By the way, he's been a regular contributor here for several years, and he usually does write at length for his pieces here.

Example: his Dec. 2008 post titled Israeli Settler Pogrom Against Palestinians; CFR/Brookings Report Suggests Linking U.S. Aid to Settlement Freeze.

It's a pity that, as with several of the Cafe contributors, the tech people seem to have screwed up the availability of his archives and one has to find his past posts here through Google. Another pity is that they seem to have lost the contributor biographies they used to have when you clicked on the writer's name. (I recall one of the reasons Marshall gave for changing the software here because it was getting too cliquish and assumed knowledge of the site to comment--well it doesn't help much on that front if regular users have to explain who the columnists are and what their history here is.)

On the shortness of the post, maybe he's finally learning to do the more simplistic posts on topic that the many commenters here seem to prefer? (Now I the one being facetious.)

Top Palestinian Rules Out Race for Re-election By ETHAN BRONNER and MARK LANDLER

RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, warned on Thursday that he would not seek re-election, the latest sign that the Obama administration’s drive to broker a Middle East peace accord, one of President Obama’s key foreign policy goals, has fallen into disarray.

Mr. Abbas, 74, has threatened to step aside before, but coming immediately after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s visit to the region aimed at reviving a peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, his announcement laid bare the deepening tensions over the administration’s failure to extract an Israeli settlement freeze or any concessions from Arab leaders.

Mrs. Clinton’s visit, which she characterized as a success, sowed anger and confusion among Palestinians and other Arabs after she praised as “unprecedented” the offer by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to slow down, but not stop, construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank....

A family member put it well once. Every time someone approaches the "but they no longer have quality of life" topic regarding older people, they should think whether they would say the same thing about Stephen Hawking or Christopher Reeve (Most don't realize what a poster child Reeve was against standard living wills-those that say "don't put me on a respirator. He was on a respirator from his accident to the day he died, it's just that he could afford a real fancy portable one and could tolerate a tube that allowed him to talk.)

To think it's ok for Hawking, but not for a seventy-something, is ageism--those arguing that way are no different than the primitive societies who sent the elderly off to die in order to save resources, and those arguing that way must be made to confront that they are actually doing that. It's dishonest not to confront the totality of what one is actually advocating.

And too many of those who speak on this have no idea of how complicated the choices that actually happen often are. All the more simple blathering does is create terrible mental suffering for people making those decisions, for the rest of life, no matter what the decision, one wonders whether it was the right one--i.e., should we have tried that, we shouldn't have done that...

My condolences that you and Mr. TheraP had initiation into the club of unhappy users of our system.

As I learn more and more that helps interpret what I have experienced over decades with myself, family and friends, I see this mostly as an effect of specialization, as they become scientists of the body part or system or disease group in which they specialize, and all the high tech treatments available for whatever body part or system that is their specialty. Originally, doctors were not scientists, they were artist-craftsman/detectives dealing with keeping whole human beings operational. The latter is where the "first do no harm" oath, the former is more like this: if you are a cardiac specialist, "first do no harm to the cardiac system"--the unsaid part is "but don't worry about what that might do to the endrincology of the patient nor the patient's kidneys."

The return to prestige for the primary care type of doctor, the detective/diagnostician of the whole body, is really key to us seeing any improvement. Lots of people are fixated on insurance companies right now, but I believe getting rid of them would just be a baby step in improving the problems that all patients who have been seriously ill know. In actuality, reform of Medicare is what's probably going to help us get there. Because Medicare was such a huge giant, it's pay protocols as to practice speciality are what influenced what kind of practice doctors went into. In the end, fee-for-service is one of the main problems, much more than insurance companies, as loathsome as they are--the original HMO's way back when actually had the right idea, even though it was implemented wrong and with the wrong incentives.

While it's no longer possible for a single doctor to keep up with everything necessary now, it is possible to train doctors to be managers and interpreter of a group of specialists, to get them to work as a team, and to make sure that one specialist is not doing harm that another specialist tries to reverse and then causes harm for a third specialist....

This is especially applicable to the treatment in the last years of life. Few have doctors who can give the patient the whole implications of life extending treatment, in most cases of the hospitalized or seriously chronically ill, no one is even controlling those runaway trains going in all directions. People who haven't been through it don't know how complicated it can get and how worthless those living wills that address simple things like feeding tubes or respiratory assist can be in helping make decisions. I'm of the opinion we can't really have "the discussion" as a nation honestly, until we have a lot more doctors that can help patients understand what the actual realities are, ones that we can trust are looking after our whole bodies. Until then, any discussion is really useless abstractions and ideological rhetoricals.

We need a lot of "change" in our medical system, and it's going to take a long time. There are no miracle cures available.

Some of us who have been more interested in health care reform issues, or intimately involved in them via tortuous personal experience, discovered the big picture problem long ago, and in the process got over our fixation on the idea that killing insurance companies equals a magic pony. We spent those months and months years ago and moved on, realized that the insurance company problem is like teeny tiny step one. Yes, it's kind of frustrating to see other people go through the learning process, but that's the way it is in a democracy. I think the savviest health care reform plans take that into account, that its going to be a gradual learning process, through incremental changes, for the public to understand how fubar'ed our health system really is.

