is that Congress knows what they'll be in advance. The scoring process will still be a minefield, but now legislators will have a map. There won't be a situation analogous to 1994, when the White House was shocked by an unwelcome assumption and their legislation was mortally wounded by a staggering price point. Obama and his allies in Congress, along with Orszag's help, will be able to build a bill able to survive the scoring process. They can, effectively, decide their own Number.

Image used under a CC license from Train Orphans.

Here's a bleg I never thought I'd make: Thanks to an incredibly kind family member, I am now in possession of two (2) black truffles. And I am intimidated. What do I do?

I'd endorse Matt's comments on "symbolism" here, and suggest that calling the Warren issue "symbolic" is just a method of marginalizing minority discontent. Warren is not a symbolic figure. He's a religious leader who mobilizes his flock and leverages his public influence in order to affect electoral outcomes. The most prominent example was the Proposition 8 ballot initiative -- as opposed to, say, the Proposition 8 symbolic logo design contest -- in California. Warren used his power and prestige instrumentally, not symbolically. And Obama is giving him more power, and more prestige, which he will, quite assuredly, deploy in an instrumental fashion.

Meanwhile, I'd also note that the people deriding concerns about Warren as "symbolic" are the same people who were dancing in the streets when Obama won the election. When the symbolism mattered to them, they weren't spending a lot of time noting that Obama's basket of policies was really pretty standard for a Democratic candidate and so people shouldn't get exercised over the symbolism embedded in his victory.

It's not actually the case that Barack Obama is giving us a cabinet without Jewish members. Peter Orszag, son of Reba Orszag, is a member of the tribe. And Director of the Office and Management and Budget is a "cabinet-level" position, in much the same way that the vice presidency is (incidentally, so too is the Director of National Drug Policy, which is absurd). So Orszag will be there representin'.

And hey! You know what? In the latest issue of TAP, I have a profile of Peter Orszag, examining exactly how he'll manage to wield all that Jew power.

Ross Douthat's argument that in the immediate aftermath 9/11, Al Gore would have accepted the torture of terrorists, should be taken seriously. He's right to note the dangers of pretending that the executive temptations that led to Abu Ghraib only affect a small slice of Bush-era testicle crushers. That's not to suggest that, in this plane, Gore's revulsion towards Bush's methods was in any way opportunistic. Opinions are contingent on circumstance. For proof of that, think back to the battle lines when liberal hero Howard Dean was proposing 40,000 more troops for Iraq, because if we were there, we had to do the job right, and when Bush proposed the surge, ostensibly for the same reason.

The lessons of the Bush years have to be structural, not simply partisan. Our system has to work against the executive's natural tendency to arrogate power. But the system is broken. Congress is supposed to provide a check on the president, even when both come from the same party. It is an institution built to be more interested in its own power than in its party. That has clearly failed. "Congress" no longer has incentives. The parties in Congress do. And the party that controls the presidency sees its incentive as ensuring the president's success, because that will lead to better electoral results and more concrete accomplishments, and the party that does not hold the White House sees their primary incentive as ensuring the president's failure, as that will lead to better electoral results and, in the long-run, more concrete accomplishments.

I don't know how you make Congress act like a branch rather than a brawl. But they, along with the Courts, are the correct check on executive power. You can't simply trust our ability to identify and elect good-hearted executives. It's true that the Bush years have triggered a shift in Democratic foreign policy thinking and now many who might have abetted a Gore presidency's excesses would argue strenuously against any inclination Obama might have to mimic the horrors of the Bush years. But this too will fade. Ideologies don't persist in American life, and neither do particular presidents. The thread of continuity is the system. The system needs to work.

Image used under a CC license from Takomabibelot.

The winter is harder. For years, in fact, I’ve struggled with the question of winter breakfasts. Cold weather food must be warming. But warming food tends to be heavy. And I’m not going to braise a pork loin for my breakfast. Oatmeal, of course, is the obvious choice, but it’s never quite worked for me. Too much mush. The sort of thing Oliver Twist wanted seconds of, but I don’t really want any of.

A week ago, walking through the market, inspiration shook loose from the deepest reaches of my memory. Grape Nuts! When I was a kid, my mother used to microwave them for me. One minute. They would soften, plumping with milk. They’d be sweet, and nutty, but still with a nice echo of their former rough texture. So I gave it a shot. Momma Klein was right. Warmed Grape Nuts are, by far, the world’s finest winter breakfast.

Also at IFA.

Responding to my argument yesterday that we could ease the primary care crisis by radically expanding the number of nurse practitioners, Kevin MD says sorry, but "there are not enough of them." That might change though, if the profession gave them more respect and responsibility, rather than forcing them to attach to a doctor or work in a MinuteClinic. What wouldn't change is Kevin's other point, that they, too, are being drawn into the specialties.

Duncan Cross, however, disagrees with Kevin, and takes it a step further. Don't think of them as a stopgap for the primary care shortage, he argues. Think of them as the basis of a renewed primary care system.

The median physician in family practice makes $137,119 -$156,010; compare that to surgeons at $228,839 and up.

By contrast, the median physicians’ assistant makes $69,517-80,960 - and can do just about everything a PCP might do.

So if we’re going to spend more money on primary care, it’s a lot more efficient to do so making PAs a priority, rather than physicians. Obviously, 20% of 70 thousand is a lot less than 20% of $140,000 - and we can hire two new PAs for what we might have spent on one new PCP.

But what’s also clear from these numbers is the gap in physicians’ salaries - about $90,000. If the real problem is the differential between primary and specialist pay scales, then a 20% increase in general practice salaries only narrows the gap to about $60,000 dollars - still a pretty big differential. If narrowing that gap is the key to fixing primary care, then it’s going to be tremendously, maybe prohibitively expensive.

Whatever the gap between specialist and generalist PAs (the BLS isn’t very specific here), it simply can’t be as big a problem as it is for physicians. Thus PA’s salaries will be far more responsive to modest absolute increases: a $28,000 raise is going to mean a lot more to a PA than it is to a PCP. So again, the problem is much easier to solve if we look to PAs (and nurses) as the key to primary care.

What Kevin's saying makes sense in the short-term: We can't produce enough Nurse Practitioners to solve the primary care problem if current trends continue. But in the long-run, Duncan's point makes sense. And anecdotally, I've had similar experiences to Megan: My interactions with nurse practitioners have been far better than my interactions with doctors, and they've often centered around fairly complex problems. Medical schools selects for science skills. Nurse practitioners tend to be far better at dealing with patients. At the primary care level, that might actually mean, in a fair number of cases, that they're actually preferable.

Nick Kristof, who's been doing some great work lately on food issues and the production chain, jumps into the public health element with a nice column on soda taxes. Which he supports. "Let’s break for a quiz," he says, midway through the column. "What was the biggest health care breakthrough in the last 40 years in the United States? Heart bypasses? CAT scans and M.R.I.’s? New cancer treatments?"

"No, it was the cigarette tax." Among public health types, that's an uncontroversial conclusion. But in politics, you're not supposed to apply the experience in any broad way. For some reason, it's considered much more dangerous to tax soda than work. But from an economics standpoint, that doesn't make much sense. You don't want to tax things that you want people to do more of. Like, say, work. You do want to tax things that you want to discourage, like emitting lots of carbon. Insofar as our society is going to have taxes, best for them to be of the two birds, one stone variety. If we can save lives while we raise revenue, why not give that a try?

The lizard people:

Elsewhere, the Coleman camp offered a "proposal for preventing as many as 150 ballots from being counted twice. Talking about instances when a ballot couldn't be run through a voting machine, requiring a duplicate to be made, the Coleman camp said the ballot should be counted only if an original could be matched with its copy."

Is anyone else beginning to suspect this whole recount is an elaborate skit thought up by well-known political satirist Al Franken?

And speaking of Al Franken, he's ahead in the count and way up in the InTrade markets. He may actually win the Minnesota Senate election. That would be the sort of brilliantly absurdist outcome that could only have been thought up by well-known political satirist Al Franken.

At this point, the stock market is lower than it was a decade ago. As James Surowiecki has said, you can look at the last 10 years as a period not of market growth, but of incredible volatility. Lots of movement up, lots of movement down, but fundamentally, no real change. But the incredible volatility had side effects. An industry arose to arbitrage it. Paul Krugman looks at that industry today, and concludes that "the vast riches achieved by those who managed other people’s money have had a corrupting effect on our society as a whole."

That's been true in politics, of course, where money has spoken, and loudly. It's a neat trick how even with Democrats in power, hedge fund managers still pay half the tax rates of the rest of us because their income is redefined under a tax loophole.

As it became common for brokers to earn a million, and for the best to earn far more than that, inequality rocketed forward, with all its attendant expenditure cascades. As economist Robert Frank explains, expenditure cascades are "a process whereby increased expenditure by some people leads others just below them on the income scale to spend more as well, in turn leading others just below the second group to spend more, and so on." This leads to more visible consumption in order to retain status, and thus less savings. Put simply, it's hard to keep up with the Joneses when the Joneses are trying to keep up with the Burgs and the Burgs are tryying to keep up with the Charloffes and the Charloffes are trying to keep up with Bernie Madoff.

One way to keep up, though, is to join up. The riches were so near, and so tempting, that a tremendous quantity of Ivy League talent rushed to Wall Street, rather than to more productive, or public-spirited, pursuits. If half your peer group is starting out with six figure salaries and a gleaming bachelor pad in Manhattan, it can be hard to go the research route.

