Extended Phenotype

The debate seemed pretty clear-cut to me. Bush showed better than the first debate, but poor compared to the second debate. He kept his temper under control, but some of the answers were confused, and lacked much in the way of punch.

OK, I’m a sucker for a good joke. Whomever wrote “Being lectured by the President on fiscal responsibility is a little bit like being Tony Soprano talking to me about law and order in this country” deserves a raise. I suspect we’ll hear that one quite a bit between now and November 2nd. And we’ll see the video juxtaposition between his statement tonight on Bin Laden and what he said a couple of years ago. Over and over. Jon Stewart is probably on it already.

Bush’s answer on the flu vaccines was ludicrous. ‘Nuff said.

I do think Schieffer is asking some tough questions — homosexuality, better jobs questions than we’re heard thus far. I do think everybody ought to stop talking about Dick Cheney’s daughter. Heck, I want Kerry to win, and I don’t want to hear the poor woman used to smack the Administration again.

Wow. Instant reaction, but Kerry is laying on the religion and bible references pretty heavily tonight. Not sure that will convince any evangelical Christian to vote for him, but I suppose he’s aiming at some undecided demographic. It sounds a little odd coming from Kerry, however.

Here’s a question. What the heck is a “maternity group home?” Sounds like a poor house to me. Vaguely Dickensian. (definition here).

The President is not even close to credible on why health care costs are going up. Health care costs are going up because they’re not using information technology? Huh? The President gets the best health care of any human being on the planet, and hasn’t noticed all the computers?

Of course, Kerry’s answer isn’t really very convincing either — no mention is made of the fact that newer, high-technology diagnostic and therapeutic procedures are massively expensive and increasingly widely applied. This is a huge driver for cost increases, compared to per-capita costs in other countries. So it’s a tough problem, because who wants to not have the latest and best?

Gotta stop at this point because I’m getting kind of bored listening to the debate for the second time.

Newspapers are starting to issue editorial endorsements for Presidential candidates, and the tide is turning against the incumbent. Kerry leads Bush 11 – 8 in terms of endorsements (as of 10/11), with the bigger papers dominantly going to Kerry (4-to-1 ratio in total circulation). Here’s the list as of Monday:

“G” and “B” refer to whether the paper endorsed Gore or Bush in 2000:

JOHN KERRY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (G): 418,323
The Philadelphia Inquirer (G): 387.692
Detroit Free Press (G): 354,581
The Oregonian (Portland) (B): 342,040
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (G): 281,198
The Seattle Times (B): 237,303
Seattle Post-Intelligencer (G): 150,901
The Philadelphia Daily News: 139,983
Arizona Daily Star (Tucson) (G): 109,592
Portland Press Herald (Maine) (G): 73,211
The Day (New London, Conn.) (B): 39,553

Total Pro-Kerry Daily Circ: 2,534,377

GEORGE W. BUSH
Las Vegas Review-Journal (B): 170,061
Tulsa World (Okla.) (B): 139,383
Mobile (Ala.) Register (B): 100,244
The Columbian (Vancouver, Wash.) (B): 51,498
The Pueblo (Colo.) Chieftain: 52,208
Amarillo (Texas) Globe-News (B): 51,105
The Sun (Lowell, Mass.) (B): 50,369
The Courier (Findlay, Ohio) (B): 22,319

Total Pro-Bush Daily Circ: 637,187

Kind of speaks for itself, except that Editor and Publisher forgot that the local Crawford, TX paper endorsed Kerry as well.

Tonight ought to be interesting on domestic policy. Kerry needs to “close”, and President Bush will really need to keep misrepresenting Kerry’s policies since he has little new to tell us about his own. But misrepresentations get fact-checked quickly, and opposed nearly immediately. Health care is a case in point.

President Bush’s claim that Kerry’s health care proposal is socialized medicine are bogus. In case we couldn’t tell that for ourselves, however, leading health care finance and management professionals have circulated a letter saying:

We have reviewed the health care finance proposals put forward by Senator John Kerry. Their primary thrust is to make the federal government a reinsurer when a single insured individual incurs health care costs greater than $50,000 in the course of any one year.

Because high-cost individuals account for a large proportion of the total cost of health insurance, this reinsurance is intended to make private health insurance more affordable for both employers and individuals and thus reduce the number of uninsured individuals and families. This approach is fully consistent with maintaining a health care finance system largely run by private insurance, private employers, and private medical providers.

