FACT: Glenn Beck tapes his show in New York. FACT: There are roughly 150-200 unsolved killings in NYC every year. FACT: Glenn Beck has never provided a "believable" alibi for any of these killings.

"The NEA was created by the Congress of the United States and President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 as “a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education.”  The issue of health care is curiously absent from this description on their website.
  So I’d like to start a little debate and ask you, the reader, the same question. Do you think it is the place of the NEA to encourage the art community to address issues currently under legislative consideration?
  And before answering, let me give you my take."    

Is Apple the new (evil empire) Microsoft?

Glenn Beck continues to hemorrhage advertisers.

"Today, generally, Adam Smith is claimed by the Right, Darwin by the Left. In the American South and Midwest, where Smith’s individualist, libertarian, small-government philosophy is all the rage, Darwin is reviled for his contradiction of creation. Yet if the market needs no central planner, why should life need an intelligent designer?
Conversely, in the average European biology laboratory you will find fervent believers in the individualist, emergent, decentralised properties of genomes who prefer dirigiste determinism to bring order to the economy.
So long is the shadow cast by the determinism of Karl Marx that it is often forgotten how radical the economic liberalism of the political economists seemed in the 1830s, the decade when Darwin’s thinking crystallised."    

Is a global recession good for the environment? I know I'm generating a lot less trash than I did in 2007. From TreeHugger: Point and counterpoint (and another from Scientific American). This writer makes the point any negative environmental effects of a global recession are more than outweighed by benefits stemming from a massive reduction in economic growth. And Newsweek's article from earlier this year highlights examples of recession-induced pollution reduction around the world:

The impact of China's slowing economic growth (6.8 percent in the fourth quarter last year but 13 percent in 2007) has hit hardest in cities in the export-heavy south such as Dongguan. There, roughly 10 percent of the 22,000 factories have closed since last year. In Zhejiang province, just south of Shanghai, at least 60,000 small factories are shuttered. Survivors have slashed production and grounded fleets of diesel-fume-belching trucks. As a result, streams where factories dumped their waste are getting cleaner and the air is less smoggy. In 2008, the number of days with dangerous levels of air pollution in Dongguan fell by 65 from the year before, mostly in the final months of the year. "When there's less work, there's less release of sewage and trash, so environmental pressures have eased," says environmental scientist Liu Zhiming of Dongguan University of Technology.

John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc., offers his elegant solution for health care reform. The cynic in me sees nothing like this coming to pass because its clarity allows for no or too little deal making, rent seeking and back scratching up on Capitol Hill.      

A moment later, after some reflection, he added, “But it also sounds an awful lot like what happens in a banana republic or in Putin’s Russia, when the captains of industry did favors for the government in exchange for economic subsidies. How do you stop from going down the slippery slope and becoming like Putin’s Russia?”  

The most important questions arising from the Bank of America–Merrill Lynch merger do not involve Ken Lewis. They involve Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and the U.S. government.

  In an interview with Andrew Cuomo, Paulson “largely corroborated” Lewis’s rendition of the events of December 2008, Cuomo wrote in an April 23 letter to federal officials. “Secretary Paulson indicated that he told Lewis that if Bank of America were to back out of the Merrill Lynch deal, the government either could or would remove the Board and management.”  

“Most scientists who study the human mind are convinced that minds are the products of brains, and brains are the products of evolution. Dr. Collins takes a different approach: he insists that at some moment in the development of our species God inserted crucial components — including an immortal soul, free will, the moral law, spiritual hunger, genuine altruism, etc.”
I thought we were done with the religious running the science when we got that new guy in the White House but I guess not.  

IF there’s a silver lining to our current economic downturn, it’s this: With it comes what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” the failure of outmoded economic structures and their replacement by new, more suitable structures. ... this downturn offers an excellent opportunity to get rid of one that has long outlived its usefulness: gross domestic product.

See also: Genuine Progress Indicator.

I am thankful to be living in a time when we have the privilege to debate over health care. I love the future; so much better than the past.

Senator Dodd, who I like to call Senator Big Bank, and Senator Schumer, who I like to call Senator Wall Street, are doing their best to ensure that regulatory reform in the financial services sector results in nothing but good news for their biggest donors. Senator Big Bank this week chaired a Senate Banking Committee hearing on regulatory reform where he asked this ridiculous question: "Is the administration's proposal really enough, or should we be listening to previous administrations...that greater consolidation should be the next step?" (quoted in American Banker, 8/5/09) Apparently he feels that the Bush, and to some extent Clinton, administrations' march toward regulatory consolidation, the same administrations who laid the groundwork for the banking crisis, had the right idea. Huh?

