O:9:"MagpieRSS":17:{s:6:"parser";i:0;s:12:"current_item";a:0:{}s:5:"items";a:25:{i:0;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:16:"Bill of the week";s:4:"link";s:67:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/bill_week";s:11:"description";s:1647:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Bill of the week        </div>
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                    J.F. | ATLANTA        </div>
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                    Chips chip away at chip encroachment        </div>
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<p>THE best part of the <a href="http://www.gpb.org/news/2010/02/04/ga-senate-passes-bill-opposing-involuntary-microchips">bill</a> recently passed by the Georgia state senate banning involuntary implantation of microchips into humans is not that it addressed a problem that by the bill's sponsor's admission does not exist (unlike budget shortfalls, MARTA funding and water rights). It is not that it follows a similar one passed in <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/09/AR2010020903796.html">Virginia</a>, sponsored by an official who fretted over microchips being "the mark of the beast". The best part of SB235 is that it was cosponsored by Senators Rogers and Pearson, both of whom have the first name Chip.</p>";s:8:"comments";s:76:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/bill_week#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:31:24 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004835 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:1647:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Bill of the week        </div>
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                    J.F. | ATLANTA        </div>
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                    Chips chip away at chip encroachment        </div>
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<p>THE best part of the <a href="http://www.gpb.org/news/2010/02/04/ga-senate-passes-bill-opposing-involuntary-microchips">bill</a> recently passed by the Georgia state senate banning involuntary implantation of microchips into humans is not that it addressed a problem that by the bill's sponsor's admission does not exist (unlike budget shortfalls, MARTA funding and water rights). It is not that it follows a similar one passed in <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/09/AR2010020903796.html">Virginia</a>, sponsored by an official who fretted over microchips being "the mark of the beast". The best part of SB235 is that it was cosponsored by Senators Rogers and Pearson, both of whom have the first name Chip.</p>";}i:1;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:39:"Ehud Barak breaks the apartheid barrier";s:4:"link";s:98:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/israel_demography_democracy_or_apartheid";s:11:"description";s:7219:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Israel, demography, democracy or apartheid        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
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                    America wakes up to Israel&#039;s demography/democracy crisis, 23 years late        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="220" height="334" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w07/barak220.jpg?1266253279" />        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w07/barak220.jpg" alt="" align="right" width="220" height="334">WE'VE been <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2010/02/judging_israel">talking</a> a lot lately about Israel and American Jews, so here goes another post on the topic. On Friday Daniel Levy <a href="http://progressiverealist.org/blogpost/retractionist-retentionist-discourse-israel">wrote</a> a trenchant response to what Ehud Barak, Israel's former prime minister and current defence minister, said at the Herzliya Conference the week before. To wit:</p><blockquote><p>If, and as long as between the Jordan and the sea, there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic... If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a binational state, and if they don't, it is an apartheid state.</p></blockquote><p>Mr Levy writes that Mr Barak's views reflect the basic realist center-left diagnosis of Israel's situation, but that there is a terrible "disconnect" between this diagnosis—a Palestinian state, or apartheid—and the weak, hopeless half-measures most on the Israeli (and American Jewish) left advocate in response. Continuing negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, which the Israeli right can continue to sabotage at every launch of a Hamas missile, will go nowhere; they have gone nowhere for nine years. This road leads to apartheid. Mr Levy says the real contest for Israel's future is between the "hard retractionists", those who support drastic measures to end Israel's occupation of the West Bank, and the "hard retentionists", who want to keep the West Bank.</p><blockquote><p>Hard retentionists know they will have to rewrite the rules of democracy, and plead a special exemption clause for "Jewish democracy" and for the elevation of Jewish-only rights. Palestinians are to be dehumanized, human and civil rights groups and international humanitarian law excoriated and a vocabulary created for laundering and justifying an apartheid reality.</p></blockquote><p>Hard retractionists, Mr Levy says, must "stand up for (long-ridiculed) Jewish values, ethics and morality...and ultimately support international campaigns that distinguish between Israel proper and the occupied territories." (Even this, the observer notes, sounds like a bit of a euphemism.) But when Israeli leftists take such positions, Mr Levy says, they are excoriated as traitors.&nbsp;<a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/matthewyglesias/%7E3/rVdZPt8fflc/means-and-ends.php">Matthew Yglesias</a>&nbsp;agrees, and adds that American Jews have been similarly unwilling to advocate moves commensurate with their analysis of the situation.</p><p>I agree with Mr Levy that it is refreshing that Mr Barak is willing to pose the Israeli-Palestinian problem in these terms. It would have been even more interesting if Mr Barak, and other mainstream Israeli politicians, had considered the issue in this light a bit earlier. To my knowledge, the first major figure to pose the problem of how Israel could cope with a Palestinian claim to citizenship in a state stretching from the Jordan to the sea was the Palestinian intellectual and activist Sari Nusseibeh, who, in 1987, <a href="http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/palestinian_biographies/sari-nusseibeh-biography.html">proposed</a> that Israel annex the occupied territories and give Palestinians the vote. As Mr Nusseibeh knew, Israel could not possibly absorb the Palestinian populations of the West Bank and Gaza, and the only alternative was a two-state solution.</p><p>Mr Nusseibeh <a href="http://www.israeli-occupation.org/2010-01-20/sari-nusseibeh-a-palestinian-state-has-become-impossible/">now believes</a> the two-state solution has become virtually impossible. There are too many Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and the Israeli political system is incapable of making the concessions that would be necessary even to halt further settlements, let alone to withdraw them and allow the creation of a Palestinian state. Mr Nusseibeh is a keen political thinker, a non-violent man who opposed the 2001 "second intifada" and has many close Israeli friends. His history of negotiations with Israeli authorities began with his secret talks with the right-wing government of Yitzhak Shamir in the 1980s. His assessment fits with the history of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue over the past 60-odd years: each side has rejected every plausible deal at every available opportunity, only to look back a decade or two later with bitter regret.</p><p>If American Jews want a pointer as to how to approach this problem, here is a rule of thumb: think of the most impossible concession you can imagine, the bitter point of contention you absolutely refuse to give way on. In 1970, it was the existence of a Palestinian (not Arab) people; in 1980, it was accepting that Israeli forces had expelled the Palestinian refugees in 1948 and thus bore responsibility for their plight; in 1990, it was accepting Yasser Arafat and the PLO as the representatives of the Palestinian people; in 2000, it was the idea that Israel might legitimately be compared to an apartheid state. Then understand that within ten years, you will have given way on that point. What on earth is the point of this resistance? Do you want, once again, to give way on the point when it is too late, and the deal is no longer available? Mr Nusseibeh says his next move will be to demand that Israel annex the West Bank and grant Palestinians at least "third-class citizenship": economic and residential rights, without political ones. On what grounds will you defend Israel's inevitable refusal of such a demand? How long before Mr Barak's words are not taken as dire prophecy, but simple description?</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";s:8:"comments";s:107:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/israel_demography_democracy_or_apartheid#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:14:22 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004833 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:7219:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Israel, demography, democracy or apartheid        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
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                    America wakes up to Israel&#039;s demography/democracy crisis, 23 years late        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="220" height="334" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w07/barak220.jpg?1266253279" />        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w07/barak220.jpg" alt="" align="right" width="220" height="334">WE'VE been <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2010/02/judging_israel">talking</a> a lot lately about Israel and American Jews, so here goes another post on the topic. On Friday Daniel Levy <a href="http://progressiverealist.org/blogpost/retractionist-retentionist-discourse-israel">wrote</a> a trenchant response to what Ehud Barak, Israel's former prime minister and current defence minister, said at the Herzliya Conference the week before. To wit:</p><blockquote><p>If, and as long as between the Jordan and the sea, there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic... If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a binational state, and if they don't, it is an apartheid state.</p></blockquote><p>Mr Levy writes that Mr Barak's views reflect the basic realist center-left diagnosis of Israel's situation, but that there is a terrible "disconnect" between this diagnosis—a Palestinian state, or apartheid—and the weak, hopeless half-measures most on the Israeli (and American Jewish) left advocate in response. Continuing negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, which the Israeli right can continue to sabotage at every launch of a Hamas missile, will go nowhere; they have gone nowhere for nine years. This road leads to apartheid. Mr Levy says the real contest for Israel's future is between the "hard retractionists", those who support drastic measures to end Israel's occupation of the West Bank, and the "hard retentionists", who want to keep the West Bank.</p><blockquote><p>Hard retentionists know they will have to rewrite the rules of democracy, and plead a special exemption clause for "Jewish democracy" and for the elevation of Jewish-only rights. Palestinians are to be dehumanized, human and civil rights groups and international humanitarian law excoriated and a vocabulary created for laundering and justifying an apartheid reality.</p></blockquote><p>Hard retractionists, Mr Levy says, must "stand up for (long-ridiculed) Jewish values, ethics and morality...and ultimately support international campaigns that distinguish between Israel proper and the occupied territories." (Even this, the observer notes, sounds like a bit of a euphemism.) But when Israeli leftists take such positions, Mr Levy says, they are excoriated as traitors.&nbsp;<a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/matthewyglesias/%7E3/rVdZPt8fflc/means-and-ends.php">Matthew Yglesias</a>&nbsp;agrees, and adds that American Jews have been similarly unwilling to advocate moves commensurate with their analysis of the situation.</p><p>I agree with Mr Levy that it is refreshing that Mr Barak is willing to pose the Israeli-Palestinian problem in these terms. It would have been even more interesting if Mr Barak, and other mainstream Israeli politicians, had considered the issue in this light a bit earlier. To my knowledge, the first major figure to pose the problem of how Israel could cope with a Palestinian claim to citizenship in a state stretching from the Jordan to the sea was the Palestinian intellectual and activist Sari Nusseibeh, who, in 1987, <a href="http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/palestinian_biographies/sari-nusseibeh-biography.html">proposed</a> that Israel annex the occupied territories and give Palestinians the vote. As Mr Nusseibeh knew, Israel could not possibly absorb the Palestinian populations of the West Bank and Gaza, and the only alternative was a two-state solution.</p><p>Mr Nusseibeh <a href="http://www.israeli-occupation.org/2010-01-20/sari-nusseibeh-a-palestinian-state-has-become-impossible/">now believes</a> the two-state solution has become virtually impossible. There are too many Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and the Israeli political system is incapable of making the concessions that would be necessary even to halt further settlements, let alone to withdraw them and allow the creation of a Palestinian state. Mr Nusseibeh is a keen political thinker, a non-violent man who opposed the 2001 "second intifada" and has many close Israeli friends. His history of negotiations with Israeli authorities began with his secret talks with the right-wing government of Yitzhak Shamir in the 1980s. His assessment fits with the history of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue over the past 60-odd years: each side has rejected every plausible deal at every available opportunity, only to look back a decade or two later with bitter regret.</p><p>If American Jews want a pointer as to how to approach this problem, here is a rule of thumb: think of the most impossible concession you can imagine, the bitter point of contention you absolutely refuse to give way on. In 1970, it was the existence of a Palestinian (not Arab) people; in 1980, it was accepting that Israeli forces had expelled the Palestinian refugees in 1948 and thus bore responsibility for their plight; in 1990, it was accepting Yasser Arafat and the PLO as the representatives of the Palestinian people; in 2000, it was the idea that Israel might legitimately be compared to an apartheid state. Then understand that within ten years, you will have given way on that point. What on earth is the point of this resistance? Do you want, once again, to give way on the point when it is too late, and the deal is no longer available? Mr Nusseibeh says his next move will be to demand that Israel annex the West Bank and grant Palestinians at least "third-class citizenship": economic and residential rights, without political ones. On what grounds will you defend Israel's inevitable refusal of such a demand? How long before Mr Barak's words are not taken as dire prophecy, but simple description?</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";}i:2;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:32:"Anti-American internet rhetoric?";s:4:"link";s:80:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/china_bans_more_google";s:11:"description";s:3129:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Authoritarianism and the internet        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
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                    How authoritarian regimes justify their curbs on the internet        </div>
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<p>THE point Nancy Scola is making <a href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&amp;year=2010&amp;base_name=internet_antiamericanism">here</a> seems logical enough at first.</p><blockquote><p>We saw it with China, when they responded to a possible Google pullout by complaining that the World Wide Web is hopelessly flooded with American content, and we see it again and again in Cuba, where the Castro regime argues that the content on the Web is so skewed toward American interests that they just don't want it for their people. From the perspective of Beijing or Havana, it's as if you turned on a TV in New York City and 470 of 500 channels were running Latin American telenovelas. More local, non-English content would be good for everyone involved.</p></blockquote><p><a href="http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/american-internet">Kevin Drum</a> notes that in fact, obviously, authoritarian regimes are using concerns over cultural autonomy as a smokescreen for asserting political control. But even this doesn't quite express how off-point Ms Scola is. In fact, regimes like China and Iran (and Vietnam, and others) are not unduly worried about English-language content produced in America flooding their countries, because few of their citizens can read English. (It's not even the same alphabet. Cuba, admittedly, may be different.) What really worries such countries is politically independent material produced in local languages. Such countries often allow the English-language websites of, say, the BBC or Voice of America to be viewed unimpeded inside the country. It is the Mandarin-, Farsi-, and Vietnamese-language sites of such news organisations that are blocked.</p><p>True, much of the politically sensitive material produced in these languages comes from diaspora communities in America and Europe. But that is precisely because these regimes crack down so hard on locally-produced political content. It's convenient for China and others to claim that cultural anti-imperialism is the reason for their curbs on internet content. If that's true, they can prove it by allowing their own citizens to post whatever they want. Don't hold your breath.</p>";s:8:"comments";s:89:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/china_bans_more_google#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:13:08 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004820 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:3129:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Authoritarianism and the internet        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
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                    How authoritarian regimes justify their curbs on the internet        </div>
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<p>THE point Nancy Scola is making <a href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&amp;year=2010&amp;base_name=internet_antiamericanism">here</a> seems logical enough at first.</p><blockquote><p>We saw it with China, when they responded to a possible Google pullout by complaining that the World Wide Web is hopelessly flooded with American content, and we see it again and again in Cuba, where the Castro regime argues that the content on the Web is so skewed toward American interests that they just don't want it for their people. From the perspective of Beijing or Havana, it's as if you turned on a TV in New York City and 470 of 500 channels were running Latin American telenovelas. More local, non-English content would be good for everyone involved.</p></blockquote><p><a href="http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/american-internet">Kevin Drum</a> notes that in fact, obviously, authoritarian regimes are using concerns over cultural autonomy as a smokescreen for asserting political control. But even this doesn't quite express how off-point Ms Scola is. In fact, regimes like China and Iran (and Vietnam, and others) are not unduly worried about English-language content produced in America flooding their countries, because few of their citizens can read English. (It's not even the same alphabet. Cuba, admittedly, may be different.) What really worries such countries is politically independent material produced in local languages. Such countries often allow the English-language websites of, say, the BBC or Voice of America to be viewed unimpeded inside the country. It is the Mandarin-, Farsi-, and Vietnamese-language sites of such news organisations that are blocked.</p><p>True, much of the politically sensitive material produced in these languages comes from diaspora communities in America and Europe. But that is precisely because these regimes crack down so hard on locally-produced political content. It's convenient for China and others to claim that cultural anti-imperialism is the reason for their curbs on internet content. If that's true, they can prove it by allowing their own citizens to post whatever they want. Don't hold your breath.</p>";}i:3;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:18:"The unique country";s:4:"link";s:64:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2010/02/judging_israel";s:11:"description";s:6062:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Israel and America&#039;s punditocracy        </div>
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                    R.L.G. | NEW YORK        </div>
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                    Why &quot;double standards&quot; don&#039;t apply to Israel: it&#039;s a country like no other        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="300" height="200" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/IsraelFamily300.jpg?1265997162" />        </div>
