Unassisted Triple Play

This is about the rarest thing that can happen in a baseball game. In the history of Major League Baseball, it's only happened fifteen times, and this is only the second time it has ever happened to end a ballgame (In 1927, Johnny Neun of the Detroit Tigers did it). I think it's much more impressive than an inside-the-park home run (which happened in this game). Congratulations to Eric Bruntlett of the Philadelphia Phillies.

It'll Never Get Old But It'll Always Be Obscure

I've done enough reading about the seventeenth century recently that this one from XKCD is really funny to me.
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Which reminds me. Did you hear the one about Beethoven's career after he died? He started decomposing! Har har har!!!

Okay, I'll leave you all alone for the weekend now.

A Simple Lesson In Tactics

Please Note An Update

I've made a significant update to yesterday's post about predicitions of the future effects of same-sex marriage in New England and Iowa. If the issue interests you, please revisit that post. Thank you for your attention.

The Punishment Should Fit The Crime

Now, I think there's no problem with a law that requires you to register your guns. And Plaxico Burress owned a gun that he had not registered. And it went off when he carried it into a club in New York City, discharging into his own foot. So he pretty clearly violated the gun registration law. I think that deserves punishment. And sports fans and gun owners all over the country couldn't understand how someone could possibly carry a weapon so incompetently that he literally shot his own foot. "Shooting yourself in the foot" is a turn of phrase for everyone but Plaxico Burress, who instead turned it into a way to get the attention of the bouncer at a New York nightclub.

What the hell was he thinking, trying to get a gun into a nightclub in the first place? Don't clubs in New York have metal detectors?

But the punishment for violating a gun registreation law, absent proof of some other crime being concurrently committed involving the illegal firearm, should be a fine. I had mistakenly thought Burress had a prior conviction but upon looking into it, it seems his criminal record was clean. (Sad that I simply presumed that an NFL player would have had a prior conviction on his record, isn't it?) Other than failing to register his weapon, then, Burress was not committing any crime.

And literally shooting yourself in the foot is undoubtedly quite painful; that pain seems sufficient punishment for stupidity and/or carelessness while handling a firearm. Not to mention that Burress, as a wide receiver in the NFL, needs to have healthy feet in order to make his living and earn his prodigious salary. Had he been fined on top of being hurt, endangering his career, and being publicly humiliated, I would have said that was sufficient. Two years in prison is a bit much in terms of sentencing for this particular crime, no matter what his attitude about the whole thing was.

The punishment should fit the crime. This punishment seems aimed more at making an example out of Burress precisely because he's a big-name celebrity, which I think is a bad reason to deprive someone of more liberty than would have been done to Joe Schmoe in the same situation.

Taking Predictions (Updated)

Over at TOries_and_WingNuts_ALL.com Townhall.com, another example of a thoughtful writer manifesting sanity and principle in the face of the shriller, more headline-generating style of what gets called "conservative" in political debate these days. In essence, Steve Chapman points out that five states -- Iowa and four of the six New England states -- have same-sex marriage. Some of the other 44 have civil unions or domestic partnerships, and the rest have no recognition of same-sex marriage. So Chapman asks: what do you predict will happen differently in those states than the others?

Specifically, he's aiming his comments at people like Maggie Gallagher and Stanley Kurtz, who have been eating out for several years by trotting out a parade of horribles to scare SSM opponents into political and social action. Some of these predictions have included declining heterosexual marriage rates and/or higher heterosexual divorce rates, declining birth rates, legalized polygamy and incest, and perhaps worst of all, rising homosexuality rates. Even otherwise-sane friends have advanced the idea that "judicially-induced loss of faith in dictionaries" was a good reason to vote in favor of Proposition 8 despite claiming to support SSM. Which in my mind just goes to show you how crazy this issue makes some people.

Well, the Maggie Gallaghers and Stanley Kurtzes of the world have refused to offer any predictions at all.

I am unafraid, however. My prediction will be pretty easy for you to anticipate: Comparing overall rates of self-identified homosexuals to self-identified heterosexuals in the SSM states versus the non-SSM states, we will find no statistically significant difference. Comparing overall heterosexual marriage rates between the SSM states versus the non-SSM states, we will find no statistically significant difference. Comparing birth rates, divorce rates, or any other sort of vital statistic you care to think of, we will see no statistically significant difference between SSM states and non-SSM states. This prediction may be evaluated at any interval you pick, although I would suggest one year, two years, and five years.

If you think I'm wrong, let's hear your predictions for New England and Iowa.

UPDATE: Maggie Gallagher responds by making predictions! She says:

1. In gay-marriage states, a large minority [of] people committed to traditional notions of marriage will feel afraid to speak up for their views, lest they be punished in some way.

2. Public schools will teach about gay marriage.

3. Parents in public schools who object to gay marriage being taught to their children will be told with increasing public firmness that they don't belong in public schools and their views will not be accomodated in any way.

4. Religous institutions will face new legal threats (especially soft litigation threats) that will cause some to close, or modify their missions, to avoid clashing with the government's official views of marriage (which will include the view that opponents are akin to racists for failing to see same-sex couples as married).

5. Support for the idea "the ideal for a child is a married mother and father"will decline.

Leaving aside the fact that nothing she predicts is quantifiable in a meaningful way, here's what I say on a qualitative basis to those predictions:

1. If someone becomes afraid to speak out against SSM, that will be because they are afraid of being thought of as bigots -- the punishment will be social reprisal, not legal punishment. The First Amendment isn't going to go away. Unlike a generation ago, people now hesitate to use racial slurs -- not so much because they fear legal liability for violating anti-discrimination laws, but rather primarily because that kind of speech has become socially unacceptable. If that happens about SSM or homosexuals, I applaud that.

