The Weekly Sift

In this week’s Sift:

• Afghanistan Anxiety. I went trolling for wisdom and came up empty. Here’s what I got instead.
• Reacting to Ted. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, but Ted set the pattern for a generation of Democratic presidential might-have-beens. On the other hand, I wish all famous-name-inheriting politicians followed his example.
• Six Months With My Kindle. The new-gadget aura is gone. So how’s it working out as an appliance?
• Short Notes. Republican hope is great and white. Tom DeLay’s embellished memory. How Blue Dogs bring home their chow. Bill Bradley’s dumb idea. Ministers who pray for Obama’s death. And the role of minotaurs in enhanced interrogations.

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For a lot of commentators, the recent Afghan elections have been a time to reflect how the war is going. So for the last few weeks I’ve been collecting links and planning to pull together a condensation of the collective wisdom.

Good luck with that if you want to try it. The state of the war has been reviewed by the Washington Independent (which links you to a lot of other articles by people who ought to know something), Wes Clark, the Economist, and the New York Times — just to get you started.

If you find any wisdom there, let me know. The main thing I picked up was anxiety. “The war is going badly,” says the Economist. The NYT asks, “Could Afghanistan Become Obama’s Vietnam?” That gives you the general flavor. Plus, there are the raw numbers: July and August have seen 146 coalition troops die. The previous two-month record was 77. But I’m not finding convincing arguments for doing anything in particular: pull out, double down, invade Pakistan. Anything. I’m hearing a lot of “the next six months will be critical” statements, which is commentator-speak for “I don’t know what’s the heck is going on.”

Like the United States, I’m scaling down my objectives. Instead of the clear how-things-are and where-we-go-from-here article I was planning, I’m just going to explain the general anxiety.

Afghanistan, if you remember, was the war that made some kind of sense. It really did have something to do with 9-11, and the Al Qaeda infection was already there — not like in Iraq, where we spread it around like an unsanitary surgeon.

The articles talk about a counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy replacing a counter-terrorism strategy. Here’s what that’s about: In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the initial Bush strategy was to go in and kill the bad guys. That’s counter-terrorism, which was a complete insert-expletive-here disaster in both countries. Basically, the bad guys let us chase them hither and yon, leaving destruction in our wake. That convinced the populace — most of whom didn’t originally give a damn about us one way or the other — that they had to get these foreigners out of their country. So they joined an insurgency. David Kilcullen described this pattern very precisely in The Accidental Guerrilla, which I discussed in March.

Counter-insurgency is the strategy that General Petraeus brought to Iraq in the famous Surge. The idea is that you stop chasing the bad guys and instead settle in with the people to defend them from the bad guys. In Kilcullen’s words, you don’t fight the enemy unless he gets in your way.

Now we get to the part that’s confusing everybody: Kill-the-bad-guys is such a god-awful stupid strategy that counter-insurgency has been an undeniable improvement. If you’re going to be in Afghanistan or Iraq at all, that’s how you want to do it. But is it a good strategy? With a COIN strategy, can we hope to accomplish something positive rather than just spend money and get people killed? And will the objectives we can accomplish justify the cost? (The cost from here on, that is. The total cost-from-day-one will never be justified, but that’s blood under the bridge now.)

Nobody really knows those answers, and that’s why everybody is so anxious. We know from Iraq that the change-over from CT to COIN raises casualties temporarily, and that’s happening in Afghanistan. In theory the numbers should start to drop again in 6-12 months. In theory.

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You don’t need me to tell you that Senator Edward Kennedy died this week. There have been tributes in a bunch of newspapers and specials on lots of networks. The coverage hasn’t reached Michael Jackson proportions — which tells you something about our country — but it’s hard to claim that Ted hasn’t gotten enough attention.

I have two personal reactions when I think about Senator Kennedy. First, he was the exception that tested one of my rules: In general, I dislike politicians who cash in on a famous name. That’s one reason I had an instant distaste for George W. Bush. If W’s name had been Smith, he’d have been the nobody his merits entitled him to be.

Whatever a person might think of Ted Kennedy’s abilities, he wouldn’t have entered the Senate at age 30 if he’d been a Smith. That said, his name was Kennedy and he did become a senator in 1962, during his brother’s administration. And to be fair, he deserves to be judged on what he did with that opportunity, rather than whether he earned it or not.

And that’s what gives my rule an exception: If you rise to power through your family connections, you should use that power to help the rest of us. That’s the difference between Ted and conservative rich kids like W or Dan Quayle. Kennedy’s family could send him to Harvard, so he wanted a good education for everybody. He got good medical care, so he wanted everybody to have it. He never had to take a debilitating job or work in a toxic environment, so he tried to protect all workers.

If some authentic rags-to-riches type wants to preach rugged individualism and you’re-on-your-own capitalism, fine. But I can’t listen to it from guys who have had everything given to them. If a famous heir wants to go into politics, he should be a Ted Kennedy.

My second reaction is that — fairly or unfairly — I connect Ted with a lost generation of Democratic leadership. Let me tell you about an editorial cartoon that has stuck in my head ever since I saw it in 1969. Nixon’s inauguration was the end of maybe the most eventful and disturbing election cycle in American history: McCarthy’s college kids chasing LBJ out of the race, the King and RFK assassinations, the “police riot” at the Democratic Convention, and so on. Humphrey came out as a damaged nominee, and his last-minute comeback fell just short. Nixon was president.

Anyway, the inauguration-day cartoon: It showed a park bench in front of the White House. Nixon was walking away from us, into the White House, his footprints in the snow trailing back to the bench. Still sitting on the bench was Ted Kennedy.

That’s how inevitable his presidency seemed in those days. He wasn’t even 40 yet, but he was the heir to two martyred brothers. History was proving him right about Vietnam. Nixon seemed like an accident, a product of 1968’s one-of-a-kind circumstances. The White House still rightfully belonged to the Democratic coalition that had elected JFK in 1960 and given LBJ a landslide in 1964. Ted would take it back for us in 1972.

That summer brought Chappaquiddick, and the whole inevitability thing was over. And so began an entire era when it seemed like the Democrats couldn’t get their first-string team onto the field. McGovern in 1972 and Carter in 1976 were second-stringers, not legitimate heirs to the Kennedy mantle. Ted tried to take the nomination away from Carter in 1980, but the combination of incumbency, residue of scandal, and a bad campaign resulted in Carter’s renomination and loss to Ronald Reagan.

In the 1980s, Democrats had a new heart-throb who was always on the sidelines when the game was being decided: Mario Cuomo. Mondale and Dukakis were second-stringers, and when Clinton ran into his own scandals in 1992, no one had the stature to take advantage. We got used to having an if-only candidate, a candidate who could claim our hearts, but (for some reason) not our nomination. Our nominee would always be damaged, always somebody circumstances had stuck us with. That lasted right up to 2004, when Dean self-destructed and Hillary stayed on the sidelines.

I think 2008 marked the end of that era. Whether the primary campaign came out the way you wanted or not, every Democrat (other than maybe Gore) who should have run did. If you couldn’t find a Democratic candidate to get excited about in 2008, you probably aren’t really a Democrat. That hadn’t been true since … well, since Gene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey faced off in 1968.

Ted Kennedy can’t be blamed for the era he was born into any more than he can be credited for his name. But to me he will always be the central figure in those lost four decades, when Democratic presidential politics constantly had the crushed-rose scent of doomed romance.

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Flags all over the country are flying at half-mast for Senator Kennedy — except at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. Wonder why.

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Back in March I told you about buying a Kindle book-reader. Now I’ve had it six months — long enough for the new-gadget aura to wear off. It’s time to examine how it’s working as a everyday appliance.

The short answer is that I’m reading about half of my books on the Kindle. Of the last 61 books I read, 32 are on the Kindle, 18 came from the library, and 11 are printed books I own. Some of the owned books were backlog off my shelf and some were bought new. The numbers may be slightly skewed by all the traveling I’ve done this summer, since the Kindle is way easier to take on a trip than a pile of printed books.

While I was doing that tabulation, I often had to check the Kindle’s book-list to remember whether I had read a book on it or not. In other words, what I remember about reading a book on the Kindle is the book, not how awful or wonderful it was to read it on the Kindle.

