Month: August 2009

The Long Play

by Patrick Appel

Daphne Eviatar once again defends Holder prosecuting CIA interrogators who went beyond the Yoo memos:

Whether it’s a good idea to focus on these sorts of cases, which clearly went beyond the bounds laid out by the Bush Justice Department’s legal memos, or whether Holder ought to be prosecuting the authors of the memos themselves is beside the point. Because the CIA agent who clubbed a man to death or hung him from his wrists on the ceiling or left someone in sub-zero temperatures chained to the floor naked is going to have to explain how he came to think that was acceptable interrogation conduct. And that’s likely to reveal that the bounds we’ve all seen in John Yoo’s torture memos – many of which were drafted years after these murders occurred — were never articulated to the interrogators on the front lines.

Correcting The Correction

by Chris Bodenner

Ezra scores another win for Twitter:

Investor's Business Daily, incidentally, has now deleted the offending line from their editorial and published a correction. "This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK," reads the addendum.

But that's not a correction at all. IBD never claimed that Hawking didn't live in the UK. It claimed that the NHS would judge him worthless and leave him to die. That was what was wrong. And that has not been corrected by the IBD — which says a lot about how much trust readers should place in their work. Instead, it has been corrected by Hawking himself. And these many, many, many tweets. How strange that we can get better and more accurate information about international health systems from Twitter than from many of our major media outlets.

Health Care Blue Book

by Patrick Appel

The Consumerist highlights a new website that lets prospective patients find standard costs for procedures based upon zip code. The Consumerist blogger isn't thrilled:

I imagine this site can be helpful in rooting out price gougers or helping people decide whether they can afford liposuction. But that strikes me as its only good use. Do you really want to choose a surgeon or hospital based on price? Healthcare is such a complex matter that the typical consumer isn't equipped to understand the difference between methods and procedures, between what's necessary and not.

By itself this website isn't enough, but if health insurance company websites provided this sort of analysis along with online tools to rank and review doctors it would be much easier to determine the best value and the best doctors. Yelp.com does this for restaurants. Amazon.com does this for merchandise. Why can't we mandate that insurance companies do this for health care? I've often looked through approved providers on my health insurance company's website but have no way to determine the quality of various doctors without googling them to see if they have been rated and reviewed elsewhere. Often there is no information to be found, so I pick a doctor based upon geographic location. There is a better way.

Beatings At The Bazaar

by Chris Bodenner

An Iranian tweets the latest protest:

The “green shopping” protest planned for today turned into violence with police interference

Plain cloths & special forces in Naser Khosro, Bouzar Jomehori & other streets leading to bazaar were beating ppl

People were chanting “Down with the dictator” & “This poor government is illegitimate”.

IRIB teams were filming the bazaar trying to create a video showing bazaar was calm.

This is the first time since #iranelection that protesters gather in Tehran’s bazaar

(Hat tip: NIAC)

Framing The Debate

by Patrick Appel

Rod Dreher speaks up:

I was talking the other day to a friend who is really frightened of the healthcare bill, saying that he won't be able to get the care he's used to. I'm not sure how true that is, but what troubles me about critics of health care reform is the lack of concern from many of them about the uninsured. I have a good friend who just lost his job. He has a young son with a chronic health issue. COBRA is going to cost them $1,800 a month, for as long as it lasts. What if he can't find work before it runs out? What if the work he finds doesn't come with health insurance? By the grace of God and the generosity of my employer, I have good health insurance. But what if I lost my job tomorrow?

Look, I'm not saying that we should not be concerned about, and not oppose Obama's proposed healthcare reform, if it truly is a bad deal. But it's not enough to say, "Hey, it's going to mess with my healthcare, and I'm going to fight it tooth and nail." The situation we're in now is intolerable, and unsustainable, and we don't do the country any good by adopting the Democratic Party's line on Social Security — namely, that any attempt to reform a broken system that would cost any current recipient anything is completely wicked and must be opposed.

The Value Of Shitty Work

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

To the people who say that the unemployed should accept menial jobs, I would say… why should I? Speaking from personal experience, I put in 4 years getting an undergraduate degree and 2 years getting a professional certification so that I wouldn't have to work in a warehouse. From an economic standpoint, does it make sense to force talented workers into dead-end jobs just to survive? Or to give them a safety net, and let them find a job more suited to their skills?

I'm with this reader:

I worked a number of jobs in college to make ends meet. My parents were able (and gracious) to help me out my freshman year, but with two more siblings following me to college in short order, I knew I had to get off the parental dole after that. I was fortunate to have an academic scholarship to pay for tuition, so all I had to cover was room, board and incidentals (including books). I worked at McDonald's and as an overnight stocker in a grocery store in the summers, and during the school year in the cafeteria and at a tutoring center. These experiences have led to my "shitty job" theory: everyone should have to work a shitty job at least once in their lives. It does two important things for you:

1) It inspires you to achieve something greater. We called the full-time year-round workers at McDonald's "McLifers". It was a future I would have done anything to avoid – I viewed it as the prison sentence it sounds like- and I worked hard to make sure when I left I wouldn't have to come back.

2) It gives you some empathy for people who have to make a living at a shitty job. I still neaten up displays at the grocery store – I won't leave things in the wrong places and when I put some thing in my cart I move the one behind it to the front of the shelf. I remember people taking out their frustration on me – a woman screaming at me about the price of a kid's drink, as if I was the one responsible for setting the price, people throwing things at you ("I asked for BBQ sauce, not Sweet-n-Sour!!!") I have my bad days too, but having been on the receiving end, I try not to inflict them on innocent bystanders, and to remember it's not the end of the world if someone puts onions on my hamburger.

After four waiting jobs, I never tip below 20%.

Immigration Reform In 2010?

by Patrick Appel

DiA sizes up the politics of tackling immigration in an election year:

[M]aybe introducing an immigration bill in spring 2010 and having it dominate the headlines in the summer of a mid-term election year would be great for Democrats. As the Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court confirmation battle showed, the overwhelmingly white conservative core of the Republican Party can be reliably counted on to go absolutely crazy over anything connected to racial diversity and the fossilised remains of the issue formerly known as "political correctness". It's true that immigration reform caused George Bush immense political trouble in 2006. But the reason why it caused him trouble was that it caused a far-right revolt among white conservatives, whose racially tinged invective devastated Republican Party support among Hispanics. Mr Bush's immigration reform efforts were excellent politics—for Democrats.