2. If public schools teach about SSM in an age-appropriate fashion, that's something I approve of. Gallagher hints without saying that kindergarten teachers are going to be passing around Blue Boy magazines (my link goes to the Wikipedia description, which has no pictures), which of course anyone would condemn. But kids should be taught that bigotry is bad, and that's something appropriate to teach from a very young age.

3. This is nothing that doesn't already exist. Parents who object to their kids being taught evolution in the public schools (evolution, sex ed, etc.) are already told "too bad." Social conservatives applauded when the Supreme Court upheld legislatively-mandated speech by public employees which conservatives approved of, so having created the legal principle that the state can take sides in a social debate, they have to live with the results.

4. This may come true. As I've written previously, a church that does not want to have an SSM performed within its property is entirely able to make sure that doesn't happen, by not offering its facilities to the general public or accepting public funds to build or maintain them. I see nothing unreasonable in this. So I can foresee some churches having to choose between restricting the use of their facilities to parishioners only or allowing an SSM to take place there. Yes, this may have a financial impact on those churches. But for the most part, I would expect that a couple wouldn't want to get married in a church that condemned them in the first place.

5. Too late, Ms. Gallagher; and don't blame SSM for this one. First, the social ideal of the 2000's is necessarily going to be different than the social ideal of the 1950's or that of the 1900's or that of the 1850's or that of the 1800's. Second, straight people have already made a hash of "traditional marriage" and "traditional families" on their own, often with the collaboration of allegedly conservative social and religious leaders -- how many Christian pastors, with children, are divorced in violation of Jesus' injunction against divorce, yet drawing no objections from their congregations for this sort of contra-Biblical family arrangement? The correct answer is "so many it's not considered remarkable anymore." It's facile to blame gay people wanting to form families for the decline in "traditional family structures" that straight people have already accomplished all on their own.

While she breaks it down into things she can intone about darkly, Ms. Gallagher is ultimately predicting that "People will generally come to accept SSM as a normal, unremarkable part of everyday life." If that is her real prediction, then I agree with it -- and I will applaud its eventual occurrence.

The Spectacle Of The Principled Conservative

I don't know why people find Ted Olson's advocacy against Proposition 8 to be so surprising. He got to being opposed to Prop. 8 the same way a lot of people did -- by realizing that restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples only is discrimination that cannot be justified by any legitimate governmental interest, and understanding that discrimination without such justification is simply wrong. I don't think that should even be a conservative-versus-liberal sort of calculus in this day and age.

What's saddening is that so many people think that this is an aberration, something unusual. Thus has the conservative movement descended into disrepute.

And if the quote near the front of the article is correct, then that explains why. Dick Cheney gets a "pass" to deviate from the conservative movement's party line and support gay marriage because he has a daughter in a relationship with another woman. But Ted Olson does not have anyone in his family who is gay, so he has no "reason" to not march in lock step with his fellow conservatives.

Why can't Ted Olson realize that what's right for the Cheney family is right for everyone? If it's OK for Dick Cheney to deviate from the movement's platform for the sake of his daughter, why can't Olson deviate from it for the sake of Cheney's daughter? Anyone's daughter? For the sake of wanting to see the government treat all people fairly?

Can no one imagine that a person might act based on consistent adherence to a set of firmly-believed principles?

Postscript: Olson and his co-counsel David Boies have a trial date, by the way -- January 11, 2010. The main issue in the trial will be whether proponents of Prop. 8 were motivated by anti-gay animus or whether they were acting to protect a legitimate state interest. The degree of legitimacy demanded -- whether the interest has to be compelling or not -- will be something decided by the bench.

Immaturity

Concerning the issue of why, exactly, one should oppose health care reform, let me take on the subject of "Death Panels" and why, although they are a red herring, they reveal something interesting about the issue of how we deal with health care in the United States.


I. Mortality and its Expenses

One day, you are going to die. That isn't a threat, it's a simple fact. That you may find this fact unpleasant does not change its fundamental reality.

Despite all the good nutrition, exercise, premium-quality health care, medicine, and the best efforts of potentially thousands of well-meaning people, one day your heart will stop beating, and you will die. So far in human history this has happened to every human being who has ever lived. (Yes, even Jesus -- even within the Christian religion, Jesus actually dies on the cross before he is resurrected). It will happen to me, it will happen to everyone that I love, it will happen to you, and it will happen to everyone you love. It is inevitable. No matter what else you may think about human nature, mortality is the one thing that all human beings unquestionably have in common.

Readers, I hope for all of your sakes that this transition is long-delayed and that each of you have long, happy, pleasure-filed lives before this happens to you; I hope that when this change does come (as it inevitably will) it is very quick and completely painless. But it will happen. And you would be deeply foolish to think otherwise.

Now, you may think, "My death will not have any significant consequences." Hey, maybe you're even right. Maybe you have no friends, maybe no one loves you and no one will mourn your passage. That's probably not true, of course, but maybe it is in your case.

Nevertheless, your death will have consequences on the body politic. If nothing else, someone is going to have to clean up your corpse and whatever bodily fluids leak out of your body in between the time you expire and the time it is found. Whoever finds you is unlikely to be used to contact with dead bodies and therefore will experience a degree of psychological shock. You're probably going to smell bad, too. A doctor will have to examine your corpse and verify that indeed you are dead. A public official such as a coroner will have to handle your body and issue paperwork documenting your death. Someone is going to have to dispose of your body in some way, either by burying it or embalming it or cremating it. Unless you have no family and no friends at all, someone will probably want to have a memorial service of some kind or another in your honor, if only to ease their own grief at your death.

