Cataclysmic Christopher Hitchens!

Enjoy.

Sicko...

Here is a comparison of the two health care plans competing for the American vote. Obama's plan seems to be more comprehensive, but really not enough:

Some experts estimate that the McCain plan would reduce the number of uninsured only modestly because millions of people would drop or lose employer coverage, and not many more than that would buy policies outside of work. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that the McCain plan would lower the number of uninsured by a mere two million in 2018, out of a projected 67 million uninsured in that year. The Obama plan would cut the number by 34 million, the center says, but still leave nearly 33 million uninsured.

I have wondered many times why Americans can't see the obvious: health care is not a consumer good like all others. There is just too much imperfect information and the stakes are too high to apply conventional utility curves to the consumption of health care (as McCain tries to do). Three years ago Malcolm Gladwell wrote an essay on this aspect of American exceptionalism that sheds some light on the politics and ideology involved.

My favorite essays from the campaign

For those who are interested in in-depth essays and have the patience to go through them. The selection is, naturally, biased:

1. Andrew Sullivan's defining piece on Obama, long before other pundits caught up with him.

2. Tim Dickinson tears apart the myth John McCain carefully crafted for himself after Vietnam and that propelled him into national politics.

3. For those interested in the challenges of mass-scale campaigning, here is a good and a bad example.

4. The best-grounded endorsement I have read, from The New Yorker board of editors.

5. This article explains how Sarah Palin was eventually selected as a VP candidate and casts light on the workings of a rotten party.

The Tory boys

This picture was taken 20 or so years ago; it shows the then members of the Bullingdon Club, an infamous drinking society at Oxford. Anyone following British politics should recognize two of the "toffs". As two other members of the society, shadow Chancellor George Osborne and financier Nat Rothschild have been involved in a fundraising scandal in the past few days, one wonders if the old boy networks still dominate British politics.

The many faces of Barack Obama

The Guardian runs a round of short interviews with people who have met, befriended or worked with Obama over the years. All of them confirm the impression of him on the campaign trail: relaxed, sophisticated, inquisitive, mature, warm but still a tad detached. Personally, I find myself amazed and deeply moved by the way he has retained a calm temperament thouroughout his life despite all the geographical, racial and social mobility. The secret might lie in the following quote from his former employer, Gerald Kellman:

Barack had grown up as an outsider, without a father, as an American kid living abroad and separated from his mother at high school. Outsiders do one of two things: try to be like everyone else or identify with other outsiders. Barack did the latter. He was reflective and willing to identify with people in poverty, with people who faced discrimination.

Obama has probably been a keenly observant outsider all his life. However, I do not agree that he chose to identify with the underdog (underdogs do not usually end up in the White House). He crafted for himself a third solution, a vision of the politician-above-politics, who returns to the basics of "what works" and broad coalitions. This type of politics ties with the type of man he is: sensible, hard-working and essentially optimistic about people's common humanity. For Obama these qualities were not icing on cake; they were necessary to navigate through the mosaic of diverse social groups he had to live with all his life.

That he will become President in a few days is also a result of good chance. After so many years of divisive politics Americans are looking for a uniting voice. Deeply mired in crisis, they will opt for sensible change (Obama) rather than hotheaded experience (McCain). None of these qualities would sell so well four or eight years ago.

Awesome!

The collapse of the Greek government is imminent...

... if not a fait accompli. Yet again, my native country earns worldwide publicity for the wrong reasons. The scandals that have plagued the government are too numerous to be recounted here. But this time the polls show that the people have had enough. No wonder why. As the Greek Stock Exchange fell by 12% today, the credit-fed greek people got another big reality check.

(The comic strip is from daily Ta Nea. Each woman is a different crisis -in the economy, in the parliamentary trust etc- rehearsing the Greek national parade to take place in a few days.)

The real motive behind choosing Sarah Palin

A few days ago, when I told a friend of mine she looked like Sarah Palin, I thought I had come up with a thinly disguised compliment about her looks. Needless to say, she got furious at me. Did John McCain make a similar faux pas during his vetting of Mrs. Palin? Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post thinks so.

Greenspan admits "mistake" over ideology

Wow. I wonder what the cheerleaders of unfettered free market will say after such a blatant confession by their head coach:

"“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said.
Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”
Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.
“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Greenspan, this is not "A mistake", but an accumulation of hundreds of erroneous judgments over several years. I have not read his book to have a clear picture of where he is coming from, but he seems to be one more ideologue of the Reagan era suffering an ungraceful fall.

Mirabile Visu III

I almost forgot this one. It might actually be my favorite:

Mirabile Visu II

11) Jibjab's warm-up to the campaign, in the great American-Musical tradition:



12) The McCain campaign reenacts "Legally Blonde" by equating a former president of Harvard Law Review with Paris Hilton. Fabulous stuff:



13) Enter: Sarah Palin. "Moron!":



14) A fair selection of Palinisms. In mainstream moviemaking, editing usually adds to the comedy. Here, however, it might actually detract from Palin's full comic effect, manifest when uninterrupted in her incoherent rambling. I haven't felt so compelled to laugh and cry at the same time since I watched Ricky Gervais in The Office. :



15) Baracky! (Hat Tip to His Awesomeness MB for this one)



and the much-awaited sequel:



16) Hillary vs. Sarah courtesy of SNL:



17) The McCain-Palin mob in all its glory:



18) Obama emerged victorious from all three debates according to the polls, but the real protagonist was -in the great American populist tradition- Joe the Plumber. Btw, his name isn't Joe, he isn't a licensed plumber and he hasn't paid all his taxes but never mind:



19) A really decent Republican stating the obvious. Hopefully, the GOP will make use of his likes to be reborn after Nov 5.



20) Obama delivers a really funny speech at the Al Smith dinner in New York. Check out McCain's which was also very funny. After all the campaign claptrap, I couldn't believe my eyes and ears!



Part II here

21) D'OH!



22) Sarah Silverman invites people on the Great Schlep to Florida with a lot of chutzpah and makes poor Punditocrat's crush on her even more desperate:

Mirabile Visu - The beginning of a blog

My favorite videos (speeches, ads and other random moments) from a ridiculously long and arduous Presidential campaign. I start off the blog with them, because the campaign itself has woken me up from academic hibernation and prompted me to start this blog.

1) The first killer ad coming from Obama fans. Brilliant in its design and devastatingly simple in its message:


2) Remember Mike Huckabee?


3) Obama's "Yes We Can" Speech. I fell in love with the guy after watching this one (and promptly ordered his memoir on Amazon). His rhetoric still had a transcendental quality back then, before Hillary's mudslinging pushed him towards more neutral territory.


4) The music video inspired by the previous speech featuring will.i.am and a host of other celebrities. Directed by Bod Dylan's son, it was first released on dipdive.com and became an instant sensation. Throughout the campaign Obama used the Internet as well as an impressive number of volunteers to redefine grassroots campaigning.


5) Hillary's tear-stained choking before the NH primary. In retrospect, I think people (esp. women) sympathized with her in the same way they cling to a trusted brand that faces imminent collapse.


6) Obama, facing accusations on inflammatory comments of his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, gives a generation-defining speech on race. He says he can't disown him in the same way he cannot disown his white grandmother who sometimes made cursory racist remarks. My favorite lines:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.



7) The One tries to connect with middle America and bowls a 37. Stick to the orange ball, Dude:


8) The infamous 3am Clinton ad:


9) Hillary concedes gracefully:


10) Jesse Jackson gets a little antsy and Obama gets a boost for his Presidential bid: