Looks like Al Franken’s going to be a US Senator. I’m pretty excited about this.

Profile of Chan Yan-tak, the first Chinese chef to earn three Michelin stars. His cuisine is Cantonese in origin and his restaurant in Hong Kong.

Via Tyler Cowen, a paper on consumer-driven health care in action:

Amenities such as good food, attentive staff, and pleasant surroundings may play an important role in hospital demand. We use a marketing survey to measure amenities at hospitals in greater Los Angeles and analyze the choice behavior of Medicare pneumonia patients in this market. We find that the mean valuation of amenities is positive and substantial. From the patient perspective, hospital quality therefore embodies amenities as well as clinical quality. We also find that a one-standard-deviation increase in amenities raises a hospital’s demand by 38.4% on average, whereas demand is substantially less responsive to clinical quality as measured by pneumonia mortality. These findings imply that hospitals may have an incentive to compete in amenities, with potentially important implications for welfare.

This is irrational on one level. But on the other hand, it’s pretty intuitive — people are much better equipped to judge the quality of hospital amenities than they are to judge the quality of patient care. I’m also familiar with research indicating that when it comes to malpractice suits the main issue isn’t how much the doctor screws up, but whether or not he or she is a generally nice and friendly person. Again, you can see why it might go that way, but these things are important aspects of the health care market.

Israeli ground forces now moving into Gaza. Whatever you think of the merits of this step, I think we can take it as implicit acknowledgment by the IDF that the past week’s worth of air strikes were, though deadly to the people killed or maimed by high explosive and flying rubble, basically useless and undertaken without real strategy. So far, though, the fighting has succeeded in boosting the incumbent Labor/Kadima coalition’s poll numbers versus their Likud adversaries. So that’s something, I guess.

This is days old, but important. Back on December 29, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

I’ve never understood why anyone in their right mind would accept us as an honest broker, given our declared allegiances. But more than that, I wonder why it’s incumbent on us to broker at all. Lately, our judgment hasn’t exactly been the greatest either.

I think the idea that we should just step away from the whole thing and not see the United States as obligated to play an active role in pushing for a settlement has some logic to it. And of course it’s also a tempting idea for people who don’t want to spend their time in endless bitter arguments about the various Israeli-Arab conflicts. But it’s crucial to underscore that if you really want the United States to step away from the conflict, you would need to push us to genuinely step away. As long as Israel is the primary recipient of United States foreign assistance funds, it doesn’t make sense to say that we’re taking a hands off approach to the issue. When our hands are off, as they have been throughout this bombing campaign, it’s you and me who’s tax dollars are going to defray the costs of the operation.

This certainly doesn’t look good to me:

The company has never made a contribution. But less than a month after Mr. Rangel met with its officials, the company turned to the congressman for help: A senior A.I.G. executive who had attended the fund-raising meeting wrote a letter directly to Mr. Rangel, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, urging him to support a provision of a tax bill that would save A.I.G. millions of dollars a year, according to Joseph M. Norton, a company spokesman.

Mr. Rangel’s exchange with A.I.G. last spring appears to be at odds with the public statements he has made since his fund-raising for the school became an issue. When his approach to A.I.G. was first reported in The Washington Post in July, Mr. Rangel said that he could not recall any issues his committee might have considered in which A.I.G. had an interest.

To be honest, this hardly seems like the most pernicious political quid pro quo in the universe. But there are lines of explicitness you can’t cross without getting in trouble, and certainly it doesn’t help when it turns out you’ve done things that “appear[] to be at odds with the public statements” you’ve made.

Former Iraqi PM hops on the anti-Bush bandwagon:

“Yes, Bush’s policies failed utterly,” said Allawi, describing the U.S. administration that once backed him. “Utter failure. Failure of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, including fighting terrorism and economic policy.”

“His insistence on names like ‘democracy’ and ‘open elections’, without giving attention to political stability, was a big mistake. It cast shadows on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Egypt, and I believe this will be remembered in history as President Bush’s policy,” he said.

A lot of truth to this, though of course Allawi shouldn’t be taken too seriously. His view was that being a cozy “pro-American” Iraqi leader ought to entitle him to being installed as permanent (“political stability”) strong man of Iraq at the tip of American bayonets. Bush tried it Allawi’s way for a while and his recognition that it wasn’t going to work out counts, in my view, as a non-error of the occupation regime. Indeed, quite the reverse. The smart pay would have been to seize advantage of Iraqi’s early 2005 elections, and the Iraqi public’s clear rejection at the polls of the Bush-Allawi vision for Iraq, to set a timeline for withdrawal way back then before the great civil war and ethnic cleansing of 2006 and 2007.

Julian Sanchez has a very thoughtful critique of the “rebuild the party” initiative to upgrade the GOP’s use of high-tech tools. I agree with everything he says, but I want to emphasize a point hidden within one of Julian’s points:

Moreover, you’re still fundamentally doing political organizing. Part of what made Obama’s vaunted online operation succeed where Howard Dean’s fizzled—and this is something his online people themselves always stress—was that it was an organic component of the broader brick-and-mortar campaign.The core skill set here is still political: What you need are people who know enough tech to understand how the different tools can work with each other, and with more traditional tactics, toward the ultimately non-technical goal of persuading moderates and mobilizing your base. The tech is only useful in the hands of people who are, first and foremost, good at doing those other things.

The fact that online political organizing is still political organizing leads to, I think, a larger issue here. Organizing suburban evangelical mega-churches did a lot for conservatives. But adopting suburban mega-church organizing tools wouldn’t be a very smart strategy for progressives. The audience is wrong. Conversely, outreach to black ministers does a lot of good for Democrats but doesn’t work for Republicans — the black churches are full of black people and black people don’t like Republicans. And at the moment, neither does the core audience for things like Twitter and Facebook. Under the circumstances, it’s difficult for the GOP to do lots of useful organizing on social media platforms.