Palin for president of whitebread America.

From Sam Tanenhaus' New Yorker review of Sarah Palin's memoir, as well as another book about the former governor:

Palin, though notoriously ill-travelled outside the United States, did journey far to the first of the four colleges she attended, in Hawaii. She and a friend who went with her lasted only one semester. “Hawaii was a little too perfect,” Palin writes. “Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls.” Perhaps not. But Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, gave a different account to [Scott] Conroy and [Shushannah] Walshe [authors of 'Sarah From Alaska']. According to him, the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.”

For president of the modern world's first multiracial superpower, you might pick a native of Hawaii, the most multicultural state. For president of those who can't or won't adapt to America's multiracial reality, you might pick a kindred spirit, the "talking hair-do" mascot of the Tea Partiers.

New Republic's Isaac Chotiner asks, "Why has this gotten absolutely no media attention?" Good question.

 

 

 

FDR's colossal blunder...

...wasn't that he tried to "pack" the Supreme Court, in 1937, but that he failed in a worthwhile effort. I was taught this was one of the few big mistakes of the great U.S. president, a deeply misguided exercise in power-grabbing. But the high-school texts have it wrong, argues jurist Richard Posner in New Republic:

Would it really have been so terrible had the Court-packing bill passed? I am not so sure. It would have increased turnover on the Court, reduced the average age of justices, made an appointment to the Court less prestigious, and made the justices more cautious about bucking strong political forces, because they would have learned that Congress was willing as well as able to rein them in. We would probably have been spared the excesses of the Warren Court, which turned Roosevelt’s idea of the “living Constitution” on its head: where Roosevelt wanted the Court to stand aside so that the government could deal with the distinctive problems of modernity, the Warren Court responded to the surging crime rates of the 1950s and 1960s by increasing the rights of criminals.

 
Supreme Court, by Frank Martin.

 

 

 

Who'd have guessed...

...that an independent fan site, Obama's America, would be a showcase for futuristic ideas, most grounded in real-world practicality, and not a collection of beefcake shots? Offering topics like this:

A Race of races

Few have focused on what may well be the country's most historically significant and powerful weapon: its emergence as the modern world's first multiracial superpower.

Looking for brain food on urban, tech, health, demographic, ecological and humanitarian trends and all-round inspiration? Click here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Didn't they also invent chutpah?

Paul Krugman on banking:

That's everybody's challenge: come up with a clearly beneficial example of financial innovation without mentioning A.T.M.s, and no one can do it. (1)

 

From Larissa MacFarquhar's profile of the Nobel laureate economist in the March 1 New Yorker.

 

Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, at home with their cats, Doris Lessing and Albert Einstein. (Photo by Tina Barney.)

Note: Paul Volcker, the former U.S. Federal Reserve Board chairman, has made the same observation:

I made a wiseacre remark that the most important financial innovation that I have seen the past 20 years is the automatic teller machine. That really helps people and prevents visits to the bank and is a real convenience.

How many other innovations can you tell me that have been as important to the individual as the automatic teller machine, which is in fact more of a mechanical innovation than a financial one?

 

Enjoy your weekend.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

My favorite take on the health-care summit - and Obama.

From Jonathan Chait, New Republic, live-blogging the healthcare summit:

President Obama is so much smarter and a better communicator than members of Congress in either party. The contrast, side by side, is almost ridiculous.

Update: Good example of what I'm talking about: Lamar Alexander contradicts Obama, says that the Congressional Budget Office found that premiums would rise under the Senate's plan. Obama points out, correctly, that Alexander is just wrong.

But most the time, this is like watching Lebron James play basketball with a bunch of kids who got cut from the 7th grade basketball team. He's treating them really nice, letting his teammates take shots and allowing the other team to try to score. Nice try on that layup, Timmy, you almost got it on. But after a couple minutes I want him to just grab the ball and dunk on these clowns already. [Emphasis added.]

Maybe the bipartisan nice guy stuff matters, and he has to defer to the Congressional Democrats. I'd enjoy seeing more of him swatting Lamar's weak jumper into the tenth row.

 

 

 

Enjoy your day.

This just in...

