DC’s first unpleasantly hot day of the year:

— “Predicting the Present with Google Trends”.

— Adam Serwer on Obama’s revival of military commissions.

— Elana Schor joins Streetsblog as a DC-based national political correspondent.

— The case for a politician on the Supreme Court.

The specifics of the Nancy Pelosi issue aside, it strikes me as totally ridiculous that the circle of people briefed on secret CIA activities is so narrow.

It can’t possibly be the operating assumption of the US government that members of congress and their senior staff are traitors. And if there’s something that genuinely needs to be kept secret for national security purposes, then you have to assume that honest and patriotic members of congress aren’t going to leak damaging information. But it’s clear that in the case of this waterboarding business, there was no real security need for all this operational secrecy. Instead, the Bush administration wanted to keep it secret because it was illegal and if people found out that it was happening they were likely to blow the whistle on the illegal torturing that was happening. But helping powerful people cover-up illegal activity is precisely what classification isn’t supposed to accomplish.

If you’re working in the executive branch and you’re saying to yourself “if we fully briefed all members of the intelligence committees of both houses of congress about what we’re about to do, they’d leak it to the press and there’d be hell to pay” you have to ask yourself “is that because what we’re doing is scandalous and illegal?” The idea that executive agencies can keep secrets from members who sit on the committees that oversee their activities makes a hash of the whole idea of oversight.

Julie Gunlock complains at NRO that “food snobs” are ruining America by serving unduly fancy food at soup kitchens. It’s actually rare that conservatives get to combined their hatred of poor people with their hatred of “cultural elites” in a single argument, so Gunlock gets so busy dishing out the sarcasm that she can’t quite seem to deliver the “so what?” point where we see who is being harmed by this alleged trend.

But more perniciously, throughout the piece she runs together the idea of soup kitchens being too “snobbish” about what food they serve with the idea of soup kitchens being health-conscious about the food they serve. This is an important distinction to make, however. When people can’t get enough to eat, they become malnourished. The point of charitable food assistance is to help people avoid that fate. That means, however, that it’s foolish to ignore the nutritional content of what you’re serving. Oftentimes, the situation is so dire that you can’t afford to fuss too much about this. People in Somalia and elsewhere in the Horn of Africa are teetering on the brink of starvation and need food by any means necessary. But fortunately for us, even in this economy the United States is not a drought-ravaged, famine-stricken, war-torn, malgoverned third world state. We’re not facing imminent mass starvation. So it’s eminently sensible for people trying to bring food to those in need to be paying attention to the differential health impact of different meals.

The generosity on display from Pfizer as they decide to offer 70 medications for free to the jobless is the kind of generosity that really only a pharmaceutical firm can offer. The reason, of course, is that while the costs of developing a new medication are high, the marginal cost of producing additional pills is tiny. So insofar as a firm can identify people who would be genuinely unable to afford to buy medicine, there’s no real cost to the firm in giving the product away to those people. Indeed, it generates good PR. And good PR is important to pharmaceutical companies, in part because it’s a marketing-heavy business but more importantly because it’s a heavily-regulated business that benefits a lot from direct government expenditures on research and relies on government-granted monopolies (i.e., patents) for its business model.

But while this is nice to see, it’s also a reminder that financing medical research by providing firms with patent-generated monopoly profits is a very costly way of getting the research. And it’s not a method we arrived at by rigorously weighing the alternatives. Dean Baker has an essay in Boston Review that gets at some of this:

We could expand the public funding going to NIH or other public institutions and extend their charge beyond basic research to include developing and testing drugs and medical equipment. Or the government could contract out the research and development process to private firms and pay for the work up front so that all patentable results fall in the public domain. Or the government could construct a prize mechanism under which it buys up patents after the fact for a premium keyed to the patent’s usefulness.

It seems to me that ideally we should be looking to develop a mixed system. There are a lot of so-called “lifestyle” drugs, like pills that are supposed to prevent baldness, that it wouldn’t really make sense to have direct government funding of. But it’s still good, all things considered, that those pills are developed. They’re basically a form of high-end consumer good, and their creation is progress. Our current system is a good way of financing that kind of thing. But bringing more prizes and contracting-out into the mix for key medical priorities could help build a much more efficient system.