The biggest change in my book-buying habits was unexpected: I’m buying fewer books that I don’t read. In the past, I bought a lot of books not because I wanted to read them right away, but out of worry that I’d either forget them or not be able to find them later. Many of those books never got read.

That hardly ever happens any more. If a book is available on the Kindle, I can add it title to my “Save for Later” list. Whenever I decide I really want to read it — maybe at three in the morning in a town that doesn’t have a good bookstore anyway — I can download it and pay for it. With that option, there’s never a reason to pay for a Kindle book that I’m not ready to start reading immediately.

Another unanticipated consequence is that I’m reading more library books. Some books that I used to buy now go onto the save-for-later list — and before I get around to buying them I see them in the library.

I’m also reading more classics, which are either free or very cheap on the Kindle. I read Pride and Prejudice and 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas for free, and Tolstoy’s My Confession and The Death of Ivan Ilych because they came as part of a 50-works-of-Tolstoy-for-$5 package. I’ve also downloaded free copies of Oliver Twist and The Three Musketeers, which will be there the next time I’m stuck in an airport.

And then there was Amazon’s attempt to manipulate my reading habits. Shortly after I got the Kindle, Amazon offered free downloads of sample novels by several authors who have written a lot of books. It was a clear “this is addictive; the first one’s free” strategy. It worked, but not exactly as Amazon planned it. For example, I downloaded Lee Child’s Persuader for free, then munched through 12 more of his books like salted peanuts. But I only bought one — the last one, which my library didn’t have yet.

In deciding whether to buy a Kindle, I had three main questions. First, would I use it? The answer there is clearly yes. Second, would it save space? This was the main issue for me, because I’m an apartment-dweller with vast numbers of books. Again, the answer is yes, both because electronic books take up no space and because I’m (unexpectedly) getting more stuff out of the library.

Finally, would savings on books ever pay for the Kindle? In March I was pessimistic about this; now I think it depends how I figure. A new Kindle was $350 when I bought mine; now it’s down to $300. New books (typically ones that have no paperback edition yet) run about $10-15, older books $5-10, and classics either free or too cheap to worry about. (I got a Complete Works of Shakespeare for $2.) I haven’t kept track of how much the books I’ve read on the Kindle would have cost me as printed books, but a wild guess is that I’ve saved about $3 on average. For 32 books, that means I’ve gotten almost $100 of my $350 back by now.

But that’s the wrong way to look at it, because I’m reading and buying different books than before. Factoring in the books I haven’t bought at all — the good-intentions books that would have sat unread on my shelf or the ones that I have ended up getting out of the library rather than buying — I believe that my total-cost-of-books has dropped quite a bit more than $100. So for me the economics seems to be working out. But your mileage may vary.

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I’ve found that the Kindle is a more private way to read in public. The guy sitting there with his Kindle might be reading anything from the Bible to Terrorism for Dummies or Compensating For Your Small Penis. So I may finally get around to reading Lolita without worrying that the other people at Starbucks will think I’m a pedophile.

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It’s a mortal sin to use a bookstore as a showroom then order an e-book from Amazon. Unless the showroom is Barnes and Noble.

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Slate suggests strategies for the Kindle’s competitors.

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If you just hate the whole idea of a Kindle and want someone to agree with you, the New Yorker’s Nicholas Baker is your guy.

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The Blue Dog Coalition of right-leaning Democratic congresspeople receives more than half of its contributions from the health care industry. Coincidentally, these are the representatives most likely to drag their feet on heath-care reform. As Will Rogers once observed: “We have the best Congress money can buy.“

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Conservatives wonder why people think they’re racists. Maybe because of stuff like this: “Republicans are struggling right now to find the great white hope,” Republican Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins told a town hall meeting in Kansas this week.

The phrase great white hope goes back to the early 1900s, when Jack Johnson was the first black heavyweight boxing champion. The “great white hope” was whatever boxer might reclaim the title for the white race. So now Republicans need a great white hope to reclaim the White House from the first black president.

Jenkins denies that’s what she meant, but take her at her word for a second: How ignorant do you need to be not to grasp the implications? Are Republicans scraping that close to the bottom of the barrel when they pick candidates for Congress?

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Panelists for the Onion News Network discuss the recently abandoned practice of putting suspected terrorists in an endless labyrinth with a minotaur. Was it torture? By eliminating the practice, has the Obama administration tied the hands and hooves of our interrogators?

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In a sensible corporate system, investors would hold a CEO accountable if he outraged a significant number of the customers for no good reason. Well, some Whole Foods investors are acting sensibly.

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Dancing With the Stars has put disgraced House leader Tom DeLay back in the spotlight, so of course we’re asking his opinion about everything again. Misbehaving right-wingers at town hall meetings? Hey, the other side has done worse:

When I did my town hall meetings, I’ll never forget one back in the ’80s — on health care, by the way. They brought in quadriplegics on gurneys and dumped them on the floor in front of my podium.

Funny, nobody else remembers that. Seems like it would stick in people’s minds.

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In June I told you about a minister praying for Obama to die. Here’s another one. You know, I doubt there are many churches much more liberal than mine, and we said a lot of unkind things about Bush over the years. But I never heard of anybody praying for him to die. I never met a liberal who thought God would welcome such a prayer, much less answer it.

That’s the single thing that most amazes and appalls me about right-wing religion: Their God is no better than they are. They might as well be worshiping Zeus or Mars.

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You’d expect the people who study visualization methods to have a really kick-ass way to visualize their subject matter. They do. Move your mouse around and watch for the pop-ups.

In this week’s Sift:

• Yes, They Did Corrupt the Justice Department. The Judiciary Committee files show that we weren’t just making a bogeyman out of Karl Rove.
• Should You Boycott Whole Foods? Probably not — no matter what their CEO just said. But you might want to re-examine why you shop there to begin with.
• Healthcare is About Real People. So much of the debate about healthcare is in some fantasy realm: death panels, what might be happening in other countries, and so on. The best thing liberals can do is get real people to tell their stories.
• Short Notes. Heckuvajob Brownie brings his heckuva powers to a new job. Joan Baez dialogs with picketers. Rick Perlstein assures us that right-wingers were always crazy. The townhall protesters are fodder for Jon Stewart. And the oil industry plans a new astroturf campaign.

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Before I get into the details, I have to say that I’m of two minds about boycotts. In the ideal boycott, you temporarily stop doing business with an organization until they change some particular practice. The classic example is the Montgomery Bus Boycott that ended the segregation of city buses.

But a boycott is on shakier ground when you’re trying to punish somebody for their personal political beliefs rather than what their organization does. The worst example in recent years was the campaign to get radio stations not to play songs by the Dixie Chicks after one of them told an English audience that she was ashamed of President Bush.

In general, I dislike any step down the road towards apartheid between liberals and conservatives. So, for example, I don’t respond to the anti-abortion activities of Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, because I don’t have to agree with you to eat your pizza.

So what did Whole Foods do to arouse the ire of would-be boycotters? Nothing directly, but CEO John Mackey, wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal against healthcare reform. Wait, that’s unfair: He’s only against the kind of reform that keeps sick people out of bankruptcy. But he’s for the kind of reform that frees health insurance companies from all oversight. So he wants no state regulation, no federal mandates about coverage, and so on. (I explained last week why this is a bad idea.) This point caps it off:

Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care — to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?

It’s obvious to Mackey that no one has a right to eat or to come in out of the rain, so of course sick people no right to treatment. But he does show compassion for those without health insurance — he suggests they be covered by charity. (A similar turn of mind led Scrooge to recommend prisons and workhouses as a solution to the poverty problem.)

Mackey’s editorial is no worse than what a lot of conservatives say, but it was a thumb-in-the-eye to Whole Foods’ liberal customers. Whole Foods was overwhelmed by callers (512-477-4455) and by protesting commenters on its website — many of whose comments got removed.

But should we boycott Whole Foods, as some are proposing? As an occasional but not regular Whole Foods shopper, I say no, because there’s no goal. I don’t see what Whole Foods can do to surrender, so boycotters are mainly just venting.

