The Weekly Sift

Everyone talks about patriotism near the Fourth of July. Obama did it better than most, but not even he put a name to the main threat to American patriotism: its rival, nationalism. Patriots love their country and want it to be as good as it can be. Nationalists make an idol of their country and demand that all kneel before it. The nationalist’s country is great and good by definition, not because it lives up to its ideals.

In recent years authentic patriotism has been losing out to nationalism. In order to fight back, patriots need to start doing two things: First, always call nationalism by its true name; don’t let the nationalists get away with calling themselves patriots. And second, we need to understand — and make the public understand — that nationalism is not just bad politics, it’s bad religion. A nation, even one with the power and accomplishments of America, can only be a false god.

This week’s clearest example of how nationalism has usurped the place of patriotism is the column Obama’s Real Patriotism Problem that National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg wrote for Tuesday’s USA Today. Despite his superficial denial, the “patriotism” he promotes is pure and simple nationalism:

Definitions of patriotism proliferate, but in the American context patriotism must involve not only devotion to American texts (something that distinguishes our patriotism from European nationalism) but also an abiding belief in the inherent and enduring goodness of the American nation. We might need to change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem, but at the end of the day the patriotic American believes that America is fundamentally good as it is.

No matter what our country does, it has “inherent and enduring goodness” and is “good as it is.”

Goldberg goes on to charge that Obama, like liberals throughout American history, can’t manage this kind of patriotism. He recalls a series of articles a liberal magazine published in 1922 in which “smug emissaries from East Coast cities chronicled the ‘backward’ attitudes of what today would be called fly-over country.” Someone even had the gall to suggest “that Dixie needed nothing less than an invasion of liberal ‘missionaries’ so that the ‘light of civilization’ might finally be glimpsed down there.”

Umm, Jonah, I don’t know how to break this to you, but that’s exactly what happened. The South in 1922? Jim Crow, remember? The liberal missionaries were the Freedom Riders and all the other civil rights activists of the fifties and sixties. If we follow Goldberg’s definition, though, the real patriots were the people who thought the Jim Crow South was “fundamentally good as it was” — not disloyal liberals like the Freedom Riders or Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King.

In May I was at the Newseum in Washington, the brand new journalism museum. They display a piece of the lunch counter from the Woolworth’s in Greensboro where civil rights sit-ins began, and show a filmed interview with one of the original Freedom Riders, whose name escapes me. He explained that they didn’t stage events for the press, but that if they expected trouble, they made sure reporters knew about it. “If you’re going to beat us up,” he said (or words to that effect; I’m pulling this quote out of memory) “don’t beat us up by the dark of night. Beat us up where everybody can see.”

Bunch of anti-American wimps, eh, Jonah? They just couldn’t see the goodness of America as it was.

I suppose Goldberg must find Frederick Douglass’ Fourth of July speech from 1852 to be extremely unpatriotic. Douglass pointedly refused to tell his white audience that America was good as it was:

The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.

Douglass had to contend with people who thought he should argue more calmly and reasonably against slavery, as today we have to contend with people who want us to do a cost/benefit analysis of torture. What, Douglass wondered, would such an argument be? Should he attempt to prove — to those not already convinced — that the slave is human? That humans have rights? Douglass refused:

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

Would that my country had more such people today. Because those are the words of a man truly loyal to the ideals that America represents, someone who wants his country to be as good as it can be. That’s the patriotism of a true American.

I was happy to see the L.A. Times recognize how silly all the recent campaign controversies have been. As Paul Krugman notes:

Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet. Howard Dean didn’t scream. Hillary Clinton didn’t say she was staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated. And Wesley Clark didn’t impugn John McCain’s military service. … Again and again we’ve had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place.

TPM put together everything you need to know about the Clark incident — the simple true statements Clark made, the way they were blown into something Clark never said, and the indignant way the media shot down those overblown statements of their own creation. It’s a good lesson in how political media works, and is pretty clear evidence that the media bias still tips towards McCain.

The other tempest in a teapot was Obama’s alleged flip-flop on Iraq. Obama said that in pulling troops out of Iraq he would “take facts on the ground into account.” If you had imagined that Obama’s plan was for our troops to throw down their weapons and run full speed for the Kuwaiti border, then this was a significant change. But anyone who has actually been listening to Obama, like TPM’s Josh Marshall or Tim Starks of Deutsche Welle’s Across the Pond blog, wasn’t all that shocked. Jed Lewison analyzes CNN’s attempt to manufacture an issue here.

Like a lot of people, I’m disappointed that Obama isn’t taking a strong stand against telecom immunity. And I’m even more disappointed that it looks like the FISA bill is going to pass. I expect to say more about this next week.

Iran. The biggest question of 2008 isn’t the election, it’s whether Bush will attack Iran before he leaves office. Seymour Hersh says yes, as he has been saying for some while now. Mostly using his usual collection of anonymous sources, Hersh paints a picture of a bureaucratic wrestling match between Dick Cheney, who wants to attack, and the Pentagon, which doesn’t.

The most disturbing part of Hersh’s article is the allegation that covert ops are already in progress, aiming to exploit ethnic tensions among the Ahwazi Arabs (Iran is predominantly Persian, not Arab) and religious tensions among the Baluchis, who are Sunnis. (Iran is predominantly Shia). He quotes former CIA officer Robert Baer:

The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda. These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.

Hersh notes that 9-11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a Baluchi. Afghanistan in the eighties is where Al Qaeda came together.

While polls show the American public opposed to yet another war in the Middle East, an incident in January convinced the administration that the public might support — or even demand — a military reaction if it appeared that the Iranians had shot first. One of Hersh’s anonymous sources told him that

a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

Neocon columnist Bill Kristol, who has been pushing for an attack on Iran about as long as Hersh has been predicting it, said on Fox News that Bush might attack Iran “if he thinks Obama is going to win.” Under that Bizarro-world logic, I guess, hawks should root for Obama and doves for McCain.

Commentary’s Max Boot thinks that Hersh’s article “is a combination of innuendo, hearsay, and opinionizing that detracts from the sum total of public knowledge” and that Hersh “is partly a victim of his anti-Bush worldview and partly a victim of his sources.” Of the alleged meeting in Cheney’s office he says, “That’s the kind of meeting which only takes place in the fevered imagination of Hersh and his leftist cohorts.” However, Boot brings no facts or sources (even anonymous ones) to the table, just his own intuition about how the administration works.

Afghanistan and Iraq. In hindsight, the real problem with the Surge has become obvious: You should never commit your last reserves until the decisive battle. If you’re about to win or about to lose, throw in everything. But otherwise, you need to keep the enemy guessing.

