| From: LindyBill | 4/29/2005 9:41:54 AM | | | | | | The Vulcan Mind-Meld
belmontclub.blogspot.com
Techdirt has a story on a concept called 'Napster' for news which describes a trend in which individuals have become to reporters as bloggers were to newspaper pundits.
With bloggers getting press passes, citizen journalists creating ambitious open source news networks, and Wikimedia trying their hand at news, newspapers are running scared. Instead of trying to squeeze money from these flailing members, Scripps general manager and editorial director propose that the Associated Press reinvent itself as a digital co-op, a sort of "Napster" for news.
One example it cites is Now Public, where ordinary guys file news and video stories: click a button to "email in footage" it says: and why not you? What has made this possible is widespread Internet connectivity and the availability of cheap consumer video cameras. Readers may recall how the really spectacular footage of the tsunami which swept the Indian was provided by tourists who happened to have been at the disaster sites. That demonstrated how anyone at the site of breaking news could become an instant correspondent. Now Public emphasizes video and has a surprisingly wide collection of stories. Many of those filed from the Middle East focus on the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. And did you know that Scott Ritter predicts a US attack on Iran in June 2005?
While professional journalists may be tempted to poke fun at these early efforts the quantity of these observer-provided stories is likely to grow and its quality likely to improve. The sheer volume of information that will become available is going to make the world both more and less opaque. More opaque because the relatively simple plot lines provided by the mainstream media will be replaced by a flood of filings telling literally all sides of story. Whereas one used to be able to "understand the world" by reading the New York Times lead and grooving into the standard world view, no such simple, consolidated tales will be served up by the oncoming news avalanche. There will be no suggestive lead, no magisterial peroration, no drastic simplification. Instead there will be detail in mind-boggling abundance. The good news is that the world will become more transparent to anyone with the tools and services needed to sift through that deluge of information. The existence of so much collateral information will make it very difficult to lie on any scale. It will be possible to "know" something about an event in detail inconceivable a decade ago. There will never again be a new Walter Duranty who can foist a fraud on a reading public for any length of time from the vantage of privileged access. In short, the world threatens to become a news reader's nightmare and an intelligence analyst's paradise.
The choice of the phrase 'Napster' for news to describe the ways information will flow between these decentralized nodes is extremely apt. When individual nodes are able to transfer information in a peer-to-peer fashion to any other node perception will propagate at rates never before seen. Original presence at an event will be as definite a concept as original music CDs in this age of digital reproduction. It will make the stock phrase "you are there" almost literally true. This surfeit of raw information will overwhelm even the most avid information consumer and will probably spur a demand for aggregation and analysis services of various kinds. Perhaps readers will clamor for the return of Walter Durantys to reinterpret the world in ways that they prefer. Illusion always gave the truth a run for its money. Information, like freedom, is a burden sometimes too great to endure. |
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| From: LindyBill | 4/29/2005 9:48:40 AM | | | | | | Thousands of illegals obtained drivers licenses the old-fashioned way--they found the right person and bribed them
Feds claim thousands got licenses via bribes
No visible terrorist ties: A Florida case leads to 52 arrests; it follows similar ones this week in both Michigan and Maryland
By Lara Jakes Jordan
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Thousands of undocumented immigrants have obtained driver licenses in three states, federal authorities said Thursday, highlighting a security hole that the Sept. 11 hijackers exploited.
Three employees of Florida's motor vehicles agency were among 52 people arrested in a bribery scam that put driver licenses in the hands of at least 2,000 undocumented immigrants, officials said. The case, announced Thursday, follows similar arrests in Michigan and Maryland over the past week.
''With a valid driver's license, you establish an identity,'' said Michael Garcia, assistant secretary of the Homeland Security Department.
He said the cases do not appear to be related and there was no evidence of any terrorist connection.
''What we're looking at is the vulnerability and potential here, and we want to make sure that avenue isn't open to criminals or people posing a threat to our national security,'' he said.
Eighteen of the 19 hijackers involved in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, had valid driver licenses or state-issued identification cards. At least one of those hijackers was in the United States illegally.
Nine of the 19 had Florida driver licenses; three had ID cards issued by the state.
Obtaining driver licenses was a priority for the hijackers, said Janice Kephart, counsel to the Sept. 11 commission and an expert on immigration and border security issues. ''The object was to appear legitimate,'' Kephart said.
So far, 58 people face charges in the three license-for-cash cases. They include:
l An employee at Michigan's secretary of state office who was arrested April 20 with two accomplices from Guinea and Iraq on charges of selling hundreds of driver licenses and other ID documents to illegal immigrants in suburban Detroit. The employee, who issued the licenses, allegedly accepted as little as $25 for allowing applicants to skip a mandatory written driver test. She has been suspended without pay.
l A worker at Maryland's Motor Vehicle Administration and two partners who were arrested April 22. They allegedly charged more than $1,000 to provide driver licenses or ID cards to about 150 illegal immigrants and other applicants without requiring proof of identity or citizenship.
l In the Florida case, 23 people were charged with criminal fraud and an additional 29 people taken into custody on immigration violations. Of the more than 2,000 licenses issued, 36 were for commercial drivers to operate trucks, and about six to transport hazardous materials, officials said.
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| From: LindyBill | 4/29/2005 9:51:38 AM | | | | | | Our housing bubble continues unabated. A friend of mine put her Leeward condo on the market last friday. She got an offer yesterday at $25,000 more than she was asking. It included all closing costs.
Sophistical arguments, a continuing series
marginalrevolution.com
By Tyler Cowen on Economics
Are you worried about a housing bubble? Go buy that house anyway.
Let's say you buy and the price of housing then goes up. Surely you are happy.
Let's say the price of housing, including your house, falls. Well, in absolute terms that is not so bad either. You can simply stay put. Even better, you might buy another house. Consider the polar case where houses fall to a nickel a piece. Yes you wasted 600K on an overpriced big box. But now you can buy your favorite mansion for a dime.
In technical terms, consider the changing price as a budget constraint rotating around a fixed status quo point (you can always stay in the house you bought). The rotating budget constraint will put you on a higher indifference curve.
So go ahead and buy that house. Yes, you might be better off by waiting for the price to fall. But don't worry about bursting bubbles, you won't end up worse off.
And let's assume you won't have to move anytime soon.
So buy, buy, buy. And don't stop at homes |
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| To: Lane3 who wrote (111711) | 4/29/2005 9:54:10 AM | | From: Mary Cluney | | | | Last nail in the conservative coffin.
Private accounts is not the answer.
A Private Obsession
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: April 29, 2005
American health care is unique among advanced countries in its heavy reliance on the private sector. It's also uniquely inefficient. We spend far more per person on health care than any other country, yet many Americans lack health insurance and don't receive essential care.
This week yet another report emphasized just how bad a job the American system does at providing basic health care. A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation estimates that 20 million working Americans are uninsured; in Texas, which has the worst record, more than 30 percent of the adults under 65 have no insurance.
And lack of insurance leads to inadequate medical attention. Over a 12-month period, 41 percent of the uninsured were unable to see a doctor when needed because of cost; 56 percent had no personal doctor or health care provider.
Our system is desperately in need of reform. Yet it will be very hard to get useful reform, for two reasons: vested interests and ideology.
I'll have a lot more to say about vested interests and health care in future columns, but let me emphasize one key point: a lot of big companies are essentially in the business of wasting health care resources.
The most striking inefficiency of our health system is our huge medical bureaucracy, which is mainly occupied in trying to get someone else to pay the bills. A good guess is that two million to three million Americans are employed by insurers and health care providers not to deliver health care, but to pass the buck to other people.
Yet any effort to reduce this waste would hurt powerful, well-organized interests, which have already demonstrated their power to block reform. Remember the "Harry and Louise" ads that doomed the Clinton health plan? The actors may have seemed like regular folks, but the ads were paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America, an industry lobbying group that liked the health care system just the way it was.
But vested interests aren't the only obstacle to fixing our health care system. We also have a big problem with ideology.
You see, America is ruled by conservatives, and they have a private obsession: they believe that more privatization, not less, is always the answer. And their faith persists even when the evidence clearly points to a private sector gone bad.
I could cite many examples of this obsession at work. But a particularly good illustration of ideology-induced obliviousness is the 2004 Economic Report of the President, which devotes a whole chapter to health care that can be read as a sort of conservative manifesto on the subject.
