So I'm the proud father of a new daughter, our first child (see pictures here), who was born very early Thursday morning. My wife was attended only by a midwife and nurses with no doctors and no drugs other than some antibiotics. Here's the odd thing-- our birth experience was completely bizarro by US standards, yet completely normal by the standards of almost every other industrialized country.

In the US, just 8% of births use midwives, yet midwives attend 90 percent of normal births in Germany and virtually all normal births in Denmark and France. There is a whole feminist view of the denial of women's autonomy involved in the history of shifting power over births in the US from a female-dominated widwife profession to a male-dominated obstretrician hierarchy, but along with the overall medicalization of birth, the changes also are part and parcel of the ridiculous costs of the US health care system. As Marsden Wagner, former director of Women's and Children's Health for the World Health Organization, recently wrote:

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Michael Ledeen -- who once told me that he only supported the Iraq War because it provided momentum and pre-positioning of American military forces to then go after Iran -- is not going to feel self-actualized until America unleashes a considerable portion of its arsenal against the nation and people of Iran.

I'm not a pacifist. I have to admit that there might be circumstances in which war with Iran is our last and only option -- but we are far, far away from that situation.

I'm particularly worried that there are bad guys in Iran who so desperately want to consolidate their political positions inside Iran that they see a hot conflict with the U.S. and/or Israel as "helpful". It's also clear that Vice President Cheney as well as his followers inside the administration and his ideological following in Washington's think tank sector want war to pump up their eroding political position.

But Ledeen, James Woolsey, Norman Podhoretz, and others want war now with Iran. They want the bombs to fly. They are obsessed with delegitimating the important diplomatic efforts of Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad, and others. They despise Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- and they are increasingly offering defamatory comments about George W. Bush himself at their small dinner parties and neocon gatherings.

Ledeen has a piece, "Talking with Iran," that has just appeared in the Wall Street Journal that tries to savage those calling for negotiations with Iran. It's embedded throughout with distortions, but it is an important case statement profiling neocon obsession with waging war against Iran as soon as possible.

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Watching the news from Iraq this week and I couldn't help but wonder: is anyone going to pay for these crimes?

How is it that innocent people can die by the hundreds and thousands thanks to policy decisions made by Americans and nobody here is held accountable.

And, no, I do not think that losing Congress or the Presidency amounts to being held accountable for mass carnage.

The worst part is that these people do not even hold themselves accountable. LBJ and McNamara suffered pangs of, I don't know, guilt, shame, anger, regret. Something.

Not this gang.

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The Onion has a pseudo-survey of what people who are trapped in subprime mortgages are planning to do. In usual Onion fashion, it is both grim and funny. But what ARE families going to do? For all their fulminations, most of the Washington crowd is focused on developing regulations to stop the next credit bubble--not to help millions who will be hurt by this one.

Bankruptcy law is the final arbiter of debtor-creditor rights, but here's an interesting asymmetry in the law: If a corporation can no longer afford the mortgage on its factory, it has powerful tools to rewrite the mortgage in bankruptcy. But if a homeowner is in exactly the same trouble following an interest rate hike, those same tools are unavailable.

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Raising expectations and then dashing them is a unique form of anti-social behavior. The "big tease" can take many forms, in many social or business settings.

It is singularly inappropriate when a government agency does it by promising relief from a restrictive policy and then, at the last minute, backing away.

That's what the FCC did to the cellphone-using public.

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One of the impacts of globalization is the increased supply of goods, services, labor, capital, and so on. I’m not gonna go all breathless, Tom Friedman-ny about it, but it’s unarguably true. And that truth carries benefits and costs.

We’re seeing one harsh aspect of the cost side of the equation play out in the China toy debacle, and this raises some deeply important caveats about the way globalization is evolving.

Where was the regulatory breakdown?

Where is the market discipline?

Why is toy production so concentrated; where’s the global risk dispersion?

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My preference ordering of the top three candidates has been Edwards, Obama, Clinton (in descending order). I'd vote for any of them rather than most any Republican in the known universe, but I'm strongly thinking of switching #2 with #3. Today in the Post we find Obama claiming an advantage over Clinton by virtue of his capacity to unify the country.

The last thing we need, at a point where the Democrats can establish a decisive margin of political power, is somebody out to unify the country. I fear that Senator Obama is turning into the DLC candidate, in all but name.

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Another heart-wrenching reminder of the link between health crises and bankruptcy.

There is a piece of disinformation circulating on the net claiming that Washington, DC is more dangerous than Iraq. BULLSHIT!! Here’s the claim:

There has been a monthly average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theatre of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2,112 deaths. That gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000 soldiers.
The firearm death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000 persons for the same period. That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in the U.S. Capital than you are in Iraq .
Conclusion: The U.S. should pull out of Washington

Now for the facts. Go here. The actual Firearms Death Rate per 100,000 is 31.2 . That makes DC 1st among 50 states and the District. [1st of 51] Not even close to the alleged figure of 80.6. But most of our troops are not dying from gunshot wounds. They are being blown to bits from roadside bombs and mines.

Oh, by the way. Guess what the death rate per 100,000 is from Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices in the District of Columbia? ZERO. The nimrods circulating the nonsense that Washington, D.C. is more dangerous than Iraq deserve a one way, all expenses paid trip to Baghdad.

So how are things in Baghdad?

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I'm coming late to Wayne Barrett's celebrated "Rudy Giuliani's Five Big Lies About 9/11," which spills detail after ugly detail about this trigger-finger blowhard's phonied-up resume, which depicts him as a hybrid of Jack Bauer and Teddy Roosevelt.

Giuliani gives revisionism a bad name. But most of the mainstream press has missed the bulk of Giuliani's sheer outrageousness.

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This page one article from the Washington Post is worth a read.

It turns out that one Linda Chavez -- the rightwinger whose bread-and-butter is using her Hispanic last name to bash liberal Latino organization, liberals, and labor unions -- has been raising tons of political money for her own (and her family's) personal use.

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The whining from Wall Street is growing louder. Those brilliant high-flying hedge fund managers are now facing the prospect of financial ruin. It seems that they are holding hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage debt, some of which is worthless, and much of which is worth considerably less than it was a few weeks ago. Since the hedge funds are heavily leveraged (they borrowed heavily to buy assets), many of them could be wiped out.

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John Edwards has made us think hard about two Americas. In a Businessweek interview released today, he makes credit cards a central issue as he reaches out to working families. Here's the exchange:

Q: As President, what would you do to help middle-class Americans reduce credit-card debt and help lower-income people avoid getting trapped by predatory credit-card lenders?

Edwards: What we're going to do is restore balance in the credit-card market. I am proposing a Borrower's Security Act that would do the following: first, require credit-card companies to disclose the true cost of making only minimum payments, as many consumers do. Second, I would restore a 10-day grace period before imposing late fees and penalty rates. Third, apply interest-rate increases to future balances only. And fourth, end the practice of universal default, where a creditor can change a borrower's terms based on their debt payments to other creditors. We also need a new consumer protection commission, which I would call the Family Savings & Credit Commission, whose job it'll be to review all the financial services products that are being marketed to families and ensure that the terms are reasonable and fairly disclosed. [The commission would] oversee all types of financial institutions whether chartered under federal or state law.

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