Last week, noting that the Republican Party abandoned its previous support for bailouts and fiscal stimulus precisely when they lost power, I argued that Republicans probably weren't engaged in conscious economic sabotage. Rather, they simply allowed themselves to change their mind in a way that dovetailed with their political self-interest:
People are extraordinarily deft at making their principles -- not just their stated principles, but their actual principles -- comport with their interests. The old Upton Sinclair quote -- "It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it" -- has a lot of wisdom to it.
I don't think many Republicans are actually trying to stop legislation that might help the economy recover because they know that a slow economy is their best route to regaining power. I think that when they're in power, consequences like an economic slowdown or a collapsing industry seem very dire, and policies to prevent this are going to sound compelling. When you're out of power, arguments against such policies are going to sound more compelling.
Jonathan Zasloff thinks they are engaging in sabotage -- and that's okay!
If you’re a right-wing Republican nutcase — which is to say, you are a Republican — then you think that Democratic policies are very, very bad for the country. If that is so, then what you fear is that the economy will improve, salvaging Democratic hopes for this November’s midterms. And that will lead to more Democratic policies than otherwise, which – in your view — will be very, very bad for the country.
So of course you want to “sabotage” any economic recovery over the next few months, because you believe that any temporary improvement will pale in comparison to the medium- and long-term damage that Democratic policies will cause. That’s a hard calculus, but it’s a pretty straightforward one, and perfectly reasonable if you accept Republican assumptions.
In 2006, I was frightened that the economy would somehow improve and save Republican control of Congress. Fortunately it didn’t, and Democrats took over, to the lasting benefit of the nation. I don’t think that I, or any Democrat, should apologize for that attitude. And neither should Republicans now.
It's not a terrible argument. Of course, it requires imposing a great deal of economic hardship on the public in order to bring about more distant and uncertain relief in the future. Moreover, it's yet another reason why a political system that gives the minority party veto power over the majority's agenda is deeply flawed.

Ian Millhiser catches Sen. Jeff Sessions expressing the embodiment of the modern Republican judicial philosophy: demanding aggressively intervene to overturn laws they don't like, while leaving in place laws they do like. First Sessions announced:
The American people are concerned about their courts. They’re concerned about a growing expansive government that seems to be beyond anything they’ve ever seen before. And they’d like to know what their judges might have to do about it. So I think that’s kind of where we are.
Then, seconds later, he added:
The question is: does the judge understand that they can’t utilize the power, the lifetime appointment, to redefine the meaning of the constitution — to have it promote an agenda in an activist way that the American people won’t vote for.
Both parties are fairly instrumental about the law. They favor judicial activism in issue areas where they're politically weak, and support it in areas where they're politically strong. The difference is that Republicans tend to alternate their demands for judicial activism with a lot more pious declarations of fealty to judicial restraint.
Ian Millhiser catches Sen. Jeff Sessions expressing the embodiment of the modern Republican judicial philosophy: demanding aggressively intervene to overturn laws they don't like, while leaving in place laws they do like. First Sessions announced:
The American people are concerned about their courts. They’re concerned about a growing expansive government that seems to be beyond anything they’ve ever seen before. And they’d like to know what their judges might have to do about it. So I think that’s kind of where we are.
Then, seconds later, he added:
The question is: does the judge understand that they can’t utilize the power, the lifetime appointment, to redefine the meaning of the constitution — to have it promote an agenda in an activist way that the American people won’t vote for.
Both parties are fairly instrumental about the law. They favor judicial activism in issue areas where they're politically weak, and support it in areas where they're politically strong. The difference is that Republicans tend to alternate their demands for judicial activism with a lot more pious declarations of fealty to judicial restraint.

There are quite a few programs can be customized and edit the context menu (right menu). We have covered the context menu, click edit tool, WinBubble. This time, we have another similar tools to customize your context menu quickly and easily.
A small amount of the context menu apply with Windows XP 7, allows you to add some useful context menu options (right) and click. The current version of the context menu allows you to add to the directory replication, folder, in the notepad, administrator command prompt, encryption, create file list, god mode, and reverse 3d options.
In addition, still can add custom folder to my computer and control panel of the context menu. Enhanced with the context menu, you can customize your computer, desktop, control panel window to add custom folder.
Atebits when buying, the company behind Tweetie customers, singing singing, excellent iPhone despite concerns about it will slow down the development program. Fortunately, it doesn't look like what happened. As today, the Internet version of 3.0.1 twitter just to support for the following four and apples.
In fact, while the other great procedures, such as apples, operas in support of the latest behind the iPhone function, twitter is one of the first some useful new features.
Earlier today, there are a very interesting interview facebook founder/CEO mark zuckerberg. In conversation involves a series of theme including proliferation of social games, advocate across all game, why not mention facebook credits zuckerberg fear. It also explained facebook income Numbers: zuckerberg says an estimated 1 yuan between, operas will be $1.1 billion this year, "not so far, in either direction of any pain... make us."
So what did he mean? Zuckerberg income estimates that last year's earnings are lowballing facebook attribute hurt the company. Now to such change, at least, is not see any operas, adverse effects from analysts speculated.