That money came from somewhere, though. That somewhere was fees. Investors paid traders to navigate and assess risks that the investors didn't understand, but the traders swore they did. They didn't. But they don't have to give back any of those fees. So money that could have gone into the bank, or into an index fund, or into personal luxury -- that could have been used productively -- instead went to Wall Street. And as Wall Street grew richer, we were more impressed by them, and we trusted them more, and gave them more money. And so it went.

But I'm going to do it anyway. Please donate to The American Prospect.

I ask because the first insight wasn't as powerful as the second. I hated working on the campaign. But I loved stealing away to write my blog. It was the first inkling that I wanted to work as a journalist. A year later, I came to DC to intern for The Washington Monthly (The American Prospect, showing good judgment, rejected my application). Two years later, sitting on the paisley couch at the entrance to UCLA's Hilgard Dorms, I was talking online with some guy named Matt Yglesias, a young writer at The American Prospect, who suggested I apply for The American Prospect's fellowship program.

Happily, this time, I was accepted. But I didn't shut my personal blog down. Another institution would have asked that, and rightly so. Writing posts took up most of my day. Time they were paying me for. But TAP encouraged the outside work: People read it. It focused on policy. It fit into the mission.

This is not, as they say, a profit-making enterprise. It's mission-driven. And part of that mission is finding, and supporting, liberal writers and thinkers. TAP has been the birthplace for not only my career, but Josh Marshall, Matthew Yglesias, Dana Goldstein, Nick Confessore, Mark Greif, Jonathan Cohn, Chris Mooney, and many others. When people talk about developing an ideas infrastructure, when they talk about building institutions, when they talk about pushing progressive voices into the mainstream media, this is the first step. It's easy enough to support demonstrated talent. What TAP does is find talent, and save it from going to law school. The world would be worse off without Josh Marshall, which is to say, it would be worse off if Josh hadn't been plucked from the history program at Brown University and given time and space to develop as a writer. It's an important role. But not a profitable one. Which is why it needs support.

About a year ago, I moved my blog onto The Prospect's web site. They didn't ask. I offered. This blog would be a lot worse if I'd never come to this magazine. The health care commentary wouldn't be leavened by reporting. There wouldn't be interviews with Tom Daschle and AHIP, or the sort of historical grounding that only comes when you can spend the time researching a 6,000 word article on the health care battles of 1994. That's all a function of the support the magazine provides its writers, and the guidance its editors offer along the way. As you can imagine, though, it's not the sort of content that advertisers are aching to attach themselves to.

Even so, in November, this blog played host to more than 85,000 words, not counting the thousands of comments. Many of them contained recipes. All of them appeared here for free. But producing them, at the end of the day, isn't free. Worse, this isn't a great time for struggling non-profits that need to raise money. And TAP doesn't have a wealthy owner: There's no Marty Peretz or CanWest or CondeNast waiting in the wings. So I'm doing the thing I thought I wouldn't do: Asking you to give money. Not to me, but to TAP.

One more point on Rick Warren*: He is not simply a religious figure. He is a political figure. He explicitly involved himself and his flock in the fight over Proposition 8. He has gone on Sean Hannity's show and commented on war with Iran. He hosted a presidential forum, where he asked political candidates questions on everything from Supreme Court justices to taxation.

Warren is a religious leader who leverages his prominence and spiritual credibility for political purposes. That is an understandable decision. But it makes it impossible to argue that he should be understood as a purely religious figure. He has a discrete policy agenda, he uses his prominence to advance it. Thus, when asking whether Obama should give Warren the most important religious-political honor available, you have to ask whether it's a good thing for Warren to be a more powerful political figure.

*That is, one more point unless I think of another point I want to make. Woo Blogs!

Over at the Motherblog, Harold Meyerson, who's known Hilda Solis for years, gives a longer take on her political record, and explains his enthusiastic reaction (the post is called "HILDA SOLIS IS GREAT."). Solis is a politician willing to take risks. And just as important, she tends to know which risks to take. In a position like Secretary of Labor, where you can either fade to obscurity or make a genuine difference, that's a powerful attribute. Sez Harold:

In 1996, when she was a back-bencher (and the first Latina) in the California State Senate, Hilda Solis did something that no other political figure I known of had done before, or has done since: She took money out of her own political account to fund a social justice campaign. Under California law, the state minimum wage is set by the gubernatorially-appointed Industrial Welfare Commission, and California’s governors for the preceding 14 years, Republicans George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, hadn’t exactly appointed members inclined to raise that wage. So Solis dipped into her own campaign treasury and came up with the money to fund the signature-gatherers to put a minimum wage hike initiative on the California ballot. The signature gatherers gathered the signatures, the measure was placed on the ballot, it passed handily in the next election, and California’s low-wage janitors and gardeners and fry and taco cooks, and millions like them, got a significant raise.

While in the legislature, Solis also became the chief proponent in state government for the environmental justice movement that was bubbling up in various working-class communities around the state, steering to passage bills that reduced airborne carcinogens in industrial areas and that created parkland alongside the rivers that run through some of Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods. She took a leading role in promoting domestic violence awareness in the state’s communities of color.

And in 2000, she did something liberals always talk about doing and almost never do: she challenged an incumbent Democratic congressman with a piss-poor record in that Spring’s Democratic primary, and defeated him soundly. Marty Martinez, a 9-term incumbent seeking his 10th, had voted for NAFTA, opposed gun controls and abortion rights, and backed the extension of a freeway into a residential area -- managing to estrange labor, enviros, feminists and liberals of all descriptions. Still, Democrats virtually never run against incumbents, from the left or from anyplace. But Solis, with the encouragement of L.A. County AFL-CIO chieftain Miguel Contreras, did just that. She not only won, but defeated Matinez by a whopping 69 percent to 31 percent margin.

Encouraging.

I'm going to be on MSNBC around 2:45 Eastern, talking Rick Warren.

Word is that Congresswoman Hilda Solis is to be named Labor Secretary. I'd write a long post on this, and maybe I will later, but I think most of what I'd say is better expressed by the fact that Harold Meyerson just ran into my office doing everything but clicking his heels in the air. The same sentiment has been echoed by every Labor supporter and union worker I know. I'd add one point: Solis is Hispanic. That's not tokenism. For the Secretary of Labor, it's relevant. The movement's most rapid growth is among immigrant workers, but for many years, immigration was the prime fissure separating newer unions, which focus on service workers and other low-wage industries, and older unions, which considered immigrant labor a threat. In recent years, the unions have painfully and courageously united around a vision that prizes immigrants as part of their coalition, and they were a major partner in the pro-immigrant rallies that swept through the nation in 2006. Solis helps cement that alliance, and that self-conception, which is good new for those of us who care about both growth and justice in Labor.

Here, by the way, is Solis speaking on the Employee Free Choice Act.

The Washington Times reports that a variety of military and political leaders are pushing Obama to appoint William White, head of the Intrepid Museum Foundation, to serve as Secretary of the Navy. "He would be phenomenal," said retired Gen. Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 to 2001. Oh, and he's gay. But the Secretary's job is a civilian position, so it wouldn't conflict with the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. It would, however, serve to show that the policy is fundamentally absurd.

If you're interested in the question of academic journals, there's a lot of good stuff in this comment thread. The consensus seems to be that they made sense at one point in time when you needed someone to take on the job of choosing good research and collecting it for libraries, and now they survive because they're a) profitable for the publishers and b) serving an advancement function for academics. Indeed, Neil Sinhababu, about as public-spirited a thinker as you'll find, writes:

I'd love it if the government could buy the journals out of the publishers' hands and open them to the public. I hear that some of that has happened in the sciences. The money taxpayers pay out in doing that would soon be recouped, at least in part, by public university academic libraries not having to pay subscription fees. Bonus: Ezra and other ordinary folk get to read my stuff without paying.

But I'm going to keep sending most of my papers to old-line journals that Ezra can't read and hoping they get accepted. After I got a paper accepted in Philosophical Review two months ago (it's perhaps the top journal in the discipline), one of my colleagues told me that at some places, people can get tenure just for that! I'd love to have more people read my stuff, but if I just put it on the web for free hardly anybody would even know it was there, or that it was worth reading. Get it into Philosophical Review, and I'm assured that my colleagues will see it, my adversaries will respond to it, and people hiring or promoting me will be impressed.

A sidenote here is that the incentives are all mucked up. If researchers had to buy individual subscriptions to these incredibly expensive journals, the outcry would end the practice in a day. But they don't. The university libraries pay the fee, put everything in searchable form, and so the main consumers of the research -- academics -- are taken care of. In theory, the university libraries should want to stop paying the fee, but that's a collective action problem on the one hand (no one university could unilaterally stop providing access as its researchers would suffer) and arguably a bureaucratic problem on the other, as it's good for the library staff to still be the access point to the journals. And the losers are, well, all of us, who can't read and benefit from the research.

The primary care blogosphere is rightfully pissed at an op-ed by Dr. Jonathan Glauser, an emergency physician and MBA, that takes the form of an angry screed against the primary care profession. "If ever there was a group that has failed in providing care, it is our primary care system," he says. "To fund such a venture for groups that are singularly inept at performing anything of value to society is pure folly and a waste of precious health care dollars."

Data is not the plural of anecdote, and anecdote is the only data Glauser offers. Dr. Rob, Bob Doherty, and even fellow emergency physician Shadowfax pull out the long knives and the longer studies. But the dispute is more than a simple rant. Primary care doctors are asking for massive subsidies right now. The ACP wants a 10 percent boost in Medicare payments. Kevin MD will see their 10 percent, and raises them to 20 percent.

