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Thursday, July 30, 2009
Obama in Karen Tumulty's excellent interview:
And I will say that this has been the most difficult test for me so far in public life, trying to describe in clear, simple terms how important it is that we reform this system. The case is so clear to me. And when I sit with our policy advisors — we had somebody here sitting right there this morning who is a medical expert, worked at McKinsey for a while, he's now working on our health care team — and he just ran through: We pay 77 percent more on prescription drugs, we're paying $6,000 more per individual on health care than any other industrialized nation; here's all the failures in the delivery system that account for it. It's not just because we are somehow more obese or more unhealthy. It turns out actually we're a little bit healthier than most of these other countries because our smoking rates are lower and we're younger. So we should actually be paying less than they are.
And when you just start hearing the litany of facts, what you say to yourself is this shouldn't be such a hard case to make, because the American consumer is really not getting a good deal.
Sounds like a man in a bubble to me, listening to McKinsey guys tell him how right he is. ... P.S.: Should we expect smoking to push up health care costs? Isn't lung cancer a relatively cheap way to die? ... [via Treatment] 11:52 A.M.
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Too Bad the '60s Didn't Take! E.J. Dionne, right on about "teachable moments," probably the most nauseating concept in modern politics. ... 11:51 A.M.
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Dude's on my turf. ... 11:50 A.M.
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Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Obama at a town hall today:
"Here's my promise. ...[snip] We will not sign ... I will not sign a health care bill that is not deficit- neutral, that is not paid for. I will not sign a bill that does not have all the reforms that we need to lower health care inflation over the long term." [E.A.]
Really? This is a pretty hyperbolic veto threat. If Congress sends him a bill that dramatically expands health coverage, includes a public option and is deficit-neutral over a decade ... he'll still refuse to sign if because it does not also have "all" the reforms necessary to "bend the curve" after the CBO's 10-year window? All of 'em! Does anybody believe this? ... Did he plan this enhanced threat in advance or is he just winging it? ... Maybe Barone is right. ... 11:54 P.M.
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A Nation Torn! Who's confused? The New York Times, baffled by its health care poll:
Over all, the poll portrays a nation torn by conflicting impulses and confusion.
In one finding, 75 percent of respondents said they were concerned that the cost of their own health care would eventually go up if the government did not create a system of providing health care for all Americans. But in another finding, 77 percent said they were concerned that the cost of health care would go up if the government did create such a system. [E.A.]
Why does this show confusion? It shows realism. Their health care costs are going up--either way! At least they're "concerned" about that happening in each case. Is that an illogical pair of answers? I'm troubled by at the 23-25% of people who weren't concerned. ... The Times apparently expected voters to respond like partisan pundits and skew their answers to benefit one side or the other in the reform debate--as if they have to believe that one side or the other has a solution that will keep health care costs steady. They don't have to believe this, and they are almost certainly right not to. ... 11:46 P.M.
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Room 8's Larry Littlefield crunches numbers and concludes that, after recent rejiggerings, New York City public schools can no longer claim that they're underfunded. ... Too bad, Littlefield says, that the increase will mainly be going not for higher wages to recruit better teachers or for smaller classes, but to pay benefits--and not to teachers who are teaching, but to those already retired. ... ***Spoiler!***: Unions are implicated. ... 1:59 A.M.
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Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Here's a safe political prediction: Despite all the innovative e-mobilization and ad campaigns and town halls and community organizing, the August recess will not produce any effective groundswell of popular support for Obama's health care reform. Why? The "security" message--which might appeal to the vast middle--is not getting through. On Pollster.com, Mark Blumenthal discusses the polling that backs this up. ... Reform advocates have now belatedly realized what the Orszag emphasis on cost-reduction has lost them politically, and have started talking about the "moral dimension" of reform. But even that makes it sound too guilt-trippy and altruistic--'do the right thing, even if it costs you.' The point is that everyone wants health care security. I do. You do. It's not a "moral" fight like the civil rights struggle. Transcendence of self-interest should not be required. Suggesting otherwise probably loses more support than it gains. ... P.S.: Have Democrats forgotten how to talk about the welfare state? It seemed to me even Walter Mondale** talked about medical security effectively, back when Charles Krauthammer was writing speeches for him. (Mondale had a proven staple anecdote about what it meant to his mother to get her Medicare card). ... Bring back Mondale! There's another thing I thought I'd never say. ... Update: More on the Gallup numbers that show voters think health care reform is against their own self-interest (in terms of cost and quality of care and access to care). ...
** DeLong: Explain to the juiceboxers who this person was. Thanks! ... 2:41 P.M.
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FYI: MKH PWNS AS FTW! ... FSTFITB!** ..
** First Shoot the Fish In the Barrel ... 3.51 P.M.
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Harry Reid or Casey Jones? According to Roll Call, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is "sketching a process for railroading the [card check] bill through the floor as quickly as possible." And maybe not even the vaunted "compromise" card check bill, says Jennifer Rubin--she suggests some union leaders are holding out for allowing labor organizers to avoid secret ballots. ... Obviously this isn't legislation that holds up in public view for long, so the rush approach is strategically sound. But Reid sems like a deeply cynical operator. He apparently likes to engineer train wrecks. (Remember what happened to "comprehensive immigration reform"?) Is he really trying to ram this explosive bill through, or is he trying to demonstrate to labor that it can't be rammed through? ... I note that even Rubin, a congenitally optimistic they-don't-have-the votes card check foe, seems rattled. ... 1:54 P.M.
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Old Comeback: "I'd rather waitress."
New Comeback: "I'd rather have a seat in the European Parliament."
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I'm sure the NYT has already assigned a top reporter to find out what Steve Rattner's old colleagues at Quadrangle think of him. Aren't you? ... 12:45 A.M.
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Postrel 1, Orszag 0: As originally presented, OMB Director Peter Orszag's vaunted "game-changers" were cost-saving changes to the entire health care system. The implication--in Obama's big February Congressional Address (and in Orszag's blog posts) was that you couldn't get the game-changing changes unless you had "comprehensive health care reform," including expansion of coverage to offer "quality affordable health care to every America," According to Obama
[I]t's a step we must take if we hope to bring down our deficit in the years to come.
Along came Virginia Postrel, who noted in a blog post that if Orszag's changes were so great, why didn't he apply them to Medicare and Medicaid first? Orszag was concerned and conscientious enough to phone Postrel to defend himself. But now, with Orszag and Obama having wholeheartedly embraced the IMAC plan to cut Medicare expenses in the long run, hasn't Postrel's suggestion won out? IMAC appears to be restricted to recommending changes in Medicare, not the entire health delivery system.
That, of course, is a tacit admission that controlling the federal budget deficit by cutting Medicare and expanding non-Medicare health coverage are two separate policy initiatives--and that Obama was dissembling when he said, in his address, that you had to do both parts at once "to bring our deficit down." It looks like you could have an IMAC panel to cut Medicare costs and shrink the deficit without any of the rest of Obama's "comprehensive" reform, including universal coverage. Or you could have the rest of Obama's reform without the IMAC panel.
The connection between the two appears to be entirely political, and conjectural--the idea that either you need IMAC as a way to get Blue Dog votes for expanded coverage, and that only by offering an extension of coverage can you get the senior lobby (AARP) to go along with Medicare changes. Like so many "comprehensive" reforms, it's not an interlocking web of mutually dependent policy mechanisms so much as an interest-group sandwich.
If all you had to do is appease the Blue Dogs and AARP, the strategy might be sound. The problem is that the IMAC "game changer" scares the daylights out of lots of people, and adds to the ballast of the whole package with the general public. ... 12:41 A.M.
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GM's best cars--the Chevy Malibu, the forthcoming Buick LaCrosse and possibly the next Buick Regal--are all basically Opel designs. Yet GM is selling Opel. I don't get it. ... 12:35 A.M.
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Monday, July 27, 2009
Somebody's hiring. It's only Nick Denton. But a) he's hiring one of the best people away from the hapless doomed flailing retooling LAT, and b) I hear he's paying MSM money, not blogger money. ... Hacks will play this as another sign of the Net's rise at the expense of dying print dailies, and they'll be right. ... Update: Felix Salmon ... 2:46 P.M.
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Rattner Rehab: What Do You Call A Source Greaser When the Source You're Greasing Has Already Left His Job? Micheline Maynard and Michael de la Merced's latest GM story has an "as told by Steve Rattner" quality to it. Not very informative--unless you read a lot into Rattner subtly distancing himself from the fate of the shiny new GM he was boasting about ("We're not going to fail") only a few weeks ago:
Like Mr. Rattner, [Jalopnik editor Ray] Wert is also concerned that G.M.'s deliberate and nonconfrontational corporate culture could stymie the changes that Mr. Henderson must pursue. [E.A.]
Or maybe the Times is just doing Rattner a favor by distancing him. ... Doesn't Maynard cover Detroit? Does she not have any inside-GM sources who might provide a skeptical take? ... P.S.: The other news tip to take away from the piece is that new GM CEO Fritz Henderson might not be GM CEO long. The Obama task force didn't want him to begin with:
In truth, the task force had no interest in running G.M. But the only available alternative to Mr. Wagoner was Mr. Henderson, a lifelong G.M. employee, and he did not initially impress some task force members, according to administration officials involved in the discussions.
But they picked him anyway because they decided that after CEO Rick Wagoner's defenestration, G.M.'s employees "could not handle more uncertainty." ... But maybe they'll be able to handle it in a couple of months! ... P.P.S.: The Truth About Cars gives its not-uninformed, cynical view of Henderson's recent management 'shake-up.' ... 3:06 P.M.
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Sunday, July 26, 2009
Blow #3 to Orszagism in 24 hours: David Broder--who as Lucianne notes will surely be one of the first the Juiceboxers send to the ice floe--notices that what Peter Orszag's proposed Medicare cost-cutting panel is designed to get around is ... the ordinary practice of representative democracy. The Independent Medicare Advisory Commission, or IMAC, isn't (yet) as undemocratic as, say, the Fed: As drafted, IMAC's recommendations could be blocked by either the President or the Congress (two-house veto required). But they'd have to accept or reject the package of reforms as a whole, in the manner of the famous base-closing commission. ...
