Month: September 2012

A reader writes:

The example you quoted from Dave Baldridge doesn't even begin to relate how controversial blood lineage has become, and not just to the federal government. My father is a card-carrying member (really – he has a membership card) of the Quechan tribe in Yuma, Arizona. He was born and raised on the reservation before his father moved their family to Los Angeles in the '60s. His father (my grandfather) had 3/4 Native blood, making my father 3/8ths and me 3/16ths. The reason I lay all that out is to frame the controversy just in my family. Sometime in the 1970s our tribe instituted a blood requirement for membership.

You had to be at least 1/4 Quechan in order to be permitted membership, which means not only those benefits provided by the federal government but also ownership of a portion of tribal lands, a share in gaming profits (visit the Quechan Paradise Casino on the California/Arizona border if you're stranded in that desert sometime), and all other benefits arranged by the tribe. I have dozens of cousins – both on the reservation and off – who share the same blood as mine but are official, card-carrying members of our tribe because they were born before the cut-off date. As you can probably tell from the way I've laid this out, I was born after the cut-off.

The sad thing about the whole situation is that blood requirements were an invention of the white man – specifically the Bureau of Indian Affairs – that was sure to lead to our eventual breeding out. And now many tribes have adopted the practice in order to limit tribal rolls and concentrate existing members' shares of gaming revenues and other resources (land chief among them).

Garance Franke-Ruta wrote about "blood quantums," as they're known, earlier this year.

Sean Sullivan passes along Pew’s polling on attention paid to Clint’s improv:

Eastwood’s speech left as much of an impression in the minds of those who tuned in as Mitt Romney’s speech did. Among Americans who watched at least a little convention coverage, 20 percent said the actor/director’s speech was the highlight while 17 percent said Romney’s nomination acceptance address was the highlight. … Even among Republicans, Romney’s speech was not a huge attention-grabber. Twenty-five percent of Republicans polled said that Romney’s speech was the highlight of the convention. But Eastwood’s address was not far behind: Nearly one-in-five (19 percent) Republicans named Eastwood’s speech the highlight of the GOP gathering. Twenty-six percent of independents said Eastwood’s speech was the highlight of the convention, while a plurality of Democrats said there was no highlight.

In response to the new numbers, Douthat attempts to defend Eastwood’s speech. Meanwhile, someone is still having fun:

@invisibleobama FAKE! Your birth certificate is fake! Times tamp on it is 1030PM hours AFTER you appeared on NTL TV! FAKE!FAKER!

— Jonathan Stack (@Jonathanstack) September 4, 2012

Earlier Dish coverage here, here, here and here.

Fred Clark sees trouble brewing in mobile home communities:

The problem with mobile homes is that they’re not really mobile. They’re anchored to a particular site, and detaching them to transport them elsewhere is extremely expensive and, in many cases, impossible. That means the regular rules of the market do not apply — there can be no competition to restrain arbitrary or extreme rent hikes because these home-owners are, literally, stuck right where they are. This creates an untenable situation for both the homeowners and the landlords who rent out the ground beneath their homes.

My preferred solution is to convert them — all of them, everywhere — into resident-owned communities. That’s the idea championed by New Hampshire-based nonprofit ROC USA. They’re right. When residents own the land beneath their homes they acquire the stability and security they now lack. They are able to build equity and to plan for the long term. Resident-ownership strengthens communities and empowers the families and retirees who live in them. And it reduces government regulation and intervention by eliminating the need for it.

Better than the original:

A few readers share tales of cats turning on humans:

My 68-year-old mother has three cats.  One of them found itself caught in the handle of a plastic bag two months ago. As she freed it, the panicked feline bit her hand.  This was around 9:30pm on a Thursday night. Friday morning she woke up to find her arm swollen to the elbow, unable to bend her wrist, and in what she described as the "worst pain I've ever felt".  Her doctor admitted her to the hospital, where she stayed for THREE NIGHTS, on an IV drip to kill all the bacteria. For a while, they were considering surgery to release the pressure the infection was putting on her arm.

From what her doctor said, cats have really really dirty mouths. They also have long, pointed teeth, so when they bite, they go deep (dogs have cleaner mouths and tend to tear the skin).  I've always been told that if a cat bites you, you should go to the doctor or ER immediately.

Another:

Here's the story about how an outdoor cat scarred my little sister physically and emotionally.

She has a pet rabbit whom we all dearly love, and we mostly keep him inside the house, where he hops around wherever he wants. If we take him outside, it's inside a pen, and only with supervision, because one of our neighbors have an evil outdoor cat. It kills with impunity, and not for food. It'll stalk, kill and decapitate small animals, then just leave them around our yard and and everyone else's.

A few years ago we had a litter of wild baby rabbits living in our backyard. And my sister, being the rabbit lover that she is, loved to go outside and feed and watch them. Then came along the evil cat. As soon as it came into our yard, she knew what it was going to do. She tried to scatter the baby rabbits, but the cat managed to corner one in our garden. My sister panicked and tried to shoo it away, and the cat hissed and scratched her, leaving a scar on her leg that is still there today. Then she had to watch helplessly as the cat stalked a tiny baby rabbit and then bit it's head off. She can't even look at cats these days without being frightened.