The problem they're responding to is real. We're about to face an epic shortage of primary care doctors -- we're talking 44,000 or 45,000 too few docs -- which will ensure massive disruption for patients. The problems for primary care are basic: Fewer graduates, more patients. As I understand the issue, there are two problems here. The first is lifestyle. Primary care doctors have too many patients, too little time, too much paperwork, too much administrative hassles, too little satisfaction. The other is money. Primary care doctors make far less than specialists, even though they go through a similarly expensive and rigorous training process. It's no surprise, then, that most doctors opt to become specialists, where they have better incomes and more control over their lifestyle. The famous stat here is that the highest MCAT scores are now to be found among dermatologists. Great money, nice lifestyle.

The money fix being proposed comes on the payment side. How can we make it lucrative enough to be a primary care doctor? The answer is increase the pay of primary care doctors. And there's an argument for this: More primary doctors would probably make the system cheaper, even at higher reimbursement rates. Specialist medicine is expensive. But you could also examine the problem on the training side: How can we make it cheaper to become a primary care doctor?

Rather than drawing from the same pool that produces surgeons, why not draw from the pool that produces nurses? That's exactly what Massachusetts did recently, passing a law that recognized nurse practitioners --nurses who have completed advanced training in the diagnosis and management of health conditions -- as primary care providers. This may not be the solution some doctors want -- obviously it encourages, rather than discourages, the tendency to see primary care as a less specialized and complex form of medicine -- but insofar as the aim is to flood the market with accessible and effective primary care providers, and move us towards a system that emphasizes primary rather than specialty care, it makes the most sense, and does so without rapidly raising costs.

The counterargument comes on expertise: Primary care doctors are pricier because they have far more training. But I'm not aware of any consensus showing worse outcomes when patients see nurse practitioners. A randomized study in the BMJ found that "Generally patients consulting nurse practitioners were significantly more satisfied with their care, although for adults this difference was not observed in all practices." Satisfaction may not be the same as long-term outcomes, of course, but it's not meaningless. More to the point, a JAMA study found that "In an ambulatory care situation in which patients were randomly assigned to either nurse practitioners or physicians, and where nurse practitioners had the same authority, responsibilities, productivity and administrative requirements, and patient population as primary care physicians, patients' outcomes were comparable."

Dana Goldstein recently returned from a trip to Finland, where she examined what most education experts agree to be the most effective and sophisticated system in the world. Folks on the right laud the Finnish system for its emphasis on schools choice and vocational education. Folks on the left praise its commitment to early childhood education and national curriculum standards and strong unions. And Dana's conclusion was that they're both right, and that this has implications for broadening the American conversation over education:

The point of studying other nation's school systems is not to find the silver bullet, but to realize that there isn't one. In the United States, the education debate has been framed as a zero sum game. We've been told again and again that we need to make hard choices between labor protections and doing what is best for children. But a good education system can include merit pay, as well as strong unions and tenure. It can have relatively short school days and large classes, but also national curriculum guidelines. Teachers can have autonomy in lesson-planning while simultaneously being held to high professional standards. Universal day care and pre-school on one end of the education spectrum can be matched by a commitment to vocational preparedness on the other.

The truth is that if the United States committed politically and socially, at the national level, to taking education seriously -- as the Finns do -- the universe of possibilities would open up wider than most of us can imagine.

The American conversation over education has a tendency to become a proxy argument over other things: unions, say, or religion. We battle over merit pay as if someone, somewhere, believes it the actual answer to our woes, even though no one would dare admit to such an absurd view. We've managed to reach levels of extreme contention over policy changes that are, in fact, very small, because the real fight, for now, is between which political coalition will hold power. Indeed, if you read the Education Equality Project's statement of principles, they speak more of political economy than curricula policy. The space for discussion is small indeed.

In the course of my day, I tend to spend a fair amount of time clicking around the university pages of academics and downloading the rough drafts amassed in the "working papers" section. But the proliferation of accessible "working papers," rather than final products, is baffling. Henry Farrell, however, offers up some insight:

Because of copyright issues, academics often don’t publish the final versions of their papers to the web (indeed the trouble is often getting them to publish any version at all). And even when they do, there usually isn’t any simple or obvious way of finding out which is the most recent non-paywalled version of a piece without emailing the author to ask.

Dave Weigel Anonymous Economist blogger did the yeoman's work of digging through the congressional districts that swung from Bush to Obama and examining where they suggest Republican vulnerabilities in the next election, and thus Republican incumbents who could be pressured to vote with Obama in the next two years. You can be sure that Rahm Emanuel knows this list by heart.

From an interview BeliefNet's Dan Gilgoff did with Rick Warren:

Before last night, McCain had been widely criticized by Christian activists for keeping mum about his faith and about values issues like abortion and marriage Last night seemed to change that. How much headway did McCain make among skeptical evangelicals?

I'm a pastor, I'm not a prophet, so I would not predict how evangelicals are going to vote. I will tell you they're not monolith. That's a big myth. They're going to make up their minds based on the hierarchy of their values. For many evangelicals, of course, if they believe that life begins at conception, that's a deal breaker for a lot of people. If they think that life begins at conception, then that means that there are 40 million Americans who are not here [because they were aborted] that could have voted. They would call that a holocaust and for them it would like if I'm Jewish and a Holocaust denier is running for office. I don't care how right he is on everything else, it's a deal breaker for me. I'm not going to vote for a Holocaust denier[...]

Then it sounds like it would be unconscionable for an evangelical to vote for a pro-choice candidate like Obama.

Well, we're going to see what happens. All I can say is you'll see what happens.

The going explanation for Warren's presence on the inauguration podium is that "this aims to be the most open and inclusive inauguration in history," as Linda Douglas, a spokeswoman for the inauguration committee, told Politico. It's a peculiar definition of "open and inclusive." Warren, after all, is the only preacher giving the invocation. He will not share the stage with a rabbi, an imam, a monk, and an episcopalian. And Warren is not being chosen because he himself is open and inclusive. He thinks abortion a "holocaust" and urged his flock to vote for Prop 8. He compared gay marriage to incest and polygamy and pederasty, and when asked if he really thought those things "equivalent to having gays getting married," he replied, "Oh, I do."

The tolerance Obama is asking for, in other words, is not from Warren. It's from the LGBT community, and women. He is asking them to be tolerant of Warren's intolerance. It's a cruel play, framed to marginalize the legitimate anger of those who Warren harms and discriminates against.

Then there's the Realpolitik explanation. Obama is just assimilating Warren into his "Team of Rivals." Better to have him in the fold than on the warpath. Better to find common ground than admit to division. Adam Serwer elegantly dispatches that thinking.

It's possible to interpret the decision to include Warren and Lowery as another Lincoln "we are not enemies but friends" moment, an attempt to bring the religious right and religious left together. The only problem is the most offended parties, the LGBTQ community and the women Warren equates with Nazis, are not in any symbolic sense present to make the choice to be friends or enemies. Had Obama, say, chosen a gay pastor and forced Warren to make the difficult decision of whether or not to appear, the situation might be a bit different.

This might be a wise political calculation on Obama's part. But it is a cruel thing to ask of his coalition. There's a time to pander to intolerance, and it is called the election. The election is over. January 20th is the inauguration. Pro-choice women and gays were a significant part of Obama's coalition, and they're being forced to accept that the candidate they worked for will use the election they won to elevate a powerful religious leader who works often and publicly against their interests. For them, the day will be darkened.

Update: Meanwhile, did you hear who Ahmadinejad chose to deliver his invocation? Now that's crazy.

• Are magnet schools the answer?

• A Teamster Apart: Ron Carey Remembered.

• The problem with achievement gaps.

Sarah Posner reports that "Rick Warren, who just this week equated gay marriage with polygamy and incest, and who thinks that Christians who work for social justice are Marxists, will deliver the invocation at Obama's inauguration." She says she's "speechless."

An argument can be made that Obama is using Warren Warren, after all, is the author of the best selling book of all time, and Obama's demonstrated respect for the preacher might build some level of rapport, or at least openness, with that community. But I doubt it. Rather, the benefits probably flow in the other direction. Warren's legitimacy as a mainstream figure grows. His status as the country's premiere religious leader is cemented. And he keeps telling his flock that the ideas Democrats hold make them Marxists and child murderers and advocates of the slippery slope to legalized incest.

Obama's embrace of Warren might mean Obama's name is left out of the sermon, but will that be true for the next Democrat? Or the next? And so we'll have a situation where the preacher that Obama embraced is working aggressively to convince his flock to vote against Obama's would-be Democratic successors? There's a difference between reaching out to the evangelical community with respect and surrendering to it. Obama could have called on an Episcopalian or a Methodist or any number of more complicated and nuanced religious figures. Giving Warren this sort of political-religious opportunity effectively codifies his position as America's most politically important, and accepted, religious leader. That seems unwise, and unnecessary.

As the days go by, we're getting a bit more of a sense of the potential opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act. On the business front, an article on The Hill notes that tech companies -- which are traditionally Democratic donors ad so have good relationships on that side of the aisle -- are moving into a stance of total opposition. The article quotes Gerry Connolly, a Democratic congressman from Virginia, recalling a meeting he had with local tech leaders.

Connolly expected questions on issues unique to the industry, such as expanding broadband access or raising visa limits for highly skilled foreign workers. But the Fairfax County Board chairman also found himself defending the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a controversial proposal to expand union membership.

“They spoke in almost apocalyptic terms and they made it clear they didn’t support it,” said Connolly, a Democrat, who would end up winning the race to replace Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), who did not run for reelection. “I was a little surprised by the vehemence of the argument against the bill.”

The article also quotes Gerry Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, saying “the tech industry has been asleep on the switch on this one. If you want to devastate our country economically and shut us down every week with a strike, card-check is the answer.”

