democratic views

Medicare for Everyone

All the rhetoric about encouraging more competition in the health care marketplace is claptrap. Look at data from just one state, Missouri, and you'll find between 280 and 330 firms providing individual or group accident and health insurance coverage. It would be no more efficient to have more insurance companies than it would be to have more airplane manufacturers, or automobile makers.

Paul Krugman argues that there is no free market when it comes to health care. Whether you agree with him or not, there are reasons why even in a free-market system other industries serving a national infrastructure have consolidated into a handful of large firms. The only way we will have competition in a health care market that has multiple payers is if a government-run public option is available.

An Affirmation of Life (Let’s Take A Break from Health Care, War, Recession)

Tom Friedman published a very nice essay in the New York Times about – golf. That is, golf as a metaphor for life, as a story about the triumphs of age and character, and our eternal struggle against the unpredictable.

Golf happens to be the setting, but it highlights our ability to achieve great things at any age, and without saying it directly, the dangers of underestimating someone because they are, well, old. Now, Tom Watson, who at 59 lost a playoff for the championship of the British Open isn't exactly old – but he's beyond the age at which we believe someone can be competitive at that level against players 10, 20, 30 or 40 years younger.

Al Jazeera English Comes to Washington and 20 U.S. Cities

While CNN runs Larry King and works on exposes about the drugs Michael Jackson's doctor may have furnished, Al Jazeera English provides coverage of a massacre in Nigeria, riots and police violence provoked by a general strike in South Africa, coverage of U.S.-China economic talks including President Obama's remarks to the group gathered in Washington, a snippet on U.S. Defense Secretary Gates commenting on relations with Iran during his trip to the Middle East, a segment on U.S. Special Envoy George Mitchell trying to move along the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which included footage of Palestinian leaders as well as Jewish settlers resisting any change, an interview with a journalist from Cambio magazine in Colombia during a segment on the U.S. drug war in Ecuador and Colombia, along with stock market indicators and exchange rates.

Scottsboro and Cambridge

Overdramatic underestimation. In Scottsboro Alabama in the 1930s, 9 black boys were accused of raping two young white women, with tragic results. The boys spent years in prison; eventually all were released, and in one case, Governor George Wallace, with his racist views, issued a pardon. But Samuel Leibowitz, a famous defense attorney recruited by the Communist Party of America, completely underestimated or did not understand how he was part of the problems the defense faced. Despite Leibowitz's failures in the trial phase, his appeals were instrumental in saving the boys' lives, aided by a heroic decision by Judge James Horton and later, by a U.S. Supreme Court decision setting aside guilty verdicts and ordering new trials due to Alabama's exclusion of blacks during jury selection.

NRA Celebrates bin Laden Death

A public relations spokesperson for the National Rifle Association said that they were pleased hear of a report that that a son of Osama bin Laden has been killed. The NRA is still smarting from the Senate's defeat of their amendment to overturn state's rights and allow holders of concealed weapons permits in any state to travel throughout the rest of the United States with concealed weapons. "We welcome any news that shows how weapons in the right hands, with authority granted by the constitution of the United States, can be used to kill those opposed to the American dream," said the anonymous NRA official.

Where Is Obama’s Moonwalk?

John F. Kennedy issued a clarion call to the nation's youth and launched the Peace Corps. He sent American astronauts to the moon. 40 years ago tomorrow, Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and American footprints in the lunar dust created a new horizon. Kennedy also botched the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and continued enlarging America's wrong-headed intervention in Viet Nam.

Digging for Gold

The Wall Street Journal blasts Goldman Sachs for profiteering, calling them "Goldie Mac." Paul Krugman says its good for the financiers but not for the taxpayer. Ariana Huffington tries to meld the right and the left into a withering criticism of Wall Street which leads to a scathing critique of the Obama administration coddling of financiers run amok. Paul Volker, the hero of Reagan's taming inflation is shouted down by Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers. In short, another day in the mines for policy makers owned by those with so much money we all believe their failure threatens everyone.

