I could probably just put all of these on FatMixx, but this one seems important. I probably could automate this post, but if you’re not watching Keith Olbermann, you’re completely missing out.

I don’t have much to add. This summarizes the last month or so of the terrorism debate and policy world in one 10 minute segment.

Update: I hate being away for weekends. I hadn’t heard that they found more remains around ground zero. For ****’s sake, are these people so incompetent that they chose to make us feel better instead of actually doing the right thing? First, they lied about the air quality. Now we have this. This stuff was always going to come out. Treat the public like the adults they are, that’s all I really want.

I think Keith Olbermann is trying to the be Edward R Murrow of our time…and heavens knows we could use it. I’m glad that someone in the mainstream media is saying this. His latest commentary, published Oct 19, is truly to the point:

And now—our rights and our freedoms in peril—we slowly awaken to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing…A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

In times of fright, we have been only human. We have let Roosevelt’s “fear of fear itself” overtake us. We have listened to the little voice inside that has said, “the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass.” We have accepted that the only way to stop the terrorists is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.

Read the rest of the article. It is a bit long, but worth reading.

Update (from sujal): Here’s the video:

My sister emailed me this morning asking to check up on her flights home. She also passed along the fact that she might miss her flights because Nepal was experiencing violent protests over a hike in fuel prices. The government thought it was a good idea there to raise fuel prices by up to 38%. Diesel rates went up 11% in one shot. I can’t imagine who thought this was a good idea. If you wanted a reminder of why hard price floors and ceilings are a bad idea, Nepal provides a great example.

They’ve since backed down on the price hike so the protests have ended and my sister will be fine coming home.

Kevin Drum linked to a good roundup of Estate Tax policy information on his site. The most striking pieces of information:

• Under the $3.5 million/45% plan, we would retain 60% of the revenue that we get from the current estate tax. This would pay for about half of the projected Social Security shortfall.
• 99.7% of all estates would pay no tax at all.
• Only 50 (that’s “fifty,” not “fifty thousand”) farms and small business would owe any estate tax.
• Conversely, repealing the estate tax entirely would cost nearly $1 trillion over ten years. That’s “trillion,” not “billion.”

99.7%… the compromise current plan seems reasonable. Even without the compromise plan, with the current $2 million dollar exemption, only 0.5% of estates are taxed with the 2006 law. The exemption rises to $3.5 million in 2009. This seems like a complete non-issue and a sop to very, very wealthy Americans. When you factor in the cost of a repeal of this tax, plus the fact that we’re fighting a war and are looking at some large entitlement spending bills, is a repeal of the estate tax in the best interests of our country?

Congress is looking at estate tax repeal this month. You should let them know what you think. Or, you can let me know what you think here, since I’m curious about other opinions.

Update: Made a mistake about the current plan vs. the compromise being discussed. The 99.7% number is under the current plan, not the compromise plan.

I’ve been reading bits and pieces of the debate between William Saletan and Katha Pollitt about whether pro-choice people should advocate reducing the number of abortions to zero. Heidi and I have this debate in some form every now and again. Both of us are pro-choice but we arrive at that position from different directions. Saletan (who is closer to my position) and Pollitt (who is closer to Heidi’s) cover the territory well, and the debate is well worth reading. If you’re already pro-choice or simply want to know why people are pro-choice, read this.

There are some very honest things said here, and I’d be lying if Heidi and I haven’t gone through these same hard questions. Thursday’s exchange was a good one. This bit from from Saletan was good:

Before I go, I forgot to answer your original question. You ask why I think abortion is bad. I think it’s bad because the fetus is of us and is becoming us. It’s not a person, but it’s on the way to becoming a person, and the longer it develops, the more I recoil at the idea of killing it. Most people, according to polls, think the same way.

What about you? You say pro-choicers don’t see abortion as “morally trivial.” You say they defend it as a reluctant decision, a “sad necessity,” a “morally serious, very unfortunate event.” Is that how you see it?

Pollitt responded:

After I sent off my entry yesterday afternoon I asked myself: What exactly are Will and I arguing about? We both agree, after all, that it’s better not to have an unwanted pregnancy in the first place than to have an abortion, we both agree that America needs lots more birth control and lots more realistic sex education. We both want emergency contraception to be widely available over the counter. We both want men to take more responsibility—to use condoms, for example. If you and I were actually designing policy, I’m guessing we’d see the practical piece much the same way: Ramp up that funding! Build those clinics! Make health insurance companies pay for birth control like they pay for Viagra. We’d ask stern questions about how that male pill is coming along and about when we might see some new options for women. We’d look at the experience of countries with lower rates of unwanted pregnancy, teen births, and abortion (every other Western industrialized nation); we’d interview experts and study the literature, we’d set up a bunch of pilot programs to see what worked best with what sub-populations.

And then would come the ad campaign. Mine would have pictures of cheerful girls and women: “At my local Saletan clinic, the doctors are great and birth control is free! They really took time with me and answered all my questions. Best of all, I can call anytime and talk to a nurse in total privacy. Thanks to Saletan, I’ll have a baby when I’m ready—but not till then.” Yours would show a spiky-haired, pierced, and tattooed girl looking sullen and miserable: “I stayed out all night and forgot to take my Pill. Now I’m having an abortion and it’s totally my fault. Go on, hate me, I deserve it! If only I’d listened to the doctors at Saletan.” Or maybe you could have a picture of a stern-looking nun standing in front of an abortion clinic: “Birth Control: Because Purgatory’s better than Hell.”

