openpolitics.com

Young people find it strange that such a large fraction of overall medical expenses is incurred in the last few months of life—that is, by people who are dying. (Last-year-of-life medical care accounts for 26 percent of Medicare expenditures and 22 percent of all medical expenditures. PubMed. ) Having nothing to look forward to, why are they willing to spend so much on a meager extension of life? There are several reasons.

• One is that a good deal of end-of-life medical care is devoted to reducing suffering rather than to extending life.
• Another reason is uncertainty as to whether one is really dying.
• Another is that the (private) cost of care, however extensive, is negligible for persons who are covered by both Medicare and private “medigap” insurance that pays for the copayments that Medicare requires.
• Still another reason for the heavy loading of medical expenses at the end of life is that for people who do not have a strong bequest motive, the opportunity cost of money spent in their last period of life is negligible because they will not be able to spend any money saved during that period.

The latest chapter in the legal history of torture is being written by American pilots who were beaten and abused by Iraqis during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. And it has taken a strange twist.

The Bush administration is fighting the former prisoners of war in court, trying to prevent them from collecting nearly $1 billion from Iraq that a federal judge awarded them as compensation for their torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Usually, foreign states have a sovereign immunity that shields them from being sued. But in the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, Congress authorized U.S. courts to award "money damages … against a foreign state for personal injury or death that was caused by an act of torture, extrajudicial killing, aircraft sabotage [or] hostage taking."

The picture changed, however, when the United States invaded Iraq and toppled Hussein from power nearly two years ago. On July 21, 2003, two weeks after the Gulf War POWs won their court case in U.S. District Court, the Bush administration intervened to argue that their claims should be dismissed.

"Salivating morons." "Scalp hunters." "Moon howlers." "Trophy hunters." "Sons of Sen. McCarthy." "Rabid." "Blogswarm." "These pseudo-journalist lynch mob people."

This is excellent invective. It must come from bloggers. But wait, it was the mainstream media and their maidservants in the elite journalism reviews, and they were talking about bloggers!It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked.

Interviewing Robin Williams is an experience. If you've ever seen him on late night TV and thought, 'That has to be scripted, no one is that quick,' let me be the one to tell you, oh yes, he is that quick. He is razor sharp.

Reining Williams in becomes a task in itself, but at a point, you just don't care. He's like a child with intense ADD, frantically jumping from subject to subject, wherever the laughs may lie. However, unlike dealing with a difficult child, you are too busy laughing at Williams to care if he ever gets back to the subject at hand.

Here's my favorite version, from another fighting moderate, Eliot Spitzer: "As President Bush embraces the ownership society and tries to claim that he is the one that is making it possible for the middle class to succeed and save and invest - well, I say to myself, no, that's not right; it is the Democratic Party historically that created the middle class."