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I think this is the most amazing interview on healthcare reform I’ve seen.

Andrew Sullivan posts this comment from a reader: The economic argument against the public option is simple. Yes, it may reduce monetary outlays, but it will do so by forcing providers to accept prices lower than what they would in a competitive market. The public option can do this because it will be subsidized by [...]

I really cannot comment on the Iranian election itself, but I think I can comment somewhat on the popular pundit reaction to the election. Fortunately, Matthew Yglesias captures most of my thinking in < 140 characters: People who now think Obama is insufficiently concerned with the Iranian people used to think we should drop bombs [...]

The dilemma for many of the critics is that virtually all agree that the settlement does a lot of good, and they don’t necessarily want it struck down. Google’s book scanning project will bring new life to millions of out-of-print books, making them available at libraries across the country, and potentially providing a new source [...]

Change may have come, but the corporatism continues. A review of hundreds of pages of financial disclosure forms on Friday evening offered an extensive portrait of the wealth of top officials in the Obama administration. The forms detail the salaries, bonuses and investments of the president’s circle of advisers, many of whom took deep pay [...]

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.

Hilzoy on Will: Where I come from, when someone writes something of the form: “P is not evidence for Q, and here’s why”, it is dishonest to quote that person saying P and use that quote as evidence for Q. If one of my students did this, I would grade her down considerably, and would [...]

From this piece at TPM: Next, since there are no controlled experiments in recessions and depressions, there’s no really concrete and dispositive evidence about what policies end or don’t end severe economic downturns. Why don’t we change this? It seems like the easiest way to run a controlled experiment is to shape the stimulus by [...]

Part two in my response to this. The section of the speech on nuclear winter is the most convincing part of the argument. It is also involves a particular piece of history that I don’t know very well, so I am forced to take Michael Crichton’s retelling of the facts at face value. Even in [...]

My Dad sent me the following link to a speech by Michael Crichton on the commingling of science and politics: http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html. It is a well crafted speech that contains many arguments worth considering. I’m going to spend a couple of posts eviscerating those arguments. Stay tuned.