Later On

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones (and following his post, Nate Silver explains why this is silly):

You have got to be kidding me. Here’s the reaction to our latest Osama wannabe’s ludicrously failed terrorist plot:

According to a statement posted Saturday morning on Air Canada’s Web site, the Transportation Security Administration will severely limit the behavior of both passengers and crew during flights in United States airspace — restricting movement in the final hour of flight. Late Saturday morning, the T.S.A. had not yet included this new information on its own Web site.

“Among other things,” the statement in Air Canada’s Web site read, “during the final hour of flight customers must remain seated, will not be allowed to access carry-on baggage, or have personal belongings or other items on their laps.”

I’ll refrain from further comment until TSA makes this official. Hopefully Air Canada just jumped the gun here. Because if this is true, it means our government has finally and irrevocably gone insane.

UPDATE: Plus there’s this from an accompanying story:

In effect, that means passengers on flights of about 90 minutes or less will not be able to get out of their seats, since they are not allowed to move about while an airplane is climbing to its cruising altitude.

Air Canada also told its United States bound customers that they would be limited to a single carry-on item and that they would be subjected to personal and baggage searches at security check points and in the gate area. It said this would result in significant delays, canceled flights and missed connections. Air Canada said it would waive the baggage fee for the first checked bag as a result of the new policy.

Aaron Potter comments: "If this is true, So much for flying with kids." And it means the end of carry-on baggage entirely for anyone who also has a purse or a briefcase.

Apparently al-Qaeda doesn’t need to bother with real terrorism anymore: just light off a firecracker on a plane and the U.S. government will react as if a major city had been leveled. Why not just ban air flight entirely and be done with it?

Nate Silver on the odds of airborne terror:

Not going to do any editorializing here; just going to do some non-fancy math. James Joyner asks:

There have been precisely three attempts over the last eight years to commit acts of terrorism aboard commercial aircraft. All of them clownishly inept and easily thwarted by the passengers. How many tens of thousands of flights have been incident free?

Let’s expand Joyner’s scope out to the past decade. Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides a wealth of statistical information on air traffic. For this exercise, I will look at both domestic flights within the US, and international flights whose origin or destination was within the United States. I will not look at flights that transported cargo and crew only. I will look at flights spanning the decade from October 1999 through September 2009 inclusive (the BTS does not yet have data available for the past couple of months).

Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.

Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

Again, no editorializing (for now). These are just the numbers.

Though often claimed to be hottest, 1998 was not. John Cook at Skeptical Scientist explains:

The argument "global warming stopped in 1998" still enjoys popularity (in fact, #7 on the skeptic leaderboard). The nuanced response to this line of thought is to point out that global warming is fundamentally due to the planet accumulating heat. Direct observations find the planet’s total heat content has continued to rise past 1998 (Murphy 2009). Recent ocean heat measurements show the planet has been in positive energy imbalance to the end of 2008 (Schuckmann 2009). Global warming is still happening. Nevertheless, there is a simpler response to the argument that 1998 is the hottest year on record. It’s not true. 1998 is not the hottest year on record.

The most prominent global temperature records come from the Hadley Centre at the University of East Anglia (HadCRUT), a branch of NASA called the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA GISS) and the National Climatic Data Center which is part of the USA government’s National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Of these three records, only the HadCRUT record shows 1998 as the hottest year on record. While all three records show near identical long term trends, there are differences on a year-to-year basis. GISS and NOAA both find 2005 is the hottest year on record (with 2009 possibly on track to pip 1998 as the second hottest year on record).

A new independent analysis of the HadCRUT record sheds light on this discrepancy. The analysis is by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) who calculated global temperature, utilising a range of sources including surface temperature measurements, satellites, radiosondes, ships and buoys. They found recent warming has been higher than that shown by HadCRUT. This is because HadCRUT is sampling regions that have exhibited less change, on average, than the entire globe.

Figure 1 shows the regions that HadCRUT have sampled compared to the regions ECMWF included in their dataset. The ECMWF analysis shows that in data-sparse regions such as Russia, Africa and Canada, there is strong warming over land that is not included in the HadCRUT’s sampling data. This leads the ECMWF to infer with high confidence that the HadCRUT record is at the lower end of likely warming…

Continue reading.

