Kevin Drum on what the destroyed evidence would show us:

So here’s what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical “confessions” under duress. This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and and law enforcement personnel.

I was thinking of this the other day when once again pondering the “does torture work” question. It’s a reminder that the right issue isn’t “could there be times when torture produces useful information?” it’s “is torture as a policy a good way of obtaining useful information?” In other words: Does the time wasted on obtaining bad information, or — worse — acting on it, outweigh the good it is. From what we’ve been able to see peeking out of the shadows of the Bush torture regime, the answer looks like a very resounding “no.” In addition to the time wasted and the innocent people killed, the administration was able to confirm a lot of its wrong preconceptions about Iraq, and in the battlefield scenarios at Bagram and Abu Ghraib set the stabilization missions backwards by turning our forces into hated occupiers. Even if some operationally useful intel has come out of this (and with so much garbage sloshing around, how could you even tell?) the systemic impact has been to flood the system with nonsense and brutality.

I’ve got an op-ed in today’s LA Times noting that though it’s certainly good news that Iran seems to not have a nuclear weapons program, I’d still like to know what our Democratic candidates would have done had things gone the other way. I’d like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in short, to follow Bush’s lead and repudiate unilateral preventive military action as a plank of nonproliferation policy.

It’s clear that, roughly speaking, when you move farther away from an urban core your housing costs go down but your transportation costs go up. But that still leaves the question as to whether or not it all balances out in the end. Well, via Ryan Avent it turns out that it more or less does:

That graph’s taken from this National Housing Center report arguing that we need to think of affordable housing issues as much more tightly linked with transport/congestion issues than has traditionally been the case.

Jonathan Cohn has a very informative article on the Obama health care plan and the mandate debate. He sums up the case for mandates thusly:

Still, the most important rationale for a mandate may be a more practical one: It’s necessary to keep other reforms from unraveling. If you make insurers sell to everybody, even people with pre-existing conditions, but let people choose whether or not to buy it, people in good health will be more likely to wait until they’re sick before buying coverage, figuring there’s no point in forking over premiums while their chances of needing care are so low. This will cause a chain reaction. As healthy people opt out, insurance programs will be left dealing with a population of sicker and sicker people. Since insurance relies on contributions from healthy people to offset costs from sick, it will become more expensive–which will cause even more healthy people to opt out. The cycle will repeat over and over again, with the cost of insurance going up and enrollment going down. Wonks call this the “adverse selection death spiral.” And it’s hardly theoretical. By the late 20th Century, most of the nation’s Blue Cross plans had stopped offering insurance to all comers, regardless of pre-existing condition, because their competitors–who didn’t make the same generous offer–had stolen away all the healthy patients.

Now in my view promoting a death spiral among private sector insurance companies could be a good thing if the intention was to kill ‘em off and move people into an alternative public mechanism, but unfortunately I’m pretty sure this isn’t what Obama’s driving at. And there’s the rub. I like Obama and I don’t really like the mandate fad. And Obama doesn’t like it either. But all indications are that his team doesn’t come to this conclusion from the same direction I do, and his proposals are as bad as Clinton’s in terms of a misguided focus on taming private insurance firms rather than destroying them.

John Edwards, who’s publicly hinted around about his plan as designed to put us on a slippery slope to the bountiful world of socialized medicine, is a clear winner here in my view.