Matthew Yglesias

URL Change

Painfull as it is to try and deal with the internet over a dial-up connection, it seems that people should know that the URL of my TPM Cafe blog will, in fact, be:

http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com

and not whatever it is I said before.

To The Beach!

Well, no more blog for me. Check out TPM Cafe when it opens. And if you want to do me a favor, don't send any email over the weekend . . . I'll be checking for any urgent TPMC missives, but otherwise you're out of luck.

Questions Answered

Commenter Joe Smith wanted to know what this 80s movie bleg was all about. Well, it happened while I was working on a review of Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented The 1980s for The New York Times Book Review and was considering disputing some generalization the author made about 80s movies. At any rate, I decided not to go in that direction in the review, which was submitted without any mention of movies whatsoever. Then there were some revisions to get done, and the editor said he was happy with it. Then I got my check. But the actual review doesn't seem to have run. I haven't heard that it's not going to run, but it's been a long time now, so I'm not holding my breath.

It's The End Of The Blog As We Know It(And I Feel Fine)

At about 40 months, this site is one of the oldest political blogs on the internet. And in a rather important announcement, it now falls to me to inform you all that it's coming to an end. The site will still physically (or, perhaps, virtually) exist as a useful way for me to store certain things and because there's a chance that it will start up again in the future. But I'm going away for a little Memorial Day Weekend vacation to the Outer Banks in North Carolina and when I return I won't be posting here anymore for the foreseeable future. Instead, I'm going to be joining the team at TPM Cafe which Josh Marshall has been talking about for a while.

A word on how this will work. As Josh was explaining yesterday, the new site will feature a big group blog with a lot of very exciting contributors. I'm not going to be one of them. In addition to the group blog, TPM Cafe will be hosting several additional blogs. One will be a group effort devoted to foreign policy called America Abroad, whose contributors list you can find here. One will be brought to you by the team that did the TPM Bankruptcy Blog, though with its focus expanded somewhat. Another will be my blog, with its same boring eponymous title, its same solo author, and essentially the same content you find here (hence the shutdown of this site).

Roughly speaking, we're talking about the same site with a new URL -- http://www.tpmcafe.com/sections/yglesias -- just don't try and visit it right now or you'll only get the "Coming Soon" page. Nevertheless, some content is already posted and as soon as TPM Cafe opens for business, you'll have posts to read. In addition, as soon as the technical details get worked out, copies of this site's archives are going to be moved over to TPM Cafe which will be convenient for me in a variety of ways and also serves as a token of the sort of continuity between this site and the new one that we're looking for.

On one level, then, very little will change. So why do this? There are several reasons. Most obviously, like guest-blogging on TPM a little while back, it's a chance to get exposure to the broader audience of people who I assume will get sucked into this thing. Most trivially, it's a chance for me to get out from under the burden of running some of the technical and commercial aspects of this enterprise -- I'm a writer, not a web designer or a businessman -- and joining up with the Cafe should lead to better technical implementation with less work. Most profoundly, it's an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of something that could prove to be big; an exciting new sort of media enterprise that involves a lot of excellent people who are, quite frankly, significantly more experienced and more important by conventional standards than I am. Perhaps it will fail, but I think the chances of success are good and if so I'll be very happy to have been a part of it.

What's most important -- and most promising -- for readers in the short term is that TPM Cafe won't just be a bunch of blogs all hosted at the same domain. The technical back-end is driven by Scoop, the program used to build Daily Kos and a few other sites. That means there people who are interested in participating in the enterprise in a more robust way than simply reading it are going to have some much more powerful tools at their disposal. Posts will have comments, like this site, but there will be mechanisms in place that are beyond my capacity to handle alone to police the boards against trolls and generally try to maintain a high level of discussion. There are going to be separate discussion fora apart from the posts. As on Daily Kos, readers will have the opportunity to establish user accounts and start up diaries (i.e., blogs) of their own and contribute to the site. This stuff should all be valuable on its own, but perhaps most importantly can serve to knit the whole enterprise together in terms of the various different kinds of content we'll be hosting.

If you're not in to any of that. If you don't want to read any of the other blogs Josh is putting together, don't want to deal with diaries, etc. you don't have to. If you're a fan of this site and want things to stay the same, you'll just be able to click the URL, read posts, and the only thing different about it will be the design of the page. But I would encourage everyone to look around at the other stuff, and especially encourage the people who've been commenting here to take part in the expanded opportunities TPM Cafe will provide.

Beyond that, I'm still working at The American Prospect, still co-writing Tapped, and generally speaking still doing whatever else it is I do. And spending the weekend at the beach.

When Bigger Is Better

Since just the other day I was offering up some libertarian-style skepticism about the efficacy of state intervention correcting certain sorts of apparent market failures, I think it's worth looking at that same issue from another angle. To my way of thinking, the biggest problems with "government failure" tend to occur when you have a situation that involves a lot of discretion and changing things around. Zoning laws, at times, have various sorts of bad effects. But if instead of zoning laws, you had an eleven person elected board that just got to decide who gets to build what where on an ad hoc basis, things would get much worse. A really rigid set of rules, naturally enough, will produce bad results in some cases. Concentrating a huge amount of totally discretionary power in the hands of a small group of people who will become the subject of massive campaigns of lobbying, bribery, etc. would be worse.

This is one of the things that's nice about the sort of big government involved in Social Security. It's a large program indeed. But basically it's large just because the aggregate quantity of the checks getting shuffled around is large. It's not a mammoth bureacracy full of people sitting around in offices in every city in America trying to micromanage individual financial decisions. It's all worked out by a rigid formula. And, thanks to its fabled "third rail" status, the congress is not in the habit of popping the hood every year to tweak things. Indeed, one of the main motives for adopting wage indexing was precisely to avoid a situation where it was standard for the congress to start revising the benefit formula every couple of years.

One fear that one ought to have about replacing the program with a set of highly-regulated savings vehicles is that their creation will likely spawn a cottage industry of lobbyists trying to get the rules changes this way or that so as to make more money for their clients. Instead of taking a big chunk of money out of the government's hands and delivering it to the people, you're basically taking a big chunk of money out of a government program that more-or-less runs on autopilot and putting it under a different and potentially more unstable form of government control.

They're Worried Now?

Are we seriously supposed to believe that people are just now getting the sense that there's a sectarian edge to the violence in Iraq? No shit it's sectarian.

