Later On

Interesting article by Aram Roston in Playboy (I read it only for the articles):

The weeks before Christmas brought no hint of terror. But by the afternoon of December 21, 2003, police stood guard in heavy assault gear on the streets of Manhattan. Fighter jets patrolled the skies. When a gift box was left on Fifth Avenue, it was labeled a suspicious package and 5,000 people in the Metropolitan Museum of Art were herded into the cold.

It was Code Orange. Americans first heard of it at a Sunday press conference in Washington, D.C. Weekend assignment editors sent their crews up Nebraska Avenue to the new Homeland Security offices, where DHS secretary Tom Ridge announced the terror alert. “There’s continued discussion,” he told reporters, “these are from credible sources—about near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11.” The New York Times reported that intelligence sources warned “about some unspecified but spectacular attack.”

The financial markets trembled. By Tuesday the panic had ratcheted up as the Associated Press reported threats to “power plants, dams and even oil facilities in Alaska.” The feds forced the cancellation of dozens of French, British and Mexican commercial “flights of interest” and pushed foreign governments to put armed air marshals on certain flights. Air France flight 68 was canceled, as was Air France flight 70. By Christmas the headline in the Los Angeles Times was "Six Flights Canceled as Signs of Terror Plot Point to L.A." Journalists speculated over the basis for these terror alerts. “Credible sources,” Ridge said. “Intelligence chatter,” said CNN.

But there were no real intercepts, no new informants, no increase in chatter. And the suspicious package turned out to contain a stuffed snowman. This was, instead, the beginning of a bizarre scam. Behind that terror alert, and a string of contracts and intrigue that continues to this date, there is one unlikely character.

The man’s name is Dennis Montgomery, a self-proclaimed scientist who said he could predict terrorist attacks. Operating with a small software development company, he apparently convinced the Bush White House, the CIA, the Air Force and other agencies that Al Jazeera—the Qatari-owned TV network—was unwittingly transmitting target data to Al Qaeda sleepers…

Continue reading.

Dean Baker in The Guardian:

The Senate finance committee overwhelmingly voted to approve Ben Bernanke for another four-year term as Federal Reserve board chairman. This is a remarkable event since it is hard to imagine how Bernanke could have performed any worse during his last four-year term. By Bernanke’s own assessment, his policies brought the US economy to the brink of another Great Depression. This sort of performance in any other job would get you fired in a second. But for the most important economic policymaker in the country it gets you high praise and another term.

There is no room for ambiguity in this story. Bernanke was at the Fed since the fall of 2002. (He had a brief stint in 2005 as chair of President Bush’s council of economic advisors.) At a point when at least some economists recognised the housing bubble and began to warn of the damage that would result from its collapse, Bernanke insisted that everything was fine and that nothing should be done to rein in the bubble.

This is worth repeating. If Bernanke knew what he was doing, he should have been able to see as early as 2002 that there was a housing bubble and that its collapse would throw the economy into a recession. It was also entirely predictable that the collapse could lead to a financial crisis of the type we saw, since housing was always a highly leveraged asset, even before the flood of subprime, Alt-A and other nonsense loans that propelled the bubble to ever greater heights. Of course as the bubble expanded, and the financial sector became ever more highly leveraged, the risks to the economy increased enormously.

Through this all, Bernanke just looked the other way. The whole time he insisted that everything was just fine.

To be clear, there was plenty that the Fed could have done to deflate the bubble before it grew to such dangerous proportions. First and foremost the Fed could have used its extensive research capabilities to carefully document the evidence for a housing bubble and the risks that its collapse would pose to the economy.

It then should have used the enormous …

Continue reading. And then take a look at this “greatest hits” of things Bernanke has said.

Excellent column by Dean Baker and Mark Calabria:

The following is a joint piece by Dean Baker, the co-director of the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research, and Mark Calabria, the director of financial regulations studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Congress will soon consider whether Ben Bernanke merits another term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. It is fair to say that no single individual played a larger role in responding to the recent financial crisis. The Fed has directly lent more than $2 trillion to financial and non-financial institutions in the last two years. It has guaranteed trillions more. It is also fair to say that few individuals and institutions played as large a role in the economy leading up to the crisis than Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve.

