Year: 2013

Is The Republicans’ Loss The Democrats’ Gain?

Ezra parses recent polling on the shutdown:

No one involved in this mess is particularly popular. But a two-party political system with first-past-the-post elections is a zero-sum affair. And Republicans are not only less popular than Democrats, their popularity isfalling faster than Democrats’. They are, in other words, losing, and badly.

Sides counters:

Disapproval Change[T]he Post’s numbers suggest this: if Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in the electorate approved of congressional Republicans as much as Democrats approve of Obama (71% do), congressional Republicans would be no less popular than congressional Democrats are.

Why does this matter? Because the politics of these approval numbers do not suggest that the GOP’s disadvantage would redound to the Democrat’s advantage in the midterm election in any clear zero-sum fashion.  As Lynn Vavreck and I noted in our piece for CNN, party identification predicts the vote in congressional elections very well.  The Republicans who don’t approve of the GOP’s handling of the budget negotiations aren’t likely to go vote for a Democrat.

How Masket understands the political impact of the shutdown:

If you want to do something with a bit lower profile, like changing logging rules or greenhouse gas regulations in order to satisfy some of your activist base, go for it. Most voters will never hear about it, and the people who do already have their mind made up about you anyway. But start a war, try to create or kill a piece of the social safety net, raise taxes, or shut down the government and its major services, and people will definitely notice, and they may punish you for it. That’s way outside of the blind spot, and if you operate there, you’re courting a reprisal. (Another way to operate outside the blind spot is to shrink it by drawing attention to what you’re doing, as Senator Ted Cruz did during his marathon Senate speech.)

But another thing to keep in mind is that voters are notoriously myopic. To the extent that they punish officeholders for their behavior, it’s usually for things that happened very recently. Sam Wang draws upon recent public opinion polls to find that the Democrats’ chances of taking back the U.S. House next year have gone from 13 percent to 50 percent, but that election is still more than a year away. (It’s not a coincidence that this standoff is happening now, and the last debt ceiling standoff occurred in 2011—both off-years for elections.) Lots of other things that voters may care about will happen between now and then. Congressional elections will also be affected somewhat by the economy, but voters will be evaluating an economy that doesn’t yet exist. Basically, they’ll be looking at economic growth in early 2014.

What Broke Washington?

Frum zooms out:

Why are American politicians playing so rough? We have moved into an era of scarcity. Once it seemed possible to have the spending Democrats wanted, financed at the tax rates the Republicans wanted, while paying for sufficient national security and running bearable deficits. That sense of expansiveness is gone. The trade-offs between Obamacare and Medicare, between spending and taxes, suddenly seem acute, imminent, and zero sum.

These disputes are not merely economic. As the United States becomes more ethnically diverse, debates over fiscal priorities inescapably become conflicts between ethnicities and cultures.

The Medicare population is more than 80 percent white. On the eve of the 2008 recession, the uninsured were 27 percent foreign born. Similar group dynamics are at work in debates over fiscal and monetary stimulus: inflation is a lot more frightening to a retiree who lost a great part of his or her savings in a stock-market crash than to a young family struggling with student loans and a mortgage. And again, America’s retirees are much more likely to be white and native-born than are America’s struggling young families. They are visible again in debates over taxes, where people who earn relatively more feel suddenly intensely vulnerable to the demands and resentment of those who earn less. Those were the feelings Mitt Romney channeled in his notorious crack about the 47 percent.

You don’t have to endorse any of these fears to recognize how they constrain even the best politicians. And not all politicians are best. There will always be people in political life who regard one man’s fear as another man’s opportunity. Such people have enjoyed a very prosperous half-decade.

The Political Price Of Epistemic Closure

A reader writes:

Speaking of Ted Cruz and the possibility of a “one-man default,” you ask, “One wonders what kind of demented ego lies behind this reckless, phony demagogue?” It’s not “ego” in the normal sense of the word. It’s paranoia – as in Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics. For example, here’s a commenter on Krugman’s NYTimes column headlined “The Dixiecrat Solution:”

The Republicans are trying desperately to save America from the self appointed Czar and his Democrat henchman desperate to save their jobs. Your dire prediction is only shared by those of you in the Socialist media that also drank the Koolaid. Too bad you cannot be voted out of office too.