Tactics, Strategy

Continuing a trend of writing blog posts criticizing people who I'm soon going to be collaborating with (more on that later, as the kids say). By way of introducing my criticism, let me say that I really like the conclusion of Kenny Baer's latest New Republic column:

Bush and the GOP provide that vision: the terrorists are evil; democracies are good; America will defeat evil and support and spread good. It's simple, but extraordinarily compelling, especially to pro-Israel voters. Strategically, the Democratic answer to Bush's idealism can't be realpolitik (after all, these voters know that interests can change more easily than beliefs). Ideologically, it's not the answer either. Democrats have fought for generations to bring values into the practice of foreign policy, from Wilson trying to make the world safe for democracy to Truman's stand against Soviet expansion and Clinton's launching an air war to stop a genocide in the Balkans--and shouldn't allow Republicans to take that mantle. Democrats need to remember that for decades they have been able to speak to Americans' deep sense that we are a unique "city on a hill" and a "light unto the nations." Democrats must reclaim that heritage and make the case that Republicans have undermined America's moral standing (and, by extension, our security) both in the world and at home. If they do that, Democrats not only will win over security voters of all faiths and win elections, but they also could once again become the automatic choice of the chosen people.

That is what Democrats should do. But in the broader context of the column, Baer offers a very strange reason for doing it -- that this step is necessary to halt the erosion of Jewish support for the Democratic Party. All else being equal, of course, halting said erosion is a good thing. But it'd be mighty odd to orient one's entire approach to national security for that reason. Among other things, erosion of Jewish support for Democrats isn't really a huge problem. The areas where Baer sees it happening -- New York City, Northern New Jersey, some inner NYC suburbs -- just aren't vulnerable terrain. It's almost impossible to imagine a scenario where Democrats lose an election because they lost New York (which is to say that if they lose New York, they'll have lost enough other stuff that winning New York wouldn't have won the election). The reason to do what Baer suggests is that it's right on the merits.

Politics and policy aside, I think those of us who'd classify ourselves as being among the more "hawkish" brand of liberals have a media strategy problem. Roughly speaking, a lot of Democratic voters don't like us very much. What we need to do is convince more liberals that they should like us. That means spending more time trying to convince liberals of the merits of our views, and less time re-enforcing the impression that we're just opportunists searching for votes out there in some ill-defined center. Give the people a convincing argument for a plausible hawkish policy (Kosovo, for example) and plenty of liberals will come along for the party.

The Lies, The Lies

As we know, and as this letter writer to his site reminds us, Andrew Sullivan has been a pretty consistent proponent of the view that Paul Krugman is some sort of liar. At issue, are Krugman's repeated insistences that George W. Bush's economic policy is founded on a tissue of lies. Krugman is, of course, entirely correct about this. The unnoted irony here is that in his May 14, 2001 column "Downsize," Sullivan conceded Krugman's point:

Ah, but the details. The Krugmans and the Chaits will shortly have a cow, if not a whole herd of them. The Times will weigh in again with yet another barrage of articles, editorials, and op-eds opposing any tax relief that would actually benefit those who pay most of the taxes. And, to be fair to these liberal critics, they're right about one thing. One of the tax cut's effects will surely be that the United States won't be able to afford a vastly expanded Medicare drug benefit. And the archaic sinkhole known as Social Security won't be shored up either. And Medicare, may the gods preserve us, may even have to grow at a slightly slower rate. In fact, many of the spending programs that some still believe solve most human problems will encounter the only political resistance that matters in budgetary matters: insolvency.

To which my response is: Hoorah. We don't need these expansions of the welfare state. We need to privatize Social Security if we want to provide for our retirement in ways slightly more up-to-date than those based on economics and life-expectancy figures devised in the 1930s. We don't need to add yet another entitlement for the most pampered generation--our current seniors.

And if there is one thing we have learned in the past 20 years, it's that controlling government spending is simply impossible without deficits. Look back at the last decade. A huge part of Bill Clinton's economic success was his remarkable grip on public finances. He deserves credit for this, although the Republican Congresses from 1994 to 1998 were mainly responsible, and Ross Perot made deficit-cutting hot. But from 1998 on, all hell broke loose. Last year, discretionary spending increased by a whopping 8 percent--under the Republicans. The minute deficits became surpluses, in other words, the politicians started bribing the voters with their own money. The only relevant question is: Why do Dennis Hastert, Trent Lott, Dick Gephardt, and Tom Daschle know better than taxpayers how to allocate their own resources? . . .

Some commentators--at this magazine and elsewhere--get steamed because Bush has obscured this figure or claimed his tax cut will cost less than it actually will, or because he is using Medicare surplus money today that will be needed tomorrow and beyond. Many of these arguments have merit--but they miss the deeper point. The fact that Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of "compassionate conservatism" shows how uphill the struggle is.

Yes, some of the time he is full of it on his economic policies. But a certain amount of B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state. Conservatives learned that lesson twice. They learned it when Ronald Reagan's deficits proved to be an effective drag on federal spending (Stockman was right!)--in fact the only effective drag human beings have ever found. And they learned it when they tried to be honest about taking on the federal leviathan in 1994 and got creamed by Democrats striking the fear of God into every senior, child, and parent in America. Bush and Karl Rove are no dummies. They have rightly judged that, in a culture of ineluctable government expansion, where every new plateau of public spending is simply the baseline for the next expansion, a rhetorical smoke screen is sometimes necessary. I just hope the smoke doesn't clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again.

Now needless to say, Sullivan differs from Krugman in thinking that this is a good thing, while Krugman thinks it's a bad thing. But that's really all there is to it. Bush was lying. As Sullivan correctly points out, the lies were integral to securing public tolerance for Bush's agenda. Krugman has tried to expose the lies in hopes of denying Bush's agenda public support. It's very hard to see how Krugman can be held culpable in this scenario.

Spare Us

I have no idea why Peggy Noonan's so upset with the nuclear option deal, but her skewering of the self-importance and grandiosity of the dealmakers is pretty sweet.

Wanted: A Strategy

What kind of sense does this make? After quoting Neil Ferguson's observation that to staff the Iraq War at levels similar to what the British used in the 1920 we would need 1,000,000 soldiers, Marshall Whittman observes:

Needless to say, we are completely incapable of matching these levels. The Administration failed to prepare for the occupation and then irresponsibly rejected requests for additional troops. With the military stretched to the limit and recruitment lagging, the Bushies and the Republican Congress have abdicated their responsibilities in addressing this situation as a crisis. Business as usual is the order of the day - the religious right and business interests come before the national security interests of the nation.

Public support for the war is falling - but what is worse is public apathy. A Paris Hilton ad for the Spicy BBQ Six-Dollar Burger gets more attention than the plight of our brave soldiers facing death, disability and danger in the hellish heat of Iraq.

While pulling out and conceding defeat is unfathomable - a slow defeat would be even more disastrous to the region and to the credibility of the United States. It is a good thing that Saddam's brutal reign is over. And it was a great achievement to hold a democratic election in a region that has only known tyranny. But it is unconscionable that our leadership class refuses to level with the American people about the status of this war and offer a strategy to prevail. If we continue on this current course, it is only a matter of time before support for this war collapses.

