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NPR's response to my letter on their handling of Lisa Simeone.

2011-10-21T13:26:00.001-04:00

I wrote a letter to NPR to complain about their handling of Lisa Simeone. While their response addressed some of the particulars of this situation, it didn't address the broader point of supressing their affiliated journalists personal opinions - not that I expected them to. Perhaps unsurprisingly they insist on not being involved in Soundprint's dismissal of her.

My letter

Dear NPR management:

I am writing to express how disturbed I am by NPR's behavior with regards to Lisa Simeone, a freelancer who appears on some shows that NPR broadcasts, as reported here.

I am a long time listener of NPR and long time supporter of both NPR and my local station WNYC. The pattern of behavior of the leadership at NPR that has emerged in the last 1-2 years with regards to its persecution of people who express any political views is highly troubling. However, in this particular case it's not just troubling but also completely unfair and misguided. Ms Simeone is not an employee of NPR, and as the article points out, is far from the only one who has shown to possess political views.

While I understand the desire by your organization to remain apolitical and neutral, I think that you have taken this policy several steps too far. In addition to this incident, I found your policy that "NPR journalists may not participate in marches and rallies involving causes or issues that NPR covers, nor should they sign petitions or otherwise lend their name to such causes, or contribute money to them" to be borderline anti-democratic if not outright illegal. NPR journalists are private persons and as such cannot and should not be prohibited from expressing their views in their private lives.

I value NPR and it's stations for the reporting and programming they do. However if this pattern of behavior continues I will have to rethink my support for it and its affiliated stations.

Best,
Alex Kristofcak

NPR's response

Dear Alexander,

There have been some inaccuracies in recent reporting on World of Opera host Lisa Simeone that we’d like to correct.

World of Opera is produced by WDAV, a music and arts station based in Davidson, North Carolina. Lisa is not an employee of WDAV or NPR; she is a freelancer with the station.

Lisa will continue to host World of Opera. That has not changed. You can read WDAV’s statement confirming this on their website. The management of WDAV is solely responsible for the decision making around Lisa’s role with the program. This high quality cultural program will continue to be heard by thousands of listeners.

NPR had no role in the decision made by the management of the public radio documentary program Soundprint to end its relationship with Lisa as the program’s host. Soundprint is an independent public radio program that is not produced by NPR. NPR had no contact with the management of the program prior to their decision. We learned about it after the fact. You can read more about Soundprint's decision on their website.

Other than Lisa’s role as host, Soundprint and WDAV’s World of Opera are completely unrelated. To that point, it is important to understand that not every public radio program is produced or distributed by NPR. And not every public radio station is a member of NPR. NPR is one piece of a larger public radio system. You can learn more about the public radio system on NPR.org.

It is clear that you feel passionately about the role and value of public radio. Thank you for sharing your perspectives with us.

Sincerely,

Dana Davis Rehm
Senior Vice President
Marketing, Communications, and External Relations

Vive La Occupation! (or, how a progressive movement finally came about)

2011-10-07T12:55:00.001-04:00

For the upcoming issue of the fabulous Zahranicna Politika.

On several occasions in the past, I have wondered in these pages why we haven’t seen a populist progressive movement rise up in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent economic meltdown in the United States. This seemed logical given that the crisis, which traces its origins to broad deregulation of the financial sector and reckless behavior of the banks, has left millions of Americans without jobs, homes and any hope for a better future. What’s more, the banks have not only escaped unscathed - no criminal prosecutions to date to report on - but they have also been kept alive thanks to a near trillion dollar bailout from taxpayers and shortly thereafter returned to the good old days: record profits and bonuses.

And yet, the only populist movement that has begun since those days was the conservative and libertarian “Tea Party.” Their primary principle was animus towards the government, taxes, spending and the President. In their interpretation of events, it was Obama who orchestrated the Wall Street “bailouts”, the “government takeover” of healthcare and the “failed” stimulus of 2009. This interpretation resembles reality only to the extent that it doesn’t distort it completely: the “bailout” of Wall Street was actually the idea of Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary of George W Bush; the health reform law which passed in 2010 relies on market mechanisms to expand insurance coverage, not on government bureaucracy; the biggest problem with the 2009 stimulus was that it was too small not that it was too big.

Indeed, Obama has been relatively centrist in many of his proposals and policies. The banks which caused the crisis needed government funds to survive because they were “too big to fail” and yet Obama’s administration did not dismantle them. The fiscal stimulus the president sought when the recession started was relatively modest (given the magnitude of the output drop) and combined spending with tax cuts, something to like both by Democrats and Republicans. At the end of 2010, when the tax cuts for the wealthy that President Bush signed in 2001 and 2003 were set to expire, Obama sided with the conservative view that one should not be raising taxes during a recession. A blood thirsty socialist he was not.

Despite this apparent centrism, the Tea Party movement was gaining strength. In a sense, the Tea Party rose up from a conservative fear of what Obama could be, if he really was the person that progressives hoped he was. While the reality of Obama’s administration did not reflect these fears by any stretch of imagination, by the summer of 2010 the Tea Party has coalesced into a political force bent on pushing the Republican Party further to the right and dismantling anything and everything that Obama has dared to touch. In November 2010 the movement scored a victory: with many of their candidates elected to the House of Representatives and the establishment of a Tea Party caucus it became a distinct force in the Republican party.

While Obama’s first two years in office were difficult - even with Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate passing reforms turned out to be difficult - things got exponentially harder with the new Republican majority and Tea Party extremists in the House. This led to a shift: Obama, a centrist from the start, started moving further to the right to compromise with Republicans who, in turn, were pulled to the extreme right by their Tea Party colleagues.

This shift became crystal clear during the debt ceiling negotiation which we covered in the last issue: there was absolutely no need to cut spending or the deficit in order to raise the debt ceiling, an arbitrary limit of the total amount the US Federal government can borrow. However, Obama has previously decided that cutting the deficit and government debt are worthwhile goals - 10% unemployment rate be damned. And so, from the get-go, he was there alongside with the Republicans talking about the government balancing its checkbooks “just like every household has to”, even though most economists have warned: the government is not at all like a household: when times are tough, governments have to borrow and spend, not cut and save. By the time the debt ceiling debate climaxed it was not a question of whether spending would have to be cut - the President has already agreed that it does - but by how much and whether there would be any corresponding tax hikes (something the conservative staunchly opposed). In a clear move to accomodate the nihilists on the right, Obama went as far as to agree to $4 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases, for a total of $4 trillion dollars. The fact that even this was not enough is a testament to both his sloppy negotiating tactics and the extremism on the right.

All of this rightward shifting by the Tea Party, Republicans, Democrats and Obama has created a clear vacuum on the left. It is perhaps this vacuum that created the perfect breeding ground for a progressive movement to finally come together. On September 17th, a group of people started a protest called Occupy Wall Street, and almost three weeks later the protest is continuing and growing. While at first the effort was at best unnoticed and at worst mocked by the media, as days go by it is gaining traction and similar protests are being staged in hundreds of cities around the US. Perhaps as a result of its indefinite nature and notable growth, coverage of the protests has turned from sardonic to curious. It has been amusing to watch journalists scratching their heads, “what do these people want?”, as if they have lived on Mars for the last 3 years.

Very pointedly the movement has called itself “We Are The 99%”, referring to the majority of Americans who have seen their incomes drop and prospects dim at the expense of the richest few whose fortunes have never been better. A brief look at http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/, a website dedicated to people posting their personal stories, shows that these are not anarchists or hippies but regular people who have played by the rules and found themselves trapped in desperate situations. Another common theme is the sense of disenfranchisement that happened as a result of a supreme court decision that deemed corporations to have the same free speech rights as people and as such eligible to give unlimited donations to candidates. One of the consequences of this ruling is that the culprits of the meltdown of 2008 are much more powerful in influencing political outcomes thanks to their ability to “finance” politicians, which in return, comes at least partly from capital they received from the taxpayers. All things considered, protesting seems like the only reasonable thing to do.

It is too early to say if this movement will amount to much real change. So far they may lack clear goals and methods, however there seems to be a real momentum for it to grow into something much larger. At its outset the Tea Party itself seemed like a bunch of crazies with silly poster and it took several months for it to form into a more coherent movement and eventually to become a real political force. Perhaps the same faith awaits the occupiers of Wall Street and the 99%.

A Midsummer Debt Freakout.

2011-10-05T15:39:00.001-04:00

For August 2011 issue of Zahranicna Politika

Did you know the US could go bankrupt any day now? While various European nations have been battling with the specter of debt defaults, the United States has been sitting there happily and smugly. Sure, there have been enormous deficits of late in the land of the free. However, no one ever questioned the credit-worthiness of the US. That is, until very recently, when the government has been scrambling to raise the “debt ceiling”. How is it that the US is suddenly looking at the possibility of defaulting on its debt? Is this crisis real or is America just suffering from default-envy?

First, several terms and concepts need to be explained. The notion of the US government not defaulting on its debts is so self-evident and central to economic and financial theory, that the interest rate that the US pays on its obligation is referred to as “the risk-free rate”. In other words, every other asset - with the exception of cash - carries a certain level of risk, and the return that investors expect to make for holding that asset is a compensation for that amount of risk. A Greek government bond, for example, will pay a higher rate because it is more risky than a German government bond. The US government - due to its sheer size and clean history of debt repayment - has always been considered so safe that the rate it pays on its debts is the lowest of them all. Another illustration: whenever there is a crisis - a recessions, a war, a natural disaster - and the stock markets start panicking, the asset that everyone parks their money is US government debt. This phenomenon is known as “flight to safety”. You get the point.

So how does a country go from being the safest place on earth to park your money to potentially defaulting on its debt in such short order? This is where the concept of a “debt ceiling” comes in. While the US can borrow at incredibly low rates, the overall amount it can borrow is limited by law. Historically, the US Congress had to approve each issuance of debt separately. During the World War 1, when this became impractical, the Congress gave the Treasury the right to issue debt as they see fit in order to meet the government’s funding needs. However, in exchange for this flexibility, the Congress put in place a cap on the overall amount of debt. Through the years, this cap, or ceiling, has been raised dozens of times, whenever it was necessary. And so, even as recently as a few weeks ago, no one thought this would actually be an issue - of course the Congress would vote to raise the ceiling if it’s needed to fund the government. Otherwise, without the ability to issue new debt, the US would actually need to declare default, and that is obviously not going to happen. Right?

As a reminder, if the US were to default on its debts, the securities which were previously considered risk-free by everyone would no longer be so risk-free. US government interest rates would go up - and perhaps more importantly - all other interest rates would follow. This would mean that anyone with any debt - a mortgage owner, a businessman, a student - would be facing higher costs of interest. The consequences would be so wide reaching and dire that it is not an exaggeration to think that a global recession, if not a second Great Depression, would follow.

Well, perhaps this isn’t so obviously to the folks in the US Congress. While every normal person simply assumed that the debt ceiling would be raised, the Republicans figured: here’s something that needs to get done - let’s get something in return! And since cutting spending is the Republican mantra, the little treat they asked for in return is a $4 trillion cut in government spending.

The frustrating thing about the economic discourse in the US is that there is not a single issue that can ever be a purely economic one. Before long, everything becomes another tool in the never ending ideological war between Democrat and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. And so while things like the social safety net and even the phenomenon of taxation are non-controversial issues in the old continent - hello! we need some of both! - nothing is ever considered settled in the US. Which is how what should have been a total no-brainer became a heated issue. While everyone agrees the debt ceiling needs to be raised, the controversy flared up around how to cut the deficit - an important issue, maybe - but one that needn’t be considered at the same time as the decision about whether or not we allow the economy fall from a cliff.

The other fascinating phenomenon in the never-ending ideological war is that the answers are always the same, at least from one side. It simply doesn’t matter what is going on with the economy or with incomes or with unemployment - for a Republican, raising taxes is always bad. Naturally, when we are trying to plug a multi-trillion dollar hole in the budget, it might make sense to at least consider raising some taxes. Instead, Republicans counter that raising taxes is bad because it would kill jobs (a cool sounding motto which no one has ever bothered to prove). And yet, somehow, it must be magic!, the spending cuts they propose are automatically assumed to occur in a complete vacuum from the rest of the economy. Simply put, this is complete nonsense. A core macro-economic formula says it all: GDP = C (consumer spending) + I (capital investments) + G (government spending). Cutting spending can’t not hurt the economy and employment.

The US officially runs out of money on August 2nd and yet an agreement is nowhere in sight. In the meantime, Standard and Poors, the credit rating agency, has been watching the two parties negotiate and declared that their stunning inability to find a compromise this close to the deadline might lead them to downgrade the US debt even if they do find one eventually, leading to raising rates, economic slowdown, etc. One can’t watch this self-inflicted mess without thinking: do Americans feel like life would be more fun an actual debt crisis? If so, there are a few European countries I can recommend for them to move to. For the rest of us, fingers crossed that cooler heads with brains prevail.

Mission Unaccomplished.

2011-10-05T15:34:00.001-04:00

For June 2011 Zahranicna Politika

On May 1, 2003, George Bush gave a speech that stated that the major operations in Iraq are over. The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, where he delivered this speech, was carrying a banner that said “Mission Accomplished.” Anyone with a remote awareness of the last 10 years recognizes why this event became infamous: the toughest, bloodiest and most expensive phase of the Iraq war has not even begun. 8 years and a day later, when his successor announced the death of Osama Bin Laden, Americans celebrated in the streets and I couldn’t help but wonder if we’re living through another “Mission Accomplished” moment. Will history remember this as yet another premature declaration of victory or misguided celebration?

The connection between the two events is more than accidental. While the official pretext for the war in Iraq were the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration alleged Saddam Hussein either had or was developing, it’s useful to remember that the context that enabled the Iraq war was that of the post-9/11 war on terror. More specifically, in the lead up to the Iraq offensive, the Bush administration reinforced the connection between 9/11 and Iraq so much that by the eve of the war, almost half of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11.

In May 2011, when Osama Bin Laden was executed, it clearly did not matter what Americans did or did not believe in 2003. Apparently all that mattered was that he was dead. However, as people rejoiced over this raw act of vengeance, I started thinking about all the things that happened in the wake of 9/11. The wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq with the hundred of thousands of soldiers and Iraqis who died in them were bad enough. But how about the mountain of debt that the US accumulated as a result of all the military and national security spending in the last decade, money that the country could have invested in its neglected infrastructure or education or health care or any of the many other things that make nations great? It is no coincidence that during this time, the US became further indebted to China, while China was growing by leaps and bounds, investing in its infrastructure, growth, research, education and health care.

And let’s not forget the regime of torture that was instituted in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo during the frantic hunt for clues that ensued after 9/11, which to this day corrodes the American justice system and makes the US a violator of a wide array of international treaties and conventions. Furthermore, I would be remiss not to mention the Patriot Act - a piece of legislation passed in October 2011 which gave unprecedented powers to law enforcement agencies to monitor Americans. Torture, violated conventions, encroached individual rights - these were some of the ways that the US government dismissed the principles of the rule of law and liberty on which it was founded. As if to drive the point home, even the killing of Bin Laden - in lieu of an arrest and a trial - was likely a violation of both international law and the simple principle of criminal procedure.

My purpose in listing these effects of 9/11 is not to argue that they were the right or the wrong steps to take in those circumstances - perhaps they were even the best! Instead, my point is that the response to the event had wide and dramatic effects on the US, and was in many instances detrimental. OBL’s stated goal was to bring down America and while 9/11 clearly did not do that literally - no single attack could obviously do that - reviewing the aftermath reminds me how effective it was in accomplishing that goal.

And so as Americans celebrated the death of OBL, I failed to see how the killing of one man was supposed to make all those things somehow better. Does it mean the war on terror is over? Can Americans stop worrying about terrorists? Will the government fully investigate and prosecute all the abuses of power and violations of law that occurred in the last ten years during the hunt for Bin Laden? Will they pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan with the knowledge that those places with be the same as when they entered them? No way. Instead, I found the occasion to be a sad reminder of how deep America sank in the last ten years and how and why it keeps sinking.

When Everyone Thinks You’re Wrong, You Just Might Be Right.

2011-04-01T13:02:00.001-04:00

Some thoughts on reactions to Obama's actions in Libya, written for Zahranicna Politika.

In the days since President Obama decided to support the UN sanctioned no-fly zone in Libya each little cell on the American ideological spectrum has found out its own unique way to trash him. And yet, if the sheer variety of disagreement reveals anything, it might be that Obama took the most reasonable and responsible course of action.

To describe the criticism of Obama’s decision to get involved in Libya as “diverse” wouldn’t do justice to the colorful palate of dissenting opinions. On the left, the criticism typically arose from a combination of distaste for war and meddling in other countries’ affairs. On the right, the critics have blasted Obama for either acting too slowly (2008 presidential candidate John McCain), for caring too much about international approval instead of simply doing it alone (potential 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney), for using a no-fly zone instead of simply invading the country and killing Gaddafi (2008 VP candidate and potential 2012 Republican nominee Sarah Palin), or for doing acting at all, since:

“...for one thing, we haven’t identified yet who the opposition even is to Qaddafi. We don’t know if this is led by Hamas, Hezbollah, or possibly al Qaeda of North Africa. Are we really better off, are United States, our interests better off, if let’s say Al-Qaeda of North Africa now runs Libya?”

That astonishingly ignorant statement comes from Michelle Bachmann - apparently one of the front-runners for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. While these kinds of attacks from the right are clearly motivated by politics rather than policy, they are also easy to dismiss on substantive grounds: the “too slow” criticism somehow neglects that two months ago, Libya wasn’t even on our radar. The charge of being “too international” ignores the decade of global anti-American loathing that has resulted from unilateral arrogance in the Middle East. The brilliant idea of simply invading Libya and taking out Gaddafi overlooks that the US tried that - in Iraq - and it took 8 years and cost a trillion dollars.

The attacks from the left are harder to dismiss on purely substantive grounds - those who are against wars and/or foreign interventions have a laundry list of failed military campaigns to point to as supportive evidence of their case. And yet, when these same people point out the irony of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize they either don’t know or forget that this sort of intervention is a perfect example of the vision that Obama laid out in his acceptance speech in Oslo.

