In his latest NYT column, Paul Krugman (may he abide in shrillness forever) is so confident we’ll get some kind of health care reform that he’s willing to speculate on how it will be received:

[T]he experience in Massachusetts, which passed major health reform back in 2006, should dampen conservative hopes and soothe progressive fears.

Like the bill that will probably emerge from Congress, the Massachusetts reform mainly relies on a combination of regulation and subsidies to chivy a mostly private system into providing near-universal coverage. It is, to be frank, a bit of a Rube Goldberg device — a complicated way of achieving something that could have been done much more simply with a Medicare-type program…

[R]eform remains popular. Earlier this year, many conservatives, citing misleading poll results, claimed that public support for the Massachusetts reform had plunged. Newer, more careful polling paints a very different picture. The key finding: an overwhelming 79 percent of the public think the reform should be continued, while only 11 percent think it should be repealed.

Interestingly, another recent poll shows similar support among the state’s physicians: 75 percent want to continue the policies; only 7 percent want to see them reversed.

As a proud Massachusetts resident by choice, I can attest it would be hard to get 79% of my fellow Massholes to come out in favor of sunshine and/or kittens. This is good news for Nancy Pelosi!

WordPress still won’t let me change so much as a misplaced comma in the Lexicon. Actually, WordPress is only allowing me to read the site about 60% of the time this week, just in case anybody thought the secondary front-pagers got some kind of special access. Either the Red State Trike Farce Strike Force is being unusually modest, or John Cole should never have paid the NRO support team to upgrade Balloon Juice.

Here are some entries that will be added to the BJ Lex someday, I hope, along with DougJ’s latest, Wingerati...

27 Percenters – Those Americans who will predictably vote against their own best interests. In his seminal post on the Crazification Factor, John Rogers used the 2004 Obama/Keyes senate race as a measure: “Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.” Or, as commenter Davis X. Machina phrased it:

“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of who will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”

Banana Republicans - The modern Robber Barons; individuals who dedicate their political efforts to turning America into an oligarchy where they assume they will be the rulers. Erik D. Prince, founder and sole owner of private military company Blackwater (now Xe), may be the foremost exemplar of the breed.

Bobbleheads – Derogatory nickname for television talkshow hosts and the pundits who use them—empty novelty items nodding in uniform approval of “their team”. See also Media Village Idiots.

I once asked my friend who’s a higher-up at a hedge fund if he thought that markets were rational. He told me “No one in the financial world believes that markets are rational.” It’s always been surprising to me that professional economists do. Krugman (h/t Atrios):

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.

I’ll spare you the details of my theory that many economists like the idea of high-powered math because they’re failed mathematicians, partly because you might find it offensive and partly because it doesn’t fully explain the problem here. Our society, especially its elites, has some weird fixation with the idea that we’re the best of all possible societies. Our markets work perfectly, we have the best healthcare in the world, and soon history will end as the rest of the world emulates our perfect societal system.

I could go on and on, but I’ll stop. The point here is that it’s hardly surprising that the same people who believe American society is the ideal final state for civilization would also have childlike naivete about how well markets work. Economists are especially disposed to believe all this crap because they’re paid so well. When you’re paid 300K a year to spin fantasies, it’s pretty easy to believe that you live in a perfect world and that your beautiful fantasies are the truth.

For a progressive and a sentimentalist, one of the advantages of living in the Boston television market has been its coverage of Senator Kennedy’s last public appearance. He was one of ours, and he did a lot of good for a lot of individuals and families here, apart from his many services to the welfare of all Americans. I’ve been glad to sniffle through many an anecdote from the people who came to witness the hearse carry Teddy’s casket from Hyannisport, through Boston’s Government Center and the North End streets where he first politicked, to lie in state at his brother’s JFK Library in Dorchester.

People like the couple whose son was killed in Iraq, and Kennedy not only sent a note of condolence, he found out the soldier’s father was having problems obtaining his citizenship—problems that magically disappeared within two weeks of Kennedy’s intervention. And when the couple started a scholarship fund to honor their son’s memory, Teddy sent a personal check. People like the Republican parents whose son’s last words from Iraq lamented the lack of decent body armour; they contacted Kennedy “despite our doubts” and the Senator successfully fought to change the Pentagon rules protecting Blackwater and its private-contractor ilk by denying civilian donations toward ‘non-approved’ equipment. “Teddy did more for us than any of the senators we contacted who voted for the war,” they said.