So basically, the whole point of this story is: cat owners, please be aware that your outdoor cats may like to play in trees and bring you "presents", but you are not the only ones who have to deal with them. Outdoor cats roam neighborhoods freely, and often get into scuffles with other animals and humans. The least you can do is be considerate.

All of the previous stories and commentary in the "Your Little Purring Murderer" thread are here.

Reid Epstein considers the risk that Dems are taking in showcasing Warren, scheduled to introduce Bill Clinton tonight:

Will she handle the flood of interviews without hijacking Obama’s message to middle-class voters or alienating what remaining Wall Street donors the campaign still counts as friends?

I'd keep her as far from the podium as possible. She can turn Democrats into Republicans more effectively than Reagan. In Massachusetts, she is currently losing the race to Scott Brown by five points – losing a safe seat that any effective Democrat should win back. Monica Potts explores the candidate's weaknesses:

[Interview moderator Christopher] Lydon brought up an anecdote he’d heard: Warren, while she served on the bankruptcy panel during Clinton’s presidency, had known the first lady, Hillary Clinton. Clinton had supported Warren’s work and opposed changes to bankruptcy law. But later, when Clinton was in the Senate, she’d turned around and voted for changes Warren opposed. Lydon quoted what Warren had said at the time: "If she can’t take the heat, who can?" Later, Lydon asked Warren if she thought she could withstand the same pressures Hillary had sometimes caved to, or whether she’d just join the old boy’s club of the Senate.

"Oh, I think there’s a real question about what people run for," [Warren] replied. She added that she got into the race to uphold her principles, "not because this was a great career move for me." The implication was that other politicians, including Clinton, were in it for themselves. It was a pretty harsh dig at a Democrat admired by many in Massachusetts, whether or not Warren meant it to be.

Alec MacGillis' profile from last month touched on similar themes, arguing that Warren launched her campaign guided by "the Aaron Sorkin–esque notion that, if a candidate laid out the facts and made her argument with conviction, voters would see the light." Then there's the problem of her pedigree:

Warren is no carpetbagger—the Oklahoma native moved to Cambridge in 1995—but she lacks the same fluency in the state’s cultural preoccupations. She "doesn’t know that Ben Downing, the state senator from the Berkshires’ dad used to be the D.A. and he died of a heart attack shoveling snow," says [former Democratic president of the Boston City Council] DiCara. "You can get briefed all you want, but it’s tough to understand that stuff."

Maybe:

Democrats haven’t entirely leveled the Senate playing field. They still face more exposure to losses and some hurdles, not the least of which is the presidential race. It is possible that President Obama’s expected weak performance in states such as North Dakota and Indiana may prevent Democratic Senate victories there. And the presidential race appears to be making Senate contests in swing states such as Florida and Ohio more competitive than they were just weeks ago. Finally, Democrats will need to work to slow the momentum that Republican nominee Linda McMahon has in Connecticut, a state that should be an easy win for Democrats.

Democrats are in better shape than they were six months ago. Their hold on the majority is not guaranteed, but their prospects look more promising than they have all cycle.

Scott Morgan bets that no one at the Democratic convention will mention marijuana:

I’ve heard many Democrats address Obama’s handling of the marijuana issue by asking, “what do you expect?” and I’m happy to answer them. I expect change. Absent that, I expect an explanation. An explanation is something you ought to have when you’re arresting millions of people to protect them from a piece of plant material they put in their own pocket. The billions we spend trying to stop people from relaxing in this particular fashion should be subject to the same scrutiny as any other enormous amount of money our government spends, if not far more.

My solace is that they weren’t mentioning marriage equality four years ago – and now look where we are. The thing conservatives understand – and today’s Republicans don’t – is that in the end, reality wins. It’s just a matter of the terms of the peace treaty between reality and our delusions. I favor magnanimity.

Democrats appear to be running "two parallel conventions":

One hard-edged pitch to the party's base; and one broad, warm appeal to swing voters. The beginnings of Tuesday's convention were marked by fiery, shouted denunciations of Mitt Romney's wealth and and by relentless warnings about Republican views on women's health and quips like former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland's: “If Mitt was Santa Claus, he’d fire the reindeer and outsource the elves." The program swerved when prime time hit and broadcast viewers arrived, however, quickly becoming conciliatory and emotionally warm, closed by Michelle Obama's personal speech.

In the live-blog last night, I touted the fact that Romney's Massachusetts came in 47th out of 50 states in job creation. That's true if you average out all four years, but he improved the ranking from 50th to 28th over that period. I know the Romney campaign would never give Obama's job record that kind of fair treatment, but still, I want to issue a clarification that puts Romney's record in a much better light.

As for the 4.5 million jobs touted by Castro last night, that's roughly the number of new private sector jobs since the stimulus helped turn the economy around. It's not a net number over the full four years. But again, since it actually tells the real narrative, rather than a static average, I have no problem with that. You just can't do that with Obama's record and not do the same with Romney's.