The Obama Administration may be dropping the public option requirement from its health care agenda. PHOENIX — The White House, facing increasing skepticism over President Obama’s call for a public insurance plan to compete with the private sector, signaled Sunday that it was willing to compromise and would consider a proposal for a nonprofit health [...]

In answer to James’ query below about when a state or county have forced unmarried people not to live together, meet Olivia Shelltrack, Fondray Loving and their three children. Welcome to Wednesday afternoon at 12475 Parkwood Lane in Black Jack, Mo.: In his room on the second floor, 8-year-old Cortez Loving wages an intergalactic battle [...]

The CBO has analyzed some of the suggested methods for controlling health care costs, and the Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC) in particular. The findings so far is not all that good, In particular, CBO reviewed draft legislation transmitted to the Congress by the Administration on July 17, 2009, titled the Independent Medicare Advisory Council [...]

Via Greg Mankiw comes this quote from Michael Kinsley But people, even liberals, are starting to get unnerved by the cost of all this. We now talk of trillions the way, even a few months ago, we spoke of billions. In mid-June, the Senate health committee put out its version of reform and was horrified [...]

I actually like this article by Ezra Klein. Often I’ve found his articles lacking in understanding of economics, an appreciation for incentives, etc. But this looks quite good. Well balanced and displaying a healthy skepticism about why Medicare’s adminstative costs are lower and if we can get such low costs in general for health care [...]

For the sake of argument let us assume that Medicare’s administrative costs are lower than those of the typical health insurance company. Does this imply that Medicare is more efficient than the private company? I’ve been skeptical of this view point since one thing I’ve learned in economics is that firms want to maximize profits. [...]

Are they lower? This article by the Heritage Foundation makes an interesting point. Medicare beneficiaries are by definition elderly, disabled, or patients with end-stage renal disease. Private insurance beneficiaries may include a small percentage of people in those categories, but they consist primarily of people are who under age 65 and not disabled. Naturally, Medicare [...]

Looks like Reps. Barney Frank and Anthony Weiner want both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to loosen lending standards for condos. Two U.S. Democratic lawmakers want Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax recently tightened standards for mortgages on new condominiums, saying they could threaten the viability of some developments and slow the housing-market recovery, [...]

This article on how the International Olympic Committee picks host cities is a great way of demonstrating the problems with voting and Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. In selecting a host city, the IOC, acting like a papal conclave, takes a series of votes until a candidate receives a majority. Each of the 100-plus IOC members gets [...]

With the economy apparently not responding to the stimulus President Obama is trying to reassure the nation that everything is on track. At least that is the story of this article. WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama assured the nation his recovery plan was on track Monday, scrambling to calm Americans unnerved by unemployment rates [...]

Back when there was all that big argument about the efficacy of stimulus spending to mitigate the effects of a recession one argument is that we have to spend the money fairly quickly, at least by Washington DC standards. Otherwise there is the likelihood that the spending will occur when the recession is already over. [...]

You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cell phone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it. Neat, huh? There you [...]

Apparently, the Supreme Court is leaning towards letting school administrators do just that. The case in question is a about a girl who was strip searched by school officials when she was 13 years old in eighth grade. The school officials were acting on a tip from another girl who had been caught with prescription [...]

Recently-minted PhD Thoreau discusses the difference between research grants offered by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and those backed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) thusly: NSF wants to see more Americans in grad school, because they believe that the only way to maintain America’s competitive edge is to continue to over-produce Ph.D.’s. If [...]

WaPo federal beat reporter Ed O’Keefe helpfully notes that, Washington, D.C.-area federal offices will operate today under “liberal leave” or “unscheduled leave” and delayed arrival status, meaning employees who cannot make it to work can request off, or should otherwise arrive to work no more than two hours later than normal, according to the Office [...]

Despite my being local and getting the Sunday Washington Post delivered to my driveway, I just encountered this story about an Alexandria shop owner’s renting his space to a sex shop to spit city planners on memeorandum. To many in Old Town Alexandria, the sex shop that opened recently on King Street is nothing short [...]

Buried in the article that James linked in his earlier post about the loophole that essentially eliminates the executive pay limitations of the TARP program is this fun little tidbit: Lawmakers agreed to the Treasury’s request that the measure apply only to executives at companies whose assets were bought by the government through auctions. In [...]

