Brink Linsdsey has an exerpt from an extremely critical Wall Street Journal editorial on Bush's complete lack of conviction when it comes to free trade. It isn't just steel and cotton. I can't help but quote this part:

While some amount of compromise is unavoidable, this administration has offered nothing but. Not once has it told a protectionist business lobby to take a hike. Not once has it advanced a proposal -- whether in the WTO, FTAA, or any other context -- to reform a major U.S. trade barrier. Not once has it spent a dime of the political capital that comes with an 80-plus percent approval rating to fight for the national interest in open markets against parochial interests in protectionism.

Link, quote, comment. Will the circle go unbroken?

Read Diane L.'s touching memorial to Matthew Barnes, and remember that there are so many more like him.

Instapundit is right; Eric Alterman sure is being a dick in this article, even though he's right about the insubstantiality of many of Andrew Sullivan's crusades. Does one stupid Nation article cancel out one stupid National Review article? Can we just pretend they both never happened?

The National Review has a stupid, wrong, intellectually bankrupt article saying that since Russia has a flat tax, it proves that the US should have one as well. I started one of those point-by-point deconstructions of a stupid article, but I couldn’t stand it. Here’s the two important points:

From the National Review:

It also is interesting to note that Russian tax revenues are skyrocketing even though the tax rate now is now far below the 30% top rate of the old system. According to preliminary figures, inflation-adjusted tax revenues climbed by 28% last year. This proves the class-warfare artists in Washington completely wrong when they argue that tax revenues would fall and the rich would get a big tax cut if America adopted such a system. The Russian experience confirms — again — that tax revenues rise under a flat tax.

How the &^$&* does it prove that? Russia is a basket case, a Third-World country who already sold most of their assets under market value at gunpoint. Eight or so oligarchs control the considerable majority of the wealth and assets of the country. They didn’t get wealthy through productive enterprise that provides lots of jobs. For the most part, their wealth came by using connections and physical violence to obtain publicly-owned assets at prices far under market value. People don’t get paid for months at a time, and basic services don’t perform. Not just things like gas, garbage and electricity. I remember reading in the Economist about a teacher who came to school one day and found that someone had built a fence around their playground overnight; he was starting a parking lot. There was no one the school could turn to, so they lost their playground.

The oligarchs don’t pay taxes, period. In her fantastic book Sale of the Century, Chrystia Freeland details how the Russian government actually accepted bribes from an entrepreneur who set up an internal tax island- a block of land in which people could pay a hefty fee to reside or incorporate, from which they didn’t have to pay taxes at all. The entrepreneur who set the island up is fabulously wealthy, the other fabulously wealthy don’t pay taxes, and the country is a cesspool. Most citizens don’t pay taxes, either, because they know that the government won’t enforce it. According to the World Bank:

A majority of Russians say that there is no need to pay taxes—the government will never find out. Three-quarters believe that a cash payment to a tax official enables someone to evade payment of taxes claimed. Altogether, five-sixths of Russians think that taxes can be evaded; they differ only in whether the best tactic is not paying at all or tipping tax officials to avoid legal obligations.

Furthermore, with five minutes on Google, I found that the flat tax isn’t flat. They actually raised the rates on foreigners and foreign corporations. I wonder if that had anything to do with the increase in revenues. According to the Russia Journal:

The flat tax ... isn't flat. There are three tax rates – 13 percent, 30 percent and 35 percent – and many of this paper's readers will face the higher ones.
Up to now, nonresident individuals (broadly, those in Russia for less than 183 days in a year) were generally tax-free. High taxes or low, it didn't matter to them because their rate was zero if they were paid from abroad.

Many executives have carefully counted their days in Russia each year to keep this status. Starting Jan. 1, these individuals are in for a shock. Income from the performance of duties in Russia will be taxable, even if paid abroad. And the 13 percent rate is only for residents. Nonresidents with Russian-source income will see their rate climb from zero to 30 percent.…

Incidentally, for the many expats who have created their own, personal, tax haven here by simply not filing any returns – watch out. The tax inspectorate now records the passport numbers of those who do file. And armed with this information, the authorities could in the future begin comparing passport numbers to tax data files for those leaving the country. If they start doing that, those who turn up at Sheremetyevo having not paid their taxes may well find that they miss their plane.

