The Mistake of 2010 is an opinion piece by Paul Krugman.

Somehow it became conventional wisdom that the deficit, not unemployment, was Public Enemy No. 1 — a conventional wisdom both reflected in and reinforced by a dramatic shift in news coverage away from unemployment and toward deficit concerns. Job creation effectively dropped off the agenda.

Beside the substance of Krugman’s piece, which is very worthwhile to understand, I come back to the question of how the “somehow” in the above paragraph came to be.

This somehow comes back to my major complaint about how President Obama and the rest of the Democrats have been handling the key role of a politician, and that is to educate the public about the important matters of the day.  Sure politicians have to make important policy decisions.  However, it would be much easier to make the political decisions if the electorate were strongly and vocally supporting the correct decisions.  The only way for that to happen is to make sure that people are properly educated about which path is the right one and which is the wrong one.

The Republicans may honestly believe that the way to create more jobs and stimulate the economy is through cuts in government and cuts in taxes.  It is the job of the Democrats to make sure that the public understands why such a policy is a disaster as far as promoting job growth.  It is not enough to make sure people know what the Democrats want to do.  It is more important for the public to know why.

With the Republicans lack of numbers in the Senate (and past lack in the House), they have been aware that winning the public debate among the pundits is their best strategy.  The Democrats, except for the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Dennis Kucinich, seem to think that their job as politicians seems to start and stop with their negotiations within the halls of Congress.

During an electoral campaign, the Democrats sometimes seem to understand the need to “educate” the electorate in order to get elected.  After the election they make the mistake of saying “the time for politics is over, now we have to govern.”  A necessary and valuable part of governing is the politics of keeping the electorate educated about the decisions you need to make.  The Republicans, on the other hand, seem to have figured out that politics is something that needs to continue after the election is over.  There is a reason why President Theodore Roosevelt talked about using the bully pulpit that went with his office.

The point about a politician’s job of educating the public was made by Klaus Schwab at the very end of his interview as noted in Interview of Klaus Schwab, Chairman, World Economic Forum.

Rawstory.com is carrying the story Sanders to Obama: Stop selling out.

Sen. Bernie Sanders tore into President Barack Obama on Thursday, accusing him of cowering to Republican “extremists” and failing to standing for progressive priorities.

Please remember that this blog and probably Senator Sanders only say these things in an effort to do what FDR told Harry Belafonte to do for him.  That is to force him, FDR,  to do the right thing.

Read the article Madison Avenue Declares ‘Mass Affluence’ Over to see why:

In a deeply unequal America, if you’re over 35 and your income hasn’t yet topped $200,000 a year, you don’t matter.

A report from The  Christian Science Monitor headlined, Supreme Court: US Muslim cannot sue Ashcroft for 2003 detention ordeal, leads to the stunning conclusion about holding people as a material witness and torturing them.

“Efficient and evenhanded application of the law demands that we look to whether the arrest is objectively justified, rather than to the motive of the arresting officer,” Justice Scalia wrote.

Apparently the following circumstances are objective reason to believe that a person was fleeing to avoid testimony:

The material witness warrant used to justify the Kidd’s detention contained substantial errors. It said Kidd was booked on a one-way, first-class flight to Saudi Arabia. (He held a round-trip coach ticket.) It also said Kidd’s testimony was crucial in the ongoing visa fraud investigation in Idaho.

Despite the aggressive actions taken by the government, Kidd was never called as a witness in the visa fraud case or any other case. Nor was he charged with a crime.

Apparently the Supreme Court and I don’t use the same version of the English language.  Perhaps we do need an English only law that applies only to the Supreme Court.

Despite the title of the article on Rawstory.com – Larry Wilkerson: Congress’s ‘remarkable’ reaction to Netanyahu might be explained by money – the more likely reason comes toward the end of the interview.

There is one action in the interview – that takes probably less than 10 seconds – that will spell the doom of Wilkerson’s career. The doom will not be from the meaning of what he did, but from the portayal of that meaning in the snippet that will be broadcast over and over again on Faux Noise and then taken up by the “serious” media.

Rita F. Redberg, a cardiologist, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the editor of Archives of Internal Medicine wrote the article Squandering Medicare’s Money for The New York Times.

She describes procedures that Medicare pays for that have no benefit for the patient.  She said the following:

Changing the system would be relatively easy administratively, but would require a firm commitment to determining whether tests and procedures truly benefit patients before performing them. Unfortunately, in a political environment in which doctors providing end-of-life counseling are called death panels, and in which powerful constituencies seek to preserve an ever-increasing array of procedures and device sales, this solution remains hidden in plain view.

It is more than just the political climate that makes it difficult to solve this problem.  Culturally and economically there are forces that make this a natural outcome of health insurance.  The escalating cost of private health insurance demonstrates that it is not just a problem for Medicare. If it costs the individual patient nothing directly extra for his or her individual decision, then why wouldn’t the patient opt for any procedure that might have even the slightest possible benefit?  Efforts to make the patient pay something for making these kinds of decisions is fraught with its own set of problems.

It will take a very wise and creative person or group of people to figure a palatable way to solve this problem.  It is an easy problem to recognize, but a devilishly hard one to solve.  When the individual has no ability to change the costs and benefits by individual action,  but the group suffers the penalty for actions of the group,  this type of problem is classically a difficult one to solve.

It is easy to say that we ought to pay for outcomes rather than services performed.  In other words, a doctor or hospital gets paid in proportion to how much better the patient does than if the doctor or hospital had not intervened.   I suspect that this change to the system is much easier said than done.

I found a very intelligently written letter to the editor in the Boston Globe about the The Ills Of One-Party Rule in Massachusetts.

SCOTT BROWN is quite right that one-party rule by Democrats in Massachusetts causes problems for the state. The Republican Party could make itself part of the solution by nominating candidates to office whom residents would like to vote for.

When residents weigh the damage caused by one-party rule with the potential damage of voting for a Republican candidate whose ideas of governance would be even more damaging, they are forced to choose the lesser of the two evils.

One would think it wouldn’t be too hard to find nominees who would represent a lesser evil than some of our corrupt office holders. If the Republicans cannot find the way, perhaps another party will come along that can.

The author of said letter was some fellow named Steven Greenberg in some town called Fiskdale, wherever that is.

I found the article There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says on wired.com.

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden tells Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

What Senator Ron Wyden is saying is that there is a law of the land that you are obligated to follow, but you cannot be told what it is.  It makes me wonder who is actually running this government. I am very unhappy to hear that this sort of thing continues under the Obama administration.  I was very naive to believe that getting rid of George W. Bush would put an end to this.

From the story Protester Who Heckled Netanyahu In Congress Allegedly Beaten, Arrested At Hospital, comes this quote:

Netanyahu said after being interrupted by Abileah. “You can’t have these protest in the farcical parliaments in Tehran or in Tripoli. This is real democracy.”

Ironic, isn’t it, that you can’t have these protests in a “real” democracy either.  In a real democracy they don’t injure and arrest protesters.  What happened to the people who tackled and injured the protester?

Maybe Israel can show us the way to do things in a “real” democracy.

On the 63rd Israeli Independence Day, Israelis defy the ban on mourning the Nakba in the heart of Tel Aviv

Then there is this story, Government Official Who Makes Perfectly Valid, Well-Reasoned Point Against Israel Forced To Resign.