Responding to David Drezner's recitation of the various public intellectuals alive and breathing, Kevin Drum says, "40 years ago there were a small number of what you might call mega-intellectuals — people like Buckley and Chomsky and Galbraith and Friedman — who had a bigger influence on public discourse than any single public intellectual does today. Nobody on Dan's list really seems to compete on quite the same plane as some of those 50s and 60s superstars."

I agree with that, and I can't decide if it's to be expected or really weird. In the to-be-expected category, the media is much more fractured than it was 40 or 50 years ago. When you had only a couple networks, and they had only a couple hours of news programming, it's to be expected that the voices they chose to feature would have had an outsized impact on public life. If there are fewer options, then the options left will command more market share. By contrast, today you have 24-hour news networks and blogs and online magazines and print magazines and every op-ed page is internet accessible and people are uploading YouTubes and all the rest. It's no surprise that, within this cacophony, it's harder for a few voices to ring out clearly. The news has so much time to fill that they stock their shows with unknown "strategists" to fill the hours.

On the other hand, the amount of media, and its reach, has tended to increase the power and visibility of "superstars." This has been true for CEOs, for actors, for sports stars, and most visible positions. George Clooney has not seen his star dimmed because the world also has cable networks. Kobe Bryant hasn't had trouble getting his name out there. So it's not clear to me why other public professions have seen this reputation inflation while public intellectuals haven't. My sneaking suspicion is that the real answer lies in what the news media rewards: Before there was Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs and Neil Boortz, there was Buckley and Galbraith and Vidal. Where the discourse used to turn to so-called public intellectuals for opinionated commentary, now it seeks out political showmen. And so that's what we get, and those are the names we know. There was never a job of public intellectual, it's just that some intellectuals used to take the job of high profile commentators. Now, there are more commentators, and those that ascend highest are not the ones who write long books about countervailing powers.

According to the Energy Department, wind could supply 20 percent of America's electricity needs by 2030, enough to reduce reliance on natural gas by 50 percent and cut coal consumption by 18 percent. It would cost about $197 billion but be offset by $155 billion in fuel savings, not to mention various positive environmental externalities. In other words, it's one of many things we could simply do if we're indeed serious abut this global warming stuff.

Over at the Motherblog, Dana makes a useful point on teachers unions:

Just as it's easy to pick out circumstances in which the interests of teachers unions seem antithetical to the interests of children, it's easy to point to times when the two are in sync. Teachers unions advocate for smaller class sizes. Teacher's unions advocate for newer, better supplies, from textbooks, to chairs and desks, to cleaner classrooms. Teacher's unions advocate for more support staff, such as guidance counselors, psychologists to deal with learning disabilities and problems at home, and classroom assistants. All of that is very good for kids.

The context of all this is that certain conservatives are gleefully suggesting that the post-Katrina improvements in New Orleans schools show the drag of teacher's unions. As Ryan Avent replies, "too many institutional factors changed [after Hurricane Katrina] for us to have a good idea what generated the improvement. And statisticians out there might note that when tracking changes over time, it helps to keep the sample constant. For an economist to look at a city’s educational system, subtract a quarter of a million poor people, then look at it again and suggest that destroying the teachers’ unions made all the difference is…well it’s not exactly a rigorous analysis." It's odd, because I don't really care about teacher's unions and don't want to constantly have this argument, but it's genuinely poisonous for the debate around education to be so infected by right wingers promising massive gains if we just neuter an interest group they find politically troublesome.

One of the problems in health care is a simple shortage of primary care doctors willing to work in underserved or poor areas. In response to this, people like me often suggest inducements like loan forgiveness programs that might help folks rationalize choosing a post medical school career path that doesn't make them very rich. Turns out Massachusetts just tried a repayment program that knocked out about 60 percent of medical student loans for doctors willing to serve in Eastern Massachusetts' community health centers. The program more than doubled recruitment success. Imagine what full repayment could do.

