IF IT AIN'T DUTCH...It ain't much

That is all I have to say on the entertaining but disappointing World Cup.

Was it a yellow card?

In the World Cup final, Holland's John Heitinga was sent off in the 109th minute, which opened the door for Spain's Andres Iniesta to shoot a pretty goal with four minutes remaining. English head referee Howard Webb issued Heitinga a second yellow card after he touched the shoulder of Andres Iniesta just outside the box. See for yourself:



It looks like Iniesta has the ball played too far ahead of him and he takes a dive. Was it a make up call for de Jong's ugly chest stomp ealier?

There is no lack of self-righteous commentary that the Dutch got what was coming to them for their physical or 'dirty' style of play. Much less noted is the fact that Spain retaliated with dirty tricks of their own -- by diving -- and they did not receive a single booking for it. There was a collective attitude that Holland had no right to tackle Spain, even after van Bronckhorst and Sneijder exhibited some brilliant tackles. No one likes defense.

Holland intelligently understood Spain's weakness. Disrupt their rhythm and they cannot score. Spain is not known for its set pieces or long balls, rather it is their dazzling passing.

FIFA ought to review its policies. Even their best referees are not able to avoid game-changing mistakes.

Where the Wild Things Arej

In my childhood, I was not a raving fan of the classic book Where the Wild Things Are. It was amusing and I was happy to leave it at that. So in 2009 when the eponymous film debuted, I did not intend to see it. But in some inexorable way, the DVD made its way into my living room and I complained "it's for kids" as I queued it up on the ol' MacBook.

The film is a most exhilarating rumination on the human condition. Now, now, stop rolling your eyes, just go and see it and you will see what I mean!

Max is a troubled child and an imaginative loner. He has a blowout with his sister and mom and disappears into the world of Carol and a small band of other assorted creatures. The Wild Things each have their own set of problems and issues. Carol's slightly dangerous level of frustration strikes an instant chord in Max and the two form a bond. Max tells the Wild Things that he has come as their king to make everything right. He embarks them on a project which offers hope and healing, but soon glimpses the dark side of disappointment.

It is to the film's credit that it offers more questions than answers. The things that make us uneasy are ventured but not resolved. Each viewer will take away something different, of relevance to his or her own life. The anxieties of the Wild Things stem from the embittered disappointments of experienced adulthood, contrasting with the relative innocence of Max's childhood. What is leadership? Is healing possible? Are we capable of getting along, finding love, finding fulfillment? The exhilarating part is that these questions have been (touchingly) aired, and thus must indicate some common malady that binds us together.

Understatement of the year award

Yesterday a candidate for parliament in Ethiopa was murdered in cold blood. How depressing. A spokesman was maybe trying a little comic relief. “They cut him, they stabbed him in the stomach, and he died,” Mr. Gebru said. “It’s becoming very difficult to run” a political campaign, he added. I'll say.

Zero sum politics

It has been observed that while economics is NOT a zero sum game, politics IS. Economics is built on the notion of mutual gain. This principle is embodied in the metaphors "all boats rise" and "expansion of the pie". But in politics, how can all boats rise? If one party wins, another party loses. There can only be one president. If you create a co-presidency, as in Kenya and Zimbabwe, each president has only half the power.

In theoretical physics, conserved quantities enjoy a central and esteemed role. The conservation of mass, energy, momentum, and charge empower the practitioner to comprehend and predict the subtleties of nature. But the conservation of political power has the potential to unleash bitterness and cynicism with fearsome force.

Such is the embattled political history of Pakistan, where political rivalries wreak a ferocious toll. Benazir Bhutto's first act on being elected Prime Minister was to nullify her opponent Nawaz Sharif's accession to the governorship of Punjab province. I like to say that the elected governments are, contrary to conventional wisdom, good at prosecuting corruption -- in the opposition party.

Another example is the jockeying for power by global powers. This has most notably been led by China against the Western dominated status quo. China's "multi-polar" world view is shared by most nations, and it is arguably a euphemism for obstructionism. Most recently China led a block of developing countries, the G77, in thwarting any significant result at Copenhagen.

But is the zero sum game really an accurate picture, or is it a race to the bottom in which everyone loses? While economics is built on the notion of mutual gain, politics sometimes looks like it is built on the edifice of mutual loss. The US Congress is notorious as one of the most unpopular public institutions, currently with an approval rating below 20%. How can its members desire this? Are public servants really as monochromatic as to live or die for party victory? The Republicans may fare well in the next election, but their members of Congress will still be reviled the next day. Which is why your Evan Bayh's and Chris Dodd's are dropping like flies. There is nothing them to be proud of.