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<p>IT'S a little late to wade into <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/something-much-darker">Wieseltier</a>&nbsp;v&nbsp;<a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/02/the-latest-from-leon.html">Sullivan</a>—my colleague <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/leon_wieseltier_accuses_andrew_sullivan_anti-semitic_tendencies">already has</a>, and I really don't care about their feud beyond idle curiosity. (What, someone has to tell me one day, happened between those two? The gossip hasn't reached me.)</p><p>But Mr Wieseltier makes an accusation worth addressing because it is so often repeated against others: Mr Sullivan, goes the charge, treats Israel more harshly than other countries. Words like "hypocrisy" and "double standards" bounce around, intended as proof that anyone who gets especially exercised about Israel must have some passion all out of proportion about Jews, and case closed.</p><p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/IsraelFamily300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" align="right">But there's an obvious alternative: Israel really isn't like any other country, and the Israeli-Arab conflict is like no other too. It's a simple case to make. Not all the points are unfavorable to Israel, which is why it has such passionate supporters. The Jewish roots in Palestine are thousands of years old. Israel was founded just three years after the biggest crime in human history wiped out a huge proportion of the world's Jews. Since its founding, its neighbours have repeatedly tried to wipe it off the face of the planet. It is still bordered by two states that don't recognise it, and two states with which it has only a hostile peace. The region more broadly is utterly antagonistic, and one nearby adversary is boastfully adding nuclear capacity at speed. Israel has suffered repeated terrorism directed against its civilians like no other country has. And yet it remains the lone democracy in a darkly autocratic region. No other country has all these reasons for sympathy and support.</p><p>But Israel is also the only country governed by a mostly white, mostly European-descended majority smack in the middle of a non-European region. (Whites dominated America, Canada, Australia and others so long ago, and so thoroughly, that the crimes committed there are distant to most. More recent examples, white colonies like Angola, South Africa and Algeria, were dismantled in ignominy.) Israel is the only state in the world that offers citizenship automatically to coreligionists wherever they come from; it is a religious-nationalist project in an era in which such projects are far from favour. More, Israel displaced most of its territory's autochthonous population in living memory. Their descendants still live miserably just outside the borders, under the world's eyes. Finally, when it fights, as it does frequently, it is filled with and surrounded by journalists that send images of the blood of its enemies, and of the inevitable civilians alongside, around the world.</p><p>Israel is basically a Western country. Its founders were European-born or their parents were. It joins the Western Europe and Others group at the UN, it plays in Europe's international football forums and even enters the Eurovision song contest. But it is in the Middle East, and it remains embroiled in a century-old conflict that has embittered both sides to commit atrocities. Being judged by Western standards in a never-ending Middle Eastern war is no easy thing, especially when the enemy today consists of terrorists who dress like, and hide among, civilians. For that alone Israel deserves sympathy. But it also deserves special scrutiny in the West, because Israel's failure to find peace is the world's worry, and especially America's. Getting excitable about Israel in a way you can get excitable about no other country is no proof of anti-Semitism. Its supporters are excitable too. Israel is no other country, which is exactly why we talk about it so much.</p><p><strong>Addendum: </strong>Before comments go too far on a tangent, I'm aware of Israel's Sephardim, Yemeni Jews, Ethiopian Jews and other non-Ashkenazi groups. That's why I said "governed by a <em>mostly </em>white, <em>mostly </em>European-descended majority": Ashkenazim still dominate the elite, and Israel has never had a Sephardic prime minister. Later I said "Its <em>founders </em>were European-born or their parents were," for the same reason. Israel isn't exactly European, but it isn't exactly not-European either, which was my point.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";s:8:"comments";s:73:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2010/02/judging_israel#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:55:54 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004805 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:6062:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Israel and America&#039;s punditocracy        </div>
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                    R.L.G. | NEW YORK        </div>
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                    Why &quot;double standards&quot; don&#039;t apply to Israel: it&#039;s a country like no other        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="300" height="200" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/IsraelFamily300.jpg?1265997162" />        </div>
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<p>IT'S a little late to wade into <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/something-much-darker">Wieseltier</a>&nbsp;v&nbsp;<a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/02/the-latest-from-leon.html">Sullivan</a>—my colleague <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/leon_wieseltier_accuses_andrew_sullivan_anti-semitic_tendencies">already has</a>, and I really don't care about their feud beyond idle curiosity. (What, someone has to tell me one day, happened between those two? The gossip hasn't reached me.)</p><p>But Mr Wieseltier makes an accusation worth addressing because it is so often repeated against others: Mr Sullivan, goes the charge, treats Israel more harshly than other countries. Words like "hypocrisy" and "double standards" bounce around, intended as proof that anyone who gets especially exercised about Israel must have some passion all out of proportion about Jews, and case closed.</p><p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/IsraelFamily300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" align="right">But there's an obvious alternative: Israel really isn't like any other country, and the Israeli-Arab conflict is like no other too. It's a simple case to make. Not all the points are unfavorable to Israel, which is why it has such passionate supporters. The Jewish roots in Palestine are thousands of years old. Israel was founded just three years after the biggest crime in human history wiped out a huge proportion of the world's Jews. Since its founding, its neighbours have repeatedly tried to wipe it off the face of the planet. It is still bordered by two states that don't recognise it, and two states with which it has only a hostile peace. The region more broadly is utterly antagonistic, and one nearby adversary is boastfully adding nuclear capacity at speed. Israel has suffered repeated terrorism directed against its civilians like no other country has. And yet it remains the lone democracy in a darkly autocratic region. No other country has all these reasons for sympathy and support.</p><p>But Israel is also the only country governed by a mostly white, mostly European-descended majority smack in the middle of a non-European region. (Whites dominated America, Canada, Australia and others so long ago, and so thoroughly, that the crimes committed there are distant to most. More recent examples, white colonies like Angola, South Africa and Algeria, were dismantled in ignominy.) Israel is the only state in the world that offers citizenship automatically to coreligionists wherever they come from; it is a religious-nationalist project in an era in which such projects are far from favour. More, Israel displaced most of its territory's autochthonous population in living memory. Their descendants still live miserably just outside the borders, under the world's eyes. Finally, when it fights, as it does frequently, it is filled with and surrounded by journalists that send images of the blood of its enemies, and of the inevitable civilians alongside, around the world.</p><p>Israel is basically a Western country. Its founders were European-born or their parents were. It joins the Western Europe and Others group at the UN, it plays in Europe's international football forums and even enters the Eurovision song contest. But it is in the Middle East, and it remains embroiled in a century-old conflict that has embittered both sides to commit atrocities. Being judged by Western standards in a never-ending Middle Eastern war is no easy thing, especially when the enemy today consists of terrorists who dress like, and hide among, civilians. For that alone Israel deserves sympathy. But it also deserves special scrutiny in the West, because Israel's failure to find peace is the world's worry, and especially America's. Getting excitable about Israel in a way you can get excitable about no other country is no proof of anti-Semitism. Its supporters are excitable too. Israel is no other country, which is exactly why we talk about it so much.</p><p><strong>Addendum: </strong>Before comments go too far on a tangent, I'm aware of Israel's Sephardim, Yemeni Jews, Ethiopian Jews and other non-Ashkenazi groups. That's why I said "governed by a <em>mostly </em>white, <em>mostly </em>European-descended majority": Ashkenazim still dominate the elite, and Israel has never had a Sephardic prime minister. Later I said "Its <em>founders </em>were European-born or their parents were," for the same reason. Israel isn't exactly European, but it isn't exactly not-European either, which was my point.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";}i:4;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:25:"The complicated jobs bill";s:4:"link";s:83:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/tax_breaks_hiring_workers";s:11:"description";s:6661:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Tax breaks for hiring workers        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
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                    Are tax loopholes the best way to encourage hiring?        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="275" height="350" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Employment350.jpg?1265990386" />        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Employment350.jpg" alt="" width="275" height="350">UNEMPLOYMENT is running at almost 10%&nbsp;in America, but not everyone is feeling the pain. Take, for example, those&nbsp;workers with a family income over $100,000 a year. For them the unemployment rate is lower than 4%,&nbsp;according to&nbsp;<a href="http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2010/02/10/rich-people-still-have-jobs-poor-people-dont/">a recent Northeastern University study</a>. So the recession hasn't felt like much of a recession for many&nbsp;college-educated white-collared folks. It is blue-collar and unskilled workers&nbsp;who are experiencing the most hardship. For the bottom 30% of households unemployment was between 19% and 30% at the end of 2009, and underemployment an additional 12-21%.</p><p>Democrats and Republicans both want to do something about this. And because Republicans are unlikely to agree to any new government spending (apart from defence and, obviously, pretty much any project in their own districts), <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/baucus-grassley-propose-new-jobs-bill/?hp">the jobs bill they unveiled</a>&nbsp;yesterday concentrated on tax cuts.</p><blockquote><p>Senators Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, and Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the panel’s senior Republican, released a draft $85 billion plan that would give employers a payroll tax exemption for hiring those who have been unemployed for at least 60 days. The bill would also provide a $1,000 income tax credit for new workers retained for 52 weeks. (A <a href="http://www.finance.senate.gov/sitepages/legislation.htm">draft of the bill is available here.</a>)...</p><p>The costs of the bill would be offset by closing tax loopholes and shifting some money to be made available for future improvements in the Medicare program.</p></blockquote><p>In short, they planned to open a new tax loophole, and pay for it by closing some others. This doesn't seem to me, instinctively, to be the way a government ought to make economic policy. Then again, it might not be the worst thing in the world to have the tax code favour hiring unemployed workers. Inequality has been rising inexorably over the past few decades, and it's pretty clear the burdens of globalisation's creative destruction fall most heavily on low-skilled workers. <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703382904575059424289353714.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection">Megan Carpentier</a> yesterday noted a <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703382904575059424289353714.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection"><em>Wall Street Journal</em> survey</a> of economists who expected the economy to add just 133,000 jobs a month through 2010, barely more than it needs to incorporate new entrants to the labour force. They expect unemployment to still be at 9.4% at year's end. So it might not hurt to use tax loopholes for the next few decades to tilt the playing field towards employing some of those less-productive workers.</p><p>But by the end of the day yesterday, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/us/politics/12cong.html?partner=rss&amp;emc=rss">Harry Reid had announced</a> the jobs bill would be stripped down to four basic initiatives, losing some of the things Republicans had wanted, like disaster-relief money for Arkansas and Mississippi and&nbsp;the extension of some corporate tax breaks (which seems reasonable if the idea is to <em>close</em>&nbsp;loopholes). Mr Reid also apparently took out some extra benefits for the unemployed. Cutting unemployment benefits seems like a bizarre priority for a Democrat, particularly since <a href="http://politics.theatlantic.com/2010/02/bipartisan_jobs_bill_receives_bipartisan_boos.php">Marc Ambinder reports</a> that the only thing the CBO believes would do more to create new jobs than a tax credit aimed at hiring would be raising unemployment benefits. The unemployed spend new funds so quickly, raising demand in the economy so much, that increasing unemployment benefits is, counterintuitively, the single best way to create jobs.</p><p>Here's my concern: this business with the opening and closing of tax loopholes is so hard to follow, and it's so difficult to say anything meaningful about its effect on jobs, that it makes it essentially impossible to write a decent blog post. Fortunately, the jobs bill also appears to contain some actual spending on useful long-term projects that would involve, you know, creating some jobs. The worry during last year's stimulus-bill discussions was that non-"shovel-ready" projects would only start hiring workers after the recession had passed and everyone already had jobs, thus driving up inflation. That worry seems less salient now that economists are finding that the end of the recession, rather than cutting unemployment by, say, 5%, just means those of us who already have jobs will have to produce, say, <a href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.nr0.htm">6.2% more</a>. For example, if Congress's political initiatives remain as incomprehensible as what went down yesterday, I may have to increase my blog output by at least a post a day.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";s:8:"comments";s:92:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/tax_breaks_hiring_workers#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:44:57 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004808 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:6661:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Tax breaks for hiring workers        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
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                    Are tax loopholes the best way to encourage hiring?        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="275" height="350" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Employment350.jpg?1265990386" />        </div>
        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Employment350.jpg" alt="" width="275" height="350">UNEMPLOYMENT is running at almost 10%&nbsp;in America, but not everyone is feeling the pain. Take, for example, those&nbsp;workers with a family income over $100,000 a year. For them the unemployment rate is lower than 4%,&nbsp;according to&nbsp;<a href="http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2010/02/10/rich-people-still-have-jobs-poor-people-dont/">a recent Northeastern University study</a>. So the recession hasn't felt like much of a recession for many&nbsp;college-educated white-collared folks. It is blue-collar and unskilled workers&nbsp;who are experiencing the most hardship. For the bottom 30% of households unemployment was between 19% and 30% at the end of 2009, and underemployment an additional 12-21%.</p><p>Democrats and Republicans both want to do something about this. And because Republicans are unlikely to agree to any new government spending (apart from defence and, obviously, pretty much any project in their own districts), <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/baucus-grassley-propose-new-jobs-bill/?hp">the jobs bill they unveiled</a>&nbsp;yesterday concentrated on tax cuts.</p><blockquote><p>Senators Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, and Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the panel’s senior Republican, released a draft $85 billion plan that would give employers a payroll tax exemption for hiring those who have been unemployed for at least 60 days. The bill would also provide a $1,000 income tax credit for new workers retained for 52 weeks. (A <a href="http://www.finance.senate.gov/sitepages/legislation.htm">draft of the bill is available here.</a>)...</p><p>The costs of the bill would be offset by closing tax loopholes and shifting some money to be made available for future improvements in the Medicare program.</p></blockquote><p>In short, they planned to open a new tax loophole, and pay for it by closing some others. This doesn't seem to me, instinctively, to be the way a government ought to make economic policy. Then again, it might not be the worst thing in the world to have the tax code favour hiring unemployed workers. Inequality has been rising inexorably over the past few decades, and it's pretty clear the burdens of globalisation's creative destruction fall most heavily on low-skilled workers. <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703382904575059424289353714.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection">Megan Carpentier</a> yesterday noted a <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703382904575059424289353714.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection"><em>Wall Street Journal</em> survey</a> of economists who expected the economy to add just 133,000 jobs a month through 2010, barely more than it needs to incorporate new entrants to the labour force. They expect unemployment to still be at 9.4% at year's end. So it might not hurt to use tax loopholes for the next few decades to tilt the playing field towards employing some of those less-productive workers.</p><p>But by the end of the day yesterday, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/us/politics/12cong.html?partner=rss&amp;emc=rss">Harry Reid had announced</a> the jobs bill would be stripped down to four basic initiatives, losing some of the things Republicans had wanted, like disaster-relief money for Arkansas and Mississippi and&nbsp;the extension of some corporate tax breaks (which seems reasonable if the idea is to <em>close</em>&nbsp;loopholes). Mr Reid also apparently took out some extra benefits for the unemployed. Cutting unemployment benefits seems like a bizarre priority for a Democrat, particularly since <a href="http://politics.theatlantic.com/2010/02/bipartisan_jobs_bill_receives_bipartisan_boos.php">Marc Ambinder reports</a> that the only thing the CBO believes would do more to create new jobs than a tax credit aimed at hiring would be raising unemployment benefits. The unemployed spend new funds so quickly, raising demand in the economy so much, that increasing unemployment benefits is, counterintuitively, the single best way to create jobs.</p><p>Here's my concern: this business with the opening and closing of tax loopholes is so hard to follow, and it's so difficult to say anything meaningful about its effect on jobs, that it makes it essentially impossible to write a decent blog post. Fortunately, the jobs bill also appears to contain some actual spending on useful long-term projects that would involve, you know, creating some jobs. The worry during last year's stimulus-bill discussions was that non-"shovel-ready" projects would only start hiring workers after the recession had passed and everyone already had jobs, thus driving up inflation. That worry seems less salient now that economists are finding that the end of the recession, rather than cutting unemployment by, say, 5%, just means those of us who already have jobs will have to produce, say, <a href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.nr0.htm">6.2% more</a>. For example, if Congress's political initiatives remain as incomprehensible as what went down yesterday, I may have to increase my blog output by at least a post a day.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";}i:5;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:33:"This week's Economist/YouGov poll";s:4:"link";s:78:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/economistyougov_poll";s:11:"description";s:3158:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Economist/YouGov poll        </div>
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                    R.M. | NEW YORK        </div>
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                    Who&#039;s making more of an effort at bipartisanship, Republicans or the president?        </div>
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<p>SOME highlights from this week's <em>Economist</em>/YouGov poll:</p> <p>• Who's making more of an effort at bipartisanship, Republicans or the president? Answer: 48% of the public believe Barack Obama is trying to work with Republicans in Congress at least "a fair amount", while only 27% think the Republicans are trying to work with Mr Obama.</p><p>• Yet two out of three say Mr Obama has made little or no progress in changing the partisan tone in Washington. Even a majority of Democrats see little movement there. And of those who think Congress accomplished less than usual last year, 41% blame the Democrats while 23% blame the Republicans. (Of course, many more Republicans think Congress accomplished little.)</p><p>• But does the public really understand how difficult it is to pass legislation on the Hill? Not really—59% of the public cannot correctly answer the question: "Do you know how many votes are required to end a filibuster in the US Senate?"</p><p>•&nbsp;Forty-two percent of the public are "angry" about the way things are going in Washington, while 40% trust the government to do what is right "almost never". <a href="http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15498280">Tea anyone?</a> (Only 11% think they can trust the government most of the time.)</p><p>• Many of those distrustful people are also supporters of Sarah Palin. And yet here's the big problem for the Palin 2012 campaign: 39% of the public have a ("somewhat" or "very") favourable opinion of Mrs Palin, but nearly as many (38%) have a "<em>very</em> unfavourable" opinion of her (while another 16% view her "somewhat" unfavourably).</p><p>• Finally, one percent of the public say Barack Obama is "very conservative", once again proving that you can get 1% of Americans to say just about anything.</p><p><strong>Data links:</strong> Our top-line numbers can be found <a href="http://media.economist.com/images/pdf/Toplines20100211.pdf">here</a>. Our tracking graphs can be found <a href="http://media.economist.com/images/pdf/TrackingGraphs20100211.pdf">here</a>. All of the data can be found <a href="http://media.economist.com/images/pdf/Tabs20100211.pdf">here</a>.</p>";s:8:"comments";s:87:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/economistyougov_poll#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Fri, 12 Feb 2010 02:48:10 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004807 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:3158:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Economist/YouGov poll        </div>
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                    R.M. | NEW YORK        </div>
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                    Who&#039;s making more of an effort at bipartisanship, Republicans or the president?        </div>