The main message of that report is that U.S. health care is doing just fine. Never mind the huge expense, the low life expectancy, the high infant mortality; it's a market-based system, so it must be good.
The report even takes a Panglossian view of uninsured Americans - one that is completely at odds with the grim statistics I cited above - suggesting that "many of them may remain uninsured as a matter of choice," perhaps because "they are young and healthy and do not see the need for insurance."
The president's economists had only one criticism of the system: insurance is too comprehensive, which encourages people to consume too much health care. As they see it, insurance covers too large a percentage of medical costs. The answer to this problem is the creation of, you guessed it, private accounts, which have now superseded tax cuts as the answer to all problems.
Indeed, a new paper by Martin Feldstein of Harvard, which clearly reflects the administration's views, suggests that Social Security privatization and health savings accounts - tax shelters designed to encourage people to pay medical costs out of their own pockets - are only the beginning. "Investment-based personal accounts," he says, are the way to go for unemployment insurance and Medicare, too.
O.K., let's not turn this into a Bush-bashing session. President Bush didn't cause the crisis in American health care. His health care policies have made things only a little bit worse.
The point, instead, is that even though all the evidence suggests that we would be much better off under a system of universal coverage, any such move will be fiercely opposed, on principle, by conservatives who want us to move in the opposite direction.
And reform will also be opposed by powerful vested interests - my next subject in this series. |
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| From: LindyBill | 4/29/2005 9:56:12 AM | | | | | | Thirty Years at 300 Millimeters
By Hubert Van Es
The New York Times
April 29, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
PICTURE AT URL - nytimes.com
HONG KONG
THIRTY years ago I was fortunate enough to take a photograph that has become perhaps the most recognizable image of the fall of Saigon - you know it, the one that is always described as showing an American helicopter evacuating people from the roof of the United States Embassy. Well, like so many things about the Vietnam War, it's not exactly what it seems. In fact, the photo is not of the embassy at all; the helicopter was actually on the roof of an apartment building in downtown Saigon where senior Central Intelligence Agency employees were housed.
It was Tuesday, April 29, 1975. Rumors about the final evacuation of Saigon had been rife for weeks, with thousands of people - American civilians, Vietnamese citizens and third-country nationals - being loaded on transport planes at Tan Son Nhut air base, to be flown to United States bases on Guam, Okinawa and elsewhere. Everybody knew that the city was surrounded by the North Vietnamese, and that it was only a matter of time before they would take it. Around 11 a.m. the call came from Brian Ellis, the bureau chief of CBS News, who was in charge of coordinating the evacuation of the foreign press corps. It was on!
The assembly point was on Gia Long Street, opposite the Grall Hospital, where buses would pick up those wanting to leave. The evacuation was supposed to have been announced by a "secret" code on Armed Forces Radio: the comment that "the temperature is 105 degrees and rising," followed by eight bars of "White Christmas." Don't even ask what idiot dreamed this up. There were no secrets in Saigon in those days, and every Vietnamese and his dog knew the code. In the end, I think, they scrapped the idea. I certainly have no recollection of hearing it.
The journalists who had decided to leave went to the assembly point, each carrying only a small carry-on bag, as instructed. But the Vietnamese seeing this exodus were quick to figure out what was happening, and dozens showed up to try to board the buses. It took quite a while for the vehicles to show - they were being driven by fully armed marines, who were not very familiar with Saigon streets - and then some scuffles broke out, as the marines had been told to let only the press on board. We did manage to sneak in some Vietnamese civilians, and the buses headed for the airport.
I wasn't on them. I had decided, along with several colleagues at United Press International, to stay as long as possible. As a Dutch citizen, I was probably taking less of a risk than the others. They included our bureau chief, Al Dawson; Paul Vogle, a terrific reporter who spoke fluent Vietnamese; Leon Daniel, an affable Southerner; and a freelancer working for U.P.I. named Chad Huntley. I was the only photographer left, but luckily we had a bunch of Vietnamese stringers, who kept bringing in pictures from all over the city. These guys were remarkable. They had turned down all offers to be evacuated and decided to see the end of the war that had overturned their lives.
