Brian Galle argues the Supreme Court could uphold healthcare reform’s individual mandate under Congress’s power to levy taxes, and also firmly limit the Commerce Clause:

In brief, upholding the statute under the taxing power would allow the Court to issue a genuine holding—not just dictum—narrowing the scope of the Commerce power, while at the same time avoiding the unpredictable mess that invalidating the statute would bring. In addition to potentially flammable political blowback, tossing the Act in whole or part could throw the health sector — 1/6 of the economy, and even larger share of many state budgets— into total chaos. At argument, Justice Kennedy sounded ready to reap that whirlwind if that was what it took to make his point about the limits of federal power, but maybe he doesn’t have to.

Interesting argument.

Simple’s iPhone app was just released. Simple, if you haven’t seen them, is a bank started by Alex Payne to be a bank people will love. I’ve been following the company for quite a while now, so I am excited to se them launching.

Shawn Blanc has some new t-shirts available, and they are awesome. What else needs said? Go get one. Or two. It’s really up to you.

Stijn Debrouwere argues newspapers are being disrupted by the web’s proliferation of new sources for information and entertainment:

Here’s my hypothesis. Educated people over forty have come to assume that journalism, whether on television, radio, print or the web, is the most convenient way to get answers to questions like what’s on the television, what’s going on in my neighborhood, who got elected, who is making a mess of things, any new music I should hear? Ask any of those questions to the baby boomer middle class, as the Knight Foundation did, and they’ll hand you a newspaper.

The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.

If there’s one thing you read this week, make it this piece.

Ben Brooks on how to make writing on the web sustainable:

I could sit here all day and talk about why I think the current model is broken, but that solves nothing. I personally only see one way forward: asking readers to support you.

It’s the direct model, it’s old-fashioned, but it works. If blogs are no longer driven by page views, then we — as a whole — get better content, content we as readers deserve.

I completely agree. I think the difficulty, though, is whether the payment readers make is actually for the writing—e.g., the site is gated off and paying readers get access—or whether the site is still public and can be read for free, and readers pay simply to support a writer they really like.

Shawn Blanc took the second route when he began writing full-time, with a few nice extras thrown in for paying readers. While it’s worked well for Shawn, I’m not sure this model will work for a significant number of writers. If a site’s articles are still available for free, what percentage of readers will pay? For many writers, it may end up being very few.

A larger part of the problem, I think, is people are less willing to pay to support a site when the reading experience isn’t that good. Reading through an RSS feed on the web—and having to enter your credit card number to begin paying—isn’t a spectacular experience. A well-designed reading app on the iPad, though, with one tap needed to begin supporting writers, well, that could be a different story.

Instacast 2.0 is out, and it has a new pricing model:

I thought a lot about this issue and decided to change the pricing model. The first thing I will do is to lower the initial price from $1.99 to $0.99. I hope this will convince more people to try out the app. Second, I added an in-app purchase for features that novice users won’t need most likely, but power-users will appreciate when using the app on a day-to-day basis. It’s called Instacast Pro and it’s for sale at $1.99. For now it includes the ability to manage playlists, add your own bookmarks, configure settings on a podcast-by-podcast basis and receive push notifications for new episodes.

I hope this is a success for Vemedio. Not only is Instacast my favorite podcasting app, but this is an issue I’ve been thinking a lot about, so I’m glad to see someone experimenting with pricing. App sales alone is not sufficient in many cases to sustain a business, unfortunately.

Peter Feaver on the Obama campaign’s bin Laden advertisement:

The critique of Romney was fundamentally dishonest in the way that campaign ads often are. The ad cherry-picked Romney quotes and deployed them out of context. The valid Romney observation that defeating al Qaeda would require a comprehensive strategy, not one limited to hunting down a single man, got distorted by the Obama scriptwriters into a hesitation to pursue Bin Laden. And the valid Romney observation that it was a mistake to boast in advance about conducting unilateral strikes against the territory of our Pakistani partner got distorted into an unwillingness to act in America’s national interest.

Republicans have been angry, as expected, and Democrats have responded that the right’s sudden righteousness on political advertisements is a bit rich considering the Bush campaign’s proclivity for using national security as a club to beat Kerry over the head in 2004, which is true.

But wasn’t Obama supposed to be above this kind of crap? It was Obama, after all, that spoke of learning to “disagree without being disagreeable” when he announced his candidacy in 2007. I suppose those words don’t matter much when there’s an election to win, though. Change we can believe in, I guess.