Most of these things cost money. All of them divert resources, whether financial or otherwise, from other uses.


II. Planning for Death

For the most part, we treat death as a medical condition in this country, one which as a rule of thumb we devote resources to avoiding. Given the inevitability of death, this is kind of like the moral logic of an airplane -- the device is simply too big to stay aloft forever and eventually it will run out of fuel, so at some point, it's going to have to land. But that doesn't mean we simply allow it to crash whenever something goes wrong. So too with preserving human life.

Because we as a society have decided that life is worth saving, we try to save lives. So we spend money -- public money if need be -- to keep people alive regardless of who they are. We send paramedics out to revive people who experience cardiac arrest. We train our doctors extensively in ways to keep people alive in despite disease and injury. We invest billions of dollars and devote a large segment of our economy to finding and delivering ways to keep people alive in the form of "medical care." Our scientists devote tremendous resources and intellect into creating medications and ways of treatment to preserve life in the face of daunting challenges which, without the benefit of scientific medicine, would take massive amounts of life at early ages.

To do otherwise would deeply offend our collective sense of morality.

We have created a financial product called "life insurance." If you think there might be someone still alive after you die who would be adversely affected by your death -- say, a spouse or a child who will now have to do without the financial support you provide -- you can buy a product while you're alive that will provide for the financial equivalent of the support you would have given had you lived. This seems to me to be a deeply moral and compassionate thing to do, particularly given the inevitability of your death.

No one thinks life insurance salespeople are doing something morally wrong by selling their product. Not everyone buys it, of course; not everyone is ready to admit that they are mortal and that their death will cause pain and suffering to those whom they love. And of course money is a poor substitute indeed for the actual love and companionship of someone. But death is inevitable, so that love and companionship will one day be gone. When you accept that fact, life insurance starts to look like something you ought to seriously consider spending your money on.

What's more, the time, place, and manner of your death is utterly unpredictable. For some, there are factors that may shift some of the probabilities; a history of heart disease in your family, for instance, or an occupation that requires you to drive more than the average person. Actuaries and underwriters make their living figuring that sort of thing out.

For some of us, nothing anyone can do will prevent it. For others, threats to life will arise which modern medicine can combat. Two dramatic examples:

Contracting bubonic plague used to be a pretty certain death sentence. It's still a serious and life-threatening medical condition. But thanks to the development of antibiotics and other kinds of medical treatment, if the plague is identified early enough after a patient contracts it, the disease is survivable.

I've met people -- and you probably have too -- who have had heart attacks severe enough that they actually died. Their hearts stopped completely; their brains ceased to function; their bowels relaxed; their lungs no longer moved; blood began to respond to gravity instead of pressure. Then, someone else performed CPR and revived them. This happens so frequently in contemporary life that we do not consider it all that remarkable anymore.

This is the power of modern medicine. It can ressurect the dead. It has reduced a plague which once felled between a third to a half of all human beings in the Eurasian landmass in a period of three years to a serious but curable disease. But to do these things requires the intelligent, advance deployment of resources. Expensive resources.


III. Economic Choices About Death Are Mandatory

To survive the plague thanks to modern medical treatment requires that a patient spend a long time in a hospital, where the patient consumes huge amounts of antibiotics and donated blood. At what ultimately amounts to tremendous economic expense and a large devotion of the labor of doctors and nurses who could have spent their time treating other patients with other kinds of problems.

To perform the miracle of resurrection through CPR, an investment in training someone in the technique must be made. That this person then be summoned to the scene of a cardiac arrest and perform this service. All of this takes an investment of money and resources into putting this person on call and having a delivery service like an ambulance available to get the victim and the resuscitator to the same place soon enough that the treatment will be effective. That, in turn takes money. Meanwhile, the resuscitator could have been doing something else for someone else.

Somebody, somewhere, somehow, decided that the plague victim was worth the expenditure of those resources and someone else was not. Somebody, somewhere, somehow, decided that the cardiac arrest victim was worth the expenditure of those resources and someone else was not. Who was that somebody? How did they make that decision?

Given that we apply our considerable technological and economic power to preventing and in some cases even curing and reversing death, chances are good that unless you have a complete cardiac failure in your sleep or some very sudden act (such as violence or a vehicular collision) ends your life, you will go through a period of time in which medical and financial resources are expended to keep you alive. Those resources are scarce, not plentiful. As I've written before, we don't have enough of those resources -- even in the world's most technologically advanced and wealthiest society -- for everyone to have all the health care they could possibly want.

So somebody, somewhere, somehow, has to decide that somebody doesn't get those resources. That is a life-or-death decision. It is also by definition an economic decision -- it involves the allocation of a scarce resource.

The best person to make that sort of decision, I submit, is the person whose death is the subject of the decision. For the future decedent to make a decision about when and how death will occur is something that requires advance planning. When the situation is at hand, quite often the would-be decedent will not be in a position to make that decision. Thus, the law steps in and we have things like living wills, through which a person can state in advance of an emergency what they would like to have happen if something terrible goes on.

But not everyone wants to do this. Just like not everyone wants to buy life insurance. This is an unpleasant task for many people because it involves confronting one's own mortality. It involves contemplating one's own death and the prospect of what will happen to the people one loves and supports afterwards. I find the idea of considering what life would be like for The Wife after my death (should I predecease her) very unpleasant. I imagine she finds the idea of considering the converse situation unpleasant, as well. That is, however, part of what it is to love someone in a mature way. And dealing with this issue is a hallmark of maturity.

