Brendan Nyhan on the myths about health care: “While some of the more outlandish rumors may dissipate, it is likely that misperceptions will linger for years, hindering substantive debate over the merits of the country’s new health care system. The reasons are rooted in human psychology.”
Transport Politic on Amtrak’s push to operate high-speed rail lines: “Amtrak has a significant credibility gap to make up before states will be willing to let it operate their new high-speed rail services.”
John Sides on open primaries: “At best, these forms of primaries might make Democrats and Republicans a few points more moderate, but that is a far, far cry from ‘reducing toxic levels of dysfunction.’”
Rod Adams on Bill Gates and the development of a new generation of nuclear reactors: “Gates and TerraPower are definitely interested in developing reactors that can burn depleted uranium and used nuclear fuel for a very long time before they need to be refueled.”
Pew has a new study on China leading the world in clean energy.
Tom Tauke, chief lobbyist at Verizon, spoke yesterday in a speech designed to take a fresh start on governance of the Internet. His comments got some coverage as challenging the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) role in regulating broadband communication. The FCC’s broadband powers may be decided in a court ruling expected this spring — following oral arguments in January — on a Comcast challenge to the FCC’s oversight of Internet service providers on constitutional grounds.
As James Vega pointed out in a post last night, threats or even acts of violence by right-wing fringe groups are entirely predictable — and even rational from the point of view of their perpetrators — in an atmosphere where even “respectable” conservatives often indulge themselves in charges that the country is sliding into some sort of totalitarian system.
You may have heard that Republican Meg Whitman held a narrow lead over Democrat Jerry Brown in the latest Field Poll on the California’s governor’s race. But this week’s state reports on the spending of the candidates puts that in a better perspective.
Now that the Obama administration has chastised Israel for expanding settlements in East Jerusalem, it should turn its attention to Mughrabi Square.
Palestinian students gathered earlier this month to dedicate a square in the West Bank town of El Bireh to the memory of Dala Mughrabi, a young woman responsible for the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history.
The highly touted Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future that President Obama assembled last year will have its first public meeting today at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. The panel, co-chaired by former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN) and former National Security Advisor to President George H.W. Bush Brent Scowcroft, is tasked with reviewing policy options for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, including developing a safe, long-term solution to the nuclear waste problem.
William Galston on selling health care reform: “If the debate between now and November is generic—about the role of government—Democrats will probably lose. If the debate is more specific—comparing the bill to the status quo and pointing out its concrete advantages—the public’s view may well become much more favorable.”
Michael Mandel on the growing gap between government and private-sector benefits: “In the private sector, adjusted for inflation, employer spending on retirement benefits stagnated between 2004 and 2009. That’s right, just flat, even before the financial bust. By comparison, state and local costs for retirement rose by 30% between 2004 and 2009, in real terms.”
Infrastructurist on the 20 U.S. cities with the most energy efficient buildings, according to the EPA.
David Leonhardt on health reform and inequality: “The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.”
Tom Friedman on the radical center: “I’ve come to realize that none of these innovations will emerge at scale until we get the most important innovation of all — political innovation that will empower independents and centrists, which describes a lot of the country.”
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) speaks on campaign finance and the Fair Elections Now Act at an event held by the Progressive Policy Institute and Americans for Campaign Reform last week on Capitol Hill.
Back on February 12, a CNN/New York Times poll gave us our first good look at the Tea Party Movement, and it didn’t confirm the media stereotype of angry average citizens who were somewhere in the “middle” on issues and equally disdained the two parties. Instead it showed the Tea Party folk to be, basically, very conservative Republicans determined to pressure the GOP to move to the right or suffer the consequences — in other words, a radicalized GOP base.
Channeling my inner Rahm: never waste a good crisis. The earthquake in Haiti was, and continues to be, tragic. However, at least one entrepreneur sees an opportunity to rebuild a critical part of Haiti’s infrastructure and probably make a few bucks in the meantime:
John Stanton, founder of Voice Stream and former chief executive of T-Mobile USA, wants the Haitian government to forget about rebuilding its copper wire communications network.
If you need a pet story to follow over the next year, Google and China is it. The issues at hand — freedom, human rights, censorship, and the almighty dollar — define, in a microcosm, China’s internal struggle to shape a coherent, enduring image on the world stage. Can China have its cake and eat it too — censorship and repression on one hand, and Western companies that help foster economic growth on the other? The long-term fallout from this story could set precedent for decades to come.
