Year: 2013

There’s A Big Congressional Majority To Fund The Government

Fallows highlights that fact:

The Democratic administration, and a sufficient number of Republicans, already agree and are ready enough to compromise to solve this problem. If the normal machinery of democracy were allowed to work, the manufactured crisis would be over. The only reason the senseless damage is being done is that hostage-takers have terrorized members of their own party.

Robert Costa reveals Boehner’s thinking:

Boehner is aware that, on paper, potentially more than 100 House Republicans would be open to a clean CR should he bring one to the floor. But the internal chaos such a move could cause could be devastating, and with a major debt-limit battle approaching, he won’t let a CR vote divide his conference.

Bernstein wonders whether defections will force the Speaker’s hand:

Surely if 60 Republicans were to say they wanted to vote for a clean CR, Boehner’s position would be untenable, wouldn’t it? My guess is the line would be some number greater than 25 and fewer than 60.

But again, in what universe are we even talking about this? There’s a majority in the House and the Senate to keep the government open and running, and yet the Speaker will not allow a free vote on it. This is not about the governance of the United States. It is about the crazed shenanigans of something that looks like a religious sect. This is a party not only unfit for government, but also for opposition.

Talking To The Loony Right

Yuval Levin gives a course in the bleeding obvious to his fellow GOPers:

Republicans did not do nearly well enough in the last election to enact legislation that would repeal Obamacare. In order to repeal that elephant-tightropelaw and attempt an effective reform of our health-care system along conservative lines, they will need to do better in the next election and the one to follow. To that end, they can take several kinds of steps with regard to Obamacare in the meantime: steps that would weaken the law (by highlighting its faults or disabling some of its elements) and ultimately make it easier to replace; steps that would weaken the law’s supporters (by further connecting them to the law in the public’s mind and forcing them to defend its least popular elements) and ultimately make them easier to replace; and steps that would strengthen the law’s opponents (by clearly identifying them as opponents of an unpopular measure and champions of a more appealing approach) and help them gain more public support.

In my view (shared with all who would listen to no avail, for what it’s worth) the original defund strategy was not well suited to doing any of these things.

The tone of this piece is its perfection. The studied civility when talking with complete fanatics, the careful reason when interacting with constitutional know-nothings … it’s like reading Ross Douthat, as the excruciating reality keeps surfacing that his party is a disgrace to the very idea of a political party, more extremist than any in the West save Hungary’s neo-fascists, unteachable and proud of it, a nub of Palin’s id quivering in its fervent frisson of pure vandalism.

If only one of the last remaining conservatives with brains would get it over with and simply scream at the top of their lungs what everyone else is thinking: “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MINDS?”

(Photo by Thomas Subtil. More of his work here.)

Congress Is Ruining Countless Vacations

Government Shutdown Forces Closures In Nation's Capitol

Daniel Gross looks at how the shutdown will hurt the travel industry:

[T]he U.S. Travel Organization put out an annual report that estimates the impact of travel generally in the U.S. The report suggests 14.4 million total jobs are supported by travel, or one in every eight in the private sector.  For 2013, it forecasts travel spending will be $889.1 billion, up 3.9 percent from $855.4 billion in 2012. New York City alone in 2011 welcomed (or didn’t welcome, as the case may be) 50.9 million tourists.

Of course, most tourists traveling in the U.S. visit sites run by the private sector—like Disney World, or Las Vegas. But federally-run sites are also among the largest attractions.

Mount Rushmore gets three million visitors per year. That’s nearly four times the population of South Dakota. Without government entities, the 17.9 million tourists who visited Washington, D.C. in 2011 would have had little reason to go. An estimated 275 million people visit national parks each year. And without other government operations—the State Department, which processes and grants visas, the airports, customs officials—people wouldn’t be able to enter, exit, and move about the country.

Noam Scheiber watched Fox News’s shutdown coverage yesterday:

[E]very half hour brought another report from a correspondent in the field surveying the landscape of shuddered facilities. The Statue of Liberty. Bunker Hill. My favorite was a group a World War II veterans who’d trekked to Washington to tour the World War II memorial, only to find it barricaded when they got there. Fox played the footage over and over, clearly sensing a prime Kulturkampf opportunity—aging war veterans made to suffer indignities by socialist president. But none of the Foxies narrating the story could quite figure out what to do with the fact that it takes government money to build memorials, and government money to keep them open. And so it just hung out there as an implicit rebuke of Republicans.

