Didn't pay much attention to the world last week -- too preoccupied digging out from the biggest snowstorm to hit Wichita since 1962 -- so I scrambled a bit today. Turns out there's plenty to get worked up about, and this barely scratches the surface:

• Brad DeLong quotes Josh Barro: Why We Need Republicans:

  Democrats make their own errors in evaluating the economy . . . Republicans have an often-healthy skepticism of regulation . . . When they try, Republicans can make government more efficient . . . Republicans aren't all out to lunch . . . Republicans are succeeding in states where their national brand is severely damaged tends to be that their state-level policy agendas are markedly better than the party's national one.

  This sounds like wishful thinking going back to the 1970s or 1980s when Reagan's "11th Commandment" allowed some moderate, pragmatic Republicans to run "good government" campaigns, notably winning some mayoral campaigns in solidly Democratic cities (New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland, etc.), governorships in Massachusetts and New York, etc. Even in Kansas, where Republicans didn't have to appeal to Democratic voters, a long string of moderate Republicans were reasonably competent stewards of government. (I loathed Bob Dole going all the way back to his House days, and never forgave him for his scurilous campaigns against Bill Avery and Bill Roy, but even he came to be seen as a Republican with enough sense of responsibility and reality to deal with real national problems.) But none of this stuff is remotely true today.

  Democrats do have weak spots in "evaluating the economy" -- they're much too fond of finance and high-tech as growth engines -- but the Republicans have thrown out the entirety of macroeconomics, pushing an austerity program that seems gleefully self-destructive. Their "often-healthy skepticism of regulation" is at best a minor merit, and is often expressed in absolute excess. (For instance, there is no evidence that environmental regulations in oil and gas are too strict -- Deepwater Horizon is just one counterexample.) Far more important is an effort to restore losses in equal opportunity, to reinforce the safety net that protects ordinary people from ravages of the (increasingly laissez faire) business cycle, and maintenance and expansion of public goods like infrastructure and science.

  While there is some evidence that Republicans become marginally saner in power, that's getting to be little comfort. When Republicans gained state power in 2010 from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, they did nothing to make government more efficient much less fair; they spent all their efforts attacking public employee unions and trying to rig voting in their favor. And Kansas, under Sam Brownback, has gone from being a boring Republican fiefdom to a dangerous experiment in how badly mismanaged government can become. (One example is that the Koch Brothers are now exempt from paying state income taxes because they're small businessmen.)

  Maybe if the Republicans actually had the sort of influence the idiocy of their policies deserved -- down around 10-15% of voters, which is still pretty generous considering how many fewer people would actually benefit from their policies -- it might make sense to try to cheer them up a bit. But now isn't the time. And given how frequently they vote in lockstep in Congress, the notion that there are other Republicans elsewhere who aren't so embarrassing isn't much comfort. For all practical purposes, the Republican mind these days ranges from Cantor to Ryan, a diversity that's harder to calculate than all those angels on pins.

  Also see this No More Mister Nice Blog piece on Kansas.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Jelani Cobb: Lincoln Died for Our Sins: "The greatest impediment to achieving racial equality is the narcotic belief that we already have." Also see Thomas Frank: Team America for its jaundiced view of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Both of these touch on Steve Spielberg's film Lincoln, which I have yet to see. In the end, Frank taunts:

  If you really want to explore compromise, corruption, and the ideology of money-in-politics, don't stack the deck with aces of unquestionable goodness like the Thirteenth Amendment. Give us the real deal. Look the monster in the eyes. Make a movie about the Grant Administration, in which several of the same characters who figure in Lincoln played a role in the most corrupt era in American history. Or show us the people who pushed banking deregulation through in the compromise-worshipping Clinton years. And then, after ninety minutes of that, try to sell us on the merry japes of those lovable lobbyists -- that's a task for a real auteur.

• Chuck Eddy: Mindy McCready: When the Angels Stopped Watching.

• Mike Konczal: How Is Inequality Holding Back the Recovery: Follows up on Joseph E Stiglitz: Inequality Is Holding Back the Recovery, with links to Paul Krugman and John Judis, and some twists.