Mark Schmitt on health care reform and public anxiety: “Health reform will succeed politically not by being popular but by working. That is, by giving Americans a much greater sense that they are not on the brink of losing everything, that they can change jobs or start their own business or admit to a medical condition without risking disaster.”
Chad Alderman on high schools that leave students unprepared for college: “The community and regional colleges that enroll the vast majority of students needing remediation are blamed for the poor persistence and graduation rates. Most importantly, the student is implicitly lied to, pushed out the door of one school unprepared for the next. It’s the old college lie.”
NRDC’s Noah Long on ENERGY STAR: “The good news is that last week, DOE and EPA announced that they will be increasing the level of attention they pay to testing and enforcement.”
Bradford Plumer on the Clean Air Act: “So the bleak predictions of 1970s-era environmentalists never panned out, but largely because they helped enact rules that prevented those outcomes.”
Stanley Greenberg on what winning does for Democrats: “I believe that the Democrats’ winning on health care reform will affect voters’ perceptions on a wide range of issues. Competence and progress count. And all the comparisons to the 1994 midterms, indeed a disaster for Democrats, may need revision.”
The Dragon’s Dilemma: A Closer Look at China’s Defense Budget and Priorities
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This is the first installment in a three-part series investigating the state of China’s military. The other articles in this series will look at China’s missile capabilities and naval modernization.
This week, China’s National People’s Congress will convene its annual meeting in Beijing. Among the developments that are expected from the gathering is one we should all pay close attention to: the announcement of China’s 2010 defense budget. Beijing has given the military double-digit budget increases for well over a decade, and some Chinese security analysts are calling for a larger-than-usual boost this year in a bid ...
Charting a Course for a National Infrastructure Revival
As the United States struggles to rouse itself from its economic slumber, the country is beginning to keenly feel the need to lay down a foundation for a new and vibrant economy. A concerted effort to modernize our infrastructure must top any checklist for recovery. The backbone of our economic system has suffered from years of neglect – budgetary, conceptual, institutional. With his recent request for $4 billion to create a National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, it’s encouraging that President Obama seems to understand how essential an infrastructure revival is to our prosperity.
But such a fund is not nearly ...
Fast Track to the Future: A High-Speed Rail Agenda for America
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In the next few weeks, the administration will be announcing which states will be awarded funds from $8 billion dedicated for high-speed rail (HSR) development in the stimulus package. Right now, 259 applications from the states valued at $57 billion are chasing the recovery plan money. The administration’s decision to devote considerable resources to developing HSR underscores its commitment to bring bullet trains to the U.S. But unless it makes the right decisions about where to put the money and what policies to follow, the new enthusiasm for HSR could be just the latest false start in ...
The State of State: A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom
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The past decade has seen the U.S. government expand its activities around the globe in response to complex and stateless threats. In the face of these challenges, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, and members of Congress have all called for increasing the resources and capabilities of the State Department to roll back what Gates has termed the “creeping militarization” of foreign policy. But efforts at reform are hindered by an institutional structure rooted in a 19th-century view of the world.
The days of traditional diplomacy conducted behind closed ...
Spooks in the Machine: How the Pentagon Should Fight Cyber Spies
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In Washington, "cybersecurity" is a term that's come to have a thousand meanings, and none at all. Any crime, prank, intelligence operation, or foreign-government attack involving a computer has become a “cyber threat.” Russian teenagers defacing Georgia's websites, hackers eyeing the power grid, overseas powers embedding government microchips with malicious code – they all share equal billing as cyber foes. The vague definition muddies the debate about what the real dangers are, where they lie, and how to respond to them. No wonder it took the White House so long to find someone to serve as a ...
Campaign Finance Reform 2.0: A Small-Donor Approach to Fixing the System
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It’s been said that money is the mother’s milk of American politics. Congressional incumbents spend about a third of their time chasing after it in never-ending campaigns for reelection. Interest groups contribute it in ever-increasing sums to politicians as an investment in government policy, or at least as a cost of doing business. Political consultants and the broadcast media collect it by the hundreds of millions every two years, thanks to the epic, televised spectacle we call the modern campaign.
Difficult though it may be to imagine American politics unconstrained by big money in elections, that ...
