After the reconciliation bill was announced, Ryan sent a letter to the CBO asking for some alternative calculations based off of several different assumptions. Here is the CBO's response.

Ryan's objection is that he believes the Democrats are indulging in some budgetary trickery. I don't have a very fine grasp of the details here, but the gist is that the CBO has agreed with Congress on a particular method of projecting our budget forward. This method bases its assumptions off of legislation that is currently on the books, so it is "technically" accurate. However, Congress has a long history of tweaking some of the same laws every year to change its spending and revenue, and there's every reason to believe this history will continue. These tweaks are not part of the CBO's projections, and so it can be argued that the CBO's projections are not realistically accurate.

This may sound familiar. The Bush administration was infamous for creating budgets each year that didn't include any war cost, and then issuing supplementary budget requests for war funding. In addition, Congress had a long history of passing a yearly fix on the Alternative Minimum Tax - the reason they wouldn't reform it permanently is that it would make the budget figures look too horrible. President Obama was against both of these practices, and sought to normalize the numbers so the yearly budgets would be more realistically accurate, so it is reasonable to want to do the same with the Health Care Reform bill.

The problem is with Medicare. The story is that long ago, Congress passed Medicare reform in an attempt to tamp down rising health care costs. Again, without having a deep grasp of the policy details, the intent was to put a cap on Medicare payments that would adjust each year. The thought was that the cap would help keep health care costs from rising. I imagine what really happened was that since the cap only applied to Medicare spending, and not health care spending as a whole, it didn't have a chance of working - health care costs started rising far too fast for the Medicare cap. As a result, in April 2010, Medicare's payment rates for physicians' services would be reduced by 21% if Congress doesn't step in with its yearly fix. I think this is what they call the "doc fix".

There is a bill that reforms this, which would change the calculations of the health care reform bill - the Medicare Physicians Payment Reform Act of 2009 (H.R. 3961), according to Paul Ryan. Right now the health care bill is projected to decrease the deficit by around $140 billion in the first ten years. If this "doc fix" bill were passed in conjunction with the health care reform bill, the deficit would instead increase over the first decade, by about $60 billion. This is because the "doc fix" bill by itself would cost around $200 billion.

My own sense is that this isn't really an issue, for two reasons:

1. In both cases, the long-term impact is that the deficit will be increased. It still bends the cost curve down.
2. Barack Obama's requirement was that it doesn't increase the deficit. But he was obviously referring to the CBO's projections, and his team knows how the CBO projects things. In other words, his unit of measurement was the same as CBO's - it's not accurate to say that since the bill doesn't really decrease the deficit in the first decade, that it doesn't meet Obama's standards. That'd be like me saying a product of $9.99 is less than $10, and then you saying I'm wrong because it's twelve Euros.

Ryan then manages to put together a scenario showing that even the long-term deficit would increase if some other assumptions are changed, but these other assumptions don't hold water in my view. Unfortunately, it is difficult to tell which of his four assumptions really drive the numbers towards deficit expansion.

His most dubious assumption is the one on the excise tax - he assumes it would never take effect. The problem with this assumption is that it is designed to never take effect, by holding health care costs down, which would still be good for the deficit. The excise tax is different than the Medicare problem described above, because it applies to all health care spending, and because it is tied in to the competitive market of the health insurance exchange.

Ryan's assumptions also overlooking one huge point - there are several other cost controls in the bill that have a high likelihood of positively impacting the deficit figures, but cannot be projected by the CBO. Because of that, the CBO assumes that none of them will work at all, when some of them will undoubtedly meet with some success. Ultimately, by trying out different assumptions to get worse-sounding numbers, Ryan is doing little more than trying to fit the data to his own conclusions.

I have to remember a point that I often make to other people. Those of us that try to be fact-oriented are not really used to being on offense. For those of us who really started paying attention to politics during the birth of the internet age, this is our first experience at really paying close attention at how legislation is done.

And the amount of times something can die and come back to life is mind-numbing. If this were a movie, it would have an awful plot. If our hero died that many times, we'd be considering walking out of the theater, telling him to just die already. Maybe it's satisfying in a pulp fiction sort of way, like in the old radio serials where our hero faces certain death every fifteen minutes.