Some commenter once suggested that we could trust businesses to do the right thing. This sentiment is so removed from actual experience that it’s puzzling. Sure, on small-scale things I do trust businesses—which are closely regulated by law regarding commercial transactions—to sell me produce, books, and the like. But commercial transactions are closely observed—by the buyer, generally, though sometimes businesses taint the products they sell so that you cannot detect the problem until, for example, your pet dies from the adulterants added to the food.

Here’s a terrific example of the untrustworthiness of businesses by Les Blumenthal in McClatchy newspapers:

A 562-foot smokestack that spewed a plume of arsenic, lead and other heavy metals over 1,000 square miles of Washington state’s Puget Sound for nearly a century remains a fitting symbol of the largest environmental bankruptcy in U.S. history.

However, it also tells a cautionary tale of how a company that’s intent on shedding its environmental liabilities could manipulate the nation’s bankruptcy system.

In this instance, Grupo Mexico, S.A. de C.V., tried and failed, according to lawyers and regulators who are close to the case. It took a federal judge, however, to block what some bankruptcy lawyers call a "candy heist" that could have left taxpayers responsible for cleaning up 80 polluted sites in 19 states, a job that initially was estimated to cost $6.5 billion.

The smokestack in Ruston, Wash., once the world’s biggest, has been demolished, as has the copper smelter that fed it. The smelter was owned by Asarco, a century-old mining, smelting and refining company based in Tucson, Ariz., that once was listed on the Fortune 500. Grupo Mexico bought Asarco in 1999.

In court documents, Grupo Mexico has denied that it maneuvered Asarco into bankruptcy in an attempt to evade its environmental responsibilities. Grupo Mexico refused to comment for this story.

"Grupo Mexico tried to use a bankruptcy court to avoid Asarco’s cleanup responsibilities, and they almost got away with it," charged Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

Asarco officially emerged from bankruptcy earlier this month, and Grupo Mexico has paid $1.8 billion in cleanup costs. In addition to claims filed by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, 15 states — including Washington, Oklahoma, Missouri, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas — and various Indian tribes and private parties had filed environmental claims against Asarco.

State and federal regulators say they’re more than satisfied.

Unless the laws are changed, however, Cantwell and others say that another company almost certainly will try to manipulate the bankruptcy system the way they charge that Grupo Mexico did…

Continue reading.

Very interesting post at Firedoglake by Cynthia Kouril:

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: If you are being foreclosed on, DEMAND in court, that the bank or entity trying to foreclose on your house produce the original “blue ink signature” mortgage documents and promissory note and that they produce each and every piece of paper showing the various transfers of those documents from the original lender to the entity trying to take your house away.

The possibility that the entity foreclosing on you does not have the legal right to do so IS VERY REAL. Do not just lay down and play dead.  I’ve already told you that many mortgage deeds were split from the debt (the promissory note) and that may, in some states, cancel the ability to take the house. I’ve also told you that some, maybe many, mortgage documents got lost in the vortex that is MERS. Now, it seems that even without MERS, some mortgages just got lost.

The NY Times is reporting

Starting in late 2007, Deutsche Bank invested $1.2 billion in a mortgage financing vehicle known as Ocala Funding; alongside it was BNP Paribas, a French bank that put $481 million into the same vehicle.

Ocala issued short-term notes and from the proceeds, bought mortgages that it could promptly sell to Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprise. Bank of America was trustee, collateral agent, custodian and depository agent to Ocala — its back office, in essence.

–snip—

But there were a couple of problems with the set-up: the company writing the mortgages funneling through Ocala was Taylor Bean & Whitaker, a lender that filed for bankruptcy last August. And to make its loans, Taylor Bean used money from Colonial Bank, a Montgomery, Ala., institution that also went belly-up. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took over Colonial in August.

Sorting through the wreckage of those related failures has generated more questions than answers so far. Taylor Bean was shut down by the Federal Housing Administration, citing possible mortgage fraud. According to people briefed by those winding down Taylor Bean’s operations, who requested anonymity in order to preserve professional relationships, there are signs that the company sold some of its loans to more than one buyer. Lawyers representing Taylor Bean did not return phone calls seeking comment.

In any event, Ocala says mortgages worth more than half a billion dollars are missing. And the F.D.I.C. is withholding the release of mortgages worth hundreds of billions held at Colonial that Ocala investors say are theirs. The government contends that it is not clear that Bank of America — as a representative for Ocala — paid for them.