Perhaps the more valid criticisms of the intervention in Libya could have been raised by folks in any part of the ideological spectrum. They include questions like: (a) does the President have the power to wage war without the authorization of Congress (according to Obama the candidate he doesn’t - hence, the outrage), (b) do we need another Iraq, (c) why Libya, and (d) what is the end game?

Will all the criticism firing from every direction, it was clear that Obama needed to do a better sales job. It turns out that when the President is responding to an actual emergency - unlike the manufactured one of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - he does not have the luxury of time to get everyone on board ahead of time like the Bush administration did during the months leading up to the Iraq war in 2003.

And so, 10 days after the start of the offensive, Obama did what he does best - he gave a speech on Libya. His address was successful in outlining a clear moral and strategic case for the intervention:

“It is true that America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs. And given the costs and risks of intervention, we must always measure our interests against the need for action. But that cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what's right. In this particular country – Libya; at this particular moment, we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale. We had a unique ability to stop that violence: an international mandate for action, a broad coalition prepared to join us, the support of Arab countries, and a plea for help from the Libyan people themselves. We also had the ability to stop Gaddafi's forces in their tracks without putting American troops on the ground.”

The speech also laid out why this intervention is different from Iraq - in terms of an imminent need, a limited scope, defined means and an international mandate. Judging from the reactions to the speech in the days that followed, what the President failed to do, was to answer those critics who said that he needs to get authorization from the Congress and those who, correctly, wonder what the end game is in Libya. What happens if the intervention results in a stalemate between Gaddafi and the rebels? What happens if the rebels ask for arm assistance in their combat with Gaddafi? Does the US help them out like they did with Afghans against USSR only to have the same weapons used against them by the Taliban a few decades later? There are many questions that remain unanswered and for now Libya remains the least popular US military intervention in the last 30 years.

Inconvenient Democracy.

2011-02-18T15:50:00.001-05:00

I wrote this column for Zahraničná politika on the eve of the fall of Mubarak's regime, so some of it is already out of date. However, other parts of it continue to be valid in light of the once-again focused or conflicted reaction of the US administration to unrest in other countries...

Inconvenient Democracy

Any reasonable person would expect that a people rising up to take down a dictator would be greeted with universal cheers. Democracy is ultimately the best form of government, after all, or so we have been taught since our time in the crib. And yet the reaction to the revolution in Egypt has been anything but a cheer. Instead what we have seen thus far is at best a lot of concern and at worst completely naked cynicism. It serves to remind us just how hollow the American belief in democracy has become long before anyone in Egypt ever thought about protesting in the streets.

While it remains unclear whether the revolution in Egypt will be successful in overturning Hosni Mubarak’s rule, it is perfectly obvious just how conflicted the US feels about this development. First, Obama didn’t think it necessary even so much as mention the protests in Egypt or the revolution in Tunisia during his state of the union speech on January 25th. Then, a few days later, his vice president went on TV to say that Mubarak should not step down and refused to call him a dictator. It wasn’t until more recently that the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton communicated a message more sympathetic with the protestors; yet, the emphasis was on calling for an “orderly transition”.

However appalling, the hesitant behaviour of the US officials makes sense. A quick look at the list of recipient of US foreign aid reveals that Egypt is the second largest recipient (after Israel and also not counting spending in Iraq and Afghanistan). Egypt - and Mubarak’s regime - received on average about $2 billion per year since Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Clearly they are a key US ally; though the partnership doesn’t seem to extend too far beyond our military interests: it’s kind of telling that the vast majority of that aid is specifically for military assistance which Egypt uses to purchase products from US defense contractors. Humanitarian effort this is clearly not.

And yet, I can’t help but point out the irony of President Obama on the one hand encouraging Egyptians “to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed” in his speech in Cairo in June 2009, and on the other hand failing to convey a more supportive tone once Egyptians attempted to do just that. After the first few days of demonstrations, there were reports from Egypt of people dismayed at the tepid response from the US: apparently they didn’t realize that a speech by President Obama, as uplifting as it may be, is just that - a speech.

Egyptians are, in a sense, getting to know the real Obama, the one that disillusioned liberals in the US have long lost any hope in: a president, who ran on openness and once in power chose to invoke the state secrecy privilege to squash any attempts at prosecution of the Bush torture regime and instead decided to focus energy on finding creative ways to criminalize those who leak and publish classified information.

The extent to which the American mainstream is supportive of this kind of cynicism is apparent in the way the public has embraced the “concerns” about Egypt. According to a poll conducted by Rasmussen, 59% of Americans say if the unrest in Egypt spreads to other countries, it will be bad for the United States and only 5% people think that the current government falling would be good for America. Most starkly, 70% of people think America should leave the situation alone. One has to wonder where were these concerns hiding on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, when close to ⅔ of Americans supported the war, according to a March 2003 ABC poll.

Given the history of the middle east, these concerns are not entirely unwarranted, of course. There is plenty of precedent for an autocrat stepping only to be replaced by an even worse alternative, think Iran, the Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini. And there are plenty of examples where democracy has led to undesirable outcomes, such as the election of Hamas in Gaza. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, is the saying that has become popular to describe the situation.

And yet I fail to see the upside in supporting status quo in Egypt. How can the US ever be taken seriously again if the grand summary of its foreign policy in the middle east over the last 10 years ends up being “democracy, only when we want it”? As I see it, the administration has missed the chance to be on the right side of history when history was being made: recognize that a regime change is inevitable sooner or later, and by endorsing it fully, hope for a continuing cooperation from Egypt in the future. The question is whether the haphazard and belated support - one that the US is likely to offer eventually - will be enough.

Health Reform Might Be Unconstitutional Because Democrats Compromised.

2010-12-15T10:20:00.001-05:00

So, a judge in Virginia ruled the individual mandate in the new health reform law unconstitutional. Big deal?

If you are in favor of providing universal coverage to everyone, the individual mandate is key. Yes, there are ways to circumvent it (for example, provide a tax credit to those who purchase health insurance; or charge a penalty to anyone who opts out and then signs up), but as the reform law is currently constructed, the mandate is essential. Without it, insurers can hardly be expected to provide coverage to everyone regardless of preexisting conditions, and they will surely file their own lawsuits if the mandate is ripped out. Soon we'll be back where we started.

Still, two other judges ruled that the mandate is just fine. So why would one man's opinion matter? Well, the revealing fact is that of the judges who opined on this thus far, those who ruled in favor of the mandate were nominated by a Democrat and the one who rules against it was a Republican appointee. In short: the constitutionality of the mandate seems to be partisan - imagine that! Now, with multiple diverging opinion, the case is guaranteed to go up to the Supreme Court, where a panel of 5 conservatives and 4 liberals is fairly likely to strike it down (OR I'm just a cynic and the judges are totally non-partisan).

Anyhow, the issue I wanted to address is not what the future holds, but rather how we got here. The individual mandate is allegedly unconstitutional because the federal government cannot force people to purchase a commercial product. Think about that for a moment: the federal government cannot force people to purchase a commercial product. In other words, the current challenges to the mandate would have no teeth if it weren't for the fact that the current design of the law relies on people buying coverage from insurers. The irony is that the genesis of that construct lies not with the Democrats - who generally favor governmental provision of health benefits (the public option, remember?) - but rather with the Republicans who prefer any government benefit to be administered by corporations (Medicare Part D thanks to Bush, social security, if Bush had his way, the military contractors, etc, etc).

So in other words, had the Democrats had their way on the design of health reform, there would be no grounds for a constitutional challenge. Of course that was not the preferable path, since back then we needed everything to be BIPARTISAN. And what did they get in return for this compromise? A single Republican vote? No, not a single one. Instead they now have this compromise coming back to bite them in their ass.

I find it hard to believe that the Republicans were smart enough to plan this ahead of time - eliminate any governmental option to provide coverage to get a chance at repealing the law in court. I think the facts just conveniently lined up that way. But I think it is instructive to point out - especially as we are talking about the tax cut "deal" between Republicans and Obama - that these kinds of compromises tend to have unintended consequences down the road. So, as some Democrats are slapping themselves on the back about what a good deal they got ("back-door stimulus"), I'm just thinking: you just wait.

An email from Columbia's SIPA to their students proves that we now live in China.

2010-12-03T15:04:00.001-05:00

“We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance. The documents released during the past few months through WikiLeaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents not make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.” Via Democracy Now.

WikiUgh, or how annoying some reactions to WikiLeaks are.

2010-12-01T17:29:00.001-05:00

Think what you want about WikiLeaks, there isn't much to like about Julian Assange's "style." He kind of sounds like an egomaniacal prick. And yet I was disappointed that people - ones I usually find to be rational and above this kind of thing - can't somehow get over his persona in their assessment of the latest dump of data or what WikiLeaks does, generally.

Last night, Jon Stewart couldn't help himself and make fun of Assange. This was right before he postulated that "If there's total transparency, we won't really see anything." How deep.

Then Ezra Klein chimed in: "I'm not sure this guy's incentives -- which by now include impact and publicity -- are really trustworthy."

Really guys, ad hominem attacks?

How strange that we didn't see any of those reactions (definitely not from the liberals), when the leaks were exposing horrific information about the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I suppose that was barely noteworthy? Or maybe that was stuff that validated their opinions? But now that WikiLeaks published a whole bunch of mundane info from the State Department (thought not all of it was totally dull - and I am not talking about the gossipy crap about various foreign leaders, I mean stuff like this, which seems to be getting totally lost in the shuffle - not unsurprisingly), we are all up in arms about the propriety of what Assange is doing? Really?

The more bizarre line of reasoning that I first saw emerge in a Brooks column here, is that this disclosure will damage the global conversation or even the ability of US diplomats to do their work. I don't find that entirely convincing, but it's not totally without merit: I suppose having your raw thoughts about someone plastered all over the internet probably doesn't help your relations. I can see that.

But then yesterday, looking at the prospect of a data dump from a major US bank, Ezra Klein took that argument even further, and argued that this kind of disclosure will stymie information sharing of all kind:

"If he's really effective, the likely outcome won't be that people know more, but that they know less, as major institutions -- both public and private -- will stop sharing their information so widely internally and stop writing so much of it down. That means decision-makers will know less, bureaucrats and managers will know less, reporters will know less, historians will know less, and so on."

I suppose so if it wasn't for the fact that short of verbally communicating everything - which is impossible - there is no way to avoid digital communication and record-keeping in this day and age. First, it is simply impractical, and second, people are dumb and will always put self-incriminating shit in writing. As an example, a full decade after the original Wall Street email scandal (analysts pushing tech stock and calling them a piece of crap in private emails), we had the exact same thing happen with mortgage securities (trader's salling products they called crap to clients to whom they have full disclosure and fiduciary duties).

Besides, at the other extreme, is the implication that we should never publish incriminating records and prosecute accordingly for the fear that we may inspire corporate insiders to sensor their written communications? More importantly, why exactly would they feel the need to sensor themselves if they aren't doing anything sinister? Or are we now concerned about protecting criminals?

The Jon Stewart Philosophy?

2010-12-01T11:10:00.001-05:00

From the man who gave us "If we amplify everything, we hear nothing", comes a new pearl of wisdom: "If there's total transparency, we won't really see anything." I think I see a pattern?

"a hypocritical and inconsistent opposition is better than no opposition at all" is a revealing motto http://nyti.ms/dEKTXi

2010-11-29T13:54:00.001-05:00

My new column for Zahraničná politika "Welcome to United States of Absurdity"

2010-11-11T09:29:00.001-05:00

Welcome to United States of Absurdity

“Absurdistan” is a term that has appeared in art and in the press as a sarcastic description of a country where absurdity is the norm. The suffix “-stan” connotes the former Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc generally, so although it could be used to describe several countries, it’s etymology renders it inapplicable outside of that loose geographical context. However, a closer look at recent events in the United States reveals that absurdity is not the exclusive domain of emerging Eastern economies with young democracies and fragile political and social structures. Absurdity has, it would seem, found a very comfortable home in America.

To understand the proportions of the phenomenon, let’s look at the recent congressional elections in which absurdity reached a terrific crescendo. Only two years after electing Barack Obama the President and giving the Democratic Party historic majorities in both houses of Congress, the Republican Party won the control of the House of Representatives and significantly reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate. While Obama remains the President, his ability to pursue his agenda is thus greatly diminished; some have even asked: “Is the Obama era over?”

There are many ways to look at this loss, but the simplest explanation lies in the economy: persistently high unemployment rates are the kiss of death for the incumbent party, regardless of which party that is. For many people this alone could be called absurd: Did Americans really expect the Democrats to reverse the economic collapse that commenced in 2008 in less than two years? More importantly, do Americans believe that Republicans, who presided over the built-up to the collapse, are to be trusted with making things better? The same Republicans, who tied the country’s hands behinds its back with two wars and a massive expansion in deficit, and who are now suddenly raising alarm about the size of government spending, precisely when the country is in desperate need of fiscal stimulus?

In light of these questions, one might find voters’ preferences for Republicans absurd, but the truly absurd thing is that Americans don’t actually have that preference. According to a New York Times/CBS poll conducted in October, only 41% of voters had a favorable view of the Republican party, while 46% of voters had that opinion of the Democratic party. In other words, Americans have a more favorable view of the Democrats and yet they vote for Republicans. What is going on? Perhaps the vote is a referendum on President Obama and his handling of the economy? That doesn’t seem likely: the same poll showed that 30% blame the Bush administration for the current state of the economy while only 8% attribute it to the Obama administration. So what is it then? Is it possible that in 2008 Americans didn’t just fall in love with Obama’s vision of “Change” but instead became addicted to change of any sort and now, every two years, we will witness a panicked move of power from one party to another?

It is not just the voting preferences that seem to have no rhyme or reason - it’s also the discourse that surrounds politics. While reasonable people can disagree on ways to solve the numerous problems facing the country (economy, education, health care, immigration, environment, energy, infrastructure, the list goes on and on), the debate is almost never about these policy differences. Instead, Americans spent months debating the “Ground Zero Mosque” (does a Muslim organization that has been active for years in the neighborhood surrounding Ground Zero have the right to build a community center with a prayer room?). Another time the whole nation is completely consumed by a debate about anchor babies - a phenomenon I covered in this column before; and who could forget the endless hours that we all talked about the plane that crashed into the Hudson river or the man who claimed his son flew away in a balloon when he was hiding in the garage? And yes, the problem probably lies with the advertising-driven media which is more interested in conflict, controversy and soundbites which generate viewership and ad sales. But again, this is never really discussed, nor are any sorts of alternatives. Instead, we see Republicans calling for defunding National Public Radio - one of the few remaining independent sources of news and programming.

And so, while the American infrastructure is rapidly falling apart and the economy is in limbo, some people lay awake at night worrying that some Muslims might be able to pray in the same zip code as Ground Zero. At the same time that the US is committed to two large wars and potentially planning another one (because, why not?), in addition to a multitude of military bases around the world, we’re debating whether or not gays are worthy of the right to fight for their country - a question other NATO armies have settled long ago in favor of inclusion and without any apparent detriment. Are Americans just masochistically trying to make things harder for themselves to show the world how tough they are?

Perhaps it is not fair to talk about absurdity in American politics as a recent phenomenon, maybe it has been here all along. The US is, after all, the oldest democracy in the world founded on the genocide of one group of people and enslavement of another. And yet, however bloody its history may be, America has always seen dissent movements which have kept it at least somewhat honest to its stated principles. By contrast, a quick look at today’s dissent reveals a big soup of absurdity. The Tea Party is a pseudo grass roots anti-government movement which dates back to the early days of the Obama administration and which has since been co-opted by corporations and the Republican establishment. The absurdity of this movement is best exemplified by the statement “get your government hands off my Medicare” - a government program, in fact. Their supporters are routinely beneficiaries of government programs but have somehow concluded that the government is the greatest problem in the modern age. In their rallies, the Tea Partiers have routinely accused President Obama of being a socialist AND compared him to Hitler, all for proposing economic policies which would seem conservative to most European politicians.

The response to the Tea Party is even more absurd than the Tea Party itself. Especially after all the transgressions of the financial system and the debacles of the US military excursion in Iraq and Afghanistan one would expect a strong progressive populist movement would somehow arise to counter the agenda of the Tea Party. And yet, the only liberal movement we have seen has been organized by the comedian Jon Stewart in his “Rally to Restore Sanity,” with the overarching message being that both sides of the spectrum need to be more civil in their disagreements. In a sense, his rally was an “ironic rally” or an anti-rally, and the purpose was not to disagree with or promote any ideas, but instead to tell everyone that no cause is serious enough to get angry about.

The call to sanity was well received - some 250,000 people attended the rally; clearly the idea resonated with many Americans. And while the stated goal isn’t entirely unreasonable, I couldn’t help but wonder: is this really the best that liberals can do especially with a popular politically driven conservative movement positioned to gain meaningful control of the Congress? Are no causes worth genuinely rallying about?

Or am I to believe that we have reached an age where a people that has the freedom to organize and protest has nothing better to do with that freedom than to poke fun of it?

Wassup, cupcake?

2010-11-05T11:38:00.001-04:00

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Just Shut The Fuck Up.

2010-10-21T10:24:00.001-04:00

I don't understand this latest string of developments. DADT is back in effect as a result of a stay issued yesterday. The purpose of a "stay" is to stop the effect of a ruling while it's being appealed. Fine, I suppose. I can understand the logic of doing this in an orderly fashion (even if I don't agree with it).

But how about the reverse? Shouldn't there also be a "stay" on DADT enforcement while it's being reviewed? If the end goal is an orderly end of the policy, wouldn't it be logical to stop firing people for being gay? As the history of DADT enforcement shows, the Pentagon has not applied the policy uniformly over time (hint, discharges drop in time of conflict), suggesting that there isn't really any factual emergency when it comes to gays in the military. And as the testimony of a high level NATO official shows, the whole concern about unit cohesion is totally bogus. So while the judges, bureaucrats and the assholes in Congress are working on this one, why not stop enforcement of DADT?

As for the DOJ appeal of the DADT ruling, I suppose they didn't have a choice. But again, it matters how you do this. Amy Davidson makes some good points on this here, in particular about the wording of the DOJ motion.

