Month: October 2014

The Battle For Kobani, Ctd

Air strikes on ISIS in and around the besieged Syrian border town continued to escalate today. Local Kurdish forces are still holding out against the militants, though there are conflicting reports of how much of the town ISIS currently controls:

The U.S. Central Command said five airstrikes south of Kobani since Wednesday had destroyed an Islamic State group support building and two vehicles, and damaged a training camp. The strikes also struck two groups of Islamic State fighters, it said in a statement. “Indications are that Kurdish militia there continue to control most of the city and are holding out against ISIL,” it said, using an acronym for the Islamic State group, which controls large swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq. …

The [Syrian Observatory for Human Rights] said the militants had seized more than third of Kobani, but Kurdish officials disputed that, saying their forces had recaptured several parts of the town. “I can confirm that they don’t control a third of the city. There is only a small part of Kobani under the control of Daesh,” said local Kurdish official Idriss Nassan, using an Arabic acronym to refer to the Islamic State group.

Turkey’s foreign minister stressed in a press conference that Ankara would not launch a unilateral ground operation to rescue Kobani. The government’s refusal to act has sparked protests among Turkey’s Kurdish community, leading in many cases to violence. Piotr Zalewski provides an update on the clashes, which by his count have left at least 21 dead:

In Diyarbakir, about 60 miles north of the border with Syria, members of Hizbullah, a local Islamist group allegedly sympathetic to ISIS, traded gunfire with Kurdish protesters, including PKK militants. Ten people were found dead by the morning. More clashes have been reported in a number of other cities across the southeast, as well as in Kurdish neighborhoods in Ankara, Izmir and Istanbul, with security forces firing tear gas and rubber bullets against protesters armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails. A curfew was imposed in six provinces, with soldiers patrolling the streets of several cities on Wednesday.

Tulin Daloglu analyzes the situation from the perspective of Turkish politics:

Turkey is going through a decade of polarization to an extent never seen before in its republican history. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s policies have divided the public and his decision to put imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan at the center of the peace process created serious controversy. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader, blamed Erdogan again Oct. 8 for having wrong-headed policies. …

Despite such serious disagreements about the country’s direction between Turkey’s ruling and opposition parties, all the legislators seem to agree that Turkey should use caution before ordering its ground forces to intervene in Kobani. Moreover, all agree that pro-PKK voices exaggerate linking the fall of Kobani to the fall of Ankara. Yet, they all believe that if IS captures Kobani, its jihadists will control a long stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border and that would pose a threat to the country’s national security. In sum, the situation is in a dire mess.

At yesterday’s Pentagon briefing, Rear Adm. John Kirby acknowledged that Kobani might still fall to the jihadists:

“We all need to prepare ourselves for the reality that other towns and villages, and perhaps Kobani, will be taken by ISIL.” Kirby reiterated a point he has emphasized before, which is that the U.S. military is fully aware that airstrikes alone will not be sufficient to roll back the Islamic State’s gains in Iraq and Syria. To do that, the United States, along with its partners, is going to have to retrain the Iraqi security forces, bolster the Kurdish Peshmerga, and build a ground force in Syria out of vetted and trained members of the Syrian opposition.

Kobani, in Ben Wallace-Wells’ view, “suggests one risk of the plan: that in the interim there may be atrocities on the ground that these forces are helpless to stop”:

The smart line in Washington ever since Obama took office, both from the administration and from foreign-policy thinkers, has been that the Bush adventures revealed some of the limits of what the United States could accomplish overseas, that we could no longer be everywhere at once. That is a sensible posture to take; it may be the only possible posture. But the cost of that posture is that there will be some very grim events that the United States allows to unfold, because they are not taking place at strategically important spots like “command and control centers,” because our allies aren’t ready, because we can’t be there and everywhere else, too. There will be some things that are unpleasant to stomach. Right now, it looks like Kobani may be one.

Morrissey doesn’t see how this ends well without someone sending in ground forces:

Air strikes may have bought a little more time for Kobani, but without any troops to bolster its defenses, those airstrikes are only delaying the inevitable. If Obama really wants to “degrade and destroy” ISIS, he’ll need to convince the Turks and other regional players to get on the ground, or he’ll have to send American troops to do it.