On the other hand, you might re-examine why you shop at Whole Foods in the first place. If you like their food, don’t give it up because Mackey disagrees with you about healthcare. But if you shop at Whole Foods to make the world a better place — you’re not. Just give that idea up. Whole Foods is anti-union, uses harsh tactics against its competitors, and is a major force for corporate rather than local organic farming. Because they charge high prices and only locate in upscale neighborhoods, they point to a future where the rich eat healthy food while the poor consume whatever crap agribusiness wants to produce. You’d do about as much good — and pay less — if you bought organic food at WalMart.

The Texas Observer, in an article that was widely quoted, but which I can’t find on its website, summed it up:

People shop at Whole Foods not just because it offers organic produce and natural foods, but because it claims to run its business in a way that demonstrates a genuine concern for the community, the environment and the ‘whole planet,’ in the words of its motto. In reality, Whole Foods has gone on a corporate feeding frenzy in recent years, swallowing rival retailers across the country. … The expansion is driven by a simple and lucrative business strategy: high prices and low wages.

(It’s only fair to point out that another Texas Observer writer likes Whole Foods.) If you want your grocery dollars to improve the world, find a nearby farmers’ market or food co-op instead. But keep in mind that green shopping is no substitute for regulation. As Andrew Szasz puts it:

Surveys show that Americans care about the environment, water pollution, and air quality, but there’s a disconnect. Instead of engaging in political action, people go shopping and think they’ve solved the problem. That needs to change.

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Another boycott-like action: Since the inauguration, Glenn Beck has been working hard to stir up an misinformed mob. But when Beck said that Obama was a “racist” who had “a deep-seated hatred for white people” that was the final straw for Color of Change, which started pressuring Beck’s advertisers.

The campaign is working:

In what is shaping up to be one of the more effective boycott campaigns in years, advertisers are abandoning the “Glenn Beck” show on Fox News following the host’s incendiary comments

Advertisers like Procter & Gamble and Geico. A spokesperson for Sargento Cheese said:

We market our products to people regardless of their political affiliations. Yet we do not want to be associated with hateful speech used by either liberal or conservative television hosts.

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The healthcare debate is a great example of Stephen Colbert’s observation that “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” Conservatives do well as long as the debate is about bizarre fantasies like Sarah Palin’s “death panels“. Conversely, the most persuasive liberal argument is to get real people telling their stories.

So this week, rather than analyze the issue myself, I’m mainly going to link to people telling their own stories in their own words. Basically, the stories fall into two categories: horror stories from the American health care system, and stories that contradict the crazy conservative inventions about what happens in countries with “socialized medicine”.

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The most hilarious fantasy-versus-reality story is Investor Business Daily’s editorial against Obama’s healthcare plan, which (until the world exploded in laughter) contained this paragraph:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Lost in their paranoid fantasy of Obama killing off the cripples, IBD overlooked the well-known fact that Stephen Hawking is British. Hawking felt obligated to comment:

I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.

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The evils of the British NHS are a staple of Republican attacks — even though no Democratic proposal is based on or resembles the NHS. Even so, if the NHS were so bad, you’d think that trashing it would be good politics in the UK.

Apparently not. When Daniel Hannan, a Conservative Party member of the European Parliament, went on a series of American TV shows to criticize the NHS, the rest of the Conservative Party ran for cover. Conservative leader David Cameron described Hannan’s views as “eccentric” and told BBC News: “The Conservative Party stands four square behind the NHS.”

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TPM reader JR tells a story of his/her daughter getting better treatment in Scotland that she got in the US.

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An American doctor currently living in Germany tells how that country’s system works:

People here freely change jobs, careers, and locations without any regard for health insurance, and they are free of the fear of going bankrupt or losing their homes or life’s savings if they were to get seriously ill

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Loudmouth Liberal on DailyKos tells about having a baby with American health insurance:

This week, Baby Liberal turned one. It goes without saying that Mr. Liberal and I think our son is absolutely perfect. What he is NOT, however, is priceless.

On the day he arrived, my little darling was worth $56,826.50. By the time we left the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) eight days later, he was worth an additional $21,651.50. Having already met the $6,000.00 maximum out-of-pocket deductible with my prenatal care, my precious bundle of joy had a pricetag of $84,478.00 before we’d purchased the first pack of diapers.

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DailyKos’ Jerome a Paris described what happened five years ago, when his four-year-old son was diagnosed with a brain tumor in France.

world class treatment was provided immediately, not subject to any “death panel” of any kind, and at no cost to us. In this case, treatment was provided in a public hospital, but if the best solution had been in a private clinic (or even, in some cases, if the only solution was to ship my son to a foreign specialist, something which happens in rare instances), then my son would have been taken there at no cost to us, everything been covered by the “Sécu”

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A TPM reader recently diagnosed with breast cancer in France tells about the closest thing she has seen to a “death panel”:

It makes a decision about a patient’s health that does not depend upon considerations like age, income, pre-existing conditions or lifestyle. The council has only one question to answer: does the patient have an illness (or trauma) that requires long term treatment? If the answer to that question is yes, the person is immediately covered at 100 percent for the duration of the illness.

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Finally, there’s Remote Area Medical Group, which was founded to bring medical care to poor people in third world countries. Now they do 65% of their work in the United States. CBS covered the long line of people waiting to get free care at an RAM event in the L.A. Forum. Joan Walsh comments:

It’s a wonderful example of American volunteerism and compassion; it also represents a complete breakdown in our values of fairness and equal rights.

The British, French, or Germans would be ashamed to see their countrymen forced to use a medical service designed for the world’s most backward places. Are we?

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A commenter on a Whole Foods forum gives a long but hilarious response to the point that the government can’t do anything right.

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Historian Rick Perlstein faces the question of whether right-wing crazies are crazier now than they have been in decades past. The answer is no, they’re very similar, but today’s media covers them differently.

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The astroturf campaign to derail healthcare reform is going so well that the oil industry is planning to run one against climate change.

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The town-hall craziness is bringing out the best in Jon Stewart. Check this and this.

In this week’s Sift:

• The Healthcare Debate Takes a Turn for the Worse. Before we can even get into a discussion of the legitimate issues in healthcare, we have to beat back the nonsense. And no, we’re actually not proposing to kill off all the old people — no matter how much money it would save.
• Meanwhile, in Iran. The Iranian regime’s show trials are reminding us what torture is really good at: extracting false confessions.
• Short Notes. Tim Geithner can’t sell his house. Louisiana cheapens its diplomas. William Shatner performs Sarah Palin’s poetic masterpiece. Most white Southerners aren’t convinced that Obama was born in American. Michelle Malkin blames unemployment insurance for unemployment. Coalition casualties in Afghanistan skyrocket. And more.

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The most frustrating thing about the healthcare debate is the way that it hinges on nonsense. In an ideal democracy, the opposition to Obama’s proposals would be principled and fact-based. We’d be talking about various ways of designing the program, what they would all do, whether that’s what we want, and so on.

Instead, the opposition is taking sections of the proposed House bill, making up bizarre and scary scenarios vaguely related to the subjects of those sections, and dishonestly telling people that’s what the proposal would do. So, for example, President Obama had to respond to this comment at his AARP town-hall meeting:

I have been told there is a clause in there that everyone that’s Medicare age will be visited and told to decide how they wish to die. This bothers me greatly, and I’d like for you to promise me that this is not in this bill.

It’s not in the bill, it’s never been in the bill, and no Democrat in the adminstration or Congress has ever put forward such an idea. So you have to wonder how this strange notion got into the head of Obama’s elderly questioner.

Maybe she’s been listening to people like Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, who has been talking about “seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.” Or like House Minority Leader John Boehner, who said that Section 1233 of the Democratic proposal “may place seniors in situations where they feel pressured to sign end of life directives they would not otherwise sign. This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law.” Or maybe she got a misleading chain email like the one ObamaGrandma refutes point-by-point.

It sounds very impressive when Boehner references a numbered section of the bill, like he really must have the goods. Unless you know what Section 1233 actually says: If a Medicare patient wants to have a conversation with his or her doctor about end-of-life care, so that s/he will understand the options and can make sure that the doctor understands what the patient wants and doesn’t want — Section 1233 says Medicare will cover that office visit.

That’s it. That’s all it says. There’s no mandate, no requirement, no government official visiting your home. No euthanasia. No seniors being put to death by their government. It just says: If you want to have that conversation, if you want to tell your doctor that you don’t want to spend years living as a vegetable like Terry Schiavo, Medicare will pay for the doctor’s time while he listens to you.