As for Obama's insistance that DODT "will end on my watch", I'd like to see where he gets his ballsy certainty from. Will it end on his watch when the newly Republican House and possibly Republican Senate vote to repeal it? What else will they do while they are at it? Pass a climate change bill and an immigration overhaul? Clearly, saying that the Congress will do anything is an empty promise and acting like it's self-evident means that either he is delusional or believes that we must be, and I don't know which is worse.

Life's Good Now.

2010-10-20T19:41:00.001-04:00

Carboloading.

2010-10-20T07:27:00.001-04:00

Yea, right.

NATO Official on Gays in Military: "It's Working Out Quite Well"

2010-10-15T10:39:00.001-04:00

Reposting this interview with Chairman of NATO's Military Committee, because this needs to reposted again and again and again.

DI PAOLA: I think it's working out quite well. In the end, fundamentally, the issue here is the sexual orientation is not an issue insofar as you being a soldier or whatever you would be in the environment you are working for, that is not a problem. Sexual orientation is a personal matter, not a matter for state policy.

BLITZER: So it hasn't undermined unit cohesion, combat readiness?

DI PAOLA: Absolutely not. If there is misconduct, applied to a gay or non-gay, that would be treated as misconduct. So your sexual orientation does not have to influence the environment in which you work.

BLITZER: When NATO troops, whether from Canada, Britain, or Germany, or France or Italy, serve in Afghanistan, for example, with U.S. combat troops and there are gays serving side by side, have you seen one example of an incident that has undermined the ability to fight?

DI PAOLA: I have not seen it. I am not aware of it. Of course, I don't know all the cases that might have happened. But I'm not aware of any cases of any relevance.

Hipster Cat.

2010-10-15T10:19:00.001-04:00

http://www.sadanduseless.com/2010/04/hipster-cat-the-best-of/

For Bernd and Cenk from Starbucks.

2010-10-15T08:28:00.001-04:00

No Amount of Running Can Help Me Now.

2010-10-14T15:23:00.001-04:00

Ahma? How Papal of You.

2010-10-13T18:44:00.001-04:00

I Love Running.

2010-10-13T09:49:00.001-04:00

Seriously, Stop Obsessing About Paladino.

2010-10-12T10:16:00.001-04:00

You probably heard all about it: the Republican nominee for the governor of NY made a nasty remark about gays. NY Times and NPR can't stop reporting about it. Predictably, Andrew Sullivan reacts to Paladino's rant with his own typical Sullivan rant. I take one look at Intrade and Pollster and say: who gives a shit. In all seriousness, the chances of him being elected are pretty slim, and clearly rants like this are not particularly helpful. Yes, it is infuriating for a serious candidate for political post to be saying these things .. but honestly, maybe his slim chances of being elected are a testament to how marginal and extreme his views are? So instead of wasting time and energy on him, can we all please get more sleep or run for 10 minutes?

"The Nobel thus not only crowns a career but provides the basis for a fine future Javier Bardem/Antonio Banderas movie."

2010-10-11T14:32:00.001-04:00

http://nyr.kr/dsLW0B

Gay Marriage Trivia.

2010-10-11T11:50:00.001-04:00

Due to reasons I may (or may not) discuss another time, I was on the Wikipedia page on civil partnerships in the UK and on the right hand side, in the list of countries and jurisdictions that recognize same-sex marriage, I see a list: United States: CT, DC, IA, MA, NH, VT, Coquille. Huh? Well, apparently Coquille is an Indian tribe in Oregon which legalized same-sex marriage in 2008. “We want all people to be open to benefits and accepted in our group,” stated the Tribal Chief.

Bad, Bad Due Process!

2010-10-08T16:01:00.001-04:00

A terrorist is on trial. The key witness is not allowed to testify since his identify was revealed as a result of torture. The terrorist might possibly be acquitted. As Glenn Greenwald points out, the neocons are angry at Obama for subjecting us all to the inconvenience that is due process.

And of course they are also angry at the assholes who tortured the guy and botched the case in the first place. Finally faced with potentially adverse consequences of torture - a terrorist could be acquitted - they insist on investigating the torture regime of the previous administration.

A man can dream, no?

Marathon Mania Begins.

2010-10-08T09:57:00.001-04:00

___
Alex Kristofcak
917.742.2713

Cue the applause?

2010-10-08T09:49:00.001-04:00

Welcome to 2002, douchebags.

___
Alex Kristofcak
917.742.2713

Seasonal goodness.

2010-10-07T10:48:00.001-04:00

Totally forgot to post an update. A pretty fun month .. ESPECIALLY PUMPKINS!

Source.

1 Month To Go!

2010-10-07T09:45:00.001-04:00

What are you waiting for?

“There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

2010-10-07T09:05:00.001-04:00

Trifecta of Torment

Want to feel good about yourself?

2010-10-06T18:13:00.001-04:00

I know you do!

"There's a lot more butter around than we all thought there was."

2010-10-06T11:21:00.001-04:00

Online World.

2010-10-06T11:14:00.001-04:00

"Plains of Awkwardly Public Family Interactions." HA.

Taliban in Afghanistan, Back to Future.

2010-10-06T10:47:00.001-04:00

This is quite bizarre. In 2001, when the US attacked Afghanistan "to find Osama bin Laden and other high-ranking Al-Qaeda members to be put on trial, to destroy the organization of Al-Qaeda, and to remove the Taliban regime which supported and gave safe harbor to it," few probably imagined that the outcome of the war would be for the Taliban to be in the government of Afghanistan. And yet, that is what is apparently happening, according to this article, which says that Karzai is in talks with the Taliban over a negotiated end to the war.

I would lie if I said I can envision a different end to the war. But God, how dispiriting: after all these years of fighting, how is one to feel about the fact that Taliban might be back in power in Afghanistan? And not because we failed to stop them from doing so by force but rather because they negotiated some sort of a deal? And how does the "surge" factor into this? What about the counter-insurgency strategy? The administration will have a lot of explaining to do.

More importantly, if a negotiated settlement with our original enemy ("we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them") is indeed the ultimate solution, can we all please stop for a moment and agree on the obvious conclusion to leads to with regards to American military intervention in foreign lands? Please?

Wanda Sykes: "Neh, nobody's gonna bully me, come on."

2010-10-06T09:53:00.001-04:00

Wanda Sykes, Kathy Griffin and Tim Gunn. It's like gay cocaine.

Evil Genius? Who cares.

2010-10-06T08:54:00.001-04:00

Pretty good article from the Times about Zuckerberg. I genuinely believe that success on this scale is 5% skill and 95% total randomness (right place, right time, etc). That said, the movie was super fun. http://nyti.ms/atfaaF

Stewart on Gross

2010-10-05T20:15:00.001-04:00

A totally great interview.

Aww.

2010-10-05T07:47:00.000-04:00

Re: today's Brooks column, maybe the White House should care less about what Brooks thinks?

Quote of the Day.

2010-09-30T16:32:00.000-04:00

“Oh that's nice to start early. Because then you can stop sucking sooner.”

David Sedaris.

A Plan.

2010-09-29T19:59:00.000-04:00

Ezra writes:

"I have a plan that will raise wages, lower prices, increase the nation's stock of scientists and engineers, and maybe even create the next Google. Better yet, this plan won't cost the government a dime. In fact, it'll save money. A lot of money. But few politicians are going to want to touch it.

Here's the plan: More immigration. A pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants. And a recognition that immigration policy is economic policy and needs to be thought of as such."

Ah, yes, something I have written about many times. Many many many many times.

Book Editing Fail.

2010-09-23T14:38:00.001-04:00

Indeed, consider the "nearly $100 million Kenneth Lewis earned as CEO of Bank of America in 2007, as he was leading the bank toward collapse (and absorption by Merrill Lynch)."

Wait, wasn't it the other way around?

Tony The Wonderful.

2010-09-21T13:29:00.002-04:00

Ah, I hope that I won't have enough spare time in my lifetime to run out of things to read by Tony Judt.

In his most recent essay in the NYRB, he makes a really interesting link between the unquestioning faith in communism among Marxists of the last century to today's widespread faith in capitalism.

Our contemporary faith in “the market” rigorously tracks its radical nineteenth-century doppelgänger—the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History. Just as the hapless British Labour chancellor in 1929–1931, Philip Snowden, threw up his hands in the face of the Depression and declared that there was no point opposing the ineluctable laws of capitalism, so Europe’s leaders today scuttle into budgetary austerity to appease “the markets.”

But “the market”—like “dialectical materialism”—is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers—mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers—who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives. We know perfectly well that untrammeled faith in unregulated markets kills: the rigid application of what was until recently the “Washington consensus” in vulnerable developing countries—with its emphasis on tight fiscal policy, privatization, low tariffs, and deregulation—has destroyed millions of livelihoods. Meanwhile, the stringent “commercial terms” on which vital pharmaceuticals are made available has drastically reduced life expectancy in many places. But in Margaret Thatcher’s deathless phrase, “there is no alternative.”

It was in just such terms that communism was presented to its beneficiaries following World War II; and it was because History afforded no apparent alternative to a Communist future that so many of Stalin’s foreign admirers were swept into intellectual captivity. But when Miłosz published The Captive Mind, Western intellectuals were still debating among genuinely competitive social models—whether social democratic, social market, or regulated market variants of liberal capitalism. Today, despite the odd Keynesian protest from below the salt, a consensus reigns.

For Miłosz, “the man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.” This is doubtless so and explains the continuing skepticism of the Eastern European in the face of Western innocence. But there is nothing innocent about Western (and Eastern) commentators’ voluntary servitude before the new pan-orthodoxy. Many of them, Ketman-like, know better but prefer not to raise their heads above the parapet. In this sense at least, they have something truly in common with the intellectuals of the Communist age. One hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay, Miłosz’s indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: “his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.”

This struck a chord in me. Consider something I wrote almost 2 years ago, as world seemed to be going into a complete meltdown:

Growing up in post-Communist Slovakia, I was a part of a young generation that was never fully indoctrinated with the theories of Marxism and Leninism. Anxious to be as western as possible, we embraced the ideas of the free market like a religion. Capitalism was cool, it was the only way to be. Today, as I listen to Greenspan, and read more about behavioral economics, I am increasingly aware that what may have previously seemed like an axiom was really just a doctrine. Maybe it is right, maybe not, but still nothing more than a doctrine.

Just for the record, my views haven't changed in the last two years. If anything, everything we know now about how the crisis developed further undermines the belief in rational fair markets. Amazingly, this knowledge was not enough to fuel really dramatic reforms. Oh well.

The Case For .. Whatever.

2010-09-20T13:37:00.006-04:00

It has been almost 1.5 years since I got angry over an editorial at the National Review Online about the "Future of Marriage." In case you haven't read that piece, let's just say that that "future" didn't have much room for gay couples. And in case you haven't read my reaction, let's just say it was not peaceful.

This month, the editors have gifted us with another think piece on gay marriage, this one titled "The Case for Marriage." And while my insides were boiling while reading it, after thinking about it a little, I was overcome by a gratifying sense that it illustrates that we're winning. Consider the fact that the NRO feels compelled to make the case in the first place. It shouldn't be surprising, of course - they are making the case for a position they held for a long time. And yet, it feels like an act of desperation: they are trying, yet again, before it's too late, before the events around them render them completely obsolete, to say their piece. Of course, that is my interpretation, but check this out: In their article from April 2009, they start out by saying:

"Contrary to common perception, however, the public is not becoming markedly more favorable toward same-sex marriage. Support for same-sex marriage rose during the 1990s but seems to have frozen in place (at least according to Gallup) since the high court of Massachusetts invented a right to same-sex marriage earlier this decade."

In today's editorial, we read this:

"If it is true, as we are constantly told, that American law will soon redefine marriage to accommodate same-sex partnerships, the proximate cause for this development will not be that public opinion favors it, although it appears to be moving in that direction."

Nice shift. Here's what happened during the time between the two articles:

- Federal judge in California declares Prop 8 unconstitutional

- CNN poll finds that 52% of Americans are in favor of gay marriage

- AP poll finds that 52% of Americans are in favor of gay marriage

Clearly, the NRO is on the defensive here, and oh how good it feels:

"It may be that the conventional wisdom is correct, and legal recognition of same-sex marriage really is our inevitable future. Perhaps it will even become an unquestioned policy and all who resisted it will be universally seen as bigots. We doubt it, but cannot exclude the possibility. If our understanding of marriage changes in this way, so much the worse for the future."

50-Something Days Left, Or: I Can Eat What I Want Without Worrying About What I Will Look Like At The Fire Island Pines Underwear Party.

2010-09-16T12:16:00.007-04:00

Rainbow at a gay wedding in Massachusetts.

Welcome to the fall. The leaves are turning funny colors, the air is getting dry and cold, the hot naked bodies have disappeared from Central Park, and the oven is on 400F non-stop, doing what it can to satisfy my perma-craving for baked goods. Oh yea, and we're training for the marathon.

You could barely tell I'm training given how little I have been running. It's been by far the most relaxed training season ever. I mean, I don't even know my weekly mileage. I just religiously follow my training plan (most runs are time-based, not mile-based, hence my ignorance), running at most 4 times per week. And I am only up to 14 miles in my long run this week. This is quite a step back since my last running update and it happened for a good reason: the herniated disc which prevented me from running Paris has struck again, so I had to stop running for all of July and half of August. Leading up to it, I was running so much that 12 miles was just something I would run for fun on a Wednesday, often reaching north of 40 miles per week - in June. Obviously my body was like "um, no" and by early July I could barely run at all. Luckily, this happened in early July and not in October.

Olive has been instrumental in motivating me for my runs, since she is the only creature alive who I can run with and not be dropped. Having come back from an injury at a time when everyone else has been running all summer, I am super slow compared to all my friends. It's not that Olive isn't faster than me (in short distances at least). But, alas, she's a dog, and being a human with a leash gives me certain advantages over her that wouldn't necessarily be cool with my friends .. not while running anyway.

So now I'm back at it, with my legs 95% ok, still seeing a physical therapist and doing what I can to get my miles in and cross that damn finish line. After singing up for and missing 2 marathons in 3 years due to injuries, I am determined to finish this fucker. Also, I have made a commitment to raise money for Team Continuum and I am planning to keep that promise. They are a really cool organization that helps out people with cancer as well as researchers and facilities focused on cancer treatment. It's a very personal choice for me, as cancer has struck both in my family and among my friends, luckily with no tragic consequences. And that's kind of the point - I have seen first hand that with the right care and support, cancer can often be treated successfully. So please donate to this great cause.

Cheers,

Is Brooks Naive, Misinformed or Downright Stupid?

2010-09-03T13:21:00.006-04:00

I was all but ready to have a lovely peaceful Friday afternoon, and then Daniel pointed out today's column by David Douchebag Brooks. In it he lays out his vision of an alternate reality in which the Democrats would not have been heading towards a terrible election.

1. Apparently, things would have been much better if back in early 2009 Obama understood that Americans will "recoil at the prospect of federal debt without end" and instead of more spending, proposed a stimulus that relied heavily on cutting payroll taxes which would "send a quick jolt to the economy without concentrating power in Washington." OMG, where do I begin?

a. Deficit = Spending - Taxes. More spending increases the deficit; cutting taxes increases the deficit. Suggesting that a stimulus program that relies on lowering taxes instead of higher spending would somehow have been less bad for the size of the US deficit is either total idiocy or a display of the typical Republican hypocrisy when it comes to deficits: they are only bad if they come from higher spending. For more details on this strange logic, see Bush tax cuts circa 2001-2003.

b. Later in the column, Brooks fantasizes: "Obama put [puts?] signs around the White House: “No Quick Fixes.” Administration officials were forbidden from promising a short-term summer of recovery." EXCEPT, I guess, when the columnist suggests that tax cuts would "send a quick jolt to the economy." So which is it, David? Do we stop promising quick fixes? Or are you suggesting that there are no quick fixes WITH THE SOLE EXCEPTION of cutting taxes? How fucking convenient for a conservative to believe that!

c. For a program that Brooks implies was all about spending, the stimulus actually had a surprising amount of tax cuts. In fact, over 1/3 of its total size came from tax cuts. Best of it all, almost 1/2 of these tax cuts came from payroll taxes.. in other words, exactly what Brooks is suggesting the president could have done to avoid a historic defeat in December.

2. "At about that time, General Motors and Chrysler started teetering. Obama decided to help the companies if they were willing to make the tough choices that would boost long-term competitiveness. It occurred to him that this was the template for the whole country." I guess Brooks is somehow implying that the administration somehow failed in this respect.. though it seems to me that what actually happened was precisely what he describes AND, if anything, it worked well .. For more details, see the $1.3 billion in profit GM reported in the last quarter!

3. "April brought the cruelest fight: whether to spend the rest of the year getting health care reform or a new energy policy. Obama decided to do energy first. The economy was uppermost on everybody’s mind. Americans were wondering where new innovations would come from, what new jobs would emerge.By doing energy first, Democrats were able to spend the entire summer talking about technological advances, private sector growth and breakthrough productivity gains. Obama toured one small business after another, and got his energy bill." Do I even have to refute that?

In summary: Obama would have been hailed as savior and the Democrats loved, had they only cut taxes, bailed out the car manufacturers, told people to expect a slow gradual recovery, and passed energy reform first. Gosh, I am no huge fan of many things Obama has done but this analysis is total horse shit.

On a Roll!

2010-09-03T09:20:00.005-04:00

Inspired by a teammate's recent post on shredded pork, I developed an immense appetite for some shredded goodness. But 6 hours of cooking were a huge turn off. I know slow cooking is a beautiful thing, but when I want something, I want it ASAP. So naturally, I started thinking about using the pressure cooker. I went to Fairway, got a piece of smoked pork butt, threw it in the pressure cooker for 30 minutes (and used the "natural release method" for the pressure to subside, IE, allowing it to sit while I went for a run with Olive and Hiro) and voilà! -the meat just fell apart between my fingers! I mixed in some BBQ sauce (a smoky flavor.. maybe one day I will attempt to make my own, but honestly.. there is only so much a girl can do in one night!) and served it on a brioche bun with slow-sautéed onions and peppers. Wow, I think I saw Jesus that night.

