On February 25, 1994 Dr. Baruch Goldstein, a physician in the Israel Defense Forces living in the historically contested ancient city of Hebron, walked into the Ibrahimi Mosque, located in the Cave of the Patriarchs, and with his machine gun murdered 29 Muslim men at prayer. The tremor that ran through Israelis and Jews around the world was two-fold. The first tremor was that here was a massacre of innocents attributable to a madman. But this attribution could not stand by itself for long.

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.

Anthony Wright is executive director of Health Access California, the statewide health care consumer advocacy coalition. He blogs daily at the Health Access Weblog and is a regular contributor to the Treatment.

When Senate Majority Leader Reid held a press conference announcing the inclusion of a version of a public health insurance option in the merged Senate health reform bill, he didn’t mention the outcome of another major difference between the two Senate committee proposals--what would be responsibility of employers with regard to on-the-job coverage. And not a single reporter asked.

It’s strange that on-the-job coverage gets relatively little attention in the debate, even though more than half of Americans have health coverage through their employers. That's more than the Americans in programs like Medicaid and Medicare (around a third of the population) and much more than the Americans who buy coverage as individuals (less than a tenth of the population).

For all its flaws, employer-based coverage generally provides good benefits to workers and their families. It pools together shared contributions by employer and employees, leveraging group purchasing power for better premiums and/or a better level of benefits. Among other things, employers use their purchasing power to prevent any of their workers from being denied for pre-existing conditions. The workplace provides an easy place to sign up for coverage--and sometimes a useful ombudsman to deal with the insurer. It is also efficient way for insurers to get multiple customers at once, rather than incurring the expense of marketing and selling policies one at a time. That helps keep premiums down.

But despite its dominance, employer-sponsored insurance doesn’t extend to all workers. More than 80 percent of the uninsured are workers, or family members of workers. And without reform, on-the-job benefits are eroding. The percentage of Americans who get coverage through employers shrank by over 5 percent in the past decade. And in some states, like California, it’s about to go under the half-way mark--which is why the state has been exploring setting some minimum standard for health benefits. With the overall cost of health care rising, employers are scaling back coverage or in some cases dropping it altogether.

When John Kerry persuaded Hamid Karzai to agree to a run-off election, the New York Times correctly described this victory as "little more than a catastrophe averted." So how do you describe the situation as it exists now, with the run-off called off due to Abdullah Abdullah's withdrawal? I'd say it's a pretty big victory for Karzai, and not just because he's won himself another term.

Are representations of the Prophet Muhammad permitted in Islam? To make or not to make images of the Prophet: that is the question I will try to answer. It is an unexpectedly burning question, as the newspapers regularly demonstrate. But both the answer to the question and the reasons for raising it require a broader introduction.

There have been many times in recent years when one bemoaned the explosion of media that have provided public forums for so much incompetence and ignorance, not to speak of prejudice. Matters became worse after September 11, for two additional reasons. The first is the propagation of a climate of fear, of ever-present danger from ill-defined foes, which led in the West, and especially in the United States, to a plethora of security measures ranging from reasonable and useful to ridiculous and demeaning. Penetrating and perverting institutions and individuals, this fear collided in the Muslim world with a complex ideological and psychological evolution that led many people in Muslim countries and communities to a reflexive and often self-destructive brutality in reaction to the slightest whiff of verbal or visual provocation.

Let me be clear: I don't doubt for a moment that Barack Obama genuinely believes that he can calm the roils that trouble the United States in its relationship with the Muslim world and the Arab orbit within it. The problem is, alas, that he hasn't a clue. Moreover, he hasn't had the chance to learn. And maybe--just maybe--he is not inclined to learn because in his generation wisdom doesn't come from study but from ideological narrative. George W. Bush had his own favorite narrative. It was hewn in Texas and polished, if it was polished at all, just before old Yale collapsed before William Sloane Coffin, if anyone still remembers his tortured and torturing soul.

