Three Unconnected Things

• In memoriam:  Mark O. Hatfield, liberal Republican Senator from Oregon back in the day.
• Doghouse Riley on Medicare v. Defense:

  Why in the world would someone like David Leonhardt make this mistake? Is it because, as a Reagantot (born 1973) he's spent his entire life being lied to about it? Medicare, like Social Security, is a trust. You pay a separate tax bill into the fund. Eliminate it altogether and you get that portion of your taxes back, and good luck saving it for when you can't work. This has been lumped into the "social spending" category--public health, hospitals, schools--by the American Right and Democratic centrists since the Vietnam war, in order to insist it was The Great Society, and not a wasteful and useless jungle conflict, which was destroying the US economy. It's an argument disguised as a fact, and apparently no one born after the Nixon administration can be bothered to notice. Fer chrissakes, we spent nearly $700 billion on "Defense" in 2010 not including the costs of however many wars we're in now, and that's if you believe it's the one thing the government doesn't lie about. Subsuming this as "national security" is like imagining Wal*Mart is the most successful Mom & Pop hardware store in the country.
  
  Look, children: you've been sold a bill of goods, including the confusion of the honor of military service with the less-that-honorable uses to which it's been put over the last sixty years. You got sold the idea that the war in Vietnam was divisive because dirty hippies spit on returning veterans, and not because the goddam thing was a lie from beginning to end which a large portion of the citizenry slowly came to realize, and object to. There's nothing in this country so bloated and wasteful as our military budget; there's no government expenditure anywhere else in the world that begins to match it. Caring for our elderly and disabled citizens is not a discretionary item; it's a measure of our humanity. I don't know how the argument got so twisted, but I do know that a moment's thought should be enough to untangle it.

• Via Making Light:  the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization.  And then go to the Maps tab and spend hours.