We're not changing our health-care system very much at all, in fact.

Nothing happens in 2010. Or in 2011. Or in 2012. In 2014, when the bill really begins, the insurance situations of 18 million people change. A full 16 million of those people are uninsured. Aside from the small sliver of people who will pay a surtax on the final few dollars of uncommonly expensive insurance plans, the country simply will not notice this legislation.

We're reforming the margins of the health-care system.

via voices.washingtonpost.com

As Big Tent Democrat says: "Put THAT on the teleprompter."

My disappointment with so-called "healthcare reform" is profound and Ezra Klein's post at the WP does the best job of laying out why. There's not much there. No public option. No real reform for five years. A so-called mandate with no penalties and a seemingly optional agreement with the health insurance industry - whose stocks are soaring to half-century highs on the news of this mess.

Some will call it "historic." They will be wrong.

Two of those with tin cups rattling around the RSS blizzard this week were my blogging buddy Lance Mannion and everybody's favorite voice of conscience, Digby. I gave a tiny bit of personal stimulus money to each - and I ask you to do the same.

In this season of peace on earth and goodwill to men, don't you want to support those who would scorch the skin off Ben Nelson and Joe Liebercare? I know I do. Every night, a Senator goes to sleep in Georgetown safe and secure - you and I can change that with just a few clicks. Please give.

Digby here.

Sir Lancelot here.

Look for the handy tip jars - you're a big girl now.

I love this video - the 1963 Mets promotional video, featuring Casey Stengel, Ed Kranepool, Duke Snider, Lindsay Nelson, Ralph Kiner and Bob Murphy. It says as much about the New York of the early 60s as it does about baseball. There was real optimism in the air. Shea Stadium ("the most modern edifice ever constructed for the game of baseball") was going up in Queens and the Polo Grounds saw its last games. George Weiss talked about the farm system that would soon produce Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Cleon Jones, Bud Harrelson, Nolan Ryan and Jerry Grote. And dig those New Yawkah man-on-the-street interviews. Just brilliant, and in such contrast to the doom and gloom downer (until the last episode of season three) of everyone's favorite costume drama, Matt Weiner's Mad Men.

That optimism is in stark contrast to the attitude Mets fans in this off-season, though I'd argue that the hour Jose Reyes did with Mike Francesa this week on the FAN was like a brief summer win blowing across the frozen tundra of Citi Field. If Reyes's evident love of the game - not to mention his speed - makes its return at the top of the Mets order, we may avoid the horror of last summer, a baseball dead zone capped by the Metsies' worst-choice World Series match-up.

The Mets haven't made a big off-season move as yet, banking on comebacks from the Season of the Surgery (unless yesterday's signing of Japanese set-up man Ryota Igarashi counts as big-time); they've an offer into slugger Jason Bay, and another for aging catcher Bengie Molina. All these moves are incremental and could improve the on-field product next season. Certainly, the Mets - if reasonably healthy - should return to a team that plays well above .500.

But they don't (at present) have enough to challenge the Phillies' growing Eastern hegemony. That's a team built for the present and the future. The Mets' biggest hole is their rotation, and Citi Field's capacious pastures demands a herd of rawhide arms like the Metsies produced in the mid-60s. Right now, the Mets have a come-backing Johann Santana and a possible inside straight of 20-something head cases. The rotation simply won't make it.

Across town, meanwhile, it appears that the Yankees had a better team in the parade up the Canyon of Heroes than they do entering 2010. Trading out Damon and Matsui for Grandersn and Johnson is an obvious net loss, despite the gains in average age. Matsui was underrated for his entire Yankees' stint, and Damon in the two-hole was absolutely vital to last year's production. Both will be missed in the extreme.

It was a very great honour to meet Yessika Hoyos Morales of the Corporacion Colectivo de Abogados for lunch today.  Yessika is a deeply inspiring character and has given me the energy to pressure the government into taking a tougher line with Colombia, particularly within EU negotiations on a possible free trade agreement with the country.

I shall be asking questions of the Foreign Office about the extra-judicial killings of dozens of trades unionists in Colombia, many of which are linked to the Colombian army.

via www.tom-watson.co.uk

My friend and namesake Tom Watson, MP met with Yessika Morales to discuss anti-trade union violence in Colombia - something that the Obama Administration should paying more attention to. As Tom tweeted: "Yessika Hoyos Morales risked her life to see me today. Help protect her by sharing her name with your networks." Done! And I'd ask you to do the same.