(Photo: World War II veteran Russell Tucker of Meridian, Mississippi, stands outside the barricade as he visits the World War II Memorial during a government shutdown on October 1, 2013. The memorial was temporary opened to veteran groups arrived on Honor Flights on a day trip to visit the nation’s capital. By Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The GOP Defies Its Own Logic

Yesterday, the House GOP proposed funding just the parts of government they like, a ploy that quickly failed. Yglesias is puzzled by the strategy:

The entire premise of shutting the government down over Obamacare is that shutting the government down is bad and has bad consequences. The consequences were supposed to be so bad that Democrats flinch from the horrors being inflicted on the American public and agree to repeal the Affordable Care Act. For that to work, two things need to be the case. The first is that middle-class people must suffer from the absence of government services. The second is that middle-class people must turn their rage against the uninsured and demand the repeal of Obamacare rather than turning their rage against Republicans.

The problem for Republicans is that the shutdown is clearly—obviously and unambiguously—their fault, so the public’s rage is much more likely to turn against them. The small-batch funding idea is supposed to tone that rage down. But absent the rage, there’s no leverage.

One Step Closer To The Bionic Leg

In a breakthrough for prosthetics, a Chicago team has developed a robotic leg that is wired directly to the patient’s brain, allowing him to control the mechanism with his thoughts alone:

To accomplish this, surgeons redirected the nerves that previously controlled some of the man’s lower-leg muscles so that they would cause muscles in his thigh to contract in a technique called targeted muscle reinnervation. They then used sensors embedded in the robotic leg to measure the electrical pulses created by both the reinnervated muscle contractions and the existing thigh muscles. When the surgeons combined this information with additional data from the sensors, the man was able to use the leg more accurately than when attempting to control the leg with its sensors alone, the scientists report. They hope that other people with missing limbs will be able to use the technology within the next three to five years.

Derek Mead looks ahead to the next likely innovation:

Integrating a prosthetic directly into a patient’s nervous system would seem to be the answer. Rather than learning how to use one’s robo hand, it could be controlled just as directly as your flesh-and-bone models. The concept has been proven before; research earlier this year showed that a paralyzed person could control robot limbs with her thoughts, but actually deploying it in a prosthetic—especially one as challenging as a lower leg—is even harder. So far, the proof of concept appears to be working (walking?) well, and [lead researcher Levi] Hargrove’s team hopes to have it ready for broader use within a few years.

Update from a reader:

I’m a biomedical engineer who does this type of work every day. I don’t mean to throw cold water on the RIC prosthetic, but targeted reinnervation has been a tested and proven method for controlling prosthetics for almost a decade now. That’s not to say doing it in the leg isn’t an amazing piece of biomedical engineering, and I applaud everything Dr. Kuiken has done, from Jesse’s Arm to this leg work.

But the second problem with this bit of media over-hype is to say the prosthetic is “wired directly” to the brain. That is not the case. It is connected to already existing nerves in the leg (or for arm prosthetics, they connect it to arm nerves they surgically relocate to the pectoral muscle). To say that his prosthetic is “wired directly” to the brain would be like saying my smartphone is directly connected to dish.andrewsullivan.com, without mentioning that the Internet is involved. Directly interpreting brain neural output and using that to accurately control prosthetics is still far, far in the future.

The Very Least Among Us

Charles Kenny covers the plight of America’s bottom 1%:

The bottom 1 percent in the U.S. live on an income that is one six-hundredth of the average for the richest 1 percent of Americans. They live on less than the average GDP per capita of a low-income country such as Afghanistan, Mozambique, or Haiti. And they live at or below the national poverty lines of such countries as Ghana, Congo, and Mongolia. Despite living in one of the richest countries in the world, the bottom 1 percent of Americans see incomes below the global median.

Guns Do Kill People

Matt Steinglass reviews the statistics:

[G]un-rights advocates often argue that there’s no point taking away people’s guns, because you can kill someone with a knife. This is true, but in practice people are nowhere near as likely to get killed with a knife.

In America, of those 14,022 homicides in 2011, 11,101 were committed with firearms. In England and Wales, where guns are far harder to come by, criminals didn’t simply go out and equip themselves with other tools and commit just as many murders; there were 32,714 offences involving a knife or other sharp instrument (whether used or just threatened), but they led to only 214 homicides, a rate of 1 homicide per 150 incidents. Meanwhile, in America, there were 478,400 incidents of firearm-related violence (whether used or just threatened) and 11,101 homicides, for a rate of 1 homicide per 43 incidents. That nearly four-times-higher rate of fatality when the criminal uses a gun rather than a knife closely matches the overall difference in homicide rates between America and England.

