Underlying the latest U.S.-Israel spat over settlements is the deeper — real — problem: There are five key actors in the Israeli-Palestinian equation today. Two of them — the Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and the alliance of Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah — have clear strategies. These two are actually opposed, but one of them will shape Israeli-Palestinian relations in the coming years; indeed, their showdown is nearing. I hope Fayyad wins. It would be good for Israel, America and the moderate Arabs. But those three need their own strategy to make it happen.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Let’s Fight Over a Big Plan – NYTimes.com.

I needed to take a Clonazepam by the second sentence of this opening graf of Friedman’s. God bless this guy. Can anyone else out there recall a more opaque opening paragraph?

But the state still gets between 10 and 20 e-mails seeking verification of Obama’s birth each week, most of them from outside Hawaii, Kim said Tuesday.

via Hawaii considering law to ignore Obama ‘birthers’ – Yahoo! News.

I was tempted to laugh at this story about the Birthers still asking for Barack Obama’s birth information — the state of Hawaii is considering passing a law allowing them to ignore these requests — but then it occurred to me that at least those people are actually doing their homework.

On the other hand, I get pestered at least once a day by some lunatic who a) hasn’t noticed that I actually oppose the health care bill, and b) has fallen for the reams of robo-emails floating around the internet making extravagant claims about what’s in the Obama Health Bill. One of the most popular is something written by a Texas County Judge named David Kithil – I have no idea if he actually exists or not — who purports to have combed through HR 3200 and found evidence of all sorts of fiendishness. Some of the highlights of the evils lurking in the Health Care bill, according to this possibly-real person:

** Page 50/section 152:  The bill will provide insurance
to all non-U.S. residents, even if they are here illegally.

** Page 58 and 59: The government will have
real-time access to an individual’s bank account and will have the authority to make electronic fund transfers from those accounts.

** Page 65/section 164:  The plan will be subsidized (by
the government) for all union members, union retirees and for community organizations (such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now – ACORN).

** Page 203/line 14-15:  The tax imposed under this
section will not be treated as a tax.  (How could anybody in their right mind come up with that?)

** Page 241 and 253:  Doctors will all be paid the same
regardless of specialty, and the government will set all doctors’ fees.

** Page 272. section 1145: Cancer hospital will ration
care according to the patient’s age.

** Page 317 and 321: The government will impose a
prohibition on hospital expansion; however, communities may petition for an exception.

** Page 425, line 4-12: The government mandates
advance-care planning consultations.  Those on Social Security will be required to attend an “end-of-life planning” seminar every five years. (Death counceling.)

** Page 429,  line 13-25:  The government will specify
which doctors can write an end-of-life order.

Attention all you fine citizens who are writing to me about this stuff: instead of sending abusive emails to a person who actually opposes the bill, do us all a favor and read the fucking bill. Thanks to a miraculous invention called the internet, you can find it quite easily. Here, I’ll even give you the link. Check each one of those supposed clauses and you’ll find they’re all bullshit, if you can even find them at all.

The author of this Rovian screed was clever. He picked sections of the bill that used very general language and then simply pasted lies on top of them that sounded like they might fit, even when they did not. A good example is the first bit about section 152, which does indeed prohibit discrimination and provides health coverage “without regard to personal characteristics.” Section 152, however, says nothing about immigrants.

The section that does talk about immigrants is section 242, the “Affordability Credit Eligible Individual” section, which basically defines an “affordability credit eligible individual,” i.e. a subsidy-eligible individual, as a person who is “lawfully present in a state in the United States.”

Similarly, while there is a section giving providers the ability to check on a patient’s ability to pay, there is nothing in there allowing withdrawals or transfers to or from a person’s bank account. And the advance care deal, as we all, know, does not mandate advance care consultation every five years; what the bill says is that if you want advance care consultation, you can’t get it more often than once every five years, unless there’s an extraordinary reason (i.e. a significant new change in the person’s condition, an injury, etc.).

But you’d have to actually read the bill to learn that. Much easier, of course, to simply rely upon the analysis of some anonymous internet author who can’t spell “counseling.” Is this a great country, or what?

Reconciliation has been used with increasing frequency. That was bad enough. But at least for the Bush tax cuts or the prescription drug bill, there was significant bipartisan support. Now we have pure reconciliation mixed with pure partisanship.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Spirit of Sympathy – NYTimes.com.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t one of the Bush tax cuts only passed when Dick Cheney broke a tie in the Senate?

We’re going to hear an awful lot of hand-wringing in the next few weeks if the health care bill sneaks through the House and ends up passing in the Senate via reconciliation — as though using reconciliation were somehow immoral, or cheating.

I’m not sure I get what the issue is here. No Republican Senator is ever going to vote for the health care bill under any circumstances. It could have a rider in it mandating biblical readings up through the junior college level and you still couldn’t get even a very God-fearing Republican like Tom Coburn to vote for an Obama health care bill. Chuck Grassley wouldn’t vote for it if you moved the U.S. Naval Shipyard to an Iowa cornfield. They’ve locked arms on this bitch like soccer players on a free kick.

From the start, the only way this was going to pass was with 100% Democratic votes. So if there are 60 Democrats, you can do it without reconciliation. If there are 59, you have to use reconciliation. “Sympathy” has nothing to do with this; it’s math.

I also don’t get how anyone could have watched the Senate over the last year or so and not concluded that this thing is better passed with 50 votes than 60. With 50 votes, you have ten fewer Senators to bribe, which according to my calculations should bring the overall cost of the bill down by about at least fifty trillion dollars.

