SUPERSOLARPANEL

Coming soon to Cle Elum, Washington.

My impression is that Eastern Washington has large deposits of whatever natural resources are needed to make solar panels, and, of course, lots of sun (once you get past the Cascades, the climate of the rest of the state is much closer to that of Southern Idaho than Vancouver). Combined with the states very green-tinged political culture, you have lots of incentive to get this sort of project up and running.

Senator Fifty Versus Senator Sixty

It would seem that the 50th Democratic vote in the Senate -- and I don't know who exactly that is, probably some Southerner -- would have much to gain by the de-emphasis of the filibuster. If legislation needed only 50 votes to pass the Senate, people designing stimulus bills and health care plans and energy legislation would take that into account. They wouldn't have to sell their bill to Ben Nelson, and they'd write more ambitious things. Figuring out some way to tailor bills to Senator Fifty, or else buy Senator Fifty's vote with a variety of shiny trinkets, would be the goal. You can see how Senator Fifty might be quite pleased with this dynamic.

But I haven't seen any evidence that potential Senator Fifties are acting on these incentives. You don't see, say, Bob Casey or Mark Pryor or Mary Landrieu or Kay Hagan dissing on the filibuster and calling out Ben Nelson for obstructionism. And I don't really know why. Obviously, there are going to be a number of people jockeying to be Senator Fifty, but in a session where people are trying to move lots of historic legislation, the stock of rewards is probably large enough that everybody in the 45-55 range has a reasonable shot at some share of the goodies. So why is everybody letting Ben Nelson have all the fun?

Should I Give Henry Waxman Money?

With my much-loved Nancy Pelosi's Speakership secure, I don't care that much about converting another Republican seat into a Blue Dog seat. And while there are some vulnerable Democrats I'm interested in defending -- Tom Perriello's international human rights heroism makes me interested in helping him -- there really aren't many people on there who I see as having a big progressive impact.

So I'm starting to think that it might be time to throw some money at the awesomest legislator in the House, Henry Waxman, in hopes of giving him a big pile of cash that he can use for various wonderful Waxpurposes. Like: gaining influence for his Waxprojects by donating his stash to other Congresscritters. I've read so many awesome articles about Henry Waxman that I can't remember which one I heard this from, but apparently one of the secrets to his success was making contributions from his personal stash to other Congressional Democrats. This was effective in causing them to cast excellent Waxvotes.

If you're wondering why I'm being so Waxlaudatory here (I promise that's the last one), let these Henry Waxman Facts be your appetizer:

In the midst of the Reagan era's cutbacks, Waxman expanded the number of working poor eligible for Medicaid a stunning 24 times.

For virtually the entire 1980s, Waxman blocked Dingell and the Reagan administration from weakening auto emission standards. At one point, he blocked a key vote on a bill to debilitate the Clean Air Act by introducing 600 amendments, which he had wheeled into the room in shopping carts.

He publicized an obscure EPA report that established secondhand smoke as a carcinogen, uncovered the onetime Philip Morris lab director who had determined that nicotine was addictive, and publicly grilled tobacco company CEOs about their failure to share that fact with the public.

And then, for your main course, you can read Charlie Homans' piece in the Washington Monthly on how Waxman always wins. I guess I should keep our Klein/Yglesias streak unbroken by linking to today's Ezra Klein interview for dessert.

Thus Spoke Ezrathustra

Says the Ezra Klein of today:

we need to distinguish between different types of public plan. There's the public plan which is actually a version of Medicare-for-All. Everyone can buy in, the plan can partner with Medicare to become the largest bargainer in the system, and the expectation is that it will eventually take over the insurance market. I could understand making that the definition of health-care reform, as it is a fundamental transformation of the health-care system. But if you don't think we can pass Medicare-for-All, there's not much reason to think we can pass that.

Sure, I can see how the insurance interests will hate all over the robust public plan which we could call Medicare-for-everyone-who-wants, knowing that it's a one-way trip to Medicare-for-all. And that's going to be a big obstacle.

But if Ezra has taught me anything, it's that we don't want to change everybody's health care all at once through legislation. Here's what he wrote in January 2008, and I doubt I'm the only person who took it to heart:

The line the Clinton campaign did use, "health security that can never be taken away," foundered because, before the plan offered that security, the health security that Americans currently trusted would be taken away.