So what's his plan? The political logic of saying "pulling out . . . is unfathomable" is clear to me. It's centrist, hawkish, tough, etc. But where's the substance to the criticism? If you ask me, this is a big part of the Democrats' national security problem -- the adoption of rhetorical stances that are very clearly driven more by political calculation than by genuinely belief in the merits of the view.

Money Can't Buy Me Good Books

Ross Douthat wonders if, somewhat paradoxically, the number of good books by conservative intellectuals hasn't gone into decline at the same time the quantity of books published and number of copies sold has gone up. In Ross' comments, the always-intersting Steve Sailer agrees this has happened and blames the Jews. Surveying the scene in a holistic and pan-ideological manner, it seems to me that the rise of the political bestseller has, indeed, had a pernicious impact on the quality of political books. The temptation now exists on a scale it once did not for a writer interested in politics to churn out a rather silly potential blockbuster rather than try to really do his best work. I'm quite certain, for example, that Rich Lowry would have been capable of producing a more interesting, more intelligent book than the hackish and absurd Legacy: Paying The Price For The Clinton Years. And if nobody had been willing to pay him a bunch of money for Legacy he might have tried to actually write it.

I'll refrain from speaking ill of any of my elders on the left side of the aisle, but suffice it to say that one could find similar examples there. From my perspective inside the editorial staff of The American Prospect, I can say that one key factor in holding quality up is that near as we can tell there's no conceivable way to make our publication (or any of the other publications in the category) a really popular mass market success. If we believed dumbing things down would get us 900,000 subscribers, we'd be under a lot of pressure to do it. Since nobody thinks that's the case, we try to just do the best we can of influencing the influential. An analogy could probably be drawn to the adverse impact of the growth of the international market on Hollywood filmmaking (Dark Water of course, being the exception that proves the rule).

UPDATE: Slightly kidding about Sailer. He doesn't blame the Jews per se, he blames the influence of the Israel lobby on the contemporary American right. I'd be mad if I blamed something on the influence of the Israel lobby on the contemporary American right and someone characterized that as blaming the Jews. So, apologies on that score, I just don't find his theory very plausible.

Take A Life, Save A Life

Will Saletan says it's inconsistent to say you shouldn't take life to save life in the context of stem cell research but then support the death penalty which, presumably, is supposed to be a way of taking life to save life. A Corner reader writes in to say you can make the rhetoric match up by saying you shouldn't take an innocent life to save the lives of others. That does work, there, but I seriously doubt anyone actually adheres to the implications of this principle. Virtually everyone believes there are circumstances in which it's acceptable to undertake military actions that will inevitably lead to civilian deaths. Lots of people think it's wrong to deliberately target civilians as a military strategy, but everybody understands that any sort of military action winds up killing civilian bystanders as well as damaging civilian infrastructure leading to further deaths. The Just War tradition relies on the doctrine of double effect to explain why these sorts of predictable civilian deaths (but not deliberate targeting as a military strategy) are unacceptable. Make of double effect what you will, the point still remains that the view that it's always wrong to kill innocent people has some very far reaching consequences and leads to some rather extreme conclusions. Of course, some people find those conclusions convincing, but I don't, and I take it that neither National Review nor George W. Bush do either.

Non-Economic

It's hard to tell if this is dishonesty on David Stern's part, or ineptitude from the Associated Press, but there's something about fishy about this: "If the players accepted the framework, Stern said the only key areas left to be negotiated would be non-economic -- the length of player contracts, drug testing and minimum age." On what planet is the length of a maximum contract a non-economic issue? Once you impose a salary cap across an industry, naturally enough rewarding players with longer contracts becomes one key way of attracting personnel. It's pretty clearly the case that many, many, many NBA contracts are "too long" in that it really doesn't make sense for teams to make the sort of unconditional commitments they're often making to their players. But that's just another way of saying that in an uncontrolled market, a lot of guys on long contracts would just be making more money-per-year. Eliminating the cap-generated distortion in contract lengths by shortening the max length is very much an economic issue. It's a way of lettings owners spend less money and leaving players with less money.

Who Compromises?

Ezra Klein's efforts to sketch out the details of some kind of mish-mash of universal health care and Health Savings Accounts is a good time for some further thoughts on the question of "political feasibility" and health care. Obviously, this is a major concern for the sort of single-payer ideas I like. And not just a concern. A stopper. There's no chance this stuff could pass the congress. The interest-group opposition would just be too vehement.

Nevertheless, it's not clear to me that the alternatives are any more feasible. It's important to note that the feasibility metric here isn't that by taking a more moderate position you swing more of public opinion around to your side. Instead, the point of things like Clinton's plan, Haase's plan, New America's idea, etc., etc., etc. is that you can successfully convince some substantial bloc of interests out there to support rather than oppose your plan, and some other bloc to stay on the sidelines. I don't think that sort of "negotiating with ourselves" makes sense. It amounts to trying to guess what kind of plan you make be able to get insurance companies, or the AMA, or General Motors (or what have you) to support.

My preferred progressive strategy is to keep the short-term focus on preserving and expanding Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, VHA and other public-sector programs. For the long term, focus on talking up the virtues of single-payer and making it clear that this is what liberals in our hearts know to be right. At the same time, we should always make it clear that we recognize that any such program would do immense damage to powerful interests in the United States and we'd be willing to take half a loaf if it were offered to us. But the onus here to find a way to make a deal should remain on them. If AHIP or the AMA or the NAM wants to put some kind of managed competition on the table and bring some conservative politicians along with them, great. We should be happy to sit down at the table and make a deal. But they need to move toward us, we're not going to guess randomly at what it is they want. The reality is that the employer-based health care system is crumbling, and it's dragging some very large businesses down with it. Our responsibility is to plant our flag and try to rally as many people around it as possible. When some of the big players get interested in a compromise, they can write one up, and if it's halfway reasonable, we'll deliver our support.

Everybody's Doing It

Naturally enough, there's a Sleater-Kinney blog. I imagine in the future that absolutely everyone will be expected to blog, and if you don't do it you'll be considered some kind of freak like those people who still don't have cell phones. The Woods -- it's good. The blog -- not so great.

Innovation

Some more on Leif Wellington Haas' ideas from Brad Plumer who really just starts riffing on the theme of medical innovation and makes some good points. I've read enough Hayek, though, to get wary when I hear things like "Where and how should we be steering medical innovation?" Market mechanisms are almost always satisficing strategies that don't really produce the optimum result. It's easy enough to look at a set of outcomes and say, "but really it would be better if we had this and this." You can even dust off the classics of market failure like the QWERTY keyboard. The question, however, becomes not "would really, really smart, benevolent government agents have done better?" but "would an actual public sector system run by actual people and subject to actually existing political controls do better?"

