I get a little tired sometimes of a the navel-gazing intra-Jewish controversies about Israel. Here’s a first-order issue:

Israel is denying Palestinians access to even the basic minimum of clean, safe water, Amnesty International says. In a report, the human rights group says Israeli water restrictions discriminate against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. [...]

In the 112-page report, Amnesty says that on average Palestinian daily water consumption reaches 70 litres a day, compared with 300 litres for the Israelis.

Israel is, of course, a democracy. And politicians in democracies are responsive to the interests of the electorate. Jewish settlers in the West Bank get to vote. Palestinians in the West Bank don’t get to vote. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that infrastructure decisions are systematically made in ways that favor the interests of the settlers over the interests of the stateless Palestinians. These are the wages of occupation.

Good times: “Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has produced his own Downfall parody video, making fun of the fact that Constantin Films has issued DMCA notices to remove all of the Downfall parody videos from YouTube.”

The issue with this kind of thing is that the social losses involved in cutting off all the parodies and remixes far, far exceed any actual losses incurred by the copyright holder. Whenever you strengthen IP protections, you do increase the financial incentives available to creators. But you also increase the burden on users and creators. There’s an appropriate balance to be struck, and banning these kind of parody videos doesn’t strike it.

… Democrats always could adopt a caucus rule in which committee chairs, even ones named “Lieberman” and “Landrieu,” don’t get reappointed if they alienate their colleagues by refusing to vote for cloture on major priorities.

More details are emerging on the “opt-out” public option. For one thing, my question of who does the opting has been answered—to opt out you need a bill based by both houses of the state legislature and signed by the governor. That means the vast majority of people will likely have the opportunity to join the public option.

On the other hand, the version of the public option that people will get to join would be a pretty limited one. Igor Volsky explains:

The comprise was developed by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who converted Sen. Tom Carper’s (D-DE) original state-based opt-in proposal into a national opt-out option, and is far more conservative than the robust public option being considered in the House.

If the option is modeled on the provision in the HELP Committee’s bill, the plan would only save about $25 billion over 10 years, without significantly lowering health insurance premiums. It would likely lack Medicare’s market clout or leverage to significantly lower health care costs, but would still represent a not-for-profit alternative that can begin spearheading critical delivery system reforms.

Since both Senate bills establish state and regional based exchanges in lieu of a single national structure, it’s likely that the compromise in the merged Senate bill will establish 50 different options, all controlled by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The public plan would have to attract a network of providers, charge premiums “in an amount sufficient to cover expected costs,” and meet all solvency and reserve fund requirements.

It’s been clear for a while that the support just isn’t there in the Senate for a more robust Medicare-linked public option. But this kind of pared-back public option is a lot worse than the meatier version. One reason folks like Ezra Klein and myself were saying over the summer than the public option fight wasn’t the be-all and end-all of health reform was precisely the awareness that any public option that passes the Senate would almost certainly have to be this kind of “level playing field” public option that only improves things marginally.

The best thing about the level playing field public option, however, is that it keeps hope alive. It might be able to spearhead some crucial delivery reforms. States that opted-out initially might opt back in. And with the public option in place, it could be altered over time in a more Medicare-ish direction as it becomes clear that that would be a way of helping to deal with the various deficit issues that will come to a head sometime after this recession ends.