The subpoena was issued on January 30th, Eric Holder was confirmed on February 3rd, and the subpoena was rescinded on February 25th. There are a lot of things you can criticize the Obama Justice Department for, but this is not one of them. Looks to me like they actually did solve this problem.

If you think that the extra costs we spend in the U.S. on health care go to doctors or for better treatment, you're sadly mistaken. Approximately 30% of the costs go directly to the insurance industry. Another 14% are spent by hospitals on staff whose sole job is to file insurance claims. That's right, almost half our costs are administrative in nature.

I find it sad that right-wing politicians have convinced you of an idea that has no basis in fact. The direct costs of tort are negligible: 0.46%, according to the recent estimates. [1] While you might assert that the indirect costs of defensive medicine are higher, you have no way to prove that this is the case. Indeed, there is a lack of statistical correlation between the states with lower health costs and the states with tort caps. And while correlation does not imply causation, lack of correlation does imply lack of causation.

By the way, Canada has more tort per capita than the U.S. They also have lower infant mortality rates, higher life expectancies, higher cancer survival rates, and lower costs. Please, tell me how my evidence is wrong and how litigation really is destroying the system. I'll be especially persuaded by the anecdotal testimony of some doctor bitching and moaning about his malpractice insurance costs.

(FYI, don't get surgery in Texas. If the surgeon accidentally cuts your balls off because he switched your chart with someone else's, the most you'll be able to get is $250k. And just think, since the cap was passed in 2003, the state has seen its costs rise more than anyone else's. Tort "reform," indeed.)

[1] G.F. Anderson et al., "Health Spending in the United States and the Rest of the Industrialized World," Health Affairs 24, no. 4 (2005): 903-914.

What? Sensationalistic libertarian FUD on Slashdot? Why, I never!

Like I said, the Lewin group is a wholly-owned subsidiary of United Health Care. Their stated agenda is to prevent health care reform, and even they're not claiming that it will shut down the private market.

What? The health care industry has already spent tens of billons fighting reform. The federal government has spent nothing, unless you include the salaries of the president and Democratic representatives. Besides, a poll was released today by AARP that suggested that 79% of all people are in favor of a public option.

For 44 cents, you can send a letter from Maine and have it arrive in Hawaii in three days or less. FedEx and UPS would charge you at least $5. How is the USPS doing poorly? Also, for the record, the public option would be a quasi-public entity as well.

You're missing the point. By law, those funds will be kept separate. It would take a second law to overturn the first one. If that time ever came, you could complain about that. It doesn't make the statement that "under this bill, the federal government will pay for abortions" any less false.

It may be disingenuous, but it's much less so than making claims about death panels.

$14 trillion? You pulled that number out of your ass. No one's claiming that it will cost nearly that much. CBO estimates put it at $1 trillion over ten years.

It seems to me that you swallowed the right-wing talking points instead of spitting. Tort reform reducing costs? Best estimates put tort at 0.46% of current spending, and that includes defensive medicine. There is also no statistical correlation between states that have enacted tort reform and states with the lowest costs. Insurance portability? Great, so federal edict will override consumer protections enacted at the state level. That's very pro-states rights of you.

Let's review:
1. Even industry shills don't say that the bill contains a complete government takeover of health care.
2. There is nothing in this bill that could lead to legally-backed death panels. Their existence would require another bill.
3. There is zero federal funding of abortions in this bill. Federal funding would require another bill.
4. There will be zero illegal immigrants getting care through this bill. Doing so would require another bill.
Again, no basis in fact.

None of those "arguments" hold any water whatsoever.

Any system, not just government-run ones, has rationing. Would you spend $500,000 to keep someone alive an extra three months? If so, would you spend $1 million to keep someone alive for one month? What about $5 million to keep someone alive for a week? A billion for a day?

And actually, a little bit of "rationing" through the use of efficacy studies is important. The Mayo Clinic has some of the best health care outcomes in the country and also keep their costs low, a result of their stringent standards. Constrast this with the hospitals in McAllen, Texas, whose doctors spend three times as much as the national average and have some of the worst outcomes.

Right now, the rationing is done by private entities with no accountability to anyone, and whose sole bottom line is profit. The reality is that there is nothing in the bill that gives anyone the authority to pick winners and losers. You can say that it will all you want, but it doesn't make it so.

Well, the nonpartisan CBO would dispute that. They estimate that 11 or 12 million people will move to the public option if it existed. Even the Lewin Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of United Health Care, says that only 100 million people will move to the public option. At the same time, how do you explain UPS and FedEx's ability to compete with the USPS, despite the fact that they are legally prohibited from sending certain types of mail? The facts just aren't what you think they are.

Wrong. Though the bill allows the public option to pay for abortions, it will only do so if you pay extra premiums, premiums whose funds are by law kept completely separate from the rest of its money. In other words, zero public dollars will be used for abortions. This language has been explicitly written into the bill, and has no unelected committee could override that.

The plan specifically prevents illegal immigrants from getting coverage on the public option. I don't know what more you could ask for.

