Now Hear This…

I’ll admit it… this idea is cribbed, with appreciation, from Chez’s Listening Post entries at Deus Ex Malcontent.  I’d been thinking about something like it for a little while, but it wasn’t until I heard the following song for the first time that I was moved to post it.  The video itself doesn’t move me; however, close your eyes and listen to the music, the melody, the voice.  Haunting, ephemeral, and transcendental all at once.

This is Niraj Chag’s Khwaab, with vocals by Swati Natekar.  I haven’t been able to stop listening to it.

How I feel about Obama’s Afghanistan Policy

Mike Lux over at Open Left nails it.

I sure hope Matt Taibbi is wrong…

Matt Taibbi, who has been one of the best writers out there writing about the crash of our economy and the resulting recession, has a pretty pessimistic post today about the health care reform situation.  And while I hope and pray that he is wrong, I fear that he is right… The monied interests entrenched against any serious reform have basically bought off all of the republicans and enough idiot democrats that I despair for any serious reform.

I wonder when we’ll really figure it out, and see that every other first world country achieves better health results for a fraction of the money we spend, and manage to cover EVERYONE.

America’s Health Insurance “System”

A great catch by Digby, who notices that we’ve become like Soviet Russia in one way… although we don’t have lines to buy bread, we have lines to get health care.

As those opposed to health care reform in this country say, at least we don’t ration care! *sigh* Of course, the truth of the matter is that in other, civilized, countries, they ration care by how sick you are.  In this country, we ration care by how much money you have.

The REAL rate of unemployment

The recent rise in the “official” unemployment rate to 9.5% has created a lot of concern, especially since it unemployment has grown faster than the Obama administration predicted.  This in turn has led to calls for a second stimulus (unfortunately, most people don’t realize that there were a great many economists calling for the first stimulus to be even larger… why they don’t know this is thanks to our wonderful traditional media, who parrot every right-wing talking point as if it were the sermon on the mount).

However, as Charles Lemos points out at MyDD, the official unemployment statistics bandied about severely undercount the numbers of people out of work.  The actual numbers of people who are unable to work at all, or who are working part-time when they would rather be working full-time, is 16.5%, and there are several states where the numbers are 20% or higher.  Even worse, those numbers are still going to go up.

Thanks, Dubya!

A reasonable football playoff proposal…

The folks over at Football Outsiders have come up with a pretty good playoff proposal for Div I FBS College Football.  It incorporates all the conference champs, 5 at-large teams, and allows for the continuation of the current bowl system.  The only things that are dealbreakers are probably the elimination of the conference championship games, and the removal of the 12th game of the regular season.

But overall, I think it’s a very workable proposal.

Debunking Canadian Health Care Myths

A nice opinion piece from the Denver Post debunking the standard right-wing myths about the Canadian Health Care System.

Our Broken Health Care System… and Entrepreneurship

Two things caught my eye today, both related to our broken health care system.  The first is a absolutely FANTASTIC piece by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker about one of the biggest problems with our health care system that very few people talk about: that our current system rewards quantity without any control for quality.  That is, that doctors make more money for piling on tests and procedures, when there is evidence that shows that not only does that not help the patients get better, but can actually do more harm than good.  He examines a case of a small town in Texas that charges Medicare almost twice the national average per subscriber, and investigates why.  He makes the very valid point that for all the talk of insurance companies, and single-payer, and the public option, this contradiction at the heart of our current health care reimbursement system needs to be addressed for a real breakthrough in controlling costs.  Just a great piece, and one that needs to be read by everyone.

And now the second thing that caught my eye. Over at Think Progress, Matthew Yglesias has a great post about how our current health care system limits the amount of innovation and entrepreneurship in our current economy.  He writes:

The thinking is that our current system unduly punishes risk-taking. There are a lot of different aspects of this, but basically the American health care system both produces labor market rigidities (”job lock”) and makes jobs at small firms relatively unattractive.

He goes on to quote a study which codifies the negative impact that this system of employer-tied health care has on entrepreneurship.  Speaking personally, I know that my fear of being without health care has really dimmed any thoughts I might have had about changing fields or changing jobs, and it is even more of an issue now, when any of us might lose our jobs in an instant due to the current economic crisis (thanks, W.!).

Joe Posnanski on Tony Gonzalez

Joe Posnanski, one of the great sportswriters of this generation, writes an article about Cal alum Tony Gonzalez, who was traded from the Kansas City Chiefs to the Atlanta Falcons yesterday.

A great read.

The Importance of Education, and of Supporting Education

Matthew Yglesias has a great post at his blog which describes a McKinsey report that analyzes the economic cost of having a poor education system.  From his blog:

…having a high-performing school system is extremely valuable. This is important to keep in mind when talking about spending money on schools or other social services aimed at children and their parents. There’s much more to improving educational outcomes than spending money at random, but insofar as you identify a use for the money that’s genuinely useful it’s worth spending extremely freely.

Among the statistics he sites:

If the United States had in recent years closed the gap between its educational achievement levels and those of better-performing nations such as Finland and Korea, GDP in 2008 could have been $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion higher. This represents 9 to 16 percent of GDP. (emphasis his)

Follow the link to see the rest of the stats.  It truly does make it clear how important education is, and further illustrates the sheer lunacy of wannabe Republican presidential candidates like South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who are actively reject stimulus money from the federal government.  Money that could be spent on… hmm… education.