Achenblog

My story this morning on health care legislation.

The bill, a work in progress called H.R. 3200, is already phone-book thick. The latest amendments this week swamped Room 2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building, home turf of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Some 250 amendments had appeared by Wednesday night, and the number jumped to 350 by Thursday afternoon. The amendments filled 39 file boxes on chairs, under desks and in the aisles.

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Yeah, what Ian Shapira said.

My friend Bob Wright and I recorded one of those Bloggerheady things last night and it should be up later today for your viewing pleasure. I'll post a link when that happens. [UPDATE, 4:38 p.m.: I've added the video at the end of this post.] But in the meantime here are some thoughts about Bob's fantastic new book, "The Evolution of God."

Bob, as you know, has an IQ so high it has to be expressed in scientific notation. He has been called a genius by Bill Clinton, who as president made all of his staffers read Bob's book "NonZero." I would like to point out, however, that I once ate dinner with President Clinton. So that's a wash, surely.

Bob has had a highly successful career as a writer, teacher, and bloggingheader, so it is with all due respect that I say that he has spent much of the past couple of decades retailing one big idea. And it's a really big idea. It is a candidate, frankly, for a Theory of Everything.

Bob's idea -- and I hesitate to summarize it in my clumsy way, but here goes -- is that human history, including thousands of years of cultural, economic, and political changes, can be explained through a fundamentally mathematical principle that Bob refers to as "non-zero-sumness."

Presumably he chose that term because an even uglier and more ungainly one was unavailable. Give him credit; he sticks with it despite any brickbats from those of us in the bleacher seats, and it plays a crucial role in his latest book, modestly titled, "The Evolution of God."

The other night when the House Democrats had their marathon tutorial, someone wheeled in a cartload of pizzas. I estimated 35 pizzas total. A staffer could barely push the cart down the hall, so laden was it with cheesy goodness. But, of course, it was also the Cart Of Death. Think of the carbs! The drippy yummy artery-clogging fats! I feared for these lawmakers -- and suspect that the pizzas were secretly ordered by their hated rivals, the Republicans. The GOP surely knows that the best way to kill health-care reform is for some large percentage of Democrats to be at the very least hospitalized. The ol' take-em-out-on-a-gurney strategy.

Congresspersons are unnaturally fond of junk food. See the Times story from earlier this week. And today Politico tells us more about the junk-food junkies of Congress and notes the failure of the health reform efforts to do much of anything about America's obesity epidemic.

Some of the most radical proposals for combating obesity -- like raising taxes on sugary drinks -- have been all but dismissed as political impossibilities. No surprise why: The food and beverage lobby spent more than $20 million in Washington lobbying in 2008 and contributed more than $15 million to political campaigns in the 2008 cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

But I bet you dollars to donuts that Congress's subsidies of the corn industry have played a role in the expanded use of high-fructose corn syrup throughout your local grocery story and in your soda pop.

[By the way, I'm at the Energy and Commerce markup. I just came from the Rayburn Cafe, where the pizza is selling -- dare I say -- like hotcakes.]

I've been on the Hill a bit the last couple of days, trying to figure out how many cooks have how many fingers in how many health-care reform pies. Deals are being struck behind closed doors; reporters loiter in the corridors, shagging quotes from lawmakers who usually have very little to say that is truly illuminating. (We hear repeatedly that "we're making progress," the facial expression usually indicating otherwise.)

Ultimately health-care reform is a form of long-term nation-building. The current trajectory of health-care costs threatens to bankrupt the country. At the very least, we won't be able to make good on the entitlement programs already on the books. Something's gotta give. "Bending the cost curve" is a matter of national fiscal survival. And there's the little matter of 47 million people who have no insurance -- a moral issue, really.

The conventional wisdom is that, the longer this drags out, the less likely it will be that Congress will approve any kind of sweeping reform. We're told that, come fall, lawmakers will already be focused on the 2010 election. It's rather perverse that the prospect of an upcoming election is considered suppressive rather than inspiring. The assumption is that legislation is, in the most general sense, unpopular. Decisions will be punished. Doing something is dangerous!

[Update: Your blogger on "Marketplace" this evening.]

[My Web story posted this morning.]

