Washington Monthly has a new article on how the Texas textbook adoption board is dictating the nation’s textbooks. This is nothing new, but if the article is right, the Texans are crazier than ever.

“Adoption” in this case is, of course, the practice of a state board of textbooks approving which textbooks may be used in public schools in that state. Obviously, textbook publishers go all out to please adoption committees so as not to be shut out of a chunk of the market.

What frustrates me about these articles on whackjob textbook committees is that no one ever goes to the textbook industry to find out what the industry plans to do to accommodate ever more elaborate demands. There is an assumption that the textbook industry will respond as it has in the past, by publishing national edition books that are mostly sterilized mush. And if a state requires something that would make the book unsalable in another state, usually these specifics involve rewording of a few paragraphs here or there, worked into state editions by means of a black plate change on the printing press.

In other words, the national editions are made as bland and unobjectionable to conservatives as possible without making them completely unusable in less-conservative markets. That way, the publisher needs to do only a little minor tweaking in the state editions. All the textbooks nationwide are still pretty much alike. However, the kinds of changes the Texas board is talking about are far more radical and pervasive than what I have seen in the past. I can’t see how the old strategy is going to work.

I found a chart showing which states are adoption states and which are not. This was compiled in 2005, and I’m not sure it’s up-to-date, although it could be. If you look at the list, you will notice that most of the adoption states are conservative. These also are states that tend to rank lower in achievement scores, although some are better (or worse) than others.

There are a number of non-adoption states that have big populations and lots of schoolchildren. These include Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The kinds of textbooks the Texas adoption committee wants would be laughed out of a large portion of school districts in those states, especially in high-population urban areas. So it seems to me the publishers will have to come up with big chunks of original material for Texas. The old trick of tweaking a blandly inoffensive national edition for sale in Texas ain’t gonna work.

And this would mean that the national editions finally will be less constrained by what Texas wants. I venture to guess that if the Texas economy remains weak in 2013, when the crazier rules go into effect, some publishers might consider sitting out the adoptions rather than throw tons of money into creating a unique textbook for an anemic market. I’m probably wrong about that, but I don’t think it’s impossible.

There’s a lot of interest in digitally published textbooks as the way to both bring down costs and easily accommodate the quirky requirements of the adoption committees. I understand there already are some downloadable textbooks that students can choose to read on their iPhones, kindles, or computers, or print out. I could see that working very well at college level, but I doubt many primary or secondary schools are equipped to provide all students with whatever technology they need to read digital textbooks.

Maybe someday a publisher will offer a school free kindles or nooks if it subscribes to their digital textbook series. But I can’t see handing out kindles to packs of third-grade boys and not expect most of them to be smashed or lost within a month.

Harold Meyerson: The real “welfare queens” are red states!

I’m all for maintaining the presumption of innocence until someone is found guilty in court. But Ben Stein’s defense of Dominique Strauss-Kahn is the most sexist and elitist garbage I have seen in a long time. Shame on The American Prospect for hosting it. [The American Spectator, sorry] See also TPMMuckraker.

Senate Republicans refuse to cut subsidies to Big Oil. Another campaign issues to hang around your necks next year, dudes.

The Republican presidential field is a lot thinner than it was three days ago. Donald Trump dropped out as soon as NBC announced it was picking up Celebrity Apprentice for another season. I’m actually a bit disappointed Mike Huckabee dropped out, because I was prepared to go all out to tell the world about Frankie Parker if the Huckster became a contender.

And then there is Newt. Newt is still running, but his campaign has gone so far off the rails it’s almost painful.

Newt became a political powerhouse in the early 1990s both as a lightning rod and as chief spokesperson for a particular moment in movement conservatism. That moment has passed.

It has struck me all along that much of what Newt was saying seemed weirdly dated. He was picking up some of the current buzzwords but didn’t seem to know what to do with them. In his mind, it was still 1994. It’s like trying to talk about popular music with a great uncle who still thinks Neil Sedaka is hip.

On Sunday, on Meet the Press, Newt dissed Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan, calling it “right-wing social engineering” and “radical.” No doubt Newt had seen the poll numbers that said the plan is wildly unpopular with a large majority of Americans. It may have seemed a shrewd move to position himself as the Republican alternative for people who don’t like Ryan’s plan.

