David Mamet's master class for writers

here (colorful language alert), via The Browser. Here's an excerpt:

AS WE LEARN HOW TO WRITE THIS SHOW, A RECURRING PROBLEM BECOMES CLEAR.

THE PROBLEM IS THIS: TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN DRAMA AND NON-DRAMA. LET ME BREAK-IT-DOWN-NOW.

EVERYONE IN CREATION IS SCREAMING AT US TO MAKE THE SHOW CLEAR. WE ARE TASKED WITH, IT SEEMS, CRAMMING A SHITLOAD OF INFORMATION INTO A LITTLE BIT OF TIME.

OUR FRIENDS. THE PENGUINS, THINK THAT WE, THEREFORE, ARE EMPLOYED TO COMMUNICATE INFORMATION — AND, SO, AT TIMES, IT SEEMS TO US.

BUT NOTE:THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN’T, I WOULDN’T. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA.

QUESTION:WHAT IS DRAMA? DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TO OVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC, ACUTE GOAL.

SO: WE, THE WRITERS, MUST ASK OURSELVES OF EVERY SCENE THESE THREE QUESTIONS.

1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?

THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS ARE LITMUS PAPER. APPLY THEM, AND THEIR ANSWER WILL TELL YOU IF THE SCENE IS DRAMATIC OR NOT.

IF THE SCENE IS NOT DRAMATICALLY WRITTEN, IT WILL NOT BE DRAMATICALLY ACTED.

Thank you seniors!

I had a smile on my face all week.

Photo source here.

UPDATE: WSJ's Stephen Grocer relates:

Louis Dale and Mark Coury have either interned or will intern at the investment bank, Bloomberg reports. They are hardly the first Cornell players to spend the summer in New York at Goldman. Former players Khaliq Gant and Jason Battle also held internships and Battle is currently a securities analyst at Goldman Sachs. It’s good to know they have a back-up plan if this whole basketball thing doesn’t work out.

Amen

Arnold Kling meditates:

Pharoah created jobs for us. Moses led us away from those jobs. Even though those jobs helped to complete public infrastructure. Even though they were green jobs, where we used our muscles and our backs instead of fossil fuels.

Moses could have been part of the ruling class in Egypt. He chose freedom instead. Those of us who followed Moses also chose freedom. Freedom brings risks. But we preferred the risks of freedom to the security of bondage.

Do not confuse government with G-d. Government cannot miraculously provide us with manna--or health care. When we look at government, we should not see G-d. We should see Pharoah. Government-worship is Pharoah-worship.

Quotes of the day

But nevertheless, in some aspects of [China's] policy, particularly with respect to censorship, with respect to surveillance of dissidents, I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism, and I find that personally quite troubling.--Sergey Brin

Google’s decision should also tell the U.S. government something about how to advocate its interests with China. The Google controversy coincided with cyber attacks against over 200 American companies, believed by U.S. authorities to have been launched by the People’s Liberation Army. China’s unchallenged behavior shows why we should not be optimistic that romancing Beijing will produce crippling sanctions against Iran’s nuclear weapons program any time soon. Instead, the Obama administration should emulate Google’s approach in official dealings, and support U.S. businesses in situations similar to Google so they do not have to act alone.--John Bolton

Yet, many advocates of socialized medicine seem to prefer that everyone be forced into a rationing system rather than have the government provide some basic minimum and let patients and providers who want to opt out of the system do so. So, what started out as a belief in a right to health care ended up as a belief in preventing people from getting health care. Thus my conclusion that it's not about rights at all, but about power.--Arnold Kling

This is the canary in the coal mine; if Social Security's finances are in trouble, Medicare's will also be looking worse. While I was at the Kauffman Foundation's economics blogger forum last Friday, a show of hands indicated that about 80% of the people there thought America would have a serious fiscal crisis in the next two decades. This is how it starts--not with a bang, but with a moderate decline in revenues.--Megan McArdle

Steny Hoyer was notably silent when it was President Obama making pitchfork threats, and when his political ally ACORN was busing mobs to executives’ homes. Man up, Steny. Or just, you know, shut up. You’re a hypocrite when it comes to thuggery, and you and your colleagues aren’t credible playing the victim.--Glenn Reynolds