For the second straight month, coalition deaths in Afghanistan set a record, and were higher than coalition deaths in Iraq. 46 coalition troops died in Afghanistan in June, 31 in Iraq. (If you only care about American troop deaths, Iraq wins 29-28.) The Pentagon would like to send more troops to Afghanistan, but there aren’t any. “I don’t have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq,” says Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen. The Taliban knows this, and can escalate attacks without fear that we’ll escalate in response.

In Iraq, the insurgents and militias know we can’t maintain this troop level, so why not lay low and wait? That’s the real reason casualties and violence are down. We haven’t disarmed or defeated the insurgents, and the Malaki government hasn’t made peace with them. They’re just waiting.

Strangely, the administration has fallen into the trap that they so often warned about whenever a timetable for withdrawal was proposed: If the enemy knows you’re leaving, they can wait you out. Well, the Surge brigades are starting to leave now, and we don’t have any brigades to replace them. The Iraqis know this. Look for violence to ramp up again after the November elections, when the Surge is completely over and Iraq starts to become the next president’s problem.

Or maybe this isn’t so strange. Maybe the point of the Surge wasn’t to improve the situation in the long term, but just to kick the can down the road. For the rest of his life Bush will say, “We were winning when I left office.” The mess he leaves his successor will not be his fault, because nothing is ever his fault.

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538 still predicts a solid Obama win, but the margin has shrunk to a 309-229 electoral vote split, closer than the 339-199 projection two weeks ago. Real Clear Politics, which has always had a more conservative estimate of Obama’s lead, has a similar 304-234 projection. My prediction: The race will drift closer until the conventions, when the nation compares Obama’s acceptance speech to McCain’s. Then the margin will grow, and the debates won’t help McCain close it.

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Slate’s Peter Maass argues that the worst dictator in Africa is somebody you’ve probably never heard of: Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea “whose life seems a parody of the dictator genre.” Maass explains why the American media hasn’t bothered to cover Obiang. Yes, he’s crushing the spirit of his nation, and yes, he’s stealing all the oil money and leaving his people in poverty. But hey, the oil is flowing, ExxonMobil is happy, the Bush administration considers Obiang “a good friend,” and the victims are almost all black. So what’s the big deal? Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.

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Speaking of oil, Andrew Leonard’s How The World Works column at Salon explains Why $140-a-barrel oil is no surprise

a tipping point has been reached. Enough people now believe that the era of cheap oil is over to ensure a significant, and ongoing, adjustment upward in the real price. Modern civilization as we know it is dependent on cheap oil, and cheap oil is becoming scarce. Voilà — time to panic. And a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy dynamic kicks in. The higher the price of oil goes without encouraging dramatic increases in production, the more worried the market gets.

One response is VW’s soon-to-be-marketed concept car, which gets 235 MPG.

On a deeper level, John Michael Greer at The Archdruid Report — how many of you have been reading that blog? — has given a name to something that really needed one: the Silent Running fallacy. Named after a classic sci-fi movie, the fallacy is “the mistaken belief that human industrial civilization can survive apart from nature. It’s this fallacy that leads countless well-intentioned people to argue that nature is an amenity, and should be preserved because, basically, it’s cute.” (Now we need a name for a similar fallacy on a smaller scale: that emotions are an amenity androids could function without.)

And just when we were getting used to the idea of Peak Oil, what about Peak Metal? A lot of industrial metals — gallium, indium, hafnium, and even (to a lesser extent) zinc — are being used up faster than we’re discovering new supplies.

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CalorieLab released its annual fattest states rankings: Mississippi is the repeat champion, with 31.6% of its adult population classified as obese. West Virginia waddled past Alabama to claim second at 30.6%. Colorado is the slimmest state at 18.4%. In general, the Mountain West and New England are the least obese regions, the South the most. But it’s getting worse across the board — CalorieLab had to shift the color-coding standards on its map this year.

Ian Welsh on FireDogLake comments intelligently on the rankings and why Americans are so fat. Our farm policy “literally subsidizes crap food that makes people fat. … And if you’re missing essential nutrients in your diet, your body keeps wanting them and keeps telling you to eat more, in the vain hope you might eat something that isn’t crap.” (Those subsidies could also explain why the fattest states tend to be the poorest states.) He also blames unwalkable suburbs and recommends that physical education classes teach children how to exercise rather than just play team sports that involve a lot of standing around.

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When I grew up back at the dawn of time — before SimCity, in other words — we thought games like Monopoly were educational because you had to figure out how much change to give somebody who buys Baltic with a $500 bill. Well, games currently on the drawing board are supposed take things to yet another level. Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is involved in a game project called Our Courts, which is scheduled to appear late next year. She describes it as “online, interactive civic education project for seventh- and eighth-graders.” (It’s necessary because the No Child Left Behind Act, according to Reagan appointee O’Connor, has “effectively squeezed out civics education” in the schools. Guaranteeing an uninformed populace for decades to come — just one of the many accomplishments of George W. Bush.)

Microsoft and AMD sponsor the Imagine Cup, an annual student competition to create computer games. Each year (2008 is the sixth) the games revolve around a theme from the UN’s Millennium Goals. This year the theme is “Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment.”

I noticed this stuff when Mike Musgrove wrote about it in his @play column in the Washington Post. But a more consistent source of information is the Games For Change blog.

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While we’re talking about play, a great internet toy is Policy Map. It combines U.S. maps with all sorts of data sets so you can see things like how income is distributed around the country, or between neighborhoods of your city, or which neighborhoods have a lot of car thefts. A bunch of the data sets come from the 2000 census, so the unemployment figures are way out of date. But the crime stats come from 2006 FBI reports, and the ethnic distribution of the country probably hasn’t changed that much since 2000. The basic interface resembles GoogleMaps, so you can zoom in or out at will. It’s hours and hours of wonkish fun.

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I frequently highlight statistics showing how poorly the economy is doing. The American magazine presents the other side: How well the American economy is doing over the long term. One criticism: Most of the article’s graphs display averages. Meaningful economic graphs display medians. Unlike medians, averages hide the gap between rich and poor, as well as the gap between the very rich and everyone else.

For example, if Bill Gates (net worth $58 billion ) walks into a bar in a poor neighborhood, the bar’s average customer becomes a billionaire — hiding the fact that all the other customers (besides the guy who mugs Gates) are still poor.

Suppose Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (net worth $16 billion) invites Gates to join him in the owner’s box at a Seattle Seahawks game, and fills the rest of Qwest Field’s seats with 66,998 homeless bums. Then the average fan is a millionaire, but the median fan is a homeless bum.

