Here's Nicholas Kristof using his ass to nudge toward the reader what Kristof wants him to believe is the truth about healthcare: <link>, but what is, in fact, the truth about the journalist's relationship to those who provide him with freebees that few others, certainly not those at the FTC, naturally connect to payola: tax breaks.

It's tempting to laud Kristof for proposing that all the members of Congress be threatened with something (in this case, random selection). It's also Mengele-like. And Kristof proposes anything at all for those with less than he only because he's cornered by those with less than he. This particular proposal represents for Kristof the least injurious thing he can do to those to whom he is beholden. It doesn't hurt that such injuries as those Kristof would cause to some members of Congress, being random, will be democratic.

Slate's own Tim Noah, never cornered, has been doing for a long time, in Prescriptions, what Kristof would do in today's NYT. It's Noah's considered opinion that the reader's problem is that he doesn't know to a sufficient degree or in fine-enough detail what it is that causes him to be on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder (and marked not in ink but still for death). Too compassionate to list and to describe for the reader any of the many wondrous and beauteous things being enjoyed by the wealthy at the expense of the poor, Noah employs symbols--dollar amounts, many a professional's favorite euphemism--when explaining to the reader his sad condition.

Mengele (or any pro-Iraq War member of Congress [and today that would be 100% of them]), employing Noah's methods, would've gotten nowhere.