Nevertheless, it lived, and now it appears immortal. What matters isn't so much a matter of the policy details. It's that an entire frame has been demolished by a new frame. The old frame was that universal health care was a McGuffin, something that would never happen, from being uniquely incompatible with America. The old frame was that an attempt would come along every twenty years, and then be left dormant. And the old frame was that health insurance was something that people would get if they were self-reliant enough to pay for it, or have the kind of employment that would give it to them.

Now the frame is that health coverage is the rule, and not the exception. That people can't have their life ruined if they get sick and then recover. That the nation has a self-interest in looking after the health of its population. This is going to take a while to sink into the nation's psyche, but it's going to have all sorts of butterfly effects. People are going to start arguing for more efficient care, and the government isn't going to be able to abstain. The government will become more efficient, and will be able to use its resource more efficiently in other areas. The population will become healthier as they worry less about being screwed by their insurance policies. They population will become more mobile in terms of switching jobs, and more entrepreneurial as they find less barrier to forming their own businesses.

President Obama said tonight, "This is what change looks like." He was referring to how change often has to be incremental. But it also applies to our incremental understanding. We only have a glimmering of an idea of what kind of change this will create. We'll know a lot more later.

I've been thinking about threats to national security, and who and what can be a threat. Obviously, other nations can be a threat, and some organizations like Al Queda can be, too. But when talking about the individual, the measure of how much of a threat an individual can be comes down to one question: What is the maximum amount of damage one person can do?

The key ingredient is leverage. How much leverage can one person have, when they are thinking and acting on their own? One route a person can take is by making themselves a sleeper agent of sorts, by spending years living an outward life that enables them to burrow into some sort of organization where they could have a lot of leverage. Like a government, or a nuclear power plant. But the other type of person is the normal citizen that just freaks out from time to time.

Over the years, does it get more extreme? It seems that someone flying a plane into a building is a post-9/11 occurrence, but I can't help but think that's just a belief borne of 9/11 trauma. This had to have happened before 9/11. But I also can't help but think that each time something like this happens, the pandora's box opens further.

So far it seems to be a matter of a disturbed individual taking a gun to the workplace or to school. In this case, flying a plane into an office building. But it seems possible for a normal citizen to create more leverage and cause even more damage. I have a resistance to even thinking/imagining what kinds of things are possible, and maybe that resistance in all of us is what keeps them from happening. But it does seem the resistance (in society, not in myself) towards imagining these things does go down over time, doesn't it?

At any rate, the question is what defense do we have against asymmetry? Asymmetrical attackers aren't rational actors in the way most nation states are, so you can't exactly use diplomacy, or appeal to their self-interest. In general, the best defense against asymmetrical attacks appears to be decentralized sources of power, whether that means power grids, the financial system, or government.

Here are my predictions going forward.

• Brown will win and be seated as the 41st Republican Senator.
• Democrats will not attempt to rush the health care bill through conference before Brown gets seated. The optics are horrible.
• The House will pass the Senate bill, and Obama will sign it into law.
• There will be some half-hearted attempts at reconciliation for some improvements.
• Netroots will again get furious about whatever isn't in the bill going forward, or if the reconciliation bill isn't passed.
• Progressives left and right will agree with Republicans more and more often that the Obama administration is a failure.

Beyond that, it's hard to say. I'm currently feeling pretty discouraged at the direction we're heading, and not for the reasons that many in the netroots aren't.

If I were to phrase it in a way that others would agree with, I'd say that Obama has done a piss-poor job at communicating with the base. If I were to phrase it in a more controversial way, I'd say he's done a piss-poor job at managing the base's expectations. The base is crazy, and that's about where I get off the train. Obama's failure is that he didn't neutralize the base. The base is basically agreeing with the Republicans that the health care bill is awful, and since Republicans are more set up to run against the Democrats than the base is, then that means Republicans get elected.

The base is wrong and stupid, but there's nothing to be done about that short of a massive education effort that won't get through to anyone. We've still got people arguing that dumping the current bill and starting over with reconciliation would be an improved approach, as if them saying it often enough makes it true, not paying attention to the fact that a reconciliation bill would do nothing for ridding society of medical bankruptcy. The Senate bill is a good bill, far better than a good bill, and it can be built upon. On a night like this it seems no one cares about that.

More later, I'm sure, as I get my head on straight again.