• Andrew Leonard: Conservatives Declare War on College: Notably, governors Scott Walker (WI), Rick Perry (TX), and Rick Scott (FL): cut funding, cut costs, purge humanities from the curriculum.

• Mark Perry: Elliot Abrams' Plan to Divide the Palestinians: On the 2006 coup that Fatah attempted against Hamas in Gaza, which led to Hamas seizing power in Gaza and Israel, Egypt, and the US blockading Gaza and driving it to the brink of catastrophe. That was just one of many brainfarts from the ever fertile mind of one of the few people who actually got convicted for Reagan's illegal Iran-Contra scheme. He was later rehabilitated by G.W. Bush and given responsibility for the Middle East, and, well, you know how that turned out. Abrams has a new book out, promsing an inside look at the Bush era in the Middle East, and he should know, but he's never shown any awareness of how badly his ideas have worked out, nor much interest in expressing his motives. But no one has done more in the last 10-15 years to make peace impossible. He is a one-man axis of evil, or if you insist on three, remember that he was the inevitable go-between of G.W. Bush and Ariel Sharon.

• Annie Robbins: Autopsy Reveals Arafat Jaradat Died of Extreme Torture in Israeli Custody: As I recall, some years ago Israel's Supreme Court ruled that Israel could not practice torture of prisoners, but this is more evidence (beyond the Zygier affair reported last week) that the cuffs are off. One commenter writes: "you do get the impression that Israel is deliberately trying to provoke another intifada, to provide cover for god knows what."

• Alyssa Rosenberg: As George Tiller's Wichita Clinic Reopens, 'After Tiller' Reframes the Abortion Debate: After Dr. Tiller was murdered, Wichita lost its only women's health clinic that provided abortions of any kind. One of Tiller's former associates is working to open another clinic in Wichita, and may succeed despite an extraordinary amount of legal and extra-legal harrassment. (The KS legislature has even more anti-abortion bills on the way, including one to convict doctors of a felony if a woman decides to abort based on the sex of the child.) Piece also talks about a documentary, After Tiller, which goes into the late-term abortions that Tiller was one of the very few doctors in the country able (and willing) to perform. The new clinic in Wichita will not help on that front, but will fill a need and restore a right. It's a shame that it takes such heroic dedication to do something so basically just.

• Matthew Yglesias: Steve Brill's Opus on Health Care: Brill's piece in Time is the further study, but Yglesias' summary should be quoted here and now (his italics):

  The analytic core of the article shows that when it comes to hospital prices, who pays determines how high the price is. When an individual patient comes through the door of a hospital for treatment, he or she is subjected to wild price gouging. Insane markups are posted on everything from acetaminophen, to advanced cancer drugs, to blankets, to routine procedures. Because these treatments are so profitable, internal systems within the hospital are geared toward prescribing lots of them. And even though most hospitals are organized as non-profits, most of them in fact turn large operating profits and their executives are well-paid.

  In addition to providing insurance services, a key service that a proper health insurance company provides is bargaining with hospitals so you get screwed less. No insurer worth anything would actually pay the crazy-high rates hospitals charge to individuals. But in most markets, the hospitals have more bargaining leverage than the insurance companies, so there's still ample gouging. The best bargainer of all is Medicare, which is huge and can force hospitals to accept something much closer to marginal cost pricing, although even this is undermined in key areas (prescription drugs, for example) by interest group lobbying.

  I can see two reasonable policy conclusions to draw from this, neither of which Brill embraces. One is that Medicare should cover everyone, just as Canadian Medicare does. Taxes would be higher, but overall health care spending would be much lower since universal Medicare could push the unit cost of services way down. The other would be to adopt all-payer rate setting rules -- aka price controls -- keeping the insurance market largely private, but simply pushing the prices down. Most European countries aren't single-payer, but do use price controls. Even Singapore, which is often touted by U.S. conservatives as a market-oriented forced-savings alternative to a universal health insurance system, relies heavily on price controls to keep costs down.

  Yglesias also affirms common sense that Raising the Minimum Wage Is Overwhelmingly Popular.