Month: November 2009

The Daily What:

Cancer-stricken Disney characters by MMS Recife for the Children’s Cancer Support Center. Copy: “Once upon a time a girl dreamed to be just like other children.” Hi-res: Little Mermaid; Snow White; Pinocchio.

Just one snapshot:

Megan warns:

[Government bankruptcy] is not inevitable; it is theoretically possible to raise taxes to cope with Medicare growth, though it would be extraordinarily painful to do so.   In the face of fiscal crisis, it might also be possible to make Medicare cuts that we have otherwise been unable to stick with.  But as any competent development economist will be happy to tell you, every dollar you add, or interest group you create, makes it less likely that this sort of resolution will happen.

Matt Steinglass counters:

Right now, Medicare cuts are politically off-limits. You need to have a countervailing political claim to make them possible. The need to create universal health insurance coverage is that countervailing claim. Our political system has never been able to approach the idea of cuts to Medicare. Until now. Barack Obama is the first president who may be able to pass Medicare cuts, because he’s doing it as part of a bid for universal health insurance.

The Kentucky State Police report:

The Kentucky State Police Post 11 in London, with the assistance of the FBI, the U.S. Forest Service, the State Medical Examiner’s Office and the Clay County Coroner’s Office, has concluded the investigation into the death of William E. Sparkman, Jr.

The investigation, based upon evidence and witness testimony, has concluded that Mr. Sparkman died during an intentional, self-inflicted act that was staged to appear as a homicide.

While all the details of the investigation will not be released at this time, the unusual level of attention and speculation attributed to Mr. Sparkman’s death necessitates this release of information. The investigation indicates that Mr. Sparkman died of asphyxiation/strangulation at the same location where he was discovered in Clay County, Ky. Despite the fact that Mr. Sparkman was found hands, feet and mouth bound with duct tape, rope around his neck and the word “FED” written on his chest, analysis of the evidence determined Mr. Sparkman’s death was self-inflicted.

A thorough examination of evidence from the scene, to include DNA testing, as well as examination of his vehicle and his residence resulted in the determination that Mr. Sparkman, alone, handled the key pieces of evidence with no indications of any other persons involved. Witness statements, which are deemed credible, indicate Mr. Sparkman discussed ending his own life and these discussions matched details discovered during the course of the investigation.

It was learned that Mr. Sparkman had discussed recent federal investigations and the perceived negative attitudes toward federal entities by some residents of Clay County. It was also discovered during the investigation that Mr. Sparkman had recently secured two life insurance policies for which payment for suicide was precluded.

All tips and leads, including those from the public, were thoroughly investigated but were found to be inconsistent with any known facts or evidence. It is the conclusion of the Kentucky State Police, the FBI, the U.S. Forest Service, the State Medical Examiner’s Office, and the Clay County Coroner’s Office that Mr. Sparkman died in an intentional, self-inflicted act that was staged to appear as a homicide.

A reader writes:

It's very simple why women don't like her as much as men. Women saw through Sarah Palin and we saw through her quickly. Men are literal and are more likely to say what they mean  and mean what they say. Women are more nuanced and better able to persuade and manipulate others with their words. So it's quite natural for us to be able to look below the surface of another woman's words and grasp the intentions behind them. 

Sarah Palin is the peppy cheerleader in high school all the boys thought was so sweet but the girls knew was really a vicious shrew. She's the new girl in the office who wears tight shirts and three-inch heels, is super-friendly to her male superiors, ignores the other women, and gets promoted sooner than her more capable and hard working peers. She's the outgoing PTA mom all of the other women are scared to cross because they will find themselves put on the worst committees. Only a woman knows how to give another woman a sweet smile and at the same time cut her down to size with an artfully crafted "compliment" without male observers having a clue about what just happened. It's like a dog whistle.

After her convention speech that so many pundits raved about, I talked to a few of my Republican girlfriends and they all disliked her immediately, telling me things like, "she's mean", "who does she think she is putting Obama down like that" and "I just don't like her". And these were women who, all except one, ended up voting for McCain anyway, although much less enthusiastically than they would have before his VP pick. The one who switched her vote to Obama did so solely because of Sarah Palin. It wasn't really the attack lines the McCain camp gave her to deliver that had turned my friends off. It was the relish with which she delivered them.

The Republican women I know who love Palin are a great deal like her–simplistic thinkers who are always feeling victimized themselves. I have a feeling that if the McCain camp had spent more than a weekend checking Palin out, a woman on his staff (my money would be on Nicole Wallace) would have figured out what kind of person she was and none of us would know her name right now.