There are basically two entirely different ways that the health care system currently hurts the sick and the poor. The first is that health care costs are skyrocketing, and responsible health care is getting more and more expensive. But the second is that when serious medical problems do occur, people can go bankrupt and lose their life savings. This is a structurally different problem, in that it is possible to make premiums more affordable without doing anything to protect people from medical bankruptcy.

There are several health insurance practices that make medical bankruptcy possible, such as pre-existing conditions, rescission, and annual/lifetime maximums. In order to protect people from medical bankruptcy, these practices need to be ended.

Here is the problem. The reason these practices are in place are because they make it cheaper for health insurance companies to pay out claims. If they exclude people with pre-existing conditions, they have protected themselves from paying predictable medical costs. If they kick someone off a policy after they get sick (rescission), they've saved themselves a lot of money in expensive care. If they have annual or lifetime caps, they save themselves from having to pay the most expensive of claims, from people who have already racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses.

If they instead had to pay all of these costs, they would undoubtedly be passed along to consumers in the form of higher premiums - even higher than they are now.

What would the result be of this? As health insurance premiums get more expensive, the population becomes more likely to gamble by choosing not to buy health insurance. The healthier someone is, the more likely they are to gamble. When a healthy person leaves, it means the average health of the people left in the insurance plan is worse, which makes the premiums even more expensive. And then it happens again - more healthy people leave, premiums go up. This repeats, and accelerates. The reason we know this is because it is already happening.

The only way to solve this is to get more healthy people into the insurance plans. Then premiums go down for everyone. That is why the mandate is required. Without the mandate, we simply cannot afford to end pre-existing conditions, rescissions, and plan maximums, and it will still be far too possible for people to suffer bankruptcy just from getting injured or sick.

The reason it is H.R. is because according to the Constitution, all revenue-related bills must start with the House. So the Senate took an unrelated House bill called the "Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009" and hollowed it out and renamed it. This is a common practice.

The CBO has scored the version of the bill that corresponded to when Reid announced that the Senate has the necessary 60 votes to end debate. A blog entry from the CBO referring to this, and their original analysis of the Senate bill, is here.

The Democratic Policy Committee has a summary of the bill here. OpenCongress has a markup of the bill here.

The House version of the bill is called the Affordable Health Care for America Act, or H.R. 3962. This passed the House by a vote of 220-215 on November 7, 2009.

The CBO has scored H.R. 3962 and has summarized it here. OpenCongress has a markup of the bill here.

Hopefully someone will come up with a good way to reconcile the commonalities and browse the differences between the two.

And then if you follow the discussions online, you'll see a pattern. First, someone will point out that some of the things we really want in a health care bill - like the end of rescission, and the end of using pre-existing conditions to deny care - are not eligible for a reconciliation bill.

Well, someone else responds, there's a great answer for that. You pass TWO bills - one for reconciliation with the stuff we want, and another one with the regulations. That one will have the regulations, and it won't have the controversial stuff, and it should pass with 60 votes no problem, they say.

But, the say, we have to get started. Dump the current bill and start over.

If you're following along, you can see the opportunity here. The current bill already has the controversial stuff stripped out. The current bill is already large identical to the hypothetical "second bill" in the reconciliation approach.

Passing the current bill would make the desired outcome more likely, and would also take less time, than dumping the bill and starting over.

Pursue reconciliation, by all means. But the way to do that is to pass the current bill.

Except, the folks saying it are Democrats.

A while back in Denver, there was a news segment about a gunman who tried to get away from the cops by holding a gun to his own head. From what I understand, they caught the guy. One anchor asked the other if they could think of another case of a gunman holding himself hostage.

Suffice it to say, this is not a coherent political strategy.

It's worth reviewing what has happened up to this point, and who the big winners and losers are, if things go forward from this point.

Winner: Sick people. We've still got a huge expansion of Medicaid going on here. This is huge addition of people to public insurance - bigger than the public option or the medicare expansion ever would have been by itself. We've got the end of rescission, and the end of pre-existing condition exclusions. We've got improved out-of-pocket maximum rules. And the mandates don't matter to them, because the sick people are going to be glad they have insurance.

Winner: Health Insurance companies. They don't have to risk being put out of business by a public plan marketed towards people with money. And, the mandates mean more people will get on their plans.

Winner: Congressional moderates. They've expressed their power and have really split the difference between Progressives and Republicans.

