Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

I, like most people, was stunned to wake up and find that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. I really have no idea how the deliberations on these things go beyond looking at the description of the proper recipient from Nobel's will. It said that the prize should be awarded:

. . . to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.

I think you can make a credible case for all three of these criteria on Obama's behalf. But pretty much any US President is in a position to come out on top there every year if he's interested in peace and committed to multilateralism. So, only in the weakest sense of the term do I think that Obama "earned" the prize.

Over the course of the day, the rationale for Obama's selection became a bit clearer. In an interview with the New York Times, the Nobel Peace Prize's new committee chairman said:

It’s important for the committee to recognize people who are struggling and idealistic, but we cannot do that every year. We must from time to time go into the realm of realpolitik. It is always a mix of idealism and realpolitik that can change the world.

He then went on to use the examples of Willy Brandt, who won the prize in 1971 while Chancellor of Germany for his policy of rapprochement with the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), despite the fact that his policy had yielded few results at the time he won.

This seems somewhat akin to handing out gold medals in the Olympics to the athletes with the most promise. The point of prizes like Olympic medals and the Noble Peace Prize is to reward achievement, not promise of it. I strongly believe that Obama is going to achieve things during his time in office, but he hasn't yet. But giving him the Prize now degrades its value. So, when Obama wins again for something like brokering a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, it will mean just a little less.

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Update: Hat tip to my friend TD for emailing me a particularly well-phrased question that helped me work out my thoughts on this.

Listening to The Clash's Sandinista! Again

I've been a huge fan of The Clash since I was a kid. While a lot of bands that I liked in my youth are now embarrassing to even mention (ahem, Def Lepard), my appreciation for The Clash has grown considerably. The band's 1979 release London Calling has been one of my default "play this" albums for well over 20 years.

"Spanish Bombs" is for me the quintessence of punk: it's both a rocking tune and a decent introduction to the Spanish Civil War. As a special bonus, the "oh my corazon" refrain rendered in Strummer and Jones' thick Brit accents is strangely endearing. Another song on that album, "Lost in the Supermarket", is hands down the most clever critique of consumerism I've ever found; every time I walk into a big-box store, it's queued in my internal sound track.

But, for some reason Sandinista!--the album that many critics consider to be the band's greatest achievement--never really got to me. I've owned the CD for many years and have probably listened to it every couple of years, but, always left with the feeling that the next time I was in a Clash mood, I'd put London Calling on. Tonight was different for some reason. I put Sandinista! on in the background while I was doing some cooking, and this time the album "took".

The first thing that hit me was just how extraordinary Paul Simonon's bass-playing is on this album. This probably caught my attention because the mixing on the album pushes the bass rather hard (and it works). The brilliant, jazzy "Look Here" is one example. The riff is a pretty standard one from the jazz bass repertoire, but Simonon gives it a Clash signature, in part by playing what you'd expect to hear on an upright bass on an electric. "One More Time" is another example, but this time in a ska piece (and one that includes among Strummer's most brilliant lyrics: "you don't need no silicon/to calculate poverty." This song was recorded in 1979, i.e., before the birth of the personal computer.)

After my revelation about Simonon while listening to Sandinista!, I went back to my usual Clash fix, London Calling, to hear if I'd been missing something in that album. And I had. It is clear to me now that Simonon's bass is one of the driving forces on this album as well. If you take his bass work out of "Lost in the Supermarket", the song loses its musical soul and with it the substantial punch behind Strummer's lyrics. And "Koka Kola" becomes just another song.

Thoughts on the President's Speech

I'm much happier with this speech than I'd expected. I think the President made a strong case for the public option, which was in itself good. And he also referred to a plan that includes the public option "my plan". That's good, too.

But, even better, I think the President drew a line in the sand on the public option. A fine line, and a line that is open to some interpretation, but a line nonetheless. I haven't gone back to the video to confirm my notes, but I am pretty confident that I got at least the gist: he's open to any alternative to the public option that achieves its goals, that is, anything that insures that all Americans have access to affordable insurance. Short of a single-payer system--which is certainly not in the cards today and I doubt will be in my lifetime--I don't see how you achieve that goal without a government-backed insurance plan that introduces real competition into the market.

Both substantively and tactically, I think that the President made a smart move by mentioning medical malpractice reform. Republicans have a valid point about fear of lawsuits and the cost of medical malpractice insurance being a contributor to the rising cost of health care. It is far from the biggest cause, but it is a cause and we should be looking at ways to address everything that's contributing to the spiraling cost of health care in the US. I'm genuinely interested in what happens with this. Tactically, of course, it makes it just a little bit harder for the Republicans to use malpractice reform as their default alternative to broader health care reform.

