Month: December 2009

A prominent Iranian twitterer tweets:

Mousavi’s car attacked by plainclothes on the way to Tehran

Attackers damaged the car but no one were injured and Mousavi is safe

Mackey elaborates:

My colleague Nazila Fathi writes to say that the opposition Web site Rahesabz reported that Mir Hussein Moussavi’s convoy was attacked and one of his bodyguards was injured. According to the Web site, a group of Basiji militia members followed Mr. Moussavi’s convoy in Qum on motorcycles and blocked it several times. At one point, they attacked Mr. Moussavi’s car and smashed the rear window which injured one of his bodyguards. Mr. Moussavi was not hurt. The leader of the group was also injured after one the bodyguards confronted them.

Take it away, Confederate Yankee:

Robert Byrd has been around a very long time, and his many decades of service have made West Virginia a wonderful state in which to manufacture methamphetamine or frame the locals for murder. But it's time for Senator to do the right thing, and expire. It isn't too much to ask for Byrd to step off for that great klavern in the sky before the Senate vote that may force this nation to accept government-rationed health care. Even a nice coma would do. Without his frail, Gollum-like body being wheeled into the Senate's chambers to cast the deciding vote, the Senate cannot curse our children and grandchildren with crushing debt and rationed, substandard healthcare.

Jon Cohn gets down to specifics:

A family making $50,000 will have to make serious sacrifices to find $10,000 [the amount you're likely to spend for an insurance policy under the new law]. But it’s better–light years better–than finding $25,000 or more [the amont you'd have to find without the new law]. It’s potentially the difference between having to give up your home, get an extra job or declare bankruptcy. Just knowing the bills that could come will be the difference between getting care you need–and skipping it, at grave risk to your health.

I keep waiting for this obvious fact to sink in. What Obama has done is force the existing system to insure 30 million more people at a modest cost, and to include a swathe of (still-insufficient) varieties and strategies of cost-control. This is huge – the biggest first year achievement of any president since Reagan. If you consider that he did this while also managing the steepest down-turn in decades, revamping America's image in the world, preventing a banking implosion, and prosecuting two unresolved wars in the face of almost deranged opposition, it's pretty damn impressive.

This seems clearer to me after a break from the Intertubes. Maybe others will feel the same way after the hols.

Bill Kristol, whose view of politics is pretty much as Trotskyite as the far left used to be, does not see healthcare reform as a means of addressing a serious political, economic and moral challenge. It is, of course, just one more battle in the eternal ideological and partisan warfare he believes in. His current advice to the GOP is the same as the advice he has given for a couple of decades now:

Keep fighting on health care. Fight for the next few days in the Senate. Fight the conference report in January in the Senate and the House. Start trying to repeal the worst parts of the bill the moment it passes, if it does… The criticism of the Obama administration needs to be broad-based, because you never know just what issue is going to take off, and because the opposition needs to knit together all those who object to the Europeanization of America… So: Fight on with respect to health care. Fight on other fronts. And recruit new fighters. In a word: Fight.

Note that the issues as such are largely opportunistic – "you never know just what issue is going to take off".

Just keep punching out the outrages, constantly wage scorched earth resistance to any reform of any major problem, find any issue, any appointee, any opening to wage a campaign of brutal oppositionism … and for what? To win against liberals. That's the goal. Yes, that's all they have. And that will make them happy enough. It's a game after all, isn't it?

Healthcare reform? The GOP has no way to insure the uninsured and is now pledging to keep Medicare untouched to foil any cost controls. Climate change? Again, there's no valid alternative, no brave championing of a carbon tax as a better alternative to cap and trade, just an incessant attempt to throw mud and scandal at any of those concerned with global warming. The deficit? If it grows, attack Obama. If it shrinks a little and joblessness rises, attack Obama. There's no real coherence here, just bellicosity, limitless partisanship, profound cynicism and fanaticism.

Fareed proffers a salutary warning not to look away. He's more optimistic than I am and more comfortable with direct US intervention in the months ahead. But his core point is surely valid: this year will be as critical in Iraq as in Afghanistan. If the US is to extricate itself successfully from this misjudgment, it will need much more care in leaving than it took in invading. The Sunnis remain unreconciled and the Kurds are restive.

Julian Sanchez, who began this latest round of the free will debate, feels that Dish readers are in error:

[O]rdinary decisionmaking does not seem like other kinds of “unfree” action—doing something by reflex or under hypnosis, maybe. Also, we’re no more directly aware of the neural underpinnings of our decisionmaking than we are of, say, our sensory processing. And of course, we aren’t aware of what the results of our deliberation will be in advance—otherwise, why deliberate?—so they will be necessarily “open ended” in that sense. But to call these things an “illusion of free will” just seems like a mistake.

It is as if someone had told me for the first time about subatomic theory, and I mused that I nevertheless have this illusion of a solid desk chair, when after all, it is really these clouds of quarks and whatnot. And this would be silly: The parameters of “solid” and “desk chair” are given by ordinary life, and within those bounds the chair is exactly as solid as it ever was. A theory about the microstructure of the chair could notbe in conflict with, or prove “illusory,” my ordinary perceptions,  because they were not perceptions of the microstructure in the first place.

The same goes for claims that we “act as if” we are free, or “cannot help talking as though” we were free. 

Patrick Appel:

The Dish is trying to become a go-to place for intelligent debate online, to suck the marrow out of the hive mind of the blogosphere.

Trying is the operative word. And it's work:

I get up around 8 am, check Memeorandum, and skim new items in my RSS reader until about 10 am. As I’m reading, I open around fifty posts in tabs for closer inspection. I then read through those tabs, delete most of them, and draft the best. According to Google Reader, I have 1,086 blogs in my RSS reader and have read 16,070 posts in the last 30 days. This is down from a high of about 32,000 posts during the height of the election. 

The perennial seasonal creepfest has a handy visual interpreter (NSFW):

Douthat does a health care reform pre-mortem:

In the end, when the history of the health care debate is written, I don’t think any of the choices that G.O.P. lawmakers made this year will loom particularly large. The choices that they made, or didn’t make, across the last fifteen years are what made all the difference. Between the defeat of Clintoncare and the election of Barack Obama, the Republicans had plenty of chances to take ownership of the health care issue and pass a significant reform along more free-market, cost-effective lines. They didn’t. The system deteriorated on their watch instead. And now they’re reaping the consequences.

That seems a pretty fair assessment to me although it doesn't absolve the GOP of abdicating all responsibility this year to place country before party. By that, I mean constructively engaging the process to improve the result rather than total oppositionism and partisanship. But that is also a function of the past many years as the GOP put Rovianism before any coherent governing philosophy and culture war before any real attempt to innovate policy or better understand government.