The highest rate, 35 percent, is in part aimed at killing off some old tax-avoidance schemes, since it applies to deemed income from preferential loans and also some deposit interest and insurance schemes that have been favored by a number of employers as a method of paying employees while avoiding social fund costs.

So they raised taxes and stepped up enforcement, and somehow their tax income went up. Will wonders never cease.

Thank God, our economy and our tax system doesn’t have a blessed thing to do with Russia’s. The US is a mature capitalist economy with a thriving middle class. A flat tax by definition means that the poor (or in some plans, the middle class) pay the same rate as the rich. To keep the same levels of revenue, the lowest rates have to come up, and the highest rates have to come down. By definition, in a flat tax system, either (a) tax revenues fall, or (b) the rich get a big tax cut. There’s no other way!

Second point, from the National Review:

The difference between President Bush and President Putin, of course, is that while Russia enjoys its flat tax, Americans still have to navigate the hundreds of forms required by all 45,000 pages of our mind-numbing tax code. But don't blame President Bush. He's boxed in by tax-cut opponents such as Sens. Tom Daschle and Edward Kennedy. If they're willing to filibuster against a tiny tax cut in a stimulus bill, it's not hard to imagine what they would do to stop a flat tax.

You want to see how mind-numbing the progressive portion of the income tax code is? Here it is, in its entirety. Five whole rates. It takes less pixels than it does for Tim Blair to call Michael Moore fat. The tax code is fat because of deductions, not because it’s progressive. If you want to make the tax code simpler, have the guts to get rid of deductions. Don’t pretend that you need a flat tax to simplify the tax code, because it just isn’t true.

I don't know if this is true, but if it is, it makes me furious. I can't believe the juvenility of the Republican leadership sometimes. I know Democrats do embarassing things, but this is indefensible. The U.S. Government is not Trent Lott's goddamn sandbox.

Just to show you how incredibly fair-minded I am (cough), the Bush administration's proposed loosening of medical privacy regulations isn't a bad idea. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which was completed at the tail end of Clinton's second term, puts some strong restrictions on patient privacy. In particular, patients are supposed to give written permission every time their records are passed on to someone else. This is, indeed, a swell way to protect patient privacy. However, there are times when a third party has a legitimate reason to access patient records. A pharmacist might want to know what medicines you're taking, or an ER doctor might want to know your medical history. If you're incapacitated, you aren't able to tell them.

Right now, this isn't a problem that the law can fix, since the records aren't accessible in any case. They're a folder full of paper and films, and said pharmacist or ER doc wouldn't be able to resurrect them at a moment's notice even with permission. However, as we rapidly move toward digitized files, the guy in the ambulance will soon be able to tell if you're allergic to penicillin or are taking any drugs. If you are incapacitated, under the old law, he'd have to make sure that you had given specific permission for this situation. Now, he doesn't; he can just pull them up. In addition, they're making it easier for medical researchers to get access to de-identified patient data. This is a very good thing, acheived at very little cost.

Insurers like this change for a slightly more nefarious purpose: they'll get access to patient records for reimbursement purposes without the special written permission of the patient. But, of course, this is not really nefarious at all; any health care system breaks down if doctors and hospitals can't get paid for the services they perform. I'm looking at the press release right now, and it looks like they can't share patient information for marketing purposes without the specific authorization of the patient.

There may be some dark cloud I'm not seeing. For example, they're making it easier for parents to see their children's medical records, which could turn into a roundabout parental notification act for abortion. But in general, it looks good to me.

UPDATE: From the New York Times: "Pharmacists and hospitals had expressed the same concern. Drugstores said they could not fill prescriptions phoned in by a doctor for pick-up by a patient's relative or neighbor. Hospitals said they could not schedule medical procedures until the patient had read a privacy notice and signed a consent form." These are some good reasons, too.

Charles Dodgson is right on; remember this the next time you hear a Republican calling the Democratic Senate "obstructionist."

A while ago, I was so impressed with a post in Slate's Fray that I made a copy. I'm reposting it now; enjoy. This is by John Nowicki, and was posted on March 1, 2001, back when we had a surplus to invest. This guy needs a blog, or better, a position as a Democratic strategist.

