Garance Franke-Ruta

With the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act turning one today, there are a slew of anniversary pieces out there about the law. Here's what you need to know about where things stand, culled from some of the best of them: 1. The law hasn't covered many people yet. Though the law was never intended to cover most of those eventually eligible until 2014, it still has fallen dramatically short of expectations on the proof of utility front. Reports The Washington Post, "Nearly 12,500 Americans have joined high-risk pools that were created to cover people who were rejected by insurance companies because of medical problems. The enrollment so far is about 3 percent of government forecasts." A further "nearly 4 million older Americans on Medicare with especially large prescription-drug expenses received $250 rebate checks last year.... about one in eight people with the program's drug benefit." And "no one knows how many people" are being aided by the change to allow kids to stay on their parents' coverage until age 26, or by the one barring insurance discrimination against kids with pre-existing conditions. 2. The Supreme Court decision on whether it is constitutional will probably come down just as the GOP 2012 presidential primaries are in full swing. "Are you ready for a dispositive ruling on the federal health-care law just in time for the heart of the presidential primary season?" asks Andrew Cohen, after examining the history of judicial review of major legislation dating back to the New Deal. "Cue the chattering class. Book the air time. Dust off the cloistered law professors and other 'experts.' One year from today we'll either know, or be very close to knowing, whether the Act stands or falls." Until that decision is in, all talk about what the law is expected to do in the future comes with the caveat, "if the court agrees." 3. Support for the law has not increased -- nor has public understanding of the what the Act seeks to do. This, despite administration efforts to sell it. "According to monthly surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation ... support for the law has never quite broken 50 percent. The dominant feeling about the legislation, the surveys show, is confusion -- now reported by 53 percent, just two percentage points less than 11 months ago," reported The Post. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released today found that, one year in, "37 percent of Americans support the measure, with 59 percent opposed. That's basically unchanged from last March, when 39 percent supported the law and 59 percent opposed the measure." 4. The outside group that was supposed to help Democrats sell the law appears to have fallen by the wayside. This might have something to do with the continuing low level of public understanding. Reports Politico Pro's Jennifer Haberkorn: "Democrats are under siege as they mark the first anniversary of health care reform Wednesday -- and they won't get much help from the star-studded, $125 million support group they were once promised. Wal-Mart Watch founder Andrew Grossman unveiled the Health Information Campaign with great fanfare last June. Tom Daschle and Ted Kennedy's widow, Vicki, were expected to lead the effort. They'd have help from former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn. They'd have an office in Washington with 10 or 15 operatives backing the Affordable Care Act and those who supported it. ... But nine months later, the Health Information Campaign has all but disappeared. Its website hasn't been updated since the end of last year. Its executive director and communications director are gone. There's no sign that it has any money. And neither Daschle nor Dunn will return calls asking about it." 5. The law won't fix America's health-care financing problem -- the biggest budgeting worry -- in the long run. TNR's Jonathan Cohn reports that, even if the law is implemented as written, "ten years from now, the best projections suggest we'll have spent roughly as much on health care--as a government and as a country--as we would have if the law never passed." That said, it will slow the rate of increase in costs, he writes: "The official projections suggest that, as of 2021, government spending (and, apparently, the country's total spending) on health care will not be rising as fast as it is now." All of that said, if you think you're eligible and might like to try to get coverage under the new law, The New York Times recently published a very helpful piece walking readers through how to do so. Image credit: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Updated 7:06 p.m.-- Over the weekend, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin arrived in Israel, where she was photographed wearing a Star of David around her neck. The Star of David or Magen David is a symbol associated with Jewish texts far back as the 11th century and has been used by European Jews to symbolize their faith since the 17th century. As Zionism developed as a European philosophy, the Star of David came to represent the movement and later became the defining symbol on the flag of the state of Israel. In contemporary urban America, wearing a Star of David on a chain generally marks the wearer as Jewish. So what was the most decidedly not-Jewish Palin doing wearing one in Israel? Not appealing to American Jews -- that's for sure. Most American Jews, being Democrats, can't stand her. And one visit to Israel, a nation many American Jews have mixed feelings toward, anyway, isn't going to change that. Rather, by wearing the Star of David, Palin was reaching out to American evangelical Christians -- and also being one herself. According to David Brog, the (Jewish) executive director of Christians United for Israel, "it is increasingly common" for evangelical Christian supporters of Israel -- who follow a fairly common Israel-centric strain of American biblical interpretation -- to wear Stars of David as symbols of solidarity with the Jewish state. "A lot of the folks in my organization, they wear Stars of David," he noted. "Mainly the women." In CUFI circles, indeed, "it is increasingly common to wear one all the time," Brog noted, and not just while visiting Israel. To do so is seen as an expression of being "pro-Israel" and "philosemitic," part and parcel with worshiping Jesus as a Jewish carpenter and honoring the Jewish roots of Christianity. CUFI says it is the biggest pro-Israel organization in America, bigger even than the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, though the groups measure members differently. The Founder and National Chairman of CUFI is Pastor John Hagee, who during campaign 2008 raised the ire of the Catholic League, which condemned him as a "bigot" after Hagee endorsed Palin running-mate John McCain. Hagee and the Catholic League have since reconciled. CUFI was not involved in Palin's trip to Israel. Image credit: Reuters