Via Ann, this video showing Cindy Chavez, the former vice-mayor of San Jose, discussing gender discrimination in politics, is depressing stuff:

Chavez says the vitriol directed at her gender was considerably worse than anything levied at her race, her politics, or any other facet of her candidacy. You see much the same thing in the blogosphere, where female writers endure attacks of a sort and style that male writers never really face. I've been called an idiot many a time, and even a sell-out, but never quite encountered any of this sort of intimidation, and have never had my picture posted on a male-only message board and had people consider discuss I was worth a "hate fuck" (as happened to one friend). I've no real solutions here, but it's the sort of thing worth pointing out once in awhile.

John McCain is older than the chocolate chip cookie. I don't even know how to process that.

George W. Bush has now gone 40 months without majority approval from the country he's supposed to represent and govern. That's longer than Truman, Nixon, or any other president since the advent of polling. He has cracked 70% disapproval, another first, and is now more unpopular than Nixon was directly before he resigned from office. He is shockingly unpopular, and this is a reality that neither the Congress nor the media has quite figured out how to address. It's something of a crisis for our political system that the president has now spent over three years hated and mistrusted by the majority of the country, and yet has never felt the need to take steps to restore his legitimacy. Something is wrong.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Danny Hammontree.

Ah, I remember the good old days when I was having long minimum wage arguments with libertarians. Sniff. Go forth, Kathy. Go forth and graph!

Eventually, I exited stage left from this particular debate because it got a little absurd. The lay of the land on the minimum wage is this: The evidence is ambiguous on employment dislocation, with some studies showing a slight loss in jobs, lots of studies showing no measurable impact, and a couple showing an increase in employment. Meanwhile, the evidence is clear that low wage workers enjoy higher salaries. We have passed increases in the minimum wage a fair number of times in our history, and have never -- seriously, never -- seen mass layoffs or economic chaos result.

Then we start on the minimum wage merry-go-round. It only effects kids, say opponents. It's never made clear why teenagers should make crap wages, and in any case, it's not true. 71% of the 1996-97 minimum wage increase accrued to adults. If you're really interested in this, here's an analysis of census data that examines the distributional effects of a hypothetical increase to $7.25. 80% goes to folks over 20.

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Tim asks, "I would ask under what circumstances would you ever vote for a Republican? For instance, the editors at National Review have typically said they endorse whatever candidate is the most conservative and has a chance of winning the general election. I have heard some of my union buddies that they would vote for a golden retriver in a congressional election as long as it had a "D" behind their name. What are your thoughts toward this?"

Well, as an employee of a 501(c)3, I have absolutely no opinions on who you should and shouldn't vote for. That said, when figuring out how you'd vote and when you'd cross party lines, you have to be clear on which office you're talking about. It is, for instance, foolish to vote for individuals in House elections. The US House of Representatives is the closest thing America has to the Politburo. The only thing that matters is which party you're from. The only truly important votes you'll cast are for control of the chamber and make-up of the leadership. Individual initiative is extremely constrained, and though many in Congress work hard and put enormous labor in the pursuit of the public good, it basically doesn't matter. If you're looking at the best Republican in the world against the worst Democrat, but you're a Democrat, go with your party, because the individual characteristics of the Republican will be almost meaningless. In the current Congress, members have voted with their party 90 percent of the time, and most votes where they crossed were meaningless, or they were freed to cross because their leadership had the votes they needed.

On the other side of the spectrum is the presidency. Here, individual characteristics are extremely important. Indeed, a genuinely liberal Republican, or actually conservative Democrat, can levarage their affiliation to reach across the aisle and use the cover of bipartisanship to push non-traditional priorities that would be otherwise be impossible (think Nixon goes to China or Schwarzenegger goes to health care). Though most candidates for president have come up through the party superstructure and are substantially indebted to various factions, if you did, indeed, find an individual candidate of the other party who was relatively free of encumbering ties, and you liked her better, it would make sense to vote for her.

So when thinking about your vote, you need to think about whether it makes sense to vote party or vote person. Person makes sense for executive positions (president, governor, mayor) or positions where the party is weak (most city councils, say). Party makes sense for positions where the individual is going to be subsumed into a party structure, like the House of Representatives, state legislatures, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the Senate. In those bodies, the individual, no matter how terrific, is virtually meaningless. Voters are being asked to choose an individual when the real issue is which collective gets picked.