Although Senator Kerry’s proposals should be subject to a full analysis of their cost and impact, any claim that they amount to “government run health care” or a “government takeover” of the health care system or of health care decision-making is simply inconsistent with the facts. We are not aware of any expert in health care or health care finance, whatever his or her political orientation, who believes otherwise.

At current count, 74 professionals have signed the statement.

Many are faulting both candidates for not articulating a more detailed plan for Iraq during the debates. David Broder’s latest column in WaPo is just one example.

I’m a policy and details person, so naturally I’m interested in the forward-looking plans as well. But I’m coming to wonder whether the truth is, that neither candidate can offer a detailed plan on the ground because we simply don’t know what will work. Thus, the Bush campaign falls back to “staying the course,” and the Kerry campaign wants to repair alliances and bring in allies to help. Neither is so much a plan as an approach.

Approaches to the problem might be all we have at the moment. Reclaiming areas from insurgents doesn’t appear to yield to general solutions — though locally negotiated solutions seem to be yielding incremental improvements (I’m thinking here of the nascent arms-for-aid swap in Sadr City). Juan Cole (who is extremely well informed on the situation although conservatives may find his outlook not to their tastes) believes that the Mahdi will not disarm completely, but may turn over excess weapons and avoid appearing in the streets heavily armed.

What I’m saying is that it may be unreasonable right now to expect a detailed, simple plan for how we “fix” Iraq from either candidate. God knows I’d love to hold the Administration’s feet to the fire on how to fix things, but I don’t think they know how to do it. I don’t think Allawi knows how to do it. And Kerry, since he’s got even less information than either Allawi or the Administration, can’t be expected to know, either.

So we have to judge these candidates not on the details of plans which likely don’t exist. We have to judge them on their approaches. On their philosophies of action, on what they will try to do going forward in Iraq.

At least, that’s how I’m going to be looking at tomorrow night’s debate and subsequent campaign rhetoric on Iraq.

Bills are going through the House and Senate right now that will effectively stop all manned private space flight, along the lines of Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne. The amendment to HR 3752 (its Senate counterpart is S.2772) purports to protect crew and passenger safety. In fact, however, the amended bill places stringent requirements on crew safety that can’t be met during the experimental phase of flying test vehicles.

Passenger and crew safety are important to protect, yes, especially if private space flight becomes an industry. Consumers would need the kind of protection from negligence we try to create in the commercial airline industry.

But we’re not there yet. By definition, test pilots are flying vehicles that haven’t flown the tens of thousands of missions needed to compile a flight safety record. Virtually all of the research and development for private manned space flight will be done with a smaller margin of safety than current commercial air traffic. The companies developing private space flight know this. Their insurance companies know this. The test pilots, and their families, know this. Their investors know this. It is, quite simply, their choice. Their use of the liberty afforded to citizens.

Nobody involved in private space flight is saying that they won’t achieve FAA “production” safety standards before the time comes to let a customer fly. But as HR 3752 and S.2772 seem to read today, this nascent industry will never get that far. Manned space flight will remain a government monopoly, profitably contracted out to the largest aerospace companies and defense contractors. The safety regulation will not affect government-led space flight, of course.

Which means that HR 3752/S.2772 have the effect — whether intentional or not — of raising protectionist barriers around aerospace contractors who currently run government and military space efforts. The amended bills will kill competition in the nascent industry. The amended bills amount to a revenue guarantee for aerospace contractors as the demand for commercial space flight continues. And a victory for industry lobbyists.

Write the Senators on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, and express your opinion on the last-minute amendments.

UPDATE: The bill seems unlikely to move forward right now, and several Senators may try to broker a compromise.

I’m getting sick of arguments for not voting that boil down to “your vote won’t matter in deciding the winner.” Such arguments range from the easily ignored to “serious” quantitative analyses by economists and public choice theorists. Steven Landsburg’s recent article in Slate was the last straw, however.

Landsburg argues that your vote doesn’t matter, because the chances of your vote “deciding” the winner are miniscule. Even in Florida in 2000, your chance of being a tie-breaking vote was 1 in 3100; in today’s election, your chance of casting the tiebreaker is (he says) 1 in 10 to the 1046th power. I have no reason to quarrel with these numbers. If you believe that voting is “about” being the person whose vote broke a tie, then it’s reasonable to conclude that Landsburg, or some of the libertarian fringe that post on Lewrockwell.com, are right. But I didn’t come of age believing that voting was about breaking ties, and I’ll bet neither did you.