Lipstick On A Pig: How Memes Make The News

If you came to this piece thinking it would be about Sarah Palin, well, it's not. But now that you're here, there is a scathing post from Shannyn Moore that blasts Palin for enough things to make it hard to see the lipstick on a blushing pig. Unlike the heavyweights of the Republican establishment – Rove, Huckabee, Kristol, and countless others have opined on what Princess Sarah is up to - Moore is based in Anchorage and has something to say about how Palin laid waste to the state's governance and finances with her abrupt resignation.

Before I move on to the real story, Hendrik Hertzberg steals a line from Cyndi Lauper when he writes of Palin in the forthcoming New Yorker that "this is one girl from the north country who just wants to have fun." His comparison of statements on political change made by Thomas Jefferson and Governor Palin show how far she has to go before a sixth-grade grammar teacher would give her credit for uttering a complete sentence with a subject, verb and predicate. She may be "crazy like a fox" as Bill Kristol tried to argue – or she may not be so foxy after all.

Never On Sunday

When it comes to the British repatriating the Parthenon marbles taken from Greece more than two hundred years ago, never applies to any day of the week. Greece just opened a spectacular new museum on the Acropolis just a few hundred meters from the ruins of the Parthenon, which the British Museum's Trustees say they "warmly welcome". Their gracious words notwithstanding, they persist in holding to their position that the artifacts were legally acquired from the Ottoman Turks who conquered and occupied Greece for a few centuries, and thus will remain in British possession.

It wasn't the Greeks who conveyed the objects; it was the occupying Turks. The imperialist Ottoman government was no doubt pleased to see reminders of Greek culture and antiquity removed so as to diminish the past glories of Greece, to further abase their Greek subjects and make a point of the abject state of Greece as a result of the Turkish occupation. For the British to argue that this was a legitimate deal between two sovereign powers is comparable to saying that Hitler's Nazi regime had a legal right to dispose of artworks it took possession of as it conquered Europe.

Nothing But The Truth

The film "Nothing But The Truth" purports to dramatize the outing of Valerie Plame, the undercover CIA agent whose name was leaked during the Bush administration in retaliation for her husband's finding that there was no substance to reports that Saddam Hussein was obtaining fissile material from Nigeria to make nuclear weapons. The film takes great liberties with the underlying facts of the Valerie Plame case. It has to do so in part because no one who knows what really happened is talking, so "the truth" eludes us. In the film a whacko right-wing zealot shoots and kills the betrayed CIA agent solely for melodrama, leading viewers to lament her widowed husband and now-motherless daughter. It's too bad they took such liberties, which highlight the film's essential weakness: trying to tell a story where there's something important going on, but not much to say.

China Dams Green Dam – For Now

After a large number of protests from governments, industry, and consumers, China delayed indefinitely its requirement that all computers sold starting July 1, 2009 come with monitoring and censoring software known as Green Dam. This is good news, but leaves open the question of whether China will persist in trying to control the flow of information to computer users using Microsoft's Windows operating system. (Note to Apple and Linux vendors: Prep your marketing plans. Green Dam is a potential bonanza.) After getting over the shock of a government mandating something so intrusive, one wonders about the lack of planning exhibited by the Chinese government and its Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Neither Chinese officials nor the software developers working on Green Dam seem to have thought through how such a program could be installed on every computer in the country (not just new ones, and not just Windows-based machines). I won't give away any of the trade "secrets" that constitute best practices and working models for software deployment in the U.S., because it would help Chinese autocrats compromise free markets, privacy, security, and individual liberty. Don't be surprised if Beijing comes back with another attempt on this front once they think they've got it figured out. On the other hand, maybe they will quietly walk away from this blundering effort at censorship wrapped in the cloak of "protecting children" and hope that we will politely refrain from reminding them about it in the future.