Month: November 2009

Frum argues that "Obamacare could ban abortion." His thoughts on the bill more broadly:

Small employers can now escape the obligation to provide health care for their employees by paying an 8% payroll tax. Many small employers will seize that offer. Their employees will have to go shopping for themselves in a very complicated and confusing marketplace. Many will opt for the seeming security of the government-run plan. Over time, the public option will grow, setting private insurance on the road to extinction – or at best to a tightly regulated new role as the health equivalent of public utilities. The big decisions will be made in Washington; the insurers will comply.

At any rate, that’s the House leadership’s hope: not a single payer, exactly, but a single administrator.

Remixing the whitest man on Earth:

And yes, that actually happened.

A reader writes:

Call me a spoil sport. But I think at least some critical analysis should be offered up of this growing trend of surprising the children of soldiers with their parents return from deployments into war zones. Think for a minute about what these children are deprived of because of these staged episodes. Of the celebratory knowledge that their parent is safely on their way home. Of 2 – 3 days (maybe even more) of carefree living as they no longer need worry about what might happen to their parent. Of the growing anticipation of the impending return, and of assisting in the planning and preparations for that return. To exchange all of that for a candid camera moment to share and rack up hits on YouTube suggests – just perhaps – that our priorities have gone a little bit screwy.

The Israeli government's clear intent to do nothing to jump-start peace negotiations – and to threaten to launch a war against Iran if Washington doesn't – leaves the US in a bind. How to push Israel to end all their settlement provocations and fundamentalist intransigence in Jerusalem and the West Bank? Obviously, in a rational environment, the US would look to the massive aid that American tax-payers send to Israel, especially the illegal military aid to a country secretly possessing nuclear weapons which it insists on denying to any regional neighbors. If you're trying to pressure an ally, aid is one of the obvious ways to do it.

Of course, the idea of using the lever of suspending aid has long been a non-starter in Washington so strong is Israel's support in the capital. But Tom Friedman today urged a policy of American withdrawal from the conflict altogether until the two/three parties show some minimal interest in moving forward:

If the status quo is this tolerable for the parties, then I say, let them enjoy it. I just don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore. We need to fix America.

That no-subsidies-for-Middle-East-intransigents line would have real traction for many Americans, sick of spending their money and risking the lives of their sons and daughters in religious conflicts far away. (It could be used against Egypt as well). More interestingly, as Greenwald notes, Joe Klein now thinks using aid as leverage is a good idea:

It is in the best interests of the United States for the Israelis to make this deal. It is also in the best interests of the Israelis. The Neocon-Likudniks have neither Israel's nor our best interests at heart. Boot is right: The Obama Administration may have to be a bit less "grandiose" in dealing with Netanyahu's irredentist government. It should start by putting a hold on all economic and military aid to Israel; the aid should not be discontinued, just held, for a nice long review until the Netanyahu government comes to understand that Jerusalem must be the capital of both Israel and Palestine, and that if you actually want peace, you don't build illegal settlement colonies in the Palestinian capital.

Remember also that American tax-payers helped finance the Gaza assault. At some point, the US has a right to say: no mas.

A reader writes:

Here are two views from the same place – the windows of a semi-ruined East German watchtower on the former border between West and East Germany. The first view [above] is looking north, the second view [after the jump] is looking south. Both show the former "death strip", which has now been reclaimed by nature. Twenty years ago today, the people seeing this view would have been armed and with orders to shoot on sight. The pictures were taken at 12:53 and 12:54 pm near Morsleben, Germany. This would be a nice choice for today, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall and the opening of the inner German border.

Please also note that Inner German Border will be Wikipedia's featured article of the day on November 9th, tying in with the 20th anniversary of the revolution in East Germany. You might find it an interesting read. (Disclaimer: I wrote the article).

There's something deeply comforting about seeing nature reclaim an arbitrary human divide created by ideology. It reveals the transience of even the most horrifying isms in the context of the planet we live in, and the hubris of humans who think their own vision has now supplanted everything that came before. For me, the end of the Wall meant the beginning of a chance to live without ideological war or the fear of ideological war, a moment for the peace dividend to take hold and the idea of US global hegemony given a break in a more stable, less fraught and much less ideological world. How wrong I was. 