Update: Josh Marshall also notes the President's drawing a sort of faint line in the sand on the public option, though he is a bit more skeptical than I am. I agree with Josh's contention that there is a lot of wiggle room in the President's position, but, I think it gives those of us who support the public option rather more leverage than I'd expected from the speech.

Live Blogging the President's Health Care Address

7:16--Here we go! Don't want to throw anything at the TV. Yet. I am not optimistic about this speech.

7:18--Think he struck about the right tone on the economic recovery by pointing out success in pulling the economy "back from the brink" but acknowledging work ahead and committing to do that work.

7:19--"Not the first President to take up this call, but I am determined to be the last." Like the fight. Let's see the substance.

7:20--Framing the state of affairs as a failure is good.

7:21--Hadn't heard the "30m who can't get health insurance" number before. Can't because they can't afford it, or, because of pre-existing conditions?

7:24--Going at the cost issue now. Not sure how he is going to wriggle around needing the public option to bring in competition and drive down costs.

7:28--"The time for games has passed". The Obama v Congress things would have been so much better earlier this summer, but, it may still work.

7:29--The Beef, Part I: You got insurance? Great. You can keep it. But, we make it better:
a) no more exclusions for pre-existing conditions.
b) illegal for insurance companies to drop policies on sick.
c) illegal for insurance companies to set coverage caps.
d) set limits on out-of-pocket expenditures
e) require insurance companies to cover preventive care, e.g., colonoscopy

7:32--The Beef, Part II: No insurance? Ok. We got an insurance exchange for you where you can shop, leveraging the law of large numbers to keep prices down. Insurance companies have an incentive to participate because there is money to be made.

7:35--The Beef, Part III: What about those who don't want health insurance? They are costing us money. People will be required to carry basic health insurance and businesses will be required to provide as well. ~95% of small businesses exempt. "Improving our health care requires everyone to do their part".

7:38--What was that? Somebody shouted out something that made Pelossi and Biden blanch. Will be interested to find out who it was and what they said--it was in response to Obama's calling the claim that reform would include coverage for illegal aliens.

7:41--Sounds like the same asshole said something when Obama said he didn't want to put health insurance companies out of business.

7:41--Defense of the Public Option, starting now. Come on, Obama. Make the case.

7:43--Saving from lower admin costs, no profits.

7:44--He refers to the public option as part of "my plan". Surprising. But also opens to door to a law that doesn't have it.

7:45--"If Americans can't find affordable insurance, we will provide you with a choice." That seems to be his line in the sand. I wonder where we can wiggle from there?

7:46--How are we paying for it? Will not sign on to a bill with a plan that will add to the deficit.

7:47--Most of this can be paid for by reducing waste. Contentious point, let's see how he makes it.

7:49--What are these Medicare subsidies to doctors that are going away?

7:52--Fee for insurance companies' most expensive policies. Makes a lot of sense. These plans add no measurable results in terms of health outcomes.

7:53--Very clever bone tossed to the Republicans on malpractice insurance. Will be interesting to see how this is fleshed out.

7:54--Bending the arc.

7:55--Here's the [political] plan: If you're serious, my door is open. If you just want to kill the plan rather than make it better, pound sand. If you talk shit, we will call you on it.

Tuesday's Gmail Fail

Google has posted their official explanation of Tuesday's nearly two-hour Gmail collapse:

Here's what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail's servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn't in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail's web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.

However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system "stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!". This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn't access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn't be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don't use the same routers.

This is stunning incompetence from an organization that I've come to expect excellence from. First, not having good data on traffic load before undertaking an upgrade of this sort is indicative of incredible sloppiness. Second, having a router overload algorithm that defaults to shutting down routers rather than simply routing traffic more slowly is idiotic (up to a point--at some point traffic becomes so slow as to render it useless).

Google says that they've addressed these issues, but, I have to say this shakes my faith in a company that I've come to regard as a paragon of excellent quality and service.

Bill Clinton's Success in North Korea

I expected the resolution of the imprisonment of American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee in North Korea to be resolved as a side-deal with the North Koreans. The scenario I envisioned was something like a standoff between the US and North Korea over an intercepted North Korean ship suspected of carrying components for nuclear weapons bound for Burma.

The actual result was substantially better. The women are safely home in the US rather than facing hard labor in the North Korean gulag. That's obviously good. Less obviously good is that it came at a lower price to the US than in the scenarios I'd imagined. North Korea really had few chips to play so the relative value of their hostages was low. Consequently, the price the US paid was having a former president sit on a stage looking at Kim Jong Il like he'd just farted. I'm good with that.

Amazon's Kindle Caper, Redux

Andrew Sullivan flags a case of a student who lost his summer reading homework when Amazon nabbed his copy of 1984. I alluded to such a possibility here when the story initially broke.