Introduces new e-book "Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 existing download free Microsoft. This book is for who is interested in SQL Server 2008 R2, want to understand and improve the new function designs SQL Server 2008 R2.
Introduced Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 covers the following chapters in 216 page.
I database management section
The first chapter of SQL Server 2008 R2 version, and improvement
Chapter 2 more server management
Chapter 3 - Tier application Data
Chapter 4, high-availability, virtualization improvement
The fifth chapter consolidation and monitoring
The second part of the development of business intelligence
The sixth chapter extensible data warehouse
Chapter 7 main data services
Chapter 8, StreamInsight complex event handling
Chapter 9 report service improvement
Chapter 10, analysis and PowerPivot service
Opera software has reached an agreement with the Russian federation, the mobile phone operator MegaFon OJSC under special packaging "MegaFon unlimited Internet opera," mini "will be distributed to all of the Russian territory.
That doesn't sound too like at first glance, but you must consider MegaFon owns more than 53 million mobile users, Russian federal district 7.
In addition, there are all MegaFon 39% of mobile communications network, in Russia, according to a recent study territory (this is the first time Russia in operation of 3G networks based on UMTS). The operator, internal statistics show that opera mini user generated twice effective traffic than any other MegaFon users.
It is 4INFO Zaw CEO tried to flow, the title of "king of SMS."
Mobile advertising companies dominate the market, we provide some 400 million text messages per month (its monthly rate has roughly doubled from early 2010), but it gets tired of his crown, or more specifically, he prepared to different people. 4INFO trying to become the world's largest mobile advertising, text messaging and beyond, the company is preparing to gain other players to get it.
The first part (some of them even say too ambitious) has the butter, specialized in creating custom mobile solutions and advertising campaign for itself and the Android platform. This all stock - this Tuesday, announced the agreement was a modest acquisitions - a source that the butter and not break - but it did to 4INFO embodies the main strategy of adjustment. The value of his acquisition strategy, butter, and why they pursue (6) income may be dominant in the video.

Microsoft beta release repair it has been released and free download center. Microsoft repair center can solve the problems with a single quick click. In repair center can repair the house automation and repair problems troubleshooters.
According to Microsoft, repair center and repair many common PC and equipment. It also helps to prevent new problems, actively looking for the known and installing updates. Repair center to consolidate the fault diagnosis and repair the problem into an automated tool, so do the job to you.
(you can also create a repair center free online account and effective sharing ID repair it for you. Provide extra help and support the center line, as repair center will not solve the problem.
You can find more information about the same tools in repair center home. Repair center can be installed in a Windows XP, Windows, 7, Windows Server 2003 version of the software and Server, Server 2008 2008 R2 operating system.
Apple computer program not only need to upgrade today in Microsoft search engine. Ice also began to launch new features, its main search engine on the web. The biggest change is a major new search directory handle, including better entertainment for music, movies, TV series and games. "We do shopping, travel and health, local last explains," senior vice President yusuf mehdi. "Now, the network has to unlock all these entertainment, but for many people, they spent too much time to find what they want to do not enjoy it. We are trying to remove all these obstacles that you enjoy it. You should be able to see or to hear music, performance, play games online and a few clicks.
About 10 percent of all search related, according to mehdi entertainment. 90 percent of people have at least one entertainment search for a month. Ice entertainment purpose is to provide a more thorough, visual search experience for music, movies, TV series and games.
One of the most notable changes of music will be interested in. Now back music retrieval and will be available for 500 million words, the songs, has authorized by Microsoft Zune service. Complete each song will be broadcast every 30 seconds, then the search in the future will be.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Johnson takes the time to define the terms that he uses. Most notable is his discussion of Islamism, a word we often encounter but rarely hear properly explained. Who are all these “Islamists,” really? This is one of the helpful moments at which Johnson breaks his narrative to tell us clearly: “Islamists differ from traditional Muslims because they use their religion in pursuit of a political agenda, via either democracy, or violence.” In his strong but unassuming way, Johnson tells us something that is true and significant: “Implicit in Islamism is a rejection of Western society and its values.” This is one of the most essential—and uncomfortable—truths in the book. Yes, the West has unwittingly fed the rise of political Islam. And still worse, America continues to misunderstand something even more fundamental about the politics of Islamism: much of its ideology is born out of opposing the West.
The question follows, Can the West coexist with Islamists? Johnson reveals that the current ideological fault lines are more insurmountable than we know. Appeasing Islamists is ill-advised policy. But America continues to support groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood anyway. There are two Muslim Brotherhoods, he argues, one in the West and another in the rest of the world. The former is much more perilous to American interests. Still, out of ignorance and laziness in part, many American bureaucrats and foreign policy-makers turn to the best-looking business-suited Islamist leaders as allies. Many are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, which, in the West, is a deliberate proponent of radical Islam. The United States does this, in part, because it’s easier to turn to self-appointed spokesmen for the world’s Muslims than to reach out to far less media-savvy members of civil society—Muslim groups that aren’t so slick and organized by ordinary people. “Ordinary people are messy,” Johnson puts it.
The book is funny and tragic and peaks toward the end when Johnson takes us along on his interviews with contemporary members of the European branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. One day in Cologne, Johnson rides along in the BMW’s passenger seat of Ibrahim El Zayat, a young Islamist who leads many of Germany’s Muslims. Zayat is hugely controversial, and it is hard to know whether or not he condones the use of violence based on some of his murky associations. When Johnson points this out, Zayat points right back at Johnson. “A lot of people say that Ian Johnson is a CIA agent because you write so little.” “My boss says that too,” I say. “You should write more. Sloth is a sin.”
Once World War II ended, many of these men, stuck in Germany and having lost their homelands, found a new employer: the United States. Radio Liberty, the lesser-known stepsister to Radio Free Europe, was the CIA’s effort to broadcast anti-Soviet propaganda into Eastern Europe. In order to reach the thirty million Muslims living within the Soviet Union, the Americans turned to many of these former Nazi sympathizers. The idea, from the 1940s onwards, was to use Islam to undermine the Soviet system. Islam, American officials mistakenly believed, was the ideal antidote to godless communism. Although many of Johnson’s readers will know this story in broad strokes, no book before this one so deftly traces the history of this ideological misstep. And no one, until Johnson, has traced how far back this error in judgment went.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Johnson takes the time to define the terms that he uses. Most notable is his discussion of Islamism, a word we often encounter but rarely hear properly explained. Who are all these “Islamists,” really? This is one of the helpful moments at which Johnson breaks his narrative to tell us clearly: “Islamists differ from traditional Muslims because they use their religion in pursuit of a political agenda, via either democracy, or violence.” In his strong but unassuming way, Johnson tells us something that is true and significant: “Implicit in Islamism is a rejection of Western society and its values.” This is one of the most essential—and uncomfortable—truths in the book. Yes, the West has unwittingly fed the rise of political Islam. And still worse, America continues to misunderstand something even more fundamental about the politics of Islamism: much of its ideology is born out of opposing the West.
The question follows, Can the West coexist with Islamists? Johnson reveals that the current ideological fault lines are more insurmountable than we know. Appeasing Islamists is ill-advised policy. But America continues to support groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood anyway. There are two Muslim Brotherhoods, he argues, one in the West and another in the rest of the world. The former is much more perilous to American interests. Still, out of ignorance and laziness in part, many American bureaucrats and foreign policy-makers turn to the best-looking business-suited Islamist leaders as allies. Many are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, which, in the West, is a deliberate proponent of radical Islam. The United States does this, in part, because it’s easier to turn to self-appointed spokesmen for the world’s Muslims than to reach out to far less media-savvy members of civil society—Muslim groups that aren’t so slick and organized by ordinary people. “Ordinary people are messy,” Johnson puts it.
The book is funny and tragic and peaks toward the end when Johnson takes us along on his interviews with contemporary members of the European branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. One day in Cologne, Johnson rides along in the BMW’s passenger seat of Ibrahim El Zayat, a young Islamist who leads many of Germany’s Muslims. Zayat is hugely controversial, and it is hard to know whether or not he condones the use of violence based on some of his murky associations. When Johnson points this out, Zayat points right back at Johnson. “A lot of people say that Ian Johnson is a CIA agent because you write so little.” “My boss says that too,” I say. “You should write more. Sloth is a sin.”

