The Dish

Adam Ozimek notes a $100 million health care provision in the bill. He worries:

The problem with these handouts is that they are going to generate even less complaints than defense handouts do, because it’s a lot harder to get mad about $100 million for a health care facility than it is for a $100 million space laser or some failed helicopter project. I mean, who is going to complain about money going to medical treatment for workers exposed to asbestos in a vermiculite mine?

Similarly, can you picture anyone angrily declaring “the government is building another childrens’ hospital!? My god, this is what my tax dollars are going to? Curing diseases for children!?” And to a certain extent, there’s a good reason why few people would make that complaint; we obviously want to cure sick childrens’ diseases, and we want there to be enough health care facilities.  But there is such a thing is too much of this stuff,  and there is an unlimited supply of lobbying for it, which suggests to me that we will be getting quite a bit more than “enough” health care facilities in the future.

Has anyone coined the phrase health-care-industrial-complex yet?

Ambers' take on the health insurance reform bill is as judicious as it is informed. Like most things he writes.

A reader writes, "Stephen Colbert + Elvis Costello's Christmas duet is depressing in a very cynical way."

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
A Colbert Christmas: Colbert/Costello Duet
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

A reader writes:

I'm a reporter working in Asheville, and I've been surprised by the amount of national play this manufactured "controversy" has gotten, given that there's no serious attempt to remove City Council member Cecil Bothwell from office.

The Citizen-Times' article that began the controversy cited unnamed "critics" that wanted Bothwell barred from taking office due to his atheism, but it quoted only one person: H.K. Edgerton. While Edgerton's been referred to as a former President of the NAACP in many articles and posts about this controversy, that sidelines what he's been best known for locally and elsewhere: brandishing a Confederate flag and marching around extolling the virtues of the antebellum South. He is, to put mildly, not a mainstream figure. Even in the initial article, even he didn't say he was going to press a lawsuit, just that, based on his rather unique views of the U.S. Constitution, he didn't think Bothwell could hold office.

Eventually the Citizen-Times did find another Bothwell critic for a follow-up piece: the publisher of the far-right Asheville Tribune, a small circulation tabloid best known for running multi-part defenses of secession, slavery and the Crusades. Again, not exactly a mainstream threat. Furthermore, Bothwell doesn't even call himself an atheist, but a "post-theist." He attends a Unitarian church. The assertion about his atheism was based on the reporter looking up a long-defunct Myspace page.

When Bothwell took his oath of office, along with the other elected council members and the re-elected mayor, there was not one bit of serious dispute over his right to take his seat. No one shouted, no one heckled him. No one's tried to press a lawsuit. The city attorney's office is completely unconcerned. No one on council, including the conservative Democrat, the sole Republican and our outspokenly Christian mayor, tried to oppose him. He got his round of applause and at his first full meeting, on Dec. 15, exercised his rights to speak and vote just like every other council member.

However, the "controversy" has blown up. Since this started, I've seen the false assertion on numerous blogs (usually atheist) that Bothwell was prevented from taking office (he wasn't) and that Asheville "needs to join the 21st century," though our city populace and government seem just fine with Bothwell's religious views or lack thereof.

Atheists, like many members of minority creeds, do face incidences of discrimination. This isn't one of them. But it's abundantly clear that the grumbling of one or two fringe figures and some sloppy newspaper articles now make a national shouting match, as long as it's about atheism. Good to know.

The above is Jon Cohn's attempt to measure the impact of the current bill against the status quo for various socio-economic segments:

Here's a graph showing people's incomes (the blue bar), the amount they could pay in medical bills without reform (the green bar), and the amount they could pay with reform (the orange bar).

It seems pretty obvious to me that it's a huge boon to the working poor who need healthcare and cannot now afford it. Meanwhile, Ezra thinks the health care debate will soon largely fade from view:

Health-care reform is very big on the scale of things that Congress normally does, but very small in comparison to our health-care system, or even our health-care problem. This bill isn't as good a bill as it needs to be, in large part because it leaves so much of a broken system untouched. But by the same token, it is not as vulnerable a bill as it could be, because it leave so much of a politically powerful system untouched. The political system will move onto other things, and the underlying policy isn't dramatic enough to hold America's attention.

The ultimate takedown.

This is one of the entries in the contest, among several strong contenders. View the finalists and vote here. Vote as often as you like.

I'd always dismissed the story as a classic anti-Semitic blood libel: and in its more dramatic versions, such as the lurid lie that Palestinians were actually being captured and killed for organ harvesting, it was. But this more nuanced truth is what we now learn:

Israel has admitted that it harvested organs from the dead bodies of Palestinians and Israelis in the 1990s, without permission from their families. The admission follows the release of an interview with Jehuda Hiss, the former head of Israel's forensic institute, in which he said that workers at the institute had harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers.

In the interview, which was conducted in 2000 when Hiss was head of Tel Aviv's Abu Kabir forensic institute, he said: "We started to harvest corneas … Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who conducted the interview, told Al Jazeera on Monday that Hiss had said the "body parts were used by hospitals for transplant purposes – cornea transplants. They were sent to public hospitals [for use on citizens]. And the skin went to a special skin bank, founded by the military, for their uses", such as for burns victims.

Hiss was dismissed from his post four years ago. It's obviously unethical by any measure and the government says the illegal practice stopped many years ago. It is a far, far paler version than the original lie, but it  suggests there was a small, isolated flame that provoked all that smoke. Israel's need for organ transplants is severe.

James Joyner is jealous:

While this revelation has been controversial, it’s actually a brilliant model for blogging. I spend most of my day doing what Patrick and Chris do and much less time than I’d like actually writing and analyzing the things I find. Most days, I identify several topics that I never get around to writing about because I just don’t have the time and energy.

James gets it. But it really isn't a "revelation" since I've been very candid about this experiment's evolution since it started, including every step along the way with Chris and Patrick.