Once again, people we would like to trust display jaw-dropping gall – are they abusing our trust, or ignorant, or incompetent? Somehow by leaving the details vague these things fade away. One wonders if at a planning meeting a junior person timidly asked about the ethical aspect of this effort, or questioned if this idea might be misconstrued possibly …

By way of a footnote just to how what an environment of commercialism news reporting exists within, I noted an odd double underlining of the word “administration” in the Politico piece lead: an ad pops up offering healthcare insurance.

Thomas Friedman is Right!

I just wanted to see if my computer could type those words. His assessment of the Waxman-Markey bill looks right on the money to me. It’s worth reading.

—Dean Baker

It is, actually. I know how Baker feels; I’ve done the same myself ( though I had to look back four years to find it).

Deniers

National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson explained his rationale yesterday for denying evidence of global warming.

I just spent a few days in the Sierra in May during freezing cold temperatures and snow; a week ago it was quite cool and raining in New York; each time I have passed through Phoenix this spring it seemed unseasonably cool; and just gave a talk on the Russian River and about froze. Meanwhile the grapes look about ten days behind due to unseasonably cool temperatures. Any empiricist would be worried, as Newsweek once was, about global cooling. Will the planet boil, if we slow down a bit, review the science and dissenting views, and consider the wisdom in a recession of allotting nearly a trillion dollars to changing our very way of life (while the Chinese absorb market share)?

It’s items like these that help explain why our political discourse is so routinely stunted. If the left and right disagreed on how best to address policy challenges, that would at least open the door to constructive dialog. But we’re still stuck in a political environment in which prominent conservative voices at high-profile conservative outlets a) don’t recognize the difference between climate and weather; b) find meaningless anecdotes compelling evidence of global trends; and c) are entirely comfortable delaying necessary solutions while trying to continue an already-completed debate. …

Which is by way of context for this graph via Paul Krugman.

One of the favorite arguments of climate-change deniers is “but it was warmer in the late 90s.” In fact, the odds are good that I’ll get that argument from George Will on This Weak tomorrow. I basically know the answer: temperature is a noisy time series, so if you pick and choose your dates over a short time span you can usually make whatever case you want. That’s why you need to look at longer trends and do some statistical analysis. But I thought that it would be a good thing to look at the data myself.

So here’s average annual global temperature since 1880, shown as .01 degrees C deviation from the 1951-80 average.

Update: one more thing, also via Krugman.

Better than I can, anyway.

Who Are You and What Have You Done with the Paul Krugman I Used to Know?

I would have thought it impossible for Krugman to cite Robert Reich completely approvingly, without even a trace of snark. Yet, lo and behold, it has happened:

Read Robert Reich: Just read. He’s right.

Robert Reich:

Robert Reich’s Blog: “What Can I Do?”: Someone recently approached me at the cheese counter of a local supermarket, asking “what can I do?” At first I thought the person was seeking advice about a choice of cheese. But I soon realized the question was larger than that. It was: what can I do about the way things are going in Washington?

People who voted for Barack Obama tend to fall into one of two camps: Trusters, who believe he’s a good man with the right values and he’s doing everything he can; and cynics, who have become disillusioned with his bailouts of Wall Street, flimsy proposals for taming the Street, willingness to give away 85 percent of cap-and-trade pollution permits, seeming reversals on eavesdropping and torture, and squishiness on a public option for health care.

In my view, both positions are wrong. A new president — even one as talented and well-motivated as Obama — can’t get a thing done in Washington unless the public is actively behind him. As FDR said in the reelection campaign of 1936 when a lady insisted that if she were to vote for him he must commit to a long list of objectives, “Ma’am, I want to do those things, but you must make me.”

We must make Obama do the right things. Email, write, and phone the White House. Do the same with your members of Congress. Round up others to do so. Also: Find friends and family members in red states who agree with you, and get them fired up to do the same. For example, if you happen to have a good friend or family member in Montana, you might ask him or her to write Max Baucus and tell him they want a public option included in any healthcare bill.

My memory reaches back to September 18, 1787:

Mrs. Powell: “Well, doctor, what have we got?”

