Tab dump
16 Dec 2009 11:22pm GMT 1) Jay Rockefeller on Howard Dean's calls to kill the Senate bill: "It's nonsense and it's irresponsible and coming from him as a physician, it's stunning." 2) The final paragraph of Max Weber's 'Politics as a Vocation' has some good advice for the final weeks of health-care reform. 3) "To see how the difference between ressentiment and simple schadenfreude matters, consider Palin one more time." 4) As always, you should be reading Jon Cohn. Recipe of the day: Zeke Emanuel teaches you to...
Is health care the stimulus redux?
16 Dec 2009 10:33pm GMT Remember that picture? I pulled it from The Washington Post's archives. It was taken in February, though it feels further back than that. But back then, this picture was all over. It wasn't worth just a 1,000 words, but $100 billion of desperately needed stimulus funding. Back in June, I predicted that health-care reform would follow the path of the stimulus: a huge accomplishment that nevertheless feels like a defeat to its supporters. "As the legislation winds its way through the Senate,...
Ben Bernanke as 'Person of the Year'
16 Dec 2009 9:40pm GMT I'd like to stop linking to Matt Yglesias today, but it's hard to do that if he refuses to stop writing good posts. For instance, he could have taken a long lunch rather than writing this analysis of Time's decision to name Bernanke its "Person of the Year." Bernanke takes office in February of 2006 holding what’s probably the second most-important job in the United States and the most important job for determining overall macroeconomic conditions. He follows basically conventional...
20 questions
16 Dec 2009 8:27pm GMT Nate Silver has 20 questions for liberals -- or anyone -- who want to kill the Senate bill. The first one is particularly good: 1. Over the medium term, how many other opportunities will exist to provide in excess of $100 billion per year in public subsidies to poor and sick people?
The importance of the individual mandate
16 Dec 2009 8:23pm GMT Markos Moulitsas explains his opposition to the Senate bill, and says it all comes down to the individual mandate. "Strip out the mandate," he says, "and the rest of the bill is palatable. It's not reform, but it's progress in the right direction. And you can still go back and tinker with it at a later time." I'm sympathetic to his thinking. This was, of course, Barack Obama's position during the 2008 campaign, and it led toarguably the most bitter policy dispute in the race. But after winning...