That, unfortunately, is typical of the debate we’re having.

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Even some well-intended parts of our national conversation are based on a misunderstanding of what insurance is and what it’s for.

Let’s review some history: Insurance as we know it started in the 1600s in a London coffeehouse called Lloyd’s, where sea captains liked to hang out between voyages. In those days long voyages — to the Americas, to the South Seas, and so on — were all-or-nothing propositions. If a ship made it there and back with its cargo, the profit was huge. Otherwise it was a total loss. (That’s where we get the phrase waiting for your ship to come in.)

Few people — particularly not captains trying to make the jump to ship-owner — were rich enough that they could afford to lose a whole ship, so instead they traded interests in each other’s voyages. In today’s terms, they were diversifying their investments. When a captain planned a trip, he’d stick an announcement to the wall at Lloyds, telling where he wanted to go and how much money he needed to raise — and leaving space at the bottom where others could write their names and how much of the voyage they wanted to finance. (That’s where we get the term underwriters. They literally wrote under the announcement.) So began the legendary insurance house Lloyds of London.

Here’s why I told you that story: The original purpose of insurance is to defend against catastrophic loss, the kind that otherwise would bankrupt you. In more recent times we’ve confused the issue by insuring against all sorts of lesser losses, like buying service contracts on gadgets we could easily replace or do without. Mostly we do this for superstitious reasons (so that the gadget won’t break), and as a result many of us have lost track of what insurance is really for.

A lot of health insurance — especially individual policies — depends on that confusion: It insures people against everything but a catastrophic loss. It’s like insuring your ship against everything other than sinking. If your insurance has an annual or lifetime cap, for example, it misses the point. A cap means that you’re insured unless you need very expensive treatment. If you do, you’re on your own; you’ll probably have to declare bankruptcy. If your health insurance excludes some potentially expensive pre-existing condition like cancer or diabetes, it misses the point. You’re insured against everything but the thing you actually need to worry about.

We throw around a lot of numbers about the uninsured: 45 million people, 50 million, whatever. And whenever we hear those numbers, the rest of us silently congratulate ourselves for having health insurance. But some of that self-congratulation is misplaced, because we don’t really have health insurance; we still face the risk of going bankrupt if we get very sick. According to the American Journal of Medicine, 62% of American bankruptcies have medical causes. “Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance.”

In the other wealthy countries — in Japan, Canada, France, and so on — do you know how many people are at risk of going bankrupt from medical bills? Zero. That’s what real health insurance means, and that’s what we’re now trying to bring to America.

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I’m tempted to give the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle a pass, because she makes a reasonable argument against government-sponsored healthcare, one that doesn’t depend on making stuff up. She claims that government won’t have as much incentive to produce innovative new treatments as profit-making industry does.

Anybody who makes that argument, though, needs to explain the defense industry. Somehow we keep coming up with all these whiz-bang new weapons systems, in spite of the fact that the government is the only customer.

McArdle specifically talks about breast cancer treatments, which brings responses from FireDogLake’s breast-cancer survivors Jane Hamsher and Marcy Wheeler. Jane points out that in the same study that Republicans are using to denigrate Britain’s breast-cancer survival rate, the country with the best rate is … [wait for it] Cuba.

Marcy goes into a little more detail about the overtreatment/undertreatment question in her case:

You see, I’m no doctor. But based on my fairly sophisticated understanding of the breast cancer diagnosis I had, I understand that instead of the treatment I had here in the US–6 rounds of chemo plus Neulasta, surgery*, radiation, then five years of Tamoxifen–the standard of care in Europe would have been just the Tamoxifen. Or, by my rough calculations, well over $72,000 [less] in costs.

And, at least according to the limited studies they’ve done on women with breast cancer at my age, the outcomes are exactly the same.

[*Based on my own fairly sophisticated understanding of my wife’s breast cancer diagnosis of 1996, I’m guessing Wheeler means only Tamoxifen after surgery. I can’t believe the Europeans would leave the tumor in there, or get equivalent results if they did. The $72,000 estimate would still make sense. I heard another chemo patient refer to her treatment — which makes hair fall out and then come back frizzy — as a “$100,000 permanent”.]

Marcy has no complaints about her husband’s insurance, which paid for it all. But in the long run, she wonders whether less treatment might be better:

One of the chemos I had leads to heart problems and has basically turned the veins in my arms into solid tubes. The radiation–particularly in someone with my apparent genetic background–can lead to new cancers. And those known risks are basically short term risks–because so few women are diagnosed as young as I was, they don’t know what happens 30 years after this stuff, because most women are diagnosed with just 20 years left in a normal life span. Who knows? Maybe my husband’s company paid $72,000 extra for treatments that will eventually kill me.

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I’ve made this point before, but we have to keep repeating it whenever the other side tries to confuse the real issues: People in other countries spend much less on health care, and yet they live longer. Whenever the Right tells some horror story about waiting for treatment in Canada or Britain or someplace, repeat this phrase: But they live longer. If their healthcare is so terrible, how do they live longer than we do?

When asked by a Canadian viewer, Bill O’Reilly had an answer to that question: “Well, that’s to be expected Peter, because we have ten times as many people as you do.” Yeah, I know, it doesn’t make any sense. Were you expecting it to? (This wasn’t the kind of brain glitch anybody can have on live TV. O’Reilly was responding to a written comment.)

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Jon Stewart takes on the healthcare scare tactics. And this earlier Stewart rant is pretty good too. In response to John Boehner saying: “If you like going to the DMV and think they do a great job or you like going to the post office and think it’s the most efficient thing you’ve run into to then you’ll love the government run health care system.” Stewart says:

If you like the “military” protecting the “country” or “doctors” helping “veterans” you’ll love this new government plan.

By the way, why are you ragging on the post office? For forty-four cents, someone comes to your house, picks up some piece of crap you wrote, and takes it to Wyoming on a plane!

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Here’s a Canadian doctor’s analysis of what Americans should learn from the Canadian healthcare system.

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Newsweek’s Jon Alter makes the tongue-in-cheek case for why we don’t need healthcare reform.

I like the “lifetime limits” that many policies have today. Missed the fine print on that one, did you? It means that after you exceed a certain amount of reimbursement, you don’t get anything more from the insurance company. That’s fair.

Speaking of fair, it seems fair to me that cost-cutting bureaucrats at the insurance companies—not doctors—decide what’s reimbursable. After all, the insurance companies know best.

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Tina Dupuy compares healthcare to a private industry that government took over in the 19th century: fire-fighting. Imagine if we were having that debate today, and folks like Senator DeMint were saying: “Do you want a government bureaucrat between you and the safety of your home?

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The Iranian government is giving the world a demonstration of what
torture is good for: You can make people say whatever you want.

Currently, Iran is having show trials where repentant opponents of the government confess their sins. Juan Cole quotes from an account of a news conference by two former dissidents, Mohammad Ali Abtahi and Mohammad Atrianfar. Both now completely support the government’s claim that there was no fraud in the recent presidential election.

Asked if his current position was under the effect of his imprisonment, Abtahi said the situation in the prison helped him to reach a conclusion about the recent incidents. … Atrianfar said that the situation in the prison helped him to be courageous enough to confess to his mistakes. He said that many political activists who are being tried today have the same idea, but it may take time before they confess to the same things.

Time and pain, I imagine.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the United States could denounce this kind of thing without making the whole world laugh? Iran tortured people to say that their elections were fair; we tortured people to say that Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda. Maybe there’s a difference there somewhere, but wouldn’t you rather be able to say “They torture and we don’t”? Maybe, now that Bush is out of office, we don’t torture any more. I hope that’s true.

Fortunately, in spite of all the repression, the Iranian people are not giving up. According to a posting on an Iranian email list (quoted by Cole) 150-200,000 people converged on the grave of recent martyr Neda Agha Soltan and chanted anti-government slogans. I don’t know of any way to verify accounts like this — much less the crowd estimate — but it does seem to indicate that this isn’t over.

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The Daily Show’s John Oliver investigates the plight of an American homeowner who took a job in a new city but (given the current real estate market) can’t sell his old house: Federal Reserve Chairman Timothy Geithner.