Yep, Ocala THINKS it owns a bunch of mortgages, it’s got the names of people and the address of the house, and the block and lot number and everything. What is apparently doesn’t have—is any right to foreclose on those houses. Good news, perhaps, for those people whose houses are in that deal. It will be years before that case is sorted out, and until then, nobody will know who actually owns the mortgage or the right to foreclose. So, if your mortgage is in that pool, you might have a roof over your head and some breathing room to maybe get your finances in order as the economy improves.

But only if you stand up for yourself in the foreclosure proceeding. And what if your mortgage doesn’t happen to be in that rather large pool? …

Continue reading.

An interesting post by Steven Stosny, Ph.D., a psychologist who treats people for anger and relationship problems:

We must assume that Charlie Sheen is innocent of the domestic violence-related charges leveled against him on Christmas Day, at least until the criminal justice system runs its course. Yet his arrest once again raises the question of why so many celebrity entertainers and athletes fall into a trap of domestic abuse in one form or another.

As a result of a couple of books and many TV appearances on issues of abuse and anger, I have had the opportunity to treat several celebrities and athletes arrested for domestic violence, several others who would have been arrested, had their partners called the police, and many more who were guilty of emotional and verbal abuse. (The latter two groups include a few well-known politicians.) Remarkably, I have found them to be no different from the poor, beaten-down court-ordered clients whom I also treat.

Though varied in experience, wealth, and social standing, abusers are remarkably the same in the motivation to hurt loved ones. Famous or not, the following qualities of abusers are usually apparent only in their intimate relationships. Most of us can show the world a certain face. But our closest relationships expose our deepest sense of inadequacy and vulnerability. That’s why we always hurt the ones we love.

Abusers tend to have: …

Continue reading.

Terrific shave to start the week: the Plisson Chinese Grey worked up a completely wonderful lather from QED’s Chocolate shave stick, then the Slant Bar with an aging but still able Astra Superior Platinum blade removed all traces of stubble in three passes. I know the blade is getting old because the first pass did not leave my face as smooth as a sharp blade will. Finally, a finish with Geo. F. Trumper Spanish Leather aftershave, a wonderful finish.

James Gibney, The Atlantic Monthly Deputy Managing Editor, on the best book he read in 2009:

Travels With Herodotus,  by Ryszard Kapuściński

You don’t ask Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński for box scores, stock tips, or the weather—and not just because he died almost three years ago. More magical than realist, Kapuściński wasn’t above letting his imagination get the better of him. What would you expect from a man whose role model was Herodotus, the original King of the Whoppers?

Yet, after reading Kapuściński’s Travels with Herodotus, I had more admiration for both. Offering a book within a book, and a journey within a journey, Kapuściński takes the reader along on his first stumbling forays as a foreign correspondent to India and China, armed with a copy of Herodotus’s The Histories given to him by the editor of his Polish newspaper. Onward through Egypt, where he’s mugged atop a minaret, and on to Sudan, where he hears Louis Armstrong sing "Moon River" and "Hello, Dolly" to a strangely silent stadium, and through Iran, Ethiopia, Congo, and elsewhere in Africa, Kapuściński weaves his stories with those that Herodotus tells of his own travels and the war between the Greeks and the Persians.

Kapuściński is less interested in how Herodotus speaks to current events (for that, consult my colleague Robert Kaplan) than in what lessons he offers for the art of reporting. (In fact, as the author of "world literature’s first great work of reportage," Herodotus might justly be called not only the father of history, but also the first foreign correspondent.) Among other things, Kapuściński tags his forebear as the "first globalist," the "first to realize the world’s essential multiplicity." He is "never shocked at difference, never condemns it; rather, he tries to learn about it, to understand and describe it." Predictably, Kapuściński’s character analysis sometimes blurs the line between the observer and the observed, as when he avers that "Herodotus’s mind is incapable of stopping at one event or one country…. A fact that he discovered and ascertained today no longer fascinates him tomorrow, and so he must walk (or ride) elsewhere, further away." But given that this was Kapuściński’s last book, I’m willing to allow him a little elegiac license.