Lame-o excuses from Toyota USA boss in Congressional testimony:

"[Jim] Lentz's stammering performance put the 'oy' in Toyota," reports WaPo on Tuesday's testimony. "If somebody was uneasy about driving a Toyota before Tuesday's hearing, they'd probably have been downright panicky by the end." Among other things, Lentz came up short when asked if the fixes the company has implemented so far will solve the gas-pedal-trapped-in-the-floormat problem. Lentz said: "Not totally." That was a 180 from a few weeks ago when Lentz claimed "We are very confident that the fix in place is going to stop what's going on."

Jim Lentz of Toyota Motor Sales USA: "I can't tell you exactly." "I don't know specifically of the results of the tests." "I would assume so. I don't know." "I'm not an engineer, so I'd probably mess this up."

And on deck today, Lentz's boss, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda:

"In his prepared testimony, released on Tuesday, Toyoda said he took personal responsibility for the situation, NYT reports. In the past, he said, the company's priorities were safety and quality, and sales came last. But as Toyota grew to become the world's biggest automaker, "these priorities became confused, and we were not able to stop, think and make improvements as much as possible." WTF? This is the enterprise that made relentless "continuous improvement" part of the vocab for leaders in all walks of life. We're told Toyoda, 53, grandson of company founder Kiichiro Toyoda, has "intensely" prepped for today's testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the investigatory committee of the House. Let's hope he's better prepped than Lentz...

WaPo's Eugene Robinson urges Dems to grow a spine and pass healthcare reform.

"If the party is going to take a political hit anyway, it might as well get the benefits -- which are considerable. When Republicans scream about 'big government' and 'socialism' and all that, Democrats need to be able to tell voters that this exercise brought real change: No refusals of insurance coverage due to preexisting conditions. No arbitrary increases in insurance premiums. Coverage for 31 million Americans who are now uninsured. A major step toward limiting the unsustainable long-term rise in health-care costs.

"House Democrats, who passed a more progressive reform bill, may have to hold their noses to accept Obama's proposal. Senate Democrats may need their spines stiffened to go through with the reconciliation maneuver; perhaps it will give them courage to imagine how they would look if they reject a bill that is all but identical to one they passed a couple of months ago."

And the Dems just got some ammo, as Anthem Blue Cross sticks with 39%% rate hike in CA.

Add Anthem to your boycott list, along with parent WellPoint, America's biggest private health insurer. And this is on top of a double-digit Anthem hike in premiums last year. Manna from heaven for reform advocates, of course, whose bugbears have included the many Americans satisfied with their insurance and fear change. Oops, turns out even if you are well-insured - unlike the 30 million Americans with no coverage, and tens of millions more with inadequate coverage - even you can get hit with premium hikes that make your coverage unaffordable. And that's before you make a claim and discover that all those premiums over the years don't cover the finger lost in an industrial accident, since, it turns out, one of your policy's loopholes is not to cover workplace accidents that your state's worker-compensation scheme supposedly pays for.

Banks lobbying fiercely to block legislation that would curb their overdraft fees...

...which amount to a staggering $40 billion or so annually, about half the banks' total haul from ATM and credit card fees. Used to be that bouncing a check or otherwise spending funds not in your account was stigmatized - and a good thing, when you think about it. Now banks encourage you to overspend your account holdings, and then whack you with a giganto fee that goes straight to their bottom line, given how little cost is involved at their end. Then again, nobody's putting a gun to your head to run a tab with Chase or Citi. So, starve the bank, feed your savings.

Nearly 25% of U.S. mortgages are underwater.

"Research firm First American Core Logic, which monitors housing equity, reported Tuesday that 11.3 million homeowners - or 24% of all homes with mortgages - were underwater as of the end of 2009. That's up from 23% and 10.7 million borrowers three month earlier, CNN Money reports. "Nevada was the state with the worst record at 70% of all mortgaged properties underwater. That was followed by Arizona (51%), Florida (48%), Michigan (39%) and California (35%)."

Medical residency programs rely on Big Pharma funding, med journal says.

