Month: August 2009

Deal Hudson is worried.

This is a very helpful post from Goldblog:

The best cops would not, I suspect, disagree. But even the best cops have bad days. And it’s always safer to be Harold than Kumar.

Israelis still don't seem to get it. And with distressing acts of forced removal of Palestinians from homes they have lived in for decades to accommodate Jewish activists, they are making things worse. Tom Friedman has some tough love:

For a very helpful guide to the online debate about this, check out the Atlantic Wire, our new, smart aggregator feature.

A story from the 1895 archives of the New York Journal – wherein a German anti-Semite gives a public lecture in NYC and gets … well, it's from the days when newspaper writers were allowed to write.

Abbas Milani examines Ahmadi's defiance towards a regime that created him:

Even after a week-long delay in acknowledging Khamenei's order [to fire his deputy], Ahmadinejad still did not fully carry it out. He wrote back a note–terse, angry and defiant in tone–declaring that Mashai had decided to resign his post (rather then being dismissed, as Khamenei had decreed). More incredible still, Ahmadinejad appointed Mashai to the important position of his own chief of staff and special advisor to the president–in brazen defiance of Khamenei and nearly the entire top clerical establishment of the regime. […]

The events of the past few days reveal the June 12 electoral coup's chickens coming home to roost. The regime handed Ahmedinejad a landslide victory–and he wasted no time in exercising his power accordingly, even against those that manufactured his win. It seems that, like the rest of the nation, he sees the nearing end of Khamenei's days as an absolutist ruler, and is trying to establish an independent turf of his own.

A great interview with Michael Lewis by Terrence McNally on banking reform. Michael is unimpressed with the lameness of the Geithner package. Money quote:

When you think about corruption, there's the simple kind where I give you $1000 to interview me on the radio so it will promote my book. That's corrupt and we both know it. But there's a different sort of corruption where we're all part of a system that is rewarding us very well to pay attention to certain things and not pay attention to others. We're paid to have blind spots. There's an awful lot of that kind of corruption in the financial system because people's incentives are all screwed up.

Ratings agencies were paid by the people who issued the bonds to put the triple A rating on them. Their incentive is to please the people who are issuing the securities. They can't at the same time independently judge the securities.

Why on earth is Obama not planning on making it illegal for

for issuers to pay raters for ratings? It's a bribe. Instead the administration says they're going to give the regulators more authority to evaluate ratings agencies. That doesn't do anything; they already had that authority.

And she was insured!

Those are the perils of the current insurance market, and in the Beltway rush to spin the healthcare battle in terms of the fate of Obama's presidency, we forget that even a minimal bill would end this kind of nightmare. And that's a good thing, if we can find a way to afford it.

Did John Bolton just call for getting rid of them? And am I allowed to acknowledge publicly that they exist but we can't talk about them?

Some pushback from yours truly against the notion that the president’s attempt to address the cost and access of healthcare in America has been some kind of failure so far:

I suspect that what we’ll end up with will be the healthcare equivalent of the emerging climate change legislation. The structure for a saner policy will be laid down but none of the hard choices will be made now. Companies and unions will be too strong to give up their tax break; it will take years for the efficiencies of electronic records to take effect; the fee-for-service model will continue to push costs up; the public plan will be anemic; and in a short while Congress will have to return to the system and impose sacrifices. At some point, Americans will have to pay more, get less and adjust to a more collective system. Just not now.

As for Obama? He’ll get credit and also take some flak. He will be blamed for any reduction in healthcare provision and choice; but the public deep down know that the status quo is unsustainable for much longer. So they’ll see him as their community organizer for more pragmatic change, not the savior who will end all their problems.

And that’s a good thing. The full column is here.

(Photo: the president last week by Jim Watson/Getty.)

Juan Cole in Salon compares Sarah Palin to Ahmadinejad and finds "a surprising amount in common."