Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just spent three days visiting Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. She spoke seven times, including interviews, press roundtables, and press conferences with assorted leaders. But reporters did not find much to say about Rice’s tour, beyond noting her announcement that henceforth Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Mahmoud Abbas will hold meetings twice a month. (Perhaps she reasoned that the two leaders would end the conflict just to get out of having such frequent meetings.)
Posts For: March 28, 2007
Tiramisu, Andrew?
Joshua Muravchik wrote what I thought was a sharp and sensible item about Zbigniew Brzezinski here yesterday. Others disagree. Andrew Sullivan called Josh’s posting a “brutal, personal attack.” Andrew then proceeded to note that he is still waiting “for one leading neocon to examine some of the premises that led us into what is clearly a bloody and endless trap in Iraq.”
To paraphrase Josh, this is rich. Actually, it is not just rich, it is a parfait on top of tiramisu.
Leading neoconservatives have been examining the premises which led us to topple Saddam Hussein longer than Andrew has been lambasting conservatives—and avidly flagellating himself—for supporting the war.
The Future of Health Insurance
Monday’s New York Times highlighted one of the many ways that existing models of medical insurance are beginning to come undone. In this case the subject was long-term-care insurance, which is supposed to help cover the exceedingly high cost of intense chronic care required by some elderly Americans—especially those with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. As policy-makers have looked at the economic forecasts for old-age health care in the past few decades, they have increasingly used tax incentives and other spurs to encourage middle-aged and older Americans to buy such insurance.
Insurance companies at first jumped right into the newly burgeoning field, but as the years have passed and more patients have made claims, insurers have come to realize that the economic model of long-term care does not work like the rest of their business: demographic changes mean much more demand than originally anticipated, costs are enormous and stretch on for years, and the normal insurance premium structure is often not adequate to make such insurance a profitable enterprise. Several of the biggest early players have suffered mightily. Conseco, which at one point was the leading insurer, actually went bankrupt.
Welcome, Wilfred McClay
contentions would like to welcome as a guest blogger Wilfred M. McClay, holder of the SunTrust Chair of Excellence in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a veteran COMMENTARY contributor. His most recent book is Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past (Eerdmans). He’ll be blogging from Rome, where he is spending a term as senior Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Rome. Wilfred brings with him tremendous erudition and a distinct voice, and we’re delighted to have him.
God and Man in Rome
When it comes to cultural exchange programs for academics, my reflexive attitude tends to be very much like my attitude toward the institution of tenure: it’s probably a bad idea in many cases, for most people, but if it’s going to exist . . . well, I shouldn’t deny myself the benefits. Thus I’ve come to Rome, under the auspices of the Fulbright program, for a semester of teaching and lecturing. I am not sure whether five months spent living in Rome and traveling around Italy will make me a better professor, but the experiment seemed worth conducting. So I have taken it on—strictly, I will have you know, in the severe spirit of disinterested scientific inquiry, a spirit I bring with particular asperity to my examination of Italian foods and wines.
I am teaching the history of American religion to graduate students in an American-studies program, and can report that the level of interest in the subject is extremely high. I had not really wanted to spend so much of my time teaching about American religion, but my Italian hosts insisted otherwise, and now I understand their wisdom.
