Friedman, Kristof and Rich

Life is good today.  MoDo is off so we don’t have to suffer through another of her attempts at fiction.  The Moustache of Wisdom explains “How the G.O.P. Goes Green” and says Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is courageous in his stance on the country’s energy policy.  It is to larf.  In it he says “Five more G.O.P. senators like him and we could have a real energy bill.”  Right, Tommy.  They’ll get around to voting on an energy bill just as soon as that moron Sen. Inhofe is done with his witch hunt.  (He wants a criminal investigation of American climate scientists.)  Mr. Kristof, in “Learning From the Sin of Sodom,” says that a growing number of conservative Christians are acknowledging that to be “pro-life” must mean more than opposing abortion.  Mr. Rich has been paying attention.  In “The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged” he says violent invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

It is early evening on Capitol Hill, and I am sitting with Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, who, along with John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, is trying to craft a new energy bill — one that could actually win 60 votes. What is interesting about Graham is that he has been willing — courageously in my view — to depart from the prevailing G.O.P. consensus that the only energy policy we need is “drill, baby, drill.”

What brought you around, I ask? Graham’s short answer: politics, jobs and legacy. We start with politics. The Republican Party today has a major outreach problem with two important constituencies, “Hispanics and young people,” Graham explains:

“I have been to enough college campuses to know if you are 30 or younger this climate issue is not a debate. It’s a value. These young people grew up with recycling and a sensitivity to the environment — and the world will be better off for it. They are not brainwashed. … From a Republican point of view, we should buy into it and embrace it and not belittle them. You can have a genuine debate about the science of climate change, but when you say that those who believe it are buying a hoax and are wacky people you are putting at risk your party’s future with younger people. You can have a legitimate dispute about how to solve immigration, but when you start focusing on the last names of people the demographics will pass you by.”

So Graham’s approach to bringing around his conservative state has been simple: avoid talking about “climate change,” which many on the right don’t believe. Instead, frame our energy challenge as a need to “clean up carbon pollution,” to “become energy independent” and to “create more good jobs and new industries for South Carolinians.” He proposes “putting a price on carbon,” starting with a very focused carbon tax, as opposed to an economywide cap-and-trade system, so as to spur both consumers and industries to invest in and buy new clean energy products. He includes nuclear energy, and insists on permitting more offshore drilling for oil and gas to give us more domestic sources, as we bridge to a new clean energy economy.

“Cap-and-trade as we know it is dead, but the issue of cleaning up the air and energy independence should not die — and you will never have energy independence without pricing carbon,” Graham argues. “The technology doesn’t make sense until you price carbon. Nuclear power is a bet on cleaner air. Wind and solar is a bet on cleaner air. You make those bets assuming that cleaning the air will become more profitable than leaving the air dirty, and the only way it will be so is if the government puts some sticks on the table — not just carrots. The future economy of America and the jobs of the future are going to be tied to cleaning up the air, and in the process of cleaning up the air this country becomes energy independent and our national security is greatly enhanced.”

Remember, he adds: “We are more dependent on foreign oil today than after 9/11. That is political malpractice, and every member of Congress is responsible.”

This isn’t just for the next generation, says Graham: “As you talk about the future, if you forget the people who live in the present, you will have no future politically. You have to get the people in the present to buy into the future. I tell my voters: ‘If we try to clean up the air and become energy independent, we will create more jobs than anything I can do as a senator.’ General Electric makes all the turbines for the G.E. windmills in Greenville, South Carolina.” He also is pushing to make his state a manufacturing center for nuclear reactor components and biomass from plants and timber.

What would most help him bring around his G.O.P. colleagues? The business lobby. “The Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers need to tell my colleagues it is O.K. to price carbon, if you do it smartly,” he says.

Sure, Graham’s strategy will give many greens heartburn. I don’t agree with every point. But if there is going to be a clean energy bill, greens and Democrats will have to recruit some Republicans. Graham says he’s ready to meet them in the middle. “We’ve got to get started,” he says, “because once we do, every C.E.O. will adopt a carbon strategy, no matter what the law actually requires.”

And for those Republicans who think this is only a loser, Senator Graham says think again: “What is our view of carbon as a party? Are we the party of carbon pollution forever in unlimited amounts? Pricing carbon is the key to energy independence, and the byproduct is that young people look at you differently.” Look at how he is received in colleges today. “Instead of being just one more short, white Republican over 50,” says Graham, “I am now semicool. There is an awareness by young people that I am doing something different.”

Five more G.O.P. senators like him and we could have a real energy bill.

“We can’t be a nation that always tries and fails,” Graham concludes. “We have to eventually get some hard problem right.”

Well, Lindsey, sweetie, you might start by talking to your bone-headed colleagues.  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

For most of the last century, save-the-worlders were primarily Democrats and liberals. In contrast, many Republicans and religious conservatives denounced government aid programs, with Senator Jesse Helms calling them “money down a rat hole.”

Over the last decade, however, that divide has dissolved, in ways that many Americans haven’t noticed or appreciated. Evangelicals have become the new internationalists, pushing successfully for new American programs against AIDS and malaria, and doing superb work on issues from human trafficking in India to mass rape in Congo.

A pop quiz: What’s the largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization?

It’s not Save the Children, and it’s not CARE — both terrific secular organizations. Rather, it’s World Vision, a Seattle-based Christian organization (with strong evangelical roots) whose budget has roughly tripled over the last decade.

World Vision now has 40,000 staff members in nearly 100 countries. That’s more staff members than CARE, Save the Children and the worldwide operations of the United States Agency for International Development — combined.

A growing number of conservative Christians are explicitly and self-critically acknowledging that to be “pro-life” must mean more than opposing abortion. The head of World Vision in the United States, Richard Stearns, begins his fascinating book, “The Hole in Our Gospel,” with an account of a visit a decade ago to Uganda, where he met a 13-year-old AIDS orphan who was raising his younger brothers by himself.

“What sickened me most was this question: where was the Church?” he writes. “Where were the followers of Jesus Christ in the midst of perhaps the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time? Surely the Church should have been caring for these ‘orphans and widows in their distress.’ (James 1:27). Shouldn’t the pulpits across America have flamed with exhortations to rush to the front lines of compassion?

“How have we missed it so tragically, when even rock stars and Hollywood actors seem to understand?”

Mr. Stearns argues that evangelicals were often so focused on sexual morality and a personal relationship with God that they ignored the needy. He writes laceratingly about “a Church that had the wealth to build great sanctuaries but lacked the will to build schools, hospitals, and clinics.”

In one striking passage, Mr. Stearns quotes the prophet Ezekiel as saying that the great sin of the people of Sodom wasn’t so much that they were promiscuous or gay as that they were “arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49.)

Hmm. Imagine if sodomy laws could be used to punish the stingy, unconcerned rich!

The American view of evangelicals is still shaped by preening television blowhards and hypocrites who seem obsessed with gays and fetuses. One study cited in the book found that even among churchgoers ages 16 to 29, the descriptions most associated with Christianity were “antihomosexual,” “judgmental,” “too involved in politics,” and “hypocritical.”

Some conservative Christians reinforced the worst view of themselves by inspiring Ugandan homophobes who backed a bill that would punish gays with life imprisonment or execution. Ditto for the Vatican, whose hostility to condoms contributes to the AIDS epidemic. But there’s more to the picture: I’ve also seen many Catholic nuns and priests heroically caring for AIDS patients — even quietly handing out condoms.

One of the most inspiring figures I’ve met while covering Congo’s brutal civil war is a determined Polish nun in the terrifying hinterland, feeding orphans, standing up to drunken soldiers and comforting survivors — all in a war zone. I came back and decided: I want to grow up and become a Polish nun.

Some Americans assume that religious groups offer aid to entice converts. That’s incorrect. Today, groups like World Vision ban the use of aid to lure anyone into a religious conversation.

Some liberals are pushing to end the longtime practice (it’s a myth that this started with President George W. Bush) of channeling American aid through faith-based organizations. That change would be a catastrophe. In Haiti, more than half of food distributions go through religious groups like World Vision that have indispensible networks on the ground. We mustn’t make Haitians the casualties in our cultural wars.

A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals. They’re also less likely to spend vacations volunteering at, say, a school or a clinic in Rwanda.

If secular liberals can give up some of their snootiness, and if evangelicals can retire some of their sanctimony, then we all might succeed together in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity, like illiteracy, human trafficking and maternal mortality.

And now here’s Mr. Rich:

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, even rationalized Stack’s crime. “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened,” he said, “but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it’s going to be a happy day for America.” No one in King’s caucus condemned these remarks. Then again, what King euphemized as “the incident” took out just 1 of the 200 workers in the Austin building: Vernon Hunter, a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran nearing his I.R.S. retirement. Had Stack the devastating weaponry and timing to match the death toll of 168 inflicted by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, maybe a few of the congressman’s peers would have cried foul.

It is not glib or inaccurate to invoke Oklahoma City in this context, because the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air. Two days before Stack’s suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow’s chilling, months-long investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. “The New World Order,” with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.

Barstow confirmed what the Southern Poverty Law Center had found in its report last year: the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a few self-styled “patriots” to sow havoc.

Equally significant is Barstow’s finding that most Tea Party groups have no affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party’s ham-handed efforts to co-opt them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why. They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of George W. Bush. They really do hate all of Washington, and if they hate Obama more than the Republican establishment, it’s only by a hair or two. (Were Obama not earning extra demerits in some circles for his race, it might be a dead heat.) The Tea Partiers want to eliminate most government agencies, starting with the Fed and the I.R.S., and end spending on entitlement programs. They are not to be confused with the Party of No holding forth in Washington — a party that, after all, is now positioning itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are talking about here is the Party of No Government at All.

The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers. Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P. guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party’s counterconservatism.

The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that none of this trio can be elected president. As George F. Will recently pointed out, Palin will not even be the G.O.P. nominee “unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states” (as it did in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Waterloo). But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P. Congressional minority.

In the days after Stack’s Austin attack, the gradually coalescing Tea Party dogma had its Washington coming out party at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), across town from Capitol Hill. The most rapturously received speaker was Beck, who likened the G.O.P. to an alcoholic in need of a 12-step program to recover from its “progressive-lite” collusion with federal government. Beck vilified an unnamed Republican whose favorite president was the progressive Theodore Roosevelt — that would be McCain — and ominously labeled progressivism a cancer that “must be cut out of the system.”

A co-sponsor of CPAC was the John Birch Society, another far-right organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation. Its views, which William F. Buckley Jr. decried in the 1960s as an “idiotic” and “irrational” threat to true conservatism, remain unchanged. At the conference’s conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz describes Paul’s followers as “conspiracy theorists, anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged.”