I am a registered Democrat, but since I have voted (mostly) Republican in recent years, let me assure you that I unequivocally condemn those threats and any possible acts of violence taken in response to the bill. That is not even remotely the way to settle such political disputes. Such things must be handled at the ballot box. That said, and for similar reasons, I also unequivocally condemn the actions of the Democratic Party in running roughshod over the clear will of the American people. Every poll taken in proximity of the vote showed our citizenry in substantial opposition to the global health care reform being pushed through Congress by you, Speaker Pelosi and the administration. And yet, in the grand tradition of totalitarian regimes everywhere, you employed “any means necessary” to make sure your ends were achieved, bribing and threatening your fellow Congressmen and women, etc. It is small wonder that our people are angry. It would be amazing if it were otherwise. You have reaped a whirlwind by subverting a democracy. Now you must deal with it. The Democratic Party is no longer “progressive” or “liberal.” It is reactionary. And you and your cohorts have forever defined yourselves as reactionary politicians. Violence is to be condemned, but so is the desecration of a great democracy.--Roger Simon

Here’s what a cynical charlatan James Cameron is. The first “Avatar” DVD release occurs on Earth Day to take full advantage of all his Stupakky fans who want to feel good about themselves without actually doing anything to further their cause. But it’s a barebones release. This way Cameron can make a whole lot more money in the future releasing the same film again and again in Special Editions, Deluxe Editions, Platinum Editions and so on. Does this sound like someone who gives a hi-ho hearty damn about Mother Earth? No, this sounds like just another greedy capitalist wringing every possible nickel from his wares by finessing the market in a way that promotes as much consuming as possible of a product that, by the way, comes in a thick plastic case that must have a landfill half-life of a couple thousand years.--John Nolte

In several interviews, [Tom] Hanks presented a version of World War II in which racism played the dominant role. The Japanese "were out to kill us because our way of living was different," he told Time magazine. "We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different." Forget Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March and Tokyo's territorial expansionism. The United States was really fighting a war against human diversity, according to the former star of "Bosom Buddies." "It would be naive to assume that racism was not part of that quotient of World War II," Mr. Hanks said. That is true. Racial sentiments no doubt played a role. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's internment order for Americans of Japanese ancestry - overseen in California by state Attorney General Earl Warren and later upheld by the liberal majority on the U.S. Supreme Court - remains a controversial episode in American history. Some government propaganda showed the Japanese in an unflattering light, but propaganda against Axis partners Germany and Italy did as well. The idea that the United States was making war on "the yellow people" is nonsense, however. America was allied with China and fought to liberate all parts of Asia that had been overrun by the Japanese Empire, including the Philippines, which was a U.S. commonwealth. The fact that the Japanese were Asians did not make a conflict against the nation of Japan a de facto race war.--Washington Times editorial board

John Carney, managing editor of financial news and gossip vertical Clusterstock at Business Insider, was let go this afternoon by B.I. owner Henry Blodget, we've confirmed with sources familiar with the matter.--Foster Kamer

Carney certainly has his idiosyncrasies, and he wouldn’t last a week at Bloomberg, but he’s perfectly open about them, and one of the great things about media companies in general and blog companies in particular is that they’re pretty good about letting the talent do what it needs to do, just so long as the stories keep coming. And Carney always kept the stories coming. What’s more, the beating heart of Clusterstock is the dynamic duo of Carney and Joe Weisenthal; now that he’s fired Carney, Blodget must know that he risks losing Weisenthal as well. If he loses them both, he’ll rapidly become something like 24/7 Wall Street or Minyanville: a site with lots of low-quality traffic and generally uninspiring editorial content. --Felix Salmon

We believe it is unlikely that many brands will gain market share by using heavy models in their ads.--Naomi Mandel

[Cornell is] a perfect team. It's hard to get them out of what they want to do. All of them can shoot. They run their offense. They don't break it. Their whole team can shoot. Anybody can step out and shoot. They've got our full attention.--John Wall, Kentucky guard who is projecting to be the first pick of the upcoming NBA draft

Oddest comparison of the day

And in the oddest contrast imaginable between them: Kentucky started Mark Coury 29 times under Billy Gillispie in 2007-08. Cornell has started the UK transfer once.

