Month: November 2012

In July, Massie wrote about the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare and the politics surrounding Obamacare:

The peculiarity of this brouhaha is that most Americans broadly support the Affordable Care Acts’ ends while a plurality also opposes its means. This in turn means health care remains a troublesome issue for both parties. Democrats must defend an unpopular bill yet Republicans still have no plausible alternative. It is all very well to run a campaign pledging to repeal Obamacare; quite another to have something with which to replace it that still manages to cover the presently uninsured and fix America’s broken, chaotic, ludicrously-expensive healthcare system.

Follow that blog here. Watch his previous videos here and here.

"MSNBC invited me, but I said, 'You’re just like Fox, but not as good at it.' They wrote back and said, 'Thank you for your candor,'" – Tom Ricks, telling the truth as usual.

Ackerman doubts that Iron Dome, as currently constructed, can adequately protect Israel:

Hamas is peanuts. Its Qassams and Fajr-5s are unguided systems, unsophisticated compared to the missile arsenals of Hezbollah and Iran, which include ballistic missiles. Even a souped-up Iron Dome would probably be overwhelmed by those. So as encouraged as Israel is by Iron Dome’s success, it’s already scaling upward, to more powerful interceptor-based missile defenses intended to blunt a layered assault from Hamas to Hezbollah to Iran. Some, however, doubt that a bullet is the right instrument for stopping another bullet, and would prefer to use the laser weapons the U.S. is developing.

Oh, great. A laser war in the Middle East. They really are getting creative in that part of the world, aren't there? At the same time, you realize that over sixty years after Israel was born, they need 200 nuclear warheads, an Iron Dome and lasers – and the evisceration of any regional rival – just to stay besieged. The scale of the effort – the huge costs to sustain the security of a tiny, new little state in the Middle East – reminds you of the utopianism of Zionism.

A fanatically pro-Israel friend once told me with some relish that all the isms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had failed, except one. Communism, fascism, Nazism, and socialism are no longer serious models for a human polity. But Zionism has endured and succeeded. I'd amend that from the vantage point of late 2012 to the fact that Zionism has endured. But it has not succeeded – in gaining full legitimacy from its neighbors, in creating a stable polity with a Jewish majority, and in the past four years has edged toward greater and greater illegitimacy in the eyes of its neighbors and much of Europe.

Isms are as dangerous as all attempts to radically remake the map of human history and culture by force of arms, however well-intentioned they are. Because the damage they do before they finally expire – because the world in reality is different than the world in the mind of an ism – can be immense. Reality always, always has the last word.

Xeni Jardin explains what you're seeing:

A firm in Japan is offering expectant moms and dads the ability to purchase a 3D-printed model of their unborn child, for about $1200 USD. The "Shape of an Angel" is about 9cm, in white resin, encased in a transparent block that forms the shape of the mother's body. The modeling data comes from an MRI scan…. It comes with a tiny little version that can be used as a mobile phone trinket (young women in Japan often dress up their phones with little dangly adornments).

(Photo: Japan's 3D computer-aided design (CAD) venture Fasotec employee Tomohiro Kinoshita displays a nine-month fetus and mother's body image, made of two-colour acrylic resin at the company's headquarters in suburban Tokyo. By Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)

You have to read the tea-leaves right now, but this struck me as interesting:

“Republicans want the president to own the whole offer upfront, on both the entitlement and the revenue side, and that’s not going to happen because the president is not going to negotiate with himself,” the official said. “There’s a standoff, and the staff hasn’t gotten anywhere. Rob Nabors [the White House negotiator], has been saying: ‘This is what we want on revenues on the down payment. What’s you guys’ ask on the entitlement side?’ And they keep looking back at us and saying: ‘We want you to come up with that and pitch us.’ That’s not going to happen.”

So both sides are still cowards when it comes to cutting and reforming entitlements, a critical element of any move back toward pre-Bush fiscal sanity. At some point, I think Obama needs to own the entitlement cuts – just as the GOP will have to own the tax increases. I'm not privy to the negotiations – and there are few who are – so I cannot know what the strategies currently are. But Obama cannot lead from behind on entitlements. He's a re-elected president who promised us he would tackle the hard problems – and this is a matter of compromise from his own party. Tick, tock.

Hot Springs, Virginia, 10.10 am

Nate Silver notes that Obama won the Bay Area by 49 points and that "among the 10 American-based information technology companies on the Forbes list of "'most admired companies,' Mr. Obama raised 83 percent of the funds between the two major party candidates." Why this matters:

If Democrats have the support of 80 percent or 90 percent of the best and brightest minds in the information technology field, then it shouldn’t be surprising that Mr. Obama’s information technology infrastructure was viewed as state-of-the-art exemplary, whereas everyone from Republican volunteers to Silicon Valley journalists have critiqued Mr. Romney’s systems. 

Sometimes it escapes:

Mark Vanhoenacker explains the steam system under NYC:

Con Edison, New York City’s venerable power company, pipes steam to customers in Manhattan just like any other utility product (such as gas, water, or electricity). The steam—some purposely created, some a ‘waste’ byproduct of electricity generation—comes from power plants. Commercial, urban steam systems of this size are rare, and New York’s is the world’s largest.

(Lockport, N.Y., had the world’s first urban steam system, in 1877, and Denver’s is the world’s oldest in continuous operation.) NYC’s system has 105 miles of main pipes, 3,000 manholes, and reaches around 1,800 buildings—everything from the Empire State Building to United Nations Headquarters. Steam connections run from the southern tip of Manhattan to 96th Street on the West Side and 89th Street on the East Side.

What’s the steam used for? A little bit of it is used as, well, steam—to operate laundries and even to sterilize hospital equipment. But a lot of it is used to heat buildings and their water supplies.

Richard Socarides hopes the president will further advance gay rights during his second term. On his wish list:

An Administration that is more responsive on immigration issues and more aggressive on the appointment of sympathetic federal judges. Advocates want to be a part of any comprehensive immigration reform, allowing same-sex bi-national married couples the same rights as heterosexual couples. And, like other left-leaning constituencies, they would like the Administration to focus more on the appointment of progressive federal judges, in which even Senate Democrats believe they have lagged. (Jeffrey Toobin has more on that.)

Comprehensive immigration reform should be comprehensive. That means including gay spouses from other countries exactly as we do straight ones. If you legitimately marry an American citizen, you can become an American. Simple – and yet so much pain, grief, sadness and anxiety has been created by the hostility to gay relationships that our immigration law reflects.