Month: August 2009

by Patrick Appel

Ryan Avent takes me to task. My comment was sloppy. I agree with pretty much everything he says, partially because I've no car in DC and rely on my bike for almost everything. The anger this debate inspires among readers always amazes me. When I lived in the suburbs, I drove everywhere; living in the city I either bike, walk, or ride public transit. I've no anger at any mode of transportation, though bikes are often given little consideration by urban planners, at least in DC. That fact is going to have to change when oil spikes again. This reminds me that I've been meaning to post about this statistic: you would need a 228-lane Brooklyn Bridge to replace NYC's subway system:

Public transit and biking aren't a cure all, but maximizing those options where we can is common sense.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

by Patrick Appel

The mancession continues: women are close to representing a majority of the workforce.

by Chris Bodenner

Congressman Ike Skelton, in an open letter to Gates yesterday, became the most senior Democrat to oppose the transfer of detainees to Fort Leavenworth. Although Skelton recognizes that Gitmo is a “recruiting tool for those who would seek to harm us,” he insists that the USDB – the military’s only maximum-security prison – is not a suitable alternative.

His first concern is over the cost of outfitting the facility to ensure that foreign and domestic prisoners are segregated, per military law. But any Gitmo transfer is going to cost millions in added security. And the USDB, just seven years old, is already top notch.  Also, are alleged terrorists really the issue Skelton wants to spend his fiscally-conservative capital on?

His second concern is even less comprehensible:

I have strong indications that, if detainees from Guantanamo were to be transferred to Fort Leavenworth, a number of Muslim countries would decline to continue to send their students to the Command and General Staff College. This would have a very negative outcome for our military officers, the school, and the health of our relationships with Muslim nations.

Brownback has used this same excuse for a while now, but I have yet to see a single statement from a Muslim student or foreign official expressing such concerns. What exactly are these “strong indications”? Skelton’s logic is confounding: If Gitmo has “tarnished the otherwise sterling reputation of our Armed Forces and our country,” then why haven’t Muslim students boycotted the college already? And now that Obama has ended the torture policies of Gitmo, and its closure would erase the stigma of Gitmo, what else is there to protest?

While Skelton avoids using the NIMBY rhetoric of his Republican counterparts, the fact that his Missouri congressional district is just a few dozen miles from Fort Leavenworth sends an implicit “not in my backyard.” At least Republicans like Brownback have the consistency to oppose both the Gitmo closure and the transfer; they don’t think that detainees should be in the US at all. Skelton does – just not near his voters.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

This has got to be your worst post that I've read, Patrick, and not worthy of the Dish. The very book that's being attacked here refutes almost every argument presented. Did anyone actually read the damn book? This author is a vicious and willfully ignorant denialist, and his supposed indictments of Pollan are so tone-deaf that I find it almost impossible to believe he even read this pragmatic, sensible, and well-supported book.

You wrote '"sustainability" gone too far.' There is no such thing as sustainability gone too far. The very idea is infuriating. Sustainability means not letting anything go too far–and that's exactly what Pollan advocates. It's like "sensibility gone too far" or "decency gone too far." Come on. Nothing in Michael Pollan's suggestions is economically unsound, and indeed, what he prescribes is as necessary as any plan to root out a big, big problem, like the ones we face with health care or the environment.

I've not read Pollan's book (it's on my long list), though I've read many, but not all, of his columns. I thought that the Hurst paragraph quoted made an undervalued point, though parts of the linked article are annoyingly partisan. My comment was directed more towards the sloppy economics of some organic boosters and GM haters generally rather than Pollan specifically. The slow food movement, organic produce, and local eating are all wonderful trends, but this excellent Prospect article from a few years ago changed my mind about the practicality of their widespread adoption. Another reader:

After reviewing Blake Hurst's so-called attack on Michael Pollan, I have to wonder if he really even read The Omnivore's Dilemma. First, Pollan is as critical of industrial organic farming as he is of industrial farming in general because he thinks that centralized food production makes us susceptible to attack or disease and limits the diversity in a healthy diet and severs important cultural ties to food. He came away from writing the book an advocate of local polyculture, not an advocate of organic farming. Hurst claims that "Pollan thinks farmers use commercial fertilizer because it's easier, and because it's cheap. Pollan is right. But those are perfectly defensible reasons." That's false. Pollan thinks farmers use commercial fertilizer because they have to, because they've removed other sources of fertilizer, like cattle, from the farm and placed them in CAFOs or concentrated animal feeding operations where they are fed corn (something their bodies have not evolved to digest) and antiobiotics.

The documentary King Corn reveals that 70% of all the antibiotics in the US are fed to animals that humans eat. The animal waste generated by a CAFO, which once might have fertilized the soil, is now its own problem as well. Pollan is undoubtedly idealistic, but I don't think he's as naive as Hurst claims. He is simply arguing that we must eventually begin turning to solar sources of energy in agriculture and relying less on petroleum to sustain it. He also knows that we have to find ways to do that on a large scale and is looking to places like Argentina where cattle-crop rotation is performed on an industrial scale. Moreover, his arguments for the relationship between food product and chronic disease is strong. This is about more than agriculture alone, and I don't think Pollan would ever describe the use of pesticides as easy or cheap. That's simply not the basis of his critique, and anyone who has read his book could see that.  

A reader writes:

A comment from this reader finally got me to write out my experience.

“To me, the worst part of the American health care financing system is that you can't tell what your treatment will cost.”