Hmm. Why isn't a base-closing style commission the solution to every one of our problems? After all, it's logical that the problems our peculiar system of government--featuring a Congress that gives powerful voice to regional and local interests--hasn't yet solved will be precisely the problems that our peculiar system of government is almost incapable of solving. Otherwise they would have been solved already! The solution is a quick suprise switch to a different system of government, featuring powerful judge-like bureaucrats subject only to a broad legislative veto. Trouble imposing energy caps? Base-close it! An Independent Carbon Advisory Commission! If the Midwest objects, let them try to overturn it. Heh, heh. ... Tax code riddled with loopholes? An independent Loophole Closing Commission, empowered to recommend any changes in the tax code as long as they don't result in the collection of less revenue. Immigration? A Comprehensive Regularization Commission, empowered ... well, you get the picture. Always be Base-Closing.
It's not crazy. The Constitution created an unwieldy system--requiring that every law pass two houses and get approved by the President--that we long ago concluded was incapable of generating the quantity of binding laws a modern society needs. The response was the creation of the administrative state--the "unelected fourth branch of government" that writes enforceable rules subject to nobody's veto (except the lawyers and the courts). At least the base-closing solution grounds the outcome in the consent of elected officials.
But like Broder, I wonder, in the health care case and others, whether the Base-Closing route is a politically shrewd or, as they say, "sustainable" course. OMB Director Orszag's ridicule of a Democratic Congresswoman who wanted to protect oxygen suppliers in her district may play will with reporters from the Wall Street Journal. But how well will it play with Congresswomen? ... 11:20 P.M.
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Orszagism--the idea that health care reform will be able to dramatically "bend the cost curve" and solve the long-term budget crisis, without compromising care-- suffered a couple of blows in the past 24 hours:
1. A front page WaPo article on heart attack treatments reaches a conclusion that reinforces what many Orszag skeptics have suspected:
Although inappropriate care, high administrative costs, inflated prices and fraud all add to the country's gigantic medical bill, the biggest driver of the upward curve of health spending has been the discovery of new and better things to do when someone gets sick. ...
"The low-hanging fruit has been largely consumed," said C. Michael Gibson, a cardiologist and chief of clinical research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "We are now facing the battle of a half- to one percent improvements in mortality that will come at very high cost." [E.A]
2. Lipstick on a fig: The proposed independent board designed to curb ... well, inappropriate care, high administrative costs, inflated prices and fraud--and which Orszag had hailed as "probably the most important piece that can be added" to the House health bill--would only save an estimated $2 billion over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Orszag counterblogs that's too short a time frame--the "IMAC" panel is one of his "game changers" designed to "bend the curve" over the longer term. (Why might it not be able to? See point #1).
But, a) Orszag has the chutzpah to actually pretend that CBO has semi-endorsed the plan:
With regard to the long-term impact, CBO suggested that the proposal, with several specific tweaks that would strengthen its operations, could generate significant savings. ... [snip]
The bottom line is that it is very rare for CBO to conclude that a specific legislative proposal would generate significant long-term savings so it is noteworthy that, with some modifications, CBO reached such a conclusion with regard to the IMAC concept. [E.A.]
In fact, what the CBO said is that, without draconian additions that would impose automatic "fallback" cuts ("such as an across-the-board reduction in payments") if the IMAC panel's economies didn't materialize, the chances of generating those savings were slim:
Although it is possible that savings would grow significantly after 2019, CBO concludes that the probability of this outcome is low for the proposal as drafted ... [E.A.]
Maybe this conclusion is an artifact of the CBO's peculiar methodology, which favors near-certain mechanisms like automatic "fallback" provisions. Maybe, as Bush official Mark McClellan suggests, it wouldn't be that hard to "reduce medical growth by about 1.5 percentage points annually" through delivery reforms without reducing quality of care. But CBO didn't say that, and it seems disingenuous of Orszag to suggest they did.
P.S.: Again, I don't understand why "game changing" has to be an essential part of the bill Congress considers if a) we're talking about changes way beyond a decade hence; b) even Orszag concedes "we don't know today" exactly what those changes will be; and c) raising the prospect of dramatic cost reduction also raises legitimate fears of rationing and loss of helpful treatments--and makes it almost impossible to generate the public support necessary to pass the coverage-guaranteeing core of Obama's package. Cover everyone, let the Blue Dogs boast about cuts that make the plan deficit-neutral for 10 years, study various alleged game-changers for a few years and then we can have a debate on how much to control costs a decade from now (and how much to instead raise taxes and other payments to cover them).
Save Health Security First! ... 3:27 A.M.
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Last week's twitters today at kf:
A national conversation on race! The NPR pledge drive of American politics.4:36 PM Jul 24th from TweetDeck
Does your doctor order up unnecessary tests? I have to pry them out of mine.12:03 AM Jul 24th from TweetDeck
Just realized that pedestrians should always go around intersections counterclockwise. Otherwise left-turners get you. You're welcome.3:03 AM Jul 23rd from web
Kevin Drum's health care pitch better than Obama's. http://tiny.cc/RsqRg Hire Drum. Let Favreau date starlets.6:29 PM Jul 21st from web
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Friday, July 24, 2009
Not All Juiceboxers Are Alike: A secret conversation on "JournoList" apparently produces eerily similar arguments against the filibuster from Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias. Except Yglesias goes on to make some quirky and sophisticated points about the effects of filibusterless democracy on campaigning and on the welfare state, while Klein's reads like a prize-winning high school essay. (Also, Klein hides the JournoList connection, while Yglesias is transparent about it.) I predict this scientific experiment will be replicated in the future. ... 4:10 A.M.
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From AP yesterday:
"We have to do what businesses and families do. We've got to cut out the things we don't need to pay for the things we do," Obama said at a town-hall style meeting Thursday in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. The meeting followed a prime-time news conference the night before in which Obama sought to rally public support for his health plan. [E.A.]
From Boston Globe, earlier this month:
WASHINGTON - Sweeping healthcare legislation working its way through Congress is more than an effort to provide insurance to millions of Americans without coverage. Tucked within is a provision that could provide billions of dollars for walking paths, streetlights, jungle gyms, and even farmers' markets. ... "These are not public works grants; they are community transformation grants,'' said Anthony Coley, a spokesman for Kennedy, chairman of the Senate health committee whose healthcare bill includes the projects.
4:06 A.M.
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Peggy Noonan is on to something potentially big--the possible alliance between Christian pro-life forces and liberal universal health insurance advocates in favor of broadly available life-saving care ... and the potential fight between that alliance and the cost-saving Orszag end-of-life-rationalizing would-you-please-die-now crowd. ... Prediction: The sneering Dem majority position in the Schiavo case will get a second, skeptical look from at least some liberals. .... 4:04 A.M.
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Always trust content from kausfiles .. even when it's on Twitter. 4:02 A.M.
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Thursday, July 23, 2009
The Case for Delayed Orszagism: One way to control health costs--at least according to the Congressional Budget Office--is to wean people away from employer-provided insurance, maybe by taxing it like other income. Once everyone's buying insurance with their own, unsubsidized dollars, the argument goes, people will be more sensitive to the price of care, more willing to shop around, and less willing to spend on unneeded treatments.
Fair enough. But if you want to break the employer/untaxed insurance link, won't that be easier to do if there's a public option in place with a good rep that people know they can rely on if they leave their employer's plan? First you give everyone security. Then many of the changes necessary to control costs are that much easier to make. They will be less threatening, for one. And even when they are still threatening--as some of the treatment-defunding plans of the Orszaggers arguably are--people will understand that the changes are needed to preserve their benefits, not to pay for extending insurance to someone else.
The two-step approach doesn't necessarily mean abandoning cost controls, in other words. It might be the only way to actually achieve reasonable controls (though put me down as doubting that the cost curve can or should actually be bent very much).
P.S.--The Case Against 'Comprehensivism': This is the problem with a "comprehensive" plan--i.e. a plan that does everything at the same time. It's asking the public to trust that all the parts will work at once just as the experts say they will work. I don't understand why Dems seem to think it helps policy proposals like their health plan to call them "comprehensive." ... Look how that word helped sell "comprehensive immigration reform." It's just catnip for voters! (Even supporters of "comprehensive" immigration change have been gravitating toward a two-step, non-comprehensive approach: reassuring border security first, legalization later.)
Every time a politician calls his reform "comprehensive" I look for the dangerous part that doesn't have to be there. ... 7:14 P.M.
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Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Obama Presser: Instant reaction rant:
"In addition to making sure that this plan doesn't add to the deficit in the short-term, the bill I sign must also slow the growth of health care costs in the long run. ... [snip]
I won't sign a bill that doesn't reduce health-care inflation so that families as well as government are saving money. I'm not going to sign a bill that I don't think will work.
And my measure of whether things work or not are listening to the American people, but also listening to health-care experts who have shown that in some communities health care is cheaper and delivers a better result. [E.A.]
He's still in the thrall of Orszagism! Here we're dramatically changing insurance (no more "preexisting conditions") and insuring the uninsured and creating a health care exchange and promoting a public option and generally telling everyone they can stop worrying about whether they will have coverage. It's all going to be deficit neutral over a ten year period. Why do we have to also dramatically change the "health care delivery system" at the same time (in order to save even more money after ten years)? Doesn't that undermine the reassuring message that if you like your health coverage, nothing will change? Sure. Nothing will change except the entire health care delivery system! Which is going to be redesigned! By experts! Maybe get rid of fee for service--Obama hinted at change along those line. All seemingly on the basis of a single article in the New Yorker that isn't nearly as convincing as it's made out to be. (I would like to see Dems apply Orszag's logic--that all Medicare expenses can obviously, without sacrifice be cut to the level of the cheapest provider--to the school system.) ...
I know I'd like universal health coverage. That's been debated ad nauseam. What hasn't been debated--what have been blessed mainly by pronouncements from on high couched in euphemisms and deception--are Orszag's "delivery system" changes. I'm worried that they will result in denial of treatments that may be useful at saving and prolonging lives. Obama's refusal at his press conference to declare that all covered treatments would still be covered is an example of what people worry about. And Obama knows--or even scarier, maybe he doesn't--that the difficult decisions don't involve cheap blue pills that are as good as red pills, but treatments that are the "best" but also the "most expensive"--including cancer drugs like Herceptin and Sutent. ...
P.S.: Obama got more mired in explaining (or, rather, santizing) curve-bending and therefore became less effective during the question period. Why was a press conference--as opposed to a speech--the best way to rally support? ....
P.P.S.: On tax increases, Obama said
I don't want that final one-third of the cost of health care to be completely shouldered on the backs of middle-class families who are already struggling in a difficult economy. And so if I see a proposal that is primarily funded through taxing middle-class families, I'm going to be opposed to that ... [E.A.]