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I don’t know exactly what to do to improve American education, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t it: Louisiana’s Gov. Bobby Jindal just signed legislation creating a second kind of high school diploma with lower standards.

Under the new law, students 15 and older could leave the standard curriculum and instead take a “career track” if they have parental approval. They would face easier requirements for graduation and a curriculum less geared toward college preparation. It would also allow eighth graders to advance to ninth grade without passing the state’s high-stakes standardized test.

The idea, I guess, is to do something about Louisiana’s low high-school graduation rate. (57.5% in 2006, 5th lowest. The national average is 68.6%.) But it seems like they’re defining the problem away rather than solving it. So much for “challenging the soft bigotry of low expectations“.

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Most observers thought it was incoherent, but they just don’t get poetry — that was Conan O’Brien’s reaction to Sarah Palin’s good-bye speech. To give the rest of us a chance to appreciate Sarah’s poetic brilliance, Conan arranged a dramatic reading of her speech by William Shatner.

Remember last summer when John McCain described his running mate as “the most popular governor in the country“? Well, that was then, this is now: 46.8% positive, 47.5% negative.

And in other Palin news, spokeswoman Meg Stapleton says there’s no truth to the rumor that Sarah and Todd are splitting up. For what’s its worth, the leading spreader of that rumor only backed off as far as to say that “I just talked to my source again and learned the following. Sarah and Todd will not be making their break up official for some time.” (Don’t you love anonymous sources?) He added (in response to a denunciation by Stapleton, apparently): “I am going to wear the title of ‘so-called journalist’ with pride.”

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The Episcopal Church isn’t backing down on gay bishops.

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Creationism was just the beginning. Now fundamentalists want to rewrite how we teach American history.

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Conservative blogger Michele Malkin knows what really causes unemployment: People’s unwillingness to go out and find a job.

If you keep extending these ‘temporary’ unemployment benefits, you’re just going to extend joblessness even more. … People will just delay getting a job until the three weeks before the benefits run out.

And notice where she said this: As a panelist on ABC’s “This Week”. How often do liberal bloggers make the jump to be panelists on Sunday talk shows? Approximately never.

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Where does this recession rank among post-WW2 recessions? Do you really need to ask?

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A few weeks ago I was telling you about the Wolfram Alpha sort-of-a search engine.
InfoWorld’s Neil McAllister wonders how Wolfram’s unusual copyright claims for Alpha’s output will change our legal relationship to software.

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The number of coalition troops who died in Afghanistan in July: 75. The most to die in any other month is only 46. Nine more have died in the first two days of August.

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You know those crazy people who think — in spite of all available evidence — that President Obama wasn’t really born in America? They’re close to a majority in the South. 23% of Southerners definitely say he wasn’t, while another 30% aren’t sure. This compares to 4% no and 3% not sure in the Northeast. Dave Wiegel does some unofficial number-crunching and concludes that as many as 70% of white Southerners either don’t believe or aren’t sure whether Obama is a native-born American.

CNN’s Lou Dobbs claims not to be a “birther” himself, but he continues to fan this made-up controversy on his show. Media Matters has made an anti-Dobbs ad, which they want to run on Dobbs show itself. That’s got to be a media-criticism first.

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It’s flu season in the southern hemisphere. The doomsday scenario is that the swine flu, which wasn’t all that deadly at the end of our flu season, may mutate down there and then come back this winter like the Grim Reaper. That’s the pattern of the 1918 Great Influenza. But reports from Argentina indicate that so far that isn’t happening.

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Apparently the O’Reilly-Olbermann feud is over. But it wasn’t settled by Bill and Keith, by their staffs, or for any journalistic reason. This was a corporate negotiation between GE and News Corp, which own the respective networks. So much for the idea that the corporate types don’t interfere with the news networks.

In this week’s Sift:

• Inspector Generals’ Report on Warrantless Wiretapping. It’s no substitute for a real investigation, but it makes the truth a little harder to deny: The Bush administration constructed a process to give them the answers they had already decided on.
• Browser Wars to Become Operating System Wars. Google’s Chrome Browser is going to turn into an OS and challenge Windows. And Wolfram Alpha is interesting once it figures you out.
• Why I’m Afraid of Sarah Palin. Conservatives say the liberal reaction to Palin is all about fear. It is, but maybe not the way they think.
• Short Notes. A first-person healthcare saga. Nate Silver’s mathematical model of corruption. John Ensign’s scandal keeps getting worse. Six percent of scientists are Republicans. (Why so many?) And the Westboro Baptist Church uploads a music video to tell us that Hank Moody was right: God hates us all.

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The 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) instructed the inspector generals of the various intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies to report on what we’re now calling the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP) — warrantless wiretapping, in other words.

The unclassified version of the report came out Friday. It’s short (38 pages) and readable, but contains little that we didn’t already know. Like a whole series of the reports that have come out over the years on the Bush administration’s illegal activities, it’s main virtue is as an authoritative source. Bush supporters can more easily wave off the same information when it appears in the New York Times or in personal accounts like Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency, which I reviewed here.

As Glenn Greenwald points out, the report is no substitute for a real investigation, because the inspector generals had no power to compel anyone’s testimony (though they did get to look at a lot of classified documents). Key people like John Yoo or Dick Cheney just didn’t bother to answer questions.

Still, seeing the whole process laid out in one place is striking. I am reminded of what the Downing Street Memo said about the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq: “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”. It’s the same here: The authorization process for the PSP was whatever was necessary to get it authorized. The threat assessments, the legal opinions — their purpose was not to guide policy, but to justify decisions already made.

Every 45 days the PSP came up for re-authorization. CIA analysts would compose the scariest possible assessment of the terrorist threat, without knowing that it was being used to justify that an extraordinary spying program was “reasonable”. (That’s because the Fourth Amendment protects us against “unreasonable searches”.) If higher-up folks didn’t think the justification was sufficient, the threat assessment was sent back so that the analysts could make it scarier.

The legality of the program was verified like this: Of all the lawyers in Justice Department, only John Yoo and Attorney General John Ashcroft knew about the PSP. Yoo wrote an opinion that the program was legal, and every 45 days Ashcroft signed off on it. (“[C]urrent and former DOJ officials told us that this certification added value by giving the program a sense of legitimacy.”)

No one was checking Yoo’s work, and it was shoddy. A legitimate legal memo discusses how the recommended action deals with difficult parts of the law and handles difficult precedents. Yoo just ignored them.

Glenn Greenwald summarizes:

These were not legal opinions in any sense of the word. What happened, instead, is clear: Cheney and Addington knew that Yoo was a hardened ideologue who would authorize anything they wanted. So they purposely chose only him — a low-level Assistant Attorney General — to be “read into” the program, and then used his memos to give themselves legal cover.

As soon as Yoo left the Justice Department, his replacement (Patrick
Philbin) got his boss (Jack Goldsmith) and his boss’ boss (James Comey)
read into the program, and they convinced Ashcroft that there was no
legal basis for parts of the PSP. Ashcroft started refusing to sign,
and ultimately Bush himself had to vouch for the legality of the program (based on his deep understanding of constitutional law, I assume.) If you want to understand the Unitary Executive Theory in a nutshell, it comes down to one memo written by Alberto Gonzales, who was then White House Counsel. Deputy AG Comey wrote a memo about his continuing inability to find any legal basis for parts of the PSP. Gonzales wrote back:

Your memorandum appears to have been based on a misunderstanding of the President’s expectations regarding the conduct of the Department of Justice. While the President was, and remains, interested in any thoughts the Department of Justice may have on alternative ways to achieve effectively the goals of the activities authorized by the Presidential Authorization of March 11, 2004, the President has addressed definitively for the Executive Branch in the Presidential Authorization the interpretation of the law.

In other words: the President has spoken, so the Justice Department should stop worrying about justice. Like everyone else in the Executive Branch, the Justice Department is just an extension of the President’s will.

The other thing the report verifies is that the PSP includes more than what was revealed in the New York Times. How much more? The report doesn’t say. It’s still classified.

The other thing the report doesn’t say is whether the nation gained anything in exchange for abandoning the rule of law. The IGs asked whoever would talk to them in the CIA, NSA, and FBI. The answers were weak. Nobody would come out and say we got nothing, but at the same time “Most [intelligence community] officials interviewed by the PSP IG Group had difficulty citing specific instances where PSP reporting had directly contributed to counterterrorism successes.”

