So Americans have a choice. We can spend 40 percent of our G.D.P., and provide services like Britain’s national health care. If we spent like the Nordic countries, we could provide government-paid maternity leave, subsidize college tuition and offer a health plan that was close to free for all Americans. But this would leave significantly less money for taxpayers to spend as they want.

Sounds good to me! Bring everyone on board!

*Yes, that Bob Packwood. (Geez — Newt, Eliot, now Bob Packwood, too? Is everyone going to be rehabilitated at some point?)

Today begins the first day of a “journalism adventure” and one that I hope succeeds. Which also is to say that some of the hand-wringing about the death of print media is kind of overwrought. In my hometown, Phoenix lost its second newspaper back in the 1980s when the Phoenix Gazette folded. Back in the 1980s, the Gazette had no “web-only” option to fall back on. The P-I does. That’s a good thing. Try not to fuck it up. At least 20 newsroom employees’ jobs depend on it.

Several of us in the BATP constellation have been watching the bad news over the last couple of months about print media and discussing it — some of us don’t read a physical newspaper anymore, some of us do (I use mass transit each day, so I do; I still need something to read) — but it’s kind of clear how antiquated the delivery system is. A while back I was stunned to hear that printing the New York Times costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Kindle. That is stunning. No, really stunning.

So that said, I hope Hearst isn’t just scuttling the franchise, because this is a real opportunity to try something new. And outside of the Bay Area maybe, I can’t think of another place in the country that isn’t more technologically savvy than Seattle. Go with it.

But go big. Real big. Make sure every single article is permalinked and let the website make assloads of cash on content that’s already there. The now-defunct New York Sun is just sitting there online with big 300-pixel ads on the right margin collecting hits.

As a web-only entity, the Post-Intelligencer can’t argue that they’re losing subscribers to the internet, since that’s all they’re doing. Embrace it. And while you’re at it, why not consider putting everything from its 146-year history online? The New York Times recently made available its .pdf’ed ProQuest articles dating back to 1851 online and it’s fantastic — it’s an amazing archive that researchers and interested people can now access. And if you pay attention to Google, you’ll see that the Times’ articles have kind of body-snatched search queries since the paper went big online. Now perhaps an article from Seattle in the 1800s isn’t a big Google search hit, but it could be. Go with that, too. It’s worth a try.

In short, I want to believe. Let’s do this . . .

Unconvinced? What about John McCain running around Europe pandering about Kyoto and torture and “reestablishing diplomacy”?

Karl Rove is smarter than you think!

For months, the Republican establishment in New York and New Jersey marched nearly in lock step behind Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former hometown mayor they were confident would become their party’s nominee for president.

But as Mr. Giuliani has plummeted from first to fourth — or worse — in some national polls, as he finished near the bottom of the pack in the nation’s earliest primaries, and as his lead evaporated even in Florida, the state on which he has gambled the most time and money, those Republican leaders are verging toward a grim new consensus:

If Mr. Giuliani loses in the Florida primary on Jan. 29, they say, he may even have trouble defeating the rivals who are encroaching on his own backyard.

“It’s pretty certain that he has to win Florida,” said Guy V. Molinari, the former Staten Island borough president, who is co-chairman of Mr. Giuliani’s campaign in New York.

Those supporters say they are confident that if Mr. Giuliani carries Florida or runs a very close second, he will remain the odds-on favorite to claim virtually all of the delegates from the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut primaries on Feb. 5, when Republicans in 22 states vote.

But if Mr. Giuliani is relegated to a distant second or worse in Florida, even some of his supporters acknowledge that New York’s primary one week later would most likely be up for grabs, with Senator John McCain of Arizona and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts being Mr. Giuliani’s strongest rivals. Like Mr. Giuliani, both are fielding full delegate slates in all 29 of the state’s Congressional districts.

“If he carries Florida, he carries New York,” said Fred Siegel, a Cooper Union historian who has served as an adviser to the former mayor and written a largely admiring biography of him. But winning Florida would require “a miraculous comeback,” he said, adding: “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Giuliani obviously wouldn’t be running for president were it not for Sept. 11. With the exception of generals or war heroes, few leaders actually get the opportunity to show their leadership skills; his performance in the days after Sept. 11 was one of those rare opportunities — and he was good, too! He burnished his image as a leader who can remain cool and project a steady image in a difficult situation. Like I said, leaders just don’t get those kind of opportunities to rise to the occasion.

That said, recently I started to think about it and I asked myself how I’d feel with the U.S. being led by someone whose narrative was so wrapped up in Sept. 11. I don’t generally give a merde about how the rest of the world sees the U.S., but I felt a little uneasy about the image of this 9/11 warrior traipsing around the world; I imagined myself as a European thinking that Americans are still so worked up about Sept. 11 that they elected this guy. It struck me as wallowing in victimhood. Sept. 11 was horrible, but I feel like I want to move away from it — not because I’m callous but because, well, it’s weird to keep living like that.

Point being, are there other voters who deep down feel the same way? That when you really start to think about it, the image Giuliani would project around the world would be one of backward-looking victimhood*. And it’s not so much about Giuliani’s policies or his style or anything substantive more than its just kind of embarrassing to keep worrying about the threat of Islamic Fascism. It was scary in 2001-2003. It’s less so now. But even if UBL sets off a nuclear weapon in midtown, do we really want to keep defining ourselves this way?