**************

While I agree with 90% of what you've said here, I do have to call you on the stock market point. As a stereotype social Liberal/fiscal Conservative (I support affirmative action and NAFTA), the continued acceptance by the "New Democrat" wing of the horridly bad idea of govt. controlled stock investments bugs me.

To wit, you just have waaaay too much moral hazard involved here. First, a few basic, though probably incorrect assumptions. We'll assume the "surplus" runs as projected, and that the $3.5T holds. We'll also assume that the "Parliament of Whores (PoW)" (Thank you P.J. O'Rorke) doesn't buy votes with it, by shipping the cash back home in "Highway Improvements", etc... Pretty heroic assumptions in my book, especially the latter, but hey. One last assumption, just to weaken my position...the govt. only dumps a $1T into the market.

First, where do they dump that $1T, which is now the single largest investment fund in the market? Since this is the govt., the investments will implicitly have to follow political rules. Denny's gets nailed for racial discrimination...can you picture the headlines if the Fed. is holding huge amounts of that firm? Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson running protests? Uh huh...so out goes the money, fast, not for economic reasons, but political/social ones. What about non-union shops? What about firms that do/don't offer gay employees partner benefits? What about the reverse under a conservative Republican admin?

What you have, no matter how much blather is made about "independence" of the fund managers (which is practically impossible, even the Fed. is only quasi free of politics), is an implicit industrial policy. The govt. running the private markets. With a $1T 800 pound gorilla bouncing around the markets, acting economically "irrational" (i.e. reacting to political pressures) no private investments are safe. Would you want to be the fool holding Apple stocks, when a heavily conservative admin takes over, and quietly places pressure on the administration agency to divest, as the have a gay friendly partnership benefits program? Or holding an anti-union firm when a new liberal admin does the same? With no investments safe from short to medium term slams when the gorilla divests, no one will invest.

Moreover, what about changes in political behavior based on the markets? Would a DoJ go after a Microsoft if the govt. held a chunk of the stock? Would we be more, or less likely to act militarily if the country in question could tank the govts. portfolio (for example, a Middle Eastern Conflict and oil stocks). Would the Fed. restrict rates while the Nasdaq is plunging? And would not every such action, as just mentioned, immediately create the impression of investment based bias, even if not. Again, using the MS example...smart money on a breakup would be in Sun, Aol/Netscape. But as an investor, would that not make the govt. an "inside trader" to its own DoJ policy?

In addition, what about PoW payola? Given the impossibility to completely exclude political considerations from investment issues, would it not behoove companies to pony up at the PoW trough? It's already necessary to buy off your Representatives and Presidents through soft money...imagine if you give those same folks implicit power over market valuations. How often would "Senator Blowhard" put pressure on the investment admin to place money into a large campaign contributor? If we think we have corruption now...just wait for this. You also create an incentive to industry to spend $ on buying politicians, rather than compete effectively...options cash based on short term market value, not long term profitability.This is getting too long, so here's a few others in shorthand...

1. Domestic vs. International investment. Will the admin be free to invest abroad, or only domestically? I can't picture the political air to allow diverse international investments, so the fund is totally at risk to one market's downturns. Also, that $1T restricted to domestic investments impacts #2, below.

2. Maximum investments. Can the govt. hold controlling interest in a company? I don't even need to explain the implications of that, but $1T invested domestically implies that happening, especially in small caps. If you accordingly lock out small caps, you now make it likely in mid caps, and so on.

3. Related to #3, above. What about foreign owned firms listed domestically? Daimler/Chrysler for example? Especially if said firm directly competes against a purely domestically held firm?

4. Sectoral Shifts. We have seen a huge sectoral shift in the economy from old line industries with low skill/high wage employment, to services and technology, with high skill/high pay employment. The result has been an erosion of unskilled labor income and an explosion in high skill income. As a computer programmer I benefit from this. But as a govt. investor, will you really take tax money from factory workers to invest in firms that will destroy their employment? You will if you want to get return from the winning sector in the shift. Conversely then, will you tax me to prop up the failing sector, and lower the returns accordingly?

5. Boomer Bye-bye. When the boomers hit majority retirement, this $1T will leave, and leave quickly. I hope you have plans set for dealing with the deep recession.

