They say insurance premiums will keep rising, like it's some monster that's going to eat our entire economy. But won't there be a natural limit? After health care expenditures become around 20% of our GDP, won't people just stop getting health services? Won't people start to think, "okay, this budgetary item is too expensive, so I'm going to stop buying health insurance." Or they'll think, "there's got to be a cheaper insurance provider." For all the complaining about health insurance, I rarely hear people exchange information about which insurance providers are a better deal. It's almost like people haven't yet become smart consumers about their health care.

The government has a budget for Medicare too. And it doesn't have unlimited money. And eventually they'll just have to cut services.

Health care is such a high percentage of our GDP because Americans green light every expense request. You want a helicopter-ambulance? Sure. You want a CT scan? Let's do it! You need drugs? Excellent, here's a whole buffet of them.

Our ad hoc freedom to consume is now the most cherished American freedom.

Or simply, our appetite for health care consumption has been much higher than the industry's capability to satiate it.

I believe there is a big difference between the following:

(a) committing a violent crime that just so happens to intimidate a protected class
(b) committing a violent crime because you really hate a protected class
(c) committing a violent crime in order to set an example to a protected class

(b)(c) were given extra sentencing in 1994 at a federal level. However, because of the weakness of the language, effectively (a) also qualifies for extra sentencing.

There is new pending legislation that removes the restriction that it has to occur at a federal level. It also includes gays in the protected class definition.

They also attempt to say that evidence must show that your hatred is connected to the crime.

But the language is so weak that most likely (a)(b)(c) will still qualify for extra sentencing.

I believe that only (d) should carry extra sentencing, which is:

(d) committing a crime in order to set an example to 1 or more other people

This could be a mafia boss ordering a hit on a grocery store owner for not paying up in order to set an example to other transgressors in the community. This could be someone targetting a prominent women's right activist for rape in order to scare the women's rights community.

And I believe that it's not necessarily hard to legislate against just that. Our law already includes many provisions about motive and intent. And perhaps (I'm not a legal expert) it already carries extra sentencing for intended community intimidation factor. In which case, hate crimes laws are not necessary.

Jimmy Carter came out today saying that the backlash against Obama is largely because of anti-black sentiment among whites.

But when it comes to interpreting all racial events, you have to simulate the events with the races switched.

So if we had a white Democratic president, like Hilary Clinton, and given our economic situation, and the probable policies (bailouts etc.), the protests would be much worse! Well, the thing is Hillary wouldn't be pushing healthcare reform, but assuming she was, she would face worse.

Now, what if it wasn't Hilary though. What if it was John Edwards pushing healthcare reform in an economic downturn, he'd probably face protests, but not as hard as Hilary. But I attribute that to the already pre-existing hatred toward Hilary. Maybe it's because she's a woman?

You know what I think it is, I think because she's a woman and because Obama's black, many Americans (both left and right) have started out skeptical of them, and some of those people, through a confirmation bias and because they only listen to conservative talk radio, have increased their intensity of hatred and haven't revised their opinions.

So, I believe that Obama being black and Clinton being a woman probably just increases the polarity of the divisiveness, but I don't think people who dislike Obama or Hilary would dislike Edwards any less. Rather, they just have more force, along the lines of, "see, I told you we shouldn't have elected a black (or female) president."

But then, you have to consider what if John Edwards' infidelities surfaced after the election. Would he get Bill Clintonized? Probably, and he'd get railroaded as much as Obama is getting now.

So, in summary, I wouldn't think it fair to say that people hate Obama because he's black. And you'd want to be especially careful saying something like that because the portion of white conservatives who are honest-to-god non-racists take major offense to that accusation. So, I'd agree with Michael Savage, that Carter's statements incite more racial enmity.

The House is considering a rebuke of Joe "You Lie" Wilson. Here's my arguments against it:

• It will only make him stronger. My liberal friends seem to think Joe Wilson really harmed himself with his remarks. This shows just how far away the left is in understanding the mind of the right. On conservative talk radio, Joe Wilson's a hero, much like the guy that threw a shoe at Bush is among liberals. Joe also raised a lot of money from it.
• Rebuking is petty.
• There was some raucous heckling already swelling up a few seconds before his outburst. It mostly seems like he just had poor timing, perhaps being like the person who claps thinking he'll start an applause.
• We don't want to seem like we're trying to discourage or oppress free speech. Imagine if the GOP tried to rebuke a Democrat for an outburst at Bush, that would just further add to the idea that government wants to muzzle criticism.

You accused conservatives earlier of being party to a slippery slope fallacy. But aren't liberals also party to that too. Just because I'm making a point about white people having ethnic pride, doesn't mean I'm all of a sudden a culture warrior like Bill O'Reilly. I know the War on Christmas is a made-up war and the fear of gay marriage stuff has spun out of control.

White pride needs a second look.

Here's the antecedents to this:

• My Indian friend went on a huge rant about how India is an idea of convenience used to gain independence from the British. He said that calling a Punjabi a Gujurati would be like calling a Chinese person Filipino.

• I have two white friends, one conservative, the other liberal, who both have this suppressed racial pride. They both claim Native American ancestry mixed with European and yearn to be viewed as such.

• I spent some time plumbing this Alternate History Map of Europe and was just flooded by the sense of how much various Europeans separate themselves from one another. For example, I learned how Spain isn't really a country, but rather a decentralized state of autonomous regions that correspond to former kingdoms. Or that many countries in Europe have native speakers of minority languages. To Americans, most Europeans are just "white."

I believe that Europeans visiting the United States would be surprised by white Americans' lack of ethnic identity. The truth is, white Americans and black Americans are the same in that some black Americans are really into their African-American roots, just as some white Americans get really into their particular roots (whether they be Dauphiné French, Celtic, or Anglo-Saxon). However, African-Americans are afforded a publicly acceptable avenue for expression of their ethnic identity, while as white Americans usually aren't.

I think white pride is a misnomer, more of a phantom ethnic identity created out of Americans' unwillingness to see white people as having ethnic differences. Celtic-American pride should be a legitimate thing. Unfortunately, this is nobody's fault. I don't know who's fault it is. Maybe the media? I'm not really interested in pinning blame or anything. Historically, though, during the various waves of European immigration, each ethnic group became this minority other that needed ethnic pride to boost them up. While as the so-called entrenched ethnicities had to tone down their ethnic pride. It's the same thing as how Jews have become so entrenched American culture they're just "white" now.

Someone said this on reddit:

Let me get this straight, Reagan was the greatest modern president, he turned the US into a debtor nation, cut social programs, supported Sadam, sold Iran thousands of missiles, armed and trained those who became the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and married religion with conservatism. There anything else?

The immediate response from some was, "Who won the Cold War?" Which was rebutted with:

Reagan was the beneficiary of defunct and bankrupt society that was on its way to folding regardless of who was in power. Reagan had no hand in the collapse of the USSR except to be someone who's ass was in the Presidential Chair at the time.

Sure, I'll accept that Reagan didn't have much to do about the Cold War if you accept the premise that Clinton didn't have much to do with the boom and prosperity of the 1990s. I've read reasonable articles both overstating and understating both Clinton and Reagan's impact. I think the answer on both these questions is probably, "we don't know."

Health care reform in 2 paragraphs? Nice! Let's run with that idea. Why doesn't Congress make a bill that says "all bills must be less than 100 pages" long. Call it the simplicity bill. And just so we don't all of a sudden get bills with tiny fonts, specify how many characters of text can be used to describe the bill.

If you can't state it in 100 pages or less, it's beyond the ken of ordinary citizens, and therefore undemocratic.

And/or mandate that a 10-page version of each bill is created and posted for public consumption at least 48 hours before the bill is voted on.

On a lateral topic, is Obama helping healthcare reform? I think there's two points to make that he's not.

For one, I think he's deflating the liberals. I see a lot of articles pop up on my radar that mention this or that extreme case of insurance malpractice (new expression I coined), but I don't see the attendant grass roots campaign for the victims. There was Sicko that came out in 2007, but where's the equivalent angry mob supporting health care reform?

It seems like there was more liberal activism against Proposition 8 than there is supporting health care reform. Honestly most liberals don't understand health care reform (most conservatives don't either). Obama's leading the way, and so the supporters are just passively hoping The Professor knows what's best. If the Anointed One wasn't running the show, maybe we could see a regular grass roots street fight for health care reform.

Another point is that conservatives are conflating these healthcare reform protests with their lingering bitterness that Obama won the election. How can Obama become the bipartisan president if he doesn't have bipartisan appeal? I know he did well among some independents in some states, but damn if the conservatives don't hate this guy. They hate him more than they hated Clinton.

This is why some black Americans didn't want a black president, because they didn't want, as The Onion put it, to have a "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job."

Anyway, I'll keep re-iterating this point: Healthcare reform should have happened in small, tangible chunks that just appeal to the common sense of both sides.

Ideologically, the Right has a problem with the idea of "forced charity." The Left, on the other hand, has statements like, "We're the richest nation in the world, how can we not [fill in the blank]," where you sub in either "feed the poor" or "provide health insurance to everybody."

If anything about the independence and freedom side of the Right appeals to me, it's the "don't force me to do things" kind of freedom. I'm not sure whether the actual size of the government is a concern, but rather the quantity and quality of the force that it's applying on its citizens. Isn't that the real concern with socialism. It's not socialism itself that's a problem, but rather the understood totalitarianism that has to come with it.

Removing the public option, therefore, seems ok. This is what the Obama Administration is now prepared to do. If Americans want to provide insurance to the poor, they can do so through charities. The new co-op idea should have bipartisan appeal because this is simply taking a core cost-saving aspect of the European healthcare systems and bringing it here.

Some European systems, like UK's NHS, provide universal health care which in turn provides them cost-savings by having a single-payer. But maybe the net effect is that universal coverage is more charity than cost-savings (the jury is still out on that).

So there is some aspect of the European way that is just patently unappealing to the Right, and that's the forced charity part. But there is a major aspect that should be appealing to both sides, and that's how they're able to spend one-third less of their GDP than we do on health care (our 15% vs. their 10%).

I think a reasonable compromise in all these "Big Government vs. free markets" debates is that we should use the government to put its finger on the scale, and only so. Use the government to tweak the markets and influence the market so that it maximizes positive outcomes most of the time. A totally free-wheeling market is anarchic and causes violent economic upswings.