Actually, card check would probably reduce strikes. Strikes are often a method of hurting employers till they accept a union. Card check allows workers to vote the union into existence on their own. But anyway. Blanche Lincoln, a Democratic Senator from Arkansas, agrees with this sort of thing, and said today that card check was "not necessary." She's up for reelection in 2010, and would rather not face $80 million in ads as the business community seeks to make an example of her. If the business community can get a few of her colleagues to make similar statements, thus proving that they can sustain a filibuster, EFCA will never come up for a serious vote at all.

In the comments to the Caroline Kennedy post below, Scott writes, "I don't understand this argument. You are opposed to someone with so many legs up over any competition being appointed - but of course she'd still have all those advantages in an election...Making her kiss babies and make the rounds meeting with New York's power brokers doesn't change that. I'm afraid I miss the inherent value in going through those motions to get to the same result." Similarly, Anne says that she's "still [a] dynastic choice even if the voters make that choice."

Maybe so, but then the voters make that choice. For better or worse, the will of the voters is the very essence of legitimacy in our system. It may not be fair, or wise, or produce the best outcomes, but it is the definition of legitimate. And that's all you can ask of the process (which is not to say you can't be disappointed in the result). By contrast, a governor appointing a celebrity to the Senate and giving her the powers and advantages of incumbency is somewhat shadier. It's a thumb on the scales of the vote. Which gets into a larger argument, that vacancies should always be filled by special election. Letting governors choose successors is strange and distorting. Among other things, it discourages presidents from appointing members of Congress from states with governors of the opposite party (if you're Barack Obama you don't appoint Evan Bayh to anything, because the result is that you lose a vote in the Senate) and means that an unexpected death can result in a seat switching parties. Neither is a good outcome.

Over at The Motherblog, Dana Goldstein admits that she's coming around on Caroline Kennedy. I'm not -- at least not as an appointment. Which is not to deny Kennedy's genuine advantages:

• Star Power: Few politicians will command as many cameras as Kennedy. Few will be as able to shout through the media's everyday cacophony to make a sustained argument. There's real value in having a prominent progressive able to use the airwaves -- not to mention a beloved Democratic legacy -- for her political purposes. You could see how this could matter amidst a long health care battle, or a fight over global warming, or another war. Carolyn Maloney would not have the same national presence.

• Money: Kennedy is not an experienced legislator, but she is an experienced fundraiser. She helped lead an effort that raised more than $60 million for New York public schools. And that has real benefits. It has benefits for keeping Kennedy's seat, of course, but also for winning other elections. A Kennedy fundraiser for a congressional candidate in southern Massachusetts, or even western Missouri, will raise a lot of money. If Kennedy dedicated herself to this aspect of the job, she could conceivably play a decisive role in securing a couple more votes in Congress.

• Kennedy-ness: Obama owes both Caroline and, even more so, Ted Kennedy. That's a good thing. It's important that the most effective progressive in American life has the president's ear. But due to his health, Ted Kennedy's continued presence in the Senate looks ever less certain. If he had to vacate his seat in the near future, Caroline could lay authentic claim to his legacy and ensure the president and the Senate don't lose focus on his priorities. Her moral and emotional weight of her presence would make it less likely that promises made to Ted Kennedy would be broken in his absence.

• Safety: It's simply very unlikely that she'll lose the seat. She has too much money, too much media access, too much residual goodwill. A Senate seat in New York isn't exactly a tenuous position, but strange things can happen with unknown candidates. Put simply, she's the best bet to keep the seat in Democratic hands for the foreseeable future.

That said, she's an inexperienced legislator, has no record of constituent service, is not nearly the most qualified applicant for the job, and is an inescapably dynastic choice. On ground of simple equity, she should not be appointed. No direct descendant of John F. Kennedy needs an extra leg up in life. But then, no one should be appointed. At least not in a way that effectively decides the Democratic nomination and the Senate seat.

Rather, Governor Paterson should make a caretaker appointment: Some gray wonk or dutiful civil servant or relevant expert (What's up, Varmus?) who will step down from the position in 2010, when it comes up in a special election. Kennedy has expressed interest in this seat, so presumably she's prepared to run for it. Let her. Let her do the work of talking to voters and amassing endorsements and holding townhalls. And let everyone else interested in the seat do the same. Use the appointment to emphasize the importance of the 2010 election, not effectively decide it. Then if Kennedy wants the seat, she can campaign for it, and win it, with no questions of legitimacy or elite favoritism. Leave it to the voters. It's a neat resolution from a procedural standpoint, and it's good politics for Paterson, too, as it draws a sharp contrast with Blagojevich's efforts to leverage the appointment process to increase his own power and wealth.

Image used under a CC license from DiggerSF.

I'm not going to try and summarize it, but this discussion between (Nobelprizewinningeconomist) Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Brad DeLaon, Dean Baker, Mark Thoma, and others is pretty interesting.

This is a point made well Gotz Al's book Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. Aly argues that Hitler's war amounted to "a state-sponsored campaign of grand larceny," channeling the resources of murdered Jews and conquered lands into the German welfare state. Under the final prewar budget of Germany, the Jewish emigration tax and other anti-Jewish measures accounted for more than 9 percent of the country's total revenues. The Nazis liquidated Jewish properties and possessions, which were classified by the state as "abandoned assets" and became "property of the general government." And beyond assets such as businesses and homes, stolen goods of all kinds were redirected back to the German marketplace, creating a surplus of high-demand consumer items that stabilized prices during an economically uncertain moment of the war. The state, moreover, sold the confiscated possessions at bargain prices, creating a direct benefit for vast swaths of the German populace. Cowen notes that wage income fell during the war, but Aly's implication is that the purchasing power of the median german family went up -- and this was even truer given that so many men were at war, and so families were so much smaller.

Conquered countries were forced to pay a yearly "contribution for military protection," as well as monthly bills for the services of the soldiers who were so kindly guarding their lands. Here, too, the scale of the thievery proved astonishing. One Reichsbank study estimated that the first year of occupation cost Holland 180 percent of its normal state revenues, Belgium 200 percent, France 211 percent, and Norway 242 percent. When this extortion proved insufficient, and fears of inflation emerged, the Germans began liquidating the assets of Jews in the occupied countries as well. Aly concludes:

After every military victory, no matter how quick and relatively painless for German forces, the same problems with finances and food supplies kept cropping up ... [this] meant that the Nazi leaders had to push ahead with further military expansionism. Any hesitancy would have led to the end of the regime.

Put in more contemporary terms, Germany was dependent on there always being another sucker to invade, and when that proved unsustainable, they were left in bad shape indeed.

I do think it's good news that Tom Vilsack has expressed opposition to the tariff on Brazilian sugar cane. Corn ethanol is inefficient and only survives through subsidy. Cellulosic ethanol isn't ready. But if you want to make ethanol a bridge fuel, allowing Brazilian imports is the way to go. Wikipedia explains:

Brazil's sugar cane-based industry is far more efficient than the U.S. corn-based industry. Sugar cane ethanol has an energy balance 7 times greater than ethanol produced from corn. Brazilian distillers are able to produce ethanol for 22 cents per liter, compared with the 30 cents per liter for corn-based ethanol. U.S. corn-derived ethanol costs 30% more because the corn starch must first be converted to sugar before being distilled into alcohol. Despite this cost differential in production, the U.S. does not import more Brazilian ethanol because of U.S. trade barriers corresponding to a tariff of 54-cent per gallon – a levy designed to offset the 51-cent per gallon blender's federal tax credit that is applied to ethanol no matter its country of origin.

Corn ethanol, by contrast, is Agribusiness's get-rich-quick scheme masquerading as an energy policy.

Also in the Time magazine feature on Obama is an article by Michelle Obama's brother, Craig Robinson, on playing basketball with Barack. "He has a very nice outside shot that has gotten better over the years, because as we get older, we can't go to the basket as easily," says Robinson. "He's very thin, but he's not weak. You can tell the guy has played. He is extremely left-handed. Most left-handed guys are quicker going to their right. Well, he's better going to his left. I'll have to work on that with him.

The piece reminded more of one of the West Wing's openers that I'd always thought laughably unrealistic, but is looking more and more like an accurate representation of the Obama administration:

Of course, this time, Rodney Grant will be played by Duncan Arne, Secretary of Education and former professional baller.

Do I really need to do a post noting that Time Magazine picked Obama as their Person of the Year? Probably not. But they do have a good interview with him. And these pictures a photographer took of him when he was in his 20s. Rick Stengel, editor of Time, says "we thought about possibly giving it to the American voter for electing Barack Obama," but I'm glad he beat back that impulse. I got the award in 2006. Let someone else have a chance.

Yesterday, I joined Seyward Darby in lauding the impressive improvement in test scores during Arne Duncan's tenure as CEO of Chicago's public schools. Dana Goldstein, however, has a useful corrective on this sort of thinking:

A major problem of the testing apparatus under No Child Left Behind is that states can make up their own standards. A report from the Center for American Progress and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that Illinois is in the middle of the pack when it comes to the rigor of its standards.

So blogger-sociologist Eduwonkette, who works handily with statistics, looked at Chicago's performance not according to Illinois tests, but according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Also known as "The Nation's Report Card," the NAEP is administered by the Department of Education to students across the country and, in typical American fashion, counts for nothing, despite experts' recognition of its findings as the best benchmark we've got. Eduwonkette found that under Duncan's tenure, gaps between black and white students actually grew...This doesn't meant Duncan is a bad superintendent, or that we can't learn anything from him, or that he shouldn't be secretary of education. His leadership on early childhood education, polytechnic secondary schools, and careful growth of the charter sector is a model. But we have to be very careful when we talk about student achievement and the achievement gap, because we just don't have agreed-upon ways of measuring success and failure. Indeed, that's a major problem with NCLB that I hope Duncan will address as secretary.