I decided recently that I need to do more baking. I have a lot of kitchen toys that are just sitting there most days, collecting dust, AND I have a big appetite for desserts (as well as a boyfriend who has an even greater appetite for desserts!), so I really wanted to do more pastry. To start, I picked something relatively simple: upside down apricot cake. I did my best to make this recipe less of a calorie/cholesterol bomb than it was (subbing butter with Earth Balance and part of the sugar with Splenda) .. but it still turned out to be ridiculously decadent. But so fucking good.

My next pick was inspired by our recent trip to France, where the pastries are obviously insanely good. I wanted to make something with an almond filling, which both me and Daniel totally adore. So I picked an Almond Pear Tart .. of course I modified it to be a little less heart-attack inducing but there is only so much you can do when a recipe calls for 2 sticks of butter! It turned out so beautiful that I was afraid to try it - what if the flavor is a let down? Well, holy shit, it was not. I was sitting on the sofa literally going "um, I think I took this to a whole new level." Damn right I did. I also think it motivated Daniel to wake up this morning and do a bike workout.. or at least talk about doing one.

Hello September!

2010-09-01T09:54:00.005-04:00

Things in season, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Beginning of the Fall.

Terrorist Babies Attack, ctd.

2010-08-31T14:09:00.002-04:00

Clearly, there is much more to be said on immigration. Right after finishing up my article on the topic, I check Matthew Yglesias' blog and he points me to a cool study about the effects of immigration on the labor market:

"Data show that, on net, immigrants expand the U.S. economy’s productive capacity, stimulate investment, and promote specialization that in the long run boosts productivity. Consistent with previous research, there is no evidence that these effects take place at the expense of jobs for workers born in the United States."

In a subsequent post, he theorizes that allowing more immigrants in the US would be good for the housing market. Makes sense to me, although I can already see the hysterical headlines:

Foreigner Demand for Houses Pushes Out Americans!

Terrorist Babies Attack!

2010-08-31T11:51:00.006-04:00

While last summer US Democrats were conspiring to kill off sick seniors, this summer, flocks of pregnant foreign females are flying all over the US and dropping babies, which upon touchdown start sucking up public resources and multiplying at an astonishing pace! Depending on who you believe, these offspring are either created to eventually provide US citizenship for their parents, or they are being planted as terrorist sleeper cells only to blow up when they reach the age of 18 or when they are fed after midnight, whichever comes first. It’s August in America and everything is possible!!

"People come here to have babies. They come here to drop a child. It's called “drop and leave.” To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child's automatically an American citizen. That shouldn't be the case." These were the words of Lindsey Graham, the Republican Senator from South Carolina, who at the end of July suggested that Americans should rethink the 14th Amendment of the Constitution which grants US citizenship to anyone born in the US. And thus the principle of birthright was brought into the spotlight, creating much ado during these hot summer months.

This debate is as inconsequential as it is unsurprising. It’s lack of consequence is twofold: procedurally, it is impossible in the present political climate to amend the US constitution, so any suggestion to do so is unlikely to go anywhere; substantively, the number of children born to two foreign parents on the US soil - let alone to parents who come here specifically for the purposes of giving birth - is so comically small that the amount of attention it receives is wildly disproportionate. In other words, the debate is a ridiculous waste of time and attention span for everyone involved.

And yet no one should be surprised that it surfaced now. Ever since the state of Arizona passed a stringent immigration law in April, immigration has gone from being just another big national problem (next to health care, financial crisis, climate change, national debt, etc) to being a hotly debated issue. And any time a major complex issue comes to the forefront of collective consciousness, someone, somewhere manages to cut out a tiny sliver of the problem and completely blow it out of proportion - often reducing the entire complex issue into this one pseudo-controversial bit.

Those who paid attention to the health care reform debate last year will recognize a pattern. Back then, after months of committee hearings and negotiations on various aspects of the health care overhaul, some opponents of the proposed bill picked up on a paragraph which called for paying physicians for end-of-life counseling. This provision was distorted and portrayed as a “death panel” which will decide whether or not we should “pull the plug on grandma.” Very quickly, the hysteria over death panels became the defining element of the debate, and almost killed the nascent reform entirely. Anchor babies are the new death panels.

The amount of attention that the narrow issue of birthright receives is unfortunate because it takes away from other critical aspects of the immigration debate, namely: what should be done with roughly 11 million illegal immigrants already in the US? And how should the law governing immigration be revamped and modernized to reflect the realities and needs of the country? For a nation of immigrants, the US has a fairly spotty record in the its treatment of foreigners, and for every wave of immigrants, there is a corresponding wave of anti-immigrant backlash - anti-Chinese laws in the late nineteenth century and depression-era deportations of Mexicans are just a few examples.

But no matter which way the winds blow at any given time, immigrants are a vital component of the US, not just conceptually, but also economically: according to a landmark study by the National Research Council, the average immigrant and her immediate descendants contribute $80,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits. The reason for this is twofold: even though they are not eligible to use benefits due to their status, most illegal immigrants actually pay income and social security taxes - the tax authorities have smartly figured out that there is no harm in collecting money from them and don’t ask too many questions of those using fake documentation. Legal immigrants, on the other hand, have to earn above-average incomes in order to be eligible for work visas or permanent residency (so as not to compete with natives on the basis of lower pay), so by design they actually end up on the top end of the income scale, paying a disproportionate amount of taxes relative to the rest of the population.

Despite these contributions, when the economy goes south and millions of Americans lose their jobs, immigrants are almost inevitably portrayed as an existential threat. The current recession is no exception. It is one of the great ironies of this debate that while rising unemployment seems to inflate the anxiety about foreigners, immigration - legal and illegal - has actually been on the decline: according to the Department of Homeland Security, the number of illegal immigrants dropped almost 1 million in 2009, the second consecutive annual drop and the largest such drop in three decades. And it is not just illegal immigration that has been on the decline - the demand for work visas for foreign workers has dropped so much when the current recession began that in 2009 the quota for visa applications was unfilled - for the first time since 2004. So, while the opponents of immigration reform often talk as if the country was bursting at the seams with an ever-growing influx of foreigners, the recent experience - largely due to the weak economy - has been quite to the contrary.

An ever greater irony is that the US not only benefits from immigrants - it needs them desperately. The population is aging due to the generation of baby boomers growing older and reaching retirement age. What that means is that the number of people who qualify for benefits like Medicare and social security is rising dramatically - and much faster that the number of young productive people who pay for these benefits with taxes. The situation is getting even grimmer with the birth rate is dropping to the lowest level in US history in 2009, according to recently released statistics from National Center for Health Statistics. What these trends add up to is roughly $100 trillion (as in, $100,000,000,000,000) in unfunded liabilities - the difference between projected payments to beneficiaries and projected tax payments by working adults. Of course, the situation could be remedied by cutting benefits or raising taxes. But neither one of those seems possible or likely. Benefit cuts are a political suicide in a country with such a large - and politically active - senior population. Tax increases are not a slam dunk either - with one party opposing them religiously and the other party scared to do anything that might hurt the economy. In fact, it seems like replenishing the population with productive immigrants who can support the burgeoning geriatric class is the most viable option.

So while Americans are passionately debating the pros and cons of birthright citizenship, they are entirely misguided: the challenge is not how to reduce immigration - something which is happening on its own - but rather how to bring in immigrants as fast as possible. The steps taken in Congress so far demonstrate this confusion: earlier this month, Democrats in the Congress passed a bill which finances $600 million in border security funding through substantially higher visa fees for companies that hire foreign workers. Because border security is a big concern for Republicans, these anti-immigrant measures are being interpreted by some as a negotiating tactic by the Democrats to facilitate broader reform down the line. That would make sense, but only if I had been asleep during the year-long health care reform negotiation: time and time again, we saw such strategic concessions by the Democrats yield no results except to move the debate further to the right. So while it might be unwise to write off immigration reform at this point, I worry that given the direction in which this debate is going the final reform - if it ever happens - will totally miss the point.

Soros on the Euro.

2010-07-12T11:06:00.002-04:00

Pretty depressing stuff. On the role of Germany:

"And this brings me to the gravest defect in the euro’s design: it does not allow for error. It expects member states to abide by the Maastricht criteria—which state that the budget deficit must not exceed 3 percent and total government debt 60 percent of GDP—without establishing an adequate enforcement mechanism. And now that several countries are far away from the Maastricht criteria, there is neither an adjustment mechanism nor an exit mechanism. Now these countries are expected to return to the Maastricht criteria even if such a move sets in motion a deflationary spiral. This is in direct conflict with the lessons learned from the Great Depression of the 1930s, and is liable to push Europe into a period of prolonged stagnation or worse. That will, in turn, generate discontent and social unrest. It is difficult to predict how the anger and frustration will express itself.

The wide range of possibilities will weigh heavily on the financial markets. They will have to discount the prospects of deflation and inflation, default and disintegration. Financial markets dislike uncertainty. Meanwhile, xenophobic and nationalistic extremism are already on the rise in countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy. In a worst-case scenario, such political trends could undermine democracy and paralyze or even destroy the European Union.

If that were to happen, Germany would have to bear a major share of the responsibility because as the strongest and most creditworthy country it calls the shots. By insisting on pro-cyclical policies, Germany is endangering the European Union. I realize that this is a grave accusation but I am afraid it is justified.

To be sure, Germany cannot be blamed for wanting a strong currency and a balanced budget. But it can be blamed for imposing its predilection on other countries that have different needs and preferences—like Procrustes, who forced other people to lie in his bed and stretched them or cut off their legs to make them fit. The Procrustes bed being inflicted on the eurozone is called deflation.

Unfortunately Germany does not realize what it is doing. It has no desire to impose its will on Europe; all it wants to do is to maintain its competitiveness and avoid becoming the deep pocket for the rest of Europe. But as the strongest and most creditworthy country, it is in the driver’s seat. As a result Germany objectively determines the financial and macroeconomic policies of the eurozone without being subjectively aware of it. When all the member countries try to be like Germany they are bound to send the eurozone into a deflationary spiral. That is the effect of the policies pursued by Germany and—since Germany is in the driver’s seat—these are the policies imposed on the eurozone.

The German public does not understand why it should be blamed for the troubles of the eurozone. After all, it is the most successful economy in Europe, fully capable of competing in world markets. The troubles of the eurozone feel like a burden weighing Germany down. It is difficult to see what would change this perception because the troubles of the eurozone are depressing the euro and, being the most competitive of the countries in the eurozone, Germany benefits the most. As a result Germany is likely to feel the least pain of all the member states.

The error in the German attitude can best be brought home by engaging in a thought experiment. The most ardent instigators of that attitude would prefer that Germany leave the euro rather than modify its position. Let us consider where that would lead.

The Deutschmark would go through the roof and the euro would fall through the floor. This would indeed help the adjustment process of the other countries but Germany would find out how painful it can be to have an overvalued currency. Its trade balance would turn negative and there would be widespread unemployment. German banks would suffer severe exchange rate losses and require large injections of public funds. But the government would find it politically more acceptable to rescue German banks than Greece or Spain. And there would be other compensations: pensioners could retire to Spain and live like kings, helping Spanish real estate to recover.

Let me emphasize that this scenario is totally hypothetical because it is extremely unlikely that Germany would be allowed to leave the euro and to do so in a friendly manner. Germany’s exit would be destabilizing financially, economically, and above all politically. The collapse of the single market would be difficult to avoid. The purpose of this thought experiment is to convince Germany to change its ways without going through the actual experience that its current policies hold in store."

Not Funny.

2010-07-09T12:23:00.005-04:00

Instead of the usual "omigod-I-haven't-blogged-in-forever" I will just paste in my new article for Zahranicna Politika that has kept me busy, on a topic that has been a lot on my mind. Arguably I am not an expert on Afghanistan and therefore never had a strong view on what the US should do there, which has historically prevented me from writing about it. But that's really a cop out. If you care about something you can always become more informed and form a firmer opinion. And since the US military involvement in Afghanistan is the longest active war ever, and chances are it will be an increasingly important component of the political discourse, there are plenty of reasons to care about it. So after the recent faux pas with General McChrystal I read a lot of stuff from different people on the war and my article reflects a viewpoint that I formed as a result. Anyway, here it is.

Not Funny

The idea of a top US army general agreeing to be the subject of a magazine profile that ends up getting him fired seems almost comical. The hubris necessary to allow being followed and showcased by a magazine (one with a clear anti-war record, no less) and in the process opening up to a reporter who happily transcribed every incriminating quote - that just seems like something taken out of an episode of M.A.S.H., a black comedy TV show based on the Korean and Vietnam wars.

And yet, when General Stanley McChrystal was forced to resign from his position as Commander of US forces in Afghanistan due to a profile published in the Rolling Stone magazine, no one was laughing. Apart from comments mocking several civilian officials which were the reason why the article attracted attention in the first place and ultimately why McChrystal was replaced, the article offered a rather depressing portrayal of the state of affairs in Afghanistan and a rather scathing criticism of the whole operation, concluding with the following assessment: “So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word "victory" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.”

And so, a mere 8 months since President Obama pledged to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan - upon McChrystal’s urging - this episode has forced many to reexamine the operation in Afghanistan.

Whether one agrees with the war or not, there are good reasons to believe that the current strategy of counterinsurgency (COIN) - a two pronged approach of taking over areas from insurgents, replacing them with Afghan government while infusing the local population with monetary aid - is not working. First, judging from the number of troops employed and lost, the vast expense, and the sheer amount of time spent in Afghanistan it seems like the US is simply not getting any smarter in fighting the insurgency. And even in the event of clearing an area from insurgents, the job is not over. One of the key components of the strategy is for the Afghan government to establish administration and ultimately take over security from US and NATO forces. Peter Galbraith, who served as deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to Afghanistan in 2009, wrote that this strategy can only work if the Afghan government can provide honest administration to win the loyalty of the local population. However, “in too many instances, the nominal government authorities are powerless, corrupt, working with both sides in the conflict, or all of the above. Karzai’s national government cannot remedy any of this. It is corrupt, ineffective, and widely seen as illegitimate.” Clearly, it doesn’t help that Hamid Karzai came to office through an election that was unmistakably fraudulent. And because the US embraced Karzai they are now relying on his government to fulfill a critical function, something it cannot do due to its shady origins.

The second prong of COIN - pouring aid to the local population - might not be effective and could be making the situation worse. Research by Andrew Wilder and Stuart Gordon on the ground in Afghanistan found “little evidence of aid projects winning hearts and minds or promoting stability.” What they observed was the main reason given by the Afghans they interviewed for the growing insurgency was the “corrupt and unjust government.” Additionally, they observed that “the single overriding criticism of aid was the strong belief that it was fueling massive corruption, which undermined some of the positive impacts it may have otherwise had.”

Still, even if the counterinsurgency strategy is not terribly effective, that doesn’t necessarily mean the US should pack up and leave. It is, however, instructive to ask, why is it that the US is in Afghanistan in the first place. One almost forgets that the answer is not “bringing peace and prosperity to the Afghans” but rather “9/11 and al-Qaeda”. In light of that original objective, it was interesting to hear the CIA director Leon Panetta recently admit that “we're looking at 50 to 100, maybe less” al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and that most of the terrorist network is operating from the western tribal region of Pakistan. Certainly, it seems odd to spend $100 billion in 2010 alone to target such a small group. Indeed the objective of the war seems to have shifted as the primary enemy fled to another country altogether. The US is no longer hunting down al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; instead they are making sure that Afghanistan can never again serve as the breeding ground for terrorism against the US.

For many who insist on US military presence in Afghanistan the need to prevent the creation of a security “vacuum” is probably the most compelling argument. Even those who oppose the war in principle, are hard pressed to advocate a withdrawal, often citing this reason. On the surface the argument makes sense: before 9/11, the Taliban harbored al-Qaeda; if the US were to withdraw from Afghanistan it would be leaving behind empty ground for the enemy to come back to. In other words, the US is stuck. In reality, it is not at all clear that the presence in Afghanistan did not contribute to a greater security threat by potentially destabilizing Pakistan. The last terrorist attempt in the US, after all, seems to have been organized by the Pakistani Taliban. Besides, even in the event of a complete success in Afghanistan (and, by extension, Pakistan) who is to say that al-Qaeda won’t find a new base somewhere - and if they do, how many countries can the US afford to invade, rebuild from scratch and immunize from potential terrorist-harboring - especially when the track record in Afghanistan is as terrible as it is?

In reality, it is hard to envision the US civilian leadership going against the recommendations of the military and suggest a withdrawal from Afghanistan any time soon - the politics of the situation offers little reward for wanting to skimp on counter terrorism measures and high costs for any potential failure. Our best hope, as Matthew Iglesias of the Center for American Progress Action Fund suggested, is that the leadership redefines success: instead of shooting for a full blown transformation in Afghanistan, they need to reframe the problem and stake out smaller achievable goals that will allow them to declare victory at some point in the foreseeable future and put them on track for downsizing the US involvement. Otherwise we might be looking at another Vietnam war - a lengthy expensive and painful conflict with no discernible accomplishment to speak of - except maybe some equivalent of M.A.S.H.

Aura.

2010-05-14T14:18:00.004-04:00

It happened a few hours ago and it caught me by surprise. Suddenly my vision started deteriorating. Large patches of my field of vision became blurry. A circular shape of something formed in my eyes that kept me from seeing properly. Even when I could read something, I couldn't discern anything two words over. I started freaking out: am I going blind?

Concerned, I texted Daniel, who called me back immediately. I started bawling, almost unable to say anything without crying even harder. We agreed I would call my doctor immediately while he would consult with a doctor friend. Then I remembered a coworker is actually an ophthalmologist by training so I stopped by his office.

"Oh it's a migraine," he said. Huh? I've had headaches before, even bad ones, ones I swore were migraines, but not once were they ever preceded by fucked up vision. Well, apparently, this was the real stuff - a migrane with aura.

Jesus F. Christ.. who knew? And more importantly, what else do I need to know? What other ailments can randomly occur that will make me feel like I'm losing my shit and then quickly go away?

Do It Do It Real Good!

2010-05-10T09:46:00.002-04:00

The Europeans announced a massive one trillion dollar package to save Europe and the markets all over the world are up a shit load.

So what should you do with this newfound confidence in a bright prosperous future for all humankind?

Donate to my marathon charity!

Paris, Bratislava, New York, Philadelphia, Boston.. I'm Back to Running!