However, at the moment Congress lacks the independent and objective analysis needed to fully assess Bernanke’s performance and therefore to make an informed judgment as to whether he deserves re-appointment. For this reason, Congress should put off a vote on Bernanke’s nomination until there has been a full audit of the Fed’s actions preceding and during the crisis.

Before considering Bernanke’s role in containing the financial crisis, Congress should, via the Government Accountability Office (GAO), investigate the role of Fed policy in allowing the housing bubble to grow. This is not just an effort at playing the blame game; an objective assessment of this policy will also be helpful in avoiding future bubbles.

It is often noted that Mr. Bernanke’s research on the Great Depression makes him well prepared to run the Fed in this period of crisis. Unfortunately, Mr. Bernanke’s research apparently did not tell him the obvious: that allowing an $8 trillion housing bubble to grow unchecked would lead to an economic disaster like what we are now experiencing. He and his colleagues at the Federal Reserve Board either could not see, or did not care about, this huge bubble. As a result, Ben Bernanke has been running around for much of the last year and a half telling us about his knowledge of the Great Depression…

Continue reading.

Take the money out of the Defense budget. In fact, ThinkProgress’s Matt Corley identifies the best programs to cut:

In his West Point speech announcing his 30,000 troop escalation in Afghanistan, President Obama declared that he was committed to addressing the ongoing costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “openly and honestly.” Though he did not get into specifics, Obama said he would “work closely with Congress to address these costs as we work to bring down our deficit.”

Some Democrats, such as Rep. David Obey (D-WI), have suggested a war surtax to pay for the estimated $30 billion it will cost to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But the Obama administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) have rejected a tax. In a new report from the Center for American Progress, Lawrence Korb, Sean Duggan, Laura Conley, and Jacob Stokes recommend that the administration “look to the base defense budget” to pay for the escalation:

Rather than allow the supplemental and additional costs of the escalation for FY2011 to add to the large and growing national deficit, the Obama administration should look to the base defense budget for programs and weapons platforms that can be eliminated or scaled back without jeopardizing our national defense strategy or capabilities. Our allies in Great Britain have adopted such a policy. In order to pay for the cost of sending an additional 500 troops and supporting equipment to the front lines in Afghanistan, the British government is currently “reprioritizing” existing Ministry of Defense spending, including domestic cuts in civilian staff, and a commitment to improve procurement.

Noting that defense investment funds have “grown by approximately 75 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars over the past decade,” they recommend adjustments to “nine costly and outmoded weapons platforms and programs and an across-the-board reduction in research, development, test and evaluation funding” that could save some $40 billion in the next fiscal year:

On Washington Journal this morning, Korb explained how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “are the first wars in our history” where Americans fiscally “haven’t been asked to make any sacrifices.” “Not only did we not raise taxes, we actually cut them and because of that we have this tremendous budget deficit,” said Korb. Watch it:

Obama is human, so he makes mistakes. This was a big one: after touting the public option as necessary and good, he refused to exert the slightest effort to push it through Congress. Is he averse to confrontation and conflict? Sometimes it’s good to push. Zaid Jilani in ThinkProgress:

In recent days, there has been an uproar in the progressive community over the Senate’s decision to drop the public option from its health care bill in order to reach the crucial 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. Given that many liberals backed a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system, the public option was seen as a political compromise.

“I didn’t campaign on the public option,” President Obama told the Washington Post. But he touted the public option on his campaign website and spoke frequently in support of it during the first year of his presidency, citing its essential value in holding the private insurance industry accountable and providing competition:

– In the 2008 Obama-Biden health care plan on the campaign’s website, candidate Obama promised that “any American will have the opportunity to enroll in [a] new public plan.” [2008]

– During a speech at the American Medical Association, President Obama told thousands of doctors that one of the plans included in the new health insurance exchanges “needs to be a public option that will give people a broader range of choices and inject competition into the health care market.” [6/15/09]

– While speaking to the nation during his weekly address, the President said that “any plan” he signs “must include…a public option.” [7/17/09]

– During a conference call with progressive bloggers, the President said he continues “to believe that a robust public option would be the best way to go.” [7/20/09]