People like the 9/11 widow who’ll be standing with the Kennedy family overnight, at the coffin wake. It wasn’t just that he contacted her and the other families immediately, she said, or the “dozens of little things, stuff that was only important to us” that he’d done in the years since. “He walked me through those first terrible days, taught me how it was possible to go on, when I thought I would never get through it… He told me I could, and I knew I could trust him, because he’d had to—he’d done it himself.”

*****
And then I made the mistake of looking at Andrew Sullivan’s blog, hosting the smug and disingenuous Hanna Rosin, whose back-handed ‘tribute’ to Teddy’s public service went beyond the usual Wingnut Welfare Wurlitzer “Chappaquiddick today, Chappaquiddick tomorrow, Chappaquiddick forever” sniping to “the bigger problem of the Kennedy women”:

“If they were lucky, like Eunice Kennedy Shriver, they managed to install themselves at the head of virtuous nonprofits—“charities,” we used to call them.”—Goodbye, Kennedy Women, Double X, August 26

Rosin is treating Eunice Kennedy Shriver the way she laments Joe Kennedy did—as a mannequin, a non-person whose highest ambition was to worm its way into a figurehead position. This is a grave and willful misunderstanding, which denigrates not only Mrs. Kennedy Shriver’s lifetime of hard work, but the worth of the Special Olympics and the Special Olympians.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver was not “lucky”, she was brave.

Senator Edward Moore Kennedy (D) has died at the age of 77, after 46 years of service in Congress.

He had the good luck to be born into a wealthy and powerful American family, and the bad luck to be born the ‘caboose kid’ in an Irish-American family that imbued its every member with an outsized drive for success at all costs. The old man never let his older brothers Jack and Bobby forget that they’d never measure up to their eldest brother, Joe Jr, his martyred WWII flying ace; the rest of us never let Teddy forget that he’d never measure up to Jack and Bobby, our martyred political heroes. He inherited an orphanage full of traumatized nephews and nieces, the suspicion that his every success would owe more to sentimental nepotism than his own labor, and the undying resentment of every kleptocrat, paleoconservative, and Nixon-spawned ‘Reagan Republican’ bent on turning America into their version of a banana republic.

He survived in the Senate, for eight terms and counting, because he was renowned for his scrupulous adherence to the all-politics-is-local wisdom of “constituent service”. Even his fierciest local critics, the Chappaquiddick Chorus, admit that Kennedy’s office would go the extra mile to untangle the red tape obstructing every missing Social Security check or family-member visa petition. But he earned his “Lion of the Senate” title by fighting to ensure that every American could enjoy some basic level of human dignity, even those without access to a Senator of power and influence.

When his fatal illness was announced last year, a lot of the professional cynics in the “mainstream” media were shocked at how many people, of all political affiliations and income levels, had been touched by Teddy’s kindness while their loved ones were undergoing treatment in Boston’s great medical institutions. Going back to the early 1970s, when his son lost a leg and almost lost his life to bone cancer, it seems that Teddy had done a thousand small kindness for the families of cancer patients, especially pediatric patients—visiting devasted parents and terrified children, arranging special daytrips, setting his staff to battle recalcitrant insurance companies for the benefit of people who’d never have the chance to vote for him, under circumstances where no favorable publicity would accrue to him. The man did some terrible and many very stupid things in his life, but he also spent half a century in service, public and private, as atonement.

The glee of Senator Kennedy’s enemies and ours will be unbounded over the next few days. I’m sure the birfers, astroturfers, industry shills, talibangelicals, Blue Dog DINOs, glibertarians, neocons, and general malefactors of great wealth will weep crocodile tears as they lament that Teddy’s death should not be used as an opportunity by crass liberals to pass the kind of serious health care reform he spent the last thirty years championing. And that, my friends and President Obama, is why it’s time to come back after Labor Day with a single coherent Senator Edward M. Kennedy Health Care Reform Bill, and to twist whatever arms, ears, or other parts are necessary to get a good strong comprehensive bill passed and signed, NOW. We owe the memory of a great man no less.

Unless I have fallen for an unusually elaborate hoax, Ralph Nader is about to release a novel ...

