Policy 08/29/2009

• Pentagon Official Questions U.S. Message to Muslims – NYTimes.com

  tags: Policy

  • “To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate,” Admiral Mullen wrote in the critique, an essay to be published Friday by Joint Force Quarterly, an official military journal.
  • “I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all,” he wrote. “They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are.”
  • Admiral Mullen expressed concern over a trend to create entirely new government and military organizations to manage a broad public relations effort to counter anti-Americanism, which he said had allowed strategic communication to become a series of bureaucracies rather than a way to combat extremist ideology.
  • “That’s the essence of good communication: having the right intent up front and letting our actions speak for themselves,” Admiral Mullen wrote. “We shouldn’t care if people don’t like us. That isn’t the goal. The goal is credibility. And we earn that over time.”
  • Admiral Mullen did not single out specific government communications programs for criticism, but wrote that “there has been a certain arrogance to our ‘strat comm’ efforts.” He wrote that “good communications runs both ways.”

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Policy 08/27/2009

• The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  tags: Policy

  • They key thing, according to the CIA, is to enhance “the potential dread a high-value detainee might have of US custody”. Notice the shift from the standards of the past. In the past, the US was known for being a country whose soldiers would never mistreat prisoners; now, the US wants the world to know that US custody is something to be dreaded. That’s what Cheney did to America. He’s proud of it. If you are ever captured by a US soldier, and suspected of terrorism, you know that torture will be coming soon. The values of Washington and Eisenhower and Reagan are inverted. The reputation of the US as a defender of human rights is reversed. The point is that America must be feared for its willingness to abandon all human rights.

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Policy 08/26/2009

• Ezra Klein – The Other Klein Says True Things

  tags: Policy

  • well, you guys sure know how to crowd out a discussion.

    Don’t you know that people gave up on this thread, and went back to a more fruitful source, namely Ezra’s other posts?

    I stopped when I read this:
    “I’ve seen your stats on tort reform and I don’t buy them. I believe that…”

    Which translates as, “I’ve seen your facts and prefer this version of reality, with no facts supplied to get in its way.”

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Policy 08/19/2009

• Ezra Klein – The Liberal Revolt

  tags: Policy

  • The problem, I think, is that there is a tendency to understand heath-care reform as an equal negotiation in which all sides want a deal, and you can game out various bargaining stratagems. But health-care reform is not a negotiation. It’s a campaign. Reformers wants a deal, even as some differ on its precise shape. The opposition wants to kill the deal entirely. And that gives the opponents a lot more power to say “no.” “No” isn’t their fallback position. It’s their position. The supporters — if they’re not sociopaths of some sort — actually do want to extend health-care coverage to 40 million people and regulate the insurance industry and create out-of-pocket caps and make life better for millions and millions of people. That makes it hard to say “no.” Being a decent person turns out to be a terrible weakness. And the pressure is even greater because the history of this stuff is that you don’t get a deal at the end of the day. Failure isn’t an unlikely outcome. It’s the default.

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Sustainability 08/15/2009

• China signals long-term plans to curb GHGs, Cabinet report finds “The large amount of greenhouse gases emitted through human activities is the main reason for global warming leading to extreme weather events” « Climate Progress

  tags: Sustainability

  • It’s a hopeful sign that even as almost half of our own political leaders refuse to face up to the realities of Climate Change, that the leaders in the rest of the world, seem to getting it. Unlike the U.S., they are refusing to allow political philosophies of convenience to dictate their science-based decisions and policy-making.

    The U.S. may be the biggest GHG emitter on a per-person basis, but we are still only 300 million people out of 7 billion. While it is a pitiful indictment of our country that we are no longer forward-looking and so cannot lead on this critical issue, the rest of the world seems to have accepted that fact and intends to go forward without us.

    Say goodnight, America.

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Policy 08/15/2009

• Ezra Klein – Time Heals All Wounds

  tags: Policy

  • ” If anything, the suspicion that public popularity would make it impossible to roll back changes that I oppose on principle gives me even more reason to oppose something like the public option.”

    Bingo.

    That, in one sentence, summarizes the conservative argument against health care reform.