2010-05-07T09:33:00.007-04:00

After the N-th hiatus, this time caused by a herniated-disc/foot-injury combo, I am happy to report that I am back to running! And not just a casual run here and there, but a semi-regular running routine.

One of the ways you know you're running regularly is when a trip (vacation or work) doesn't serve as an excuse to not run but instead provides new exciting venues to get the miles in. It's been fun tracking these with the Garmin.

And so here, let me present to you:

(This map doesn't quite do justice to the kind of run that this was - here's the elevation map - brutal!)

Yay!

Conservative Political Nihilism.

2010-05-06T13:04:00.002-04:00

During the healthcare debate, Senator Lamar Alexander famously said

"we've come to the conclusion that we don't do comprehensive well .. Our country is too big, too complicated, too decentralized for Washington, a few of us here, just to write a few rules about remaking 17 percent of the economy all at once. That sort of thinking works in a classroom, but it doesn't work very well in our big, complicated country."

A few days ago, we were told by David Brooks:

"we should all probably calm down about politics. Most of the proposals we argue about so ferociously will have only marginal effects on how we live, especially compared with the ethnic, regional and social differences that we so studiously ignore."

These two ideas have something in common - namely, the implication that we shouldn't try too hard. The logic of these ideas aside, I just have to say that between the guy who doesn't even try to lift a finger because he doesn't think he can accomplish anything and the guy who choses to work hard to improve the world around him however hard it may seem, I find the latter the more appealing and less ~~lazy~~ convenient position.

The Big Race.

2010-05-03T09:38:00.003-04:00

So, I signed up to run the 2010 NYC marathon.

It will be exactly 3 years since my last marathon. And it will be the 3rd marathon I signed up to run since that last marathon. First, there was Chicago 2008, which I ended up not running due to a combination of injuries, laziness and general lack of motivation. Then there was Paris 2010, which I signed up for all gung-ho after watching the '09 NYC marathon and started training excessively - reaching 50 miles per week in early December - only to be sidelined by a crippling herniated disc and a foot injury. So I really hope that this time around I make it to the marathon start line injury free.

It is difficult to explain why I signed up. Yes, there are the 20 pounds I gained since last summer and with the approaching 3-0 that is a scary trend. But there are less painful ways to reverse that. Frankly, the memory of running 20 miles in 85 degree temperatures makes my stomach turn. But I also remember the fun of the experience .. not just the race itself but also training with friends. And I know that without the structure of a training program, I am increasingly unable to commit to a workout routine. On top of all that, there is now an extra reason to run - the charity that got me my running spot - Team Continuum. To donate, please go here.

And so, here we go, New York. 6 months to go.

Void.

2010-04-30T07:49:00.002-04:00

New article for Zahraničná politika. My other articles for them are here.

Void.

At the end of March, the United States Congress passed the long-debated health care reform legislation. Regardless of whether one supported or opposed the bill, everyone agreed that this was one of the most significant pieces of legislation to become law, on par with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - which abolished racial discrimination and segregation - and the Social Security Act of 1965 - which created Medicare and Medicaid, the health programs for the elderly and poor families.

The new law far from guarantees health care for everyone - illegal immigrants, not a negligible group, will be excluded from participation, for example. The mandates for everyone to purchase health insurance, we are finding out, are not particularly easy to enforce, and therefore probably not as draconian as they might sound. It is also far from a "government takeover" of health care - a common criticism levied against the new plan by its opponents - because for the most part it relies on the currently existing market mechanisms to expand health coverage. Far from the earth shattering vehicle it was often painted as, the law is in essence a relatively centrist collection of incremental steps. And yet - considering the decades of trying and the number of failed attempts - this was a giant leap towards universal health care in America. Obama himself probably described it best during the signing ceremony when he said that the law is not "radical" but "major".

As one might expect after such a major event - following months of obsessive tracking of the issue aided by virtually non-stop media coverage - I went through several emotional stages in the aftermath of reform: first, there was immense joy. It seemed almost unbelievable that against all odds the Democratic leadership managed to pass reform. I have predicted the death of reform in this column multiple times precisely because it was so difficult to pass. And yet, at the 11th hour, due to a unique congruence of forces, it happened. After joy, came relief. Finally, we can move on to other things, I thought. Health care has been sucking the air out of every room in DC for the last year and now we can deal with other pressing issues. And after relief, came sadness and void. Whether you're for it or against it, health care reform became the lingua franca in US politics, the political equivalent of weather talk. As complex an issue as health care may be, over the year that it was on the forefront of political conversation it became intimately familiar to anyone who paid any attention at all. Politicians, newsmen, commentators, bloggers - many developed a level of fluency on the topic that elevated it to national urgency the same way I imagine the country once debated slavery or the war in Vietnam. It was sad to see that go. However, the bigger part of this void is also due to the nagging question: what next?

Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of issues for the Congress to take up. Take finance reform. In the aftermath of one of the greatest economic downturns in history, the great minds in DC are wondering what could be done to prevent the same kind of meltdown from happening again. Many blame the near collapse of the financial system on the deregulation of the banking industry and are thus seeking to impose new regulatory oversight; others blame it on the unrestricted growth and risks the banks took and thus want to impose certain statutory limits or taxes on the banks. The banks - surprise! - are lobbying heavily to water down any attempt at reform: "You don't understand our business", they say, "anything you do could threaten our ability to provide liquidity to the economy!" To some, the more that can be done to decrease the size and the profitability of the banking sector - and thereby its political power and ability to draw talent from the rest of the economy - the better. The House of Representatives already passed its version of financial reform in December, while the Senate is currently developing its own bill. However, if three unsuccessful efforts to start the debate of the bill of the floor of the Senate are any indication, it's going to be a long battle.

Then there is climate change. Another priority of the Obama administration is to pass energy and climate legislation that would set America on a path to reducing emissions, increasing the share of energy that comes from renewable sources and lessening the dependence on fossil fuels. While the House of Representatives has already passed a bill in June of last year, the Senate has not even considered the issue due to its preoccupation with health care and more recently with financial regulation. However, a language of the Senate bill - cosponsored by both Democrats and Republicans - could be announced soon. This would be great news for the bill - having a Republican co-sponsor would virtually guarantee passage in the Senate. Perhaps climate change could pass relatively painlessly?

Or .. not. Releasing a bipartisan proposal was indeed the plan - at least until an entirely different issue suddenly emerged out of nowhere and quite possibly derailed everything: immigration. One lovely April day, the state of Arizona passed a harsh law to deal with illegal immigrants, namely by authorizing the local police to verify citizenship of suspicious people and arresting and fining those failing to prove their legal status in the US. The resulting national outcry - combined with large Hispanic population in several key states - created an interesting opportunity for the Democrats. Why not take up immigration on the Federal level to court a key constituency? The seeds of such an idea must have been planted in some Democratic heads because the Senate leadership quickly made it clear that they are debating weather they should act on climate or immigration first. As a result, the key Republican co-sponsor of the climate legislation threaten to withdraw his support for the effort, which could kill the bill before it even hits the Senate floor. And as for immigration reform - the grave need for it is only eclipsed by its contentiousness. If the Senate really goes down that path, we are looking at another long battle.

Financial regulation, climate change, immigration - there is no shortage of critical domestic issues. So why do I still feel the void I described above? Simply because there is a decent chance that none of these issues will see any resolution in the foreseeable future. First, any vote in the Senate requires a lot of cross-party cooperation and deal making. Democrats do not have the votes to pass anything without at least a handful of Republicans. While deal making isn't impossible, it is not easy. If health reform showed anything, it was that despite rhetoric to the contrary, Republican cooperation simply cannot be relied upon. Perhaps, given the popular support for financial reform, they will tread more cautiously this time around. However, the early signs are not good: recently they voted three times in unison against starting debate of the bill in the Senate. The other takeaway from health reform is that a bipartisan process is extremely time consuming. And that is the second reason why none of these issues are likely to see resolution during this Congress: shortage of time. The mid-term election in the fall means that all legislation needs to be considered before the summer. Once we reach the August recess, there will be no appetite among lawmakers to pass legislation, both because they will want to focus on campaigning and because they will try to avoid any controversial votes. Which leaves them with roughly 3 months to do anything. In DC time, that's an eye-blink. As a reminder, it took 3 months for the Democrats in the House of Representatives to take a vote on the Senate version of the health care bill. Something that should have been an easy step but wasn't because nothing is easy and quick in the Congress.

Maybe with some combination of luck and Herculean efforts the Democrats can muster the energy and drive to act on one of these very important issues. I'd like to be positively surprised. However, the window to pass legislation on the Democratic agenda before the mid-term elections is closing rapidly. And the currently predicted losses in both the House and the Senate during those elections won't help the Democrats' ability to do anything thereafter. Thank God for the existence of the executive branch, of without it we would be looking at some pretty uneventful years ahead.

What Did I Miss..

2010-04-27T11:29:00.002-04:00

.. while I was volcanoed in Europe? Another heart-attack inducing David Brooks column, or course. Except this time I can spare my bile, as much more eloquent people have taken it on themselves to respond to him.

More on the volcano soon, when I manage to dig myself from under the pile of work that was waiting for me here.

Come on, buddy, ctd.

2010-04-07T14:25:00.002-04:00

Packer:

The video is important because it shows the kind of tragedy that is absolutely inevitable in wars likes the ones America has been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but especially in urban Baghdad: where a journalist and a militiaman can appear indistinguishable, where a gunner surrounded by noise and heat high in the sky will fail or choose not to look for complicating details in the scene far below, and where a van taking away a wounded man might be a legitimate target if it were a military vehicle in a conventional war. Those who say that incidents like this have been common in Iraq and Afghanistan are not wrong. The military’s claim that the soldiers followed their rules of engagement is probably not wrong either (though the attempted cover-up invites suspicion). Anyone who sends young troops into war should expect them to kill innocent people by mistake, and to crack jokes about the people they’ve killed. This doesn’t make them war criminals, or even moral monsters. Nor is it the whole truth about them, or about the war. But it’s a truth, and it should be seen.

Greenwald:

The WikiLeaks video is not an indictment of the individual soldiers involved -- at least not primarily. Of course those who aren't accustomed to such sentiments are shocked by the callous and sadistic satisfaction those soldiers seem to take in slaughtering those whom they perceive as The Enemy (even when unarmed and crawling on the ground with mortal wounds), but this is what they're taught and trained and told to do. If you take even well-intentioned, young soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous war zone for years and train them to think and act this way, this will inevitably be the result. The video is an indictment of the U.S. government and the war policies it pursues.

All of this is usually kept from us. Unlike those in the Muslim world, who are shown these realities quite frequently by their free press, we don't usually see what is done by us. We stay blissfully insulated from it, so that in those rare instances when we're graphically exposed to it, we can tell ourselves that it's all very unusual and rare.

I Really Wonder ..

2010-04-07T09:53:00.005-04:00

Is Brooks' column so popular among NYT readers because they think it's so good, or do they email it to other people with comments like "look what ridiculous fluff Brooks came up with today"? I'm just curious.

PS: Looking at the comments now, I bet it is the latter. And because I no longer have the time and patience to pour out my anger like I did here, I can at least link to someone doing so much better than I ever could.

Come on, buddy.

2010-04-06T10:55:00.002-04:00

"All you gotta do is pick up a weapon."

Brooks Again.

2010-03-30T12:48:00.002-04:00

"Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow? ..

Nonetheless, if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy."

Correction, Mr. Brooks: if you have to even ask that question, out loud, you are absolutely crazy. If you believe that those two things happening to Sandra Bullock one after another makes them a "deal" and triggers the "philosophic question of the day" you are absolutely crazy. If you think it's a useful narrative device to pose a question with an obvious answer only to tell us how obvious the answer is, you are absolutely crazy. If you think that professional success is the same as income or wealth ("the relationship between happiness and income"), you are absolutely crazy. If you think that any of this in any way corroborates your point about what the government should or shouldn't do, you are absolutely crazy. And finally, if you think this makes for a good use of your op-ed real estate, you are absolutely crazy.

Again.

Approved.

2010-03-24T14:12:00.001-04:00

P032310CK-0627
Originally uploaded by The White House

Obama's signature on the health reform bill .. I want this on a T shirt or a poster.

These Nuns Are Bitchin'!

2010-03-18T08:07:00.003-04:00

One of the crazier elements of the health care reform debate has been the discussion around abortion. The catholic bishops have opined that unless we specifically prohibit funding for abortions in the bill, they cannot support it. Never mind the help it would provide to millions of poor Americans. And besides - since when do catholic bishops write our legislation? Alas, they apparently do - and so the House healthcare bill included provisions that specifically prohibited abortion coverage on the newly created exchanges. The Senate bill didn't go quite so far; however, it made sure that anyone seeking abortion coverage had to pay out of their own pocket and couldn't get one paid for by Federal funds. This would ensure that the new exchanges abide by the Hyde amendment - which bars such federal funding. (Color me totally confused but doesn't the federal government subsidize abortions with a massive tax subsidy for healthcare coverage for employers, the vast majority of which include abortions in their health care plans?) Anyhow, it was encouraging on some many levels to read this letter from leaders of catholic nuns:

The health care bill that has been passed by the Senate and that will be voted on by the House will expand coverage to over 30 million uninsured Americans. While it is an imperfect measure, it is a crucial next step in realizing health care for all. It will invest in preventative care. It will bar insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. It will make crucial investments in community health centers that largely serve poor women and children. And despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions. It will uphold longstanding conscience protections and it will make historic new investments – $250 million – in support of pregnant women. This is the REAL pro-life stance, and we as Catholics are all for it.

Seriously.

2010-03-12T10:08:00.001-05:00

Seriously, the DEMs need to lose every election possible in the fall. Everyone is accusing them of maneuvers and tricks to get the HC bill passed and instead of infusing some discipline into their joke of a party and simply passing the fucking bill in the House how do they respond? By tagging on a totally unrelated piece of legislation. Unbelievable.

Catch 22 much?

2010-03-05T07:39:00.004-05:00

Ugh.

"allowing an openly gay presence in ranks will be very difficult until we have committed leadership for it. I certainly had trouble figuring out how to provide such leadership in 1993. While I believed all people are created equal, I did not believe such equality extended to all ideas or all cultures. And since I didn’t know how to advocate the assimilation of this particular form of diversity, I saw no way to prevent it from undermining unit cohesion."

Ie, we can't have gays in the military until we have committed leadership for it. And we don't have leadership for it because people like me don't want to commit to it. Why? Like I said, because we can't have gays in the military until we have committed leadership for it. Get it?

"But it would be a serious mistake to imagine that personal performance is what matters in combat. Combat is not a contest between individuals, like poker or tennis; it is a team event whose success depends on group cooperation and morale. So the behavior that concerns us is not individual achievement but the social dynamics of relationships and groups. The issue is whether and how the presence of openly declared homosexuals in the ranks affects the solidarity of the unit.

We have already seen the fault lines form in the current debate: the individual service chiefs have expressed reservations about Admiral Mullen’s views. This lack of cohesion will likely make the Joint Chiefs less effective in the latest round of this debate."

Ie, just talking about this makes us less cohesive, and because cohesion is the end all be all in the military, it shouldn't happen, because it would make us less cohesive.

Seriously, enough bull shit. Sometimes I wonder, do these people realize that they are living on our buck? Really, you can't get behind ending DADT because you don't know how to embrace gays? Well you're a public servant and if we decide you should do something then you get in line and make it work.

That we should be obsessing so much about what the "military leaders" think about this is nauseating. Who the fuck are they? What the hell is all this crap about the military being different. Yea unit cohesion is very important in combat, sure. But so is cohesion everywhere else. In sports. In corporations. In schools. And you know what? People in every facet of life seemed to have figured out how to live around gays just fine.

Surely, in most situations we don't make life-or-death decisions .. but then if someone is willing to allow something random like sexual orientation to come between them and another soldier who is gay .. maybe the culprit is not the gay guy but rather the assholes who can't get over themselves. And instead of waiting around for these assholes to either die out or grow a brain, maybe we should just tell them to get with program or go home. I'm sure a lot of them would very quickly be just fine around gays.

Brooks' Feat.

2010-03-02T08:12:00.002-05:00

In today's highly epic column, David Brooks not only gives us further evidence of just how terrible his writing is, but he also makes a rather poetic case for socialism.

PS, since when is the NYT op-ed page the journalistic equivalent of tenure?

Go Reform Yourself.

2010-03-01T12:14:00.003-05:00

Health policy being the most interesting part of my job, I have for some time fantasized about the idea of studying health policy in grad school. Health care is so fascinating! So complex and rich with nuance! So, well, broken!

In the last 12 months as the debate around health reform unfolded in DC, the area has become a painful one. I cringe almost every time the topic comes up - the misrepresentations, the half-truths, the simplifications, the half-baked partisan talking points - so much of it is quite insufferable .. and yet, I rarely miss a chance to read another article, watch another hearing, listen to another pundit on TV opine on the topic. On the one hand I continue to be immensely drawn to the subject, on the other hand, the more I witness the current debate, the more quixotic my interest in health policy seems. Given the frustrating politics of health reform, what good will it do for another person to study health policy, other than to satisfy some intellectual urge?

I guess I gradually came to this conclusion internally, but reading this post by Uwe Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton, today I am compelled to finally say it out loud: studying this area is a complete waste of time.

The Summit.

2010-02-26T13:08:00.003-05:00

What a fun way to spend a day at work! Anyway, just 2 moments to point out now that the transcript is available:

1. In response to the argument that the government should not be regulating minimum insurance standards because .. the government shouldn't be regulating things, period:

THE PRESIDENT: We could set up a system where food was probably cheaper than it is right now if we just eliminated meat inspectors and we eliminated any regulations in terms of how food is distributed and how it's stored. I'll bet in terms of drug prices, we would definitely reduce prescription drug prices if we didn't have a drug administration that makes sure that we test the drugs so that they don't kill us.

But we don't do that. We make some decisions to protect consumers in every aspect of our lives. And we have bipartisan support for doing it, because what we don't want is a situation in which suddenly people think they're getting one thing and they're getting something else -- they're harmed by a product.

2. And a funny moment:

THE PRESIDENT: Let me just make this point, John, because we're not campaigning anymore. The election is over.

SENATOR McCAIN: I'm reminded of that every day.

On a related note, this is a great piece by Ezra Klein about the "philosophical" differences between the two parties that people kept bringing up.

