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- As I understand it, conservatives are freaking out about the recess appointment of Don Berwick to head the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services because a) he has spoken favorably about the British National Health Service, and b) the recess appointment itself is unseemly because it circumvents a public vetting that only the U.S. can provide. Simply put, Berwick can't summon NHS-style medicine to America's shores without going through Congress, and while Republican obstruction might not have been directly responsible for this recess appointment, Republican obstruction in general has made such appointments far more likely to happen.
- Obviously, the private sector is not failing to create jobs out of some apprehension about future government policy. Or there are the real explanations. In the short term, lack of demand is the immediate restraint on private investment and expansion. But in the longer term, we're still not transitioning well from an industrial-scale economy where every innovation leads to investment that spurs job growth, to one that relies on white-collar work and innovation here that leads to investment and job growth in China.
- The whole problem with the idea of natural rights is that once adopted, an infringement upon those rights transcends mere injustice into a crime against nature. If you believe rights are a naturally occurring phenomenon, rather than the product of a long historical struggle for political liberty, then it's a short step to see the world simplistically divided between those who respect these "natural" rights and those who don't.
- Remainders: The bipartisan push to "reform" Social Security; nobody could have predicted that knowledge about the worst oil spill in American history would become the privilege of those who perpetrated it; I'm baffled by this desire to ensure that churchgoers are properly armed for worship services; actually, Thomas Sowell lost his mind long, long ago; I apologize for not being more sensitive to the special needs of the very wealthy; a glimpse back to when the GOP was a reasonable political party; and the obsession with political "independents" is bad enough, but relying on the musings of focus group independents to draw broad conclusions about electoral preferences is madness.
--Mori Dinauer