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<p>SOME highlights from this week's <em>Economist</em>/YouGov poll:</p> <p>• Who's making more of an effort at bipartisanship, Republicans or the president? Answer: 48% of the public believe Barack Obama is trying to work with Republicans in Congress at least "a fair amount", while only 27% think the Republicans are trying to work with Mr Obama.</p><p>• Yet two out of three say Mr Obama has made little or no progress in changing the partisan tone in Washington. Even a majority of Democrats see little movement there. And of those who think Congress accomplished less than usual last year, 41% blame the Democrats while 23% blame the Republicans. (Of course, many more Republicans think Congress accomplished little.)</p><p>• But does the public really understand how difficult it is to pass legislation on the Hill? Not really—59% of the public cannot correctly answer the question: "Do you know how many votes are required to end a filibuster in the US Senate?"</p><p>•&nbsp;Forty-two percent of the public are "angry" about the way things are going in Washington, while 40% trust the government to do what is right "almost never". <a href="http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15498280">Tea anyone?</a> (Only 11% think they can trust the government most of the time.)</p><p>• Many of those distrustful people are also supporters of Sarah Palin. And yet here's the big problem for the Palin 2012 campaign: 39% of the public have a ("somewhat" or "very") favourable opinion of Mrs Palin, but nearly as many (38%) have a "<em>very</em> unfavourable" opinion of her (while another 16% view her "somewhat" unfavourably).</p><p>• Finally, one percent of the public say Barack Obama is "very conservative", once again proving that you can get 1% of Americans to say just about anything.</p><p><strong>Data links:</strong> Our top-line numbers can be found <a href="http://media.economist.com/images/pdf/Toplines20100211.pdf">here</a>. Our tracking graphs can be found <a href="http://media.economist.com/images/pdf/TrackingGraphs20100211.pdf">here</a>. All of the data can be found <a href="http://media.economist.com/images/pdf/Tabs20100211.pdf">here</a>.</p>";}i:6;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:12:"Pick a fight";s:4:"link";s:80:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/president_and_congress";s:11:"description";s:4579:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
        </div>
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                    The president and Congress        </div>
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                    R.L.G. | NEW YORK        </div>
        </div>
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                    Why Barack Obama should take on congressional Democrats        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="580" height="318" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/laneschart580.jpg?1265926179" />        </div>
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<p>THE <em>Washington Post </em><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/10/AR2010021000010.html">reported</a> accurately enough on Tuesday that Barack Obama's numbers are down, and that most voters don't trust him as much as they used to on the economy and health care. (Though there's little joy, except for <em>schadenfreude</em>, for Republicans, who are <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpoll_021010.html?sid=ST2010021000020">still rated less positively</a> than the Democrats in most head-to-head questions in the polls.)</p><p>But the number that caught me was the approval rating of Congress—not the Democratic majority, but the institution generally (though it's safe to assume that most people associate, good or bad, the feelings about Congress with the majority on a given day). Congress's approval rating? 26%. This should put Mr Obama's 51% in quite some perspective. Congress virtually never breaches 50%, mostly hanging around the middle 30s or low 40s.</p><table border="0"><tbody><tr><td><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/laneschart580.jpg" alt="" width="580" height="318"></td></tr></tbody></table><p>This is for a host of reasons well known to political scientists: to the average voter, exactly 532 Congressmen are working for their selfish interests; the other three (one's own representative and two senators) are rated, on average, far more highly. Congress is perceived, often correctly, as combining the worst of partisanship, selfishness and disorder.</p><p>Which leads me to wonder, again, why Mr Obama has let himself be tied so closely to congressional Democrats in the past year. As a policy matter, it has made the legislative sausage-making more unhealthy than usual. He could have put his impressive stump-skills on display to fight harder for his core goals, and against indefensible giveaways, weakenings and so on.</p><p>But worse, not keeping a greater distance from Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi has been terrible politics. Simply put, the two are loathed, and every time a Republican manages to say "Obama-Pelosi-Reid", it drags the president's reputation towards two disliked leaders of an always disliked body.</p><p>Mr Obama hinted that he would begin taking on his own congressional party in the state-of-the-union address. He told his party-mates not to "run for the hills" on health care or other issues just because of the result in Massachusetts. If I were his political advisor, I'd tell him to turn the heat up on his own party even more, creating some distance politically and hopefully wounding their pride enough that they get it together. Sure, that latter bit is very wishful thinking, but the former isn't. Come on, Mr Obama. Tell your party-mates at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that they don't deserve their majority if they can't get the job done. It has the virtue of being true.</p>";s:8:"comments";s:89:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/president_and_congress#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:44:04 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004803 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:4579:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
        </div>
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    <div class="field-items">
            <div class="field-item odd">
                    The president and Congress        </div>
        </div>
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            <div class="field-item odd">
                    R.L.G. | NEW YORK        </div>
        </div>
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<div class="field field-type-text field-field-mtblog-rubric">
    <div class="field-items">
            <div class="field-item odd">
                    Why Barack Obama should take on congressional Democrats        </div>
        </div>
</div>
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      <div class="field-label">Images:&nbsp;</div>
    <div class="field-items">
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="595" height="320" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/201007MCC897.jpg?1265923822" />        </div>
              <div class="field-item even">
                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="580" height="318" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/laneschart580.jpg?1265926179" />        </div>
        </div>
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<p>THE <em>Washington Post </em><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/10/AR2010021000010.html">reported</a> accurately enough on Tuesday that Barack Obama's numbers are down, and that most voters don't trust him as much as they used to on the economy and health care. (Though there's little joy, except for <em>schadenfreude</em>, for Republicans, who are <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpoll_021010.html?sid=ST2010021000020">still rated less positively</a> than the Democrats in most head-to-head questions in the polls.)</p><p>But the number that caught me was the approval rating of Congress—not the Democratic majority, but the institution generally (though it's safe to assume that most people associate, good or bad, the feelings about Congress with the majority on a given day). Congress's approval rating? 26%. This should put Mr Obama's 51% in quite some perspective. Congress virtually never breaches 50%, mostly hanging around the middle 30s or low 40s.</p><table border="0"><tbody><tr><td><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/laneschart580.jpg" alt="" width="580" height="318"></td></tr></tbody></table><p>This is for a host of reasons well known to political scientists: to the average voter, exactly 532 Congressmen are working for their selfish interests; the other three (one's own representative and two senators) are rated, on average, far more highly. Congress is perceived, often correctly, as combining the worst of partisanship, selfishness and disorder.</p><p>Which leads me to wonder, again, why Mr Obama has let himself be tied so closely to congressional Democrats in the past year. As a policy matter, it has made the legislative sausage-making more unhealthy than usual. He could have put his impressive stump-skills on display to fight harder for his core goals, and against indefensible giveaways, weakenings and so on.</p><p>But worse, not keeping a greater distance from Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi has been terrible politics. Simply put, the two are loathed, and every time a Republican manages to say "Obama-Pelosi-Reid", it drags the president's reputation towards two disliked leaders of an always disliked body.</p><p>Mr Obama hinted that he would begin taking on his own congressional party in the state-of-the-union address. He told his party-mates not to "run for the hills" on health care or other issues just because of the result in Massachusetts. If I were his political advisor, I'd tell him to turn the heat up on his own party even more, creating some distance politically and hopefully wounding their pride enough that they get it together. Sure, that latter bit is very wishful thinking, but the former isn't. Come on, Mr Obama. Tell your party-mates at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that they don't deserve their majority if they can't get the job done. It has the virtue of being true.</p>";}i:7;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:46:"Why are Democrats so bad at collective action?";s:4:"link";s:95:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/republicans_democrats_and_game_theory";s:11:"description";s:5225:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Republicans, Democrats and game theory        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
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                    And why are &quot;individualist&quot; Republicans so good at it?        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="287" height="400" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/donkeyelephants400.jpg?1265918411" />        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/donkeyelephants400.jpg" alt="" width="287" height="400" align="right" >CHRISTOPHER BEAM had a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2244161/">suggestive piece</a> in <em>Slate</em> the other day on legislative tactics and game theory. The piece got me thinking about&nbsp;one of the oldest saws in American politics, the Republican "11th Commandment": Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. In the last couple of years, this norm has taken a bit of a beating, what with the disowning of George Bush by many conservatives late in his term, the Tea Party activists' insurgencies against "Republicans in Name Only", and the bitter post-campaign bickering between Sarah Palin and John McCain's staffers. But it's hard to argue that Republicans are worse on this front than Democrats, even at this low ebb. Up until about 2006 GOP solidarity remained extraordinary. No Democratic president since FDR has enjoyed the kind of uniform, murmurless support from his own party commanded by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.</p><p>It generally goes unremarked that this norm of Republican solidarity is completely bizarre. Certainly, refraining from speaking ill of your political allies is a highly effective strategy for collective action—whoops! What was that phrase? Collective action. That's what it is. The temptation to criticise one's political allies exists because criticism can help individuals derive personal advantage, either within the group or by forming temporary alliances outside the group. Refraining from criticising your allies is a strategy of deferring or sacrificing individual benefits for the good of the group.</p><p>But Republicans are supposed to be individualists! Democrats are supposed to believe in collective action for the good of the group. And yet Democrats are perfectly awful at collective action. Democrats are constantly undercutting their presidents; liberals have been lukewarm and quick to turn on Carter, Clinton and Obama, and no Republican president has ever faced the kind of fury from his base that the left directed at LBJ. Meanwhile, in Congress, Democrats defect or hold out in exchange for goodies constantly when they are in the majority (think Ben Nelson or Bart Stupak on health care). When they are in the minority, on the other hand, they...defect or hold out in exchange for goodies! (Think of all the Democrats who voted for George Bush's tax cuts, Medicare Part D, and No Child Left Behind.)</p><p>I think this points out the importance of culture and organisational norms in determining the bounds of rational individual behaviour. It's not actually irrational for individual Republicans, like Olympia Snowe, to turn down Democratic offers of compromises and incentives in the interest of maintaining group discipline and voting "no" on health-care reform. It's rational for her to do that, because she knows that the rest of the senators in her party are, well, Republicans: they'll enforce discipline too, and the party will make political gains as a result that filter back to her. For Democrats, on the other hand, it would be crazy to pass up the opportunity for short-term gain from playing an outside game against the party, because they know the rest of the people in their party are Democrats. There's little point playing along with party discipline, because nobody else will. This is a multiple-iteration Prisoner's Dilemma game, and both parties know how their fellow prisoners generally behave. The Republicans may not be enforcing "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican" so well anymore, but they're doing a pretty good job on "Thou shalt not vote with a Democrat". The Democrats, meanwhile...they aren't so enthusiastic about this whole "commandments" thing.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";s:8:"comments";s:104:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/republicans_democrats_and_game_theory#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:44:52 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004797 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:5225:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
        </div>
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            <div class="field-item odd">
                    Republicans, Democrats and game theory        </div>
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            <div class="field-item odd">
                    M.S.        </div>
        </div>
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<div class="field field-type-text field-field-mtblog-rubric">
    <div class="field-items">
            <div class="field-item odd">
                    And why are &quot;individualist&quot; Republicans so good at it?        </div>
        </div>
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      <div class="field-label">Images:&nbsp;</div>
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            <div class="field-item odd">
                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="287" height="400" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/donkeyelephants400.jpg?1265918411" />        </div>
        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/donkeyelephants400.jpg" alt="" width="287" height="400" align="right" >CHRISTOPHER BEAM had a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2244161/">suggestive piece</a> in <em>Slate</em> the other day on legislative tactics and game theory. The piece got me thinking about&nbsp;one of the oldest saws in American politics, the Republican "11th Commandment": Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. In the last couple of years, this norm has taken a bit of a beating, what with the disowning of George Bush by many conservatives late in his term, the Tea Party activists' insurgencies against "Republicans in Name Only", and the bitter post-campaign bickering between Sarah Palin and John McCain's staffers. But it's hard to argue that Republicans are worse on this front than Democrats, even at this low ebb. Up until about 2006 GOP solidarity remained extraordinary. No Democratic president since FDR has enjoyed the kind of uniform, murmurless support from his own party commanded by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.</p><p>It generally goes unremarked that this norm of Republican solidarity is completely bizarre. Certainly, refraining from speaking ill of your political allies is a highly effective strategy for collective action—whoops! What was that phrase? Collective action. That's what it is. The temptation to criticise one's political allies exists because criticism can help individuals derive personal advantage, either within the group or by forming temporary alliances outside the group. Refraining from criticising your allies is a strategy of deferring or sacrificing individual benefits for the good of the group.</p><p>But Republicans are supposed to be individualists! Democrats are supposed to believe in collective action for the good of the group. And yet Democrats are perfectly awful at collective action. Democrats are constantly undercutting their presidents; liberals have been lukewarm and quick to turn on Carter, Clinton and Obama, and no Republican president has ever faced the kind of fury from his base that the left directed at LBJ. Meanwhile, in Congress, Democrats defect or hold out in exchange for goodies constantly when they are in the majority (think Ben Nelson or Bart Stupak on health care). When they are in the minority, on the other hand, they...defect or hold out in exchange for goodies! (Think of all the Democrats who voted for George Bush's tax cuts, Medicare Part D, and No Child Left Behind.)</p><p>I think this points out the importance of culture and organisational norms in determining the bounds of rational individual behaviour. It's not actually irrational for individual Republicans, like Olympia Snowe, to turn down Democratic offers of compromises and incentives in the interest of maintaining group discipline and voting "no" on health-care reform. It's rational for her to do that, because she knows that the rest of the senators in her party are, well, Republicans: they'll enforce discipline too, and the party will make political gains as a result that filter back to her. For Democrats, on the other hand, it would be crazy to pass up the opportunity for short-term gain from playing an outside game against the party, because they know the rest of the people in their party are Democrats. There's little point playing along with party discipline, because nobody else will. This is a multiple-iteration Prisoner's Dilemma game, and both parties know how their fellow prisoners generally behave. The Republicans may not be enforcing "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican" so well anymore, but they're doing a pretty good job on "Thou shalt not vote with a Democrat". The Democrats, meanwhile...they aren't so enthusiastic about this whole "commandments" thing.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";}i:8;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:12:"J'insinuate!";s:4:"link";s:121:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/leon_wieseltier_accuses_andrew_sullivan_anti-semitic_tendencies";s:11:"description";s:3610:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    The Wieseltier-Sullivan fued        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
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                    Turning the charge of anti-semitism into an easy, tired cliche        </div>
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<p>LAST MONTH I read Leon Wieseltier's <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/the-explored-recesses">excellent review</a> of Philip Roth's much-criticised recent novel "The Humbling". One phrase stuck in my head, a criticism of Mr Roth's habit, in that book, of allowing his characters to rattle off trivial lists and technical-background descriptions: "This is mere information, it adds nothing, it is the pseudo-polymathy of a Googling age." It was the kind of warning shot that changes your writing habits. I have since tried to avoid coming across as a Googling pseudo-polymath, and have been more alert to the tendency in others. This is how a good literary critic shapes culture.</p><p>This week, Mr Wieseltier wrote a <a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/02/wieseltier-vs-sullivan.php?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+matthewyglesias+%28Matthew+Yglesias%29&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader">much</a>-<a href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/02/about-frank-foer-editor-of-the-new-republic-is-he-a-spineless-cowardly-slug-or-is-he-a-human-being.html">criticised</a>&nbsp;piece <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/something-much-darker">accusing Andrew Sullivan of trending towards anti-semitism</a>. He began by attacking Mr Sullivan for <a href="http://www.pheedcontent.com/click.phdo?i=dd9af18cdee0d5809b50f8c192568058">writing last month</a> that "most American Jews" are tolerant and compassionate, but that "the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing is something else. Something much darker." Mr Wieseltier responds:</p><blockquote><p>I was not aware that they comprise a “wing” of American Jewry, or that American Jewry has “wings.” What sets them apart from their more enlightened brethren is the unacceptability of their politics to Sullivan. That is his criterion for dividing the American Jewish community into good Jews and bad Jews—a practice with a sordid history.</p></blockquote><p>This is silly. Mr Sullivan's phrasing was bad form, but the reader knows perfectly well what he meant by "the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing": he meant right-wing American Jews who supported the invasion of Iraq, use terms like "Islamofascism", and support the use of torture in interrogation of suspected terrorists and combatants. It's absurd to claim that there is no such political bloc, or to imply that criticising it in harsh terms is anti-semitic. Mr Sullivan is identifying "good Jews and bad Jews" only in the sense that someone who criticises Catholic homophobes is identifying "good Catholics and bad Catholics", or that someone who criticises racialist black nationalists is identifying "good blacks and bad blacks".</p><p>";s:8:"comments";s:130:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/leon_wieseltier_accuses_andrew_sullivan_anti-semitic_tendencies#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:41:43 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004788 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:3610:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