It's really amazing how a factual sociological observation can quickly devolve into the most ridiculous story imaginable as it moves down the media food chain. I speak, of course, of the absurd idea that there was some sort of geopolitically important gender gap within the administration on the question of backing a no-fly zone over Libya, and the bombing campaign needed to implement one, because a handful of the president's more senior female aides argued in private meetings, according to reports, on behalf of an interventionist posture. Note to anyone still playing with this idea: You might as well title your story, "Hello, I am an idiot who has not been paying attention to politics in the past 15 years." And yet away we go, as the story trickles down from a totally fair and balanced observation -- "an unlikely alliance" between "a handful of top administration aides" -- into a kind of shorthand -- "Obama agenda: The women vs. the men?" -- into accusations a weak president was railroaded by harpies into backing an intervention that's against America's interests -- the women "nagged him to attack Libya until he gave in" -- or that only the women of Obamaland have any balls. Um, hello: Hillary Clinton pushed for intervention in Libya not because she's female, but because, cautious as she may be, she also is among the more historically hawkish members of the administration. Indeed, one of the central reasons she is not president today -- and Obama is -- was her vote in favor of the military intervention in Iraq that Obama opposed. Then-state Sen. Barack Obama stood up against President Bush's fear-mongering push to invade Iraq, and opposed authorizing the use of force that Clinton backed. And he won support for his presidential bid because the left-leaning Democratic primary electorate wanted more change on the foreign policy front from the Bush years than Clinton represented. "I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars," he declared in October 2002. If Clinton is now, years later, still a more hawkish individual than some other Obama aides, it is not because she is female, but because in selecting her for his team of rivals Obama brought in someone whose foreign policy leanings have been for more than a decade far more aggressive than his own. That was his call, just as it was his call as Commander-in-Chief to back a strong resolution before the United Nations Security Council authorizing intervention in Libya in defense of threatened civilians there. There were other men and women, less hawkish, he could have chosen to lead the State Department, and he certainly demonstrated an ability to deliver a sharp rebuke to Clinton during campaign 2008, both before the primaries and after, when he chose not to select her as his vice presidential ticket-mate. As for Samantha Power, the most important fact about her is not that she is female, but that she is one of the leading proponents of Clintonian (president, not secretary of state) liberal internationalism, an individual whose conscience was seared by the brutality of the Balkan wars, which she covered as a reporter, and who later wrote the definitive work about the consequences of America's failure to intervene in Rwanda. Far from being lady-allies in pant suits, Power had to resign from the Obama campaign for calling Clinton "a monster." "We'd like to think that women in power would somehow be less pro-war, but in the Obama administration at least it appears that the bellicosity is worst among Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power," lamented Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation in a piece that was, bizarrely, aggregated by Fox News. Yes, it is the case that on average women are more pacifist than are men. But there are no average women at the level of senior administration advisers or Cabinet secretaries. And anyone who is unable to have a conversation about what is happening within the administration without recourse to tired gender stereotypes about women's better, gentler natures -- or else how the strength of their views, when heeded, is somehow emasculating -- is willfully playing the part of cultural idiot, regardless of what side of the question they are writing from. As women increasingly take on important positions within the foreign policy arena, there will inevitably be moments when small groups of them -- as women remain a minority in such arenas, small groups are what you get -- will agree on policy issues, just as in other circumstances they ally with male peers, without anyone batting an eye. The original gender gap emerged in the 1980 election as Democratic women stuck with Jimmy Carter instead of flocking to Ronald Reagan, in part because the Republican Party had adopted opposition to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment for women as party planks during what was a time of feminist ferment. Women-specific issues and the transformation of women's roles in society since the 1970s created a gap in voting patterns that has persisted, though it has also shrunk in recent years. There is no gender component to the Libyan conflict, as compared to, say, the ongoing conflict in Sudan, or other conflicts where America's top women security advisers and female secretary of states apparently have not managed to hen-peck the president into more aggressive action, even as Clinton has made American concern for the status of women globally one of the hallmarks of her tenure in the Secretary's chair. The women of the administration are individuals with distinctively intellectual histories that are sufficiently explanatory of their views that no further imaginings about some mysterious female factor are required. They were hired for those histories, not because they are women, and it is their distinctive intellectual backgrounds that doubtless led them to arrive at certain conclusions about the appropriate course of action in Libya. If those histories led them to postures people find disagreeable, they ought to be called out for their politics -- but anyone who points first to gender is really just pointing the finger back at their own crabbed and narrow thinking about the legitimacy of women in power.