When a Foreign Ministry spokesman was asked to explain why Chen Guangcheng had been imprisoned in his own home, this was his reply:

“After Chen Guangcheng was released from prison, he is a free person as far as I know. He has been living in his own house,” Mr. Liu stated. Challenged on that, he responded: “That’s what you said. As far as I know, he’s living in his hometown.” He also deflected a spate of other questions about Mr. Chen and Liu Xiaobo’s wife, Liu Xia, mostly saying that China’s legal system ensures proper treatment of all citizens.

“That’s what you said.” Asked about a fact that every one is aware of, a fact whose validity is unchallenged, the Chinese government’s official position is to pretend it doesn’t exist. Rather than deal with the reality and therefore that the government imprisoned a man for concocted crimes and, when set free, imprisoned him again in his own home, the Chinese government pretends that isn’t the case.

That’s what an authoritarian government that tries to mold what people perceive as reality into something convenient for them looks like. That’s this government’s strategy for maintaining power—deny inconvenient truths, prevent people from learning of them (the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, Liu Xiaobo, Chen Guangcheng), and focus people’s attention on what you want them to look at: economic growth and, when convenient, “meddling” from foreign aggressors.

And that’s why the Chinese government is so afraid of Chen. Here is a blind, self-taught lawyer who escaped cordons and fences around his home, went to the nation’s capital, and evaded police. He revealed the Chinese state—the all-powerful Chinese state—to be incapable of finding a blind man with an injured foot in Beijing. In one night, he undermined the government’s work to deny what they do to people who are inconvenient to them, and what has been done to people as a result of the nation’s one-child policy. In other words, he not only embarrassed the government, he threw their abuses back in their faces, and in the world’s face.

Martin Weller:

So I would argue that the answer to the first question above, as to whether new approaches such as blogging constitute scholarly activity, is an emphatic yes. Which leads us to a more problematic question: How should we recognize it?

Weller argues that blogging should constitute scholarly activity for faculty at universities, but I have a different suggestion: blogging should count toward credit for students. Students should have every incentive to begin heavily researching something and writing about it, and if they do so well enough, it should absolutely count toward their degree. Odds are they will learn much more by doing their own self-directed work than they could in a classroom, the results of their research is public, and they can use it to tap into the community for their area of work.

Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese lawyer who escaped house arrest and fled to the U.S. embassy in Beijing, has left the embassy for medical treatment and has been reunited with his family after U.S. negotiators received assurances from the Chinese government that Chen and his family would be safe and that he could continue studying law at a university.

Chen, though, now says he left the embassy due to threats to his family:

But in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from his hospital bed late Wednesday evening, Mr. Chen said American officials told him while he was under American protection that Chinese authorities had threatened to beat his wife to death unless Mr. Chen left the American embassy, and that Mr. Chen therefore left under coercion.

U.S. officials deny this and say that, instead, his wife would be sent back to Shandong, their hometown, by the Chinese government (and no one could offer her protection there) unless Chen left the embassy to see her. That may well be the case, but U.S. officials seem to be intentionally clouding the issue. Perhaps Chinese officials never explicitly threatened to beat his wife to death, but that doesn’t matter—sending her back to Shandong is threat enough, because once there, she will be under control of local police—the same local police which placed Chen, his wife and daughter under house arrest and beat him. Threatening to send her back with no protection is little different than explicitly threatening to beat her to death.

Chen has also now stated that he regrets losing American protection and now wants to leave China for safety abroad. Chen’s reversal seems contradictory, though, because when he arrived at the U.S. embassy last week, he was said to not want asylum, but rather assurances from the Chinese government of his safety and the safety of his family, which he has received. Moreover, while leaving the embassy for the hospital, Chen reportedly told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “I would like to kiss you,” apparently in reference to her advocacy on his behalf and on the behalf of other human rights activists. Perhaps he simply wanted to thank her for her work, despite the circumstances of his leaving the embassy. That’s possible, but it seems to be a strange comment to make while leaving the embassy’s protection under duress.

Or perhaps Chen was threatened later, after arriving at the hospital and after U.S. officials had left. That seems plausible and would fit with the Chinese government’s interests: make promises for his safety and future so he’ll leave the embassy, and once he’s outside U.S. protection, make threats so he’ll shut up and the problem can go away. Of course, Chen kept talking, and did so to international media, no less, so who knows.