        </div>
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            <div class="field-item odd">
                    The Wieseltier-Sullivan fued        </div>
        </div>
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    <div class="field-items">
            <div class="field-item odd">
                    M.S.        </div>
        </div>
</div>
<div class="field field-type-text field-field-mtblog-rubric">
    <div class="field-items">
            <div class="field-item odd">
                    Turning the charge of anti-semitism into an easy, tired cliche        </div>
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<p>LAST MONTH I read Leon Wieseltier's <a href="http://www.tnr.com/book/review/the-explored-recesses">excellent review</a> of Philip Roth's much-criticised recent novel "The Humbling". One phrase stuck in my head, a criticism of Mr Roth's habit, in that book, of allowing his characters to rattle off trivial lists and technical-background descriptions: "This is mere information, it adds nothing, it is the pseudo-polymathy of a Googling age." It was the kind of warning shot that changes your writing habits. I have since tried to avoid coming across as a Googling pseudo-polymath, and have been more alert to the tendency in others. This is how a good literary critic shapes culture.</p><p>This week, Mr Wieseltier wrote a <a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/02/wieseltier-vs-sullivan.php?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+matthewyglesias+%28Matthew+Yglesias%29&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader">much</a>-<a href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/02/about-frank-foer-editor-of-the-new-republic-is-he-a-spineless-cowardly-slug-or-is-he-a-human-being.html">criticised</a>&nbsp;piece <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/something-much-darker">accusing Andrew Sullivan of trending towards anti-semitism</a>. He began by attacking Mr Sullivan for <a href="http://www.pheedcontent.com/click.phdo?i=dd9af18cdee0d5809b50f8c192568058">writing last month</a> that "most American Jews" are tolerant and compassionate, but that "the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing is something else. Something much darker." Mr Wieseltier responds:</p><blockquote><p>I was not aware that they comprise a “wing” of American Jewry, or that American Jewry has “wings.” What sets them apart from their more enlightened brethren is the unacceptability of their politics to Sullivan. That is his criterion for dividing the American Jewish community into good Jews and bad Jews—a practice with a sordid history.</p></blockquote><p>This is silly. Mr Sullivan's phrasing was bad form, but the reader knows perfectly well what he meant by "the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing": he meant right-wing American Jews who supported the invasion of Iraq, use terms like "Islamofascism", and support the use of torture in interrogation of suspected terrorists and combatants. It's absurd to claim that there is no such political bloc, or to imply that criticising it in harsh terms is anti-semitic. Mr Sullivan is identifying "good Jews and bad Jews" only in the sense that someone who criticises Catholic homophobes is identifying "good Catholics and bad Catholics", or that someone who criticises racialist black nationalists is identifying "good blacks and bad blacks".</p><p>";}i:9;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:22:"The Perry-Palin Ticket";s:4:"link";s:76:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/perry-palin_ticket";s:11:"description";s:4311:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/perrypalin300.jpg" alt="Rick Perry, Sarah Palin" align="right" height="165" width="300">SO SARAH PALIN wants to run for president in 2012, and because she and Rick Perry have been buddy-buddy lately, some on the right have allowed themselves to dream about a joint ticket in 2012.</p><p>That doesn't even make much sense according to the traditional running-mate considerations, because they don't fill gaps for each other. But here's the fun thing to think about: who would be on the top of that ticket? The conventional wisdom is that it would be Mrs Palin, because a vice-presidential nominee traditionally runs for president on his or her next time out, and because, as I mentioned yesterday, Mr Perry is below the radar for now. But on its face, that seems backward. Mr Perry has far more experience than Mrs Palin (and he's about ten years older, although they both look young). Unlike Mrs Palin, his record gives him plenty of specific things to brag on with primary voters (and plenty to be criticised on, including the Willingham case, which I have written about before). And although he doesn't inspire the same kind of adulation that Mrs Palin does with her portion of the base, neither is he so polarising.</p><p>I posed the question to a Republican source, who made three points in favour of Palin-Perry. First, he said, Sarah Palin has already been the vice-presidential candidate; it would be a step back for her to run for the same job again. On the other hand, as the second point, for the governor of Texas, the vice-presidency would be a step up. Third, there is at this point a collegial relationship between Mrs Palin and Mr Perry that would preclude a primary dustup.</p><p>I agree with the first point, about Mrs Palin's aspirations, but not the second two. Let's take them in order. Is vice-president of the United States a better job than governor of Texas? Debatable. A governor has more autonomy than the vice-president, more daily power, and arguably (depending on the state and the governor) a better national platform. Also, there's no doubt that Mr Perry loves being governor—even Kay Bailey Hutchison agrees with that. (It's probably why he's always in such a good mood.)</p><p>As to the idea that Mr Perry and Mrs Palin are too good of friends to have a primary fight. I think we've all seen that Mrs Palin isn't afraid to rogue out against former friends. And Mr Perry never hesitates to release his attack dogs, either. So I don't think either of them would hesitate to challenge the other should the situation warrant.<br><br>In fact, for the modal realists out there: if you subscribe to the belief that the Republican Party is in such high dudgeon that it creates an opportunity for a firebrand like Mrs Palin, then you should accept that there is a possible world in which Mr Perry is the person who blocks her from winning the Republican nomination.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";s:8:"comments";s:85:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/perry-palin_ticket#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:38:50 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004779 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:4311:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/perrypalin300.jpg" alt="Rick Perry, Sarah Palin" align="right" height="165" width="300">SO SARAH PALIN wants to run for president in 2012, and because she and Rick Perry have been buddy-buddy lately, some on the right have allowed themselves to dream about a joint ticket in 2012.</p><p>That doesn't even make much sense according to the traditional running-mate considerations, because they don't fill gaps for each other. But here's the fun thing to think about: who would be on the top of that ticket? The conventional wisdom is that it would be Mrs Palin, because a vice-presidential nominee traditionally runs for president on his or her next time out, and because, as I mentioned yesterday, Mr Perry is below the radar for now. But on its face, that seems backward. Mr Perry has far more experience than Mrs Palin (and he's about ten years older, although they both look young). Unlike Mrs Palin, his record gives him plenty of specific things to brag on with primary voters (and plenty to be criticised on, including the Willingham case, which I have written about before). And although he doesn't inspire the same kind of adulation that Mrs Palin does with her portion of the base, neither is he so polarising.</p><p>I posed the question to a Republican source, who made three points in favour of Palin-Perry. First, he said, Sarah Palin has already been the vice-presidential candidate; it would be a step back for her to run for the same job again. On the other hand, as the second point, for the governor of Texas, the vice-presidency would be a step up. Third, there is at this point a collegial relationship between Mrs Palin and Mr Perry that would preclude a primary dustup.</p><p>I agree with the first point, about Mrs Palin's aspirations, but not the second two. Let's take them in order. Is vice-president of the United States a better job than governor of Texas? Debatable. A governor has more autonomy than the vice-president, more daily power, and arguably (depending on the state and the governor) a better national platform. Also, there's no doubt that Mr Perry loves being governor—even Kay Bailey Hutchison agrees with that. (It's probably why he's always in such a good mood.)</p><p>As to the idea that Mr Perry and Mrs Palin are too good of friends to have a primary fight. I think we've all seen that Mrs Palin isn't afraid to rogue out against former friends. And Mr Perry never hesitates to release his attack dogs, either. So I don't think either of them would hesitate to challenge the other should the situation warrant.<br><br>In fact, for the modal realists out there: if you subscribe to the belief that the Republican Party is in such high dudgeon that it creates an opportunity for a firebrand like Mrs Palin, then you should accept that there is a possible world in which Mr Perry is the person who blocks her from winning the Republican nomination.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";}i:10;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:40:"Comparing a budget plan to health reform";s:4:"link";s:101:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/ross_douthat_objects_our_paul_ryan_analysis";s:11:"description";s:3367:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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<p>ROSS DOUTHAT <a href="http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/liberals-and-the-ryan-roadmap/">objects</a> to the way I compared Paul Ryan's budget roadmap to Democratic health-care reform proposals. Mr Douthat writes:</p><blockquote><p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/paulryanbudget280.jpg" alt="Paul Ryan, budget" align="right" height="223" width="280">(T)he difference between the cost-control proposals in the Democratic bill and the cost-control proposals in Ryan’s roadmap isn’t that the former are “complicated and really hard to understand” (read: smart) while the latter are simple, unimaginative and cruel. It’s that the Democratic bill wouldn’t come close to balancing the budget in the long run, and Ryan’s plan would.</p></blockquote><p>Mr Douthat is right that it can be misleading to compare Mr Ryan's plan to balance the budget to Democratic plans to reform health care. The Democrats did not set out to balance the entire federal budget by reforming the health-care sector. Their plan aims to do two different categories of things. First, it aims to make sure that almost everyone in the country has health insurance, and that perverse effects like losing your insurance when you are fired, or when you fall sick, end. Second, it aims to begin controlling costs, and as Mr Douthat notes, it contains some promising measures. The Democrats start from the principle that if you control costs without first achieving fairness and universal coverage, you will most likely end up balancing the budget by slashing aid to poor people, since poor people are the ones who need aid.</p><p>Mr Ryan's bill, on the other hand, does not aim to achieve universal coverage or solve problems relating to affordability and accessibility. It aims only to control costs. And, indeed, it ends up cutting the deficit in large measure by ending Medicare and ceasing to provide health insurance for those who cannot afford to pay for it.</p><p>";s:8:"comments";s:110:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/ross_douthat_objects_our_paul_ryan_analysis#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:15:24 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004771 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:3367:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    As Ross Douthat says, you can&#039;t quite compare the two        </div>
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<p>ROSS DOUTHAT <a href="http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/liberals-and-the-ryan-roadmap/">objects</a> to the way I compared Paul Ryan's budget roadmap to Democratic health-care reform proposals. Mr Douthat writes:</p><blockquote><p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/paulryanbudget280.jpg" alt="Paul Ryan, budget" align="right" height="223" width="280">(T)he difference between the cost-control proposals in the Democratic bill and the cost-control proposals in Ryan’s roadmap isn’t that the former are “complicated and really hard to understand” (read: smart) while the latter are simple, unimaginative and cruel. It’s that the Democratic bill wouldn’t come close to balancing the budget in the long run, and Ryan’s plan would.</p></blockquote><p>Mr Douthat is right that it can be misleading to compare Mr Ryan's plan to balance the budget to Democratic plans to reform health care. The Democrats did not set out to balance the entire federal budget by reforming the health-care sector. Their plan aims to do two different categories of things. First, it aims to make sure that almost everyone in the country has health insurance, and that perverse effects like losing your insurance when you are fired, or when you fall sick, end. Second, it aims to begin controlling costs, and as Mr Douthat notes, it contains some promising measures. The Democrats start from the principle that if you control costs without first achieving fairness and universal coverage, you will most likely end up balancing the budget by slashing aid to poor people, since poor people are the ones who need aid.</p><p>Mr Ryan's bill, on the other hand, does not aim to achieve universal coverage or solve problems relating to affordability and accessibility. It aims only to control costs. And, indeed, it ends up cutting the deficit in large measure by ending Medicare and ceasing to provide health insurance for those who cannot afford to pay for it.</p><p>";}i:11;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:35:"Do you really want us to know that?";s:4:"link";s:97:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/wall_street_donates_gop_protect_bonuses";s:11:"description";s:4469:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/wall%20street260.jpg" alt="wall street" align="right" height="294" width="260">MEGAN CARPENTIER has <a href="http://washingtonindependent.com/76198/how-wall-street-spun-the-press-on-campaign-donations-to-dems">an interesting piece</a> in the <em>Washington Independent</em>&nbsp;arguing that Wall Street isn't really shifting donations to Republicans in retaliation for Democratic moves to regulate the financial sector. Ms Carpentier says Republican politicians and some folks on Wall Street are just spinnning the press to create that impression, in order to scare Democrats away from any reforms. But the amazing part of the article isn't that some folks on Wall Street might be successful at convincing reporters that they will defund politicians who touch their institutions' profits or their bonuses. The amazing part is that some folks on Wall Street might&nbsp;<em>think it would be a good idea</em>&nbsp;to convince reporters that they will defund politicians who touch&nbsp;their institutions' profits or&nbsp;their bonuses. One would think that at a moment of intense public anger against the financial industry, politicians would find it risky to openly admit that they owe their jobs to campaign contributions from that industry, and would hence be unlikely to vote against financial reform in response to naked threats communicated <em>via the mainstream media</em>. And one would think that finance industry bigwigs would understand that.</p><p>It's one thing for banks or hedge funds to signal politicians, via back-door channels, that they will shift campaign contributions to the other party in defence of their profits and their officers' financial interests. Such messages would normally be concealed from the press in order to preserve the fiction that members of Congress remain uninfluenced by such considerations. But it's something else entirely to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/us/politics/08lobby.html?hp">send these signals openly</a> in the pages of the <em>New York Times</em>, as Kelly King of BB&amp;T does. This suggests that the finance industry is so confident of its ownership of Congress that it couldn't care less whether average voters know about it. As for John Boehner's office apparently&nbsp;<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703575004575043612216461790.html?mod=e2tw">leaking</a>&nbsp;to the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> that Mr Boehner had been soliciting contributions from Democratic-leaning finance-industry <em>machers</em> by promising to be more protective of Wall Street's interests...well, it's hard to tell who these guys think they're supposed to be working for. Eric Cantor, describing the supposed Wall Street shift to Republicans, actually calls it "buyer's remorse". Don't you hate it when you buy yourself a legislature and, after a few months, it turns out not to work as advertised? I may be naive, but I like to think most American voters would still prefer that their government not be for sale.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";s:8:"comments";s:106:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/wall_street_donates_gop_protect_bonuses#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:06:14 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004772 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:4469:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    Bankers shouldn&#039;t brag about their sway over the legislature        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/wall%20street260.jpg" alt="wall street" align="right" height="294" width="260">MEGAN CARPENTIER has <a href="http://washingtonindependent.com/76198/how-wall-street-spun-the-press-on-campaign-donations-to-dems">an interesting piece</a> in the <em>Washington Independent</em>&nbsp;arguing that Wall Street isn't really shifting donations to Republicans in retaliation for Democratic moves to regulate the financial sector. Ms Carpentier says Republican politicians and some folks on Wall Street are just spinnning the press to create that impression, in order to scare Democrats away from any reforms. But the amazing part of the article isn't that some folks on Wall Street might be successful at convincing reporters that they will defund politicians who touch their institutions' profits or their bonuses. The amazing part is that some folks on Wall Street might&nbsp;<em>think it would be a good idea</em>&nbsp;to convince reporters that they will defund politicians who touch&nbsp;their institutions' profits or&nbsp;their bonuses. One would think that at a moment of intense public anger against the financial industry, politicians would find it risky to openly admit that they owe their jobs to campaign contributions from that industry, and would hence be unlikely to vote against financial reform in response to naked threats communicated <em>via the mainstream media</em>. And one would think that finance industry bigwigs would understand that.</p><p>It's one thing for banks or hedge funds to signal politicians, via back-door channels, that they will shift campaign contributions to the other party in defence of their profits and their officers' financial interests. Such messages would normally be concealed from the press in order to preserve the fiction that members of Congress remain uninfluenced by such considerations. But it's something else entirely to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/us/politics/08lobby.html?hp">send these signals openly</a> in the pages of the <em>New York Times</em>, as Kelly King of BB&amp;T does. This suggests that the finance industry is so confident of its ownership of Congress that it couldn't care less whether average voters know about it. As for John Boehner's office apparently&nbsp;<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703575004575043612216461790.html?mod=e2tw">leaking</a>&nbsp;to the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> that Mr Boehner had been soliciting contributions from Democratic-leaning finance-industry <em>machers</em> by promising to be more protective of Wall Street's interests...well, it's hard to tell who these guys think they're supposed to be working for. Eric Cantor, describing the supposed Wall Street shift to Republicans, actually calls it "buyer's remorse". Don't you hate it when you buy yourself a legislature and, after a few months, it turns out not to work as advertised? I may be naive, but I like to think most American voters would still prefer that their government not be for sale.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";}i:12;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:43:"Who dat reading about Paul Laurence Dunbar?";s:4:"link";s:77:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/six_degrees_who_dat";s:11:"description";s:2435:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    Six degrees of who dat        </div>
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                    Weird coincidences in dialect, politics and sports        </div>
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<p>WEIRDLY, on Sunday night, while I was reading <a href="http://www.therestisnoise.com/">Alex Ross</a> on Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion Cook (and then <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/james_okeefe_acorn_and_racial_resentment">posting</a> on the elliptical connection between them and James O'Keefe), I had no idea that Messrs Dunbar and Cook were apparently the first to introduce the phrase "Who dat?" to mainstream American popular culture. The <em>New Yorker</em>'s <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2010/02/the-strange-case-of-who-dat.html">Amy Davidson</a> traces the connections nicely, by way of the Marx Brothers and (tangentially) the 1969 New York Mets. I seem to have been reading about Messrs Dunbar and Cook at the same time Saints fans were screaming their catchphrase in the stands at the Super Bowl, for completely unrelated reasons. Or is anything really unrelated these days? It reminds me of "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108149/">Six Degrees of Separation</a>", in which Will Smith portrays a con artist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Separation_%28film%29">pretending to be related</a> to Sidney Poitier, who <a href="http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews28/paul_robeson_portraits_of_the_artist.htm">narrated a documentary</a> about Paul Robeson, who <a href="http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-33654459_ITM">commissioned and performed songs</a> based on the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar.</p>";s:8:"comments";s:86:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/six_degrees_who_dat#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:06:08 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004773 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:2435:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Six degrees of who dat        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
