The Dish

The widely-panned original Windows 7 launch party video. And the remix:

Greenwald wonders how the WaPo can condemn "Roman Polanski's apologists," without mentioning their op-ed page is a clusterfuck of said apologists. Well, the editorial page and the op-ed page are different entities. Which is why a paper that allegedly opposes torture has provided a platform for the intellectual architect of American torture and fired the one writer capable of speaking the unvarnished truth about it.

What Clive Crook says. I lay out what kind of public option I could live with here.

A reader writes:

Situations as shown in your post worry me constantly when I and my husband travel. We both have medical conditions that could at any time put us in an emergency room. Although in California we feel a little safer (we are one of the 18,000 couples married here while it was legal) it's still very difficult and degrading. Any heterosexual married couple only has to say that they are married and either of the spouses would have full access and rights at any hospital in the world without having to show any proof. I on the other hand would have to show proof of marriage (and in our case prove that we were married during that period of legality) in most places.

We were married on our 30th anniversary.

Such couples have to disguise their relationships when entering through immigration (as well as concealing HIV medications in their bags) for fear of being split up by immigration officers and forced to live abroad as so many now do. Imagine a straight married couple having to hide their marriage from the American government in order to avoid the risk of it being torn apart.

One major political party regards this kind of cruelty and discrimination as something so vital it wants to enshrine it in the federal constitution – a position championed by the last "compassionate conservative" president. And his successor pays lip-service in small gatherings of gay activists, takes their money and work and support but will not lift a pinkie finger to help. All the time he is firing gay servicemembers for the crime of being gay.

He may believe it is prudent to wait. That is his prerogative. It is my prerogative to call the first black president missing in action on the vital matter of a minority's civil rights.

(Photo: David McNew/Getty.)

Gallup checks out how Americans feel about the government's role in healthcare:

An important principle behind the current push for healthcare reform is that healthcare is a basic right that the government ought to guarantee for all Americans. Not only are the details of achieving universal coverage proving to be highly controversial, but it is unclear how strongly Americans support the premise. Americans tend to agree with the government's taking responsibility for guaranteeing healthcare coverage when asked in "yes or no" terms. However, they are more libertarian on the issue when asked whether the government or individual citizens should be primarily responsible for ensuring that coverage.

I dispute the premise. I don't believe an attempt to help more Americans to get their own health insurance implies that it is some kind of basic right that can be demanded of government. Some may believe that. I don't.

But I do see the pragmatic benefit of removing chronic insecurity that impedes labor mobility. I do see the pragmatic benefit of ending expensive emergency room care in favor of more preventive insurance and avoiding the free rider problem. I see the advantages of including everyone in an insurance scheme to spread risks more widely. I see the waste of resources when sick people become destitute for lack of insurance, when they could otherwise be healthy, productive members of society. And I do see the moral case that it is part of the American character to care for those rendered helpless by illness, and the moral cost of seeing them suffer for lack of adequate preparation.

Moreover, what we're talking about here is insurance against the lottery of health – not provision of care as such. Obama is not proposing the British NHS. He's proposing an extension of private insurance through public subsidies because healthcare is now an utterly different thing than it was in days gone by, and enormously expensive to boot. Hayek – not exactly a socialist – expressed his view on the matter here:

"Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong… Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make the provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken," – The Road To Serfdom (Chapter 9).

The current Democratic plans are not, it seems to me, driven by ideological templates, but are attempts to address obvious distortions and unnecessary inequalities in a healthcare system whose enormous costs have become insufficiently balanced by commensurate benefits. The problem with our current politics is that it has become too ideological, too framed around abstract questions of the role of government, rather than around the duty of government to adjust existing institutions and policies to newly understood needs and newly emergent problems.

In this sense, Obama is the Tory. It's the Republicans who are the philosophes.

From the Economic Policy Institute's new survey. Further thoughts at Free Exchange.

Jacob Heilbrunn makes the case:

[The German] election, widely touted as boring and uninteresting, proved to be anything but.

The [Free Democratic Party], which espouses a classical liberal program of slashing taxes and curbing government regulation, was led to its smashing victory by its chairman, Guido Westerwelle. […] The election confirms a wider trend in Europe that Malte Lehming, an editor at the Berlin Tagespiegel, dubs “the end of socialism in Europe.” As Lehming notes, socialist parties have failed in France, Italy, Germany—and England is next. Meanwhile, Lehming tartly noted, Greece has a socialist government “and they’re rioting over there in the streets.” For Westerwelle, the election vindicates his strategy over the past eleven years to shun the Left and focus on an alliance with the conservative Christian Democrats. Westerwelle is young and dynamic, presenting himself as a kind of German Barack Obama.

Cameron is next. But the idea that European socialism has been alive and well these past couple of decades is absurd. The last real attempts at socialism in Europe were in the 1980.  Meanwhile, Sarkozy, Merkel and Cameron are conservatives who reflexively support a welfare state that American Republicans believe is "communism". The three Euro-Tories are also dedicated to a secular politics, are neutral on abortion and strong supporters of gay equality. Cameron has championed socialized medicine and gay marriage as a core tenet of his One Nation Toryism. Suck on that, Newt.

In that sense, the notion of a trans-Atlantic right is pretty much dead. Cameron was comfortable with McCain. But with Limbaugh or Beck or Palin? They're enough to make a Tory shudder.

(Hat tip: Atlantic Wire)

Today on the Dish, Andrew concentrated on the consequences of empire in Afghanistan and the effect Palin is having on the far right. He also discussed the Catholic sex scandal, while a reader shared a heartbreaking account of abuse. Another heartbreaking story stemmed from the consequences of the gay marriage ban, though we did see some movement toward repealing DADT.

The blogosphere is buzzing with the Polanski scandal; we compiled some commentary here, here, here, and here, and ran some reader dissents here.

— C.B.