On the way back from the evacuation point, where I had gotten some great shots of a marine confronting a Vietnamese mother and her little boy, I photographed many panicking Vietnamese in the streets burning papers that could identify them as having had ties to the United States. South Vietnamese soldiers were discarding their uniforms and weapons along the streets leading to the Saigon River, where they hoped to get on boats to the coast. I saw a group of young boys, barely in their teens, picking up M-16's abandoned on Tu Do Street. It's amazing I didn't see any accidental shootings.
Returning to the office, which was on the top floor of the rather grandly named Peninsula Hotel, I started processing, editing and printing my pictures from that morning, as well as the film from our stringers. Our regular darkroom technician had decided to return to the family farm in the countryside. Two more U.P.I. staffers, Bert Okuley and Ken Englade, were still at the bureau. They had decided to skip the morning evacuation and try their luck in the early evening at the United States Embassy, where big Chinook helicopters were lifting evacuees off the roof to waiting Navy ships off the coast. (Both made it out that evening.)
If you looked north from the office balcony, toward the cathedral, about four blocks from us, on the corner of Tu Do and Gia Long, you could see a building called the Pittman Apartments, where we knew the C.I.A. station chief and many of his officers lived. Several weeks earlier the roof of the elevator shaft had been reinforced with steel plate so that it would be able to take the weight of a helicopter. A makeshift wooden ladder now ran from the lower roof to the top of the shaft. Around 2:30 in the afternoon, while I was working in the darkroom, I suddenly heard Bert Okuley shout, "Van Es, get out here, there's a chopper on that roof!"
I grabbed my camera and the longest lens left in the office - it was only 300 millimeters, but it would have to do - and dashed to the balcony. Looking at the Pittman Apartments, I could see 20 or 30 people on the roof, climbing the ladder to an Air America Huey helicopter. At the top of the ladder stood an American in civilian clothes, pulling people up and shoving them inside.
Of course, there was no possibility that all the people on the roof could get into the helicopter, and it took off with 12 or 14 on board. (The recommended maximum for that model was eight.) Those left on the roof waited for hours, hoping for more helicopters to arrive. To no avail.
After shooting about 10 frames, I went back to the darkroom to process the film and get a print ready for the regular 5 p.m. transmission to Tokyo from Saigon's telegraph office. In those days, pictures were transmitted via radio signals, which at the receiving end were translated back into an image. A 5-inch-by-7-inch black-and-white print with a short caption took 12 minutes to send.
And this is where the confusion began. For the caption, I wrote very clearly that the helicopter was taking evacuees off the roof of a downtown Saigon building. Apparently, editors didn't read captions carefully in those days, and they just took it for granted that it was the embassy roof, since that was the main evacuation site. This mistake has been carried on in the form of incorrect captions for decades. My efforts to correct the misunderstanding were futile, and eventually I gave up. Thus one of the best-known images of the Vietnam War shows something other than what almost everyone thinks it does.
LATER that afternoon, five Vietnamese civilians came into my office looking distraught and afraid. They had been on the Pittman roof when the chopper had landed, but were unable to get a seat. They asked for our help in getting out; they had worked in the offices of the United States Agency for International Development, and were afraid that this connection might harm them when the city fell to the Communists.
One of them had a two-way radio that could connect to the embassy, and Chad Huntley managed to reach somebody there. He asked for a helicopter to land on the roof of our hotel to pick them up, but was told it was impossible. Al Dawson put them up for the night, because by then a curfew was in place; we heard sporadic shooting in the streets, as looters ransacked buildings evacuated by the Americans. All through the night the big Chinooks landed and took off from the embassy, each accompanied by two Cobra gunships in case they took ground fire.
After a restless night, our photo stringers started coming back with film they had shot during the late afternoon of the 29th and that morning - the 30th. Nguyen Van Tam, our radio-photo operator, went back and forth between our bureau and the telegraph office to send the pictures out to the world. I printed the last batch around 11 a.m. and put them in order of importance for him to transmit. The last was a shot of the six-story chancery, next to the embassy, burning after being looted during the night.
About 12:15 Mr. Tam called me and with a trembling voice told me that that North Vietnamese troops were downstairs at the radio office. I told him to keep transmitting until they pulled the plug, which they did some five minutes later. The last photo sent from Saigon showed the burning chancery at the top half of the picture; the lower half were lines of static.
The war was over.
