They are not unconnected. They are not unconnected at all.
Now, presumably the president didn't want to provoke the rage of the Palestinians. (Although, then again, he might just have anticipated it.) But Palestinian rage is very easy to provoke. Snap your fingers and, there, you have it. You don't even have to rent a mob. It comes free will, so to speak.
The fact is that Obama did more than snap his fingers. He sent out very top members of his administration to beat up on Israel and they did.
My post from a couple days ago, about how my instincts about Howard Dean from 2004 have been vindicated, made me think of something: Just how awful was the 2004 Democratic primary field? Go through the list, and try to imagine any of these men as a presidential nominee, let alone (shudder) a president:
One casino has betting odds of various figures winning the 2012 presidential election. Hillary Clinton seems strangely high at 10-1 -- that line might be bait for those who still attribute supernatural powers to the Clintons. Sarah Palin is also 10-1, which I find plausible but uncomfortably high for a potentially cataclysmic event.
Dick Cheney is very low, at 150-1, below Ron Paul (50-1), John Edwards (65-1) and even the Constitutionally ineligible Arnold Schwarzenegger (100-1.)
As readers may have discerned, if only from the Harry Reid "Negro Dialect" furor the big whoop in Washington during the last few days has revolved around Game Change, a 2008 campaign chronicle by DC press veterans John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.
Peter Harbage is a Washington DC-based health policy analyst who worked with both Senator John Edwards and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on their individual mandate proposals. He has also worked at both the Center for American Progress and the New America Foundation.
In the context of legislation that would cost nearly a trillion dollars, it's easy to overlook a provision that, on its own, would cost a mere billion. But one such provision in the House bill could make a huge difference in the success of reform--if House-Senate negotiators put it in the final package and especially if, upon doing so, they make it even stronger.
The provision, Section 104 of the House bill, would make $1 billion available to states in order to monitor possible insurer price gouging during the transition to health reform. The idea, in a nutshell, is to provide states with resources to review premium increases in the next few years--and to make recommendations on whether or not price gouging has occurred.
The Senate bill has no corresponding section. But it really should. Health insurance premiums can increase by double digits year after year, with small businesses taking the hardest hits. Insurers could use health reform as an excuse to force even bigger increases, enlarging profits and discrediting health reform in the process. As one of the “immediate reforms” under the House bill, the provision’s success or failure would help set the tone for how people see health reform in 2010.
But it’s not enough for the federal government simply to make the money available. The bill must make sure the funds are used effectively.
Matthew Continetti can rest easy: It seems a lock that Sarah Palin's favorability will remain higher than John Edwards's for some time to come.
Peter Harbage is a Washington DC-based health policy analyst who worked with both Senator John Edwards and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on their individual mandate proposals. He has also worked at both the Center for American Progress and the New America Foundation.
With the release of the Congressional Budget Office report on the Senate Finance health
bill, there has been significant concern about how health reform may not cover all of the uninsured. From leaders in the progressive movement (read Jon's list of top health reform issues) to Karen Ignagni's October 11 cover memo on the infamous PwC "report", people have been talking about the size of the penalty for families failing to purchase insurance. It's a good question, but it misses the point. Getting everyone covered depends on a three step process: coverage must be made affordable, coverage must be made easily available, and once that is achieved, then you can have an effective mandate and penalty.
It is this second step--making coverage easy to get--that has gotten too little attention. Six out of ten children eligible for Medicaid and CHIP (basically free coverage) are estimated to be eligible and not enrolled. The forms involved can be overly complex and the system can be difficult to navigate. In fact, today's health insurance system is seemingly designed to keep you out of insurance. Job change, marriage, change in age, all mean that you could lose your current insurance.
Politico is spotlighting a long piece about the pathos of Andrew Young, the former John Edwards staffer who made the ultimate sacrifice for his beloved boss: publicly claiming to be the baby daddy of Rielle Hunter's child, only to be later kicked to the curb by his idol.
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
By Jennifer Burns
(Oxford University Press, 459 pp., $27.95)
Ayn Rand and the World She Made
By Anne C. Heller
(Doubleday, 559 pp., $35)
I.
The current era of Democratic governance has provoked a florid response on the right, ranging from the prosaic (routine denunciations of big spending and debt) to the overheated (fears of socialism) to the lunatic (the belief that Democrats plan to put the elderly to death). Amid this cacophony of rage and dread, there has emerged one anxiety that is an actual idea, and not a mere slogan or factual misapprehension. The idea is that the United States is divided into two classes--the hard-working productive elite, and the indolent masses leeching off their labor by means of confiscatory taxes and transfer programs.
Norm Coleman. John Edwards. Ursula Plassnik.
Norm Coleman. John Edwards. Ursula Plassnik.
What do all these people have in common? That's right. Each one became a Harvard fellow after failing to win a high-profile political campaign. And while this year's crop—which includes Senator Coleman and Terry McAuliffe—is perhaps not the most dignified, Cambridge remains a prime spot for office-seekers to rehabilitate. Click through this slideshow to see some of Harvard’s most prominent spurned politician-turned-fellows.
The News & Observer reports that Rielle Hunter showed up at the federal courthouse in Raleigh, North Carolina, today to speak the grand jury investigating whether John Edwards misused campaign funds to buy her silence about their affair. Who knows what Hunter told the grand jury, but it's curious she brought her 18-month-old daughter with her.
--Jason Zengerle
Alan Wolfe is a TNR contributing editor and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His latest book is The Future of Liberalism (Knopf, 2009).
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.
