Month: November 2009

Talking About Healthcare, Forevermore

Suderman worries:

Reform won't just mess up our health care system, it will infect our political system; the more our politics and our health care are tied together, the more our political debates will become indistinguishable from our health care debates. They'll become permanently intertwined, going on and on, forever and ever, cable news without end.

Ross adds:

[S]ince the stakes are literally life and death, it stands to reason that the more power the government has to divvy up health care dollars, the more rancorous these debates will get. “Death panels” and “Republicans want you to die quickly” are just the beginning …

I agree.

When you listen to political debates in Britain, every politician is subject to the accusation that they effectively killed some patient who needed some treatment that he or she didn't get in time or ever. Anyone who tries to cut healthcare spending becomes a mass murderer overnight.

The difference, of course, is that the British government does have direct control over these things – because healthcare really is socialized in Britain. In America, under the likely reforms, health insurance companies will bear the overwhelming burden of making such decisions. But that assumes rationality on the part of politicians. We know that in America, on most issues, such rationality always cedes to demagoguery. But equally, the government clearly needs to do something to make the current system less callous and less fiscally insane.

Yglesias Award Nominee

"[T]here is no question about the legitimacy of U.S. federal courts to incapacitate terrorists. Many of Holder’s critics appear to have forgotten that the Bush administration used civilian courts to put away dozens of terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid; al-Qaeda agent Jose Padilla; “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh; the Lackawanna Six; and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was prosecuted for the same conspiracy for which Mohammed is likely to be charged. Many of these terrorists are locked in a supermax prison in Colorado, never to be seen again," – Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith, deputy attorney general and assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, respectively.

Fox News’ Internal Names For Obama Jpegs

The fair and balanced outfit gets busted yet again:
has its innards exposed Picture-16
Megan thinks scrutinizing them is a good good thing.
 UPDATE: There is, it turns out, a much more innocent explanation for this, as a reader explains:

I am a former intern in Fox News’ web department, and I can tell you with certainty that “Doomsday” and “Monster” are internal code names used to describe the dimensions of images that appear on the FoxNews.com home page.

A “Doomsday Top” describes a wide oversized image, like the one of Obama’s War Council in this example.  When FoxNews.com goes into “Doomsday Mode,” a single story will appear above the fold with one large photograph, such as this one.

Likewise, “Monster” corresponds to another image size: Big, but not quite as big as Doomsday.  You will notice that the two images with the Monster title are the same size.

The fact that nobody bothered to rename these images something less ominous certainly constitutes laziness or carelessness on somebody’s part, but probably nothing more.

That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, and “busted” is therefore inaccurate. Apologies. But the phrase “Doomsday Top” will not easily slip my consciousness.

Go Big Or Pull Out?

Tom Ricks reviews David Kilcullen's speech from earlier in the week:

[Kilcullen's] bottom line is that there are two real options in Afghanistan: Either tell the Kabul government we are pulling out, or put in enough troops to actually break the cycle of corruption, which he said would be a minimum of about 40,000. “We either put in enough to control, or we get out.” The worst thing we could do, he added, is put in enough troops to get more people killed but not enough to do anything to break change the behavior of corrupt officials. Also, he said, it is more about what you do than the actual number of troops — “If you do it wrong, you could put it a million troops and it wouldn’t make any difference.”

I just don't believe this is doable without a flawless decades-long occupation. And the odds of that are tiny and the cost beyond any rational measurement of costs and benefits. I believe Obama knows this because he is not crazy, but he also knows that withdrawal would be used by the GOP to flay him alive for a war they botched but they insist he must now somehow save.

I'm glad I'm not the president, aren't you?

(Hat tip: Ordinary Gentlemen).