Screen Shot 2013-10-15 at 12.00.10 PMThat’s what’s really behind this recklessness. They don’t believe default will have any real consequences; they do believe the repeated warnings – “dire predictions” – are nothing but left-wing “socialist” propaganda, meant to squelch their movement and perpetuate the currently ascendant sociopolitical regime.

So there’s every reason to believe they will deliberately push the nation into default for no other reason than to call this “socialist” bluff, explode the “dire prediction” for the empty propaganda it is, validate their vision of the world, and completely reset the terms of any future debate. In other words, they want default. They want a showdown. And they may deliberately sabotage any attempt to avoid it: “Bring it on!”

Cruz may be reckless, and a demagogue, but I suspect he shares this commenter’s worldview – all of which is much scarier than mere “ego.” Maybe this has to happen. Maybe one side or the other has to explode, has to be exposed for what it is. They’re convinced that it’s the “socialist” mainstream that will be exploded. We think otherwise.

The only problem is, a great deal more than an abstract political vision may be exploded during the test.

(Image from Twitter user darthredpandacare)

Beard Of The Week

Super Rugby Rd 10 - Lions v Brumbies

I leave it to the Guardian’s round-up of great sports beards to describe it:

Being lost for the appropriate words with which to describe the beard worn by the South African back row Josh Strauss, who has now completed the necessary quarantine period and installed his magnificent specimen in a suitably airy, light and fecund greenhouse somewhere in Glasgow, I’m reduced to wondering exactly which Confederate Civil War general he resembles most. Maybe James Longstreet crossbred with Stonewall Jackson? If nothing else, it’s an image.

(Photo: Josh Strauss of the Lions during the 2012 Super Rugby match between MTN Lions and Brumbies at Coca Cola Park on April 27, 2012 in Johannesburg, South Africa. By Duif du Toit/Gallo Images/Getty Images.)

“Excruciatingly Embarrassing”

That’s how Robert Gibbs describes the disastrous Obamacare rollout:

Ezra is equally blunt:

We’re now negative 14 days until the Affordable Care Act and most people still can’t purchase insurance. The magnitude of this failure is stunning. Yes, the federal health-care law is a complicated project, government IT rules are a mess, and the scrutiny has been overwhelming. But the Obama administration knew all that going in. They should’ve been able to build an online portal that works.

To my mind, it’s by far the biggest error Obama has made since taking office. To bungle the rollout of his core domestic initiative is unforgivable. To have known about it long before and kept quiet is inexcusable. To offer no real explanation or to take any serious responsibility is governmental malpractice. At some point, the president has to reassert control and explain what has gone so horribly wrong and chart a course for correction. Those responsible must be fired. McArdle thinks the government took far too long to begin building the website:

I’m a longtime critic of federal contracting rules, which prevent some corruption at ruinous expense in money, quality and speed. But federal contracting rules are not what made the administration delay writing the rules and specifications necessary to build the system until 2013. Nor to delay the deadline for states to declare whether they’d be building an exchange, in the desperate hope that a few more governors might decide — in February 2013! — to build a state system after all. Any state that decided to start such a project at that late date would have had little hope of building anything that worked, but presumably angry voters would be calling the governor instead of HHS.

Suderman examines the enrollment window:

Obama administration officials are downplaying problems, and framing current troubles as a rocky start that won’t necessarily doom a six-month enrollment project. Open enrollment, they note, doesn’t actually end until March 31 of 2014.

But in order for Obamacare to have any chance of success, the exchanges will need to be functional long before then. In order for coverage to start on January 1, individuals will have to complete applications by December 15. And in order to avoid the law’s penalty for remaining uninsured, they’ll have to be enrolled by February 15 of next year—not the end of March.

In other words, the administration doesn’t really have six months to fix problems with the exchanges. Political pressure will build well before the end of March.

Previous Dish on the disastrous web-launch here.

The House’s New Demands

The latest from the star reporter of the shutdown:

Allahpundit translates:

In other words, the House bill as modified will be even less palatable to the Senate. All both sides are doing now is killing time when there’s not much time left.

Beutler adds:

Harry Reid called the House GOP position “a blatant attack on bipartisanship” and vowed that it “won’t pass the Senate.” Boehner is already reacting, scrounging for more GOP votes by promising to stick it to Congressional staff. National Review’s Robert Costa reports that Boehner is reversing his position that aides should be held harmless in this fight, and will agree to nix the federal government’s contribution to their health insurance as well. It could move further right still. And as before it may not pass anyhow.