To Drum, the renewed calls for us to do something are fairly predictable:

Some of this will just be partisan opportunism, but most will be perfectly sincere protests from people with the memory span of a gnat. What they want is a magic wand: some way for Obama to inspire all our allies to want exactly what the United States wants and then to sweep ISIS aside without the loss of a single American life. Anything less is unacceptable.

But guess what? The Iraqi army is still incompetent. America’s allies still have their own agendas and don’t care about ours. Air campaigns still aren’t enough on their own to stop a concerted ground attack. This is the way things are. There are no magic wands. If you want quick results against ISIS, then speak up and tell us you want to send in 100,000 troops. If you’re not willing to do that, then you have to accept that lots of innocent people are going to die without the United States being able to offer much help. Make your choice now.

Changing Your Gender Retroactively

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Katie Zavadski describes a new NYC bill that would “change the requirements for updating the sex field on birth certificates, allowing it to correspond to a person’s identity rather than on steps taken to physically transition”:

New York State has had an expansive definition of sex for years, and current requirements simply require a physician to say that “appropriate clinical treatment” is occurring — a broad category that could mean hormonal treatments, or simply counseling. The state does not require proof of surgical intervention to update the sex marker. New York City, however, lagged behind on that shift.

Not anymore: The proposal, introduced Tuesday and backed by both the City Council speaker and Mayor de Blasio’s administration, not only changes the requirements, but also expands the range of health-care providers qualified to make this assessment. In addition to doctors and psychotherapists, physicians’ assistants, nurse practitioners, and midwives will now be able to confirm that a document change “more accurately reflects the applicant’s sex,” based on “contemporary expert standards regarding gender identity.” The new regulations would also nix a prior requirement for a name change.

Transgender people across the Hudson, however, shouldn’t get their hopes up:

Elsewhere, opponents to similar proposals have sometimes argued that the changes could be subject to fraud or abuse. In January, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey vetoed legislation that would have removed that state’s surgical requirement for birth-certificate changes, saying the bill’s sponsors sought to change the application process “without maintaining appropriate safeguards.”

Elizabeth Nolan Brown responds to such objections:

Opponents say that regardless of someone’s current gender identity or genitalia, their birth certificate is a historical document and shouldn’t be changed. But this same argument could be used against amending birth certificates post sex-reassignment surgery, also, and most states now allow that. (I’m not saying that’s necessarily a good argument for it, merely that it’s not as radical/unprecedented as some might think.) And it’s not as if the original birth documents or records are destroyed, though they are generally sealed. The basically administrative change simply allows transgender individuals to navigate more easily through official state paperwork and such.

What The Hell Is Happening In South Dakota?

The current state of the Senate races:

Senate Map

South Dakota has become a three-way race between Democrat Rick Weiland, Republican Mike Rounds, and Independent Larry Pressler. Aaron Blake summarizes a poll that came out yesterday:

A new poll of the South Dakota Senate race shows former three-term GOP senator Larry Pressler, now running as an independent, has surged into second place and is within the margin of error against former governor Mike Rounds (R). The poll, from automated pollster SurveyUSA, shows Rounds at 35 percent, Pressler at 32 percent and Democrat Rick Weiland at 28 percent.

Silver finds that this “is a challenging race to forecast — both because of the inconsistent polling and the three-way dynamic”:

But the logic programmed into the FiveThirtyEight model is as follows: because Pressler is more ideologically similar to Rounds than Weiland — at least according to the statistical measures that we use — the model assumes that Pressler and Rounds will mostly trade votes with one another rather than with Weiland. In other words, Pressler’s gains will tend to come at Rounds’ expense, and vice versa. (See here for a more technical explanation.)

That makes Pressler the more likely candidate to pull off the upset; he can gain ground relative to the frontrunner more quickly. The FiveThirtyEight model currently gives Pressler a 9 percent chance of winning the race, versus 3 percent for Weiland. Those chances will grow if more polls come along with results like SurveyUSA’s.