Loser: Republicans. Progressives might howl that Republicans are winning here, but really - they have to deal with a massive expansion of health care that people will feel they have a right to, given to them by the Democrats. And them getting an expansion will be contagious, and they'll feel like they can get more.

Winner: Pragmatic Progressives. See Republicans, above.

Loser: Harry Reid. Maybe there's something I don't know, but we have the spectacle here of Reid getting embarrassed by both Lieberman on one side, and the White House on the other, in agreement and ganging up on him. Meanwhile, progressives are blaming him for not getting the job done, probably unfairly. What Reid seems most guilty of is getting too clever for his own good. By putting the public option and then Medicare in the bill, a lot of his own decisions get gutted and pulled out, embarrassing him and making him look ineffectual. And now, if the bill ends up better than what is in the Senate bill, it is likely it will seem to be in spite of him rather than because of him. I still may not be seeing this clearly, though - his role has done more to expose Lieberman's cynicism than anything else, and there may be advantages in that.

Loser: Daily Kos and the netroots. What a bunch of idiots the daily kos community has become. My own political attitudes have remained largely static over the last few years, but my reading habits have changed a lot. The only places I can go to get any of those "yes, finally someone said it!" relief feelings are Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Brad DeLong, and others. I used to get that with Daily Kos - particularly back in the days when several smart Daily Kos columnists were explaining the ins and outs of GWB's Social Security cons - but no longer.

Even Markos - a more pragmatic citizen - is getting sucked in to the mentality. He's off on his twitter feed railing against the bill, saying it's a "bloody abortion" that should be pulled entirely. Ezra Klein makes the point that even as is, the bill will still save over 150,000 lives over ten years. End 150,000 lives because you're not getting what you want politically? What have these progressives become? What is really the bottom line here? What is really more important than saving lives?

Daily Kos and other parts of the netroots have been off on the wrong foot here since the beginning of the Health Care debate. The netroots are great for passion, and mobilizing for things like elections. Causes that require energy, but not a whole lot of logic and deep policy knowledge. But the netroots suck eggs at this kind of thing. What happens is that you get a collection of people with their own petty collection of non-negotiables, people with a talent for rabble-rousing that has no relationship with their ability to deeply understand policy, and they set the terms of war. What follows is a long pattern - large groups of people reinforce to each other that they have power, power they really don't have. They then fail, and then there is a lot of anger, bargaining, and finally a greater sense of bitterness, disengagement, and cynicism. They don't leave the community, they just dial up the snark and tear each other down. I think it's possible that as powerful a platform as the internet was for an out-of-power progressive netroots, it may be just as powerful at creating cynicism and bitterness while the Democrats are in power. At least, unless a major platform change occurs.

What the netroots need to accept is that just because we may have the power to affect elections, it doesn't mean that we have a proportional ability to affect policy. It's not our skill set. Our skill set is in numbers, and in money. Not in our ability to come up with stunning insights about policy, not yet. Any congressional staff can run circles around us. All we can hope to do is positively affect an election cycle, and then see how the results turn out legislatively. If they're not ideal, then all we can do is positively affect the next election cycle, and so on. Maybe someday an open netroots community will pop up that will be able to analyze bills correctly, and lobby, and even write new bills, but we're not even close to that point yet - and it'll take longer if people start sitting out elections just because they didn't get everything they wanted after one year.

You'll notice there's one small player in this drama that I haven't judged: Obama. The man is so far above the fray that it's impossible to judge him until the bill is on his desk. Will he get the credit for a massive positive change in health insurance reform? Or, on balance, will he look weak for not being able to offer a public plan to more segments of the population? I think this will basically come down to messaging and posturing in the late stages, and that is still to be played out.

Years later I read about how that was a deliberate foreign policy strategy - brinksmanship and saber-rattling - to convince our enemies that we might just be crazy enough to do it. To get them to back down. And over time, it worked - helped along by an unexpectedly enthusiastic Reagan suggesting arms reductions beyond what was planned for. (His advisors hated him for that.)

Dick Cheney had his hand in that policy. A brinksmanship policy that freaked the hell out of everyone while it was happening, but that proved to yield positive results in hindsight (sort of).

What looked crazy at the time was actually rational in hindsight.