Obama's narrative is assumedly third world, maybe just by dint of his skin complexion. But, frankly, there weren't many dreams from his father in Dreams From My Father. In fact, there were at least as many from his hippie white mother. So here is a very contemporary person. The two lines, though, do connect in his chosen life as it is retold and projected into the future. Here, his prominence in the deeply left-wing "community organizing" universe meets the do-not-ask-questions rules of the Chicago Democratic machine.

So, much as George Bush did not doubt, so President Obama does not doubt. He doesn't doubt himself and he doesn't doubt what he says. I made the comment the other day in another Spine with reference to Obama: narcissism is the most dangerous of sins...because it doesn't let the sinner recognize it in himself.

I've been thinking for a couple weeks that Joe Lieberman is the Democrats' biggest potential problem. The rest of the party has a strong incentive to pass health care reform and avoid a 2010 catastrophe. But Lieberman? He's not a Democrat and won't be running on the Democratic ticket in 2012.

The notion of a world society is nothing new to Americans. It dominated the rhetoric of World War II, of the founding of the United Nations, of much of the cold war. It is now a received idea, and its impress may be measured by the success with which advocates have found audiences for issues defined in international terms: the world environmental problem; the world population problem; the world food problem." Those words, platitudes now, were written presciently in 1975, and continued: "Much of this internationalist rhetoric is based on things real enough. There is a world ecology; there is a world economy; and some measures important to individual countries can only be obtained through international accord. Thus the concept of interdependence has become perhaps the main element of the new consciousness of a world society." Daniel Patrick Moynihan made those observations long before the rage for globalization and the shrinking world. He wished to call into question the prestige of international consensus. What mattered for him, heretically, was the substance of that consensus. After all, history is littered with unanimous falsehoods, and with their results. Moynihan transposed the classical anxiety about the tyranny of the majority to the realm of international affairs, and contended that there will be circumstances when American ideas and American interests require of us a strategic concept that he called "the United States in opposition." I cannot imagine a strategic concept more contrary to the thinking of Barack Obama, who regards "the United States in opposition" as the problem that he was anointed to solve.

California is a mess, but I love it all the same--especially the Bay Area, where I lived for 15 years. I went to Berkeley in 1962--a refugee from Amherst College, which at that time was dominated by frat boys with high SAT scores. I didn't go to Berkeley to go to school, but to be a bus ride away from North Beach and the Jazz Workshop. In a broader sense, I went to California for the same reason that other émigrés had been going since the 1840s. I was knocking on the Golden Door.

Check out this astounding collection of photos by Lu Guang on China's pollution problem (and its severe toll on the country's people). This one below looks like some grotesque apocalyptic wasteland, but it's just the Yangtze River, brimming with untreated wastewater from a nearby chemical factory and flanked on both sides by cracked, contaminated soil:

This is the second installment of our new feature: Curbside Consult. For the uninitiated, curbside consults are a venerable medical tradition, whereby a doctor seeks informal advice from an experienced colleague in treating a patient with a complex condition. In covering or understanding complex health and social policies, we need sometimes help too.

Today’s interview is with Katherine Swartz, PhD. She is Professor of Health Economics and Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. Author of Reinsuring Health: Why More Middle-Class People Are Uninsured and What Government Can Do, she has researched state efforts to cover the uninsured and to help people with costly conditions who fare poorly in the private health insurance market.

Swartz is a particular expert in the economics of high-risk pools (HRPs--sorry for the acronym) and reinsurance. If you follow health reform, you’ve probably heard these terms thrown around without a lot of discussion of what these terms actually mean.

To put it simply, HRPs are special insurance plans for people who couldn't get coverage on their own, because of costly pre-existing medical conditions. Reinsurance is probably best explained as "insurance for the insurers." It's a special fund that reimburses insurers for the super-high claims of catastrophic medical expenses. The idea is that this spreads the burden of those expenses as widely as possible, while removing (at least partly) the incentive insurers have to avoid risky beneficiaries.

Both parties propose HRPs and reinsurance to address the immediate and long-term challenges in financing care for people with costly conditions. President Obama mentioned HRPs in his address before Congress to offer quick help to people facing the dual challenges of uninsurance and serious illness. Such provisions are contained in the Baucus bill and in recently-proposed Republican amendments. The Bush administration made modest investments in HRPs. Senator McCain’s 2008 health plan made heavy use of them, as do current Republican proposals presented in the House.