It goes without saying that the Obama administration is not covering itself with glory either. Laws have been blatantly broken, and there is no effort to bring the malefactors to justice. In effect, Obama is ratifying Richard Nixon’s old idea that “when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.“

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Attorney General Eric Holder is hinting at prosecutions for torture, but Glenn is doubtful. The worrisome part of the Newsweek article about Holder’s thinking is:

There were startling indications that some interrogators had gone far beyond what had been authorized in the legal opinions issued by the Justice Department, which were themselves controversial.

Glenn’s concern is that Holder will focus on the little fish, as in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Sure, low-level CIA interrogators who exceeded their instructions might have committed crimes. But the real problem was that their instructions were criminal. Everything we know points to the conclusion that the Justice Department legal opinions (also written by John Yoo) were written in bad faith; the decisions had already been made and Yoo was instructed to justify them. It was a criminal conspiracy.

An analogy might help. Suppose I’m part of an agency that the president instructs to rob banks — after he orders a lawyer to tell him he has that power. In the course of robbing a bank, I hit a security guard, which is not explicitly in my instructions. Prosecuting me for assault — and letting the whole bank-robbing thing go — won’t do much to re-establish the rule of law.

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Because I use a Mac, I haven’t had the chance yet to play with Google’s Chrome browser, which has generally gotten good reviews. (Including this promising note about its security. There may be privacy issues, though.) Well, now Google is upping the ante, and things could get interesting: Chrome is going to be the basis of a new operating system that will compete with Microsoft’s Windows.

The inner workings of ChromeOS will be Linux while the user interface will be Chrome. They’re focusing on the cheap ($250-$500) netbook computers, which are based on the cloud computing model. (Netbooks can be cheap because their users do most of their storage and processing on the internet, not locally. I don’t use a netbook, but the way I create the Sift is a simple example of cloud computing: I write the text on the Google Docs word processor — I tried Zoho once, and it’s just as good — then publish it using Google’s Blogger software and email it out using GMail. If my personal hard drive crashed, the Sift wouldn’t be affected in the least, because it lives on servers on the internet.)

So far, Chrome has not threatened the dominance of Internet Explorer. But as an OS, Chrome could exploit a market niche where Google already has an advantage over Microsoft, which has been at best ambivalent about cloud computing. If trends break just the right way for Google, Windows could become mainly a business operating system and Chrome could grab the downscale computer-as-home-appliance market.

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Slate’s Fahrad Manjoo is pessimistic about the Chrome OS, while Wired’s Priya Ganapati is just skeptical.

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One quirky but interesting competitor to Google’s search engine is Wolfram Alpha. It gets stumped by a lot of queries that Google handles easily, but when it knows what you mean, it returns answers, not references. “Capital of Illinois” netted me the name (Springfield), population, position on a map, current time and weather, and so on. “Distance to Mars” produced an up-to-the-minute estimate (171.7 million miles). Given “sunset chicago august 1, 2009” it came back with 8:10 p.m.

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Sarah Palin’s resignation has turned into the political junky’s version of Michael Jackson’s death. It’s incredibly easy to get so drawn into the details of the soap opera that you forget why you started watching it in the first place. As in: Did you hear what Levi said about a reality show? (Or maybe this is the reality show.) What’s up with being interviewed in hip-waders? (An Evening Sun blogger speculates that’s all she has left after the RNC reclaimed the $150,000 worth of clothes it bought her for the fall campaign.) All that stuff about Alaska spending “millions” on “frivolous” ethics complaints turned out to be false. (It’s more like a few hundred thousand, and if the complaints are all frivolous, why did she reimburse the state $8000 of travel expenses?) Is she really claiming a per diem to live in her own home? And so on.

When I take a step back, though, the more interesting question is: Why do we care? Why is Sarah Palin the bright, shiny object that otherwise thoughtful people can’t stop looking at?

The knee-jerk answer (because she’s so good-looking) doesn’t hold up. We’re not talking Anna Kournikova here. Until recently, a female politician could only achieve high office late in her career, so Palin looks great within her peer group of women like 76-year-old Dianne Feinstein or 69-year-old Nancy Pelosi. But put Palin on any national stage other than politics and she doesn’t stand out. Let CNN’s Campbell Brown interview her, for example, and we’ll see who’s attractive (and smart and articulate).

So why, then? Palin-pushing conservatives claim it’s because liberals are afraid of her authenticity. She’s the real deal, they say, like Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich were in the 80s and 90s. But that doesn’t explain why she generates so much hostility among non-liberals like Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan: “In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. … She wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough.” Or Cathy Young: “While not an intellectual, [Reagan] was a man of ideas. Palin is not known to harbor those.”

I’ll agree with Bill Kristol this far: It is fear. I do feel a rising sense of panic when I watch Palin, similar to what I felt watching Bush run against McCain in the 2000 primaries. But (in both cases) I don’t think it has anything to do with conservative authenticity exposing my liberal false consciousness.

I think I can explain my Palin anxiety in a way that Republicans might recognize from their own experience. (They can fill in the corresponding Democrats themselves.) Like most Americans of left or right, I hold two contradictory visions of American politics. On my happy days, I picture intelligent people of good will who just disagree about how the world works. So in 2008, when Republicans talked about nominating McCain or Romney or even Huckabee, I thought: “Well, I wouldn’t vote for them, but I get it.” I could understand how somebody with a different worldview might want one of them to be president.

On my unhappy days, I fear that the other side suffers from a dangerous lunacy. Nothing but gibberish comes out of their mouths, and the idea of engaging them in rational discussion seems pointless, even foolish. I’d just be humoring their delusions. In 2000, for example, the Republicans had a choice between a charming war hero and a spoiled rich kid who had failed at everything he had ever attempted (only to be bailed out by his family connections so that he could fail again). They picked the rich kid, and what rational thing could I possibly say about that? I started to panic.

That’s how I feel when I see folks getting excited about the prospect of Palin running for president. I start to worry that my unhappy, paranoid side might be right. Maybe I’m living in an insane asylum. Maybe crazy people are the dominant voting demographic.

It’s not that I think she’s crazy; it’s the idea of her as a national leader that is crazy. It’s not her incoherent rambling or her constant misrepresentation of established facts or her family issues or anything else people attack her for. It’s: Why are we having this discussion at all? As with George W. Bush in 2000, if I start with a blank sheet of paper and try to imagine reasons why a sane person would want her to be president, the page stays blank. It’s not her lack of experience, it’s her lack of … everything.

She arrests my attention because there’s a vicious cycle running in my head: This can’t be happening. It is. This can’t be happening. It is. No, wait, if we just explained things more clearly, public sanity would re-assert itself. It won’t. No, wait.

BTW, I think my introspection — to the extent that it applies to liberals in general — points out a mistake we’re making in arguing about Palin. Our this-can’t-be-happening panic makes us want to explain to her supporters why they’re wrong. But that just feeds our energy into her persecution narrative: Those elite educated liberals don’t get it, and so on.

As a result, Palin supporters never have to make a positive case for her. The right question: “Why, of all the 300 million people who live in America, should this one be our leader?” never gets asked, much less answered.

We need to make them explain more clearly. Don’t attack; just be curious and keep asking questions.

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Other interesting takes on Palin: Dahlia Lithwick, Frank Rich, and Judith Warner. And Scott Bateman’s animation and annotation of her resignation is fun.

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Some people respond to statistics, some people respond to stories. If you had a “Yeah, I know …” reaction to the stats about the uninsured I posted last week, read Progressive Fox’s “How I Lost My Health Insurance at the Hairstylist’s.”

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Last week I blamed special-interest money for the problems we’re having getting a public option into Congress’ healthcare plan. Little did I know that Nate Silver already did a mathematical analysis of this a month ago. His conclusion is that special interest money’s largest effect is to turn moderate Democrats against a public option.

if a mainline Democrat has received $60,000 from insurance PACs over the past six years, his likelihood of supporting the public option is cut roughly in half from 80 percent to 40 percent.

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I was so busy catching up last week that I forgot to mention where I was during my two-week break from the Sift. I was blogging the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Salt Lake City. No, SLC is not sacred to UUs as well as Mormons; the General Assembly moves around. But SLC turns out to be a perfectly wonderful city; I’d happily go back there on vacation.