...just as many people discover religion in the face of tragedy, the GOP appears to have discovered philosophy in the face of a Democratic majority.

Anniversary.

2010-02-25T09:35:00.003-05:00

It was exactly a year ago when I went to La Guardia to pick up Olive. She turned out to be the sweetest thing and I never stop being amused by the simplest things she does. Like this morning when she jumped up on the bed, licked my face and decided to lay down on my face, of all the places. Here's to our first year together, my little beast.

The Weird Idiocy of the Filibuster in the Senate.

2010-02-24T10:55:00.003-05:00

The Senate just passed the $15b jobs bill, with 70 yeas and 28 nays.

Now, the extremely weird thing is that the cloture vote (ie, ending debate on the bill to allow for the actual vote on the merits of the bill, ie breaking the filibuster) was 62 to 30.

In other words: on Monday night, there were 8 people who didn't even want to allow a vote on the bill who by Wednesday morning voted in favor of the bill.

Huh??

Edge.

2010-02-24T10:11:00.002-05:00

Having grown up in one country and lived all of my adult life in another, yet not really identifying with or feeling fully at home in either, I appreciated Tony Judt's essay on the New York Review of Books blog.

Speaking of which, his recent collection of memoirs in the last 3 issues of NYRB is well worth purchasing the online subscription. But in case you're hesitating, here's the first one from the series, which can be accessed for free.

Hear That, McCain?

2010-02-23T10:18:00.003-05:00

On CNN's Situation Room, Wolf Blitzer asks NATO military chairman about gays in the military:

BLITZER: Let's talk about gays serving openly in the military. It's a big debate here in the United States as you well know, right now. Most of the NATO allies, including in Italy, allow gays to serve openly in the military. How is that working out in the NATO alliance?

DI PAOLA: I think it's working out quite well. In the end, fundamentally, the issue here is the sexual orientation is not an issue insofar as you being a soldier or whatever you would be in the environment you are working for, that is not a problem. Sexual orientation is a personal matter, not a matter for state policy.

BLITZER: So it hasn't undermined unit cohesion, combat readiness?

DI PAOLA: Absolutely not. If there is misconduct, applied to a gay or non-gay, that would be treated as misconduct. So your sexual orientation does not have to influence the environment in which you work.

BLITZER: When NATO troops, whether from Canada, Britain, or Germany, or France or Italy, serve in Afghanistan, for example, with U.S. combat troops and there are gays serving side by side, have you seen one example of an incident that has undermined the ability to fight?

DI PAOLA: I have not seen it. I am not aware of it. Of course, I don't know all the cases that might have happened. But I'm not aware of any cases of any relevance.

SO, for someone to argue against gays in the military, they not only have to explain why the US military is different in this respect from almost every other military in NATO, but also why it is a problem for gays to serve in the US military when US troops routinely serve along side with gays from other countries during NATO missions. I guess the only possible answer would be that American gays are somehow lesser or more problematic when serving openly than foreign gays, and I am dying to see someone explain that.

Editor-At-Home.

2010-02-23T08:37:00.002-05:00

All I have to say about Krugman's profile in the New Yorker is that when I become a big time columnist/writer/academic, I hope Daniel will be my at-home editor. Because that's really neat.

Tufts, Blonde.

2010-02-22T16:29:00.002-05:00

Reality imitates fiction - it's just a little sad when it choses to imitate Legally Blonde .. the timeless classic featuring Reese Witherspoon who gets into Harvard Law thanks to a video in lieu of an application essay.

That was my first thought when I read about Tufts encouraging college applicants to make YouTubes of themselves. But I'll let the admission dean explain the brilliant idea in his own words:

Lee Coffin, the dean of undergraduate admissions, said the idea came to him last spring, when watching a YouTube video someone had sent him. “I thought, ‘If this kid applied to Tufts, I’d admit him in a minute, without anything else,’ ” Mr. Coffin said.

Really? Great.

Truth With An Error Range.

2010-02-16T10:23:00.005-05:00

A recent article by Megan McArdle cause a mini storm in the health blogging circles. Moved by the assertion made by Ezra Klein back in the fall that Joe Lieberman was willing to cause the deaths of hundred of thousands of people by threatening to block reform, McArdles goes on to examine the link between mortality and health insurance and after finding various reasons to ignore or disqualify various studies on the issue, she concludes that while there might be some effect, it's hard to tell how big it is and because it's hard to measure exactly how big it is, it's probably too small to matter.

Needless to say, McArdle has been attacked from all sides (actually, mostly from the left) for this article and it's easy to see why. While her article doesn't insist that health insurance is irrelevant and she does say "even if we did agree that insurance rarely confers significant health benefits, that would not necessarily undermine the case for a national health-care program" by launching a pedantic attack on a statistic, she helped to undermine what many would consider a "logical" case for expanding health coverage to everyone.

There are two reasons why I find this whole debate incredibly annoying and offensive.

First of all, by making a reasonable case that the effect of health insurance on mortality are hard to determine precisely she then goes on to argue that we can't say how large it is. If one study says 50, another study says 200, it could probably as well be 0, seems to be the argument. The truly annoying thing about this argument is that from everything McArdle says, she doesn't seem to actually believe that there is no relationship, but she is suggesting that it might be small and either way no one can claim with any certainty what exactly it is.

I guess McArdle deserves credit for correctly identifying a problem with the studies of this sort - they aren't perfect and they aren't precise. However, does it mean they are thus entirely irrelevant? That's what she seems to be suggesting in her concluding paragraph: "we should have had a better handle on the case for expanded coverage—and, more important, the evidence behind it—before we embarked on a year-long debate that divided our house against itself." Translation: why didn't you pro-reform morons get your facts straight before wasting everyone's time with this non sense for a whole year?

Therein lies the insane contradiction of what McArdle is saying: on the one hand, she discredits the assertion that expanding health insurance saves lives by showing how evidence is hard to attain; on the other hand, she says we need better evidence to show exactly how many lives were saved by health insurance. Unless we have an exact measurement, it's useless; if it pretends to be exact and precise it's probably wrong.

McArdle's sophistry is equivalent to asking a man on a boat in the middle of an ocean how deep the water underneath is. The man clearly sees that the water is very deep but he has no good way to measure it until he realizes that he can tie a heavy rock to one end of a thread, drop it in the ocean and measure the length of the thread until the rock hits the bottom. Of course the bottom of the ocean is uneven, so multiple measurements will result in different results. Faced with this imperfect technique and variation in results, McArdle would probably say that we can't conclude that the ocean is very deep. Even though it is intuitive and obvious to all the rest of us that the ocean is very deep, because one can't measure exactly how deep, she would suggest there's some likelihood it's shallow, and maybe we're all just imagining the ocean in the first place. In the case of health care, McArdle's logic would suggest that because we can't exactly measure the link between insurance and health outcomes, we shouldn't be so obsessed with providing insurance to everyone. In the case of our man on a boat, McArdle would probably send the man without an oxygen tank to find something on the bottom of the ocean because he can't prove exactly how deep it is. Despite the preponderance of logic, common sense, intuition and countless anecdotes of people who lose their lives because they can't get the care they need, McArdle is totally unmoved and declares the deep ocean of the problems that uninsured have a mere mirage.

The other reason why this debate is incredibly annoying is because it's entirely besides the point. Yes, it would be great if we could say with total certainty how many people die each year because of lack of insurance and it would be awesome if we could therefore accuse someone blocking reform of killing hundreds of thousands of people. But even in the absence of that, the case for reform is no weaker. In fact, disproving (or undermining) any one "estimate" does not change the fact that the system is incredibly broken and unfair. And while it might be fun to play around with statistics to make a case one way or the other, the truth has an error range and no estimate or projection can be relied upon with absolute certainty. Ultimately, this debate is about values and trade-offs and I wish those hiding behind pseudo-statistical analysis would debate it as such.

What Now?

2010-02-08T07:50:00.001-05:00

New article for Zahraničná politika. Other articles here.

What Now?

On January 19th, 2010, the good people of Massachusetts were voting to elect a US Senator to replace the deceased Ted Kennedy, a Democrat who held the seat since 1962. Ever since the Republican candidate Scott Brown was announced the winner of that election, the Democrats have been in a crisis that is threatening to completely dismantle the young Obama administration.

First some background is due. Prior to this election, the Democrats (in combination with the independent Joe Lieberman) held 60 seats in the Senate, and the Republicans held 40. Because a Republican won the seat, the Democrats lost their 60-vote majority. Now, in most legislative bodies, a 59% majority is still a perfectly good majority to pass a bill. Not so in the US Senate, where the rules require that in order to take a vote on a bill, the debate has to be formally brought to conclusion by 60 or more votes. Therefore, losing the 60th seat amounted to losing the ability to pass anything in the Senate. While Democrats technically still have a majority of seats in the Senate, what matters more is the other 41 seats occupied by Senators that represent 37% of the US population, who can bring the Senate to a halt any time they wish. If you thought that the US was a representative democracy, you might want to rethink that.

There is no area that illustrates better the effects this has had on American politics than healthcare. Prior to the special election, before the Democrats lost their 60th seat in the Senate, both the House of Representatives and the Senate passed their version of reform. Like they would with any other bill, after passing their respective versions, the representatives of the two bodies started negotiating a compromise bill that could be put to vote and passed in both chambers of Congress, thus finally enacting health reform, after nearly a year of hearings, negotiations and compromises - and a century of failed attempts. Indeed, when the President set the date for his first State of the Union speech for January 27th, 2010, it was commonly expected that he will list health reform as one of his first year accomplishments.

The situation changed dramatically on January 19th when a Republican won the Massachusetts senate seat. The implications of this loss quickly reverberated throughout DC. On a practical level, the loss of the 60 vote supermajority meant that the standard route that everyone envisioned prior to the election - passing a compromise bill in both chambers - was no longer a viable option, since the Democrats were now one vote short of the necessary supermajority in the Senate. As a result, the only option to still pass reform was for the House to simply adopt the bill already passed by the Senate prior to the special election. (Remember, as long as both chambers of US Congress pass the same legislation, it becomes law.) With a Democratic majority in the House and a simple majority required to pass a measure, one might think that concluding this saga would be a breeze.

However, what happened in Massachusetts had a much more profound impact than simply losing a seat in the Senate. With a solidly Democratic state like Massachusetts suddenly voting Republican, the narrative that quickly developed in the media was that the election in Massachusetts was basically a litmus test for Obama, his administration and the Democrats at large. The failure of a Democrat to secure the seat despite hugely favorable position in the polls just a few weeks prior to the election was being interpreted by many as a sign of meaningful dissatisfaction in the electorate. Even more specifically to healthcare, many commentators insisted that popular opposition to the current reform effort occurring in the Congress was behind the downfall of the Democratic candidate. Whether or not these theories have any truth to them, it is understandable that all Democrats in the Congress must have asked themselves what this means for them and their prospects during the midterm elections in November. After the loss in Massachusetts, which no one saw coming, are they risking their reelection by voting for the health bill? Something along these lines must have been happening, because by January 21st, the speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi declared that she doesn't have the votes to pass the Senate bill.

This chain of events clearly had an effect on Obama's State of the Union speech. Instead of taking a victory lap for passing health reform, Obama felt it necessary to urge the legislators: "Do not walk away from reform. Not now. Not when we are so close. Let us find a way to come together and finish the job for the American people." Certainly, these are not words of someone confident in the imminent passage of the bill; on the other hand, some optimists in the pro-reform crowd might have rejoiced: he still cares about reform, despite what happened in Massachusetts! Clearly, Obama did not drop the issue entirely; however, the fact that he spent barely 5 minutes in the second half of his 69 minute speech on something that he and the Congress spent a whole year deliberating would suggest that he would rather not risk being remembered as the president who went down in flames in his first term due to his aggressive insistence on health reform. Instead, Obama used the speech to outline new priorities - the economy, financial sector reform, and the deficit.

At this point, many have written off health reform as dead. The irony of the situation is that not many envisioned the process getting this close - and its path certainly was not easy. After the August recess and a wave of attacks from all sides this column all but predicted its failure. Which is why after passing through both chambers of the Congress, it seemed all but inevitable and very few could see what would stop its momentum - until that fatal election in Massachusetts.
So what does this all mean for Obama, the administration and Democrats generally? On the one hand, it is hard to make a bulletproof argument that the Democrats should keep on marching fearlessly without a second thought about public preferences - an arrogance that was the staple of the last two administrations. On the other hand, it is not exactly obvious that letting health reform fail will save them from the anger that is brewing in the American public and that was at least part of the reason for the Democratic loss in Massachusetts. Yes, health reform has become less popular - a quick look at the polls can prove that (http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/healthplan.php). Still, will simply reversing course on health care be the saving grace for the Democrats? Unlikely. A recent survey by Public Policy Polling shows that the Democrats' chances at the midterms are not necessary better if reform fails - in fact, fewer people are likely to vote Democrat if reform fails. It seems that whatever damage health care is doing to the Democrats has already been done and retreating from it now can only do more damage. As Jonathan Cohn at the New Republic pointed out, letting reform die would have a threefold effect: first, it will discredit the party in the eyes of those who supported the effort - their base; second, it won't prevent the Republicans from campaigning against them as supporters of reform (they voted for it once before!) - and flip-floppers (they keep changing their minds!), and third, it will rob them of the chance to point to one big accomplishment. The last piece is the most critical one, not only in a symbolic sense (passing bills means "getting things done") but also in a practical sense, that is, there were enough concrete positive measures that would become effective immediately and be perceive positively. And so, even if the public is now riled up against reform, once they started experiencing its early benefits, they would quite possibly appreciate it.

Thinking about the current situation more broadly, if the result of the special election is the failure of health care, I deeply worry about the next 3 years and the ability of this administration to do anything at a time when crucial reforms are desperately needed in America. For if this one road block has the power to create such paralysis among the Democrats that they are not able to take the roads that are still widely open to them to deliver on a key domestic priority, what are their chances to tackle their next agenda items that are just as important yet controversial, like the economy, financial sector reform, climate change? And more importantly, if they fail on this one occasion, why should they deserve to even have the chance to try? After all, how can the country and indeed the whole world face the challenges of the post-Great Recession era with an impotent US government? My message is simple: wake up, Democrats, or die.

30 million reasons.

2009-12-18T12:30:00.002-05:00

In today's column, Brooks lists the reasons to support and oppose the healthcare bill currently under consideration in the Senate.

His reasons to oppose the bill anger me, each in its own unique weakly reasoned and misleading way. But the thing that bothers me the most is the opening sentence:

"The first reason to support the Senate health care bill is that it would provide insurance to 30 million more Americans."

Brooks spends exactly 21 words in his 800-word column on this fact as if to quickly get that out of the way so he can talk about the important stuff.

Well, here is my list:

1. It will expand health insurance to 30 million Americans.

2. It will be budget neutral .. and I don't care what Brooks says about the alleged political inconceivability of spending cuts. If you really believe that you can't support legislation because the Congress will never be able to stick to its targeted savings embedded in it, that's political nihilism and effectively invalidates any further debate. On the one hand he wants more cost control, on the other hand he doesn't believe that the cost cutting measures in place will be implemented. What exactly does that leave the Congress with then?

3. It will expand health insurance to 30 million Americans.

4. It will save tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives every year.

5. In case you missed it, it will expand health insurance to 30 million Americans.

6. It will launch a host of ideas to improve the system.

We're not talking about anything revolutionary or immediate here but I have absolutely no idea what else Brooks is looking for that would:

(a) improve quality and efficiency

(b) correct all the messed up incentives currently in place

(c) cut not just wasteful spending but also total spending (that seems to be what he is looking for in his reason to oppose # 2)

(d) and at the same time do all magic this BY MEANS OF A SINGLE BILL and AT THE SAME TIME not be achieved with some measure of government involvement in the current system (which he cites as reason #4 to oppose).

Brooks is opposing the bill because it fails to live up some vague ideal of "getting the fundamental incentives right" .. but he also expects us to believe that it's a tough call for him, and he "flip flops" every day, as if the bill kept changing dramatically overnight from one that fundamentally transforms the system to a bad one that only insures 30 million more people without bending the cost curve.

As if all this time it seemed like we might, in the end, suddenly, find the holy grail .. and - OMG, oops - we didn't, so - sorry 30 million uninsured Americans, better luck in 16 years!

And those 350,000 of you that die in the meantime because you have no coverage - you can rest in peace because .. we didn't slow innovation!

You Know You Made It When ..

2009-12-09T17:21:00.005-05:00

.. a dorky historian uses you as an example of flamboyance.

"To be recommended humble discretion by President Sarkozy is like being counselled modesty in dress by Lady Gaga, or self-denial by a banker."

Thanks, TGA, for a hump day chuckle. And an otherwise good article on the Swiss minaret craziness.

Boeuf Bourguignon.

2009-12-07T14:54:00.008-05:00

Because this blog does have "eat" in its title, some pictures from my effort to make Boeuf Bourguignon a la Julia Child.

You start with oil, butter and bacon, of course.

You pat the beef dry with paper towels and display it on a white cutting board to take a nice picture.

Then you do a million other steps, all of which you forget to take pictures of .. oh, except the onions ..

.. and mushrooms ..

.. all of which are sauteed in butter - naturally! While the beef is braising in the oven for 3 hours, you realize you're starving and you run out to buy some cheese - how French! - and consume tons of it with crackers and wine.

When the meat is done and your whole home smells like butter and beef, you take a nice picture of the beef ..

.. and conclude that you're entirely too full of cheese to eat much of it. Refrigerate and reheat it the next day, when the flavor developed into even more orgasmic dimensions.

Bon Appétit!

Warning: This recipe was developed by Julia Child to prevent weight loss by long distance runners despite training as much as 50 miles per week. Reading this post alone is equivalent to consuming a tablespoon of butter. Eat some bread.

Clueless.

2009-12-03T10:41:00.003-05:00

I have to admit: I have no idea what the US should do in Afganistan and I don't have a strong view on Obama's decision about this on Tuesday. And judging from reading the million and a half comments about it in the last few day, nor does anyone else really. Given the insane mish-mash of entirely contradicting elements of the genesis of the war, the current situation and the variety of possible ultimate goals, it's impossible to have an answer that will be entirely satisfying to anyone - and so the critics abound.