Benjamin Franklin: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

CORRECTION: The other day this blog referred to right-wingers recklessly calling Obama weak for his careful handling of the Iranian crisis as “clowns.” In fact, they should have been called “dangerous clowns.” Best Defense regrets the error.

… And how does Caesar figure into the Finkelstein saga, exactly? Well, there was that whole flap over the inhouse Macy’s clothing brand, just for starters. Under Finkelstein’s power-mad reign, you see, Macy’s “began pushing its own private labels despite the fact that customers still wanted traditional brands…. Private labels in department stores often connote ‘cheap.’ But Finkelstein kept the prices on Macy’s private labels so high that even customers who, to save some money, might have overlooked the stigma of in-house brands chose not to buy them.” The launch of a dubious clothing line and a plot among senators to do in a dictator-in-perpetuity: This, indeed, is a stunning parallel.

But that’s nothing next to the principle adduced from the whole affair: “Once you decide on your plan and take action, don’t look back or second-guess yourself”—i.e., precisely the behavior that got both Caesar killed and Finkelstein shitcanned. …

You’ve gotten some pushback on your article about McAllen, Texas. Today, in fact, some doctors from the area held a press conference rebutting your claims, and you published a blog post re-rebutting theirs. What have you found to be the most convincing counterarguments against your piece?

The three lines of criticism were ones I anticipated or even talked about. The idea that these people in McAllen are unhealthier. The idea that it’s all malpractice. The one point I didn’t get into was the snowbirds [retirees from colder areas who summer in Texas], but they’re not in the spending calculations anyway because Medicare counts them in their home area.

The criticisms I’d been hearing and seeing but that hadn’t been going away was pointing out that McAllen is the poorest county in the country. They’d say you couldn’t compare it to Mayo. But I didn’t. El Paso, which I did compare it to, was the sixth poorest in the United States. They’re very closely similar in poverty, in immigration, in physician supply, in rates of disease, and so forth.

…

Live long and prosper

Via Andrew Gelman, Greg Mankiw describes the use of international comparisons of life expectancy as part of the argument for reform as “schlocky.”

Grrr. Not many serious advocates of reform use the life expectancy differences to argue that health care is clearly better in other advanced countries than it is in the United States; when it comes to care, the general assessment seems to be that it’s comparable, with no advanced country having a clear advantage. The reform argument actually goes like this:

1. Every other advanced country has universal coverage, protecting its citizens from the financial risks of uninsurance as well as ensuring that everyone gets basic care.

2. They do this while spending far less on health care than we do.

3. Yet they don’t seem to do worse in overall health results.

So Greg suggests that maybe it’s all because we have an unhealthier lifestyle — what Ezra Klein calls the well-we-eat-more-cheeseburgers argument.

Three things. First, surely the burden of proof here is on Greg. I mean, we’re spending 6 or 7 percent of GDP more on health care than other countries — call it a trillion dollars a year — without any clear advantage. That’s not the sort of thing you wave away with a casual suggestion that maybe we have bad habits.

Second: you know, people have thought about this — and tried hard to measure it. For example, the huge McKinsey Research Institute study on the cost of US healthcare tried to quantify the costs of lifestyle-related issues — and found that it didn’t explain much.

Third, read Atul Gawande!

Bottom line: this is the most important domestic policy issue we face. It deserves more than casual just-so stories about how the kids American health care might, despite all appearances, be alright.

Dan Walters: Historic tax overhaul plan to hit Capitol

… The California Commission on the 21st Century Economy, better known as the Parsky Commission for its chairman, businessman Gerald Parsky, is on the verge of proposing a massive tax system overhaul to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislators.

Although revenue-neutral – that is, not changing the amount of money now collected – the plan will probably propose abolishing corporate income taxes and the state sales tax in favor of a “net receipts” tax that’s similar to the value-added taxes common in European countries, replacing the steeply progressive personal income tax with a flat tax, perhaps 6 percent, and adding a “carbon tax” to reduce fuel use. …

You might be forgiven for not knowing what the hell a Parsky Commission is.