But the howling from both the teabaggers and the Republican establishment must have caught Newt by surprise. By Monday he was furiously walking back what he had said on Sunday. “There is little daylight between Ryan and Gingrich.” a Gngrich spokesperson said.

Then Newt fell back even further, blaming the media for taking what he said “out of context.” But it’s not just “the media” trashing Newt over his apostasy. It the right-wing punditocracy and other Republican politicians, and they are letting him have it, big time.

One wonder if Newt will get his pundit gig at Faux News back when his presidential hopes finally die. He’s become persona non grata on the Right.

This isn’t what happened back in 1994. Back then, the Republican establishment rallied to back Newt’s every pronouncement. Now it’s obvious Newt has no support from within the Republican establishment, and he doesn’t seem to have a popular base among voters, either.

He’s delusional enough to stay in the race for a while, but for all practical purposes, I’d say his campaign is over.

I just saw this bar graph at Talking Points Memo [correction: not TPM, but another site] and liked it so much I did a screen capture —

There’s nothing there most of you regulars don’t already know, of course.

Some things snark themselves —

The nation’s major health insurers are barreling into a third year of record profits, enriched in recent months by a lingering recessionary mind-set among Americans who are postponing or forgoing medical care. …

… Yet the companies continue to press for higher premiums, even though their reserve coffers are flush with profits and shareholders have been rewarded with new dividends. Many defend proposed double-digit increases in the rates they charge, citing a need for protection against any sudden uptick in demand once people have more money to spend on their health, as well as the rising price of care.

I don’t think the skin-in-the-game theory takes insurance company price gouging into account.

“I am noticing my patients with insurance are more interested in costs,” said Dr. Jim King, a family practice physician in rural Tennessee. “Gas prices are going up, food prices are going up. They are deciding to put some of their health care off.” A patient might decide not to drive the 50 miles necessary to see a specialist because of the cost of gas, he said. …

… For someone like Shannon Hardin of California, whose hours at a grocery store have been erratic, there is simply no spare cash to see the doctor when she isn’t feeling well or to get the $350 dental crowns she has been putting off since last year. Even with insurance, she said, “I can’t afford to use it.” Delaying care could keep utilization rates for insurers low through the rest of the year, according to Charles Boorady, an analyst for Credit Suisse. “The big question is whether it is going to stay weak or bounce back,” he said. “Nobody knows.

The article goes on to say that people with employee benefit insurance are paying higher premiums and co-pays, and an increasing number have deductibles of $2,000 or more.

First — obviously, more “skin in the game,” or making people pay more money for their health care, does result in people passing up medical treatments they don’t need. However, it also results in their passing up medical treatments they do need.

There’s a Gallup poll out saying that 47 percent of Americans are opposed to raising the debt ceiling. 17 percent are in favor, and the rest say they don’t understand the issue well enough to have an opinion.

What the poll doesn’t tell us is how many of those opposed have any clue what the debt ceiling issue is about. Skim through the comments section of just about any rightie blog post on the debt ceiling — and some leftie ones as well — and it’s painfully obvious that most of the commenters believe Congress is arguing about a vote to raise the debt. And they are opposed to raising the debt, so they are opposed to raising the debt ceiling.

I don’t watch television news as much as I used to, so I have no idea if any of the bobbleheads are even attempting to explain what the debt ceiling issue really is about. I assume Rachel Maddow has taken a stab at it, because it’s the sort of thing she does really well. But my impression is that most people in this country aren’t even being exposed to basic explanations of the issue. They just hear “debt” and “raise,” and they’re agin’ it.

Republicans are demagoguing the debt ceiling issue for all they are worth. Obviously, the plan is to get congressional Dems to cave to at least some changes in Medicare, Social Security, etc., and they’re holding the nation’s economy hostage to do it.

Steve Benen:

Look, this is so obvious, it usually goes unsaid, but it’s important to understand. McConnell and other Republicans are eager, practically desperate, to make major changes to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — changes that the public won’t like. What the GOP needs more than anything is bipartisan cover. They want Obama to make it so, to use McConnell’s word, this isn’t “usable” in the next election, because if Republicans tried to do this on their own, the electoral consequences would be severe.