In standard Washspeak, this means Obama is open to a health reform that taxes middle class families as long as it isn't "primarily" or "completely" funded by taxes on middle class families. But 49% funded by taxes on middle class families? ... However you interpret these sentences, it's hard to see how Obama hasn't given a flashing green light to non-trivial tax increases on middle class families. ... 6:10 P.M.
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Henry Louis Gates Jr. tells his daughter in The Daily Beast about his arrest for disorderly conduct:
If I had been white this incident never would have happened. He would have asked at the door, “Excuse me, are you okay? Because there are two black men around here try’na rob you [laughter] and I think he also violated the rules by not giving his name and badge number, and I think he would have given that to one of my white colleagues or one of my white neighbors. [E.A.]
Hmm. In my experience, cops never give out their badge and number, regardless of what the "rules" say and regardless of how white I am. I tried it in the '60s and '70s at anti-war demonstrations, it didn't work. Last year, when Manchester, New Hampshire police pulled me over during the Dem primary because they thought I was a pimp, one of the women in my car repeatedly asked one of the cops for his name. He was very friendly but totally ignored the request. Nobody wants to get sued. (Of course, she was probably asking him because she wanted to interview him, not sue him, but he didn't know that.) I'm in talks with PBS about a documentary. I've also learned it never pays to talk back at cops.
P.S.: Here's the key passage of Gates' account in The Root, after a Cambridge cop asks him to step out onto his porch and Gates refuses:
My lawyers later told me that that was a good move and had I walked out onto the porch he could have arrested me for breaking and entering. He said ‘I’m here to investigate a 911 call for breaking and entering into this house.’ And I said ‘That’s ridiculous because this happens to be my house. And I’m a Harvard professor.’ He says ‘Can you prove that you’re a Harvard professor?’ I said yes, I turned and closed the front door to the kitchen where I’d left my wallet, and I got out my Harvard ID and my Massachusetts driver’s license which includes my address and I handed them to him. And he’s sitting there looking at them.
Now it’s clear that he had a narrative in his head: A black man was inside someone’s house, probably a white person’s house, and this black man had broken and entered, and this black man was me.
So he’s looking at my ID, he asked me another question, which I refused to answer. And I said I want your name and your badge number because I want to file a complaint because of the way he had treated me at the front door. He didn’t say, ‘Excuse me, sir, is there a disturbance here, is this your house?’—he demanded that I step out on the porch, and I don’t think he would have done that if I was a white person.
But at that point, I realized that I was in danger. And so I said to him that I want your name, and I want your badge number and I said it repeatedly. [E.A.]
a) Isn't it pretty clear that Gates had a narrative in his head too? b) What was the question he refused to answer? c) Just reading this passage--Gates' own words--it seems to me he pops into litigious mode a little quickly. He says he wanted to file a complaint "because of the way he treated me at the front door." How had he mistreated him at the front door? He asked him 'Would you step outside onto the porch?' (where, as Gates notes, the cop would have more rights). When Gates refuses and instead gives the cop an ID, the cop looks at the ID. And at that point Gates has already determined he's been treated unfairly. He's already refusing to answer questions and planning to file a complaint. Again, from his own words it looks like he rushes a bit to the conclusion that a white man in a similar situation would have been treated differently. Is that really true? I'm not saying that Gates wasn't stereotyped in a deeply annoying and disturbing way. Just saying the stereotypes can run both ways. ... 2:02 P.M.
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The estimable Jonathan Cohn is remarkably unconvincing in arguing that long term health care cost-curve-bending is politically essential, right now, for the Democratic Party--as opposed to essential for some Blue Dog Dems who want to posture as non-big-spenders. If Congress passes a bill that basically produced universal, secure coverage and was deficit neutral over 10 years, are Dems really going to be punished at the polls because it doesn't also reduce the rise in medical expenses that's expected in years 11-30?
It seems particularly unlikely that, as Cohn argues, long term curve-bending is essential for its political appeal to moderate income voters:
If Democrats don't make the difficult decisions on raising revenue and controlling costs, then the reform they pass won't do much to help middle class Americans.
a) Huh? Isn't the reform offering health security to middle class? Cohn should read Drum. b) Cohn suggests that lower subsidies will hurt the near-poor, who are middle class. But that's an argument for higher short term subsidies, which would have to be paid for by short term cuts or revenues. Long term curve bending doesn't affect those subsidies, at least not for a long time; c) In the long run, I suppose, Cohn's argument would be that the expected rise in medical costs will make health care less affordable to those in the middle, taking a bigger bite of their paychecks. True enough. Against this, though, you have to balance understandable middle class fears that Orszag's untested cost-bending solutions, involving empowering bureacrats to deny reimbursement for treatments on grounds that--well, who knows what the grounds will end up being--would bend the curve by undermining the very health security reform promises. That seems, at best, a wash.
I mean, do you really think the middle class Americans will oppose (or not care about) a historic, 10-year-deficit-neutral universal care bill that doesn't bend the curve, but suddenly burn up the Capitol Hill phone lines to demand that the package be passed when they learn that it contains an "Independent Medicare Advisory Commission"? That's red meat out in the suburbs!**
I share the Obamist consensus that failure to pass a health bill would be politically disastrous for Dems, including the very moderates in swing districts who are currently making demands. Democrats need a victory. But a historic coverage-securing bill that isn't a "curve bender" would be more than victory enough. ... And if Republican candidates then really started making a fuss about the perils of rising costs in 2024--as opposed to making a fuss about, say, government-mandated cost-control rationing near the end of life--the stage would be set for the Orszagists to push their curve-bending plans. (Or is it because Cohn et al know this won't happen that they're desperately trying to portray curve-bending as politically essential this year?) ...
**--Isn't it more likely that empowering this cost-cutting commission will open up the reform to a Dick Morris-style they're-destroying-Medicare attack? ... 4:11 A.M.
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[This item restored after being vaporized by crap cost-effective Slate blogging software--7/24/9]
Marc Ambinder on how the White House made its fateful choice to try to sell its health plan on cost cutting rather than coverage:
Earlier this year, the White House decided to base its health care messaging on the concept of cost -- the current system was unsustainable and wasteful. They did not focus their argument on access, which appeals to people without access but doesn't do much for people with insurance, or about quality, which is complex and not intuitively helpful for Democrats. Maybe the price of doing business with the insurance company was to focus on costs. Maybe they overcorrected from the Clinton model in 1994, which focused on "health security."
"We tried access and quality, with a tad of moral imperative, once before and it didn't work out so well. Its difficult no matter how you slice it," a senior Senate aide told me. A White House adviser conceded that "access is killer, no matter how you poll it."
1) As is so often the case, overpolling seems to blame. In the event, polls on Obama's cost-obsessed pitch so far do not seem to bear out whatever his aides saw "earlier this year." I suspect they saw what they wanted--and they wanted to focus on costs. It's possible to take polls that show something very different; 2) Is "access" the right word to test-as opposed to "security"? "Access" makes it sound as if you are focusing on the problem of the uninsured--i.e. charity, to many middle class Americans--as opposed to security for everyone. If they polled "access," that may have stacked the deck from the start; 3) "Maybe" they "overcorrected from the Clinton model"? Maybe?
Ambinder goes on, in full captured-by-source mode, to say the "basic problem" with a cost approach is that " in order to reduce costs .. reform will cost something extra in the near-term." Er, no. The basic problem is that it's not clear Obama and Orszag's reforms actually will work to reduce costs in the long term without encouraging unacceptable practices like rationing. They might work! But "bending the cost curve" isn't something that has been done here. So Obama's asking for a huge investment up front for a scheme that might well not have the long run effect he desires.
In contrast, "security" is not a pig in the poke. We know what highly popular health care security in this country looks like. (It looks like Medicare--though that might be just one possible form.) We know it is attainable if we are willing to pay for it. It dovetails with a traditional liberal idea that the wealth of Americans shouldn't determine whether they live or die when they need a doctor.
Only the sophistication of modern opinion research could obscure this difference and tell Obama, in effect, "go with the untested, hard-to-explain cost-cutting scheme."
**--Don't give the problem a human face! Even the anecdotes Obama uses--even the anecdotes about middle class Americans who've gotten screwed by the health system--seem to confirm the vague sense that it's just a question of helping out a few hard luck cases--i.e. charity, rather than universal, middle class security. This is one instance where the hack CW advice to use telling anecdotes--as opposed to appealing generalities--may backfire. FDR used appealing generalities, no? ...
Update: Kevin Drum adds just a touch of fear-mongering to a security-oriented sales pitch. Not un-powerful! If Obama simply read Drum's post on national TV--and didn't add five Orszag-approved paragraphs on cost-cutting--it would be a step in the right direction. ...
Mark Blumenthal on various way pollsters can skew the results on the importance of "cost"--one promised to "eliminate co-pays and deductibles"! That's a) not about to happen and b) very different in voters minds from the "remote, systematic changes" that Obama and Orszag predict will "bend the curve" a decade or two from now.... 2:20 A.M
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Last Year's Model: Megan McArdle on the trouble with shifting from evil "fee for service" medicine to a "capitation" system, which is being proposed for Massachusetts. For one, with capitation
[d]octors who happen to get stuck with a sicker population go broke. If you try to rig the payments to account for degrees of sickness, you will quickly get mired in a system even more complicated than the current health insurance system.
Also they have a financial interest in letting you die quickly and cheaply! Or, as McArdle more tactfully puts it:
I don't like a system where the doctor has a financial incentive to give me unnecessary tests. But I'm even less fond of the idea of giving her financial incentives not to give me necessary ones.
2:10 A.M.
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Brad DeLong notes that the last two recoveries have been "jobless" ones, in which the unemployment rate took a long time to go down even after the economy as a whole started to grow. He offers some reasons, including:
[F]irms believe that their remaining workers will forgive them if they fire large numbers of workers during a recession out of economic necessity, but not at other times. Hence the start of the recovery is a business's last moment to slim down its labor force and become more efficient and profitable in the coming boom.
Sounds plausible. But why, then, does DeLong seem confident, at the end of his column, that if only the stimulus had been bigger we might not have been in for a jobless recovery? It's obviously a question of degree, but if employers use recessions as an excuse to slim down with a $787 billion stimulus plan, won't they use the recession as an excuse to slim down with a $1787 billion stimulus plan? The latter will produce a bigger recovery, presumably--but at some point don't you also run into the problem of inflation? Mightn't it be that--because of the factors DeLong cites--there is no longer any sized stimulus that produces a non-jobless recovery that isn't also so big that it reignites inflation? Just asking! ... That doesn't mean the stimulus shouldn't have been bigger. Only that a non-jobless recovery** might be an unattainable goal. ...
