Month: May 2009

No Change

Gary Andres argues in the Weekly Standard that the GOP's leadership is the problem, not the platform. Democracy In America gives the gist:

…as ideologues sometimes forget, many voters simply don't conceive electoral politics as a contest between liberal and conservative philosophies of government, but primarily as a choice between individuals who may be personally competent or incompetent, trustworthy or corrupt. Among these voters, Mr Andres suggests, the problem is not (as moderates aver) that the party is seen as too extreme or (as conservatives insist) that Republicans need to more clearly distinguish themselves from Democrats, but that the current set of Republican standard bearers are seen as venal and inept. That's awkward for party leadership if true: An ideological problem can be fixed by moving to the right or the centre as needed; a personnel problem can only be solved by moving out. Which, one imagines, strengthens the incentive for them to conclude there's no problem.

This angle isn't wrong as such but telling the GOP's rump that ideological rigidity is a feature and not a bug probably isn't going to help win elections anytime soon. And fresh faces with exhausted policies won't help much either. What you have to do is base new policies on old principles: like, say, tax simplification as an extension of lower taxes and more accountable government. DiA notes:

…populist movements often develop explanations for why the volk aren't rallying more enthusiastically to the cause. For old school Marxists, it was our old friend "false consciousness". More recently, Thomas Frank's book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" posited cultural issues as the opiate of the masses, used by plutocrats to dupe blue-collar workers into voting against their own (supposedly more authentic) economic interests. For modern conservatives, the narrative of the liberal media seems to play much the same role.

Obama’s Healthcare Gambit

Healthcare bloggers on the left appear tentatively optimistic about the photo-op today. Drum:

My problem here isn't that the industry folks haven't proposed detailed plans or enforcement mechanisms.  That's to be expected.  My problem is that they're apparently planning to argue that things like streamlined billing and "encouraging" the use of evidence-based guidelines will be enough to entirely meet Obama's cost goals.  Cost effectiveness research?  No need!  A public plan?  No need!  It's just like 1993, when the HMO revolution was going to change medical care so dramatically that there was no need for Bill Clinton's healthcare reform.  That didn't work out so well.

Yglesias:

Whatever kind of backstabbing these industry groups may or may not do in the future, they won’t be able to take back the fact that once upon a time they stood beside the White House in agreeing that it’s possible to achieve massive cost-savings without compromising patient care. That argument may well prove hugely important, politically, to getting a package through congress.

Ezra Klein:

What we have…are promises of future cost containment that exist alongside concrete and continued opposition to the cost containment ideas that are actually on the table. And for good reason. A 1.5 percentage point decrease in health spending is a 1.5 percentage point decrease in medical industry profits. This commitment doesn't contain any examples of concessions that will reduce a participant's revenue streams. Conversely, every time legislators have proposed a reform that will actually cut industry profits — and thus cut health spending — the industry has howled in pain and anger. It's hard to sync that with promises to cut spending by $2 trillion over the next 10 years by implementing a set of unspecified reforms.

Digby:

By committing themselves to lowering costs, these industry leaders are essentially committing themselves to lower profits, which is illogical unless they see that as a best-case scenario. AHIP and some of these other groups have every incentive to guard their profits while rejecting reforms that would cut into them too heavily. For instance, cost control could be a bargain in exchange for killing the public option. The lack of detail in the letter should not go unmentioned, either, and the Administration must make mandatory some changes to reduce costs rather than relying on these former enemies of reform to voluntarily reduce. Because "reducing over-use" of health care can mean a lot of things – denying care, for example, which health insurers are really good at.

Jonathan Cohn:

Students of history may hear in Monday's announcement echoes of the infamous "Voluntary Effort"–a promise by the hospitals, during the late 1970s, to curb the cost of care in their facilities. They made the promise, in part, to derail talk of reform in Washington. And they succeeded in that. It was the cost control that, shockingly, didn't work out so well. Spending came down for one year, then started skyrocketing again.

But note the key difference between now and then: This time, the industry groups aren't promising to control costs as an alternative to reform. They're promising to control costs as part of reform. In fact, some of the efficiency steps they are proposing wouldn't even be possible without the sorts of changes now under discussion in Washington, because they require changes in legislation.