6. Too many more to even go into. I will reiterate that this is just 1/3 the total "surplus"...it gets far worse if the entire thing is used in this manner.

In summary, you blithely ignore huge amounts of political, moral, and corruption risks inherent in this model. The only way to minimize these risks would conflict with each other, and with the goal of maximizing investment returns. You create an implicit govt. industrial policy, and a potential for actual govt. ownership of firms. There is no way around these issues. You then will pull the rug out in 20 years, triggering a huge recession. Thus, the idea of surplus investment in private markets is a horrid one, and should be abandoned.

Happy Fun Pundit explains that the requirement of an Oklahoma school board to test for drugs before participating in extracurricular activities is completely counterproductive. "The end result of this will be a huge drop in enrollment in extra-curricular activities, less control over the children instead of more (they'll be out hangin' at the mall instead of playing in the marching band now), and drug use won't drop one bit." He does a good job with it, but I'll add one more point: In these schools, participating in extra-curriculars will be equivalent to saying "I'm drug-free!" In the real world, this is not a badge that everyone wants to wear. I can easily imagine a tough kid who want to join the football team, but is turned off by the goodie-goodie message that this entails. So he doesn't join the football team. This is clearly not what the school board wanted.

According to Rotten Tomatoes, which amalgamates published reviews, the best film nominees rate as such:

Lord of the Rings: 96%
In the Bedroom: 91%
Gosford Park: 88%
A Beautiful Mind: 78%
Moulin Rouge: 71%

Only three movies were better than Lord of the Rings: The Taste of Other, Down From the Mountain, and Life and Debt. The Taste of Other and Life and Debt are foreign films, and Down From the Mountain is a documentary feature, but none of them are nominated for those categories. Huh.

Via Paul Orwin:

In Bias, Bernie Goldberg makes a statement that could be confirmed or disproved: "In the world of the Jennings and Brokaws and Rathers, conservatives are out of the mainstream and have to be identified. Liberals, on the other hand, are the mainstream and don't have to be identified."

Geoffrey Nunberg actually tests this assertion, and finds that Goldberg is wrong:

In fact, I did find a big disparity in the way the press labels liberals and conservatives, but not in the direction that Goldberg claims. On the contrary: the average liberal legislator has a thirty percent greater likelyhood of being identified with a partisan label than the average conservative does. The press describes Barney Frank as a liberal two-and-a-half times as frequently as it describes Dick Armey as a conservative. It gives Barbara Boxer a partisan label almost twice as often as it gives one to Trent Lott. And while it isn't surprising that the press applies the label conservative to Jesse Helms more often than to any other Republican in the group, it describes Paul Wellstone as a liberal twenty percent more frequently than that.

Goldberg also claims that "it's not unusual to identify certain actors, like Tom Selleck or Bruce Willis, as conservatives. But Barbra Streisand or Rob Reiner. . . are just Barbra Streisand and Rob Reiner." Nunberg finds that, in fact, "The press gives partisan labels to Streisand and Reiner almost five times as frequently as it does to Selleck and Willis. For that matter, Warren Beatty gets a partisan label twice as often as Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Norman Lear gets one more frequently than Charlton Heston does."

In response, Paul Orwin asks a good question:

Could you prove to a conservative (or a liberal) that they were not being persecuted by their favorite bugaboo? Will a conservative ever believe that the NY Times is pretty much fair in its news coverage (regardless of the examples Ira Stoll finds, there is no evidence, that I know of, of systemic, statistically significant bias in news coverage in either direction, at any newspaper. The op-ed pages, of course, are a different story, but op-ed stands for opinion and editorial, so it is entirely appropriate for that part of a newspaper to express an opinion. Conversely, it is hard for many liberals, especially hard-core lefties, to accept that sometimes corporations do the right thing because the people running them are human beings with actual consciences, and not cold, ruthless automatons. I suspect that for many no amount of statistical analysis of these or many other pernicious myths will change their minds, but one can always try.

Holy smokes, you please Tom Tomorrow and watch the referrals roll in. Sorry, new readers; I'm really busy until Monday or so, but usually I'm full of it (in a good way). I can't get the links working either, so search for "health care" if that's what you came for. When it works, it'll go here.

What he said.

Via Banana Counting Monkey, a great story about a dumb-ass blogger who decided to tell the world all about his dating as it happened.