That leaves Republican leaders with two choices to get what they want. Option #1: the GOP can agree to some tax increases and Pentagon cuts as part of a grand bargain with Democrats. Option #2: the GOP can threaten to destroy the economy, on purpose, unless Democrats give in to Republican demands on entitlements.

Guess which one the GOP prefers?

This really is a game of chicken.

John Cogan writes at Wall Street Journal that the old folks are livin’ high on the hog on your tax dollars:

Readers may recall the 1950s TV show, “The Millionaire,” which portrayed stories of individuals who were given a “no strings attached” gift of money by an anonymous benefactor. Each week in one of the show’s opening scenes, a man representing the wealthy benefactor, John Beresford Tipton Jr., knocked on an unsuspecting recipient’s door and announced: “My name is Michael Anthony and I have a cashier’s check for you for one million dollars.”

That TV program is scheduled to return next year as a reality show, and the new recipients will be the typical husband and wife who reach age 66 and qualify for Social Security. Starting next year, this typical couple, receiving the average benefit, will begin collecting a combination of cash and health-care entitlement benefits that will total $1 million over their remaining expected lifetime.

WSJ illustrates this with a cartoon showing a gray-haired couple getting their million dollar check from Uncle Sam while some scrawny children pick through what’s left in a broken piggy bank. Not subtle. Generational warfare, anyone?

Of course, a million dollars doesn’t go quite as far as it did in the 1950s, and I assume (Cogan isn’t entirely clear) that the million dollars is the total amount of Social Security and Medicare Benefits the couple will receive from age 66 to whatever age most 66-year-olds make it to these days. frankly, given the cost of medical care, I’m surprised it isn’t a lot more than a million dollars.

It would take me years to pick apart all the misinformation in Cogan’s column, but let me just start with this paragraph:

Under the federal government’s fee-for-service Medicare program, every time a senior citizen meets with his physician or health-care provider for a check-up, lab tests or surgery, somebody other than the patient foots most of the bill. That such a program should produce runaway costs is hardly surprising.

First, it isn’t the Medicare program that is generating runaway costs. The costs are from the rise in the cost of health care, which is eating or economy. According to a recent report from the Millman consulting group, the average cost of health care for the average family of four has more than doubled since 2002.

Given the recent growling over Paul Krugman I hate to quote him again, but he’s most often the one who comes up with the data I’m looking for, so here he is, from 2009 —

I notice from comments that a fair number of readers think that Medicare has had runaway costs. What you need to ask is, runaway compared to what?

Here’s the raw fact, from the National Health Expenditure data: since 1970 Medicare costs per beneficiary have risen at an annual rate of 8.8% — but insurance premiums have risen at an annual rate of 9.9%. The rise in Medicare costs is just part of the overall rise in health care spending. And in fact Medicare spending has lagged private spending: if insurance premiums had risen “only” as much as Medicare spending, they’d be 1/3 lower than they are.

We don’t have a Medicare problem — we have a health care problem.

Cogan continues,

Over the years, the government has expanded the type of services covered, such as prescription drugs, and it has assumed a greater portion of the program’s finances. Medicare premiums paid by senior citizens once covered half of the cost of physician and related services. They now cover one-fourth. Copayments once covered nearly 40% of these services’ costs. They now cover only 20%.

Paying half of health care costs in, when, 1968? Versus paying one-quarter now? Given the explosion in health care costs, making the oldsters pay half of their costs today would be the same as putting them on ice floes to die. A lot more of them would simply not be able to afford health care than would have been true 40 or so years ago.

And let us not forget that the Medicare prescription drug benefit was set up by the Bushies to gouge the taxpayers for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry, by not allowing the federal government to negotiate drug prices. According to Wikipedia, the Department of Veterans Affairs, which does negotiate, spends 58 percent less for drugs than Medicare does.