William Kristol dismissed the straw poll results as the youthful folly of Paul’s jejune college fans. William Bennett gingerly pooh-poohed Beck’s anti-G.O.P. diatribe. But in truth, most of the CPAC speakers, including presidential aspirants, were so eager to ingratiate themselves with this claque that they endorsed the Beck-Paul vision rather than, say, defend Bush, McCain or the party’s Congressional leadership. (It surely didn’t help Romney’s straw poll showing that he was the rare Bush defender.) And so — just one day after Stack crashed his plane into the Austin I.R.S. office — the heretofore milquetoast former Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, told the audience to emulate Tiger Woods’s wife and “take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country.”

Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted “people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry — no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that “the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent revolution. The right has a different history. In the months before McVeigh’s mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho and Texas in Congress, publicly empathized with the conspiracy theories of the far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions.

In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied with Beck’s 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that “another civil war” may be in the offing. “I don’t see us being the ones to start it,” she told Barstow, “but I would give up my life for my country.”

Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin’s memorable final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention earlier this month: “I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help.” It’s enough to make you wonder who is palling around with terrorists now.

Blow and Herbert

Gail Collins is off today.  Mr. Blow has been to the movies.  In “Tyler Perry’s Crack Mothers” he says recent data do not support the ubiquity of black crack-mom characters in the movies.  Not any more than data supported “Cadillac-driving welfare queens” in St. Ronnie’s day.  Some things never change.  Mr. Herbert considers “Paterson on the Brink.”  Now that the bottom has fallen out of Gov. David Paterson’s election bid, the question remains: Is he still suited to be governor?  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Mo’Nique is a favorite to win an Oscar next Sunday for her powerful and disturbing portrayal of an abusive mother in the movie “Precious.”

If she wins, I may grit my teeth at the depraved depiction, but at least her character is merely juxtaposed with the crack scourge and isn’t in fact an addict. That’s heartening since the crack-addicted black mother has recently made a curious comeback.

There was a time when this character was more relevant: in the 1980s and 1990s when the crack epidemic plunged whole communities into violence, fear and chaos. (To be fair, “Precious” is set in the 1980s.) But this character now feels like a refugee of time — and discordant with the facts on the ground.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan pushed the crack-baby myth. In 1991, “Boyz in the Hood” and “New Jack City” were released. In 1995, the late Tupac Shakur released “Dear Mama” in which he rapped: “Even as a crack fiend, mama/You always was a black queen, mama.” Part of its poetry was that it was impossible to tell if this was an address or a lament.

And then there was Whitney Houston’s breathtaking decline, and her infamous 2002 “crack is whack,” “I want to see the receipts” interview with Diane Sawyer. Receipts for crack, Whitney? Poor thing.

That seemed a sort of cultural end cap, and data suggest that it was with good reason.

A National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a report released last week, found that young black adults ages 18 to 25 years old were less likely to use illicit drugs than the national average. (For those doing the math, you’re right. Those are the children born during the crack epidemic.)

Also, a 2007 study of college undergraduates published in the Journal of Ethnicity and Substance Abuse found that young blacks’ rates of illicit drug use was substantially lower than their counterparts, with black women having the lowest rates of all.

Furthermore, data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration revealed that of the total admissions to treatment services for crack use, blacks outpaced whites in 1996, but whites outpaced blacks in 2005 for those under 30 years old.

Then came Tyler Perry with his inexplicable fascination with this cliché, and his almost single-handed revival of it.

In the last five years, he has featured a crack-addicted black mother who leaves her children in two of his films and on his very popular sitcom, “House of Payne.” (In one of the films, the character is referred to but never seen.) In another film, a main character is a drug-addicted prostitute. And in yet another, a mother leaves her family for the drug dealer.

It should be noted that “Precious” is “co-presented” by Perry.

Let it go, Mr. Perry. These never-ending portrayals perpetuate the modern mythology that little has changed when much has. Even for Whitney.

Correction: An earlier version of this column incorrectly described Mo’Nique’s character in the movie “Precious.” She was not a crack addict.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

It’s not like David Paterson had a choice. His decision to give up on a bid for election to governor in his own right was a decision to scrap a campaign that had no real support and absolutely no chance of succeeding. The bottom had completely fallen out of his election bid, and the question now is whether the same is true about his governorship.

When you are the first black governor of New York and black elected officials and members of the clergy are gathering to light the path to your exit, you are in deep, deep trouble.

There are two immediate questions for voters: Why did the governor select David Johnson, a man with a troubled background and no demonstrated command of state government policies or practices (at one time he was the governor’s driver) to be his most powerful, most trusted adviser? And why, in the name of heaven, did people close to the governor, and perhaps even the governor himself, intervene to protect Mr. Johnson from an ugly domestic violence allegation?

These questions go to the heart of whether Mr. Paterson is suited to serve out the remaining 10 months of his term as governor. He is responsible for staffing his administration with the best people and for seeing that the great power of state government is used on behalf of the interests of ordinary New Yorkers, not as a club to protect his cronies.

Domestic violence was supposed to be an issue that Mr. Paterson knew something about. He was an advocate of tougher laws to protect victims and has not been shy about criticizing Hiram Monserrate, who was expelled from the State Senate after being convicted of misdemeanor assault for dragging his companion down an apartment building hallway.

The governor described the victim in that episode as “a classic case of a woman who was intimidated.”

But when Mr. Johnson was accused of attacking his longtime companion — stripping off most of her clothes, choking her, slamming her against a dresser, preventing her from calling for help — state officials raised a protective cordon around Mr. Johnson, not the alleged victim. Even as the frightened woman was seeking an order of protection from the courts, she was being urged by powerful state forces to drop the whole thing.

When she failed to show up in court just one day after a conversation with the governor himself, the charges against Mr. Johnson were thrown out.

There is something terribly wrong with this picture. For one thing, the case was a local police matter, but the woman complained to the court that the State Police had been harassing her, trying to get her to change her mind about seeking an order of protection and pursuing her case against Mr. Johnson.

The State Police? It turns out, according to sources cited by The Times on Friday, that Maj. Charles Day, the head of the governor’s own State Police security detail, personally contacted the woman. This is an outlandish abuse of State Police power. The police are supposed to be in the business of protecting crime victims — or alleged crime victims — not intimidating them.

The governor’s top criminal justice adviser, Denise O’Donnell, was not at all hazy about this. She quit the administration on Thursday, saying:

“The fact that the governor and members of the State Police have acknowledged direct contact with a woman who had filed for an order of protection against a senior member of the governor’s staff is a very serious matter. These actions are unacceptable regardless of their intent.”

Mr. Johnson was not arrested as a result of the woman’s complaint, which is not unusual. She alleged that he choked her, but choking is not a crime in New York unless there is evidence that the victim was injured. The charge raised against Mr. Johnson — and later dropped — was second degree harassment. That’s not even a misdemeanor. It’s a violation, the equivalent of a disorderly conduct charge.

But it was quite enough to get the big guns in state government rallying to Mr. Johnson’s side, and that should cause us to take a much closer look at people like Major Day, and the State Police superintendent, Harry Corbitt, who learned of the encounter between the woman and Mr. Johnson within 24 hours. He doesn’t seem to get that the State Police intervention was improper. Nor has he mastered the concept that cops are supposed to protect victims, not perps.

Mr. Paterson’s job now is to reassure the public that his overall judgment is sound and that he understands what was wrong about his behavior, Mr. Johnson’s behavior and the State Police’s behavior in the domestic violence case.

If he can’t do that, then he should hand the keys to the governor’s residence to the next in the line of succession, Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch.

It’s beginning to look like they need to put a revolving door on the New York Governor’s office…

Brooks, Cohen and Krugman

Bobo’s gone all concern troll in “Not as Dull as Expected!” in which he wrings his hands and says the health care summit may not have bridged the partisan rift, but there were moments of hope for the next set of reformers.  You’ll notice that the key words are “next set.”  In other words, Bobo’s praying the summit will be called “Kill Bill 2.”  Mr. Cohen, in “An Eye for an Eye,” says as drone attacks on terror suspects grow more frequent, it’s time for the U.S. to set out its doctrine on targeted killings.  Prof. Krugman also watched the health care summit.  In “Afflicting the Afflicted” he says since Republicans didn’t bother making much of a case at Thursday’s White House meeting, Democrats may have the last laugh by finishing the job and enacting health reform.  From his lips to God’s ear.  Here’s that tool Bobo:

Going in, I was as cynical as everybody else about the Blair House health care forum. I was planning to watch for a half-hour and then write about something else.

But the event was more meaningful than that. Most of the credit goes to President Obama. The man really knows how to lead a discussion. He stuck to specifics and tried to rein in people who were flying off into generalities. He picked out the core point in any comment. He tried to keep things going in a coherent direction.

Moreover, he seemed to be trying to get a result. Republicans had their substantive criticism of the Democratic bills, but Obama kept pressing them for areas of agreement.

The second useful thing about the meeting was that it bypassed the Congressional power structure. As usual, the quality of the comments got worse the closer you got to the party leadership. The Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid, gave remarks that veered between the misleading and the incoherent. Statements from Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, were partisan spin. The Republican leaders, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, were smart enough to stand back and let Senator Lamar Alexander lead the way, which he did genially and intelligently. While Alexander was speaking, Reid and Pelosi wouldn’t even deign to look at him.

Once you got to the other members, about two-thirds of the statements were smart and well-informed. This was not a repeat of the Baltimore summit, in which Obama dominated the room. This time, Obama was very good, but so were many others, like Mike Enzi, Jim Cooper, George Miller and Tom Coburn. If you thought Republicans were a bunch of naysayers who don’t know or care about health care, then this was not the event for you. They more than held their own.

The third useful thing about Thursday’s forum was you got to see the Obama presidency encapsulated in one event. At the very end, the president summarized some possible points of agreement between the two parties, offered some concessions and asked Republicans to see if they could make some on their own.

As always with the Obama compromise offers, this offer seemed to be both sincere and insincere. Embodying the core contradiction of the Obama presidency, the president seemed both to want to craft a new package and also to defend the strictly Democratic approach. I think he’s a bipartisan man stuck in a partisan town, but maybe he’s an iron partisan fist in a velvet postpartisan glove.

Fourth, you got to see how confident Republicans are. Obama’s compromise offer is one the Republicans can happily refuse. In their eyes, he is saying: If you don’t make some concessions now, I’m going to punch myself in the face. If you don’t embrace parts of my bill, I will waste the next three months trying to push an unpopular measure through an ugly reconciliation process that will probably lead to failure anyway.

Fifth, you got to see at least one area of bipartisan agreement. Neither side was willing to be specific about how to cut costs and raise revenue. The Republicans continued to demagogue efforts to restrain Medicare spending. The Democrats (and the Republicans) conveniently neglected to mention the fact that they had just gutted the long-term revenue source for their entire package, the excise tax on high-cost insurance plans. That tax was diluted and postponed until 2018. There is no way that members of a Congress eight years from now are going to accede to a $1 trillion tax increase to pay for a measure that the 2010 Congress wasn’t brave enough to pay for itself.

Sixth, the summit illuminated one of the core mysteries of this whole debate: Are the two parties so fundamentally divided that there will never be any agreement, or is there at least the theoretical possibility of a compromise approach?

Both parties see the same problem. The current system is a mess, with opaque prices and perverse incentives that mostly favor the insurance companies. But, as Yuval Levin has pointed out in National Review, the Democrats believe the answer is to create a highly regulated insurance system with inefficiencies eliminated through rational rules. The Republicans believe that the answer is to create a genuine market with clear price signals, empowered consumers and an evolving process.

Philosophically, it is hard to bring these two sides together. And there were times on Thursday when compromise seemed hopeless. But there were other times, when participants started talking nuts and bolts of the exchanges, when there was overlap: how to create interstate insurance markets without a race to the bottom; how to end insurance company power over those with pre-existing conditions.

Health care reform probably will not get passed this year. But there were moments, at the most wonky and specific, when the two sides echoed each other. Glimmers of hope for the next set of reformers.

Here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from Madrid:

Back in 1976, a Chilean hit squad assassinated former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American colleague in Washington. Letelier was one of the most prominent opponents of the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

A rough equivalent today would be China orchestrating the elimination in the United States of a prominent Uighur opponent, or the Russians assassinating a leading Chechen on a Georgetown street.

Needless to say, the U.S. government would be outraged at such extrajudicial executions on American soil. We don’t want to live in a world where nations blow up enemies, or smother them with pillows, in other countries with which they’re not at war.

But nor, of course, can we do less than everything possible to avert another 9/11, and that’s where things get murky.

So let’s make a few things clear. Since 9/11, with greater intensity under the Obama administration, the United States has wordlessly lifted the ban in effect since the Ford administration on targeted killings by U.S. intelligence officers. Such killings are now taking place almost daily under a C.I.A.-directed covert program. Drones firing Hellfire missiles have eliminated several Al Qaeda leaders.

The drone strikes are concentrated on Pakistan, with which America is not at war. The Obama administration has declined to say anything about this doctrine of targeted killing. It’s not clear how you get on a list to be eliminated; who makes that call; whether the decision is based on past acts (revenge, say, for the killing of C.I.A. agents in Khost, Afghanistan) or only on corroborated intelligence demonstrating that the target is planning a terrorist attack; what, if any, the battlefield limits are; and what, if any, is the basis in law.

The closest I can find to an official accounting of the drone program was from Senator John Kerry last October: “I am convinced that it is highly circumscribed now, very carefully controlled within a hierarchy of decision-making, significantly limited in its collateral damage, and profoundly successful in the impact it has had in putting Al Qaeda on the run. It is why we can now say that perhaps 14 of the top 20 Al Qaeda leaders have been eliminated.”

That success is significant, even if “on the run” is hyperbole. But the “collateral damage” is also substantial and has a cascade terrorist-recruitment effect. On balance, President Obama, who campaigned against the “dark side” of the war on terror and has insisted that America must lead by example as a nation of laws, owes Americans an accounting of his targeted killing program.

Revenge killings don’t pass the test for me. They’re unacceptable under international law. I want to know that any target is selected because there is verifiable intelligence that he’s actively planning a terrorist attack on the United States or its allies; that the danger is pressing; that arrest is impossible; and that civilian lives are not wantonly risked.

The bar of pre-emptive self-defense is then passed. A pinpoint strike is better than the Afghan or Iraqi scenarios. But that bar must be high. America departs at its peril from its principles.

I know, terrorists have no rule book, no borders and no compunction. The global war on terror (GWOT) is untidy. Still, the current accountability void for U.S. targeted killing is unacceptable.

America is treading a familiar path. Israel pioneered the use of unmanned drones to kill Hamas operatives. Gerald Steinberg wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal that “U.S. forces have copied Israel’s technique with their own drone killings of jihadi terrorists.” But, of course, the United States is not Israel. It’s not a small nation, surrounded by more numerous enemies, at war since its foundation against foes bent on its destruction. It’s not consumed by the specter of nonexistence.

Vicky Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer, told The Los Angeles Times: “At one time, the United States did not kill in the shadows — until we became as afraid for our lives as the Israelis have been for decades.” That’s right — and unacceptable. Fear cannot be a global license for the United States of America to kill.

My doubt level that the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, was behind the murder in Dubai last month of the senior Hamas operative, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, is about that of the Dubai police chief who said he was “99 percent, if not 100 percent” certain that Israel was responsible. An eye for an eye: al-Mabhouh was the murderer of two Israeli soldiers, as well as a shipper of arms to Hamas. I won’t shed a tear.

But what a messy trail: all that video, European passports belonging to Israelis whose lives are now at risk, diplomatic fallout. So what, argues Steinberg, who teaches political science at Bar Ilan University, al-Mabhouh was “probably making arrangements for the next round of attacks.”

Note the “probably:” That’s insufficient grounds for extrajudicial execution. Israel, too, must at a minimum have specific intelligence that a target is planning an imminent terrorist attack. Revenge is a blind alley.

And America must lead by its own — not a far more vulnerable ally’s — example or it will end up eyeless in GWOT.

And now here’s Prof. Krugman:

If we’re lucky, Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans responding with slander and misdirection.

Nobody really expected anything different. But what was nonetheless revealing about the meeting was the fact that Republicans — who had weeks to prepare for this particular event, and have been campaigning against reform for a year — didn’t bother making a case that could withstand even minimal fact-checking.

It was obvious how things would go as soon as the first Republican speaker, Senator Lamar Alexander, delivered his remarks. He was presumably chosen because he’s folksy and likable and could make his party’s position sound reasonable. But right off the bat he delivered a whopper, asserting that under the Democratic plan, “for millions of Americans, premiums will go up.”

Wow. I guess you could say that he wasn’t technically lying, since the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Senate Democrats’ plan does say that average payments for insurance would go up. But it also makes it clear that this would happen only because people would buy more and better coverage. The “price of a given amount of insurance coverage” would fall, not rise — and the actual cost to many Americans would fall sharply thanks to federal aid.

His fib on premiums was quickly followed by a fib on process. Democrats, having already passed a health bill with 60 votes in the Senate, now plan to use a simple majority vote to modify some of the numbers, a process known as reconciliation. Mr. Alexander declared that reconciliation has “never been used for something like this.” Well, I don’t know what “like this” means, but reconciliation has, in fact, been used for previous health reforms — and was used to push through both of the Bush tax cuts at a budget cost of $1.8 trillion, twice the bill for health reform.

What really struck me about the meeting, however, was the inability of Republicans to explain how they propose dealing with the issue that, rightly, is at the emotional center of much health care debate: the plight of Americans who suffer from pre-existing medical conditions. In other advanced countries, everyone gets essential care whatever their medical history. But in America, a bout of cancer, an inherited genetic disorder, or even, in some states, having been a victim of domestic violence can make you uninsurable, and thus make adequate health care unaffordable.

One of the great virtues of the Democratic plan is that it would finally put an end to this unacceptable case of American exceptionalism. But what’s the Republican answer? Mr. Alexander was strangely inarticulate on the matter, saying only that “House Republicans have some ideas about how my friend in Tullahoma can continue to afford insurance for his wife who has had breast cancer.” He offered no clue about what those ideas might be.

In reality, House Republicans don’t have anything to offer to Americans with troubled medical histories. On the contrary, their big idea — allowing unrestricted competition across state lines — would lead to a race to the bottom. The states with the weakest regulations — for example, those that allow insurance companies to deny coverage to victims of domestic violence — would set the standards for the nation as a whole. The result would be to afflict the afflicted, to make the lives of Americans with pre-existing conditions even harder.

Don’t take my word for it. Look at the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the House G.O.P. plan. That analysis is discreetly worded, with the budget office declaring somewhat obscurely that while the number of uninsured Americans wouldn’t change much, “the pool of people without health insurance would end up being less healthy, on average, than under current law.” But here’s the translation: While some people would gain insurance, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most. Under the Republican plan, the American health care system would become even more brutal than it is now.

So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right.

But Democrats can have the last laugh. All they have to do — and they have the power to do it — is finish the job, and enact health reform.

Kristof, flying solo.

I wish I had the vacation schedule that the Times columnists do.  Gail Collins is off today, and Mr. Kristof has a question:  “Do Toxins Cause Autism?”  He says autism and other development disorders constitute a huge national health burden, and suspicions are growing that one culprit may be chemicals in the environment.  Here he is:

Autism was first identified in 1943 in an obscure medical journal. Since then it has become a frighteningly common affliction, with the Centers for Disease Control reporting recently that autism disorders now affect almost 1 percent of children.

Over recent decades, other development disorders also appear to have proliferated, along with certain cancers in children and adults. Why? No one knows for certain. And despite their financial and human cost, they presumably won’t be discussed much at Thursday’s White House summit on health care.

Yet they constitute a huge national health burden, and suspicions are growing that one culprit may be chemicals in the environment. An article in a forthcoming issue of a peer-reviewed medical journal, Current Opinion in Pediatrics, just posted online, makes this explicit.

The article cites “historically important, proof-of-concept studies that specifically link autism to environmental exposures experienced prenatally.” It adds that the “likelihood is high” that many chemicals “have potential to cause injury to the developing brain and to produce neurodevelopmental disorders.”

The author is not a granola-munching crank but Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, professor of pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and chairman of the school’s department of preventive medicine. While his article is full of cautionary language, Dr. Landrigan told me that he is increasingly confident that autism and other ailments are, in part, the result of the impact of environmental chemicals on the brain as it is being formed.

“The crux of this is brain development,” he said. “If babies are exposed in the womb or shortly after birth to chemicals that interfere with brain development, the consequences last a lifetime.”

Concern about toxins in the environment used to be a fringe view. But alarm has moved into the medical mainstream. Toxicologists, endocrinologists and oncologists seem to be the most concerned.

One uncertainty is to what extent the reported increases in autism simply reflect a more common diagnosis of what might previously have been called mental retardation. There are genetic components to autism (identical twins are more likely to share autism than fraternal twins), but genetics explains only about one-quarter of autism cases.

Suspicions of toxins arise partly because studies have found that disproportionate shares of children develop autism after they are exposed in the womb to medications such as thalidomide (a sedative), misoprostol (ulcer medicine) and valproic acid (anticonvulsant). Of children born to women who took valproic acid early in pregnancy, 11 percent were autistic. In each case, fetuses seem most vulnerable to these drugs in the first trimester of pregnancy, sometimes just a few weeks after conception.