No one's forcing you to buy life insurance. No one will force you to execute a living will. You are free to not do these things. You are free to abdicate that decision-making process to -- well, to someone else. Maybe that person will be your spouse or your child. Maybe it will be your doctor. Who knows? Maybe it will even be a bureaucrat or an insurance adjuster.

If you don't decide how to handle your own death, someone else will. That decision will be inherently economic.

IV. What's Really On The Table In Washington

Someone (Sarah Palin or someone working with her) came up with the idea that the "Obamacare" reform would involve someone making this inevitable economic decision. Perhaps this person ignored the simple, inevitable fact that such an economic decision is an unavoidable consequence of, well, life.

This "death panel" nonsense that is polluting our debate about health care reform is based on language in the primary health reform bill in Congress that would require doctors to periodically discuss end-of-life care planning with their patients. This would, I presume, involve doctors explaining what living wills are, what hospice care is, and that Medicare (or whatever we substitute for it) will pay for some of this stuff. Maybe it even will go so far as to have the doctor say to the person, "If you don't decide in advance what you want done to keep you alive, someone else will have to make that decision for you."

That's not a "death panel," or if it is, it's hardly an innovation. That's the status quo, my friends.

But that's what is being used to scare people away from even considering the idea of reforming the quickly-bankrupting public medical insurance system upon which, like it or not, all of us rely. Even if you have private insurance, chances are very good that at some point in your life (often after age 65), that private insurance will piggyback on Medicare. Moreover, all private insurance payments are roughly indexed to the discounts on the face value of medical services charged by providers like hospitals and doctors. It is routine for Medicare to pay 25% of the face value demanded for many services, and private insurance follows this lead.

Now, what's on the table in Washington is described in an article published today by the until-now-I-thought-he-was-sane Nat Hentoff:

A specific end-of-life proposal is in draft Section 1233 of H.R. 3200, a House Democratic health care bill that is echoed in two others that also call for versions of "advance care planning consultation" every five years — or sooner if the patient is diagnosed with a progressive or terminal illness.

As the Washington Post's Charles Lane penetratingly explains (Undue influence," Aug. 8): the government would pay doctors to discuss with Medicare patients explanations of "living wills and durable powers of attorney … and (provide) a list of national and state-specific resources to assist consumers and their families" on making advance-care planning (read end-of-life) decisions.

Significantly, Lane adds that, "The doctor 'shall' (that's an order) explain that Medicare pays for hospice care (hint, hint)."

But the Obama administration claims these fateful consultations are "purely voluntary." In response, Lane — who learned a lot about reading between the lines while the Washington Post's Supreme Court reporter — advises us:

"To me, 'purely voluntary' means 'not unless the patient requests one.'"

But Obamas' doctors will initiate these chats. "Patients," notes Lane, "may refuse without penalty, but many will bow to white-coated authority."

Well, of course they will. People trust their doctors, and if their doctors say, "Maybe you should consider hospice care," then I hope they will.

Seriously, what is really objectionable about this?

Frankly, if I look to my medical care providers for nothing else, I'd want hospice care for my last days. I would a doctor to take away the pain and a counselor to ease the fear of my imminent non-existence. And just as important, I want that counselor to help the people who love me to prepare for their grief. I can think of no more valuable service that could be rendered to a patient than this form of extreme unction.

Well, that, and if you're going to have a memorial service or a wake or something for me, I think it would be great if you did it while I was still alive to enjoy it. It doesn't have to be morbid -- hell, you can roast me.

What, then, is the moral objection to a policy of having doctors counsel patients that this service is available? The only objection that I can fathom is that someone might think that "Gee, if death can be made painless, maybe that's the option for me." If someone is going to think that, then the issue is psychological because that's the functional equivalent of suicidal ideation. As much as I would want hospice care for my final days, that doesn't mean I'm eager to die. To confuse wanting an eased transition to non-existence with a desire for that transition to take place is ... well, it's baffling.

Is the objection that, while maybe I'm willing to accept hospice, you have a moral objection to paying for it? Too bad. The government pays for all sorts of things that all sorts of people have moral objections to. You get a vote, and if you are in the minority, you get to challenge the Constitutionality of the majority's decision, and if you lose that, then you get to tolerate the policy being implemented.

So the only real issue here seems to me to be that someone thinks that health care is dealing with the issue of death at all. As if death doesn't exist, or as if medicine and death were somehow opposites. They aren't. Death is the end of life. It should receive as much thought and care and resources as any other phase of one's journey through a medical crisis.


V. Don't Be An Ostrich

If we're going to reform health care at all, end-of-life care should be a piece of that puzzle. To use this as a scare tactic strikes me as the essence of the same kind of immaturity that leads people to refuse to consider buying life insurance. Sticking your head in the sand about it won't make the issue go away. The issue is this:

One day, you are going to die. Who benefits from the government ignoring that fact?

A Christian's Evaluation Of How Christians Treat Non-Believers

As always, I enjoy thoughtful Christian thoughts on how non-believers are to be treated. This is a particularly damning evaluation of the behavior of a particular institution, from which frankly I had low expectations to begin with. The author, whose thoughts appear to be deeply-grounded in a desire to emulate Jesus, deserves your attention and praise -- and we should all, believers and non-believers alike, try to remember the lesson he teaches.

What She Said

Preaching to the Choir: What part of no don't you understand?