Tim Murphy reports that the House GOP is considering other additions:

[S]everal Republican legislators said there was another provision they wanted included in the legislation: a so-called “conscience clause” that would exempt employers from having to provide coverage for birth control as part of the health care plans they offer employees. This idea has been on the Republican wish list for years—Obamacare already has this sort of exemption for churches, mosques, and other places of worship—and with Washington in full-on crisis mode, GOPers are looking to exploit current circumstances to win this long-running fight.

Kilgore says a “conscience clause” won’t fly:

That’s a big deal-breaker with Democrats in both chambers and in the White House. If conservatives get behind that demand, it’s another way of saying Boehner doesn’t have the votes for his proposal, and will have to rely on Democratic votes for passage. And if that’s the case, he might as well just go along with the Senate proposal, which would shorten the end-game by several crucial days.

And Chait explains why the House Republican leadership is committed to these petty demands:

 The only point of the demands is to maintain the precedent that the House can hold the debt ceiling hostage. But of course the chaos and frenetic timing of the events serve only to show why it is so crucial that Democrats — or any sane American — not allow this precedent to be enshrined. The white-knuckle terror being inflicted on the world economy is the conservative movement’s vision of how divided government should be conducted from now on. Paying even a tiny ransom now means that debt-ceiling ransoms will continue in perpetuity until one party finally miscalculates and the explosives go off.

A Tea Party Party?

A couple weeks back, Matt Steinglass imagined the Tea Party as a third-party:

I think tea-party Republicans would have a better shot at launching a sustainable third party than we’ve seen in America in a long time. Not that it would be a particularly good shot; the segregationist Dixiecrats had a similar combination of congressional power, loyal voter blocs and a unifying ideology when they tried to set up the States’ Rights Democratic Party in 1948, and it didn’t last past that one election. Still, for anyone who does want to see American politics shaken up through the entrance of a third party, it’s worth thinking about the congressional-revolt strategy in combination with the bottom-up one.

Yesterday, David Frum entertained a split between the GOP and the Tea Party:

Right now, tea party extremism contaminates the whole Republican brand. It’s a very interesting question whether a tea party bolt from the GOP might not just liberate the party to slide back to the political center — and liberate Republicans from identification with the Sarah Palins and the Ted Cruzes who have done so much harm to their hopes over the past three election cycles.

Nate Cohn dashes David’s hopes:

According to a July Pew Research survey, Tea Party Republicans make up nearly half (49 percent) of the Republican primary electorate and fully 37 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners.

So long as Democrats remain modestly unified, it is not conceivable that Republicans could compensate for the loss of anything near 37 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners with gains among moderates and independents. Once a Republican realized there aren’t enough opportunities to win without the tea party, the centrist fantasy would come to an end. Republicans would immediately tack back to their right, in an effort to consolidate the Republican coalition.

Larison likewise dismisses Frum’s dream:

Even if [the GOP] lost just 10% of its current level of support, it would be doomed to near-permanent minority status. It’s true that Republicans nominated some weak candidates in 2010 and 2012 and lost races that could have been won, but the harm done to the Republican “brand” predated those elections by many years and had nothing to do with the Palins and Cruzes. Republicans in 2008 were doomed by the Iraq war, the financial crisis, the extraordinary unpopularity of Bush, and a bad nominee of such poor judgment that he thought Palin was an acceptable running mate. For all the mistakes that Tea Partiers have made in the last few years, they weren’t the ones that drove the party into the ditch.

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #175

vfyw_10-12

A reader writes:

Mediterranean I suppose, and I’m going to lay a marker down that those are terraced almond trees cut into the hillside. That peak in the background is probably some famous hill and the reason the pic was taken. But wait a minute – I call Shenanigans! This is the View from your Window Contest, and the goal has always ultimately been to find the window. But this week’s view is clearly shot from a vehicle pulled over to the side of the road. The barricade gives it away, as does the sloped angle of the shotgun window.

