Serious in Singapore. I am in the Gan Eng Seng Primary School in a middle-class neighborhood of Singapore, and the principal, A.
W. Ai Ling, has me visiting a fifth-grade science class. All the 11-year-old boys and girls are wearing junior white lab coats with their names on them. Outside in the hall, yellow police tape has blocked off a “crime scene” and lying on a floor, bloodied, is a fake body that has been murdered. The class is learning about DNA through the use of fingerprints, and their science teacher has turned the students into little C.S.I. detectives. I missed that DNA lesson when I was in fifth grade. This was just an average public school, but the principal had made her own connections between “what world am I living in,” “where is my country trying to go in that world” and, therefore, “what should I teach in fifth-grade science.” I was struck because that kind of linkage is so often missing in U.S. politics today. Singapore is tiny and by no means a U.S.
Tree of Failure. Of course, even a great speech won’t usher in a period of civility.
Speeches about civility will be taken to heart most by those people whose good character renders them unnecessary. Meanwhile, those who are inclined to intellectual thuggery and partisan one-sidedness will temporarily resolve to do better but then slip back to old habits the next time their pride feels threatened. Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance. Every sensible person involved in politics and public life knows that their work is laced with failure. Moreover, even if you are at your best, your efforts will still be laced with failure.
But every sensible person in public life also feels redeemed by others. Each individual step may be imbalanced, but in succession they make the social organism better. As a result, every sensible person feels a sense of gratitude for this process. Republicans Reject Cost Estimate of Health Law Repeal. The new House speaker, , flatly rejected the report, saying it was based largely on chicanery by Democrats.
Mr. Boehner’s dismissal of the report by the Congressional Budget Office, at his first formal news conference as speaker, was the latest salvo in the battle over the health care law. White House officials on Thursday said they were stepping up efforts to defend the law, with a new rapid-response operation to rebut Republican claims and to deploy supporters to talk about the benefits of the law. But Mr. Boehner’s remarks held wider implications, effectively putting him on a war footing with the independent analysts whose calculations generally guide discussions about the projected cost or savings of any legislation. “I do not believe that repealing the job-killing health care law will increase the deficit,” he said. “C.B.O. can only provide a score based on the assumptions that are given to them,” Mr.
According to the budget office, those goals are contradictory. Buckle Up for Round 2. The courts.
So far, one judge has struck down the individual mandate, the plan’s centerpiece. Future decisions are likely to break down on partisan lines. Given the makeup of the Supreme Court, this should concern the law’s defenders. False projections. The new system is based on a series of expert projections on how people will behave. More seriously, cost projections are way off.
Employee dumping. The number of people in those exchanges could thus skyrocket, especially as startup companies undermine their competitors with uninsured employees and lower costs.