Kevin Drum notes that Ezra Klein agrees with David Brooks about something):

Ezra Klein, after a full day of prostate blogging yesterday, says today that David Brooks is right when it comes to the big picture in healthcare policy:

He correctly identifies the central reality of health care politics, which is that most Americans are basically happy with what they have, but worried about keeping it. Policies that guarantee their futures are quite popular. Policies that radically change their presents are not.

Drum has a ready answer:

Well, if that’s the case, then here’s an idea: expand Medicare (or create a similar program) to cover every person in America under the age of 21. And then let them keep it as they grow older. In ten years everyone under 31 would be covered.

Only someone who has had no experience with Medicare would recommend expanding that miserable excuse for an “aid” agency, with its grotesquely bloated bureaucracy and its outlandishly incompetent bureaucrats. And don’t even get me started about what they consider an appropriate level of care.

Our health care system must be addressed … somehow. I’m no wonk—I don’t know the first thing about it. But can we think up something more effective than Medicare? Please?

Aretha sang about it a long time ago.

Now, the PLO’s ambassador to Poland shows it by visiting Auschwitz:

The PLO’s ambassador to Poland visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on Wednesday. … After signing the camp’s visitors’ journal, [Khaled] Soufan told reporters he was there to convey his solidarity with the Jewish people’s suffering during World War II.

It would be easy to deride this as cheap political theater were it not for the fact that Holocaust denial is all the rage among some rather  prominent Muslims.

Which makes this gesture all the more powerful and resonant. So hat’s off to Khaled Soufan, and bravo.

The long road to peace begins with reconciliation. And there is no reconciliation without mutual respect.

By the way, the Pakistani ambassador to Poland also visited Auschwitz recently, I see from the same article. Nice of the media to report it, eh?

As if the Arab world’s refusal to screen an Israeli movie with a peace message isn’t unfortunate enough, the Israelis, who’ve come up with two Oscar-worthy films in one year, are also squabbling amongst themselves to compete for Hollywood’s attention.

The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard is doing a fine job of promoting women as more worthy political leaders than men. Meanwhile, back in the real world, MoDo delights in taking a pound of flesh out of Hillary.

Exerting maximum public pressure on Iran is “Trash Talk.” Fear of Iran is unreasonable; it’s the Republican base that we should fear.

Did you ever have one of those blogging days where you bookmark a ton of interesting stuff and you just know that there is no way in hell that you’re going have enough time or energy to write something worthwhile about them?

Well, that’s the kind of day it’s been, so …

I’m looking forward to reading this novel:

Mr. [Alan] Bennett poses a delicious and very funny what-if: What if Queen Elizabeth at the age of 70-something were suddenly to become a voracious reader? What if she were to become an avid fan of Proust and Balzac, Turgenev and Trollope and Hardy? And what if reading were to lead her, in turn, to becoming a writer? Mr. Bennett’s musings on these matters have produced a delightful little book that unfolds into a witty meditation on the subversive pleasures of reading.

They’ve canceled the Halloween parade in San Francisco? (Note to self: It’s still on in New York, though. Remember to be east of Sixth Avenue well before 5 o’clock tomorrow afternoon.)

Tortured about torture? It certainly won’t make you feel any better to read in the New York Times that the Bush administration”embraced harsh physical tactics.” At the same time, I’m with this guy:

In a PBS interview with Charlie Rose last week, General Hayden, the C.I.A. director, complained about negative press coverage of the agency’s interrogation practices. “What puzzles me is to why there seems to be this temptation, almost irresistible temptation, to take any story about us and move it into the darkest corner of the room,” General Hayden said.

Ahhhhhh, but a few pieces of Renaissance art from Florence have come to the Met:

Now, here’s something you don’t read about very often anymore, someone with a

deep, deep sympathy for the Israelis, not based on their political situation, but a very existential empathy for their national philosophy and their culture, which he perceives as honest and manly, really for standing for something that is good and true about the human race,

That would be Charles Hill, who’s a Yale prof and an adviser to—who else?—Rudy Giuliani.