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                    Weird coincidences in dialect, politics and sports        </div>
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<p>WEIRDLY, on Sunday night, while I was reading <a href="http://www.therestisnoise.com/">Alex Ross</a> on Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion Cook (and then <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/james_okeefe_acorn_and_racial_resentment">posting</a> on the elliptical connection between them and James O'Keefe), I had no idea that Messrs Dunbar and Cook were apparently the first to introduce the phrase "Who dat?" to mainstream American popular culture. The <em>New Yorker</em>'s <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2010/02/the-strange-case-of-who-dat.html">Amy Davidson</a> traces the connections nicely, by way of the Marx Brothers and (tangentially) the 1969 New York Mets. I seem to have been reading about Messrs Dunbar and Cook at the same time Saints fans were screaming their catchphrase in the stands at the Super Bowl, for completely unrelated reasons. Or is anything really unrelated these days? It reminds me of "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108149/">Six Degrees of Separation</a>", in which Will Smith portrays a con artist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Separation_%28film%29">pretending to be related</a> to Sidney Poitier, who <a href="http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews28/paul_robeson_portraits_of_the_artist.htm">narrated a documentary</a> about Paul Robeson, who <a href="http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-33654459_ITM">commissioned and performed songs</a> based on the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar.</p>";}i:13;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:25:"Stemming the Asian hordes";s:4:"link";s:77:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/asian_carp_michigan";s:11:"description";s:3961:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Asian carp in Michigan        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
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                    Detroit makes its last stand against the real Asian threat        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="290" height="219" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/carp290.jpg?1265752155" />        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/carp290.jpg" alt="carp" width="290" height="219" align="right">IT MAY be the final indignity. As though the Midwest had not suffered enough from Asian invaders over the past three decades—Toyota, Hyundai, and soon perhaps China's Chery—it now struggles to contain the most voracious intruder yet: carp. In an emergency summit yesterday at the White House, Jennifer Granholm, the governor of Michigan, <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20100209/NEWS06/2090310/1322/Granholm-Carp-battle-is-urgent">demanded</a> that the federal government close the locks on canals that might allow Asian carp to move up into Lake Michigan. The threat is urgent (we first <a href="http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15179536">reported on it</a> back in December). The fish have already conquered much of the South. Bereft of natural predators in America's unsuspecting waters, they come to dominate the food chain, growing to spectacular size, in some kind of weird inversion of their teeny automotive cousins. DNA testing shows the lake may already be contaminated, though no one has yet found the fish themselves. (Could they be mutating into some kind of <em>virus?</em>&nbsp;It's too horrible to contemplate.)</p><p>The governors of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, patriotic Americans all, have joined the call to close the locks. But, as happens so often in these days of American political paralysis, commercial interests stand in the way. Barge owners have complained that closing the locks could cost them up to $190m in freight revenues. Ms Granholm has countered that Michigan's sport fishing industry is worth $7 billion. But paper-pushing Washington bureaucrats are holding things up too. Specifically, they've argued that closing the locks will have little effect, since the fish can still get through the Calumet River and several other waterways. This claim comes from none other than Jo-Ellen Darcy, assistant secretary of the Army for civil works. I recognise that Ms Darcy outranks me, and, if ordered to, I will shut up and salute. But does she understand the gravity of the situation? If the US Army can't stop Asian carp from contaminating&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">our precious </span><span style="text-decoration: line-through;">bodily fluids</span>&nbsp;the great, pure freshwater lakes of America's heartland, we might as well give up. Will the last ice fisherman to haul a genuine American steelhead out of Lake Superior please take down the flag. It's over.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";s:8:"comments";s:86:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/asian_carp_michigan#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:55:13 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004762 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:3961:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
    <div class="field-items">
            <div class="field-item odd">
                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
        </div>
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                    Asian carp in Michigan        </div>
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            <div class="field-item odd">
                    M.S.        </div>
        </div>
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            <div class="field-item odd">
                    Detroit makes its last stand against the real Asian threat        </div>
        </div>
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      <div class="field-label">Images:&nbsp;</div>
    <div class="field-items">
            <div class="field-item odd">
                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="290" height="219" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/carp290.jpg?1265752155" />        </div>
        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/carp290.jpg" alt="carp" width="290" height="219" align="right">IT MAY be the final indignity. As though the Midwest had not suffered enough from Asian invaders over the past three decades—Toyota, Hyundai, and soon perhaps China's Chery—it now struggles to contain the most voracious intruder yet: carp. In an emergency summit yesterday at the White House, Jennifer Granholm, the governor of Michigan, <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20100209/NEWS06/2090310/1322/Granholm-Carp-battle-is-urgent">demanded</a> that the federal government close the locks on canals that might allow Asian carp to move up into Lake Michigan. The threat is urgent (we first <a href="http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15179536">reported on it</a> back in December). The fish have already conquered much of the South. Bereft of natural predators in America's unsuspecting waters, they come to dominate the food chain, growing to spectacular size, in some kind of weird inversion of their teeny automotive cousins. DNA testing shows the lake may already be contaminated, though no one has yet found the fish themselves. (Could they be mutating into some kind of <em>virus?</em>&nbsp;It's too horrible to contemplate.)</p><p>The governors of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, patriotic Americans all, have joined the call to close the locks. But, as happens so often in these days of American political paralysis, commercial interests stand in the way. Barge owners have complained that closing the locks could cost them up to $190m in freight revenues. Ms Granholm has countered that Michigan's sport fishing industry is worth $7 billion. But paper-pushing Washington bureaucrats are holding things up too. Specifically, they've argued that closing the locks will have little effect, since the fish can still get through the Calumet River and several other waterways. This claim comes from none other than Jo-Ellen Darcy, assistant secretary of the Army for civil works. I recognise that Ms Darcy outranks me, and, if ordered to, I will shut up and salute. But does she understand the gravity of the situation? If the US Army can't stop Asian carp from contaminating&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">our precious </span><span style="text-decoration: line-through;">bodily fluids</span>&nbsp;the great, pure freshwater lakes of America's heartland, we might as well give up. Will the last ice fisherman to haul a genuine American steelhead out of Lake Superior please take down the flag. It's over.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";}i:14;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:14:"Why not Perry?";s:4:"link";s:71:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/why_not_perry";s:11:"description";s:4185:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Rick Perry for president        </div>
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                    E.G. | AUSTIN        </div>
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                    The governor of Texas would make a good presidential candidate        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/RickPerryHats300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="203" align="right">THE occasion for Sarah Palin's visit to Texas, you probably know, is that she was stumping for Rick Perry, the state's governor. Mr Perry will face the state's senior senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and the conservative activist Debra Medina in the state's Republican gubernatorial primary on March 2nd. Mr Perry has a healthy lead in the polls (although the three-way split might necessitate a runoff) and he is a safe bet to be re-nominated.</p><p>So with little suspense in the primary we naturally look to the forthcoming elections. On paper, Mr Perry would seem to have the profile of a 2012 presidential prospect: going on ten years of experience governing an important state, an economic record in said state that compares favourably to most; no personal scandals (though some political scandals); and he's a very good campaigner. (This isn't my idea of the case for his candidacy, just a few ways in which he differs from the various other candidates.) Yet we hear more about Scott Brown for president than Rick Perry for president. What gives?</p><p>Paul Burka <a href="http://www.texasmonthly.com/preview/2010-02-01/feature">takes up this question</a> in a cover story for the current <em>Texas Monthly</em> (subscription required):</p><blockquote><p>Most people who follow Texas politics know by now the conventional wisdom about Perry: that he is an accidental governor who inherited the job when George W. Bush became president; that he is "Governor Goodhair" or "Governor 39 Percent" or some similar appellation of mild disrespect accompanied by a twist of humor; that he doesn't really do anything well except win elections, which he has done with regularity. There is truth in the conventional wisdom, but there is also blindness. Perry has been so often viewed as a caricature that many Texans have failed to recognize his talent. The fact is that no Republican has so ably surfed the wave of populist anger that has swept through the party in the past year.</p></blockquote><p>This is right. I would add that on the politicking level Mr Perry has some talents beyond surfing the populist wave. One of his most valuable assets is that he typically exudes confidence and good humour, after the Reagan model, not the paranoiac style that is popular with some of our other politicians. (Typically—his smirky turn at the first gubernatorial debate hit an unusually sour note.) Sarah Palin, for example, was more buoyant at the Perry rally than she appears in her Facebook posts, but her speech was peppered with references to various adversaries. One gets the sense that she has a long enemies list. Mr Perry gives the impression he doesn't have enemies, only people he wants to make fun of at some point this afternoon before he goes for a long run and then wolfs a plate of brisket. Mr Burka's entire article is well worth reading, for those who have a subscription. An odd side note about perceptions of Mr Perry: This "good hair" thing has been following him since his lieutenant-governor days. Yet his hair is actually nondescript. We should pass that appelation on to Mrs Palin or Mitt Romney.</p>";s:8:"comments";s:80:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/why_not_perry#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:49:20 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004757 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:4185:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Rick Perry for president        </div>
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                    E.G. | AUSTIN        </div>
        </div>
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                    The governor of Texas would make a good presidential candidate        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/RickPerryHats300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="203" align="right">THE occasion for Sarah Palin's visit to Texas, you probably know, is that she was stumping for Rick Perry, the state's governor. Mr Perry will face the state's senior senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and the conservative activist Debra Medina in the state's Republican gubernatorial primary on March 2nd. Mr Perry has a healthy lead in the polls (although the three-way split might necessitate a runoff) and he is a safe bet to be re-nominated.</p><p>So with little suspense in the primary we naturally look to the forthcoming elections. On paper, Mr Perry would seem to have the profile of a 2012 presidential prospect: going on ten years of experience governing an important state, an economic record in said state that compares favourably to most; no personal scandals (though some political scandals); and he's a very good campaigner. (This isn't my idea of the case for his candidacy, just a few ways in which he differs from the various other candidates.) Yet we hear more about Scott Brown for president than Rick Perry for president. What gives?</p><p>Paul Burka <a href="http://www.texasmonthly.com/preview/2010-02-01/feature">takes up this question</a> in a cover story for the current <em>Texas Monthly</em> (subscription required):</p><blockquote><p>Most people who follow Texas politics know by now the conventional wisdom about Perry: that he is an accidental governor who inherited the job when George W. Bush became president; that he is "Governor Goodhair" or "Governor 39 Percent" or some similar appellation of mild disrespect accompanied by a twist of humor; that he doesn't really do anything well except win elections, which he has done with regularity. There is truth in the conventional wisdom, but there is also blindness. Perry has been so often viewed as a caricature that many Texans have failed to recognize his talent. The fact is that no Republican has so ably surfed the wave of populist anger that has swept through the party in the past year.</p></blockquote><p>This is right. I would add that on the politicking level Mr Perry has some talents beyond surfing the populist wave. One of his most valuable assets is that he typically exudes confidence and good humour, after the Reagan model, not the paranoiac style that is popular with some of our other politicians. (Typically—his smirky turn at the first gubernatorial debate hit an unusually sour note.) Sarah Palin, for example, was more buoyant at the Perry rally than she appears in her Facebook posts, but her speech was peppered with references to various adversaries. One gets the sense that she has a long enemies list. Mr Perry gives the impression he doesn't have enemies, only people he wants to make fun of at some point this afternoon before he goes for a long run and then wolfs a plate of brisket. Mr Burka's entire article is well worth reading, for those who have a subscription. An odd side note about perceptions of Mr Perry: This "good hair" thing has been following him since his lieutenant-governor days. Yet his hair is actually nondescript. We should pass that appelation on to Mrs Palin or Mitt Romney.</p>";}i:15;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:35:"Malpractice and the social contract";s:4:"link";s:96:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/limiting_medical_malpractice_liability";s:11:"description";s:3446:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Medical malpractice liability        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
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                    To limit malpractice liability, patients must get something in return        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="280" height="187" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/doctors280.jpg?1265735826" />        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/doctors280.jpg" alt="doctors, malpractice" width="280" height="187" align="right">I JUST wanted to add one thing about the idea of limiting medical malpractice liability. I'm instinctively sympathetic to this idea in part because I come from a family of doctors and have heard complaints about crazy malpractice suits since I was 12, and in part because I've lived in Europe, where people think American tort law is insane. But part of the reason why Europeans accept restrictions on their ability to sue doctors for malpractice is that they have guaranteed health insurance. It's part of the social contract: doctors accept limited salaries in exchange for limited liability; patients accept that they cannot sue doctors for millions of dollars in exchange for a guarantee of access to decent health care.</p><p>I have close European friends who've been involved in medical dramas that would very likely have led to lawsuits in America. One friend essentially had the opposite of Tim Tebow's mother's experience, with misdiagnoses and unwanted interventions forcing her into a situation of nearly intolerable responsibilities. The doctors have admitted their errors. But while my friend can't sue them for a big reward, she also doesn't need to: the state pays. In America, she might have ended up either rich or bankrupt. In Europe, she gets by with a little help from social services. A lot of help, actually.</p><p>America isn't going to end up with the same kind of social contracts found in European countries. But it has to have some kind of social contract. People can be persuaded to give up their right to sue doctors for huge damages if they understand that those damages come out of everyone's pockets, because the system works for everyone and requires some sacrifices from everyone. But for that to be true, the system has to work for everyone. A system where doctors are rich, patients have no guarantees, and only patients have to make sacrifices is unacceptable.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";s:8:"comments";s:105:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/limiting_medical_malpractice_liability#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:22:31 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004758 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:3446:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Medical malpractice liability        </div>
        </div>
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            <div class="field-item odd">
                    M.S.        </div>
        </div>
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            <div class="field-item odd">
                    To limit malpractice liability, patients must get something in return        </div>
        </div>
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      <div class="field-label">Images:&nbsp;</div>
    <div class="field-items">
            <div class="field-item odd">
                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="280" height="187" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/doctors280.jpg?1265735826" />        </div>
        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/doctors280.jpg" alt="doctors, malpractice" width="280" height="187" align="right">I JUST wanted to add one thing about the idea of limiting medical malpractice liability. I'm instinctively sympathetic to this idea in part because I come from a family of doctors and have heard complaints about crazy malpractice suits since I was 12, and in part because I've lived in Europe, where people think American tort law is insane. But part of the reason why Europeans accept restrictions on their ability to sue doctors for malpractice is that they have guaranteed health insurance. It's part of the social contract: doctors accept limited salaries in exchange for limited liability; patients accept that they cannot sue doctors for millions of dollars in exchange for a guarantee of access to decent health care.</p><p>I have close European friends who've been involved in medical dramas that would very likely have led to lawsuits in America. One friend essentially had the opposite of Tim Tebow's mother's experience, with misdiagnoses and unwanted interventions forcing her into a situation of nearly intolerable responsibilities. The doctors have admitted their errors. But while my friend can't sue them for a big reward, she also doesn't need to: the state pays. In America, she might have ended up either rich or bankrupt. In Europe, she gets by with a little help from social services. A lot of help, actually.</p><p>America isn't going to end up with the same kind of social contracts found in European countries. But it has to have some kind of social contract. People can be persuaded to give up their right to sue doctors for huge damages if they understand that those damages come out of everyone's pockets, because the system works for everyone and requires some sacrifices from everyone. But for that to be true, the system has to work for everyone. A system where doctors are rich, patients have no guarantees, and only patients have to make sacrifices is unacceptable.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";}i:16;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:21:"A tale of two iPhones";s:4:"link";s:89:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/china_and_intellectual_property";s:11:"description";s:4228:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    China, America and intellectual property        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
        </div>
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                    What the iPhone tells us about America&#039;s relations with China        </div>
        </div>
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      <div class="field-label">Images:&nbsp;</div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="450" height="398" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Two Iphones450.jpg?1265730975" />        </div>
              <div class="field-item even">
                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="550" height="293" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Iphone closeup550.jpg?1265731003" />        </div>