Ian Johnson abhors pack journalism. Instead, he prefers to investigate the margins of major news stories. In A Mosque in Munich, this predilection serves him well. Based in Berlin and Beijing, he speaks fluent German and Mandarin, and holds an advanced degree in Chinese Studies. With equal tenacity and lack of bluster, however, he also pursues the development of radical Islam in Europe. Mostly by accident, the veteran journalist stumbled upon one of the largest untold stories of the last fifty years: how, with help from Nazis and the CIA, radical Islam first established its foothold in the West, and planted its roots firmly in Germany.
Johnson begins decades before the now-familiar Cold War narrative of the 1980s. In that decade the United States began to back the Muslim holy warriors, mujahideen, in their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. But as Johnson’s investigative work definitively shows, America’s efforts to use the religious and political fervor of Islam to its own ends followed a Nazi program intended to do much the same thing during World War II. This was a program, Johnson writes, which Hitler “explicitly blessed,” saying, “I consider only the Mohammedans to be safe. All the others, I consider unsafe.”
In the eastern regions of the Soviet empire, where the Nazis were more interested in oil than ethnic cleansing, the Third Reich mobilized Muslims and other ethnic minorities to fight for the liberation of their homelands. The Nazis plucked Muslims from German prisoner-of-war camps: some Muslims became German soldiers; some, members of the SS; some, professional propagandists. Although rumors and half-truths about this historic collusion have long existed, Johnson does the painstaking archival work of retracing the lives of these largely unknown Muslim Nazis, and pieces together their lives compellingly.

This part of Shlaes's argument has generated enormous enthusiasm on the right. At last the cultural baggage of Roosevelt's predecessor--Hoovervilles, Hoover flags, and the like--has been lifted off the shoulders of conservatism and onto the real culprit, which is liberalism. Senator Kyl proclaimed on the Senate floor last fall that "in the excellent history of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, we are reminded that Herbert Hoover was an interventionist, a protectionist, and a strong critic of markets." Recently the House Republican Steve Austria went so far as to declare that Roosevelt actually caused the Depression. "When Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression," Austria said. "He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That's just history."
There is indeed a revisionist scholarship that recasts Hoover as an energetic quasi-progressive rather than a stubborn reactionary. William Leuchtenburg, in his short new biography Herbert Hoover, makes some allowance for the revisionist case, but finally he settles on a more traditional conclusion. Leuchtenburg shows that Hoover's history of activism consistently left him with the belief in the primacy of voluntarism and the private sector, a faith that left him unsuited to handle a catastrophe like the Depression.
Leuchtenburg also provides a handy rebuttal to Shlaes's preposterous conflation of the two presidents. Hoover's National Credit Corporation, he explains, "did next to nothing." Hoover and Roosevelt would be amused to hear that his bank holiday aped Hoover's, given that Hoover denounced the Emergency Banking Act as a "move to gigantic socialism." (Does this ring a bell?) Shlaes's attempt to equate Hoover's disdain for short-sellers and Roosevelt's regulation of the market presumes that there is no important difference between expressing disapproval for something and taking public action against it.
Yes, Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But (I am quoting Leuchtenburg) "at Hoover's behest, RFC officials administered the law so stingily that the tens of thousands of jobs the country had been promised were never created. By mid-October, the RFC had approved only three of the 243 applications it had received for public works projects." Hoover's head of unemployment relief said that "federal aid would be a disservice to the unemployed." Hoover was a staunch ideological conservative who remarked, in 1928, that "even if governmental conduct of business could give us more efficiency instead of less efficiency, the fundamental objection to it would remain unaltered and unabated." This was not, to put it mildly, Roosevelt's philosophy.