Trapped By Trash

If we don’t clean up our space junk, we might be cut off from the rest of the universe:

NASA claims that more than 500,000 pieces of debris, ranging from the size of a marble to eight tons, are in orbit. These scattered fragments travel at speeds up to 17,500 miles per hour. In the forthcoming movie Gravity, a piece of satellite debris destroys a shuttle, but even much smaller objects such as chips of paint could damage a satellite, space station, or a spacecraft carrying astronauts. A 2009 study performed by all the major space agencies – including ESA, NASA, and Roscosmos – revealed that even if no further space launches occur, the amount of orbital debris will continue to increase. More than simply littering Earth’s low orbits, we would be hindering our ability to safely travel beyond it.

The European Space Agency’s Clean Space Initiative is working on a solution, but it won’t be an quick or easy:

The only way to preserve key orbits is to remove the debris, like picking up scraps of refuse blowing down a highway. … “It’s an extremely challenging mission,” says Luisa Innocenti, the head of the Clean Space Office. “Getting close to the debris is dangerous because you need to maneuver around the uncontrolled object.” This means developing a guidance and navigation control system where chasers stay close to the targeted debris. A capturing mechanism – a big net, a harpoon, a robotic arm, or a giant tentacle that, amid the stars, would clamp down on the object – would collect the debris and return it to Earth. The goal is to have a mission in 2022.

A Letter From Afghanistan

A reader writes:

I’ve been reading your blog since the fall of 2002, and today I thought I’d share my perspective on the shutdown. I work as a senior advisor at one of the military commands in Afghanistan.  I don’t work for DoD; I work for one of the foreign affairs agencies.  I’ve been in one of the more dangerous places in Afghanistan for about 15 months now.  We get shelled frequently by the Taliban.  I’ve loaded flag-draped caskets containing the bodies of co-workers onto cargo planes.  I have a wife and some beautiful children that I don’t get to see very much on account of my work.

Unlike my military colleagues, my agency has not been exempted from the shutdown.  I’m deemed essential personnel by virtue of my service in Afghanistan, meaning I’m basically required to go to work, but I’m working for an IOU.  In addition, the longer this goes on, the more likely it is that I won’t be able to take leave and see my family any time soon.

I think you’ve covered the utter betrayal of our government by Republican congressmen pretty well.  But I think you raise an important point when you say that anyone who sees this as some kind of good faith compromise between two sides is complicit in this shocking turn of events. What gets me as much as the cynical Republican strategy is my supposed friends who enable it. I’ve gotten into more than a few debates with friends who support this – and also go out of their way to thank me for my service.

What I’ve taken to doing is explaining to them the practical effects of the actions they support and then asking them if they’d like to fly out here and join me in volunteering, pro bono, for their country.  Suddenly their tone of certainty changes and it’s equivocation time.  It’s a complete act of cowardice by people who, by and large, have never done anything for their country.

Is it any surprise that people feel this way?  Generations of American politicians have made it into office by tearing down the very government they want to join.  When I joined the government over a decade ago, I was amazed at how many competent, dedicated professionals I came across, many of who could have taken much more lucrative jobs in the private sector (and many of whom left such jobs to join the government).  These are people who believe in America and believe in service.

But the joke’s on us, because decades of spiteful rhetoric has conditioned Americans to view us as a blight on the landscape, a detractor from (rather than contributor to) this country.  And now, with this, I have to say, I feel completely and utterly betrayed by the people elected to represent me.  I’ve never had a more disheartening moment in my decade-plus long career in the service of my country, and that includes the time I was living overseas when Abu Ghraib blew up. It’s sickening.

An Author For The Ages

Joshua Hammer pays homage to Albert Camus on the 100th anniversary of his birth:

For [scholar Alice] Kaplan and other admirers, Camus was, above all, a humanist, who believed 459px-Albert_Camus2 (1)in the sanctity of life, the folly of killing for an ideology and the urgency of peaceful coexistence. “There is a Camus for every stage of life,” says Kaplan, trying to explain Camus’ staying power and relevance today. “Adolescents can identify with the alienation of Meursault. The Plague is for when you’re in college, politically engaged and sympathetic with resistance.” The Fall, Camus’ 1956 novel about the crisis of conscience of a successful Parisian lawyer, “is for 50-year-olds. It is angry, acrimonious, confronting the worst things you know about yourself.” And The First Man, a beautifully rendered, unfinished autobiographical novel published posthumously in 1994, “is Camus’ Proustian moment, his looking back on his life. You can spend your whole life with Camus.”

(Photo of Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards via Wikimedia Commons)