**--What's a non-jobless recovery? After all, jobs eventually come back even with "jobless" turnarounds. DeLong suggests one reasonable measurement: Will they return in time for the 2010 elections? .. . 2:08 A.M.
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Walter Cronkite raced Volvos? 2:10 A.M.
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Warmer: From President Obama's Friday remarks:
So this is what health insurance reform will mean for the average American. It will mean lower costs, more choices and coverage you can count on. It will save you and your family money.
You won't have to worry about being priced out of the market. You won't have to worry about one illness leading to your family going into financial ruin.
Americans will have coverage that finally has stability and security, and Americans who don't have health insurance will finally have affordable quality options.
I haven't followed Obama's health care remarks closely, but this seems like a significant improvement (for reasons suggested here). Now if he'd just drop the Orszag talk about "bending the cost curve" we'd be getting places. ... Compare: Obama's highly Orszagged, cost-control-obsessed address at a Green Bay town hall in June. ...
P.S.--Kick Orszag Down the Road? When Obama did talk about "bending the cost curve" in the long run he said:
The bill I sign will also include my commitment and the commitment of Congress to slow the growth of health care costs over the long run.
This is a separate issue. And I just want to be clear. There's an issue of how do we pay for health care reform immediately, in a way that's deficit neutral, but how do we also bend the cost curve so that we're not seeing huge health care inflation over the long-term ...
Our proposal would change incentives so that providers will give patients the best care, not just the most expensive care, which will mean big savings over time.
This is what we mean when we say that we need delivery system reform. I've proposed to Congress, and I am actually confident that they may adopt these proposals,..
Am I crazy to think, by making it clear that long-term curve bending is "a separate issue," Obama's setting it up as a separate issue that could be addressed later? That may not be what seems to be happening now--Obama's curve-bending proposal for an "independent panel" to set Medicare practices is said to be key to getting the votes of conservative Dems. But once the curve-bending issue is distinguished, it can be treated distinctly-- and it would be in keeping with a time-honored Washington tradition to put off the pain (while registering a "commitment"). This impression is reinforced by the uncertain language Obama uses to describe his long-term curve-related changes--he says Congress "may" adopt his proposals--which contrasts with the train-is-leaving-the-station certainty on the immediate package of deficit-neutral but non-curve-bending reforms ("We are going to get this done. ... It will happen this year.") ... Obama specifically did not say what Marc Ambinder says he said--that "he wouldn't sign a health care reform bill into law unless it bended health care cost curve downward."
But maybe I'm giving the speech a wishful reading. Can't De-Orszag this initiative fast enough for me. ...
Backfill: Atlantic's Clive Crook also suspects Orszag's long-term cost controls are about to be put in a box and sent on a long voyage to nowhere. From Crook's Friday comment:
One thing that surprised me about Obama's statement today was that he continues to emphasize cost control, as opposed to wider access, as the principal driver of reform. It is obvious by now that Congress has no stomach at all for cost control, and is arguing mainly over how to raise the taxes necessary to pay for wider coverage. Obama's selling proposition, so to speak, is therefore beside the point ....
Moreover, Crook wonders:
What would be so wrong with saying we must have health reform to address economic insecurity--note this is not just about the 40m uninsured; people with insurance are worried about losing it--and that the price in higher taxes is worth paying. It happens to be true, after all. That should count for something. Is it really so hopeless a platform?
Wasn't this the right platform all along? I would add that when you are wondering who is going to pay for your treatment if you get sick, your insecurity is more than economic. [via Dish]... 2:08 A.M.
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Closer? Obama's about to begin a campaign-style attempt to sell health care reform:
Senior White House aides promise "an aggressive public and private schedule" for Obama as he presses his case for reform, including a prime-time news conference on Wednesday, a trip to Cleveland, and heavy use of Internet video to broadcast his message beyond the reach of the traditional media.
Hmm. When was the last time a President's campaign-style attempt to sell a policy has actually succeeded in selling the policy? I can't remember it. I can remember lots of flops (e.g.,Bush on Social Security). Traditional trips to non-Beltway places like Cleveland get heavily filtered by the media, for example. Prime time news conferences don't get huge ratings, right?. The only thing I can think of that might have a momentum-changing effect is a roadblocked prime-time presidential address. ..."Internet video"? I don't think so. ... 2:07 A.M.
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Via Jennifer Rubin: "Card check"--allowing unions to avoid secret ballots--is now semi-officially out of the "card check" compromise bill. But the other sweeping structural change in the economy--allowing government "arbitrators" to set wages in the first union contract-is still in. The goal for unions is now to hide this "mandatory arbitration" provision and pretend that the fight was almost all about the defunct anti-secret ballot provision. The NYT's Steven Greenhouse, as usual, gives the unions what they want.
Opponents may need to come up with a new name for the bill (though "card check" is working pretty well for them). How about "federal pay determination"? Keep in mind that not only does the apparent "compromise" propose abandoning the hoary idea that wages should be set in the marketplace, it also abandons the New Deal's substitute idea that wages should be set in labor contest where unions threaten to use their strike power and management threatens to survive a strike. Unions seem to have given up strikes. Instead they want to authorize an official--maybe even an actual federal bureaucrat--to simply swoop down and impose what would undoubtedly be a wage increase. That's more akin to FDR's notorious, failed National Recovery Act--except the NRA at least let industries set their own rigid wage scales. ...
Note also that the arbitration provisions give now-unorganized workers a new, powerful incentive to unionize: Vote for the union, wait a few months, and an arbitrator will fly in and give you a raise. No strike. No fuss. No muss. ...
P.S.: Opponents also need to go on offense. ... 5:53 P.M.
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Bob Lutz, old/new General Motors product czar and now public face of exciting New GM, has announced that GM is killing its one shot at building an affordable rear-drive sedan on the discontinued Pontiac G8 chassis--a possibility Lutz himself floated a few days ago-- because there is no "marketing" case for it ... at which point hundreds of thousands of U.S. car fans, who have residual fondness for GM because they remember its classic rear-drive cars, think to themselves, "F--k it. Let GM die. What's it good for? Building boring family vehicles that are aren't quite as good at Toyota's boring family vehicles?" ...[via The Truth About Cars] 4:23 P.M.
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WaPo's Ezra Klein decrees "rules" for those who would use the CBO's damning analysis "against the existing health-care reform proposals"--they "must," he says, endorse some combination of cost-cutting proposals from a list he provides. Huh? Even as mock hubris (and it's hard to tell) this makes no sense. Who said opponents have to be for more cost-cutting? Why can't Republicans say to Dems a) You said your plans would bend the cost curve down. Instead they increase costs. The status quo would be better than your plans. Vote no. b) You said your plans would bend the cost curve down. Instead they increase costs. Why should we believe anything else you say? ... That isn't what I would say, but it's not an illogical or inappropriate response. ...
P.S.: Klein goes on, of course, to re-endorse the very treatment-restricting form of cost-cutting that is scaring people away from the Dem plans, specifically
comparative effectiveness review that can judge not only the effectiveness but also the cost-effectiveness of various treatments, and give the federal government authority to use that data when deciding reimbursement rates.
In other words, a medical treatment can be more effective than the alternative but the government will still try to prevent you from getting it if it's expensive. Yikes. Smug self-styled wonks will kill health care yet. ... [What would you do?--ed Guarantee health care security to all citizens--a public plan being one way to do it. People can switch jobs and lose jobs and be poor and near-poor and move and get ill without worrying about being covered. Assume this will raise costs. Assume the cost curve of medical costs will be hard to bend in any case, if that can be done at all. Figure out how to pay those costs--through taxes, if necessary. Take reasonable cost-controlling measures, if desired, once everyone has health care security--but don't expect too much. Stop acting as if cost-cutting and treatment-denying is the point of health care reform.] ... 2:28 A.M.
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But they got Car of the Year! BA/Merrill Lynch predicts GM will lose 3 more points of market share--down to 15% from 22% last year--largely because there are so few new products** in the pipeline. That means the company is heading for another federal bailout, says The Truth About Cars. ... Rattner got out just in time. (Reason #5) ...
**--Though GM has demonstrated the ability to introduce new products and still not make up much ground. See the recent history of Saturn. ... 4:52 P.M.
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Obama v. Kurtz: [From Just One Minute] Obama implies that, not only did he never formally nominate CNN's on-camera medic Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General, but he never offered him the job:
Obama: Could I say, I have great respect for Sanjay Gupta, but I never nominated him.
The press nominated him. I never — you know, that was not — there were people who had suggested that he might make a good surgeon general. And I think, in fact, he could have made a good surgeon general. He's a very well-spoken person and a lot of the job of the surgeon general is to get a message out. [E.A.]
It's the press' fault! Is Obama dissembling (so as not to insult his actual nominee, Regina Benjamin) or did CNN's Howie Kurtz get it wrong when he disclosed, on January 6, that:
President-elect Barack Obama has offered the job of surgeon general to Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon and correspondent for CNN and CBS, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.
I have no dog in this fight. I trust Marmolite will get to the bottom of it. ... 4:50 P.M.
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Tim Noah has what seems like a very good suggestion regarding the public plan
[The House bill says the] public health insurance option "shall offer basic, enhanced, and premium plans" and may also offer "premium-plus plans," presumably at escalating levels of cost. This is to make it conform to the private plans also offered within the new, strictly regulated health insurance exchange created under the bill. ... [snip]
Rather than provide a menu of four public-option plans, I'd prefer to see the government establish a single, reasonably generous public-option plan and leave the gold plating to private insurers. Doing so would allow the government to take a more egalitarian approach and at the same time would turn over to private insurers a decent-sized potential market for nonbasic health care. It wouldn't stop their squawking, but it might reduce it. [E.A.]
Would Medicare offer tiered service? It wouldn't. ... Tiered service also threatens to undermine the social-egalitarian benefits of universal health insurance. Instead of everyone waiting in the same waiting room, there might be a different waiting room for every purse and purpose. ... 4:48 P.M.
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One good thing the Presidental Task Force on Autos did--force some UAW patronage desk workers to actually start building cars again:
Unlike their nonunion rivals, the Detroit Three have paid for a small union bureaucracy at each plant to handle grievances, conduct union elections and support labor-management initiatives. Those people didn't work in the plant.
Now in the leaner post-bankruptcy environment, the UAW is eliminating at least 300 positions across its 23 Chrysler locals, according to several local officials. General Motors expects the initiative will affect less than 1% of its 52,000 U.S. hourly employees, according to Childers Arb.