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<p>CHINA'S patent applications grew by 210% from 2005 to 2009, surpassing France but still well behind America, as <a href="http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15487738&amp;fsrc=rss">we report</a>&nbsp;this week. Does China's growing intellectual-property sector mean the country now has a stake in respecting international intellectual-property law? Well, maybe. Let's put it this way: I took this picture yesterday. Both of these phones were assembled in China. One of them cost me $800 three weeks ago, including local VAT. The other cost my assistant $110 last weekend. Which is which?</p><table border="0"><tbody><tr><td><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Two%20Iphones450.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="398"></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Having trouble guessing? Need a hint?</p><table border="0"><tbody><tr><td><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Iphone%20closeup550.jpg" alt="" width="550" height="293"></td></tr></tbody></table><p>In a pinch, I'd have to guess the one that was designed in Clifarnia cost less. It also has a shoddy touch-screen that you have to press down on really hard. On the other hand, it has a built-in broadcast TV receiver with a fold-out antenna. Take that, Apple!</p><p>There's a bright side to this sort of thing, however. In the aftermath of America's recent arms sales to Taiwan and Barack Obama's pledge to meet with the Dalai Lama, a lot of people in China have been <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article7017951.ece">calling for threatening moves towards America</a> or some kind of "new cold war". Both the "Assembled in China" tag on the real iPhone, and the existence of the fake iPhone, are reminders that China has commercial interests that make any such move unlikely. As Elizabeth Economy writes <a href="http://blogs.cfr.org/asia/2010/02/02/the-u-s-and-china-have-at-it-again/">here</a> and Fareed Zakaria echoes <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/233189">here</a>, the apparent recent downturn in Chinese-American relations will probably not amount to much.</p><p>(For more coverage of America's relations with China, see <a href="http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15452821">here</a> and <a href="http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15452683">here</a>.)</p><div class="field field-type-text field-field-initials">
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                    M.S.        </div>
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";s:8:"comments";s:98:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/china_and_intellectual_property#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:13:37 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004760 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:4228:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    China, America and intellectual property        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
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<div class="field field-type-text field-field-mtblog-rubric">
    <div class="field-items">
            <div class="field-item odd">
                    What the iPhone tells us about America&#039;s relations with China        </div>
        </div>
</div>
<div class="field field-type-filefield field-field-mtblog-images">
      <div class="field-label">Images:&nbsp;</div>
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            <div class="field-item odd">
                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="450" height="398" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Two Iphones450.jpg?1265730975" />        </div>
              <div class="field-item even">
                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="550" height="293" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Iphone closeup550.jpg?1265731003" />        </div>
        </div>
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<p>CHINA'S patent applications grew by 210% from 2005 to 2009, surpassing France but still well behind America, as <a href="http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15487738&amp;fsrc=rss">we report</a>&nbsp;this week. Does China's growing intellectual-property sector mean the country now has a stake in respecting international intellectual-property law? Well, maybe. Let's put it this way: I took this picture yesterday. Both of these phones were assembled in China. One of them cost me $800 three weeks ago, including local VAT. The other cost my assistant $110 last weekend. Which is which?</p><table border="0"><tbody><tr><td><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Two%20Iphones450.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="398"></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Having trouble guessing? Need a hint?</p><table border="0"><tbody><tr><td><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Iphone%20closeup550.jpg" alt="" width="550" height="293"></td></tr></tbody></table><p>In a pinch, I'd have to guess the one that was designed in Clifarnia cost less. It also has a shoddy touch-screen that you have to press down on really hard. On the other hand, it has a built-in broadcast TV receiver with a fold-out antenna. Take that, Apple!</p><p>There's a bright side to this sort of thing, however. In the aftermath of America's recent arms sales to Taiwan and Barack Obama's pledge to meet with the Dalai Lama, a lot of people in China have been <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article7017951.ece">calling for threatening moves towards America</a> or some kind of "new cold war". Both the "Assembled in China" tag on the real iPhone, and the existence of the fake iPhone, are reminders that China has commercial interests that make any such move unlikely. As Elizabeth Economy writes <a href="http://blogs.cfr.org/asia/2010/02/02/the-u-s-and-china-have-at-it-again/">here</a> and Fareed Zakaria echoes <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/233189">here</a>, the apparent recent downturn in Chinese-American relations will probably not amount to much.</p><p>(For more coverage of America's relations with China, see <a href="http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15452821">here</a> and <a href="http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15452683">here</a>.)</p><div class="field field-type-text field-field-initials">
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                    M.S.        </div>
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";}i:17;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:46:"Let's scream at each other about health reform";s:4:"link";s:87:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/bipartisan_health-care_summit";s:11:"description";s:5085:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Barack Obama, Republicans and the health-care summit        </div>
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                    A bipartisan health care summit could work, if the CBO scores the proposals first        </div>
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<p>AS MY colleague <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/health-care_summit">notes below</a>, the&nbsp;health-care-reform summit has generated a good deal of debate in the blogosphere and beyond.&nbsp;At first glance, the idea of a summit appears slightly insane. But the key to making it work is in the process Mr Obama outlined in <a href="http://politics.theatlantic.com/2010/02/couric_interviews_obama_--_and_he_makes_news.php">his interview with Katie Couric</a> on Sunday. First, he will invite Republicans to come to the White House to lay their ideas on the table. Then, after the recess, a joint meeting will be held to go over the different plans and debate their merits. That could prove to be a useful discussion, as long as the intervening period provides time for the CBO and other neutral appraisers to score the different proposals. Otherwise, the meeting could turn into a ludicrous media circus where nobody knows what they're talking about.</p><p>My colleague says both sides will want to begin the conversation by criticising the other's ideas. Democrats will have gotten used to this by now, after months of defending their adequate yet imperfect bills in the House and Senate. The Republicans, on the other hand, should finally have to explain why none of their ideas&nbsp;address America's major health-care challenges in a politically feasible way. (That, of course, is also the tactical reason why Mr Obama wants to force Republicans to lay their cards on the table.)</p><p>Republicans essentially have two small ideas for health-care reform, and two big ones. The small ideas are limiting medical malpractice liability, and allowing cross-state purchase of insurance policies. Limiting malpractice liability, while a good idea, has little meaningful impact on the affordability of insurance or care: malpractice insurance amounts to less than 2% of the national health-care budget, and while "defensive medicine" is a problem, <a href="http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;q=cache:zH6AnhcHCN0J:www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10641/10-09-Tort_Reform.pdf+limiting+medical+malpractice+liability+budget+impact&amp;hl=en&amp;pid=bl&amp;srcid=ADGEESi77e4zzak5zAgPYx0fYPClwTbewIew-wBkbylCERJocjgnHFSjzJ9PUEIJ-3AqfB4CQJRMhUhLjvwMQV8XYigC3Geu6XQs9rteRUjSpC4aO0cec40Sqo7MQ9tHPjWxWNdoyPRp&amp;sig=AHIEtbS1Qdr1pnEKZvpGcML6Rx9ef3x7gw">the CBO estimates</a> that an aggressive programme to limit liability would reduce the nation's overall health expenses by about 0.5%. And, obviously, tort reform does nothing to end discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions, to address the problem of people losing their health insurance when they lose their jobs, and so forth.</p><p>The interstate sales idea, meanwhile, is actively pernicious. It is a way to destroy the efforts of states to fix insurance-industry problems themselves. For example, <a href="http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;q=cache:zH6AnhcHCN0J:www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10641/10-09-Tort_Reform.pdf+limiting+medical+malpractice+liability+budget+impact&amp;hl=en&amp;pid=bl&amp;srcid=ADGEESi77e4zzak5zAgPYx0fYPClwTbewIew-wBkbylCERJocjgnHFSjzJ9PUEIJ-3AqfB4CQJRMhUhLjvwMQV8XYigC3Geu6XQs9rteRUjSpC4aO0cec40Sqo7MQ9tHPjWxWNdoyPRp&amp;sig=AHIEtbS1Qdr1pnEKZvpGcML6Rx9ef3x7gw">New Jersey has guaranteed issue</a>: insurance companies must issue policies to all comers, regardless of pre-existing conditions. This, obviously, means healthy people must pay more than they otherwise would. Interstate sales of insurance would mean healthy, but not sick, New Jerseyites would exit the system and buy cheap insurance in Texas, which has no guaranteed issue. This would drive prices for sick New Jerseyites up even further, causing yet more people to drop out, in an insurance death spiral that would leave the sickest New Jerseyites paying astronomical premiums for in-state insurance. Ultimately, America must fix its broken health-insurance system at the national level; but absent a national solution, undermining the ability of the states to attempt their own fixes is one of the worst ideas around.</p><p>";s:8:"comments";s:96:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/bipartisan_health-care_summit#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:44:31 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004714 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:5085:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Barack Obama, Republicans and the health-care summit        </div>
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            <div class="field-item odd">
                    M.S.        </div>
        </div>
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            <div class="field-item odd">
                    A bipartisan health care summit could work, if the CBO scores the proposals first        </div>
        </div>
</div>
<p>AS MY colleague <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/health-care_summit">notes below</a>, the&nbsp;health-care-reform summit has generated a good deal of debate in the blogosphere and beyond.&nbsp;At first glance, the idea of a summit appears slightly insane. But the key to making it work is in the process Mr Obama outlined in <a href="http://politics.theatlantic.com/2010/02/couric_interviews_obama_--_and_he_makes_news.php">his interview with Katie Couric</a> on Sunday. First, he will invite Republicans to come to the White House to lay their ideas on the table. Then, after the recess, a joint meeting will be held to go over the different plans and debate their merits. That could prove to be a useful discussion, as long as the intervening period provides time for the CBO and other neutral appraisers to score the different proposals. Otherwise, the meeting could turn into a ludicrous media circus where nobody knows what they're talking about.</p><p>My colleague says both sides will want to begin the conversation by criticising the other's ideas. Democrats will have gotten used to this by now, after months of defending their adequate yet imperfect bills in the House and Senate. The Republicans, on the other hand, should finally have to explain why none of their ideas&nbsp;address America's major health-care challenges in a politically feasible way. (That, of course, is also the tactical reason why Mr Obama wants to force Republicans to lay their cards on the table.)</p><p>Republicans essentially have two small ideas for health-care reform, and two big ones. The small ideas are limiting medical malpractice liability, and allowing cross-state purchase of insurance policies. Limiting malpractice liability, while a good idea, has little meaningful impact on the affordability of insurance or care: malpractice insurance amounts to less than 2% of the national health-care budget, and while "defensive medicine" is a problem, <a href="http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;q=cache:zH6AnhcHCN0J:www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10641/10-09-Tort_Reform.pdf+limiting+medical+malpractice+liability+budget+impact&amp;hl=en&amp;pid=bl&amp;srcid=ADGEESi77e4zzak5zAgPYx0fYPClwTbewIew-wBkbylCERJocjgnHFSjzJ9PUEIJ-3AqfB4CQJRMhUhLjvwMQV8XYigC3Geu6XQs9rteRUjSpC4aO0cec40Sqo7MQ9tHPjWxWNdoyPRp&amp;sig=AHIEtbS1Qdr1pnEKZvpGcML6Rx9ef3x7gw">the CBO estimates</a> that an aggressive programme to limit liability would reduce the nation's overall health expenses by about 0.5%. And, obviously, tort reform does nothing to end discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions, to address the problem of people losing their health insurance when they lose their jobs, and so forth.</p><p>The interstate sales idea, meanwhile, is actively pernicious. It is a way to destroy the efforts of states to fix insurance-industry problems themselves. For example, <a href="http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;q=cache:zH6AnhcHCN0J:www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10641/10-09-Tort_Reform.pdf+limiting+medical+malpractice+liability+budget+impact&amp;hl=en&amp;pid=bl&amp;srcid=ADGEESi77e4zzak5zAgPYx0fYPClwTbewIew-wBkbylCERJocjgnHFSjzJ9PUEIJ-3AqfB4CQJRMhUhLjvwMQV8XYigC3Geu6XQs9rteRUjSpC4aO0cec40Sqo7MQ9tHPjWxWNdoyPRp&amp;sig=AHIEtbS1Qdr1pnEKZvpGcML6Rx9ef3x7gw">New Jersey has guaranteed issue</a>: insurance companies must issue policies to all comers, regardless of pre-existing conditions. This, obviously, means healthy people must pay more than they otherwise would. Interstate sales of insurance would mean healthy, but not sick, New Jerseyites would exit the system and buy cheap insurance in Texas, which has no guaranteed issue. This would drive prices for sick New Jerseyites up even further, causing yet more people to drop out, in an insurance death spiral that would leave the sickest New Jerseyites paying astronomical premiums for in-state insurance. Ultimately, America must fix its broken health-insurance system at the national level; but absent a national solution, undermining the ability of the states to attempt their own fixes is one of the worst ideas around.</p><p>";}i:18;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:29:"I'm sorry you're such a loser";s:4:"link";s:77:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/political_apologies";s:11:"description";s:2576:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Political apologies        </div>
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                    R.L.G. | NEW YORK        </div>
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                    The art of saying you&#039;re not really sorry        </div>
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<p>IT APPEARS, though we don't have exact quotes from their chat, that Rahm Emanuel apologised to the head of the Special Olympics for having called Democrats, in a closed-door meeting, "fucking retarded". One hopes the apology was thorough, even if, knowing Mr Emanuel, he did it through clenched teeth. For there are many classic strategies for avoiding any sign of real contrition (with a nod to <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000327.html">Geoff Nunberg</a>). Classic non-apologies include:</p><p>- "I'm sorry <em>that this regrettable incident occurred</em>" (not because someone was hurt, but because it's now rather embarrassing for me and I wish the whole thing hadn't happened).</p><p>- "I'm sorry <em>if any offense was caused</em>" (because man, did I not expect that, but some people can't take a joke).</p><p>- "I'm sorry <em>if my words were misconstrued</em>" (but I'll be damned if I'll withdraw them).</p><p>Now, Andy Samberg, channelling an imaginary (but not implausible) Mr Emanuel, offers a new category of non-apology: I'm sorry I didn't call you something worse.</p><p><object id="W4727a250e66f97234b707503d7ea308d" width="384" height="283" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/4b707503d7ea308d/4741e3c5156499a7/e8e0c80/-cpid/40bc0028c21821a8"><param name="movie" value="http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/4b707503d7ea308d/4741e3c5156499a7/e8e0c80/-cpid/40bc0028c21821a8"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><param name="allowNetworking" value="all"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></object></p>";s:8:"comments";s:86:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/political_apologies#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:00:30 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004753 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:2576:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Political apologies        </div>
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                    R.L.G. | NEW YORK        </div>
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                    The art of saying you&#039;re not really sorry        </div>
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<p>IT APPEARS, though we don't have exact quotes from their chat, that Rahm Emanuel apologised to the head of the Special Olympics for having called Democrats, in a closed-door meeting, "fucking retarded". One hopes the apology was thorough, even if, knowing Mr Emanuel, he did it through clenched teeth. For there are many classic strategies for avoiding any sign of real contrition (with a nod to <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000327.html">Geoff Nunberg</a>). Classic non-apologies include:</p><p>- "I'm sorry <em>that this regrettable incident occurred</em>" (not because someone was hurt, but because it's now rather embarrassing for me and I wish the whole thing hadn't happened).</p><p>- "I'm sorry <em>if any offense was caused</em>" (because man, did I not expect that, but some people can't take a joke).</p><p>- "I'm sorry <em>if my words were misconstrued</em>" (but I'll be damned if I'll withdraw them).</p><p>Now, Andy Samberg, channelling an imaginary (but not implausible) Mr Emanuel, offers a new category of non-apology: I'm sorry I didn't call you something worse.</p><p><object id="W4727a250e66f97234b707503d7ea308d" width="384" height="283" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/4b707503d7ea308d/4741e3c5156499a7/e8e0c80/-cpid/40bc0028c21821a8"><param name="movie" value="http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/4b707503d7ea308d/4741e3c5156499a7/e8e0c80/-cpid/40bc0028c21821a8"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><param name="allowNetworking" value="all"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></object></p>";}i:19;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:12:"It's a trap!";s:4:"link";s:76:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/health-care_summit";s:11:"description";s:3764:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    The health-care summit        </div>
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                    R.L.G. | NEW YORK        </div>
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                    Does Barack Obama want to work with Republicans on health care, or expose them?        </div>
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      <div class="field-label">Images:&nbsp;</div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="280" height="154" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/obamahealthcare.jpg?1265659439" />        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/obamahealthcare.jpg" alt="" width="280" height="154" align="right">TWO contrasting views on what Barack Obama is playing at with his health-care "summit" with Republicans, set to happen later this month. <a href="http://xpostfactoid.blogspot.com/2010/02/as-in-afghanistan-obama-picks-none-of.html">Andrew Sprung</a>&nbsp;thinks Mr Obama wants to "solicit Republican 'ideas' and expose their vacuity", and that this is likely to work. Brendan Nyhan <a href="http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2010/02/obamas-phony-health-care-summit.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed:+BrendanNyhan+(Brendan+Nyhan)&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader">agrees</a> that the summit is a "PR stunt", but thinks it is raising genuine hopes of bipartisanship, and sets the president up for another slap.</p><p>Mr Sprung says that Mr Obama has "structured this 'exchange of ideas' as a debate he cannot lose." Is that right? Only if Mr Obama's frame is accepted. He <a href="http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2010/02/katie_couric_super_bowl_obama.html">says</a></p><blockquote><p>I want to be very specific. "How do you guys want to lower costs? How do you guys intend to reform the insurance market so people with preexisting conditions, for example, can get health care? How do you want to make sure that the 30 million people who don't have health insurance can get it? What are your ideas, specifically?"</p></blockquote><p>It's true that if Republicans try to answer all these questions with "tort reform", they're going to look silly. But they won't. They'll criticise the Democratic bills that do exist, and they'll have a point. They're messy, they don't do enough on cost-control, and they include ugly indefensible giveaways to favoured constituencies and Ben Nelson.&nbsp;</p><p>In other words, both sides want to have a conversation that begins with "First, let me expose how bad or nonexistent your ideas are." This seems rather unlikely to lead to a meeting of the minds. Can Mr Obama be sure that showing the Republicans as the party of No will outweigh yet another public discussion of Democratic bills people simply don't like? It's a risky bet. Mr Obama had a good session with the Republicans in Baltimore. But this time they're going to be better prepared.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";s:8:"comments";s:85:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/health-care_summit#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:58:28 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004749 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:3764:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    The health-care summit        </div>