So as we try to improve our health care, it’s also prudent to curb the risks from the chemicals that envelop us. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey is drafting much-needed legislation that would strengthen the Toxic Substances Control Act. It is moving ahead despite his own recent cancer diagnosis, and it can be considered as an element of health reform. Senator Lautenberg says that under existing law, of 80,000 chemicals registered in the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency has required safety testing of only 200. “Our children have become test subjects,” he noted.

One peer-reviewed study published this year in Environmental Health Perspectives gave a hint of the risks. Researchers measured the levels of suspect chemicals called phthalates in the urine of pregnant women. Among women with higher levels of certain phthalates (those commonly found in fragrances, shampoos, cosmetics and nail polishes), their children years later were more likely to display disruptive behavior.

Frankly, these are difficult issues for journalists to write about. Evidence is technical, fragmentary and conflicting, and there’s a danger of sensationalizing risks. Publicity about fears that vaccinations cause autism — a theory that has now been discredited — perhaps had the catastrophic consequence of lowering vaccination rates in America.

On the other hand, in the case of great health dangers of modern times — mercury, lead, tobacco, asbestos — journalists were too slow to blow the whistle. In public health, we in the press have more often been lap dogs than watchdogs.

At a time when many Americans still use plastic containers to microwave food, in ways that make toxicologists blanch, we need accelerated research, regulation and consumer protection.

“There are diseases that are increasing in the population that we have no known cause for,” said Alan M. Goldberg, a professor of toxicology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “Breast cancer, prostate cancer, autism are three examples. The potential is for these diseases to be on the rise because of chemicals in the environment.”

The precautionary principle suggests that we should be wary of personal products like fragrances unless they are marked phthalate-free. And it makes sense — particularly for children and pregnant women — to avoid most plastics marked at the bottom as 3, 6 and 7 because they are the ones associated with potentially harmful toxins.

Friedman, solo.

MoDo is off today, which is a very good thing.  The Moustache of Wisdom addresses “Iraq’s Known Unknowns, Still Unknown,” and has a question:  Will Iraq’s new politics triumph over its cultural divides, or will its cultural divides sink its fledgling democracy?  He didn’t interview a cab driver or discuss Friedman Units, so I don’t know what to make of it.  Here he is:

From the very beginning of the U.S. intervention in Iraq and the effort to build some kind of democracy there, a simple but gnawing question has lurked in the background: Was Iraq the way Iraq was (a dictatorship) because Saddam was the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq was the way Iraq was — a collection of warring sects incapable of self-rule and only governable with an iron fist?

Alas, some seven years after the U.S. toppled Saddam’s government, a few weeks before Iraq’s second democratic national election, and in advance of the pullout of American forces, this question still has not been answered. Will Iraq’s new politics triumph over its cultural divides, or will its cultural/sectarian divides sink its fledgling democracy? We still don’t know.

In many ways, Iraq is a test case for the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s dictum that “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

Ironically, though, it was the neo-conservative Bush team that argued that culture didn’t matter in Iraq, and that the prospect of democracy and self-rule would automatically bring Iraqis together to bury the past. While many liberals and realists contended that Iraq was an irredeemable tribal hornet’s nest and we should not be sticking our hand in there; it was place where the past would always bury the future.

But stick we did, and in so doing we gave Iraqis a chance to do something no other Arab people have ever had a chance to do: freely write their own social contract on how they would like to rule themselves and live together.

With elections set for March 7, with America slated to shrink to 50,000 troops by September — and down to zero by the end of 2011 — Iraqis will have to decide how they want to exploit this opportunity.

I met last week with Gen. Ray Odierno, the overall U.S. commander in Iraq, who along with Vice President Joe Biden has done more to coach, coax, cajole and occasionally shove Iraqis away from the abyss than anyone else. I found the general hopeful but worried. He was hopeful because he has seen Iraqis go to the brink so many times and then pull back, but worried because sectarian violence is steadily creeping back ahead of the elections and certain Shiite politicians, like the former Bush darling Ahmed Chalabi — whom General Odierno indicated is clearly “influenced by Iran” and up to no good — have been trying to exclude some key Sunni politicians from the election.

It is critical, said Odierno, that “Iraqis feel that the elections are credible and legitimate” and that the democratic process is working. “I don’t want the campaigning to lead to a sectarian divide again,” he added. “I worry that some elements will feel politically isolated and will not have the ability to influence and participate.”

How might this play out? The ideal but least likely scenario is that we see the emergence of an Iraqi Shiite Nelson Mandela. The Shiites, long suppressed by Iraq’s Baathist-led Sunni minority, are now Iraq’s ruling majority. Could Iraq produce a Shiite politician, who, like Mandela, would be a national healer — someone who would use his power to lead a real reconciliation instead of just a Shiite dominion? So far, no sign of it.

Even without a Mandela, Iraq could still hold together, and thrive, if its rival Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish communities both recognize the new balance of power — that the Shiites are now the dominant community in Iraq and, ultimately, will have the biggest say — and the new limits of power. No community can assert its will by force and, therefore, sectarian disputes have to be resolved politically.

The two scenarios you don’t want to see are: 1) Iraq’s tribal culture triumphing over politics and the country becoming a big Somalia with oil; or 2) as America fades away, Iraq’s Shiite government aligning itself more with Iran, and Iran becoming the kingmaker in Iraq the way Syria has made itself in Lebanon.

Why should we care when we’re leaving? Quite simply, so much of the turmoil in the region was stoked over the years by Saddam’s Iraq and Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, both financed by billions in oil revenues. If, over time, a decent democratizing regime could emerge in Iraq and a similar one in Iran — so that oil wealth was funding reasonably decent regimes rather than retrograde ones — the whole Middle East would be different.

The odds, though, remain very long. In the end, it will come back to that nagging question of politics versus culture. Personally, I’m a believer in the argument Lawrence Harrison makes in his book “The Central Liberal Truth” — culture matters, a lot more than we think, but cultures can change, a lot more than we expect. But such change takes time, leadership and often pain. Which is why, I suspect, Iraqis will surprise us — for good and for ill — a lot more before they finally answer the question: Who are we and how do we want to live together?

Brooks, Cohen and Herbert

In “Into the Mire” Bobo writes about another compromise from the White House, another Washington gimmick as the health bill remains (barely) alive.  Mr. Cohen, in “The Narcissus Society,” says it’s time for self-absorbed Americans to recognize one another through universal health care.  In “Where the Bar Ought to Be” Mr. Herbert tells us that in Harlem, an educator is expecting the best, not the worst, from students at her charter schools.  Here’s Bobo:

Barack Obama came to Washington with the nation’s hope for change riding on his shoulders. He promised to reform the health care system. He hired many of the country’s top experts who had written brilliantly about how to do reform.

He immediately moved away from some of their ideas. This was understandable. America isn’t Plato’s Republic. It’s not a nation governed by experts. It’s a democracy. To get things passed, you’ve got to allow for political reality.

So President Obama promised to keep health insurance the same for most Americans. This meant it was going to be harder to bring down costs. This meant it wouldn’t be possible to replace the fraying employer-based insurance system. But these compromises could be justified.

Then the Congress began its deal-making. There were special favors put in for certain senators. There were special arrangements made for big Democratic donors, like the trial lawyers. These were compromises, too. They were ugly, and they soiled everybody involved. But, again, they could be justified for reasons of political expediency. The bill that emerged from the Senate was not to everybody’s liking. It wouldn’t reduce the nation’s overall health care spending.

But at least the Senate bill had some integrity. It would cover 30 million people without adding to the deficit. It did this in real ways. It included real Medicare cuts. Most importantly, it included an excise tax on luxury insurance plans.

The excise tax is one of those ideas health care economists of all stripes love. Currently, we have a perverse tax system that taxes salaries but not health benefits. This exclusion favors the rich over the middle class. It encourages extravagant health spending.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, taxing health benefits is one of the two most effective ways to bring down health care costs. Plus, it brings in a ton of revenue. According to the Lewin Group, a health care consulting firm, the excise tax in the Senate bill would bring in $957 billion between 2020 and 2029. This is what pays for expanding coverage. This is why the president could promise to veto any bill that adds a dime to the deficit.

But, alas, this is Washington, 2010. The muck rises. The compromises never stop.

As the year went on, health care reform grew more unpopular. If you average the last 10 polls, 38 percent of voters support the reform plans and 53 percent oppose. Obama’s reform is more unpopular than Bill Clinton’s was as it died.

As the political costs rose, members of Congress squealed louder. Congress is not a bastion of courage in the best of circumstances. When it is asked to actually pay for its expenditures, it verges on hysteria.

Some Republicans campaigned against the excise tax. John McCain had made the excise tax a centerpiece of his reform plan. But Scott Brown of Massachusetts and others ran against it.

Unions went next. They demanded a special deal so their members would be exempt from the tax. The Democrats caved and gave it to them.

Blood was now in the water. Everyone smelled weakness. If the White House hopes to pass something in this atmosphere, it needs every Democratic vote it can get. It needs to cater to every special-interest plea. Right now, the White House has no leverage.

Efforts to kill the tax mounted. On Jan. 27, Nancy Pelosi told a group of journalists, “The excise tax has no support, very little support, in our caucus.” The pollsters said it was a loser. That was a sign the Congressional leadership wanted it dead.

On Monday, the White House made another compromise. On the surface, it seems mundane. The imposition of the excise tax will be delayed until 2018, and the threshold at which the tax kicks in will be raised. In reality, the delay turns the tax into another Washington gimmick. Lord, give me virtue, but not yet.

The odds are high that the excise tax will never actually happen. There is no reason to think that the Congress of 2018 will be any braver than the Congress of today. It will probably get around the pay-go rules or whatever else might apply and it’ll postpone the tax again. The excise tax will turn into another “doc fix.” This is a mythical provision in which doctors are always about to get their reimbursements cut. But somehow they never do because the cuts are always pushed back, year after year.

So we’ve sunk another level in our tawdry tale. The White House, to its enormous credit, has tried to think about the long term. But it has been dragged ever lower into the mire by Congressional special interests that are parochial in the extreme.

This bill may be deficit-neutral on paper. But it has just become a fiscal time bomb. The revenue will never come. Compromises have to be made to keep it (barely) alive. But responsibility ebbs. Politics wins.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

Where Oedipus once tormented us, it is now Narcissus. Pathologies linked to authority and domination have ceded to the limitless angst of self-contemplation. The old question — “What am I allowed to do?” — has given way to the equally scary “What am I capable of doing?” Alain Ehrenberg, a French author and psychologist, speaks of the “privatization of human existence.”

Community — a stable job, shared national experience, extended family, labor unions — has vanished or eroded. In its place have come a frenzied individualism, solipsistic screen-gazing, the disembodied pleasures of social networking and the à-la-carte life as defined by 600 TV channels and a gazillion blogs. Feelings of anxiety and inadequacy grow in the lonely chamber of self-absorption and projection.