This would fit with Rattner Departure Reason # 8. .... But note the fine print at the end of the story, disclosing that GM will not eliminate useless patronage positions where they are "required under the local labor contract." Oh. How many of them are there? ... P.S.: So the brother in law of some union official has been sitting behind a desk for 20 years. Now he's on the line, and pissed off about it. Do you want to buy the car that he'll build? ... [via TTAC] 4:46 P.M
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Matt Yglesias on the road not taken in health care reform. ... 4:44 P.M.
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Dearth of a Salesman: President Obama gave interviews to a number of network medical correspondents today as part of his health care push. Here is an "edited transcript" of his talk with Dr. Nancy Snyderman of NBC. As a health care sales pitch, it was awful. Why? Let's go to the videotape. [Emphasis added.]
1) What's in it for you? Pain and discipline! Here's Obama's first big spiel, embracing a question from Snyderman:
Snyderman: I haven't heard anyone ask just for the American public to pony up here, that this is going to require some give for all the stakeholders involved.
Obama: Well, let me - let me talk about what I think the American people are going to have to do.
First of all, the American people have to recognize that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Right? So, we can't just provide care to everybody that has no cost whatsoever, you don't end up having to make any decisions.
So, obviously, we've got to have a system that controls costs, gives people choices, but makes sure that we're getting a good bang for the buck. And we've got to have the American people doing something about their own care.
Snyderman: So, self-responsibility.
Obama: So, self-responsibility is going to be critical. This is probably not going to be something that's legislated. But I tell you what, every business out there is going to be looking at their health care bottom line. And increasingly what you're going to see is that businesses are going to incentivize their employees to stop smoking, lose weight, get exercise, get regular checkups.
What we can do is we can encourage those companies that have those sorts of wellness-prevention programs. We can make sure that it's easier to find a primary care physician to get a regular checkup, that everybody has basic insurance. But the American people are going to have to participate in their own health.
Did Obama forget to highlight the part about the good things that are in the health care bills--things people might actually want that they don't have now? That failure is all the more inexplicable because the bills emerging from the House and Senate HELP committees actually do hold out the promise of a down to earth benefit that an most voters might desperately crave, namely not having to worry about where their health insurance will come from anymore! (Worst comes to worse, they can always sign up for the public plan.) Instead, in Obama's version it's time for voters to pay the bill for what they are already getting. Pony up, sinners! Everybody loves collection agents.
2) He lectures: It's also time, Obama tells his viewers, to lose weight, and stop smoking, and pull up your socks. Later on he tells people that they are foolish to prefer brand name drugs to generic drugs, and to want multiple medical tests. "If you only need one test, why do you want five tests?" Stop clinging to your tests! You're worse than those people in Pennsylvania.
Who knew we were electing a national mother-in-law? And get a chance to endure increased taxes for the privilege. Obama's supposed to be rallying support from voters, not castigating them. Outside the S& M parlor, most people do not enjoy paying to be disciplined.
3) The pain today is designed to avoid a problem that is over the horizon:
Well, I think that the most important thing for people to understand is that the system, as it is, is unsustainable. And if people understand that; if you look at the trend lines, where your premiums have doubled over the last nine years; your out-of-pocket costs have gone up 62 percent; the federal government is being bankrupt by Medicare and Medicaid - if you look at all these things, then you know that, just standing still, we are going to be overrun by health care costs.
Once the American people understand that, then it's a matter of us making intelligence choices.
As a matter of policy, maybe it makes sense to "look at the trend lines" and ward off unsustainability down the road. As a matter of politics, it's a proven loser. When was the last time we cut Social Security benefits because, sometime in the future, the "trend lines" might produce a crisis? Voters tend to say, "Thanks. Call me when the crisis actually hits." Why gratuitously make the health care bill seem like the (apparently unpopular, now-stalled) global warming bill--a costly prophylactic measure to ward off a danger that experts tell us may hit in coming decades?
FDR would never have made a pitch like this. He would have talked in simple terms about what was in it for "the people" now. Obama's arid, wonky, condescending approach might convince a majority of subscribers to the Brookings Institution email list. It's hardly going to create the kind of public demand that will push health care reform over the goal line.
Part of the problem might be Snyderman's editing. Maybe Obama gave a fabulous closer that got left on the cutting room floor. I doubt it. But even if that's true, it's still Obama's fault. He's controlling the venues in which his message gets out. He didn't have to pick the medical reporters. And he should be able to twist every question of Snyderman's into an excuse to say what he wants to say.
The likelier possibility is that he is saying what he wants to say. He's been surrounded by Orszaggy wonks for so long he thinks talking about "trend lines" and "incentivizing" is red meat. Which brings us to a final point:
4) He doesn't seem to know that much. Obama is asked why he changed his mind about a requirement that individuals purchase insurance (which he opposed in the campaign):
[M]y concern was, if we post a mandate, then people who couldn't afford it still would not have the ability to pay for the health insurance that was out there that was available, except now they were also being punished.
But I've changed my mind on this because what I've — was persuaded of was that, if we can phase this in so that we know there's affordable insurance out there — and, in fact, a lot of the uninsured are relatively young people who could be insured fairly cheaply — that that actually will drive down the cost for everybody
Huh? It was news to him that "a lot of the uninsured are relatively young people who could be insured fairly cheaply"? Even I knew that.
Obama does twist Snyderman's question--into another condescending bit of pedagogy:
So there's an example of, if the president of the United States can get educated on something and change their mind. I have confidence that the American people, when they get all the facts, will see that we can improve quality.
Yikes. If passage of health care depends on Obama's ability to educate the American people and change their mind--which, thankfully, it doesn't--we're in big trouble. The American people don't have to have their minds changed! They voted for Obama! He promised to deliver health care for everyone. Now he just has to convince them his plan will do what they wanted. Where is John Edwards James Carville when we need him? I never thought I'd say that. ... 11:22 P.M.
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Dick Morris is right twice a day, and this could be one of those times: If I were a Hill Democrat, I'd be very worried about this possible line of attack. ... It's a proven killer, and Obaman Dems, with all their talk of bending cost curves and denying treatments and reducing Medicare spending by 30%, have rendered themselves wide open to it. I'm amazed the GOPs haven't used it already. ... True, they'd have to embrace the popular big government Medicare program, violating conservative tenets. Are they really that principled? Or are they just saving it for September, 2010? ... 5:14 P.M.
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The network of community colleges is a powerful lobby. Solid citizen advocates in every district. They just got $12 billion from Obama. But do they do much good? Frederick Hess sees "some terrific institutions but [also] broad pockets of mediocrity." (I was actually expecting a more sweeping indictment.) That leaves the usual Obama question: How much reform will accompany the large outlay of taxpayer funds? The auto bailout may have set a pattern, and it's not a promising one. ... Update: Here are some numbing details. I suppose "challenge grants" can produce reforms. But vouchers-where the consumers of education could decide where to go, potentially threatening mediocre schools with defunding, whether or not they have good lobbyists--seem more effective. ... 5:11 P.M.
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David Brooks may spend until the end of his days being asked which Republican senator he's referring to in his recent MSNBC confession:
I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here....
He'll be asked at every dinner party he attends for the forseeable future. He'll be asked by his dentist, when he's in the chair. He'll be asked by his editors. I urge Brooks to seek the counsel of Bob Woodward, who managed to keep an even more sought-after name secret for decades. But there is a smaller universe of suspects with this one. It might be hopeless.
P.S.: I know I have my favorite. ... As a TPM reader notes, it would have to be someone Brooks really didn't want to piss off. ... 1:49 A.M.
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A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Bob Wright about his Evolution of God for KCRW, my local NPR supplier. They're running it today--Tuesday--at 2:30 West Coast time. Says here it's "live stream/on demand/podcast." Voices were raised. They wanted contentious. ... Update: Less contentious than I remembered! Better to bill it as "thoughtful." That's the ticket. Thoughtful. ... I also think some of the things Bob says toward the end about the tolerant history of Islam might provoke some blowback from the right. ... 1:48 A.M.
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Jeffrey Toobin said something that's not true? I'm shocked shocked ... [via Olson] ... Update: Olson cites more evidence against Toobin's crowd-pleasing oversimplification. ... 1:47 A.M.
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Mr. LUTZ: [W]here we really messed it up and took our eye off the ball in terms of product was in '70s, '80s and early '90s. And I think we've - in the last five or six years - we've had a radical transformation in the way we approach the product and our goals for products and look at the awards we've gotten. We got car of the year.
SIEGEL: But when you take your eye off the ball for more than 20 years...
Mr. LUTZ: Yeah, well, that was bad. ...
Update: It's also pathetic that Lutz cites the Motor Trend Car of the Year contest. If you follow cars, you know that this is not a respected award. It has a reputation for ...well, see TTAC's cynical flow chart. Over the years it has been won by some mediocre cars (1995 Chrysler Cirrus?), some awful cars (1971 Chevy Vega,1983 Renault Alliance), some loser cars (2002 Ford Thunderbird) and lots of cars Bob Lutz wouldn't be caught dead in (1997 Chevrolet Malibu) including more than ten from what Lutz labels as GM's lost decades. ... [Thanks to Reader D] 1:45 A.M.
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Phase Out: Why is Steve Rattner resigning from the Obama administration so soon? Remember that when he quit his investment firm to take his auto czarito job he sent out an email declaring he was leaving Wall Street to begin "a new phase of my life, in the public sector." Short phase. Why? Some theories: 1) The pay-to-play scandal is embarrassing. Obama let him do his job through the bankruptcy and then quit gracefully when fewer people would be looking. 2) Also, he needs to spend his efforts making sure the "unlikely" charges against him stay unlikely; Update: "NY AG probe of Rattner ... heats up"--Reuters; 3) He's too much of a press hound for the Obama crew**; 4) He's enough of a press hound to know that if he quits now he can get some suckup stories about how he's "going out on top;") 5) Indeed, the glamour work of the auto task force is done. All that's left to do is watch the bailed out auto companies fail to meet expectations, and quite likely fail period. It's either up or out for an ambitious guy like Rattner. There was no up. So it's out. 6) Ron Bloom always had the power. Rattner was the front man. That wasn't about to change. 7) He shares Sarah Palin's career adviser; 8) Ron Gettelfinger never liked him anyway. Also: Rattner is skeptical of auto unions and it's the union's show now. 9) Pinch needs him. 10) He wants to direct. 11) Obama and Geithner want to dramatize that "day-to-day management of these companies" is back "in the hands of the private sector"--and Rattner was the walking, leaking personification of government intrusion. 12) This extremely unverified but widely viewed undernews, about which I know nothing and which even its source blogger writes might be "inflammatory nonsense"! ...