It’s also a good read, sprinkled with the offbeat encounters and lyrical placesetters that will be familiar to devotees of his other books (in Dar es Salaam, "the sea was always calm; slow little waves, creating a quiet rhythmic splash, sank without a trace into the warm sand of the shore.") And notwithstanding his astringent critics, I think that Kapuściński’s impressionistic coverage still has its place, provoking us to experience, to feel, to think, and to test our assumptions, no less than a million Twitter feeds.

I didn’t do the Nordic Track today, but I did do the walk (3 blocks out: still less than 9 minutes). I sort of like the slow and steady buildup. Tomorrow I’ll definitely do the Nordic.

I had the inspiration of making miso using chicken stock instead of dashi. I even had some cool Garlic Red Pepper Miso to use.

Alas: there’s a reason to use dashi in making miso soup. It tastes very good. I can’t in good conscience recommend chicken stock as a substitute. You have been warned.

A lack of quality control:

Cocaine’s a hell of a drug, and even more so when laced with another drug that’s commonly used to deworm opossums. Federal agents have found that 69 percent of cocaine shipments seized entering the United States contain levamisole, a veterinary drug linked to serious weakening of the immune system in humans. Here’s the real funny part: no one knows why.

This comes from a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the immune system condition, known as agranulocytosis. The paper tracks 21 cases from New Mexico and Washington State linked to cocaine, including one death, but cautions that many more cases have probably gone under the radar of public health officials.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) also noted that 69 percent of cocaine shipments seized as of July 2009 contained levamisole. The CDC has since launched a national surveillance effort to continue monitoring the levamisole link to cocaine.

Perhaps as a sign of the times, the toxicology report from the death of DJ AM in August revealed that the celebrity’s body contained both cocaine and levamisole, along with a lethal cocktail of other drugs such as Oxycontin, Vicodin, Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin, and Benadryl…

Continue reading.

Don’t these sound a lot like death squads?

The U.S. Special Operations Command is in charge of small, elite units within the military that carry out a variety of missions in hostile territory, many of them classified. Established in 1987, it has about 54,000 active duty personnel from all four branches of the armed services. Its secret counterterrorism units are credited with capturing or killing many of the most wanted terrorist or insurgent leaders, including Saddam Hussein.

The command’s role in the military underwent a sea change immediately after 9/11, when the U.S. military focused on combating terrorism. As defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld wanted the Special Operations Command to work unilaterally; he believed that it would be more aggressive in hunting down terrorists than were the regional commanders, who are tied most closely to conventional forces.

In 2004, Mr. Rumsfeld gave it the authority to carry out secret counterterrorism missions on its own around the world. For years, there were misgivings within the military that the command would use the broader mandate too aggressively by carrying out operations that had not been reviewed or approved by the regional commanders. In May 2008 the command stepped back from the plan.

Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who in May 2009 was chosen to become the new top American commander in Afghanistan, was commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, a part of the Special Operations Command so clandestine that the Pentagon for years refused to acknowledge its existence. But former C.I.A. officials say that General McChrystal was among those who, with the C.I.A., pushed hard for a secret joint operation in the tribal region of Pakistan in 2005 aimed at capturing or killing Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy.

The operation was canceled at the last minute, a move that former intelligence officials say General McChrystal found maddening.

Thanks to Jack in Amsterdam for the pointer.

Two copies of Babbage’s original design have been constructed—and they work just fine. Read the story here. Article includes 10 more photos.

Tellingly, they always create diseases that require taking prescription drugs that they make, and generally require taking those drugs permanently. Take this example:

This is the story of how pills for osteopenia ended up in Benghauser’s medicine cabinet, and in the medicine cabinets of millions of women like her all over the United States. But more broadly, it’s the story of how the definition of what constitutes a disease evolves, and the role that drug companies can play in that evolution.

Osteopenia is a condition that only recently started to be thought of as a problem that required treatment. Until the early 1990s, only a handful of people had even heard the word. And to understand how osteopenia was transformed from a rarely heard word into a problem that millions of women swallow pills to treat, you need to go back to the beginning, to a place very far away from Benghauser’s suburban Virginia home…

Read the whole story.

Pretty cool, eh? Here’s the story:

The Bamboo Bike Studio is run by three men in their late 20s who know a lot about bamboo and a lot about bicycles. On a cool autumn morning, two of them are out on a bamboo harvest — in a dense grove near New Brunswick, N.J.