And let's face it: the straight men are also bedazzled by the beauty. Men are led first and foremost by an organ a little cruder than the brain. And Rich Lowry's starbursts – God love him – render him merely human. And blind.

(Photo: Sarah Palin holding her infant with Down Syndrome on a book tour stop in Roanoke, Virginia.)

Just a reminder. December 2006:

I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq. I heard on the news about the new deployments, and while I support our president, Condoleezza Rice and the administration, I want to know that we have an exit plan in place; I want assurances that we are doing all we can to keep our troops safe.

My italics. Today:

“I want our president and this administration to listen to the advisers who they hired. McChrystal, for one, back in March, telling the president, 'Here's what we're going to need there' and then ramping up that advice lately, saying, 'Mr. President, here's what we need in Afghanistan to win, to make sure that those terror cells don't grow, so that those terrorists don't come back over to the homeland in America, on our soil, and kill innocent Americans.'”

Haleakala National Park, Hawaii, 12.22 pm

Tyler Cowen joins the fray:

Krugman writes: "Belgium is politically weak because of the linguistic divide; Italy is politically weak because it’s Italy. If these countries can run up debts of more than 100 percent of GDP without being destroyed by bond vigilantes, so can we."

I would interpret this evidence differently.  A high deficit often is an unfavorable symptom of bad politics, even if you think the high deficit is economically OK on its own terms.  It's a sign that you have dysfunctional institutions and decision-making procedures, as indeed they do in Belgium and Italy.  I believe that the not-always-swift American voter in fact understands high deficits — correctly — in this light.  They don't hold theories about "crowding out," rather they sense something in the house must be rotten.  And so they rail against deficits, as do some of their elected representatives.  It's a more justified reaction than the pure economics alone can illuminate.

When water regularly overflows from your toilet, you want the toilet fixed, whether or not the water is doing harm.

I'm a worry-wart on this as readers know. I understand the dangers of deficit reduction when demand is so vulnerable. But the dangers of the kind of debt the US is now holding are immense. It's textbook imperial collapse/welfare state sclerosis combined.

And it's driven in my view by three interest groups: corporate America, the elderly, and the military. Until conservatives tackle all three – ending corporate welfare through radical tax reform and simplification, controlling middle-class entitlements by raising the retirement age, and ending defense expenditures that underpin an unsustainable global hegemony – their message will not convince.

But if conservatives can show that they can tackle corporate welfare as well as entitlements, and if they can begin the task of realizing that their occupations of two countries are government programs with no end in sight, and if they can drop their fundamentalist approach to social policy, and allow for states to go their own way, then we're talking.

I just see a long way from here to there. But maybe all this ugliness and its political futility will help accelerate the end of denial and rage and begin a process of thought and argument. I can hope, can't I?

Palin is now accusing president Obama of not acknowledging the sacrifices of the troops:

“There’s been a lack of acknowledgement by our president in understanding what it is that the American military provides in terms of, obviously, the safety, the security of our country. I want him to acknowledge the sacrifices that these individual men and women — our sons, our daughters, our moms, our dads, our brothers and sisters — are providing this country to keep us safe.”

One imagines that, to take just two recent examples, she did not hear the president's Fort Hood speech or know of his recent trip to Dover. But of course, the reality is not what matters. What matters is attacking the president of the United States as a traitor to his own soldiers. And what is in the interest of those soldiers? More war, of course. And no presidential analysis of strategy – just being "tough" and adopting maximalist interventionism.

Check out Ron Brownstein's weekend health insurance reform post, which president Obama instructed his aides to read at yesterday's senior staff meeting. It's an argument that the Reid bill is actually much better on cost-containment than some feared; and closely aligns itself with Baucus. Money lede:

When I reached Jonathan Gruber on Thursday, he was working his way,

page by laborious page, through the mammoth health care bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had unveiled just a few hours earlier. Gruber is a leading health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulted by politicians in both parties. He was one of almost two dozen top economists who sent President Obama a letter earlier this month insisting that reform won't succeed unless it "bends the curve" in the long-term growth of health care costs. And, on that front, Gruber likes what he sees in the Reid proposal. Actually he

likes it a lot.

"I'm sort of a known skeptic on this stuff," Gruber told me. "My summary is it's really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can't think of a thing to try that they didn't try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here….I can't think of anything I'd do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn't have done better than they are doing."

Gruber may be especially effusive. But the Senate blueprint, which faces its first votes tonight, also is winning praise from other leading health reformers like Mark McClellan, the former director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under George W. Bush and Len Nichols, health policy director at the centrist New America Foundation. "The bottom line," Nichols says, "is the legislation is sending a signal that business as usual [in the medical system] is going to end."

The rest here.