Recently the Iranians tested a missile. They even faked a picture to make the missiles look more successful than they were. What does this mean?

Well, we’ve managed to scare them, that’s what. And that’s not a very good idea.

The U.S. and Israel have been threatening Iran for several months now. From McCain’s silly attempts at musical humor to Obama’s statements about how big of a threat the country is.

Because when one or both sides in a conflict lives in fear, bad things happen.

Yesterday I wrote about a way to cut health care costs by attacking the some of the costs that get built into the system of educating doctors, running the practice and dealing with malpractice. This is my idea for single-payer care, and I don't claim it's terribly original. It borrows much from the Canadian system.

But the real point here is that I'm trying to sell this to people. So this is not just an idea for a plan, but a manifesto of sorts. Think of it as a position paper that I would love to see the candidates adopt. Not only a position paper but a sales pitch that I think will work better than others have in the past. Because it avoids putting things directly in government hands, and might appeal to those that think (wrongly I know) that government can't do anything right unless it involves guns.

Democrats and the GOP have been going back over proposals for health insurance reform. All of them focus on insurance and access to it. That's important, no question.

But I'm going to take a different tack here. I'm going to lay out some little-discussed reasons why health care is more expensive in the US than in almost any other country. I'm talking about the built-in costs. That is, all the stuff that keeps the system running -- and doesn't need to cost as much as it does.

Basically, there are three components: the cost of being a doctor, the cost of interacting with insurance companies and the cost of having the oversight for the medical profession in the court system.

If I've seen the word "electability" once I've sen it a thousand times. And it's a product of lazy thinking, which Democrats can't afford.

Electability doesn't mean anything. You're electable if people vote for you, that's it. Anyone's electable. The question is whether the party (be it Democrat or Republican) stands behind you and gives all the support it can.

Then there's experience. "Obama is inexperienced" you say. Well, so was JFK. So was Dubya. People voted for them anyway.

So I am going to do two things: a little math and a little history, to show why we need to kill these two memes now and kill them dead.

A lot of times in the conversation about race I hear this:

"My ancestors came here after slavery was over, we didn't benefit."

"Black people need to take responsibility."

"Look at the (insert hip-hop caricature pathology here)."

"Asians succeed, why can't they?"

"(Insert black guy here, probably nation of Islam) hates white people, see, they're racists too!"

This is my answer.

People talk about experience, but nobody votes for it.

As we (the high information voters) debate which candidate is the best for the Democratic Party and give our razzies to McCain, I thought it might be a good idea to deflate the idea that experience matter one whit in American politics. People have touched on it here before, noting that Abraham Lincoln had a pretty short resume. The usual rejoinder is that the presidency is very different now than it was in 1860.

I'm going to take a slightly lighter view of this, and note that from an "electability" standpoint, both the Democrats and Republicans are getting ready to run the very kind of candidate people won't vote for, based on experience in office.

I read the New York Times Op-Ed page Wednesday, and came face to face with genocide.

That's what it is. Let there be no mistake about it. And I know this because the general, Charles Dunlap, who wrote  this piece, doesn't seem to have learned a thing from nearly 100 years of counterinsurgency warfare.

Dunlap, without meaning to, seems to be saying that if we kill enough people, and imprison the rest, the war in Iraq will be won. I'd say that's a dubious proposition at best.

A while back I wrote about how your civil rights help catch criminals. I’m going to try another radical frame: harsher punishments make for worse criminals even before they go to prison, and reducing penalties may actually increase public safety. Because when you have nothing to lose, killing one more person doesn't matter. New Jersey’s abolition of the death penalty could be something that leads the country in the right direction.

There are a lot of interesting ways people want to fix the immigration system, and a few have been proposed on this site (most recently here, well worth reading). But I want to ask Democrats if they would support some simple proposals. Most don't require major changes in the law. Our system of handing out visas actively encourages illegal immigration. And it's all due to an old economic principle known as Gresham's law.

Every time someone asks a candidate about civil liberties the question always seems to come to the false choice: safety or civil rights.

But I'm going to offer a new way to ask the candidates that question. We need to ask them if they understand how our civil liberties help cops do their job, and do it well.

So I am going to lay out here a new frame: civil liberties help catch criminals. Sometimes even terrorists.

The PBS dcumentary "Judgement Day" was a big victory for progressives -- not just because Dover was a victory, but for all of us who are big fans of science it was such a great explanation of how these things work. But I'm here to say now is not the time to get complacent; if anything, we all need to work harder. And the place to start is ourselves.