Month: February 2010

Will a good handshake get you a job?

Pivoting off a post by Jonathan Bernstein, Chait wonders whether the House or Senate is a bigger hang-up:

The whole reason the House distrusts the Senate is that the Senate has a filibuster, which has meant that every single Democrat must hold together in the fact of GOP obstructionism in order to pass anything substantial. To pass a reconciliation patch, the Senate can afford to lose nine Democrats, which makes it a piece of cake. Which is to say, the House is acting irrationally. It needs to pass the Senate bill and trust that 50 Democrats can be found to carry out a verbal agreement.

The flip side, of course, is that the irrational distrust of the Senate is part of what gives the House leverage here. In a negotiation where both sides have a strong incentive to compromise but the parameters of agreement are wide, the side that can more credibly threaten to walk away has an advantage — which is to say, the crazy man wins.

From Scott Anderson's article on Mormon polygamists:

Not all FLDS women are quite so sanguine about plural marriage. Dorothy Emma Jessop is a spry, effervescent octogenarian who operates a naturopathic dispensary in Hildale. Sitting in her tiny shop surrounded by jars of herbal tinctures she ground and mixed herself, Dorothy admits she struggled when her husband began taking on other wives. "To be honest," she says, "I think a lot of women have a hard time with it, because it's not an easy thing to share the man you love. But I came to realize this is another test that God places before you—the sin of jealousy, of pride—and that to be a godly woman, I needed to overcome it."

What seems to help overcome it is an awareness that a woman's primary role in the FLDS is to bear and raise as many children as possible, to build up the "celestial family" that will remain together for eternity.