UPDATE: If you don't read the comments, Mary Lacroix links to an interesting Metafilter thread that is much more sympathetic to the blogger and hard on the journalist, who apparently improved some of the quotes. Read it here.

Charles Murtaugh takes Leon Kass to task for his absurd suggestion that modern medicine is looking for a "victory over mortality". Says Charles:

I'm down with death, too, don't get me wrong, but what bugs me is the notion that biomedicine is inevitably tied to a drive for immortality. This is just flat-out wrong. Why is so much research money devoted to AIDS and breast cancer? It's not because these are leading killers; in fact, cardiovascular disease kills more people, but it gets less research funding per death than cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, and a host of other high-profile diseases. And what gives these diseases their high profiles? The fact that we see them as more tragic than "ordinary," "appropriate" death: they strike people down before their time is due, or they steal the dignity from what ought to be peaceful final years.

In fact, my suspicion is that none of the gains in human lifespan over the past two centuries have even the slightest recognizable relationship to a quest for immortality. Instead, each incremental gain was won against the absurd tragedies that beset our forebears: cholera, smallpox, polio, malnutrition. I can't speak for all biomedical researchers, but I know that in moments of immodesty, I can see myself in a line of descent that includes Jenner, Pasteur and Salk: scientists who knew how to recognize suffering when they saw it, and how to distinguish it from something "natural" and good.

And he uses a Radiohead reference as a title!

Interesting post on blacks who take on Arabic names at Spinsters.

Many were the protestors at the Barcelona summit on European integraton. No shit. Barcelona is one of the most spectacular cities on Earth. I'd go there to protest yesterday's Ziggy.

You want to reduce violent protests at globalization summits? Hold them in Akron in February. If any anti-capitalists dragged their asses up to Akron, I'd read their pamphlets.

Ken Layne has a great line on blogger etiquette:

Imagine this kind of thing at an actual human gathering:

Hey, I like your stuff.

Thanks. Hang on a second ... HEY EVERYBODY! THIS GUY LIKES MY STUFF! HOW ABOUT SOME MONEY OVER HERE?

Andrew Sullivan deserves credit for addressing a problem that the Republicans generally ignore, and the Bush budget lies about: the rising cost of health care, and the ticking bomb that this represents in the federal budget. There’s also the little matter of 42 million or so Americans with no insurance. Then there’s the fact that employer-based insurance is a brake on labor mobility; when you lose coverage for pre-existing conditions every time you change jobs, you’ll try to avoid changing jobs at all costs if there's a possiblity of illness in your family.

The free market has shown no sign of sorting this out; rather, we see medical costs increasing much faster than inflation, more and more costs being shifted to the insured, doctors getting squeezed harder and harder. Libertarians complain that we don’t have a free market in health care, but I’ve never seen a cogent argument about how deregulation is supposed to improve access or quality of health care system. And I read a whole book about it.

I work in healthcare, and I happen to know a little bit about this. Our health care system is the most expensive in the world by a wide margin, but it's ranked 37th in quality. As you probably know, the systems that are cheaper and work better are European single-payer systems. (You can see where I’m heading with this.)

I know that Euro-bashing is wildly popular in blogland, but isn't it at least conceivable that, since the Euros get a better quality system for less money, they're doing something right? (Quick review: a single payer system is not the same thing as socialized medicine, in which doctors are government employees. That's what they do in the UK, and I'll be the first to tell you that it's highly unsatisfactory. It's also not what Clinton was trying to get. Rather, it’s the system by which all citizens are covered by a single publicly owned insurance system, which is paid for by taxes. Providers are still private institutions, just as doctors and hospitals who still take Medicare patients are.)

From Physicians for a National Health Program, which I'm indebted to for many quotes and facts:

"Research shows that people in other industrialized countries with national health insurance get more doctor visits, hospital care, and even more expensive, life-saving types of care like kidney transplants (for kidney failure), and bone marrow transplants (for leukemia) than Americans do. Waits for care in other countries are far less of a problem than believed (or that occur for many patients in this country), and there are NO waits for emergency care.

Because of national health insurance and other policies that reduce social inequality, residents of other industrialized countries have lower infant mortality, longer life expectancies, and fewer worries about whether the health care system will be there for them when they fall ill. They truly have "health security" and don't want U.S.-style for-profit health care."