These trends are common to all globalized modern democracies, ranging from those that prize individualism, like the United States, to those, like France, where social solidarity is a paramount value. Ehrenberg’s new book, “La Société du Malaise” (“The Malaise Society”) is full of insights into the impact of narcissistic neurosis.

Sometimes, it seems, we are as lonely as those little planes over the Atlantic in on-board video navigation maps.

I was thinking of this during a recent spell as a grand juror. Thrown together for two weeks at Brooklyn Supreme Court with 22 other jurors, I was struck by how rare it is now in American life to be gathered, physically, with an array of other folk of different ages, backgrounds, skin colors, beliefs, faiths, tastes, education levels and political convictions and be obliged to work out your differences in order to get the job done.

It was not always easy, of course; not easy to deal with the fidgety paramedic chewing chips through murder testimony, the scattershot flirtations of the former rhythm-and-blues musician, the off-point ruminations of the old guy who knew he was always right, the intermittent tedium and incoherence.

I can still hear the juror next to me. “I work at 311” — the number New Yorkers dial with complaints or questions about the city. “Drives me nuts, been doing it five years. People treat you like idiots. Most of the time it’s water seeping into basements, sewage systems blocked. At least my job hasn’t been outsourced to Bangalore. People ask me, ‘You in New York?’ They ask me, ‘Are you a human being or a robot?’ Sometimes I say, “I … AM … A … ROBOT.’ But we’ve got supervisors listening to calls. One thing that drives me crazy is all the people who speak slowly, as if I’m an idiot. I tell them, ‘You can speak faster, you know!’ Jury duty’s actually a relief!”

In a way, it was — a relief from being alone on a phone or in front of a screen. We got to know each other’s tics and, having dealt with killing and rape and assault and insurance fraud, we all embraced at the end. Oh unthinkable act, we’d done something selfless for the commonweal, learned to listen to each other, accepted differences and argued our way to decisions.

America could use more of that kind of experience. As it is, everyone’s shrieking their lonesome anger, burrowing deeper into stress, gazing at their own images — and generating paralysis.

Which brings me to health care: Crunch time has come on a question central to the nation’s future, where an acknowledgment is needed that, when it comes to health, we’re all in this together. Pooling the risk among everybody is the most efficient way to forge a healthier society. That’s what other developed societies do. And they don’t have 30 million plus uninsured.

Now, as I understand it, the Tea Party movement is angry about waste, bail-outs for the rich and spiraling debt. They detest big government. But if waste and debt are really what’s bothering them, how about the waste in the more than 1,800 daily health-care related personal bankruptcies, the 25 to 30 percent of some corporate insurers’ costs going on administration (versus 6 percent for Medicare), the sky-rocketing health premiums that are undermining U.S. corporations (and so taking jobs), the endless paperwork of private reimbursement procedures, and the needless deaths?

Americans don’t want a European nanny state — fine! But, as a lawyer friend, Manuel Wally, put it to me, “When it comes to health it makes sense to involve government, which is accountable to the people, rather than corporations, which are accountable to shareholders.”

All the fear-mongering talk of “nationalizing” 17 percent of the economy is nonsense. Government, through Medicare and Medicaid, is already administering almost half of American health care and doing so with less waste than the private sector. Per capita Medicare costs for common benefits grew 4.9 percent between 1998 and 2008, against 7.1 percent for private insurers. Why not offer Medicare as a choice — a choice — to everyone? Aren’t Republicans about choice?

The public option, not dead, would amount to recognition of shared interest in each other’s health and of the need to use America’s energies and resources better. It would involve 300 million people linking arms.

Or we can turn away from each other and, like Narcissus, perish in the contemplation of our own reflections.

And now here’s Mr. Herbert:

Deborah Kenny talks a lot about passion — the passion for teaching, for reading and for learning. She has it. She wants all of her teachers to have it. Above all, she wants her students to have it.

Ms. Kenny has created three phenomenally successful charter schools in Harlem and is in the process of creating more. She’s gotten a great deal of national attention. But for all the talk about improving schools in this country, she thinks we tend to miss the point more often than not.

There is an overemphasis on “the program elements,” she said, “things like curriculum and class size and school size and the longer day.” She understood in 2001, when she was planning the first of the schools that have come to be known as the Harlem Village Academies, that none of those program elements were nearly as important as the quality of the teaching in the schools.

“If you had an amazing teacher who was talented and passionate and given the freedom and support to teach well,” she said, “that was just 100 times more important than anything else.”

This emphasis on program elements is one of the main reasons it has been so difficult to repeat the successes of outstanding schools. As Ms. Kenny put it, “They were trying to replicate programs instead of trying to develop people.”

It’s not that the program elements are unimportant. When I visited a Harlem Village Academy middle school on First Avenue, the first thing I noticed was an apparent paradox: There was a great deal of energy and excitement in the school but not much noise, not even when children were changing classes. The school day is longer. The curriculum is carefully thought out. And discipline is obviously important. Youngsters are not allowed to make fun of one another. And there is no fighting.

When I asked one boy why there were no fights in the school, he replied, “Because it’s not allowed.”

Ms. Kenny’s point is that these programmatic, structural elements in the schools are just the starting points, the foundation that supports the essential mission of any school: to teach.

“I became obsessed with how to develop great teachers,” she said.

The first step in that complex, difficult process is to create a school environment that has standards high enough and challenging enough to appeal to very good people. “You put all of your focus on finding great people,” said Ms. Kenny, “and you establish a culture that helps them constantly learn and grow and become better at what they do. You have to provide a community in the school that supports and respects teachers. And you have to give them the kind of freedom that allows their passion for teaching to flourish.

“We’ve created a culture that brings out the passion of the teachers and they bring out the passion of the kids.”

Charter schools, of course, can fire teachers for poor performance. “Obviously, none of us should be allowed to be in front of children if we’re not doing a good job,” Ms. Kenny said. “But the threat of being fired if you don’t do a good job is not what makes a teacher great.”

Ms. Kenny has established two middle schools and one high school and is in the process of creating three elementary schools. Her track record has been extraordinary.

The majority of the youngsters come into the middle schools performing at three to four years behind their grade levels. Within a very short time, they are on the fast track toward college. In 2008, when the math and science test scores came in, Ms. Kenny’s eighth graders had achieved 100 percent proficiency. It was not a fluke.

What’s ironic is that the teachers are doing everything but teaching to the tests. Ms. Kenny’s goals for the youngsters in her schools are the same as those that she had for her own three children, who grew up in a comfortable suburban environment and are now in college. Merely passing a standardized test was hardly something to aspire to.

“I had five core things in mind for my kids, and that’s what I want for our students,” she said. “I wanted them to be wholesome in character. I wanted them to be compassionate and to see life as a responsibility to give something to the world. I wanted them to have a sophisticated intellect. I wanted them to be avid readers, the kind of person who always has trouble putting a book down. And I raised them to be independent thinkers, to lead reflective and meaningful lives.”

It never crossed Ms. Kenny’s mind that a rich and abiding intellectual life was out of the reach of kids growing up in a tough urban environment.

The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz, in “Enquiring Minds,” says not all affairs produce corruption, but the media should be willing to go digging for those private acts that should be publicly disqualifying.  Great.  Just what we need… more panty sniffing by the likes of the Putz.  (The brain bleach is over there in the corner.)  Prof. Krugman, in “The Bankruptcy Boys,” says Republicans are adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, but they don’t have any other plan, except to regain power.  Here’s The Panty Sniffing Putz:

This year, for the first time in its colorful history, The National Enquirer will be in the running for a Pulitzer Prize.

It might even deserve to win one.

Last Thursday, after weeks of hedging, the Pulitzer Committee acknowledged that the Enquirer’s extensive coverage of John Edwards’s double life — stories that were first ignored, then dismissed, and finally vindicated in the mainstream press — would be considered for investigative reporting and national news reporting awards.

By rights, the Edwards story should have been entered in the “public service” category as well. If the supermarket tabloid’s reporters hadn’t gone digging where other journalists declined to even tread, we might never have learned how close the Democratic Party came to nominating a truly disgraceful character for the presidency.

It’s remarkable, in a way, that the Enquirer still exists at all, let alone that it’s enjoying a moment in the journalistic sun. In the age of Gawker, Twitter, and TMZ.com, a weekly scandal sheet seems quaint, if not archaic. And in an era when newspapers are fighting desperately for readers, you would think that the mainstream media — hemorrhaging subscribers and hungry for online eyeballs — would uncover all the really interesting scandals first.

But you’d be wrong. The Internet is very good at generating gossip, but lousy at the dogged work of transforming rumor into news. And the national press almost seems more uncertain about when and whether to probe into politicians’ private lives than it was in the days when The Miami Herald cheerfully ran a photograph of Donna Rice sitting side-saddle on Gary Hart’s lap.

The result is salacious overkill one moment, but unexpected diffidence the next. The last election cycle, for instance, gave us the great Sarah Palin feeding frenzy. But it also featured a number of cases where the media raised a potential scandal and then left it unresolved — from The New York Times’s report about John McCain’s complicated relationship with a female lobbyist, to the Vanity Fair profile of Bill Clinton that implicitly accused him of philandering without coming out and saying it.

And then, of course, there was the scandal that was never raised at all, save in the pages of the Enquirer: the truth about John Edwards’s recklessness and caddishness, and the grim reality behind his doting-husband facade.

Such journalistic reticence might be defended as a means to a less prurient and sex-obsessed culture, which heaven knows we could use. But the gossip machine will grind on irrespective of what the major newspapers report. If Americans aren’t reading about Edwards and Rielle Hunter, they’ll just read about Tiger Woods or the Jolie-Pitts instead.

Better the former than the latter. Watching Woods unburden himself last Friday made me think: This really shouldn’t be any of my business. I’ve never had the same thought watching John Edwards confess his sins. Athletes and actors don’t work for us directly; they’re entrusted with great wealth and fame, but not great power. But the private peccadilloes of politicians tend to interfere with, and corrupt, their commission of their public duties.

This has been the pattern in nearly every recent sex scandal, from Mark Sanford’s dereliction of duty to Arizona Senator John Ensign’s alleged payoffs to his mistress to Eliot Spitzer’s prostitution habit. (It’s worth noting, as a precedent for the Enquirer’s Pulitzer bid, that The Times won a prize last year for its coverage of the Spitzer story.) And it was the pattern 50 years ago as well. Anyone who waxes nostalgic for the days when the press corps winked and nodded at John F. Kennedy’s adulteries, for instance, should acknowledge that they’re pining for a time when the president of the United States probably shared a mistress with a mobster without the public knowing anything about it.

Not all affairs produce corruption, and we don’t have to know every sin that our politicians commit. Bill Clinton wasn’t on the ballot in 2008, and maybe the public didn’t need a substantial investigation into his post-presidential sex life. (Though one imagines that Democratic primary voters trying to decide whether to let him back inside the White House might have wanted to hear a little more about the issue.)