Meanwhile, I like the analysis of the Tuesday speech put forth in this TNR article:

"the rhetoric does, I think, help to answer a question that a lot of pundits have been puzzling over for the past year: What, exactly, is Barack Obama's overarching worldview when it comes to foreign policy? For a long time, I've felt I didn't really know. After last night's speech, I suspect Obama doesn't really know either. A politician who is capable of sounding such dissonant notes in the same speech is a politician who is still figuring out his first principles of foreign policy. This might help explain some of the more confusing things about Obama's first year in office: how, for instance, a president who has found his way to a human-rights-friendly policy on Afghanistan could have seemed so cold to human rights in his approach to Iran and China; or how a candidate who once spoke forcefully about the need to address genocide in Sudan has proven to be such a disaster on the issue now that he is in office."

On a slightly different note, I really enjoy the proposal to institute a war tax to pay for this insanity. And not because I want to pay more taxes, but because it exposes the hypocrisy of proponents of escalating the war who at once want to send more troops, but don't want to pay for it with tax hikes, even thought they are allegedly fiscally conservative (yes, I'm talking about Republicans here). And, in a sense, it will put the question to the nation as a whole: is this war worth paying for and if it's not worth paying for, why is it worth fighting?

Dubai.

2009-12-02T21:50:00.002-05:00

An interesting article about Dubai .. but this part is particularly insightful:

"In Saudi, it's hard to be straight when you're young. The women are shut away so everyone has gay sex. But they only want to have sex with boys – 15- to 21-year-olds. I'm 27, so I'm too old now."

Marie's Secret?

2009-11-27T09:55:00.002-05:00

"In VR [velvet revolution], it is not just the Abbé Sieyès who survives. Louis XVI gets to keep a nice little palace in Versailles, and Marie Antoinette starts a successful line in upmarket lingerie."

Timothy Garton Ash in a recent article in the NY Review of Books, explaining one of the differences between old-style revolutions and velvet revolutions.

Tough First Years.

2009-11-25T13:28:00.002-05:00

Regarding Obama's first year, Joe Klein makes a good point:

"Stepping back a bit, I do see a metapattern that extends over the 40 years since Richard Nixon's Southern strategy began the drift toward more ideological political parties: Democrats have tough first years in the presidency. Of the past seven Presidents, the two Bushes rank at the top in popularity after one year, while Obama and Bill Clinton rank at the bottom, with Jimmy Carter close by. There is a reason for that. Democrats come to office eager to govern the heck out of the country. They take on impossible issues, like budget-balancing and health care reform. They run into roadblocks — from their own unruly ranks as well as from Republicans. They get lost in the details. A tax cut is much easier to explain than a tax increase. A foreign policy based in bluster — railing against an "axis of evil" — is easier to sell than a foreign policy based in nuance."

Human Inventions.

2009-11-25T13:11:00.002-05:00

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason.

While listening to NPR I came upon a segment with Thomas Frank who has an article in Playboy (slightly unfortunate venue) about Glenn Beck. During the segment he points out the conservatives' reverence for the founding fathers generally and Beck's obsession with Thomas Paine in particular.

False Choice.

2009-11-24T16:33:00.005-05:00

According to Brooks, "we face a brutal choice. Reform would make us a more decent society, but also a less vibrant one. It would ease the anxiety of millions at the cost of future growth. It would heal a wound in the social fabric while piling another expensive and untouchable promise on top of the many such promises we’ve already made. America would be a less youthful, ragged and unforgiving nation, and a more middle-aged, civilized and sedate one. We all have to decide what we want at this moment in history, vitality or security."

It is strange to conclude that reforming health care is a simple trade off between vitality or security from the fact that the current bills do not bend the cost curve (and never could, by Brooks' logic), when the principal reason why this is so is because Republicans, the great conservative minds, did everything in their power to strip serious cost containment out of every version of the bill (eg, independent Medicare payment commission, "death panels", strong public option etc.).

Yes, Brooks is right to point out that the current bills would do little do contain costs, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should ask ourselves if we want to give up growth for security. The question we should be asking ourselves is if we are willing to give up what he calls "a more decent society" only because the current system is phenomenally resistant to change without even asking ourselves why that is so and what can be done about it.

Suprise!

2009-10-30T13:26:00.003-04:00

Americans don't give a flying monkey about bipartisanship, when it comes to getting the public option.

"Which of these would you prefer – (a plan that includes some form of government-sponsored health insurance for people who can’t get affordable private insurance, but is approved without support from Republicans in Congress); or (a plan that is approved with support from Republicans in Congress, but does not include any form of government-sponsored health insurance for people who can’t get affordable private insurance)?"

Fifty one percent said they preferred the public option; 37 percent said they preferred a bill with some support from Republicans in Congress. Six percent said neither and seven percent expressed no opinion."

Good to know that Americans care more about the substance of the bill than they care about holding hands with their evil twins on the other side of the political spectrum. Because, really, bipartisanship doesn't pay your health care premiums when you get fired and the insurance companies denies you coverage because you're pregnant or diabetic.

And as Tapper points out, this might embolden the Democrats to go ahead with the public plan with no Republican support and, maybe, this means we can end the obsession with Olympia Snowe. Unfortunately, I don't think it's that simple: the reason why they might need at least one Republican vote - and Snowe's seems the most likely to come on board - is because there are some Democrats and Independents who might vote to filibuster a bill with a public option in it.

Ridiculous Conclusions.

2009-10-29T16:44:00.004-04:00

And since I'm all about blogging again, why not post my upcoming article in Zahraničná politika? I'm back on Obama, with gloves off.

Ridiculous Conclusions

Sometimes the tactical decisions that Obama makes make one wonder what the man really believes in. And, increasingly, they don't even seem to produce their purported goals.

When the President received criticism for being the first president since 1991 not to receive the Dalai Lama during his most recent visit to Washington in October, the press was promptly educated by his senior adviser Valerie Jerrett that "it is not a signal of any lack of commitment to human rights .. that's a ridiculous conclusion to draw." At the same time, Jerrett admitted it is "a fair point to make" that the decision to postpone the meeting was made out of respect to Chinese sensitivities to Tibet. In other words, it was a tactical move, not a principled move; the appearance of bending over backwards to please the Chinese should not be disconcerting - the President knows what he's doing - trust him.

To be sure, America's dependence on China is hardly a secret. With some $2 trillion in US government bonds, China is the largest holder of the US debt and thus the largest funder of its massive deficits. Amicable relations with China are therefore a clear priority for US foreign policy. And yet, this sort of diplomatic calculus could hardly justify not meeting with the Dalai Lama. For one thing, even George W. Bush received him during his visit in 2007 (and awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal) and other Congressional leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, met with him during his most recent visit in October. Of course, this was enough to make the Chinese dissatisfied: shortly thereafter, China accused the US of interfering with their internal affairs. In the end, Obama's tactical move not only enraged those who think the US should take a principled stand on human rights in China, but it also failed to deliver the goal of pleasing the Chinese government, instead encouraging them to make even more ambitious demands.

To anyone who has been watching Obama's presidency with a little bit of a critical eye, this scenario looks eerily familiar. In fact, we witnessed a similar tactical blunder even before the Obamas moved into the White House, when then president-elect asked Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration ceremony. For the sake of context, this choice was controversial due to Warren's widely publicized support for Proposition 8, an anti-gay marriage ballot measure in California during the November election. The choice of an extremely conservative pastor was widely seen as Obama's attempt to reach out to the conservative base and passionately criticized by his largely progressive supporters. In the end, it did very little to improve national cohesion (as evidenced by the largest partisan gap in Obama's job approval ratings, according to PEW) and at the same time offended his socially progressive supporters.

Fast forwarding to last summer, we saw the same pattern emerge during the health care reform debate. As the debate quickly focused in on the question of the public plan - a government run insurance option - the legislators increasingly looked to the White House for guidance. At this critical juncture, in an apparent attempt to bring some Republican support on board, the President and his advisors, through interviews and press conferences communicated the message that while the President supports the public plan, it is "not the entirety of health-care reform" and "not the essential element". Ironically, this telegraphed flexibility did not make Republicans any more constructive in the reform efforts. In fact, despite the president's soft-pedaling on one of the key components of reform, it seems likely that if reform passes, it will happen with no Republican votes.

Obama's willingness to make sacrifices to achieve greater goals - Dalai Lama vs the Chinese, progressive issues vs national cohesion, public option vs bipartisan support - is theoretically understandable as shrewd political calculus. However, it is then imperative to judge his effectiveness in making these trade-offs and, so far, it seems to be very limited. In fact, it seems that every time the President decides to give something up, he receives very little in return. The impression it creates is one of an almost pathological desire to please his opponents even if this disregards the sensitivities of those that might be hurt in the process.

It is certainly understandable how his predilection for compromise and trade-offs would make Obama appealing to a certain committee in Norway. At home, however, he is testing the patience of his liberal base. It is ironic that one of the common criticisms of George W Bush was his inflexibility. These days, Democrats sometimes wish that Obama would exhibit some of that stubbornness, at least when it comes to defending their interests – the promises he made a year ago.

20 Years.

2009-10-29T14:49:00.003-04:00

Yes, it's been almost 20 years since the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe that effectively ended the Cold War and that being one of my personal favorite topics, I was delighted to find a pretty good article on it in the New York Review of Books. Hiding in the analysis of the article are a couple of really fun anecdotes that are worth quoting:

So what happened in 1989 can only be understood on the basis of a scrupulous, detailed chronological reconstruction of intended and unintended effects, in multiple directions on multiple stages, day by day, and sometimes—as on the evening of November 9 in Berlin—minute by minute. The reporting or misreporting of events, especially by television, is itself a vital part of the causal chain. When a trusted, avuncular presenter on the 10:30 PM West German television news declared that "the gates in the Wall are wide open" they were not yet wide open; but this report helped to make them so, since it increased the flood of East Berliners (who watched and were more inclined to believe West German television) hoping to get through the frontier crossings to the West, and the crowds of West Berliners coming to greet them on the other side.An erroneous report on Radio Free Europe that a student called Martin Šmid had been killed, in the suppression of the November 17, 1989, student demonstration in Prague, helped to swell the protesting crowds in the first days of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. (In what seems to me the best, and certainly the most amusing, of the retrospective chronicles, György Dalos tells how the student came home the next evening to be told by a somewhat agitated father that he was reportedly dead.)

With regards to the apparent US apathy towards or understatement of what was going on in CEE:

Nor did Bush set much store by bearded dissidents who looked like something out of Berkeley in the 1960s. Victor Sebestyen, in a book full of sharp snapshots and crisp narrative, has a well-sourced account of the President meeting with the leading Hungarian dissident János Kis in Budapest in July 1989, and subsequently telling aides, "These really aren't the right guys to be running the place." Much better to stick with a preppy reform communist.

The bottom line of the article seems to be that 20 years later, given the significance of the events of that year, someone needs to write a comprehensive history of 1989 from all angles. However, looking at these anecdotes, I think this would make for brilliant material for a 4-hour epic movie 1989 (fine, I'll settle for a 10-part series on PBS). I mean, seriously - a blunder on TV, a screw up on the radio and you have a revolution - that is classic.

Gosh, WTF.

2009-10-29T11:35:00.002-04:00

I realized that I totally stopped posting anything on the blog and that's not fun. I guess the temptation to just spit out random crap on Facebook is easier than blogging and I keep telling myself that I will just reserve the blog for longer more thought out stuff .. except that doesn't happen anymore, because all longer more thought out entries never start as longer more thought out entries, instead they almost always happen as a quick reaction to something and then take a life of their own .. except all the quick reactions to crap are now channeled to FB, hence the death of blogging. But that has to end. Now!

Health Reform in America – Why It Should, Could and Probably Won't Happen

2009-10-19T08:22:00.005-04:00

A super belated installment of my article in Zahranicna Politika. It was meant to be a "US Health Reform 101" for readers outside the US who may not be familiar with the problem. Of course a few things have changed since the time it was written but the conclusion still rings true, especially when one looks at the Senate Finance Committee bill.

Health Reform in America – Why It Should, Could and Probably Won't Happen

The story of US health reform is a complicated one and a thorough analysis of the topic is beyond the scope and scale of this column. However, it has become increasingly difficult to ignore given the prominence it has risen to in the last few months. Not only has it become the number one domestic issue that the president, lawmakers, lobbyists, news reporters and policy analysts are occupied with, but it is also quickly becoming the gauge for the Obama administration's success and potentially one of the determinants of the mid-term Congressional elections (in November 2010) and the next presidential election (in November 2012). Even more broadly, it has been a fascinating study in the functioning (some would say, malfunctioning) of the US political system and its many quirks. In short, for anyone interested in US politics, there are many reasons to care about health reform.

So what is all the fuss about? Why all the talk about reforming a system which is defined by spectacular innovation and some of the most advanced treatments and therapies? The standard answers to that question typically involve three aspects of the system: access, cost and outcomes. Quite simply, with all its high technology and innovation, the US health system leaves many people uninsured, and despite being the most expensive in the world, it produces worse outcomes. Specifically, while almost a fifth of non-elderly Americans don’t have any health insurance, the cost per capita is roughly twice that of most developed countries, and yet life expectancy is remarkably below average while infant mortality is astonishingly high. Underneath all these characteristics lies the fact that health care in America is an amalgam of disjointed systems of financing and delivery with little coordination of care, no incentives for prevention and wellness and plenty of room for duplication and errors.

(Source http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/health/spend/cost_longlife75.gif)

If this brief description of the complexity of US health care and its flaws in and of itself doesn’t make it obvious how much of a fool’s errand trying to revamp the system is, consider the fact that during the last reform effort, led by Hillary Clinton, the backlash from all stakeholders was so strong that for the last 15 years most lawmakers treated health care like a bag of toxic waste they wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. And yet, given the ambitious nature of Obama’s agenda, it seemed almost natural that he would try to find the Holy Grail.

Interestingly, despite the obvious difficulty of the task and the discouraging historical precedent, as recently as in June, there was a widespread sense of confidence on Capitol Hill that this time around things are different and something will get done. For starters, in the 15 years since the last attempt, healthcare spending has ballooned 160%, while the ranks of the uninsured have swelled from 41 million to 47 million. In fact, according to the CNN exit polls from the presidential election, while the economy was the number one issue for the vast majority of voters, healthcare ranked as number one for as many as did the issues of terrorism and Iraq. Even more specifically, two thirds of voters said they were worried about health care costs (and 60% of them voted in favor of Obama). In addition to having an apparent mandate and greater urgency, the new Democratic administration was also equipped with an expanded Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress - the first time such power alignment occurred since 1993. Perhaps more importantly, unlike in 1993, there seemed to be an agreement among key stakeholders, including the for-profit healthcare industry, about the need for reform. This was a major difference from the Clinton era, when the lobbying and advertising efforts of the health insurers, pharmaceutical manufacturers and doctors killed reform in its infancy. The new administration, trying to prevent Clinton’s mistakes, kept the process as open and collaborative as possible so as not to ignite hostile opposition from any of the key groups, instead making deals with each of them. The premise was that if we can fix the system and expand coverage, all of the participants will benefit and should therefore contribute in their own ways towards making the overhaul affordable. In short, for a very long time it seemed like the stars were aligning for the impossible to occur.

In hindsight, it was only a question of time when the fairy tale would turn into a mean fight. Once the committees in Congress started drafting bills – there are 3 of them in the House of Representatives and 2 in the Senate with jurisdiction over health care – the details got in the way of noble goals. The reality is that while most agree on the need for reform, there are numerous starkly different ideas about both how it should be accomplished and paid for – and each of them has a different set of proponents and enemies. The obvious goal is to find a solution that upsets the smallest number of participants – which isn’t very consistent with the objective of revamping 16% of the US economy. To make matters more complicated, the differences of opinion do not necessarily fall along party lines, rendering the Democratic majorities in Congress largely useless. As an example, a major portion of the debate has been around the possible introduction of a government-run health insurance option that would compete with private health insurers. While progressive democrats perceive this as an essential part of the reform, the conservative block of the party is vehemently against it. Recognizing the complexity of these diverging interests, Obama has been smart in keeping his demands as vague as possible and instead putting out broad parameters for reform – it has to expand coverage, improve quality and save money. This strategic vagueness, however, didn’t prevent the opponents of reform from poking holes in the proposals and the proponents of different solutions from engaging in hostile debates.

And so here we are in August and the whole reform effort appears to be on life support. Why? If reform fails, history books will probably trace its death to the August congressional recess. The recess is a month-long break during which lawmakers typically go back home to meet with their constituents. Early on in the month it became clear that having a bunch of health care proposals sitting around for a month was like leaving a carton of milk on the table for a few days. The news became quickly dominated by reports of contentious town hall meetings in which lawmakers encountered anger and even violence, often fueled by outrage over the supposed attempt to nationalize healthcare and over particular provisions in the health care bills, some of which were completely made up. The famous example was the rumor that Obama’s reform would create government-run “death panels” that would determine which patients are worth living – which turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of actual proposals to include funding for voluntary end-of-life counseling. Another example of populist hysteria was the accusation that the reform will force preferential hiring of homosexual hospital administrators and includes funding for sex change operations, when in fact none of the proposals include any such language. Absurd or not, these protests have a good chance of making lawmakers uneasy about their support for reform especially if they are Democrats in conservative districts or states and thus vulnerable in the next election.

So does this mean that health care reform is dead? Probably not entirely. Obama has made the issue so central to his domestic policy that a complete failure could harm the future prospects of both his party and his own. However, given the lack of legislative will and mounting opposition in the electorate, the most viable alternative is to settle for some smaller incremental changes such as expanding some public programs like Medicaid to cover more poor people and children and pay for it by cutting spending in a few targeted areas. This would be very far from a comprehensive reform of financing and delivery of care, and it will certainly anger the progressive Democratic base. However, faced with the prospect of getting nothing at all, the progressives will likely take whatever “reform” they can get. In the end, it seems quite possible that this will all have been yet another exercise in the realpolitik in the US legislative process and perhaps another lesson for those who believed in Change: it’s slow, painful, full of compromise and ultimately not very satisfying.

Dear Mr. Collier,

2009-08-25T08:08:00.004-04:00

I read about you in the New York Times and I have to say I am truly perplexed.

