The Dish

Call a third of Americans independents. Responding to Zakaria and Bai, John Sides hits the caps lock:

INDEPENDENTS ARE NOT A “VAST MIDDLE GROUND.”

INDEPENDENTS DO NOT COMPRISE MORE THAN “A THIRD OF AMERICANS.”

How many DAMN TIMES must this be said before this MOST BASIC OF FINDINGS — first explicated at length almost 20 YEARS AGO! — sinks into the heads of pundits.

I will keep linking to this post as long as it takes. To repeat: true, honest-to-God independents are about 10% of the American population. Declining support for Obama among independents accounts for less than a fifth of Obama’s overall decline in support.

A reader writes:

By “free riders” do you mean the government and service workers unions that are exempt from any costs in the Senate health “reform” plan that you seem so desperate to have passed? The bottom line is that 80% of Americans have health insurance that they are basically happy with and they do not feel that now, with massive deficits, 10% unemployment and a shaky recovery, is the right time to pass a bill that will not make the system more efficient, will not cut the deficit (anyone who believes this will be deficit neutral is delusional) and will still not cover everyone.

Passing a terrible bill just so that Obama can claim a political victory is not putting the country’s interests first. The American people have made it clear that they do not want this bill and if Obama and his party continue to press forward without listening, they will be slaughtered in the 2010 elections. They will meet the same fate that the GOP met when Bush refused to listen to the people about Iraq and instead embraced a “my way or the highway” attitude. Obama needs to stop talking so much and start listening.

I simply don’t agree that this is a “terrible” bill; I think, barring radical overhaul from the right or the left, it’s the best we’re going to get. And the task now is not to kill it – and any meaningful reform for a decade – but to ensure that it works, that the cost controls are real, that the Medicare cuts are followed through.

"I know I’m the people’s senator, but do I have to hang out with them?”- John Edwards, as reported by his flunky Andrew Young.

Yes, there are major extenuating circumstances, but after three months of a paywall in place, and a redesign costing $4 million, the number of paying online subscribers amounted to … 35.

Joe Carter remains sure that nothing wrong could have happened at Gitmo when three prisoners somehow committed a triple suicide, with their bodies hanging for two hours until guards (whose SOP was to check on each prisoner every ten minutes) discovered them. A reader writes:

Anyone who believes that the three detainees committed a triple suicide needs to explain, among other things, how the military "lost" the heart, kidneys and "throat organs" before sending al Zahrani's body back to his father. Without an explanation of these extraordinary and salacious details, which otherwise seem consistent with a cover-up of an administered-drug-induced heart attack, traces of which would have been in the heart and kidneys; rather than a hanging, which would have left evidence at the throat, we're left with an utterly implausible official story.

Remember how the bruised bodies – even with throats and organs removed – also did not fit the suicide explanation. I think we know why the Obama administration is ignoring this.

The enormity of what might have happened – the torturing to death of an innocent 21 year-old, held captive since he was 16 and the removal of his organs – would recruit even more Jihadists than Cheney managed in his seven years of torturing and covering up. It would put US soldiers at risk. It would galvanize the enemy. It would be a huge propaganda victory for al Qaeda. 

If you want to know how the government "lost" the last tape of the torturing of Jose Padilla, or why the CIA, with impunity, destroyed the tapes of their waterboarding, this reason remains. Exposure of the evidence would do incalculable damage to the war effort and put troops at risk. And someone somewhere in the military or CIA has told the Justice Department to stay away, just as they persuaded the president to withhold photographs proving that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were worldwide policy on Cheney's and Bush's orders.

Eric Holder, meanwhile, seems to act as if his job is to ignore evidence of hideous criminality in the government, rather than to prosecute it. The best explanation is that he is biding his time until the administration has more achievements under its belt. But delay itself is a violation of Geneva. As if those Conventions counted for anything any more.

"She has now chosen to align herself with several bad actors. What should this be called, the Rinoization of Sarah Palin. At the time of the election, perhaps Sarah Palin could have been forgiven for her ideas on immigration (and lack of knowledge) because she was governor of Alaska, not Arizona. But in the intervening months, she has done little but promote herself as a celebrity, known because her brief time on the national stage. She is certainly entitled to write a book and make money for her and her family, but other than what has she has done to support Republican and patriotic candidates," – Paul Streitz, co-founder of the 2012 Draft Sarah Committee, on Palin's decision to campaign for McCain's Senate reelection.

So says the public. Michael Scherer responds:

There is a wholesale rejection of authority that is taking place, and Fox has cornered the market on the not-being-an-authority-as-much-as-a-beset-rebellion-against-the-authority style of journalism.

It's bewildering to me. And as deeply depressing as the rest of the news in this new year.

The Onion makes a discovery.

This Lydia DePillis post on DC’s 5 cent bag tax is making the rounds:

It turns out that shoppers are now taking extreme measures to avoid paying that extra nickel—even schlepping groceries in their arms if they didn’t bring a backpack. The fee may drive people crazy, and the Journal may grumble about “bureaucracy,” but it actually seems to work: Stores report giving out half as many bags as they did before they started charging for them. And the reason seems to be rooted in how our brains operate…

A 2007 study (pdf)  by Dan Ariely, Kristina Shampanier, and Nina Maza discusses this cognitive bias in much greater detail:

When considering promotions at a low price, companies should experiment with further discounts to zero, which likely will have a surprisingly larger effect on demand. At least one piece of anecdotal evidence supports this claim. When Amazon introduced free shipping in some European countries, the price in France mistakenly was reduced not to zero but to one French franc, a negligible positive price (about 10¢). However, whereas the number of orders increased dramatically in the countries with free shipping, not much change occurred in France.

Silver isn't worried that Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson oppose using reconciliation to modify the healthcare bill:

[If] Democratic negotiators have any brains, you'd think they'd know better than to worry about what Bayh, Nelson, Lincoln, Mary Landrieu or Joe Lieberman are thinking about and see what's doable with some combination of the other 54 votes….If you start to see Senators that are closer to the veto point make uncomfortable noises about reconciliation — someone like Claire McCaskill or Nelson of Florida or Mark Warner — that's when you'll know that the strategy is doomed.