Vice President Biden has tapped a second journalist to be his communications director, announcing that Shailagh Murray of The Washington Post would lay aside her notepad to join the Obama White House. Murray will succeed former Time Washington bureau chief Jay Carney, who left journalism for Biden's shop before being becoming White House press secretary upon Robert Gibb's departure in mid-February. Murray covered the Obama presidential campaign for The Washington Post from its earliest days and later led coverage of the health-care overhaul fight after returning to Congressional coverage. Her last byline covering the administration she will soon join appeared on March 2. "Shailagh's years of experience covering a broad array of issues ranging from domestic policy to foreign affairs make her uniquely positioned to lead our communications team," Biden said in a statement announcing the move, which was first reported by Murray's colleague Chris Cillizza at The Post (both Murray and Cillizza are former colleagues of mine). "She is as well-respected among her peers as she is versed in the serious issues facing our nation and the world. Her leadership and counsel will be invaluable to me, and to the entire administration," Biden said. In November, Murray took on a new role at The Post reporting on "the political dynamic between the White House and Congress," according to a Post memo published on FishbowlDC. "She will pay special attention to the relationship between Democrats and the president as their party regroups for 2012." Murray's move will make her "one of more than a dozen people formerly employed by national news outlets working for the administration," The Post's Ed O'Keefe noted Friday. She will be the fourth from The Post, according to O'Keefe's list. Murray joined The Post in 2005 after working at The Wall Street Journal from 1992 to 2005.