I think Jordan is probably right that Whitewater has more to do with the Clinton's Us Against Them mentality than Lewinsky. For one thing, Whitwater came first. It lasted longer. It involved Hillary Clinton far more directly, and to a far greater degree. And it was totally made up. It led to a $60 million investigation that discovered no wrongdoing, but that eventually diverted itself to focus on Lewinsky. So to the Clintons, Whitewater probably underlies the Grand Unified Theory of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

Gordon Ramsay and Rickey Gervais talk food, animal rights, and advertising. Things get a bit, err, juvenile, towards the end:

I haven't looked at McCain's climate change plan in detail yet, and probably wouldn't know what to say even if I had, so instead, go read Dave Roberts, who concludes, "my initial reaction is that it's better than expected, somewhat short of Lieberman-Warner, and far short of what Obama has proposed. It should comfort us that a McCain presidency will mean real action on climate change, not the shell game Bush is engaged in. But it's hard to see how McCain can claim the allegiance of voters who rank climate change as a top concern."

Matt writes, "despite the theory that the 'freak show' builds ratings and sells papers, the reality is that television, newspaper, and magazine journalism are all in long-term structural decline steadily losing audience. It's almost as if people don't, in fact, want to watch the news covered in a stupid manner but actually would be somewhat interested in learning important information about the world."

I'm not sure the troubled business model of the news suggests that at all. Rather, it could be that large masses of people don't really want to watch the news, are somewhat more likely to watch sensationalized news, but would frankly prefer to watch the Simpsons. And that's okay. This argument won't be won by appealing to hypothetical business models in which policy commentary becomes really profitable. Rather, the news, like other things in life, should not be seen as a straight commodity. It is not there to turn a profit. It is there to keep our democracy healthy and our public informed. If that means it can't be appropriately subsidized through advertising, and needs public subsidies in a blind trust, or some sort of philanthropic revenue scheme, then so be it. Other countries do this, and do it well. But either the way, the bottom line should be that if it turns out that responsible news reporting isn't profitable, then we should sacrifice the profitability, not the responsible news reporting.

Ross calls Fareed Zakaria's itemized list proving America's decline "lapse into Friedmanesque blather." And, let's be clear, some of it is a bit silly:

The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.

We are no longer the only country with an internet, or a Sears Tower, if we ever truly were. And as more Americans come to realize that, it could have fairly profound psychological effects. After all, these symbols are how many folks have always understood our affluence, The reason the World Trade Center was a crucial American symbol wasn't because most folks understood it housed much of our financial sector. It was because they were two really tall, really impressive, buildings. They were a visual heuristic for power. But now other countries are developing their own entries into that genre, and they're no longer pale imitations of ours. As the world develops, America is going to start to look less exceptional -- as that's the inevitable result of being less exceptional. The point of Zakaria's book, as I understand it, is that whether we see that shift as an opportunity or a threat is probably the most important foreign policy question of the 21st century.

Image used under a Creative Commons license from Shuttering2Think.

Maybe I just don't understand business, but it sure seems like it would be a problem for Ebay to remain on the board of Craiglist even as they launch a major competitor to the site. Moreover, it's a pretty hostile move for them to refuse Craigslist's offers to buy out their minority share. Aren't there laws that prevent this sort of maneuvering and explicit corporate espionage?

Let there be assignments.

After McCain began running his "the American president Americans have been waiting for" ads, I lost the last vestiges of my half-belief that he was really going to run an honorable campaign of decency and ideas and admitted to myself that it would just be more warmed over red-baiting and dark insinuations about patriotism and heritage. Thus, I don't feel terribly guilty about linking to http://www.thingsyoungerthanmccain.com, where we learn that McCain is older than Bugs Bunny, the polio vaccine, Alaska, AARP, and the ballpoint pen.

That's all sort of funny, but it also points to a more serious critique of McCain's mindset, which mixes a deep desire for World War II-style heroics with a habituation to the paranoia and fear typical of the Cold War-era. What you don't see in McCain is much recognition that the world has changed, that today's threats are considerably less deadly than yesterday's dangers, and that it's been a very long time since America was a rigidly ordered society that needed its leaders to provide appropriate martial values.

