Why I Love Mother Jones Blogger Kevin Drum

He says Obama will probably nominate Elena Kagan, whose written record is surprisingly thin. And just why will Obama nominate her?

Because Obama seems to have almost a sixth sense for doing things that annoy me just a little bit. On most issues he's roughly in the same ballpark as me, but in the end he always seems to end up just a notch to my right. Not enough to really piss me off, but enough to keep me perpetually just a little disappointed. A Kagan nomination would fit that pattern perfectly. So I'm bracing myself for yet another mild disappointment.

Would Some Please Tell Me What to Think

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Health care refrom --or perhaps merely health insurance reform -- moves forward, as the Baucus bill passes out of committee. I am not sure if I should be glad that something of partial value may yet be passed or if we are now likely to get a shit pill that will cause more problems that it solves, wound the Dems and doom us to some Republican Mussolini.

That the Republicans hate it is promising, isn't it? But what if, for all its protest, this is yet another profit boost for the insurance industry??

I guess I'll think whatever Kevin Drum thinks.

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• Weiner: AHIP Justifies the Public Option (dailykos.com)

Kevin Drum, the Old 'CalPundit' on How the Public Option is Not the Sine Qua Non

His complete argument. He makes sense, I think -- that's what I want to think since the public option seems to be in trouble. But to be honest, on this issue I tend to agree with whomever I read last. I guess I'll put up Howard Dean's take on it al tomorrow....

As much as I'd like to have a public option (primarily for its ability to force more robust price competition), I just don't see it as something to threaten nuclear destruction over. If insurance reforms are robust and low-income subsidies are decent, that's a huge win for millions of people, and it's a win we can build on. And contra Atrios, social legislation does have a history of getting better after it's first passed. Just ask Henry Waxman.

There's more to say about this. For example: most European countries rely on regulated private insurers of one kind or another to provide universal coverage, and they've managed to make this work. And: a credible threat only works if the opposition is afraid you might carry it out. But as near as I can tell, the folks who oppose the public option aren't really all that afraid of the possibility that healthcare reform sinks completely. Plus: the only way to get it is via reconciliation, and various comments to this post make it pretty clear that trying to pass a huge healthcare bill via reconciliation is probably impossible.

It's worth fighting for a public option. But it's not worth sinking healthcare reform over it. That would hurt too many real flesh-and-blood people who need this, and a second chance wouldn't come along for a long time. We've failed on the healthcare front too many times to accept failure again.

"Penal Colony with a nice coastline"

Image by Amin Tabrizi via Flickr

From Kevin Drum at Mother Jones bemoaning the lass of educational opportunity in California.

And if I had the choice of keeping Cal State universities accessible to everyone vs. shoveling another 10,000 petty crooks into prison, I know which I'd choose. Over the past 30 years my fellow California residents have decided they'd rather become a penal colony with a nice coastline than a land of opportunity. It's not a change for the better.

Michael Jackson: Vied with Sean Connery for the Title of Most Macho Heterosexual

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You see, as I noted so long ago and so long never wrote about in scholarly journals (as if!), one of the most useful tools of the columnist (and what is the average blogger but a columnist, marginally informed but totally involved) is contrarianism, which stance cuts through the haze of uniformity.

As Kevin Drum noted in a post today about the receding number of links in the posts of many bloggers:

I write as much as I ever have, but in my posts I link more to news sources and less to other bloggers than I used to. I'm not sure why. Part of it might be related to another evolution I've noticed: the political blogosphere increasingly seems to latch on to four or five outrages of the day that suck up most of its attention. It seems like every blog I read posts about the same few political nano-scandals every day, and since I mostly find this stuff kind of boring I don't link to it very much.

Same take on the same subject: One size fits all, and where's the fun in that? So there's a tip. But how to make that contrarian position thoughtful and useful even when insincere? (A headline, more's the pity, doesn't make a post.)

I believe our 50 minutes is up.

'Off the Record' is a Cancer

From Kevin Drum:

"Off the record" has become a cancer. It's now practically a default presumption, rather than a rare exception granted for specific and justifiable reasons. Unfortunately, no one is willing to do anything about it. A few years ago the big newspapers all instituted policies that banned blind quotes unless there was a good case for them, but as near as I can tell the only result was to force their reporters to concoct ever more inventive ways of saying "because he wouldn't talk otherwise." Beyond that, life went on as usual.