New York Times reports at least 40 Dead, 200 Injured in Protests Updated 4:58 p.m. -- President Obama issued his strongest statement yet calling for restraint by the regime of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh in response to pro-democracy protestors calling for Saleh's ouster. "I strongly condemn the violence that has taken place in Yemen today and call on President Saleh to adhere to his public pledge to allow demonstrations to take place peacefully," Obama said in a statement Friday afternoon. Protests following Friday prayers in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa turned violent with Al Jazeera English reporting 30 dead and more than 200 wounded among the young protestors in a scene one witness described as a massacre. "Those responsible for today's violence must be held accountable," Obama said. "The United States stands for a set of universal rights, including the freedom of expression and assembly, as well as political change that meets the aspirations of the Yemeni people," he continued. "It is more important than ever for all sides to participate in an open and transparent process that addresses the legitimate concerns of the Yemeni people, and provides a peaceful, orderly and democratic path to a stronger and more prosperous nation." Al Arabiya reported 42 dead and 300 wounded in the clashes after "pro-regime loyalists and police opened fire on protesters." The New York Times put the figure at "at least 40."

Washington's local NBC affiliate reports:

D.C. police confirmed that a substance ingested by students at a northwest D.C. elementary school was cocaine, according to D.C. Public Schools. Several children became ill when they ingested a powdery substance Thursday at Thomson Elementary School, located in the 1200 block of L Street. D.C. Fire and EMS was called to the school at about 12:30 p.m. Apparently, one student took a powdery substance to school and passed it out to other students. The children who ingested it complained of throat irritation, NBC Washington's Derrick Ward reported. Five were taken to area hospitals by ambulance for observation. Parents took a sixth student from the school.

Luiza Ch. Savage, Washington bureau chief for Canada's Maclean's magazine, reminds that this is the same school The Washington Post once recommended as the perfect public school for President Obama's daughters. Here's The Post's Jay Matthews in November 2008, urging the first couple to consider sending the kids to public school:

Why not see what their tax dollars are paying for? One educational gem happens to be the closest public school to their new home. Strong John Thomson Elementary School is at 1200 L St. NW, three-fifths of a mile from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Go north on 15th, turn right on L and three blocks farther it's on the right. ... Sixty-nine percent of Thomson's 355 students are from low-income families. Forty percent are Hispanic, 34 percent black, 22 percent Asian American and 5 percent white. That demographic mix often means remedial instruction and little enrichment, but parents say the school offers a feast of music, art and foreign languages as good as what they would find in a private school. ... The last president to send a child to a D.C. public school was Jimmy Carter.

DC. What a place.

Susan Orlean tweeted last night, "I assigned 'Hiroshima' to my NYU students this semester. It seemed like an ancient artifact at the time, and now, sadly, very relevant."

The situation now unfolding in Japan now is very different, scientifically and in other more obvious respects, from an atomic blast. The effect of a reactor core meltdown that breaks containment would be more akin to a dirty bomb than a nuclear warhead, and it's not clear yet what exactly is going on with the three damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, even as a radiation spike has been measured, evacuations ordered, etc.

Still, Orelan's tweet jogged a nuclear memory. In eighth grade at a Santa Fe, N.M., public middle school, my whole history class was made to watch a cartoon movie version of the Hiroshima bombing. This was before the end of the Cold War and fear of nuclear attack was still a major part of the culture, as were debates on nuclear policy. The film (WARNING) was very gruesome, especially all the scenes of the immediate post-blast aftermath, which were seared indelibly into my brain. I don't recall what the film was called, but I took to the Google last night after Orlean's tweet, and I think I found it.



I'm pretty sure it was the anime version of Barefoot Gen, unless there is more than one cartoon film about the Hiroshima bombing out there featuring scenes of people with their skin melting off.

Barefoot Gen was first published as a manga serial in 1972-73 by Keiji Nakazawa, a survivor of the American attack on Hiroshima, which he lived through as a child. You can read about the plot here; suffice is to say, it is both horrifying and heart-breaking. It was also made into a live action movie. The anime version was directed by Mori Masaki and released in 1983. The Barefoot Gen graphic novels were republished in 1990 (and again subsequently) in English by Last Gasp, with an introduction by Art Spiegelman, the illustrator behind Maus, the award-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust.