I went out into the streets to photograph the self-proclaimed liberators. We had been assured by the North Vietnamese delegates, who had been giving Saturday morning briefings to the foreign press out at the airport, that their troops had been told to expect foreigners with cameras and not to harm them. But just to make sure they wouldn't take me for an American, I wore, on my camouflage hat, a small plastic Dutch flag printed with the words "Boa Chi Hoa Lan" ("Dutch Press"). The soldiers, most of them quite young, were remarkably friendly and happy to pose for pictures. It was a weird feeling to come face to face with the "enemy," and I imagine that was how they felt too.
I left Saigon on June 1, by plane for Vientiane, Laos, after having been "invited" by the new regime to leave, as were the majority of newspeople of all nationalities who had stayed behind to witness the fall of Saigon.
It was 15 years before I returned. My absence was not for a lack of desire, but for the repeated rejections of my visa applications by an official at the press department of the Foreign Ministry. It turned out that I had a history with this man; he had come to our office about a week after Saigon fell because, as the editor of one of North Vietnam's military publications, he wanted to print in his magazine some pictures we had of the "liberation." I showed him 52 images that we had been unable to send out since April 30, and said he could have them only if he used his influence to make it possible for us first to transmit them to the West. He said that was not possible, so I told him there was no deal.
He obviously had a long memory, and I assume it was only after he retired or died that my actions were forgiven and I was given a visa. I have since returned many times from my home in Hong Kong, including for the 20th and 25th anniversaries of the fall, at which many old Vietnam hands got together and reminisced about the "good old days." Now I am returning for the 30th anniversary reunion. It will be good to be with old comrades and, again, many a glass will be hoisted to the memories of departed friends - both the colleagues who made it out and the Vietnamese we left behind.
Hubert Van Es, a freelance photographer, covered the Vietnam War, the Moro Rebellion in the Philippines and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company |
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| To: LindyBill who wrote (111726) | 4/29/2005 10:02:29 AM | | From: kumar | | | | US house market boom set for bust?
By Stephen Evans
BBC North America business correspondent
Is the current property boom an unwelcome replay of the dot.com bubble of the late Nineties and destined to burst in the same way, showering a lot of people with a lot of pain?
In financial crazes, there's usually a general frenzied belief that the old rules of economic gravity have been superseded - but are we about to (re)learn the hard way that prices that go up can come down with a bump?
Certainly, the anecdotes indicating there's a boom with at least an element of speculation are starting to echo those of the red-hot Nineties.
Official figures just out show that the housing market is as hot as ever: the sales of new homes rose by twelve per cent last month despite widespread gloom about oil prices and debt.
Stories abound of property in Florida being bought and sold within the same day to make a killing on the rising price, and the "how to" guides to trading real estate are selling as fast in the book shops as, well, as fast as a new condominium in Florida.
Golden opportunity
Just like in the Nineties, cheerleaders are urging buyers to believe that staying out of the market means foregoing easy money.
Home-price speculation is more entrenched on a national or international scale now than ever before
Robert Shiller
Professor of economics
Yale University
David Lereah, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, says in his new book, "Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?" that investors should "experience substantial and satisfying wealth gains".
He calls the current boom a "once-in-every-other generation opportunity".
Sharp price rises
In New York, Miami, Los Angeles and San Diego (fastest of all), the price of an average family home has pretty well doubled in the last five years.
Twenty years ago in the United States, the price of a middle of the range home would have represented about five years of income for the house-holder.
Now, it's nearly eight years.
No crystal ball
But there are some signs that the peak may have been reached: the seemingly relentless rise in applications for mortgages has shown signs of wavering recently.
Certainly, one of the best observers of markets believes that the rise in property prices has been driven by speculation.
Yale economist Robert Shiller wrote at the end of the 90s about the bust that was waiting to happen.
His book "Irrational Exuberance" was published in March 2000 as the market started to turn.
He's now up-dated it with a focus on the property market.
"There is no hope of explaining home prices solely in terms of population, building costs or interest rates. None of these can explain the 'rocket taking off' effect starting around 1998.
"So what did cause this real estate boom in so many parts of the world? My conclusion: home-price speculation is more entrenched on a national or international scale now than ever before," Mr Shiller observes.
None of which means that the market is about to turn or even crash tomorrow. Nobody - nobody - can predict market behaviour.
And a change in sentiment in the housing market may just mean stagnant prices as incomes rise.