P.S.: Full kf Rattner cache here. ...
P.P.S.: No doubt his old firm, Quadrangle, will welcome him back with open arms! ...
**-- An example of Rattner's facility at self-promotion might be the number of journalists who think Ron Bloom was "his deputy." I don't think that was exactly the case. See this delicately worded press release. ... 2:54 P.M.
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WaPo's Michael Shear follows the Kinsley source-greasing formula with comic fidelity, says Omri Ceren. Not true! Shear is greasing up about 20 staffers at once. A challenging profit environment demands that journalists exploit economies of scale. ...Update: Actually, Kinsley seems to have anticipated that change too:
"Obama has changed the rules," [a character called the source-greaser-in-chief] says. "Everyone he appoints is so wonderful that there aren't enough positive words to describe all of them. My job is to centralize the sucking up and make sure that each subject gets a fair share of the available adjectives."
2:52 P.M.
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Ezra Klein is concerned--or rather, he's "gripped" by an "unsettling thought":
[H]ealth-care reform isn't simply suffering because the public is overly opposed to some of its revenue raisers. It's suffering because the public is insufficiently supportive of its core. ... [snip]
[I]t's not obvious what health-care reform will do for the average American. I could give you a long answer about delivery system reforms and so forth because it's my job to know these things. But it would have to be a long answer .... [snip]
Higher taxes aren't buying them obvious benefits. Instead, they seem to be paying the health-care bills of poorer Americans. ... [snip]
If support for the overall effort were more robust, the polling on the tax exclusion would matter less. People are willing to pay for things they want to buy. But though they might abstractly favor health-care reform, it doesn't seem directly related to their lives. [E.A.]
I agree with my distinguished colleague (and welcome him to the concern troll community). He's woken to the realization that Obama is running into political difficulty because he's selling the middle class a pain sandwich--more taxes in exchange for more health care cuts. It would have been smarter to sell universal health care as offering, at a time when nearly everyone's job looks shaky, Medicare-like security for all. (It's not too late! And it fits on a bumper sticker.) ...
Whom should Klein blame for this tragic initial misstep? Among others, he should blame Ezra Klein, whose "long answer" explaining health care reform's benefits seemingly bought into the entire Orszag party line (health care reform is the way to lower costs and cut the budget deficit!)--even amplifying it by arguing that a more "rational" health care system would decide whether "a person’s life, or health, is not worth the price of a particular procedure." If only Klein and other influential Obamapparatchiks had been more critical and Kinsleyesque. ....
P.S.: A day after his concerned post, Klein writes:
People don't like to cut costs in the health-care system. It's painful. Politicians do not voluntarily do painful things. But a lot of people want to achieve universal health care. And they're willing to make a lot of concessions to do so. The coverage expansion, in other words, can serve as leverage for the cost controls. [E.A.]
Huh? July 10 Ezra Klein should read July 9 Ezra Klein. If universal coverage in itself doesn't do much that's obvious "for the average American"--but rather seems to mainly involve "paying the health care bills of poorer Americans," why would average Americans be willing to "make a lot of concessions" in the form of painful cost cuts to achieve that goal--any more than they will be willing to endure painful tax increases?
Bonus question: Why would Klein abandon the sound contrarian insight he'd had a day earlier? Collective criticism on JournoList? ...
Update: "Pelosi, House Leaders to Hold Press Conference Today to Highlight Benefits of Health Care Reform for Middle Class"--Politico's Mike Allen. A Pelosi press conference! That'll do it. ... 12:04 A.M.
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Gran Salida, Win/Win? WaPo profiles one of the "thousands of Latino immigrants forced back across the border in recent months by the sinking economy ..." Thousands? Is this the Gran Salida that the New York Times assured us wasn't happening? ...
P.S.: The subject of the profile, a resourceful and industrious Guatemalan illegal immigrant named Carlos Sanchez, seems to be at least as valuable an addition to Guatemalan society as he was to Washington, D.C.'s. [non-ironic]. After what appears to be non-traumatic adjustment period
Sanchez teaches typing at his house each Saturday on 27 manual typewriters his sister stockpiled for him over the years. And he landed a day job teaching English in a local high school.
Mightn't it help developing countries like Guatemala if their most enterprising citizens return home, or stay home in the first place? ... 12:02 A.M.
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"Fighting Sotomayor, Republicans Falsely Advance Fire Fighter Ricci As the White Man's Rosa Parks": I remind my brother Steve that not even the sainted Rosa Parks was quite what she seemed. ... P.S.: I've never understood quite why the Ricci case was considered to have "bad" facts by defenders of Title VII's "disparate impact" standard for judging employment tests. Ricci involved a new test, designed by consultants. The worst case, for the defenders, would be if New Haven had thrown out a traditional test that had been accepted for years as job related, no? ... P.P.S.: Would this freshly concocted multiple choice exam have met the less stringent Rosenberg Standard (a "reasonable relationship to the organization's activities")? I assume yes. But would it have been crazy for the New Haven authorities to decide "no"? ... 1:40 A.M.
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Tremors: The key sentences from Jonathan Cohn's worry about the House's delay in unveiling its latest health bill:
But lurking behind all of these complaints, according to several sources I consulted Thursday evening, is a general wariness of taking a political plunge on health care. Like their counterparts in the Senate, House members don't like taking hard votes. Raising taxes, cutting spending, anything that takes money out of people's pockets--these are not things they want to do, even in the service of a greater, more popular cause.
And now they're getting nervous. They're seeing the president's popularity dipping, however incrementally. They're watching the Senate chase its tail over the same controversies. And having just taken what were--for many of them--similarly tough votes on an energy bill, they're not exactly thrilled about "walking the plank" again.
Cohn is the last guy to indulge in generic pontificating about "the president's popularity dipping," so if he's now worried about the president's popularity dipping I figure there's reason to worry about the president's popularity dipping. ... I also assume it's still more dangerous for Democrats to not pass a health bill than to pass one. What are Dems good for if they can't do that? But the bad economy gives them a ready excuse for further study. Mike Kinsley is now pointing in that direction. ["Even the liberal" Mike Kinsley?--ed No. He'd be among the first to be alarmed by future deficits.] ... 12:42 P.M.
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WaPo's Alec MacGillis notes that Obama's health care reformers
are clearly spooked by the notion that they could be accused of denying, for example, hip surgery to an 80-year-old.
If so, they largely have themselves to blame. They brought it up! It wasn't the Republicans who billed health care reform as a cost saving, budget-balancing measure that would start to deny payments for treatments deemed "ineffective," or (as one acolyte put it) when "a person's life, or health, is not worth the price." And to think when they heard that people started to worry about rationing! Fancy that.
MacGillis also makes it clear that the Obama wonks are hiding the ball on the ultimate decisions their cost-cutting mission might entail:
A senior administration official who requested anonymity to speak candidly acknowledged that while research might point to obviously wasteful practices, the reform would for the time being not get at the "harder question" of what to do "if new technology does work better and reduces risks but costs a lot more, and how to evaluate that."
Unfortunately voters, who may deal with expensive new medical technologies every other day, aren't dumb enough not to see this "harder question" coming down the pike.
Why raise the cost-cutting issue at all? Especially if you're not going to do much about it!
In their unconvincing second-stage fallback arguments the "rationing" charge--Stage 1: No, of course we won't ration! Stage 2: Sure, we'll ration! But we're rationing now!--Dem reformers note that price is a particularly nasty way to limit access to health care:
Others retort that the United States already has rationing: The uninsured and under-insured do not get the care they need.
So why not bill health reform as ... giving the uninsured and uninsured the care they need! Hey, there's an idea. In fact, why not simply say you're reforming health care to provide health security to all Americans, including the always-anxious middle class--instead of suggesting that you are funding care for the poor out of the hip replacements of the elderly affluent? Give everybody the medical care Medicare recipients now enjoy in, say, McAllen Texas. Pay the bill with higher taxes. Then worry about reining in overtreatment and rationing later. (My bet: Voters will prefer to keep paying the bill, if that's necessary to keep the hip replacements and cancer drugs coming.)
P.S.: Kirsten Powers' excellent column today makes this same basic point. Except she has polling data to back it up. ... 3:33 A.M.
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When Father Hesburgh throws down ... How can we know when the tide of respectable opinion has decisively turned against the teachers' unions? When a panel that includes Father Hesburgh, Birch Bayh,. Bill Bradley, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Roger Wilkins goes medieval on them, saying their resistance to reforms designed to hold schools accountable has hurt "disadvantaged students" and led to "calcified systems in which talented people are deterred from applying or staying as teachers ..."
Here are two undiplomatic grafs from the report's final page:
The unions have battled against the principle that schools and education agencies should be held accountable for the academic progress of their students. They have sought to water down the standards adopted by states to reflect what students should know and be able to do. They have attacked assessments designed to measure the progress of schools, seeking to localize decisions about test content so that the performance of students in one school or community cannot be compared with others. They have resisted innovative ways-such as growth models-to assess student performance.
In their attack on education reform, the national unions have often been unconstrained by considerations of propriety and fairness. They have sought to inject weakening amendments in appropriations bills, hoping that they would prevail if no hearings were held and the public was unaware of their efforts. They have used the courts to launch an attack on education reform, employing arguments that could imperil many federal assistance programs going back to the New Deal. They have failed to inform their own members of the content of federal reform laws.
The report follows up a much heralded establishment call for reform in 1996 that was endorsed by two union presidents. But it notes that in the twelve years since, "few of the necessary reforms" have been put in place. ("Twelve years--the entire length of a child's education--is a long time.") In other words, it implicitly serves as an argument against trying to reform the schools in cooperation with the unions, and in favor of trying to reform the schools by defeating the unions. ...1:48 A.M.
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If he were a GOP, TPM would be all over it, no? Sen. Inouye acts on behalf of a constituent, who turns out to be in large part himself (a troubled bank in which his ownership share makes up "the bulk of his personal wealth"). ... Yet Josh Marshall stays silent! ... 3:17 P.M.
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Tragedy strikes Los Angeles as a brush fire narrowly misses the Getty Museum. ... Next time! ... P.S.: I'm assuming all people and art works could be saved. But the buildings? It's an incredible site on which they've built a bunch of bank branches. I was at a lecture there last month and the place already smells moldy. Burned to a crisp would be a sound outcome from a cost-benefit point of view. They could start over and do a better job, while providing lots of badly needed construction jobs. ... 3:16 P.M.
