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Barack Obama, in Boston today:
You want to go forward, what do you do? You put it your car in ‘D.’ When you go backward, what do you do? You put it in ‘R.’
Right now, the country seems to be in a retrograde mood. But that won’t last forever.
October 16th, 2010
Category: Uncategorized
October 16th, 2010
(Long wonkish post for a quiet weekend)
During the election, the handover runup and the negotiation of the stimulus package, I posted various grumbles that the Obama team´s enthusiasm for health IT was creating a risk of a rerun of the British NHS near-fiasco. I thought I´d better check to see how things are going.
As far as I can see. the short answer is: pretty well. Here´s the website of the Office of the National Health Coordinator for Health Information Technology You can judge for yourself probably as well as I can. But since I went on record with criticisms, it´s only fair to retract them.
Longer report below the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
October 16th, 2010
Category: Uncategorized
I don’t watch TV at home, which makes experiencing it in airports and hotel lobbies when I travel that much more disorienting.
A couple of nights ago I saw some random Republican talking head on some random cable channel say that Christine O’Donnell had been a boon to the GOP this year, because her over-the-top, telegenic extremist craziness had distracted attention from the less flamboyant extremist craziness of other Republican Senate candidates, like the loon in Wisconsin whose name I can’t currently recall.
Down to the last two weeks, folks. Time to make those phone calls.
October 16th, 2010
Category: Foreign Policy
As we seem to be going through a slow spot in postings, I feel comfortable re-cycling here at RBC my observations on the state of Iraqi Kurdistan, which were originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle but now reside on the regional government’s website.
As Salaam Alaikum
October 15th, 2010
Category: Academic Labor Market, Drug Policy
Unsurprisingly, Attorney General Eric Holder announced today that the Federal government would not acquiesce if California decided to legalize recreational cannabis, as provided for in Proposition 19.
Some reporters are treating this as inconsistent with Holder’s earlier decision not to bother California’s “medical marijuana” industry, but that’s an error. No matter how transparent the fig-leaf of medical use covering the nakedness of the billion-dollar industry, medical use is exempted from the international drug treaties and the regulation of medical practice (as opposed to the approval of pharmaceuticals) has long been a state, rather than a federal, preserve. Just as important, “medical” cannabis sells at more or less full dope-dealer prices, while if Prop. 19 were allowed to take effect without Federal interference the retail price of high-grade weed would (according to RAND) be about $40 an ounce, more than an 80% discount compared to the current $300. At that price, California cannabis would flood the nation.
It wasn’t hard to figure out that the feds weren’t going to hold still for that.
But what does Holder’s annoucement mean in practice?
Read the rest of this entry »
October 14th, 2010
Category: Drug Policy
Students of U.S. drug policy will mourn the passing of Professor David Musto, perhaps the greatest historian of the field. The American Disease is the best-known of his books and is justifiably called a classic. An even greater delight for drug history buffs is The Quest for Drug Control, co-authored by Pamela Korsmeyer. The latter has a CD full of internal White House memos and other policy documents that is a joy to explore. When I met Noel Koch last year and he described his work for President Nixon on drug policy, it was fun to go back to my office, pull a memo he wrote over 35 years ago from the CD (The disc has a nice search feature) and then circulate it to him and a group of old Nixon hands around town.
David had an office inside Yale’s majestic, wood-paneled, portrait-strewn, medical uber-library. He looked as comfortable there as most of us would in our living room. During my very first academic job interview, at Yale Psychiatry Department, I asked for and received the gift of an interview with David. I believe we were supposed to talk about addiction but spent nearly the entire time discussing Sherlock Holmes. He fulfilled the dream of many an irregular by getting the Journal of the American Medical Association (!) to publish a case study of Holmes’ cocaine use, which showed he had chutzpah as well as intellect.
October 13th, 2010
Category: Corruption in Washington
The skilled flacks of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – no doubt the best that foreign money can buy – have largely succeeded in obfuscating the issue about the relationship between the Chamber’s $75 million smear campaign against Democrats and the Chamber’s overseas contributors.
The Chamber says it gets only $100,000 per year in dues from its overseas affiliates, the AmChams. So what? The Chamber also solicits foreign companies for direct contributions, and has a second set of foreign affiliates, the Business Councils, to help promote that process.
It’s true that putting foreign money directly into American campaigns is a crime, and there’s no evidence so far that the Chamber has committed that crime. It’s also true that no one outside the Chamber is in a position to say whether the law has been broken or not, and that the Chamber refuses to provide the data.
But the Chamber hasn’t bothered to deny the main point of the ThinkProgress report: that the money it openly solicits from foreign companies goes into the same bank account that funds its political ads. Money is fungible. So if the Chamber gets a contribution from (let’s just imagine) the Bin Laden construction group in Saudi Arabia, it can pay its staff and overhead expenses with that money, and use some of its domestic proceeds – money it wouldn’t otherwise have available – to buy itself a friendly Congress.
The difference between a Russian or Chinese or Saudi company making a contribution to the Chamber for use in U.S. elections, and the same company making the same contribution to the same organization nominally for some other use, but which allows the Chamber to spend more money to influence U.S. elections, is just precisely no difference at all.
The Chamber can put an end to the controversy at any time, by simply publishing the same information about its money sources required of any political campaign. So far, it hasn’t done so. What is the Chamber hiding?
October 13th, 2010
I think that Tom Jensen has a point here:
Candidates matter- but they matter a lot more in Senate elections where voters really get to know them than in House elections that are much more likely to be determined by the national tide. We’ve seen time and again in Senate races this year that the better voters get to know the Republican candidates the less they like them. But unfortunately for Democrats I don’t know that voters ever get to know the House candidates well enough for that same effect to occur.