"They couldn't defend it in simple terms," says Hacker, "because it actually meant a complex set of changes for most Americans." There was no concrete reference point, because the legislation was building something that didn't yet exist. The administration's argument, in essence, was "trust us." But when it comes to health care, it's one thing to make the system better. It's a whole other to remake it entirely. You can ask Americans to walk forward, slowly, knowing they can scramble back to the ledge if need be. You cannot ask them to jump.

That's why all us lefty kids had been loving the John Edwards plan subsequently picked up by Hillary Clinton and Max Baucus. Even if the insurance companies fought us just as hard as they would if we were trying to replace all the private health care with the model of efficiency that is Medicare, we had a one-line knockdown answer to the baseless fears that national health care in America would look like some bureaucratic nightmare from Stalinist Canada: "If you like your current health insurance, you can keep it."

That was the plan -- offer Medicare-for-everyone-who-wants, watch everybody make the choice to switch on their own, and perhaps go the last mile to true Medicare-for-all once a supermajority of Americans had come under the program and you wouldn't be messing with so many people's stuff. It was a good plan, just because it's politically easier to pass a robust public option and use individual choices as the vehicle for change than to mess with everybody's insurance by running straight to Medicare-for-all.

Certainly, I appreciate Ezra's attempts to enlighten us about parts of health care reform that get less attention. And the things he talks about look really important! Maybe he's trying to lower the emphasis on the public plan relative to robust subsidies and Medicaid expansion and health insurance exchanges and other stuff. And that might be a good idea. But I find myself a lot more convinced by his positive arguments for the importance of other stuff than his newfound negative arguments against the importance of the public plan.

The Sarah Palin Show

Posting has been slow lately, as I've been in a house party full of wonderful geeky friends with whom I've been playing Magic and participating in a live-action roleplaying game based on these books. But this blog owes its readers a Sarah Palin post! So post I will. First, Hilzoy:

I do not believe for a moment that this is about taking time off to prepare for 2012. Nothing I know about Sarah Palin leads me to believe that she would give up power voluntarily, let alone for something that is such a long shot, and in such a transparently self-destructive way.

Personally, I'm closer to the Jesse Taylor position, or lack of a position: "I really have no idea what she thought she was doing, or what she was saying."

There's a point at which somebody acts so weird that you lose the ability to make ordinary assumptions about what they think or want, and every remaining option seems to posit something implausible. Has Sarah Palin tired of politics? Does she think resigning will help her position herself for the presidency in 2012? Does she think resigning will help her promote conservatism from outside the system? Has she formed a desire to go mer-Galt? I really don't know what to say here.

Lots of people speculate that another scandal is in the works. And hey, it could be -- we had a new Palin scandal every other day in September, and I was left with the impression that her closet had more skeletons than the human population of Alaska. But it's rare that Governors face scandals so tremendous that they resign in advance. So I have no idea if it would be something huge, or something that she mistakenly thinks it's huge, or nothing at all.

Also, Emily Thorson's charts are really good. If you look at when the McCain-Palin ticket loses support in 2008, it's at the same time that Palin's approval ratings fall through the floor, even more so than when people get freaked out by the bad economy.

Reading Between The Lines

My read of Ezra's interview with a Wal-Mart spokesman (and I swear we read bloggers other than Ezra and Matt Yglesias) is that Wal-Mart signed on to an employer mandate hoping that by being on the inside of the tent pissing out, they can the level of coverage and/or at least force tighter cost controls onto the medical-industrial complex. I suspect that that's a deal I would be hunting for if I were Democrats; passage will require substantial business support, unless we adopt the Bernie Sanders method of returning to up-or-down votes for most legislation. Much better to get Wal-Mart to sign on to 85% of what we're looking for, then convince them to go lobby a few Republicans, than to strike a deal with Joe Lieberman's gang of wankers that gives us only 60% of what we're looking for.

Can We Eliminate The Agricultural Committees Without Assuming A Can Opener?

I'm getting more and more convinced by the Ezra Klein view that it would be good to eliminate the agricultural committees, which have become dens of regulatory capture for the subsidy-hungry forces of Big Corn.