Paul Krugman has a good piece today on the recent behavior of oil markets, and the evidence that the run-up in prices reflects durable trends in oil demand and supply rather than some short-lived commodity bubble. Basically, what we're seeing with $100 a barrel oil is that it's still being used, and in much the same quantities, and the demand curve still looks to be sloping upwards. Turns out oil use isn't terribly elastic, at least not in the short-term. Given all that, it's not very likely that oil will tumble back down to $40 a barrel any time soon. The more remarkable lesson, however, is just how much cheaper oil has been than every other potential energy source, because even now, at quadruple the price was saw less than a decade ago, it's still cheaper than the current alternatives! In the short-term, conservation, rather than substitution, is really going to be the only viable method for dealing with energy costs. And hey look, there's some happening now...

Was playing around on Alexa this morning, and noticed that the biggest political blog in the universe is currently being trounced by a thrice-weekly web comic that's mainly comprised of stick figures doing math:

Keeps you humble.

What will happen when Obama wins?

I'd far prefer Karl Rove as cable's designated "Republican strategist" than the nameless, faceless, completely unknown types who occupy that space now. At least with Rove, we know who he is and, in a broad-brush way, where he stands. Plus, the more time he has to spend in greenrooms and driving to-and-from broadcast stations, the less time he has to spend in his volcanic lair building his deception ray and plotting earth's total ruin. Distracting him with flattering anchors and cable shout shows is probably a public good.

The New York Times has a fascinating article on the collision between romance and traditionalism in Saudi Arabia. The whole thing is an interesting read -- though it's more vivid and persuasive on the brutal and domineering relationship between Enad and his cousin Nader than it is on any broader observations about the country -- but this bit was particularly striking:

Enad’s father agreed to let Nader marry one of his four daughters. Nader picked Sarah, though she is not the oldest, in part, he said, because he actually saw her face when she was a child and recalled that she was pretty.[...]

Nader said he expected to see his new wife for the first time after their wedding ceremony — which would also be segregated by sex — when they are photographed as husband and wife.

“If you want to know what your wife looks like, look at her brother,” Nader said.

If you're going to write a post arguing that Americans want more than "a fratboy President who starts the USA chant at every ball game" and are willing to hear their leaders critically assess the meaning of the flag pin, you probably don't want to end by saying, "Personally, I'll fall back on the courageous words of Adlai Stevenson..." Wrong image to leave the reader with, I fear.

When you're hoping to ascend to the presidency seven years after qualifying for Medicare, folks are going to have some concerns about your fitness to serve four, and more to the point, eight, years in office. So for McCain, a solid VP pick isn't merely a political good or a fun parlor game: It's something of a threshold question. If voters can't imagine the VP taking office, then they probably won't let McCain get there, either. Over at RedState, they're discussing who McCain should choose, and the leading candidates seem to be Don Carcieri, governor of Rhode Island, and Rob Portman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget. Interestingly, they hate all the traditional choices -- Tim Pawlenty, Condi Rice, Mitt Romney -- because that would further show that conservatives can't trust John McCain.

One nice thing about blogs is you can say the same thing over and over again without any editors getting pissed at you. When you're coming up with story ideas, "what's new" is always the first question you're asked. But on a blog, by making the same arguments in response to different news pegs and events, you're actually much more effective at conveying your points. Few writers are so persuasive, and few arguments so instantly convincing, that one bite at the apple will transform the thinking of your audience. This is something presidential candidates and their communications teams know perfectly well. As Trudy Lieberman writes, however, it's not something newspaper reporters are equipped to deal with:

I asked Hoyt, who for many years was an editor for Knight-Ridder, whether journalists should set the record straight when candidates omit the real story. “There should be more of that,” he said and offered a reason why it’s often not done. “A newspaper will report something once, and think they’ve already done that. But new people are coming to you all the time. Some things you need to keep repeating.”

