Last week, on the one-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers crash, TNR brought together influential leaders from Washington and Wall Street for an honest examination of our financial system and its future.

[Guest post by Noam Scheiber:]

I try to explain the political imperative of voting for health care reform if you're a moderate Dem in this recent Bloggingheads appearance. (Apologies to Rep. Mike Arcuri, whom I referred to as Mike "Acuri" in my discussion.) 

--Noam Scheiber on Rahm Emanuel

--George Packer on Mitch Daniels' shameful Iraq history

--Conor Friedersdorf fillets Victor Davis Hanson

--Peter Beinart on the peril posed by Charles Rangel

In his speech today in the White House East Room, President Obama clearly indicated that he is going to press for a comprehensive, and not a piecemeal or “skinny,” health care reform bill. He also made it abundantly clear that he will accept, if necessary, a party-line simple majority vote in the House and the Senate in order to get the bill through. Reconciliation here we come.

Well, not really. I'm embarking on a family vacation for a few days. I'll be back Wednesday.

In the meantime, several of my colleagues, including Mike Crowley, Michelle Cottle, Noam Scheiber, and John Judis will be chipping in. And Amanda Silverman, the brains behind this operation, will be posting a lot of the sort of material that you all thought I've been coming up with.

See you Wednesday.

Anderson Cooper was one of the first reporters to arrive in Haiti after last week’s massive earthquake. According to a Los Angeles Times account, the CNN personality raced to the airport upon hearing the news and caught the last flight out of New York. Unfortunately, the flight he caught deposited him in the Dominican Republic, not Haiti.

My friend and former colleague Reihan Salam has a mostly thoughtful post about my recent piece on conservative crticism of Obama and the economy. He makes several good points, which speak for themselves, but I thought this one merited a response:

Along with Jason Zengerle and Michael Crowley, I was one of the three original contributors to The Plank. None of us considered ourselves natural bloggers. All of us would have probably preferred to be spending our time reporting a 5,000-word feature story. But the world had changed—and, for all our trepidations, it looked like a good time, and it was, especially during the long 2008 election season. Eventually, the rest of the TNR staff joined us on the blog. And then, many of these writers acquired their own blogs.

• Obama’s Most Underrated Move of the Year by Noam Scheiber
• Will Health Reform Open the Flood Gates for Fraud?

• The Year in Foreign Policy: Obama’s Biggest Blunders, Successes, and Strokes of Luck by Michael Crowley
• Will Health Care Reform Help Republicans at the Polls? Don’t Count on It.

• How Obama Became the Unemployment Fall Guy (or, What the Public Doesn’t Understand About Economics) by Jonathan Chait
• The Problem With Sanctions: They’d Just Strengthen Ahmadenijad’s Hand by Nader Mousavizadeh
• Continue reading "Today at TNR (December 23, 2009)"

• The Great Animator: Charles Dickens's Obsession With Ghosts, Bottled Fetuses, and Other Dead Things, by Adam Thirwell
• Cohn vs.

• Grading Obama’s First Year in Office: Will the Idealism of His Campaign Show Itself Again? by The Editors
• Coping With the Loss of a Friend, a Sparring Partner, and a Link to History by Paul Berman
• More Lie

• Should Obama Try to Create More Jobs or Lower the Deficit?

• Everything You Know About American Involvement in Iran Is Wrong by Abbas Milani
• Will You End Up Paying More for Health Insurance Under the Current Senate Bill? by Jonathan Cohn
• Why Clausewitz Would Not Be Happy With Obama’s New Afghanistan Strategy

My colleague Noam Scheiber has parsed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s testimony about the power of the Federal Reserve, but Bernanke also commented in hearings yesterday about government fiscal policy; and what he had to say was, to say the least, disturbing. Echoing the charges of economic conservatives and Wall Streeters like investment banker Peter Peterson, Bernanke took aim against what these folks call “entitlements,” but which are known popularly to be social security and Medicare. Republicans can be expected to cite his comments in the current debate over the Democratic health care reform bill.

How a society cares for those too young, too old, or too sick to work is a test of its maturity, and level of civilization. Social security and Medicare are among the foremost achievements of American government in the twentieth century. If the government needs more money to fund social security, which it presently does not, there are a host of remedies besides cutting benefits. For instance, it can always raise the limit on how much income is subject to a social security tax. 

Medicare is the most penurious and least wasteful of health insurance programs.  If anything, a dispassionate policy-maker concerned about healthcare costs might have insisted that the private sector insurance emulate, or perhaps be folded into, Medicare.  But in discussing “entitlements,” Bernanke insisted that what would have to altered is how much these programs spend.  He even threw open the question of whether these programs should be mandatory. 

When asked whether the deficits that he saw these programs as creating could be met by higher taxes, Bernanke refused to make any comments on taxes.  “I have done my best to leave that authority where it belongs, with the Congress,” he said. Yes, sure, raising or cutting taxes is Congress’s job. But so is spending money on social programs, about which Bernanke, eager to plant his flag on the side of the anti-entitlement camp, was not loath to comment.   

When I read a few of Bernanke’s comments yesterday, I thought, well, maybe they were taken out of context. Why would someone seeking to be confirmed by a Democratic majority go out of his way to promote starkly Republican concerns? 

Here are the relevant exchanges, the first between Bernanke and Utah Senate Robert Bennett and the second between Bernanke and Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed:

• What Is Obama’s Overarching Worldview When It Comes to Foreign Policy?

• Karzai's Fall: How Did a Man Once Hailed as the Savior of Afghanistan Become Its Scourge? by Jean MacKenzie
• From Thomas Paine to Glenn Beck: The Perversion of 'Common Sense' in American Politics by Damon Linker
• Palinology 101?

It's a bit more complicated than that. The New York Times put the story in the top spot of its web site. And Noam Scheiber explains the deeper consequences in The Stash right here at TNR. Apparently, according to Noam, there's some good in this for us. I do not apologize for my chauvinism. The U.S. has taken enough hits in the worldwide economic decline, and the Arabs have been riding high. Mostly as a result of rising oil prices. I hope their banks and bloated-wealth families have a great deal of exposure to Dubai debt.

It was not so long ago that the Times seemed to do a "gee whiz" article about Dubai almost every week. Then the slicks also developed this habit, and tourists responded to the hype. They could stay in the world's second highest and most single expensive in the world. As the international economy went in to a tail spin, the residential real estate business just about stopped. And the cranes next to the unfinished stood still. Dubai is virtually shut down. I don't know how many of the foreign workers without any rights whatever are still in the country.

As I told you at the beginning of this Spine, I am gloating. And I am gloating because I foretold this debacle a long time ago...and ever since. Here are my Spines in this space.

• EXCLUSIVE: A Confidential Industry Document and What It Says About Obamacare (Good and Bad) by Jonathan Cohn
• The 'Going Rogue' Index: Sarah Palin Wouldn't Publish One, so I Thought I'd Do it for Her, by Seyward Darby
• What's Next For

• Why Americans Hate to Love the Government, by John B.