Bonus dangerously offensive sounding psychological angle: Is Obama’s reluctance to portray himself as a black candidate taking into account our collective psychological need to ditch the politics of victimhood and Giulianism?

*Request to Reference Room: Did this happen with Churchill?

* A dysfunctional economy, characterized by almost schizophrenic swings in the stock market (stock market down 300 pts so far today)

* Overburdened and crumbling infrastructure

* Currency in free-fall

* Relative wealth in free-fall (keep in mind that when the U.S. currency falls, your real wealth and income relative to those with appreciating currencies also falls)

* Shambolic health care system

* Failing schools

* Inability to integrate new arrivals

* Etc.

Oddly, the reasons are vastly different. The pre-Thatcherite UK was made dysfunctional owing largely to a sclerotic welfare state and an overly burdensome tax structure — the legacy of post-colonialism and the final throes of a post-war hangover. The US is where it is today due to Bush’s disastrous war and his Voodoo Economics [should've listened to daddy, you wank].

No matter how we got here, it’s increasingly clear that our country is in crisis. This is what depresses me about the current crop of presidential candidates — do any of these folks look like they have the wherewithal to take a flamethrower to the DC establishment and rebuild it? Maybe Obama, but I’m not yet convinced he’s anything more than a nice face and a pleasant story … Bobby Kennedy without the family connections with which to actually make things happen.

We’re in trouble, America. And this is just the start.

Read Michael Pollan article in last month’s NYT Magazine for a full dissection of how the farm bill is literally killing us.

* which will continue to endlessly replay the pre-Iraq War debate until Tim Russert feels like he’s absolved himself of his guilt for not grilling Cheney harder about WMD.

If Mrs. Clinton were elected and served two terms, then for seven consecutive presidential terms the White House would have been in the hands of just two families. That’s just not the kind of equal-opportunity democracy we aspire to. Maybe we can’t make America as egalitarian and fluid as we would like, but we can at least push back against the concentration of power. We can do that in our tax policy, in our education policy — and in our voting decisions.

The political aristocracy in this country is more fluid than past nobility, and that is how the Clinton family entered it. But the benefit of membership in that aristocracy has probably increased over time, as larger Congressional districts and the rising cost of campaigns make it harder for an unfinanced unknown to rise in politics.

Particularly after George W. Bush rose to the White House partly because he inherited a name and rolodexes of donors from a previous president, we should take a deep breath before replacing one dynasty with another.

. . .

It would be unhealthy to vote for or against a person solely because of his or her family. But where there is a pool of similar candidates, it seems reasonable to count inherited (and wedded) advantage as one factor — and to put a thumb on the scales of those who rose on their own.

Granted, Mitt Romney and Al Gore are also children of the American political aristocracy. And I wouldn’t argue that Mrs. Clinton should be excluded from consideration — just that it’s reasonable to count as a factor that her family has already lived in the White House.

Throwing around a word like “dynasty” makes it sound all Qingy and Mingy — and that’s scary, sure, but to me the idea that a candidate knows what the Presidency is all about counts for a lot. In fact, I kind of only trust people who have already been President. People who want to be President are, in my mind, scary and egomaniacal.

So by that measure, I’m very comfortable with Hillary being President — I think she basically gets it.

The Bug Meister himself, Mr. Tom “Would You Like Some Dioxin and Scandal with Your Eucharist?” DeLay, former Majority Whip, is seizing on this powerful imagery for a little pre-emptive 2008 base motivation. Speaking to a group of conservative bloggers earlier this week, DeLay invoked the devil herself:

Hillary will be the next president of the United States …

I can envision DeLay and his partners in crime repeating this message over and over, like a sweaty preacher at a tent revival, working the GOP base into a frothing mass of livid humanity. Scary that this is such a powerful image. Damn shame for Hillary, too. Not that I’ve much love for her, but she’s worked hard and doesn’t deserve the powerful symbolism that’s been granted her by the Wrong.

By the way, does DeLay actually know anything about politics? Here’s his enumeration of the “masterminds” behind the Dems’ November moment — “behind the woodshed with the GOP”:

DeLay named Clinton loyalists Harold Ickes, Sidney Blumenthal, James Carville, Paul Begala and Joe Lockhart as the masterminds behind the left-wing coalition. He said that these groups, more than anything else, contributed to the GOP’s fall this November. “I have never seen a more powerful coalition,” he said.

GOP loyalists may dream of a world in which the miscast villain Hillary no longer has a bully pulpit for her communitarian wisdom and baldly self-serving pragmatism. For myself, I dream of a world in which the Wahabists all live in the Middle East where we can keep an eye on them. DeLay and his supporters are a Fifth Column more dangerous to America than any brown man with an attitude — or white woman with ambition — ever could be.

[Gorbachev] said the United States and other Western countries had missed an opportunity to make the world a better place after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 ushered in the end of communism.

“At that point, the West focused more on its geopolitical interests,” Gorbachev said, adding that Western countries had been more interested in cashing in on the “unbridled burst of globalization” that followed the end of the Cold War than in improving the international political climate.