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

Imagine that you walk outside your home one rainy morning to get your morning paper. You slip and fall on your slippery front steps, breaking your back and suffering irreparable spinal cord damage. Even if you have perfect medical insurance, you would quickly discover that you would need a lot of help. You might need a home health care aid. You might need ramps and equipment for your house, a handicap-accessible van. You might easily deplete your assets buying these goods and services. You might have to, if you end up in an institution or on Medicaid.

If falls and related mishaps such as car crashes don’t scare you, move the film forward a few decades. You are now caring for a spouse experiencing increasing cognitive difficulties, and everything that entails. You are trying to make this work without going crazy or going broke, without depleting the assets of a lifetime you hope to leave for your kids.

On Thursday,  Jeff Smokler of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association contacted me to defend the organization's study, which I had criticized as "fishy." Actually, to be clear, he had contacted me late on Wednesday, a few hours after I'd try to reach him and some of his colleagues. But I wasn't able to get back in touch with him right away, so we weren't able to speak until yesterday.

Yes, you read it right. Here is the essence: If the Saudis (and other OPEC producers) export fewer hydrocarbons, the buyers should still pay as if they were purchasing the old amount. They should pay what the Saudis could charge when the market was tight and the demand high, and the arrangements should not made in the Arab bazaar, but by treaty. It's a nice world that Riyadh lives in. Perhaps this is King Abdullah's gracious response to President Obama's servile bow.

"Less global warming would be good, right?" ask Jad Mouawad and Andrew C. Revkin in a report in Tuesday's Times. No, they answer themselves: "Not to an oil giant."

This comes up now because of the upcoming Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen. The fact is that the Saudis (as well as the Iranians, the Venezuelans, the emirates, and other big producers) are frightened that their incomes will fall if the attendees commit themselves to "improvements in fuel economy and rising mandates for alternative fuels in the transportation sector." Yes, it could be happening ... and it could be happening this year.

Jake Schmidt, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has a very apt--in fact, devastating--analogy: "It is like the tobacco industry asking for compensation for lost revenues as a part of a settlement to address the health risks of smoking." In fact, if a smoker stops smoking, why don't we oblige him to pay for his cigarettes anyway?

With California now facing its third straight year of drought, pretty much any conservation idea out there—no matter how icky it may sound at first glance—gets a hearing. For instance, as Melinda Burns reports for Miller-McCune today, the state has finally decided to legalize "gray-water" systems, which divert wastewater from dishwashers, laundry machines, sinks, and showers (but obviously not toilets) to irrigate lawns and shrubbery.

As the only Republican who supported Baucus's bill, Olympia Snowe will wield considerable leverage as the negotiations move out of committee, to the Senate floor and, eventually, into conference committee with the House. As she said during the proceedings today, "My vote today is my vote today and it doesn't forecast what my vote will be tomorrow."

So what will Snowe be pushing for in the final Senate bill?

Happy is the eye that saw all this, but our souls were anguished by what our ear heard." This is the refrain of an ancient poem in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, a lament for its author's belatedness.

Arthur Miller

By Christopher Bigsby

(Harvard University Press, 739 pp., $35)

I.

Arthur Miller could hardly have hoped for a more sympathetic biographer than Christopher Bigsby. He is the director of the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies at the University of East Anglia, and the author of a long commentary on Miller’s work and a book-length interview with the playwright. To write this biography, Miller granted Bigsby exclusive access to his papers, including unpublished manuscripts, and sat for what Bigsby describes as “many hours of interviews” over a twenty-five-year friendship.

This was the maiden sally of the United States at the U.N. Human Rights Council, a resolution under the rubric of "promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development." Phew!

The measure was introduced by the U.S. and by Egypt, which, of course, has a long and sterling record as an insurer and defender of civilized liberties. After all, earlier this year, Freedom House gave the Cairo regime a ranking on its freedom of the press index, placing it with three other bastions of human rights at 128th out of 195 countries--a notch above the Central African Republic and a few notches below Congo (Brazzaville). Are we to expect that soon America will co-sponsor a motion with Saudi Arabia on the liberties of women?

