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Charles Krauthammer entertains us writing about the never-ending presidential campaign.
… As a columnist whose job it is to chart every jot and tittle of these campaigns, every teapot tempest that history will remember for not one second, I curse election years. Now I have to curse the year before as well. But for all its bizarre meanderings, the endless campaign serves critical purposes.
The first two — testing the candidates’ managerial and consensus-building skills — are undeniably useful. But like most Americans, I find it is the third — the gratuitous humiliation of our would-be kings — that makes it all worthwhile.
Gerard Baker tries to explain the campaign to his readers at The London Times. He maintains it’s the Dems to lose and shows how they might.
… So sorry is the Republican condition that there’s little doubt now, even 18 months out, that the 2008 presidential election is for the Democrats to lose. The only reason politics remains interesting is that in the past the Democrats have demonstrated an impressive capacity to stoop to the challenge – and somehow contrive to lose it. Can they possibly do so again?
The political conditions are uniquely favourable to them. In any ordinary circumstances, for a party to win a third straight presidential term in office, as the Republicans would have to do next year, is remarkably difficult.
In the past 50 years only George Bush Sr did it, after eight years of Ronald Reagan in 1988. Change for its own sake is not only the faddish prerogative of voters but democracy’s vital means of renewing itself. You don’t have to subscribe fully to Lord Acton’s dictum to believe that kicking the buggers out every few years is the best way to safeguard the constitution. …
The Corner likes having the French return to sanity.
Clive Crook in the National Journal attempts to make sense of health care proposals.
… A quite different reform strategy — which I think is preferable on the merits, as well as politically more feasible — is to retain the distinctively American aspects of this system, notably its reliance on competing private providers, while in key respects strengthening, not attenuating, the power of market forces. The crux of this idea is to give consumers real choices. That in turn can happen only if employers are largely taken out of the health insurance decision.
Employers do not insure your house or your car; why should they insure your health? No reason, except that a huge tax subsidy encourages them to do so. …
Gabriel Schoenfeld in Contentions on the Sulzberger’s “internal consultants” at NY Times.
Working at the New York Times would seem to be one of the most glamorous jobs imaginable, what with consorting with legendary editors, rendezvousing with anonymous sources, occasionally making headlines and history, and bathing 24/7 in a jacuzzi of prestige.
But that is only the appearance. The reality is something else. Because what the public does not know, but Timesmen know all too well, is that if one works at the Times, one has to contend with what are known to all, and dreaded by all, as the Internal Consultants. …
National Review shorts.
WSJ on history of economic time.
Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture — but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level. True, there were always tiny aristocracies who lived far better, but numerically they were quite insignificant.
Then — just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations — people started getting richer. And richer and richer still. Per capita income, at least in the West, began to grow at the unprecedented rate of about three quarters of a percent per year. A couple of decades later, the same thing was happening around the world.
Here’s a cautionary tale for flyers. A little over two months ago, travelers returning to Chicago from Jamaica had a two day “flight from hell.” The Chicago Tribune has a lengthy story today. We have part of it, and a link if you wish to read more.
… Jacobs braced for a delay but never imagined that over the next two days he and about 140 passengers would be stranded in a foreign airport as a cascade of mishaps—first a lack of common parts, then no mechanics and finally having to wait for a rescue plane from Chicago—turned Flight 1073 into an “irregular operation,” airline jargon for a flight from hell.
While statistically rare, such miscues are illustrative of how far U.S. airlines have stretched resources—planes, employees and infrastructure—in attempts to regain profitability. “You have no slack in the system,” aviation expert Darryl Jenkins said. “Trying to recover [from disruptions] takes days. It’s the worst it’s ever been.”
Flying has never been so fraught with possible misery. …
Learn why doctors are lining up to move to Texas.
… a report by David Hendricks in the San Antonio Express-News (posted on the newspaper’s website on June 1) should be read by all. It offered hard data on the changes that have occurred in Texas since voters in 2003 gave the thumbs up to a state proposition capping lawsuit awards in medical malpractice cases. …