For example -- having big swathes of forests controlled by a federal agency sounds like a good idea when it's being proposed by an administration that's proposing it because they sincerely want to conserve trees. It starts looking less good when you consider that every once in a while, George W. Bush becomes president and uses public sector control of natural resources to provide his corporate supporters access to them at sub-market prices, thus leading to more-rapid depletion than you would have had under a property rights plan.

A Response on Health Care

Leif Wellington Haase, the author of the universal health care plan I criticized yesterday emailed last evening with a response that he's kindly given me permission to reprint. One main point is that in various ways his idea is more different from the New America Foundation's somewhat vague sketch of a plan. You'll find it below the fold:

I enjoyed your thoughtful and bracing response to my proposal for universal health insurance ("Clinging to Orthodoxy"). One quick point: although my report was published by The Century Foundation and I work here, it is not endorsed by the foundation. We have published, and will continue to publish, a number of studies that advocate different approaches to comprehensive health care reform, including Arnold Relman's forthcoming book that was recently excerpted in The New Republic. We are putting together a working group with the aim of getting advocates of universal coverage to discuss what their proposals share in common, and where and why they differ. Our goal is to highlight the need for universal coverage and to get various ideas in circulation and debated, not to advocate any particular nostrum (though I am partial to my own).

My first response, then, was one of pleasant surprise: if there is a bandwagon for universal coverage, I'm delighted to be on it! But I'm afraid that this bandwagon only exists in the world of think tanks and political magazines (although there are signs it might spread). And as for "orthodoxy," would that this were so! To the world at large, and in much of the medical community, an idea like mine appears completely unorthodox. Personally I would ride just about any horse that took me to the destination of getting Americans covered, hoping that the flaws in that successful approach would be remedied in time.

Many of your points about the incentives for private insurers not to cover bad risks are very well-taken. But I think my proposal is less vulnerable on this score than it may appear. First, unlike the New America plan (or my recollection of it), it proposes a much more radical restructuring of the existing system and a far greater degree of involvement by the federal government. (The proposal resembles much more closely Victor Fuchs' and Ezekiel Emanuel's recent proposal for universal vouchers in the New England Journal.) The federal government would set standard benefit packages based on new investment and research on what works and what doesn't in health care, with a focus on new, uncertain, and expensive procedures. It would negotiate with plans on what had to be covered, and compel them to take patients with higher risk of illness. Unlike under managed care, where employers typically enroll their employees in the lowest cost plans with little regard for quality, I'm not sure that there would be a "race to the bottom" under this scheme. Indviduals are pretty savvy about what they buy, if their choices are circumscribed within limits. It's hard to believe that a version of Consumer Reports wouldn't spring up and that plans that restricted their networks to "crappy physicians" wouldn't suffer in the marketplace. And while I'm not starry-eyed about the prospects for risk adjustment-- paying plans more for sicker enrollees-- the technical ability to do this has grown by leaps and bounds over the past fifteen years.

The big question for me is whether private insurers would actually want to participate under my fairly strict groundrules. My sense is that those which would participate and survive would be pretty big national plans (to be sure, there would have to be insurance reform to make the proposal fully operational) that would spread risk widely and be less compelled to discourage people with preexisting conditions from joining up. Ideally they would sell much the same product (like, say, Internet travel agenies) but compete vigorously on small distinctions. So long as all of them offer a very good package of benefits under the basic plan, and medical innovation isn't stifled, I'd be happy with the result.

Here's the scenario we face: employer-based health coverage is crumbling, health costs (largely driven by medical successes and heavy advertising) are rising swiftly, and employers are trying to get out of the business or are shifting risk to their employees through "consumer-directed" plans. Even if single-payer were viable politically in the U.S., national health plans around the world are being slammed by rising costs and expectations and are considering adding private tiers of coverage (Canada, Germany for example). If universal coverage is the goal, I don't immediately see a better way of getting there in theory or practice. But this is above all else a work in progress and I'm pleased to get your response.

The point about political feasibility is, of course, well taken. Anyone who's going to be in the business of criticizing other peoples' ideas from the left has a certain responsibility to lay out why our ideas aren't just utopian dreams and I'll be saying more on this front later. In addition, if the political climate for reform ever improves, I, at least, would be loathe to see a replay of the Clinton debacle where people pounced on the idea from all sides. If something like this seemed to have a decent chance of becoming law, I'd happily support it on the grounds that it would be a serious improvement over the status quo. Once a country has some kind of universal health program, the terms of the political debate shift to one about how it should be run and organized and in the context of a debate like that whatever problems might exist would stand a decent chance of being resolved or mitigated. In the absence of such a program, it's counterproductive for everyone who might have some doubts about any particular proposal to join forces with the people who for reasons of ideology or self-interest are opposed to the creation of a universal system.

Blame Canada

Here's something interesting. Our neighbor to the north has about 30 million people -- a tiny fraction of the North American total -- but is apparently the source of 42 percent of the continent's air pollution.

UPDATE: Hm . . . the lede of the article refers to "air pollution" but the study seems to have been only of air pollution due to lead. Of course, any reference to aggregates depends on how you count. American pollution controls don't control carbon dioxide emissions, so they don't count as a component of our official air quality measures, but a lot of people think we should control carbon emissions, etc. If I recall correctly, Canada wanted to wriggle out of Kyoto commitments by claiming that countries with lots and lots of trees should have lesser obligations on the emissions cut front, right?

Mac: By Intel

Via Joanna Robinson, I see rumors that Apple will strike a deal to use Intel as the supplier for future Mac chips. A quick scan of Googe News reveals that for reasons I don't understand (this is why I don't do business reporting) this news is considered so consequential that one can legitimately attribute a general market rally to it, even though IBM which would clearly be the loser in any such deal (they make the current Mac chips), is also going up. These dudes say it's not happening, in an article which also reveals that the reason there's no G5 laptop is that the chip gets too hot (ed. note: see, dad, I was right!) which kind of sucks.

Unlike some Mac users, I don't have some sort of ideological opposition to such a deal. If it really would make the computers cheaper without making them, you know, worse then it obviously seems like a good idea. On the other hand, it seems like such an obviously good idea that it's a bit hard to believe such an option has really been sitting on the table.

In unrelated second-guessing of the Apple business model I'm continually baffled by the company's seeming reluctance to take advantage of the open-source opportunities afforded by OS X. I have to believe that if Apple paid someone to work full time on finishing the NeoOffice port to make it look fully native and then packaged the software free when new Mac units shipped that this would be a worthwhile move for the company even though (since it's General Public License) they can't make money selling the program as such.

