Tennessee, which appears to be giving South Carolina a serious run for the title of Wingnut Central, is now at the forefront of one of the tea party’s more peculiar pet rocks: repealing the 17th Amendment, by hook or by crook.

Why are they opposed to electing senators? Hard to say. It was a Bircher thing back in the 60s (Robert Welch was apparently convinced that it represented a poisonous concentration of power in the federal government), and now it’s a thing again. The names change, but the obsessions just go on and on. There’s probably no point in asking why.

Matt Yglesias, who’s made of sterner stuff than me, read the cover story of National Review this week. It’s a long, detailed description of a conservative replacement for Obamacare, and it’s the same proposal that “serious” conservatives have been making for years. Here’s the meat of it:

The core of a replacement would be a change in the tax treatment of health insurance. The tax break for coverage would be flattened and capped so that people would not get a bigger break the more comprehensive their insurance. The break would also be extended to people who do not have access to employer coverage….Once a robust market for individually purchased insurance has emerged, the problem of people who are locked out of that market because of preexisting conditions should diminish: People will have both the incentive and the ability to buy cheap, renewable catastrophic policies before getting sick.

What should I say about this? If I don’t take it seriously, then I’m being snide and dismissive even though conservatives have done what I asked for and presented a real alternative to Obamacare. But if I do take it seriously, I’m just pretending. Because this plan is, and always has been, ridiculous. And conservatives know it.

Catastrophic insurance is already available to individuals, but there’s no robust market for it. Nor will different tax treatment change that: Insurers will continue to discriminate based on health status; they won’t offer renewable policies to everyone; and policies will remain too expensive for low-income workers. Being able to buy them with pretax dollars won’t change that, since most low-income workers don’t pay very much—or any—federal income tax in the first place. A tax credit or a subsidy might help, but then you’re back to Obamacare—except that instead of offering poor people subsidies for actual health care, you’re offering them only the opportunity to make premium payments for a policy that probably won’t do them any good and that they can’t afford. So they won’t buy them.

So why does this proposal have such legs among the right? Partly it’s because it’s something, at least, and it has enough moving parts that you can fool some people into thinking it might work. But it’s also due to the odd conservative obsession with the fact that health insurance, as currently provided, isn’t true insurance. It doesn’t protect you against big but unlikely events, like auto insurance or fire insurance. It simply pays for health care. And that’s true. But who cares? Conservatives need to get beyond that semantic hobbyhorse and instead address the problem that most Americans want addressed: provision of health care. If you don’t want to call it insurance, fine. Just call it health care coverage. And then explain how you’re going to provide that cheaply and efficiently to as many people as possible.

Once you do that, you run into a hard, shiny nugget that you can’t wiggle around: about a third of the country, maybe more, just flatly can’t afford decent health care for their families. No amount of smooth talk about HSAs and tax treatment and catastrophic care will change that. So you can either pay for this coverage via tax dollars or you can let them go without, and chalk it up to nature red in tooth and claw.

Insurance is a red herring. It’s not the primary cause of high health care costs in America, and offering different kinds of insurance, or making it available across state lines, won’t change things by more than a hair. The problem is the actual provision of health care. If you want to do that via a private sector middleman, that’s fine. Unnecessary, but fine. But you still have to pay for the actual health care somehow. When conservatives have a plan for that, let me know.

Mark Graham recently tallied up the nationality of people who make edits to Wikipedia. He found, for example, that 85 percent of edits to articles about America are made by Americans. Conversely, only 9 percent of edits about Kenya are made by Kenyans. His advice:

Some parts of the world are represented on one of the world’s most-used websites predominantly by local people, while others are almost exclusively created by foreigners, something to bear in mind next time you read a Wikipedia article.

Graham’s map is below. Via Zoe Pollock.

Matthew O’Brien on why Europe’s common currency is doomed:

The euro is the gold standard minus the shiny rocks.

Read the whole thing, which is a pretty good summary of, um, why the euro is doomed. I agree with it, but I also suffer from cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, all the fundamentals—which O’Brien summarizes admirably—say that the euro can’t survive. On the other hand, I can’t believe that Europe will ever let the euro fail. Obviously one of these beliefs is wrong. The latter, I suspect, but I’m hardly completely sure of that.

For a related take, but with a somewhat different emphasis, my version of O’Brien’s argument is here.

Apparently, during a sermon attended by President Obama yesterday, Rev. Luis León said this:

It drives me crazy when the captains of the religious right are always calling us back … for blacks to be back in the back of the bus … for women to be back in the kitchen … for immigrants to be back on their side of the border. The message of Easter is about the power of love over loveless power.

OK, that’s probably not especially appropriate for an Easter sermon. At the same time, this is a little hard to take seriously:

“It’s sad when clergy egregiously politicize worship,” Mark Tooley, president of the conservative Christian organization Institute on Religion and Democracy, wrote in one of several blogs and articles that have criticized the sermon. “Is this characterization of religious conservatives as racists, chauvinists and bigots really fair and accurate? And if political critique of religious conservatives were appropriate in an Easter sermon, couldn’t León offer a thoughtful analysis rather than snide smugness?”