“In a high mountain redoubt above the Alenuihaha Channel, seventeen megamillionaires and billionaires sat on a wide balcony overlooking the lush green island of Maui and the far Pacific Ocean. They were alike in only three ways: they were old, very rich, and very unrepresentative of humanity, which they intended to save from itself. The man behind the gathering, the richest of them all, was Warren Buffet, who had rented the entire premises of a small luxury hotel for that January 2006 weekend… ”—Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

“Since the Progressive Era, Ralph Nader has done more than anyone else to protect American consumers. With this utopian fantasy, he shows us how good he thinks things could be.”—Warren Beatty

“A high-spirited visionary romp melding the wisdom, humour and imagination of Ralph Nader. May it inspire action.”—Patti Smith

Also among the Seventeen Meliorists are Paul Newman, George Soros, and Sol Price. The book is 736 pages long, and will be “backed by a major promotional budget.”

Possibly funded by a previously-hidden TARP clause, to be known as the Satirists’ Full Employment Act.

Via Jezebel, I discovered that Howard Dean has a new book coming out, and Esquire is sufficiently Unserious as to give him a forum for his Crazy Talk™:

ESQ: It seems pretty obvious. They save money. So why are businesses so completely resistant to this?

HD: They’re not. Some businesses — and the Chamber of Commerce — are resistant because they’re ideological. They are part of the right wing. Then there are lots of businesses that aren’t particularly ideological but genuinely believe that if they keep doing the same thing, they’ll somehow get a different outcome. That’s human nature. They think they can manage health-care costs even though it’s been 40 years since any of them ever have. That’s why I think Obama’s plan is so great: If you like what you have, you can keep it.

ESQ: Speaking of the Obama plan, you’re even stronger than he has been lately in support of the public plan. You say that without it, it’s not reform.

HD: It’s not. It’s a waste of time. Don’t pretend you’re going to do health-insurance reform unless you’re really going to change the system. The discussions in the Senate have not been about changing the system.

ESQ: They seem to be worried about preserving the status quo.

HD: Washington is the most conservative town in America. Its culture is the most resistant to change except a few religious cults.

ESQ: [Laughter]

HD: It’s true! It’s absolutely true.

ESQ: You say that the public plan shouldn’t be able to dip into general government reserves to subsidize its operations. But the Republicans say it will.

HD: The Republicans just make things up out of whole cloth. Nothing they say about health care is true. It’s all just nonsense and fears and what-ifs. It doesn’t happen. First of all, Medicare doesn’t dip into government reserves. It has never happened. It might happen in 10 years if they don’t cut benefits or raise taxes, but so far, never in the history of America has a program like Medicare used public reserves. The Republican tactic is to raise objections because they never have anything positive to say themselves.

ESQ: In the book you ask, “Is health insurance really health insurance or an extension of the things that have been happening on Wall Street?”

HD: Think about it. What the big insurance companies have done is deny claims just so they can improve their bottom line. That’s just extraordinary.

Thank the uncaring heavens that our Serious Mainstream Media carefully protects itself, and by extension its readers, from contact with such looney talk as this! (/snark)

I’m looking forward to getting my hands on Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Health Care Reform, probably from the same dead-tree purveyors that provide my most current sources of economic and political instruction. The fact that so many of these sources were designed to as outlets for pop-music huckstering (Matt Taibbi), celebrity pictures (Todd Purdom), or the softest of softcore pornorgraphy is undoubtably some fault in my own character, and not a reflection on Our Serious Media Village Idiots Outlets.

This is a brilliant idea:

Morgan Stanley plans to repackage a downgraded collateralized debt obligation backed by leveraged loans into new securities with AAA ratings in the first transaction of its kind, said two people familiar with the sale.

Morgan Stanley is selling $87.1 million of securities that it expects to receive top AAA ratings and $42.9 million of notes graded Baa2, the second-lowest investment grade by Moody’s Investors Service, according to marketing documents obtained by Bloomberg News. The bonds were created from Greywolf CLO I Ltd., a CDO arranged in January 2007 by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and managed by Greywolf Capital Management LP, an investment firm based in Purchase, New York.

Why didn’t I think of this? Oh, wait? I did. JUST THIS MORNING:

Why can’t they just do with the bad assets what they did with everything else the past couple decades? Just splice ‘em up a bunch, sell and re-sell them so many times that no one knows what the hell is what, bundle them up, have the ratings agencies slap a AAA rating on them, and sell them to small towns in Georgia and Norwegian pension funds. Voila! Problem solved! Then have AIG insure them, and Goldman can make another ten billion in default swaps and hand out some bigger bonuses. Also, rename them- they are not bad assets, they are “Under-Priced Yields Offering Untold Riches For Offshore Overseas Longterm Speculators (UPYOURsFOOLS).” Screw you Kenny Lay! Let’s get rich, bitches! What could go wrong?

/joecassano

I’m speechless. I really am.

