Month: May 2009

Taking Dr. Doom’s Temperature

He has stopped predicting financial Armageddon:

Roubini says he doesn’t see much in the way of “glimmers of hope” other economists have noted. Unemployment, capital investment, and exports are all worsening, and while there are a few signs of stability in housing, it’s not much. Overall, he figures, the odds of a prolonged “L-shaped” depression have fallen to less than 20%, from about 30%, thanks largely to the efforts of this administration and, to some extent, the last. He expects global contraction of 2% this year, and expansion of about 0.5% next year, “so small it’s going to feel like a recession still.”

Still, he adds: “I don’t worry as much as six months ago about a near depression.” From the man who has been called Dr. Doom – or, as he prefers, Dr. Realistic – that’s practically cheery.

The Freeing Of Roxana Saberi

Room For Debate enlists pundits to discuss what her release means. Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, thinks that the bad publicity was intentional:

Iran’s hard-liners may have calculated that after four months, the costs of holding on to Roxana Saberi outweighed any continued benefits. After all, there are now many voices in Washington arguing that engaging Tehran’s leadership is an exercise in futility. The Obama administration should understand that this is precisely the conclusion her jailers would like us to draw.

Obama’s Healthcare Gambit, Ctd.

Megan doesn't approve of Obama's overtures:

This is all very well as political theater; politicians convene never-never working groups all the time.  But, being perhaps too cynical, I suspect that the announced plan to save $2 trillion is going to be used to sell Obama's healthcare plan as if we'd already found it.  Then when oh, darn, the SEIU doesn't agree to hold down wages or eliminate jobs, and pharma ratchets up the average price it charges the private sector to make sure it doesn't lose too much on its mandatory Medicaid discounts, etc, well, we'll all just have to dig into our pockets to pay for it, won't we?

Mish is also skeptical of the costs:

Obama has a plan, and that plan is an estimated 50%, $634 billion in the hole at the outset (the estimated amount over 10 years). However, government programs are always much more expensive implemented than proposed. Therefore, a more reasonable estimate of costs might be 2-5 times greater than proposed. And even if by some miracle the costs come in as expected, the world's most expensive healthcare system is about to get much more expensive.

This is not a plan, it's a nightmare.

Robert Reich is scared that the public option will be axed:

The only troubling thing about the President's statements today concerning health care reform was what he did not say: that he wanted a any health plan that emerges from Congress to include a public insurance option for Americans who do not want to buy private insurance. But without this option, there will be no pressure on private insurers to adopt all the other reforms to control costs or give all Americans access to affordable care.

And health care blogger Maggie Mahar wants the industry to cut deeper:

Going forward, spending on health care cannot grow more than GDP. And  we know that GDP is not going to be growing by 6.6 percent –the projected annual growth rate for health care spending. Over the next year or two , GDP might grow by 1% to 2%. If we are going to provide coverage for all Americans, and provide subsidies for those who cannot afford it, we’ll  need to save more than 1 ½ percent a year that the industry is talking about—or raise taxes substantially.

Who Was President When You Turned 18?

Nate Silver homes in on one Gallup question:

… the popularity — or lack thereof — of the President when the voter turned 18 would seem to have a lot of explanatory power for how their politics turned out later on…[T]his points toward the idea that partisan identification — while not exactly being "hard-wired" — can be quite persistent as the voter moves through her lifecourse. Voters who came of age during the eight years of the Bush Presidency are roughly eight points more Democratic than the rest of the country; that advantage could be worth an extra point or two to Democrats throughout the next half-century.

Republicanism has been branded as toxic in the imagination of a generation. That won't end soon. And if Obama manages to engineer an economic recovery that lasts … then the retrospective could hurt the GOP for the rest of our lifetime. Rove will have managed the durable majority he long sought – for the Dems.

Star Trek And Torture

The new movie has a stock torture scenario apparently. The show had a more interesting take in 1992:

In a last-ditch attempt to break Picard, the Cardassian interrogator offers him a choice: Either state that there are five lights and enjoy a life of comfort, or insist that there are four and prepare for more torture. Before Picard can answer, two Cardassian guards enter and reveal that the Enterprise has brokered the captain's release. "There are four lights!" Picard shouts, in what seems like a triumph. Later, though, he admits to a fellow officer that he was on the brink of succumbing: "I would have told him anything. Anything at all. But more than that, I believed that I could see five lights."

How strongly did Cheney believe in the al Qaeda-Saddam connection? Strongly enough to torture this "truth" out of a human being under his total control.