Clinging To Orthodoxy

I'm somewhat saddened to see the Century Foundation hopping on the self-insurance mandate (PDF) bandwagon normally associated with the New America Foundation. The basic idea is that the government will specify a mandatory minimum level of coverage that everyone needs to buy from some insurer or other. The government will then offer individuals subsidies, as necessary, to make sure they can afford the premiums. If you want to offer additional services beyond the minimum, you're welcome to do so, and if you, as an individual, want to buy such a plan you're welcome to pony up the additional premium money out of pocket. Companies will need to offer whatever plans they offer on the basis of a single price for whoever wants to buy in. The idea is to get universal coverage, large risk-pools, and other good stuff while still maintaining the benefits of competition.

I think this doesn't work. The basic problem is that in a normal market, if you offer a better product than your rivals, you get more customers, and therefore make more money. It's not at all clear that this would hold under the sort of schemes TCF and NAF are proposing. Some customers will have above-average health care costs, others will have below average costs. Adding customers with above-average costs will lose money for the insurance company.

If I were running a company under this scheme, here's what I would do. First, look at the basic stuff I need to offer. Then, put together a restricted network of physicians to offer the required services. I would put this network together by trying to deliberately weed out doctors who have good reputations. You don't want anyone so inept he's lost his license, but you're looking for bad doctors within the realm of reason. Ideally, you also look for people whose offices are inconveniently located, dirty, etc. You're meeting all the minimum standards, but you're doing it in a super bare-bones way. Next, you add-on some nifty additional benefits. Free gym memberships. Massage therapy with a copayment. Health care schwag, basically. Organize local sports leagues for plan members or something. And invest in a marketing campaign aimed at making your plan look cool.

What you've got, basically, is a plan that will be attractive to young, healthy people and unattracted to older people or folks who have reason to worry about their health. You're within the basic minimum mandates, but people who do things like spend time asking about doctor quality aren't going to join your plan, since you've restricted the network to crappy physicians. People who don't pay much attention to this sort of thing may just get suckered in by your marketing, may carelessly choose your plan, or -- best of all -- will be attracted by the free gym memberships and so forth. Now your plan's well-positioned to make a lot of money. You're getting national-average premiums for each of your customers, but paying out sub-average amounts in health care costs, since the vast majority of your enrollees will have above-average health.

But say a second plan opens up business in town with a similar model. Now you've got competition. Faced with competition, you need to improve your business model. So you need to sign up some less-crappy doctors, right? Wrong. Improving your core health care services will be bad for business, since the additional customers you'll get will be the less-healthy sorts. You want to try and make your core health services worse, driving your less-healthy customers into the arms of your rival, while beefing up spending on tangential goodies and marketing and so forth.

The basic problem is that for a market to produce the sort of good things we associate with market competition -- lower prices, better products, etc. -- you need to have yourself a real market. Real markets have downsides, of course, in terms of distributive consequences and so forth. Try to regulate those consequences away, however, and you don't just get to keep the good aspects of your former market. Once you create an oddly-structured market, with mandates and price controls and so forth, you're going to get a market that functions oddly. An insurer who's allowed to charge what he wants to whomever he wants has an incentive to make his product attractive. Each customer will be priced in a way designed to maximize expected profits, so you want to sign up as many customers as possible. An insurer who's forced to take on certain clients under terms where he's expected to lose money has incentives to do the reverse -- try to make his product unattractive to large swathes of the population in order to avoid getting stuck with the money-losing clients.

Stem Cells

New column from me on what an incoherent mess the White House position on stem cells is. More on this theme from Justin Logan. I think the sheer nonsensicality of "killing human beings for research purpose is fine and dandy as long as no federal dollars go for it" has been one of the big undercovered angles here.

Blogs and China

Nick Kristof writes about how improving information technology -- email, blogs, etc. -- are helping to erode the Chinese Communist Party's control over the country. I'm not-especially-optimistic about this line of thought for reasons Joshua Kurlantzick outlined last year, but I hope Kristof is right. My understanding is that this site is blocked in China, but that my RSS feed is readable. March on, freedom, march on.

HSAs Again

Tim Lee quibbles with my characterization of the case for Health Savings Accounts. Fair enough. I still think that in any kind of universe where HSAs are a good idea (i.e., not the actual one), universal catastrophic insurance would be a better one. Next Tim expresses umbrage at my assertion that the Republican Party likes HSAs because they'd be good for insurance companies. I'll just note this. Health insurance companies, like most sorts of companies, have a trade organization designed to promote the interests of its members. The insurance industry's trade group is called AHIP. AHIP is a big fan of HSAs. Two possibilities present themselves -- one is that AHIP is run by idiots, the other is that HSAs would be good for insurance companies.

Generally speaking, I'm surprised by the habit my libertarian friends have of taking umbrage at the insinuation that the rightwing policy agenda is largely driven by the interests of the people who finance the rightwing policy agenda since I would think they'd be familiar with the whole public choice economics scene. The big-time Democratic Party push for single-payer health care would be driven by the financial interests of powerful groups who would benefit from such a plan except for the fact that there is no such push. And there is no such push largely because there aren't any powerful groups who seem to believe at the moment that such a push is a good way to advance their interests. If a few large employers sat down around a table with the leaders of the big unions and thought rationally for a while, I bet they could reach an accord about the desirability of a single-payer push and then soon enough we'd have single-payer health care.

It would be nice indeed of neat ideas became law just because some smart folks thought they were super-awesome, but in practice not so much.

Dealmaking

Okay. Well. Anything that somewhat humiliates Bill Frist can't be all that bad. But. I'm not at all enthusiastic about this deal. As I see it, three different things were at stake. One was the high-level principle about whether or not it was okay for the Senate to operate under Calvinball rules. Democrats seem to have made no progress on this front. Another was the low-level issue that several of these nominees, and Janice Rogers Brown in particular, will make horrible judges. Democrats gave ground on this front. In the middle was the pseudo-principle that the filibuster is a pillar of American democracy. It was here -- on the party's most questionable contention -- that they seem to have made all their gains. That seems pretty dubious to me. I would much rather have made "concessions" on the filibuster as such as gains on the question of who gets to be a judge.

Now if it turns out that not only does Rehnquist retire, but O'Connor or Stevens does too, and Bush nominates a real stinker, and the Democrats filibuster, and the Republican moderates stick by the deal under those circumstances, then the Democratic dealmakers will be vindicated. That strikes me as unlikely on a whole bunch of fronts. When someone has a plan that depends on moderate Republicans not caving under pressure, it's time to ask for a new plan.

