Me: Frank Lynch

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Yo, Senate: Most Americans want the public option. New poll shows majority support the public option:

On the issue that has been perhaps the most pronounced flash point in the national debate, 57 percent of all Americans now favor a public insurance option, while 40 percent oppose it. Support has risen since mid-August, when a bare majority, 52 percent, said they favored it. (In a June Post-ABC poll, support was 62 percent.)

So, when House Minority Leader John Boehner says he's yet to meet anyone who supports the public option, you really have to wonder if he's hiding in order to avoid them all.

Link | | | 10:38 PM | Home
 

Absolutely hilarious. Write this down, because it's in a book, not online, and I'm not going to pinch a whole two pages from a book.

The next time you're in a book store, look for Jean Edward Smith's "FDR" in the biography section. Presuming the pages in the paperback are the same as in the hardover, go to page 336, and start with the paragraph "FDR took dinner at eight..." and just read for a couple pages. It's all about the abysmal cooking in the White House during FDR's tenure, thanks to one of Eleanor's hires. It's really a hilarious couple pages, and it speaks to how accommodating FDR could be at times.

Please, write it down, read it. This is a good steer.

Link | | | 11:14 AM | Home

Hind Rocket's head still in the sand. After a post where he complained about unseasonably cold temperatures in Minnesota arguing against global warming, Hinderaker updates his post by reporting an email:

UPDATE: We got a nice email from a climate scientist who objected to drawing inferences about global climate from temperatures at any given place and said that the Earth is actually still warming. I believe what he meant by that observation is that the Earth continues to warm up from the Little Ice Age (thank goodness), which is why glaciers continue to shrink, etc. What is significant, though, is that there has been no net global warming for the last decade--I believe that represents a scientific consensus--and that time period is long enough to constitute a statistical refutation of the AGW models. (Some important work on this point has been done very recently.)

Well, without actually seeing the email (which he doesn't share) or any comments to the post (they ended their comments this week in order to help keep their heads in the sand), I'm skeptical that his interpretation of the email could be accurate. Or, if it is, that it comes from a very qualified climatologist. Because the educated consensus is that while in the last half dozen or so years temperatures have not continued to rise, the plateau is too short lived to discount the overall trend in rising temperatures.

So what does Hinderaker do to buttress his opinions? He links to old posts of his that focus on recent years, or opinion polls. That's all he's got: the last handful of years, opinion polls, and wishful thinking.

Link | | | 10:50 AM | Home

Screw us; it was about their market share. Moody's, that is:

One Moody's executive who soared through the ranks during the boom years was Brian Clarkson, the guru of structured finance. He was promoted to company president just as the bottom fell out of the housing market.

Several former Moody's executives said he made subordinates fear they'd be fired if they didn't issue ratings that matched competitors' and helped preserve Moody's market share.

Froeba said his Moody's team manager would tell his team that he, the manager, would be fired if Moody's lost a single deal. "If your manager is saying that at meetings, what is he trying to tell you?" Froeba asked.

I'm no legal expert, but doesn't this read like fraud? Pimping at the least.

Link | | | 9:11 AM | Home
 

"Don't touch my Medicare" vs. "Don't touch my Medicare Advantage." If nothing else, the debate over healthcare reform starts to get educational once you bother to figure out who is telling the truth. "America's Health Insurance Plans" (AHIP), the lovely trade organization of insurance companies which released that study last weekend which thumbed its nose at any pretense of controlling costs, has a new ad threatening seniors. The ad talks about cuts, and doesn't threaten them for all of Medicare, just those on Medicare Advantage. And because of the way advertising works, naturally the ad doesn't say anything like "all you who only have Medicare and not Medicare Advantage have nothing to worry about, of course."

The ad doesn't actully lie: but it may miscommunicate, and miscommunicating was enough to get Warner-Lambert in trouble when people concluded that Listerine prevented colds. As the article states, AHIP doesn't provide any context for the proposed cuts to Medicare Advantage actually are, and doesn't say that the $100 billion is spread out over ten years, nor that they amount to a mere 7% reduction. Don't get me wrong: the 7% reduction works out to cutting the additional "advantage" benefits in half (in terms of dollars). But the extra money that's been spent on this program is subsidized by those who aren't in it. Complaining about creeping socialism ignores what happens with Medicare Advantage, just as many of the 2000 "Red States" complained about government spending while ignoring that they lived in states which were net recipients of government spending.

Clearly, navigating this change is like Scylla and Charybdis. But let's be clear: reductions in spending on Medicare Advantage are not going to lead to substandard care. I know this because I never heard about Town Halls where angry mobs of seniors and tea baggers were arguing for standard Medicare to be elevated to the same level as Medicare Advantage. No anger from those on standard Medicare, nor anger from those on Medicare Advantage.

I'm not saying "Try it, you'll like it." No one ever likes getting less; but take a hard look at where your "more" has been coming from, compare yourselves to others, and see if you can tighten your belt just a bit.

Link | | | 9:20 AM | Home
 

Mission Accomplished in Afghanistan! According to Rich Lowry, anyway:

Salter v. Rich

Don't miss Mark Salter's piece on Frank Rich on the homepage today. What struck me about Rich's Sunday column is that he apparently doesn't realize that, on his own terms, the Afghan war was won — by George W. Bush. If there are only 100 members of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and little danger of them coming back (and little hope of improving such a corrupt, impoverished country), we won the war there, to the extent we could, long ago.

This is revisionism at its finest: who, ever, said our goal was to let OBL get away and scatter al Qaeda so that they could regroup in another country and continue to taunt us, all the while recruiting new members and continuing to plot? Who would have said that we would be happy with installing a corrupt government?

You know the punchline. All together, with feeling: if this is winning a war...

Link | | | 10:09 PM | Home
 

About that coal thing... In Pennsylvania, they're learning that fewer emissions for the air means more water pollution, and it's getting into the drinking water sources.

So many of our actions have unintended consequences — eating more fish leads to over-fishing the oceans and monoculturalism in fish farms; risks of rechargeable batteries in the landfills; etc — it doesn't make me question the wisdom of the choices, but it does make me want to change the paradigm for even less consumption, decrease the amount of meat and fish in the diet, read a book or play my recorder instead of sit at the computer, and so on. It's going to take more than just alternative ways of continuing on as we always have to decrease that big fat environmental footprint.

Link | | | 7:32 AM | Home
 

A plaintiff sees it one way, therefore the world is crazy. Powerline's latest argument against health reform is just as silly as so many others we've seen before. By pointing to an unresolved complaint - - in this case, a transsexual's suit for breast implants - - John Hinderaker reacts as if it's a done deal; the mere existence of the suit for them is enough evidence for him that all of Britain's National Health is insane. (He really uses the words "insanity" and "craziness.")

The suit hasn't even been heard yet, and Hinderaker acts as if there will be no suitable counterargument.

I bet, however, that he knows it's not a done deal and hasn't remembered to write his post that way. As an attorney, he knows full and well that it takes more than to merely file a complaint to get things your way; judges and juries have input. It wouldn't be the first time he's gone off on a "the sky is falling" rant. It's also not the first time he's been purposely disingenuous.

But nowhere does he remind his readers that the case hasn't been heard - - that's buried in blocked quotes and OMG's.

Link | | | 8:47 PM | Home

Some Peruvian music to get you started. His name is Carlos Carmelo, and I heard him on the subway. What a great surprise, what a great city, what a shame he needs to busk on the subway.

Link | | | 10:52 AM | Home
 

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