But I'm wondering how one would go about doing this. For one thing, I don't know much about the procedural mechanics of eliminating a committee or demoting it to subcommittee status. But whatever those mechanics are, won't the Senators on those committees fight like crazy to protect their power? I'd imagine that they and agricultural interests would be fighting with all their might and main to prevent this from happening, while the rest of Congress would feel blase enough about Agricultural Committee elimination to be bought off. That's how regulatory capture works.

Of course, I'd like to believe otherwise. So how do we do this?

[Those who haven't heard the can opener joke should click here. I'm wondering which of the academic jokes I know are in-jokes and which are widely known.]

The Oil Ran On Time For Mooseolini

Todd Purdum's Vanity Fair article on Sarah Palin should've been edited down to a lower words-to-new-info ratio. There's not a whole lot that's new there if you've been following this stuff. As you might expect, McCain people are dissing on her off the record but unwilling to say anything publicly, for fear of being attacked by the pro-Palin echo chamber that they and their right-wing media allies created.

Palin has provided plenty of fodder for cultural and political analysis, but the strictly economic reason why someone like her could somehow get picked as VP in summer 2008 is captured by this line:

Rising oil prices provided an added lift. Palin was able to increase the annual distribution from the state’s Permanent Fund to about $3,000 per resident, almost double the amount received the previous year. She could be a fiscal conservative and a big spender all at the same time.

It's not hard to maintain high approval ratings in your state and generally be regarded as successful when the earth and the global economy are combining to pour forth vast rivers of money. Especially when the circumstances that make you look so good -- $100/barrel oil -- are dragging down all of your competition.

The Marginal Democrat is Still Marginal

Norm Coleman's gracious decision not to make yet another round of fruitless legal challenges to Al Franken's victory gives the Dems a "magical" 60th vote in the Senate. But of course, the day after Joe Biden swears in the former SNL writer, very little will be different from the day before. The 60th vote in the Senate will have moved from being Olympia Snowe to either Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, or Arlen Specter. The Republican party will require another drubbing in order to put the relevant Senate vote at someone reasonable; if Voinovich, Gregg, Bond, Martinez, Burr, and Bunning are all replaced by Dems, while Dodd, Bennett, and Lincoln all hold on, the sixtieth vote will still be Blanche Lincoln. Byron Dorgan, probably the most populist red-state Senator, would still be five votes away from sixty. Dems would have to (a) defeat David Vitter, (b) invent a Time Machine to let them go back and pick different HHS and DHS Secretaries, (c) hope that Chuck Grassley decides he's tired of feeling like a NAIL and retires, (d) hope to defeat one of the remaining incumbents in Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, or Utah, and (e) hope all of the winning Democrats are more liberal than Byron Dorgan just to get a sixtieth Senator who's more liberal than Claire "I hope we can fix the [already solicitous of coal interests] cap and trade so it doesn't unfairly punish businesses and families in coal dependent states" McCaskill. There's just not that much that's going to change with Al Franken's victory.

All of which is to say that the fact that sixty votes has become the norm to do anything in the Senate—appoint FEC nominees, pass basically any legislation, confirm judges—is highly unusual and ought to be done away with. If it's not possible to have a filibuster without seeing it abused, then abolish the filibuster or the Senate. The fiftieth Democratic Senator at the moment is probably the aforementioned McCaskill, who for all my carping is decent for a red-state Senator, and after 2011 it would probably be someone like Jim Webb in the worst case and Barbara Mikulski in the best case. That would be change we could believe in.

You Read More Novels Than Me

A couple years ago, I realized that my friends outside academia were reading many more books than I was. A former grad school classmate who had gone off to work some boring job in New York was reading a novel a week. I look over at Pandagon and Amanda is tossing up book reviews at a steady clip. This post was occasioned by the many bloggers I know who are reading Infinite Jest this summer. I am not.

There are still things I read. Like David Lewis' "New Work For A Theory Of Universals", which I finished while staying overnight at Heathrow two weeks ago. And Tom Kelly's paper on epistemic disagreement. And a bunch of other stuff that's important for my job, like this collection of essays on Thus Spoke Zarathustra that I reviewed for NDPR. (For the most part, it wasn't very good.)

