I don't question the competence of the CBO's analysts, but I wouldn't bet my 401(k) on these numbers turning out to be even roughly correct. The uncertainties lie in both directions. The plan might save more money than the CBO says: it has scored the efficiency-promoting experiments conservatively. The bigger risk is that the provisions yielding the projected savings and tax increases will be reversed before they take effect. I would need to think about it, but I might be willing to bet my 401(k) on that.
Remember, when the CBO makes a projection for how much a program will cost over time, it isn't just spitting out a single number. It's giving a range of numbers. It's typically the midpoint that you hear about, but there's always a chance that the number will be higher or lower, by a certain interval. And, in order to play it safe, CBO decided it would judge health care reform based on the worst possible estimate within that interval.
Imagine I discovered there was a paedophile ring running our crèche, and the Editor issued a stern order that it should be investigated internally with "the strictest secrecy". Imagine he merely shuffled the paedophiles to work in another crèche at another newspaper, and I agreed, and made the kids sign a pledge of secrecy. We would both – rightly – go to prison. Yet because the word "religion" is whispered, the rules change. Suddenly, otherwise good people who wouldn't dream of covering up a paedophile ring in their workplace think it would be an insult to them to follow one wherever it leads in their Church. They would find this behaviour unthinkable without the irrational barrier of faith standing between them and reality.
Yes, I understand some people feel sad when they see a figure they were taught as a child to revere – whether Prophet or Pope – being subjected to rational examination, or mockery, or criminal investigation. But everyone has ideas they hold precious. Only you, the religious, demand to be protected from debate or scrutiny that might discomfort you. The fact you believe an invisible supernatural being approves of – or even commands – your behaviour doesn't mean it deserves more respect, or sensitive handling. It means it deserves less. If you base your behaviour on such a preposterous fantasy, you should expect to be checked by criticism and mockery. You need it.
Chill, Johann. I'm religious. I demand to be protected from no debate. And many of us who believe are indeed saying – and have been saying for a long, long time – that using religious authority to cover up child abuse is evil, insupportable, corrupt and wrong. But if the church hierarchy does not understand this, if it does not instigate root and branch reform, if it uses this occasion to double down further, then it will deserve the secular assault that will come.
I fear the Church's hierarchy is as over now as the Soviet hierarchy was in the 1980s. But, unlike the lie of Communism, the truth of the Gospels remains. So when will we Catholics have our velvet revolution? When will we finally stand up and deliver our church from the evil that now controls it? And when will this farce of an establishment finally crumble into the dust it deserves?
Most observers expect Clinton to sound decidedly reconciliatory notes in her AIPAC address. Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator who works with Atallah at the New America Foundation, encouraged Clinton to pivot to productive moves on peace negotiations — especially the presentation of the administration’s own peace plan. “Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has often drawn the analogy between ending the conflict and cutting off the tail of a dog – in other words, you do both in one chop, not incremental snips,” Levy said. “When it is ready to lead rather than be led, the administration should place a clear choice of an implementation plan for two states in front of Israel and stick to that plan.” Levy added that Netanyahu’s embrace of settlement expansion “may strengthen American resolve to put forward such a plan.”
I suspect that the current state of Israeli politics makes a direct US plan the only way forward. But David Remnick's question remains:
Does there exist a Netanyahu 2.0, a Nixon Goes to China figure who will act with an awareness that demographic realities—the growth not only of the Palestinian population in the territories but also of the Arab and right-wing Jewish populations in Israel proper—make the status quo untenable as well as unjust?
Nate Silver thinks health care has better than a 75 percent chance of passing:
Over the last 24-48 hours — coinciding with the release of the CBO score — we've now moved into the second phase, which is counting up the yesses. And so far, Democrats are doing a pretty good job of it. Firm-seeming yes votes from different people representing different constituencies — Kucinich (wavering liberals), Markey (swing-district), Gordon (retirees), Gutierrez (Hispanics) have been unveiled, with one or two others looking likely to follow. As Dayen pointed out earlier today, if you take the seeming yes votes and add them to the people who are uncommitted but voted for the bill last time around, they add up to 217. This math isn't foolproof but by any means but that's a pretty important threshold to pass.
(Photo: US President Barack Obama delivers remarks on health insurance reform at George Mason University's Patriot Center in Fairfax, Virgina, on March 19, 2010. Obama hailed this weekend's 'historic' congressional vote on his health plan as the culmination of a century of struggle, at a euphoric campaign-style rally. By Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
Via Yglesias, National Catholic Reporterhas endorsed health care reform:
Bottom line: The current legislation is not “pro-abortion,” and there is no, repeat no, federal funding of abortion in the bill.
Meanwhile, writing in The Washington Post last Sunday, T.R. Reid, a first-rate journalist, a Catholic, and author of “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care,” argues persuasively that industrialized countries that achieve universal or near-universal insurance coverage have a demonstrably lower abortion rate than we have in the United States. It should matter to those who believe in the sacredness of all human life that this legislation will not only provide health care to those who don’t currently possess it, but will encourage women facing crisis pregnancies to choose life. Given the intractable nature of the abortion debate in the United States, this amounts to a pro-life victory of historic proportion.
When you realize what Netanyahu was doing the night before Irish-Catholic Zionist Joe Biden (yes, we still exist) came to visit, you begin to see how entwined the politics of the Israeli and American far right have become:
A day before Biden’s arrival, Netanyahu appeared onstage with Pastor John Hagee in Jerusalem. The occasion was Hagee’s Night To Honor Israel, an event the far-right Texas-based preacher arranged to tout his ministry’s millions in donations to Israeli organizations and to level bellicose rhetoric against Israel’s perceived enemies.
At the gathering, Hagee called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “the Hitler of the Middle East” and denounced the Goldstone Report as “character assassination by an unbiased and uninformed committee. "Netanyahu welcomed the crowd of 1000 American evangelicals to Jerusalem, a city he described as “the undivided, eternal capitol of the Jewish people. Then, he told them, “I salute you! The Jewish people salute you!” In the audience were top-level members of the Israeli government, from Ambassador Michael Oren to Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat to Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.
So Michael Oren is honoring an anti-Catholic fundamentalist bigot in order to affirm Israel's claim to all of Jerusalem for ever. And the rest of us are not supposed to notice, while he channels the Likud line directly to the Washington Post.
There's a reason that Sarah Palin wore a twinned US-Israeli flag-pin to address the Tea Party Convention.
The evangelicals see permanent Israeli colonization of the West Bank as critical to End-times theology; and they are helping fund it with millions. The neocon gamble – that uniting Jewish fundamentalists with Christian fundamentalists is an international project for greater Israel and permanent Republican majorities in the US – is still in play. And it makes a two-state solution impossible.
This is why Obama matters as much now as ever. Only he can save us from this fundamentalist politics and the religious wars it can and will unleash even further unless restrained and blocked. There are increasingly fewer ways for pro-Israel American moderates to stay silent or dodge this question. Lashing out at realists as anti-Semites is not the answer. It is a distraction. They have to take a stand. Or Israel will be as polluted by the fumes of Christianism as the GOP.
Obama is Israel's last chance to dial back this vicious fundamentalist cycle. And if israel doesn't, the consequences for all of us are grave. Petraeus gets this. When will the neocons?
"It’s not possible – is it? – that the conservative world will just pass by the affair in embarrassed silence?" – David Frum on reports of alleged financial shenanigans in the Empire of Hannity.
Keith Hennessey, who has been among the more intellectually honest opponents of health care, makes his final pitch:
The pending legislation slows the growth of Medicare spending, but then spends that money on the new promise. We still have the old unfunded promises, and those relatively easy Medicare policy changes will no longer be available to fund them.
When you or your successors choose or are forced to solve our long-term fiscal problem, these tools will be unavailable.
You will have to reduce benefits and charge seniors higher premiums, copayments, and deductibles. You will have to cut provider payments even more. You will have to means-test benefits more aggressively. You will have to raise the eligibility age for these programs. If you favor tax increases, you will find yourself evaluating options to raise them not just on the rich, but also on the middle class. The arithmetic will force you to do these things.
I was struck by this quote in your post on “The Pope’s Defenders”: “there were more than 1,000 priests in the archdiocese at the time and that Ratzinger entrusted that kind of personnel matter to subordinates.”
Having recently supervised 1,000 subordinates in positions of public trust—law enforcement officers, who are placed in much more difficult circumstances than priests—I found this “excuse” appalling. I knew (and responded, and followed up) when one of my officers spoke intemperately to a member of the public, which was normally met with formal discipline. More serious cases, such as an off-duty assault, often resulted in counseling which was carefully tracked and progress assessed as final disciplinary decisions were made and meted out.
Child rape?
Put aside the horrible truth that the Church is an organization that puts someone guilty of an act like that back into a position of public trust at all, and just ask why the head executive wouldn’t bother to monitor the most serious misconduct and discipline case under his purview. Just the fact that an organization with this much importance to so many people has not had a system or process for managing these cases is negligence of the highest order.
But I fear—as you have eloquently expressed about a Church that you still respect and love in many ways—that something worse than negligence is underlying these continued revelations of abuse. When something this evil is endemic across multiple churches on different continents, there is an intrinsic cultural problem, perhaps with roots in the dual public commitments to celibacy and anti-homosexuality.
The Church, and the Pope, must address this, NOW, or they will undermine the very commitments and teachings they have spent a lifetime serving.
Gen. Petraeus has simply erred in linking the challenges faced by the U.S. and coalition forces in the region to a solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and blaming extremist activities on the absence of peace and the perceived U.S. favoritism for Israel. This linkage is dangerous and counterproductive. Whenever the Israeli-Arab conflict is made a focal point, Israel comes to be seen as the problem. If only Israel would stop settlements, if only Israel would talk with Hamas, if only Israel would make concessions on refugees, if only it would share Jerusalem, everything in the region would then fall into line.
General Petraeus obviously doesn’t see the Israeli-Arab “peace process” as a top issue for his command, because he didn’t even raise it in his opening statement. When he was pressed on it, he made a fairly anodyne statement about the need to encourage negotiations to help moderate Arab regimes. That’s it. He didn’t say that all settlements had to be stopped or that Israel is to blame for the lack of progress in negotiations. And he definitely didn’t say that the administration should engineer a crisis in Israeli-U.S. relations in order to end the construction of new housing for Jews in East Jerusalem.
The Dish 