Justin Aguinaldo and Sean Murray carry a small Japanese pull saw and a caliper to find bamboo stems that are 1 1/2 inches thick. When they find stems that are just right, they tap the bamboo to make sure it’s not too soft: “If the bamboo’s too watery, it’s not as dense and it’s not as strong,” Aguinaldo explains.

Aguinaldo makes his living as a bicycle messenger. Sean Murray is a former schoolteacher whose voice mail greeting makes note of the fact that he is now living the dream of making bikes with his friends.

Continue reading.

Are you cooking up something nice for New Year’s? Like one of these:

Anna Teresa Callen’s Lenticchie in Umido
Avocado and Crabmeat Canapes
Baba au Rhum
Basic Roast Duck Breast
Benne Cheese Wafers
Black Bean Soup
Black Sea Toast
Black-Eyed Peas With Andouille Sausage and Rice
Blinis With Red Caviar
Bollinger Veal With Mustard Seed
Brioche With Caviar and Scrambled Eggs
Buckwheat Blini
Butternut Squash Dip
Cafe Marimba King’s Bread
Canapes With Piquillo Peppers and Anchovies
Caviar and Lobster in Brioche Cups
Champagne Cocktail
Cheese Straws
Chick Pea and Pesto Canapes
Chinese Eggplant Dip
Cilantro Marinated Shrimp
Cold Salmon With Caviar and Mustard Seed Sauce
Corn Pancakes With Crème Fraîche and Gold and Black Caviar
Crispy Pork Bits With Jerk Seasonings
Cumin Crackers
Decoration
English Twelfth Night Cake
Fennel, Orange and Apple Skewers
Fenneled Olives
Fettuccine With White Truffles
Four Seasons Oysters in Champagne Veloute
Fried Plantains
Gateau de viande (Meat pâté)
Ginger Sauce For Duck Breasts
Gingerbread Apple Cocktail
Glogg
Goat-Cheese Pizzas
Greek Cauliflower Dip
Green Peppercorn Pistachio Crackers
Greens in Phyllo
Icing
John Clancy’s King’s Cake
Lechon Asado (Cuban-style suckling pig)
Lee Bailey’s Pasta With Golden Caviar
Lemonade Soufflé
Mary Cantwell’s Steak in Champagne
Milk Punch
Miniature Corn Barquettes With Roasted Peppers
Mireille Giuliano’s Apple Tart
Navy Bean and Celery Root Soup
New Year’s Eve Cotechino
Pasta With Smoked Trout and Golden Caviar
Pasta With White Truffles
Pâté de legumes (Vegetable pâté)
Pâté de saumon (Salmon pâté)
Pistachio-Crusted Sweet-Potato Balls
Pizza Bread With Truffle Oil and Salmon
Plattar (Swedish pancakes with lingonberries)
Poached Shrimp With Dipping Sauce
Pork Tenderloin with Pear Sauce
Potato Pancakes With Pressed Caviar and Red onion
Prosciutto, Fig and Parmesan Rolls
Puffy Italian Pastries
Raised Blini
Red Lentil Dip
Restaurant Ruc’s Roast Goose With Sauerkraut
Roasted Oysters and Meyer Lemon
Roasted Red Pepper Spread
Roasted Red-Pepper Dip
Roasted Vegetables
Russian Blinis With Caviar
Sauce fines herbes (Herb mayonnaise)
Sauteed Oysters on Toast
Scallops in Leek Sauce and Caviar
Scallops With Saffron Lobster Sauce and Caviar
Scrambled Eggs With Osetra and Mouillettes
Shrimp Wrapped in Prosciutto With Curry Vinaigrette
Skewered Crisp Shiitakes With Garlic
Souffléd Black Bean Canapes
Souffléd Smoked Salmon Canapes
Spicy Duck Salad
Sun-Dried-Tomato Dip
Sweet Potato-Brussels Sprouts Hash
Tartlets of Red Caviar
Texas Caviar
The Red Tulip’s Gulyas Soup With Guluska (Goulash soup with little dumplings)
Toasted Pecans
Tuscan Bean Soup
Vasilopita
Vietnamese Shrimp Dumplings
Warm Potatoes in Red Caviar
White Bean and Smoked Tuna Spread
White Beans, With Pig’s Feet

If you do one, let us know in comments. The white beans with pig’s feet catches my eye: my local supermarket frequently has pig’s feet this time of year. Or maybe I’ll make menudo rojo, which is totally delicious.

