Stephen Walt traces the beginning of the end to 1990 and the first Gulf war, which ushered in an era of American hubris about its ability to direct events in the Middle East to its and Israel’s liking.

It is noteworthy that he does not ask if the American empire is in a state of decline. He takes that as a given. The question is what has caused it.

It seems pretty obvious to me too that the US is heading for a major crash because of its unsustainable policies, a combination of oligarchical looting at home and disastrous wars overseas. What puzzles me is why more people, especially those in the upper levels of government, don’t see this and take the necessary steps to avert the catastrophe.

Maybe Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon from 2010 is right.

I fully expect the Tea Party to go on the war path over this Newsweek cover photo of their icon.

When the same magazine published a cover photo of Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign that I thought was quite nice, I was taken aback at the protests that her wrinkles, pores, and facial hair had not been airbrushed away.

In the case of Michele Bachmann, not only do we see manic eyes, but also wrinkles, and who knows what else that I did not notice but I am sure will be highlighted by those who pay close attention to these things.

One of the worst pieces of legislation was the USA PATRIOT Act that was rushed through in the wake of 9/11 and enabled some of the worst abuses of civil liberties.

The original act was bad enough. But now two US senators have charged that “the government has a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act so broad that it amounts to an entirely different law — one that gives the feds massive domestic surveillance powers, and keeps the rest of us in the dark about the snooping.”

The two senators have called for an investigation but the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by the awful Diane Feinstein of California, has refused to allow this information to be revealed. Feinstein has been one of the most ardent supporters of the national security state apparatus, more concerned about protecting the powers of the government than the rights of people.

In research, the gold standard is to do a double-blind study in which you compare the effect of some intervention on a test group with that of a perfectly matched control group. But sometimes this is not possible, say if one is doing historical research or the conditions of the research are not amenable to being controlled by the researcher. Ethics considerations limit what one can do with animal and human subjects and if the trial might result in either group being denied a valuable benefit, such studies will be disallowed. For example, it might be valuable to know what the effect of some chemical is on infant development but it would be unthinkable to try out the experiment on test groups of infants if there is the risk of harm.

In cases such as this, researchers look for ‘natural’ experiments in which the desired experimental conditions occur naturally. Natural experiments are particularly valuable when it comes to medical research where the double-blind randomized trial is the ideal.

Such a natural experiment overcame the problem of determining definitively if Medicaid produced benefits for poor people or not. It would not have been ethical to divide the population randomly into two groups and give Medicaid benefits to one and deliberately deprive the other of them, as would have been necessary to create the appropriate protocols. As a result of this restriction, no definitive studies could be done to prove the benefits of Medicaid and thus opponents of Medicaid were able to argue that Medicaid was of no use and should be eliminated.

But in Oregon, budget woes resulted in a natural experiment occurring. Since the Oregon government had money to cover only 10,000 of the 90,000 eligible Medicaid patients, it created a lottery system in which only the winners obtained benefits, thus effectively creating a database of a large pool of subjects who could be randomized and matched in terms of other variables. Researchers seized upon this opportunity to study the effects of this difference.

Health economists and other researchers said the study was historic and would be cited for years to come, shaping health care debates.

“It’s obviously a really important paper,” said James Smith, an economist at the RAND Corporation. “It is going to be a classic.”

Richard M. Suzman, director of the behavioral and social research program at the National Institute on Aging, a major source of financing for the research, said it was “one of the most important studies that our division has funded since I’ve been at the N.I.A.,” a period of more than a quarter-century.

Researchers who used the resulting data to study the issue found in the first phase that people on Medicaid had better health outcomes than those not on it.

Those with Medicaid were 35 percent more likely to go to a clinic or see a doctor, 15 percent more likely to use prescription drugs and 30 percent more likely to be admitted to a hospital. Researchers were unable to detect a change in emergency room use.

Women with insurance were 60 percent more likely to have mammograms, and those with insurance were 20 percent more likely to have their cholesterol checked. They were 70 percent more likely to have a particular clinic or office for medical care and 55 percent more likely to have a doctor whom they usually saw.