Alex Altman looks at Pressler’s ideology:

Pressler says he hasn’t decided which party he would caucus with if elected. But with the GOP’s lurch to the right, the former moderate Republican now sounds more like a Democrat. He voted for Barack Obama. He supports balancing the budget in part by raising taxes on millionaires, a new gas tax and the elimination of some corporate deductions. He wants to raise the minimum wage and teacher salaries, supports gay marriage, and says the U.S. should pare back its military spending. “I’m not an isolationist,” he adds. “I know we have to do some bombing.”

Kyle Kondik notes the cash Democrats are putting into the race:

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — which had seemingly written off this race — entered the race with guns blazing on Wednesday: Bloomberg reported that the DSCC will put $1 million in South Dakota in the final weeks of the campaign, mostly on television advertising to attack Rounds with the hope that Weiland or Pressler — who endorsed Obama in 2008 and 2012 — will prevail and then caucus with the Democrats. It also remains possible that one or the other will stop campaigning and endorse the other, which would really put Rounds in a bind.

Jonathan Bernstein disagrees. He figures, “If Rounds found himself in a head-to-head match with Pressler, he could unleash negative ads until Election Day with little worry about a backlash”:

The real danger for Rounds is that multicandidate races tend to be unstable. If Rounds attacks Pressler, Weiland might benefit; if Rounds attacks Weiland, Pressler might move up. Indeed, if Democrats believe that Pressler might caucus with them, the best play could be for Weiland to throw as much mud as possible at Rounds, in the hopes that both would be destroyed.

Nate Cohn is wary of making any predictions:

[T]he biggest reason to be cautious is that three-way races are particularly unpredictable. Fairly significant polling errors occurred in the three 2010 three-way statewide contests (defined as a contest in which three candidates entered Election Day with at least 20 percent of the vote in most polls). In governors’ races in Rhode Island and Maine, the error averaged about 8 points; in Alaska, the majority of pre-election polls showed Joe Miller in the lead, but Lisa Murkowski prevailed by about four points.

With this history and the race beginning to attract national spending, it wouldn’t be wise to dismiss anyone’s chances.

Walmart Part-Timers, Meet Obamacare

Ester Bloom fumes:

Wal-Mart has decided to cut benefits for PT workers, even though the Wal-Mart empire has produced so much money that individual Waltons take up four spots on the list of Top 10 Richest People in America. Christy Walton is the 6th richest American with a fortune of $38 billion, Jim is 7th with a fortune of $36 billion, Alice is 9th with $34.9B, and S. Robert is 10th with $34.8. Come on guys.

Peter Suderman attributes Walmart’s change to failures of Obamacare:

You can see the kind of impact the law is having just by looking at the news. Walmart is dropping health plans for about 30,000 part-time workers, about 5 percent of its workforce, according to the Associated Press. Target, Home Depot, and other big retailers have made similar moves. The retail giant isn’t specifically citing Obamacare as the cause. But it’s almost certainly a factor.

Paul Waldman disagrees. He claims that “this development is actually a good thing, and it shows that the Affordable Care Act is working”:

So why is this a good thing? It may involve some hassle for individual employees, as they’ll have to go to the exchange to figure out what plan to get. But most of those Walmart workers will likely come out ahead. Someone who’s earning $9 an hour working 30 hours a week at a Walmart would be making $13,500 a year. Depending on what their spouse makes and what state they’re in, they could be eligible for Medicaid and pay nothing at all for insurance, or get substantial subsidies that would make a private plan extremely affordable.

Sarah Kliff also argues that the shift should be celebrated:

[F]inancial help [from the ACA] can be a big deal for those with lower incomes. Think of the 36-year-old Walmart employee here in Washington, D.C. who works 29 hours per week at the company’s average wage of $12.73 per hour. She earns just about $19,000 annually if she works every week of the year.

If Walmart doesn’t offer her insurance, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s subsidy calculator shows that she qualifies for a $1,751 subsidy from the federal government to help buy coverage on the exchange. With that financial help, she can buy insurance for as little as an $7 per month. As a low-wage worker, she gets some of the most generous financial help.

But if Walmart does offer her coverage, it becomes her only option. She doesn’t qualify for federal help and the $7 plan disappears. Walmart’s plan, meanwhile, is way more expensive. The average premium there works out to $111 per month.

