Month: November 2010

A reader writes:

Well, it finally happened! San Francisco banned the happy meal in a veto-proof majority vote yesterday. Apparently you can't be trusted to decide if your kid should get to eat a meal that comes with a toy. Or you can't be trusted to ignore your kid begging for the toy.

The specifics:

Under the ordinance, scheduled to take effect in December 2011, restaurants may include a toy with a meal if the food and drink combined contain fewer than 600 calories, and if less than 35% of the calories come from fat.

The ordinance would also require restaurants to provide fruits and vegetables with all meals for children that come with toys.

"We're part of a movement that is moving forward an agenda of food justice," said Supervisor Eric Mar, who sponsored the measure. "From San Francisco to New York City, the epidemic of childhood obesity in this country is making our kids sick, particularly kids from low income neighborhoods, at an alarming rate. It's a survival issue and a day-to-day issue."

Food justice? Jon Bershad is saddened:

The most offensive thing about this law though is the idea of the government totally disrupting the marketplace. What child is going to want to go to McDonalds now? You just know that the big California organic vegan food bar chains are going to sign a deal with Disney and totally dominate the kiddie market.

At least the McRib's back.

John McWhorter gushes over newly minted senator Marco Rubio:

Marco Rubio, in his victory speech …. showed as he often has why he is the Tea Party’s real secret weapon. Starting out with gushy God talk and closing by stressing that he is a “son of exiles,” Rubio is – let’s face it – a better Obama in his way. His Christianity will always be clear to those who care, and his foreign forebears are ones who fled Communism. At first we were to suppose that Obama’s mongrelism made him “like America,” but the leftist Kenyan business is ripe for the Becks and D’Souzas among us to frame as alien, never mind that Indonesia is a Muslim country. Rubio’s foreignness is more cuddly, immune to Fox News-style demagoguery.

Plus Rubio is a natural talker. No stagy incantations of lines based on things other people said long ago; no giggling; no props; no wandering off topic. He can rub a noun and a verb together, with minimal attendance to notes. As a result, like Bill Clinton, he seems intelligent in a way that Paladino and O’Donnell do not, and approachably human and on the ground in a way that Paul, despite his active mind, cannot.

Nate Persily examines the potential for Republicans to protect their new gains with redistricting.

In case you aren't sufficiently depressed, Howard Gleckman guesses that "President Obama and House Speaker-to-be John Boehner (R-OH) …. [will] give lip service to 'working together' and the need for deficit reduction, but will do little of either." A reader notes that the one party running on actual spending cuts – i.e. the Medicare cuts in the health insurance reform – was punished:

Republicans may be claiming the latest vote was against big spending and deficits.  But the GOP relied so heavily on votes from the elderly that it suggests what really upset these voters was $500bn in Medicare cuts over 10 years, and more than $1 trillion in the next 10. Anyone looking at the long term projections for spending knows that the main worry is Medicare, and this is the number one issue in any serious attempt to curb the deficit.

That Obama was willing to take on this issue says a lot for his courage and responsibility that few are giving him credit for.  Of course Obama's proposals didn't go anywhere near far enough, but he seems to have breached the limits of what is politically possible in addressing the number one spending problem (and taxes too, simply by returning only the very rich to Clinton-era levels).  Republicans have gotten away with a nonsense, that the government should pay for whatever health care the elderly want, but that either raising taxes to pay for it, or restrictions on how the money is spent, would threaten freedom.  This is madness, and makes a budget crisis look inevitable.

Douthat thinks yesterday's results are bad for the Palin wing of the GOP:

The G.O.P. leadership is still going to be constrained (hopefully in positive, deficit-reducing ways, rather than negative, let’s-shut-down-the-government ways) by the activists who helped put them in power, and there will probably be an even stronger crop of Tea Party insurgents running against incumbent Republicans in the 2012 Senate and House primaries. But I do think that the fate of Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, and the likely fates of Ken Buck and Joe Miller, sharply reduce the chances of a purely Tea Party-affiliated candidate — a Sarah Palin, a Jim DeMint, or someone else entirely — winning the G.O.P. nomination for president. (Though admittedly, I never thought those chances were that high to begin with.) Come 2012, there’s going to be an enormous appetite among Republican voters for someone who can actually beat Obama in a hard-fought general election campaign — and for all their victories last night, the Tea Parties still haven’t proven that their more polarizing candidates can win the hardest, most-contested and highest-profile races.

It seems to me that last night will not matter much in the primary battle for 2012. What will matter is whether the base is satisfied merely with Obama-bashing for two more years or whether they actually expect some fiscal reform from the GOP. Boehner will have to pretend for the next two years that he is interested in cutting the size of government. If he doesn't pretend well enough, there may be a Tea-Party revolt and third party breakout. Palin, one senses, would much rather "go rogue" than go easily if the GOP establishment finds their man. Noah Millman is more succinct: 

Republicans nominated very right-wing candidates who seemed like plausible Senators in Florida and Pennsylvania. They won. They also nominated very right-wing candidates who seemed like lunatics in Nevada, Delaware and Alaska. They lost. … There is a lesson here: don’t nominate candidates who seem like lunatics. You would think this would be an easy lesson to learn.

Goldblog puts it as well as anyone could:

Islam is not the problem. In fact, it's the solution to the actual problem, the problem of political Islamism, a radical and often-violent minority movement within the body of Islam. But Islam itself? Islam contains multitudes, to borrow a phrase.

In reference to the latest case — the mail bombs out of Yemen — well, this is a particularly bad case to hold up as proof of Islam's hostility to the West, because it was the Saudi government — the custodian of the Two Mosques, the government that rules Islam's holy land — that provided the West with the intelligence it needed to track down these bombs before they killed anyone. The West cannot defeat political Islamism. Only Islam can. And Saudi Arabia proved in this recent case that it is trying.

An important caveat about the record number of openly gay public officials elected yesterday:

The Victory Fund’s endorsed Republican candidates for state legislative seats were not successful, meaning no openly LGBT Republicans will be serving as state lawmakers next year.

And there are none in the US Congress. The GOP is a political party which is partly defined by exclusion of one minority group.

Angle mobilized it in Nevada:

Despite earlier polling data that indicated Hispanics would skip this election, exit polls showed they accounted for a record 16 percent of total voters. That turnout was likely backlash to an ad aired by a Republican operative explicitly telling Hispanics not to vote, as well as inflammatory ads from Angle’s campaign that used images of Hispanic youth dressed as gang members.

He seemed tired, a little down, and flat. But also earnest and humble and … a little boring. The tone felt right to me, and the calm pledge to work with Republicans on those few things – like aspects of energy policy, education and taxes – on which they agree seems genuine.

What you see here is a president actually trying to address public problems with practical solutions. The lack of any ideological arc or narrative is in stark contrast with the GOP. That has hurt him so far. But if the economy recovers, and if he can explain how he helped, this pragmatism will become more popular. Those are two serious ifs, however.