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                    Does Barack Obama want to work with Republicans on health care, or expose them?        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="280" height="154" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/obamahealthcare.jpg?1265659439" />        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/obamahealthcare.jpg" alt="" width="280" height="154" align="right">TWO contrasting views on what Barack Obama is playing at with his health-care "summit" with Republicans, set to happen later this month. <a href="http://xpostfactoid.blogspot.com/2010/02/as-in-afghanistan-obama-picks-none-of.html">Andrew Sprung</a>&nbsp;thinks Mr Obama wants to "solicit Republican 'ideas' and expose their vacuity", and that this is likely to work. Brendan Nyhan <a href="http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2010/02/obamas-phony-health-care-summit.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed:+BrendanNyhan+(Brendan+Nyhan)&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader">agrees</a> that the summit is a "PR stunt", but thinks it is raising genuine hopes of bipartisanship, and sets the president up for another slap.</p><p>Mr Sprung says that Mr Obama has "structured this 'exchange of ideas' as a debate he cannot lose." Is that right? Only if Mr Obama's frame is accepted. He <a href="http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2010/02/katie_couric_super_bowl_obama.html">says</a></p><blockquote><p>I want to be very specific. "How do you guys want to lower costs? How do you guys intend to reform the insurance market so people with preexisting conditions, for example, can get health care? How do you want to make sure that the 30 million people who don't have health insurance can get it? What are your ideas, specifically?"</p></blockquote><p>It's true that if Republicans try to answer all these questions with "tort reform", they're going to look silly. But they won't. They'll criticise the Democratic bills that do exist, and they'll have a point. They're messy, they don't do enough on cost-control, and they include ugly indefensible giveaways to favoured constituencies and Ben Nelson.&nbsp;</p><p>In other words, both sides want to have a conversation that begins with "First, let me expose how bad or nonexistent your ideas are." This seems rather unlikely to lead to a meeting of the minds. Can Mr Obama be sure that showing the Republicans as the party of No will outweigh yet another public discussion of Democratic bills people simply don't like? It's a risky bet. Mr Obama had a good session with the Republicans in Baltimore. But this time they're going to be better prepared.</p><p>(Photo credit: AFP)</p>";}i:20;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:14:"Sarah in Texas";s:4:"link";s:69:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/sarah_texas";s:11:"description";s:4282:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    Sarah Palin        </div>
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                    Going rogue may win her fans, but it will not win her an election        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/sarah%20palin%20thumbs300.jpg" alt="Sarah Palin" width="220" height="300" align="right">EIGHTEEN months after Sarah Palin first sauntered into our daily lives, she pulled on her boots (knee-high purple suede stilettos) and got on down to Houston to rally with Rick Perry. Your young blogger friend was there, and today I'll have a few comments: on Mrs Palin, on Mr Perry, and on the Perry-Palin ticket (don't worry). But before that, a word about the rally. Ted Nugent was there, speaking with Piper Palin, who looked somewhat bored with it all.</p><p>With regard to Mrs Palin. This was my first time hearing her speak in person and that was somewhat enlightening. She is definitely one of those politicians with charisma. She has it, whatever it is, and people respond accordingly. It was a dramatic contrast to seeing her on television. In interviews with non-Fox journalists, Mrs Palin has floundered dramatically, and accordingly has started to avoid the "liberal media" she often derides. But she was much more sure-footed in front of an adoring crowd.</p><p>Consider the ramifications for the body politic. The people who like Mrs Palin see her at her best. Many of the people in the Texas crowd were toting copies Going Rogue, and talking about her speech the day before in Nashville. They're not dwelling on the Katie Couric clips, which to them are old news. The people who loathe Sarah Palin, of course, aren't watching her stump at conservative rallies. So not only do they continue to think she's a loon, they can't understand why a third of the country thinks she's a reasonable person. This is how polarisation happens.</p><p>For the time being, the bifurcated public personality is working for Mrs Palin. Her ability to gin up liberal derangement makes conservatives love her even more. "I doubt there is another public figure in our country who gives liberals a bigger case of hives," said Mr Perry, introducing the former governor. " He chuckled to himself for a few seconds, thinking of the liberals foaming at the mouth, and said that if Keith Olbermann was in Houston that day his head would explode. The crowd cheered and cheered.</p><p>Eventually, though, the problem is Mrs Palin's. Politics is intrinsically adversarial and successful politicians have to know how to win an argument. Although Mrs Palin often attacks other politicians and says that her policies would be better than theirs, she doesn't welcome debate, and her preferred oppositional strategy is abrupt withdrawal. Think about the resignation from the Oil &amp; Gas commission and from the statehouse, or her choice to "go rogue" rather than convince the McCain campaign of the merits of her approach. That's how you get 30% of the vote, not 51%. And it goes without saying that it wouldn't be an effective way to govern.</p><p>(Photo credit: Bloomberg)</p>";s:8:"comments";s:78:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/sarah_texas#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:28:34 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004713 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:4282:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    E.G. | AUSTIN        </div>
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                    Going rogue may win her fans, but it will not win her an election        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/sarah%20palin%20thumbs300.jpg" alt="Sarah Palin" width="220" height="300" align="right">EIGHTEEN months after Sarah Palin first sauntered into our daily lives, she pulled on her boots (knee-high purple suede stilettos) and got on down to Houston to rally with Rick Perry. Your young blogger friend was there, and today I'll have a few comments: on Mrs Palin, on Mr Perry, and on the Perry-Palin ticket (don't worry). But before that, a word about the rally. Ted Nugent was there, speaking with Piper Palin, who looked somewhat bored with it all.</p><p>With regard to Mrs Palin. This was my first time hearing her speak in person and that was somewhat enlightening. She is definitely one of those politicians with charisma. She has it, whatever it is, and people respond accordingly. It was a dramatic contrast to seeing her on television. In interviews with non-Fox journalists, Mrs Palin has floundered dramatically, and accordingly has started to avoid the "liberal media" she often derides. But she was much more sure-footed in front of an adoring crowd.</p><p>Consider the ramifications for the body politic. The people who like Mrs Palin see her at her best. Many of the people in the Texas crowd were toting copies Going Rogue, and talking about her speech the day before in Nashville. They're not dwelling on the Katie Couric clips, which to them are old news. The people who loathe Sarah Palin, of course, aren't watching her stump at conservative rallies. So not only do they continue to think she's a loon, they can't understand why a third of the country thinks she's a reasonable person. This is how polarisation happens.</p><p>For the time being, the bifurcated public personality is working for Mrs Palin. Her ability to gin up liberal derangement makes conservatives love her even more. "I doubt there is another public figure in our country who gives liberals a bigger case of hives," said Mr Perry, introducing the former governor. " He chuckled to himself for a few seconds, thinking of the liberals foaming at the mouth, and said that if Keith Olbermann was in Houston that day his head would explode. The crowd cheered and cheered.</p><p>Eventually, though, the problem is Mrs Palin's. Politics is intrinsically adversarial and successful politicians have to know how to win an argument. Although Mrs Palin often attacks other politicians and says that her policies would be better than theirs, she doesn't welcome debate, and her preferred oppositional strategy is abrupt withdrawal. Think about the resignation from the Oil &amp; Gas commission and from the statehouse, or her choice to "go rogue" rather than convince the McCain campaign of the merits of her approach. That's how you get 30% of the vote, not 51%. And it goes without saying that it wouldn't be an effective way to govern.</p><p>(Photo credit: Bloomberg)</p>";}i:21;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:13:"Minstrel show";s:4:"link";s:98:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/james_okeefe_acorn_and_racial_resentment";s:11:"description";s:3381:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    James O&#039;Keefe, ACORN and racial resentment        </div>
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                    James O&#039;Keefe&#039;s pimp act was disturbing for a reason        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Okeefe260.jpg" alt="" width="260" height="240" align="right">MAX BLUMENTHAL'S article "<a href="http://salon.com/news/feature/2010/02/03/james_okeefe_white_nationalists/index.html">James O'Keefe's Race Problem</a>" is a few days old by now, and has been through an entire cycle of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals. It appears that the guy who punk'd ACORN last fall and tried to tamper with Senator Mary Landrieu's phones also played some role in a rather dicey panel on "race and conservatism" in 2006. He was a colleague of the panel's organiser, Marcus Epstein, who appears to have <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/02/marcus-epsteins-racist-as_n_210163.html">some serious</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/opinion/01sun1.html?_r=3">racial issues</a>. He tried to prank an office of Planned Parenthood by offering donations on the condition the money be used to abort black fetuses. He seems to have resented alleged preferential treatment of blacks while he was an undergrad at Rutgers, and to have gotten himself into some racially-charged conflicts there, which he described in unwise terms on a blog he kept as a diary.</p><p>I've included above only those claims that have not been disputed. The details of whether or not Mr O'Keefe personally staffed a table that featured racist literature are <a href="http://washingtonindependent.com/75861/conservative-media-mogul-plays-defense-on-racism-story">hotly contested</a>. What I don't think can be contested is that this is all well on the anxious side of America's racial dialogue. If any segment of American society has moved into a "post-racial" era, this isn't it.</p><p>Mr Blumenthal's article reminded me of my initial reaction to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UOL9Jh61S8">Mr O'Keefe's ACORN tapes</a>, and more specifically to the stylised sequences featuring Mr O'Keefe dressed up like a music-video director's idea of a pimp.</p><p>";s:8:"comments";s:107:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/james_okeefe_acorn_and_racial_resentment#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:42:11 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004715 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:3381:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    James O&#039;Keefe, ACORN and racial resentment        </div>
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                    James O&#039;Keefe&#039;s pimp act was disturbing for a reason        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="260" height="240" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Okeefe260.jpg?1265646835" />        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w06/Okeefe260.jpg" alt="" width="260" height="240" align="right">MAX BLUMENTHAL'S article "<a href="http://salon.com/news/feature/2010/02/03/james_okeefe_white_nationalists/index.html">James O'Keefe's Race Problem</a>" is a few days old by now, and has been through an entire cycle of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals. It appears that the guy who punk'd ACORN last fall and tried to tamper with Senator Mary Landrieu's phones also played some role in a rather dicey panel on "race and conservatism" in 2006. He was a colleague of the panel's organiser, Marcus Epstein, who appears to have <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/02/marcus-epsteins-racist-as_n_210163.html">some serious</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/opinion/01sun1.html?_r=3">racial issues</a>. He tried to prank an office of Planned Parenthood by offering donations on the condition the money be used to abort black fetuses. He seems to have resented alleged preferential treatment of blacks while he was an undergrad at Rutgers, and to have gotten himself into some racially-charged conflicts there, which he described in unwise terms on a blog he kept as a diary.</p><p>I've included above only those claims that have not been disputed. The details of whether or not Mr O'Keefe personally staffed a table that featured racist literature are <a href="http://washingtonindependent.com/75861/conservative-media-mogul-plays-defense-on-racism-story">hotly contested</a>. What I don't think can be contested is that this is all well on the anxious side of America's racial dialogue. If any segment of American society has moved into a "post-racial" era, this isn't it.</p><p>Mr Blumenthal's article reminded me of my initial reaction to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UOL9Jh61S8">Mr O'Keefe's ACORN tapes</a>, and more specifically to the stylised sequences featuring Mr O'Keefe dressed up like a music-video director's idea of a pimp.</p><p>";}i:22;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:23:"Tebow versus Man Crunch";s:4:"link";s:81:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/culture_wars_super_bowl";s:11:"description";s:6228:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    CBS showed itself both cowardly and clumsy in deciding which ads to run during the Super Bowl        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="290" height="163" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w05/UStebow290.jpg?1265568174" />        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w05/UStebow290.jpg" alt="Tim Tebow" width="290" height="163" align="right">TODAY will see the New Orleans Saints, an American football team famed for its past haplessness, take on the Indianapolis Colts, a longtime powerhouse, in the Super Bowl. The on-field action should keep most fans glued to their couches, unless it's a blowout.<br><br>This year, political junkies will be on the edge of their seats for something else: a political controversy over the ads. Focus on the Family is running a spot about Tim Tebow—one of the best two or three players in college football, and a highly-touted future professional. Mr Tebow, with the biblical verses he wears on the black glare-protectors under his eyes, and his public promise to save his virginity for marriage, is probably the most outspokenly Christian sporting star in the country.<br><br>The ad will feature Mr Tebow and his mother, who was a missionary in the Philippines when he was born. She became ill and her placenta partially detached. Doctors, fearing for her health, counselled abortion. Insead, Ms Tebow will say, she prayed, and her superstar son was born healthy. Abortion-rights groups are furious. The Super Bowl's producers have, by tradition, rejected advocacy ads during the game.</p><p>CBS, the network airing the Super Bowl, then added fuel to the controversey by turning down, as "not within the network’s broadcast standards", a lighthearted ad for a gay dating site called <a href="http://mancrunch.com/">Man Crunch</a>. What was so offensive that CBS could not bring itself to air it? Two manly fans' hands meet in a bowl of crisps as they watch the game at home; humorously exaggerated passions ensue. We don't even see the men's lips meet, since one has practically tackled the other on the couch. A slightly stunned friend watches from the next chair.</p><p><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5MQWFiIrBLA&amp;hl=fr_FR&amp;fs=1&amp;"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5MQWFiIrBLA&amp;hl=fr_FR&amp;fs=1&amp;" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always"></object></p><p>CBS's decision to air the Tebow ad has gotten most of the attention, but it is the rejection of the Man Crunch ad that rankles me. America's first-amendment tradition is so robust that even though no one has a constitutional right to have their views disseminated by CBS, we understandably expect those who sell advertising space to sell it fairly. And the decision not to air the Man Crunch ad can only be due to rank homophobia—the family-friendliness of past Super Bowl ads has allowed for bikini waxes, dogs attacking crotches, farting horses, erectile-dysfunction drug pitches and more, and that in just <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2094745/">one typical year</a>. One year, a Snickers bar, being eaten from its two ends, results in two sweaty non-gay males horrified to find themselves accidentally kissing. Acceptable, of course—becasue the joke is on the gays.</p><p>It's often said that outrageous ads are made to be rejected by the networks at Super Bowl time, for free publicity, and some think that this is what Man Crunch did. But to believe that, you have to find the idea of two men kissing outrageous. Increasingly, Americans don't—we've just had <a href="http://www.feministing.com/archives/019561.html">the first gay love scene</a> on a daytime soap opera. CBS is simply thinking as Bill Kristol does about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"—even if people's prejudices are unjustifiable, they must be deferred to. Shame on CBS, for making a decision both controversial and cowardly at the same time.</p><p><strong>Update: </strong>In the end, the Tebow ad was pretty understated, so much so that, as several commenters pointed out, you might not know it was an anti-abortion ad if you didn't know Focus on the Family. Still, CBS thought that several GoDaddy.com ads that featured women ripping their shirts off to reveal a GoDaddy tank-top shirt underneath, urging viewers to go to GoDaddy.com for a slightly more explicit strip-teasy version of the same, family-friendly enough for prime time. Not so the goofy gay dating ad. Talk about (GoDaddy's slogan) "too hot for TV".</p><p>Also, following up from <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/01/who_dat_say_dey_gonna_beat_dem_saints_1">my previous post</a>, I predict a big temporary hit to New Orleans's GDP, with strong growth in the tourism and entertainment sectors, and sharp negative growth in sectors that do not involve the production or serving of alcohol.</p><p>(Photo credit: AP)</p>";s:8:"comments";s:90:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/culture_wars_super_bowl#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:15:11 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004705 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:6228:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    Culture wars at the Super Bowl        </div>
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                    CBS showed itself both cowardly and clumsy in deciding which ads to run during the Super Bowl        </div>
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                    <img  class="imagefield imagefield-field_mtblog_images" width="290" height="163" alt="" src="http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w05/UStebow290.jpg?1265568174" />        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w05/UStebow290.jpg" alt="Tim Tebow" width="290" height="163" align="right">TODAY will see the New Orleans Saints, an American football team famed for its past haplessness, take on the Indianapolis Colts, a longtime powerhouse, in the Super Bowl. The on-field action should keep most fans glued to their couches, unless it's a blowout.<br><br>This year, political junkies will be on the edge of their seats for something else: a political controversy over the ads. Focus on the Family is running a spot about Tim Tebow—one of the best two or three players in college football, and a highly-touted future professional. Mr Tebow, with the biblical verses he wears on the black glare-protectors under his eyes, and his public promise to save his virginity for marriage, is probably the most outspokenly Christian sporting star in the country.<br><br>The ad will feature Mr Tebow and his mother, who was a missionary in the Philippines when he was born. She became ill and her placenta partially detached. Doctors, fearing for her health, counselled abortion. Insead, Ms Tebow will say, she prayed, and her superstar son was born healthy. Abortion-rights groups are furious. The Super Bowl's producers have, by tradition, rejected advocacy ads during the game.</p><p>CBS, the network airing the Super Bowl, then added fuel to the controversey by turning down, as "not within the network’s broadcast standards", a lighthearted ad for a gay dating site called <a href="http://mancrunch.com/">Man Crunch</a>. What was so offensive that CBS could not bring itself to air it? Two manly fans' hands meet in a bowl of crisps as they watch the game at home; humorously exaggerated passions ensue. We don't even see the men's lips meet, since one has practically tackled the other on the couch. A slightly stunned friend watches from the next chair.</p><p><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5MQWFiIrBLA&amp;hl=fr_FR&amp;fs=1&amp;"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5MQWFiIrBLA&amp;hl=fr_FR&amp;fs=1&amp;" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always"></object></p><p>CBS's decision to air the Tebow ad has gotten most of the attention, but it is the rejection of the Man Crunch ad that rankles me. America's first-amendment tradition is so robust that even though no one has a constitutional right to have their views disseminated by CBS, we understandably expect those who sell advertising space to sell it fairly. And the decision not to air the Man Crunch ad can only be due to rank homophobia—the family-friendliness of past Super Bowl ads has allowed for bikini waxes, dogs attacking crotches, farting horses, erectile-dysfunction drug pitches and more, and that in just <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2094745/">one typical year</a>. One year, a Snickers bar, being eaten from its two ends, results in two sweaty non-gay males horrified to find themselves accidentally kissing. Acceptable, of course—becasue the joke is on the gays.</p><p>It's often said that outrageous ads are made to be rejected by the networks at Super Bowl time, for free publicity, and some think that this is what Man Crunch did. But to believe that, you have to find the idea of two men kissing outrageous. Increasingly, Americans don't—we've just had <a href="http://www.feministing.com/archives/019561.html">the first gay love scene</a> on a daytime soap opera. CBS is simply thinking as Bill Kristol does about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"—even if people's prejudices are unjustifiable, they must be deferred to. Shame on CBS, for making a decision both controversial and cowardly at the same time.</p><p><strong>Update: </strong>In the end, the Tebow ad was pretty understated, so much so that, as several commenters pointed out, you might not know it was an anti-abortion ad if you didn't know Focus on the Family. Still, CBS thought that several GoDaddy.com ads that featured women ripping their shirts off to reveal a GoDaddy tank-top shirt underneath, urging viewers to go to GoDaddy.com for a slightly more explicit strip-teasy version of the same, family-friendly enough for prime time. Not so the goofy gay dating ad. Talk about (GoDaddy's slogan) "too hot for TV".</p><p>Also, following up from <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/01/who_dat_say_dey_gonna_beat_dem_saints_1">my previous post</a>, I predict a big temporary hit to New Orleans's GDP, with strong growth in the tourism and entertainment sectors, and sharp negative growth in sectors that do not involve the production or serving of alcohol.</p><p>(Photo credit: AP)</p>";}i:23;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:42:"Unions, like companies, can be good or bad";s:4:"link";s:118:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/are_teachers_unions_inherently_opposed_rewarding_performance";s:11:"description";s:6149:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Teachers&#039; unions        </div>