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The future of journalism revealed. ... [via Insta] ... 3:15 P.M.
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As a health care non-maven, I have four problems with the New Republic's strangely ungalvanizing description of a world without a "public option":
1) Jacob Hacker and Rahul Rajkumar suggest that, without a public option, a "59-year-old self-employed man with diabetes, or a 48-year-old single mother with breast cancer" won't be able to find private insurance "they can afford." But under the Dem reform plan, even without a public option, wouldn't "[i]nsurance companies ...be required to offer the same coverage to everyone, regardless of medical history"? If so, why won't these 59-year-olds with diabetes be able to find plans they can afford as much as 59-year-olds without diabetes? Is it because private insurers will resort to subtle tricks--e.g. offering free workout rooms, or long steep stairways--to attract only the healthiest customers? Which brings us to ...
2) The existence of a public plan--sustained "completely through enrollee premiums and federal premium assistance"-- is supposed to "keep the private insurers honest" and "control costs." OK. Suppose the public plan uses its purchasing power and lower administrative expenses to cut its prices to 20% below the leading private plans. What will the private plan do? Will it match the public plan by cutting costs--or pursue even more vigorously subterranean strategies to cherrypick the healthiest customers with perks? Or a combination of both? Clearly, faced with pressure on profits, it can respond with "good" behavior or "bad" behavior. But if we could rely on private insurers to have only "good" responses, we wouldn't need health care reform, right?
3) What of the 59-year-olds with diabetes? Well, they always have the non-cherrypicking public plan! Which they will presumably choose, raising the public plan's costs. So there are two forces at work on the public plan's pricing.
One lowers costs, perhaps--an ability to forego administrative and marketing expenses and an impulse to use purchasing leverage to bid down payments to doctors and hospitals.
One raises costs--the tendency of public plans to attract the sickest patients.
Which of these forces will be greater? I don't know. But Hacker and Rajkumar don't tell me. It's not inconceivable that the public plan will confront a vicious circle of adverse selection, in which it attracts sick patients, driving up costs and premiums, which causes healthy patients to flee, requiring even more premium hikes, etc.--right? Remember that according to Hacker & Rajkumar the public plans will operate on a level playing field with no special subsidies from the government. If they have higher costs how are they going to avoid charging higher prices? And then how are they going to keep the private plans "honest"?
4) TNR's whole disaster scenario--what will happen if there's no public plan to provide competition--seems beside the point. If the disaster starts to happen, we can always set up the public plans later, no?
What am I missing? ... P.S.: I'm still for a "public" alternative, just so everyone has the security of knowing there's at least one insurer they can go to who won't try to game them out of coverage in the fine print of a 25 page agreement. I just don't understand how the economics is supposed to work. ... 9:00 P.M.
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Has Steve Rattner gone native? ... 11:59 P.M.
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If you unimmerse yourself in the Ricci commentary, including Richard Thompson Ford's smug, reified** apocalypticism, and just look at John Rosenberg's solution for the vise-like conflict between preventing reverse discrimination and stopping non-reverse discrimination in cases of "disparate" racial impact ... well, what's wrong with it?
[T]he solution to this dilemma is conceptually (if not politically) easy: demote disparate impact to its proper role, which is suggestive evidence of the possibility of disparate treatment, a possibility that can be successfully refuted by an employer's production of credible evidence that the challenged test, policy, or procedure bears a reasonable relationship to the organization's activities. (Of course, credible evidence that an employer adopted even such a reasonable test for a discriminatory purpose would also be barred as disparate treatment.) [E.A]
Would that be so terrible? We couldn't live with that? We'd be racist if we did? Note that there would still be race discrimination suits, presumably plenty of them. They would just be easier to defend against. ... P.S.: Ford worries about an explosion "disparate impact" of lawsuits from disgruntled whites--but this rule would make those suits less easy to win too, along with suits by disgruntled blacks (and other minorities). Everyone would have to calm down! ... P.P.S.: Rosenberg notes that his solution is similar to one adopted by the EEOC in 1989, but then overruled by Congress (and the first President Bush). ...
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**--Why "reified"? Because it falsely treats the circumstances that gave rise to "disparate impact" law as more or less permanent. In reality, the arc in which race preferences are initially regarded as a necessary remedy and then gradually regarded as toxic and stigmatizing and finally as unconstitutional seems like a natural one. ... Reification #2: In predicting a hellacious gridlock of discrimination litigation from whites and blacks, Ford also seems to assume that Congress can't or won't relax the "disparate impact" test along the lines suggested by Rosenberg and the 1989 EEOC case. ... 5:38 P.M.
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No saintlier man has ever walked the earth than the brilliant and beloved David Bradley.** That goes without saying. But how, exactly, would it help solve the ethical problems created by his corporate sponsored "salons" to put them on the record--as TPM's Zacary Roth, Slate's Jack Shafer and Bradley himself seem to believe?
The problem with Bradley's salons, like the problems with WaPo's similar, now-cancelled events, is that they create two big conflicts: 1) The need to avoid pissing off the corporations who fund (and then some***) the salons in the hope of getting access to influential journalists and administration bigshots; and, even more corrupting, 2) the need to suck up to the administration bigshots to get them to show up at the salons where they can be accessed by corporations who are paying for them. ...
Shafer argues that making the "salons" off the record is a key part of Bradley's marketing strategy--it convinces the corporations that they are getting something special.**** Shafer's no doubt right. And generally, "on the record" is good (though "off the record" can be valuable too). Putting the salons on record would also help solve the Atlantic's seemingly congenital "We're Insiders, Aren't We Great, Look at Us" problem. But I don't see how it would do anything to remove conflicts 1) or 2). ... Plus, even if the meetings themselves are on the record, there would still be plenty of time for off-the-record lobbyist-to-player contacts in the halls or at any pre- or post-event cocktails. (Even if there isn't, just encountering someone face to face can make it easier to "access" them later.)....
P.S.: Marc Ambinder's post quoting Bradley's response without daring to link to what Bradley is responding to is a little creepy. Who is this guy, L. Ron Hubbard? What is Ambinder scared of? At least he gets beaten up in his comments.
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**--He's also the Last Sucker "ridiculously generous" in his willingness to pay big bucks for opinion journalists, but that in no way influences my opinion of him.
***--Bradley says openly that the salons are "one of our revenue streams."
****--I suspect that the privately funded, non-profitmaking salons Bradley also gives might be another part of the overall effort: If you are a policymaker and you show up at one of his profit-making confabs do you then you get invited to the more exclusive and legit private confab? If your corporation funds one of the profit-making salons do you find yourself invited to the more intimate event? But I am being entirely too suspicious. Bradley is just a wonderful, wonderful man. I am the one who should be concerned--for thinking such bad thoughts. My apologies. ... 4:09 P.M.
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Marc Lynch of FP suggests that Joe Biden committed "the worst foreign policy blunder of the Obama administration" in seeming to give the green light to an Israeli air strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. "Aggressive pushback" is called for, declares Lynch. Biden needs to "issue a strong clarification immediately"! ... But when you think about it, if you wanted to scare the Iranians without credibly committing the United States, isn't Biden the perfect person for the job? I mean, it's just Joe Biden! He could be actually enunciating Obama administration policy. Or he could be winging it! Or it could be just another gaffe. Who knows? The Iranians don't. They can't dismiss the threat, and have to be worried, but can't be sure whether to expect a strike or not. Meanwhile, no credible U.S. spokesman has said anything especially bellicose. That's exactly what we want, no? ...
Strategic ambiguity, I think they call it. Everything Biden says is by definition ambiguous! He's an unreliable narrator. The trick is making it strategic. But the Obama brahmins would be crazy not to try to use this asset. When you've got lemons ....
P.S.: Lynch worries that the Israelis might "[take] up the offer" and attack. But presumably the U.S. has ways of directly communicating to Israel that it doesn't have the green light, or that it does. ...
Update: Obama says the U.S. has "absolutely not" given Israel a green light to attack Iran. Guess it's just that crazy Biden! ... Or is it? ... And Obama didn't rule out a "green light" in the future. ... Maybe Biden was on to something? ... Iran still doesn't know for sure, do they? Which is the point. ... 6:30 P.M.
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Admit it, Mediaite is a lot better than you thought it would be. ... P.S.: I'm a Dan Abrams skeptic--he seems in love with himself, and I don't trust him--but on a bad day his conflict of interest in using journalists to advise corporate clients on how to work the media isn't as bad as Howie Kurtz's (covering CNN, which not only pays him an ongoing second salary but is what makes him famous). ... 6:28 P.M.
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The Grander Bargain: Hmmm. The SEIU, a major proponent of "card check" labor law revision, has also been attacking moderate Dems on health care:
In recent weeks, liberal bloggers and grass-roots groups such as MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, Service Employees International Union and Progressive Change Campaign Committee have targeted Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Arlen Specter (Pa.), Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Dianne Feinstein (Calif.). [E.A.]
Does this hurt the SEIU's "card check" push by annoying the very moderate Dem Senators they must convince in order to get a pro-labor compromise passed? Or does it help the union, which can now say "Sen. Landrieu--if you vote for card check we'll give you a pass on health care and stop attacking you"? It's a form of leverage, after all. And it's leverage that's unavailable to the SEIU on the "card check" issue itself: It's not as if the union could run an ad attacking moderate Dems for failing to embrace "card check," which is hard to defend in public. ....
Bonus question: Does the possibility of trading some health care provisions for card check in some sort of gruesome grand bargain help or hurt Obama, assuming he cares a lot more about health care than card check? ... I guess if you think left-wing pressure for a public plan is hurting his health care effort, then it arguably helps--the unions and "progressive" Senators can be bought off with card check, freeing up moderate senators to vote for, say, a health bill with a weak public option without fear of provoking serious (non-Kabuki) opposition. ....If you think the left wing union and grass roots pressure is helping Obama, because he really wants to push the "moderates" into a plan they might not otherwise like, then arguably it will hurt him, because if the SEIU gets mollified on card check the pressure on health care will let up. ... Of course there may be other, more important factors at work, like the extent to which unions are enabled to organize in the new, more heavily regulated health care sector. ... [Thanks to reader J.] 5:48 P.M.
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Whippersnappers Over the Hill: A new publication promises to be like "The Awl with a younger focus." Ha. Choire Sicha is already past it. ... Next, Ezra Klein takes WaPo early retirement. ... Update: Sicha emails: "Dude, I am 37! I am TOTALLY OLD." Who knew? Keep rockin' ... 5:46 P.M.