This is what gives me pause about this whole Iraq thing sometimes. All current explanations of Cheney rest on the assumptions of him being a power-mad and crazy recluse. It's as if no one can explain Dick Cheney without believing he's crazy.

What if Dick Cheney isn't crazy?

That question is enough to drive many progressives crazy, but they (we) do themselves no favors by refusing to consider the question.

Just as a thought exercise I think it's interesting to consider the last few years from the perspective of a leader that is rational.

The world's economy is driven in large part by America's economy, and America's economy is largely dependent on energy, which currently means oil.

Oil demand is measurable and well-known throughout the nation and the world. Oil prices are not driven by true oil supply - they're driven by perceptions of supply. Oil supply is not measurable, kept secret, and open to a high degree of speculation. On top of that, there are cartels that can control the amount of supply open to us based off of things that have little to do with pure economic interests, such as Middle East nationalism and fundamentalism.

Everyone, including Dick Cheney, knows that America would be better off if we had less reliance on foreign oil, and were less under their thumb.

Government officials and oil executives have economic models about energy. Large spreadsheets, but a million times more complicated. Of course they do, it would be impossible for them not to. They've factored in variables such as:

• the price of oil
• the efficiency of oil
• the efficiency of alternative energy sources
• the cost of scaling up alternative energy sources
• the cost involved to develop alternative energy sources
• the time required to ramp up alternative energy source
• the amount of oil that can be produced given current capacity
• the projects of increased demand in oil

Etc. Using models, it is possible to ascertain the magic point where alternative energy becomes economical "enough" to reduce our dependence on foreign oil "enough". That sentence has a lot of wiggle room, but it'll become clearer with a graph:

For the green oil line, we're plotting price against demand. You can see that as demand increases, price increases. But the slope gets very, very steep, for two reasons. We have fairly inelastic demand for oil in this country. There's a point at which we need to fill our gas tanks, no matter what the price. And supply is limited. So this means that when we're up against the (perceived) supply limits of oil, a small increase in demand can increase prices a lot. We're on the steep part of the curve right now, because our demand is running right up against the (perceived) supply limits of oil.

For the blue alternative energy line, we're plotting the theoretical cost of a unit of alternative energy against time. There are a lot of things that go into this calculation. For one thing, say it costs $50 for oil to give us a set amount of power, and $25 for a solar panel to give us that same amount of power. That doesn't matter if we can't scale up the production of that solar panel to make the dent in the demand for oil. The cost for ramping up has to be factored in, and then we might see the cost for that unit of solar go up to $150. So this line is the cost of alternative energy that has the capability of actually affecting demand for oil.

Obviously, we are not at the point where alternative energy is notably relaxing our demand for oil. We will in the future. As time passes, the cost for this unit will go down. And as our demand for oil increases (constrained by the perceived supply), the comparative cost for alternative energy will become competitive on a national scale.

There are some very interesting and economically dangerous side effects to this graph. For instance, say we reach that point where the lines cross and things become competitive. What happens at that point? More businesses will be encouraged to jump in and create more alternative energy. And, demand for oil will start to decrease.

And this is the trick of these Macroeconomic graphs - the lines can move. If demand decreases, it's like the entire green line jogs to the right a few notches. And all of a sudden the lines aren't crossing anymore, and the Alt Unit is more expensive again.

On top of that, since we're basing this off of perceived supply rather than actual supply (thanks to OPEC), surprises can happen. This is exactly what happened in the seventies during the Carter Administration. Alternative Energy companies started up. The Saudis responded by opening the spigots and flooding the market with oil. Supply increased, oil prices dropped like a stone. The Alt Unit costs that were economically competitive were all of a sudden grossly expensive. In relatively short order, we went from here:

To here:

Oil was king once again. Companies went out of business, and Carter got blamed for it. Alternative energy became something to scoff at, all because we got conned by the Saudis. R&D was devastated. It set us back decades.

This uncertainty has been priced into the Alt Unit cost since then. We're not going to really start ramping up on alternative energy until we're really damn sure, and until a sudden drop in oil prices is either not possible, or won't devastate the alternative energy sector if it happens.

The energy companies know this. Dick Cheney knows this. And the oil executives are part of large companies that are perfectly capable of entering the alternative energy markets when it becomes economical for them to do so.

