Month: February 2011

A couple days back Peter Suderman had an op-ed on the ACA and Medicaid. Aaron Carrol felt that Suderman obscured our healthcare problems:

Complaints about Medicaid seem to fall into two camps: (1) we need to cut it, and (2) it doesn’t reimburse enough. The odd part is that I often hear these same arguments coming from the same people.  Please understand that the reason that Medicaid doesn’t reimburse enough is that it is underfunded. The Medicaid population, on the whole, is sicker and more costly than the privately covered pool. But, because we underfund it,  it’s cheaper to put people in Medicaid than to pay for them to get private insurance. The reason that the PPACA puts 20 million more people in Medicaid is that it was cheaper than putting them in the exchanges to get private insurance.

Let me say that again – it was cheaper.

 And the cost control experiments in the healthcare law – without serious Medicare cuts – are also designed to make things cheaper. Like end-of-life counseling, which could save a fortune by reducing hyper-expensive ICU time to prolong someone's life by a few days. On healthcare, the GOP calls all attempts to cut Medicare costs in the rhetoric of death panels, while insisting that they are the party of fiscal restraint. I wonder, by the way, what percentage of Tea Partiers are in Medicare. If they really want to cut spending, how about their own? Or is that kind of patriotism only for the "unreal" Americans?

A reader writes:

Your post on ghost signs reminded me of a phenomenon I've seen in older cities where side-by-side houses are torn down and leave an imprint. For example, here's a ghost house in Bay Village in Boston.

Another writes:

The best ghost sign of all time is the "Vote Against Prohibition" sign in the Fell's Point neighborhood of Baltimore.

Larison finds most attack lines blocked, as Niall Ferguson's atypically weak Newsweek cover revealed:

The standard attack line against Obama used to be that he undermined allies, but most of the GOP’s foreign policy elites have been actively urging him to do just that in Egypt for weeks. Another standard attack was that he had largely given up on democracy promotion, but Obama has been moving in the direction of the democratists for the last month. The GOP’s positions on these questions have been lacking in substance or simply wrong, and now Obama has acted in such a way that they can’t credibly take advantage of it.

On the one occasion when conservative hawks might credibly charge that Obama has undermined an ally they find that they cannot use that argument, because just last month many of them were complaining that Obama was too indifferent to the cause of the Egyptian opposition. The problem that the Republican candidates have is that they can only gain traction with grassroots activists if they tap into general anti-jihadism and vague hawkishness, so when they attack Obama they must do so for his “appeasement” of Islamists, but Republican foreign policy elites strongly favor democracy promotion. The candidates can only demagogue these issues so much, since their foreign policy elites are implicated in whatever happens in Egypt.

This is because we are dealing with a complex, changing, difficult, multi-variable series of events. The GOP's foreign policy muscles are so degraded from disuse they cannot handle it. Unless, like Glenn Beck, you think it's all about Code Pink's secret alliance with al Qaeda.

Seth Godin has a question for readers at TED Conversations:

What's the overlooked gem, the book I haven't read that I must? Every reader has at least one, that book that never caught on, or is out of print, but that resonates so much with people that they can't forget it.

Lots of good answers here. My personal fave: "My Dog Tulip."

A Mormon woman warns against it:

A reader provides context:

Apparently the church requested that she take it down, but she recently posted it on YouTube (Feb. 14th, 2011), and it's not going anywhere. From her description:

I put this video on MormonsforMarriage.com during the Prop 8 debate. At the time, speaking out via this video threatened my temple recommend and calling, and I chose to take it down to protect my standing in the church. I regret that decision and put it back up as a tribute to the legend of Valentine.

John Quiggin analyzes the recent rise in Birthers:

[B]irtherism is a shibboleth, that is, an affirmation that marks the speaker as a member of their community or tribe. (The original shibboleth was a password chosen by the Gileadites because their Ephraimite enemies could not say “Sh”.) Asserting a belief that would be too absurd to countenance for anyone outside a given tribal/ideological group makes for a good political shibboleth.

It’s clear, as Dave Weigel points out, that beliefs of this kind are a marker for partisanship, as witness the high correlation between stated birtherist beliefs and approval of Palin. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the statement isn’t actually believed. Rather this is an open question and an important one for agnotological understanding of the emergence of comprehensive culturally induced ignorance as a marker for the Republican tribe.