Your situation as you describe it would seem to position you as one of the fiercest advocates of health reform. Your wife's experience with the system is nothing if not exemplary of everything that is flawed in it: your insurer denied payment for your wife's radiation treatment because they were deemed "experimental" (even thought they are pretty much the standard of care for breast cancer as far as I know), presumably to avoid paying for the $63,000 bill (which you ended up not having to pay only because of the kindness of Emory Healthcare). Your insurance premiums have been going up 15% per year - I would imagine much faster than your income - and your deductibles have quadrupled. More importantly, God forbid the cancer were to recur (and in the best case, there is about a 10% chance it will) and you happened to lose your job, your wife would be uninsurable, due to her pre-existing condition.

And yet, you oppose health reform which aims to control the growth in cost of care, prohibit insurers from discriminating among people based on pre-existing conditions, and would give you a safety net to fall back on in case you lose your job or your employer simply decides to no longer provide health coverage for employees, or their spouses (it's a recession, after all).

What I don't understand at all is your reasons for fearing health reform. You say about Obama "he wants to centralize everything. He wants to take over the car companies. He wants to take over the banks. Now he wants to take over health care." Leaving aside the fact that the government didn't simply decide to take over car companies and banks (they begged for and survived thanks to government intervention), I simply don't get what about any of the current proposals says anything about the government taking over health care. And even if it did, why is that necessarily a bad thing compared to what happened to you? You worry about the government rationing care and skimping on the elderly. Instead, you prefer to be in a system, where your insurance company can simply deny payment for a procedure which, according to medical research lowered recurrence risk of your wife's cancer by more than 50%, because it is considered "experimental", even though your doctors recommended that treatment. If that isn't rationing and intruding into medical care decisions made by your doctor than I don't know what is. But I guess having those life-threatening decisions made by a for-profit entity at least feels more American?

I suppose I can understand one reason why you want to keep the system as it is - that against all odds and thanks to a combination of luck and other people's charity, you got what you need out of it. Your wife is OK now and, however expensive it may be, you have health insurance. In other words, the system sort of works for you, so why mess with it?

All of which is to say, go read James Surowiecki's brilliant article in the New Yorker about why we tend to want to stick with things that suck.

Just Dance.

2009-08-03T09:38:00.004-04:00

Eh, not particularly timely but here's another installment of my column in the Slovak journal Zahraničná politika. I have to say, using a night out at Vandam as inspiration and a Lady Gaga reference .. that's a first for me.

Just Dance.

Starting a column with a personal anecdote like “when I went out last Sunday it occurred to me” is probably not particularly professional. And yet, at the risk of diminishing the respectability of this piece, I can't help myself: When I went out last Sunday it occurred to me that for a city in the epicenter of the greatest economic decline since the Great Depression, everyone seems to be having an unusually good time. Granted, this was the night before Memorial Day, one of the few national holidays in the US, also considered an unofficial start of the summer. But it struck me as somewhat representative of the overall mood around me – not just in my social interactions, but also at my work in the financial markets – that could generally be summed up with three statements: the world is not coming to an end; it's going to be ok; just dance. And the skeptic in me has to wonder: is this for real or are people just fooling themselves, diluting their worries with a cocktail of green shoots, only to wake up with a massive hangover of reality the next morning?

The term green shoots in this context was coined by the Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke during an interview in March to describe what he believed were some early signs of economic recovery. Since then, many analysts have been obsessed with identifying these encouraging data points. Suddenly, it mattered less that many data points were still bad or worsening; it became fashionable to point out that as bad as things may seem – or deteriorating even – they are getting worse at a slower rate, the implication being that we are close to hitting a bottom. The market responded accordingly: between early March and the end of May, the S&P500 index has climbed 35%. And this sense of optimism has clearly infected American households: the Conference Board consumer confidence index in May showed a stunning improvement since the previous month to the highest level since last September, when the crisis broke out. Even more telling is the fact that the increase was driven by a pop in future expectations – to the highest level since December 2007, the month when this recession started. In other words, while people's assessment of the current situation is still not particularly rosy, their view of the future is as good as it was before the recession started. Similarly, in the stock market, one earnings report after another, investors have been looking through mediocre near term trends, and propping up prices of stocks in the hopes of an economic recovery.

Now, let me spell out my main source of skepticism clearly: none of the fundamental negative trends that were at the core of the downturn that clearly broke out last fall has reversed. Here's a quick survey of some macroeconomic factors: the housing prices keep going down (15% in April, according to National Association of Realtors, while the inventory of homes climbed 8.8% and mortgage delinquencies hit a record high, said Mortgage Bankers Association), the true health of banks remains unclear, unemployment continues to go up, even if at a slower pace. In other words, there is plenty of negative data pouring out, if one only pays attention.

At this point, you may ask yourself: why insist on highlighting the negative and ignoring the positive signs? Shouldn't we be celebrating the improving sentiment? These questions aren't entirely unfounded. The economic cycle is, after all, a self-feeding mechanism to some extent: if sentiment recovers, businesses will plan for higher output, increase investment, hire workers, and so on and so forth. And yet, while confidence is an essential element of recovery, it doesn't actually pay for much. So while consumers may be feeling more bullish, the real question is how much stuff will they be able to buy when all is said and done. And if you think about the fact that much of the spending in the last decade was driven by a massive expansion of credit – which is unlikely to make a comeback soon, I have to wonder what the true buying power of Americans – and people around the globe – will be when the dust settles. Put bluntly, without credit cards, how many millions of people will find it essential in the future to get the latest iPod every 6 months?

And so, while it would be nice if this jolly spring became the foundation for the next boom, I am finding it difficult to ignore all the signs that tell us otherwise. What's more, the precedents are not very encouraging: even during the Great Depression the economy did not fall apart immediately. After the initial drop, there was a brief period of recovery during which the market rallied 50%, only to start an extended decline during which stocks lost 80% of their value. And while I am nowhere near making that kind of prediction, when I look around today and see everyone dancing again, I fear how surprised everyone will be when the music stops.

Finally.

2009-07-24T10:47:00.003-04:00

Some time ago I was walking with a friend and the topic of health care reform came up. The friend stated: "clearly something has to be done .. there are so many uninsured people."

I may know a lot about health care but being caught off guard on a hungover Saturday morning, my response probably wasn't as succinct or clearly stated as I would have liked it to be. And the response I think is the most appropriate is that the uninsured are not the problem with the system but rather a symptom of the problem.

Here's what I mean: with some notable exceptions (like illegal aliens and young healthy people) the reason why there are so many uninsured people in this country is because health insurance has become prohibitively expensive for many employers to offer and for many individuals to buy. The real issue in America is not access but rather cost. As health insurance premiums have grown at double digit rates every year over the last 2 decades (all the while incomes haven't changed much, if anything, they have gone down), people are increasingly faced with an ugly trade off between health coverage and other spending. This has transpired in a few ways: many businesses have either stopped offering health coverage or increased the employee portion of the cost. To the extent that employees are faced with larger portion of the premium, it has clearly provided a disincentive to buy coverage (so called "take up" rate). And while other employers haven't asked their employees to foot a greater portion of the bill, almost all have shifted their employees to plans with higher out-of-pocket expenses - effectively leaving many "underinsured". And so, even if you still technically have coverage, chances are that when you get to the hospital, you now have a large deductible and a co-pay. In other words, the precipitous growth in health care costs (which drive premiums) has left many people out in the cold.

The reason for making this distinction between access and cost (ie, the uninsured are not the problem, but rather a symptom of a problem, which is skyrocketing costs) is twofold:

1. By focusing on the number of people without health insurance the implication could be that you could solve the perceived problem of access by simply throwing trillions of dollars to those who don't have coverage and get them insured. This would, at least temporarily, make everyone happy. I say temporarily because without addressing the underlying problem of cost and "bending the cost curve" (a popular expression these days), the problem would reemerge as further increases in costs would make insurance increasingly expensive to employers and employees (ie, right where we started) or, in the case of government funding, would lead to ever increasing deficits.

2. The focus on the uninsured also makes health care reform less appealing or relevant to the average voter. While there are unacceptably many uninsured Americans, the majority is still insured and the majority likes their health insurance. By talking about reform through the perspective of access, it is hard to inspire much urgency or support when the majority of people don't have an access problem. Other than feelings of sympathy, the horror stories of those who lack health insurance are not particularly motivating to those who do. In reality, however, even those that have insurance today and are happy or OK with it, are not immune from the underlying problem of cost growth. At a minimum, their premiums and out of pocket costs are rising at incredible rates year after year. More importantly, however, unless those trends are muted, the pool of uninsured and underinsured is ever expanding - and it is this threat that should make the need for reform very personal even to those who are currently covered.

On a related note, by focusing on costs rather than access, the problem becomes not only personally relevant to everyone but also inherently less partisan. It is easy to see how a conservative would not be particularly moved by the idea of "universal coverage". And it is also easy to see why my friend, who I mentioned in the beginning of the article, would relate the notions of health reform and uninsured in his liberal train of thought. Indeed, the very need for health reform is often questioned by some in the Republican party, on the grounds that there is nothing inherent about the right to health care. However, by focusing on the real problem - costs - reform suddenly sounds like a fiscal imperative, something that is surely more appealing to conservatives. And certainly, for a problem as big and complex as health care, it is useful to think about problems in ways that people across the ideological spectrum find appealing.

So, to conclude this little diatribe, because cost is the true problem that we should be addressing, I found it heartening that recently the public discourse has finally shifted in that direction. Not only in Obama's press conference on Wednesday but also in a recent slew of articles and op-eds on the topic (here, here and here). I really hope that the message is resonating - not just with the public but also with the lawmakers who are in charge of the sausage that is the legislative process around health reform.

Health Reform Op-Ed Extravaganza.

2009-06-22T07:53:00.002-04:00

You can tell that an issue is heating up when you get a slew of columns on it in one day. Today we got one from Krugman, Douthat, and Will. All make solid points, even though they see the problem from very different perspectives. After following the issue up close for the last few years, I could probably write an novel about it, so one of these days I should at least squeeze out a longer piece here. Stay tuned.

Gay Marriage & Logic, continued.

2009-05-29T14:43:00.003-04:00

A while back I wrote about the futility of arguing with gay marriage opponents because their "arguments" are not based on logic or anything remotely related to argumentation but are instead disingenuous excuses or covers for a purely emotional pre-disposition. At the time, this was inspired by an NRO editorial "arguing" against gay marriage.

Yesterday, Jonathan Chait at the New Republic posted an article that expands on this theme brilliantly, also mentioning the NRO editorial:

Dismissing the argument that marriage might foster more stable gay relationships, the magazine's editors replied curtly, "[T]hese do not strike us as important governmental goals." There's a word for social policy that disregards the welfare of one class of citizens: discrimination.

Some hard-core conservatives are willing to openly discriminate like this, but most people aren't, which is why public opinion is warming to gay marriage. Most opposition arises from simple discomfort. When I first started hearing about gay marriage, I didn't oppose it, but it seemed sort of strange and radical--and only after several years did I realize I supported it.

The line "I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman" is an expression of that sensibility--a reflection of unease rather than principle. As people face up to the fact that opposing gay marriage means disregarding the happiness of the people most directly (or even solely) affected by it, most of us come around. Good ideas don't always defeat bad ideas, but they usually, over time, defeat non-ideas.

American Dream, Interrupted

2009-05-29T10:21:00.004-04:00

The third installment of my column in Zahraničná politika, a Slovak foreign policy magazine, touches on the less obvious yet very troubling effects of the economic crisis.

American Dream, Interrupted

There has been a lot of talk about change lately, including in this column, as a result of the election of Barrack Obama and his arguably progressive agenda. And yet the most striking changes occurring all over the place are not happening because of Obama and his agenda, but rather around him and despite him. I am talking about the current economic crisis / recession / depression and how it is slowly redefining the US in ways that are far reaching and profound. And increasingly I have to wonder, what is left of America as we know it?

The US banking system is only a few steps away from nationalization - it has been saved for now simply because the administration wants to try every avenue possible first. Several major car manufacturers are only a few miles from bankruptcy, temporarily held afloat by loans from the government. The real estate market continues to melt down and that the government is trying to revive it seems like par for the course. In short, not only are some of the key symbols of American capitalism - banks, cars, houses - are under serious stress, but also the essence of their rescue plan could be labeled un-American: government intervention and control. And yet, even those who criticize big government, higher taxes and deficit spending, have had little to offer in term of alternatives. In fact, the US - and by extension, the world economy - is lucky that the largest economic contraction since the Great Depression is occurring under the watch of a President and Congress that don't seem philosophically opposed to taking bold pro-active steps.

Yet, as ironic as all these extraordinary circumstances may seem, they do not make me wonder about the future of American capitalism and its position in the global economy. Time, simple forces of supply and demand, and presumably the current government intervention, will eventually sort out the problems in banking, autos and real estate one way or another. No, the changes that should make Americans more worried are much more quiet and subtle and are affecting some of the core fueling forces of America and, as cheesy as it may sound, shattering the idea of the "American dream."

The first issue I have in mind here is immigration. While the topic of illegal aliens is consuming the attention of the mainstream media and the President, there is an entirely different battle going on - against legal immigrants who have been living in the country on working visas. Due to a special skill or high level of education, these foreigners have been sponsored by a US company to live in the country. Over the years, many of these individuals have contributed greatly to the US economy - for example, Microsoft says that 35% of their patents came from new inventions by visa and greencard holders. In other words, this program - and immigration in general - has been the feeding channel to attract and retain the hardest-working, brightest minds from all over the globe to the US.

And yet, the visa program has come under criticism from those who argue that during a recession, American companies should not be giving jobs away to foreigners. The most vivid assault on the program came in the economic stimulus plan which imposes severe restriction on any company receiving federal funding and their ability to hire foreigners. However, even outside of the companies directly affected by the stimulus restrictions, the popular backlash against the visa program has led to a drop in applications for new visas as companies are becoming shy about sponsoring foreign workers. It was in that spirit that Wells Fargo, a major US bank, has decided to discontinue sponsorships for some of the foreigners they already employ. And Microsoft, after it announced it will continue sponsoring immigrants, had to quickly soften its stance amid criticism from media and lawmakers and declared it will file "substantially fewer" applications - this despite having clearly stating how crucial hiring from the global talent pool is for them - and the US.

Education and research are another defining element of America that is being threatened as a result of the current crisis. On one end of the spectrum, the institutions relying on public funding are facing a tough future as 36 states have either enacted or proposed budget cuts for elementary or higher level education. On the other end of the spectrum, private institutions which are not solely dependent on public funding are dealing with massive declines in the values of their endowment portfolios - 23% during the 5 months ended in November of last year, according to the National Association of College and University Endowments. Even Harvard - with its breathtaking endowment that peaked at $37 billion in 2008 but is expected to decline 30% as a result of the market meltdown - is planning to reduce its budget by $220 million over the next two years. Moreover, in the US education goes hand in hand with research: American universities are not just educational institutions, but also powerhouses of invention and progress. In fact, universities now perform about 60% of all basic research in the US, according to National Science Foundation. And the math is quite simple: fewer education dollars equals less research.

Perhaps most profoundly, however, shrinking higher education budgets translate into fewer dollars available for financial aid for students from lower income families at a time when increasingly more students are in need of such aid due to the economic downturn and market losses. Because attending college is impossible for the poor without outside assistance, the reductions in funding could have a meaningful impact on social mobility. In other words, kids from lower income families will have fewer chances to get higher education and move up on the socio-economic ladder.

While funding for higher education is dropping, it is hard to imagine any other country replacing the US as the leader any time soon. It is telling, however, that the US stands to capitalize less on its investment in education than ever before, as foreign students are increasingly likely to return home after graduation. This is not some insignificant group we're talking about: according to National Science Foundation, foreigners received nearly 60% of all engineering doctorates and over 50% of all engineering, math, computer sciences, physics and economics doctorates awarded in the US. And today, they are planning to return home in greater numbers than ever before. As the Kauffman Foundation found in its report "Losing the World's Best and Brightest", 58% of Indian, 40% of European and 54% of Chinese students surveyed would stay in the US if given the choice, which suggests a meaningful drop in the appeal of the US given that historically as much as two thirds of foreigners overall stayed in the US after receiving a doctorate, more specifically 92% of the Chinese and 85% of Indians. And while the availability of economic opportunities in the home country was the most important reason for returning (other than family ties) - a stunning revelation in and of itself - the ability to obtain a visa was also an important factor. Stated differently, it would seem that the aforementioned backlash against working visas is making it harder to stay in the US for the shrinking portion of those that find it appealing in the first place.

And so, in 2010 (or any time between 2011 and 2020, depending on which pessimistic economist you believe), when the US recovers from this recession, it will probably be very different - not because its banks will operate under different regulations and a few car companies will no longer exist but rather because some of its key competitive advantages, like ever replenishing diversity and investment in human capital, will have fallen prey to the economic meltdown. Will those naturally recover as the economic engine goes back into full speed and will other countries capitalize on America's weakness in the meantime? That remains to be seen. But for now the American Dream is on hold.

His Name Was Mellon.

2009-04-27T20:00:00.003-04:00

And I fell in love instantly. During my most recent trip to Slovakia, I took a little trip with my brother Martin and my niece Natalia and our cousin Roman to my brother's country house. It's an old defunct mill with some piece of land and a beautiful little creek:

We took Natalia to "ride" on a horse. Here's her and my brother admiring the beautiful horse, Mellon:

And here they are riding:

I tried it too. It was amazing..

Can Someone Please ..

2009-04-22T12:24:00.002-04:00

.. fire Maureen Dowd? I mean, her last column is an interview with inventors of Twitter. Let's imagine for a moment that the phenomenon of Twitter hasn't been explored by numerous other writers. And let's imagine that an interview is an acceptable way to use your column space in the NYT. Even if I give her a break on those two things, how does someone think this is remotely good material:

ME: ..Is there any thought that doesn’t need to be published?

BIZ: The one I’m thinking right now.

ME: Did you know you were designing a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls?

BIZ: We definitely didn’t design it for that. If they want to use it for that, it’s great.

ME: I heard about a woman who tweeted her father’s funeral. Whatever happened to private pain?

EVAN: I have private pain every day.