Health Care Theater

What are the Party of Nope's ideas on health care reform? NPR's Julie Ravner wraps up the Blair House summit here. The heart of the discord she says is the following:

RAVNER: [There is a] fundamental philosophical disagreement about the role of government in the health care system. Democrats think that if whats broken is to be fixed it will take a lot more government involvement. Republicans think there should be less government involvement.

If this is accurate (i.e. ignoring the Waterloo and Rope-a-Nope talk), Republicans should take note of two things:

• Americans seem to want more government involvement, if the high approval ratings for the public option indicate anything. And the irony of their position is not lost; the Nopers, riding high on the Coakley debacle, have championed the lack of a majority public approval rating for the health bill as a reason for rejecting it.
  
• There are no advanced nations that have less government involvement in their health care systems than we do and there are plenty of advanced nations that have more government involvement. Of these, all of them have a lower cost health care system and many with equal or better quality. For the Republican realists out there, empirical evidence should mean something.
  

Further on as Ravner chats with the anchor, the following bit smacked of neutrality rather than objectivity:

RAVNER: President Obama and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee got into an argument about whether the Democrats' bill would raise or lower insurance premiums. ... both point to the Congression Budget Office to make their case.

ANCHOR: Who would you say is right.

RAVNER: They both are sort of. It turns out that for most people premiums would go down slightly, because those people have group health insurance. For individuals who are a small minority... premiums would go up, but that's because the would get better coverage... they wouldn't pay more because the bill would give them help to pay those premiums. For the few people who wouldn't get help, the better coverage would probably mean they would pay less overall in total out of pocket costs for their medical bills.

ANCHOR: So the answer is its complicated.

RAVNER: Exactly.

Actually it's not so complicated and the last couple of editorial remarks were disingenuous. While Alexander was correct in a narrow construction, he is also off base. What matters is how much it costs per unit of health care, a number which the CBO says goes down. And who among those receiving subsidized individual coverage would complain about paying less for more? For more on this see Krugman's column.

The Republicans are failing their duty as an opposition party. They should be criticizing the lack of major cost controls, especially the watering down of the Cadillac tax.

'Misspoke' Is Not A Word

While it's true that English is an ever-changing language, strongly influenced by usage, 'misspoke' is unnecessary and should be radically excised before it gains a foothold in the lexicon. It should be taken out and shot by a firing line of sharpshooting librarians and hurled down the fiery volcano where it was ineffectually patched together out of toy-factory rejects.

If you would like to say that you were wrong or misinformed, received a false report, stammered, used the wrong word, tripped over your own tongue and came a nasty cropper in front of a battalion of White House reporters, just say it. Don't muck about.

Maybe you're afraid that somewhere in the world, someone giggled while watching a translation of what you said on a tiny black-and-white television with rabbit ears in his or her yurt, crumbling tenement, underground bunker, or marble palace. Just send the U.S. Army over there to clear up the confusion; don't mangle your own native tongue out of pansy-hearted cowardice.

Next time you make a mistake, and we all make them, feel free to admit it. Get it off your chest. Blame the Republicans. Lie if you have to. Tell us your momma drank and forgot to read to you, and your father was in 'France'. Say you thought they had WMDs at the time, or your wife asked you to, or you said it to intimidate the Soviets. But don't be ridiculous: don't tell us you misspoke, or we will never listen to another word you try to lay on us, squeeze into our ears, or butter us with. Anyone who uses a non-word such as 'misspoke' can't be trusted to wield the language with the least fluency, let alone represent us.

Mal-Asia

Malaysia seems from time to time to be a weird and delusional little corner of Asia. As a wealthier version of Indonesia, it is counter-intuitively more illiberal. One of the first things one notices is that most Malaysian women wear hijab while Indonesian women do not. That is all well and good, but there are deeper symptoms of tolerance issues such as the case of Lina Joy among others.

Take this week's flare up of the Allah Debate. Non-Muslim Malaysians can be jailed for using words like Allah, fatwa, imam or hajj, depending on the context. A Catholic newspaper's use of the word Allah is going through the courts. The law's aim is to impede missionaries from converting Muslims to their faith.