And the argument for lowering co-pays is that it encourages people to get to doctors while a health problem is small, as opposed to waiting until it’s grown into something nasty and harder to treat. In theory, it should help keep overall costs down, although I haven’t seen the numbers crunched. Which takes us to the “skin in the game” argument —

To fix Medicare, we must move away from the current system of fee-for-services and low copayments. First and foremost, copayments should be increased significantly. Medicare recipients need to have more skin in the game if they are to become cost-conscious medical consumers.

A lot of righties are in love with the “skin in the game” theory, which says that if people had to pay more of their own health care bills they would be better health care consumers, and costs would come down. There are a number of flaws in this theory, which Jonathan Cohn explains. One flaw is that most of us have no way to know what medical care we really need and what care is just a “frill.” We get the medical care our doctors recommend, assuming the managed care plan approves it.

And especially in the age of managed care plans, as individuals in private plans we are hardly in a position to do comparison shopping of medical treatments, assuming we won’t bleed to death first. If you need care beyond what your Primary Care Provider can give you in an office visit, you go to whatever specialist he recommends that is in your managed care network. I can’t imagine how making us pay higher deductibles would make us “smarter shoppers” than we already are.

As Cohn says also, lots of real-world studies have shown that making people pay more for health care sets up a situation in which people spend fewer health care dollars in the short run but more in the long run.

In families with high-deductible plans, kids were less likely to get immunizations and adults were less likely to get cancer screenings. Not only did this seem to jeopardize the beneficiaries’ health, it also called into question the cost savings. After all, as the authors pointed out, it was possible the failure to get preventative care in the first year would lead to bigger, more expensive medical problems down the road.

This was not a surprising finding. The original, gold-standard study on high deductible insurance, also from Rand, found that people couldn’t discern between useful and unnecessary care. More recent studies have suggested that higher co-payments on prescription drugs discouraged seniors from taking medication to control high-blood pressure.

In theory, it ought to be less expensive overall to at least not discourage people from seeking checkups and health screenings and seeing a doctor for the small stuff, instead of waiting until a condition is really awful and more expensive to treat. And finally,

Giving people more skin in the game has distributional consequences. It shifts the burden of medical expenses onto those people with the most serious medical problems, which is, arguably, what insurance is designed to prevent.

See also Ezra Klein for more data and graphs that pretty much blows Cogan’s argument out of the water.

Yet Cogan continues,

The higher copayments can be offset by reducing Medicare premiums and offering more Medicare health plan choices. Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposal—to provide fixed annual grants to enable Medicare recipients to buy an affordable private insurance plan—is a fiscally sound way to achieve this outcome.

So to reduce costs, Cogin says, we must rely more on private insurance, even though the cost of private insurance has been rising more than Medicare. And we will offset rising copayments through lower premiums, even though every independent analyst who has looked at Ryan’s plan has said the subsidies it promises to provide won’t come anywhere near paying for those private insurance premiums, and seniors will end up paying substantially more for insurance than they were under Medicare.

Let’s hop over a lot of the nonsense and go right to the end —

So today’s seniors need to consider how they want the script for “The Millionaire” sequel to be written: There’s a knock at the door. We now know that on the other side there’s a check for a million dollars. When the door opens, do we really want to see our children, under the commanding gaze of Uncle Sam, presenting us with that check?

The reality is, that if we listen to people like Cogan (a fellow at the aptly named Hoover Institute), when the old folks die, instead of getting an inheritance their children will be stuck paying for the care they received before they died. In 2007, medical care cost for the last six months of life was averaging $36,000. Right now, Medicare absorbs most of that. Under Ryan’s plan, a large chunk of those future costs will be shifted to the “health care consumer,” which means the heirs will pay for it.

Soylent Green, anyone?

I don’t have the strength to go into Cogan’s ideas about Social Security, but he honestly thinks that privatizing the Social Security system “would allow younger workers to become millionaires through their own hard work and thrift” — as opposed to, I assume, the old folks who are greedily pigging out at the public trough. Seriously.

James Joyner writes that there are three factions of elites who drive foreign policy — neocons, “liberal interventionists” and “traditional realists.” The first two factions are pretty much peas from the same pod, Joyner says, in that they both favor military intervention to cure a variety of foreign policy ills. The “traditional realists” are less likely to be interventionists, but they tend to work in academia or intelligence and don’t get much popular political support for their views.