And Senator Wall Street pulls the Rovian tactic of calling it a "turf war" effectively shutting down meaningful conversation before it even starts. It seems as if his turf (his millions of dollars of campaign contributions from Wall Street) is the only one that needs protecting. And forget about consumers/taxpayers in all of this. Banking consolidation will mean just a handful of bigger banks calling the shots for consumers and on Capitol Hill. The same way the ones that were too big to fail and needed bailing out have done it for the past decade.

One of the important things that kept the credit moving moving and prevented a total melt-down of the system, was the existence of over 6,000 state-chartered banks, many of them smaller community banks. State regulators in general have been doing their part to try and protect consumers and do their part to ensure the safety and soundness of the banking system. They are by no means perfect, and have for a long time been blocked by the feds from doing their job, but they provide checks and balances that would disappear if Senator Big Bank and Senator Wall Street get their way.

(Crossposted at MyPorch)

Although she puts her usual snarky spin on the situation, Maureen Dowd says something in her column today that sums up how I feel about Bill Clinton's trip to North Korea. "Hillary and President Obama look bigger when they share the stage with other talented players." That is exactly what I was thinking as the media and blogosphere pondered the notions that Hillary is once again in Bill's shadow, or that even in Obama's America the Clintons loom large.

This is the way I see it: We have a very competent President working hard to clean up messes he inherited and make some change in general. We have a very competent Secretary of State working hard to clean up messes she inherited and make change in Africa (at the moment). And we have a very competent former President helping to clean up a mess and just maybe set the stage for the possibility for some kind of change in North Korea. It just makes me want to shout "Hooray, adults are in charge again!"

And didn't you love how normally smiley Bill looked like he was at someone's funeral the whole time he was there?

(Crossposted at MyPorch)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is attempting to deal with the challenges of predicting chaotic behavior (climate), as well as how to deliver its findings.

House of Cards Insurance (HCI), ShellGame Inc. (SGI), and Ponzi Scheme Assurance Company (PSAC) are three lesser known companies of the 4,000 business units that make up American International Group (AIG). Apparently, whenever the greedy geniuses at one AIG unit needed to find financial guarantees for whatever brilliant business deal they were making, they just went to another AIG unit to cover their liabilities. Unfortunately, the AIG units that provided those guarantees are similarly leveraged with other AIG units. This might not be a problem if the parent company had all the money in the world to cover the debts of its spoiled children. But we all know that isn't the case. If it was then they could pay back $182 billion to taxpayers. As it is, even with the enormous federal bailout, it appears a light breeze could structurally damage their house of cards.

(Crossposted at MyPorch.)

What's the world coming to when an Urban Planner finds himself explaining derivatives to a Cabby? Then again, if both the Urban Planner and the Cabby (and millions of more people) knew about derivatives years ago perhaps they would have been regulated, and we wouldn't be propping up the firms who made billions selling the junk.

Freedom to choose what's in your health plan, Freedom for insurance companies to reward you for healthy living with lower prices, Freedom to choose high-deductible low-premium coverage, Freedom to keep your existing plan as it is now, Freedom to choose your doctors - according to House and Senate Democrats’ Health Care bills, these freedoms are not free.   

The Atlantic’s Virginia Postrel described her own personal odyssey with expensive cancer treatments and how, under one instance of nationalized medicine, she’d have a lot lower odds of being alive today. She then took the time to respond to a number readers’ letters about her article and the result are two pieces that illustrate a lot of the contradictions in health care, and highlight some of the less discussed points, such as the fact the United States, for all it’s unsystematic and “costly” nature, tends to produce the great majority of innovation in medical service and technology.

Which ever “side” of the healthcare debate you are on, whether you think healthcare is a right or a privilege, or something else,  in practice, “healthcare” is an amalgamation of products (drugs, devices, etc) and services (diagnoses, surgeries, etc), and the economic principles of goods and services apply to healthcare just as they do with other goods and services.

Read her original article first and then her response to readers.    

My wife recently had a baby, this is the bill....

In the documentary film Garbage, writer and director Andrew Nisker takes an average urban family, the McDonalds, and asks them to keep every scrap of garbage that they create for three months.