It just never stops:

Sarah Palin’s not a quitter, she wants the public to know.

“I am not a quitter. I am a fighter,” Palin told CNN on Monday while on a family fishing trip, on the heels of her Friday bombshell announcement that she was resigning as Alaska’s governor.

Resign does come from Middle French origins, so it is possible she, as a “real” American, has no clue what it means. Also:

“I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out,” she said.

There is no “Department of Law” at the White House.

How long does this have to go on before people stop speculating about her super-secret strategy and just come to terms with the fact that she is an idiot? Also. Ya’ know.

Since our WaPo chat field reporter is vacationing in Stockholm, it is up to me to do the heavy lifting around here. Via email, this gem of an exchange at today’s WaPo chat with Philip Rucker:

Louisville, Ky.: Good morning, Philip. Thanks for taking questions. I’m very interested in Palin’s decision to step down from power and return to her work as a family commercial fisherwoman. In my mind this seriously ranks her with Cincinnatus, the Roman general who gave up his dictatorship to return to his plowing, and with George Washington, who was a hero in the American Revolution, but gave up his presidential command over the young nation to return to his farm. Do you agree with my assessment? Don’t you think that this brilliant move places Sarah Palin in the same league as George Washington and Cincinnatus?

Philip Rucker: There are lots of Palin questions, so let’s start with this one. You raise an interesting point. I’m not sure I ever thought of Sarah Palin as a modern day George Washington or Cincinnatus.

Oddly enough, I never thought of Palin as a modern day Washington or Cincinnatus.

I still don’t.

If you read the whole chat, Rucker spends most of it saying “interesting point” or “good point” or “that’s a fair point.” I think I have already cracked the Rucker code, and “that is an interesting point” is shorthand for “You are a moron, and they never told me I would have to do this crap in J. School.”

Lending more evidence to DougJ’s theory, I just heard Roger Simon on Hardball state that “Sara Palin held her own in the debate.”

If, by holding your own, you mean refusing to answer any questions you didn’t like, talking about random things that had nothing to do with the question, babbling about a grade school and winking at the camera, and then spent the rest of the time just lying about things, well, sure, she “held her own.”

Also, Biden mopped the floor with her in the post-debate polling, but, you know, those are facts that might conflict with Simon’s narrative.

As a single person who enjoys being unhappy, I may be biased about this issue, but it seems to me that there are far too many books, studies, and the like being written on “how to be happy” and the “nature of love”.

I haven’t read any of these, but there are tell-tale signs they are bullshit: they show up regularly in the columns of Ross Douthat and David Brooks, they inspire overuse of the word “we” (“why we need happiness”, etc.), I’ve heard them discussed on NPR, and Slate has a “Happiness Project” blog, just to cite a few examples.

Am I being too cynical here or is the proliferation of happiness studies indicative of something sad and pathetic about contemporary America?

Steve Benen makes a very good point about who’s really in the OBAMA SHOULD BE DOING MORE crowd:

Of course, shortly before George Will’s remarks, there was Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), blasting the president on the same program for being “timid and passive” when he’d like to see Obama “speak truth to power.”

...seeing Will and Graham on opposite sides of this reminds me of a point that often goes overlooked: we’re not dealing with a dynamic that pits the left vs. the right, or Dems against Republicans. Rather, this is a situation featuring neocons vs. everyone else.

You’ll notice that President Obama’s strategy has not only been endorsed by Democratic lawmakers, but also prominent Republicans who are in office (Dick Lugar), served in Republican administrations (Henry Kissinger, Gary Sick, and Nick Burns), or are prominent Republican voices in the media (George Will, Peggy Noonan, and Pat Buchanan).

Neoconservatism is a fringe ideology. It’s even difficult to find Wise Old Men—of the sort who co-chair Baker-Hamilton, Daschle-Dole style blue ribbon panels—who subscribe to it. Normally, that dooms an ideology to obscurity, regardless of its merits. But neoconservatism is different, and I don’t know why.

If you want to get a good feeling for how kooky the whole neocon outlook is, I recommend reading about the J curve:

The idea is that by introducing instability to a repressive regime, you initially make things worse in terms of both stability and openness, but then, once you hit rock bottom on both, you start to get better on both. This explains why it’s a good idea to completely destabilize countries, rather than hope for any kind of gradual reform.

Let me pose the following question: has any policy good ever come from the discussion of curves? Laffer curve, Bell curve, J curve. What is it about a picture of a curve that strips all intelligence and reason out of a discussion?