As Tom points out, the Colombian army stands accused of a “crime against humanity” due to the “systematic and widespread” nature of the murders. You can read more about Ms. Morales's courageous campaign here.

One thing to keep an eye on. Lieberman has made some specific demands, which he insists have to be met. But what's to stop Lieberman from making new demands if the White House and Senate leaders give him what he wants now? It's not like he's negotiating in good faith, and it's not like Lieberman's word has value.

via www.washingtonmonthly.com

The White House doesn't get it: if anything about this smells like a liberal success story - or even a big Democratic victory - Lieberman will use his procedural power to block it. He's not running again. He is reviled by most in his own party, disgraced in his won state. He doesn't care, about people's lives or the future of what used to be his party. The man who ran on universal healthcare in 2000 has ceased to exist. Yet, Rahm Emanuel is in healthcare bill-at-any-cost mode and will call it "historic" no matter what it contains.

Sure, I'd picked up a few Westlakes at airports and beach-side bookmarts over the years and the prolific crime writer wasn't one to disappoint. And partly,  it was Lance Mannion's tribute: Lance favored the picaresque side of Westlake, the hilarious Dortmunder gang-of-thieves novels that dominated Westlake's late career and made him, as Lance noted, "an acute social satirist."

But falling into the Parker novels was a vicious free-fall into darkness at the start of a very dark year, a year that latches onto its dangerous and shifting shadows still. And so when I tumbled into Westlake's Richard Stark books - primarily his Parker series - the sheer absence of soul was a narcotic on a par with the hardest blues, a pure vein of criminal noir without a single beam of light. In short, Parker was the perfect literary sideman for my 2009 - a glimpse into the real American heartland, a lightning flash on the dark night that shows you a truth about this country that you don't want to see: the fact that all the do-gooders in the world can't fix some people, whether they're running things on Wall Street or killing a liquor store owner in some nameless mid-western town.

Parker is a remorseless killer, but it's not the murders that hold your attention in the series, which runs to 24 precise and plot-driven novels. Indeed, the murders are generally related without the gory details - they're just stated as mere updates in unfolding events. Rather, it's Parker's criminal knowledge that's interesting: his intricate preparation for the crime, his instincts for the score, his reaction to danger. Parker's violence is vast, but it's not maniacal; it only serves a purpose in the killer's overall goal - to make some money so he can lay low for a while. Westlake told an interviewer a few years ago: "I’ve always believed the books are really about a workman at work, doing the work to the best of his ability. However, I see him more as working stiff than professional class."

The University of Chicago Press is putting all the early Parker novels back into print, and I ran through the first eight this year. The Hunter was a repeat read, but you have to start at the beginning, and it came out in 1962, same as me. My favorite is the second in the series, The Man with the Getaway Face, in which Parker emerges after identity-shifting plastic surgery to hold up an armored car at a diner in the backroads of New Jersey. That empty pre-Sopranos northern New Jersey landscape, coupled with some double-crossing dead-enders, sets a grim table for the icy lead thief. The lack of passion in the crime - Westlake's "professional class" - can hook you with barbed end:

Parker lowered the gun. There wasn't enough reason to kill these three. It was dangerous to kill when there wasn't enough reason, because after a while killing became the solution to everything, and when you got to thinking that way you were only one step from the chair.

In some ways, the Parker novels would seem to be perfect cinematic investments: they're all plot, and paced for the screen. Yet only The Hunter has been made into movies - twice, in 1967 as Point Blank with Lee Marvin, and in 1999 with Payback with a poorly-cast Mel Gibson. I can understand why: there's not much character to latch onto, no hand-holds for a leading man. Westlake said he always pictured Parker as resembling Jack Palance, and that stony presence, without even a touch of humor, is required for the part. Tough to portray, harder to film; there are no Tony Soprano remorse sessions on the therapist's couch.

So put Parker on that booklist if it's been a hard year, or if next year looks like a tough one for the noir fan nearest you. Terry Teachout was right about these books: "Anyone who doubts the existence of original sin, or something very much like it, would do well to reflect on the enduring popularity of the novels of Richard Stark."

Sometimes you need the badlands.

UPDATE: Over on Facebook (which has taken over a lot of what we used to call blogging, I must admit) our buddy Dan Leo adds a correction on the cinematic side:

By the way, there were a few other movie adaptations of Stark books: Godard's "Made In USA", based unofficially on "The Jugger", "Slayground", starring Peter Coyote, which I never saw; and one pretty good one, "The Split", starring Jim Brown (!), based on "The Seventh"; oh, and I just remembered, another good one, "The Outfit", based on the book of that name, starring Robert Duvall.