Malaysia has a multi-cultural society long reputed for its tolerance. But things have been bending in the wrong direction in the past few years. Recently "tensions escalated when churches were burned and the severed heads of wild boars, offensive to Muslims, were found in the compound of two mosques."

Pardon me but wouldn't severed heads of wild boars be offensive to anyone? Godfather fans will know what I am talking about.

The Lieberman Haters

No senator in recent times has courted as much hullabaloo as Connecticut's fightin' Joe Lieberman. What a remarkable story he has been, eh? Tapped in 2000 by Al Gore as the first Jewish running mate, I can remember him trading zingers with Dick Cheney in the Veep Debate. But in the sequel, in a way, he would become one of Mr. Cheney's strongest allies on the Hill. And then in 2008 he campaigned for John McCain and gave the keynote address at the RNC, amid cries of "traitor" from the faithful.

The latest episode in this high-stakes drama was in health care reform. He single-handedly punted the public option from the Senate health care bill. Afterwards his approval rate in his state plummeted to 25 percent. This due to the fact that he managed to earn the ire of both the supporters and opponents of the bill. Some 84 percent of the bill's supporters and 52 percent of its opponents disapprove of the way he handled himself.

One thing is clear. He has political courage. Some would say he is foolhardy or even inept. And yet he is not inept. Anyone who can pull a rabbit out of a hat as he did in his last reelection is no Martha Coakley. But even a brilliant campaigner would not relish his prospects in 2012. Harry Reid may have hammered the final nail in his coffin.

Here is the way I imagine it played out. Lieberman tells Reid he is dead set against the public option. As we recall, it had been nixed in Baucus' committee, but was trying to make a come-back on the Senate floor. Reid calls his bluff. He knows how to read polls and he knows how weak a position Lieberman is in. How could a senator from a solidly blue state who campaigned against the party's great hope be prepared to stand alone against the popular public option? But Reid miscalculated the chutzpah!

So Mr. Lieberman basically ruined himself over a matter of principle. The other two holdouts, Landrieu and Nelson, made no bones about plundering the federal coffers for their states. Landrieu got 300 million in hush money and Nelson got Nebraska exempted from Medicare payments indefinitely - which is worth about 50 million a year. But Lieberman didn't get a cent. Some accuse him being in the pockets of the health care lobby. But through his career his biggest contributions have come from finance, lawyers and real estate.

How would Lieberman fare as a Republican? Not a whole lot better. In spite of his hawkish pro-Bush/McCain security credentials, he has always been pro-choice, supported stem cell research and sponsored legislation against homosexual discrimination. Oh yes and lets not forget he is the lead author of the Cap and Trade bill. Although Republican approval is higher than among independents or Democrats, it is still only 39 percent compared to 48 percent who disapprove. And why would the Republican Party - famous for its discipline - even be interested in a guy who doesn't follow directions very well?

And Mr. Lieberman's voting record is far from right-wing. The National Journal rated him as the 43rd most liberal senator in 2008. Six Democrats were more conservative than him and no Republicans were more liberal.

Perhaps Lieberman is out of touch with his electorate and it is time for a change. But he is not to be generally derided as one of the worst senators. He votes his conscience, works across party lines and is a moderate. Let us compare him to someone like, say, James Inhofe of Oklahoma. Mr. Inhofe was "outraged by the outrage" against the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. He believes that global warming is "the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state." Not surprisingly his largest contributions come from the oil and gas sector. Similarly in foreign policy he believes "very strongly that we ought to support Israel, and that it has a right to the land, because God said so." Indeed, one of the reasons we were attacked on 9/11 was for our failure to support Israel strongly enough, he says. And this monster is only the 8th most conservative senator according to the same vote survey.

Lieberman may have his faults, but lets be fair. He is a decent and thoughtful senator.

Health Care: What now?

Soon Republicans will control 41 seats in the Senate and everyone is wondering whether this development will scuttle 8 months of legislative buildup for a health care overhaul. Indeed, it was with this in mind that I voted for Martha Coakley -- a candidate who I didn't much care for. Scott Brown promised to vote against health care and said that we need to start over. Forgive me if I roll my eyes. Is there no other pressing business in the Senate?

In a recent column David Brooks runs through the various options left open to the Democrats. They can try to push the Senate version through the House, whittle the package down to just the popular stuff, or abandon the effort altogether. Not surprisingly he endorses the last option -- the one which incidentally does the most damage to the party.