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In This Week’s Sift:

Hocus Pocus: The Court Makes Habeas Corpus Reappear. Justice Scalia says Americans will die for this. Newt Gingrich thinks it could cost us a city. What evil invention are they talking about? Habeas corpus, the foundation of human rights.

The Negative Campaign. John McCain is behind in the polls and doesn’t have a popular issue to run on. So he’s going to have to make Barack Obama even less popular.

Short Notes. Obama comes to the town where I grew up, while McCain visits the town where I live now. The SOFA negotiations become uncomfortable. Governor Jindal, exorcist. Impeachment or hanging? And the surprising downside of loaning large sums of money to people in jail.

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: Just about all of your rights as an American are founded on habeas corpus. The Latin is intimidating, but the idea is simple. If a government official arrests you, you can get a hearing before a neutral judge. The judge determines whether or not the government has a legal basis to hold you, and if not, you go free.

Most of your other rights concern what reasons the government can or can’t use at that hearing. Your freedom of religion means that “He’s a Muslim” is not a good enough reason to imprison you. Your freedom of speech means that “She called the president an ignorant jerk” is also not a viable reason. But if the hearing is never held — if the government just arrests you and doesn’t have to explain itself to anybody — then even though your other rights may stay on the books, you have no way to claim them.

Worse, if any class of people is denied habeas corpus rights, that creates a hole in the system into which anyone else might fall. Say, for example, that non-citizens aren’t allowed a hearing. “No problem,” you say, “I’m an American citizen.” But if the government says you’re not a citizen, then who’s going to hear you claim that you are?

Cutting corners on habeas corpus is especially dangerous when combined with the Bush administration’s unitary executive theory, by which they interpret Article II of the Constitution to mean that all officials in the executive branch of government are “emanations of the president’s will” (in David Rifkin’s evocative phrase). So if somebody in the Pentagon accuses you of being an enemy combatant, and a military commission assesses the evidence against you, your accuser and your judges are all emanations of the president’s will. If the president doesn’t like you, you’re pretty much screwed.

This week the Supreme Court decided this is a bad situation, and is not consistent with the American tradition of constitutional law. That’s the good news. The bad news: They decided it by one vote, 5-4. The four in the minority — Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito — are healthy, relatively young, and likely to stay on the court for many years. The next two or three retirements are going to come from the five. Senator McCain has mentioned Roberts and Alito as models for his court appointments, so this ruling could easily be reversed if McCain is elected.

As for what the new ruling says in detail, I haven’t finished reading it yet. Glenn Greenwald (I keep forgetting he’s a lawyer) summarizes it. So does Salon’s James Ross. The Volokh Conspiracy extracts key quotes. So does emptywheel.

From the responses of conservatives, you might think that the Court had ordered the immediate release of everyone at Guantanamo, rather than just offer them a fair hearing. (Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick: “The court merely said that the petitioners are entitled to some reasonable approximation of a habeas corpus proceeding, and that the jumped-up pretrial hearings known as Combatant Status Review Tribunals just don’t substitute.”) Bush said, “It was a deeply divided court. And I strongly agree with those who dissented.” Presumably he meant Justice Scalia, who wrote that the decision “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” On Face the Nation Sunday Newt Gingrich raised the ante: “This court decision is a disaster which could cost us a city.” McCain said it was “one of worst decisions in the history of this country.” (By contrast, Obama supported the ruling, calling it “an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law.”)

Conservative commentators went even further. National Review’s Andy McCarthy passes on a “practical response” suggested to him by “an old government friend.”

Let’s free all Gitmo detainees…on a vast, deserted, open and contested Afghan battlefield. C-130 gunship circling overhead for security. Give them all a two minute running head start.

Glenn Greenwald reports on a radio debate he had with conservative Jed Babbin:

The question I put to him again and again was one that he simply couldn’t answer: how and why would any American object to the mere requirement that our Government prove that someone is guilty before we imprison them indefinitely or execute them?

And the bottom line is that many of them aren’t guilty. That’s the conclusion the McClatchy Newspapers came to in its Guantanamo: Beyond the Law series.

From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn’t belong there.

Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.

Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al Qaida’s leadership, and it isn’t clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.

This conclusion would not surprise anybody who has read Fear Up Harsh, the account of an American interrogator in Iraq. (It sounds familiar because I put it on the Summer Reading List last week.) The book describes in detail a system focused entirely on sweeping up anyone who might know something, and not at all concerned with clearing the innocent.

It didn’t occur to me at the time, but the patrol that discovered the IED had no reason to believe these two farmers had anything to do with it. But they were nearby, and so they were worth arresting. Then they were handed to someone like me, who really wanted to believe that the infantry had a good reason to pick them up.

So he moved them on to the next prison up the ladder. And so on.

Securing the Democratic nomination gave Obama a bounce in the polls, and a small but definite lead over McCain. The 538 blog is currently predicting a 300-238 electoral college victory for Obama. 538 has a complicated technique for assessing the probabilities state-by-state, and they now give Obama a 62% chance of becoming the next president. That agrees with the Intrade market, where shares of Obama are trading at 62.

Pundits of all stripes are starting to agree on the general shape of the campaign: With an unpopular Republican president, an unpopular war, unemployment and gas prices rising, and an amazing 80% of the public agreeing that the country is on the wrong track, the only way for McCain to win is to tear Obama down. Ideally, as in all negative campaigns, the candidate himself will keep his hands clean. But the mudslinging is already starting.

A lot of it will revolve around race. In America today, you can’t just campaign on the theme “Don’t vote for the black guy.” But you can raise racial fears and resentments indirectly, then provide a smokescreen argument for directing that fear and resentment at a candidate. This path was blazed by the 1988 Willie Horton ad, which never came out and said “Dukakis will let big black studs rape your womenfolk” but certainly raised that idea in viewers’ minds. The 2006 “Harold, Call Me” ad against black Senate candidate Harold Ford again put forward an interracial sex theme — deniably, of course. The beneficiary, now Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, was able to have it both ways. He could denounce the ad while claiming to be unable to stop the national Republican Party from running it. (Meanwhile, his own anti-Ford ad had African tom-toms sounding in the background.) Expect something similar from McCain.

Fox News is already trying — sometimes with unintentionally comical ineptitude — to connect Obama with anything dark and scary. The fist-bump greeting that Obama and his wife exchanged before his victory speech in St. Paul was characterized by Fox as a possible “terrorist fist-jab“. Fox labeled Michele Obama as “Obama’s Baby Mama” — a slang expression for mothers of illegitimate children, more-or-less equivalent to calling the Obama daughters bastards. As with Willie Horton, the “baby mama” phrase triggers images beyond its literal meaning, connecting Obama with ghetto gangsters who father more children than they can keep track of.