Ezra Klein wrote an interesting post Wednesday arguing that extending life through medical intervention is expensive and that tradeoffs and rationing have to be made.  The only question, then, is how much value is placed on that extra unit of health care and who’s making the valuation. The inverse of the American health care system [...]

Radley Balko links to a story about a high school student, William Poole, being arrested for, as the Poole says, writing a story about zombies. Yes, zombies. A good round-up of the story can be found here. The police contend the story was much more. About how Poole wanted to start a gang called the [...]

Responding to the implication that Democrats are trying to steal the election with fraudulent voter registration, a correspondent sent along this NYT report from yesterday’s edition: States’ Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked [...]

This video, called “Burning Down the House: What Caused Our Economic Crisis” (although, oddly, set to the tune of “Money for Nothing”) is apparently all the rage (at least in my wife’s office). It traces the subprime crisis to the Jimmy Carter era Community Reinvestment Act. To the extent this view is correct (and I [...]

Seth Godin has a number of “random travel thoughts,” several of which relate to airport security: When I go through security, why do I need to remove a cardigan sweater but the woman standing next to me can keep her cashmere blouse on? Are certain kinds of wool inherently risky? What would happen if Imagineers [...]

Both candidates have been railing against the financial market crisis. Both have been calling for more regulations. Really? We are going to let the spendthrift jackanapes who have saddled us with $36 trillion to $63 trillion (or more, it really depends on how you count it) in unfunded future liabilities? No problems there. And of [...]

(Thanks to James Joyner for a chance to post a few stories here while he is in Quebec.) A few weeks ago I read a story on air (it’s at the end of this podcast) that the idea of the gas tax holiday had not only foundered in Congress but that they were contemplating instead [...]

The District of Columbia has made it legal for residents to own a handgun after being so ordered by the United States Supreme Court.  But they’re not making it easy. The plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that overturned Washington’s strict 32-year-old handgun ban was among the first to arrive as the city started registering [...]

Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the graduating class of the Army War College to accept responsibility, listen to their subordinates, and broaden their horizons. He also signaled a radical transformation of the way the Defense Department does business. The chairman also called on a national discourse on defense. [...]

Sarasota County, Florida, has made the decision that it will no longer hire smokers. Citing the burden they place on taxpayers who pay for government workers’ health insurance, Sarasota County officials announced Monday that they no longer will hire smokers. [...] Sarasota County Administrator Jim Ley said the hiring ban came out of “a five- [...]

Jennifer Sharpe, a 15-year-old Dearborn, Michigan Girl Scout, sold 17,328 boxes of cookies by “setting up shop on a street corner.” This achievement may or may not be a national record because nobody’s actually keeping score, but we know nobody sold more this year. Regardless, it required a near-obsessive dedication and, as usual, quite a [...]

Marc Lynch extols the work of Radio Free Europe analyst Daniel Kimmage “on al-Qaeda’s internet operations, including his definitive study of Iraqi insurgent media (with Kathleen Ridolfo) and his more recent report on al-Qaeda’s internet media production network. There are very few people inside or outside the government who have worked harder or thought more [...]

The State Department’s computer security team has lost 400-odd laptop computers, CQ’s Jeff Stein reports. Hundreds of employee laptops are unaccounted for at the U.S. Department of State, which conducts delicate, often secret, diplomatic relations with foreign countries, an internal audit has found. As many as 400 of the unaccounted for laptops belong to the [...]

Some federal air marshals are being repeatedly delayed — or denied — boarding on flights because their name is on a terrorist watch list, Audrey Hudson reports. False identifications based on a terrorist no-fly list have for years prevented some federal air marshals from boarding flights they are assigned to protect, according to officials with [...]

The private sector might be shedding jobs but government is hiring at all levels. Governments added 76,800 jobs in the first three months of 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. That’s the biggest jump in first-quarter hiring since a boom in 2002 that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. By contrast, private companies collectively shed [...]

The war against Jihadists and Islamo-Fascists has been won; each and every last one of these vermin has been eradicated courtesy of the United States Government. Unfortunately, the victory is quite literally in name only. The Bush administration has launched a new front in the war on terrorism, this time targeting language. Federal agencies, including [...]

The Defense Department has only a vague idea of where much of it money goes: Since 2004, the Pentagon has spent roughly $16 billion annually to maintain and modernize the military’s business systems, but most are as unreliable as ever—even as the surge in defense spending is creating more room for error. The basic defense [...]