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Trick Question

I know it's a little confusing. But here's the thing. There is no Administration proposal for health care reform. Instead, what we've got are a set of principles and ideas that the President floated -- first as a candidate and later in somewhat more detail about a month after he took office. From there, he sort of kicked off the ideas to Congress, and he has waited to see what has emerged. In fact, there are a myriad of different pending proposals and the Administration has been throwing its political support behind a particular constellation of different ideas.

As we see in the news yesterday and today, it appears to have lost the idea of a publicly-funded competitor to private insurance, which would seem to have been the centerpiece idea behind the more progressive models of health care reform.

So everyone who answered the poll here that they had read the Administration's proposal or a summary of it, um, you didn't. Here's what the Administration has to say for itself on health care reform. It's not that the smart people working in the White House haven't done a lot of writing and research -- it's that they haven't written any legislation themselves resulting from it. Rather, they've been articulating principles and ideas. Coming up with specifics has been something the President has left to Congress.

Don't feel bad. I was confused about this too. I talked it over with a friend who is as big a public policy and politics wonk as me. I didn't really believe him. I had to do some research of my own, and even then I couldn't quite believe that the President would be so short on specifics as to have no actual plan, no actual legislation, that he was backing.

Now, if you're really interested in the policy wonkery, there are plenty of resources out there. The best one I've seen so far has been from the Kaiser Family Foundation -- bearing in mind that Kaiser has a dog in this fight, there nevertheless appears to be a relatively neutral assessment of the various proposals.

Unsurprisingly, the less ambitious ones are the ones that seem to appeal to me the most, with my top priority being economic feasibility -- we are not undertaxed as a nation, and we cannot afford a net increase in the federal deficit. Looking at what KFF summarizes the proposals in terms of whether they make even a semblance of economic sense, there are three options out on the table that pass this threshold:

First, a proposal by Congressman Tom Price (R-GA), H.R. 3400, would keep insurance costs down through tort reform, cutting spending to hospitals that accept too many uninsured patients, and conjuring money out of thin air, um, I mean, eliminating fraud, waste, corruption, and abuse (something which apparently occured to absolutely no one before Congressman Price). I'm very skeptical that tort reform will do anything other than boost profits to insurance companies. Tort reform will not relieve the psychic distress doctors feel at the threat of malpractice suits, nor should it (in terms of economic incentives, if your doctor does not fear you suing him for malpractice, why should he render good care to you?); tort reform will not lower the typical doctor's malpractice insurance premiums and therefore will not reduce the bottom-line cost of health care; but, it will likely diminish the quality of the health care that is delivered. So this doesn't seem like much of a solution at all. Worse, no one in Congress seems to have taken much action on this beyond assigning it a bill number and referring it to committee.

Second, spearheaded by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), a group of Republicans in both houses have jointly offered a proposal which looks like an attempt at actual reform: they would impose certain cost-containment provisions, convert certain Medicaid defined benefits to defined contributions (shifting a larger portion of the cost of rendering ER care under Medicaid to hospitals), and eliminate the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance (which would increase employer costs as to taxes but not premiums), indexing qualified health insurance tax credits en bloc proportionate to other kinds of entitlement reform. Sounds good, but there is little chance that entitlement reform resulting in a net decrease in payouts will go anywhere in a heavily-Democratic Congress during a recession. I do have to hand it to these guys, though; they're willing to compromise their instincts to cut taxes and their desire push the deficit down in order to respond to a need to reform health care policy as a quality-of-life issue, which is a greater degree of intellectual and ideological flexibility than a lot of Republicans have shown recently. While it's DOA politically, Ryan's proposal at least represents something that seems like an intelligent Republican counter-proposal to the much more expensive Democratic ones being floated around out there.

About the only economically sensible idea out there with any chance at all of passage is the proposal by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Bob Bennett (R-UT). Wyden-Bennett, otherwise known as S. 391, gets its funding from allowing individual premiums to rise and increasing employer assessments. Like the Ryan proposal, more costs of emergent care would be shifted to individual hospitals, and cost controls would be imposed at both the state and federal levels for both Medicaid and Medicare. Effectively, this spreads the costs of health care reform to individual insurers (your premiums will go up), employers (who will get less of a tax benefit to providing health insurance to their employees and who will be subject to a mandated contribution to premiums) and individual hospitals (who will have to absorb higher costs on ER care for non-paying patients). All that sounds like it sucks, but why is it that Wyden-Bennett is the most promising of the various proposals?

First of all, there is no tax increase or increased deficit spending associated with it. Secondly, shifting the costs roughly parallels what the market would do on its own. Third, it would result in most Americans having at least minimal health coverage. Fourth, because it would require a new product to be offered by private insurers, it actually scales back that Medicare, Medicaid, and a few other programs pay for, enabling what is left over to stay viable for the indefinite future.

Now, this is not universal coverage -- it's wider-than-present coverage but only at a very minimal level. Nor is it free; there is cost-shifting going on and you, the health care consumer, will be required to have at least the minimal insurance coverage. But, you can also buy more coverage than the minimal plan if you wish and continue with your current set-up. Chances are, you'll be paying a little bit more. I think this makes the most sense of the proposals on the table, though, precisely because these changes are not dramatic. If you already have coverage through your employer that both you and your employer jointly pay for, you will likely not notice much of anything changing for you.

Wyden-Bennett is incremental reform. It represents an effort to work within the existing structure and nothing gets torn down. It is, in other words, realistic, the closest thing to affordable that's floating around in Congress at the moment, and politically salable. It's about the best thing going in this complex and unexciting arena.