At General Assembly, I always like to cruise the booths that have snappy buttons and t-shirts. My favorite button, which I probably would have seen a year ago if I lived in California: “Can we vote on your marriage too?” I also liked “God is not a boy’s name.”

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I also forgot to post the funniest video I had found while I was away: Jon Stewart’s reaction to Mark Sanford’s inability to keep quiet. It doesn’t get old.

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Dan Froomkin has landed at Huffington Post. Firing Froomkin was just one more self-inflicted wound as the Washington Post struggles to compete.

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The John Ensign scandal just keeps getting worse. And Josh Marshall asks: “Which is more emasculating? Getting paid a hundred grand by the guy who screwed your wife? Or being a fifty-something United States senator and still needing mom and dad to cut the check to pay off your mistress and her husband?”

Republicans warned us their families would fall apart if gays started getting married. Why didn’t we believe them?

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The Pew Research Center has an interesting statistic buried deep in a recent report: 55% of scientists say they’re Democrats, 32% Independents, and only 6% Republicans. You think maybe this has something to do with Republican efforts to sneak religion into science classes, deny global warming, and censor reports written by government scientists? It’s a theory.

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DailyKos’ leading economic chart-watcher says the economy has started to turn. But Robert Reich makes a good point: “Recovery” is the wrong way to think about it, because that implies we can go back to what we were doing before.

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I know it looks like a parody, but no, they really mean it. Those lovely folks from Westboro Baptist Church (the ones who go around the country reminding us that “God Hates Fags“) have made a music video “God Hates the World” to the tune of “We Are the World”.

Everything I’m reminded of, though, really is a joke. The main character on Showtime’s Californication is the author of a novel called God Hates Us All. And in the intro to the HBO series True Blood (where vampires are a minority group seeking their rights), a roadside sign reads “God Hates Fangs“.

In this week’s Sift:

• Obama’s Cairo Speech: How to Rebuild the Center. The speech was quite deft, if you understood what he was trying to do. Self-centeredly, I read the speech as a vindication of what I was saying in 2004.
• Where’s the Real Media Bias? Nobody to Obama’s left is getting a seat at the pundit table. And it’s not because there’s nobody to Obama’s left.
• Short Notes. Online socialism. A baby fashion convention. If we could rerun 1988 today, Dukakis would win. Same-sex marriage reaches New Hampshire. “Onward Christian Soldiers” isn’t just a metaphor any more. And more.

Back in 2004, I wrote a piece called Terrorist Strategy 101: a quiz, which explained that an extremist’s path to power has two major steps. Everyone knows about Step 2, which is fighting an apocalyptic war against the extremists on the opposite side. But it’s much less well understood that Step 2 only happens after Step 1: Deflate the center.

You see, the greatest threat to any power-seeking extremist is the human tendency to muddle through. All over the world, most people would rather make a living, marry their true love, and raise the next generation than fight an apocalyptic war. If nobody interrupts that process, folks on both sides of just about any divide will support moderates, and the moderates will negotiate peace with each other — maybe not a millennial lion-lying-down-with-lamb peace or even a Disney small-small-world peace, but peace enough for most people to muddle through.

If you’re an extremist, that’s a disaster. Your apocalypse never gets off the ground. But fortunately for you, you have one big ally in Step 1 — the guy you’re planning to fight in Step 2, the would-be commander of the other side in the apocalyptic war. The two of you don’t even have to conspire, because your interests just naturally coincide in a long sequence of attacks and reprisals. You get revenge on the evil bastards for their last attack, and then they get revenge on you for yours, and on and on. Of course you never defeat the extremists of the other side — what would be the point of that at this stage? — but between the two of you, you make normal life impossible. Look at, say, Gaza, or Baghdad in 2006, or many parts of Afghanistan today: There are no jobs, and planning to raise children to adulthood seems even crazier and less likely than winning a jihad. In those places, Step 1 is nearly complete.

Wittingly or unwittingly, the Bush administration played its assigned role in this process. Bush and Bin Laden both did the deflate-the-center dance: You’re either with me or you’re with him. The Other Guy is a conscienceless madman, and his threat justifies us abandoning our consciences and acting like madmen. Either Bin Laden is a demon that only Bush can defeat, or Bush is a demon that only Bin Laden can defeat. And so on until the apocalyptic war really gets rolling.

That’s the situation that President Obama has inherited: The center is deflating, the world polarizing. On both sides, the muddling-through vision of a world where people of all faiths can work and love and raise the next generation in some good-enough peace — it’s been looking more and more like naive wishful thinking. Or it’s been turning millennial: You can work and love and raise the next generation in peace only after we win the apocalyptic war.

I think Obama has as much ego as anybody, but I don’t believe he sees himself as the Great Apocalyptic Commander. He wants to stop this polarization and rebuild the center. But how?

Rebuilding the center is a process of un-spinning and de-propagandizing. It begins with stating facts calmly, respectfully, and in terms that people leaning towards the extremes can still accept if they’re not too far gone. You want to build a substantial mass of things-everybody-knows and things-everybody-knows-that-everybody-knows. That’s what Obama was doing in Cairo on Thursday. (You can read the text or watch the video.) In the middle of the speech he makes the rebuild-the-center case very clearly:

regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations — to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God. These things we share. This is the hope of all humanity.

Here are some of the simple, common-sense points he made:

• In America, Muslims live in peace and freedom, and are protected by the government just as Christians and Jews are. This is a constant subtext of the speech, and starts right at the beginning. Lots of commentators remarked on the “Assalaamu alaykum” in Obama’s first paragraph. Fewer noticed how he frames it: as “a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country.” Elsewhere he says “Islam is a part of America” and notes that the 7 million American Muslims have an average income above the national average. These American Muslims have a tremendous symbolic value: If Muslims can live well in America, non-American Muslims can live well inside the world order that America promotes.
• Islam and American democracy share many principles. Like the Bible, the Quran can be quoted out of context to sound pacifistic or blood-thirsty or anything in between. If you pick bloodthirsty, you can frame the idealistic parts as window-dressing that’s just there to con the unwary. Obama chooses to take the idealism of Islam seriously, as moderate Muslims do. American democracy and Islam, he says, share “principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
• Obama himself knows Islam as a reality, not a caricature. He says explicitly that he is a Christian, but mentions his Muslim ancestors, his childhood in Muslim-majority Indonesia, and the American Muslims he worked with as a community organizer in Chicago. (Specifics are important here; all over the world, Muslims turned to their neighbors at this point and said, “My cousin went to Chicago.”)
• Muslims are civilized. He called attention to Muslim contributions to civilization, like algebra. (Just about any English word that begins with al goes back to the Muslims: algorithm, for example. Even alcohol, which is banned by sharia, gets its English name from the distilling process that Muslims used to make perfumes. The Crusaders brought it back to Europe and invented whiskey.)
• Caricatures of America are just as wrong as caricatures of Islam. Obama presents us as a nation formed in reaction to colonialism and empire; hence our ideals of equality. (Unspoken: Egypt and America were both British colonies.)
• 9-11 really happened. Al Qaeda killed 3,000 innocent people that day. But Obama frames Al Qaeda as the common enemy, not as a taint on all Muslims. He notes that most of the innocent people killed by Al Qaeda have been Muslims. “The sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we will all be safer.”
• If Americans could be safe from further attacks, we would bring our troops home. In both Iraq and Afghanistan “we pursue no bases, and no claim on their territory or resources.”
• The Bush administration over-reacted to 9-11. Bush is not mentioned in the speech. But Obama describes Iraq as “a war of choice” and says that 9-11 “led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals.” While not explicitly confessing that the Bush administration tortured people at Guantanamo, Obama forcefully says he has banned torture and will close Guantanamo.
• The Holocaust really happened. “Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful.” Anti-semitism is real too. America is committed to the existence of Israel, and Israel has sound historical reasons to be hyper about its security.
• Palestinians have gotten a raw deal from history. They deserve something better than refugee camps. “The only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.”
• Violence hasn’t been getting the Palestinians anywhere. Obama contrasts their continuing suffering with the accomplishments of the non-violent civil rights movement in America, in South Africa, and elsewhere. (I’ve believed for years that the Israelis are textbook targets for nonviolent tactics, because they have such a strong self-image as a moral people. Gandhi would have turned Likud inside-out by now.)
• Building Israeli settlements on disputed land makes peace harder to achieve. This is one of those things “everyone knows” that needs to be said out loud.
• The United States and Iran have done bad things to each other. We overthrew their democratically elected government in 1953 and put the tyrannical Shah back in power. They violated our embassy and held our people hostage in 1979.
• A nuclear Iran would be bad for a lot of people, not just the U.S. or Israel. I think this was a subtle reminder to Sunnis that Iran is on the other side of the Sunni/Shia divide. If Iran gets a bomb, don’t the Saudis and Egyptians need one too? Where does that scenario go?
• America wants to support democratization in Muslim countries, but not force them to be just like us. Bin Laden wants all Muslim countries to believe that if the U.S. ever gets done with Iraq, they’re next. Obama wants to assure Muslims this isn’t true. He had to tread carefully here, because Egypt is a dictatorship with some democratic stirrings. Obama didn’t want to spit in his host’s face, but he also didn’t want to give his blessing to the Mubarak government.
• Muslim women can be free without abandoning Islam. This point was widely misunderstood in America because we take the underlying idea for granted. Many moderate Muslims of both genders don’t like the vision of womanhood they see in American media. They want a daughter to be free to get an education and a find career if she wants; they don’t want her pressured to compete with Britney Spears. The two ideas are tangled up in Muslim imaginations in ways most Americans don’t quite grasp.

