Month: June 2013

Yglesias sees a “pretty strong” case for the war on coal in the above chart from the Hamilton Project, which shows the total social cost of a kilowatt-hour of energy from a variety of resources:

[T]he only way to consider new coal-fired plants a remotely plausible undertaking is to completely ignore the social costs of burning the coal. By the same token, simply throwing all my garbage into my neighbor’s backyard could look like a cheap and appealing alternative to proper trash disposal if I were allowed to completely ignore the costs to my neighbor.

Existing coal plants are a closer call since the private costs of a plant you’ve already built are naturally quite low. But we can see quite clearly that phasing out existing coal in favor of new natural gas is a clear winner. It’s worth dwelling on that for a moment, since it’s actually quite extraordinary for the cost of a brand-new infrastructure project to be lower than the cost of continuing to run what you’ve already built. The moral of the story here is that if you were able to completely ignore political considerations, the case would be very strong for an aggressive and robust war on coal even if you don’t care a whit about renewable energy.

Meanwhile, David Brodwin tires of climate change’s “environment vs. economy” storyline:

Many politicians and journalists will frame this issue in a misleading way. It will be positioned as a question of “promoting growth and jobs” versus “protecting the environment.” Those who oppose action on climate will ask if we can really “afford” to take action on climate at a time that the economy is still in recovery. This framing is misleading because it implies that taking action to protect the climate will cost more than it saves. Nothing could be more wrong. Stabilizing the climate by reducing carbon emissions saves the economy much more than it costs.

Katy Steinmetz describes an outing for returning veterans:

Then they sat shoulder-to-shoulder on a long plank, loaded their guns, and waited in silence for the snow geese to appear. Though seven men sat in the blind on that February morning, the hunting trip was really for just three of them: combat-wounded veterans invited by Freedom Hunters, one of dozens of non-profit groups across the U.S. who believe that hunting can be therapeutic for returning troops. …

The three men say that hunting reminds them of the camaraderie and ritual that defined their time in the service. On the ground in Maryland, they became a makeshift platoon. “You’re replicating the training, the kind of thing that you love to do,” Corbett says, “almost like that guard duty that every sailor and soldier and Marine goes through.” Lamke calls the long stretches of quiet in the goose blind “shared solitude” because he knows he’s with other veterans who feel like they’re at a listening post again. “Even if we never say a word to each other,” Lamke says, “we’re always looking out for each other.”

But it’s not without its dangers:

Military psychiatric experts say that mental health issues make hunting a dangerous hobby for some veterans. “Watching [an animal] die may trigger a lot of intense emotions and impulses,” says Nash. “And having a loaded gun in your hand when you’re feeling intense emotions is probably not a good thing.” Ritchie warns that the smell of gunpowder or ring of shots might trigger flashbacks and that veterans who have had suicidal or homicidal thoughts shouldn’t be going afield. Freedom Hunters tries to screen for potential problems by asking veterans basic questions about hunting experience and combat injuries. But they do not outright ask if a potential hunter has suicidal tendencies or known flashback triggers.

Wth the Senate on board, Dylan Matthews previews the House’s Gang of Seven bill:

The bill will almost certainly include a path to citizenship, border security measures, a guest worker program and other similar attributes to the Senate Gang of Eight bill. However, there will likely be significant differences. [Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.)] has said that he thinks some parts of the Senate bill — such as the scale of its guest worker program, as negotiated by the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — are unworkable, and the House bill may reflect those differences of opinion.

Diaz-Balart has also sounded optimistic about passing the bill through the House with majority support from Republicans, allowing House Speaker John Boehner (R-Oh.) to obey the “Hastert rule,” wherein only bills supported by a “majority of the majority” reach the House floor. However, [Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.)] has signaled it may be able to come to a vote without meeting that requirement. Some outside observers are optimistic about this channel; Clarissa Martínez-De-Castro, director for civic engagement and immigration at the National Council of La Raza, expressed optimism about it in an interview last month.