– Obama told NBC’s David Gregory that a public option “should be a part of this [health care bill],” while rebuking claims that the plan was “dead.” [9/20/09]

Despite all this overt advocacy for the public option, it appears that Obama was reticent to apply the political pressure necessary to get the plan in the final hours of congressional negotiation. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) — who threatened to filibuster the creation of any new public plan or expansion of Medicare — told the Huffington Post that he “didn’t really have direct input from the White House” on the public option and was never specifically asked to support it.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), one of the most ardent backers of public insurance, blamed the demise of the public option on a “lack of support from the administration.” Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) — perhaps the most visible defender of the public option in the entire health care debate — went even further, saying that Obama’s lack of support for congressional progressives amounted to him being “half-pregnant” with the health insurance and drug industries.

Update: "All I’ll say, I was surprised to hear this because I had assumed all along that the White House was pushing strongly for the public option," Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) said. "I just assumed that."

Update: In response to a questionnaire from the Washington Post, then-candidate Obama said, “My plan builds on and improves our current insurance system, which most Americans continue to rely upon, and creates a new public health plan for those currently without coverage.”

So far as I can tell, his disappointing performance on this measure was totally unnecessary. He could have fought for it in positive terms.

Had to do a few chores, but now for some blogging. I did do the Nordic Track and the walk, so I’m still plugging away at it.

Thanks to a comment from one of the developers, I’ve been playing with ThinkLinkr this morning. It’s a Web-based outliner that is designed for collaboration—you can invite people to edit the outline, or simply to view the outline (no editing capabilities). That in itself is nice, but the outliner is also extremely intuitive to use (at least for Windows folks) and, since it’s Web-based, you can use your home computer or your work computer with no need to transfer files.

When you go to the site, you’ll see a video tutorial—I highly recommend that you watch that. It’s short, not tedious, and really does a good job of explaining the software.

So that you can get a chance to play with it, I’ve put up an outline of my physical fitness regimen. Let me know in comments if you’d like to be an editor or just a viewer, and I’ll add you to the list of collaborators.

The program is still in beta, but it looks quite polished already.

A perennial mistake that new wetshavers make is to think that there are brushes good for soaps and brushes good for shaving creams and they are not the same brushes. This is incorrect. Any good brush will work well with both soaps and creams.

The Omega silvertip show above is big and soft. The Rooney 2 at its side is there simply for comparison. A big soft brush: can that work with soap?

So I pulled out the Mitchell’s Wool Fat, often seen as a “challenge” soap, and whipped up a wonderful lather. The secret: wet the brush with hot water under the tap, give it a shake, and the brush the surface of the soap rapidly but gently with the tips of the bristles. If you do it right—rapidly and lightly—you will not get a lather, but the soap will quickly build up on the tips of the bristles. After a while, determined by experience but around 40 seconds, move the brush to your wet beard (in my case washed with MR GLO and then rinsed) and brush up the lather. Works like a charm.

The Mühle razor with a Bolzano blade of a certain age did a fine job, and the Alt Innsbruck was the perfect finish.

So: no more talk about “soap brushes” and “shaving cream brushes.”

Greenwald:

Given what a prominent role "Terrorism" plays in our political discourse, it’s striking how little attention is paid to American actions which have the most significant impact on that problem.  In addition to our occupation of Iraq, war escalation in Afghanistan, and secret bombings in Pakistan, President Obama late last week ordered cruise missile attacks on two locations in Yemen, which "U.S. officials" say were "suspected Al Qaeda hideouts."  The main target of the attacks, Al Qaeda member Qasim al Rim, was not among those killed, but: "a local Yemeni official said on Sunday that 49 civilians, among them 23 children and 17 women, were killed in air strikes against Al-Qaeda, which he said were carried out ‘indiscriminately’."  Media reports across the Muslim world — though, not of course, within the U.S. — are highlighting the dead civilians from the U.S. strike (one account from an official Iranian outlet began:  "U.S. Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Barack Obama has signed the order for a recent military strike on Yemen in which scores of civilians, including children, have been killed, a report says").