The resolution passed in a voice vote, which means by acclamation. I am sure that the delegates from Cuba and China and other paragons of press freedom also shouted "aye" to the question. In any case, there was no "nay" or "abstain" recorded. So that settles it, I suppose, "freedom for all." Doubtless that the crime of insulting the president of Egypt, which can get you five years in jail, will vanish from the books ... and maybe from the courts, too. On the other hand, do not count on this.

In 2001, an entrepreneur named Tom Casten traveled down to southern Louisiana, near the small town of Franklin, with a clever idea. For decades, the area had sustained a pair of chemical plants that produced carbon black, a grimy powder used in printer ink and tire rubber. But the owner of one of the plants, Cabot Corporation, was struggling to compete against cheap tire imports from abroad, and desperately seeking ways to cut costs. That’s where Casten came in. He pointed out that the gas left over from the carbon-black process was just getting wasted--burned off and flared up into the sky. He proposed building a recycling facility that could capture the gas and use it to generate electricity. Not only would this make the plant slightly cleaner--carbon-black plants are notorious polluters--but there’d be enough juice to run Cabot’s operations, and for less than it cost to buy power from the local utility. In all, the company could save up to $1.3 million per year.

The most-watched case of the Supreme Court's last term, which ended in June, invited the justices to hold unconstitutional a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The law required certain jurisdictions--largely in the Old South--to "pre-clear" any changes in their electoral systems with the Department of Justice. It was intended to prevent states with poor civil rights histories from changing their voting systems in ways that would keep blacks from voting. From the questions asked by the justices at the oral argument, the betting among the cognoscenti was that the Court's five-person conservative majority would strike down the law on the notion that things had changed and federal supervision was no longer necessary.

It may sound like an SNL skit, but Al Qaeda's latest innovation is quite disturbing:

Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery

By Steve Nicholls

(University of Chicago Press, 524 pp., $30)

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Edited by Bill McKibben

(Library of America, 1,047 pp., $40)

Defending The Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, And The Legacy Of Madison Grant

By Jonathan Peter Spiro

(University of Vermont Press, 462 pp., $39.95)

A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir

By Donald Worster

(Oxford University Press, 535 pp., $34.99)

A Reenchanted World: The Quest for A New Kinship With Nature

By James William Gibson

(Metropolitan Books, 306 pp., $27)

Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet

By Edward Humes

(Ecco Books, 367 pp., $25.99)

I.

In contemporary public discourse, concern for "the environment" is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even free-market fundamentalists strain to display their ecological credentials, while corporations that sell fossil fuels genuflect at the altar of sustainability. Everyone has discovered how nice it is to be green. Will popular sentiment translate into public policy? There is reason to be skeptical.

It's not considered the height of political savvy here in the United States to point out that European lifestyles are greener than our own. Don't expect that line in an Obama speech anytime soon. Too many facets of European life—the cramped apartments, the clotheslines for drying laundry—would likely strike suburbanites as inconvenient, burdensome, or even downright primitive.

The New York Times gave about six inches to Bibi Netanyahu's speech at the General Assembly, and this in an article he shared with Hugo Chavez who spoke for four times the duration allowed by the rules. This is a habit among tyrants, and Chavez is no exception.

The same Times page carried a 24-inch piece about Gadhafi, not on his filibuster at the U.N. (which it covered more than amply on Thursday), but dealing with the dictator's appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations. The reporter, Mark Landler, was at the event and dubbed it a "seminar." I don't know what seminars are like at Georgetown. But at the two places I went to school, Gadhafi’s answer to a question about his successor would have been laughed out of court. Here's the description: "He said the question of who would succeed him was irrelevant because, according to the philosophy in his Green Book, the Libyan masses are in charge." "Seminar," indeed.

The ruling class that attends the high-dues CFR is easy to pacify these days.

'He was remarkably reasonable,' said a prominent financier.

 But the financier had the grace of shame. 

(he) did not want to voice his sentiments on the record.

(Last year when A'jad spoke at the Council, many of the attendees thought of themselves as heroes for defending his civil liberties.)