5 September 09 (pm)

Health Care

Bill Moyers weighs in:

A woman who got shouted down:

President Obama met with Congressional liberals:

Responding to the Progressive Caucus’s letter and demand for a meeting on the public option, President Obama had a conference call with the leaders of the Caucus yesterday, and will meet face-to-face with them prior to Wednesday’s speech.

As for the conference call:

A variety of reports suggest that, during a conference call this afternoon, President Obama probed House progressives to see just how flexible their demands are.

A source familiar with the call tells TPM that Obama asked the group to define their red line when they talk about a “robust public option.”

NBC reports that Obama reminded the group that they enjoy the security of representing safely Democratic districts.

Digby adds:

According to Mike Viqueira on MSNBC, Obama told the progressives in congress on a conference call this morning that on health care, they need to worry about their fellow members in districts that voted with McCain in ’08. I guess he figures that those conservative districts are going to be appeased by some sort of “trigger” or a plan without the public option and that those guys in tough districts will be rewarded for making that happen.

I think that’s about as delusional as the teabaggers, frankly. If those McCain voters are upset about health care reform, the only thing that will appease them is total defeat. . . .

I think Obama has an exactly backward reading of the situation and Digby has it exactly right. This subject has swirled around the blogosphere this week, mostly following from a post from Ezra, in which he posits that the Progressives can’t “beat the Blue Dogs at their own game.”

The bottom line: the seats that will be lost if health care reform fails will be mostly blue dog districts. However if the progressives cave, the usually D districts might punish them. But the major deal will be in the Senate anyway.

As far as President Obama: he may well fail. President Clinton, President Nixon and President Truman also failed. I give him credit for taking this on; that took guts. But if he fails it might not be due to a mistake or a misreading or a bad strategy; he might fail due to the difficulty of the task.

But then again, he might not fail.

5 September 09: Football!

Oh my goodness; what a game! Ohio State was up 20-7 when Navy made a 99 yard drive to cut it 20-14. OSU got a field goal to go up to 23-14 and another touchdown off of a turn over (fumble at the 30) to go up 29-14.

But with 4′th a 2 at the Navy 15, OSU went for it and didn’t make it; next play Navy hits an 85 yard touchdown pass.

So it is 29-21.

Navy gets the ball back…scores again! But on the 2 point conversion; OSU intercepts and runs it back to go up 31-27 with 2 minutes to go.

Onside doesn’t work; OSU runs out the clock.

Analysis: Navy was more excited about the game; OSU was looking toward USC next week. Navy had better not overlook Louisiana Tech next week; they are looking for a scalp.

In a show down on Thursday: Boise State whipped Oregon 19-8; so much for the Ducks.

Iowa blocked a last second field goal to hold off I-AA Iowa (ok, “play-off division”) 17-16 and Minnesota is choking against Syracuse; can they pull it out? They are at the Orange 15.

Nevada-Notre Dame next. This ought to be competitive.

Update: it looks that I was very wrong here. Sure, the game is not over yet but ND is up 28-0 at the half and is dominating.

Final was 35-0.

Big Ten: Illinois was favored; that was a joke. Missouri ran away with it 37-9; no realistic follower of Illinois football would be shocked.

And in the game in which I wanted both teams to lose (ok, I pulled for BYU oh-so-slightly):

Yes, BYU knocked out Sam Bradford and scored with 3 minutes to go to win 14-13.

(photos from yahoo)

5 September 09 (am)

Here is a heart felt post at Daily Kos about someone who has changed racial attitudes; the post is very honest and blunt.

I like this type of post for the following reason: all too often if someone admits that they don’t like blacks because so many of those that they grew up around were ill behaved and, say, beat them up are shouted down by others. Sometimes, one can grow up bitter because of the behavior of others around them; humans tend to reason inductively.

Race the Fest

5K Race the Fest: 7:38, 7:40, 8:56 (1.1). I didn’t slow that much; I caught two little boys in the last mile but they got me back. However the last mile had a small uphill so perhaps mile 2 was elevation aided? Place: 4′th over 50 finisher, and 16/61 among the runners.

This was a small town course with lots of turns; still it was very pleasant. I started out conservatively (so I thought) and stayed that way and got just a tad bit heavy legged in mile 3; I just couldn’t drop the hammer.

But last night I was up with lots of nasal drainage; but then it was 60 F and a perfect day to run.

Oh…so close. Last three 5K races: 24:09, 24:07, 24:14. I can’t break out of this rut.

Socially: Barbara did the 2 mile and Tracy also ran it.

5 September 09

Workout notes Last night I kept walking up with a mouth full of saliva. I am draining and I don’t know if it is allergies or a cold. So I’ll run the local 5K anyway; physically I don’t feel that bad.

Politics: Emotionally, this sums it up rather well. Of course, this isn’t ALL of the opposition and the wingnuts went after Bill Clinton too.

I wonder; Paul Krugman talks about his hate mail going up and becoming completely irrational.

Conservatives: Conservatives are ok with spending, so long as it is military related. I kind of thought that spending on health care would keep more Americans safe:

The absence of health insurance creates a range of consequences, including lower quality of life, increased morbidity and mortality, and higher financial burdens. This paper focuses on just one aspect of this harm—namely, greater risk of death—and seeks to illustrate its general order of magnitude.

In 2002, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimated that 18,000 Americans died in 2000 because they were uninsured. Since then, the number of uninsured has grown. Based on the IOM’s methodology and subsequent Census Bureau estimates of insurance coverage, 137,000 people died from 2000 through 2006 because they lacked health insurance, including 22,000 people in 2006.

4 September 09 (pm)

Frogs: Just read the post; this is about frog moms feeding its young on unfertilized eggs.

Reply to Paul Krugman’s article: Paul Krugman wrote an article about the spectacular failure of conservative (“fresh water”) economists to predict the economic meltdown. Krugman seemed to imply that some economists got intoxicated by the beauty of their mathematical models.

A cosmologist talks about this:

One part of the essay worth commenting on, or at least musing about, is the punchline. Krugman thinks that a major factor leading to the failures of economics to understand the mess we’re currently in was the temptation to think that beautiful models must be right.

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

Without knowing much of anything about the relevant issues, I nevertheless suspect that this moral might be a bit too pat. Sure, people can fall in love with beautiful theories, to the extent that they overestimate their relationship to reality. But it seems likely to me that the correct way of understanding all this, once it’s properly understood, will look pretty beautiful as well. General relativity is widely held up as an example of a beautiful theory — and it is, when understood in its own language. But if you put the prediction of GR in the Solar System into the language of pre-existing Newtonian physics (which you could certainly do), it would look ugly and ad hoc.

In other words, it isn’t the beauty that was the problem; it was, as Sean says, complacency.