But the Democratic Party’s narrow escape from the nightmare of an Edwards candidacy suggests that there’s a case for erring on the side of prurience. Some private acts should be publicly disqualifying, and the media need to be willing to go digging for them. Pulitzer or no, we can’t always count on The National Enquirer to tell us what we need to know.

Let us all pray that the Republican Party escapes the nightmare of a Palin candidacy…  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

O.K., the beast is starving. Now what? That’s the question confronting Republicans. But they’re refusing to answer, or even to engage in any serious discussion about what to do.

For readers who don’t know what I’m talking about: ever since Reagan, the G.O.P. has been run by people who want a much smaller government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?

The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed “starving the beast” during the Reagan years. The idea — propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol — was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait and switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government’s fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.

And the deficit came. True, more than half of this year’s budget deficit is the result of the Great Recession, which has both depressed revenues and required a temporary surge in spending to contain the damage. But even when the crisis is over, the budget will remain deeply in the red, largely as a result of Bush-era tax cuts (and Bush-era unfunded wars). And the combination of an aging population and rising medical costs will, unless something is done, lead to explosive debt growth after 2020.

So the beast is starving, as planned. It should be time, then, for conservatives to explain which parts of the beast they want to cut. And President Obama has, in effect, invited them to do just that, by calling for a bipartisan deficit commission.

Many progressives were deeply worried by this proposal, fearing that it would turn into a kind of Trojan horse — in particular, that the commission would end up reviving the long-standing Republican goal of gutting Social Security. But they needn’t have worried: Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted against legislation that would have created a commission with some actual power, and it is unlikely that anything meaningful will come from the much weaker commission Mr. Obama established by executive order.

Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they’re adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they’re still not willing to do that.

In fact, conservatives have backed away from spending cuts they themselves proposed in the past. In the 1990s, for example, Republicans in Congress tried to force through sharp cuts in Medicare. But now they have made opposition to any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely the core of their campaign against health care reform (death panels!). And presidential hopefuls say things like this, from Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota: “I don’t think anybody’s gonna go back now and say, Let’s abolish, or reduce, Medicare and Medicaid.”

What about Social Security? Five years ago the Bush administration proposed limiting future payments to upper- and middle-income workers, in effect means-testing retirement benefits. But in December, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page denounced any such means-testing, because “middle- and upper-middle-class (i.e., G.O.P.) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes.” (Hmm. Since when do conservatives openly admit that the G.O.P. is the party of the affluent?)

At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.

But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: in effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn’t enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first.

Friedman and Kristof

MoDo and Mr. Rich are off today.  The Moustache of Wisdom says “The Fat Lady Has Sung,” and that President Obama’s calling is to lead nation-building. He clearly understands this but he has yet to give full voice to it.  Mr. Kristof, in “I Cost More, But I’m a Specialist,” poses a question:  What if the news industry were like our unreformed health care system?  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

A small news item from Tracy, Calif., caught my eye last week. Local station CBS 13 reported: “Tracy residents will now have to pay every time they call 911 for a medical emergency. But there are a couple of options. Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year, which allows them to call 911 as many times as necessary. Or there’s the option of not signing up for the annual fee. Instead they will be charged $300 if they make a call for help.”

Welcome to the lean years.

Yes, sir, we’ve just had our 70 fat years in America, thanks to the Greatest Generation and the bounty of freedom and prosperity they built for us. And in these past 70 years, leadership — whether of the country, a university, a company, a state, a charity, or a township — has largely been about giving things away, building things from scratch, lowering taxes or making grants.

But now it feels as if we are entering a new era, “where the great task of government and of leadership is going to be about taking things away from people,” said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum.

Indeed, to lead now is to trim, to fire or to downsize services, programs or personnel. We’ve gone from the age of government handouts to the age of citizen givebacks, from the age of companions fly free to the age of paying for each bag.

Let’s just hope our lean years will only number seven. That will depend a lot on us and whether we rise to the economic challenges of this moment. Our parents truly were the Greatest Generation. We, alas, in too many ways, have been what the writer Kurt Andersen called “The Grasshopper Generation,” eating through the prosperity that was bequeathed us like hungry locusts. Now we and our kids together need to be “The Regeneration” — the generation that renews, refreshes, re-energizes and rebuilds America for the 21st century.

President Obama’s bad luck was that he showed up just as we moved from the fat years to the lean years. His calling is to lead The Regeneration. He clearly understands that in his head, but he has yet to give full voice to it. Actually, the thing that most baffles me about Mr. Obama is how a politician who speaks so well, and is trying to do so many worthy things, can’t come up with a clear, simple, repeatable narrative to explain his politics — when it is so obvious.

Mr. Obama won the election because he was able to “rent” a significant number of independent voters — including Republican business types who had never voted for a Democrat in their lives — because they knew in their guts that the country was on the wrong track and was desperately in need of nation-building at home and that John McCain was not the man to do it.

They thought that Mr. Obama, despite his liberal credentials, had the unique skills, temperament, voice and values to pull the country together for this new Apollo program — not to take us to the moon, but into the 21st century.

Alas, though, instead of making nation-building in America his overarching narrative and then fitting health care, energy, educational reform, infrastructure, competitiveness and deficit reduction under that rubric, the president has pursued each separately. This made each initiative appear to be just some stand-alone liberal obsession to pay off a Democratic constituency — not an essential ingredient of a nation-building strategy — and, therefore, they have proved to be easily obstructed, picked off or delegitimized by opponents and lobbyists.

So “Obamism” feels at worst like a hodgepodge, at best like a to-do list — one that got way too dominated by health care instead of innovation and jobs — and not the least like a big, aspirational project that can bring out America’s still vast potential for greatness.

To be sure, taking over the presidency at the dawn of the lean years is no easy task. The president needs to persuade the country to invest in the future and pay for the past — past profligacy — all at the same time. We have to pay for more new schools and infrastructure than ever, while accepting more entitlement cuts than ever, when public trust in government is lower than ever.

On top of that, the Republican Party has never been more irresponsible. Having helped run the deficit to new heights during the recent Bush years, the G.O.P. is now unwilling to take any responsibility for dealing with it if it involves raising taxes. At the same time, the rise of cable TV has transformed politics in our country generally into just another spectator sport, like all-star wrestling. C-Span is just ESPN with only two teams. We watch it for entertainment, not solutions.

While it would certainly help if the president voiced a more compelling narrative, I am under no illusion that this alone would solve all his problems and ours. It comes back to us: We have to demand the truth from our politicians and be ready to accept it ourselves. We simply do not have another presidency to waste. There are no more fat years to eat through. If Obama fails, we all fail.

“On top of that, the Republican Party has never been more irresponsible.”  Truer words were rarely published.  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

Our health care has been memorably compared, by Jonathan Rauch of The National Journal, to the airline system. That made me wonder: What if the news industry were like our unreformed health care system … ?

First, enjoy this column! We Americans have the greatest news care system in the world, and we in journalism are proud of the cutting-edge punditry that we provide.

Columnists in other countries simply scribble illegibly in notebooks, but here in the United States we administer CAT scans to interviewees, just to rule out the chance that our subject is dead. Expensive, yes — but we Americans must never settle for second-best.

But wait! Before you read this column, please fill out this 18-page questionnaire. And good news — if you already filled it out previously, then you only have to fill out seven additional pages. I pride myself on my efficiency.

No, no, you’re mixing up the forms. Those are the ones for Maureen Dowd’s column; you’ll find David Brooks’s forms on the right and Paul Krugman’s on the left. You must file separate paperwork to read each columnist.

Good, good. All righty then: now the co-pay, please.

Oh, it doesn’t matter that you already submitted your co-pay for another columnist. We all work independently and, as you may have noticed, sometimes at cross-purposes.

By the way, columns such as this one about health care reform are out-of-network. Your insurance plan fully covers columns about many important topics, such as nephrology and Gregorian chant. But politics, health care, international affairs and anything that I might actually write about are all out-of-network.

So I’ll be billing you soon. I’ll tell you how much after you’ve read the column. Don’t worry: the invoice will clearly lay out cost codes, footnoted in cuneiform.

Typically, out-of-network benefits will provide substantial reimbursement for nouns, especially subjects. Unfortunately, you’re on your own with predicates. In particular, insurers stipulate that adjectives and adverbs are cosmetic and at your own expense.

A side note: Those with pre-existing conditions that may lead to excessive consumption of news may be excluded from coverage. An example of a pre-existing condition is literacy.

Upon submitting an initial claim to your insurance company, you will find it summarily rejected. If you wish to appeal the rejection, call the insurance company’s 800 number. No one will ever actually answer, but you’ll have the satisfaction of dialing a number and being placed on indefinite hold. Then you’ll hear a human voice say, “This is Jennifer, may I he— ” And the line will go dead, enabling you to start over.

Such telephone systems are an effective way to reduce the costs both of hiring and of appeals. The aim is to lower premiums for you, the consumer — and it’s all about you.

By the way, if this were December, the rest of the column fee might be fully covered by your news insurance. But it’s early in the year, and I’m afraid you haven’t met your annual deductible yet.

Of course, none of this applies if you are over 65, poor or a veteran. In those cases, you get single-payer news coverage financed by the government, through Newsicare, Newsicaid or the V.A.

For those of you with flex-spending plans, you may seek reimbursement from your pre-tax “news care spending account.” Another miracle of simplicity!

In addition to bills from me, you’ll also receive bills from your newspaper carrier, The New York Times itself, the forest products company that makes the newsprint, and the copy editor for this column. Don’t forget to pay the copy editor, or future columns will omit headlines.

I’m trying to be polite because, of course, if you don’t like this column, you may sue me. Malpractice suits are a part of the landscape, resulting in defensive journalism (that’s why we administer those CAT scans). For your convenience, I just add the cost of malpractice insurance and defensive journalism right onto your bill.

Speaking of which, the bill for this column is $1,681.63. I appreciate your prompt payment. You can send envelopes of cash to me at The New York Times, in unmarked bills.

Ah, you notice I didn’t actually get to discuss health reform? Frankly, that’s because I’m too busy dealing with the news insurance companies to practice any journalism. These days, gosh darn it, I have time only to bill readers.

Thanks for reading this. And I do hope you’ll resist those silly calls for news insurance reform. We mustn’t tinker with the finest news care system in the world.

Next!

•

It’s a good thing I have malpractice insurance: my column on health care last Thursday misstated the name of an insurance company. It’s Anthem Blue Cross, not Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

Collins, Blow and Herbert

Ms. Collins, in “The Wages of Rages,” says politicians often get into trouble when they’re trying to sound more furious than they feel.  Mr. Blow, in “Spirit Quest,” says young adults are looking for spirituality but not necessarily through organized religion.  Like they’re the first generation in all the history of mankind to do that…  Mr. Herbert, in “Falling Further Behind,” says ignoring the sad state of our nation’s schools and infrastructure will hurt us.  Will hurt us?  Last time I looked bridges were already collapsing.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Today, our topic is: strange stories about Republican presidential hopefuls. Would you rather start with the one about Mitt Romney and the rapper, or Tim Pawlenty?

