Matt Yglesias fails to understand that the founding fathers put the filibuster in the Constitution for a reason

They understood that the best way to protect minority rights via legislation was to employ a three-step process.

Step One: Create a system of legislative rules so inherently dysfunctional that nothing could be done about serious national problems until blood was on the verge of running in the streets.

Step Two: And then a miracle would happen.

Step Three: Ponies!

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Politics as punting on fourth and one

One explanation for why people who advocate transparently idiotic policies that result in national disasters (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our current health care system, our drug laws, our prisons, our current financial crisis) generally don't lose their pundit credentials is that what gets you fired isn't being wrong: it's being perceived to be wrong while bucking the conventional wisdom. Indeed being wrong while repeating the conventional wisdom is generally more profitable than being right while resisting it.

That's why football coaches punt on fourth and one. It's idiotic and loses lots of games, but what gets them fired is doing something unconventional that doesn't work 100% of the time. And since nothing works 100% of the time they generally prefer to "manage by the book" as the baseball expression goes.

In American politics today, managing by the book means always being "strong on defense," which in turn means spending insane sums of money on wars and the weapons to fight them, and "tough on crime," which means throwing millions of people in prison at immense cost, often for behavior which in a more rational society wouldn't even be illegal, let alone grounds for incarceration. It also means doing nothing that would upset the economic status quo; hence bankers must receive immense bonuses 15 minutes after their firms were saved from extinction by the timely transfer of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. (This is known as "letting the market reward success.").

The conventional wisdom is the conventional wisdom because the establishment deems it to be simply the truth, and therefore not subject to question by serious people, such as themselves. This is why failed football coaches and baseball managers keep getting re-hired; this is why Bill Kristol now writes a column for the Washington Post, and Iraq war advocates aren't immediately laughed out of the room when they give their opinions on what "we" should do next in Afghanistan.

Of course eventually things get too ridiculous, and the Red Sox hire Bill James. I don't think Obama is Bill James. At best he might be Brian Cashman. Lets hope he doesn't end up working with a hard salary cap. (What brings this whole post together, which to less discerning eyes might appear to consist of a disjointed ramble of mixed metaphors, is that Christina Romer is David Romer's wife.)

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How Socialist is US Health Care?

Andy Engelson finds it to be more socialist than Communist Vietnam, thus supporting what we already know: the tea-baggers are idiots.

The money paragraph(s):

The much needed health reforms proposed in the U.S. won’t be perfect, but will go a long way to making sure everyone is insured and that getting really sick doesn’t bankrupt you (which also happens here in Vietnam). Will this be costly? Sure. But remember that the Medicare drug insurance plan passed by a Republicans Congress during the Bush administration in 2003 is expected to cost 1.5 trillion dollars, higher than the approximately $1 trillion cost cited for the current health care proposals.

Where were the tea-baggers when that bill was making its way through Congress?

But what do I know? I live in a communist country.

Meanwhile, Tim Egan argues that these same tea-baggers have unleashed their inimitable rage on the wrong target, of course:

Where was the Tea Party movement when the tax burden was shifted from the high end to the middle? Where were the patriots when Wall Street, backed in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, rewrote securities laws so that the wonder boys of Lehman and A.I.G. could reduce home mortgages to poker chips at a trillion-dollar table?

[ . . . ]

They were nowhere, because they were clueless, just as most journalists were.

But now, at a time when a new president wants to reform health care to fix the largest single cause of middle-class economic collapse, he’s called a Nazi by these self-described friends of the working stiff.

I recently returned to England from spending a two month stay in my homeland on a mixed research / professional / quality time with my partner trip, mainly in Oregon. (So recent was the return that I'm still jet lagged). While I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, and am actively considering returning to the United States, one distinction that I anecdotally noted was the quality of political discourse. I found this to be thoroughly asinine and banal to the point of profound discouragement. Not only the obvious, to quote Egan again, "the brat’s cry of Joe Wilson", but simple personal dialogue between private citizens. Six years here in the UK, indeed I start my seventh academic year in a week or so, political discourse here seems more reasoned, toned down, and respectful than the US (save for the English Defence League or our non-racist friends in the BNP). Hell, when the best I often encountered was utterly unoriginal (as well as amusingly inaccurate) tea bagger talking points, I miss the BNP's amusing attempts to demonstrate their lack of racism.

Please show that I am wrong, with examples.

Feel free to lie if you must.

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