And Michelle Bachmann adds her name to the list of GOP officials who won't confirm the president's faith and birthplace.

Chuck Salter recounts how his father found the recipe for Coca Cola in 1979 and how last week's This American Life episode "Original Recipe" revived the story:

You would think a column blowing the lid off Coke’s big secret would be front-page news in its home-town paper. A column with a photo of the recipe. But on February 18, 1979, “Is It Real Thing in Old Book?” ran inside the local news section, on 2B. And that was that. Remember, this was pre-Internet. … Fast forward three decades. …

Good luck getting on the "This American Life" website. It crashed today under the weight of traffic. "Our website has never gone down," Glass told the AJC, "We're the biggest podcast in the country and we're used to a lot of traffic."

Mike Konczal analyzes the politics of prison reform:

When it comes to actually reducing the prison population, which is where all the savings is really going to be, [Mitch] Daniels is hitting major problems within the DA’s office and among the conservative rank-and-file. This quote from Indiana’s Sen. Sue Glick, R-LaGrange, a member of the Senate’s Corrections, Criminal and Civil Matters Committee, is telling: “We just don’t accept the idea that because the Department of Correction has a bed problem that we should be releasing serious felons back on the street.”

Without making the case for why mass incarceration is bad in and of itself, not just as a budgeting issue, it’s going to be harder to move this. During times of budget stress you see an increase in fear among the general population. So any desire to use the state’s balance sheet as an argument for changing prison policy is going to be offset by an increase in an xenophobia and retrenchment that expresses itself most forcibly in the language of crime control.

 

Bruce Bartlett adds an addendum to a post that The Dish remarked on here:

I think Republicans are making a symbolic gesture on budget cutting now, knowing full well that the real budget cutting will involve entitlements. But what if this is their only bite at the apple, just as it was for Obama and stimulus? Do they really think people will be just as supportive of budget cuts a year from now? I think not.

Enduring America is collecting videos from Bahrain. Among them is this video of "riot police [attacking] the protest camp at Pearl Roundabout in Manama in Bahrain:"

EA's live-blog on Yemen, Libya, and Bahrain is here. Mackey is also on the story. How state TV is spinning it:

As Sultan Al Qassemi, a columnist for The National, a newspaper in Abu Dhabi, reported earlier on Twitter, Bahraini state television broadcast a graphic video report at about 3 p.m. local time that cast the protesters as armed Islamist militants who attacked police officers.

The Guardian's summary from earlier in the day:

• Bahrain: Five people are believed to have been killed and scores injured after Bahraini security forces raided peaceful protests in Pearl roundabout in the early hours of Thursday morning. Pictures have emerged showing brutal injuries sustained by protesters and, in one case, a young child. Riot police also targeted doctors and medics, while ambulances were prevented from reaching Pearl roundabout to collect the wounded.

Gulf Arab foreign ministers are meeting in Bahrain tonight to discuss the unrest in the country, according to reports. Bahrain TV, the state channel, has been broadcasting pictures of weapons supposedly seized from protesters at the roundabout in an apparent attempt to blame protesters for the bloodshed.

• Libya: Several hundred supporters of the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, have gathered in the capital to oppose online calls for an anti-government "day of rage". There are reports that 14 people have been killed in the country across several cities, while Human Rights Watch said 14 writers, activists and protesters who had been calling for protests have been detained. Protests have been reported in Beghazi, Zentana and al Bayda, where an opposition group says four people have been killed.

Gaddafi's regime is reportedly sending out text messages to Libyans in an attempt to quell protests, in a similar move to that seen in Egypt. "Libyan regime sending SMS to citizens threatening them with live bullets if they continue to demonstrate," @libyanfsl tweeted this morning. There will be a demonstration against Gaddafi, expected to be countered by supporters of the Libyan leader, outside the Libyan embassy in London at 3pm.

• Yemen: Security forces have clashed with anti-government protesters in Yemen for a seventh consecutive day. In Sana'a Associated Press reported that 6,000 protesters marched towards the centre of the city, being forced to fight off attacks "by police and government supporters swinging batons and daggers". A dozen protesters and an unknown number of policemen have been injured, while security officials said police arrested about 50 protesters. Clashes have been reported in several other towns, including the port city of Aden.