Megan McArdle:

There’s a growing school of thought among columnists and television pundits which says that the “real” scandal in Washington is not the fact that a government agency investigated people based on their political leanings, but that 501(c)(4)s are multiplying like Typhoid bacteria, allowing anonymous donors to fund unlimited amounts of political speech.   These groups, it is rather tediously explained, should actually have been registered under section 527, which would require them to disclose their donors. A related genre is the column explaining how the real victims here are liberls*, the Obama administration and maybe the American public.

I’m going to stick with “the real scandal is a employees of a government agency using the large powers we have granted them to selectively investigate people based on their political beliefs” and “the real victims are the people who were investigated”, though of course, I think this is also terrible for the American people, because we deserve good government.

“Yes, this happened, and it shouldn’t have, but the real issue here is…”

Josh Barro:

A lot of the calls for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on political 501(c)(4) organizations — which is what the IRS was trying to do when it touched off the scandal over Tea Party groups — focus on the claim that ideological, political groups are obviously not “social welfare” organizations as required under the law. Not so fast.

The ACLU made a Freedom of Information Act request about text message surveillance, and they received an entirely redacted document.

Because transparency!

The Justice Department seized two months of phone records for the Associated Press, apparently in relation to the AP reporting that a terrorist plot had been disrupted:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

Josh Barro’s take on the Oregon Medicaid study is good:

Yesterday, we got results from the two-year Oregon Health Study, which randomly assigned some low-income people to receive Medicaid coverage while others did not. The study found that Medicaid led people to consume more health care and was effective in reducing both financial strains due to medical costs and depression. But it did not find significant effects on the physical health measures that were tracked.

Despite efforts to spin it to the contrary, this is bad news for advocates of the Medicaid expansion. While Medicaid is clearly good for some things, it was supposed to be good for all of the measures tracked.

Enstitute is a group providing apprenticeships for college-age people:

How did she catapult from dropping out of college to landing a plum job? She became an apprentice to Hilary Mason, chief data scientist at Bitly, through a new two-year program called Enstitute. It teaches skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor’s degree — at least for a small group of the young, digital elite.

“Our long-term vision is that this becomes an acceptable alternative to college,” says Kane Sarhan, one of Enstitute’s founders. “Our big recruitment effort is at high schools and universities. We are targeting people who are not interested in going to school, school is not the right fit for them, or they can’t afford school.”

Colleges are incredibly expensive, the cost continues to rise, and yet they are increasingly less effective at preparing people to be successful. There’s absolutely value in a liberal arts education (in fact, I think there’s even more value now), but many schools don’t even do a good job of exposing students to a variety of disciplines to make them more well-rounded. Universities crank students through, make them take class after class with lecture-midterm-lecture-midterm-lecture-final, put them tens of thousands of dollars into debt, and leave many of them not much better off than they were before entering.

So new education organizations like this should be welcomed. Perhaps they’re not exactly what we need to replace universities, but we don’t need to replace universities—we need different options, different paths, different ideas that allow people to take a route that fits them better, and places pressure on our bloated, staid education system to change.

Bill Ayers defended the Weather Underground bombings over the weekend:

“To conflate a group of fundamentalist people [in Boston] who are nihilistic in some way with a group of people who spent their lives trying to oppose the murder of 6,000 people a week … and still the killing went on. And still the killing went on. What would you have done?” Ayers said. “There’s no equivalence [with Boston]. Property damage. That’s what we did.”

…

In his talk to the crowd, Ayers mentioned that in 1970, he lost three friends in the Weather Underground, including his lover, Diana Oughton. He did not explain in his talk how they died – they were killed when nail bombs they were making in a Greenwich Village townhouse blew up.

Nail bombs are a hallmark of bombings intended to damage property, and not to harm people, I’m told.

A study finds that showing the doctors the price for tests they order results in a significant reduction in expenses:

When doctors saw this information, they ordered 9.1 percent fewer tests for their patients. That, a new paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds, saved the hospital just about $400,000.

“Our study offers evidence that presenting providers with associated test fees as they order is a simple and unobtrusive way to alter behavior,” the study authors, lead by Johns Hopkins professor Leonard Feldman, write. “Unlike the process in previous studies, no extra steps were added to the ordering process and no large-scale educational efforts accompanied this exportable intervention.”