The whole film has been posted to YouTube in five to 10-minute segments. I've laid out the links to the English-language version below; the voice-overs are kind of dreadful in that overacted childrens' cartoon way, but hey, it's a movie about a little boy surviving the Hiroshima bombing, and, apparently, it was considered suitable for children back in the '80s, so I guess the concession was to make the characters sound like a Hanna-Barbera Production. It's perhaps the most gruesome cartoon you will ever see. And by all accounts it's pretty much historically accurate.

Clip1
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Clip 4: Hiroshima bombing
Clip 5: Aftermath
Clip 6: Aftermath
Clip 7: Aftermath
Clip 8: Aftermath
Clip 9: Aftermath

The first time I sat in the Washington Post's main newsroom conference room, David Broder quietly predicted that Barack Obama would be elected president. It was early December 2007, about a week before my first day, and I'd been brought in to be introduced and to sit with the august politics team for the first time. Everything about the room exuded authority and tradition, from the heavy wooden table to the posters, awards and memorabilia that lined the walls. The final two of the four rounds of buyouts that diminished the ranks of more experienced reporters at the paper had yet to happen, and every senior head listened intently to what Broder, returned once again from the field, had to say. At the time, it was not yet the conventional wisdom that Obama would win the presidency. It was not even the conventional wisdom that Obama -- and not John Edwards -- would win the Iowa caucuses, though a handful of reporters who had more or less moved to the state had felt confident since late summer of Obama's prospects there. But Broder, a cautious and methodical reporter who'd been at The Post since before I was born, went out on that limb -- only to not have it turn out to be a limb at all. In fact, his early call was simply a product of his tremendous experience as a political reporter and deep love for talking to voters. He saw something afoot in the land, among the men and women with whom he spoke that year in diners and on benches (Ed O'Keefe did a lovely video series of Broder talking with voters in early primary states in '07 and '08), and in the candidate, and he was able to call it right and call it fast. A lot has changed about the paper since then -- the old windowless conference room is now a sleek glass fishbowl, and a whole new generation of young reporters has packed the emptied desks -- but I am grateful to have had a chance to know Broder as a newsroom presence and emissary from a vanished world, as all elderly men and women are, while his feet were nonetheless firmly planted in the present, and not so far from mine. I did not work with him closely, though I worked near his office, with its magnificent and terrifying accumulation of books and papers towering from floor to ceiling, and was pleased to of a late primary night have occasion to move his copy to the Web. I could never reconcile the genial man I knew with the figure caricatured by other, much younger men I knew, some of whom skewered his role on the opinion pages before taking up a spot there themselves. He was one of the nicest people in the newsroom, and all I could figure was that he just never gave up hope that Washington could one day be nicer, too. Here's Broder's take on the 2008 race, which would turn out to be the last presidential contest he covered: Below, some takes from his colleagues at the paper: From Dan Balz:

David Broder was the best political reporter of his or any other generation. He defined the beat as it had not been defined before. He spent a lifetime instructing succeeding generations of reporters - never by dictate but always by example. He could be tough on politicians when they deserved it, but he was extraordinarily generous to his colleagues, particularly those new to the beat. He created a climate of collegiality that allowed everyone else to flourish, even while demonstrating from one campaign to the next the keenest insights and shrewdest judgments. His secret was no secret at all. He was a tireless reporter. He wrote two columns a week for most of the past 40 years, but for almost that entire time he carried a full load as a reporter on The Post's national staff. As influential as he was as a columnist, he considered himself a reporter first and foremost. He brought enormous integrity and humility to his craft. He wanted to know what others thought. He did not form his judgments and then go prove his point. He listened to people, no matter how grand or small their station, and took their scattered observations and spun them into the wisdom he dispensed in his writings. He knew the details of everything but never lost sight of the big picture. In an era when political reporting has become more and more focused on minutiae, he kept his focus where it belonged - on the events and forces that move ordinary Americans and shape history. He loved the inside stuff, but he never mistook the whim of the moment for something real.