Now, before you go and back Wyden-Bennett, or any other reform package, or before you say "no reform at all," read the lead article in this month's Atlantic. If you're afraid of "socialized medicine," well, I've got news for you -- our medical industry is already socialized to a very shocking degree. If you think there is a health care shortage, well, I've got news for you -- well, you're right, but the reason for the present level of scarcity will not be readily apparent to those looking to the government for a solution. Guaranteed you won't see it. And finally, in the debate over health care reform, we may want to take a step back and consider our semiotics: "health care" is not synonymous with health.

Big Day In History

August 14 is a big day in modern history, particularly if you have an interest in Asia. Several things that have built the world today into its current shape took place on August 14s over the past 150 years or so.

Perhaps most prominently, August 14, 1945, is the day that the Imperial Japanese government surrendered to the Allies, effectively ending the Second World War. While humilitating to the Japanese people at the time, in the long run Japan has benefitted perhaps more than any other belligerent nation in that war from joining the world of western liberal democracies who conquered it.

It's also independence day for Pakistan. In 1947, on this day, Pakistan (which I consider to be one of the critical nations in the world at the moment) became independent from British rule.

Ten years before that, FDR signed the Social Security Act. Social Security has become one of the most significant issues to address in the ongoing efforts to bring some kind of financial sense to the Federal government. No one today has a clue about how to control the beneift because every American feels like they're entitled to a government pension now. Which was precisely as FDR intended. Trivia for the day -- 7% of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States is spent on Social Security, combining both the value of benefits distributed and costs of administration. It is the largest program of any government anywhere in the world.

And finally, on August 14, 1900, the Boxer Rebellion in China peaked as a combined force of U.S., British, French, and a few other western powers advanced into Beijing to rescue beseiged diplomatic personnel and merchants. The Boxers were a popular movement of people who were concerned about foreign influence over the government and immigration into the country, who combined quasi-religious and para-military sorts of interests with their world view. Their ideology is not entirely unlike that of the Minuteman movement alive in America today. Their rage and hatred of the foreign devils in their midst turn into open warfare as they took up arms and tried to kill any non-Chinese person they could find, so on August 14, an expeditionary force was sent in to rescue them. The big significance of this is that it exposed the fundamental weakness of the Chinese government to either control its own citizens or to prevent the western powers from using their military power at will within China. This weakness caused the eventual collapse of the imperial government, to be replaced by a republic (which survives in rump form in Taiwan today) and then by a communist dictatorship (which continues to govern mainland China today).

And in 1980, August 14 was the date that dockworkers began to strike at the port of Gdansk in Poland under the leadership of union head Lech Walesa. Walesa's strike began the movement that came to be known as Solidarity, which in turn demonstrated to the world that Communist leaders in the Soviet bloc of nations had lost popular support and led, nine years later, to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its client states such as Poland and East Germany. August 14, 1980 was the day the Iron Curtain first started to tear.

May your August 14, by contrast, be peaceful and dull.

A Scold

To be 'appalled' implies a degree of moral outrage combined with being surprised. I cannot say, therefore, that I am appalled at what is happening with people discussing health care reform -- because quite frankly, I expected the debate to dissolve into people shouting past each other, calling one another names, and focusing their energies on things that aren't really the issues. Which none of you will be dim enough to think that having anticipated that this would happen is not to say that I approve of it.

Shame on -- well, shame on everyone. Shame on the SEIU for bullying people who disagree with them, and shame on conservatives for chanting slogans to drown out anyone who wants to disagree with them. Shame on whoever put the Hitler mustache on Obama -- whether it was a conservative opponent of health care reform or a liberal proponent looking to smear the conservatives. Scummy thing to do, either way. Unwarranted by the situation, unwarranted by the President's actions, however unwise they might be.

That's not to say there aren't serious discussions going on. But they sure aren't going on in town hall meetings and they sure aren't going on out in the streets and I don't get the impression that they're going on in most Congressional offices with responses to constituent contact, either.

Here's what I'm saying. Calm the f--- down, people. Apply the principle of charity. Assume that people who disagree with you do so in good faith and based upon a motive to do good.

Here's the deal I propose:

Liberals, you must recognize that your conservative opponents are deeply concerned that America's high-quality health care system will be seriously degraded by the larger role of the historically inept government that has been proposed. They are also deeply concerned that a reform package, that could cost as much as a trillion and a half dollars a year, is quite simply too staggeringly expensive -- no matter what its benefits would otherwise be. These are legitimate concerns. This does not mean that you must agree with the conservatives that health care reform is a bad idea. It means the burden is on you to explain how your plan will deal with these issues. Because it is a very big deal to add a trillion and a half dollars to the federal budget.

Conservatives, you in turn must recognize that the proponents of health care reform look out at the world and see a lot of people who don't have access to health care in the middle of the richest and most technologically advanced country in the world, and they believe that we can do better. They see that health insurance and doctors are very expensive, and that employers are cutting benefits rather than providing them as a result. The result of health care becoming too expensive for middle-class Americans is Americans doing without health care and the nation growing weaker as a result. This is not fascism, it is not evil, it is not even necessarily wrongheaded. Nor does it mean you have to endorse a single-payer system. It means you need to articulate an objection to the policy that has been proposed, not to some imaginary dystopia cooked up in someone's fantasies. If health care reform passes, Barack Obama is not going to personally suffocate your grandmother with a pillow because she has a case of the sniffles.

Both of you need to have the common f--ing decency to let people on the other side speak their piece without interrupting them, raising fists, or invoking Hitler. Really, is that so difficult? Because some of you seem to have a great deal of trouble with that based on recent events. It also means you both need to face up to the very hard truth that despite the fact that we are the richest and most technologically advanced nation on earth, there are nevertheless not enough health care providers and facilities to go around.