Last week’s American Airlines debacle was the result of bureaucratic arrogance and inflexibility, not the public interest, Melanie Scarborough argues in the Washington Examiner. The Federal Aviation Administration forced the airline to ground a fleet of planes – canceling thousands of flights and stranding a quarter of a million passengers – because not all the [...]

The United States government is thinking about coming up with a coherent system for dealing with classified information. Steven Aftergood has details. U.S. intelligence agencies have embarked upon a process to develop a uniform classification policy and a single classification guide that could be used by the entire U.S. intelligence community, according to a newly [...]

“Surprising Political Endorsements By U.S. Troops” – ABC News Why not “Government Employees Cannot Participate in Partisan Political Activity”? Or how about government employees are not allowed to state who they support politically? How about government employees are NOT allowed to vote? How about UNION government employees are not allowed to vote? Though the military [...]

Michael Cutler is incredulous that so many state governors are challenging the Real ID Act. It is impossible for me to understand how anyone who is concerned about the security of our nation in this perilous age would oppose the implementation of the Real ID Act. The seven years since the attacks of September 11, [...]

Enhanced presidential helicopters ordered six years ago have not yet been delivered and they will cost more than twice the winning bid, WaPo’s Peter Baker reports on page 1. A year after Sept. 11, 2001, the White House set out to build a fleet of state-of-the-art Marine One helicopters for the al-Qaeda age that would [...]

For the first time in history, administrators outnumber faculty among the full-time employees of America’s colleges and universities. In the fall of 2006, for which data were released Tuesday, 48.6 percent of professional, full-time jobs in higher education were held by faculty members. Faculty jobs remain the majority among full-time positions at two-year colleges and [...]

A man who mistakenly brought a load gun to Ronald Reagan National Airport was arrested by the TSA. At first glance you might think, “Well duh. Sounds like government is doing its job for once.” Not so fast. WASHINGTON (CNN) — A passenger who went through an airport security checkpoint — before remembering that he [...]

In a piece entitled “New Data and New Methods Lead to Revised View on Iran,” NYT reporter Mark Mazzetti sheds some light on how reforms in the intelligence community led to a 180 degree change in the consensus on Iran’s nuclear weapons program in only two years. Current and former intelligence officials insist that much [...]

New York has retroactively decided that a man’s GET OSAMA vanity tags are offensive and can not be displayed on his vehicle. The federal government may have a $25 million reward for fugitive terrorist Osama bin Laden, but a retired city cop says the Department of Motor Vehicles has banned his “GETOSAMA” vanity license plates [...]

The Pentagon is apparently marshalling all of its resources in the war against terrorism–including prayer and homeopathic medicine. Ask Wayne B. Jonas why the scientific foundation he directs is funding research into the effects of prayer, the use of homeopathy to fight bioterrorism and whether magnetic devices can heal orthopedic injuries, and he offers a [...]

Review: ‘The Kingdom’ Watching the trailers for ‘The Kingdom’ over the past several months, I was curious about how the film would portray Saudi Arabia and Saudis. I had personal experience with terrorist bombings of residential compounds in Riyadh and wanted to see how accurate the film might be. The film could have taken the [...]

The legendary Colonel H.R. McMaster has been passed over, for a second time, for promotion to flag rank. Matt Bennett, a VP at the liberal Third Way sees this is a “corollary to the Peter Principle: genuinely gifted and brilliant public servants who are kept far below the level to which they should ascend.” He, [...]

The USDA routinely gives money to dead people, the GAO found. The U.S. Department of Agriculture distributed $1.1 billion over seven years to the estates or companies of deceased farmers and routinely failed to conduct reviews required to ensure that the payments were properly made, according to a government report. In a selection of 181 [...]

The Department of Homeland Security suffers from under staffing at the senior levels as well as political infighting and poor morale, according to a front page piece in today’s WaPo. The Bush administration has failed to fill roughly a quarter of the top leadership posts at the Department of Homeland Security, creating a “gaping hole” [...]

Back in May, James Joyner and I wrote a piece for TCS Daily, Armed Diplomats? When State and Stability Operations Collide about the conflicting roles and missions of State Department diplomats and those of the US Military. The article noted that diplomats (as well as the various support staff needed to run a diplomatic missions, [...]

Following up on Steven Taylor’s post from this morning, the International Herald Tribune and others are reporting that former U.S. trade negotiator and deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick will replace Paul Wolfowitz as the president of the World Bank. Zoellick appears to be highly qualified for the position, and his apparent support from the [...]