My guess is that they have mystical pull which leads people to believe they encapsulate some general truth that EXPLAINS EVERYTHING, the same way that the writings of Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and the Founding Fathers do, only better, because graphs are more both more reductionist and more faux scientific.

Update. In the interest of fairness and accuracy, I should include framing as one of the things that EXPLAINS EVERYTHING. There’s no need to be too partisan about this.

Update. Commenter Redshift makes a good point:

I think the mindset behind these “curves” is similar to that of various “doctrines”; the problem comes from the belief that the curve itself is a fundamental truth, rather than an illustration of underlying data (which can then be debated, falsified, etc.) This is why they are always shown with no units, not even at the maximum. For example, the Laffer curve shows the no-brainer that there is a level of taxation where it is possible to cut taxes and raise revenue; take away the scale, and you can make the argument that cutting taxes from where we are now raises revenue (if you’re either intellectual dishonest or in the throes of confirmation bias.)

Compare this to the so-called “hockey stick” global warming graph. To scientists, this is just an illustration of data, and the underlying data is what’s up for debate. To wingnuts, it’s a major point of debate; if they can “prove” that it is in any way incorrect, then global warming is a lie.

Let’s get this out of the way: I think it’s great that Sully et al. are so supportive of the twittering Iranian protesters and it’s quite possible that said protesters get some kind of psychological sustenance from it. But it’s important to distinguish between legitimate foreign policy and things your boss might do on St. Patrick’s Day.

John has discussed the narcissism and self-absorption at the heart of the greening of the warblogosphere and Jeff Golberg, of all people, sums up the actual situation quite well:

The overarching goal is to see the birth of a democratic Iran, not to make ourselves feel good, or get in the way….That said, the liberal interventionist/neoconservative position is the easier one to understand, because it is the more human response.

But I think it’s important here not to mock, but to try to understand. One of the few things I’ve really learned about conservatives is that they often really do believe that clapping louder works (and what could be a more obvious example of clapping louder than wearing green ties?). It’s easy to imagine that the focus on clapping louder is really just a way of stifling dissent when a Republican is in power—and make no mistake, that aspect of it is a feature, not a bug—but I think that a lot of conservatives really believe the world be a much better place if everyone cheered harder for Jesus, for Reagan, for freedom. Remember, we would have won in Vietnam if not for the pesky war protesters.

This was driven home for me when I had a conversation with a local Republican official (whom I mostly respect) who told me that she’d vote for Hillary in the general but not Obama because of the flag pin stuff. I told her that struck me as typically conservative because conservatives believe more in symbolic gestures than in policy. She agreed and wasn’t the slightest bit insulted.

Don’t get me wrong, liberals like to clap louder too. But they’re much less likely to believe that they can get the rest of the world to clap along and might never have even entertained the possibility that doing so would lead to world peace.

Where does the faith in clapping louder come from? My feeling is that it comes from the notion that government policies are ineffective in the face of the power of culture, something Brooks yaks about all the time. Once you accept this (not unreasonable) idea, it’s a short step to believing that clapping louder is more important than action.


Update. Michael Berube has a good post dissecting the Brooksian “power of culture” stuff. Money line:

This just makes me want to lie down on top of the Applebee’s salad bar and never get up again.

Your United States Congress:

The House overwhelmingly approved a resolution Friday in support of Iranian dissidents as that country’s top cleric warned protesters to end demonstrations.

The resolution was approved in a 405-1 vote, with two members voting present. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) was the only lawmaker opposed to the resolution. Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and David Loebsack (D-Iowa) voted present.

They simply just can not keep their mouths shut, and rather than working on issues within their authority, they waste everyone’s time with this nonsense. Additionally, the administration had to scramble the troops to water down the resolution from the one wingnut in chief Mike Pence was offering:

The White House worked with House Democrats to moderate a fire-breathing resolution circulated by Republicans to rebuke Iran for its post-election crackdown on dissent, according to an Obama aide.

The new resolution, similar to a version introduced in the Senate, “condemns the ongoing violence against demonstrators by the Government of Iran and pro-government militias, as well as the ongoing government suppression of independent electronic communication through interference with the Internet and cellphones.”

It’s expected to pass the House today.

The language, while relatively strong, is a toned-down version of the resolution pushed for by House GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.).

There was no point in offering this resolution, and I bet that Iran and the rest of the world will find any resolution about as compelling as the Bush administration found the Berkeley City Council’s vote to impeach Bush and Cheney.

Only Ron Paul voted against it.