Finding good photos for the contest – interesting locations that are not too easy but not too challening – is much more difficult than you would imagine, so we have to bend the usual parameters for the contest sometimes. Another reader:

This one is quite problematic. The terrain and the fortified structure on the hill suggest Israel. The window, however, seems to be an automobile window, so its location is up for debate. My guess, the passenger window of a 2012 Honda Pilot, blue:

honda

Another:

Route 66, 12 miles west of Kingmam, Arizona, shot from a 2010 Toyota Camry SE with leather trim and the six-speaker Infinity sound system, but no sunroof.

Another:

This is a view out into the Arizona high country from Paolo Soleri’s “urban laboratory,” Arcosanti. The poured cement, with a very un-laboratory-like railing, and the view into the valley just look very familiar from my visits there. Arcosanti is a mind-trip: Soleri imagined that thousands would flock to what we would now call a low-impact commune and re-imagine what a city would be. No one showed up, and now 65 or so people live there. The place supports itself by the very capitalist project of selling bronze bells.

Another:

Not much to go on other than flora and landscape!  With all the talk about Breaking Bad, I was tempted to go for the Southwestern US – that hilltop compound would be an ideal meth-lord stronghold. But, I seemed to recall from geography that Southern Italy was once well known for terraced farming, which those giant “steps” in the hillside look like.  And a Google search told me that the Ragusa region is also well known for the limestone walls the farmers built after excavating the land.

Another:

My first impression is Andalucia, Spain, based on it looking dry, with olive trees and pine trees, and scrub brush, and pastel buildings in square shapes that remind me of Moorish architecture. But mostly because there was a British TV show on PBS last night called Rosemary and Thyme, about two female gardeners who solve murders, and the episode was set in Andalucia and it looked just like this photo.

Another:

It could be anywhere in Spain (or, for that matter, half a dozen other Mediterranean countries), so I’ll hedge my bets and put the marker rather centric – the mounts of Toledo, Spain. To pointlessly narrow it down, let’s say road CM-403 south of Las Ventas con Peña Aguilera, Spain (my grandfather’s birthplace).

Another:

Somewhere in northern Jordan? Or perhaps it’s the site of the fictional “Deressa” from the French-Canadian film Incendies.

Another:

I got this!

I probably don’t really have this at all. I suck at this contest. But this looks to me a heck of a lot like the island of Cyprus where I had, a couple years ago, the best vacation of my life. Just a wonderful place, that island. But I remember this is how it looks in the winter out in the countryside – out in the patch of sort of rolling mountains between the resort city of Paphos on the western coast heading up towards the lesser resort city of Polis on the north coast. You can rent out little houses in villages out there, most of the time way cheaper than you could get a hotel room in the city. Really a cool experience, seeing the villagers wake up in the morning, go out hunting, go to church, go shout at each other in the street because they’re still hung over from the night before. God help you though if you get lost.

But anyway, the scrubby, Mediterranean trees look right to me. So does the way the hills are terraced for little fruit groves. The road switch backs look right because the roads there are so windy you can barely go more than twenty miles an hour. Even the way the valley sprawls out with the villages clinging to the tops of hills. Even the beige color of that building on the right and its pink wall and its water tank on the roof. All says Cyprus to me. All makes me want to go back.

Cyprus daily dish map 1

Specifically what town? BAH! How should I know? They’re all pretty much the same and I need to go to the gym and this person I don’t think is even in a house! Standing on the side of some road! Window of their car! THEIR CAR! That’s not how this works!

Still, I’m going to guess though. Like stab in the dark guess. I’m going to say they’re on this switchback by this itty-bitty village called Melamiou looking back towards the more substantial village of Polemoi. Mostly I’m picking that because that’s near where I stayed when I was out there and the switchback looks right.

Another:

Looks like a rain collector on the roof of the building and the architecture seems to be familiar drab design one sees a lot in Israel. Mountainous and rocky terrain seem like the Golan region.

Another:

We’re doing car windows now? Really? This could bring it to a new level of insane.

So my instinct was Spain, but after puttering around the south for awhile, my boyfriend pointed out that the guards on the side of the road are different. I quickly jumped to the other country it reminded me of, Israel, and found that those guards fit better. That is where it ends however, because rolling dry hills describes way too much of Israel. I’m going with somewhere just outside of the south of Jerusalem, just because the north is more green and Jerusalem seems like a likely candidate for a Dish reader to visit.

Having already won once, the pressure is off and I find I’m enjoying the contest more. Best of luck to the winner!