OK, no more Big Red posts.

At least until tomorrow.

I have a big smile on my face after reading this

..., 38.4 percent of the Wildcats' scoring margin comes from free throws, which is an incredibly dangerous stat according to our model -- so much so that we've been calling it the Magic Bullet for a couple of years. Why is it such a big deal? Start with the Wildcats' offense. If they run into a disciplined defense or a ref calling a loose game inside, they might not get the same calls they're used to seeing. But that's not the biggest concern, because Kentucky is right around the national average in terms of percentage of points that come from the line; the Wildcats have other ways to score. The big problem is on defense. Normally, the Wildcats' ability to protect the paint without fouling is a major advantage -- only 18.8 percent of opponents' points come from the line, which is 272nd in the country. But that means nothing to Cornell, because the Big Red's game plan is based around bombs, not dunks. Just 15.9 percent of Cornell's scoring comes from the FT line, and that's 341st in the country. In other words, Cornell has proven it can win without venturing into the lane, which takes Kentucky's shot-blocking prowess out of the equation. Instead, it's all about the long ball -- the kind of high-risk/high-reward strategy successful GKs tend to employ. It also, interestingly, makes Cornell's offense more efficient than Kentucky's.

Even without getting into a discussion about whether John Calipari-led teams typically exhibit championship-level discipline, the Wildcats have a few other weaknesses. They're not good at generating turnovers (19.7 percent of opponent possessions, 219th in the country) and they let opponents hit the offensive glass (offensive rebounds on 31.6 percent of missed shots, 122nd). They're also just average at protecting the ball (turnovers on 20.2 percent of possessions, 159th). So the key to this game will be whether Cornell can exploit those flaws and maximize its own possessions.

By now, you know Ryan Wittman, Louis Dale, Jon Jaques & Co. will hit their 3s; Cornell has shot 17-for-39 (43.6 percent) from beyond the arc in the tournament so far, which is just about what it's done all season (43.9 percent, best in the NCAA). But the Big Red need offensive rebounds and turnovers to give themselves enough opportunities for those shots to translate into points. And just as we pointed out with St. Mary's, it's worth noting that the model gives Cornell a much better chance of pulling an upset in this game than it did against Wisconsin.

And for those of you who would like to know how Jeff Foote ended up transferring to Cornell, here is a nice article about it. Talk about silver linings!

Glen Whitman calls out Brad DeLong on his selective comments censorship

here. It's happened to me, too.

I wouldn't deign to click a link to his site, never mind posting one here. The thing that bugs me is that:

1. it can easily seem like comments are welcome, and not redacted
2. there's no clear disclosure that there is a practice of censorship--only the commenters who bother checking back at the site realize what is going on; not the agora at large
   

Good job, Glen.

Peter King with a great NFL update

I don't always agree with him, but King has some great stuff on the overtime change, the institutional tension (between owners, coaches and commissioner Goodell), Bob Kraft, Tim Tebow, and Ben Roethlisberger.

From giving aid to needing it

Bono, the Irish rock star, has put significant money into Elevation Partners, arguably the worst run institutional fund of any size in the United States. Bono is listed as one of the five members of the firm’s investment team.

Quotes of the day

[Dick] Fuld apparently loved the report and has been telling people it vindicated him. He can sleep easy now, which must be nice.--Bess Levin
I’d say that reaction is not inconsistent with the way he ran his firm.--Jim Chanos

He was so young, he did not realise how much less is the sense of obligation in those who receive favours than in those who grant them.--W. Somerset Maugham

... the betting norm is so important. Moving from identity to opinions about how the world works is a lot less tempting once you commit to putting your money where your mouth is.--Bryan Caplan

Good-bye social constructs. Welcome biochemical determinism. The argument goes like this: men have too much testosterone. Because of it they take excessive risks, and are impervious to the consequences of their actions. They are aggressive, violent, competitive, and do not play by the rules. What men really need is to be run by women... because then they will be able to get in touch with their feminine sides. With more women in charge, men will be softened up.--Stuart Schneiderman