"More than half of the nation’s medical residency programs to train doctors in internal medicine accepted financial support from the drug industry, even though three-fourths of the programs’ directors said accepting the aid was 'not desirable,'” NYT reports, citing a new survey by Archives of Internal Medicine. 'Program directors are aware of the problem, but right now they don’t have the funds to be free,' said Dr. Joanne M. Conroy, chief health care officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, who was not involved in the survey, but had seen the report."

 
The waterwalker strikes again.

Yet another Obama bailout. This time, the Great Lakes!

NYT editorial lauds Obama administration's ambitous $2-billion, 5-year program to "rescue and repair the Great Lakes after a century of environmental neglect and abuse...The Great Lakes, which hold 20 percent of the fresh water in the world, are in desperate condition: threatened by lingering toxic waste, agricultural runoff, deteriorating wetlands and invasive species that are upending the natural balance of life in the lakes." Toronto Star editorial urges Canada to follow Obama's lead.

 
Nasa image of the Great Lakes.

Think again about your once-a-day aspirin habit.

"If you're taking a daily aspirin to stave off heart disease, you may want to reconsider, WSJ reports. Medical experts now say some people who are taking aspirin on a regular basis should think about stopping. Public-health officials are scaling back official recommendations for the painkiller to target a narrower group of patients who are at risk of a heart attack or stroke. The concern is that aspirin's side effects, which can include bleeding ulcers, might outweigh the potential benefits when taken by many healthy or older people."

Canadian life expectancy nears 81.

"Life expectancy for a baby born in the three-year period from 2005 to 2007 has reached 80.7 years, says the study released Tuesday by Statistics Canada," Canadian Press reports. "That’s up from the average of 80.5 between 2004 and 2006, and 78.4 a decade earlier. Gains during the past decade were strongest among men, although women still live the longest. Men’s life expectancy at birth rose 2.9 years to 78.3 in 2005-2007, while among women it increased by 1.8 years to 83...'For both sexes, if you reach age 65 you can expect to live about 20 years,' Statistics Canada senior analyst Shiang Ying Dai said in an interview.

"Statscan attributes the rise in life expectancy to a number of factors, including universal health care, a good infrastructure and advances in medicine. 'We have the luxury of being able to take care of ourselves and take care of our population,” a Statscan spokeswoman said."

Another adventure on the dark side.

Cheney recovering from fifth heart attack.

"He's such a tease," says one of my progressive friends. The former U.S. veep, 69, appears intent on surpassing Ike's record, forgetting that only the cardiac scares while still in office count. LAT reports that "Cheney's longtime heart problems actually may be operating in his favor, said Dr. Robert Kloner of USC's Keck School of Medicine. 'It is likely that he has developed collateral blood vessels that grow into the areas not getting enough oxygen. That might be something that is helping him'."

Speaking of extra-terrestials, a renowned U.K. physicist allows they might exist:

"The intriguing remark was made by Lord Martin Rees, a leading cosmologist and astrophysicist who is the president of Britain’s Royal Society and astronomer to the Queen of England. Rees, who last month hosted the National Science Academy’s first conference on the possibility of alien life, said he believes the existence of extra terrestrial life may be beyond human understanding," reports DailyGalaxy.com."'They could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognize them. The problem is that we’re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology...I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains'.” 

Epic humbling likely to be included in Jobs' authorized bio, eWeek speculates.

In its rundown of "11 Stories Apple's Steve Jobs Will Want to Include in His Biography," eWeek includes Jobs' humilating ouster from the iconic company he co-founded. Subsequently each of Jobs many successors were also bounced, until Apple realized its error and sought Jobs's return. And Apple (iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad) hasn't looked back. "Some might question why Jobs would want the world to remember his departure from Apple, but I think it plays into his ego," says eWeek's Don Reisinger. "When Jobs was ousted in 1985 by the company's CEO, John Sculley, Apple's senior management believed it was the right move. And yet over the next 10 years, Apple attempted to compete in an arena that was leaving it behind. Jobs might not want everyone to know the issues surrounding his departure from Apple, but you can bet that he'll want everyone to know that once he was gone, the company he founded was in deep trouble." (That should read, cofounded, with Steve Wozniack.)

 

 

 

The End Times.

Washington, D.C., Feb. 17. My industry's woes at a glance. Folks insist on free news.

Enjoy your day.