Palinography

One assumes that the Washington Post carries some influence in our nation's capitol. So you would expect it to have an op-ed policy that calls for submissions that elevate discourse, bring some expertise to a subject, raise little known or surprising viewpoints, illuminate a current debate, etc., albeit with strong doses of the various writers' own biases. Other than on that last point, evidence shows one's assumption would be wrong.

The Palin op-ed is like a caricature of an op-ed submission. "Written" by someone with absolutely no credibility on matters of climate change, science, reading, the English language, or involuntary breathing, what is the point of it being published?

Oh, I know, because Fred Hiatt shares a hobby with many on the right these days -- do something only because it will, supposedly, piss off a liberal. Not a good way to run a newspaper.

UPDATE: Ambinder annotates.

A serious man

Shorter Fred Hiatt: No one knows how to contain health care costs, so it would be wrong to try...look over there!.

Peter Orzag has had enough of this weasels beltway complacency and misinformation masquerading as a newspaper editorial page.

Peter Orszag: Fred Hiatt... writing... that the two biggest steps that can be taken to reduce the rate of health care cost growth--changes in health care’s tax treatment and an independent Medicare commission--are missing. I agree with Hiatt on the potential substantial benefits in terms of cost containment from these two changes. But a note... the Senate Finance Committee bill includes both of these measures... creates an excise tax on insurance companies offering high-premium plans--which would create a strong incentive for more efficient plans that would help reduce the growth of premiums... establishes a Medicare commission--which would develop and submit proposals to Congress aimed at extending the solvency of Medicare, slowing Medicare cost growth, and improving the quality of care delivered to Medicare beneficiaries. If [Fred Hiatt's] concern is that these two provisions would not survive the rest of the congressional process, then [Fred Hiatt should] say that--rather than suggesting that they aren’t already reflected in legislation. Moreover, as I blogged a couple of weeks ago, the Senate Finance Committee’s bill is not the only measure that includes important cost constraining provisions... that experts from across the spectrum agree will help transform health care... penalties for hospitals with high, preventable 30-day readmission rates... encouraging the establishment of accountable care organizations... bundled payments for high-cost, chronic conditions.... Hiatt writes that "no one knows for sure how to control costs." True, we have never transformed the health sector before, and it is therefore difficult to quantify precisely how these steps will work together to promote quality and reduce cost growth. But it is wrong to conclude that these steps--even the ones beyond the excise tax on high-cost plans and the Medicare commission--are merely hypothetical pie in the sky.

The designated moonbat

It's too uncomfortable for those in power to keep him around when history has proved him right.

That’s why the firing of Dan Froomkin now makes a perverse sort of sense. As long as the right was in power, he was in effect the Post’s designated moonbat, someone who attracted readers but didn’t threaten the self-esteem of the self-perceived serious people at the paper. But now he looks like someone who was right when the serious people were wrong — and that means he has to go.

Via Greenwald.

Rumble!

Fred Hiatt has long been on a mission to turn the WaPo's editorial page into irrelevancy. Seems that reporters at the paper are noticing.

The satellite data released by NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center show that the maximum extent of the 2008-2009 winter sea ice cover was the fifth-lowest since researchers began collecting such information 30 years ago. The past six years have produced the six lowest maximums in that record, and the new data show that the percentage of older, thicker and more persistent ice shrank to its lowest level ever, at just 9.8 percent of the winter ice cover.

"We're seeing an ice cover that's younger and that's thinner as we head into summer," Walt Meier, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said in a telephone news conference. "It's been a pretty sharp decline."

The new evidence -- including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s -- contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.