We have been put on earth to make Kafka come true.--old Soviet proverb

Reason has limited possibilities, whereas the absurd knows no limits.--Andrei Loshak

The free market, by enabling people to compete openly, is the most effective device that has ever been invented for making people pay for their prejudices, and thus for making it costly for them to exercise it. What you do when you impose equal pay for equal work law, is that you make the expression of prejudice costless, and as a result you harm the people you intend to help.--Milton Friedman

The real Scott Brown lesson, it turned out, was embraced by the Democrats maybe even more than it was by the Republicans this winter. Don’t give up. Don’t take anything for granted. Don’t let the other side tell you whether you have a shot or not. Work it and believe in it.--Jules Crittenden

They love you at the beginning and they love you at the end. It’s the middle that’s tough.--Steve Grogan

The 1964 Civil Rights Act had more support from Republicans than Democrats. In the Senate 21 Democrats voted against the bill, vs. only 6 Republicans. It is true that in the late 1960s many white racists moved over to the Republicans, but the 1964 Civil Rights Bill wasn’t the key factor. LBJ won white votes by a landslide in 1964. The big problems for Democrats were busing, soaring crime rates, and affirmative action.--Scott Sumner

Thanks to a spiraling deficit, the economy is chugging merrily towards a broken bridge over a rocky canyon—a fact that almost no one from either party is willing to do anything about. America, according to the CBO, is on an "unsustainable" fiscal path, and the nation's solid-gold credit rating may be at risk. So it doesn't matter how many times blinkered legislators repeat to themselves, "I think I can, I think I can": Nothing short of significant cutbacks to entitlement spending is going to magically transform the U.S. budget into the little engine that could. Instead, politicians are paying for new entitlements by shifting money from unsustainable programs—money that ought to have gone toward getting America's fiscal house in order. Democrats made history all right—but only by sacrificing the future.--Peter Suderman

As America's teetering tower of unkeepable promises grows, so does the weight of government, in taxes and mandates that limit investments and discourage job creation. America's dynamism, and hence upward social mobility, will slow, as the economy becomes what the party of government wants it to be -- increasingly dependent on government-created demand. ... Politics in a democracy is transactional: Politicians seek votes by promising to do things for voters, who seek promises in exchange for their votes. Because logrolling is how legislative coalitions are cobbled together in a continental nation, the auction by which reluctant House Democrats were purchased has been disillusioning only to sentimentalists with illusions about society's stock of disinterestedness. Besides, some of the transactions were almost gorgeous: Government policy having helped make water scarce in California's Central Valley, the party of expanding government secured two votes by increasing rations of the scarcity. Thus did one dependency lubricate legislation that establishes others. ... Seeking a silver lining? Now, perhaps, comes Thermidor. That was the name of the month in the French Revolutionary calendar in which Robespierre fell. To historians, Thermidor denotes any era of waning political ardor. Congressional Democrats will not soon be herded into other self-wounding votes -- e.g., for a cap-and-trade carbon-rationing scheme as baroque as the health legislation. During the Democrats' health-care monomania, the nation benefited from the benign neglect of the rest of their agenda. Now the nation may benefit from the exhaustion of their appetite for more political risk.

Correlation of the day: More power, more lying

Explanation here, via Dan Primack.

A. No one

Q. Who regulates the regulators?

UPDATE: Schools redux, sponsored by the current Secretary of Education.

UPDATE: Up to our eyeballs in it.

A clearer picture of healthcare legislation costs

The bottom line is that Congress would spend a lot more; steal funds from education, Social Security and long-term care to cover the gap; and promise that future Congresses will make up for it by taxing more and spending less.

from former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin:

In reality, if you strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion.

Gimmick No. 1 is the way the bill front-loads revenues and backloads spending. That is, the taxes and fees it calls for are set to begin immediately, but its new subsidies would be deferred so that the first 10 years of revenue would be used to pay for only 6 years of spending.

Even worse, some costs are left out entirely. To operate the new programs over the first 10 years, future Congresses would need to vote for $114 billion in additional annual spending. But this so-called discretionary spending is excluded from the Congressional Budget Office’s tabulation.