    The principle is the key thing. The government must be made small enough to drown in a bathtub. Obama must be destroyed.

    The facts that our health care is destroying our economy, that many people are now unable to get the health care they need, that in a decade or two MOST people will not get the health care they need all mean nothing. Trying to fix the system means nothing.

    It is the principle that counts.

    Posted by: PatS2 | August 14, 2009 5:51 PM
    | Report abuse

    ah, thank you PatS2, a breath of clarity. The blurry logic of this opposition makes me lose sight of things that were once clear.

    After the last administration ended I relaxed and lost sight of that stance of denying all evidence of the senses in favor of the pre-conceived doctrine.

    Now the shape of all this “ruckus” comes back into focus for me.

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Policy 08/14/2009

• Ezra Klein – What Health Care Can Learn From Whole Foods

  tags: Policy

  • Whether he’s “right wing” or a “libertarian,” John Mackey is a rich man whose views reflect his economic status. People like my son, who has Type 1 diabetes through no fault of his own, do not factor into his mindset.

    If an insurance company won’t insure my son at an affordable rate — and they won’t of their own accord — he should look to charity for support, according to Mr. Mackey.

    So whatever you call it, this is pretty much the same view that would have been put forth by Cornelius Vanderbilt or any of the other Gilded Age plutocrats. It is a disgrace in our era. People who aren’t rich and yet agree with Mr. Mackey are dupes.

    Mr. Mackey, you may be smug about the high-deductible policies you offer your employees, but this is the end of my support for Whole Foods.

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Economics 08/05/2009

• The Strange Role of the Insurers

  tags: Economics

  • Other countries get better results at less than half the cost per patient. Clearly we can learn something from them. We do not have to invent the wheel. But this posting acts as if we are the only country in the universe. The reason is never stated, but it is clear. The most important principle in health care for the media is to preserve the income of health insurance executives and their wealthy stockholders. That is why we can’t learn from other countries. That is why all of the proposal being considered are so complicated.

    The goal of a well run corporation is to make money for shareholders. In the case of health insurance companies this is in conflict with providing good efficient health care to the country.
    The for profit insurers have learned that the way to get a high stock price is to have a low Medical Loss Ratio which is the percentage of inflow (premiums) paid out in medical benefit to patients. Notice that they consider medical benefits as “losses.”

  • They do this in two ways. They make the numerator smaller by making it difficult for doctors and patients to collect. They make the denominator larger by obscene executive compensation, high profits, billions spent processing complicated forms they require of physicians and patients, and still more billions spent on fighting with doctors and patients over coverage and payments. See the SEC fillings for the Medical Loss Ratios and a recent Commonwealth Fund Study for the difficulty patients and physicians have with coverage and payments.

    Because all of the current proposals try to fix health care but keep the cancer of for profit insurance, they are horrendously complicated. They run about 1,000 pages. HR676, Medicare for All, not only gives good health insurance to everyone, it solves the problems of pre-existing conditions and the situation where loss of job implies loss of health insurance. Furthermore, it costs less than any of the current proposals because it will save us $500 Billion each and every year by the elimination of the high overhead (= 1 – Medical Loss Ratio) and huge compliance costs of both physicians and patients. Also it will make it easy to crack down on the wasteful “marketing” of drug companies. In fact, studies have shown that we can get all this and it will not cost us anymore than we are already paying and probably less.

    HR676 is 70 pages long.

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Policy 08/04/2009

• The Optimist | The American Prospect

  tags: Policy

  • Strange as it is, there is something admirable, tough, and consistent in Obama’s cockeyed optimism about our institutions. It’s not like he doesn’t know that our democratic institutions have failed. Rather, by asserting that they are capable of actually governing, he is, in effect, demanding that they do so, calling them out in much the way that he has called out conservatism: by taking it seriously.

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Economics 08/04/2009

• Op-Ed Columnist – Rewarding Bad Actors – NYTimes.com

  tags: Economics

  • Neither the administration, nor our political system in general, is ready to face up to the fact that we’ve become a society in which the big bucks go to bad actors, a society that lavishly rewards those who make us poorer.

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