Presidential candidates know that repetition works, and that’s why we hear the same words and themes in speech after speech—McCain and his best-in-the-world health care; Clinton and her use of “universal coverage”; Obama saying he never takes money from lobbyists. They know that if voters hear the same message often enough, they will believe it, even if it is less than true.

Journalists must also repeat, therefore. We must add history, context, and analysis, and when something is flat-out wrong, we should say so. The topic of American health care quality is a good place to start. And to repeat.

Not sure if folks remember me posting this Gordon Ramsay video on how to make eggs, but I just tried his technique (though with a quarter of the butter) and it was staggeringly good. Mix it with a good slice of bread and some fried sweet potatoes and you're having a nice morning.

I don't have tremendously strong feelings on the vice-presidential pick. But the unity ticket stuff isn't convincing to me. Good arguments have been made against it across the blogosphere, but one I'd add is simply organizational. You don't want a toxic working relationship between the president and the vice-president. Imagine President Obama, with VP Hillary Clinton and shadow-VP Bill Clinton, wants to pursue a legislative strategy that the Clintons think is a bad idea. How will they feel when Obama ignores their 8 years of White House experience and goes his own way? Will they be able to keep their sprawling universe of well-connected confidantes from leaking tales of their displeasure to the press? Will they want to? What happens when the first Time magazine cover comes out with Obama staring down the Clintons, and the tagline is, "Who's Really Running the Country?" It's such an obvious story that it can be predicted, with almost perfect certainty, right now. Will he sideline them? Will it sow seeds of mistrust?

Running the executive bureaucracy is hard enough without trying to navigate between two competing power poles. In the past, strong vice-presidents have, for that reason, been sidelined and marginalized, as Kennedy did to Johnson, and as Johnson did to Humphrey. It's not that their counsel wasn't potentially valuable, but that the top priority for the president was asserting the primacy of his own authority, and that meant going further than one might have wanted in locking away his vice-president. That sort of thing is not an effective use of White House resources or talent, and it's not a desirable dynamic in the executive branch. And though this doesn't often get a lot of attention, a smoothly functioning executive branch will be crucial to the success of the next president's agenda.

In one of the more enjoyable writing experiences I've had of late, I've got the cover in this month's Columbia Journalism Review recounting my month with the Amazon Kindle and what it suggests about the future of reading:

I’m not sure exactly what I expected from my month with the Kindle. Maybe for some inquisitive older gentleman, possibly wearing wire glasses and a tweed blazer, to sidle up and say, “Excuse me, I hate to bother you while you’re reading, but do you really think that can replace the book?” Or possibly for a librarian to berate me. In any case, it didn’t happen. In fact, nobody noticed at all. Though reading the Kindle felt like a courageous betrayal of every word written since the moment papyrus gave way to paper, it turns out that looking at words on tiny screens in public places is far too common to attract attention. Indeed, the only person who demonstrated a heightened awareness of nearby reading habits was me. Suddenly everyone seemed to be staring at a laptop or scrolling through a BlackBerry or searching for songs on an iPod or texting on a flip phone. The Kindle is far less the start of a revolution than the codification of one. It’s a declaration of war long after most of the contested lands have been conquered.[...]

Let me be clear: though the Kindle has some advantages over traditional books, for the moment, I’d stick with the low-tech option. The problem is that the Kindle tries to compete too directly with paper. It attempts to electronically mimic the experience of reading a book. But the book is very, very good at providing the experience of reading a book. In this way, the Kindle occasionally comes off as if Ford, failing to make the conceptual leap to the car, had instead built a motorized horse. Sure, there would be some advantages: the robo-steed would never grow tired, and could be outfitted with more plush seating. But horses are pretty good at being horses. And books, like horses, have evolved to maximize their advantages.

The true promise of the Kindle, and its inevitable descendants, is in creating a product that goes where the book cannot. Printed text is fundamentally limited. Once on the page, nothing more can be done with it. With digital text, everything is a draft, to be edited, altered, broadened, remixed, and redirected. As better conveyors of electronic text are developed, the big question is how content itself will change to take advantage of the new opportunities.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from John Pastor.