For many people, the mere assertion by anonymous U.S. Government officials that these attacks targeted "suspected al-Qaeda sites" will be sufficient to deem them justified.  All credible reports confirm that there is indeed a not insignificant Al Qaeda presence in Southern Yemen, so that claim, at least, seems at least grounded in reality.  Yet arguments about justification to the side for the moment, here we have yet another violent attack by the U.S. which — even under the best-case scenario — has killed more Muslim civilians than it did "Al Qaeda fighters," and failed to kill the main target of the attack.  When it comes to undermining Al Qaeda — both in Yemen and generally — isn’t it painfully obvious that the images of dead Muslim women and children which we constantly create — and which we again just created in Yemen — will fuel that movement better than anything else we can do?

Consider what else is happening around the Muslim world that is quite consistent with all of that yet receiving virtually no attention in the West (though receiving plenty of attention there).  Pakistani lawyers — many of the same ones who protested the tyrannical practices of General Musharraf — held a large protest in Islamabad this weekend objecting to the presence of "notorious" Blackwater agents in their country.  Palestinians are consumed with a recent incident in which West Bank settlers torched one of their mosques, burning holy books and leaving threatening messages; that was preceded by the Israeli Justice Minister proclaiming that "step by step, Torah law will become the binding law in the State of Israel."  And perhaps most significantly of all, while reports have focused on alleged tension between the Obama administration and Israel over the latter’s uncooperative conduct, this is what is actually happening:

Read the rest of this entry »

Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

The White House Press Office sent out a statement today announcing that President Obama signed the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010 into law on Saturday:

H.R. 3326, the “Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010,” which provides FY 2010 appropriations for Department of Defense (DOD) military programs including funding for Overseas Contingency Operations, and extends various expiring authorities and other non-defense FY 2010 appropriations.

Within the Appropriations Act is Sen. Al Franken’s (D-MN) amendment prohibiting defense contractors from restricting their employees’ abilities to take workplace discrimination, battery, and sexual assault cases to court. The measure was inspired by Jamie Leigh Jones, who was gang-raped by her co-workers while working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. Many Republicans opposed the legislation — saying it was an unnecessary attack on their allies in the defense contracting business — and faced intense political blowback over their positions.

In fact, the 30 Senators who voted against this amendment are quite angry with Franken because… well, I don’t know why. (Does anyone know a reason that makes any sense?) Those Senators also don’t like to try to explain to their constituents why they voted against the amendment.

And Alex Seitz-Wald at ThinkProgress:

Responding to horror stories of stranded travelers, the Obama administration ordered airlines today to allow passengers to disembark from planes that have been stuck on the tarmac for more than three hours. With the move, the Obama administration is “sending an unequivocal message to airlines that it won’t tolerate” excessive delays:

Airlines will be required to provide food and water for passengers within two hours of a plane being delayed on a tarmac, and to maintain operable lavatories. They must also provide passengers with medical attention when necessary. [...]

“Airline passengers have rights, and these new rules will require airlines to live up to their obligation to treat their customers fairly,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement.

Between January and June of this year, airlines stranded passengers on the tarmac for more than three hours 613 times. One particularly horrendous incident in August brought the issue to national attention. Passengers on a Continental flight from Houston to St.Paul-Minneapolis were forced to stay in a cramped commuter jet overnight with a foul-smelling lavatory after thunderstorms diverted their plane to Rochester, MN and gate crews wouldn’t allow them off the plane. The ordeal led to the first-ever government fine of a airline for a tarmac stranding, with the three companies involved being forced to pay $175,000 for their negligence. Airlines have “strongly opposed a hard time limit on tarmac strandings,” claiming it will disrupt their operations. But travelers who have experienced lengthy delays will likely be grateful for the new rule, which will take affect in 120 days.

Interesting article by Robert B. Gagosian, President and Director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution:

Are we overlooking potential abrupt climate shifts?

Most of the studies and debates on potential climate change, along with its ecological and economic impacts, have focused on the ongoing buildup of industrial greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a gradual increase in global temperatures. This line of thinking, however, fails to consider another potentially disruptive climate scenario. It ignores recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.

Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth’s climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries. In addition, these climate shifts do not necessarily have universal, global effects. They can generate a counterintuitive scenario: Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates.