So what we can actually say is that during Duncan's tenure in Chicago, student achievement on an Illinois-designed test improved and the black-white achievement gap shrank. On the national test, however, those improvements were not in evidence, and the achievement gap actually grew. Which does go to show the difficulty of accurately measuring educational achievement. Teachers aren't just bullshitting when they say that the problem with merit pay and rigorous "accountability" is that there's no agreement on how we examine this stuff in a reliably useful way. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it does imply a certain humility as to the implications of the results, at least until we figure out the methodological problems.

Update: Via Dana comes a very cool site -- the product of a joint venture between CAP and the Chamber of Commerce -- that lets you compare the results, testing scores, and data collection of various states.

The Iowa Independent seemed to want to write a positive analysis of Tom Vilsack's record in Iowa and its implications for his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture, but when you read past the irrelevant bits on tax policy and business incentives and political accomplishments, you're not left with much:

On matters of agriculture, Vilsack was a pragmatic centrist, content with incremental changes and reluctant to take steps to significantly disrupt the status quo. When he successfully ran for his first term as governor in 1998, the generally pro-Republican Farm Bureau decided not to oppose him, choosing instead to endorse both him and his opponent. That was an impressive feat for an underdog Democrat running for governor — especially for a trial lawyer who had never farmed a day in his life.[...]

While he was governor, Vilsack remained largely above the fray of ongoing feuds over the placement of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) near rural communities. Groups on the left who would like to give local communities stricter control over where the CAFOs are allowed felt betrayed by their governor’s unwillingness to help, but his stance kept agribusiness interests relatively quiet.

The Iowa farm industry is uniquely powerful, so you can argue that Vilsack had little choice. It was important to be governor than take on farm interests. But it means that all you've got is a vague hope that he'll act differently as Secretary of Agriculture. And, as they say, hope is not a plan. Vilsack could prove a great secretary, but for now, I'd have been more comfortable with a choice whose record aligned with progressive hopes for the office.

Kevin Drum is right to call median wages "Obama's biggest challenge" and remind that long-term growth is fundamentally reliant on consumer spending. And consumers can't spend if they can't earn. For awhile, that shortcoming was masked by a precipitous rise in consumer debt (some argue that both the tech and housing bubbles were both manifestations of the credit bubble, which is only now popping), but that band-aid has been ripped off the economy. Cue Kevin:

One way or another, there's really no way for the economy to grow strongly and consistently unless middle-class consumers spend more, and they can't spend more unless they make more. This was masked for a few years by the dotcom bubble, followed by the housing bubble, all propped on top of a continuing increase in consumer debt. None of those things are sustainable, though. The only sustainable source of consistent growth is rising median wages. The rich just don't spend enough all by themselves...How do we make this happen, though? I'm not sure.

The problem, fundamentally, is inequality. The rich are making so much money that there's not enough left for wage growth among the working class. But here you're dealing with a lot of little decisions -- how much an individual employer decides to pay an individual employee -- that, when examined in the aggregate, paint a clear macro trend of wage stagnation. As such, there's no single mechanism you can point to. Some blame the pressure of rising health costs which have eaten wage increases. But that's not a sufficient explanation. Others argue that the rich have begun amassing more of the wage gains from rising productivity. But that lacks an obvious cause -- it's just another way of saying we're seeing rising wage inequality. Others name unions, or culture, or politics, or deny the trend altogether. And none believe that the underlying mechanism, or basket of mechanisms, is particularly amenable to government intervention.

The potential implication of that is a little weird: You could approximate more equal growth through simple redistribution, taxing the rich and sending out checks that assure the sort of median finances we want to see. But creating a norm of government wage support for the middle class is fairly far outside our ideological traditions. On the other hand, it's not a good scene for the rich to capture so much of our economic growth that the bottom 90 percent see stagnant wages. And no one wants the government dictating wage rates. It's a hard problem.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the abundance of law degrees and apparent absence of public policy or public administration degrees in the Obama administration. Today, however, Eli Rosenbaum writes in to ay that the situation has changed:

there is now a Cabinet secretary (Secretary of Housing and Urban Development-designate Shaun Donovan MPA '86, also has an M.Arch and A.B. from Harvard), the head of an office within the Executive Office of the President (Director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Nancy Sutley MPP '86), and of course Obama's former Senate chief of staff who will now be one of his three senior advisers, along with David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett (Pete Rouse MPA '77, also has a master's from the LSE).

I would also note that several senior members of the Bush administration were HKS alums: the current head of the National Economic Council, being replaced by Larry Summers (Keith Hennessey MPP '94), the former CEO of Fannie Mae, perhaps not the best example but still very senior (Daniel Mudd MPP '86), and the former chief-of-staff (Andrew Card, who did not graduate but was in the MPA class of 1980). I am sure there are more of which I am not aware.

I, for one, welcome our new MPA overlords.

John Nichols has a wistful post on the names he'd like to have seen attached to the Department of Agriculture, but he forgets the most obvious choice. One of America's best-known small farmers, its most quoted agricultural aphorists, its keenest social observers, and its most effective salesmen. I speak, of course, of Dwight K. Schrute.

Much is made, for instance, of the fact that Vilsack has shown flashes of real courage on climate change. His energy plan, in particular, sought a 75 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, and envisioned mandating carbon-free power plants by 2020 in order to reach that goal. But it still contained provisions for radically enlarging the role of ethanol in our energy mix -- though that included cellulosic ethanol -- and in interviews, wasn't willing to say that we could transition away from corn ethanol by midcentury. That said, the upside is that Vilsack knows these issues, knows the relevant lobbies, and if tasked with carrying out a saner subsidy policy, could draw on extensive experience navigating the relevant constituencies.

At the end of the day, though, Vilsack is arguably less the problem than his agency. In 1862, when the Department of Agriculture was founded, agriculture composed 82 percent of American exports. America had three times as many farms as it does now -- and those farms were far more labor intensive, in a country that had one-third the population. Agriculture, in other words, was the main export and one of the nation's largest employment sectors. You needed a Department of Agriculture. Today, agricultural exports make up 8 percent of the total. Agricultural industry employs a tiny fraction of Americans and is dominated by a few large producers. It is an interest group that has attained cabinet status. That it would be headed by a governor from a state whose reliance on agricultural exports makes it a throwback to the days when the agency had a more obvious claim to existence makes sense. What doesn't make sense is why you'd have a Department of Agriculture rather than, say, a Department of Food.

Related: Vilsack describes his vision for the position.

Reuel Marc Gerecht still thinks life is an episode of 24. "If you had been confronted on 7 September 2001 with a captured Khalid Shaykh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah," he says in response to Andrew Sullivan, "and you knew that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down in the United States, and you had plenipotentiary authority for the nation's security, you would not have used any physically coercive techniques against the gentleman." Forget the question of torture. Gerecht has managed to answer the question in the form of an accusation of deadly cowardice.

But we weren't confronted with that situation on September 7th and, so far as we know, have not been confronted with it since. The appropriate analogy is to imagine yourself an Army recruit who becomes an interrogator in Iraq. A group of young men are captured in a nighttime raid. Some of them might be terrorist sympathizers. Some of them might be innocent. Do you use physically coercive techniques?

In general, we did. Matthew Alexander is the pseudonym for a special operations officer that led the interrogations task force that eventually located, and killed, the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He oversaw more than 1,000 interrogations and personally conducted more than 300. He writes:

Torture and abuse cost American lives. I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

Now go back to Gerecht's example, because Alexander faced something near to it. You are an interrogator charged with finding the deadliest terrorist in one of the most violent and combustible slices of the globe. You are repeatedly faced with prisoners who know his location, and refuse to divulge it. Finding Zarqawi will save American lives. What do you do?

The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them...I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000.

The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi....Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

There's something intuitive about torture. Hurt something until it breaks. The phrasing of the the 24 scenario plays implicitly on that intuition: Do you do the thing that works and saves lives? Or do you let abstract principle ensure the deaths of thousands? Framed thus, it's an easy argument to win. When applied to policy, though, it directly ensures the deaths of thousands and fails to capture the worst of the terrorists. God's sense of humor is dark indeed.

There's a lot of talk about how an effective global warming policy will have to be international in scope and coercive in nature, and that may all be true, but there's a lot we can do in the meantime. Indeed, it's worth remembering how disproportionate our contribution to the problem is:

The difference between Americans and residents of less dense, less inefficient developed nations is stark. This is simple energy imperialism. The rest of the world has to live in our atmosphere whether they like it or not. In the long-run, they're paying to sustain -- or at least perpetuate for a little while longer -- the manner of living to which we've become accustomed. And we're powerful enough that they can't impose a different set of preferences on us. But morally, it's atrocious. Fairly few Bangladeshis are likely to benefit from our highway system. But hundreds of millions will be flooded out of their homes by the consequences. At this point, with the science so solid, with cap-and-trade plans having been considered and voted down in Congress, a fairly good case can be made that our unwillingness to seriously address emissions is much worse than anything we've done in Iraq. The fact that it feels lazy rather than evil, and that the deaths and costs are long-term and less direct, doesn't change the tally.

Speaking of good interviews with important environmental appointees, via James Fallows comes a long and substantive chat with Steven Chu.

