Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek: "Any news organization that took its responsibilities seriously would take pains to cover presidential criticism fairly. It would regard doing so as itself a test of integrity. At Fox, by contrast, complaints of unfairness prompt only hoots of derision and demands for "evidence" that, when presented, is brushed off and ignored...

Bono in the NYT today: "The Nobel Peace Prize is the rest of the world saying, “Don’t blow it.”

But that’s not just directed at Mr. Obama. It’s directed at all of us. What the president promised was a “global plan,” not an American plan. The same is true on all the other issues that the Nobel committee cited, from nuclear disarmament to climate change — none of these things will yield to unilateral approaches. They’ll take international cooperation and American leadership.

Gene Lyons on Salon: "Appearing on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” the White House’s Dunn made it clear that the Obama administration intends to deal with the network as a political enemy. “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” she subsequently told The New York Times. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” {...}

One of the more interesting results of the Framingham Heart Study: happiness and healthiness are contagious:

"two years ago, a pair of social scientists named Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler used the information collected over the years about Joseph and Eileen and several thousand of their neighbors to make an entirely different kind of discovery. By analyzing the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses..."

Read Don's latest post here.

I thought in my last post we were making some progress in this discussion, but it seems we've backslid to talking points and exaggerations. So now I'm feeling much less optimistic that we'll be able to achieve even the most basic level of mutual understanding as a result of this exchange.

Our President, to the world (I tried to summarize but couldn't do it, so the emphasis is mine): "I come before you humbled by the responsibility that the American people have placed upon me; mindful of the enormous challenges of our moment in history; and determined to act boldly and collectively on behalf of justice and prosperity at home and abroad.

Don's latest post is here. Sorry for the delay in response -- I've been on the road, and I'm only now catching up.

I agree with you, Don, that this has been a very good dialogue. I've come to understand not only the perspective of those who oppose the President's plan, but also what the ZOPA (zone of possible agreement) is for this area. While I may be personally comfortable with some of the ideas proposed, such as a public option, it's clearer to me why others are not, and that has helped to moderate some of my ambitions for what could be achieved with health care reform.

I had an interesting back-and-forth with my friend Conor Sen in email this morning. I'm usually the one who sends him links to David Brooks columns in the NYT, but this one he sent my way. My favorite part:

“What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.

“One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,” the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. “The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.”

It’s not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old.”

My argument is that all of this is more about class than race. But this cleft represents a major threat to our democracy. It also resonates with me based on my current back and forth with Don on this blog...

Cohen in the NYT today: "Some of my summer in France was spent listening to indignant outbursts about U.S. health care reform. The tone: “You must be kidding! What’s there to debate if 46.3 million Americans have no health insurance?”

I think the French are right. I don’t think there’s much to debate when France spends 11 percent of its gross domestic product on health care and insures everyone and the United States spends 16.5 percent of G.D.P. and leaves 20 percent of adults under 65 uninsured. The numbers don’t lie: The U.S. system is wasteful and unjust.

This is a great dialogue. See Don's latest post here. I feel like my understanding of the issues we're discussing is improving, and I think I've got a much better handle on Don's perspective. I'll follow the numbering system we've been using to keep the points ordered.

1. Government is getting involved because the current system has become so inefficient and ineffective in addressing society's need for broad based health care. The creation of HMOs in the 80s was an attempt to turn everything over to the private sector, and it has created many of the problems we're now encountering. You can't optimize the benefit of social expenditures on health through a largely unregulated private process, which is based on profit maximization. This reform preserves the private system we currently have but increases the role of government in regulating and managing it. There's nothing in that design that violates the laws of economics -- government is constantly changing rules and incentives in the marketplace, and the market adjusts in response. The only thing that will generate bad outcomes is if the government fundamentally disrupts the incentives for private companies to provide coverage and care, and I haven't seen anything that indicates this reform will do that.