Hoover himself would have found the notion that Roosevelt mostly carried on his work offensive. During the campaign of 1932 he warned that, if the New Deal came to fruition, "the grass will grow in the streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns." This was not mere campaign rhetoric. After Roosevelt won, Hoover desperately sought to persuade him to abandon his platform. He spent the rest of his years denouncing Roosevelt's reforms as dangerous Bolshevism. Leuchtenburg records that Hoover wrote a book about the New Deal so acerbic that his own estate suppressed its publication to avoid further tainting his reputation.
Of course, the transition from one presidency to another always involves some level of continuity. The world never begins completely anew with a presidential inauguration. But the break between Roosevelt and Hoover was certainly sharper than that between any president and his predecessor in American history. After 1932, generations of Democrats continued to paint Republicans as neo-Hooverites. This was mostly a calumny. Though Hoover himself continued to assail the New Deal as calamitous socialism right up to his death in 1964, from 1936 on the party remained in the hands of men who understood that the New Deal had built an enduring base of support and could not be directly assailed.
But now we have come to a time when leading Republicans and conservatives--not just cranks, but the leadership of the party and the movement--once again sound exactly like Herbert Hoover. "Prosperity cannot be restored by raids upon the public Treasury," said President Hoover in 1930. "Our plan is rooted in the philosophy that we cannot borrow and spend our way back to prosperity," said House Minority Leader Boehner in 2009. They have come to this point by preferring theology to history, by wiping Hoover's record from their memories and replacing it with something very close to its opposite. It is Hoover, truly, who is the Forgotten Man.

That Roosevelt see-sawed between Keynesianism and budget-balancing has been conventional wisdom among mainstream historians and economists for decades. The MIT economist E. Carey Brown wrote this in 1956. Keynes made the same point in a pleading letter to Roosevelt in 1937. Economists disagree about the extent to which Roosevelt's fiscal expansion helped. Many give more credit to his abandonment of the gold standard--which Shlaes, naturally, also decries. The fact that he retreated from Keynes in 1937 and that this retarded the recovery, though, bears little dispute.
Adam Cohen's Nothing to Fear, an admiring history of Roosevelt's first hundred days, captures the deep tensions between camps in the Roosevelt administration. Cohen's take is conventional, but it is executed well, tracing the disparate life stories of the main New Dealers in such a way as to make the inevitability of their conflict clear. This was a true team of rivals, some of them winding up as Roosevelt's most unhinged critics. Even before Roosevelt took office, Cohen writes, there was a "fundamental conflict--between spending more to fight the Depression and spending less to balance the budget--that would be a central tension of the Hundred Days." Yet for Shlaes and her admirers, the finding that Roosevelt vacillated between Keynesianism and orthodoxy represents a devastating intellectual blow to the New Deal edifice. And, yes, if you think of the New Deal as a series of unbroken triumphs held together by a clear and consistent ideology, and you have failed to take in any of the scholarship about the period produced over the last half-century, then The Forgotten Man will come as a revelation.
Shlaes writes that her discoveries about the New Deal show that "Roosevelt was unworthy of emulation." But who, exactly, is proposing to emulate everything that Roosevelt did? Much of his program has long been deemed a failure by liberals, including Roosevelt himself. (This includes the National Recovery Administration, which Shlaes dwells on at great length, while breezing past or ignoring altogether vast swaths of the New Deal.) When liberals suggest that Obama follow Roosevelt's model, they do not mean that he should replicate the entire thing. (The way, say, conservatives do when they suggest following Reagan's model.) They mean that he should emulate the Keynesian fiscal policies and other parts of the New Deal that worked. Shlaes has set out to demolish an argument that no serious person has ever made.

At one point in her book, in fact, Shlaes actually concedes that Roosevelt's Keynesian experiment succeeded when he tried it. "The spending was so dramatic that, finally, it functioned as Keynes ... had hoped it would," she writes about 1936, "Within a year unemployment would drop from 22 percent to 14 percent." So Keynesian policy worked, and the main fiscal problem with the New Deal was that Roosevelt made too many concessions to the right. Here we are in agreement. So can conservatives stop carrying around The Forgotten Man like it's Mao's Little Red Book? Can we all go home now?