Floyd Brown, the producer of the original Willie Horton ad, is raising money for an “independent” anti-Obama advertising campaign. His first ad pushed the idea that Obama was soft on gang violence, and his most recent one promotes the frequently debunked Obama-is-a-Muslim charge. Expect more. His group, the National Campaign Fund, maintains the exposeobama.com web site.

The worst stuff, naturally, is in emails of no determinable source that people forward to their friends. Maybe you’ve gotten some.

Obama is showing early signs of responding more quickly and effectively than John Kerry did to the Swift Boat ads in 2004. His campaign recently put up a Fight the Smears web site to collect simple evidence debunking negative rumors. For example, in response to the charge that Obama won’t say the Pledge of Allegiance, they have a tape of Obama leading the Senate in saying the Pledge on June 21, 2007.

At a fund-raiser in Pennsylvania Friday, Obama promised not to be a patsy. “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he said. This line has been widely interpreted as a reference to the scene in The Untouchables where Sean Connery explains “the Chicago way” to Kevin Costner.

Maybe the best way to fight back is with ridicule, like this video in which people explain why they’re voting Republican.

Saturday Obama was in my home town (Quincy, Illinois), which is bracing for the same flood waters that have swept through Cedar Rapids. He filled a few sandbags and called for his supporters to come out and volunteer to build up the levee. This is the right way for him to exploit the age issue. Obama wielding a shovel displays vigor in a way that McCain can’t match. The call for volunteers is a clear contrast with President Bush, who won’t ask average Americans for any sacrifice beyond going shopping. And anything about floods and levees is going to remind Americans of New Orleans, where the Bush administration failed in its pledge to protect American cities.

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I saw McCain here in Nashua Thursday. He said pretty much the same things he said here in December, but I think I’m starting to understand him better now. I wrote up my observations on DailyKos and on my own Open Source Journalism blog. And if you happened to see this piece on CNN, the questioner was absolutely as boring and single-minded as they made him out to be.

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Today is the first day for same-sex marriages in California. State officials think they might be busy.

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The Bush administration’s attempts to negotiate a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) with the Iraqi government has run into problems. The administration has been very secretive about what it is proposing, but leaks from the Iraqi side indicate that the administration wants a large number of permanent bases in Iraq and free rein for American forces to do whatever they deem necessary, without Iraqi approval. Prime Minister al-Maliki says this would “violate Iraqi sovereignty.” Smintheus on Daily Kos has a pretty good summary of what is publicly known.

Glenn Greenwald recalls when it was almost treason to accuse the administration of wanting permanent bases in Iraq:

What’s striking is how those who pointed out that this was the administration’s plan were totally demonized in our establishment political discourse — Americans who said that long-term bases were the real U.S. intention in Iraq were scorned as anti-American, far Leftist hysterics, while Iraqis and other Middle Eastern Muslims who said this were mocked as primitive, Arab Street paranoids.

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This week the Washington Post has a series (called The Bubble) about the housing mess. Here’s a clip from Sunday’s installment:

The young woman who walked into Pinnacle’s Vienna office in 2004 said her boyfriend wanted to buy a house near Annapolis. He hoped to get a special kind of loan for which he didn’t have to report his income, assets or employment. Mortgage broker Connelly handed the woman a pile of paperwork.

On the day of the settlement, she arrived alone. Her boyfriend was on a business trip, she said, but she had his power of attorney. Informed that for this kind of loan he would have to sign in person, she broke into tears: Her boyfriend actually had been serving a jail term.

Not a problem. Almost anyone could borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house in those wild days. Connelly agreed to send the paperwork to the courthouse where the boyfriend had a hearing.

Who could possibly have foreseen that something might go wrong with such a sound business model?

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Congressman Dennis Kucinich filed 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush this week. Read them all here. I think Bush should be glad that he’s president of the United States and not Pakistan, where opposition leader Nawaz Sharif is calling for President Musharaf to be hanged. On the other hand, Kucinich should appreciate that he’s not in Zimbabwe, where President Mugabe has brought treason charges against the second-in-command of the party that had the audacity to run against him. “We are prepared to fight for our country and to go to war for it,” Mugabe said.

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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is sometimes mentioned as a McCain VP. So isn’t it handy that he has experience as an exorcist? I can see it now: Vice President Jindal is presiding over the Senate when some crazy-assed thing Senator Inhofe says about global warming makes Harry Reid’s head spin. As soon as Reid’s eyes come around to the front again, there’s Jindal with the Holy Scripture in his hand. “Out, demon, out!” he commands.

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Pollster.com graphs the changing party identification of people in Wisconsin: Democrats rising, Independents and Republicans sinking. This may not be a swing state any more.

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A few weeks ago I linked to a video that compressed the Democratic presidential race so far into seven minutes. Well, now that the race is complete, it takes eight minutes.

The Weekly Sift will return on June 9.

In This Week’s Sift:

Marriage Equality in California. The more same-sex marriages there are, the stranger the objections to it sound.

Targeting Obama. It’s no longer acceptable to say “Don’t vote for the black guy.” But that doesn’t mean racism’s gone.

The Voter-Fraud Fraud. A phony voter-fraud issue lets the Republicans squeeze out marginal voters.

Short Notes. The Olbermann-O’Reilly feud escalates to GE vs. News Corp. Mad Pride. And John King’s close encounter.

One of the great discoveries in the history of marketing is known by the acronym FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. If you represent the status quo, you don’t have to make any verifiable charges against your upstart rivals. Instead, you just have to raise FUD. Get people thinking that if they change, something — you don’t have to be clear about what — might go wrong. In fact, the less clear you are the better. Any specific fear might be confronted and dealt with, but how can your rivals fight people’s vague sense that something they haven’t considered might come back to bite them?

The weakness of a FUD campaign is that, lacking substance, its effectiveness tends to dissipate all at once, like a fog blown away by the wind.

No issue in recent years has had a higher FUD-factor than same-sex marriage. Some unnameable thing is going to go horribly wrong if gays and lesbians are allowed to marry. “Barring a miracle,” James Dobson wrote in 2004 as the first same-sex marriages were happening in Massachusetts, “the family as it has been known for more than five millennia will crumble, presaging the fall of Western civilization itself.”

You can almost imagine believing that kind of hyperbole when same-sex marriage is some strange theoretical concept. But then you move in next door to Bob and Jim, who have rose bushes make a great peach cobbler, and the idea that they’re bringing down Western civilization suddenly seems pretty wacky. The more Bobs and Jims there are, and the more people who live next door to them, the harder it is to raise credible FUD against gay marriage. The fog blows away.

