A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
I think Jonathan Chait has it just about right.
If health care passes, will it be a grand historical achievement, or a crushing disappointment? The answer, I predict, will be both. The American health care system is an indefensible morass of waste and cruelty. The distance between the status quo and the ideal is therefore so vast that we could—and probably will—end up with a reform that massively improves the system, while coming nowhere close to the ideal.
why America can’t seem to make sane public policy, Steve Benen has a clue.
Kate Sheppard reported today on some recent Barton comments about climate change and wind power.
“Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.”
Something to think about, indeed.
Barton is, of course, the same lawmaker who recently suggested that humans will “adapt” to climate change because we can “get shade.”
And as Matthew DeLong reminds us, Barton was, up until a couple of years ago, the lawmaker House Republicans made the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.”
I have been writing (and worrying) a lot about the transition of the media, and the effect of the current landscape on public discourse and policy.
As I told a friend, it’s one thing to disagree about something that we both see. We can both look at a photo, or a piece of art, or a draft of a pending bill, and disagree about its meaning, or–in the case of proposed legislation–whether it is a good idea. But the current fragmented media environment and the disproportionate attention garnered by “pundits” of varying philosophies and degrees of sanity has created a situation where we are far too often not looking at the same reality. It reminds me of the time (b.c.–before cellphones) when a friend and I agreed to meet for lunch at “the tearoom.” Back then, both Ayres and Blocks had tearooms, and I went to Ayres while she went to Blocks. This made conversation difficult, in much the same way that our current media environment does.
Clay Shirkey recently wrote an essay that is one of the more thoughtful analyses of the morphing of media. In it, he echoes the observation of Paul Starr that “journalism isn’t just about uncovering facts and framing stories; it is about assembling a public to read and react to those stories.”
In other words, there is a difference between an audience and a public. As Shirkey says, journalism is about more than dissemination of news; its about the creation of shared awareness. It’s about occupying the same reality, or eating at the same tearoom. It’s about enabling meaningful communication.
As the information environment continues to fragment into smaller and more widely dispersed niches, what will the consequences be for public communication and discourse?
For those who doubt the need for reforming America’s health insurance industry, this one-page summary from the Kaiser Foundation pretty well speaks for itself.
Eric Vieth at Dangerous Intersections has a fascinating–and chilling–review of Antonin Scalia’s position on executing people who are proved innocent after being convicted in a “fair” trial. Hint: “they probably did something wrong anyway…”