Reliable sources tell me the Soto Show will get spicier as the week goes on:

— Serbian summer music festival hitting the big time.

— I thought Brüno was pretty funny, but for someone with something meaningful to say you’ll have to read Richard Kim.

— Jeff Rosenfeld’s 2003 senior thesis, ” Debates of Artistic Value in Rock Music: A Case Study of the Band Weezer, 1994-2001.”

— All about the TIME Act.

— Don’t think this Jannero Pargo signing is going to put Chicago over the top.

— Fiscal implications of DC Statehood.

Song of the day, Weezer’s “El Scorcho”.

Eiffel Tower, Paris, France (wikimedia)

As every good conservative knows, France is bad and universal health care is bad. This the sneering condescension in this Dennis Boyles post at the Corner must secretly make sense:

A couple of things you can learn if you’re in France:

First, the meaning of “universal.” It doesn’t mean what you think if you’re a poor person in France, where “universal” health care is arguably better than elsewhere in the EU. It means about 75 percent. Le Parisien reports this morning that, as in the U.S., the more money you have the better care you get. Shocking. The paper backed up a recent study with a small-scale sting of their own and discovered that if you rely on France’s medical insurance alone, 25 percent of French doctors will refuse to treat you. That’s how you say ObamaCare in French.

For one thing, Obama’s proposed reforms—unfortunately—wouldn’t actually make American health care much like French health care. That said, the moral of the story is that in France no matter how poor you are, or what pre-existing conditions you have, or what happened to your job amidst the latest recession, or whatever else if you get sick 75 percent of doctors will treat you and the government will pick up the tab. In the conservative free market utopia, as I understand it, what would happen to you is that you would just die.*

The reality is that France provides a very high standard of health care to its citizens:

Some researchers, however, said that study [from the WHO, proclaiming French health care the best in the world] was flawed, arguing that there might be things other than a country’s health care system that determined factors like longevity. So this year, two researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine measured something called the “amenable mortality.” Basically, it’s a measure of deaths that could have been prevented with good health care. The researchers looked at health care in 19 industrialized nations. Again, France came in first. The United States was last. [...]

“There are no uninsured in France,” says Victor Rodwin, a professor of health policy at New York University, who is affiliated with the International Longevity Center. “That’s completely unheard of. There is no case of anybody going broke over their health costs. In fact, the system is so designed that for the 3 or 4 or 5 percent of the patients who are the very sickest, those patients are exempt from their co-payments to begin with. There are no deductibles.”

There’s a lot that could be said about the relevance of France’s success in health care policy to the American debate. But to argue that the French system is unsuccessful is totally untenable. And to argue that it’s somehow worse for the poor than America’s “good luck with that!” approach is ridiculous.

Read more

One of the quirks—well, really, the quirk—of Japan’s political system is that the same party basically always wins. But it looks like that just may change. Prime Minister Taro Aso had been seeking to avoid calling an election because polls indicate the Liberal Democratic Party will lose, but after facing some local setbacks he’s decided to go call one raising the prospect that the opposition Democratic Party will take over. Brad Plumer says there’s an important climate angle here:

The likely winner of the election, the Democratic Party of Japan, isn’t exactly a “liberal” party in the American sense of the word. But it is quite a bit greener than the LDP—or at least it has been in opposition. Earlier this year, when Aso’s government announced a goal of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, the DPJ criticized the targets as much too weak, calling instead for a 30 percent cut from 2005 levels.

Brad also offers a link to this article on robots getting laid off in recession-ravaged Japan. That seems like the kind of thing likely to lead to a robot rebellion.