UPDATE: Hm. I will agree with Josh that if Dobson and Bauer are this pissed, the deal seems to have some merit.

HSA Thought

It seems to me that do to the intersection of corporate profit-seeking and conservative ideology, this fine nation is doomed to dwell in the swamps of the Health Savings Account for a little while. In the long run, I'm fairly certain that the GOP's encouragement of this device will merely hasten the death of the current American health care system and quicken the birth bangs of socialized medicine.

But let's say conservatives are right. Let's say the main problems with the US healthcare system really are overconsumption (i.e., third party payment encourages people to use health care services they don't really need) and overregulation (i.e., mandated features on insurance plans designed to make them better just price them out of the range of too many consumers) and that, therefore, HSAs are a good solution. Isn't universal health care still the way to go? Now you wouldn't have universal health care à la France, Canada, or the UK if you thought this was the correct analysis, but I think you would want to do something like this. First, eliminate the tax preference for health insurance as compensation vis-à-vis money. Next, implement a national catastrophic care program where the government will pick up the tab for any health expenses you incur over a "deductible" of $X which you need to pay out of pocket. Providing catastrophic care to the entire under-65 population shouldn't be particularly expensive. Ending the insurance tax deducation should pay for it and leave money left over to spare either for worthwhile things (not bloody likely!) or else tax cuts for rich people.

Now I don't think that's a good idea, but I do think that if you grant the conservative analysis of the problems with the status quo it has to count as a good idea. Indeed, as a better idea than HSA. The only -- er, let's make that "only" -- downsides to my plans vis-à-vis HSAs is that they neither create a potential windfall for private insurance companies (indeed, my plan would be terrible for insurance companies) nor a potential massive tax shelter for very rich people. No small concerns when talking policy with a GOP hack, but on an ideological basis I think it's much sounder. Indeed, Milton Friedman himself agrees with me though he regards this as politically infeasible. As a second best, he proposes HSAs (though he calls them "Medical Savings Accounts"), the end of the insurance tax deduction, and the elimination of Medicare and Medicaid. Since it is not, in fact, possible for anything to be less politically feasible than the elimination of Medicare and Medicaid (seriously, what would it be?) I think Friedman should have just stuck to his guns.

Department of Equivocation

Being Chairman of the Federal Reserve is sort of like the reverse of being a blogger -- you need to be very, very, very careful about every word that passes through your lips lest an unintentional slip create a financial panic. Thus, Greenspan's thoughts on housing are a true classic of the genre:

"Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it's pretty clear that it's an unsustainable underlying pattern," Mr. Greenspan told the Economic Club of New York at the Hilton New York hotel in Midtown.

Mr. Greenspan emphasized that he sees no sign of a nationwide housing bubble, but he acknowledged concerns over "froth" in the market and pointed to a big increase in speculation in homes - particularly in second homes. As a result, he said, there are "a lot of local bubbles" around the country.

No bubble, but many small, local bubbles. Hence an overall froth. And, presumably, a bubble here in Washington, DC, where prices have gone up a lot. From the standpoint of self-interest, this seems to me to be the best possible outcome since a decline in local home prices would be give for me as a non-homeowner who plans on sticking around town for a whle, but a nationwide collapse would have all sorts of bad spillover effects. Therefore, I choose to believe that Greenspan's called this correctly.

Via Alina Stefanescu who notes that the equivocation has thrown the nation's headline-writing industry into crisis.

Just Saying

You know what's really, really complicated? Telecommunications regulations. Just saying. More on this later.

Deliberate Misrepresentation Time

Kos:

NARAL, and many people here, whined and cried about Langevin, the way they whined and cried about Harry Reid, because of those Democrats' personal opposition to abortion. Didn't we know, they demanded, that choice was a core principle of the Democratic Party?

To which I have a simple answer: The hell it is.

Attack, feminists of the blogosphere, attack!

No, just kidding, in context he's not really saying what that sounds like. On the underlying issue, I continue to think this is a bit of a yawn. However, yelling a lot at NARAL for being small-minded, intolerant, extreme, etc. while simultaneously running a pro-choice Democrat against Lincoln Chaffee is a best-of-both-worlds kind of gesture. Moving toward the center is a vital political strategy. And, yet, it's a strategy best pursued through utterly hollow, meaningless rhetorical gestures like saying mean things about Sister Souljah or Nancy Keenan without any substantive policy changes. So, NARAL, Democrats -- have at it.

Poppy

Mark Kleiman provides some valuable perspective from the US drug control side of things and says that what kind of poppy eradication the Karzai government pursues won't really make a difference to American heroin consumption. Good to know. There are internal-to-Afghanistan reasons to think it's a bad idea to just let the poppy growers run free, but also good internal-to-Afghanistan reasons to worry about the consequences of pushing too hard, too fast. Fortunately, one of the good things about setting up a democratic-ish semi-functioning government in Kabul is that we can, if we choose, let said government make up its own mind about how to strike the right balance.

I Surrender

At long last comes a Joel Kotkin article that doesn't appear to have been dashed-off at blog-like speed, and I must admit that I basically agree with its conclusion:

This will mean making choices. New York needs to decide that fixing its subways represents a more important use of its bonding authority than a stadium for the Jets. Los Angeles needs to decide its biggest priority lies in preventing the region's port complex, its largest generator of private sector jobs, from becoming hopelessly congested and obsolescent. Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and the other hard luck cases need to focus on trying to fix their schools, transportation systems, and economies. Phoenix needs to concern itself with generating jobs and opportunities for its soaring immigrant population. Let the glitzy restaurants and rock clubs take care of themselves.

Steps like these will require a new political consensus. Much of the current progressive agenda--with its anti-growth economic bias--does little to boost the competitive status of urban centers. Cities must return to a progressive focus on fixing their real problems--that is, the problems of the majority of the people who live there--not serving the interests of artists, hipsters, and their wealthy patrons. Right now school reform is often hostage to the power of teachers' unions. City budgets, which could be applied to improving economic infrastructure, are frequently bloated by, among other things, excessive public sector employment and overgenerous pensions. In the contest for the remaining public funds, the knitted interests of downtown property holders, arts foundations, sports promoters, and nightclub owners often overwhelm those of more conventional small businesses and family-oriented neighborhoods that could serve as havens for the middle class.

Ultimately, a new urban progressivism must challenge this power axis. It would force local governments to focus on the most important historical work of cities: the transformation of newcomers to America into successful, middle-class citizens. This has underlay the emergence of all great modern cities, from fifteenth-century Venice to seventeenth-century Amsterdam to twentieth-century New York. The American metropolis can be more than a way station for the wealthy young and part-time destination for the nomadic rich. It can be a place where average people live, thrive, and build communities across lines of race and class. Now that would be a cool city.