There is another line to add into this graph. I'm going to call it the America line. This is the line that symbolizes our collective standard of living, of survival. It's our ability to handle economic hardship - not on an independent level, but on the collective level. It's the point at which American society reaches a tipping point - where if we can't sustain the level, then American society degrades to a level similar to if a plague were to hit us. You can imagine whatever scenarios you wish, but it's basically the tipping point at which we cannot sustain our familiar levels of societal peace and safety, at which the violence and danger starts to feed on itself and becomes virtually irreversible.

This point is obviously dependent on energy costs. If we reach a point where we simply cannot meet "enough" of our energy costs, society will degrade in a way that does not compare to current or past American history.

When energy gets expensive enough that it crosses the red line, that's... the point to avoid. Is it too hard to imagine that our administrations, with all the brainpower of America behind them - thousands of lifelong government workers doing nonpartisan studies - have not analyzed and modeled American sociological behavior and tolerances?

And so. A decision for war might have come down to one very simple point in time, a decision between two scenarios.

Say that we originally had the assumption that our energy outlook looked like this:

But then, due to new information - whether it was new oil field data showing less supply, or China's greater than expected demand reducing our perceived supply, or perhaps 9/11 raising the likelihood of inflamed anti-American sentiment and less oil supply being available to us - our energy outlook changed to this:

The first graph shows us avoiding the energy costs crossing the red line, thanks to alternative energies. The second graph shows society panicking before we get to that point.

We cannot control the placement of the blue line - we can't make time move faster than it is. The blue line would factor in all scenarios, including Manhattan projects to speed up alternative energy development and deployment.

All we can do is try and affect the position of the green line.

What would a rational, if diabolical, government leader do in this case? Well, the models would tell him:

• Without perceived supply increasing, American society will degrade unacceptably before alternative energies can reduce our demand for oil.
• The only way to force an increase in perceived supply is to control the flow of more of the oil.
• Whoever controls Iraq and Iran controls the flow of oil.
• America needs to increase the perceived supply of oil available to them, even if only to give them more time to reduce the Alt Unit Cost.
• A safe and content American society has the luxury of being moral and objecting to such a policy, while an American society on the other side of the green line would collectively be in favor of it.
• It might actually be possible to come out of it with a stronger Democratic presence in the Middle East, thereby depressing Middle East nationalism and leading to fairer oil markets for the world. Which would mean that American society would eventually be in favor of the policy in hindsight.

And so, the war in Iraq was launched, with all the creativity the administration could muster to make the war palatable "enough" to the American people.

Of course, the war effort failed in many ways, because while this administration was partially dominated by a diabolical strategist, it was also dominated by incompetence (Katrina, Iraq's initial occupation strategy) and testosterone-laden cowboy bravado (Rumsfeld's too few troops, the attitudes leading to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib). The result so far has been to cause enough devastation and death in another society that the choice between that path and the path leading to American society degrading is an interesting moral debate. But even with that, there are murmurings in the foreign press among foreign policy experts, unthinkable two years ago, but voiced publicly now - that things in Iraq might - might - actually improve to a point to where things will be better than they were when Saddam was in power. If so, then in a matter of years, the initial choices for war, while seen as unconscionable now, might eventually be seen as rational in hindsight.

The above is a thought experiment. When we judge our opponents as being merely evil and crazy, we do ourselves a disservice since it gives us permission not to understand. And that's what they want. The attempt to understand leads to us being better able to oppose. Again to quote the great Keyser Soze: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist."

We're in a period of time right now, right after the Pennsylvania Primary, where Obama's victory looks assured, and Hillary's looking rather desperate given her only strategy is to concede the elected delegates, hope for a dubiously-counted popular vote lead, and expect that to convince the unclaimed superdelegates to move towards her en masse.

The press is loving it. Democrats in disarray! John McCain content to let them tear each other down!

And in the meantime, state after state has record Democratic turnout, with almost no Republican activity. New Democratic voters are being manufactured by the thousands.

It's enough to make you wonder.

Setting... deep in the bowels of the DNC, Hillary and Barack meet to go over their plan.

"Hi Hill."

"Hi Barry. Good job with the Jay-Z angle, I think the kids needed a boost."

"It was really a great idea of yours, thanks. And your debate performance kept up the fighting Dem image, nice job."

"Thanks. On to Indiana, hmm?"

"Looks like it. How are things on your end?"

"Good. Bill's keeping things interesting."