I think this is true on a gross level. Certainly there were liberal interventionists joining with the neocons to push for war in Iraq awhile back. But what annoys me about Joyner’s essay is that the way he arrives at conclusions tends to obscure reality as much as explain it.

Here is how Joyner defines these three groups:

Neoconservatives of both parties urge war to spread American ideals, seeing it as the duty of a great nation. Liberal interventionists see individuals, not states, as the key global actor and have deemed a Responsibility to Protect those in danger from their own governments, particularly when an international consensus to intervene can be forged. Traditional Realists, meanwhile, initially reject most interventions but are frequently drawn in by arguments that the national interest will be put at risk if the situation spirals out of control.

I’m OK with Joyner’s definition of neoconservatives, but his definition of liberal interventionists is confusing — “Liberal interventionists see individuals, not states, as the key global actor and have deemed a Responsibility to Protect those in danger from their own governments.” Seems to me national governments are the key players, or actors, in that definition.

And I think Joyner is confused if he thinks the primary motivation for most of the “liberal” interventions he sites — e.g., Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti — was to protect people from their own governments. It’s more often the case that the international community and U.S. liberal interventionists will stand aside and allow all kinds of awful things to happen (think Rwanda) as long as it is contained within national borders. (Other mitigating circumstances include whether the nation is capable of nuclear retaliation or is of some interest to China, in which case the international community tends to look the other way, also.)

The international “liberal interventionists” are far more likely to intervene if the awfulness threatens the political stability of an entire region, which some believed was the case with Kosovo; or if the government perpetrating the awfulness has a history of pushing awfulness on a global scale; think Muammar Gaddafi. People can disagree whether a particular situation is likely to keep itself contained or not, of course. But the reasons given for such interventions usually are only partly humanitarian.

And when Joyner talks about “traditional realists,” he seems to be talking about moderate isolationism. But the word “realist” for me brings to mind Realpolitik, which put into practice by people like Henry Kissinger is not isolationist at all.

This is all by way of arguing “how perpetual war become U.S. ideology.” It seems obvious to me that U.S. politics is still struggling to function within Cold War ideological frameworks, at least as far as foreign policy is concerned. And once generations of Americans were conditioned to accept perpetual global war against communism, it wasn’t that much of a leap to get them to accept perpetual global war against Islamic extremism. In fact, some people seem to think they are the same bogyman.

This is all so obvious I can’t imagine why anyone feels a need to write analysis about it. Basically, over the past sixty years, we went from Republicans blaming Democrats for losing China and letting Russia get the bomb, to Republicans blaming Democrats for Islamic terrorism and letting Iran get the bomb. As far as U.S. political rhetoric is concerned, all we’ve done is change the labels.

Basically, what Joyner does here is sort all foreign policy players into his three clumsily defined cubbyholes. Then he focuses on what the cubbyholes have in common to forge his conclusion. You could have taken the same raw facts and come up with entirely different cubbyholes, or taken the same cubbyholes and focused on how they differ instead of how they are alike, and come to entirely different conclusions, and the various conclusions would be no more or less defensible.

All of the above approaches amount to just rearranging the furniture in your head, so to speak. Such exercises tend to provide answers that are devoid of actual understanding.

By the time we reach adulthood we’ve all got a filing system in our heads by which we know everything we know. When confronted with something new, the first thing we do is classify it so we know where to file it. And then we learn about the new thing in the context of how we classify it. That’s useful up to a point, but if we’re not careful it can get in the way of seeing things as they are. It tends to make us focus on how things are alike, and miss how they are different. Or vice versa. And it also tends to keep us locked into rigid, and limited, ways of thinking about things.

Along these lines — I was very much taken with something Paul Krugman wrote in his blog the other day. Speaking of David Hume, Krugman wrote,

I read Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in college, probably in my sophomore year, and it changed my life. I was at the age when impressionable young people can all too easily get pulled into a rigid belief system — say, by getting hooked on Ayn Rand. Hume, by contrast, was wonderfully liberating: his amiable skepticism, his insistence that what we think we know comes from experience, and that knowledge is always provisional, opened up my whole outlook.

