New York Times

There’s a lot of stuff we consume while barely pausing to consider where it comes from; it is easy, these days, to be insulated from production. Inquisitive writers profitably explore the knowledge gap: recent work about the life stories of handguns, French fries and Panama hats comes to mind.

Joining the national debate over the 47 million people without health insurance, a group of the largest commercial hospital chains plans to propose today that individuals be required to have basic health coverage.

The proposal, which the hospital group hopes might eventually find its way into federal legislation, would require individuals to take coverage through employers, when health benefits are offered; purchase it on their own; or if they are eligible, to receive it through existing government programs...

It is a common experience for journalists covering low-intensity conflicts to see masses of civilians running from the mere rumor of far-off attacks. They flee in motor vehicles driven at high speed down narrow, overcrowded roads, often at night without lights for fear of enemy fire. The result is a death rate from accidents that often dwarfs the losses from enemy action. Yet despite the wrecks littering the sides of the roads, nothing will persuade the drivers that they are making a false calculation of risk. They think they know how to drive.

At a conference devoted to “big ideas” for the nation’s future, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said this morning that compromise need to be “a goal – not a dirty word” in politics and government, remarks that reflect her own pragmatic style but that are more moderate than the views of some of her rivals and hard-core elements of the Democratic primary electorate.

Wal-Mart Stores, the nation’s largest employer, is expected to announce today that the number of workers enrolled in the company’s health plan rose 8 percent last fall, the result of its introduction of cheaper insurance policies.

But the company said that, even with the increase, less than half of its 1.3 million employees — 47.4 percent — receive health insurance through Wal-Mart. About 10 percent of its employees, or 130,000, have no coverage at all.

When Jonathan Hu was going to high school in suburban Southern California, he rarely heard anyone speaking Chinese. But striding through campus on his way to class at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Hu hears Mandarin all the time, in plazas, cafeterias, classrooms, study halls, dorms and fast-food outlets. It is part of the soundtrack at this iconic university, along with Cantonese, English, Spanish and, of course, the perpetual jackhammers from the perpetual construction projects spurred by the perpetual fund drives.

What is the most pressing problem facing the economy? A good case can be made for the developing health care crisis. Soaring costs, growing ranks of uninsured and a steady erosion of corporate health benefits add up to a giant drag on the nation’s future prosperity.

Here is the redacted version of a draft Op-Ed article we wrote for The Times, as blacked out by the Central Intelligence Agency's Publication Review Board after the White House intervened in the normal prepublication review process and demanded substantial deletions. Agency officials told us that they had concluded on their own that the original draft included no classified material, but that they had to bow to the White House.

The French saying, often attributed to Talleyrand, that “this is worse than a crime, it’s a blunder,” could easily describe America’s invasion of Iraq. But for the United States to pull entirely out of that country right now, as is being demanded by a growing chorus of critics, would be to snatch an unqualified disaster from the jaws of an enormous blunder.

As liberals try to articulate a post-Bush foreign policy, some are feeling a bit of cognitive dissonance.

They have always thought of themselves as idealistic, concerned with the welfare of humankind. Not for them the ruthlessly narrow focus on national self-interest of the "realist" foreign policy school. That school’s most famous practitioner, Henry Kissinger, is for many liberals a reminder of how easily the ostensible amorality of classic realism slides into immorality.