I sort of glanced past this on my first series of reads, but I’m intrigued that the departure point of the attempted Christmas plane was Amsterdam. My personal impression was that Schiphol Airport has some of the tightest security of anyplace I’ve ever flown out of. I recall that when I was in the Netherlands for an event sponsored by the Wiardi Beckman Stichting their security asked me what I’d been doing in the country and I had all kinds of trouble pronouncing “Wiardi Beckman Stichting” (understandable, I think) which led to all sorts of enhanced scrutiny. And whenever I’ve mentioned this to other people they, too, seem to feel that Amsterdam security is unusually high pressure.

Not entirely sure what conclusion to draw from that, but every time I get on a plane I’m certainly nagged by the suspicion that these security procedures are a classic example of the kind of thing that’s a pain in the ass for innocent people but not actually that big a problem for malefactors with the patience to make a careful study of what you can get away with.

Some bad news for the hope that price transparency will do a huge amount to slow the growth in health care costs:

The health care reform bill before the U.S. Senate would require hospitals to publicize their standard charges for services, but New Hampshire and Maine have gone much further in trying to make health care costs more transparent to consumers.

New Hampshire and Maine are the only states with Web sites that let consumers compare costs based on insurance claims paid there.

In New Hampshire, the price variation across providers hasn’t lessened since the Web site went live in 2007.

Tyler Cowen offers some theories as to why this may not be working. His option number four “Many local choices, especially in these states (somewhat rural, so-so road connections), don’t involve a lot of competition” is something that I think is worth emphasizing.

I went to the Maine version of this idea and decided to pretend that I was living at my dad’s summer house in North Brooklin, ME and was considering my hospital options. It turns out that the closest place to get a knee MRI costs $1,550 and is a 40 minute drive to Ellsworth. There are two slightly cheaper options in Bangor—$1,159 or $1,160—but that’s more like a 75-80 minute drive. So the competition in this market is not very fierce. Bangor is the second-largest city in the state; it’s not convenient to get there from Brooklin, and even there you only have two options. Possibly not the best test case for these ideas.

That said, I still do wonder how much this will work. In some contexts, people love bargains. If you can get a piece of brand-name clothing or electronics on a discount, then you snap it up. You haven’t bought a cheap suit, you got a great deal on a suit—the brand name and typical high prices serves as a anchor. But in other cases, the psychology is different. Do you want to send your kid to the discount pediatrician? In the absence of clear information about quality, I think information about price only gets you so far.

Marc Lynch was joking yesterday that soon we’d be hearing the calls to invade Yemen and here’s Joe Lieberman:

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, (I-Conn) a renowned hawk and one of the foremost champions of the invasion of Iraq, warned on Sunday that the United States faced “danger” unless it pre-emptively acts to curb the rise of terrorism in Yemen.

“Somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war,” Lieberman said, during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday”. “That’s the danger we face.”

This is dumb. Unless we invade Yemen today, it’ll be tomorrow’s war? At any rate, Glenn Greenwald had an actual Yemen expert Gregory Johnsen on the Christmas Eve edition of his podcast if you want to learn about the subject.

The good news is that while progressives basically need Joe Lieberman’s vote in the Senate to pass domestic legislation, thus giving him a ton of leverage over what happens, nobody needs to listen to him about Yemen. The balance of risks, it seems to me, is neither that we’re just going to ignore the al-Qaeda movement there nor that we’re going to invade. Rather the risk is that, as Johnsen says, we’ll have too many airstrikes without “the proper groundwork to undermine al-Qaeda to the degree that these attacks would be seen as a good thing by the Yemeni population.” Nobody likes to see American airstrikes happening inside their country. But if the political context is right, people can see it as the lesser of two evils. If the context isn’t right, that can build support for al-Qaeda faster than it kills terrorists.

I think this point from the brief on Yemen that Andrew Exum and Richard Fontaine did last month is basically on those same lines:

Since 2001, U.S. policy toward Yemen has focused mostly – and, at times, overwhelmingly – on counterterrorism. This is understandable, but problematic. When the perceived terrorist threat in Yemen retreated in 2003, U.S. policymakers lost interest, abandoning or curtailing development projects in the country. Given the threat posed not just by terrorism in Yemen, but also by the potential for nationwide instability, U.S. policy should move toward a broader and more sustainable relationship, with a strong focus on development. Such a relationship would include a counterterrorism component, but not be defined by counterterrorism alone. American officials should make clear, both publicly and privately, that the United States seeks an enduring relationship with the people of Yemen. In so doing, they should note that the United States does not merely view Yemen as a counterterrorism problem, but rather as a country with which it seeks a multifaceted and enduring relationship that includes economic development, improved government, and domestic stability.

In practice, this seems like a tricky rope to walk. One where a Lieberman-style bombs away mentality isn’t going to help.

At the bar last night we got to talking about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Various points were raised including the argument that it should really be Leonardo who “does machines.” My main issue, however, is that Donatello seems like a much less-renowned artist than the other three.

I’ll be the first to admit that I shouldn’t be your go-to source for Renaissance art commentary. But in this sense I think I’m ideally qualified to speak to the issue at hand. I’m semi-cultured. My family took me to the Met a bunch when I was a kid. I’ve been to pretty much all of Western Europe’s super-obvious famous museums. And it’s just clear that Donatello doesn’t have the star power of the other three.

My suggestion as a replacement turtle would be Titian. He doesn’t quite have the blockbuster appeal of the other three, but no one does, and I think he comes closest. I also think he chronologically matches the other better. I suppose the counterargument would be that he’s Venetian and the others are Florentine, but it’s all Italy to the kids.

When I first heard about the Christmas airplane plot, my working assumption was that we should discount talk of a internationally orchestrated campaign. After all, as far as terrorist attacks go this was a pretty lame one. There was none of the redundancy, simultaneity, and good planning that were once the hallmark of al-Qaeda. But according to Eric Schmitt and Eric Lipton investigators are taking these claims seriously:

Federal authorities on Saturday charged a 23-year-old Nigerian man with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, and officials said the suspect told them he had obtained explosive chemicals and a syringe that were sewn into his underwear from a bomb expert in Yemen associated with Al Qaeda.

The authorities have not independently corroborated the Yemen connection claimed by the man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was burned in his failed attempt to bring down the airliner and is in a hospital in Michigan. But a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said on Saturday that the suspect’s account was “plausible,” and that he saw “no reason to discount it.”

As Spencer Ackerman pointed out yesterday if this is what an international al-Qaeda conspiracy looks like these days, then we’ve made a lot of progress:

Abdulmutallab acted alone. There can be little doubt the operation was intended to go off on Christmas, for the obvious symbolism, so we would have seen evidence of a coordinated attack by now. The inescapable if preliminary conclusion: al-Qaeda can’t get enough dudes to join Abdulmutallab. And what does it give the guy to set off his big-boom? A device that’s “more incendiary than explosive,” in the words of some anonymous Department of Homeland Security official to the Times.

The bad sign here is the emergence of Yemen as a potential trouble spot. This is something the government has been aware of for some time. But I think it underscores the difficulty of ever truly succeeding at eliminating “safe havens” all the world ’round. You could imagine a sort of whack-a-mole situation developing, since no matter what results from our current efforts in Afghanistan and Yemen I hardly think we’re going to bring stability and good government to every single country on earth.