I live about four miles from Massachusetts, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2004. I’m not sure what kind of noise the fall of Western Civilization is supposed to make, but I’m sure I would have heard it. As far as I know, civilization has also not yet collapsed in the Netherlands, which started performing same-sex marriages in 2001. Nor in Spain, Canada, Belgium, or South Africa. Civil unions of one sort or another are currently recognized right here in New Hampshire, as well as in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, Oregon, Vermont, and the District of Columbia. Denmark has been doing them since 1989. The list of other civil-union-recognizing countries is longer than I want to type — Wikipedia has it — but includes such avant-garde places as Uruguay and Croatia.

If government-sanctioned homosexual relationships can’t even bring down civilization in Uruguay, how bad can they be?

Thursday the California Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that the state’s separate-but-almost-equal domestic partnership arrangement isn’t good enough. According to their interpretation of the state constitution and its equal-protection clause, California has to have one institution, not separate ones for opposite-sex and same-sex couples. The court leaves the legislature to decide whether that institution will be called “marriage” or “domestic partnership” or something else, but it has to be the same for everybody.

It’s been fascinating watching reactions from the usual FUD-slingers, who don’t seem to realize that their talking points are becoming increasingly irrelevant. They still talk about unelected judges imposing their liberal vision on the rest of us through judicial activism — totally ignoring the role of elected officials in bringing this case to trial, as well as the fact that 3 of the 4 judges in the majority were appointed by Republican governors.

History. The California judges outline the history of the case, beginning on page 12 of the decision. In February 2004, the mayor of San Francisco started a process that led to the city issuing marriage licenses to about 4000 same-sex couples. Conservatives went to the courts to stop this, and got this same California Supreme Court to tell San Francisco to knock it off and to nullify the licenses already issued. The city then filed suit claiming that the statute the court had based its ruling on (Proposition 22, passed by voter initiative in 2000) was unconstitutional, a subject the court had not ruled on. That suit was joined by a number of same-sex couples, and then wound its way up the state court system, winning in superior court and losing in appellate court before landing back in the lap of the supremes.

In the meantime, in 2005 and again in 2007, the state legislature passed a same-sex marriage bill, which Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed each time for procedural reasons. (On pages 29-32 of the decision, the court agreed with Schwarzenegger.)

Eventually, this whole thing is going to end up back with the voters anyway. A constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage is likely to be a ballot soon. (Is it just me, or is it crazy to have a system where a simple majority can amend the constitution? I think if I were a California citizen, I’d be gathering signatures on an initiative petition amending the constitution to require a 2/3 vote to amend the constitution.) Prop. 22 got 61% of the vote in 2000, but that was before civilization failed to collapse in Massachusetts, and before the California Domestic Partner Act of 2003 also failed to herald the Apocalypse. It will be much more difficult to raise a significant FUD cloud this time.

Legal reasoning. Legally, all the same-sex marriage decisions look a lot the same. Whenever the government treats some group of people differently from another, it needs to have a reason. How good that reason needs to be depends on how inherently suspect the discrimination is.

For example, where I vote, people whose names begin with A-L stand in a different line from the M-Z people. Nobody suspects that the election officials have anything against either group, and neither line has any particular advantage over the other, so the officials don’t have to have much of a reason. “Convenience” is good enough. But now imagine that blacks had a special line that went much slower. “Convenience” wouldn’t be nearly good enough to explain that arrangement to a court, because racial discrimination is inherently suspect in a way that alphabetical discrimination isn’t.

So all the same-sex marriage cases hang on two questions: How inherently suspect is it to discriminate based on sexual orientation? And how good a reason does the government have for marriage discrimination? Does the government just need to have just a rational reason to discriminate against gay and lesbian couples (a reasonable connection between the discrimination and some legitimate government goal), or a compelling reason (there’s just no other way to do whatever it is they’re doing). For example, if a town had evidence that its students would learn better in separate boys and girls high schools, it would have a rational reason for creating such schools, but not a compelling reason. But the government has a compelling reason to discriminate against murderers, because society falls apart if you don’t.

In California, the appellate court had ruled that the state only needed a rational reason for marriage discrimination, and it had one. The Supreme Court overturned that by ruling that the state needed a compelling reason, and it didn’t have one. In Massachusetts, the court had ruled that marriage discrimination lacked even a rational justification. I agree with Massachusetts.

What about the children? When pressed to produce some rational reason for the state to discriminate against same-sex couples, the traditional-values types always claim to represent the best interests of the children. The traditional father-mother family, they say, is the best environment for raising children, and that’s why the state should favor it over other types of households.

A bunch of things are wrong with this argument. First, it’s ad hoc. People who use this argument against same-sex marriage ignore its other implications — like not allowing parents to divorce until their children are grown. When I hear the anti-gay-marriage folks propose that, maybe I’ll start taking them seriously.

Second, which children does marriage discrimination help? Children being raised by same-sex couples today are clearly harmed by having their households stigmatized. And if marriage discrimination discourages gay and lesbian single parents from forming long-term partnerships, then their children are harmed also. And children being raised by opposite-sex couples — how does discrimination against same-sex households help them?

The only way this argument makes sense is if we’re talking about future children, not existing ones. And then only if the state, by juggling incentives, can induce people to choose heterosexual relationships over homosexual ones. By favoring heterosexual households, you see, the state encourages more people to form them. And that benefits whatever children they may have, I guess, because repressed homosexuals make such good parents.

The state’s incentives, however, only make a difference if homosexuality is a choice rather than an orientation. The secular evidence for this notion is pretty thin, but right-wing Christians have theological reasons for believing it. (Sin has to be your decision, not God’s. Otherwise sending you to Hell is a miscarriage of divine justice.) So, when you break it down, what you basically have is a religious argument, not a social policy argument.

Finally — and I left this to the end because it’s the hardest objection to explain — the whole argument is based on bogus statistics. On just about any issue in social science, a small group of people is responsible for most of the dysfunction. If you want to slander some other group of people, you arrange your categories so that they are lumped together with the underperforming group. Then you total up, and — presto! — their category is responsible for most of the dysfunction.

Whenever I’ve chased an opposite-sex-superiority claim back to the source study, they’ve been comparing children raised by their married biological parents against children raised by everyone else. “Everyone else” includes a substantial number of teen-age single mothers, many of whom are poor and uneducated. And I’m sure you won’t be shocked to discover that on average, children of poor, uneducated, teen-age single mothers don’t do as well as most other children. So children from traditional married mother-father families, on average, do better than other children, but the reason has nothing to do with homosexuality.