Please don't feel sneered at! I admire and envy your interest and ability to read all the amazing and wonderful things you do. I read all this contemporary metaphysics and epistemology mostly because it helps me build myself into a more effective machine for turning hard liquor into journal articles. And I enjoy it, because I enjoy philosophy. My job suits me very well. But I'm kind of impressed by all you people who read novels and short story collections and essays written by people from worlds without tenure. I just read work-related stuff, and then I drink and dance and do things that allow me to make animal noises. Or blog.

The Final Vote Count

I'm not very worried about the roll call on Waxman-Markey. As with trade agreements, this is one of those votes that's incredibly tough for Members in competitive districts. Everyone is terrified that by next summer, the economy will be doing slightly better, but not better enough that people feel it, and that the improved economy will drive up gas prices again (which are already getting close to $3/gallon where I live). This leads to the 30 second add about how Jane Q. Congressmen voted to raise gas prices, force neighborhoods to put up solar panels, make traffic worse, take away your foot massager, and so on. No one wants to face that. So the White House probably wanted a final vote that was as close to 218-217 as they could get. Considering there are at least two nay votes from the left—DeFazio and Kucinich—Dems will probably have a 5-10 vote cushion once the bill comes out of conference.

Why Ricci Means Liberals Shouldn't Feel Bad About Waxman-Markey

It's worth noting that the original Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not cover state and local governments, and required amendment in 1972 after Congress found that police and fire departments remained highly segregated. Likewise, the law signed by Lyndon Johnson did not mention "disparate impact", and it was not until the mid-70s that Congress followed the Warren Court's innovations on this front. If employment discrimination laws from the 1960s still existed today, the city New Haven wouldn't have thrown out the results of theor promotion exam, since there would have been no grounds for a lawsuit to dispute an exam that was in theory race-neutral but discriminatory in practice.

This is the sort of story that makes me think Ezra is right to critique the Big Bang Theory of Legislation. Once the political establishment agrees that something is a problem, the tendency is improve on existing legislation rather than unroll it entirely. To wit, while George W. Bush engaged in some rollback of environmental regulation, he was unable to fully unwind everything accomplished by Bill Clinton, meaning that the current state of environmental regulation is somewhat to the left of where they were when Ronald Reagan took office (and, it should be noted, George H.W. Bush signed amendments to strengthen the Clean Air and Clear Water Acts). And under Obama they will probably shift leftward again. Sure, Waxman-Markey has lots of problems, but once it's passed, Congress will take another bite at the apple, probably within a decade.

Height Taxes: In Which The Utilitarian Eats Mankiw's Counterexample With Rawlsian Mustard

I was traveling when Matt linked Greg Mankiw and Matthew Weinzierl's paper on why utilitarians should support a height tax, so I didn't get a chance to dig into the whole thing at that time. But now I have, and it's looking to me like a height tax would be a good thing, when considered on its own as a piece of fiscal and social policy. I'm less impressed with Mankiw's attempt to use this as a counterexample to utilitarianism. Supporting a height tax might seem like a bitter pill to swallow, but the empirical considerations in Mankiw's paper end up making it quite tasty.

Here's how Mankiw's argument goes: Utilitarians want to use taxation to push incomes towards equality, because of the diminishing marginal utility of money. (Mankiw is right that we utilitarians generally like this -- extra money does much more for a poor person's happiness than a rich person's, so moving money down the income scale by progressive taxation will generate more happiness, and that's what utilitarians are all about.) However, insofar as income levels are correlated with effort, this sort of taxation will have negative effects on people's effort, and you don't want that because people expending less effort results in the creation of less awesome. So if you can find something that's correlated with income, but which is disconnected from effort, you have a reason to tax it. And it turns out that height is like that. So on a utilitarian view, height should be taxed. But taxing height? That's crazy! And in the view of one of the authors, this is a reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism.

I was struck with the weirdness of a height tax the first time I heard about it. But I was also quite struck by these numbers from early in Mankiw and Weinzierl's paper:

Judge and Cable (2004) report that “an individual who is 72 in. tall could be expected to earn $5,525 [in 2002 dollars] more per year than someone who is 65 in. tall, even after controlling for gender, weight, and age.” Persico, Postlewaite, and Silverman (2004) find similar results and report that "among adult white men in the United States, every additional inch of height as an adult is associated with a 1.8 percent increase in wages." Case and Paxson (2006) write that "For both men and women...an additional inch of height [is] associated with a one to two percent increase in earnings."