O.K., if you really insist, Tim Pawlenty. Hehehe.

Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, appeared before the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington this week. The all-important question was whether he would be angry enough to win the hearts of the Tea Party-types.

He doesn’t seem naturally irate. People call him T-Paw, which sounds like a character in a children’s cartoon — maybe a lovable saber-toothed tiger with big feet. Or a pre-Little League game in which children who can’t hit anything with a bat are allowed to just thwack at the ball with their fists.

Politicians often get into trouble when they’re trying to sound more furious than they feel. And Pawlenty told the conservatives they should try to be more like … Tiger Woods’s wife.

“We should take a page out of her playbook and take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country,” he urged.

The overall strangeness of this thought aside, consider the timing. An angry man had just smashed his airplane into an I.R.S. office in Austin, Tex., killing one federal employee, injuring others and breaking quite a few windows. Does this seem like the very best time to be encouraging people to assault government property? Pawlenty’s defenders will undoubtedly say that he did not want his listeners to literally grab a golf club and hit something. But it is my experience that many Americans do not totally understand the concept of a metaphor.

Another star of the conservative conference, Scott Brown, was worse. When the new senator from Massachusetts was asked on Fox News about the I.R.S. office attack, he appeared to embrace the possibility that the pilot of the plane might have been one of his followers.

“And I don’t know if it’s related, but I can just sense, not only in my election but since being here in Washington, people are frustrated,” he said. “They want transparency.”

Let’s think this through. Andrew Joseph Stack III, the pilot, was a man with multiple hatreds, from Catholicism to unions, whose rage at the I.R.S. apparently began when the agency refused to allow him to declare his house a church for the purpose of avoiding taxes. And the end of the story is that he crashed a plane into a building, killing and injuring innocent people. Plus, he burned down his house. Where his wife and her daughter lived.

How many of you think this story would have come out differently if there was more transparency in Washington? That if only President Obama had followed through on that pledge to put the health care negotiations on C-Span, Stack and the I.R.S. offices would all be with us today?

When prodded by the interviewer, Brown agreed that sending a plane plowing into an office building was “extreme” and added, “You don’t know anything about the individual. He could have had other issues. Certainly, no one likes paying taxes, obviously.”

At least we now know that when Brown announced to his campaign victory party that his young daughters were “available” it was not a one-time slip of the tongue by a man who was normally more careful with his choice of words.

Romney, who was introduced by Brown at the conservative event, had a less-dramatic take on current events. In his speech, he railed about “liberal neo-monarchists” but did not suggest beating them up with a golf club.

As you may remember, Romney’s real big news moment this week occurred when he had an altercation with an unidentified passenger on a flight back from the Winter Olympics. A Romney spokesman said the former governor was attacked when he asked the man to raise his seat before takeoff.

The mystery passenger has apparently now come forward. Sky Blu, a rapper with the group LMFAO, said the encounter began when Romney yelled at him about the seat and put a “condor grip” on his shoulder. “No hard feelings to him. I’m sure he’s a good dude,” said Sky Blu, who was put on a different plane.

We had wondered if this story had a political tinge, but the rappers, who specialize in songs about shot-drinking, do not seem like neo-monarchists. My niece, Becca, worked with LMFAO on a promotional video this week and reports that Romney’s name never came up. “There was absolutely no political discussion whatsoever,” she said in a tone of deep certainty.

And my sorrow in discovering that the fight did not involve retribution for the day Romney drove his dog to Canada strapped to the roof of the family car was ameliorated by my joy at the vision of Mitt having an argument with a rapper about proper seat positioning for takeoff.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

I recently met a young woman who was just back from a monthlong Costa Rican vacation. She said that she had gone in part to connect with her spiritual self, to shed the moral strictures of her youth and to find her place of peace as an adult. In her mind at least, it had been a successful trip. She was a new woman, spiritually awakened.

She told me that she had gone from religious to nonbeliever, and then to spiritual. Putting aside the fact that most young people probably couldn’t afford to take a monthlong vacation in a foreign country, and the fact that her spiritual awakening was admittedly spiked with copious amounts of Costa Rican rum, her story struck me as increasingly normative rather then anomalous. Many young adults seem to be moving away from organized religion while simultaneously trying desperately to connect with their spirituality.

In fact, two recently released reports seem to buttress this observation.

A report entitled “Religion Among the Millennials” produced by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life and released this week found that one in four people 18 to 29 years old are unaffiliated with a religion. But that by no means makes them all atheists or agnostics. While there are always religious people among the unaffiliated, the numbers are significantly higher among the younger unaffiliated crowd. While they are less likely than those unaffiliated and older than them to believe in God, they are more likely to believe in life after death, heaven and hell, and miracles.

So, anyone laboring under the delusion that the generation weaned on MTV would move us closer to being weaned of an abnormally high level of religiosity — at least when compared with other industrialized countries — may have to keep waiting.

In fact, on some measures, the data suggest that these so-called millennials may be more spiritually thirsty than older generations. According to a Knights of Columbus/Marist poll also released this month, being “spiritual or close to God” was the most selected of any other “primary long-term life goal” among those 18 to 29 years old (other choices included “to get married and have a family” and “to get rich”). The rate at which they selected it was significantly higher than other generational groups, and nearly twice that of Generation X.

And the spiritual quests of the millennials may eventually have policy implications. According to the Pew report, “They are slightly more supportive than their elders of government efforts to protect morality, as well as somewhat more comfortable with involvement in politics by churches and other houses of worship.”

That last point worries me. It makes me want a double shot of that Costa Rican rum. Maybe then I, too, can find the spirit in the spirits.

Mr. Blow has succeeded in making me want to go out and find a young person to slap.  Excellent job!  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

One section of the Maytown Elementary School in rural Maytown, Pa., was built in 1861. Another section was built in the late-1920s. There’s a time clock in the ancient gym that was donated by the class of 1946.

This is a school that could use an update. No, scratch that. It needs to be replaced.

Shelly Riedel, superintendent of the Donegal School District, which includes Maytown, told me that teachers can’t mount smart boards in their classrooms because of the asbestos “encapsulated” behind the walls. The asbestos is not dangerous as long as the walls are not disturbed. The electricity is not particularly reliable. A teacher who is using, say, an overhead projector has to check to make sure that other teachers are not using similar devices at the same time as that might cause an outage.

There is no air conditioning. And there is no money right now to replace the school, which has an enrollment of 237.

You can travel the United States and find comparable, or worse, conditions in schools throughout the country. It’s part of the overwhelming problem of maintaining and modernizing American infrastructure. It’s hard to even get good data on the physical condition of the nation’s schools. But Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, has said that 75 percent of the public schools have structural deficiencies and 25 percent have problems with their ventilation systems.

The Donegal district is planning to build a bare-bones regional high school with money from its general budget. The existing school, which was built in 1954, has many problems, including a sewage system that saw its best days when names like Eisenhower and Kennedy were on the mailbox at the White House. The proposal for the new high school does not even include an athletic field for the kids.

Getting the nation’s schools up to date is an enormous problem, but it’s only a small part of the overall infrastructure challenge. In Pennsylvania, a state in which the governor, Ed Rendell, is all but obsessed with infrastructure, there are still thousands of bridges that either need a lot of work or should be replaced.

Fifty-one miles of Interstate 95, the main north-south highway on the East Coast, make their way through southeastern Pennsylvania. Construction of the highway began more than a half-century ago, before Barack Obama was born. Rina Cutler, Philadelphia’s deputy mayor for transportation and utilities, noted that long stretches of I-95 are now reaching the end of their useful life and will have to be rebuilt.

In a report titled “Just Because You Ignore It Doesn’t Make It Go Away,” Ms. Cutler wrote:

“These stretches require reconstruction that is conservatively estimated to cost $6 billion to $10 billion over the next two decades. This badly needed investment could be expected to support tens of thousands of jobs over that period. The Federal Highway Administration has estimated that every $1 billion of investment in the Federal Highway Aid program generates 42,100 full-time equivalent jobs.”

Schools, highways, the electric grid, water systems, ports, dams, levees — the list can seem endless — have to be maintained, upgraded, rebuilt or replaced if the U.S. is to remain a first-class nation with a first-class economy over the next several decades. And some entirely new infrastructure systems will have to be developed.

But these systems have to be paid for, and right now there are not enough people at the higher echelons of government trying to figure out the best ways to raise the enormous amounts of money that will be required, and the most responsible ways of spending that money. And there are not enough leaders explaining to the public how heavy this lift will be, and why it is so necessary, and what sacrifices will be required to get the job properly done.

In an era of historically high budget deficits, the case has to be made that this is not wasteful spending but essential investments that will yield powerful returns. “If you’re not willing to invest,” said Governor Rendell, “you have to be willing to accept an inferior product. That’s the danger we’re facing.”

There are sound ideas available for raising the money to rebuild America’s infrastructure. These include, most prominently, a proposed national infrastructure bank, which would allocate public funds and also leverage private capital for the most important projects. In the absence of a national bank, it might be possible to establish regional infrastructure banks.

The point is that top government leaders should be seeking as many solid and creative ideas as possible, with the goal of moving with dispatch on the best ones. The only thing at stake is the economic future of the United States.

Brooks, Cohen and Krugman

Oh gawd, but Bobo is a moron.  Today, in “The Power Elite,” he solemnly informs us that as the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society has increased, the trust in elites has declined.  He actually has the following words in this thing:  “Government used to be staffed by party hacks.”  Used to be? What planet do you live on?  Mr. Cohen says we should “Target Iran’s Censors,” and asks a question:  Why is the U.S. Treasury holding up sales of software that would help Iranians communicate?  Prof. Krugman addresses the “California Death Spiral,” and says surging health insurance premiums show the need for comprehensive, guaranteed coverage — which is exactly what Democrats are trying to accomplish.  Here’s that disgrace Bobo:

One of the great achievements of modern times is that we have made society more fair. Sixty years ago, the upper echelons were dominated by what E. Digby Baltzell called The Protestant Establishment and C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite. If your father went to Harvard, you had a 90 percent chance of getting in yourself, and the path upward from there was grooved in your favor.

Since then, we have opened up opportunities for women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics and members of many other groups. Moreover, we’ve changed the criteria for success. It is less necessary to be clubbable. It is more important to be smart and hard-working.

Yet here’s the funny thing. As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.

It’s not even clear that society is better led. Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. Now financial firms recruit from the cream of the Ivy League. In 2007, 47 percent of Harvard grads went into finance or consulting. Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?