They held the tutorial in the Capitol basement starting at 4 in the afternoon Monday. For the first two and a half hours, about 180 members of Congress had to do something for which they typically have limited affinity: Remain speechless. Sit still in a little folding chair. Listen to staffers.

They couldn't even ask questions, but they could jot them down, for discussion later in the evening.

They were all House Democrats, boning up on the historic and controversial health-care reform legislation that's gradually emerging from their chamber. The rough draft of the bill ("America's Health Choices Act") runs more than 1,000 pages, with amendments yet to come. Last week the Democrats decided that they needed to know more about the legislation before they go back to their constituents for the August recess. Hence the teach-in, an unusual basement seminar that lasted five hours with one break for procedural votes on the House floor.

Staffers led the members through the bill section by section -- from Division A, Title I, Subtitle A, Section 101 all the way through Division C, Title V, Subtitle D, Section 2531.

"No one's going to say we haven't read the bill," said Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, a Maryland Democrat, as he took a break from the closed-door gathering.

Click here to keep reading.

In this Age of Bad Information, we are surrounded by peddlers of bunk. Some decorate their nonsense in scientific jargon. Others work for institutions that sound more reputable than they actually are. They may sound utterly objective even while pushing a specific agenda. In some cases, industries fund institutes that, in turn, produce studies that support the aims and goals of the industries. You have to follow the money.

This mimicks the political process, in which politicians take dollars from the industries they are supposed to regulate, and, lo and behold, somehow conclude that those industries don't need so much regulation after all.

Of course, just because information comes from a questionable source doesn't make it wrong. You don't have to be pure of heart and free from any conceivable conflict of interest to arrive at the truth.

But it's just tough these days, as a citizen, to navigate the information bazaar. How are we supposed to know what's right and wrong, for example, with health-care reform when we hear so many competing arguments and can't always discern the hidden biases and special interests?

Moreover, sometimes the special interests know best, because they're the ones who are, by definition, specialists about a subject.

Friday morning news roundup:

Here's one in the Times that has my hackles in a knot that may take the rest of the day to unravel. It's an echo of Jon Stewart's line about the market investors operate in and the "real" market operated by, and for the benefit of, the Wall Street insiders. Remind me why this is legal? Why should my 401K, my 529 account and my other pitiful investments have structural leakage that benefits insiders who know how to game the system?

as new marketplaces have emerged, PCs have been unable to compete with Wall Street's computers. Powerful algorithms -- "algos," in industry parlance -- execute millions of orders a second and scan dozens of public and private marketplaces simultaneously. They can spot trends before other investors can blink, changing orders and strategies within milliseconds.

High-frequency traders often confound other investors by issuing and then canceling orders almost simultaneously. Loopholes in market rules give high-speed investors an early glance at how others are trading. And their computers can essentially bully slower investors into giving up profits -- and then disappear before anyone even knows they were there.

High-frequency traders also benefit from competition among the various exchanges, which pay small fees that are often collected by the biggest and most active traders -- typically a quarter of a cent per share to whoever arrives first. Those small payments, spread over millions of shares, help high-speed investors profit simply by trading enormous numbers of shares, even if they buy or sell at a modest loss.

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In case you hadn't heard, Obama's big health-care-reform initiative is under the weather. The Democrats are divided [see Von Drehle's piece in Time on a Blue Dog Democrat in Kansas]. Obama has backed off his August deadline. Poll numbers are going South for the president. Some critics say the public doesn't trust the government to lower health-care costs and not pile up ever greater budget deficits (the CBO analysis didn't help Obama's cause).

"Here, I'd get shot." It was a throwaway line, off the cuff, and followed by a big smile. President Obama was answering Lynn Sweet's question about the racial implications of Skip Gates getting arrested by Cambridge cops. And he hypothesized what would happen if he tried to break into his house. From a purely technical standpoint, he constructed the framework of a potential joke (overlapping but incompatible frames of reference). Presidents don't even have keys to the White House, presumably. Moreover, the place is armed to the teeth. So Obama did something he doesn't do very often -- he went for the laugh.

Joking is perilous business for any president, because every utterance is scrutinized mercilessly. As a young president who came into office amid accusations that he was too green for the job, Obama has been especially careful to comport himself with dignity (winning huzzahs from the likes of David Brooks). Dignity doesn't easily pair up with jocularity.

