Insurance is complicated... But I'm not sure the rolling into ACA is quite the fine tuned machinery you say it needs to be. As has been pointed out a lot, for many people nothing will change - Medicare, veterans, most people employed by large companies. It's the uninsured, and as we've seen, people in special situations like the individual market who face the hardest choices. And yes, some of them may find it complicated... But I don't know that it needs to be; the whole exercise has been envisioned (not necessarily executed) as what most corporate workers see- choices among similar plans, all of which should give good basic coverage. The larger problem as you point out is that most people don't understand or think about the complexities around health insurance. That's why stories about problems stick and why anecdotes are driving our discussion rather than sound policy. Everything will likely unfold fine for most people; but if that's not the story that gets told, people will likely assume and accept the worst. Massachusetts did not have an entirely smooth rollout; that's not crucial. How people perceive their experience and their ability to obtain care matters more. And that part is, I think, where the Obama people are struggling.

I think there's one point to be made, though I sympathize overall: in the chronology of the "lockdown" it's worth remembering that public transportation shut first. Once city officials stopped the T (in essence, before it even started up for the day) the rest of the paralysis was more or less guaranteed - you can't easily get around Boston if you rely on buses and subways usually and they're all stopped. Universities can't expect commuting students to make class or even some faculty to get in. That makes canceling classes basically a given.. And so on. Few cities, if any, have Boston's unique makeup of such a central transit system so widely used, the lack of a 24 hour town (trains don't run between 1 and 5), and a large one way traffic flow to the central core and back at night. If this had unfolded midday, a lockdown would have been virtually impossible, like most cities.

Brilliant review, Lance. I tend to agree on pretty much all points (I even wrote it), right down to the influence f growing up (as you say) in Moore, rather than Connery. That said, I do have the reverence now for Goldfinger and Thunderball and such, but The Spy Who Loved Me is what taught me Bond. I will have to watch the Johnny English references. I found Bardems fey-ness off-putting, and too easily categorized as a familiar "gay is weird and creepy and worthy of being destroyed" to be casually accepted. And, fr the life of me, I dn't get the Cult of Bardem (as opposed to the Worship of Dame Judi Dench, which I do, or the Concept of Craig, which I share). I also wonder where this goes from here ("From Russia With Love"? I doubt it), but I've been wondering that since Casino Royale. And each iteration does give a pretty satisfactory "let's stop here, but there's still a ways to go". And for that, I think I'm less dismissive of Quatum than you are. I think routine Craig Bond is notches above the others. For all those reasons on which we agree. PS I tend to agree with your Brosnan thinking, and the "reboot" trajectory of the producers (Barbara Broccoli sounds like this in her interviews), but I think we don't give Brosnan enough props for truly "being" Bond. I think it tends to underestimate how much he brought to the part, that whole Remington Steele,"he was born to play Bond" thing that suggests somehow he did that all too easily. I think that's the point of being an especially good actor... if you really do it right... the seams never show. http://nycweboy.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/11/skyfall-jb-hooker.html

Without seeing the Greenwald and Sullivan posts, I have to agree, I'm mystified; as a liberal, Ron Paul doesn't particularly upset me in any way. He won't be President, and libertarianism, with or without him, makes for entertaining philosophical debates, but little more. I did ask my mom, who does seem to get a little more perturbed about him, and she said it's mainly his comments on race and stuff... but again, nothing that would cause some crisis of her liberal ideals or principles. The idea that "Ron Paul makes us nervous" is amusing, almost as amusing as the rest of Ron Paul's derailing of the GOP nominating process... but beyond that, why bother?

Biggest of Disinformation: That we no longer have a housing crisis, or a mortgage debt problem, and we should just wait for housing prioes to naturally "bottom out." Best way to debunk it: probably the lawsuits being pursued against foreclusres, and hoping that, over time, more intrepid reporters dig their way into the details of this story. But I'm not very hopefu on either one, and I suspect that tbis is a lesson we will learn, painfully, when the problems of debt, home ownership, and excessive past lending crash into the illusion that we are living in anything like an economic recovery.

...but of course "objectivity" is the problem, after all: the Cuomo quote strikes me as a good indication why nothing is going to change anytime soon (not to mention why Cuomo, in his mealy mouthed way, manages to say bland things that appeal to next to no one). Having worked in human resources and seen hard choices in personnel management, seniority is a big part of any discussion mostly because of two things: institutional memory and acquisition of skills. Both, in some ways, are overrated - skills can be learned, institutional memory isn't necessarily improving a business. Teachers do learn things over time in a classroom setting. They can become better teachers. They can also get worse. Seniority, as a standard, isn't objective. It's subjectively assuming that time spent in a job is the most important criteria, irrespective of others. And it seems to me unions like this idea because, in large part, power accrues over time. Politicians like it because experience is assumed to improve excellence (and because it feels a lot like incumbency). But a pure seniority standard, most of all, says we don't trust administrators - principals and school boards - to do the work of figuring out who contributes the best work, in and out of the classroom. That, I think, is a good indication of the real problem Americans have with teachers' unions: there's a sense in which the union uses its clout most to be as unsupervised as possible. LIFO isn't objective; it's a system which strips your boss of the kind of subjective criteria which would suggest, well, supervision. The complication, really, is the nature of public, government run education, which suggests that should be some sort of distant "objective" way to think about job evaluations, when, really, subjective, more human assessments would probably yield better results - better for the worker, better for the product (teaching), and better for the consumer (students and parents and a community at large). "Objectivity" then, is a false goal... and like so many strange, false goals in our education debate, it's really the problem, not the solution.

"He's not as bad as he appears, He's got rhythm and a PhD. " Thanks for making me see this song for the allegory I tend to miss. I just liked the love story... which probably says something about how, occasionally, i get that love sees no color. On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 10:50 AM, wrote:

Oh... you make me sad. I know it's... a bad song... but I always kind of liked it, the whole Melisaa trying to catch up to the 80s vibe, that sort of thing. I was probably watching too much Solid Gold. :) On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 5:49 AM, wrote:

So far... I'm really liking it. Nice improvements on the interface, I especially like the frontpage dashboard, so I can see stats and jump immediately into composing.