This new paradigm of abrupt climate change has been well established over the last decade by research of ocean, earth and atmosphere scientists at many institutions worldwide. But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur.¹

It is important to clarify that we are not contemplating a situation of either abrupt cooling or global warming. Rather, abrupt regional cooling and gradual global warming can unfold simultaneously. Indeed, greenhouse warming is a destabilizing factor that makes abrupt climate change more probable. A 2002 report by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) said, “available evidence suggests that abrupt climate changes are not only possible but likely in the future, potentially with large impacts on ecosystems and societies.”²

The timing of any abrupt regional cooling in the future also has critical policy implications. An abrupt cooling that happens within the next two decades would produce different climate effects than one that occurs after another century of continuing greenhouse warming.

Are we ignoring the oceans’ role in climate change?

Fossil evidence and computer models demonstrate that Earth’s complex and dynamic climate system has more than one mode of operation. Each mode produces different climate patterns.

The evidence also shows that Earth’s climate system has sensitive thresholds. Pushed past a threshold, the system can jump quickly from one stable operating mode to a completely different one—“just as the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns on a light,” the NAS report said.

Scientists have so far identified only one viable mechanism to induce large, global, abrupt climate changes:  …

Continue reading.

This article is by Jeff Gerth, ProPublica, and Jon Ungoed-Thomas, The Sunday Times:

Two years ago in a conference room in the Randolph hotel in Oxford, England, Henrik Thomsen gave his inside account of a medical "nightmare." In a presentation to about 30 colleagues, Thomsen, one of Europe’s leading radiologists, revealed how patients treated at his Copenhagen University hospital had subsequently contracted a rare and potentially fatal disease.

Thomsen and other doctors were baffled about why 20 kidney patients who had been given routine scans were afflicted by a disorder — nephrogenic systemic fibrosis (NSF) — in which the skin gradually swells, thickens and tightens. Some sufferers were confined to wheelchairs. At least one died. There was no known cure.

Then, in March 2006, came a breakthrough. It was confirmed that all those who had fallen ill with NSF [2] had been given the same drug in advance of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan.

That drug, Omniscan, was used to enhance the images produced by the scan. The product was sold around the world and was manufactured by GE Healthcare, a subsidiary of General Electric, one of the world’s largest corporations.

Thomsen’s presentation lasted no more than 15 minutes, with the final slide reading: "I hope none of you meets a similar medical hurricane."

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to The Younger Daughter for sending a link to this post, from which these two videos (and more info at the link).

I am always fascinated by collaborative tools, though in fact I pretty much work alone. But I like the idea of working as part of a team.

I’m familiar with tools for collaborative writing, but of course prior to the writing is the development of (and agreement on) the outline. A commenter pointed out the collaborative outliner at thinklinkr. Check it out. A video at the link explains how it works.

Thanks to Kevin for the reminder.

Omega silvertip brushes—especially the big bushy soft ones like the one pictured—are (IMHO) wonderful: they generate and hold loads of lather. This morning the lather came from La Toja shave stick, and the Slant Bar did it proud, easily erasing the stubble. La Toja aftershave was a fine finish—and then I did 8 minutes on the Nordic Track.

China is moving quickly to not only catch up with the US but move ahead. Evan Osnos in the New Yorker:

On March 3, 1986, four of China’s top weapons scientists—each a veteran of the missile and space programs—sent a private letter to Deng Xiaoping, the leader of the country. Their letter was a warning: Decades of relentless focus on militarization had crippled the country’s civilian scientific establishment; China must join the world’s xin jishu geming, the “new technological revolution,” they said, or it would be left behind. They called for an élite project devoted to technology ranging from biotech to space research. Deng agreed, and scribbled on the letter, “Action must be taken on this now.” This was China’s “Sputnik moment,” and the project was code-named the 863 Program, for the year and month of its birth.

In the years that followed, the government pumped billions of dollars into labs and universities and enterprises, on projects ranging from cloning to underwater robots. Then, in 2001, Chinese officials abruptly expanded one program in particular: energy technology. The reasons were clear. Once the largest oil exporter in East Asia, China was now adding more than two thousand cars a day and importing millions of barrels; its energy security hinged on a flotilla of tankers stretched across distant seas. Meanwhile, China was getting nearly eighty per cent of its electricity from coal, which was rendering the air in much of the country unbreathable and hastening climate changes that could undermine China’s future stability. Rising sea levels were on pace to create more refugees in China than in any other country, even Bangladesh.

In 2006, Chinese leaders redoubled their commitment to new energy technology; they boosted funding for research and set targets for installing wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, and other renewable sources of energy that were higher than goals in the United States. China doubled its wind-power capacity that year, then doubled it again the next year, and the year after. The country had virtually no solar industry in 2003; five years later, it was manufacturing more solar cells than any other country, winning customers from foreign companies that had invented the technology in the first place. As President Hu Jintao, a political heir of Deng Xiaoping, put it in October of this year, China must “seize preëmptive opportunities in the new round of the global energy revolution.”

A China born again green can be hard to imagine, especially for people who live here. After four years in Beijing, I’ve learned how to gauge the pollution before I open the curtains; by dawn on the smoggiest days, the lungs ache. The city government does not dwell on the details; its daily air-quality measurement does not even tally the tiniest particles of pollution, which are the most damaging to the respiratory system. Last year, the U.S. Embassy installed an air monitor on the roof of one of its buildings, and every hour it posts the results to a Twitter feed, with a score ranging from 1, which is the cleanest air, to 500, the dirtiest. American cities consider anything above 100 to be unhealthy. The rare times in which an American city has scored above 300 have been in the midst of forest fires. In these cases, the government puts out public-health notices warning that the air is “hazardous” and that “everyone should avoid all physical activity outdoors.” As I type this in Beijing, the Embassy’s air monitor says that today’s score is 500.

China is so big—and is growing so fast—that in 2006 it passed the United States to become the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases. If China’s emissions keep climbing as they have for the past thirty years, the country will emit more of those gases in the next thirty years than the United States has in its entire history. So the question is no longer whether China is equipped to play a role in combating climate change but how that role will affect other countries. David Sandalow, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy for Policy and International Affairs, has been to China five times in five months. He told me, “China’s investment in clean energy is extraordinary.” For America, he added, the implication is clear: “Unless the U.S. makes investments, we are not competitive in the clean-tech sector in the years and decades to come.” …

Continue reading. The US, of course, has the free market and the financial services industry, and that should solve all our problems.

Very interesting article in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande:

Cost is the spectre haunting health reform. For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage. Those gaps have widened to become graves—resulting in an estimated forty-five thousand premature deaths each year—and have forced more than a million people into bankruptcy. The emerging health-reform package has a master plan for this problem. By establishing insurance exchanges, mandates, and tax credits, it would guarantee that at least ninety-four per cent of Americans had decent medical coverage. This is historic, and it is necessary. But the legislation has no master plan for dealing with the problem of soaring medical costs. And this is a source of deep unease.

Health-care costs are strangling our country. Medical care now absorbs eighteen per cent of every dollar we earn. Between 1999 and 2009, the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family insurance coverage rose from $5,800 to $13,400, and the average cost per Medicare beneficiary went from $5,500 to $11,900. The costs of our dysfunctional health-care system have already helped sink our auto industry, are draining state and federal coffers, and could ultimately imperil our ability to sustain universal coverage.

What have we gained by paying more than twice as much for medical care as we did a decade ago? The health-care sector certainly employs more people and more machines than it did. But there have been no great strides in service. In Western Europe, most primary-care practices now use electronic health records and offer after-hours care; in the United States, most don’t. Improvement in demonstrated medical outcomes has been modest in most fields. The reason the system is a money drain is not that it’s so successful but that it’s fragmented, disorganized, and inconsistent; it’s neglectful of low-profit services like mental-health care, geriatrics, and primary care, and almost giddy in its overuse of high-cost technologies such as radiology imaging, brand-name drugs, and many elective procedures.

At the current rate of increase, the cost of family insurance will reach twenty-seven thousand dollars or more in a decade, taking more than a fifth of every dollar that people earn. Businesses will see their health-coverage expenses rise from ten per cent of total labor costs to seventeen per cent. Health-care spending will essentially devour all our future wage increases and economic growth. State budget costs for health care will more than double, and Medicare will run out of money in just eight years. The cost problem, people have come to realize, threatens not just our prosperity but our solvency.