"He's proven really good at making news out of absolutely nothing."

"Mo' headline, mo' money. Right?"

"Well said."

"How's your end?"

"Great. I made some inroads on those demographics in Pennsylvania. Really good to have the practice against Republican tactics."

"I knew the dress rehearsal would do you good. How are things online?"

"Kos and Jerome are doing great shilling for both of us. Keeps the online world split. With Kos and Jerome being friends, I think it'll definitely help the healing when it's time."

"Good, good, that's good to hear. I'm so glad you're up on that stuff. I see a mouse, I stand on a chair!"

Both laugh deep and heartily. Then they say their goodbyes and until next times, and leave to prepare for another toughly fought primary that will undoubtedly register tens of thousands of more Democrats...

What's most interesting to me is the murky societal battle about imbuing power in words.

In Hollywood in particular, there's been a concerted effort to reduce the power of these words. The main example I can think of is Pulp Fiction, and the extremely liberal use of "nigger", said by white and black characters alike. Quentin Tarantino's character said it a lot, and Tarantino defends it in an activist fashion:

[...] Tarantino claims that by using such a loaded word so frequently and almost randomly (white characters are called niggers almost as often as black ones) he is actually trying to defuse the word of its power. Nigger, he claims, "is probably the most volatile word in the English language. My feeling is that any time a word is that powerful, you should start screaming it from the rooftops, take away that power."

And I think it's fair to say that over the years, whether it's because of Tarantino's movies, or the younger generation's fandom of hip-hop culture (among both black and white youth), the power of the word has been slowly transformed and weakened. Not entirely and not permanently, but it's had an impact.

But now that the Michael Richards incident has happened, the fallout has included a concerted effort to re-imbue the word with more negative power:

Black leaders on Monday challenged the entertainment industry, including rappers, to stop use of the racial slur that Michael Richards uttered in his tirade.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson and others said they will meet with TV networks, film companies and musicians to discuss the "n-word."

"We want to give our ancestors a present," Jackson said at a news conference. "Dignity over degradation."

Obviously, I'm describing this from the viewpoint of believing that the words should be stripped of their power. Now, I don't like dismissing Jackson as a simple spotlight-seeker - so, taking him at face value, he's of the belief that these words and symbols are imbued with their power permanently.

Now, what Richards did is clearly not comparable to Tarantino's intentions. I haven't even viewed or read the complete quotes of Richards' tirade, but I get that it was pretty ugly. Just by putting myself through the exercise, I can understand the various dynamics of the situation having an influence, but not up to the point that he took it. Like, you're being heckled, someone's hurting you in a personal way, you're exposed in a way they're not, you want to hit them back in a personal way... but it's at that point that it breaks down for me, I still don't understand how it goes from there to where Richards took it, even with all the (up to that point) coolness of de-emphasizing the n-word, being deliberately politically incorrect, etc.

It's interesting because while I think Tarantino was onto something, that rhetorical and linguistic walkback of de-emphasizing the n-word required a lot of grace and patience. In Pulp Fiction, it was done within the bounds of a social relationship - he wouldn't have had a character just start ranting it out of anger, in a way that he would have expected the audience to identify with. In True Romance, I saw Dennis Hopper's rant as being about baiting someone else's racism than expressing his (Hopper's character's) own. But here, Richards blundered right through it all and ruined the progression. As a result, there's a real slapback effect going on here.

What I'm interested in - was this effort to de-emphasize the power of the n-word doomed to failure? Was there a hard limit to how far that could be pushed? Was this an inevitable rubberband effect, a cultural reaction that was just waiting for a flashpoint? Or was Tarantino onto something anyway?

• U.S. Civil War, 1861-1865. Population 31.4M, 622,000 dead.
• Iraq, 2003-? Population 26.8M, through 2006 655,000 dead.

What can cause this to break down? Spiteful personal relationships. Political interests. Community breakdowns (the blogging community isn't so young anymore... being connected as a "fellow blogger" isn't such a powerful idea anymore...).

I'm amazed it hasn't happened more often. Welcome to 2008. It's all too easy to practice the "politics of personal destruction" (sharing embarrassing personal details) on bloggers, since they don't have the protection of celebrity or power. All you need is a few opening salvos. Then you'll experience some true blogwars, that will potentially have a chilling effect on the voice of blogging itself.