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                    And the same probably goes for teachers&#039; unions and schools        </div>
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<p><a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/02/what-is-the-education-reform-debate-about.php">MATTHEW YGLESIAS</a>&nbsp;and <a href="http://www.pheedcontent.com/click.phdo?i=3d412e240afc746d679948a493ee0c21">Megan McArdle</a> are having a debate about whether teachers' unions will always inherently tend to oppose merit pay. Mr Yglesias thinks the tendency of American unions to oppose such pay is a historical accident; teachers' unions grew to dominance at a time when contracts rewarded seniority and degree-scarfing, so those are the kinds of contracts unions now defend. Ms McArdle thinks this misses the intrinsic logic of union self-interest:</p><blockquote><p>A collective bargaining unit run by a "majority rules" system is always going to look for a system that rewards the median or modal worker, not the best... Unions are set up to minimize frictions and maximize benefits for the bottom 55%. That's how they work everywhere—in schools, and out.&nbsp; That's&nbsp;<em>how they have to work</em>. No amount of cajoling, no number of white papers, is going to change that.</p></blockquote><p>I don't know whether or not it is inevitable that American teachers' unions will oppose merit pay, but this thesis seems overstated to me. I think it runs into some of the same problems as a lot of analyses that try to boil complicated institutions down to a single intrinsic logic. Take for example&nbsp;<a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch09.htm">this thesis</a>:</p><blockquote><p>The more productive capital grows, the more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands. The more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands, the more competition among the workers expands and the more their wages contract.</p></blockquote><p>It seems logical, after all, that competitive capitalism will drive wages relentlessly down. But in fact things are a lot more complicated than that, and another effect of competitive capitalism is to generate huge increases in productivity that drive wages up. Similarly, unions are implemented in different ways in different industries, firms and countries. So, <a href="http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/DP0539.pdf">finds David Metcalf</a> of the London School of Economics:</p> <blockquote><p>It is not possible to use theory to predict unambiguously any union effect on productivity because unions can both enhance and detract from the productivity performance of the workplace or firm.&nbsp; The evidence indicates that, in the USA, workplaces with both high performance work systems and union recognition have higher labour productivity than other workplaces. In the UK previous negative links between unions and labour productivity have been eroded by greater competition and more emphasis on “partnership” in industrial relations but there is a lingering negative effect of multi-unionism, just as there is in Australia. In Germany the weight of the evidence suggests that the information, consultation and voice role of works councils enhances labour productivity particularly in larger firms. In Japan unions also tend to raise labour productivity via the longer job tenures in union workplaces which makes it more attractive to invest in human capital and through the unpaid personnel manager role played by full-time enterprise union officials in the workplace.</p></blockquote><p>In the case of schools, things are particularly complex because "productivity" is not measured in dollars. How exactly to measure it is controversial, but it clearly involves some mix of grades, standardised text scores, and social metrics such as graduation and truancy rates. The question is whether teachers' unions will always prefer job security and higher salaries for their mediocre and low-performing members to improvements in the education of the kids they're teaching. The fact that many teachers will accept a cut in pay to teach at more successful, inspiring (and generally private) schools suggests that the overall population of teachers has some willingness to trade wages and job security for workplace satisfaction. This isn't surprising, given the fairly low pay and status that attends the profession in America.</p><p>It may of course be that the current shape of the American educational system drives most of the results-motivated teachers out of the unions and the public school system, but I don't think that's inevitable because of the intrinsic logic of unions. It seems like a mistake to ignore the influence of such non-inevitable historical factors as white flight from America's urban core in the aftermath of desegregation, the peculiarly anti-high-school-teacher path taken by America's counterculture in the same period, the political tensions caused by funding schools through property taxes, and constant <a href="http://www.nj.com/hunterdon-county-democrat/index.ssf/2009/06/food_fight_breaks_out_at_n_hun.html">cafeteria</a> <a href="http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/news_article.aspx?storyid=129219&amp;catid=3">food</a> <a href="http://www.fox30jax.com/content/actionlocal/story/Cafeteria-food-fight-leads-to-heavy-punishment/qvTBsmyng0GMLI2QiuIVdw.cspx">fights</a>.</p>";s:8:"comments";s:127:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/are_teachers_unions_inherently_opposed_rewarding_performance#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:10:50 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004669 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:6149:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Teachers&#039; unions        </div>
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                    M.S.        </div>
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                    And the same probably goes for teachers&#039; unions and schools        </div>
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<p><a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/02/what-is-the-education-reform-debate-about.php">MATTHEW YGLESIAS</a>&nbsp;and <a href="http://www.pheedcontent.com/click.phdo?i=3d412e240afc746d679948a493ee0c21">Megan McArdle</a> are having a debate about whether teachers' unions will always inherently tend to oppose merit pay. Mr Yglesias thinks the tendency of American unions to oppose such pay is a historical accident; teachers' unions grew to dominance at a time when contracts rewarded seniority and degree-scarfing, so those are the kinds of contracts unions now defend. Ms McArdle thinks this misses the intrinsic logic of union self-interest:</p><blockquote><p>A collective bargaining unit run by a "majority rules" system is always going to look for a system that rewards the median or modal worker, not the best... Unions are set up to minimize frictions and maximize benefits for the bottom 55%. That's how they work everywhere—in schools, and out.&nbsp; That's&nbsp;<em>how they have to work</em>. No amount of cajoling, no number of white papers, is going to change that.</p></blockquote><p>I don't know whether or not it is inevitable that American teachers' unions will oppose merit pay, but this thesis seems overstated to me. I think it runs into some of the same problems as a lot of analyses that try to boil complicated institutions down to a single intrinsic logic. Take for example&nbsp;<a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch09.htm">this thesis</a>:</p><blockquote><p>The more productive capital grows, the more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands. The more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands, the more competition among the workers expands and the more their wages contract.</p></blockquote><p>It seems logical, after all, that competitive capitalism will drive wages relentlessly down. But in fact things are a lot more complicated than that, and another effect of competitive capitalism is to generate huge increases in productivity that drive wages up. Similarly, unions are implemented in different ways in different industries, firms and countries. So, <a href="http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/DP0539.pdf">finds David Metcalf</a> of the London School of Economics:</p> <blockquote><p>It is not possible to use theory to predict unambiguously any union effect on productivity because unions can both enhance and detract from the productivity performance of the workplace or firm.&nbsp; The evidence indicates that, in the USA, workplaces with both high performance work systems and union recognition have higher labour productivity than other workplaces. In the UK previous negative links between unions and labour productivity have been eroded by greater competition and more emphasis on “partnership” in industrial relations but there is a lingering negative effect of multi-unionism, just as there is in Australia. In Germany the weight of the evidence suggests that the information, consultation and voice role of works councils enhances labour productivity particularly in larger firms. In Japan unions also tend to raise labour productivity via the longer job tenures in union workplaces which makes it more attractive to invest in human capital and through the unpaid personnel manager role played by full-time enterprise union officials in the workplace.</p></blockquote><p>In the case of schools, things are particularly complex because "productivity" is not measured in dollars. How exactly to measure it is controversial, but it clearly involves some mix of grades, standardised text scores, and social metrics such as graduation and truancy rates. The question is whether teachers' unions will always prefer job security and higher salaries for their mediocre and low-performing members to improvements in the education of the kids they're teaching. The fact that many teachers will accept a cut in pay to teach at more successful, inspiring (and generally private) schools suggests that the overall population of teachers has some willingness to trade wages and job security for workplace satisfaction. This isn't surprising, given the fairly low pay and status that attends the profession in America.</p><p>It may of course be that the current shape of the American educational system drives most of the results-motivated teachers out of the unions and the public school system, but I don't think that's inevitable because of the intrinsic logic of unions. It seems like a mistake to ignore the influence of such non-inevitable historical factors as white flight from America's urban core in the aftermath of desegregation, the peculiarly anti-high-school-teacher path taken by America's counterculture in the same period, the political tensions caused by funding schools through property taxes, and constant <a href="http://www.nj.com/hunterdon-county-democrat/index.ssf/2009/06/food_fight_breaks_out_at_n_hun.html">cafeteria</a> <a href="http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/news_article.aspx?storyid=129219&amp;catid=3">food</a> <a href="http://www.fox30jax.com/content/actionlocal/story/Cafeteria-food-fight-leads-to-heavy-punishment/qvTBsmyng0GMLI2QiuIVdw.cspx">fights</a>.</p>";}i:24;a:7:{s:5:"title";s:34:"No good compromise goes unpunished";s:4:"link";s:103:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/republicans_voted_against_democratic_tax_cuts";s:11:"description";s:5950:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Republicans and tax cuts        </div>
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                    If Republicans won&#039;t vote for Democratic tax cuts, what will they vote for?        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w05/BLmrsmith200.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="253" align="right">LAST night I was trying to explain American politics to a Dutch friend. It wasn't that hard; the Dutch pay a surprising amount of attention to American politics. But this friend had never heard of the filibuster before. (Fair enough. Until last month I didn't know <a href="http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15213212">what proroguing was</a>, and Canada is right next door.) In any case, I ran through the familiar script about how the demise of Southern Democrats had unified the parties into coherent ideological blocs, while at the same time the modernising reforms of 1976 had unintentionally made it easier to filibuster by removing the requirement that Jimmy Stewart actually stand on the floor reading the Federalist Papers until the room goes all swirly. (Good thing Frank Capra lived in the 1930s, not the 1970s. Jimmy Stewart indicates he is unlikely to vote for the bill, and it dies—now there's a lousy movie.) So essentially, I said, unless the Democrats can cobble together a couple of Republican votes, they can't pass anything. Perhaps something very minor. Or, of course, they could always pass a Republican bill, if they wanted to. They could probably increase defence spending, or pass tax cuts, I said.</p><p>But I was wrong! It turns out the Democrats don't even get Republican votes when they try to pass tax cuts. Last weekend David Axelrod noted on "Meet the Press" that the Democrats passed 25 tax cuts this year and got no Republican support. PolitiFacts <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/02/david-axelrod/axelrod-claims-democrats-passed-25-tax-cuts-last-y/">examined the claim</a>, and they say he's right. The biggest is the "Making Work Pay Tax Credit", which for 2009 and 2010 only provides "a refundable tax credit of 6.2% of earned income up to $400 for individuals and up to $800 for married taxpayers filing joint returns." That comes to $116 billion. In all, tax cuts made up about a third of the stimulus bill, which is estimated to cost $862 billion over ten years.</p><p>Nick Baumann, filling in this week for Kevin Drum, <a href="http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/tax-cut-fail">writes</a> that "Democrats' inability to inform the public that the stimulus plan cut taxes in a big way should go down as one of their biggest political screw-ups in recent years." To be sure, all of the tax cuts were part of the stimulus bill, which made them harder to publicise: the conservative-friendly tax cuts were offset by liberal-friendly spending, and the cuts are so complex and narrowly tailored that they tend to get buried in the bill in a way George Bush's across-the-board cuts in marginal rates didn't. One also wonders whether the upper limits on the cuts didn't have something to do with their failure to make more noise. For the median American household, with an income of $50,000 a year, a tax refund of $800 would be a substantial benefit. But most of the people with the power to set media agendas won't even notice it. This isn't going to register on the radars of Roger Ailes or Keith Olbermann, and it's not going to be detectable for people who subscribe to Bloomberg terminals either. But the main point is that it's really not clear what Democrats can hope to pass with the Republican Party as unified as it is. If not tax cuts, then what?</p><p>Anyway, getting back to rising partisanship, the august traditions of the Senate, and the wisdom of checks and balances: Richard Shelby, a Republican senator from Alabama, has just <a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/report-shelby-blocks-all-obama-nominations-in-the-senate-over-al-earmarks.php">put a hold on every single one</a> of Barack Obama's nominees for government posts. According to reports, he won't let them proceed until the administration moves forward with two programmes: a $40 billion contract for airborne refueling tankers (parts of which would be built in Mobile) and a $45m IED testing lab for the FBI (which Mr Shelby earmarked for Alabama's Redstone Arsenal). Aren't we glad we have this saucer in which to cool the hot passions of the House? Still, calling it the "<a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/the_worlds_most_ridiculous_leg.html">world's most ridiculous legislative body</a>" may be a bit overblown. Imperial Russia's Council of Boyars was worse. I think.</p><p>(Photo credit:  Ronald Grant Archive)</p>";s:8:"comments";s:112:"http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/republicans_voted_against_democratic_tax_cuts#comments";s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:40:30 +0000";s:4:"guid";s:36:"21004678 at http://www.economist.com";s:7:"summary";s:5950:"<div class="field field-type-nodereference field-field-mtblog-site">
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                    <a href="/blogs/democracyinamerica">Democracy in America</a>        </div>
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                    Republicans and tax cuts        </div>
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                    If Republicans won&#039;t vote for Democratic tax cuts, what will they vote for?        </div>
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<p><img class="mceItem" src="/sites/default/files/images/blogs/2010w05/BLmrsmith200.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="253" align="right">LAST night I was trying to explain American politics to a Dutch friend. It wasn't that hard; the Dutch pay a surprising amount of attention to American politics. But this friend had never heard of the filibuster before. (Fair enough. Until last month I didn't know <a href="http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15213212">what proroguing was</a>, and Canada is right next door.) In any case, I ran through the familiar script about how the demise of Southern Democrats had unified the parties into coherent ideological blocs, while at the same time the modernising reforms of 1976 had unintentionally made it easier to filibuster by removing the requirement that Jimmy Stewart actually stand on the floor reading the Federalist Papers until the room goes all swirly. (Good thing Frank Capra lived in the 1930s, not the 1970s. Jimmy Stewart indicates he is unlikely to vote for the bill, and it dies—now there's a lousy movie.) So essentially, I said, unless the Democrats can cobble together a couple of Republican votes, they can't pass anything. Perhaps something very minor. Or, of course, they could always pass a Republican bill, if they wanted to. They could probably increase defence spending, or pass tax cuts, I said.</p><p>But I was wrong! It turns out the Democrats don't even get Republican votes when they try to pass tax cuts. Last weekend David Axelrod noted on "Meet the Press" that the Democrats passed 25 tax cuts this year and got no Republican support. PolitiFacts <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/02/david-axelrod/axelrod-claims-democrats-passed-25-tax-cuts-last-y/">examined the claim</a>, and they say he's right. The biggest is the "Making Work Pay Tax Credit", which for 2009 and 2010 only provides "a refundable tax credit of 6.2% of earned income up to $400 for individuals and up to $800 for married taxpayers filing joint returns." That comes to $116 billion. In all, tax cuts made up about a third of the stimulus bill, which is estimated to cost $862 billion over ten years.</p><p>Nick Baumann, filling in this week for Kevin Drum, <a href="http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/tax-cut-fail">writes</a> that "Democrats' inability to inform the public that the stimulus plan cut taxes in a big way should go down as one of their biggest political screw-ups in recent years." To be sure, all of the tax cuts were part of the stimulus bill, which made them harder to publicise: the conservative-friendly tax cuts were offset by liberal-friendly spending, and the cuts are so complex and narrowly tailored that they tend to get buried in the bill in a way George Bush's across-the-board cuts in marginal rates didn't. One also wonders whether the upper limits on the cuts didn't have something to do with their failure to make more noise. For the median American household, with an income of $50,000 a year, a tax refund of $800 would be a substantial benefit. But most of the people with the power to set media agendas won't even notice it. This isn't going to register on the radars of Roger Ailes or Keith Olbermann, and it's not going to be detectable for people who subscribe to Bloomberg terminals either. But the main point is that it's really not clear what Democrats can hope to pass with the Republican Party as unified as it is. If not tax cuts, then what?</p><p>Anyway, getting back to rising partisanship, the august traditions of the Senate, and the wisdom of checks and balances: Richard Shelby, a Republican senator from Alabama, has just <a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/report-shelby-blocks-all-obama-nominations-in-the-senate-over-al-earmarks.php">put a hold on every single one</a> of Barack Obama's nominees for government posts. According to reports, he won't let them proceed until the administration moves forward with two programmes: a $40 billion contract for airborne refueling tankers (parts of which would be built in Mobile) and a $45m IED testing lab for the FBI (which Mr Shelby earmarked for Alabama's Redstone Arsenal). Aren't we glad we have this saucer in which to cool the hot passions of the House? Still, calling it the "<a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/the_worlds_most_ridiculous_leg.html">world's most ridiculous legislative body</a>" may be a bit overblown. Imperial Russia's Council of Boyars was worse. I think.</p><p>(Photo credit:  Ronald Grant Archive)</p>";}}s:7:"channel";a:3:{s:4:"link";s:92:"http://www.economist.com/blogsfeeds/democracyinamerica/atom.xml/democracyinamerica/index.xml";s:8:"language";s:2:"en";s:7:"tagline";N;}s:9:"textinput";a:0:{}s:5:"image";a:0:{}s:9:"feed_type";s:3:"RSS";s:12:"feed_version";s:3:"2.0";s:5:"stack";a:0:{}s:9:"inchannel";b:0;s:6:"initem";b:0;s:9:"incontent";b:0;s:11:"intextinput";b:0;s:7:"inimage";b:0;s:13:"current_field";s:0:"";s:17:"current_namespace";b:0;s:19:"_CONTENT_CONSTRUCTS";a:6:{i:0;s:7:"content";i:1;s:7:"summary";i:2;s:4:"info";i:3;s:5:"title";i:4;s:7:"tagline";i:5;s:9:"copyright";}}