Consider, too, the fate of the $70 billion in premiums expected to be raised in the first 10 years for the legislation’s new long-term health care insurance program. This money is counted as deficit reduction, but the benefits it is intended to finance are assumed not to materialize in the first 10 years, so they appear nowhere in the cost of the legislation.

Another vivid example of how the legislation manipulates revenues is the provision to have corporations deposit $8 billion in higher estimated tax payments in 2014, thereby meeting fiscal targets for the first five years. But since the corporations’ actual taxes would be unchanged, the money would need to be refunded the next year. The net effect is simply to shift dollars from 2015 to 2014.

In addition to this accounting sleight of hand, the legislation would blithely rob Peter to pay Paul. For example, it would use $53 billion in anticipated higher Social Security taxes to offset health care spending. Social Security revenues are expected to rise as employers shift from paying for health insurance to paying higher wages. But if workers have higher wages, they will also qualify for increased Social Security benefits when they retire. So the extra money raised from payroll taxes is already spoken for. (Indeed, it is unlikely to be enough to keep Social Security solvent.) It cannot be used for lowering the deficit.

A government takeover of all federally financed student loans — which obviously has nothing to do with health care — is rolled into the bill because it is expected to generate $19 billion in deficit reduction.

Finally, in perhaps the most amazing bit of unrealistic accounting, the legislation proposes to trim $463 billion from Medicare spending and use it to finance insurance subsidies. But Medicare is already bleeding red ink, and the health care bill has no reforms that would enable the program to operate more cheaply in the future. Instead, Congress is likely to continue to regularly override scheduled cuts in payments to Medicare doctors and other providers.

Quotes of the day

In the long run, we are all better off because our dead ancestors stuck with capitalism.--William Easterly

Your driver informs you that the taxicab business isn’t just for riders; its for drivers, too. Drivers need incomes, and his income of late has been too low to enable him to pay his bills. “So,” your driver announces, “by first going out to Montauk before heading to Times Square, I’ll make a lot more money off of you than I would if I drove you directly to Times Square. You’ll get there, but just not as quickly or as inexpensively as you would if I drove you there directly. Relax and enjoy the view.” ... You’d report any such cab driver as described here to the authorities and call it a crime. But when Congress does the same thing, the producer-favoritism is typically discussed respectfully as “trade policy.--Don Boudreaux

Why am I defensive about Walmart? Let me tell you about the long-gone downtowns, my friends. Before I do, I know you have some wonderful, cheerful, perhaps tearful, stories about the downtowns of your youth. Me too. I don’t want to hear them. Let me tell you, the late downtowns in East Texas burgs were usually small stores run by locals. They generally priced things three times more than they were worth. Maybe they had to, but I don’t care. I don’t want to pay $30 for a hammer and a fistful of nails. If I wanted a banana, I had to go to another store. If I wanted to pick up a pair of shoes, another store. The parking was minimal, and the choices were few. If you worked, by the time you got off work, many of the stores were closed. Saturday, they might be open, but Sunday they were closed again. So for the working individual, the mother or father who had a kid wake up in the night with aching gums from teething, and you wanted something to make it all better, you had to wait until the next day. If you noted it was 7 p.m. and you were expecting dinner guests at 8 p.m., but forgot to buy hamburger for the meat loaf, you were, once again, screwed. If you’re poor and barely making it, or even if your income is middle-of-the-road, it’s good to get what you need at slashed prices, anytime of the day, seven days a week, in a big, ugly, over-lit store that closes only on Christmas and half a day on Christmas Eve. If you forgot to get a gift card and a six pack of tall boys, you have to think, “To hell with downtown.” What we got now in our downtown are specialty stores that provide things we can’t get at Walmart, like maybe a stuffed deer head for that special place over the mantle. The stuff we really need, hell, it’s at Walmart. Here’s something else. With Walmart in town, lots of people can be put to work, far more than downtown ever employed. Someone has to run a 24-hour store, check people out, sack groceries, push carts, place stock, work at the McDonald’s sequestered in the back. The workers have all skin colors, not something I saw a lot of downtown, except for immigrants unloading trucks.--Joe Lansdale