Government used to be staffed by party hacks. Today, it is staffed by people from public policy schools. But does government work better than it did before?

Journalism used to be the preserve of working-class stiffs who filed stories and hit the bars. Now it is the preserve of cultured analysts who file stories and hit the water bottles. Is the media overall more reputable now than it was then?

The promise of the meritocracy has not been fulfilled. The talent level is higher, but the reputation is lower.

Why has this happened? I can think of a few contributing factors.

First, the meritocracy is based on an overly narrow definition of talent. Our system rewards those who can amass technical knowledge. But this skill is only marginally related to the skill of being sensitive to context. It is not related at all to skills like empathy. Over the past years, we’ve seen very smart people make mistakes because they didn’t understand the context in which they were operating.

Second, this new system has created new social chasms. In the old days, there were obviously big differences between people whose lives were defined by “The Philadelphia Story” and those who were defined by “The Grapes of Wrath.” But if you ran the largest bank in Murfreesboro, Tenn., you probably lived in Murfreesboro. Now you live in Charlotte or New York City. You might have married a secretary. Now you marry another banker. You would have had similar lifestyle habits as other people in town. Now the lifestyle patterns of the college-educated are very different from the patterns in other classes. Social attitudes are very different, too.

It could be that Americans actually feel less connected to their leadership class now than they did then, with good reason.

Third, leadership-class solidarity is weaker. The Protestant Establishment was inbred. On the other hand, those social connections placed informal limits on strife. Personal scandals were hushed up. Now members of the leadership class are engaged in a perpetual state of war. Each side seeks daily advantage in ways that poison the long-term reputations of everybody involved.

Fourth, time horizons have shrunk. If you were an old blue blood, you traced your lineage back centuries, and there was a decent chance that you’d hand your company down to members of your clan. That subtly encouraged long-term thinking.

Now people respond to ever-faster performance criteria — daily stock prices or tracking polls. This perversely encourages reckless behavior. To leave a mark in a fast, competitive world, leaders seek to hit grandiose home runs. Clinton tried to transform health care. Bush tried to transform the Middle East. Obama has tried to transform health care, energy and much more.

There’s less emphasis on steady, gradual change and more emphasis on the big swing. This produces more spectacular failures and more uncertainty. Many Americans, not caught up on the romance of this sort of heroism, are terrified.

Fifth, society is too transparent. Since Watergate, we have tried to make government as open as possible. But as William Galston of the Brookings Institution jokes, government should sometimes be shrouded for the same reason that middle-aged people should be clothed. This isn’t Galston’s point, but I’d observe that the more government has become transparent, the less people are inclined to trust it.

This is not to say that we should return to the days of the WASP ascendancy. That’s neither possible nor desirable. Rather, our system of promotion has grown some pretty serious problems, which are more evident with each passing day.

Unbelievable.  And I don’t think for a moment that Bobo wouldn’t gleefully welcome a return to the days of the WASP ascendancy.  I need brain bleach.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

Here’s what happens when a business linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (I.R.G.C.) is targeted with sanctions. A representative of the Revolutionary Guards finds a lawyer in Dubai and says: “Look, I’m on this stupid U.S. Treasury list. I’ll give you 10 percent. Help me set up a shell company in Dubai or Malaysia.”

The Treasury Department enemy list (“Specially Designated Nationals”) is easy to find. It’s at www.ustreas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sdn/. Revolutionary Guard tycoons in Tehran know that. Once they have a new shell company, say in a cousin’s name, they circumvent the list. They go on reaping the heady profits open to the in crowd when sanctions distort an economy.

Iran has lived with sanctions for a long time; its immune systems are highly developed. As much as 20 percent of the gross national product of Dubai is linked to Iran trade. I don’t see new “targeted” sanctions disrupting this traffic. Iran’s economy, even in a slump, is too big, too diverse and too sophisticated: North Korea it is not.

Still, thanks to Iran’s erratic response to President Obama’s overtures and its ongoing nuclear nationalism (a more coherent political than weapons program), the United States finds itself in lockstep toward new sanctions.

I expect China, averse to conspicuous isolation, will eventually abstain on a new round of U.N. sanctions on Iran. They will be imposed. Stuart Levey, the under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence (and a household name in Iran), will burrow away in search of actionable U.S. sanctions against the Iranian regime.

The sanctions will feel cathartic, satisfy the have-to-do-something itch in the Congress, and change nothing. I’m just about resigned to that. But there is a smarter approach to Iran: Instead of constraining trade, throw it open.

On Dec. 15, Richard R. Verma, an assistant secretary for legislative affairs at the State Department, wrote to Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, informing him that the State Department had asked the Treasury to waive certain sanctions on Iran relating to the export of technology. Yes, waive — not tighten. (How much have you read about that?)

Verma wrote: “The Department of State is recommending that the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (O.F.A.C.) issue a general license that would authorize downloads of free mass-market software by companies such as Microsoft and Google to Iran necessary for the exchange of personal communications and/or sharing of information over the Internet such as instant messaging, chat and e-mail, and social networking.”

Now that’s smart! There’s a way to bolster the remarkable, still unbowed opposition movement in Iran as well as weaken the Revolutionary Guards’ stranglehold on society and the economy. And what has O.F.A.C. done about this request in the past two months?

Nothing.

No license has been issued. It’s still illegal for Microsoft to offer MSN Messenger in Iran. Instead, earlier this month, Treasury sanctioned four Guards companies — a meaningless gesture. Treasury has things upside down.

“With respect to Iran, human rights and free speech efforts have been made illegal under federal law!” said Austin Heap, a brilliant “techie” working for an organization that’s been trying to get technology designed to bypass government filters and other censorship into Iran, but has been frustrated by sanctions that make that illegal. “Sanctions are deterring people from doing things to help.”

That’s right. With the Islamic Republic weaker than at any time in its 31-year history, fractured by regime divisions and confronted by a Green movement it has tried to quash through force, U.S. sanctions are abetting the regime’s communications blackouts.

Heap works with Babak Siavoshy, 27, at the Censorship Research Center (C.R.C.), whose engineers have developed software called “Haystack” that makes it near impossible for censors to detect what Internet users are doing.

“Double-click on Haystack and you browse the Internet anonymously and safely,” Siavoshy said. “It’s encrypted at such a level it would take thousands of years to figure out what you’re saying. It’s a potent open-society tool. It’s just a matter of getting it to Iran — and that’s still illegal.”

The C.R.C. has applied for a license from O.F.A.C. to distribute in Iran. Without pro-bono lawyers, it would have given up long ago. They’ve had to draft hundreds of pages of applications to Treasury.

My understanding is the license may soon be approved. Treasury insists it’s now sitting at State. My urgent message to the Obama administration is: Hurry up with this license and the general one for mass market software!

Iranians are resourceful. On thumb drives, SIM cards, encrypted photo files and the like, they’d get Haystack software into the country. The United States is shooting itself in the foot by making this illegal. Hillary Clinton’s speech on the importance of an open Internet was good, but right now it’s just a speech. Don’t shut down on Iran; open up to its promise. Sanctions are a feel-good impasse.

“Tear down this wall!” was a 20th-century cry. It has given way to the 21st century’s “Tear down this firewall!” That, not sanctions, is what the I.R.G.C. fears most; and that, not sanctions, should be Obama’s priority.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Health insurance premiums are surging — and conservatives fear that the spectacle will reinvigorate the push for reform. On the Fox Business Network, a host chided a vice president of WellPoint, which has told California customers to expect huge rate increases: “You handed the politicians red meat at a time when health care is being discussed. You gave it to them!”

Indeed. Sky-high rate increases make a powerful case for action. And they show, in particular, that we need comprehensive, guaranteed coverage — which is exactly what Democrats are trying to accomplish.

Here’s the story: About 800,000 people in California who buy insurance on the individual market — as opposed to getting it through their employers — are covered by Anthem Blue Cross, a WellPoint subsidiary. These are the people who were recently told to expect dramatic rate increases, in some cases as high as 39 percent.

Why the huge increase? It’s not profiteering, says WellPoint, which claims instead (without using the term) that it’s facing a classic insurance death spiral.

Bear in mind that private health insurance only works if insurers can sell policies to both sick and healthy customers. If too many healthy people decide that they’d rather take their chances and remain uninsured, the risk pool deteriorates, forcing insurers to raise premiums. This, in turn, leads more healthy people to drop coverage, worsening the risk pool even further, and so on.

Now, what WellPoint claims is that it has been forced to raise premiums because of “challenging economic times”: cash-strapped Californians have been dropping their policies or shifting into less-comprehensive plans. Those retaining coverage tend to be people with high current medical expenses. And the result, says the company, is a drastically worsening risk pool: in effect, a death spiral.

So the rate increases, WellPoint insists, aren’t its fault: “Other individual market insurers are facing the same dynamics and are being forced to take similar actions.” Indeed, a report released Thursday by the department of Health and Human Services shows that there have been steep actual or proposed increases in rates by a number of insurers.

But here’s the thing: suppose that we posit, provisionally, that the insurers aren’t the main villains in this story. Even so, California’s death spiral makes nonsense of all the main arguments against comprehensive health reform.

For example, some claim that health costs would fall dramatically if only insurance companies were allowed to sell policies across state lines. But California is already a huge market, with much more insurance competition than in other states; unfortunately, insurers compete mainly by trying to excel in the art of denying coverage to those who need it most. And competition hasn’t averted a death spiral. So why would creating a national market make things better?

More broadly, conservatives would have you believe that health insurance suffers from too much government interference. In fact, the real point of the push to allow interstate sales is that it would set off a race to the bottom, effectively eliminating state regulation. But California’s individual insurance market is already notable for its lack of regulation, certainly as compared with states like New York — yet the market is collapsing anyway.

Finally, there have been calls for minimalist health reform that would ban discrimination on the basis of pre-existing conditions and stop there. It’s a popular idea, but as every health economist knows, it’s also nonsense. For a ban on medical discrimination would lead to higher premiums for the healthy, and would, therefore, cause more and bigger death spirals.

So California’s woes show that conservative prescriptions for health reform just won’t work.

What would work? By all means, let’s ban discrimination on the basis of medical history — but we also have to keep healthy people in the risk pool, which means requiring that people purchase insurance. This, in turn, requires substantial aid to lower-income Americans so that they can afford coverage.

And if you put all of that together, you end up with something very much like the health reform bills that have already passed both the House and the Senate.

What about claims that these bills would force Americans into the clutches of greedy insurance companies? Well, the main answer is stronger regulation; but it would also be a very good idea, politically as well as substantively, for the Senate to use reconciliation to put the public option back into its bill.

But the main point is this: California’s death spiral is a reminder that our health care system is unraveling, and that inaction isn’t an option. Congress and the president need to make reform happen — now.