According to Senator Baucus, the health bill that eventually clears the Senate will probably include a public plan option. Wow, so this is what newfound political clout can accomplish. Considering that Baucus was initially cool to the idea of a public plan, this is a big deal. Of course, nobody has actually seen a bill yet and plenty of political shenanigans could still occur. We could see a neutered public plan that offers only bare bones coverage. Or we could see some kind of “trigger” nonsense, where a public plan remains inactive unless private insurers fail to provide affordable coverage after a vaguely defined length of time.

There are still a thousand ways that a public plan option could be excluded from a final bill or watered down, but Baucus’s statement is a hopeful sign that Obama’s promised health reform will be truly progressive. 

Governor Pawlenty announced earlier today that he will not seek a third term. Most of the local pundits assume that he has ambitions for national office, although he’s going to have to work hard to keep himself in the spotlight. Mike Huckabee was a former governor when he ran for president and things didn’t turn out so well for him. Pawlenty might also try challenging Amy Klobuchar for her Senate seat, but he’ll have a tough time toppling a political figure who is generally seen as likeable and competent.

Pawlenty will finish his term having done little to make Minnesota a better place to live. He’s mostly muddled through, keeping his promise not to raise taxes (sort of), but otherwise demonstrating no real vision for the state. He did launch some promising initiatives to address homelessness and mental health, but those eventually had to be sacrificed at the altar of his anti-tax zealotry. Not even a collapsed bridge in downtown Minneapolis could convince him of the necessity of an incremental tax increase to fix our roads and improve our transit system. His last major act as governor, the coming unallotment, is going to hurt a lot of people who are already struggling. Not exactly a strong finish.

And whoever in the GOP candidate next fall is likely to be just as conservative as Pawlenty, if not more so.

Dear pro-life advocates:

I get your opposition to abortion. I don’t agree with it, but I understand where you’re coming from. That said, I don’t recall any pro-choice advocates coming into churches armed with a handgun to assassinate anyone associated with your movement. Rhetoric has consequences.

Ten years ago this month, I signed up as a Seti@home volunteer. I might have mentioned Seti@home before; it’s a distributed computing project in which volunteers donate idle computer power to process chunks of data from radio telescopes to find potential signals from other civilizations. In that time, according to my account page, my various computers have performed 112.32 quadrillion calculations for the project. Multiply that kind of number-crunching by a couple million volunteers and you have one of the biggest computing projects ever undertaken. In an interview with Science Friday commemorating the project’s ten-year anniversary, one of the lead scientists notes that Seti@home is a success whether or not it pinpoints a signal. If we discover evidence of other civilizations, it will be a profound development in human history. If we eventually realize that we are indeed alone, that will be just as profound.

In the meantime, my computer will continue to crunch the numbers, if for no other reason than that it’s marginally more useful than most of the other things I make it do.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is, from the very beginning, a quintessentially French novel. It contains weighty meditations on philosophy, the aesthetics of Dutch still life paintings, and the absurdity of life. And it contains the most ridiculously effusive praise for the film The Hunt for Red October that you will ever see in print. The book is a glimpse into the interior lives of two characters who inhabit vastly different strata of French society, but have much in common. Renee is a concierge of a tony apartment building in Paris where she tends to the needs of its upper-class residents, most of whom she detests. Renee possesses a brilliant mind and is a self-taught intellectual, but she is determined to keep her fierce intelligence hidden from view and is content to play the part expected of her: that of the lower-class, poorly educated working stiff. Paloma is a 12-year-old girl living in the same building with her well-to-do but dysfunctional family. Like Renee, she’s bright and perceptive, but she’s quite taken with the idea of setting fire to herself and burning down the apartment in the process.

Renee and Paloma are little more than familiar faces to each other when the book begins, living separate lives and thinking dismal thoughts about most of the people around them. Unbeknownst to both of them, they share a love of Japanese culture and art. And when an elegant, charming Japanese businessman moves into the building, they can barely contain their excitement.

Muriel Barbery writes with wit and compassion; her fondness for these sad, lonely characters is evident on every page. As I was reading it, I kept wondering how an American writer would have written the same story. We seem more inclined to view class as a fluid concept rather than a fixed characteristic, when we acknowledge it all. If Hollywood tried adapting this book, it would probably end with Renee and her Japanese neighbor falling in love and Paloma reconciling with her family. The book’s actual ending is much messier and uncertain, which is as it should be. Perhaps this quote of Renee’s best sums up the tone of the book:

Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our
doom. Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day
to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost.