[with contributions from Matt O’Brien and Darius Tahir]
If you’re an obsessive blog reader, then chances are good you’ve seen the viral campaign ad for Ed Lee, who’s running for reelection as mayor of San Francisco. But just in case some of you missed it, you can watch it above.
A quick programming note: A feature deadline looms, so posting may be light for the next few days.
Elsewhere:
For the 99 percent: Greg Sargent teamed up with Citizens for Tax Justice to figure out how many people would pay the proposed millionaire surtax to finance infrastructure spending. The answer? Not very many.
IVF meets abortion. If you believe life begins at conception and that it’s wrong to destroy embryos, then you also want to ban many IVF practices. And that’s exactly what might happen in Mississippi. Michelle Goldberg has the story.
Has anybody noticed… that Mitt Romney is proposing to cut Medicaid even more severely than Paul Ryan is? Igor Volsky has.
Bigger is better: James Surowiecki argues in the New Yorker that politicians’ love for small business is misplaced: on net, they don’t create that many jobs, and are less productive than big businesses. To wit: “Small may be beautiful. It’s just not all that prosperous.”
A radical idea for Medicare. It comes from Phil Longman in the Washington Monthly. Longman is the author of Best Care Anywhere, a terrific book arguing that there’s nothing wrong, and quite a lot right, with health care that is truly government run. (At least when government runs it the right way.)
Nothing uncertain about this. The administration makes its case that regulatory uncertainty is not the problem with the economy.
Devil's advocate. John Quiggin sketches out the progressive counterpart to the 9-9-9 plan, calling it – naturally – the 6-6-6 plan.
Because who doesn’t love health care charts? Austin Frakt has a bundle of them. And they’re actually useful.
Reader comment of the day: From “K_Wilson,” responding to my item about blogger Jennifer Rubin and the conservative mentality on health care:
It's a measure of how extreme the American right has become when a mainstream conservative commentator says, "There are moral, public health and economic reasons not to have the sick and injured go untreated", a position about as unexceptionable as "don't stomp on kittens", and it's so unusual that Mr Cohn writes a whole column on it.