Politics
Trading With the Enemy: Smart, but Never Popular
The recent and overdue debate about the Israeli blockade of Gaza raises an old, unresolved question: does shunning our enemies work or do we do them more harm by embracing them? For me, this is not a theological or moral question, although I always loved the suggestion attributed to Mark Twain to “love your enemies — [...]
The First Rule of Holes
California is quickly learning the first rule of holes: when you find yourself at the bottom of one, stop digging. Banks, insurance companies, and pension funds buy government bonds because they are a very safe investment. Suppose they have to choose between the bonds of: a) Mexico. The world's newest narco-state, so beloved by its citizens [...]
From the New Deal to the BFD
You had to laugh. When Joe Biden introduced the President at the White House health care bill signing today, he leaned over and quietly reminded Obama that "this is a big fucking deal". His comment was off color but on target. Health care reform is a watershed. Not only did the federal government finally grant tens [...]
The People's Republic of Apple
Apple, Google, and Microsoft are the three most important technology companies in the world and they now mirror the world's three most important economies. Apple is China, booming but autocratic. Microsoft is Europe, wealthy, stagnant, and declining. Google is the USA, an immature but powerful force for freedom prone to arrogance and to fighting too many wars at [...]
The Elephant in the Room on Health Care
Today is Obama's health care summit, and there is an elephant in the room. To find it, start by identifying which of the following health care plans is or was sponsored by a Republican? a) A 1996 plan to cover every American b) A 1992 plan to cover 30 out of 35 million uninsured Americans c) A [...]
Warfare at the PhD level
Failure is usually easy to spot since mistakes are costly, painful, or at least embarrassing. Success, on the other hand, is easy to overlook. Noticing what works is important in business and in wartime — especially if the war is not going well. I wrote earlier about the success of the 101st Airborne in Mosul, [...]
Health Care: simple, basic, fully financed
Martha Coakley's unwelcome but richly-deserved loss of the Democratic Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy has recast the debate over health care reform. Many Democratic Senators from states less blue than Massachusetts are recalibrating their commitment to the current bill. If he wants a bill he can proudly sign, Obama needs to focus the Congress [...]
The speeches that made Barack Obama
More than any president since Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama reveals himself through the speeches he gives at critical moments. Like FDR, Kennedy, and Lincoln, Obama has given his best speeches under pressure, before hostile audiences, or in the face of excruciating pressure. He has done this often enough that it is worth laying these speeches [...]
Atul Gawande: America's Doctor
Who is Atul Gawande and why is he having a bigger impact on your life than any physician in America who is not treating you?Gawwande is a cancer surgeon in Boston. A Rhodes Scholar and the recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant", he trained at Harvard, and Stanford and grabbed a Masters in Public Health [...]
The Great Sell-out.
It's Oaklandish — the great liberal caterwauling about the death of the public option and the claims that Obama has sold out to big insurance and pharma. To humiliate a liberal, film this stuff and replay it in ten years.If this is a sell-out, count me a buyer. Last night's Senate deal killed Harry Reid's [...]
Solar Power
There is a natural and healthy tension between politics and markets. The tension is the difference between socially oriented citizens who are often unfamiliar with business and in any case favor the strong, visible hand of government protection and their commercially-oriented brethren who prefer the invisible hand of market competition and generally view government as [...]
The Hamilton Mixtape: "Cause I'm the damned genius that shot him"
One of the cool things about being President is that talented people of all sorts are happy to drop by and perform for you. Last May, the White House sponsored "Poetry, Music, and Spoken Word", an opportunity to let people most of us have never heard of get their 15 minutes. In the Heights [...]
Did Susan B. Anthony and Abraham Lincoln elect Barack Obama?
In the earliest days of the United States, only white protestant men with property were eligible to vote, Since that time however, the US has steadily, if unevenly, advanced the cause of suffrage. Has it mattered? To find out, ask how the 2008 presidential election would have turned out if only white men had voted. [...]
The revolution will not be televised. It will be Tweeted, Blogged, and YouTubed.
Iran has crossed into promising and dangerous ground — that moment when political mobilization creates the possibility that chaos will give birth to progress or collapse in repression. Politics becomes a real and serious struggle as history either leaps forward or falls back based on the cumulative impact of thousands of people who cannot know [...]
"We must say openly the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors."
I slept soundly through the 3am alarm I set so that I could catch Obama's speech live from Cairo. It would have been worth getting up for. Its empathy, intelligence, directness, and unusual rhetoric assure that this speech will survive along with his Philadelphia discourse on race, his Notre Dame address, his talks on the [...]
Redesigning California
Update: our local public radio station broadcast the two minute version of this post. Listen to it here.Most clichés about California are true: we are both America’s most urban state and its most agricultural. We are home to more national parks, more immigrants, and a better public university than any other state. We have Silicon [...]
The Challenge: How to make fun of Barack Obama
Answer: practice. Not a bad start here.
Will iPhone Skype force Intelligent Net Neutrality?
Net neutrality is one of those terms like "sustainability" that everybody favors because nobody defines. Net neutrality, as argued in a post that has held up reasonably well here, is a general view that network operators should give equal treatment to all the traffic on their networks. In practice, network operators don't do this and [...]
The US Auto Hospice
Today the White House issued its assessment of the GM and Chrysler turnaround plans. To summarize: Chrysler has 30 days to live. It is being given palliative care only and physicians are under medical directive to not revive the patient. Fiat, it's slightly less dead companion, will either marry Chrysler or let it slip into [...]
Where is the Stick?
Obama needs to acknowledge that his bank rescue plan cannot be entirely voluntary. He will force weak banks out of business by making them sell assets at prices that acknowledge their insolvency.This is not especially fun for a politician — but it is essential that he do it anyway.Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner has put forward [...]