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"'I'll sue you for defamation!' is the toothless wonder of the legal world," declares a confident and defiant HuffPo blogger. But is it really toothless? ... Background: Sarah Palin's attorney suggests that an Alaskan blogger has been defaming the Governor, and is threatening to sue not only the blogger but also "those who republish the defamation, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post." I would have thought that this threat was decidedly non-toothless--that if a blogger really was publishing something defamatory about Palin (or anyone**), and if HuffPo or the NYT published the blog on their web sites, they'd be on the hook for defamation just as if they'd published an article by one of their own reporters.
That was before I learned about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. It's imprecisely worded, but if it really does immunize HuffPo and Gawker and even Slate or the NYT, etc --by requiring any libel plaintiff to recover damages from the actual original blogger, as some cases suggest--that would change a lot from what I thought I learned in law school. The changes go way beyond defanging Palin. I'm obviously way behind thinking about this, but off the top of my head, here are some of the possible ramifications:
a) It would be great for blogging, because it would mean lawyers for big journalistic outfits (like the Washington Post, which owns Slate) won't require blogs to be edited. In fact, they won't want the blogs to be edited, lest that be interpreted as implicating the big journalistic outlet itself in any libel. "Curation" is for co-defendants!
b) Most bloggers themselves are probably poor enough to be judgment-proof, although some HuffPo bloggers might have deeper pockets than HuffPo itself;
c) It means unverified undernews would now have a prominent, semi-official, de facto-sanctioned home, namely judgment-proof blogs on big news sites;
d) Are they really going to apply this to organizations that pay freelance bloggers for their submissions? If not, the statute might protect HuffPo (which usually doesn't pay bloggers) but not Slate (which pays me). But does this paid/unpaid line really make sense, since readers don't necessarily know who's paying what to whom when evaluating a blog's credibility? Is HuffPo all that different from Slate? And I don't want to give my editors another reason to cut my salary to zero. ...
e) What about repeating these protected-by Sec. 230-but-unverified blog allegations in the core MSM? If actual reporters working for actual traditional news outfits can then relay 'the fact that Judgment-Proof Blog X is reporting Y rumor'--despite the traditional rules saying news outfits couldn't do this, but hey, why cut them out of the new vibrant "diversity of political discourse"?--we've really entered a new world. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with it. ...
But I find it difficult to believe that the broad web-site-protecting reading of Section 230 will hold up--it's a mere statute, remember. Congress can amend it. Is Congress really going to let average citizens get libeled by blogs on the New York Times web site without being able to sue the New York Times? ... On its face, the statutory provision, which protects "interactive computer services and other interactive media," appears intended more to protect outfits like American Online than traditional newspapers that host blogs or even new hybrid journalist/blogging/activist outfits like HuffPo. When Congress sees how that phrase has been interpreted, it may (as they say) revisit the issue. ...
**--Sure, public figures like Palin would have to show "actual malice," as defined in New York Times v. Sullivan. But that's not always impossible to do. ... 2:21 A.M.
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The "Savonarola of Sullivan's Island": Was he in love with the Latina hottie or with the "unashamedly navel-gazing culture of Argentina itself?" ... 12:11 A.M.
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It's seemed to me that the Obama administration has made a mistake in the framing of the health care issue: 'We'll raise your taxes and in exchange we're going to cut your treatments.' I mean, how could that not have widespread appeal? It's pain/pain! ... This mistake has been replicated, perhaps, in the subsidiary debate over the "public option." I tried to make that argument on bloggingheads yesterday, and boy did I not realize I was getting so overexcited. Don't play it at 1.4X or you'll be calling for a straitjacket. ... Key teaser suggestion: Health care reform is not really about covering the uninsured, and it's not about controlling cost, it's about ... something left-wingers used to understand, before they got Orszombified! ... 12:35 A.M.
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I can see 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Palin theories ... and counting: 1) She's running for president; 2) She's undergoing fame withdrawal and plans to get more attention in the lower 48; 3) She wants to cash in ($); 4) There's another shoe about to drop; 5) She'll now run against Murkowski for Senate. 6) She needs to tend to her family. 7) She's bonkers. 8) She's preggers. 9) She wants to "effect positive change outside government at this point in time on another scale and actually make a difference for our priorities." 10) Actually being a governor in a recession is no fun. Gives you ulcers. 11) She worried she wasn't giving "Alaska's issues" the attention they deserve, and was being criticized for that; 12) She's "fed up with politics ... the personal garbage" etc.. 13) She wants to fight back without one hand tied behind her back. 14) The Alaska legislature now hates her; ... These theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. ... I have no fish in this hunt. ... Update: Mediaite has an intravenous drip. ... see also HuffPo ... and NRO ... Murphy is morphing! ... The Daily Beast has a mere 11 theories. ...
P.S.: Kurtz is sure! "No way Palin can run for president now." ... Update: Now he asks, "How can these talking heads pop off about the meaning of Palin's resignation when not one of them saw it coming?" ... It's the return of Kurtz vs. Kurtz! ...
P.P.S.: I'm waiting for someone to claim it was all the Scientologists' idea. So far, no one. But the night is young. ...
15) She's in a paranoid sulk! ... 4:35 P.M.
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According to National Review's impressive indictment, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill has this payoff for organized labor:
Projects receiving grants and financing under Waxman-Markey provisions will be required to implement Davis-Bacon union-wage rules, making it hard for non-union firms to compete - and ensuring that these "investments" pay out inflated union wages. And it's not just the big research-and-development contracts, since Waxman-Markey forces union-wage rules all the way down to the plumbing-repair and light-bulb-changing level.
Stick the equivalent provision in a health care bill--requiring government-administered union wages for hospital janitors and uniform-launderers as well as nurses--and you can kiss Obama's curve-bending health-care cost-savings goodbye. ... [Thanks to reader A.] 1:42 A.M.
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"Half the U.S. servicemen in Nam lost their virginity there ..."
My BS Detector begin to vibrate and yelp at that sentence in Slate's hit-grabbing Asian babe piece. I understand that the sexual histories of those who went to Vietnam did not necessarily replicate the experiences of my friends, most of whom avoided the draft and went straight to college. Still, I'm skeptical. ... P.S.: The piece reminded me of the NYT "ethics" column in which the normally permissive Randy Cohen suddenly turned on a seemingly innocent questioner:
I'm a white male, straight, and I'm attracted to Asian women. It's a simple question of the sort of look that I find physically attractive. Recently, an Asian friend of mine (male) confided that he found my dating patterns offensive. Am I being racist, or does he have some issues of his own? --Anonymous
Here's what this is not: a simple question about looks. Here's what it is: racism, albeit not in a malicious form. ... [snip] Race is a cultural construct, a set of ideas. Before you try to date Michelle Yeoh, or Margaret Cho, or Madame Chiang Kai-shek, think a little harder about what those ideas are, about what you mean by "Asian."
O-kay! And ... huh? ... I claim the cracked, unexplained out-of-the blue severity of Cohen's response was echoed effectively in the second item of this Steve Martin parody (which was funnier when it didn't have a bright green background). ... 1:05 A.M.
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Grats to kf role model Walter Olson, who started his Overlawyered blog 10 years ago. The high process costs of litigation are what lawyers--for obvious reasons--habitually leave out of their let's-have-notice-and-a-hearing-for-everything reasoning. One thing Olson does is to put them back in. ... P.S.: Here's a pithy Olson graf on the litigation vise facing businesses, one aspect of which the Supreme Court addressed in the Ricci case:
How are employers supposed to behave when they face a possible discrimination lawsuit no matter which way they turn?
It's a question HR managers and company lawyers are used to facing every day. Would you rather field the legal claims that result from targeted layoffs, or the ones that result from sacking people regardless of performance? Would you rather face a defamation lawsuit for mentioning the reasons for a problem employee's departure, or a failure-to-warn lawsuit for not mentioning them? Will your policy on religious proselytizing in the workplace get you sued by the believers, or by the atheists?
But Justice Anthony Kennedy's solution to this problem in the Ricci case--that a city can't throw out a job test that winds up promoting whites and no blacks unless there is a "strong basis in evidence" that it would lose a subsequent discrimination lawsuit--seems an unsatisfying solution to the litigation vise.
What if a city, after reading the Ricci decision, decides there's just a wee a bit less than a "strong" basis for thinking it will lose a discrimination case, and doesn't throw out the test (lest SCOTUS smack it down)--and then loses the discrimination case anyway? That it was scared to throw out the test doesn't necessarily mean the test didn't have an unjustified "disparate impact" (The evidence might not have been overwhelmingly apparent at the time, for the city could have guessed wrong.) Justice Kennedy seems to have carved out, not a safe haven but an area of uncertainty where the outcome could typically be "lose lose." ...
But, again, maybe I'm confused or missing something. ...
P.S.: I took this item down briefly when I thought for a moment it was wrong. Now I think it is not wrong. ... 7:05 P.M.
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They're having a terrific time at the Aspen Ideas Festival! Ferguson vs. Fallows was *great,* for example. Too bad you're not invited and you're missing it! ... But you can watch some short video highlights of a few speakers here. ... P.S.: Classic Atlantic operation. Not having a fabulous exclusive party--"inspired thinking in an idyllic setting"--but expecting readers to enjoy being third-class voyeurs at your fabulous exclusive party while the invited Atlantic people tell you (now via Twitter) what a good time they're having. ... 11:05 P.M.
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Alert reader Z, who is not ill-informed, had a pithy reaction to my perhaps overconfident assertion that if Gore had won in 2000 he wouldn't have invaded Iraq after 9/11:
Gore would have invaded Iraq, or he would have lost in 2004 to...George W. Bush, who would have invaded Iraq. Similarly, had Bush refused to consider invading Iraq in 2002, Gore would have come out for it, would have been the nominee and would have beat Bush in 2004.
Z thinks "Dems were desperate for a military issue to get to the right of the Repubs, and Iraq would have been perfect." ... Hmmm. I tend to think that even if President Gore had wanted to invade Iraq after 9/11 he wouldn't have been strongheaded enough. But he is friends with Marty Peretz. And it's easy to forget how strong the pro-war CFR consensus was in 2002. ...
As for whether Gore would have mounted a successful pro-war challenge to Bush if Bush won and hadn't invaded--well, Gore would have to win the Dem primaries first. How would that have been possible on a pro-war platform? ... The one "Z" scenario I have trouble discounting is a) Gore wins b) doesn't invade c) loses in 2004 to Bush d) who invades. ... 4:27 P.M.
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