WASHINGTON — The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said Tuesday night that he and a group of 10 Democratic senators had reached “a broad agreement” to resolve a dispute over a proposed government-run health insurance plan, which has posed the biggest obstacle to passage of sweeping health care legislation.

via www.nytimes.com

It appears from the scant details making the rounds this morning that this Senate is punting the public option down the field to some future Congress (and President) - while expanding the nation's current public healthcare system (namely Medicare) and enacting new regulations on private insurance. The White House calls the news of the "deal" between 10 Senators of the middle "great progress" but I'm not so sure. While it appears to improve what is un-ironically referred to as the "American healthcare system," the deal abandons true public healthcare under a Democratic President and Congress. Said Russ Feingold: "“I do not support proposals that would replace the public option in the bill with a purely private approach.” with the absence of Barack Obama in the jaw-boning on this issue - in my view, one of the poorest strategic decisions of this still-young Administration - a handful of Senators is batting around an increasingly frayed reform package that may in the end accomplish very little.

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

The truth hurts - and the truth is the last two "booms" actually weakened the American middle class, setting it up for further slippage during down-turns. The right decries "class warfare"but we'll have it if the wealth gap continues to grow. Why? Because we're an aspirational society at heart, at the very core, and without realistic aspirations the modern American society is dead in the water. Elizabeth Warren, an important voice, makes great sense.

Online giving contests such as the Case Foundation's America's Giving Challenge are offering nonprofit groups new opportunities to raise money and awareness. How can charities make the most of these opportunities? Tom Watson, an author and consultant, and Kari Dunn Saratovsky, of the Case Foundation, in Washington, discuss the answers to this and other questions with Allison Fine, the host of Social Good.

via philanthropy.com

I enjoyed appearing on Allison's excellent Chronicle of Philanthropy podcast today with Kari Dunn Saratovsky of the Case Foundation. You can listen right here:

Back in the late 90s, Jason Chervokas and I briefly worked on a book proposal we tentatively entitled "No Media." Our contention was that the global network would eventually devalue the existing media universe to the point of its near-disappearance. We believed that the evolution of the Web and the growth of DIY "content" - a word we both came to loathe - would explode the market for expensive, professional news stories, music, movies, television....the works. I think we were partly right, and it was somewhat ironic to see mention in David Carr's dark death-of-media Times column of the very vehicle we used to test some of those ideas at the time.

In the late days of our involvement with @NY, the newsletter and website we founded in 1995 and sold to Alan Meckler in 1999, Jason and I were recruited to work on a start-up media project called Inside. It was a print magazine (we wrote the end-paper column), a website, a media trade-pub community - and it was more than half a decade before its time.

Inside was the brainchild of Michael Hirschorn, Deanna Brown and Kurt Andersen - an all-star team of media veterans hell-bent on creating the, well, inside venue for the whole media industry during its incipient period of turmoil. It was funded by Flatiron Partners and our friends Fred Wilson and Jerry Colonna and it was a great, but sadly brief, writing gig - we wrote about subjects we were interested in and were paid very well. Here's how Carr places the Inside story (it failed within a year and was sold off to Steve Brill, who didn't do much with the carcass) into the narrative of the dying professional media landscape:

That feeling of age, of a coming sunset, is tough to avoid in all corners of traditional publishing. Earlier in November, the New York comptroller said that employment in communications in New York had lost 60,000 jobs since 2000, a year when the media industry here seemed at the height of its powers.

I arrived in New York that same year as part of Inside.com, a digital news site conceived to cover a media space that was converging and morphing into something wholly new. The site covered the mainstream media’s efforts to come to grips with new realities and efforts by new players to cash in on emerging technology.

Few of us could have conceived that in the next decade some of the reigning titans of media would be routed. Profligate dot-com ad money that had fattened print went away in a digital wipeout, and when digital media came back, it was to dine on the mainstream media rather than engorge it. After 2000, jobs in traditional media industries declined at a rate of about 2.5 percent annually and then went into a dive in 2008 or so. (Inside.com, an idea before its time — hey, let’s charge for high-quality, business-oriented content — disappeared after about 18 months.)

That carnage has left behind an island of misfit toys, trains whose cabooses have square wheels and bird fish who are trying to swim in thin air. The skills that once commanded $4 for every shiny word are far less valuable at a time when the supply of both editorial and advertising content more or less doubles every year.