I have been waiting for Paul Krugman to tell me how we are going to handle the debt, once we get this recession out of the way. No, really. There’s no economist whose judgment I trust more. (About economics, that is.) I’ve been all for the stimulus and the jobs bill and even, I guess, the sundry bailouts. But don’t we at some point have to start paying the money back? And how are we going to do that? Krugman’s failure (unless I’ve missed it) to give us an answer to that question is one of the things that makes me worry. A final word to Matt Yglesias, who thinks my problem is “thinking too moralistically about the economy,” because I express doubt that we can escape without pain from the dilemma we find ourselves in. Obviously (or perhaps not) this is a prediction and not a hope. I am not in favor of pain. I just don’t see any way to avoid it. Yglesias apparently believes that we can escape our fiscal dilemma without pain. I would like to know how. And if there is such a way, why have we denied ourselves for so long? Why do we ever bother to show fiscal restraint? Why have taxes at all? Why deny ourselves anything money can buy? If $15 trillion in debt can be a freebie, why not $30 trillion or $60 trillion?--Michael Kinsley

After nearly a month-long scapegoating campaign in which Greek PM G-Pap said he would spit in the faces and skullf#@* all those who dared to buy Greek CDS (because as we have all been lied to by everyone who doesn't know the first thing about CDS, it is CDS buying not bond selling that drives spreads), with the stupidity reaching as far and wide as the Spanish and German secret services, which said they would spy on CDS traders in London and New York, Greek daily Kathimerini has just uncovered that the biggest speculator, holding 15%, or $1.2 billion of the total $8 billion in Greek notional CDS, has been a firm that operates about 2 blocks away from the parliament building in Athens - the state-owned Hellenic Post Bank (TT)!--aka Tyler Durden

This paper examines the effect of alcohol consumption on student achievement by exploiting the discontinuity in drinking at age 21 at a college in which the minimum legal drinking age is strictly enforced. We find that drinking causes significant reductions in academic performance, particularly for the highest-performing students.--Scott E. Carrell (UC-Davis and NBER), Mark Hoekstra (University of Pittsburgh) and James E. West (US Air Force Academy)

So higher frequency electronic trading DOES improve liquidity and price discovery

according to Terrence Hendershott, Charles M. Jones and Albert J. Menkveld.

Surprise, surprise.

Similarities between the Mafia and corporate fraud

highlighted in an interesting article by Mark Gimein.

It reminds me of The Sopranos episode from 2000 entitled "Bust Out".

Gimein seems to give the government less than their due, only citing tepid regulators, and the FBI's blinders at the end of the piece. Hey Mark, what about Fannie and Freddie?!? Talk about fraud!

UPDATE: See, even Tim Geithner gets it.

The Feldstein Trade

Drop your healthcare insurance, pay the fines, and when you need insurance, then go buy it (without being rejected for preexisting conditions).

Via Mark Perry.

Good economics reading today

Arnold Kling differs with Greg Mankiw, who differs with Alan Greenspan.

For even more fun, Bryan Caplan and Mike Shedlock have a bet on unemployment through 2015.

UPDATE: Scott Sumner calls out several economists, including himself. The whole thing is fascinating; I'll just excerpt what he said about his views on history:

I once read all the New York Times from 1928-38. History seems really different when it is actually happening. The people back then seemed just as smart as we are. Of course we have a bit more history to learn from, so we did a bit better with monetary policy this time around. But we still made many of the same mistakes, just to a lesser degree. The class distinctions back then seemed bigger–which surprised me. I knew that was the case for African-Americans, but I didn’t realize that class divisions among whites were also much greater, and that the upper class was so uninterested in the suffering of average farmers and workers. Or how much wealth was concentrated in New York City at that time. I also developed a much greater respect for the stock, bond, and commodity markets’ ability to forecast the economy. They reacted to lots of things that seemed very important at the time, and that I think actually were very important, which are totally ignored by historians. A good example is the gold panic of early 1937 and the dollar panic of late 1937.