In short, the only real reason to oppose same-sex marriage is because God says it’s wrong. If you don’t believe that, or if (like a court) you’re not allowed to take that argument into account, then there’s no reason at all.

FUD has played a special role in the Republican strategy in all recent elections, the general point being that if Democrats get power, something really bad will happen. The vaguer that something really bad is, the more effective the campaign. One Democrat after another flails about, trying to prove that something really bad won’t happen if he or she gets power. “Under my administration, the United States will not have any more random misfortune than you would ordinarily expect.”

It’s not a very compelling message, is it?

Against Obama, though, FUD will be even more important due to the way racism works in this era. It is clearly out of bounds for a 21st-century campaign to say “Don’t vote for the black guy.” Even among friends or in the privacy of their own minds, the vast majority of Americans aren’t willing to admit, “I’m not going to vote for that guy because he’s black.” We know that we’re good people, and good people aren’t supposed to think like that.

But forcing racism (or sexism or any other prejudice) into the unconscious doesn’t make it go away. Instead, a candidate like Obama starts the campaign under a shadow: Many voters have a nebulous sense that there must be something wrong with this guy. Finding some specific wrong feels like a relief: Thank God, now I know why I never liked him. It’s not because he’s black, it’s because he has a wacko pastor, or because he’s a Muslim, or because he’s not patriotic, or anything other than because he’s black. Republicans know that they don’t need to offer people a reason to vote against Obama, just an excuse.

This week’s excuse is that Obama is “an appeaser”. Because he wants to go back to the traditional American practice of talking to our enemies — Nixon and Mao, Reagan and Gorbachev, Kennedy and Krushchev, etc. — Obama is like Neville Chamberlain giving Czechoslovakia away to Hitler. Clearly, something really bad would happen if Obama met with Iran’s Ahmadinejad. What? No one is saying.

Bush started this smear in a speech to the Israeli parliament, and it was dutifully picked up by the usual shills. (The most embarrassing version of this was conservative talk-radio host Kevin James on Hardball. James kept repeating “appeaser” but seemed to have no idea what it meant. Chris Matthews totally humiliated him. Details on Digby’s Hullabaloo.)

McCain (and the usual shills) has been trumpeting a similar talking point about Obama being endorsed by Hamas. The kernel of truth here is that a Hamas guy said something nice about Obama during a radio interview. A comparable situation would be if someone from the KKK said that they’d rather see the white guy (McCain) get elected. But framing this as an “endorsement” implies that Obama wooed Hamas the way McCain wooed John Hagee. The key question in all these issues is: What’s the accusation?

By now Democrats should know that trying to appear harmless doesn’t work. We’ve have got to do an FDR and target fear directly, as Michelle Obama does in the video that the lead quote comes from.

This issue goes a little beyond FUD. It’s a scam based on manufacturing and exploiting fear of something negligibly rare: people showing up at a polling place and falsely claiming to be eligible voters. In response to this bogus fear, Republicans pass laws that make it harder for people on the fringes of society — usually Democrats — to vote.

Expect to see much more of this now that the Supreme Court has given its blessing to Indiana’s voter ID law, the one that protected the Republic from 12 elderly nuns who tried to vote in the recent Indiana primary.

Sunday the Dallas Morning News provided more evidence that voter fraud is not a serious problem: Texas’ Republican attorney general set up a special unit to prosecute voter fraud, got a $1.4 million federal grant to fund it, and in two years has managed to prosecute only 26 cases, 18 of which were technical violations involving how absentee ballots are mailed in — probably innocent mistakes and certainly not fixable with a voter ID law. None of the cases seem to be part of any larger conspiracy. But the targets were all Democrats and “almost all … blacks or Hispanics”. The cases resulted in “small fines and little or no jail time”.

But this “success” allowed the AG to claim (in a brief to the Supreme Court) that he had “obtained numerous indictments, guilty pleas and convictions” of voter fraud. Texas Republicans are now pushing for an Indiana-like voter ID law.

TPM reminds us how high this goes: “In the case of the US Attorney firings, most of the dismissals targeted prosecutors who refused to use the power of their office to advance the interests of the Republican party by engaging in these kinds of witch hunts.”

Missouri Republicans want to up the ante even further. The Center for American Progress totals up the cost of compliance with a proposed Missouri law that voters come to the polls with proof of their citizenship. This is a 2-for-1 deal on manufactured fear: not just voter fraud, but illegal immigrants as well. No one has been able to identify an illegal immigrant who has voted fraudulently, but it would be really scary if it happened, wouldn’t it?

Digby: “I would imagine that there are a whole lot of older people who’ve never had to prove their citizenship in their lives and wouldn’t have a clue about how to go about doing it.” The New York Times comments: “The imposition of harsh new requirements to vote has become a partisan issue, but it should not be. These rules are an assault on democracy itself.”

One of the more amusing parts of Keith Olbermann’s nightly Countdown program on MSNBC is his running feud with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. Almost every night, some bit of buffoonery from “Bill-O” is one of the three finalists in Countdown’s “Worst Person in the World” segment. For his part, O’Reilly has stopped mentioning Olbermann’s name, and instead has been going up the ladder, attacking NBC and now NBC’s parent corporation, General Electric. (Because GE is winding down its contracts with Iran — for energy and health care equipment, not weapons — rather than breaking them, O’Reilly has been targeting them for “doing business right this minute with Iran, who are killing our soldiers.”) It’s one of those classic high-school Smart Alec vs. Jerk battles, where the smart alec (Olbermann) seems to be having a good time and the jerk (O’Reilly) is taking it seriously. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz has more detail.

Joe Galloway is trying to stay on top of the story of the ex-generals organized by the Pentagon to repeat administration talking points while claiming to be independent commentators on TV. The media has completely ignored this attack on its credibility since the New York Times broke the story four weeks ago. MediaBloodHound comments on Brian Williams’ lack of comment. Media Matters estimates that these compromised “analysts” were quoted 4,500 times on the major news networks.

Have you seen that high-tech election board that CNN’s John King mans during their primary election coverage? 23/6 provides an amusing soundtrack for it.

Which is more depressing: That the gap between male and female starting salaries hasn’t budged during the Bush years, or that each gender is worse off than it was in 2000?

Digby reviews Nixonland by Rick Perlstein: “you can’t begin to understand our current political time without understanding that one.”

The New York Times recently had an article about the “Mad Pride” movement to de-stigmatize mental illness. Liz Spikol is part of it, and this video is great. It starts out funny, and then does something else.