From the Washington Monthly:

We should acknowledge the problems: waits for non-urgent types of care, and recent, damaging cuts (see Rachlis piece, this issue). But waits are not uncommon in the U.S. Sometimes it takes six weeks for a new patient to get a routine appointment with me (Dr. Himmelstein); in Canada, that would be called a "queue", in the U.S. it's not called anything. At Cook County Hospital in Chicago, there are 10,000 poor patients on the waiting list for primary health care. Cook County doesn't have the capacity, so most of these patients will never get care for their hypertension and other problems. Canadians get more doctor's visits, more hospital days, more procedures, and more bone-marrow transplants than Americans. Canadians do get fewer CABGs, but their death and reinfarction rates following acute MI are the same as ours.

It costs less, provides better quality of care, and everyone gets covered. So what’s the problem?

Would you really turn 15% of our economy over to government with the efficiency of the post office, the compassion of the IRS, and the cost effectiveness of the defense department?

This is a real issue, not just a rhetorical challenge. Government is often repressive and inefficient. I distrust government, and have the FBI file to prove it. However, the only current alternative to a national health program is health care dominated by large for-profit corporations. At least we can watch Congress, and vote them out. We don't even have the right to know where HMOs' boards meet, much less elect their executives. On the issues of clinical freedom and efficiency, we know that government programs have a better track record. Canada's insurance overhead is just 1% of health spending, and there is little intrusion into clinical practice. U.S. Healthcare takes 30% overhead and takes clinical decision-making out of doctors' and patients' hands. In Cambridge, my city taxes come to about $1,300 per person, about what I pay for car insurance. For my taxes I receive police and fire protection, trash collection, schools for my two children, care at a public hospital whether or not I am insured, and snow-plowing of the streets. For my car insurance I get. . . car insurance. So where did I get the better deal?

The scandals in government pale in comparison to those in corporate health care. No government official earns (or swindles) close to the $1 billion Leonard Abramson got from the Aetna-U.S. Healthcare merger, or the hundreds of millions NME made from kidnapping psychiatric patients, or what Caremark made paying kickbacks for referrals.

The U.S. government does many things right in health. The spectacular achievements of the NIH should not be underemphasized. All too often the credit goes to the drug companies who take the profits after publicly-funded scientists make the breakthroughs.

"But Europeans have to pay higher taxes for their single-payer systems, which is a drag on their economies." We pay about 13.7% of our GNP for health care, whereas Germany pays 11%, Canada pays 9%, and other European countries pay less. The Danish system costs 6.7% of GDP. For which, of course, they get better results- more doctor visits, lower infant mortality, more pre-natal care. There is no reason to believe that a single-payer system would cost more than the mess we have now. If we could save 4% of our GDP, wouldn’t that be a tremendous boon to the economy? Wouldn’t you rather pay 9% to the government instead of splitting 13.7% between private businesses and the government?

"It'll create a ton of bureaucratic waste." Here’s the strongest argument, besides the 42 million with no health care. National health insurance costs less than 4% in administrative overhead (Canada only spends 1% on insurance administration; our Medicare program only spends 3%).

In contrast, our private insurers consume between 9% and 30% of health care dollars. The GAO says that health care bureaucracy costs $100 billion a year. There are well over 40,000 insurers in the country. Every one of them has a different set of forms, different rules for reimbursement, different sets of hoops for doctors and facilities to jump over. As a result, the average office-based American doctor employs 1.5 clerical and managerial staff, spends 44% of gross income on overhead, and devotes 134 hours of his/her own time annually to billing

In contrast, Canadian physicians employ 0.7 clerical/administrative staff, spend 34% of their gross income for overhead, and trivial amounts of time on billing (there's a single half page form for all patients, or a simple electronic system).

Blue Cross in Massachusetts employs more people to administer coverage for about 2.5 million New Englanders than are employed in all of Canada to administer single payer coverage for 27 million Canadians. In Massachusetts, hospitals spend 25.5% of their revenues on billing and administration. The average Canadian hospital spends less than half as much, because the single payer system obviates the need to determine patient eligibility for services, obtain prior approval, attribute costs and charges to individual patients, and battle with insurers over care and payment.