Those are, in a nutshell, the important points. Heidi and I literally had an argument for like 45 minutes during one of our road trips on the subject of insurance funding for Viagra vs. birth control. Like Pollitt, I wonder what Heidi and I are arguing about sometimes. We agree on the end result, but the details of why and how and what we say becomes just as critical.

The unfortunate subtext of this debate is that both sides of the political abortion debate have made it so that the sides can’t be honest about the issue. Pro-choicers do actually want to reduce the number of abortions. It would be nice if we could say so without worrying about the words being twisted by opponents more interested in winning points rather than having an honest discussion.

(the debate found via Atrios, who also had an interesting opinion on this)

By way of a random Technorati click, I found the blog of a Georgia high school paper which made me search for an article about (phew!) how the Hartford Public Schools are now fining students for using profanity at school:

Students in Hartford, Conn., now have to pay for what they say – literally.

Under a new plan, 2,800 students at two high schools in the district could be subject to $103 fines for uttering profanity on school premises.

Officials there call it a last-ditch effort to create a learning space free from the linguistic irreverence so commonplace in society today.

“We have had kids that just curse out their teachers in the hallways,” says Zandralyn Gordon, the acting principal at Hartford Public High School. “That cannot continue.”

…

Experts say some schools are cesspools for swearing because disciplinary action is not strictly enforced. That was not the case in Hartford. Suspensions were handed down for obscenities, but administrators say they were seen as vacations and did nothing to improve unruly behavior. Now, says Ms. Gordon, “they are not going to curse, because it is going to cost.”

The fines, issued by police officers in the schools on a case-by-case basis, must be paid or students must appear in court as they would for a speeding ticket.

A main impetus behind the program was to reduce violence – and the suspensions and expulsions that were byproducts of that violence. “We find one kid swearing at another kid, the other kid responds,” says Cathy Carpino, the president of the Hartford Federation of Teachers, “and it goes from being a verbal altercation to a physical one. It needs to be stopped.”

Not sure what to say except that I’m curious what happens to students that can’t pay. It seems to me, but perhaps I’m wrong, that by the time the students enter high school, at least some of their swearing is already learned. I also wonder what happens if you stub your toe and yell out something like “shit” or “damn”? Seems like a steep fine when it’s not directed at anyone, especially if a “main impetus” is to reduce violence.

It’ll be interesting to see how it gets enforced. Heidi may have more on this at her blog later.

By the way, students at Pebblebrook (the school in Georgia), um, teachers and students are actually allowed to talk about religion in school. It would be impossible to teach large chunks of western history without talking about religion. What is not allowed is teaching students how to be good Christians. There’s a difference that ought to be obvious.

The founder of Ebay, Pierre Omidyar, is on stage right now talking about a new fund he has created called The Omidyar Network. He’s started the fund with over $400 million of his own money with the goal of fostering business that “does good” in the world. He wants to fund businesses and non-profit and policy enterprises that have as a direct result of their business model the direct empowerment of individuals. This could be in terms of economic empowerment (a la Ebay), social empowerment, or anything else.

It’s an interesting idea. While I’ve been turned off by the whole VC frenzy around here, this one makes me smile. Business can do good, business does do good, and anything that can encourage businesses that do actually do good, well, I’m all for that. It’s a very progressive thing.

They do want to actually make a return on their investment and it’s not a charity in the traditional sense (though I’m not sure how it can’t be for “policy efforts” or non-profits). It will be interesting to watch this grow and proceed. I hope it works…

Jonathan Chait has a good article talking about whether the Democrats really lack ideas and whether the Republicans have truly won the battle of ideas. His conclusion is that neither statement is true and that the primary reasons for this perceptions are ones we’ve seen before… The party in power generally gets to be the party of ideas. It’s full of interesting tidbits. One thing that is clear is that the Democrats aren’t the party of good slogans. Bush did a good job in both elections of coming up with bullshit little phrases that mean nothing but sound good. They also have good mantras that people generally associate with the party.

I’d like to make a few suggestions for the Democrats. Let me know what you think:

• No New Deficits
• No New Massive Clusterf**cks

I’m still working on tweaking those, but I think they’re a good start.

At some point, I think the Democrats have to play toward pulling in fiscal conservatives that are at least socially moderate. Concerted sloganeering and policy proposals should be able to bring this group over to the Democratic side. I suspect that most Democrats, including the more fiscally liberal members, are on the same page with the deficits: it’s bad and it needs to go away. It also needs to go away faster than the plans that Bush has suggested (though he actually hasn’t passed a budget that actually tracks to those goals, but that’s a different post).

Just go read this excellent commentary: THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH: Torture Isn’t a Laughing Matter–It’s Deadly Serious.

Kieran Healy has an excellent explanation about why torture never is good policy. It’s fascinating to me to watch the power of fear come over people in this country. I’ve always wanted to believe that we’ve moved beyond this, but the fact that this is still an ongoing debate says otherwise.