Day of Mourning, Protests, Called by Mousavi on Thursday

Mir-Hosain Mousavi, who maintains he won last Friday’s presidential election despite official assertions that he lost 2 to 1 to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is calling for another rally Thursday, this time in part to honor the persons killed by hardliners or security forces in the course of previous demonstrations.

Mourning the martyr is as central to Iranian Shiite religious culture as it was to strains of medieval Catholicism in Europe, and Mousavi’s camp is tapping into a powerful set of images and myths here. The archetypal Shiite martyr is Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who championed oppressed Muslims in Iraq and was cut down by the then Umayyad Muslim Empire. Recognition that a Muslim state might commit the ultimate in sacrilege by beheading a person who had been dangled on the Prophet’s knee has imbued modern political Shiism with a distrust of the state. When Husayn’s head was brought to the Umayyad caliph Yazid and deposited before his throne, older companions of the Prophet are said to have wept and remarked, “I saw the Prophet’s lips on those cheeks.” Shiites ritually march, flagellate, and chant in honor of the martyred Imam or divinely-appointed leader.

Today’s protesters are wearing green, which symbolizes Mousavi’s descent from the Prophet Muhammad. (Mousavi’s family name refers to the Seventh Imam (descendant of the Prophet with claims to divine knowledge), Musa Kazim, whose tomb is in Kazimiya, north Baghdad. Sayyid families, those claiming descent from the Prophet, often take one of the Imams’ names as a family name to honor them, though of course they are also claiming descent from the previous Imams right back to the Prophet.) The repertoires of protest the reformists are using echo those of the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution — they are chanting “God is Great,” mourning pious fallen martyrs, etc. — another sign that this movement is not just alienated secularized elites.

But now Mousavi’s his supporters are also sporting black ribbons to indicate that they are in mourning for the fallen. Typically, the dead will be commemorated again at one month and at 40 days. In 1978 such demonstrations for those killed in previous demonstrations grew in size all through the year, till they reached an alleged million in the streets of Tehran. Since the reformists are already claiming Monday’s rally was a million, you wonder where things will go from here.

The regime’s attempt to paint the protesters as nothing more than US intelligence agents underlines how wise President Obama has been not to insert himself forcefully into the situation in Iran. The reformers and the hard liners are not stable groupings. The core of each is competing for the allegiance of the general Iranian public. If the reformers can convince most Iranians of the justice of their cause, they will swing behind the opposition. If the hard liners can convince the public that the reformers are nothing more than cat’s paws of a grasping, imperialist West — i.e. that they are Ahmad Chalabis trying to bring Iran foreign occupation so as to get power themselves — then the reformists will be crushed. Iranians value national independence above all, having suffered with a CIA-installed goverment for decades in the mid-twentieth century.

The prescriptions of John McCain and Faux Cable news for muscular US diplomacy at this point are tone deaf to Iranian realities and would backfire big time, harming both the reform cause and US interests. Anyway, after the basket case to which the US Republican Party reduced Iraq, no one in the global South is likely to want them meddling in their internal affairs.

Reports are streaming in of the arrest of over a hundred opposition figures and of hard line militia men following protesters home and breaking into their homes to terrorize them. See e.g., Basij paramilitary forces terrorize residential complex. The Basij militiamen are said to be afraid to come out in numbers during the opposition demonstrations, but sneak around at night to trail protesters and harass or arrest them.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had met Tuesday morning with the representatives of all four presidential candidates, urging them to make up but continuing to insist that Ahmadinejad was the winner by 24 million to 14 million votes. He portrayed the massive post-election demonstrations and charges of ballot fraud as a minor tiff.

Gary Sick wonders if Khamenei really is the supreme leader any more, and hints that the hard line tack of stealing the election was directed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country’s religious national guard.

Reports are coming in from Iran that allege that the regime is tracking down and destroying satellite dishes, using helicopters for aerial surveillance of neighborhoods and Basij, the right wing militia (sort of like Mussolini’s Black Shirts) to do the breaking and entering. Kindly neighbors who have tried to warn suspected satellite dish owners that the militiamen were coming have sometimes reportedly themselves been arrested.

SF Techie helps Iranian protests.