He said I was his friend:

— Dave Roberts on the bleak prospects for climate legislation.

— Connecting with nature makes you nicer.

— Even just sticking to MBTA, “Wonderland” is a way better name than “ruggles.”

— Robert Novak’s death seems like a good time to revisit Amy Sullivan’s articles on his horrible ethics and DC media’s perverse indulgence of his bad behavior.

— Kevin Arnovitz on Brendan Haywood’s homophobia.

— “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” in flow chart form.

Last night I watched Nirvana Unplugged on DVD in honor of the last time universal health care died in congress. Max Baucus reminds me of “The Man Who Sold the World”. Or, if you prefer, Bowie’s original.

Tom Ricks offers us a rare window into one of journalism’s most beloved clichés.

What's he thinking?

Noam Scheiber says the hue-and-cry over rumors that the White House might drop its support for a public option is good news for health reform:

Around the conference table at TNR, we’ve been saying for weeks that what Obama really needed was a group of equally vocal, equally zealous critics on the left, pulling the debate’s center of gravity in the other direction. And, wouldn’t you know, that’s exactly what’s happened over the last 48 hours. We’ve now got a pole on the left to match the intensity of the pole on the right. (Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting a moral equivalence between the two. As far as I’m concerned, the critics on the left are basically right and the critics on the right are either insane or deeply cynical.) From a sheer tactical perspective, I think the White House and the Democratic leadership in Congress have dramatically improved their position.

Plausible!

But the known unkown in all of this is do centrist Democratic Senators really want to pass a health care bill or don’t they? That’s Max Baucus. And it’s also Kent Conrad. And it’s Mary Landrieu and it’s Blanche Lincoln and it’s Mark Pryor and Ben Nelson and so forth. If these folks are secretly yearning to pass a health care bill, then this bit of noise is arguably helping to create a situation in which they have the political cover they need. But if the issue is that they just really don’t want to pass such a bill, then the reverse is happening and we’re just looking at more smokescreen and delay. And I honestly don’t know which it is. For all the thousands of reporter-hours that have been spent on covering the congressional politics of the health care debate, I haven’t really seen any penetrating reportial insights into this crucial question of what the pivotal players think they’re doing. About the best you can find is Ezra Klein thinking aloud and concluding that he doesn’t know what Baucus thinks he’s doing. But since people write articles about the facts they know, rather than the questions they can’t answer, attention has tended to be deflected from what’s really the crucial issue here.

An excellent post from Felix Salmon that relates to a topic near-and-dear to my heart:

A tweet from Joe Weisenthal yesterday, on the subject of Annie Leibovitz, is I think revealing of a particularly American mindset: call it the Wealth Corollary of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. In a nutshell, it says that if you’ve made lots of money, you must be pretty smart.

I think there’s a pretty good case to be made that the EMH(WC) is responsible for a lot of the rules surrounding the limitations on who is and who is not allowed to invest in hedge funds, and also for many of the obsequious interviews with rich individuals frequently featured in the financial media.

To me the interesting thing goes beyond hedge fund rules and obsequious interviews in financial media, to a much more general phenomenon of the enormous general social, cultural, and intellectual prestige accorded to rich people. In this vein, Leibowitz is not a good example, since obviously she’s a rich person second and a famous photographer first and her work can be judged on its own photo-centric terms.

But in general it seems to me that we pay extraordinarily little attention to the giant role played by luck and happenstance in determining who becomes a super-successful businessman. Bill Gates, for example, clearly knows something about software and something about business. But there are lots of people who fit that bill. There’s only one Gates because it’s in the nature of things that only one firm gets to write the operating system that, thanks to strong network effects, becomes dominant and lets you start reaping monopoly profits. Nothing wrong with it, that’s life. But in general, as a society we tend to treat successful businessmen as if they were omniscient central planners who’d gotten rich through their powers of clairvoyance. In fact, the whole point of having businessmen instead of central planners is that nobody’s that omniscient—we let some flowers bloom and some chips fall and life moves on. But there’s no particular reason to believe that the ex post winners have enormous insights. If you hang around a casino, on any given night someone’s going to make money playing roulette, but that doesn’t mean you should ask him about his roulette strategy and it certainly doesn’t mean you should ask his opinion about public policy issues far outside his area of focus.