More importantly, abandoning health care reform would be recklessly irresponsible as the opportunity might be lost for another generation. He warns that if Democrats try to push forward, "trust in government will be irrevocably broken" resulting in a "fully justified popular rebellion." What a strange and policy-free formulation. Instead of trying to reform a system which eats up 17% of our GDP even while failing to cover 17% of Americans, the government should seek to rebuild trust with the people. Yes, I'm sure that approach would gain popular support and trust (wink wink). I would love to see a campaign pronounce: "We will work hard to rebuild trust with the American people and until that is accomplished, forgo dealing with the nations most pressing issues."

But seriously, why do Americans oppose the current proposals? About 40% support them while 50% oppose. That's nearly a majority against. Indeed, some 55% in the wake of the second Boston Tea Party favor suspending the effort.

My guess is that Americans, subject to political spin and busy looking for jobs, misunderstand the health care legislation. It is not like we are opposed to health care reform or content with the current system. After all, Barack Obama made health care reform his biggest issue and he won convincingly. This is supported by a Gallup poll conducted last July in which 71% of Americans wanted health care reform.

Okay, so most Americans want reform, but maybe they just don't want this reform. One of the biggest complaints is that our spending is getting out of control, and most of the money is going to people who don't need it -- the bankers who drove us into this miserable recession. The problem with this line of thinking is that it turns reality on its head. The health care bills have been analyzed by economists in the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office and both bills actually reduce the deficit. Moreover, they do this at the expense of wealthier Americans and "fat cats" in order to expand the safety net to millions of struggling Americans.

Why not then push forward with the Senate version of the bill while the goal line is in sight? The bill has already gotten its coveted 60-vote approval in the Senate, and so it needs only pass unmodified in the House. This won't be easy, but Paul Krugman explains why he thinks it is better than trying to do things piecemeal:

Think of health care reform as being like a three-legged stool. You would, rightly, ridicule anyone who proposed saving money by leaving off one or two of the legs. Well, those who propose doing only the popular pieces of health care reform deserve the same kind of ridicule. Reform won’t work unless all the essential pieces are in place.

Suppose, for example, that Congress took the advice of those who want to ban insurance discrimination on the basis of medical history, and stopped there. What would happen next? The answer, as any health care economist will tell you, is that if Congress didn’t simultaneously require that healthy people buy insurance, there would be a “death spiral”: healthier Americans would choose not to buy insurance, leading to high premiums for those who remain, driving out more people, and so on.

And if Congress tried to avoid the death spiral by requiring that healthy Americans buy insurance, it would have to offer financial aid to lower-income families to make that insurance affordable — aid at least as generous as that in the Senate bill. There just isn’t any way to do reform on a smaller scale.

Or compare it to the design of an automobile. We know that we want to have the car but there are 100 opinions on how the ignition should look and how the pistons should be arranged and how the steering should work. But at the end of the day, you cannot resolve the debate by leaving the ignition or the pistons or the steering assembly out. And after 8 months (Congress began committee deliberations on health care reform last April), the end of the day is here -- we need the car to drive in spite of its imperfections.

Some supporters of reform engage in wishful thinking, saying that the House version is preferable. But that is a political luxury we cannot afford and the similarities of the two bills are greater than the differences. The Washington Post compared the major elements of the Senate and House versions. Over 10 years both bills:

• Reduce the deficit by over 100 billion;
• Extend coverage to more than half of the uninsured (from 54 million down to 23 with the Senate verion or 17 with the House version);
• Spend about a trillion dollars (S $870b, H $1050b) over 10 years, which is 0.5% of the 10-year projected GDP;
• Raise money with new taxes on wealthy Americans and in the Senate on expensive insurance plans;
• Expand Medicaid coverage and other low income subsidies;
• Require that individuals purchase insurance;
• Penalize employers that do not provide insurance benefits, except small businesses;
• Do not subsidize abortion coverage; and
  
• Establish exchanges for people who don't have employer-based plans to purchase insurance.
  

On the other hand the differences are less substantial. The main one is that the Senate bill has no public option. There are also differences in the way that some of the above items are implemented.

If a majority in the House can be corralled, voters may eventually thank them when they realize that, in spite of the ugly sausage-making reality of how legislation is made, these bills do more good than harm; they extend insurance to millions of struggling Americans, modestly reduce the deficit, rein insurance company abuses in and modestly bend the mighty cost curve. As one blog headline puts it: Enough hand wringing; get the job done!