Updating the Judge and Cable result to 2009 money, the difference between being 5'5" and 6 feet adds up to $6,568 per year, even with the gender, weight, and age controls in place. One study explains this in terms of beneficial self-esteem effects coming from being the tall kid in adolescence, while another explains it in terms of childhood nutrition that affects a bunch of useful abilities like cognitive ability that actually cause the salary difference. Either way, taxing height would seem like a good idea to a utilitarian social planner. Taxing height wouldn't reduce anyone's effort, and unless parents decided to feed their children less to make them shorter or something ridiculous like that it wouldn't reduce total productive capacity in any significant way.

Even if height ends up being correlated with something particularly useful like cognitive ability, explaining both of these things in terms of childhood nutrition starts making a height tax look benign. Let's run an argument kinda like one Rawls uses in A Theory of Justice. Does any one child deserve to be fed and cared for better than another child? Of course not! All children equally deserve good nutrition and care from their parents. If the differences between the rich and poor come from the fact that the rich were well-fed as children while the poor were ill-fed, we have no reason to leave income levels where they are. "You deserve to make less money than him, because of differences resulting from how were fed poorly as a child while he was fed well" is just madness.

Some people might want to push this argument further and say that we have positive reasons to undo differences that come from factors like childhood nutrition. Being a utilitarian, I'm not quite going to go there. But I'm going to ride the Rawlsian point far enough to say that there's no reason to maintain these income disparities. When you think about how much extra money tall people make, and the causes of the salary differences, the reasons for opposing a height tax lose their force. The Rawlsian point undercuts our anti-height-tax intuitions, so we have no reason to oppose a height tax. And then it's time for utilitarian considerations regarding the diminishing marginal utility of money to do the positive work, and push us to a height tax.

(Lots of people are probably freaked out by a height tax because we're generally freaked out when the government treats people differently because of uncontrollable bodily attributes like skin color and gender. It's interesting to look at affirmative action policies in this light. It's definitely wrong for the government to entrench unfair systems by treating different bodies differently. But is it okay for the government to treat different bodies differently to overturn unfair systems? Well, people disagree. But make no mistake -- when you look at the empirical data, that's what a height tax would be doing, and there's at least some support for that sort of thing.)

In the end, I'm unimpressed by the height tax argument against utilitarianism. Sure, height taxes are counterintuitive before you think about the relevant empirical data. But I feel like the content of Mankiw and Weinzierl's study undermines the anti-utilitarian punchline.

And it's not that utilitarianism is the most intuitive ethical theory. There's plenty of places where it looks counterintuitive -- 90% of people go against it in the fat man version of the trolley problem. One of the papers I'm presenting in my current tour around the country is on how to defend utilitarianism despite its counterintuitiveness. But if Mankiw was trying to throw a counterexample at utilitarianism, well, it's among the easier ones to outsmart.

Good Times

Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) seems determined to read out loud the 300 pages of amendments added to Waxman-Markey late last night, in an effort to stall until. Apparently no parliamentary rule exists to get the Leadership to shut up at the very end of debates.

Awesome. You can watch it all on C-Span.

Friday Kitsch Cover (Michael Jackson Edition)

The King of Pop managed to inspire covers across genres. Here's Alien Ant Farm paying tribute with "Smooth Criminal", which includes visual references to almost everything Michael.



There's another version here with embedding disabled.

Leave your nominations for next week's Kitsch Cover in the comments.

Scalia Finds an Acorn

In other War on (Certain Classes of People Who Use Certain) Drugs news, the Supreme Court ruled that drug lab analysts must testify in person, and not merely submit signed and notarized documents to the court as evidence. This is one of those cases where Scalia, who takes a rather bright-line view of the Confrontation Clause, ends up on the side of the civil libertarians, while Breyer, who frequently seems to view his job as a Supreme Court Justice to play technocrat-in-chief, joined Kennedy's dissent which points out significant policy impact this decision will have. I haven't really thought too long about the legal or policy merits of forcing analysts to testify yet. Still, if you take the view that the police state has gone too far in enforcing drug laws and that any reduction in police powers or complications in prosecuting drug crimes is a good thing, today was a good day.

Deep Thought

This Village snickering isn't any more entertaining now that the target is a Republican. There are two wars, a civil uprising in Iran, and Congress is trying to move major legislation on health care and energy. Can we, you know, not run the emails now that the deed is done, and just do something else?