This story has taken a very strange turn, because Chen left the embassy so abruptly, his desires have apparently flipped and now U.S. officials are disputing his account of events. I hope the U.S. acted in good faith here, and I hope that if Chen and his family are now in danger, or will be in the future, the U.S. advocates on his behalf. As the days and weeks pass, media interest in this story will pass as well, and at that point the Chinese government could have the upper hand. And it is at that point they could place him under house arrest again, or some other kind of scheme to prevent him from making trouble. We can’t let that happen.

Big thanks to Code Academy for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed. Code Academy is one of those organizations that gets me really excited, because they’re trying to do something truly meaningful—they’re helping make programming accessible to everyone, and, I believe, they’re pioneering the future of education.

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Bob Fu says the U.S. must fight for Chen Guangcheng:

This is a pivotal moment for U.S. human rights diplomacy. The United States must stand firmly with this broadly popular individual or risk losing credibility as a defender of freedom and the rule of law.

I understand being cautious about harming relations with China. But what I also understand is the Chinese government brutally represses individuals who have done absolutely nothing wrong, and uses the law as a tool to advance the government and party’s interests, rather than to provide for justice. When someone who suffers under the government’s arbitrary rule stands up to it, we should support them. And we should support them when they are silenced, too, because that’s especially when they need spoken for.

The Chinese government argues that advocating on behalf of persecuted lawyers, human rights activists and dissidents is meddling in their own domestic affairs and is an attempt to violate their sovereignty. That’s bullshit. We have every right to, in the course of our relations with a country as large and powerful as China, to demand that basic human dignity be respected, and the rule of law operate unfettered. Not only do we have a right to, we have a responsibility to recognize and oppose repression of people whose only crime is pointing out the government and party’s wrongs. It isn’t about politics or advancing our interests. It’s about respecting human dignity.

Alexis Madrigal:

The question is, as it has always been: now what?

Decades ago, the answer was, “Build the Internet.” Fifteen years ago, it was, “Build the Web.” Five years ago, the answers were probably, “Build the social network” or “Build the mobile web.” And it was in around that time in 2007 that Facebook emerged as the social networking leader, Twitter got known at SXSW, and we saw the release of the first Kindle and the first iPhone. There are a lot of new phones that look like the iPhone, plenty of e-readers that look like the Kindle, and countless social networks that look like Facebook and Twitter. In other words, we can cross that task off the list. It happened.

We now have the tools to do incredible things, but what precisely that is isn’t as obvious as it use to be. Before, the harder question was how. Now the questions we should be spending more time on are what and why.

Answering those questions is now going to provide much, much more leverage than answering the how.

Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese lawyer and human rights activist, escaped extralegal house arrest last week and is believed to be hiding in the U.S. embassy or somewhere else in Beijing. The event, and the U.S.’s involvement, could stir up tensions once again between the U.S. and China.

I hope that Chen is indeed in the U.S. embassy, because no where else is safe. Chen’s escape is highly problematic for Beijing because it makes house arrests—one of China’s favorite tools for silencing dissidents and something they’d much rather not discuss at all—very public, and it weakens the government’s perceived power. After all, if even a blind man can escape police cordons and evade capture in the nation’s capital, how capable is it?

Worse, it means how they will deal with Chen will be very public, too. Do they allow Chen to go free, and weaken their perceived strength even more? Do they put Chen in prison, and receive international condemnation? And if Chen is in the U.S. embassy, do they risk relations with the U.S. by demanding that the U.S. hand him over?

There’s no good answer for Beijing. Their preferred approach, I would assume, would be to imprison Chen and let the controversy fade away, but with his escape being such an incredible story and embarrassment to the government, that may not be possible. Moreover, the government (and party) already feels particularly wounded after Bo Xilai’s downfall, so Chen’s escape piles on. This may be the most destabilizing period for the CCP since 1989.

Peter Thiel, in his CS183 class at Stanford:

It may upset people to hear that competition may not be unqualifiedly good. We should be clear what we mean here. Some sense of competition seems appropriate. Competition can make for better learning and education. Sometimes credentials do reflect significant degrees of accomplishment. But the worry is that people make a habit of chasing them. Too often, we seem to forget that it’s genuine accomplishment we’re after, and we just train people to compete forever. But that does everyone a great disservice if what’s theoretically optimal is to manage to stop competing, i.e. to become a monopoly and enjoy success.

More classes like this, please.