In This Week’s Sift: What McCain Wants To Do With Health Care

• The problem with American health care. We spend a lot, we don’t live as long, and we live with anxiety.
• McCain vs. the Democrats. The difference between the parties dwarfs the difference between Obama and Clinton.
• Employment and pre-existing conditions. Different ways to disentangle your coverage from your job.
• Market magic. The conservative way to get a free lunch.
• Market realities. Why health insurance won’t improve the ways personal computers did.
• Trillion with a ‘t’. In such a huge industry, even large sums can be just a drop in the bucket. Why malpractice reform won’t help.
• Summing up. The insurance companies gain power. You lose it.

Short Notes. Deaths in Iraq are back up. The gas tax holiday. And the New York Times keeps recycling the same old experts.

Tuesday John McCain gave a speech in Tampa where he outlined his health care proposals. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton long ago announced detailed health care plans, so we now have enough information to start comparing. Just to remind myself that there are actual issues that matter, I’m going to spend an entire Sift looking at what McCain wants to do about one of our most important problems.

Not captured in those poor overall statistics is the uncertainty Americans face. The Census Bureau reports that 47 million residents of the United States were uninsured in 2006 — that’s the number you hear most often. Conservatives claim it is misleading because about 10 million are non-citizens and 15.7 million had annual household incomes over $50,000 — and so, conservatives assume, could have bought insurance had they been so inclined. (You can find these numbers on page 21 [page 29 in the PDF file] of the Census Bureau report.) In addition, some large number of uninsured people are between jobs and will have insurance again in a few months. (McCain says about half; I’m not sure what his source is.) So it’s hard to estimate exactly how many of those 47 million are in the most sympathetic category: American citizens who are more-or-less permanently consigned to the mercies of emergency rooms for their health-care needs. Wild guess: 10-20 million. That’s less than 47 million, certainly, but should we be happy about it?

There are other problems with the attempts to lowball the numbers: If being uninsured is a revolving door, then many more than 47 million have been without insurance for some period of months; any poorly timed health problem could have thrown them into bankruptcy. (The revolving door is more like the spinning cylinder of a revolver in Russian roulette.) And consider those non-citizens: When the next epidemic strikes, we’re going to wish they had access to health care just for our own selfish reasons. (I wonder how many of the janitors in my apartment building are citizens and how many have health insurance. We touch so many of the same objects.) And some of the revolving-door people will only sort of be insured again when they get their next job: their pre-existing conditions may not be covered.

And that brings us to the next problem: The rigidity of our health-care system spills over into other areas. Because their coverage is tied to their jobs and a new insurer might not cover their pre-existing conditions, some large number of Americans are locked into jobs that are unfulfilling, trap them in an unfortunate living situation, or fail to use their skills well. One of the U.S.’s economic advantages — the mobility and flexibility of our labor force — is being compromised.

By the time the candidates start debating health care, a lot of options have already been closed off. None of the three candidates propose a single-payer system similar to those used by the other countries in the Wikipedia table — the ones where people live longer and spend less. All three leave most of the system in the private sector — private health insurance companies, private hospitals, and privately employed doctors. (Kucinich was the most popular candidate who proposed a single-payer system — and he wasn’t very popular.) All three also retain some version of the major public-sector programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veteran’s Administration hospital system.

Compared to McCain’s proposals, the difference between the Clinton and Obama plans is negligible. The two Democrats differ mostly about whether to mandate coverage, i.e., penalize people who don’t buy health insurance. Clinton’s plan, with mandates, is probably better from a public-health standpoint. Obama’s plan, without, is probably easier to sell politically. Clinton’s plan could easily turn into Obama’s as it makes its way through Congress.

But the philosophical difference between McCain and the Democrats is sharp: Obama and Clinton believe that the federal government has to take responsibility for making health coverage available and affordable. McCain believes that the federal government should try to create conditions that encourage the market to solve the problem, with the primary responsibility for plugging gaps in the market falling to the states. So although McCain can say things that sound just like the Democrats:

We want a system of health care in which everyone can afford and acquire the treatment and preventative care they need, and the peace of mind that comes with knowing they are covered. Health care in America should be affordable by all, not just the wealthy. It should be available to all, and not limited by where you work or how much you make. It should be fair to all; providing help where the need is greatest, and protecting Americans from corporate abuses.

really he’s just expressing a desire rather than taking responsibility for achieving a goal. It’s like when a president promises “good jobs for everyone who wants to work” — that doesn’t mean that the government will hire all the unemployed, only that the government will pursue policies that it hopes will encourage the market to create jobs.

For example, consider how the candidates deal with the problem of losing your coverage when you lose or leave a job. Obama and Clinton would open up the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan to all Americans. In other words, you’d get the same health insurance options that a federal employee has. Since your eligibility depends just on being an American rather than on working for a particular company, you stay covered (or can switch to the FEHB plan) when you leave a job. Both would use government money to make insurance cheaper for most people — which they claim to pay for by letting the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy lapse. (I haven’t checked whether those numbers work.)

McCain’s proposes to change the tax policy that favors employer-based group insurance over individual insurance. He would provide an annual tax credit — $2500 for individuals and $5000 for families — to people who buy their own insurance. He claims this is equivalent to the tax credit an employer gets currently. So while your employer’s insurance plan doesn’t go with you when you leave a job, the federal tax benefit does.

Now, what does that do and not do? It doesn’t put new government money into the system; it just reshuffles tax breaks that already exist. It mitigates your expense if you have to buy your own plan, but doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to find a plan. Elizabeth Edwards has pointed out that as cancer survivors, neither she nor McCain would be able to find an insurance company willing to take them on. McCain recognizes that gap in the system, and says that he will “work tirelessly to address the problem. But I won’t create another entitlement program that Washington will let get out of control.” His speech suggests (without making any commitments) that the federal government will assist the states in setting up subsidized pools to cover “the uninsurables.”

And finally, a tax credit only does you good to the extent that you pay tax. In 2007 a family had to have taxable income of $38,550 before they owed $5000 in federal income tax. If you just lost your job, that tax credit may not help much.

The key to real reform is to restore control over our health-care system to the patients themselves. Right now, even those with access to health care often have no assurance that it is appropriate care. … When families are informed about medical choices, they are more capable of making their own decisions, less likely to choose the most expensive and often unnecessary options, and are more satisfied with their choices. We took an important step in this direction with the creation of Health Savings Accounts, tax-preferred accounts that are used to pay insurance premiums and other health costs. These accounts put the family in charge of what they pay for. And, as president, I would seek to encourage and expand the benefits of these accounts to more American families.