Good stuff. Fallows also makes a point I haven't heard before, saying, "in karmic terms it doesn't hurt that Chu, who was born in St. Louis of Chinese parents, will head the very department that, under then-secretary Bill Richardson, was involved in the Wen Ho Lee imbroglio in the late 1990s. (In brief: Lee, who was born in Taiwan and who worked at Los Alamos, was accused of massive theft of U.S. nuclear secrets on China's behalf. The NY Times loudly trumpeted this story. Eventually nearly all the charges were dropped, and the presiding federal judge apologized to Lee for government excesses.) Again, this is not a reason to have chosen him, but it's worth noticing." Fallows doesn't quite come out and say this, but there was a lot of latent anti-Chinese sentiment embedded in that controversy, as if his ancestry rendered Wen Ho Lee inherently suspicious.

Last July, my friend Dayo Olopade had the opportunity to chat with Adolfo Carrion, the president of the Bronx borough. Fast forward to today and Carrion is going to be the director of the Obama's Office of Urban Policy and the video is suddenly a useful guide to the guy's urban policy thinking. Neat how that happens. You can read here writeup here, or just watch the clip below:

From Emusic's review of Ferndorf:

New York City's highly regarded Wordless Music series, in its exploration of the middle ground between indie and contemporary classical, has trained the spotlight an emerging new subgenre: call it Wordless Music classical. Many of the composers and musicians the series has featured — Nico Muhly, Caleb Burnhans (of itsnotyouitsme and Alarm Will Sound), and German-born pianist Hauschka — emphasize ambient textures and fleeting, Impressionist sketches in their music, foregoing the rigorous complexity of the academic avant-garde or the anarchic spirit of the contemporary classical underground. Instead, they tap the same vein of wistful, pensive melancholia that has found expression in American indie as long as relatively well-off men and women have found themselves sad for no particular reason.

Tom Lee has some interesting insight on why the Washington Metro Authority has refused to make its data available to Google Transit, and some of the objections even make sense. But WMATA is being insufficiently serious about the benefits here. Government programs have a unique need to prove themselves forward-looking and adaptable and innovative. Passing on an opportunity to make Metro more usable is opening a future opportunity for some Republican to deny them funding or argue for privatization. There's a good argument for driving a hard bargain with Google, I guess, but at the end of the day, Google doesn't need WMATA, and won't benefit much from their cooperation. But WMATA has rather a lot to gain.

As a follow-up to the previous post, here's an excerpt from an old article on subsidizing the press. Two key points: First, we subsidize the press now through tax incentives and favorable postal rates and so forth. Second, other free countries subsidize their press, and there's little evidence that well-designed subsidies reduce objectivity.

Government involvement in journalism -- even to protect it -- is supposedly a radical notion. Just as we fear that corporate ownership of the press will lead to an insufficiently critical approach to corporate power, so too does public subsidy look likely to breed a cozy, even pleading, relationship to those holding power. Yet government has helped the press for years, and the reduced postal rates, copyright protections, favorable tax treatment, and other sundry subsidies don't appear particularly causal in the press's treatment of government action. And that's not even getting into the huge subsidies the government offers in the form of radio and television wave licenses, which grant public bandwidth to private companies. The government is so quiet about this giveaway that they don't so much as demand a few preempted sitcoms to allow full coverage of the quadrennial political conventions.

Nordenson also tells of some stronger subsidy schemes in Europe. Sweden, for instance, has a system dedicated to encouraging reportorial competition. They allocate money to all but the dominant paper in a given market, so as to ensure that no town is stuck being dependent on a single newspaper or news source. The system is fully automatic, and works off a transparent and perfectly predictable formula. And the result? According to Daniel Hallin, chairman of the department of communication at the University of California, San Diego, the implementation of this system was concurrent with "a shift toward a more adversarial press. It is actually very strong evidence that press subsidies don't lead journalists to be timid."

Elsewhere, the United Kingdom spends about $7 billon on public broadcasting, while the United States spends about $480 million. So the British are spending about 15 times as much as we are, despite being only one-fifth our size. The result is that in a country renowned for a vicious, tabloid-style press, the BBC stands protected in the center, producing constant, credible, adversarial journalism that need not compete on grounds of sensationalism.

There are many models America could adopt. An independent commission that allocates money raised by an automatic tax that exists outside -- and thus away from the influence of -- the congressional appropriations process. Or Dean Baker's idea for an "Artistic Freedom Voucher" that would be controlled by taxpayers. Or even a simple, renewed commitment to publicly financed media. This requires overcoming our allergy to government support of goods with a public function. But what an odd nation we are if our discomfort with government support outweighs our fear of a media whose first imperative is to profit, rather than to inform. Such peculiar values would make for a helluva newspaper story, if there's anyone left to write it.

I'm not sure Felix Salmon quite gets this right:

There's an old saying that you'll never understand newspaper economics until you understand why newspaper vending machines are designed so that you can take as many papers as you like for your quarter. Newspapers are, first and last, devices for delivering ads to readers. It's the ads which account for all the profits, not the cash coming from subscribers or people who buy their paper at the newsstand. Yes, news itself is free, nowadays. But it always has been. What we've been paying for all these years was never news, it was papers.

The problem with newspapers is that the business model never made sense. Paying for independent reporting by packaging it with real estate listings and department store ads was always a dodgy enterprise. But if the model never made sense, at least it worked. Now, however, it neither makes sense nor works. Generally speaking, when that happens to an industry, then industry dies off, or radically shrinks, or applies to Congress for a bailout. News, however, is in a strange limbo: We think it something akin to a public good, necessary even if it's not profitable. But because it occupies an oversight role, we don't think it appropriate to publically subsidize (even though you could subsidize it in a variety of non-political ways).

So it will probably become the province of rich people and foundations. The Kaiser Family Foundation, for instance, is pumping millions into a news venture that is supposed to provide the health care reporting that is increasingly getting cut from the newspapers. It's a smart model: Kaiser pays for the reporting and then shares the content. It recognizes that others have the distribution networks and simply need the product. But if that sort of model becomes the norm, also easy to see how it could be misused by less reputable outlets that begin building content to push a particular agenda.

But there's no going back. The problem for the newspapers is that even as they die off, most consumers are in fact in a better position. There may be fewer outlets today, but I have access to a lot more news products than I did 10 years ago. So do most people. If the Baltimore Sun cuts much of its staff, but the people in Baltimore now have the LA Times and the New York Times and the Huffington Post, they have more news, not less. There will be no push to save journalism because only journalists believe it to be dying.

If you're looking for the coming fault line on the left of health care politics, keep an eye on what happens to the public insurance option in the health reform bill. Access to a public insurer is a big deal for progressives and conservatives alike. It's important to progressives because they believe a public insurer -- which is to say, an insurer that's not concerned with the profit motive -- could offer better coverage at lower cost, and in doing, attract more customers and pave the way to something closer to a single payer system. It's important to conservatives for the exact same reason. The only difference is that progressives think this a very good thing that cannot be sacrificed while conservatives think this a very bad thing that cannot be allowed. Cue the fine reporters at Congressional Quarterly:

Republicans also debated whether one aspect of Obama's health care proposal, giving people the option of buying a public health care plan, would weaken the private insurance market.

Mark Hayes, a Republican health policy adviser to the Senate Finance Committee, said Republicans have concerns because the government plan might have access to price controls and other tools not available to private insurers. This could lead to lower premiums in the government plan, which would cause most consumers to migrate out of the private market, he said.

"Over time the effect the government option could have [is an] erosion in the private market, [making] other choices not available," Hayes said.

Calling this government-backed plan one of the "radioactive fault lines" that has developed in discussions on the overhaul, McDonough suggested Democrats would be willing to look at other options.

"What is the purpose behind the proposal? The purpose . . . is [public plans are] one of the most important devices out there to provide cost accountability," McDonough said. "Maybe there are other way to achieve those ends."

McDonough is John McDonough, Ted Kennedy's senior health adviser. My sense has long been that the public insurer stood a good chance of dying once the legislative horse trading got underway, but it's surprising to hear that expressed so early.

She's throwing her hat in the ring. Eve Fairbanks and I took on the problems with this in a BloggingHeads from last week:

Kevin Drum also puts it well when he says, "Rich and famous people already have a huge leg up when it comes to winning political office, but at least they still have to run and win. Appointing them instead so they can avoid the whole messy business of engaging in a campaign is just a little too Habsburgian for my taste. Needless to say, I've got nothing against Kennedy. But appointing her to the Senate just isn't the right thing to do."

It's also, as I argue in the BloggingHeads, another example of our unwillingness to believe that "legislator" is an actual job with a particular skill set that requires expertise and understanding and experience to be effective. Caroline Kennedy is famous. She is even involved in politics. But she has never been a legislator. She knows nothing of parliamentary procedure, congressional negotiations, or constituent service. It would likely take her some time to get her sea legs and learn how to be effective. Meanwhile, there are plenty of long-serving legislators in New York politics, and in the New York delegation to Congress, that would love this seat and could step in on day one.

CBPP -- the most powerful lobby IN THE WORLD (that makes graphs) -- takes a look at the debt picture and doesn't see anything comforting. "If we continue current policies," they conclude, "the federal debt will skyrocket from a projected 46 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) at the end of fiscal year 2009 to 279 percent of GDP in 2050. That would be more than two and a half times the existing record (which was set when the debt reached 110 percent of GDP at the end of World War II) and would threaten serious harm to the economy." Here's a graph:

Yipes.

Currently, doctors write your prescription on a pad of paper. They write it in a quick scrawl, to be interpreted by a tired pharmacist. Fairly frequently, some link in this structure breaks down and you get the wrong medication. Sometimes that's fine, sometimes it makes you sick, sometimes it kills you. More than 1.5 million Americans are injured a year due to these errors. All this, in the age of computers and e-mail. In order to get doctors to move away from Bic pens and towards Gmail, Medicare is having to offer bonuses for electronic prescriptions, and many doctors still don't want to comply. It's insane.

