Mr Lehrer concludes with a call for better policy to “increase our collective creativity”. He suggests allowing more immigration, inviting more risk and enabling more cultural borrowing and adaptation (by stemming the flood of vague patents and copyright claims). He also warns that the work demands a lot of time, sweat and grit. Or as Albert Einstein put it: “creativity is the residue of time wasted.”
The Dish will be interviewing Jonah later this week. Submit and vote on interview questions here.
Frum, a former speechwriter for Bush, downplays the power of presidential rhetoric:
You know who was a really lousy presidential communicator? Dwight Eisenhower. You know who else? Calvin Coolidge. Both were overwhelmingly re-elected. Benjamin Disraeli said that a parliamentary majority was better than the best repartee. And likewise, peace and prosperity are better than any speech.
He blames lazy journalists for the current state of affairs:
Reason one for the over-estimation of presidential communication is that this over-estimation suits the tastes and interests of political journalists. If presidential elections are determined by larger demographic and economic trends, then journalists will have to write about a lot of tedious statistical matter. That sounds like work!
Over the past decade, the number of Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance has dropped [pdf] from about 70% down to nearly 50%. Note that this is for the non-elderly only, so it's not due to the aging of society or the growth of Medicare. This is working-age people only. As Krugman says, our weird employer-based health insurance scheme is "coming apart at the seams."
Despite what you might have learned in Economics 101, people aren’t always selfish. In politics, they’re more often groupish. When people feel that a group they value — be it racial, religious, regional or ideological — is under attack, they rally to its defense, even at some cost to themselves. We evolved to be tribal, and politics is a competition among coalitions of tribes.
The key to understanding tribal behavior is not money, it’s sacredness. The great trick that humans developed at some point in the last few hundred thousand years is the ability to circle around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god, and then treat that thing as sacred. People who worship the same idol can trust one another, work as a team and prevail over less cohesive groups. So if you want to understand politics, and especially our divisive culture wars, you must follow the sacredness.
Oral arguments begin next week. Ilya Somin makes the case against the individual mandate:
Cohn counters many of Somin's arguments. Cohn also considers the unintended consequences if the Supreme Court rules the mandate unconstitutional:
Ironically, some conservatives might also come to rue such a decision. After all, if it’s unconstitutional to compel contributions towards private health insurance, then surely it’s unconstitutional to compel contributions toward private investment accounts – which happens to be the idea many conservatives still have for replacing Social Security. As Simon Lazarus, counsel for the National Senior Citizens Law Center, noted last year in Slate, two of the conservative appellate judges who rejected these lawsuits cited that very possibility in their rulings.
Toobin fears the Supreme Court will rule against the law:
In order to strike down health-care reform, the new Republican Justices would have to change the underlying constitutional law, which they have proved themselves more than capable of doing. They have already cut a swath through the Court’s precedents on such issues as race, abortion, and campaign finance, and it’s possible that they will assemble the votes to do the same on the scope of the Commerce Clause. The high-stakes health-care case is a useful reminder of the even higher stakes in the Presidential election. If a Republican, any Republican, wins in November, his most likely first nominee to the Supreme Court will be [Obamacare foe] Brett Kavanaugh.
For the weightiness of the legal issues and their political impact, the Supreme Court’s decision on the health care reform law will probably rank only behind Roe v. Wade and Bush v. Gore as the most consequential cases of the last 50 years.
If Romney is able to challenge Santorum even in the rural congressional districts, he could score a big win in the battle for momentum and delegates on Tuesday.
Listen closely to the Team Santorum spin these days and you hear hints that the campaign is following the Ron Paul songbook, reading delegate rules and finding ways that a good grassroots campaign can peel off delegates that other candidates have "won."
Tom Carson offers up a couple more explanations for The Hunger Games hoopla. Andrew O'Hehir cites Collins' many inspirations, from the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur to coverage of the Iraq war, but thinks the appeal is much simpler:
The Hunger Games taps into a vibrant current of pop culture and indeed of Western civilization in general, one that never really runs dry. It’s the idea that our species remains cruel and barbarous at heart, that the strong will always rule the weak by whatever means necessary, and that our collective obsession with sports and games and other forms of manufactured entertainment is a flimsy mask for sadism and voyeurism.
Abigail Miller compares Katniss' story to the Book of Esther and Purim, while Yglesias goes into the weeds on the economic system of the tyrannical Capitol.
Some amazing footage from Wilhelmina Bay, Antarctica:
Richard W. Miller imagines the future at the rate we're going:
By the 2060s, if carbon-cycle feedbacks prove to be strong, the world could be 4°C warmer, and 40 to 70 percent of assessed species could be headed irreversibly toward extinction. And by the end of the century, my grandchildren and great grandchildren will live in a world where sea levels could be between three and seventeen feet higher than they are now. The abandonment of many of the world’s great cities will be well underway.
Map of the areas in direct danger of rising sea levels here.
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