It should be clear that intellectual coherence is not the purpose of Shlaes's project. The real point is to recreate the political mythology of the period. It does not matter that Shlaes heaps scorn on Roosevelt for doing things that liberals also scorn. Anything that tarnishes his legacy, she seems to think, tarnishes liberalism by association.
The conservative movement has invested enormous effort in crafting a political mythology that gratifies its ideological impulses. The lesson they learned from Ronald Reagan is that ideological purity is not only compatible with political success, but is also the best path to political success. They dutifully applied this interpretation to everything that happened since--George H.W. Bush, then Newt Gingrich, and then George W. Bush all failed because they deviated from the true path--and to all that happened before. Nixon failed because he embraced big government. Kennedy succeeded because he was actually a proto-supply-sider.
From such a perspective, Roosevelt casts a long and threatening shadow over the conservative movement. Here was a case of a wildly unpopular conservative Republican, Herbert Hoover, who gave way to an unabashed liberal Democrat who won four presidential elections. Shlaes goes to great pains to explain away this apparent anomaly. In this instance, she does produce an internally coherent argument. It is, alas, wildly ahistorical.
If the New Deal failed so miserably, one might wonder why voters continued to endorse it. In Shlaes's telling, Roosevelt's first challenger, Alf Landon, lost in 1936 because he "failed to distinguish himself" from Roosevelt. It is certainly true that Landon hailed from the party's moderate wing and shied away from the root-and-branch condemnation of the New Deal favored by, say, Hoover. But as the campaign wore on, Landon's rhetoric grew increasingly harsh. If Roosevelt returned to office, he warned, "business as we know it is to disappear." Voters who opposed the New Deal may not have had a perfect choice, but they did have a clear one. It also takes quite a bit of ideological credulity to believe, as Shlaes apparently does, that Roosevelt's twenty-point victory represented anything other than massive support for his program. Landon himself later remarked that "I don't think that it would have made any difference what kind of a campaign I made as far as stopping this avalanche is concerned."

And Shlaes offers an even odder explanation for Roosevelt's triumph in 1940. Wendell Willkie seized the advantage by attacking the New Deal, she writes, but squandered it with his dovish position on the war. The war, she argues, had become "the single best argument to reelect Roosevelt and give him special powers." After the election, she asserts, the Republicans "concluded, accurately enough, that the outcome would sideline not only their party but their record of accuracy when it came to the economy. They had been right so often in the 1930s and they would not get credit for it. The great error of their isolationism was what stood out."
Shlaes, characteristically, bolsters this highly idiosyncratic reading of history with only bare wisps of data. It is true that the outbreak of war in Europe made Roosevelt, the incumbent, appear safer. But this pro-incumbent upsurge merely cancelled out a powerful current of anti-third term sentiment. Moreover, public opinion opposed entry into the war, and Roosevelt had to fight the suspicion that he was nudging the country into the war by explicitly promising to stay out. Shlaes's portrayal of an electorate seeking activist government abroad and laissez-faire at home gets the history almost perfectly backward. (The Forgotten Man ends with the 1940 race, sparing her readers any further contortions of electoral interpretation.)

The final unanswered question that must nag at the minds of the true believers is how the Depression managed to develop even before Roosevelt assumed office. After all, his bungling caused the economy to stall for years, yet the Depression was already more than three years old before Roosevelt even took office. Shlaes's answer is to implicate Hoover as a New Deal man himself:

Twice during Wednesday night's press conference, reporters asked President Obama what sacrifices his health care reform plans would ask of the American people. It's a common and intuitive question: in order to give the public something--like a guarantee of health insurance that they can afford--the public has to give something up.
Of course, it hasn't always worked that way in practice, like in the Bush years. But just because the last guy in the White House didn't demand the American people to pay for some policies doesn't mean the new guy should. Most experts would tell you that achieving universal health care will require ponying up some new money. And the money has to come from somewhere. Thus, the sacrifice.
Except "sacrifice" is a funny word. Sacrifice means parting with something you value dearly. And that was subtext of those two questions Wednesday night. One, from ABC’s Jake Tapper, wondered whether Americans would have to give up "tests, referrals, choice, end-of-life care." The other, from CBS's Chip Reid, asked whether Medicare beneficiaries would have to put up with lesser benefits.
Neither question was ridiculous; there's a good case to be made that while Americans will surely have to give up some things for reform.
But it turns out there is much in American health care that's worth giving up--starting with the money wasted on pushing paper around. That includes the money individuals spend, haggling with doctors, hospitals, and insurers over billing disputes. It also includes the money companies spend, feverishly reworking their numbers and calling in consultants to help figure out ways of trimming their health benefits costs.

Of course, it's not a given that any of this will happen. We're still waiting to see what comes out of Senate Finance Committee, the last of five committees with jurisdiction over health reform. There, a bipartisan group of six senators are trying to hammer out a deal--and their progress has been slow. They seem likely to disgorge legislation that reaches even fewer people and offers even skimpier benefits. But the senators on the Finance committees, just like all members of Congress, respond to political pressure. The more pressure they feel to be ambitious, the more ambitious they will be. And that’s important, since Congress must eventually reconcile all the committee bills, taking into account whatever Finance produces.
If the possibility of lesser reform doesn't motivate liberals, then maybe something else will: the possibility of no reform. Twice in the last few decades, once during the Nixon era and then again during the Clinton years, liberals largely shunned compromise efforts at universal coverage because they didn't live up to progressive ideals. But holding out didn't lead to better legislation. It led to twenty years of trying to rebuild the momentum for reform, followed by a debate over proposals that are, if anything, less sweeping than their predecessors.
But forget all of the strategic second-guessing. There's a more basic and tangible reason why, even with compromises, progressives should engage fully in the reform battle. It's the fact that tens of millions of Americans go without health care, or endure financial hardship, because they can't pay for sky-high medical bills. If something like the House bill passes, life for these people would get immeasurably better--soon if not right away, for most if not all. They wouldn't have to give up their life savings, endure avoidable pain, or, in the worst of cases, watch a family member get sick and die because affordable medical care was not available. Surely that's a goal worth fighting for.

If so, this ambivalence probably reflects a growing awareness of what the reform bills will do--or, more precisely, what they won't do.
So far, the most ambitious measures are those that passed a pair of House committees in late July. They would, like all the reform plans under discussion, expand health insurance primarily by making it possible for most working-age people to get private insurance. But the changes designed to make that happen--in particular, the creation of a marketplace for buying coverage and the distribution of subsidies for people who need them--wouldn’t begin for four years.
Even when fully implemented, many million people would still lack coverage. According to the Congressional Budget Office, at the end of the next decade, 97 percent of legal residents--and 94 percent of people here overall--would have insurance. Although that would be a lot more than the percentage of insured Americans now--today 84 percent have insurance--it's not truly universal. And the coverage would not be as comprehensive as what people in other countries have. There'd still be substantial co-payments and deductibles; people could still owe thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses if they get really sick.
As a fan of single-payer health insurance--a scheme that would, if properly designed, cover everybody with relatively small exposure to out-of-pocket costs--I certainly understand the ambivalence. It's tempting to think of what might have been, if only the bill writers had raised their ambitions and pushed a more pristine, more far-reaching measure.

But there's a reason they didn't: Health care reform is politically difficult, particularly given the setup of American government. (The U.S. Senate, with its overrepresentation of small states and use of the filibuster, make it hard to pass anything.) It’s easy to forget, but the reform scheme Bill Clinton tried to pass in 1994 would have come pretty close to achieving most of the goals reformers now seek: It would have given generous insurance to just about everybody, by radically reorganizing the way medical care is doled out. That ambition was also a major factor in its demise.
Maybe that means those of us on the left should dwell a bit more on what reform still would achieve--even if it's not everything we hoped. The bills that passed the House committees might not mean every single American would have insurance. But they would mean that every single American could get insurance if he or she wanted it. Insurance companies couldn’t deny coverage to somebody because of pre-existing medical conditions--nor could they cancel a policy retroactively, after a large claim, as insurers have been known to do. In fact, that change--an end to the practice of "rescission"--would happen right away.
The insurance people get under reform would be relatively good insurance, too: The House bills, for example, would limit out-of-pocket expenses to $5,000 for an individual or $10,000 for a family. That's still more than people in other countries pay, yes, but it’s a far less than what many Americans end up paying today once they get a chronic or catastrophic illness. And keep in mind the exposure would be a lot less for lower-income people.
Besides, it's not as if it will be impossible to scale up these reforms later on. If Congress passes and the president signs a bill putting in place the key institutional elements of reform now, they can always revisit, and strengthen, the measure later. During the 1980s, Henry Waxman almost single-handedly expanded Medicaid to its current levels by gradually making more people eligible and securing the funding to pay for them. All he needed was the institutional structure--the program, the rules, and the basic funding stream--on which to build the new coverage. The fact that Waxman is a chief architect for this year's program ought to give liberals confidence that, once again, these reforms needn’t represent the upper limit of what might be achieved over the next few years. They are a start, and a very good start, but not a finish.

The Obama reforms would push the U.S. health care system in this direction a lot more slowly than the Clinton plan would have: Among other things, if Obama gets his way, insurance arrangements for the vast majority of people won't change, at least right away. (Under the old Clinton plan, almost every working person would have changed plans.) This is undoubtedly because pushing more quickly risks the sort of patient backlash that helped kill reform last time. But Obama also has the benefit of time--and, perhaps, a slightly smarter electorate. In the early 1990s, everybody feared managed care in part because it was still pretty unfamiliar. Today, the basic concepts are at least familiar- -as is the idea that our health care system is awash in expensive, sometimes harmful excess. Americans, in short, may be a little more receptive to the idea of managed care than they were a decade ago. Just as long as nobody calls it by that name.
The news about health care is a little confusing these days. While polls show that Americans still support the key elements of health care reform that President Obama and his allies are trying to enact, there have been numerous reports of conservative activists showing up at congressional town halls across the country, protesting those same plans with an energy not matched by the other side.
The imbalance may simply reflect the media's preoccupation with conflict and confrontation. Liberal rallies in favor of reform have garnered no similar attention, although they've attracted hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of people. But I suspect the enthusiasm gap is at least partly real--that the hate for the plans moving through Congress runs much stronger than the love, that the people fighting to stop these bills feel more intensely, and have more determination, than those fighting to pass them.