That means that somebody, somewhere, somehow, is going to have to make a decision about who gets a scarce resource and who does not. We can let the market make that decision or we can make that decision in some other manner. But the decision has to be made and someone has to get the short end of the stick. That is what the debate is really all about.

Why The Daily Show Has Become A Trusted Name In News And Political Discourse

In a word, it's because even though the host and his writers are all overtly liberal-with-libertarian leanings, if you go on the show, you get a fair chance to express yourself in your own words.

Yes, it's a comedy show and not a "real" news or public policy show. But then again, if you go on one of those, you are at risk of being shouted down by the host or the "opposing point of view" talking head who had been recruited by the produces for the exact purpose of shouting polarizing slogans at you in the name of "balance."

So even if you're a right-winger, you know that on the Daily Show, while it may be a hostile environment, you'll have a chance -- if you're good enough -- to make your pitch not only to the studio audience but to the camera and the audience watching at home. You won't be interrupted (much).

And you'll be reaching a larger -- and younger -- audience than the "real" news and policy shows could even (reasonably) pray for.

Some right-wingers have done very well for themselves on the Daily Show. Mike Huckabee, for instance, went on and proved himself to be a compassionate, intelligent, and well-humored man. He didn't have to compromise his beliefs or his ideology at all by doing it, and no one thought he was any less conservative for having gone on the Daily Show. His Presidential campaign probably was boosted significantly by the exposure he got.

It's a sign of how far our political life has degenerated that in order to have a reasonable shot at discussing of political policy, you've got to go on a comedy program.

Anti-Atheist Hysteria In Iowa

A group of nonbelievers in Des Moines, the Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers ("IAF"), took out out some advertisements for the sides of busses run by the Des Moines Area Rapid Transit District ("DART"). The advertisements looked like this:



DART received an unknown number of complaints after the ads began to run, and allegedly, some people would not board the busses with these ads on them. So DART pulled the advertisements and offered IAF a refund, stating that these ads had never been approved and never should have been approved in the first place. IAF then got in touch with the ACLU, who sent DART a letter demanding to know what DART's advertisement policy was -- given that DART admitted that it had sold advertisements to various Christian Churches in the Des Moines area in the past.

Now, the man illustrated to the left is Iowa's Governor, Chet Culver. Governor Culver is a Democrat, has held statewide political office in Iowa for eleven years, is considered a rising star in American politics, and he is up for re-election in 2010. And when confronted with this controversy, he chose to cater to religious bigots because he is a political coward who is unwilling to say that atheists have the same rights to free speech that Christians like himself do. That may seem like a very nasty thing for me to say about an otherwise promising young (Really? "Young?" He's only four years older than me.) politician, and if Culver or his people or his fans think I'm being unfair to him, I invite them to comment and explain why I'm wrong. My evidence for my remarks about him are based on what Governor Culver had to say about the DART-IAF flap:

I was disturbed personally ... by the advertisement, I can understand why other Iowans were also disturbed by the message that it sent. But, we'll see how it unfolds. I think it's a great question for the attorney general and for legal scholars to kind of sort through that, that balancing act between free speech and the type of message that is being sent. But I do again understand that people were actually not wanting to get on the bus, they were so disturbed by the message that was being sent.

When pressed, Gov. Culver dodged the question of whether the Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers had the same free speech rights as the Christian churches that had previously been sold -- and allowed to display -- advertisements on the side of DART busses.

Clearly, Governor Culver would not be "disturbed" if the Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers were not allowed to advertise their own existence the way, say, Christian congregations do. Now, someone who is really angered and upset by an advertisement that says "Don't believe in God? You are not alone." will need to explain this one to me. They will also need to explain to me how it is that the Constitution can guarantee Christians the right to proselytize freely but not the right of atheists to announce their mere existence. And most of all, they will need to explain why their offense at this ad is not exactly like this little bit of history from the ever-eloquent Alonzo Fyfe:

[Gov. Culver's statement] reminds me of a comment that, once upon a time, I heard far too often. Some of the people I encountered up in Montana would tell me, "I'm not prejudiced against blacks. Heck, when a black person is alone he can be quite nice and we get along real well. It's when a bunch of them get together that they turn into a pack of niggers." Any decent person would find this sentiment shocking and repulsive.

Seriously, I cannot figure out how any reasonable person could possibly have been offended by this ad. It said nothing at all about Christians or any other religious group. It doesn't say that anyone who does believe in God is a bad person. It doesn't say that someone who does believe in God is foolish to do so. It does not argue that God does not exist. It says that if -- if -- you are the sort of person who does not believe God exists, there are other people like you, and gives you information for how you might look for them.

Gov. Culver, all of your constituents have the same rights to free speech. If DART isn't going to sell advertisements on the sides of its busses at all, that's one thing. But it does, and that means it has to take all comers on an equal basis. What if some citizen called in to complain that an advertisement for a local Christian church offended him? Would DART pull those advertisements because of those complaints? I think not. Or if it thought an advertisement for a clothing store was offensive becuase it had a model in a provocative pose or too-scanty clothing? Would someone have to make a judgment call about that or would DART blow him off and tell him to deal with it? This isn't the Islamic Republic of Iowa.

Now, what's obviously happened instead is that someone in DART got the letter from the ACLU and said "Oh, shit. We're so obviously on the wrong side of this issue that my dog would grant the injunction. So let's offer these atheists some advertisements and dig our way out from under this one." So DART offered the IAF the opportunity to resubmit a new advertisement, because apparently the old advertisement offended people.

