If you had asked me yesterday what would be the most common sentence on the internet, I wouldn’t have guessed “Balloon Boy is alive!”

Conservatives need to stop invoking slippery slope arguments that apply to ANYONE. “First they came for people who urinate in public…”

I wish the media understood the crucial difference between military and civilian leadership. One sets policy, the other executes it.

Obama’s High Bar

The problem for the addlebrained Obama-rejectionists is that the president, as far as they are concerned, couldn’t possibly do anything right, and thus is unworthy of any conceivable recognition. If Obama ended world hunger, they’d accuse him of promoting obesity. If he solved global warming, they’d complain it was getting chilly. If he got Mahmoud Abbas and Binyamin Netanyahu to join him around the campfire in a chorus of “Kumbaya,” the rejectionists would claim that his singing was out of tune.

What would actually work? Driving down the cost of health care

What provisions in a “health reform act” would actually drop costs in health care? Let’s leave aside for the moment all the myriad other arguments – some might be seen as too much government intrusion, some would destroy the health plan industry, some would be cripplingly difficult for providers, and so on – and just focus on cost. Given the real structure of health care markets in the United States at this moment, what could be written into federal law and regulation that would actually reduce cost?me of these changes are massive, some would be invisible to those outside the industry, but all could be legislated or regulated, and all would “bend the curve” toward lower costs.
. . .
Limiting medical loss ratios: Many European countries dictate that health plans must return 85% or 90% or 92.5% of the premium paid in as medical services paid out. U.S. health plans, in contrast, compete on (and brag to Wall Street analysts about) how low their medical loss ratio is. Some are as low as 60%.
. . .
Increasing subsidies for digitization, tied to productivity improvements: There are huge inefficiencies in the actual practice of medicine. No one can improve on them until the people running health care can actually track what they are doing, in detail. In something as complex as health care, that means total digitization, like any other business.

Subsidizing automation: Many things in health care would be done much more efficiently by automation, from lab work and pharmaceutical distribution to tracking inventory. Today’s system does little to encourage such automation – instead,it actually supports the inefficiency.

Standardization and checklists: Many parts of health care have established pathways that are clinically proven and widely published in the medical literature, yet followed only at the clinician’s whim. These are not matters for the doctor’s judgment, these are matters like washing your hands between patients, fully draping a patient for a central line placement, getting clear verbal confirmation from everyone in the surgical suite that they agree on who the patient is and what the operation is for. Standard pathways, and simple feedback mechanisms like checklists to make sure they are followed, are still not common practice in health care. If regulations made them mandatory, following them would save billions of dollars in fighting infections and having to re-admit patients to the hospital with problems that could have been prevented.

High Cost of Death Row

Perhaps the most extreme example is California, whose death row costs taxpayers $114 million a year beyond the cost of imprisoning convicts for life. The state has executed 13 people since 1976 for a total of about $250 million per execution. This is a state whose prisons are filled to bursting (unconstitutionally so, the courts say) and whose government has imposed doomsday-level cuts to social services, health care, schools and parks.

Money spent on death rows could be spent on police officers, courts, public defenders, legal service agencies and prison cells. Some lawmakers, heeding law-enforcement officials who have declared capital punishment a low priority, have introduced bills to abolish it.

A Smarter (and Cost-Efficient) Way to Fight Crime

Most crimes in the United States are committed by long-term repeat offenders, a majority of whom are eventually caught. One of every 100 adults in the United States is now behind bars; many are serving lengthy sentences. The crimes they committed clearly did not “pay” in any objective sense of the term.

Why, then, did they commit them? The short answer is that most criminals are not the dispassionate rational actors who populate standard economic models. They are more like impulsive children, blinded by the temptation of immediate reward and largely untroubled by the possibility of delayed or uncertain punishment.

The evidence suggests that when hardened criminals are reasonably sure that they will be caught and punished swiftly, even mild sanctions deter them. But not even the prospect of severe punishment is effective if offenders think they can get away with their crimes.

One way to make apprehension and punishment more likely is to spend substantially more money on law enforcement. In a time of chronic budget shortfalls, however, that won’t happen.

But Mr. Kleiman suggests that smarter enforcement strategies can make existing budgets go further. The important step, he says, is to view enforcement as a dynamic game in which strategically chosen deterrence policies become self-reinforcing. If offense rates fall enough, a tipping point is reached. And once that happens, even modest enforcement resources can hold offenders in check.

GOP.com needs some better sysadmins. It’s going down faster than a Republican Senator in an airport bathroom.

The Republican party just redesigned their website to be a red version of Barack Obama’s campaign site. Knowing their primary goal should be to convince the rest of the country they’re not just a bunch of bitter old white dudes, they updated the logo to replace the “O” with a bunch of yearbook photos. Since your time is valuable, I’ll save you the strain of hitting reload a bunch of times. Here’s all of them :

I’ll leave it to others to analyze the demographic breakdown of these images and what it says (if anything) about the type of voters the Republican Party is trying to attract, though I’d be willing to bet if the GOP was really as diverse as the images here suggest, we’d have a much more civil discourse in this country.

I’m going to celebrate Columbus Day getting lost while driving across town to steal spices and enslave everyone I meet.

Nobel Prize? Yawn. Sarah Palin won the Sweet Pickles “Hooray for Reading!” Award for reading more than 10 books during her summer vacation.

When will Joe the Plumber get a chance to weigh-in on Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize? Honor us with your brilliant insights, Mr. “the Plumber”!

Kissinger, Sadat, & Arafat all won Nobel alongside their enemies for working towards peace deals. Singling them out is very dishonest.

A humble reaction to Obama’s Nobel Prize would be to reflect on international view of past/present U.S. foreign policy. Too much to ask?

Between Polanski and military contractors, there has been way too much moral relativism regarding rape lately. It’s disgusting.

Last night an ad with Levi, the Bristol Palin-impregnator woke up my dogs. They barked like mad at the TV until it ended. I love my dogs.

To those who are ignorant enough to shun vaccines during an influenza pandemic, let’s re-discuss Darwin next spring. You’re in for a treat.

If Joe Torre starts discussing how zombies will be affected by health care reform, my brain will reach critical mass.