But the second view lifts one's spirits. It shows a path ahead, and fields and trees beyond:

Yglesias sighs:

There’s also a whole bunch of folks who’ve decided that it’d be hilarious to start referring to Rep. Cao as “Mao” because, you see, they’re both responsible for the deaths of millions Asians. Also this. I think the conservative movement is going to continue to struggle in a decreasingly white America.

Jay Newton-Small on why Cao voted for the bill:

by far the most amount of pressure came from Cantor and the White House. Obama pledged to work with Cao on additional financial aid for his district, especially in disaster loan forgiveness, and on help paying for expanded Medicaid services under the bill in the years to come. Cantor also lobbied Cao, meeting with him several times Saturday. Of course, according to Cao, the decision was purely altruistic. “I have always said that I would put aside partisan wrangling to do the business of the people. My vote tonight was based on my priority of doing what is best for my constituents,” Cao said in his statement.

Marriage equality will benefit not just the gays:

As the debate over legalizing same-sex marriage in the District grows louder and more polarized, there are people whose support for the proposal is personal but not often talked about. They are federal workers and professionals, men and women who share little except that their former spouses tried to live as heterosexuals but at some point realized they could not. […]

"It's like you hit a brick wall when they come out," [Kimberly] Brooks said. "You think everything is fine and then, boom!" Carolyn Sega Lowengart calls it "retroactive humiliation." It's that embarrassment that washes over her when she looks back at photographs or is struck by a memory and wonders what, if anything, from that time was real. Did he ever love her? "I'm 61 years old," said Lowengart, who lives in Chevy Chase. "Will I ever know what it's like to be loved passionately? Probably not."

These tangibly broken families, these ruptured relationships, these betrayed spouses and confused children: why is it that the anti-equality forces have nothing to say to them?

The latest loveliness from the crackpot fringes of the Christianist right.

Some revealing background:

As an indication of the election’s importance to the United States, [Ambassador Christopher] Hill was seen shuttling back and forth between the offices of various political parties all day Sunday in an effort to pressure them to reach a deal.

“Go upstairs and vote!” he shouted at a pair of slow-moving lawmakers as they climbed a set of stairs to the chamber before the session.

Where is David Lean when you need him?

Reihan wonders whether ethno-centrism, which is a polite way of saying racism, will be the deepest obstacle to Chinese success in the next generation. The fast-aging, gender-imbalanced society needs younger people to keep its economy going, and immigrants are the obvious solution. But culture stands in the way:

China is not terribly hospitable to ethnic outsiders, including members of non-Han minorities native to China. Observers tend to overstate the level of ethnic homogeneity in China, not least because the Han category masks tremendous cultural diversity. "Hanness" is as broad and contingent a category as "whiteness." But as Frank Dikötter of the University of Hong Kong argued in his brilliant 1992 book The Discourse of Race in Modern China, traditional notions about culturally inferior "barbarians" intermingled with Western forms of scientific racism to form a distinctively Chinese racial consciousness in the 20th century. The "yellows" were locked in a struggle with their equals, the "whites"–and both were superior to the "blacks," "browns" and "reds." The dislike and distrust of Europeans was always mixed with envy and admiration. The disdain for dark-skinned foreigners, in contrast, was and remains relatively

uncomplicated.

Maoist China railed against Western imperialism, and saw itself as a leader of the global proletariat of Africans and Asians.

Now, as China emerges as an economic and cultural superpower, those notions of Third World solidarity, always skin deep, seem to have vanished. It is thus hard to imagine China welcoming millions of hard-working Nigerians and Bangladeshis with open arms. This could change over the next couple of decades as China's labor shortage grows acute. I wouldn't bet on it.

If China remains culturally closed, the Chinese Century will never come to pass. Instead, the United States–a country that has struggled with race and racism for centuries, and in the process has become more culturally open and resilient–will dominate this century as it did the last.

It can be hard to see developments like the civil rights movement for African-Americans, or the fight for women's or gay equality, as engines of economic growth. But they are; and they remain one of the West's core advantages, unless we too succumb to atavism and xenophobia.