Good Food, Good Jobs: Turning Food Deserts into Jobs Oases
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Tens of millions of Americans need more nutritious, more affordable food. Tens of millions need better jobs. Just as the Obama administration and Congress have supported a “green jobs” initiative to simultaneously fight unemployment and protect the environment, they should launch a “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative. Given that large numbers of food jobs could be created rapidly and with relatively limited capital investments, their creation should become a consideration in any jobs bill that Congress and the president enact.
Our hunger, malnutrition, obesity, and poverty problems are closely linked. Low-income areas across America that lack access to ...
Why Progressives Should Be More Open to Nuclear Energy
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The international scientific consensus is clear: The Earth is warming, and humanity’s reliance on carbon-based energy sources is a significant factor. Scientists working under the auspices of the United Nations believe that unless global emissions are stabilized by 2030 and cut by at least half by 2050, the Earth’s temperature will increase by more than 3 degrees centigrade by the end of this century.
Should this happen, these scientists predict, both the natural world and human society will experience dire consequences, including mass extinctions, severe flooding caused by rising sea levels, and the failure of primary ...
A new policy memo from Third Way offers 23 ways to create clean energy jobs and lay down the foundation for a green economy. The memo breaks down its proposals into short-, medium-, and long-term ideas for generating new jobs. Among the proposals include a small-business energy efficiency loan program; advanced energy manufacturing tax credits; transitioning diesel heavy vehicles to natural gas; nuclear workforce training; and the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank.
One year after the passage of the Recovery Act, the Obama administration continues to come under fire from Republicans over the size of the deficit. The administration’s propensity for spending, these critics argue, are behind the eye-popping deficits we see today. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities makes clear in a new report, that is simply not true. Analyzing debt projections based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, the report found that the recession that began in 2008 battered the budget by driving down tax revenues and forcing an increase in government spending programs. In the near-term, the Obama administration contributed to the deficit with its financial rescues and stimulus plan, which economists agree saved the country from plunging into a deeper recession. But the effects of those programs pale in comparison to the long-term harm done by the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the CBPP.
The last decade has seen a tremendous boom in charter schools. Charter management organizations (CMOs) have played an increasingly important role in state and national efforts to bring reform to the toughest educational environments. But as a new report from Education Sector points out, CMOs have expanded more slowly and required more resources than supporters had hoped. Ed Sector proposes a series of recommendations to policy makers for CMOs to realize their full potential, including: lifting artificial caps on the number of charter schools that can operate; prioritizing funding for states with level fiscal playing fields for charter schools; standardizing data collection requirements across charter schools; and requiring states to have accountability systems for charter school authorizers.
A new report jointly produced by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation and the Breakthrough Institute compares the U.S.’s competitiveness on the clean energy front with China, Japan, and South Korea. What they found confirms what others have written about of late: that the U.S. is now lagging in the innovation game it once ruled. According to the study, public investments in clean energy in those countries far outpace U.S. investments. If the gap persists, the U.S. will find itself importing the overwhelming majority of the clean energy technologies it deploys, from wind turbines and high-speed-rail materials to solar cells and nuclear-plant equipment. It’s a troubling survey that underscores how much ground the U.S. needs to make up to become a world leader in innovation and green energy.
“Not long ago, America’s global leadership in technology innovation was taken as a given,” writes Stephen Ezell in the fall issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Those days are over. In the past decade, America’s competitors have caught up and, in many cases, passed the U.S. Ezell points to one culprit: all but alone among the world’s top economies, the U.S. does not have a national innovation policy. Ezell makes the case for a comprehensive innovation strategy, seeing in the current economic crisis an opportunity to enshrine innovation as the engine of renewed economic growth.
Tom Tauke, chief lobbyist at Verizon, 
As James Vega 
Now that the Obama administration has chastised Israel for expanding settlements in East Jerusalem, it should turn its attention to Mughrabi Square.
The highly touted Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future that President Obama assembled last year will have its first public meeting today at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. The panel, co-chaired by former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN) and former National Security Advisor to President George H.W. Bush Brent Scowcroft, is tasked with reviewing policy options for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, including developing a safe, long-term solution to the nuclear waste problem.
Back on February 12, a CNN/New York Times poll gave us our 
Channeling my inner Rahm: never waste a good crisis. The earthquake in Haiti was, and continues to be, tragic. However, at least 
If you need a pet story to follow over the next year, 