I'm looking at you, Talking Points Memo, among others.

Nice Work, White House Press Corps

The junior high school-level behavior of the DC press wasn't limited to being upset that Nico Pitney got to ask a question. In proof that the U.S. does not have a monopoly on thin-skinned journalists, the pearl-clutching that followed yesterday's press conference managed to generate negative press abroad. The headline to this article in the Chilean newspaper La Tercera, the second-largest newspaper in Chile, reads "U.S. Press criticizes photograph of Chilean journalists with Obama". The first paragraph translates as follows:

The American press reacted with surprise and a critical tone to a single photo-op Chilean journalists, accompanying [Chilean] President Michele Bachelet on her trip to the United States and Mexico, staged yesterday in the White House.

CNN, Fox News, and the WSJ are called out specifically. Many thanks to those august news organizations for giving our country a good name around the globe. Thankfully, Obama managed to say some nice things about our guests' fiscal management of their copper-generated surpluses, so at least someone was a gracious host.

(Photo of teenagers dancing "La Cueca", the official national dance of Chile, by yours truly)

Where In The World Is Mark Sanfordiego?

Now he's saying he was in... Argentina? This is rapidly becoming a total freak show.

The Simplest Explanation is Usually Correct

Occam's Razor suggests that you don't need to come up with complicated narratives to explain the slow decline of Barack Obama's approval rating from the low-mid 60s to the high 50s. Over time, it will become more and more difficult to claim that George W. Bush's presidency is the reason things are still bad today. In addition, while we seem to be out of the catastrophic moment between September 2008 and March 2009, the number of people who say the economy is doing poorly is on the rise again. And no one else believes it's getting better. Because, let's face it, it's not. It's not immediately clear that if economy were doing worse, Obama would be doing better; economic determinism isn't always the way to go, but it's frequently a decent description of the state of the world.

Pressing The Advantage

New polling shows really intense dislike of the Republican Party among Latinos, with 8% holding a positive opinion of the GOP while 86% have an unfavorable opinion. With Democrats, the numbers are 59% favorable, 28% unfavorable. This is, of course, a subsample which probably has a big margin of error, but even so the results are striking. I'm sure that the ridiculous attacks on Sotomayor from right-wing talk show host types are a big contributor to these sweet numbers.

This shouldn't make Democrats any less aggressive in pursuing Latino support in the short-term. If these numbers are right, lots of Latinos are listening to Democratic voices (or at least, voices critical of Republicans) with a newly sympathetic ear. They'll be more ready to absorb new criticisms of the Republican Party now in a way they weren't before, and it's a window of opportunity that can be used to deepen Democratic support and spread the good word about core Democratic positions.

Pitch Counts

Scott Lemieux directs us to the James/Posnanski colloquy, and Rob Neyer's response. Some thoughts:

• It's almost certainly true that there is nothing special about the 100-pitch limit. The most exhaustive analysis I can recall is Keith Woolner's 2002 articles (Part I, Part II). The punchlines of Woolner's study are (a) the real danger zone starts at around 110 pitches for low-workload pitchers and 130 pitches for high workload pitchers, and (b) yes, Virginia, longer outings do lead to more injuries.
  
• That said, Nate Silver (there's that name again) has done some analysis which shows the age at which pitchers mature is younger than previously thought. Once a starter makes it through age 23, he's probably as healthy as he's ever going to be. Almost every pitcher carries the risk of having their elbow or shoulder fall apart, but it's no greater for a 24 year-old than a 28-year old. If Nolan Ryan and the Rangers are trying to teach 20-year old prospects to throw 130 pitches, that's probably a bad idea, but teaching a 27-year old journeyman to go one more inning is worth doing.
  
• In a semi-related vein, there is no evidence that the five-man rotation improves pitcher effectiveness. This is separate from the question of whether or not the five-man rotation reduces injury risk, for which I have yet to see a rigorous study.
• In addition to the decline in innings pitched by starters, we've also seen a decline in multi-inning relief outings. The long-reliever is basically extinct; instead, managers seem to prefer having a seven-man or eight-man bullpen and let each pitcher throw at full speed for only an inning at a time. While this may allow marginal relievers to be more effective, it forces teams to carry more substitutes who can play multiple defensive positions, which probably reduces offensive potential.