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SHA1: E947CB5AAD1DB581162C1F44F97C9B0E49E70E0A).
Size: 5,214,876,672 bytes
5710D7DF CRC:
E11D5A0BE7EC9379141A07F831DE87ED MD5.
D6315A1D8D89D30D7EA948AD93D572203D155193 SHA1:
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MICROSOFT WINDOWS. 7. J j j j 7232 BUILD WINMAIN X64 VHD. J spending
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VHD RAR file (original package sizes, in bytes. 2,513,064,106 RAR file
SHA1:90286CA644BBBD7C6B4BF1D6E6696064DA825839).
Size: 7,409,031, 680 bytes
5723B24B CRC:
F47C13D2FD1D94F5A2E9A0A85BA0B5D0 MD5.
8BB2AB688698AE503794F02C29C629131FF0160C SHA1:
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SHA1:0FF53F8ED2BBC0B1B174B47F80055BB3DACF2F01).
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67C23FE0 CRC:
0703C259676D7E4C58E0EF2184369663 MD5.
7540399601506675CF1B329CB3507875F64C555B SHA1:
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The current deepening local government fiscal crisis, as we noted in a paper last fall, is forcing more and more communities to ask just what, exactly, is the purpose and scope of municipal government in America.
Now, a fascinating story in the Wall Street Journal about Colorado Springs, CO reports some of the most extreme tumult yet.
There in libertarian “CS,” the home of the U.S. Air Force Academy and Focus on the Family, a precipitous downturn in local government revenue is prompting a fairly eyebrow-raising inquiry into just how limited limited government can get:
•Street lights? CS has flipped the switch on over one-third of them but allows residents to adopt a light for $100 a year
•Police patrols? Taxi cab drivers now volunteer to back up overstretched cops
•Trash removal? Advertisers sponsor trash cans and volunteers contract to remove the rubbish in 128 neighborhood parks
•Neighborhood community centers? Current barebones city support will dry up at year’s end, leaving the four centers’ fate to private or philanthropic engagement. An evangelical church has stepped forward to operate one
As to what we are to make of all of all of this, one view would be to dismiss Colorado Springs’ radical cut-backs and embrace of volunteerism as just the latest manifestation of anti-government extremism in the birthplace of Colorado’s small-government movement. After all, voters almost a decade ago imposed strict limits on how much the city government can spend and last November they rejected a property-tax increase, despite warnings from city officials about a projected $28 million shortfall requiring at least a 10 percent cut in an already shrunken budget.
However, another view of Colorado Springs’ grand experiment is to see it as one of the starkest auguries yet of the coming big debate the nation will soon be having about the size and shape of government in an era not just of recession, but of demographic and structural changes and years of avoided decisions.
Indeed, if a few lively back-and-forths among readers of the Colorado Springs Gazette are any indication, the folks of Colorado Springs are engaged in a spirited and democratic—if unwitting—debate about the proper and desired role of local government in their community that is compelling because it’s not theoretical but instead occurring neighborhood to neighborhood. Some residents prefer their parks mown and litter-free, while others are happy to no longer pay for park services they never use; some residents welcome the absence of light pollution from street lights, while others fear for their night-time safety. A few astute readers question both how long volunteers will continue to step forward as the free rider problem inevitably surfaces, and whether lower-income neighborhoods—where public services like afterschool rec centers have high but less visible payoffs—have the same capacity to self-provide as affluent ones.
All of this debate is healthy, and it is interesting that rather than cut services entirely Colorado Springs residents have sought to employ alternative modes of service provision. Such responsibility suggests that true introspection—rather than Tea Party talking points—is motivating the debate in Colorado’s second largest city. Here’s betting that many more states and localities—along with federal lawmakers—will soon be engaging in similar reflection. And here’s hoping that a good amount of such reflection will beget the sort of true innovation that can yield a platform for future growth. That would be a good outcome for everyone, regardless of political bent.

There are very few outright birthers holding national office in the Republican Party. What you do have is considerable numbers of Republicans who won't say that President Obama is an American citizens and won't say he isn't. Call them quasi-birthers. Sharron Angle falls into that category:
Appearing Thursday on the conservative blog talk show Libertarian Politics Live, Angle was asked by a caller whether she had “any doubts whether or not President Obama is a legitimate president or a naturalized born citizen.”

“You know I think our Supreme Court has pretty much made that decision,” Angle said. “But I think what we’re dealing with now is the presidency of a year and a half here, and I feel that he is a weak president, and he has certainly put forward policies that have weakened America and weakened our stand in the world. We really, I’m very disappointed we didn’t feel that he was qualified purely because he had not the experience, he hadn’t – we didn’t know exactly how he was voting because he was only voting present when he was voting. And now we see that as a policy maker he has truly failed us.”
In other words, the courts have ruled, I'm not going to fight this question, but I'm also not saying it was correct.
There are very few outright birthers holding national office in the Republican Party. What you do have is considerable numbers of Republicans who won't say that President Obama is an American citizens and won't say he isn't. Call them quasi-birthers. Sharron Angle falls into that category:
Appearing Thursday on the conservative blog talk show Libertarian Politics Live, Angle was asked by a caller whether she had “any doubts whether or not President Obama is a legitimate president or a naturalized born citizen.”

“You know I think our Supreme Court has pretty much made that decision,” Angle said. “But I think what we’re dealing with now is the presidency of a year and a half here, and I feel that he is a weak president, and he has certainly put forward policies that have weakened America and weakened our stand in the world. We really, I’m very disappointed we didn’t feel that he was qualified purely because he had not the experience, he hadn’t – we didn’t know exactly how he was voting because he was only voting present when he was voting. And now we see that as a policy maker he has truly failed us.”
In other words, the courts have ruled, I'm not going to fight this question, but I'm also not saying it was correct.