Breaking news! Prices work as a signaling and rationing mechanism! (But I thought medical care was something too important to leave up to the market?)

The obvious next question here is this: if showing doctors how much things costs reduces the number of tests they order, wouldn’t showing patients the true costs have the same result?

Yes. The answer is yes.

Alexis Madrigal on the missing Sunil Tripathi being incorrectly named as the suspect for the Boston bombing:

The next step in this information flow is the trickiest one. Here’s what I know. At 2:42am, Greg Hughes, who had been following the Tripathi speculation, tweeted, “This is the Internet’s test of ‘be right, not first’ with the reporting of this story. So far, people are doing a great job. #Watertown” Then, at 2:43am, he tweeted, “BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi.”

The only problem is that there is no mention of Sunil Tripathi in the audio preceding Hughes’ tweet. I’ve listened to it a dozen times and there’s nothing there even remotely resembling Tripathi’s name. I’ve embedded the audio from 2:35 to 2:45 am for your own inspection. Multiple groups of people have been crowdsourcing logs of the police scanner chatter and none of them have found a reference to Tripathi, either. It’s just not there.

The web is incredibly powerful and empowering. It can also be incredibly dangerous. Let this be a lesson to all of us (that we should have all learned after Wayne Chiang was falsely accused for the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007) what it can do when we spread information that isn’t verified: it could lead to innocent people being harmed.

Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, prisoner at Guantanamo Bay:

I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

We are committing a terrible injustice against many people at Guantanamo. Yes, many of them are not innocent—but they should be tried, not left to rot away in a prison.

Rob Portman, a Republican senator, now supports gay marriage:

I have come to believe that if two people are prepared to make a lifetime commitment to love and care for each other in good times and in bad, the government shouldn’t deny them the opportunity to get married.

Josh Barro comments:

Indeed, Portman has not only accepted his son but publicly changed his views on gay rights at potentially significant political cost. He has often been discussed as a possible Republican presidential contender; this will surely make it impossible for him to be nominated for president or vice president in 2016, and he will probably face an anti-gay-marriage challenger when he seeks re-election in three years. Portman has to know that what he did today was the opposite of politically expedient, and he did it anyway.

I think Barro is right that it comes with great risk and he did it because he truly believes it’s the right thing to do (after all, it would be easier to not touch the issue at all), but I also think that the environment within the GOP is slowly becoming more amenable toward supporting gay marriage, and he may think that supporting it now rather than later will be an advantage.

In any case, it’s a huge step for the party that a prominent Republican elected official has publicly declared their support for gay marriage. Jon Huntsman did the same just recently, but Portman has a much higher stature in the party. A snowball is forming.

Then Senator Obama answers whether he believes the president can bomb Iran without authorization from Congress during 2007:

The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.

Good thing Libya was just kinetic military action, rather than an attack.

Peter Suderman points out a, uh, tension in the Obama administration’s position on Medicare:

You can see a related tension in the administration’s approach to Medicare, the federal health program for seniors. Unlike Medicaid, Medicare is not exempt from sequestration; it’ll face a 2 percent reduction, which will amount to about $11 billion next year. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, noting that the cuts will hit health and drug plans as well as other providers, has warned that this will “result in billions of dollars in lost revenues to Medicare doctors, hospitals, and other providers, who will only be reimbursed at 98 cents on the dollar for their services to Medicare beneficiaries.” And the White House doesn’t seem too pleased either: The Office of Management and Budget’s report on sequestration complains that GOP alternatives to the spending reductions are wrong partly because they “fail to address Medicare sequestration.”

Yet the White House’s whole theory of Medicare reform is built around cutting reimbursements to health providers: When President Obama talks about modestly reforming Medicare without cutting benefits, that’s exactly what he means. Obama has repeatedly called for cutting payments to drug manufacturers, and ObamaCare includes more than $700 billion in cuts to Medicare, which are distributed amongst the various big players in the health industry. The Medicare cost-control board that ObamaCare sets up is expected to focus heavily on reimbursement cuts.