The vision here is that ordinary health care would be purchased piecemeal, like groceries, with individuals bearing the cost (out of their tax-sheltered health savings accounts) and being backed up by insurance only for expensive illnesses. Savings come because families will purchase less health care. If a doctor wanted to do an expensive test to rule out some unlikely possibility, a cost-conscious family could say “No, thank you.”

And McCain envisions the personal-health-care market responding the way that the personal-computer market has — with ever-improving quality and ever-shrinking prices. This creative interplay of supply and demand is what McCain sees missing in government programs that would

replace the inefficiency, irrationality, and uncontrolled costs of the current system with the inefficiency, irrationality, and uncontrolled costs of a government monopoly. We’ll have all the problems, and more, of private health care — rigid rules, long waits and lack of choices, and risk degrading its great strengths and advantages including the innovation and life-saving technology that make American medicine the most advanced in the world.

In order to foster this competition, McCain proposes creating a single set of federal health-insurance regulations rather than the current system of state regulations.

Right now, there is a different health insurance market for every state. Each one has its own rules and restrictions, and often guarantees inadequate competition among insurance companies. Often these circumstances prevent the best companies, with the best plans and lowest prices, from making their product available to any American who wants it. We need to break down these barriers to competition, innovation and excellence, with the goal of establishing a national market to make the best practices and lowest prices available to every person in every state.

I’ve tried to be objective and fair up to this point . Now I’ll be opinionated: This is fantasy. The health-care market is special in ways that make McCain’s magical-competition vision ridiculous.

Health insurance companies make money in two ways, one constructive and the other destructive. The constructive opportunity is through risk-pooling: Being sure that your potential losses will be covered is worth more to you that your fair share of the losses of the entire pool of people being insured, so you’re willing to pay a premium large enough that the company makes an overall profit.

But the big money in private health insurance isn’t in risk-pooling, but in risk-shifting. If you’re an insurance company, you want to insure the people who don’t get sick and not wind up paying for the people who do get sick. Every time you insure somebody who doesn’t get sick, that’s 100% profit. But every time you insure an Elizabeth Edwards (or my wife, another cancer survivor), you blow the premiums paid by dozens (or even hundreds) of healthy people. There’s nothing like this in other markets. If you sell computers or cars, the more you sell the more money you make. You don’t need to worry about selling to the wrong customers.

Left to their own devices, health-insurance companies will compete by risk-shifting, not risk-pooling, because that’s where the real money is. They’ll love to have your business until you get sick, and then they’ll do their best to get rid of you. The more freedom the market allows the insurance companies, the more nakedly they will pursue this strategy.

The second unusual feature of the health-care market is that consumers are not the well-informed decision-makers that McCain imagines. When the doctor tells you that your daughter needs this operation right away or she’s going to die, are you going to spend a week in the library researching the question? Even if you had the week to spend, would you trust your rationality under that kind of stress?

My wife, who could never get insurance on her own, gets us insurance through her employer. We have a choice of several plans, which we can change annually if we want. Are we making the best choice? I have no idea. Nobody does. We trust that the employer has vetted the plans, and we’ve had mostly good experiences so far, so we stay with what we have. People who haven’t been sick don’t even get that much information. Now shift into that health-insurance-account vision: I’m going to negotiate individually to get the best deal out of the surgeons, the hospitals, the labs that do our blood tests, and everybody else in the supply chain. And I’m especially going to do it when either I or my wife have major illnesses. Not likely.

In competitive markets full of customers as ignorant as I would be without an employer cutting down my choices, competition happens mostly through image advertising. St. Marie Antoinette’s Hospital “really cares.” The Beneficent Insurance Company hires attractive young women with chipper voices to answer your calls. The “best” doctors are with the Upscale Medical Group. The more competition we put into the system, the more money will be spent on TV commercials with messages like that rather than on providing care that helps people get well.

Finally, it’s very hard for voters to wrap their minds around the sheer scale of the health-care market. Americans spend about $2 trillion of public and private money each year on health care. In a system that big, it’s easy to come up with ideas that seem like they ought to save big money, but actually make no visible dent. Take malpractice expenses. As McCain says:

Another source of needless cost and trouble in the health care system comes from the trial bar. Every patient in America must have access to legal remedies in cases of bad medical practice. But this vital principle of law and medicine is not an invitation to endless, frivolous lawsuits from trial lawyers who exploit both patients and physicians alike.

Tort reform is a standard conservative cost-saving proposal in all fields. But the total malpractice payments in America run about $5-6 billion annually. That sounds like real money, but it’s less than $3 out of every $1000 of our total health-care spending. Eliminate all malpractice cases — including the ones where deserving patients get money they need — and you will have made not the slightest dent in our medical budget. All such savings in McCain’s plan, I predict, would be swamped by the increased advertising.

McCain doesn’t propose putting any new federal money into health care, so you won’t get a break that way. If he succeeds in pushing the insurance market towards individual policies rather than employer-centered groups, you’ll lose any bargaining power that your employer might have. If the health-savings-account model takes hold, you’ll have to make a huge number of decisions without having the proper information or expertise. Creating a national rather than state-by-state market will prevent your state government from giving you any more leverage than the federal government wants to give you. Cost savings are illusory.

In short: In McCain’s plan, your power goes down relative to the insurance companies. What you’ll get in exchange for that is not clear.

Chris Bowers, who wasn’t supporting Hillary anyway, reports:

The gas tax holiday episode collects all of my worst fears about a possible second Clinton presidency in a single, dark, place that I haven’t entered since the 1990’s. Are we to suffer through another Democratic President who will make impromptu, right-ward shifts toward bad policy, justified in nonsensical, Orwellian language, all the while claiming such a move must be done because it will score huge political points even though it is ultimately a bad political calculation, and then threaten the entire Democratic Party to fall in line behind such a move or else? This is basically all of my worst fears about Hillary Clinton becoming President rolled up into one giant ball of tin-foil and dropped on my front porch.

U.S. troop deaths in Iraq had leveled off at about 40 a month before shooting up to 54 in April. Funny how you don’t hear people say “the Surge is working” so much any more. Back in November, when deaths had dropped into the 20s after being over 100 every month last summer, you could almost share John McCain’s fantasy that our casualties were on their way to zero, and that an Iraq occupation might become no different than having troops in Germany or Korea. But the downward trend stopped well short of zero, and we have to think about how long we’re willing to keep losing those 40+ every month.

Foreign policy experts seem to have some weird form of tenure — no mistakes can possibly get them thrown out of the fraternity. For the fifth anniversary of Mission Accomplished, the New York Times pulled together articles by Richard Perle, Paul Bremer, and a bunch of other people who helped get us into this mess. What do the people who were right in 2003 think? The NYT isn’t interested in that question.