Carr tries to lift his depressing tale at the end with the observation that the young and media-ambitious are still coming to New York to find their futures - and that they will invent a new future. That may be so, but I suspect that it will continue to be a world in which the market for "content" remains almost infinite - thereby generally devaluing its creation. I kinda wish we'd written that book after all.

From tonight onward, the relevance of George W. Bush to the foreign policy of the United States begins to diminish like a lifting winter fog to the vanishing point. This war in Afghanistan is Barack Obama's war, and he traveled to West Point to boldly claim that ownership before some of the young men and women who may soon face death under the terms of his order.

President Obama's team, transported nearly whole from its triumphant political campaign, has a sure-handed mastery of the image, the words, the brand. So there was no mistaking any intention whatsoever in tonight's speech upon the Hudson - and any continued carping about inherited warfare and the failed policies of a predecessor in office conflicts with the image of strength and decisiveness the President projected at the U.S. Military Academy.

To put it bluntly: he was not forced into this decision. The failures of the opposition party are no longer all that relevant to what happens now. The Afghanistan policy - more fully understood, in my view, as the Pakistan-Afghanistan policy - is the Obama Administration's policy. It is not some moth-eaten hand-me-down hybrid forced on a unwilling President.

Liberals, who have long deluded themselves into believing Obama was a fellow traveler (in John Heileman's words), have got to find a way to accept this - to understand that President Obama is both the best and the brightest and a practical centrist to the core of his being. (This stands in stark contrast, of course, to the sheer lunacy of the hard right, which insists on branding the Administration as socialist). Progressives who somehow intuited an anti-war politician, a near-pacifist, based on Obama's opposition to Bush's Iraq misadventure must finally understand that this is a President who won't shy away from ordering military action.

Indeed, the President's national security and diplomatic team is resolutely interventionist - committed to military strength and its strategic use - even if they're not wild-eyed exceptionalist cowpokes like the previous Cheneyites. The key words in tonight's address were these:

“We are in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan. That is why we need a strategy that works on both sides of the border.”

This is about the danger from that region to American interests and lives. While I may believe Afghanistan to be an unwinnable quagmire that only cost lives and dollars with short results, that it's useless to try and prop up what Bob Herbert calls "ragtag and less-than-energetic Afghan military" and the corrupt regime, President Obama has decided differently. Clearly, the U.S. does have a national security interest in the immediate future of Pakistan and Afghanistan - and so, I might add, does the civilized world.

As David Sirota writes in a tough post tonight (he seems somehow personally hurt that Obama has decided to retain the mantle of "wartime President"), the punditry around this decision is tiresome:

Why do so many pundits and pro-Obama activists continue to focus on how "hard" and "difficult" and "trying" this decision is for President Obama, rather than on how "hard" and "difficult" and "trying" this will be for the soldiers who are killed? Doesn't Obama get to make this decision, and then go home to the comfortable confines of a butlered White House, while thousands of Americans will be sent 7,000 miles from home to face their potential deaths? Isn't the latter "harder" than the former?

I suspect the President himself would agree. Of course this wasn't an easy decision, but it was the President's decision - and the decision he ran so hard to make. Yes, he took his time and that's to his credit. And now it's his war.

And because he acts in your name and mine, it's still ours.

We can see how much public space matters in the furore over what might seem at first to be a relatively small change to the way Twitter operates. The micro-blogging service may be a minority occupation and its attractions may be a mystery to the vast majority of internet users, but the hype does not diminish its importance as a bellwether for the future development of social media.

via www.thebillblog.com

A fascinating must-read post for social media geeks from my British friend Bill Thompson, who goes into some depth on a subject I've merely been chatting about recently - the fact that Twitter has been largely invented by its users and is, in large part, a public space worthy of protection. Bill focuses in on the humble "retweet" and Twitter's corporate move to take control over its crowd-sourced feature. It'll be really interesting to see how that crowd reacts when Twitter - the company - starts in 2010 to try and extract money from Twitter, the community. I suspect that today's massive Project Red/World AIDS Day marketing campaign on Twitter is the kind of thing we'll see a lot more of. Will it work, or will the Twitter crowd merely route around the advertising messaging?