You know, if someone could wave a magic wand and we have single payer tomorrow we'd still have an awful mess on our hands. Get rid of the insurance companies tomorrow does not make us the Canadian health care system tomorrow, it's not going to work that way, we let soooo many things, actual brick and mortar things, plus many other systems and virtual things, and pay structures and employment, get built in the wrong direction. It's more like a slow "reverse course" process we have to do to get there. Especially in a democracy with such an important issue to everyone, where too much change is something some will fight to the death against.

I myself felt that Obama and Hillary were about the most identical candidates as to policy that one could imagine (just like they had nearly identical Senators as to record) there were little differences here and there on this and that which when balanced out made for equivalent candidates. The only difference I could see was that Hillary gave wingers a leg up on the attack stories and attack scenarios, but guess what, Obama suits them just fine on that front, they managed to get him to an equivalent number of nutsos freaking out and frothing at the mouth as with the Clintons in only a few months.

The whole ridiculous primary race with two groups going for the jugular struck me as ridiculous bread and circuses, I couldn't believe so many supposedly politically intelligent people on this site were falling for it, and I said so on this site more than a few times.

(The anti-Iraq thing was just nonsense, as she and he were at the same place on it after the milk was spilt, struck me that to make him into some dreamy liberal dove because he said he would have voted against Iraq but was not anti-war just anti-dumb war, and to make her into a neo-con because she voted for it but consistently and strongly criticized Bush's handling of it for years and felt it had become a dumb war.)

Not really interested in revisiting it, it still hothers me to this day that so many people can get their juices so riled about two nearly identical candidates, waste so much energy and vote based on such illusions. It bothered me a lot to see Josh Marshall et. al. feeding it, looked to me like they were doing it because it was bringing them a big audience. The whole thing was awful, and I don't feel any satisfactions from people realizing their folly.

I saw people here do stuff like make up tons of ridiculous posts about Hillary and the Obama's hating each other every day, all nonsense, then when she is appointed his Sec. of State, they disappear.

Meanwhile once in a while I would try to post something that said "hey look at this on his economic policy, do you know he's not a liberal just like Bill Clinton wasn't a liberal"?" Those kind of posts were ignored for "Hillary evil, Obama good, truth and the light" stories.

Do I have to say it simply: I don't think Hillary would have been a better president, I think she would have been equivalent. Thought I thought she might have taken a stronger role in leading health care reform, I also thought that could have backfired big time with her history, and we would likely be in the same place as we are now--the signs would just say "Hillarycare=socialism" instead of Obamacare=socialism" maybe a bit earlier. She knows the wonkery up down and backwards but that doesn't help you sell it politically...

I think him winning did the country's image a bit more good than her winning simply because he has black skin, African heritage and a name that is recognized as Islamic, that trumps a woman as president, since women leaders are not uncommon even in societies like Pakistan. That's about it.

not compunction but compulsion

Fair market value = willing buyer, willing seller, both having knowledge of all relevant facts and neither being under compunction to buy or sell.

When you are a patient who is sick or even dying and you want desperately to get well, and your doctor says you need a CAT Scan, this does not fit the fair market definition, you would pay anything for it and you are trusting your doctor with the "knowledge" part.

News Analysis: Iran’s Politics Stand in the Way of a Nuclear Deal By MICHAEL SLACKMAN Published: November 2, 2009

Though I should mention that in the past I have read suggestions/reports/polls which purport that many of the youngins' of Iran are very nationalistically/culturally patriotic (as in Persian, not Islamic Revolution) and what goes along with that is that they are also in favor of their country having a nuclear bomb.

Starting? C'mon dijamo, fess up. I know you saw the same thing I did on this site through most of 2008: quite a few self-labeled "Obama supporters" who not only willfully shut their ears to much of what he saying and promising (except for the Jon Favreau's magic speech and rally rhetoricals lifted from RFK and MLK,) but willfully pasted their own Obama creations onto his persona.

:-)

I am still constantly amazed at how honest he has turned out to be. The whole shtick he used to rise to the presidency still amazes--use fancy inspiring hope rhetoricals in rallies and speeches that are so vague they say nothing and can be taken all kinds of ways by all kinds of people, but in other venues tell people honestly straight out what your policies and politics are and only in a few instances waver from that. Tell people straight out what you honestly think, even when it gets you in trouble. And even tell people straight out that because of the nature of his speeches and his lack of record they might see things in him that are not there. But here's the kicker, the smartest move: if some people who believe in an Obama that they have created for themselves out of whole cloth, if those people want to donate time and money, it's not your problem to clear up the confusion for them, because you actually were honest about who and what you were, possbily more so than any other candidate before you, you even wrote two books about yourself, it's not your fault they were delusionally supporting you.