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My friend Bob Wright posts a persuasive "partial list" of the "false and misleading things" he argues a recent New Republic book review said about The Evolution of God.
If [reviewer Jerry] Coyne wants to write a devastating review of my book-and there can be little doubt that he wants to-he's going to have to start over.
The disputes are grouped into six substantive issues. My guess is that #4 and #5 are the hottest areas of contention. ... My own non-devastating attempt to grill Wright on his view of Islam comes toward the end of this interview. ... 9:54 P.M.
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So You Have A Death Panel in That Basket! Tom Maguire digs further into that April Bloomberg story--and the David Leonhardt NYT interview behind it--and discovers that Obama came a lot closer to talking about "death panels" back in April than I'd thought. Here's the key passage [emphasis added by Maguire]. It comes as Obama is talking about the hip replacement his grandmother got a few weeks before her death:
THE PRESIDENT: ... I don't know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she's my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else's aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they're terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn't have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life - that would be pretty upsetting.
LEONHARDT: And it's going to be hard for people who don't have the option of paying for it.
THE PRESIDENT: So that's where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that's also a huge driver of cost, right?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.
LEONHARDT: So how do you - how do we deal with it?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It's not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that's part of what I suspect you'll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.
Yikes. ... I'm sure the "not determinative" part was very important to Obama. Still! He's talking about a panel of independent experts making end-of-life recommendations in order to save costs that have an effect at an individual level. And he thought it would be in the bill that emerges. ... It's also pretty clear that something like the "IMAC" panel is what he has in mind. Whether or not the IMAC would actually do this--Harold Pollack says end-of-life issues are well down the curve-bender's list, for example--Obama thought it would do it. . .
And if health care advisor Ezekiel Emanuel believes there's actually not that much money to be saved on end-of-life care, he hadn't gotten the message to the President back in April. ...
P.S.: Hmm. If, say, Peter Orszag led Obama down the fatal path of talking about end-of-life-savings, and if Ezekiel Emanuel thinks Orszag is wrong about this, then who is Ezekiel's own brother going to recommend throwing overboard when if health care reform stalls? Just speculating! ...
Update: Timothy Noah argues that you really need all three parts of Uwe Reinhardt's "three-legged stool" to make insurance reform work. 1) Insurance companies accept all comers; 2) Individual mandate to buy insurance; 3) Subsidies so poor people can fulfill that mandate. Fine. Let's do those three things! They pointedly do not include Peter Orszag's long-term game-changers, or Obama's "very difficult democratic conversation" about end of life care. Even Reinhardt, who supports the long-term Orszag agenda, doesn't think it's something we can do in this round of reform--that's "a much longer-run effort that may take an entire decade or more." Why didn't someone tell that to Obama (who actually pledged to veto a bill that didn't do the long-term curve-bending that Reinhardt says can't be done)? 'Sir, we can achieve universal coverage.' 'No, let's have a very difficult democratic conversation first." ... P.S.: Orszag's politically disastrous "game changers" are also the piece of Obama's reforms mysteriously left off Ezra Klein's list of health care areas of agreement and disagreement. ... 9:52 P.M.
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A second talented editor leaves the L.A. Times Entertainment section in as many weeks. Kate Aurthur, who's going to the Daily Beast, was--according to kf's well-informed source--
the one top editor with any sense of innovative spirit, creativity or awareness of the internet left in the Calendar section.
Do Times employees not find Entertainment chieftain Sallie Hofmeister's leadership inspiring? ... P.S.: I used to enjoy mocking the LAT, but it's so doomed there's no point anymore. If there were a death panel for newspapers, it would issue a DNR order. ... 9:48 P.M.
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Lehanism's Biggest Failure? Here's a thought: What if Obama said, to the health care protesters and worried seniors, "I understand your concerns" instead of letting his press secretary and party allies sneer at them (for being "well-dressed" or thugs or dupes who don't know "the facts," etc.)? Isn't that more the Obama Way, as opposed to the Lehanist "fight club" way? Obama might even fire Orszag order up a few changes in the proposed legislation to alleviate some of the seniors' worries. ... P.S.: We can always control long term costs in the long term--i.e. later--just as Orszag's curve-bending schemes, even if they pass intact, could always be repealed by a new Congress and President. These are all things that will happen at least ten years from now! They aren't worth blowing universal health care over. ... P.P.S.: Hillary Clinton's plan, if I recall, did not make the mistake of making a big deal of long-term medical cost control. Maybe if she were still in the Senate she'd be making that point. ...
Backfill: Marc Ambinder may want some of his twitters back one day. ... 10:32 P.M.
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Change in Blog Dress Code: Effective immediately, readers are requested not to read kausfiles in a suit. We are trying for a more artistic atmosphere. This ban also applies to the fancier kind of pajamas--you know, the ones with the piping. Thank you for your cooperation. 10:16 P.M.
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Sarah Palin had a point! [via JTlol] 1:30 A..M.
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Chuck Lane: House health bill's free end-care "consultations"--not so innocent! A subsidized and scripted "nudge" toward a DNR order from a white-coated authority figure. ... 1:28 A.M.
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WaPo: "[B]arely one-third of seniors support a health-care overhaul, several polls found." Why? They like Medicare as it is, they're scared of Obama's changes, and Obama has conspicuously failed to reassure them. ... But the Post's Ceci Connolly seems (at least at one point) to assume, Beltway-style, that seniors' fears must be due to the $563 billion in Medicare savings over the next decade, as opposed to Orszagist curve-bending after that. ...
