I know, the ads here come from an ad network and aren't selected by Josh but come on... this is a web site about national politics and I'm getting Bloomberg for Mayor ads?

This isn't actually a problem with TPMCafe, it's a problem with Bloomberg using his vast personal fortune to run for a local office.  He's going to spend $70 million this season and he won't even feel the pinch from it because he's worth billions!

Get this... I am a New York City resident and the first time I learned the name of Bloomberg's opponent, Bill Thompson, was IN a Bloomberg ad.  Bloomberg is so outspending his opponent that I only figured out his opponent's name because Bloomberg spent money to call him incompetent.

This just isn't right.  We all worry (rightly, methinks) about the influence of big donors on politics but we don't worry enough (in this age of plutocracy) about the tyranny of the self-financed campaign.  Indeed, I've even heard people argue that super rich candidates are a good bet because they have so much they can't be bought, neglecting the more pertinent question which is not who's "buying the candidate?" but "what is the candidate trying to buy?"

By the way, I recently saw a Bloomberg campaign ad on failblog.org, a Web site devoted to funny pictures of stupid things started by the people who (I think) invented LOLcats.  It's gotten ridiculous, guys.  We need public financing for campaigns at all levels and equal media access for anyone who can poll better than 10%.  The way wealth inequality has widened (and no knock on Bloomberg here, he is self-made and I respect that) we are in serious danger of letting billionaires buy whatever election they want. Even using TPMCafe to do it.

Okay, most of us around here don't support the Baucus bill but that's top be expected -- it wasn't written for us, it was written to win the support of the insurance industry because they're the ones that killled reform in the 1990s and they're ready to do it again. So, the theory went: get the insurers on board and you remove the most forceful opposition.

Well guess what, they got 90% of what they wanted out of Baucus and now the industry is not supporting it. Our side makes compromise after compromise with them and they turn on us the second they don't get their way.  This time the objection is that penalties for people who refuse to buy health insurance are too low.

Gee Karen Ignani, I'm so sorry that the law isn't toothy enough for you. How long would you like to have people incarcerated for refusing to buy your products?  Heck, let's execute them because that'll compel people to buy coverage and get us up to 100% covered by getting rid of the holdouts!

I think we've lost sight of how extraordinary the insurance industry's desire is here. If any other industry went out in public and said "Some people don't want to buy our product, their ought to be a law compelling them to" we would laugh in their faces. We would tell them to offer better products at better prices.

We've been debating the mandate around here since the primaries and I'm perfectly willing to just agree to disagree with some of you about it. But even if you think the mandate is the best idea around, you have to agree that it is, in fact, a subsidy.  You might think it's a great subsidy or one that will pay off but it is a subsidy and it's one that the health insurance lobby has thought a lot about.  The insurers are quite obviously convinced that if there's no public option available and the penalties for not buying from the private insurer are large enough that they will make money no matter what conditions are put on them as providers.  They claim they'll stop rescinding people's coverage, stop denying people with pre-existing conditions and will even give up caps on treatments so long as the US government forces people to buy their products.

This is why, by the way, the insurers are so against a real public option. It has to be their products that people buy.  No choices. Not even legally. And the consequences for not complying have to be serious.

Of course, in the Baucus bill as it stands, the consequences are already serious.  If you get caught without insurance the penalties are already high enough that you'd feel pretty silly -- you'd have no insurance and you'll have paid a fine that's more than what you likely would have spent on insurance premiums. Not good enough for the insurance lobbyists though. They want something draconian.

If we pass this mandate without a real public option then we're just writing the industry a check. But without the mandate, says the industry, everyone's premiums will go up because of the "Free rider" problem -- people won't buy coverage until they get sick!

Two things: First, we could solve that by regulating the premiums. We don't have to let them jack rates. Second, we don't actually know that there's a free rider problem. If there is, let the insurance companies document it and lets put their evidence up to scrutiny.  We're right now legislating based on an industry's self-serving and hypothetical claim.

There's a really good reason why the free rider problem might not manifest itself -- fear of serious sudden illness or injury.  Say you're walking around without health insurance and get hit by a bus.  How are you actually going to purchase insurance before the ambulance gets there? Exactly. Not an issue. People don't not have health insurance because they think they can get away with freeloading. They don't have it because it's unaffordable or doesn't offer enough benefits for the price charged. The real solution to the free rider problem isn't "make a law" it's more generous coverage at better rates.

But the insurance lobby doesn't want you to think that way.

Afghanistan is one of those things I just feel guilty about because after 9/11 I supported it. I thought it was a necessary war and that it would end quickly and would wind up bringing Osama bin Laden to justice and so far as the Taliban was concerned, I really thought that Air Force and Navy bombardment couldn't happen to a more worthy group of guys. I was angry and out for a quick solution to the Al-Qaeda problem. Oleeb thinks through the issue of what we should do now quite clearly here.

At no point in my early support for this war did I think that we'd be talking about this in 2009.  I was surprised, in fact, that we were talking about it in 2004. We tend to blame the continued Afghanistan war on the distraction we created in Iraq. While I agree with that, I've also come to believe that we blew it by invading Afghanistan in the first place. At the time it seemed we had no other options. But we did. We could have isolated and contained Afghanistan rather than attacking it and we could have led a global police effort to catch bin Laden and to disrupt Al-Qaeda, which I think would have worked.  The global community didn't disrupt the Italian mafia by sending in the Marines, it was police work that did the job. We treated Al-Qaeda as if it were a state power when it's really a criminal organization.

There are two reasons, I'm told, why we're still in Afghanistan and neither of them compel me to support this war or even to support a temporary troop increase.

The first is that leaving Afghanistan as a failed state is bad for our security. That failed states become havens for terrorists was the mantra of this decade and it seems to be right. But it's not as if there are no failed states other than Afghanistan.  Terrorists could as easily spring from Somalia as from Afghanistan. Are we to invade and occupy all failed states in the name of our security?

Besides, there's another problem with this: terrorists can also function, and function well, in established, stable states. The fact is, terrorism can flourish anywhere. There can be terrorists in Kabul but also terrorists in Toronto or in Columbus, Ohio. So I really don't buy the idea that pulling our troops out of Afghanistan exposes us to any danger that we're not exposed to already.

The second reason we stay in Afghanistan is that we're afraid of "looking weak" and losing. As much as I hate to admit it, American military power is important to our role in the world.  But are we a little too sensitive to the notion that people might realize the truth, which is that we can't do everything as if we were a nation of powerful magicians? What do we think will happen if we pull out of Afghanistan?  Do we think that terrorists are the world will decide that they can act with impunity?  That won't happen because the kind of power we have that they fear isn't the kind of power you use to invade a country -- they're afraid of Navy Seals coming to get them in the night or, more likely, afraid that they and everyone they know will be blown to bits  by a remote control plane when they throw their daughter a wedding. Does anyone seriously think that China is going to say "Oh look, the US pulled out of Afganistan, what wimps!" and then invade Taiwan?

Fact is, we don't have anything to prove on the power front and the world would probably appreciate it if we stopped acting like we did. Hence the Nobel for Obama.

We don't need this war, there are far better uses for the money and there are better ways that we can use our military to keep us safe.  Time to stand down and to let Afghanistan either stand up on it's own or... well, or not. I'm happy to leave that challenge to them.