Is the religious right really now taking the position that religious worship shouldn’t be politicized? It’s a little late to start complaining about it now, isn’t it?

I see there’s some discussion of Twitter today on the blogosphere. I’m going to use it to make the most outlandish point possible. Watch as I attempt this death-defying feat.

Ahem. So Nick Beaudrot gave up Twitter for Lent. And he liked it! “After two days without Twitter, I barely missed it; by the second week, I was downright happy not to be thinking about ‘staying on top’ of my feed.” Ezra Klein says “amen”:

The problem isn’t Twitter, exactly. Twitter, like so much else, is excellent when consumed in moderation. But it’s also an unusually addictive product, and it has certain unusual properties that help it crowd out other information streams.

….[Compared to those other information streams,] Twitter elicits a more poisonous information anxiety. It moves so fast that if I’m not continuously checking in, I completely lose track of the conversation — and it’s almost impossible to figure out what happened three hours ago, much less two days ago. I can’t save Twitter for later, and thus there’s always a pressure to check Twitter now. Twitter ends up taking more of my time than I’d like it to, as there’s a constant reason to check it rather than, say, reading a magazine article.

It’s not just Twitter. It’s broader than that. Within the verbal, well-educated, politically conscious social group that most bloggers belong to, we’ve always been expected to keep up with things. The problem is that “keeping up” increasingly means being surrounded by an endless torrent of tweets, texts, blogs, and Tumblrs demanding our attention. With traditional physical forms of news consumption no longer acting as natural limits, the risk of relapse into obsession is never more than a ringtone away, with nothing but raw self discipline as our last line of defense. Modern social norms don’t allow us to turn this stuff off completely, but for those of us who are vulnerable to this kind of addiction, ever advancing technology conspires to turn us into nervous wrecks if we don’t.

You may or may not feel much sympathy for this problem. I don’t, because I don’t have any problem limiting my news consumption. I dip into Twitter whenever I feel like it, I don’t bother with Tumblr, and I mark all my RSS feeds read at the end of the day whether I’ve actually read them or not. For lots of people, though, it’s not that easy. It’s a real headache.

So here’s my outlandish point: if you do feel any sympathy for this problem, you should probably also feel some sympathy for conservative warnings about the breakdown of traditional social norms. In our own social group (verbal, educated, etc.), we tend to look at things like declining marriage rates and easier access to drugs as generally neutral or positive. That’s because we mostly have the self discipline to regulate our own behavior even when laws and norms loosen up, and we have robust social networks to help us out if our self discipline breaks down. But that’s not universally true in every social group. Many of the things that seem harmless to us—the way Twitter seems harmless to me—are real problems for people with poor educations, poor impulse control, and weak social networks.

We probably don’t think about this as much as we should, and conservatives don’t help by crying wolf over every single social change they happen to dislike. But it’s something to think about anyway.

Mike Konczal wrote a column over the weekend suggesting that an “anti-rentier” agenda had some potential to unite left and right. Reihan Salam comments:

Konczal also identifies tensions between what we might describe as the anti-rentier agenda of the right, which tends to focus on how state interventions serve the interests of incumbents and wealthy, influential individuals, and the anti-rentier agenda of the left, which is more concerned about the dangers of wealth concentration as such and the market power of firms that flourish in an open, lightly-regulated economy, due to first-mover advantages, network effects, and much else.

Is this really a serious agenda anywhere on the right? I’ve occasionally seen committed libertarians make the point that state interventions often serve the interests of economic incumbents, but even that’s rare.¹ Outside of that, there’s Tim Carney and….

Anyone else? Any actual working Republican politicians, for example? Maybe I’m missing something, but it sure seems to me that the Republican Party is pretty firmly dedicated to defending the privileges of big corporations and the rich. Has there been a tectonic shift that I’m not aware of?

¹It’s even rarer to see them arguing against state intervention because it would benefit the rich too much. In fact, I’m not sure I ever remember seeing an example of this.

Nick Timiraos notes today that Federal Reserve governor Elizabeth Duke is worried about the fact that after years of being too loose, mortgage standards may now be too tight:

So why haven’t mortgage credit standards eased up even a little bit, as they have for other consumer loans such as credit cards and autos? First, home prices have fallen so sharply that lenders are worried future price declines and job losses will leave them with more defaulted mortgages.

But Duke noted another more surprising cause: the Fed’s campaign to push down interest rates means lenders haven’t had to work very hard to drum up business. Together with federal efforts to ease refinancing rules, low rates have produced a surge of refinancing business. This has delivered a steady stream of high-quality, low-risk borrowers in an industry that already has shrunk significantly. Capacity-constrained lenders have “less incentive to pursue harder-to-complete or less profitable loan applications,” said Duke.