I hate this bill and have since the beginning — to me it seems like a radical and dangerous step to start forcing people to become customers of a seriously overpriced, inefficient product, thereby removing the last incentive for an already antitrust-exempted, horrifically-performing industry to improve itself in any way.

But I’m beginning to come around to the idea that if we do pass this thing, sooner or later Congress is going to get around to complaining about subsidizing the profits of WellPoint and Aetna and all the rest of them. Naturally the first place they’ll cut in future budget crises is the “affordability credits” for low-income earners, but there’s a slim chance they’ll get around to chiseling the fat from the insurance companies, too, which might in turn lead ultimately to a sane revamping of this ridiculous system.

Or maybe not. I’m trying to find a way to feel good about this thing. Is there a way this thing doesn’t suck? Input is welcomed here.

LIMBAUGH: Are you sure that Paterson appoints or is there a special election?

CALLER: I am reasonably sure that Paterson will be appointing the replacement, assuming that he, you know, doesn’t resign in the next 60 or 90 days.

LIMBAUGH: Let’s assume you’re right. So, David Paterson will become the massa…

CALLER: Yes.

LIMBAUGH: …who gets to appoint whoever gets to take Massa’s place. So, for the first time in his life, Paterson’s gonna be a massa. Interesting, interesting.

via Rush Limbaugh races to inject racial joke about Paterson into Massa mess.

I go for long stretches of time without listening to Rush/Hannity-esque hate radio, so I forget from time to time what utter douche bags these people are. The shock factor of not listening to these guys for months and then switching them on out of the blue is really awesome; it’s like visiting another planet.

Today I listened to Michael Medved and some moron from a “Religious Liberty” think-tank flipping out about the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Their thesis was that forcing God-fearing, 1000% straight men like themselves to share locker rooms and barracks with gay men will mean the end of civilization. Presumably this is because all that uncorrupted religious straight-dude flesh will be too much of a temptation for gay soldiers — who naturally will have enlisted for deadly dangerous combat in stinking Middle Eastern hell-holes just to get a glimpse of toothless Christian boys from Arkansas naked. These megachurch-bred anti-gay advocates with their visceral terror about the end of the closet, sure that liberated gay men by the hundreds will be lying in wait to rape them the instant the shower-nozzles turn on … I mean, the amount of projection going on is so obvious, it’s almost laughable.

Then I get home and I read that Rush Limbaugh is making a funny about New York Governor Paterson and the scandal surrounding Representative Eric Massa. Massa is naturally is the hot news on every right-wing talk radio station in the country today because he is a poster child for exactly this same conservative sex-paranoia — a Democratic politician who apparently felt liberated enough in our permissive cultural environment to grope and tickle straight male staffers. Limbaugh, discussing the scandal with a caller who mistakenly believed that Massa’s resignation would allow Paterson to appoint a replacement, then made the above pun.

It’s not so much that Rush made a racist joke. Nor does it even bother me that the whole premise of the discussion was incorrect (Paterson doesn’t get to appoint a replacement). We’re used to Rush being both racist and factually indifferent.

It’s more that Rush is such an intellectually lazy piece of shit who’s been on dumbly racist autopilot for so long that he literally can’t avoid making a dumb, unfunny black-baiting joke when the opportunity is shoved in front of his face. You could see this joke coming from thirty miles away, and Rush is so intellectually obese, he still couldn’t get out of the way in time. I mean, the minute the conversation switched to a discussion of the black governor Paterson and a guy named “Massa,” who among us didn’t think that Rush was going to go there?

If the guy had even an ounce of self-awareness left, he would have tried to surprise us by not making the joke. It actually might have been funny, if he had left it alone, just this once, just to fuck with us, as it were. But the guy has been self-plagiarizing for like eighteen consecutive years now — hasn’t added a single thing to his act since the first Clinton term at least — and this shit is just muscle memory with him by now. He’s just mailing it in over and over again, using as little mental energy as possible broadcast after broadcast, so that he can make it to the end of every day and stuff his face with pills or French fries or whatever his drug of choice is these days. Ugh…

Lower credit risk means a lower price for protection. Zero implies zero risk. The higher the basis points, the higher the implied risk. When U.S. credit default swaps were first introduced, the price of protection was around two basis points. According to Bloomberg, the price for five-year protection was around 38 basis points (per annum) on Friday. But the price in the over-the-counter market — where this stuff actually trades — was almost double or around 75 basis points.

Since most traders in U.S. credit default swaps don’t think the U.S. will default any time soon, why are they trading U.S. credit default swaps? They are speculating on price movements the way a day trader buys and sells stocks to speculate on stock price movements.

via Janet Tavakoli: Washington Must Ban U.S. Credit Derivatives as Traders Demand Gold.

Another Janet Tavakoli piece, this one about the market for CDS on the United States.

I’d like someone to explain to me how trading a credit default swap on a U.S. Treasury note isn’t gambling. This is purely betting on crowd behavior — after all, nobody really thinks the U.S. will default.

It’s weird enough living in a country where a man can legally own an arsenal of machine guns, but his neighbor growing a pot plant will send a team of DEA agents kicking his door in with a no-knock warrant. But this goes even beyond that. If I go online today to HaveNoLifeAndBetOnSports.com and bet fifty dollars on the Bucks against the Celtics tonight, I’m a criminal. But some gazillionaire firm in New York can legally bet against the United States of America in unlimited amounts in a trade that has nothing to do with anything, but a guess about how many other people will make the same bet.

Jesus, are we a weird country.