Washington Post editorial page highlights some interesting new research:

An economic geographer at Johns Hopkins University, [Roger] Stern contends that the Iranian oil industry is actually in something of a death spiral. Iran has been missing its OPEC quota of late, and while high oil prices have masked the decline by keeping revenue up, production has been declining. Higher domestic energy demand in Iran combined with difficulty in attracting foreign investment and other economic problems, he argues, make a rapid decline in oil exports likely — ending in the “extinction” of Iranian oil exports in 2014-15.

The Post offers up the bloggish observation that “We don’t know whether Mr. Stern is right.” I don’t know whether or not he’s right, either, and I can’t find the paper where Stern makes that argument. In this article, however, Stern winds up being quoted as having policy prescriptions I agree with.

All my life, people have been telling me “Matt, you can’t get drunk and start swinging knives around at people.” To the weak-minded, this is good advice, but I do it all the time and there’s never any ill-effect. For example, at a New Year’s Eve party, I got into this small knife fight with Becks and it was all fine.

Paul Krugman’s arguments on behalf of universal health care are well known and widely agreed upon by progressives. Then he gets controversial:

But now is the time to warn against plans that try to cover the uninsured without taking on the fundamental sources of our health system’s inefficiency. What’s wrong with both the Massachusetts plan and Senator Wyden’s plan is that they don’t operate like Medicare; instead, they funnel the money through private insurance companies.

Everyone knows why: would-be reformers are trying to avoid too strong a backlash from the insurance industry and other players who profit from our current system’s irrationality.

But look at what happened to Bill Clinton. He rejected a single-payer approach, even though he understood its merits, in favor of a complex plan that was supposed to co-opt private insurance companies by giving them a largely gratuitous role. And the reward for this “pragmatism” was that insurance companies went all-out against his plan anyway, with the notorious “Harry and Louise” ads that, yes, mocked the plan’s complexity.

I tend to agree with that. I’d happily take something like Wyden’s proposal as a compromise measure, but it takes two to compromise. I’m not sure it makes sense for liberals to be pre-emptively offering concessions to the insurance industry with no guarantee that the insurance industry will support the measures being contemplated. To me, it makes more sense to just try and build as much support as possible for a single-payer system and then be prepared to compromise if special interests come to us with alternative universal schemes they’re happier with.

Jim Henley’s annual blog awards post is, as usual, a delight.

The saddest thing about the 3,000th American death in Iraq is that unlike the first batch of casualties, people getting killed or maimed in Iraq these days are really doing so in the course of a bad faith military option. Iraq Year One was a fiasco, but it was a genuine mistake. Since then, and certainly these days, we’re passed all that. Nobody genuinely believes that they (or anyone else) has an Iraq policy that offers any kind of reasonable prospects for success. So young men and women are out there killing and dying not because the people giving them their orders really think those orders are a good idea. Instead, they need to stay in Iraq, need to keep killing and keep dying, because the idea of admitting failure is too much for some people.