And one more note on how Samuelson presented his data. "The richest 1 percent of Americans pay 28 percent of federal taxes, says the Congressional Budget Office," he wrote, as if that meant something. But the question with the top one percent is not simply how much they pay, but how much they make. If they make 50 percent of the national income, paying 28 percent of taxes is paying very little. If they make two percent of the national income, then their tax burden is heavy indeed. What they pay only makes sense if you know what they make. And this is true for historical comparisons too. You often hear conservatives argue that the rich pay a larger percentage of national taxes than they did in the 1970s, and that shows the system's progressivity. But the rich make much more money than they did in the 70s. The question is whether their share of the national income increased faster or slower than their share of the federal tax burden.

In 1979, the top one percent brought home 9.3 percent of the national income -- which is to say, for every $100 paid in wages, $9.30 went to the top one percent -- and paid 15.4 percent of federal taxes. The ratio of tax share to income share was 1.65. Their tax burden was 1.65 times larger than their income share. In 2005, they brought home 18.1 percent of the national income -- it had doubled -- and paid 27.6 percent of federal taxes. The ration was 1.52. In other words, it has gone down. The rich pay less taxes as a share of their income than they did in the 1970s, and they control much more of the nation's wealth.

This is worse than it even looks on first glance (and it looks quite bad). Progressive taxation rests on a simple theory: As you make more money, you can bear to pay a higher rate. That's how it differs from, say, a flat tax. A flat tax advocate would levy a 25 percent tax on Bob, who makes $50,000, and Russell Wordsforth Skotchpuckett III, who makes $500,000. They might even call that progressive. 25 percent of $500,000 is more than 25 percent of $50,000. The progressive taxer would scoff at this. Bob is left with $37,500 to live on. Russell Wordsforth Skotchpuckett III has $375,000. That's not an equal burden, much less a progressive one.

In other words, as the top one percent's share of the national income grew, their ratio of income-to-taxes shouldn't have simply stayed steady. It should have grown. Instead, it shrunk. Not only were they paying a lower share of federal taxes relative to their share of income, but it had gone down even as their ability to pay more had radically increased.

Responding to my post on Robert Samuelson yesterday, Ted Burke said, "You can't compare and contrast top marginal tax rates when allowable deductions are so different today than they were years ago when tax rates were higher." He's right that marginal tax rates are a crude measures of effective tax burden. Which is why researchers developed the "effective federal tax rate" measure, which combines income, payroll, corporate, and estate taxes. Here's how that looks:

For the rich, effective federal tax rates fall throughout the century. The top one percent was paying around 45 percent in 1960, and that's fallen to around 37 percent. But the real action has been in the subgroups above the top one percent: The top hundredth of a percent was paying above 70 percent of their income, and now they're only a touch above 40 percent. But using Piketty and Saez's paper on the progressivity of the US tax system, we can break that down even further:

As they say, "The contrast between the progressivity of federal taxes in 2004 and in 1960 is striking." And a lot of the change has come in the top slivers of the income distribution. "The current federal tax system is relatively close to a flat tax rate within the top 1 percent," write Piketty and Saez, and that's no small statement. In 2006, the top percentile made around $380,000. The top hundredth of a percentile made around $5,000,000 a year, and controlled 9 percent of the nation's income. But they're not bearing a significantly heavier tax burden, as they would have been a few decades ago. Indeed, their burden has decreased. That's a serious reduction in progressivity.

One hundred high-performing public schools in designated communities of need by 2010. Five-year contracts with heavy accountability measures, but beyond that, significant room for the charter schools to experiment. That's the idea of Renaissance 2010, one of Arne Duncan's signature initiatives in Chicago. Two years ago, I went out to the city of Austin to profile one of the most promising new schools, Austin Polytech, an advanced manufacturing high school that was a joint creation of city bureaucrats, local employers, community activist groups, and yes, even teacher's unions. The schools was very impressive then, and in the years since, its fame has grown, with Obama even mentioning it in speeches. The article is here, and though Duncan isn't mentioned by name, the innovative atmosphere that brought the school into being was largely his creation.

Remember those executive pay limits in the bailout bill? Well, forget them. They're done. At the behest of the Bush administration, the final legislation said the limits only applied "to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction." At the time, that was the Treasury's proposed method of aid, and so the insert was meant to ensure that only executives who brought their companies to be bailed out would be subject to the limits.

But Treasury quickly dropped the reverse-auction idea. They've not used auctions for any of the $335 billion they've disbursed so far, and they have no plans to use auctions for the next round. "Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives." In other words, there are no more executive pay limits.

Some folks are seeing the pick as an effort not to "choose sides." To avoid the wars. To appoint Switzerland to head the UN. But there's also the opposite interpretation: By being aligned with both coalitions, Duncan need not choose between their best ideas. He can synthesize a policy rather than select a winner. The Broader, Bolder approach, with its emphasis on the socioeconomic forces that shape poor educational performance, probably holds more promise in the long-term. But today's kids don't have the luxury of waiting for the long-term. The Education Equality Project is right that much in the schools is broken, and needs fixing now. But screwing with tenure will not, on its own, do nearly enough to close the gap between the suburban rich and the urban poor. An education secretary who understands the best arguments of both sides is likelier to prove able to advocate for, or at least push Obama to advocate for, the full range of necessary solutions, some of which will come from one set of reformers and some of which will emerge from the other.

Other reactions: Seyward Darby calls Duncan a "solid choice" and adds some more information on his record. "Under Duncan's watch...the number of students meeting or exceeding standards on the Illinois State Achievement Test in reading has risen almost 25 percent, while in math it's gone up 34 percent...And the achievement gap between black and white students has shrunk more than eight points in both subject areas. Dropout rates have also declined by eight percent and graduation rates has increased by the same amount."

Elizabeth Green, over at Gotham Schools, suggests that battle lines could yet be drawn. "Will Jon Schnur, namesake of the nameless reform movement, be named Duncan’s deputy, as the Democrats for Education Reform group wants? Or will Darling-Hammond, who led Obama’s transition team on education policy and was boosted by a petition with a shockingly long list of names?"

Jason Zengerle notes that Arne Duncan, a former professional basketball player in Australia, adds another name to Obama's Team of Ballers. Looked at that way, Duncan's appointment seems almost preordained.

And Matt makes a useful point, saying that the power still lies with the relevant committee chairs in Congress, and George Miller and Ted Kennedy show no signs of abandoning their reformist take. Duncan, in fact, fits neatly into their troika: Good relations with the unions paired with a healthy appreciation for their shortcomings.

On the question of changing the filibuster, not only can it be done, but it has been done. In 1975, the post-Watergate Congress, which had 61 Democrats, lowered the number you needed to break a filibuster from 67 votes to 60. It used to be that 33 Senators could block legislation. Now you needed 40. It was a major change, and democracy somehow survived.

And recently, the filibuster changed again. It transitioned from a rarely-invoked rule into an everyday tool of business, as this McClatchy graph shows:

That said, it's not necessarily clear that the filibuster will prove a powerful obstruction this time around. In 1964, at the dawn of Johnson's historic legislative push, Democrats had, if I remember correctly, 66 senators, of which a good handful were Dixiecrats. Come January, they'll have 58 or 59, none of whom are particularly far from the party's mainstream. Those are the sort of numbers where skilled legislators and steady presidential leadership should be able to break through minority obstruction. The real danger now is Democratic disunity and fractiousness. Happily for the Republicans, Evan Bayh seems aching to throw some of that into the mix.

• How South Dakota Saved Citibank -- and Created the Modern Credit Card Industry.

• Primary care doctors struggling to survive.

• Executive pay limits may prove toothless.

• Will Germany ruin Europe?

• Why newspapers are screwed.

The Democratic Policy Committee just sent out Reid's "recommendations" -- the confirmation process is, barring something unexpected, a minor formality -- for the chairmanships of the 111th Senate. They are:

Senator Herb Kohl, Chairman, Senate Special Committee on Aging

Senator Tom Harkin, Chairman, Senate Committee on Agriculture

Senator Daniel Inouye, Chairman, Senate Committee on Appropriations

Senator Carl Levin, Chairman, Senate Committee on Armed Services

Senator Christopher Dodd, Chairman, Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs

Senator Kent Conrad, Chairman, Senate Committee on Budget

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Chairman, Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation

Senator Jeff Bingaman, Chairman, Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources

Senator Barbara Boxer, Chairwoman, Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

Senator Max Baucus, Chairman, Senate Committee on Finance

Senator John Kerry, Chairman, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (upon the resignation of Senator Joseph Biden)

Senator Edward Kennedy, Chairman, Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions

Senator Joseph Lieberman, Chairman, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

Senator Byron Dorgan, Chairman, Senate Committee on Indian Affairs

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chairwoman, Senate Intelligence Committee

Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman, Senate Committee on Judiciary

Senator Charles Schumer, Chairman, Senate Committee on Rules and Administration

Senator Mary Landrieu, Chairwoman, Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship (upon resignation of Senator Joseph Biden and Senator John Kerry assuming Chair of Foreign Relations)

Senator Daniel Akaka, Chairman, Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs

Robert Samuelson tends to write bizarre columns -- who can forget his wacky dream of a world in which teenagers spend their time picketing outside the AARP? -- but today's effort is, even by Samuelson standards, an unusual achievement. In it, he attempts to bust some myths about lobbying. He writes:

A second myth is that lobbying favors the wealthy, including corporations, because only they can afford the cost. As a result, government favors the rich and ignores the poor and middle class. Actually, the facts contradict that.