A joke that falls flat, or offends some group of Americans, requires a rapid damage-control response from the president's staff (witness the unfortunate joke Obama made about his bowling prowess and the Special Olympics). So the president usually plays it safe.

Even Obama's official portrait -- the one that hangs in embassies around the world -- is so grave and serious as to offer zero hint of a sense of humor. He doesn't smile. He's all business. He looks practically monastic.

The other night I was at the Baths of Caracalla watching "Tosca," an opera that I found very, very operatic. Not that my attention ever wandered, but sometime in the second act, or stanza, of the performance, I noticed a bright light rising above an umbrella pine to the east. It couldn't be Venus -- that'd have to be somewhere over near where the Sun had set. So it was Jupiter, surely. A very Roman planet, don't you think? What I didn't know, or couldn't detect, is that within two days Jupiter was going to get slammed by an asteroid or comet, an impact detected by an amateur astronomer with a backyard telescope.

A writer at the Christian Science Monitor says this is a reminder that the Earth is in a shooting gallery. But to me it's also a reminder that it's nice having a gas giant doing our downfield blocking. Fifteen years ago, Jupiter took a hit from Comet Shoemaker-Levy. It may be that civilizations flourish only on planets that have protectors. So the next time you see Jupiter rise, offer some thanks.

Though maybe it will actually be Sirius.

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I am focused like a laser on health-care legislation, and am awaiting Obama's presser tonight. But I'm also obsessively studying that horrible, shattering Tom Watson putt on the 18th at Turnberry. Here's a YouTube of it. Jeepers. It's like watching a puppy run over by a truck. Yeah, for 71.5 holes, it's an incredible story, uplifting -- a narrative that says that, even at an advanced age of 59, a golfer might be able to turn back time and perform as he did in his prime. And then we are reminded that this is delusional. Golf is about failure. And life is about death. No one here gets out alive. That putt NEVER goes in.

Probably not. But it probably will someday, maybe thousands of years from now, and it will be quite the sparkler. Read my story about the Yellowstone caldera, in the latest National Geographic. Check out the cool graphics. I wrote about the Yellowstone "bulge" in The Post a while back. (This Geographic piece was the story I was working on when I visited the park last September, dodging bison on dark mountain roads.)

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Meanwhile, for telescope buffs, this just came over the transom, from Caltech:

PASADENA, Calif. -- After careful evaluation and comparison between two outstanding candidate sites--Mauna Kea in Hawai'i and Cerro Armazones in Chile--the board of directors of the TMT Observatory Corporation has selected Mauna Kea as the preferred site for the Thirty Meter Telescope. The TMT will be the most capable and advanced telescope ever constructed.

When completed in 2018, the TMT will enable astronomers to detect and study light from the earliest stars and galaxies, analyze the formation of planets around nearby stars, and test many of the fundamental laws of physics.

To achieve these outstanding results, the TMT will integrate the latest innovations in precision control, segmented mirror design, and adaptive optics to correct for the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere, enabling the TMT to study the Universe as clearly as if the telescope were in space. Building on the success of the twin Keck telescopes, the core technology of TMT will be a 30-meter primary mirror composed of 492 segments. This will give TMT nine times the collecting area of today's largest optical telescopes.

To ensure that the site chosen for TMT would enable the telescope to achieve its full potential, a global satellite survey was conducted, from which five outstanding candidate sites were chosen for further ground-based studies of atmospheric stability, wind patterns, temperature variation, and other meteorological characteristics that would affect the performance of the telescope.

Based on these results and extensive studies, Mauna Kea and Cerro Armazones were selected in May 2008 for further evaluation and environmental, financial, and cultural impact studies. The TMT board used the results from these meticulous research campaigns to help guide the final site-selection process.

"It was clear from all the information we received that both sites were among the best in the world for astronomical research," said Edward Stone, Caltech's Morrisroe Professor of Physics and vice chairman of the TMT board. "Each has superb observing conditions and would enable TMT to achieve its full potential of unlocking the mysteries of the Universe."

"In the final analysis, the board selected Mauna Kea as the site for TMT. The atmospheric conditions, low average temperatures, and very low humidity will open an exciting new discovery space using adaptive optics and infrared observations. Working in concert with the partners' existing facilities on Mauna Kea will further expand the opportunities for discoveries," said Stone.