Conservatives have characterized the speech as self-abasing and weak and even un-American, and the trip as an “apology tour“. For the most part, criticism was based on either not getting or actively denying the goal of rebuilding the center. I thought David Frum did the best job of stating this position:

in Cairo [Obama] exhibited the amazing spectacle of an American president taking an equidistant position between the country he leads and its detractors and enemies. It is as if he saw himself as a judge in some legal dispute, People of the Islamic World v. United States. But the job to which he was elected was not that of impartial judge, but that of leader and champion of the American nation.

Charles Krauthammer put it this way:

The problem is we are in a War on Terror, we are in a struggle against Iranian nukes. We are also in a struggle of philosophy between our way in the West and the more extreme examples of Sharia law. And if you don’t defend them unequivocally and without apology and without moral equivalence, you are conceding defeat in advance.

In other words, Frum and Krauthammer take the Bush/Bin Laden polarization for granted, and feel that it is an American president’s job to uphold the Bush pole, to present anti-Muslim pro-American-empire spin as convincingly as possible. The idea that Bush and Bin Laden are both extremists who abandoned the ideals that most Americans and Muslims share — it doesn’t even enter their minds long enough to be rejected.

Most of the rest of conservative criticism was nit-picking that supported this central point. Much was made, for example, of the fact that the word terrorism doesn’t appear in the Cairo speech. (Fox News falsely implied that Obama avoided the subject of terrorism, not just the word. And Sean Hannity went completely around the bend.) What conservatives don’t recognize and can’t admit is that they broke the word terrorism by misuse. A terrorist was any Muslim the Bush administration didn’t like; the word didn’t apply to anybody else. When Muslims hear the word terrorist now, they assume they’re just hearing anti-Muslim propaganda.

Another you-don’t-get-it criticism is “moral equivalence” charge. Whenever Obama mentions grievances of opposite sides, the Right accuses him of claiming the grievances are equal. He never makes that claim. Most of the time, such a claim wouldn’t even make sense.

But the height of cluelessness comes from Fox News’ Gretchen Carlson:

Was it only me who thought that the release of the audio of Osama bin Laden is just so extremely significant here? Because if you’re trying to reach the radical members of Islam, you haven’t.

Jon Stewart replayed that clip, and then stage whispered the obvious: “He’s not trying to reach the radical members of Islam. Those are the people he’s trying to push aside.” Then he played a clip of Carlson reading figures about America’s unpopularity in the Arab world and asking, “They don’t like us, so why are we wooing them?” To which Stewart replied (slowly, as if talking to a moron): “Because they don’t like us. That’s why you woo.”

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In spite of the bad predictions I made in Question 9, Terrorist Strategy 101 holds up very well after 4 1/2 years. I was surprised to discover that separate copies of it showed up at #2 and #4 when I did a Google search on the term terrorist strategy.

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While touring the pyramids, President Obama noted that an engraved figure with big ears “looks like me”. How long before somebody claims the image as evidence that Obama is the Antichrist?

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I wish our pundits would learn the difference between Muslim and Islamic. It’s not that hard: Something is Islamic if it’s part of the religion of Islam. But it’s Muslim if it’s associated with the human beings who practice Islam. So if a bunch guys from the mosque rob a bank, it’s Muslim crime. It’s not Islamic crime unless bank-robbing is some kind of holy ritual.

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An interesting discussion was started by Matt Yglesias — or maybe by Bill Kristol. In response to North Korea’s latest nuclear tests, Kristol said on Fox News that “targeted air strikes” might be the “wise” choice. And that provoked this observation from Matt: There are no pacifist pundits. If you think that war is never the answer, there’s very little chance your voice will be heard on the major networks or your writings will appear in major newspapers. But Bill Kristol, who thinks that war is always the answer, has no trouble getting major media outlets to provide a soapbox for him. Why is that?

Chris Bowers responded with this observation:

A pacifist is excluded from holding prominent national media positions not because of the invalidity or unpopularity of such a position, but primarily because they clearly do not demonstrate a willingness to use our power to damage and destroy other people. As such, they are not “serious.” Whatever else someone can say about pacifism, it is an inherently non-exploitative position, and thus actually dangerous to powerful, exploitation institutions. You aren’t serious until you demonstrate that you are willing to use power to damage other people.

E. J. Dionne makes a similar point in more general terms:

For all the talk of a media love affair with Obama, there is a deep and largely unconscious conservative bias in the media’s discussion of policy. The range of acceptable opinion runs from the moderate left to the far right and cuts off more vigorous progressive perspectives.

And then it loops back to Matt Yglesias. He points out that the economists (like Paul Krugman) who thought the stimulus package was too small got almost no airtime, and then concludes:

And you see this time and again. Yet, everyone could always tell from Obama’s voting record in the Senate, from his statements as a candidate, and from basic common sense that Obama is not, in fact, the most left-wing politician in the United States of America. On issues from climate change to health care to Afghanistan to stimulus to banking regulation there is a critique-from-the-left that doesn’t get heard at all.

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When I was a kid, you could always count on magazines like Popular Science or Popular Mechanics to have an article on how you could make your own jet airplane in your garage for about the price of a car. I didn’t have the price of a car and my parents would never have let me take over the garage if I did, so I never found out if any of those plans worked.

These days, you can almost always count on a magazine like Wired to tell you that some radical social change has started on the Internet. With that caveat, this article (The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online by Kevin Kelly) is pretty interesting

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Jon Stewart comments on Dick Cheney’s media tour. The clip starts slowly but it gets good about the 1:50 mark and the real punch is in the last minute.

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The latest state to allow same-sex marriage is my own New Hampshire. We did it the old-fashioned way — not by court decision, but by a law passing the legislature and being signed by the governor. From my desk I can see the Nashua River, so if it turns to blood or there’s a plague of frogs or something, I’ll be sure to let you know.

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Chris Bowers has an interesting way of demonstrating how demography is working against Republicans: Mike Dukakis would have won the 2008 election. Dukakis got 40% of the white vote, 89% of blacks, and 70% of Hispanics, which in 1988 added up to 46% of the vote. In 2008, that would have been over 50%. Bowers estimates that there’s a demographic current flowing towards the Democrats, at a rate of about 2% every four years.

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As we move into summer, “The Worst Cinematic Crap That’s Ever Been Made” turns its attention to beach movies.

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Unemployment hit 9.4% in the numbers released Friday. But cheer up, things are getting worse at a slower rate. (I can’t decide whether I wrote that sarcastically or not.)

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The Conventional Wisdom video series takes us to a couple of mind-boggling conventions: baby and tween fashion and the latest in video games.

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I’ve talked about this before, but it’s not like the problem is going away: Little by little, evangelical Christianity is taking over the armed forces of the United States.