So what does the reform package do about it? Turn to page 621 of the Senate version, the section entitled “Transforming the Health Care Delivery System,” and start reading…

Continue reading.

Jane Mayer at the New Yorker:

The first year of the Obama Administration is almost over, yet many mysteries surrounding the so-called “dark side” of the “war on terror” remain unsolved. Here are ten:

1. Did former Vice-President Cheney know the full, clinical details of the Bush Administration’s interrogation and detention program for terror suspects? Did he have a supervisory role?
2. How much did President Bush know about the alleged abuse? Cheney has said that the former President “knew a great deal about the program” and “basically authorized it.” Did he know, for instance, that one suspect was waterboarded a hundred and eighty-three times? Did he know that another died in C.I.A. custody after having been left to freeze overnight? If he did know, what was his reaction?
3. The C.I.A. destroyed ninety-two videotapes of interrogation sessions. What exactly was on the tapes, and why were they destroyed? Are there written transcripts describing what was on the tapes? Did the tapes document potential evidence of a crime? If so, did their destruction constitute obstruction of justice? And if so, which officials authorized the tapes’ destruction?
4. Have all the former C.I.A. prisoners been accounted for? Some seem not to have been sent to Guantánamo when the C.I.A.’s black-site prisons were closed, in 2006. Instead, it appears they may have been sent to other countries, including Egypt, Jordan, and Libya. If so, who were these prisoners, and where are they now?
5. Who provided the “muscle” in the C.I.A. interrogation and detention program? Were the notional global “hit squads” authorized, or made operational? Were their activities fully briefed to Congress? Were they staffed by C.I.A. officers, Special Operations officers, private contractors, or others? If there were abuses, will anyone face any consequences?
6. Vice-President Cheney and other defenders of “enhanced interrogation” techniques have insisted that coercion produced intelligence and saved lives. Many other experts have argued that the same information or better could have been obtained by less controversial methods. Will the public ever be able to access the record, in order to judge this on its own?
7. A small handful of politically appointed lawyers during the Bush years approved many forms of prisoner abuse that would previously have been judged criminal. Those lawyers have fanned out to teach, practice law, and, in one case, sit on the federal bench. Will there be professional consequences for any of these lawyers? A report on them by the Justice Department has been pending release for the entire last year. Why has it been so delayed?
8. Several contract psychologists designed and helped to implement the C.I.A.’s program of “enhanced” interrogation techniques. Will these psychologists face professional consequences? They have indicated they would like to tell their story—will they?
9. Who forged the “yellowcake” Niger documents that helped spur the U.S. into the war in Iraq?
10. Who are the chief financiers of terror, and do any of them have state sponsors?

Bonus question: Where is Osama bin Laden?

The comments are interesting, too.

David Sirota at OpenLeft:

There’s been some back and forth in the liberal blogosphere about Matt Taibbi’s latest masterpiece in Rolling Stone – the one about how Obama stuffed his administration with Wall Streeters. Taibbi, indeed, has two tiny things wrong: 1) He confused two guys named Jamie Rubin in one sentence and 2) He seemed to imply that Karen Kornbluh was a non-Rubinite, even though she was actually Bob Rubin’s former deputy chief of staff. The former is a minor screw up that doesn’t negate the thrust of the piece, and the latter actually gives Obama a benefit of the doubt he doesn’t deserve.

Of course, the criticism of Taibbi from liberals and conservatives in the Washington Establishment runs much deeper than a few non-germane factual errors. And it is telling – not about Taibbi, but about the rot, corruption and elitism that now defines Washington Establishment. 

When you read criticism from the American Prospect, you see the magazine acknowledging the factual accuracy of everything Taibbi has reported (accuracy which Reuters verifies and that Taibbi himself defends) – but you see some other stuff, too. You see an ugly form of jealousy at a reporter who doesn’t feel (as the Prospect so often does) the need to obsequiously worship Democratic politicians. You also see rage at a writer for being way more talented than almost any other writer in journalism. Even more important, you see an obnoxious Beltway elitism that suggests Taibbi doesn’t get it.

This elitism has been echoed by everyone from Matt Yglesias to Andrew Sullivan. It is an elitism best summed up by the American Conservative magazine in its criticism of Taibbi:

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