I maintain that the resistance to a single payer system cannot be explained by the success of the American system. It can't be explained by the failure of the single payer system elsewhere. Rather, it's largely a product of ideology and self-interest. I can understand why insurers don't want to be put out of business. I can also understand that a lot of people feel bone-deep that adding capacities to the government can only cause problems. (Some of my favorite people, I might add.) But failing to consider that a single payer system could work better than what we have now, contrary to the evidence in the rest of the world, strikes me as a matter of quasi-religious faith.

Blast away.

Aren't our representatives in Congress supposed to represent us? If this is uncontroversial, then who does Trent Lott think he's representing?

I know that some people are upset because the Senate Judiciary Committee thought that they had the right to object to 1 in 43 (1 in 43!) of Bush's appointments to the federal judiciary. But does that excuse this?

Within hours of Judge Pickering's party-line defeat, Sen. Lott moved to block a $1.5 million request by the committee to conduct a probe related to Sept. 11 miscues, obstructed the nomination of an aide to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to the Federal Communications Commission, and signaled that there may be more parliamentary choke points where those came from: "You'll see it in a lot of ways and in a lot of days," warned Sen. Lott. He is clearly behaving as a victim done wrong. That is a worrisome mind-set because, as minority leader, Mr. Lott's current impulsive, negative method of dealing with his anger could disrupt the Senate's important work.

Bad day for blogging, but I couldn't pass this up. Hawkgirl has an incredible story about Limp Bizkit's nationwide guitar auditions. Unlike Emily, I'm familiar with Limp Bizkit. I quickly exhaust my superlatives when I try to describe how much I hate this horrible, horrible band. A sample of actual lyrics should suffice.

Where you at, Jacksonville?
Rochester, Louisville?
Columbia, Hartford, Milwaukee, and Louiston, Maine.
Where you at, Providence, Nashville, Memphis, Lauderdale.
Portland, Orlando, Chicago, and Frisco.
I left my heart in Austin, when Mary Campbell
Got lost in Boston lookin for the tea party.
Met a child molester in Worchester.
I need a Kleenex everytime I'm leavin Phoenix.
I get silly when I play in Philly.
Limp Bizkit Comittee, down in Kansas City.
Never know what I'm in fer, when I play in Denver.
Hard rock don't stop down in Vegas.
In Cincinatti the girls call me "Daddy"
And I probably aint leavin the next time I'm in Cleveland.
Found my lucky coin in Des Moines.
And spit on a boy named Tina in Pasedina.
We got the swing from New Orleans.
Fort Worth, and Dallas we toast when we're tippin up the chalice.
Tulsa, St. Louis, Sacro, Mesa, Norfolk, Lawrence,
Minneapolis, St. Paul, North Hampton, Detroit, Omaha,
New York, L.A., what can I say?
I can't name em all.
So somebody, anybody, everybody,
GET THE FUCK UP!!!

And show me what you got!
Woo-hah!
Show me what you got!
Hey ladies?!
Who's hot, who's not?
Who? WHO?!
Who's hot, who's not?

I made a lovely trip to Austin this weekend. At the foot of the Capital building is this monument to Confederate soldiers. I was stunned to read the text:

"Died for States Rights Guaranteed under the Constitution
The people of the South, animated by the spirit of 1776, to preserve their rights, withdrew from the Federal Compact in 1861. The North resorted to coercion. The South, against overwhelming numbers and resources, fought until exhausted.

During the war, there were twenty two hundred and fifty seven engagements; in eighteen hundred and eighty-two of these, at least one regiment took part.

Number of men enlisted: Confederate Armies 880, 089 Federal Armies 2,858, 132 Losses from all causes: Confederate 437,000 Federal 485,216"

I actually had a dream about blogging this weekend. I don't remember the dream, but I woke up on Sunday morning believing that I had been called a "liberal weblogger and actor" by the Weekly Standard. I was pleased at the recognition, but I thought that I'd better go post something to let people know that I wasn't actually an actor. I don't know what this means, but it can't be good.

UPDATE: I had not read this until just now, but Andrew Sullivan is going to act in the Washington Shakespeare Company's production of "Much Ado About Nothing." (ENTER ROD SERLING)