I'm disappointed by this post from Steve B, who, understandably, is angry that I don't pay more attention to HR-676, the single-payer health care bill in Congress, but decides to chalk that up to "of inside-the-beltway corporate tunnel vision" and the sort of ideological capture that comes from reporting on the occasional insurance industry conference. Call it creeping Sirota-ism.

The problem is, it also obscures the actual obstacles to health reform. There's a very simple reason I spend more time reporting on the Wyden bill and the presidential offerings than HR-676: HR-676 isn't going to pass. Not in any set of circumstances we can currently imagine, or any congressional make-up we can currently expect. Steve talks a lot about how it's got broad cosponsorship from progressives in the House, but health care lives or dies in the Senate. Which is why the problem that animates my work has changed. It used to be why the French health care system was better than the American incarnation, because frankly, I feel most sure of myself on that ground, and it's something I enjoy writing about. But over time, I realized that though that sort of commentary was fun for me, it was beside the point when it came to health reform. There, exactly one question matters: How do you get to 60 in the Senate?

The reason I don't spend much time on HR-676 is that one has ever explained to me how you do it with that bill. Forget the 4-6 Republicans you'd need even in the unlikely case of full Democratic unanimity after an election in which Democrats gain 3-5 Senate seats. First tell me how you get 16 of the following 16 Democratic moderate-to-conservative politicians onto a single payer health care plan: Mark Pryor, Blanche Lincoln, Dianne Feinstein, Ken Salazar, Joe Lieberman, Tom Carper, Max Baucus, Bill Nelson, Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, Jeff Bingaman, Kent Conrad, Robert Byrd, Tim Johnson, and probably Mark Warner. Then, after you do that, tell me how you get three of the following three "dealmaker" Republicans: Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter. And then tell me how you get two or so of the following five dealmaker economic conservatives (cause you're not going to get the straight party hacks): Bob Bennett, Chuck Grassley, Lamar Alexander, John Sununu, and George Voinovich.

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I actually think Jon Chait goes too far here in declaring Clinton a conservative populist rather than a liberal populist. To put the two strains of thought in more specific terms, Chait is really talking about the difference between economic populism, which believes "the rich wield disproportionate influence over the government and push for policies often at odds with most people's interest," and cultural populism, which has had many variants, but which Chait defines here as a philosophy that chooses to "divide society along social lines, with the elites being intellectuals and other snobs who fancy themselves better than average Americans."

Defined as liberal and conservative visions, the two appear in opposition. But traditionally, they've often been unified (think Ross Perot, or Pat Buchanan, or, more dangerously, George Wallace), and Clinton's past few weeks on the trails have seen her playing up a moderate form of economic populism and a weak form of cultural populism simultaneously. Chait is right to be annoyed with the anti-intellectualism that infected her gas tax holiday rhetoric and right to recoil from her comments touting support among "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans," but that's been as far as she's gone into cultural populism, and I'm willing to chalk the latter up as a Kinsleyan gaffe (after all, the press corps believes that too: Chait's colleague John Judis has often fretted over Obama's apparent weakness among the white working class). As it is, Clinton's been a much more consistent economic populist throughout the campaign -- a fact reflected by her domestic policy proposals -- and I don't think it necessary nor useful to take that from her. Frankly, Obama would probably have had less trouble winning the nomination had his instincts pushed him in a similar direction from the start.

But Clinton's populism was a vote-getting device, and aside from that one comment about her support among white Americans, never dipped particularly deeply into the more vicious strains of cultural populism.

I understand why the Obama campaign wants "to help Hillary Clinton discharge her debts and pay back the $11.43 million she has loaned her organization," but, for reasons of fairness and precedent, it doesn't really seem like they should.

Clinton, after all, made an informed decision: Given low potential odds of winning the nomination, she thought it worthwhile to take out loans of approximately $11 million in order to maximize her chance for victory. It emphasized her intense commitment to her campaign, given that $11 million was a substantial sum of money to potentially lose. If it's repaid as some sort of concession prize, that suggests there was no real financial risk at all, and future trailing candidates should feel free to borrow epic sums that draw out bruising campaigns, secure in the knowledge that they can leverage their eventual withdrawal to force the winning campaign to cover their debt. It's the Bear Stearns theory of campaign financing, and it doesn't seem like something that should be encouraged.