Sure, the wealthy extract privileges from government, but mainly they're its servants. The richest 1 percent of Americans pay 28 percent of federal taxes, says the Congressional Budget Office. About 60 percent of the $3 trillion federal budget goes for payments to individuals -- mostly the poor and middle class. You can argue that those burdens and benefits should be greater, but if the rich were all powerful, their taxes would be much lower. Similarly, the poor and middle class do have powerful advocates. To name three: AARP for retirees; the AFL-CIO for unionized workers; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for the poor.

The CBPP, huh? The poor have a powerful lobbying effort comprised of...people who make graphs about the budgetary implications of tax changes? Seriously? At least name ACORN or something. Give us your best effort! As for the rich, it's rather unclear what the absolute value of 28 percent means here. It depends, among other things, on whether the top one percent have a lot of money, or only a little money. But it's not that hard to track changes to the tax code. The following graph tracks the top marginal rates since the 1940s. Unless you think politicians change those rates because they like having less federal revenue to play with, than it would seem that the rich have some sway after all:

And here's the share of the national income for the top one percent:

So over the same period of time that the tax rates on the top one percent have fallen dramatically, their share of the national income has skyrocketed. The rich may not be "all powerful," but it's quite a leap to say that they are somehow cowering before the might of Robert Greenstein and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Indeed, over the same period, they managed to (at least temporarily) eliminate the "estate tax," which was a key tax on the rich. And if you don't believe that was the rich flexing their political power, then you haven't read this.

Meanwhile, the question of elite sensitivity to various types of constituent power is the sort of thing political scientists actually study. Samuelson doesn't seem to have asked any of them for their opinions, but Larry Bartels was kind enough to share his findings with me:

I know of two systematic attempts to measure the relative influence of affluent, middle-class, and poor people on government policy. One is in the next-to-last chapter of Unequal Democracy, where senators' roll call votes are moderately strongly affected by the preferences of high-income constituents, less strongly affected by the preferences of middle-income constituents, and totally unaffected by the preferences of low-income constituents. That's the more optimistic view. My Princeton colleague Marty Gilens (in a 2005 article in Public Opinion Quarterly and a book-in-progress) has a parallel analysis focusing on aggregate poilcy shifts over two decades. He also finds no discernible impact of low-income preferences, but argues that middle-class people also get ignored when they happen to disagree with rich people.

I'm surprised to see Kevin Drum abetting this this sort of thing. There really is a difference between a technical body that leverages evidence to decide whether national plans will cover certain drugs and "an all-seeing team of Olympians who decide which medicines doctors will be allowed to prescribe." And the attempt to blur the difference between the two isn't mere disagreement, but an attempt to exaggerate the consequences of liberal policies.

The danger in a genuinely socialized system is that useful innovations really will be regulated out of the market. It's a fair concern. If the government is the only payer, and it refuses to pay for Pfizer's new pill Curesalot, then nobody has access to Curesalot. But we're not looking at a socialized system, nor anything even close to it. The maximal form of oversight that's being envisioned is a technical body that will gather evidence to set down more subtle and empirically-grounded reimbursement guidelines for public programs. If Curesalot doesn't return results, in other words, Medicare won't pay for it. But that happens already. The plans participating in Medicare Part D all have drug formularies where they make decisions on what will and will not be covered. But that doesn't mean Curesalot won't be allowed on the market, or adopted by other plans.

Coverage decisions happen all the time. They exist in both public and private programs. They differ from plan to plan. The innovation of the "all-seeing team of Olympians" -- which is to say, a board of researchers and actuaries and experts who will be able to commission research that returns relevant evidence of effectiveness and value -- is that there will be more money for research, and thus more data with which to make the sort of decisions we already make. Insofar as they will make new sorts of decisions, it will be on the meanings of "affordability" and "comprehensiveness" in health care plans.

But they do not decide what will and will not be "allowed." Indeed, they could not if they wanted to. There's no real discussion of moving to a socialized system. As such, there will be plenty of private insurers who continue competing for business. One way they will gain a competitive edge is to cover effective treatments that people want. And if they cover those treatments, and they prove useful and necessary, then they will filter down through the system, much as we'd expect the market to work. The difference is there will now be more of a burden for a drug or treatment to prove useful, which it will either do through test results or real-world performance. But Brooks is trying to scare people into believing bureaucrats will outlaw medications they don't like. That's why he says "doctors" rather than "Medicaid," or "public programs." The latter would be fairly accurate. The former is unambiguously false.

Meanwhile, it does raise an interesting question: If Brooks doesn't think Medicare should be making coverage decisions based on independently-commissioned clinical evidence, and doesn't think Medicare should simply cover all drugs at any cost, than what's the proposed stopgap? Is it simply privatizing Medicare so those decisions are made privately, or is it some other sort of hybrid policy?

The New York Times codifies the emergent consensus that the Obama team is beginning to integrate health care into their economic efforts. Putting it into the stimulus package would probably prove a heavy lift, but using the urgency of the moment to connect it to the stimulus package, to present it as a crucial measure of safety amidst historic turbulence, wouldn't be too hard.

Moving that quickly, however, probably means moving with existing legislation rather than trying to build something new. Which means the key layers are the Senate Democrats, and in particular, Max Baucus and Ted Kennedy. If they can build something that achieves rough consensus among the caucus, Obama could simply name that the vehicle and devote his efforts to using the pressure of the crisis to drive it through the Senate's traditional gridlock. That's why Max Baucus's early plan is so important: It's given other senators a rough draft to examine, critique, and change. And I'm hearing now that Baucus thinks they could have a real bill by January. That seems almost worryingly quick, but it is evidence that speed is being taken seriously. Meanwhile, Kennedy has named Dodd his deputy on heath care, which means there'll be an experienced senator speaking for Kennedy and the HELP Committee if Kennedy's health begins to flag.

It was not a few bad apples. It was not the chaos of war. It was official U.S. government policy. The release of the Senate Armed Services Committee's Report on Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody makes that perfectly clear. You can argue over when it began. Maybe it on On February 7, 2002, when President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention. Or maybe it was a month before that, when the Department of Defense General Counsel’s Office solicited information on detainee “exploitation” from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, "an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions."

The JPRA oversees the military's Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training. In short, they train soldiers to withstand torture. Which means they need to know how to torture. "The techniques used in SERE school, based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions, include stripping students of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. It can also include face and body slaps and until recently, for some who attended the Navy’s SERE school, it included waterboarding." And the Administration went to them for advice. Not on their area of expertise -- resisting torture -- but on their collateral specialty: Torturing. Included in their advice were hoods, and leashes, and waterboarding. They are not pictured in the photograph above, but they may as well have been behind the camera composing it.

It is one of the great embarrassments of this administration that they let grunt-level soldiers fall because they were following policy. Lynndie England was not a bad apple. She was just doing her job. And her boss, ultimately, was George W. Bush.

Related: Andrew Sullivan has much more on the report. Dan Froomkin tracks the many administration lies that the report exposed. And I'd add that the executive summary should be read in full. Much has been done in our names, and understanding the extent of the damage requires facing up to the full weight of our sins.

This is sort of a comic nerd timeout, but the trailer for Wolverine: Origins has been released, and it features, among others, Gambit, who has always been my personal favorite.

X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE HD

Excuse me while I have a geekgasm.

Here's the soon-to-be-former-guv:

Amanda says Steve Carell:

Angus says Jeffrey Sachs:

Ben Adler says Dan White, the murderous San Francisco councilman:

And I say the Lego Guy:

What say you?

In Arab culture, showing the sole of your shoe is a serious insult. So throwing your shoes -- one after the other -- at someone is sort of like taking your middle finger and sticking it in their eye. This was the welcome Bush got when he held his first press conference for Iraqi journalists. Say this for Bush: The guy can duck. Even so, First Read notes that this may have legacy consequences. Bush's visit to Iraq was his final trip abroad before leaving office and the defining image will be an American president being pelted with footwear.

I've argued before that I'm a bit of a pessimist on the likelihood of passing serious cap-and-trade legislation, but from a question of simple political sequencing, we're entering a very propitious moment indeed. The central weakness of cap-and-trade is that it will raise certain energy prices. The most politically salient of these is probably gasoline. The CBO has estimated that a carbon price of $28-per-metric-ton, which is around what we're likely to see, would raise gasoline prices by about 25 cents per gallon. That's not huge, but it's not popular, either. Six months ago, when gasoline was sitting above $4 a gallon, I'd have told you it was utterly impossible. But we're entering the right season, and the right economic climate, for cap-and-trade. Demand drops during the Winter. And it drops much further in recessions, during which global demand for oil slackens. As such, you're seeing prices around $1.65, and they may go even lower. Gas prices won't be terribly salient for the next few months, and so something like cap-and-trade might not be impossible.

To be sure, a carbon price like $28 wouldn't do that much to change driver habits. 25 cents a gallon might matter next time we hit $4, but it probably won't matter all that much. But it would act as a large tax that could support incredible levels of investment in green technology, new infrastructure, and so forth. In other words, it might not force the green revolution, but it would fund it.

If you wanted to use the tax to change behavior rather than fund investment, however, you'd have to make it much larger, and then you'd probably want to look at ways to offset the impacts on low and middle income households. Luckily, the CBO examined exactly this and found that "if the government chose to sell the allowances and used the revenues to pay an equal lump-sum rebate to each household in the United States...the size of the rebate would be larger than the average increase in low-income households’ spending on energy-intensive goods." That said, I imagine it will still be a bit hard to explain that the government is going to make the price of energy much higher, but will give people checks for yet more money than that, in the hopes that the high price tag triggers an irrational response to use less energy even though the lump sum check could actually cover the average family's fossil fuel habit. But whatever Obama decides to do, he's best try it quickly. Recession+Winter is a rare alignment for this particular policy.