Robert Draper has an excellent look at how the GOP has failed so badly since 2004. He looks at both how behind the Republican party is technologically and the policy and brand issues that have turned the party into something of a joke. The whole piece is excellent and there are many parts worth discussing, but I wanted to highlight one in particular. This is from a focus group conducted by a GOP pollster:

The session with the young men was equally jarring. None of them expressed great enthusiasm for Obama. But their depiction of Republicans was even more lacerating than the women’s had been. “Racist,” “out of touch” and “hateful” made the list — “and put ‘1950s’ on there too!” one called out.

Showing a reverence for understatement, Anderson said: “A lot of those words you used to describe Republicans are negative. What could they say or do to make you feel more positive about the Republican Party?”

“Be more pro-science,” said a 22-year-old moderate named Jack. “Embrace technology and change.”

“Stick to your strong suit,” advised Nick, a 23-year-old African-American. “Clearly social issues aren’t your strong suit. Stop trying to fight the battle that’s already been fought and trying to bring back a movement. Get over it — you lost.”

I admit there’s a bit of schadenfreude here because I’ve been saying much of this since well before 2008, but people—especially younger people—have abandoned or written off the GOP because they don’t seem tied to the time period we’re in. They don’t appear to have any real ideas for solving the problems we have, like health care or concerns that the middle class is declining or that children will be worse off than their parents, let alone even seem to take these problems seriously. And that says nothing about waving off global warming as some kind of collective delusion and/or conspiracy of the left, evolution denial, utter stupidity on abortion and women’s health, and veiled race-baiting. The left derides the GOP as the party of wealthy white men, and the GOP does its best effort to provide evidence to support that.

There’s a clear path the party can take. First, take science (reality) seriously. Acknowledge global warming, acknowledge that evolution is real (and not phony trying-to-please-everyone stupidity like Marco Rubio’s answer to how old he thinks the earth is). Second, acknowledge that social conservatives lost the cultural battle on gay marriage (thank God), and that abortion is a contested issue in the country and while you can work to limit it, it must be rooted in truth (that science thing again), and it must be done with not just a focus on the unborn, but also toward maximizing the interests of all women, and with an actual understanding of what it’s like to face deciding whether to have an abortion and why. Third, take the deep (and real) fear people have that the middle class is on a downward path while the wealthy are ever-climbing seriously, because it is serious, and work toward actually improving the country’s situation rather than propose tax cuts as the solution to all ills like some snake oil cure-all. Fourth, mold this new party—socially moderate, fiscally-conservative—into one focused on allowing every person in this country to pursue and realize their dreams, free from government fiat and excess regulatory burden.

That fourth part is what the Republican party should be; not a party that’s dogmatically wedded to “small government” and tax cuts, but one that believes that while government has a role in our lives, it should lean toward solutions that don’t involve it at all or that when necessary, as much as possible, empower individuals and groups to accomplish a goal rather than centralized control.

That’s a potentially very strong philosophical driver for the Republican party, but getting there starts with parts one through three. And those will be difficult; those are entrenched beliefs within the Republican base and in leadership. So it will take—among many other things—all of us within the party standing up and pointing out when our leaders are wrong on these issues and when people in the party are wrong on them. As long as we allow xenophobia, homophobia and anti-science to fester within the party, the party will not have a future.

Nicholas Carr:

No need to think of analog resources in the aggregate anymore; networked sensors allow us to monitor and rationalize the utilization of each individual resource, each person in isolation. But you can go even deeper. You can begin to rationalize each individual’s internal resources. Imagine, as Levchin does, that everyone is hooked up to physical sensors that minutely monitor their health and behavior and send the data to a centralized processing system. An insurance company “looking at someone’s heart rate monitor data could make their cardiovascular healthcare cost-free.” Of course, if you engage in risky behavior (do you really want that third slice of pizza, or that third beer?) or have some suboptimal health reading (did your heart just skip a beat?), an alert from your insurer, or maybe your employer, or maybe the government, would immediately come through your smartphone notifying you that your health care premium has just been increased. Or maybe your policy has been cancelled. Or maybe you’ve been scheduled for a brief reeducation session down at the local office of the Bureau for Internal Resource Optimization.

This is the nightmare world of Big Data, where the moment-by-moment behavior of human beings — analog resources — is tracked by sensors and engineered by central authorities to create optimal statistical outcomes.

It’s not difficult to imagine terrible outcomes for a future with computers, sensors and the Internet in everything and everyone. But it’s coming. Which is why we have to actively design technology so it works to make us better as humans, rather than control us.