But like I wrote above, it's utterly incomprehensible what substitute advertisement could be less offensive that what IAF originally submitted. Are they looking for something like this?


Or maybe this?


Come on, there was nothing bad about the original ad in the first place. Just run it already.

You can contact DART at (515) 283-8111 or dart@ridedart.com. You can contact Governor Culver at (515) 281-5211 and send an e-mail to him from this website. You should not use profanity or threats when you do so, but you should be very clear that both DART and Governor Culver have acted shamefully.

Did You Actually Need Evidence That Nancy Pelosi Is An Asshole?

Just because you disagree with the Democrats' proposal about health care reform does not make you a Nazi. No one is wearing swastikas to town hall meetings, Madam Speaker. Reductio ad Hitlerum does not sit on you very well. The real purpose of this tactic by Speaker Pelosi is to force her political opponents to silence their political opinions and let those already in power have their way unimpeded.

It's tempting to analogize the use of vicious lies to unfairly characterize powerless whipping boys to gain political capital as a tactic resorted to by the Nazis, at the expense of German Jews, during the waning days of the Weimar Republic. But this too would violate Godwin's Law.

Nevertheless it is a remarkably distasteful thing to have said. But why should she care? Pelosi is a politician who arrogantly disregards the fact that what she is doing with her power is wildly unpopular. So I can call her an asshole on this blog all I want and even on the off chance she actually reads it, she won't care.

Ultimately, again, this comes back to gerrymandering -- her district is entirely within the City and County of San Francisco, which means that she will never again in her life face any serious political challenge that requires her to actually justify her behavior to the voters. She is a modern-day mandarin, whose behavior is effectively beyond the ability of democracy to control. And she has been given a great deal of power to use from that unassailable position. You may recall a phrase coined back in Victorian times about the manner in which possession of power like this affects one's behavior. Pelosi is a good example of that, and her nasty rhetoric demonstrates it. She's an asshole, and she deserves to be called on it, but unfortunately I don't think it will do anyone any good that I've done it.

Fait Accompli

By a vote of 68-31, the United States Supreme Court is back up to its full roster of nine Justices. Sonia Sotomayor has attained the pinnacle of the American legal profession, and all of the Republican hand-wringing about her didn't matter a damn. Congratulations, Justice Sotomayor. Carry well the heavy burden that goes along with the great honor you have been given.

The National Debt Road Trip Video

Let's say that deficit spending is like speeding while driving. You shouldn't be doing it at all, but sometimes maybe you just can't help yourself.

George W. Bush was a leadfoot. So was Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Elder and Wiser. But in fact, if we're going to compare deficit spending to speeding, the we would be saying that George W. Bush blew through a stop sign at 63 miles an hour. That's bad. But not nearly as bad as Barack Obama, who is on pace to get at a supra-autobahn speed of 173:

So if deficit spending is like speeding, where's the cop who's going to pull this maniac off the road before he wipes out and really hurts somebody? That would be you, ladies and gentlemen, when you vote.

Hat tip to Doug Mataconis.

Would A Half Dozen F-35s Have Changed Pearl Harbor?

I found another free book for download on my Kindle: Weapons of Choice. It's apparently the first of three books in an alternative-history trilogy that has acquired a cult following by an Aussie journalist named John Birmingham. The idea is quite compelling -- in the year 2021, a United States Navy supercarrier group centered around the fusion-powered USS Hillary Clinton with a full complement of fifth-generation weaponry gets sent back in time to two days before the Battle of Midway.

I'm about halfway through the first book and I'm not sure if I'm going to keep up with it. The author did a nice job of finding a way to structure his story so that the Allies don't have a hugely overwhelming advantage -- the ships appear after a tramautic time-travel accident and the personnel are rendered unconscious for a while, and the 1942 U.S. Navy mistakes them for enemy vessels, resulting in both fleets attacking one another with devastating force for a time, while a few other examples of 21st century military technology -- and the personnel who know how to operate it -- fall into the hands of Axis powers.

It seems to me the intelligence the characters bring back into history with them is even more important than their technology. True warriors make a careful study of their mistakes and any warrior worth his salt would leap at the opportunity to learn from his own mistakes that he hasn't made yet. So I've reached the point where Yamamoto gets briefed on how the Battle of Midway was going to turn out, and he turns his forces around and keeps his navy intact to fight another day, and the Americans have been taken back to the States and are about to brief President Roosevelt.

The concept is hugely engaging. The execution, I'm afraid, isn't doing it for me. I hate to say it because I doubt I could have written it any better than the author did. His dialogue is about as good as I would do -- which is to say, despite editing, he still has too much exposition and it all feels kind of tinny. He has set up too large a cast of characters and failed to make any of them really come alive. I'm interested in what happens next strategically, to see how he has the war play out.

But I'm about done with the racial and gender tensions themes. Not that I think people from 1942 would have been shocked and appalled to find women in command of fighting vessels in the Navy and the racially integrated military we take for granted today, but because the book dwells ont he subject to the point that the story of the alternative-history war is being lost.

I suspect the fifth-generation weapons themselves will wind up being broken down and analyzed by both sides of the war rather than used directly -- that would be the smart way to do it under the circumstances the author sets up. If I were Roosevelt in this situation, I'd have to eventually appreciate that a single F-35 is only going to have so many missles on it, and each missile can only take out so many enemy planes or ships, and the enemy will always make more. Better to take the thing apart and use it to teach 1942's engineers how to make jet engines and good radar. But I might be wrong -- there are now nukes in Allied hands in 1942, and we know that historically, the U.S. was willing to use them pretty much as soon as they got them. What happens politically, however, will probably be a bigger question.