There are three ways to think about whether a law is constitutional

Randy Barnett observes:

Does it conflict with what the Constitution says? Does it conflict with what the Supreme Court has said? Will five justices accept a particular argument? Although the first three of the potential constitutional challenges to health-care reform have a sound basis in the text of the Constitution, and no Supreme Court precedents clearly bar their success, the smart money says there won't be five votes to thwart the popular will to enact comprehensive health insurance reform.

But what if five justices think the legislation was carried bleeding across the finish line on a party-line vote over widespread bipartisan opposition? What if control of one or both houses of Congress flips parties while lawsuits are pending? Then there might just be five votes against regulating inactivity by compelling citizens to enter into a contract with a private company. This legislation won't go into effect tomorrow. In the interim, it is far more vulnerable than if some citizens had already started to rely upon its benefits.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider another recent case in which the smart money doubted there were five votes to intervene in a politicized controversy involving technical procedures. A case in which five justices may have perceived that long-established rules were being gamed for purely partisan advantage.

You might have heard of it: Bush v. Gore.

Quotes of the day

Parents are unlikely to meet much success if they insist that their children adopt any particular set of political values. We want our son to think for himself and to come to his political views, whatever they turn out to be, ultimately because he believes in them. Nevertheless, we’re optimistic that if Thomas is reared and educated properly, he will share our classical-liberal values. We have good reason to be optimistic. Classical-liberal (or, if you prefer, libertarian) political values are no more than the application to society at large, and to government, of some of the most fundamental and indispensable rules that every decent person learns early in life and adheres to until death. What are these rules? “Keep your promises.” “Tell the truth.” “Don’t take other people’s stuff.” “Don’t hit other people.”--Don Boudreaux

Pawel joined the army and married a fellow skinhead at age 18. But his sense of self changed irrevocably at the age of 22, when his wife, Paulina, suspecting that she had Jewish roots, went to a genealogical institute and discovered Pawel’s maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her own grandparents. When Pawel confronted his parents, he said, they broke down and told him the truth: his maternal grandmother was Jewish and had survived the war by being hidden in a monastery by a group of nuns. His paternal grandfather, also a Jew, had seven brother and sisters, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust.--Dan Bilefsky

Maybe it was just my education, but much of education is backwards. You study all the hard stuff, and then you find out in the real world that you don’t use it. As long as you can use an HP 12 calculator or a spreadsheet, you have the finance knowledge that you need for most management positions. I should have taken organizational behavior and social psychology — and maybe abnormal psychology, come to think of it. --Guy Kawasaki

... certain senior level internal audit personnel do not have the professional expertise to properly exercise the audit functions they are entrusted to manage, all of which have become increasingly complex as the Firm has undergone rapid growth in the international marketplace.--Matthew Lee's internal whistleblower letter to Lehman senior management

To understand the CIA, you need to know that from its beginning in 1947, it was divided by a class system, as rigid and acrimonious as any. Everyone in the agency, wherever he or she stood, knew about it and either benefited or suffered from it. On top were the field operatives, the officers who served overseas, ran informants, conducted covert action. In the early years, most operatives came out of Ivy League schools. Many lived off trust funds, not their modest government pay. They played tennis, lived in Georgetown, and could tell the difference between a spinnaker and a jib. But by the mid-'60s, the establishment's romance with the CIA and espionage had cooled (the Bay of Pigs had a lot to do with this), and the CIA had to turn to Main Street to fill its ranks. Ohio State took over from Yale, and the bowlers from the tennis players. ... The first thing [Deputy Director Dave] Cohen did was order a "scrub" of every informant with dirty hands. Drug dealers, dictators' minions, arms dealers, terrorists—Cohen ordered the operatives to sever ties with all of them. The only problem was, these were the people who mix well with our enemies—rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea and terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. [Clinton-appointed Director John] Deutch and Cohen didn't care; they had a mandate to clean up the CIA, and that's what they were going to do. ... What John Deutch set in motion was the deprofessionalization of the directorate of operations, handing it over to bureaucrats who only went overseas to get a quick taste of life in the field before returning to the safety of the Beltway. The idea that an officer would spend his entire career abroad learning the fundamentals of espionage is incomprehensible to the new CIA. ... On January 10, 2010, CIA director Leon Panetta wrote a Washington Post op-ed in which he disputed that poor tradecraft was a factor in the Khost tragedy. Panetta is wrong. An old operative I used to work with in Beirut said he would have picked up Balawi himself and debriefed him in his car, arguing that any agent worth his salt would never expose the identity of a valued asset to a foreigner like the Afghan driver. I pointed out that if he'd been there and done it that way, he'd probably be dead now. "It's better than what happened," he said. ... If we take Khost as a metaphor for what has happened to the CIA, the deprofessionalization of spying, it's tempting to consider that the agency's time has passed. "Khost was an indictment of an utterly failed system," a former senior CIA officer told me. "It's time to close Langley."--Robert Baer