P.S: Connolly reports the White House is considering "reaching out to skeptical seniors" through a ''myth-busting' Web site." That'll do it! Game over! ... Even assuming a web site could have a big impact, "myth-busting" sites don't tamp down paranoia,in my experience. They stoke it. If an answer is only 85% satisfying, the other 15% suddenly seems very significant. Take Obama's recent attempt to reassure Karen Tumulty on the "rationing" question:
[T]his is my point, I think that there's this perception that you either have rationing that is very stringent and sort of makes you wait for months before you can get your cancer treated or you can never get your knee replaced, right, all the horror stories you hear from the British model or the Canadian system that people who are opposed to reform always trot out. Or, alternatively, you just have this bloated system in which we don't even try to make it rational, we just sort of live with what we have. And what I'm trying to suggest is, is that there's this huge space in between where we could make the system much more efficient, much more cost-effective, make people much healthier, and still not have to resort to some of the rationing that people are fearful of. ..
So we don't go all the way to Britain. We go halfway to Britain! ... Obama can't bring himself to say we won't ration. But we won't resort to "some" of the rationing. ... Reassuring! ... 1:26 A.M.
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For @jayrosen_nyu: What was so bad about the L.A. Times' "wikitorial"? How was it "arrogant"? My impression is they shut it down because they got hacked, not because it wasn't a potentially interesting experiment. ... Update: Rosen's response. ... Who's arrogant again? ...
P.S.: Actual kf Twitter feed is here. ...1:25 A.M.
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"'I'll sue you for defamation!' is the toothless wonder of the legal world," declares a confident and defiant HuffPo blogger. But is it really toothless? ... Background: Sarah Palin's attorney suggests that an Alaskan blogger has been defaming the Governor, and is threatening to sue not only the blogger but also "those who republish the defamation, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post." I would have thought that this threat was decidedly non-toothless--that if a blogger really was publishing something defamatory about Palin (or anyone**), and if HuffPo or the NYT published the blog on their web sites, they'd be on the hook for defamation just as if they'd published an article by one of their own reporters.
That was before I learned about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. It's imprecisely worded, but if it really does immunize HuffPo and Gawker and even Slate or the NYT, etc --by requiring any libel plaintiff to recover damages from the actual original blogger, as some cases suggest--that would change a lot from what I thought I learned in law school. The changes go way beyond defanging Palin. I'm obviously way behind thinking about this, but off the top of my head, here are some of the possible ramifications:
a) It would be great for blogging, because it would mean lawyers for big journalistic outfits (like the Washington Post, which owns Slate) won't require blogs to be edited. In fact, they won't want the blogs to be edited, lest that be interpreted as implicating the big journalistic outlet itself in any libel. "Curation" is for co-defendants!
b) Most bloggers themselves are probably poor enough to be judgment-proof, although some HuffPo bloggers might have deeper pockets than HuffPo itself;
c) It means unverified undernews would now have a prominent, semi-official, de facto-sanctioned home, namely judgment-proof blogs on big news sites;
d) Are they really going to apply this to organizations that pay freelance bloggers for their submissions? If not, the statute might protect HuffPo (which usually doesn't pay bloggers) but not Slate (which pays me). But does this paid/unpaid line really make sense, since readers don't necessarily know who's paying what to whom when evaluating a blog's credibility? Is HuffPo all that different from Slate? And I don't want to give my editors another reason to cut my salary to zero. ...
e) What about repeating these protected-by Sec. 230-but-unverified blog allegations in the core MSM? If actual reporters working for actual traditional news outfits can then relay 'the fact that Judgment-Proof Blog X is reporting Y rumor'--despite the traditional rules saying news outfits couldn't do this, but hey, why cut them out of the new vibrant "diversity of political discourse"?--we've really entered a new world. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with it. ...
But I find it difficult to believe that the broad web-site-protecting reading of Section 230 will hold up--it's a mere statute, remember. Congress can amend it. Is Congress really going to let average citizens get libeled by blogs on the New York Times web site without being able to sue the New York Times? ... On its face, the statutory provision, which protects "interactive computer services and other interactive media," appears intended more to protect outfits like American Online than traditional newspapers that host blogs or even new hybrid journalist/blogging/activist outfits like HuffPo. When Congress sees how that phrase has been interpreted, it may (as they say) revisit the issue. ...
**--Sure, public figures like Palin would have to show "actual malice," as defined in New York Times v. Sullivan. But that's not always impossible to do. ... 2:21 A.M.
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The "Savonarola of Sullivan's Island": Was he in love with the Latina hottie or with the "unashamedly navel-gazing culture of Argentina itself?" ... 12:11 A.M.
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I can see 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Palin theories ... and counting: 1) She's running for president; 2) She's undergoing fame withdrawal and plans to get more attention in the lower 48; 3) She wants to cash in ($); 4) There's another shoe about to drop; 5) She'll now run against Murkowski for Senate. 6) She needs to tend to her family. 7) She's bonkers. 8) She's preggers. 9) She wants to "effect positive change outside government at this point in time on another scale and actually make a difference for our priorities." 10) Actually being a governor in a recession is no fun. Gives you ulcers. 11) She worried she wasn't giving "Alaska's issues" the attention they deserve, and was being criticized for that; 12) She's "fed up with politics ... the personal garbage" etc.. 13) She wants to fight back without one hand tied behind her back. 14) The Alaska legislature now hates her; ... These theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. ... I have no fish in this hunt. ... Update: Mediaite has an intravenous drip. ... see also HuffPo ... and NRO ... Murphy is morphing! ... The Daily Beast has a mere 11 theories. ...
P.S.: Kurtz is sure! "No way Palin can run for president now." ... Update: Now he asks, "How can these talking heads pop off about the meaning of Palin's resignation when not one of them saw it coming?" ... It's the return of Kurtz vs. Kurtz! ...
P.P.S.: I'm waiting for someone to claim it was all the Scientologists' idea. So far, no one. But the night is young. ...
15) She's in a paranoid sulk! ... 4:35 P.M.
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