I dunno. I was chatting with a friend the other day who’s trying to refinance his house. You’ll have to take my word for this, but he’s basically about the most reliable, creditworthy, upper middle class person you could hope to meet. Good income, reliable job, longtime bank customer, etc. etc. And yet, his bank keeps finding things to be nervous about. This should be a slam-dunk refi, but it keeps dragging out.

It’s just an anecdote. But it makes me wonder if even the refi biz is quite as healthy as Duke suggests. If you have any horror stories of your own, feel free to share them in comments.

The New York Times ran a piece yesterday about all the shiny new teacher evaluation systems being used around the country, and how they’re basically rating nearly every teacher as effective (or, better yet, highly effective). Only about 3 or 4 percent of teachers are being rated ineffective. Dana Goldstein comments on whether ed reformers think this is a reasonable number:

I’ve asked a number of prominent accountability hawks that question over the past six years and the answer I’ve heard most frequently is “5 to 10 percent.” As Matthew DiCarlo explains, that estimate is culled from the research of the ubiquitous Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, and by that standard, these evaluation systems are already half way to where they are intended to be, a reasonable outcome for something so new.

My gut feeling is that 5 percent is probably about right and 10 percent is too high. This isn’t based on anything specific about teaching, just on my experience in white-collar jobs. Go to any large corporation and take a look through the annual reviews given to its white-collar workers. How many are rated at the bottom level, the one where you’re in danger of being fired if you don’t improve? I’d say about 5 percent. I don’t have any good reason to think teachers are much different from other white-collar workers, so I’d guess that about 5 percent of them are ineffective too.

Goldstein has some interesting historical background on teacher evaluation systems that makes her skeptical that the new ones will work any better than they have in the past. But what struck me about the Times article was the way it described how various school districts came up with their numbers. There was nothing subtle about it in Florida:

One Leon County principal, Melissa Fullmore of Ruediger Elementary school in Tallahassee, said that had it been solely up to her, one or two of her teachers would have been graded “highly effective,” the top category. Three would have been marked “needs improvement,” one rung up from the bottom, and the rest would have fallen under “effective.”

But because Leon County set the test-score bar so low, when their marks came out, all but one were highly effective, and the other was categorized as effective. “I wouldn’t put stock in the numbers,” Ms. Fullmore said.

The same was true at Springwood Elementary School nearby. “We had three or four teachers that were rated as ‘needs improvement’ on the observation, but due to changes in the cut scores, they were all bumped up to effective,” Dr. Christopher Small, the principal, said.

Officials in another county, Alachua, set scores relatively high, but when only 78 percent of teachers were deemed highly effective or effective, and when they saw how lenient other districts were, they set them much lower; ultimately, 99.4 percent of teachers were rated effective or highly effective. “It’s inconsistent, it’s unfair and it’s unscientific,” the superintendent, Dan Boyd, wrote in a letter to The Gainesville Sun criticizing how the state’s new evaluations had been carried out.

So test scores, far from tightening up evaluations, actually made them looser because districts deliberately set the cut scores to insure that very few teachers would be graded as ineffective.

This is only one state, and Florida’s new evaluation system is, well, new. What’s more, even the 2 or 3 percent of failing teachers under this system is apparently more than under the old system, in which “roughly 100 percent of them were rated satisfactory.” So it would be unwise to rush to any conclusions about this. Still, it gives you pause for thought.

California has recently enacted two electoral reforms. In June 2010, we passed an open primary initiative that allowed the top two finishers to go on the general election, even if both are from the same party, and a few months later we passed a second initiative that created a nonpartisan commission to draw district lines in congressional races. Supporters of these initiatives hoped that they would push Californians to vote for more moderate candidates.

Over at the Monkey Cage, a team of researchers reports on a study suggesting that the open primary law failed to accomplish this. Their methodology strikes me as a bit iffy, so I’d take it with a grain of salt, but I was interested in what their data said about why the open primary system seemingly failed to change things:

While voters are generally quite moderate and were willing to cast crossover votes (roughly 12% of our participants who voted for a major party candidate did so), they largely failed to discern ideological differences between extreme and moderate candidates of the same party, particularly if they were challengers.

….Of particular interest in the second graph—which includes only Republican candidates—are the respondent placements for District 24. Abel Maldonado is a well-known moderate politician in California….His potential constituents rated him at roughly 5.25 on the 7-point scale. However, they gave almost the same rating to his fellow GOP challenger Chris Mitchum, a little-known actor and Tea Party candidate.

Again, I’d take this with a grain of salt. It’s one study, the sample sizes are fairly small, and it’s early days for open primaries. Still, I’d like to see further research specifically on the question of how accurately voters assess candidates. Certainly it’s my sense that plenty of primary campaigns are brutal affairs in which it’s crystal clear who the more extreme candidates are. But maybe that’s true only in the high-profile races that tend to get national coverage. In others, maybe voters really don’t have much of an idea of who’s the centrist and who’s out on the fringe. I’d certainly be curious to see this studied further.