Sunday punditry. Read it early, talk about it late.
Frank Rich on Sarah Palin:
But no matter how much Palin tries to pass for "center-right," she’s unlikely to fool that vast pool of voters left, right and center who have already written her off as unqualified for the White House. The G.O.P. establishment knows this, and is frightened. The demographic that Palin attracts is in decline; there’s no way the math of her fan base adds up to an Electoral College victory.
Yet among Republicans she still ties Mitt Romney in the latest USA Today/Gallup survey, with 65 percent giving her serious presidential consideration, just behind the 71 for her evangelical rival, Mike Huckabee.
Maureen Dowd:
Yet Democrats would be foolish to write off her visceral power.
As Judith Doctor, a 69-year-old spiritual therapist, told The Washington Post’s Jason Horowitz at Palin’s book signing in Grand Rapids, Mich., "She’s alive inside, and that radiates energy, and people who are not psychologically alive inside are fascinated by that."
No one should confuse winning the GOP nomination (which she can do) with winning the election (when 60% think you are not qualified, you can't.) Maureen goes to to say Obama's too intellectual, blah, blah, blah.
Ron Brownstein via Ezra:
"I'm sort of a known skeptic on this stuff," [MIT health economist Jonathan] Gruber told me. "My summary is it's really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can't think of a thing to try that they didn't try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here....I can't think of anything I'd do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn't have done better than they are doing."
Gruber may be especially effusive. But the Senate blueprint, which faces its first votes tonight, also is winning praise from other leading health reformers like Mark McClellan, the former director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under George W. Bush and Len Nichols, health policy director at the centrist New America Foundation. "The bottom line," Nichols says, "is the legislation is sending a signal that business as usual [in the medical system] is going to end."
More of same from Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
The health reform bill that Senate leaders unveiled yesterday meets two rigorous fiscal tests: it reduces deficits over the next decade and beyond, and it puts long-term downward pressure on health care costs.
There are, however, still issues with affordability:
The health reform bill that Senate leaders unveiled on November 18 makes health coverage more affordable for millions of households of modest means, as compared to the bill that the Senate Finance Committee approved last month. The amounts that many families and individuals would pay for coverage would be less than under the Finance Committee proposal.
For people between 134 percent and 154 percent of the poverty line, however — people with incomes around $25,000 to $28,000 for a family of three — premiums would actually be higher than the already significant amounts they would have to pay under the Finance Committee bill. Modifications are needed at some point as the legislation moves forward to ensure that near-poor families and individuals do not face insurance premiums and cost-sharing charges that many of them could have difficulty affording.
David Broder does his own rigorous analysis, Beltway style: he asks "every expert" that agrees with him what they think of the new health care bill and ignores the CBO and the ones that don't.
Via Jay Rosen on twitter, this:
The job cuts at the Washington Post on Friday have produced a round of comments, broadly summed up by Steve Yelvington earlier today. They certainly begged the question that occurred to me as a former employee of both the Post and WPNI, its soon-to-be merged online operation: "What explains this kind of decision?"
They've decided the dead tree paper is more important than the web site.
CIDRAP:
Health officials in Wales today announced the identification of a cluster of patients in a Cardiff hospital who are infected with oseltamivir-resistant pandemic H1N1 influenza.
Also today, Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., reported that oseltamivir-resistant H1N1 viruses were found in four very sick patients hospitalized there over the past 6 weeks. A Duke press release said all four patients had been in the same hospital unit, but it did not specify how many were there at the same time.
This is what we dread. Small numbers, but keep an eye on this.