Scott in comments directed me to this excellent article (my adjective, not his), which he wrote for guys like me who keep their cameras locked to "Auto" instead of "P". I have a Canon PowerShot S2 IS, the one I use for my morning shaving equipment shots, and that has always been "Auto"—but no longer. And my new little pocket camera turned out to produce many blurry photos of individual subjects in "Auto" mode—because the damn camera was guessing badly about what to focus on, and I couldn’t control the point of focus. The camera instructions told me the menu item to lock the point of focus to a little square in the middle, but the damn menu item wasn’t on the camera’s menu—not until I switched from "Auto" to "P". (They didn’t tell me that, blast their eyes.)

Now, reading the article, I’m abandoning "Auto" for "P" in both cameras. If you’ve been using only "Auto" on your digital camera, take a look at the article.

Many thanks, Scott.

Good column by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

On Dec. 8, 1964, Mike Manatos wrote a letter that explains what’s wrong with the Senate in 2009. This wasn’t, of course, the subject of his letter. Manatos was no futurist; he was Lyndon Johnson’s liaison to the Senate, and he was writing to update his bosses on Medicare’s chances in the aftermath of the 1964 election. Surveying the incoming crop of senators, Manatos counted a solid majority in favor of the president’s effort. "If all our supporters are present and voting we would win by a vote of 55 to 45," he predicted.

That letter would never be written now. In today’s Senate, 55 votes isn’t enough to "win," or anything close to it; it’s enough to get you five votes away from the 60 votes you need to shut down a filibuster. Only then, in most cases, can a law be passed. The modern Senate is a radically different institution than the Senate of the 1960s, and the dysfunction exhibited in its debate over health care — the absence of bipartisanship, the use of the filibuster to obstruct progress rather than protect debate, the ability of any given senator to hold the bill hostage to his or her demands — has convinced many, both inside and outside the chamber, that it needs to be fixed.

This might seem an odd moment to argue that the Senate is fundamentally broken and repairs should top our list of priorities. After all, the Senate passed a $900 billion health-care bill Thursday morning. But consider the context: Arlen Specter’s defection from the Republican Party earlier this year gave Democrats 60 votes in the Senate — a larger majority than either party has had since the ’70s. Democrats also controlled the House and the presidency, and were working in the aftermath of a financial crisis that occurred on a Republican president’s watch. This was a test of whether a party could govern when everything was stacked in its favor.

The answer seems to be, well, not really. The Democrats ended up focusing on health-care reform’s low-hanging fruit: the bill the Senate ultimately passed does much more to increase coverage than it does to address the considerably harder problem of cost control, it strengthens the existing private insurance system and it does not include a public insurance option. And Democrats still could not find a single Republican vote, which meant they had to give Nebraska a coupon entitling it to a free Medicaid expansion and hand Joe Lieberman a voucher that’s good for anything he wants. If the Senate cannot govern effectively even when history conspires to free its hand, then it cannot govern.

To understand why the modern legislative process is so bad, why every Senator seems able to demand a king’s ransom in return for his or her vote and no bill ever seems to be truly bipartisan, you need to understand one basic fact: …

Continue reading.

I’ve finished my week of 8-minute sessions on the Nordic Track and walking 2 blocks out and back. Tomorrow I’ll start 9-minute sessions and 3 blocks out and back. By the end of the week, the effort required for the 8-minute session had appreciably diminished.

In the meantime, I am keeping up with the Nelson exercises every 3 days (except I went 4 days to miss Christmas day). I’m starting to find the right weights for each exercise.

And Spanish study will begin as soon as the library opens again. My plan is to pick up some youth and young adult  books in Spanish, both written books and audio books.

The Wife gave me a Canon PowerShot SD940 IS digital camera, and today on the walk I gave it a go. First is this flower bed, still plugging away on Boxing Day:

And then, next to it, this bed of rosemary in bloom:

And finally this joyous looking bush:

Today was heavily overcast—I imagine these would look spectacular had the sun been out. I’m still having trouble with the focus, and the image stabilization is not all that it could be, but I imagine practice will result in improvement.

As usual, click photos for enlargement.