Another:

Hilly country, terraced slope with olive trees, dry but not arid – Northern Israel or the West Bank would be my guess, not that I’ve ever been there.

West Bank it is. Another:

The terraced hills and the green-brown landscape remind me of the stretch of the West Bank between Ramallah and Nablus. That windy highway and cinderblock architecture could be on any small-to-medium Jewish settlement in the Judean Hills, so after a quick browse on Google Images I’ve settled on Givat HaRoeh. With my luck, this’ll be Tuscany.

Another settles on the right location:

I’m really annoyed that I can’t get this one exactly. I was sure I was  looking south at the mountains that slope down from Amman to the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea. But after scouring Jordanian mountains for a couple of hours I finally realized that if we are indeed in the hills above the Jordan Valley, we can’t be on the East Bank because the satellite dish on top of the house at right would be facing the wrong direction. So, assuming I’m right about this being somewhere in the Jordan Valley, we must be in the West Bank. I’m too pissed to keep looking, though, so I’ll just say Nablus because it’s plausible. Could be Syria, I guess, Turkey, Cambodia? Dunno. I’m sicking with Nablus.

Nablus it is. But the winner this week is much more detailed and has participated in more contests, thus breaking the tie:

Wow! This seemed to be one of those epically hard views that you throw at us every once in a while, so I’m pretty surprised to have stumbled on the answer. Between the terrain and the olive trees, I figured this was somewhere in the Mediterranean. Wikipedia gave me the world’s top olive-producing countries and I did image searches for the first few, dismissing places like Algeria and Tunisia and thinking Greece seemed close but not quite right. I thought this could be Israel, but Israel wasn’t on Wikipedia’s list. Palestine was on there, though, so I moved in that direction. Searching “Palestine valley town” in Google Images led me to an article featuring a picture of rocky hills and shrubbery that looked pretty similar to the view in question. The article mentioned “the Salfit area of the West Bank,” so I narrowed my search and found another picture/article combo that mentioned “Salim” and “Nablus.” Even though I felt I was close, you can imagine my surprise when a search for “Nablus valley” turned up this particular shot:

road-to-nablus

Remarkably, this is NOT the image from the contest … but it’s the exact same view! The caption on this photo, which was posted on the blog of a Fellow with the Kiva organization, reads, “Road to Nablus, north of Ramallah.” I Google’d the route between those two and hoped it would be an easy trot to the precise location, but several hours inspecting the main route yielded nothing. I finally decided to try one of Google’s alternate driving routes and, within a couple minutes, I came across this GPS-marked photo, which clearly shows the same pink/grey building displayed on the right side of the contest image:

Highway 60 - South of VFYW

The VFYW image itself was taken on Highway 60, about 3/4 km up the road from the Tapuach Junction, where Highway 60 meets Highway 505. In the distance of the contest photo is the Palestinian town of Huwara (alternate spelling: Hawara). Obviously there’s no address since this was taken from the road, but the coordinates are approximately 32°7’18.55″N, 35°15’21.53″E. Here’s an overhead view which shows the bend in the road and the terraced hillside on which the olive trees are planted, as well as the view over the white buildings and that distinctive tuft of trees atop the hill in the very center of the photo:

Aerial View - Hawara

Thanks, as always, for hosting this contest!

Thanks for the epic entry. Speaking of which, our grand champion nailed the right location yet again:

See, on Friday I was trying to get to Boston for a college friend’s housewarming (randomly, he’s one of the writers of League of Denial, the NFL/concussion documentary you’ve been discussing). Unfortunately, half of New York decided to book every train, plane and bus three days in advance and I didn’t make it up there. But the upside was a mostly free Saturday to work on the contest. So, off to the Holy Land I went.

And this week’s view comes from … Highway 60 near Huwara in the West Bank? I’m glad the rule against car views isn’t in effect for the contests, because this was a nice challenge. Though I’ve never been there, finding the right country was relatively easy, but tracking down the exact spot took some analysis and a bit of elbow grease. The view looks north by northeast towards the town of Huwara at center left, and the hilltop settlement of Bracha in the distance. For the die hards the exact coordinates are: 32°7’19.08″N, 35°15’21.01″E.

Here’s an image from a few hundred meters farther back on the same road with the viewer’s position marked just out of sight on the left:

VFYW Further Up the Road Marked - Copy

(Archive)