The Washington Post looks at the 11 Republican Senators who supported comprehensive immigration reform under George W. Bush but refuse to do so now:
Some of the 11 senators whose support is critical to his plans signaled Thursday that they are not ready to back reform this time around. They also denied that they had changed their positions for political reasons.
Laena Fallon, a spokeswoman for Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.), said the senator is interested in fixing the immigration system. But she added that he had made it clear he "does not support any initiative promoting comprehensive reform until the president and this administration get serious about controlling our borders."
Andy Fisher, a spokesman for Sen. Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), said the senator thinks it is simply the wrong moment for reform. "There really is not the political landscape to proceed with it at this time," he said.
Other minor legislation, designed to legalize those who came to the United States as children and then enrolled in U.S. colleges, "could potentially be doable this year," the spokesman said.
Sen. Robert F. Bennett (Utah) also said further border enforcement had to come first. "The president needs to work with Congress on a step-by-step approach, focusing first on securing our borders and then establishing a temporary worker program," he said.
Other Republicans sympathetic to the cause now have other priorities. Sen. John McCain, a past supporter, faces a tough battle in his Arizona primary. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), who had been working with Democrats on a draft reform bill earlier in the year, has now said that Congress should prioritize other issues such as Wall Street reform.

Over the past year or so the nebulous movement known as the Tea Party has co-opted many of the symbols of the founding fathers to fight against (among other things) taxation without representation. However, on Tax Day it is important to remember the one group of present-day citizens who know what “taxation without representation” really means: residents of the District of Columbia.
A refresher: Washington, D.C. has no Senator or Representative in Congress to advocate for its 588,000 District residents (541,000 of whom are citizens) because it is neither a state nor part of any state (by comparison the state of Wyoming, which has three votes in Congress, has 65,000 fewer residents and 16,000 fewer citizens). District residents contributed $17 billion in personal taxes to the federal budget last year. By comparison, Wyoming residents paid only $2.6 billion in personal taxes. D.C. does elect a non-voting Delegate (currently Eleanor Holmes Norton) to the House of Representatives, as do the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands (Puerto Rico elects a Resident Commissioner, which is very similar). However, these other territories do not pay federal income taxes.
Perhaps the most aggravating aspect of the lack of federal representation is that Congress retains its veto power over virtually all laws and budgets passed by DC’s City Council (including local taxes). Consequently some congressmen use the District to score political points in their home districts hundreds or even thousands of miles away, without regard for the will of District residents (as when Congressman Natcher of Kentucky withheld funding for Metro in the 1970s or last year’s fight over medical marijuana, needle exchanges, and abortion funding).

Pew finds older, Republican-leaning voters far more likely to vote this year than younger, Democratic-leaning voters:
Voters younger than age 30 favor the Democratic candidate in their district by a wide margin (57% to 32%). Yet only half of young voters say they are absolutely certain to vote. Voters ages 50 and older favor the Republican candidate in their district by double digits (11 points) and roughly eight-in-ten (79%) say they are absolutely certain to vote.
And, as many polls have found, the public still views the Democratic Party more favorably than the GOP on key measures:
But that probably is not going to have much impact at the polls in November. And if the economy continues to tank, as appears likely right now, look out below.
.Scott Brown claims to have a fiscally responsible plan to pay for unemployment benefits. In fact it's a money-losing gimmick that provides a windfall to the rich:
The senator has argued that “we need to stop borrowing against our children and grandchildren’s future and start paying for things.” Nevertheless, in proposing his own stimulus legislation this week, he included a gimmick that, while offsetting some costs in the short term, would make the deficit worse over the long term.
Here’s how it would work:
Americans could roll over their 401(k) balances into “Roth” accounts. Taxpayers would pay tax up front on the rollover funds but, in the future, all of the earnings on these funds would be completely tax-free. Moreover, “Roth” accounts have very permissive distribution rules and, unlike regular IRA accounts, Roth account holders do not have to make withdrawals when they reach age 70½. As a result, the rollover option would give affluent people a way to shelter years of investment earnings and then pass the accumulated funds to their heirs.

Imagine a problem facing a community -- unemployment or homelessness, poverty or environmental degradation -- and there’s a good chance a group of college students is finding a way to tackle it. At the Corporation for National and Community Service, we honor these students and their universities with the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll. The Honor Roll is the highest Federal recognition a college or university can receive for its commitment to volunteering, service-learning, and civic engagement.

Today, we are honored to announce the recipients of the 2009 Presidential Awards:

General Community Service Awardees
•Lee University, Cleveland, Tennessee
•Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio
•The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Special Focus: Service to Youth from Disadvantaged Circumstances Awardees
•Emory & Henry College, Emory, Virginia
•Raritan Valley Community College, Branchburg, New Jersey
•Willamette University, Salem, Oregon
In addition to these outstanding winners, 736 colleges and universities were placed on the Honor Roll, with 115 of these receiving “With Distinction” honors.

The competition was tough – the winners had to demonstrate their level of student participation in service activities; scope, level of effort, innovation and effectiveness of their service projects; and overall institutional support to service-learning and volunteerism.

The importance of service to college students is underscored by one telling statistic: in the 2008-09 academic year, more than three million college students contributed over 300 million hours of service. College students take on community challenges by running after school programs, tutoring at-risk youth, building and weatherizing homes, offering computer classes, restoring natural parks, and much more.

I cannot overstate the important role that colleges and universities play in the broader national service movement. These institutions’ commitment to service can have an impact on students throughout their entire lives.

The Honor Roll is one of many ways that we promote student service-learning and civic engagement. Our Learn and Serve America program works with schools across the country to promote academic achievement and civic responsibility for more than one million students each year, and AmeriCorps annually engages thousands of college students in making a difference in their communities while earning money for their education.

I want to express my sincere congratulations to the recipients of the Presidential Award and the more than 700 additional schools that applied. I encourage every college and university to apply for the 2010 Honor Roll, and to find new and creative ways to engage their students in service throughout the year. Read more about all the colleges and universities that received the Honor Roll.