Jensen’s Public Policy Polling has a clear ideological sympathy for Democrats, but it is a highly respected outfit. When it talks, I listen, and I think he’s making sense.
I see no reason to believe that the Republicans will fail to take the House in this cycle, and as the New York Times reported the other day, the GOP is expanding its field. But over the last few days, Senate polls have started to tilt back toward the Democrats: Manchin either slightly up or tied in West Virginia, Bennet closing fast in Colorado (and even up in a PPP poll), Reid and Giannoulias climbing back into dead heats in Nevada and Illinois, Murray beginning to cruise in Washington. Now, we even have a poll reporting a small lead for Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania (caveat emptor: that poll is a DSCC internal). Update: yet another Democratic internal shows this race as a toss-up, with Sestak in a statistical tie. As the piece says, certainly the NRSC sees it that way: after ignoring this race for months, it has launched its first ad against Sestak.
Jensen’s logic makes sense. Most House races are not high on anyone’s radar screen: the GOP candidate might as well be the proverbial “generic Republican.” And that means he’ll win. But in Senate races, the voters are actually finding out something about Republicans — and they are running away from what they see.
Keep that in mind next time the Villagers say that the electorate has endorsed Republican policies. They haven’t. The economy is terrible, and voters are angry. End of story.
In the meantime, you can keep the pressure on by providing money to key races here.
October 13th, 2010
Category: Lying in politics
The responses on this are so uniformly good that I am siding with the DoDo Bird and as promised, publicly endorsing every ludicrous statistical claim made as a fact, even though I know that four out of three statistics are made up on the spot. I am outraged that no one in Washington is concerned that a gun in the home of the 1 in 110 Eskimo children with autism who have 28 words for snow and are kidnapped 50,000 times a year is 42 times as likely to kill a member of the home who is divorced (as half of once married people are) and needs a computer that doubles in speed every 18 months in order to compensate for using only 10% of his brain supplied by the diminishing 20% of oxygen that comes from rain forests! It’s no wonder that U.S. companies spend 50 billion dollars a year teaching reading and math when Sex Panther works all the time 60% of the time! In closing, I summarize my message simply: My friends, one is indeed the loneliest number.
Can I have a cable TV show now?
October 13th, 2010
Category: Brazil, Latin America
Results of the Brazilian Presidential election, first round on October 3:
Dilma Rousseff ……46.91% (goes to run-off)
José Serra …………32.61% (goes to run-off)
Marina Silva……….19.33% (no endorsement yet for the runoff)
Others……………..1.15% (includes vanishing sentimental hard-left voters)
Total valid votes 101,590,153
This is all much as expected. Dilma´s vote was 2% or so down on the last polls of voting intentions , and Marina as much up. The gap was bigger on pure preferences; but Dilms already faced a 2% enthusiasm gap betwen these and voting intentions. It looks as if this gap widened. A lot of voters were undecided up to the very end: 6% according to Datafolha´s last national poll on September 28/29. Marina Silva actually beat Serra into third place in Rio de Janeiro state. The pólls were spot on (within 1%) for the Rio state governorship.
It´s a quite good result IMHO. Brazil´s main problems – inequality, lousy infrastructure, deforestation, poor education compared to other BRICs – require more government rather than less. Dilma has had a warning rather than a plebiscite, and cannot ignore the greening of the electorate. Sustainability is the new soundbite. Also it´s not a result that lends comfort to conspiracy theories of massive ballot-rigging by le pouvoir, which the paperless system encourages.
Without Silva´s dignified presence, the tone of the runoff election has deteriorated sharply into soundbites to show who is more personally against abortion, and mudslinging over sleaze. I can´t figure out what Serra, far the more experienced campaigner, thinks he is up to. To have a fighting chance, he has to (a) convince all of Silva´s electors that he´s serious about the Amazon and climate change, (b) convince some of Dilma´s electors that he won´t touch their bolsa familia and will direct a lot of the prospective oil wealth their way through infrastructure in the poor regions. He doesn´t appear to be trying and merely getting out the conservative base will not give him a chance.
Mind you, the sleaze charges against Dilma are pretty convincing. Erenice Guerra, her previous right-hand woman and successor as Lula´s chief of staff, had to resign last month in an influence-peddling scandal. Dilma and Lula are shocked, shocked. The structural incentives – the party of the poor always has a harder time financing itself than the party of the rich, its leaders are personally less wealthy – don´t help: I guess the money corruption of the left tends to take more illegal forms than that of the right (see Blair, Mitterand). Dilma´s attitude and recent career as a machine politician mean that we can expect lots more of the same during her mandate.
The Venezuelan parliamentary elections on 26 September were more interesting really. Against the odds and a barrage by Chavez´ tame media, the opposition to Chavez almost tied the popular vote (47.17% to Chavez´48.20%). International observers weren´t allowed in, so the opposition may have got a majority in fact. Chavez´party still has a large working majority in parliament, but not the two-thirds needed for constitutional amendments. The revolution has stalled, though the opposition will have a very hard time of it.
The opposition is interesting as well as brave. It´s a coalition of opposition parties of all shades, from left-of-Chavez to old-style conservatives. The language of the name – Mesa de la Unidad Democrática – comes straight from the Polish Solidarność of the 1980s. Solidarity was legally a trade union, but the broad umbrella approach is similar. As its leaders expected, after 1989 Solidarity disintegrated as a national movement into normal parties, though it survives as a trades union. MUD even held primaries to select candidates from any party with a winning chance.
Both Brazilian and Venezuelan electors are acting entirely rationally. Brazilians are voting for continuity, as things are going pretty well, Venezuelans for change, as they are going very badly. Even Caracas favelas are no longer safe fiefs for Chavez. Is only the American electorate incapable of understanding its own self-interest, and identifying those responsible for its condition?