Ads In Online Calendars!

Scott Adams has an idea:

Some time ago I blogged that advertising belongs in your electronic calendar, for your benefit more than for the advertiser. That's because my interest and desire in certain products and services is linked to timing. If my calendar has a certain birthday coming up in a week, and I've checked the boxes saying the person is a certain age and gender, or has certain hobbies, my calendar can start giving me gift suggestions and recommending online flowers and e-cards and the like. In other words, advertisements can move from nuisance to valuable service just by adjusting when you see them.

I think the biggest software revolution of the future is that the calendar will be the organizing filter for most of the information flowing into your life. You think you are bombarded with too much information every day, but in reality it is just the timing of the information that is wrong. Once the calendar becomes the organizing paradigm and filter, it won't seem as if there is so much.

Dances With Numbers

Scientific American Mind talks with author and autistic savant Daniel Tammet:

Numbers assume complex, multidimensional shapes in my head that I manipulate to form the solution to sums or compare when determining whether they are prime or not. For languages, I do something similar in terms of thinking of words as belonging to clusters of meaning so that each piece of vocabulary makes sense according to its place in my mental architecture for that language. In this way, I can easily discern relations between words, which helps me to remember them. In my mind, numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page. They have form, color, texture, and so on. They come alive to me, which is why as a young child I thought of them as my “friends.” I think this is why my memory is very deep, because the information is not static. I say in my book that I do not crunch numbers (like a computer). Rather I dance with them.

His take on IQ:

The bell curve distribution for IQ scores tells us that two thirds of the world’s population has an IQ somewhere between 85 and 115. This means that some four and a half billion people around the globe share just 31 numerical values (“he’s a 94,” “you’re a 110,” “I’m a 103”), equivalent to 150 million people worldwide sharing the same IQ score. This sounds a lot to me like astrology, which lumps everyone into one of 12 signs of the zodiac.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

Who Monitored The Torture?

The interrogation and torture of Abu Zubaydah was documented very carefully as it was pursued. The FBI claims it got a lot of valuable intelligence from him by legal methods in line with Western values and the rule of law. And Cheney yesterday seemed to confirm this:

We had captured these people. We had pursued interrogation in a normal way. We decided that we needed some enhanced techniques.

Why? What had Zubaydah or KSM not said that Cheney wanted them to say? That's the key point, isn't it?

If your goal is finding out stuff you do not know, you ask questions. Leading questions, off-beat questions, irrelevant questions .. then very relevant ones. You have experts. You try all sorts of psychological strategies. You do what professional interrogators have always done, what the Brits did in Camp 020 in World War II, what Americans always did with captured spies.

But if you think you already know something – such as, oh, I don't know, say that al Qaeda was working with Saddam to detonate WMDs in America – you have to force the captive to say exactly that. How do you force them? You torture them. And if you are convinced you know exactly what the victim is refusing to say and believe this information is vital and timely, you keep a very close eye on it all. In fact, you will want constant reports and updates and cables on the situation:

CIA interrogators provided top agency officials in Langley with daily "torture" updates of Abu Zubaydah, the alleged "high-level" terrorist detainee, who was held at a secret "black site" prison and waterboarded 83 times in August 2002, according to newly released court documents obtained by this reporter. The extensive back-and-forth between CIA field operatives and agency officials in Langley likely included updates provided to senior Bush administration officials.

And you might even want to watch a video or two before the CIA destroys the evidence. Did they? Who in the white House followed the torture of Zubaydah daily? And were they ever allowed to watch the waterboarding and beating?

How The Judiciary Influences The Executive

Richard Just makes an astute point:

[Maine Gov. Baldacci] shifted his view [on marriage] because he decided that the status quo wasn't constitutional. This struck me as a noteworthy, and unusually clear, piece of evidence in the debate over the efficacy of judicial activism. … What Baldacci's comment suggests is that, as judges across the country reinterpret equal protection clauses in light of our culture's changing understanding of homosexuality, they are not merely persuading themselves or their peers in other courts; they are also persuading those outside the judicial system.