The insured also felt better: the likelihood that they said their health was good or excellent increased by 25 percent, and they were 40 percent less likely to say that their health had worsened in the past year than those without insurance.

They benefitted in non-medical ways too.

The study found that those with insurance were 25 percent less likely to have an unpaid bill sent to a collection agency and were 40 percent less likely to borrow money or fail to pay other bills because they had to pay medical bills.

Thus being on Medicaid made people’s lives a lot less stressful.

Those who seek to deny poor people benefits in order to increase the wealth of the rich will try their best to find other reasons to do so. But this research is so definitive that it should end this particular argument.

Despite the strenuous efforts of the Obama administration to cover up torture by getting the lawsuit dismissed, a federal judge has allowed a torture suit against Donald Rumsfeld to proceed.

This is the second time a judge has allowed such a suit. Rumsfeld appealed the previous one and no doubt this will be appealed too but anything that causes these torture authorizers to sweat over the possibility of going to prison is a good thing.

I am sure that everyone is curious as to how The Undefeated is doing. On its third weekend, the number of theaters showing the film dropped from 14 to 4, resulting in gross receipts of $5,080, which I estimate works out to about an average 13 people showing up for each screening.

The total gross for the film so far is $112,078 which means that the producers are taking a financial bath but I fully expect them to recoup their investments (and more) when they release the film globally. I hear that Palin is really big in Kazakhstan because they can also see Russia from their houses.

The Onion gets it right again.

One sign of a smoothly functioning oligarchy is when everyone is so in agreement with what needs to be done that they don’t even have to discuss things.

David Corn writes about how this manifested itself in the debt ceiling vote. Despite all her public talk about how she disliked the deal, Nancy Pelosi came through for the oligarchy.

The interviewers have this weird idea that if people are really insecure about their jobs, they will work better. Damon lets them have it, but nicely. Listen to his very last words.

Matt Taibbi continues to tell it like it is about the latest deal.

The Democrats aren’t failing to stand up to Republicans and failing to enact sensible reforms that benefit the middle class because they genuinely believe there’s political hay to be made moving to the right. They’re doing it because they do not represent any actual voters. I know I’ve said this before, but they are not a progressive political party, not even secretly, deep inside. They just play one on television.
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The Democrats, despite sitting in the White House, the most awesome repository of political power on the planet, didn’t fight at all. They made a show of a tussle for a good long time — as fixed fights go, you don’t see many that last into the 11th and 12th rounds, like this one did — but at the final hour, they let out a whimper and took a dive.

We probably need to start wondering why this keeps happening. Also, this: if the Democrats suck so bad at political combat, then how come they continue to be rewarded with such massive quantities of campaign contributions?
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It strains the imagination to think that the country’s smartest businessmen keep paying top dollar for such lousy performance. Is it possible that by “surrendering” at the 11th hour and signing off on a deal that presages deep cuts in spending for the middle class, but avoids tax increases for the rich, Obama is doing exactly what was expected of him?

Thanks to reader Vincenzo for pointing me to this post by Matt Stoller. Stoller, a Democratic party insider, even uses the term oligarchy, saying, “When you look at Obama’s governing role, he is clearly a servant of American oligarchs.”

If enough people start talking like this, Obama and the Democratic party leadership could be in real danger of their supporters seeing through their act as being people who want to do the right thing but being continually thwarted by the mean old Republicans.

In order to try and repair relations with their base, watch for them to throw them some goodies in the form of policies on social issues that the oligarchy does not care about. The recent decision by the Department of Health and Human Services, starting August 1, 2012, to “require health insurance plans to cover all government-approved contraceptives for women, without co-payments or other charges” is one such step. The repeal of the absurd “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military is another. We may even see efforts to repeal of the awful Defense of Marriage Act.

All these are very good things that should have been done long ago. But we should see them for what they are, attempts to buy the allegiance of their base while they continue to be subservient to the oligarchy.