My grasp of economics is remedial at best. But it seems to me that we are in a collective state of denial about the short term future of the housing market. Too often, the "experts" called upon by the media to expatiate on the state of the market are from organizations like the National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Homebuilders, and have the most to gain from an up market and an upbeat consumer.

As someone who is planning on purchasing a home in early 2010 and is stunned by the still huge prices on some really crappy real estate, it is extremely satisfying to finally find a truth talker on TV. One of my favorite new shows, Real Estate Intervention, features Mike Aubrey, a shaved-headed, straight talking real estate agent in Maryland who does not suffer fools gladly--and he has a lot of fools to choose from. The show follows him around the Washington-Baltimore metro area while he schools home sellers on the reality of the current market. And comps be damned, the sellers never want to believe that the white hot market is lukewarm at the moment and has the potential to keep getting cooler over the next year or so. So far there hasn't been an episode where the clueless and intransigent sellers have been right and Mike has been wrong.

But then maybe I shouldn't be too hard on the sellers. They have been told for too long that the market would never go down. When faced with an ARM reset and home foreclosure this season on The Simpsons, Homer complained to his mortgage lender that he was told he wouldn't have to make any payments until the future and goes on to say "this isn't the future, it's the lousy stinkin' now." Should we really expect the average American to be smarter than Homer Simpson?

(Crossposted at MyPorch)

I'd like to welcome myself to Opensewer. Thanks to Jason, John & Rose for letting me share my two cents.

“It’s kind of a give-and-take, quid pro quo kind of environment,” said Tom Daschle, President Obama’s first choice for health secretary, who remains in touch with the White House on health care issues. “I think that the stakeholders wouldn’t do this if they didn’t think there was something in it for them.”  

If you haven't seen this yet, please watch: Bill Moyers interviews former health insurance industry executive Wendell Potter (CIGNA), who left the field after almost 20 years to become a health reform advocate.

"Late last month, Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo took the unusual step of filing a civil rights lawsuit against the police department of his own county. The suit stems from a 2008 SWAT team raid on Calvo's house that resulted in the shooting deaths of his two black Labrador retrievers. In pushing back against the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Prince George's County police department, the mayor is helping expose a more widespread pattern of law enforcement carelessness and callousness throughout the state of Maryland."

"What bothers me is that they seem to be saying, 'Some people we have good enough evidence against, so we'll give them a fair trial. Some people the evidence is not so good, so we'll give them a less fair trial. We'll give them just enough due process to ensure a conviction because we know they're guilty. That's not a fair trial, that's a show trial," Mr. Nadler said.

Wal-Mart comes out for government mandated employer health insurance. Why? Because it will benefit them. Costly mandate = (another legislated) advantage for bigger, more established and more connected corporations.

Well said: Batshit-insane American Quitter Sarah Palin ended her own special “Independence Day” by posting a series of desperate grammar-challenged nonsense and vicious threats on her Facebook and Twitter pages.

True freedom is always free; no killing required.

This is an unusually warm October day in Daytona Beach, the sun baked white sand beaches and the sea came from the ups and downs. David Braymer, who lean muscular body, men younger than his four or five years, is suffering the strong glare of the sun. This is the day today, he hoped that teaching children can be less restrictive dress code. However, this is a price that he is willing to pay what he loved, science and education are relatively new, until recently considered the pseudo-science, astrology. In some cases, long-term he would work to return to his day more exciting for a secret government departments involved in the study of additional land, but as long as these days behind him. In his five years of teaching, he has fully adapted to and become a significant emphasis on living a suburban secondary school teachers more concerned about little more than lesson plans and school dance partner. And even a new love interest in his life. State-owned local water Cheral Baskel side restaurant town, the famous views It is a very good space shuttle launch - which Cheral are smart enough to become very profitable from happening. David is a regular sponsor Cherals, he stopped in for breakfast every morning on the way to work, it is not only to her (not often, but he will not be mentioned) hash browns. It was exciting Cherals occurred this morning, as the next space shuttle launch just three days, it is on Halloween. She tried to decorate two events at the same time, leading to more confusion. David was puzzled to see that the astronauts will be a function of zombies. There is a clear sense of foreboding in the small town community in recent days, with the launch of the last two being singular technical difficulties, has not yet been explained. In fact, some of the more Seoul citizens have begun to spread the bad luck of signs on a sign, they claimed not bode well for the introduction of the night of Halloween ...

--translated from Moon People.