Limited upside?
But caution does seem to be in order.
There can't be any certainty that property prices will continue their steep, relentless rise, particularly since interest rates are going up, perhaps higher than previously feared if oil starts to inject inflation into the economy.
And rising interest rates ought to give some pause for thought to anyone thinking of borrowing big sums to buy assets that may not rise in price.
Big debts when asset prices are falling is bad arithmetic.
Story from BBC NEWS:
news.bbc.co.uk
Published: 2005/04/26 22:34:49 GMT
© BBC MMV |
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| To: michael97123 who wrote (111715) | 4/29/2005 10:02:37 AM | | From: DMaA | | | | | If a third party was able to stumble on a successful formula, the Dems and Reps would instantly adopt it and cut the third party off at the knees. There's no point for a "centrist" third party. That area is already thoroughly covered by the big two. There's some purpose for experimental third parties exploring political spaces the mains can't afford to mess around in. |
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| From: LindyBill | 4/29/2005 10:09:11 AM | | | | | | The New Jersey governor's race
tigerhawk.blogspot.com
By TigerHawk
Newshounds know that New Jersey holds its elections on odd years, which makes this year's governor's race one of the few big state elections that political junkies can twist their hankies over.
The Democratic candidate in this very blue state will be Senator Jon Corzine, who is willing to trade his very expensive first-term seat in the United States Senate for the opportunity to preside over the nest of vipers in Trenton. Corzine expects to spend another big wad to win Drumthwacket, but is trying to turn his wealth into an asset: his wealth, we are to believe, makes him uncorruptible, at least in the petty Sopranos sense of corruption:
Corzine said he will refuse campaign donations from people associated with firms that have state contracts. He will limit individual contributions to $500 - more than $2,000 lower than state law allows. And he said he would forgo public financing and pay for his effort largely out of his personal wealth, valued at $300 million.
"There might be a better way for the public to spend its money than financing someone who has the wherewithal to do it," Corzine said.
Well, there is no arguing with that.
Corzine has spent around $15 million of his own money for every year that he has served in the Senate, and now he is going to switch jobs. Why? Perhaps he calculates that as a liberal Senator from a blue state he can't really get anything done in Washington right now. Sure, like the rest of the Democrats in the Congress he can devote himself to frustrating Republicans, but that won't satisfy a guy like Corzine, who once ran the most powerful investment bank on Wall Street. Perhaps he has also learned from John Kerry's example that it is very difficult for a sitting Senator to become President. While he is unusual among Democratic politicians in that he has extensive experience as an executive, most voters won't give him credit for that until he has been a governor. This year is his shot.
The Republicans will nominate either Bret Schundler, the conservative former mayor of Jersey City, or Douglas Forrester, the choice of New Jersey's creaky Republican establishment. This is a choice not unlike Dean and Kerry last year -- Schundler is the choice of the faithful, but Forrester is the moderate who "can win."
Jersey blogger DynamoBuzz linked yesterday to the results of a new poll that show Forrester and Schundler neck and neck in the Republican primary race, even though most of the respondants admit that they have weak preferences. More interestingly, both Forrester and Schundler have narrowed the gap vs. Corzine significantly, trailing by only ten points, instead of the usual twenty or so. The question, of course, is whether this reflects a substantive improvement in Republican chances, or whether it is an artifact of the publicity around the forthcoming Republican primary. Unfortunately, I believe it is the latter.
Meanwhile, New Jersey's last elected governor, James McGreevey, continues to sink into the mire. |
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| To: LindyBill who wrote (111717) | 4/29/2005 10:10:38 AM | | From: DMaA | | | | | The coming confrontation will also be a barometer of the effectiveness of the MSM. Can they still spin the country to blame the Republicans for the government shut down? |
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| To: Mary Cluney who wrote (111727) | 4/29/2005 10:15:46 AM | | From: Lane3 | | | | >>You see, America is ruled by conservatives, and they have a private obsession: they believe that more privatization, not less, is always the answer. And their faith persists even when the evidence clearly points to a private sector gone bad.<<
>>The point, instead, is that even though all the evidence suggests that we would be much better off under a system of universal coverage, any such move will be fiercely opposed, on principle, by conservatives who want us to move in the opposite direction.<<
I don't see how Krugman's view is any less ideological. |
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