If I were an American League GM, here's how I'd use this information:

• Set a pitch count limit of 95 for any pitcher age 23 and under.
  
• Return to the four-man rotation throughout the majors and minors. This replaces the thirty or so starts by the fifth starter with eight stars from each of the teams' front four pitchers—a significant improvement.
  
• In the low minors, use "paired starters"—two pitchers scheduled for the same day, each of which will throw 85-100 pitches. In the high minors, relax the pitch count limits for older prospects and journeymen, up to 110-115 pitches, or higher for pitchers who can maintain velocity and effectiveness, up to 125-130 pitches.
• Any phenom who makes the major leagues before age 23 has to keep to the pitch limit, perhaps being the "paired starter" with a veteran on his last legs who has to keep to a lower pitch count (think John Smoltz).
• Use the reduction in pitching staff size to bring on a full-time DH. At present, almost every team uses a DH who could play in the field, and on occasion does. Only the Red Sox (Ortiz), White Sox (Thome), and Indians (Hafner) have yet to see their DH take the field, though several teams have near-full time hitters. This should result in a significant offensive boost.
• Replace three one-inning relievers with two long relief men. These pitchers would almost always be called on to pitch in games where one team is significantly ahead or behind, so while they may be less effective because they expect to pitch two or three innings, those innings would likely be in low-leverage situations.
• Keep three or four one-inning fireballers to pitch in close games. Use these pitchers only when one team is ahead by two runs or fewer.

Even if this hypothetical pitching staff had a veteran/phenom pair, it would only have ten or eleven pitchers. That would free up two or three roster slots for more niche position players—a slick fielding shortstop to help preserve a small lead at the end of the game, a speedster to come in as a pinch runner in the late innings, a backup middle infielder who can take some of the stress of the shortstop and second basemen, etc.

My Thoughts On Health Care Reform

We're going to look back at this week as the moment everyone freaked out needlessly, as the Senate Finance Committee—the rightmost pole in the health care debate—moved its plan further rightward, scaling back coverage and public intervention. Meanwhile, the House hasn't budged and expects to produce a bill with a public option. The final bill will be something in between; my guess, it will be the Senate bill plussed up a tiny bit, perhaps with a somewhat hobbled public plan, or one limited to individuals under a certain income threshold. A half dozen house liberals and a similar number of Blue Dogs will vote against it. In the Senate, no Republican will vote for it except Olympia Snowe. Every Democrat, including Ted Kennedy, Arlen Specter, and the newly-seated Al Franken, will vote for the bill.

In between now and then, it's going to be a long, hot summer in Washington DC.

Friday Kitsch Cover

The PS 22 Chorus covers Journey's "Don't Stop Believing":



Leave your nominations for next week's Kitsch Cover in the comments.

Collin Peterson: A Democrat Worth Losing?

Conditions where I'd like to see a Republican defeat a Democrat in the US House are pretty rare. But looking at Matt's post on Minnesota's Collin Peterson, the chairman of the House Agricultural Committee who is blocking climate change legislation, I'm thinking that he's the sort of Democrat whom I'd like to see beaten by a Republican in the next election. Sure, the Republican would probably be insane, but the Agricultural Committee chair would then pass over to someone who doesn't think, in direct contradiction to the NOAA's estimates, that climate change is a good thing that will help farmers achieve greater crop yields.

The next chair might be Ag Committee Vice Chair Tim Holden of Pennsylvania, who isn't anybody's lefty dream, but who at least supports the Kyoto protocols (which Peterson opposes.) There's also the off chance that some kind of Waxmania goes off and we get a surprise lefty chairman, but I have no idea whether that's possible. Especially on a relatively conservative committee like Agriculture, it would probably be harder to get.

Peterson is a pretty terrible Democrat down the line. He has a 0% NARAL rating, was one of the seven who voted against Obama's stimulus plan, and was one of the founding Blue Dogs. Guys like this are far enough to the right that they only vote with us when we don't need them. If the House were in jeopardy, we'd need him for a variety of purposes, but that's not our current situation.

Unfortunately, Peterson has won re-election in his last several contests by pretty huge margins, even in the conservative 7th district. If there's an available primary challenger from the area, I'd love to have someone to give money to.