Nate Cohn, on the other hand, argues that “if the Senate bill can only attract 30 percent of Senate Republicans, it has no chance of earning 50 percent of the more conservative House GOP caucus”:

Which brings immigration back to the so-called “Hastert Rule.” Last week, Speaker Boehner suggested that he wouldn’t move an immigration bill without the support of a majority of House Republicans. If so, immigration reform is in jeopardy. The Speaker and House Republicans have few incentives—if any—to cave to immigration reform. When Boehner folded on the “Hastert Rule” in the past, many or maybe most House Republicans probably thought it was a good idea. No, they didn’t like Sandy relief, VAWA, or the fiscal cliff compromise, but none of those bills were bad enough to justify stomaching the public backlash that would have accompanied outright blocking the legislation. In contrast, House Republicans appear authentically opposed to immigration reform. They also hail from safe, conservative districts where the Hispanic vote is unlikely to threaten their reelection campaigns.

Morrissey agrees that immigration reform could fail in the House:

[W]hen will the House get around to passing their bills? Nothing has come out of committee yet, and there’s only about three weeks left on the legislative schedule before the August recess. When they come back, both chambers will be working on debt ceilings and FY2014 budgets, which have tighter deadlines than does immigration reform. There’s a good chance that the House will end up doing nothing on immigration reform, or perhaps only passing a border-security bill that the Senate will ignore.

Chait sees another way forward, a “discharge petition” to make sure the bill gets a vote:

If 218 members of the House sign one, then it automatically comes to the House floor for a vote. Last December, Democrats in the House threatened a discharge petition to bring up a Senate bill extending the Bush tax cuts on income under $250,000 a year. …

So then the question would be, could Democrats find seventeen House Republicans willing to endure the wrath of conservatives to sign a discharge petition? The threat would come from primary challenges from conservatives. On the other hand, there is a lot of pro-immigration money out there available to support any Republican facing such a challenge. And the other big advantage of a discharge petition is that Republicans wouldn’t need to save bipartisan face by rounding up a respectable number of their own party to support it. Just the bare minimum would do.

Indeed, the House wouldn’t have to legislate at all — it could (and would have to) simply photocopy the Senate bill. No hearings, no negotiations — and since the House is bad at all those things, that’s another plus.

I fear that the chaotic nature of the GOP may turn this critical moment to ashes. But Chait’s proposal is an intriguing one. And some of the grandstanding right now is exactly that: grandstanding. My true worry is simply that the GOP hates the president so much that giving him another massive reform, after Obamacare, would cement his transformational legacy and drive them nuts. It’s not rational, but reason has almost no role any more in the GOP base.

A reader writes:

Andrew, please don’t ruin this great joy we’re all feeling about DOMA and Prop 8 by getting caught up again in your personal three-decade-old psychodrama with the Clintons. Bill is not a sociopath, per your recent post. He may have been craven to sign DOMA because he thought it was needed to salvage his reelection (and he may have been right, for whatever that’s worth), but that doesn’t even put him in the top 100 lists of political villains towards the gay community in the 1990s. If you haven’t read Josh Marshall’s take on DOMA back then, you should. He perfectly captures my take on the situation at the time, and now.

For the record, I’m a 45 year old gay man, and no I’m not an HRC guy – I find them as useless as you do – and you’re a personal hero of mine. But please don’t go down one of the over-the-top rabbit holes you do a couple times every year.

A reader on our Facebook page is more succinct:

Andrew, in another post you said that gay rights proponents should approach their former adversaries with a spirit of generosity. Maybe you should start with yourself and your bitterness towards the Clintons.

When he actually apologizes, I’ll leave this behind. But you cannot forgive someone who refuses to admit they did something wrong. Even above, he fails to take responsibility for what he did. He never took responsibility for his own actions. he wasn’t a passive observer on this; he was an active enemy of marriage equality, even exploiting homophobia in a re-election he was already winning in a landslide. Another reader:

I’m not going to defend Clinton and his craven actions around DOMA, but there are a few things that strike me about then and now. We had just come through the Federal Marriage Amendment. So, DOMA could be seen as a stop-gap measure to keep something like it from actually happening. Clinton doesn’t seem to have mentioned this in his more recent speeches, but it was surely a factor. Also, I have to wonder if something like DOMA needed to happen to get us to where we are today.

It kept us “safe,” if you will, from same-sex marriage while allowing it to build up from the grassroots. Of course, we’ll never know given that we can’t go back and test that theory. But change does often happen this way.