Amen to that. I am a graduate student at a large state school in Illinois. My wife and I wanted to start our family before graduating. Her biological clock was ticking, so she said. The first thing we did in planning was look into health insurance. The school provides insurance to its students at a low, subsidized rate. However, if a student wants to add a spouse, the rate jumps to about $1200 per semester (less for a child). Pretty high percentage of a grad student stipend, but at least it would cover a pregnancy within one year of purchasing the policy (nothing else I found would). It is a typical 80/20 plan after deductible. Naively, we thought this meant that after the deductible was met, they would pay 80% of the remaining cost. Not so. They pay 80% of what they call the “usual and customary” charges for whatever procedure you have. Anything over that magical number is completely your responsibility. How do you find out if your hospital/doctor/surgeon will charge you at or below this number? For all intents and purposes – you can’t.

This is how it was explained to me: There is a code for each procedure in every region of the country. And this code is the only way an insurance rep can look up what they deem usual and customary. They cannot look up the procedure name, only the code. So if you really want to know what, say a pregnancy is going to cost, you somehow have to get the hospital/doctor office to tell you what the insurance code is for every possible procedure you may have – a separate one for everything from a simple blood test, to an ultrasound, to a c-section surgery – and then tell you how much that procedure costs. Just imagine how much work this would be for everything associated with even a routine pregnancy. I certainly don’t have that much time to spend on the phone (assuming you can find someone who knows the codes and is able/willing to tell you). Then after all that, you have to call the insurance company and ask them what the usual and customary charges are for the codes and compare that to what you got from the doctor. Of course I have yet to mention that you have to figure out if there is a discount negotiated between your doctor and the insurance company (probably), which changes everything. We really had no idea if the prenatal visits and delivery would end up being thousands of dollars above the usual and customary amount. Maybe a vaginal delivery would be under, but a c-section wouldn’t. You don’t know. And what about emergencies? You’re supposed to do all this after realizing you’re having a heart attack so you know which hospital you should have the ambulance take you to?

Now here’s some irony for you. My wife had to quit working when she was put on bed rest at 28 weeks. This lowered our income enough that we qualified for Illinois’s All Kids program (thank you ex-Governor “Blago”). The entire pregnancy ended up costing us nothing. Now, a year later, we are extremely happy with the All Kids care my wife and son are now on. The money we save on medical costs just about make up for her not working.

by Robert Wright

Today Eugene Robinson argues that Obama aided and abetted the now-hysterical fears of health-care “rationing”:  

Reform is being sold not just as a moral obligation but also as a way to control rising health care costs. That should have been a separate discussion. It is not illogical for skeptics to suspect that if millions of people are going to be newly covered by health insurance, either costs are going to skyrocket or services are going to be curtailed.

Mickey Kaus has been pushing this meme for awhile, but I guess now that it’s moved from the Slate-blog part of the Washington Post empire to the newpspaper-op-ed part, we should take it seriously. It may give too little credit to the ruthlessly efficient messaging machines of the Republican party and the health-care industry. I don’t think Obama had to dwell long or loudly on cost containment for them to sense and exploit its perverse political potential. (And, on a similarly cynical note, I don’t think it matters much, politically speaking, whether Jon Cohn is right in saying that Obama’s plan would indeed control costs.) 

I certainly agree that Obama’s emphasis should have been more on the immediate personal benefits of reliable health coverage and less on distant, collective fiscal benefits. I’m just not sure this would have saved us from Sarah Palin’s death panels. 

by Patrick Appel

Adam Serwer applies the House Slave/Field Slave analogy to liberal Jews:

Ta-Nehisi chips in his two cents.

by Chris Bodenner

A Swedish expat in New York delivers:

I was amused to read the post about the Swedish Apoliva commercial. Below are the original lyrics, assuming I understood them correctly, with my clumsy English translation. The melody is actually from a traditional Swedish folk song.

Solen har vänt sig bort,
den bliver här alltför kort.
Men aldrig ska vindens hand,
driva dig, från mig.
Och molnen de skingras när,
du håller mig kär. The sun has turned away,
it stays here far too short.
But never will the hand of the wind,
push you away from me.
And the clouds they are dispersed,
when you hold me dear.

A reader in Sweden adds:

The song is very sweet, actually. Old Swedish love songs often have a vague menacing undertone, even when the words express happiness.

Another:

The Facebook reaction to the ad is hilarious! The advertisers are apparently trying to evoke the gloom of typical Swedish weather, and the message is that this particular brand of cosmetics is designed for the conditions Swedes “face.”

Another:

The visuals look much like the opening and closing of the film, "Lat den ratte komma in" ("Let the Right One In"). Add a too-pale girl with dark, sunken eye sockets, and you've got the makings of the next Swedish vampire-romance classic. I'm scared too, yet I can't look away.

And a final reader from Sweden:

Funny to find the freaky Apoliva-girl on the Dish! There has been headlines such as "Why the Apoliva girl scares the shit out of you" on Swedish newspapers lately, but I myself had not seen the clip. I'm gonna try falling asleep after having seen this, good night…

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I disagree with your friend who considers Stewart “toothless.”  It is precisely the fact that he is not overtly confrontational that make his interviews some of the most eminently watchable on TV. I am a big fan of Keith Olberman, but his interviews are almost unwatchable. His questions are merely setups for his own predispositions. You pretty much know the outcome of his interview once you know who the guest is. They are there to say, “You betcha Keith, and here is some more info that backs up that assertion-disguised-as-a-question.”

That is not the case with Stewart. I liken him to a more humorous and liberal Buckley in that aspect (though Buckley could be cuttingly funny). Stewart obviously has respect for the person he is debating/interviewing. He might not have the killer instinct of Buckley, but he is far from toothless.

A sample of Buckley's killer instinct after the jump:

And of course there is this classic exchange between him and Vidal.