From Chris Cillizza:

the moment I will always remember about the Dean came in January 2008. I was in Iowa, trudging through the snow and ice to make my way to an event at the Hy-Vee Hall in Des Moines and cursing the fact that the nation's first in the nation caucuses happened to be in a state where the temperature rarely got out of single digits in the winter. I looked across the street and saw Broder -- at that point in his late 70s -- trudging toward the same place. We caught eyes and he yelled out "Hello, Chris" in an impossibly cheery voice. That was David Broder. A man who had been to thousands of political events in Iowa but was excited about going to one more. A man whose curiosity and intensity about politics shined through to anyone who met him. A man who was never too big to listen to the thoughts of a junior reporter like me. A man whose kindness and open-mindedness sent the tone in the Post newsroom for decades. I count myself lucky to have spent time talking to and working alongside David. He is the standard to which all political reporters aspire. And he will be missed.

From Joel Achenbach:

If there were a more decent and generous journalist in our business than David Broder, I've never met the person. Broder ("David" to everyone in the hallway, the elevator, the campaign filing center, of course) remained the consummate collegial figure long after -- decades after -- earning the status of "dean of the Washington press corps." He had no pretense in him. He was a big-name pundit, but, most of all, he was a thing we used to call "a newspaper reporter." He knocked on doors to the very end of his career, interviewing voters, getting to know the local political organizers, never promoting himself to a rank too exalted to conduct shoe-leather reporting or pound out a deadline story in a cold gym in some remote corner of New Hampshire or Iowa. Who am I kidding: He loved those gyms! And the tighter the deadline, the better.

From his former Post colleague Lou Cannon:

When I went to Washington in 1969, Broder was the gold standard of political reporters, as he would be for decades. What I didn't realize until I joined The Post in 1972 was that his influence on his colleagues was even greater than his influence on his readers. He saw to it that the newest and rawest members of the national staff, of which I was one, received top assignments that resulted in Page One stories, even if that meant that he took a back seat. At the 1972 Republican National Convention, he sat in a smoke-filled room for four hours, taking notes for me on an obscure issue that I had been covering so I could write the lead story that day. In putting himself out for his colleagues, Broder taught us that it was the story that mattered, not our egos. He inspired us to work as a team and lifted the confidence and quality of the entire newsroom. Many years ago, he wrote a piece that began, "Let us be modest, ladies and gentlemen of the press, for we have much to be modest about." It impressed me - and it impressed my eldest son, Carl, even more. When Carl was at the Baltimore Sun, a young reporter complained that one of the prima donnas in our business had treated him shoddily. Carl told him to forget it and to think instead of the example set by Broder. "Don't ever think it's necessary to be puffed up," Carl advised the young reporter. When I was a teenager, he said, David Broder never came to our house and didn't ask me what I was doing or how I felt. He is the greatest of them all, and he never had a swelled head.

From Ruth Marcus:

When Fred Hiatt, the editor of the Washington Post editorial page, offered me the chance to write a weekly column, the first person I turned to for advice was Dave Broder. I headed to Dave's glassed-in cubicle in the midst of the newsroom. Back in the days when I used to lead tours of The Post for my kids' pre-school classes, this site was always the biggest hit with the moms -- not because Broder was such a journalistic mega-star, which he was, but because the office was so astonishingly, dangerously piled with books and papers it cried out for "clean-up time." As always, sitting amid the chaos, Dave had a minute. As always, Dave demurred at the thought that he had any wisdom to offer. As always, he did. "I can't tell you how to write a column but I can tell you what works for me," he said. First, he said, you can only have one big thought per 750-word column. Second, he said, he couldn't simply sit in his office and conjure up Big Thoughts. He had to go out and report. That was classic Broder, indeed a reporter at heart.