In other words, don’t get stuck in cubbyholes.

The “tea party” may be largely a mirage — these days the teabaggers seem to have more “leaders” and “organizers” and “spokespeople” than actual members — but it’s a mirage with clout. And the mirage has decided the debt ceiling must not be raised.

I’ve wandered into some rightie blogs discussing the debt ceiling, and my impression is that 99.9 percent of them have absolutely no idea what the debt ceiling is. They seem to think that not raising the debt ceiling means that the debt can’t go any higher. And, of course, no one in movement conservatism has the guts or inclination to explain to them that isn’t what it means.

So the “serious” conservatives are taking the stand that of course we must stand firm on the debt ceiling, even though we actually have to raise it.

Seriously. I found this John Boehner quotation in an article headlined “Why Republicans Must Not Cave on the Debt Ceiling”

“It’s true that allowing America to default would be irresponsible. But it would be more irresponsible to raise the debt ceiling without simultaneously taking dramatic steps to reduce spending and reform the budget process. To increase the debt limit without simultaneously addressing the drivers of our debt — in defiance of the will of our people — would be monumentally arrogant and massively irresponsible. It would send a signal to investors and entrepreneurs everywhere that America still is not serious about dealing with our spending addiction. It would erode confidence in our economy and reduce certainty for small businesses. And this would destroy even more American jobs.”

In other words, they’re saying that “not caving” is demanding a package of suicidal cuts from the budget as a condition for voting to raise the debt ceiling. But they’re expecting an awful lot of teabaggers if they think the baggers can be that nuanced.

Eliza Newlin Carney writes for The Atlantic —

With TV ads, petitions and grassroots lobbying, tea party organizers are gearing up to send an absolutist message to Capitol Hill: Don’t raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances.

Baggers don’t do nuance.

Tea party activists have already clashed publicly with some of the 87 GOP freshmen they helped elect last year, and they’re warning that Republicans who don’t keep their fiscal promises will pay a political price.

“We will remove as many incumbents as we can that do not do the job they were hired to do,” Darla Dawald, national director of the tea party group Patriot Action Network, said in an e-mail. “We are watching every member of Congress, their votes, position and language.”

The problem is that polls say baggers don’t want Medicare and Social Security cut, just all that other stuff.

Ezra Klein says that the amount of cuts Boehner is talking about wouldn’t be that big a deal if they are over a ten-year period. My impression is that the baggers aren’t going to settle for that, although one guy — identified as a “tea party leader” — says baggers will accept raising the debt ceiling if gays in the military can be stuffed back into the closet. Whether this guy is a “leader” of any part of the tea party other than himself, however, I cannot say.

Republicans also seem adrift on the subject of cutting Medicare. A couple of days ago we were hearing that Republicans, having been thoroughly spanked by their constituents over Easter recess, were running away from the scheme for privatizing Medicare. Apparently not all of them got the memo; however. And in his recent speech, Boehner said Medicare is still on the table —

And with the exception of tax hikes — which will destroy jobs — everything is on the table. That includes honest conversations about how best to preserve Medicare, because we all know, with millions of Baby Boomers beginning to retire, the status quo is unsustainable.

“How best to preserve Medicare” is a nice weasel phrase that can mean whatever the hearer wants it to mean.

So here’s where the Republicans are at the moment — they will not raise the debt ceiling until they raise it; and they have to simultaneously insist that Medicare must and must not be cut and/or retooled.

One idea being floated by some Democrats as well as some Republicans is to enact a series of baby-step debt ceiling increases concurrent with somewhat larger budget cuts, so that the Republicans can go back to their teabag constituents and somehow argue that they raised the debt ceiling but cut the deficit. Given that the baggers have no idea what the debt ceiling is, except that they don’t want it raised, I don’t see that as a viable option.

The more reasonable thing for the Republicans to do is to go ahead and raise the bleeping debt ceiling, before serious 2012 campaigning starts, while simultaneously pointing toward Mexico and screeching ANCHOR BABIES! A diversionary tactic, in other words. Could work.