John Heilemann has a cover story in the current issue of NY Magazine titled Obama Lost, Obama Found in which he details the challenges and opportunities facing the President. I took the time to read it last night, on the eve of the President's trip up to my birthplace and childhood home at West Point.

via www.avc.com

Fred Wilson agrees with the "far centrist" take of Heilemann's NY magazine piece. Not surprisingly, he has the most difficulty with the President's soon-to-be-announced escalation in Afghanistan - which may come to define his Presidency, alas.

No, the piles must be reduced or I face a middle-aged future not all that dissimilar from the Collyer brothers, though I do get out quite a bit and the piles are only thigh-high at their worst. However, before the physical expulsion of allergen-filled material from my bed-chamber, some intellectual exercise may also prove beneficial and I find I am called upon to share my thoughts on reading with the readers of this wayward blog, book-list hungry hordes that you are. So in recognition of the shopping demands (personal and otherwise) of the above-mentioned joyous holiday season - or JHS™ - I've decided on a series of irregular posts on the books I can safely recommend from the past year's reading.

At the top of the stack lie four or five paperback reissues from the canon of Eric Ambler. Now, this choice should carry a bit of foreshadowing against future entries in the series: I fairly wallowed in detective and espionage noir this last year; I needed escape - or at minimum, brief transportation - from the difficulties of worry and creeping despair (I suspect I'm not alone in this) and what better way outside a pill bottle than dark mayhem in the alleys of, oh say, wartime London or the salons of Istanbul. There's a reason so many video games feature the thrill of machine-gunning vast squads of Nazi thugs - it brings such good cheer.

In any case, if you need an escape hatch from the sparkly holiday lights proclaiming "shop, for you must be happy!" then Ambler's the man for you - or that reader on your list.

Early this year, I read Ambler's best-known novel, his 1939 A Coffin for Dimitrios, later made into a film starring Peter Lorre. It features what became Ambler's favorite plot device - the innocent traveler caught in a web of espionage or crime. The writing is straightforward and the characters and settings always serve the plot. Ambler will sometimes allow some of his protagonists' inner struggles and fears to surface, but he also keeps things moving. Sometimes the reader understand more of the situation than the hapless, bumbling traveler - but sometimes the innocent improves his thinking and surges ahead, while the writer holds back the deduction. Ambler, an Englishman who died in 1998, inspired a generation of noteworthy noir writers, including Philip Kerr and Alan Furst.

This summer, I went  on an Ambler tear, plowing through Epitaph for a Spy, Journey of Fear, and The Schirmer Inheritance - visiting the south of France, Parish, Istanbul, Italy and Greece with a collection of unknowing Englishmen, shadowy assassins, bluster police officials, assorted femmes fatales and the odd ex-Nazi.

There is always a moment  in the Ambler novels when the dupe - a novelist, a salesman, a teacher and the like - realizes with sinking fear that they're not in a movie or an Agatha Christie tale; that the danger is real and outlook fairly grim. It seems formulaic (and it is ) but Ambler had the rare gift of lifting such tales with his spare writing. Here's that moment from A Coffin for Dimitrios:

Besides, here was real murder; not neat, tidy book-murder with corpse and clues and suspects and hangman, but murder over which a chief of police shrugged his shoulders, wiped his hands and consigned the stinking victim to a coffin. Yes, that was it. It was real. Dimitrios was or had been real. Here were no strutting paper figures, but tangible evocative men and women, as real as Proudhon, Montesquieu and Rosa Luxemburg.

Ambler was born in London in 1909 to music hall musicians and actors, and toured Europe quite a bit as a child. He uses those experiences well, and began his novels at a propitious time: as fascism was descending on the continent like acid rain. John LeCarre once referred to Ambler as 'the source on which we all draw' but I wasn't after the roots of literary noir when I fished out his novels - I was looking for a good read, and if I'm honest, a hide-away from these times. Ambler put me on a tramp steamer in an unfriendly port or on the overnight train across the Alps - and in a better place entirely.

Note: Here's the Amazon link. I particularly like the Vintage paperback covers.

It's becoming increasingly common to "meet" someone online before you encounter them in real life. In my experience, people I meet online are generally quite recognizable when I finally get together with them at a conference or physical meeting. But maybe I'm just lucky.

via scienceblogs.com

A fascinating study by Max Weisbuch, Zorana Ivcevic, and Nalini Ambady shows that - in large part - we really are who we pose as on Facebook. The article's from Cognitive Daily. I do think we tend to present a idealized version of ourselves - the cool side of our lives we want everyone to perceive as us. But then again, we also do that in face-to-face relationships, don't we?