... crooked Afghan cops supply much of the ammunition used by the Taliban, according to Saleh Mohammed, an insurgent commander in Helmand province. The bullets and rocket-propelled grenades sold by the cops are cheaper and of better quality than the ammo at local markets, he says. It's easy for local cops to concoct credible excuses for using so much ammunition, especially because their supervisors try to avoid areas where the Taliban are active. Mohammed says local police sometimes even stage fake firefights so that if higher-ups question their outsize orders for ammo, villagers will say they've heard fighting. America has spent more than $6 billion since 2002 in an effort to create an effective Afghan police force, buying weapons, building police academies, and hiring defense contractors to train the recruits—but the program has been a disaster.--T. Christian Miller, Mark Hosenball, and Ron Moreau

In 1973, Yassir Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, had an unusual problem. His elite unit, Black September, had seized international headlines by kidnapping and then murdering Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, along with other high-profile attacks. That had forced the world to take the PLO seriously, but now that Arafat was seeking international recognition, he needed to muzzle his own attack dogs, a hundred ruthless warriors with nothing to live for but the cause. The solution was simple. The PLO married off most of Black September, offering them Beirut apartments, shapely young brides and a “child bonus” of $5,000 if they had a baby within a year. No longer did these men have nothing to lose.--Tim Harford

For Apple, which has enjoyed enormous success in recent years, “build it and they will pay” is business as usual. But it’s not a universal business truth. On the contrary, companies like Ikea, H. & M., and the makers of the Flip video camera are flourishing not by selling products or services that are “far better” than anyone else’s but by selling things that aren’t bad and cost a lot less. These products are much better than the cheap stuff you used to buy at Woolworth, and they tend to be appealingly styled, but, unlike Apple, the companies aren’t trying to build the best mousetrap out there. Instead, they’re engaged in what Wired recently christened the “good-enough revolution.” For them, the key to success isn’t excellence. It’s well-priced adequacy. These two strategies may look completely different, but they have one crucial thing in common: they don’t target the amorphous blob of consumers who make up the middle of the market. Paradoxically, ignoring these people has turned out to be a great way of getting lots of customers, because, in many businesses, high- and low-end producers are taking more and more of the market. In fashion, both H. & M. and Hermès have prospered during the recession.--James Surowieki

[Michael] Lewis is considered an expert because he worked on Wall street for 2 years and wrote Liar's Poker, an insider's view of the bluster of rich young men. As anyone who has worked in an industry for a couple decades knows, the impressions of a kid right out of college has after 2 years in a business, no matter how smart and eloquent the sojourner, are invariably quite mistaken. Indeed, Lewis's main thesis in Liar's Poker remains a theme in his latest book, the Big Short: finance is mainly an irrelevant Rube's Goldberg device for paying greedy, selfish people too much money. He notes that banks actually were shorting some products they were promoting, as if there was a big conspiracy, ignoring the fact that a market requires sellers, and increasing liquidity is a good thing because if every asset must be held to maturity, costs of financing would be much higher, etc.. Further, large financial institutions have many departments, and the fact they have different opinions is about as strange as the fact that America is full of people who disagree on whether tax rates are too high or too low. Ultimately Lewis blames everyone, but especially greedy bankers, and so in a banal sense he is correct. But Lewis will most assuredly sell more books than [Gary] Gorton, part of the reason these crises are endogenous.--Eric Falkenstein