Not many Ph.D. students expect their research to generate outrage among Washington pundits decades later, but, as it turns out, that's exactly what happened to Stephen Schneider. Back in 1971, Schneider was studying plasma physics at Columbia and moonlighting as a research assistant at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. There, he co-authored an article for Science arguing that the warming effect caused by rising amounts of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere would be swamped by the cooling effect caused by aerosol pollution like dust and smoke.
Most of the recent talk about overseas health care systems has not been terribly charitable. You'll wait in long lines, you'll die from curable cancer, etc. But during last week's markup hearings at the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Kent Conrad offered a different, more nuanced take:
As Democrats scramble to assemble a health care reform package that a majority of the party can support, Republicans have agreed on what they claim is a quick and easy way to reduce health insurance costs. In delivering the Republican reply to the President’s recent joint-session speech, Charles Boustany of Louisiana offered the GOP plan, saying "Let's also talk about letting families and businesses buy insurance across state lines. I and many other Republicans believe that that will provide real choice and competition to lower the cost of health insurance."
It's an approach conservatives have been talking up for a while. Probably its most vocal proponent is Representative John Shadegg of Arizona, who introduced the idea formally this July with "The Health Care Choice Act of 2009." But a closer examination shows that it's the "Drill baby Drill" of health care reform--a cynical slogan masquerading as a serious public policy solution.
This was the best speech I've heard Barack Obama give as president--possibly the best since January of 2008. Unlike his inaugural address, or even his convention speech, this one really soared and inspired by the end--a bit counterintuitively for a health care speech. I thought the invocation of Ted Kennedy was pitch perfect: not tacky or maudlin and certainly not partisan (hence the allusions to Kennedy's friends Orrin Hatch, John McCain and Chuck Grassley). Obama managed to depict Kennedy as a completely ecumenical figure ("Ted Kennedy’s passion was born not of some rigid ideology, but of ... the experience of having two children stricken with cancer."). And then, by segueing from Kennedy into a pragmatic defense of liberalism ("hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play"), he managed to depict liberalism as a completely ecumenical worldview. That, too, was right out of Obama's greatest campaign hits. (See here, for example.)
This was also as animated a speech as I've heard Obama give as president. On the campaign trail, he was great at talking over applause to reach a rhetorical crescendo. He did that nicely a couple times tonight, including during one of his take-away lines: "Well the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action."
A couple more quick thoughts:
Want a hint about what the president will say tonight? Check out the guest list for the First Lady's box, which the White House just published. It's full of people who had trouble paying for their medical care--people who, though from different walks of life, all had to confront the same essential dilemmas. Whether or not Obama mentions them explicitly, it suggests the personal stakes Americans have in reform will be a major theme tonight--as it should be, but hasn't always in the last few months.
One other notable guest: Vietoria Kennedy, widow of Senator Ted.
Full list of guests follows:
There are poor communicators, and then there is RNC Chairman Michael Steele. During the recess, Steele has been on something of a public-relations spree, attempting to promote the GOP's health care message on TV and in town halls, and leaving a trail of wreckage in his wake.
Click through this video slideshow to see some of Steele's worst health care messaging.
There are poor communicators, and then there is RNC Chairman Michael Steele. During the recess, Steele has been on something of a public-relations spree, attempting to promote the GOP's health care message on TV and in town halls, and leaving a trail of wreckage in his wake.
Click through this video slideshow to see some of Steele's worst health care messaging.
At first blush, the findings of a study group called the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care might not seem particularly surprising. It's no longer news that millions of American families face financial ruin or physical catastrophe because they have no way to pay medical bills. Nor is it a great revelation that, as a committee staff member put it, "[v]ery few of these families are indigent in the accepted meaning of the word.
On the morning of February 21, David Perel, the editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer, was sitting in his Boca Raton office when he pulled up The New York Times website. Scanning the screen, he was surprised by one particularly opaque headline--for mccain, self-confidence on ethics poses its own risk--that topped the Times' now infamous front-page investigation suggesting John McCain had carried on an affair with telecommunications lobbyist Vicki Iseman while he ran the Senate Commerce Committee during the 1990s.
Among the numerous Sarah Palin mini-scandals that have trickled into public view in the last few days, one of the more disturbing is Palin's appearance last January on the Bob and Mark Show, where she sat back and listened to the DJs describe Republican State Senate President (and cancer survivor) Lyda Green, whom Palin had bumped heads with in the legislature, as "a cancer. She is nothing but a very jealous woman.
More than a decade ago, Michael Kinsley, the journalist and former editor of this magazine, developed Parkinson's disease--a degenerative condition that impairs motor and speech control, producing tremors, rigidity, and eventually severe disability. While the standard regimen of medications helped, he knew that his symptoms were bound to get steadily worse with time. He needed something better--something innovative--before the disease really progressed. In 2006, he got it at the famed Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.
More than a decade ago, Michael Kinsley, the journalist and former editor of this magazine, developed Parkinson's disease--a degenerative condition that impairs motor and speech control, producing tremors, rigidity, and eventually severe disability. While the standard regimen of medications helped, he knew that his symptoms were bound to get steadily worse with time. He needed something better--something innovative--before the disease really progressed. In 2006, he got it at the famed Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.
Over the last 25 years, liberalism has lost both its good name and its sway over politics. But it is liberalism's loss of imagination that is most disheartening. Since President Clinton's health care plan unraveled in 1994--a debacle that this magazine, regrettably, abetted--liberals have grown chastened and confused, afraid to think big ideas. Such reticence had its proper time and place; large-scale political and substantive failures demand introspection, not to mention humility. But it is time to be ambitious again.
I.
The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
(HarperFlamingo, 546 pp., $26)