Further, on a level of basic equity, millions of people in this country take out unwise loans on unlikely schemes and no one covers their debt. Given that that's exactly the sort of economic unfairness Clinton has spent the last few months condemning, it seems peculiar for her to now avail herself of those opportunities. If Clinton said she would not drop out unless Obama swore to send a health care bill to Congress within his first 100 days, I'd have immense respect for that. But a repayment of debt she knowingly entered into? That's not how this is supposed to work.

Generally, I confine the recipes I find in my internet travels to the link blog on the sidebar. But this is definitely one way of making hash browns I've never thought of.

Vermonstrous writes, "ambulance fees. DC has 'em. Alexandria and Arlington have 'em. Montgomery is considering them. Supporters of these fees say they are only charged to those whose insurance pays -- functionally giving the jurisdictions free money from insurance companies. They also say the fees haven't discouraged people from calling 911. How they can say, on one hand, that taxes and fees -- on cigarettes, environmental impact and the like -- can change behavior while at the same time arguing that ambulance fees do no such thing is beyond me. What say you?"

I'm going to put aside the issue of whether I think ambulance fees are a good idea or not (I haven't thought about it much nor read the relevant literature) and simply explain why the fees don't discourage 911 calls. Basically, there are two reasons, and they demonstrate something important about health care:

1) We're insulated from health care costs. To take the cigarette example, imagine if your work paid for your cigarettes. In fact, you never even saw the price tag on the pack. Rather, you went in, flashed your smoker's coverage card, and got your cancer sticks. Would you care if the legislature raised prices a dollar a pack? Of course not. You don't really see how you're paying. Of course, in the end, you are paying, because your employer is taking that money out of your wages or passing it in to consumers. But that's very indirect, or at least feels very indirect. In the short-term, the smokes might as well be free. So too with ambulances, and ambulance costs, for folks with insurance. While the uninsured may be somewhat price sensitive, for the insured, calling an ambulance doesn't much change their insurance bill. So why not make the call? After all, your insurer is paying for it.

2) You don't comparison shop from a hospital gurney. In any economic transaction, the consumer's leverage is her ability to walk out of the store and either go without the good or find a better price somewhere else. Consumers don't have that distance when pain is lancing through their chest and every moment of delay may mean the death of more heart muscle. Too much delay could mean brain damage, or even death. When those are the stakes and the time constraints, you don't have the ability to not call the ambulance. You don't have the time to comparison shop. Folks having a health emergency go to the doctor first and figure out the pricing later. A good credit rating, after all, isn't much good if you're dead.

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While I'm not going to defend the use of revolving debt in Elizabeth Warren's presentation, Megan is underplaying the steady creep we've seen in household debt over the past decades. The following graph charts debt as a percentage of personal income, as a share of all assets, and mortgage debt as a share of real estate assets (source data here). The trends are pretty clear, and I'd argue, rather worrying:

So this stuff is increasing. The "all debt as a share of income" number is particularly worrying, as it's increased as much in the 2000-2005 period as in the 1979-2000 period. Megan might say it's all a function of asset bubbles, but economists I've talked to say the upper-bound estimate for the impact of asset market bubbles is half of the decline in the savings rate. Significant, but not, on its own, the whole story. So something is going on here. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. Michael Mandel, the chief economist at Business Week, calls the following graphic "the world's scariest chart," and while I don't think it quite compares to this one, it's not far off:

According to Mandel, the difference between the debt load we've seen and the debt load we might expect is $3 trillion dollars -- that's a lot of financial obligation weighing down our households, and we've only begun to see the effects. Im not one who believes our middle class is finished, but I wouldn't downplay the problems we're likely to face as these debts begin to come due.

At least on the internets:

Today, YouPorn is the No. 1 adult site in the world; Vivid.com, a pay site, is ranked 5,061. According to Alexa, a website-ranking company, YouPorn’s overall rank is higher than CNN.com (84), About.com (114), and Weather.com (195). (Those numbers are averages for the three-month period from mid-June to mid-September.)