That's because the Republican plan is absolutely atrocious, and does nothing to contain costs. The growth in costs is completely unsustainable. Just 25 years ago, health care was at 8% of GDP. Five years ago, it was at 14% of GDP. Today, it's at 17% of GDP. If nothing is done right now, health care costs will swallow the federal budget and GDP by 2020. Do I care about the uninsured? Yes. Does it bother me that 62% of all bankruptcies in the U.S. are a result of health care costs, and that 80% of them have health insurance? Absolutely. Regardless, my interest here is mainly selfish.

In New Hampshire, a protester with a gun was holding a sign that said "It's time to water the tree of liberty." In case you're not familiar with the full quote to which he was referring, it is "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Not only was he not arrested, he was also invited to give an interview on a national talk show. So, still think I'm nuts?

He said nothing of the sort. I have no idea what you pulled that out of.

He didn't back Pelosi: he publicly disagreed with her. Of course, Pelosi didn't even say that critics are un-American: what she actually said was that people going to town halls and shouting down legitimate dialog are un-American. Seriously, for someone who claims to be liberal, you certainly believe an awfully-large number of fact-free right-wing talking points.

Well, it's not happening under Obama. Like I said, he's the only President in decades to even pay lip service to civil liberties, and his actions back that up.

All treaty negotiations are secret, but the treaty itself has to be voted on by Congress and is thus public. Anyone making statements along the lines of "This treaty may do x" is spreading FUD.

As for the difference between the parties, while Democrats can be bought for the right price, Republicans will do it for free. This health care situation is proof of that. A few Democratic senators may have been bought by the health care industry and are holding things up, but you also have Republican ex-governors and senators making shit up about death panels.

Over half of all Americans currently believe that the health care bill creates death panels, that it includes a government takeover of medicine, that it pays for abortions, and that it pays for health care for illegal immigrants. Each assertion has no basis in fact. A stupid populace leads to stupid policy, so I'm thinking that we might need the Fairness Doctrine again.

Give me a break. Protesters have been showing up to Obama town hall meetings with loaded guns and signs tacitly calling for his assassination, and no one's done a thing. Contrast this with Bush's town halls, where people who were wearing signs that just said "No Bush" were arrested, and protesters were shuffled to "free speech zones" miles away from the venue. Actions speak louder than words, and Obama's actions show that he's the only president in recent memory to give a damn about freedom of speech.

As for Flickr, they're a private company and they do what they want.

It's really kind of misleading to say that a guitar string is a 2D wave, or a ripple on a pond is a 3D wave. Really, there are two separate concepts: the dimensionality of the domain of the wave, and the dimensionality of the wave itself. A compression wave and a guitar string are both one-dimensional waves in a one-dimensional space. A ripple on a pond is a one-dimensional wave on a two-dimensional space. Sound in a room is a one-dimensional wave in a three-dimensional space. Electromagnetic waves are six-dimensional waves in a three-dimensional space.

Broken window fallacy. It's only "stimulating" the economy by taking money from the citizens and giving it to the defense contractors. If we cut our defense budget by 15%, we could pay for health care.

It would only be an example of the broken window fallacy in a world without externalities. The whole idea of the program is that the savings created by reducing the carbon emissions of the non-clunkers should offset the cost of destroying the clunkers. Whether that's the case is debatable.

Obama received record donations across the board. Since political money is grouped by employer, a side effect of this is that he appears to be one of the top recipients of money from every major corporation. Yet for some reason, I never hear people saying that he's a shill for the University of California (his largest 'donor'). And for the record, if you compare the per-capita employee donations for Fannie and Freddie to the per-capita donation for the U.S. as a whole, you'll find that it's a factor of two less. I'm tired of correcting this fallacy, and I get the impression I'm going to keep seeing these asinine comments until 2012.

The way that all invisibility cloaks work (at least theoretically) is that you create a structure whose materials parameters vary in such a way that it effectively performs a coordinate transformation, mapping points in the cloaked region to points outside of it. In real space, the wave curves around the object, but in transformed space, it still travels in a straight line. For electromagnetic cloaks, it is the permittivity (refractive index squared) of the structure that is engineered. I don't know much about earthquake cloaks, but I imagine that it's probably something like the shear modulus being varied.

Anyway, my point is that you can't simply overlap two separate cloaks and get one big one. The transformed geometry is a highly nonlinear function of material variation, so if you try to do that, neither cloak will work. Basically, these cloaks would have to have gaps between them to work, and since the energy of a cloak travels around its edges, it's conceivable that two cloaks separated by a narrow gap could channel energy from a large area through said gap. Anything built there would have serious problems.

I'm reminded of a modified version of that quote from The Incredibles: "When everyone's a member of the press, no one is." Regardless of the medium, we will still need professional journalists to do investigative work (a naturally long and tedious process), because even the best journalist cannot put in the requisite hours if they have another job to do. Unfortunately, TV news does little to no investigative work, which means that when the newspapers die, a major vacuum will be left in the news business. I don't know what the solution is.