I must say, though, that I continue to be puzzled by the implication that the real problems here have something to do with the massive political clout of "hipsters" who, in my experiene, are all for better transportation infrastructure and tend not to be the ones pushing massive public subsidies for sports arenas. Instead, the problems of urban governance seem to be mostly attributal to fairly banal things like the massively disproportionate political influence of people who donate lots of money to candidates for office; a not-unfamiliar problem in the United States which is aggravated by the predominance of "weak mayor" models that make it hard for citizens to figure out who's responsible for what (corruption and malgovernance, like moss, grow in the shade), along with the fact that America's constitutional structure tends to put city governments at the mercy of events in state capitals.

Here in the District of Columbia, for example, I'm quite certain the mayor would, if he could, not have a Metro system primarily designed to serve the needs of suburban commuters rather than the residents of the city he's supposed to be in charge of. But it's not up to him. And I, as a citizen, would very much like to try and reward with votes a candidate who would commit to increasing the frequency of the Green Line but control of WMATA is so diffuse that it's very hard for me to know how to do that. And I have, for personal and professional reasons, much more ability than the average District citizen to figure out who's responsible for what. None of that gets the Williams administration off the hook for the stadium farce, but much as I'd like to believe there was a direct tradeoff between stadium money and better transportation, that doesn't actually seem likely to me. Instead, one of the most frequent ways you see cities improve their transit infrastructure is as a relatively small piece of a large, wasteful stadium boondoggle.

What A Surprise!

It turns out that Grover Norquist isn't a squeaky-clean good guy and that Jack Abramoff isn't some random minor figure in the contemporary conservative movement. Who knew? Well, pretty good piece. The thing to emphasize in all this, however, is still that "big government conservatism" just amounts to a grander version of the sort of nickle-and-dime crap we've seen with reference to Indian gaming and the Northern Marianas. Having abandonned plans to roll back the welfare state, instead the new idea is to turn it into a massive graft operation with various corporations skimming profits off the top which are then partially redirected into GOP pockets in the form of campaign contributions, lobbying jobs, etc. As we've been seeing this season on Deadwood the line between government and organized crime is not always a particularly sharp one.

Nuclear Bargaining

David Brooks' column, begging Senate moderates to strike a bargain to avoid the nuclear ption has really clarified my thinking on this subject. The nuclear option is wrong. It's wrong because it's cheating. In the long run, it's also going to be bad for conservatism. A lot of conservatives realize this. David Brooks is one of them. And, indeed, a decisively large number of Senate Republicans realize it.

The burden of stopping this is on those folks. If you know the nuclear option is wrong, you should vote against it. That's really all there is to it. Democrats shouldn't need to sweeten the pot in order to get Republican moderates to do what they perfectly well know is the right thing to do. People who can't figure that out on their own aren't worth compromising with.

Money Talks

This is always a concern in journalism circles, but I was reading on Dan Gross' site that Morgan Stanley has made explicit threats to media organizations that advertising will be pulled if they aren't happy with the news coverage the company gets. One can only hope this earns Morgan Stanley nothing but bad press.

When Government Works

Was very pleased to see today that the good people at the DC DOT have put a traffic light up at the corner of 12th and U . . . a real boon to the neighborhood. Three cheers for big government!

Books I Might Have Read

New meme comes to me from Julian, the question is "What 5 books are you vaguely embarassed to admit you haven't read?" Hm. Well, there are lots of books I would like to read but haven't yet, trying to think about embarassment I get:

• As mentioned yesterday, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. This always winds up being low-priority, because I know the basic outlines of classical economics pretty well for independent reasons, and because having read Theory of the Moral Sentiments I feel I can already do a better context than most of putting Smith's brand of free market advocacy in the proper broader context. Still, it's obviously a very famous book, the sort of thing that comes up a lot. And Moral Sentiments is really great and I like to talk about it, but it's hard to say anything about it without Nations coming up, and bad to go around discussing books you haven't read.
• David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature. I like my Scottish Enlightenment, as you may guess. I'm a huge fan of "Humean" positions on most philosophical topics, which is to say positions that are said to be along the lines of what Hume advocated. I know a lot, from secondary sources and contemporary Humeans, about what Hume wrote and said. But aside from a few excerpts here and there, I've read very little actual Hume. Again, embarassing, because I find myself referring to Hume reasonably often and wanting to do so more. It's good to have actually read the stuff you want to mention.
• Theda Skocpol's Protecting Soldiers and Mothers. This doesn't have the sort of classic status as the two aforementioned books, but it's something I now and again find myself pretending to have read. The book is very relevant to a lot of my professional interests, and since I took Skocpol's course on American social policy I more-or-less know what it says. As a result, I've on occassion recommended it to other people, or referenced it as an authority, both activities that certainly seem to imply I've read the thing. In fact, not so much.
• Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. I've got lots of stuff to say about anti-intellectualism in American life, and lots of stuff to say about Richard Hofstadter. I've even cited Anti-Intellectualism in American Life in print. Haven't, you know, read the book. A bit of a problem.
• Thomas Frank, What's The Matter With Kansas? I've skimmed it. I read some excerpts in magazines. I think I get the gist. But at times it seems this is the only thing anyone talks about in Washington, so I just sort of play along. Certainly, one can't be a pundit at the moment and not have an opinion on the subject. So I ought to read it. But life's too short.

There you have it. These almost certainly aren't the most worthy five books I haven't read. My fiction library is comically bare, among other things. But I think they meet the embarrassing standard in that my non-reading of them is something I frequently find myself needing to talk around, elide, misrepresent, etc. I pass to Ezra Klein, Mark Schmitt, and Brad DeLong.

The Mysterious Vanishing Intel Committee Democrats

Josh Marshall raises a good point:

But when I read the [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's] report's treatment of the topics that I'd gotten to know about in some detail I was genuinely surprised at how much it was not only misleading but how much almost the entire presentation of the facts was quite consciously engineered to give the reader precisely the opposite impression of what actually happened.

The level of mendacity was even more surprising because the report was signed off on by both the committee Republicans and the committee Democrats. And, no, I'm not saying that Democrats are intrinsically any less capable of bamboozlement than Republicans. But in this case they very much did have antagonistc political interests. And it wasn't clear to me why those political interests if nothing else would not have made them less willing to go along with such a whitewash of what happened.

I guess it was probably the same reason the Dems let themselves get scammed by Sen. Roberts with the long-awaited second-half of the committee's investigation (the one set to look at how the administration politicized and manipulated the intelligence), which he blew off once the election was safely over.

