Ezra Klein

from a different Daily Dish -- 365 petri dishes, by Klari Reis House of Wisdom, the splendid new blog on Arabic science from Mohammed Yahia, editor of Nature Middle East describes an effort to map the Red Sea's coral reefs with satellite, aerial, adn ship-based technologies. Nice project and a promising new blog. Brain and Mind Ritalin works by boosting dopamine levels, says a story in Technology Review, reporting on a paper in Nature Neuroscience. The effect is to enhance not just attention but the speed of learning. As several tweeters and bloggers have noted, H-Madness is a new group blog…

BoingBoing loves The Open Laboratory: The Best in Science Writing on Blogs 2009, founded/published by the ever-present Bora Zivkovic and edited by scicurious. Nice pointer to four entires on weightlessness, major medical troubles, vampires v zombies, and how poverty affects brain development.   Slate's Sarah Wideman reports that Insurance companies deny fertility treatment coverage to unmarried women. The Bay State's AG finds that Massachusetts Hospital Costs Not Connected To Quality Of Care Ezra Klein asks a good question: Was Medicare popular when it passed? Apparently not. Jeff Jarvis…

The Science of Reading is the Harvard library's nice new site about reading. Lots of great old texts and some history of reading science. BBC News - Man assaulted female police officer with penis. The court heard he had been drinking heavily and could not remember committing the offence at his home in Aberdeen       Indiana Jones & the Ants - The New York Review of Books In her review of Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson's first novel, Anthill, in the April 8 issue of The New York Review, Margaret Atwood encourages anyone interested in ants to "take a look at the daring eco-…

tags: Obama Now Experiencing Presidential Puberty, cultural observation, social commentary, news report, health care reform, parody, satire, humor, fucking hilarious, television, Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert, Ezra Klein, streaming video Stephen Colbert interviews Ezra Klein, who explains the reconciliation process that Democrats need to pass health care reform and what Republicans can do to drag it out indefinitely. The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Action Center - Health Care Bill - Ezra Klein www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Skate…

Ezra Klein makes his call TKTK: I think health reform is going to go the way of stimulus. The stimulus was a huge and important accomplishment. If you had told liberals in 2007 that they were going to pass an $800 billion dollar spending bill that made good on decades of promises about infrastructure rebuilding and comparative effectiveness research and train construction and broadband internet and green energy, they would have laughed at you. But by the time the bill actually wound its way through Congress, most liberals were frustrated by the outcome: A few Senate moderates had lopped $100…

via Ezra Klein comes this bottom-line chart from the Center for Economic and Policy Research: That orange line headed heaven-ward? That's our deficit. All those other lines dipping down? That's our deficit if we had the same health care spending per person as France, Germany, Canada, and the UK (all countries, incidentally, with higher life expectancies than our own). You might say, of course, that even radical reform would not bring us down to their health care spending. We could copy France's system wholesale and still pay more for care. You would be right. But such reforms would bring…

Ezra Klein thinks the stars -- and the forces -- are so far lining up much more promisingly than in 1994: The opponents of health reform are, at this juncture, entirely isolated. Industry is adopting an attitude of relentless positivity. Republicans are grudgingly attempting to appear cooperative. The only straight opposition is coming, as Maddow and Howard Dean say, from Rick Scott, a disgraced former hospital executive whose company was convicted of defrauding the federal government in the largest ever case of its kind. You can say, of course, that the traditional opponents of reform will…

Theme of the day (again, sort of): managing expectation, or Do I panic or just ignore this thing and scoff at those who express concern? Neither, of course. I'm personally provisionally encouraged at the aggregated news from yesterday -- meaning I was glad to see that though the virus is spreading, its pace doesn't seem to be wildly accelerating and, more important, there are some signs that it's not (at this point) horrifically virulent; some experts are saying it might not be much worse than a regular seasonal flu, and the warming weather is on our side. Same time, it makes sense to take…

This report on Olympia Snowe's position suggests he might (if he doesn't get too many Democratic defectors). Snowe's importance to Obama's agenda was made clear in her support of the stimulus package -- she was one of 3 GOP senators whose support allowed the bill to go through. It appears she supports substantive action on health-care reform as well. Via Ezra Klein: Last Friday, an alert reader linked Steve Benen to this The Bangor Daily News writeup of Olympia Snowe's health care listening session. This quote, in particular, caught his eye: "We have a totally dysfunctional system now,"…

Glenn Reynolds declares that a private listserv run by Ezra Klein is a "scandal". Which is interesting, because I first ran into Glenn Reynolds on a private listserv run by Eugene Volokh. The members included pro-gun law professors like Reynolds, an NRA staffer and at least one journalist. I do not consider Volokh's listserv to be a scandal. Volokh converted it to a public listserv in 2003 and traffic dropped significantly after that, though that might be a coincidence.

Ezra Klein reviews Obama's handling of yesterday's health summit -- a piece well worth reading for a taste of how sharply focused and serious Obama is about truly comprehensive health-care reform. Karen Tumlty, a health-care expert, describes in Time her own family's grueling wrestling match with the health-insurance industry. A timely story -- no pun intended -- as it makes painfully clear that it's not just the 46 million people uninsured (did I just say "just" 46 million people) who fare poorly in the current system. Genetic Future looks at how a Victorian-era height-prediction system…

Ezra Klein gives the short whodat on Kathleen Sebelius, the Kansas governor who will be Obama's health and human services secretary. Sebelius's tenure as insurance commissioner in Kansas seems to have been both successful and fairly quiet: She is not defined by the battles and struggles of that period. She was not at the center of any tremendously controversial initiatives. Rather, she seems to have been a politically skillful and administratively competent commissioner. In 2001, Governing magazine named her one of the top public officials in the country and gave a nice summary of her…

Check this very scary projection of what current trends in health-care spending will mean for our economy: a growing weight that will account for half of GDP by 2082: Peter Orszag, Obama's budget director, shows that slide in his standard talk on what's wrong with our budget. It shows why, as Ezra Klein puts it, an odd bedfellows coalition of centrist economists ranging from Dean Baker to Henry Aaron to Paul Krugman to, well, Peter Orszag and Jason Furman have been forcefully arguing that there is no such thing as an "entitlement crisis." Social Security is safe. The crisis is in Medicare.…

Ezra Klein relays Jim Manzi's worry that public funding of drug trials exposes you to the inverse problems of the current system. Namely, "bureaucrats and politicians tend to have enormous career risk from an unsafe drug introduction, but almost none from a rejected drug that would have been effective had it been introduced...[it] would likely result in fewer new drugs being brought to market." There's a bit to this. But it misses something important: The biggest problem with the present system may not be that deeply unsafe drugs are approved but that too many drugs that carry modest safety…