Yes, quite so. In particular, Senator Rockefeller has, over the past few years, been putting in one of the most strikingly ineffective performances in the U.S. Senate. If he can't -- or couldn't -- prevent the Intel Committee Republicans from doing their best to cover things up, then fair enough. But he's managed to not even make a big stink about it, even though it's pretty clear to almost all of us who have even a vague familiarity with what's been going on there that there have been big stinks to be made. What makes it so very strange is that, as Josh emphasizes, this isn't really a "do the honorable thing for the good of the country" sort of situation. It's more like a "do the partisan thing for political advantage that coincidentally happens to line up with the good of the country" sort of situation. I haven't really written much on that particular nook of the situation, because I know various journalists much better situated than I to get to the bottom of it and I figure that they'll answer to question if anyone will. But I'd really like to know. Is he just the biggest sucker on the planet earth, unfortuitously located in a key position?

I note that a somewhat similar question could be asked about Senator Dorgan's behavior as ranking member of the Indian Affairs subcommittee, a post that, one would think, would give him prime opportunity to push the envelope on some of these Indian gambling scandals. I like Senator Dorgan as a general matter and he's been busy (like a lot of us!) trying to save Social Security, but this is really something that there should be motion on. I hear he's considering taking a more active role, however, so I'll refrain from condemnations and offer encouragement instead.

Heh

John Cole versus Hugh Hewitt:

Everyone repeat after me:

Reporting on abuses that have been committed by our troops, in our name, is not anti-military. While I am not arrogant enough to attempt to divine the motives of every journalist who reports on such abuses, Hugh appears to be up to the challenge. I find his attack on the reporting of the outrageous abuses detailed at length in the NY Times to be both disturbing and disingenuous.

Apparently in the myopic worldview of Mr. Hewitt, reading and reporting the just-released documents the Army itself created is both 'anti-military' and 're-hashing' an old story. Let's not focus on the fact that few, if any, have been punished for these transgressions. Let's not focus on credible reports that these incidents continue to occur. Instead, if Hewitt is to have his way, we should all focus on the 'anti-military' stance of the media.

Now it's quite true, as the hawkosphere has been emphasizing, that one of the things we learn from these documents is that the military kinda sorta punishes the wrongdoers involved here. We also learn that the military most certainly investigates this stuff -- hence the documents. But as Henley points out the occassional prod from the dread MSM is absolutely vital to spurring any sort of action in these cases. Which is, of course, to be expected. There's nothing unusual about the military being an organization that tends not to function as it should unless subjected to external scrutiny by media investigators, opposition politicians, and various other outside groups (lawyers, human rights groups, etc.). That's just how the world works.

That's why we have a free press. That's why we have political parties. That's why we have civil society. That's why when America does a good job of promoting democracy abroad we emphasize the vital role of these sorts of institutions in making it work. Rather tragically, the burgeoning militarists of the contemporary right seem to want to cripple all that in a manner remarkably alien to the American tradition, including our military's proud history of defense of, and subordination to, principles of democratic, liberal, constitutional government.

Is This True?

"Many Americans do not even know anyone who is openly gay." Obviously, it depends on what you mean by many. But how many people is this true of? I suppose I'm not a good single case to generalize from in this instance, since I grew up in a pretty atypically gay-heavy neighborhood, but still, I think these people need to get out more.

Tierney on Smith and the Sith

Today's column is certainly more interesting than your usual rightwing effort. Still, I can't help but think it strange that not only The Wealth of Nations (which, NB, I haven't read and thus hesitate to comment on) but also Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments are listed at the end as "further reading" on the theme. Tierney seems to be pushing an Ayn Rand-style "greed is good" line here that is very much not what Smith's other book, at least, says. Generally speaking, it's almost never a good idea to bring up something that's fundamentally about meta-ethics when trying to make a political point, since the odds that it's actually relevant are exceedingly low.

NBA Predictions

The second round ended predictably, despite a brief moment when it seemed that injuries might alter the outcomes, setting us up for what should be two great Conference Finals and an NBA Finals that will be very competitive no matter what the outcome. I think you've got to give the Pistons the edge in the East. Despite Dwayne Wade's emergence, it's very hard to see how you construe this year's Heat as better than last season's Lakers. It gets a bit easy to forget in the midst of the Lakers' collapse this season and the poor Kobe Bryant decision-making that helped bring it about just how good Kobe (number two in scoring this year) is. Plus Karl Malone and Gary Payton. But they still lost. The current Pistons aren't as deep as the old ones, but their starting five has improved and they've got a good sixth man and their bench, honestly, is pretty decent despite Larry Brown's reluctance to play them. Shaq clearly has a motivational edge vis-à-vis last year, but he's not entirely healthy.

Suns-Spurs is a bit harder to call -- such a contrast of styles. In principle, I suppose San Antonio's experience edge should help them keep their heads together and control the pace of the game. On the other hand, I think Phoenix has been a lot more consistent throughout these playoffs.

On Uzbekistan

Good editorial in the new Weekly Standard on "Our Uzbek Problem". If we're lucky, maybe Bill Kristol really does run a vast neoconservative network that controls America's foreign policy....

Blame The Messenger

Reading Kevin's post on the use of images in coverage of the Iraq War, I thought the striking thing was less anything any of the news organizations said than the fact that "The editors interviewed for the story said . . . that public reaction was intensely negative on the occasions when they did print pictures of dead or wounded U.S. soldiers." I find that a bit disturbing. When American soldiers get killed serving abroad, that's the sort of thing I'd like to know about. And while I'm not super-eager to see pictures of their corpses or the wounds of non-fatal casualties. One takes for granted nowadays that news stories will frequently be illustrated with photographs, and if the stroy is about soldiers getting killed or wounded then, well, I would expect to see pictures of it.

This seems to me to be of a piece with the fact that there really is strong grassroots support for the notion that news organizations printing accounts of torture taking place in American detention facilities is a bigger problem than the reality of torture and abuse taking place in American detention facilities. That blame the messenger attitude toward various sorts of bad news from the front is pretty troubling. People on various sides throw a lot of shit in the media's direction, but we're obviously not going to get good press coverage if the people don't want to know what's going on.

An Observation

You know what? I seriously doubt that NARAL's endorsement is going to be a decisive factor in the Rhode Island Senate race. Lincoln Chaffee has become a bizarrely anachronistic figure in the US Senate, and provided the Democrats nominate some normal run-of-the-mill Democrat, the state's voters will either dig Chaffee's weird thing and he'll win, or they won't and he'll lose. Fun argument, though!

Read The Laws!

A little while back, there was some loose talk about how congressmen and senators should read the laws before they vote on them. Well, I've just been reading a bill (from 1994, passed the House, died in the Senate, significant portions of the language passed both houses in 1996 as part of a big legislative package) and I can tell you . . . this is never going to happen. You would need to pay me truly unimaginable quantities of