David Graham views the move as simply a sign of the times:

Take a step back and this story looks like another milestone on the changing road of the American health care system, even if there are only 30,000 employees affected by this particular step. And it looks more like a symptom of the same underlying issues that inspired the Affordable Care Act, rather than like a result of that law. In announcing the move, Walmart cited the rising costs of health insurance. Big companies are seeing their costs rise, but they also don’t have to worry as much about keeping their employees well, since they can be sure that they’ll be insured through exchanges anyway.

Health-policy experts and wonks on both the right and left tend to look askance at the American system of employer-based insurance, which is essentially a historical accident. (They differ on what do in the post employer-based-insurance world, of course: Progressives want a universal national insurance system, while conservatives want individuals to deal with it themselves.) As more and more American workers leave employer-based insurance plans, for one reason or another, the end of this anomalous system seems closer and closer.

The Trouble With Islam

Refugees Flee Iraq After Recent Insugent Attacks

Well, this debate really does have legs, so allow me to address some of the latest arguments. There seems to be a consensus that Islam in the contemporary Middle East is in a bad way. When you have hundreds of thousands killed in sectarian warfare, ISIS on the rampage, Saudi Arabia fomenting the more virulent flames of Salafism, Iran’s theocrats brutally suppressing peaceful protests, and Hamas cynically relying upon the deaths of innocents for strategic purposes, you can surely see the point. No other region is as violent or as inflamed right now – and since the battles are all on explicitly religious terms, it seems crazy not to see unreconstructed forms of Islam as part of the problem. Last night, I specifically mentioned the absence of any civil space for scholarly or historical examination of the sacred texts of the religion. Without such a space, it is impossible for this current Middle Eastern tragedy to resolve itself. And the lack of such a space is a key tenet of the religion itself. It’s a little amazing to me to watch some liberals who get extremely upset at religious people refusing to bake a cake for someone else’s wedding on religious grounds, suddenly seeing nuance when a religion believes that anyone who leaves it should be executed. If you’re against fundamentalism of the mildest variety here, why are you so forgiving of it elsewhere?

It’s also good to see Nick Kristof note the following today:

Of the 10 bottom-ranking countries in the World Economic Forum’s report on women’s rights, nine are majority Muslim. In Afghanistan, Jordan and Egypt, more than three-quarters of Muslims favor the death penalty for Muslims who renounce their faith, according to a Pew survey.

For me, that last statistic is a key one. Here you do not have a fringe, but a big majority in one of the most important Arab Muslim states, Egypt, believing in absolutely no religious freedom whatsoever. Democracy doesn’t cure this – it may even make it worse. To argue that this majority belief has nothing to do with Islam is also bizarre. The Koran is as complex as the Old Testament, and there are injunctions to respect religious freedom, but also deep currents in favor of suppressing it, for the sake of people’s souls. These latter currents are not unique to Islam, but they are now clearly dominant in one region, and they are a terrible threat to all of us when combined with modern technologies of destruction. It is legitimate to ask why core human rights, such as the right to follow one’s own conscience, are non-existent in much of the Middle East. It is legitimate to point out that Saudi Arabia forbids the free exercise of any religion except its own. It is legitimate to note the sectarian murderousness of the Sunni-Shi’a battle lines and the brutal assault on religious minorities in the region. These excrescences are all defended by the tenets of that religion and in the terms of that religion. Of course religion has something to do with it.

Does it actually help anyone to keep saying this? Here, I think, there is a pragmatic case for non-Muslims like yours truly to shut the fuck up for a change. Ed Kilgore notes regarding the Real Time exchange:

You don’t have to watch the segment in question to understand, a priori, that five non-Muslims, none of whom are in any way experts on Islam, aren’t going to do much of anything other than damage in dissecting a big, complicated, multifaceted World Religion in a single segment of a single television show.

It’s also true, as Reza Aslan argues, that religious identity is not all about the faith itself but embedded in culture and history:

As a form of identity, religion is inextricable from all the other factors that make up a person’s self-understanding, like culture, ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexual orientation. What a member of a suburban megachurch in Texas calls Christianity may be radically different from what an impoverished coffee picker in the hills of Guatemala calls Christianity. The cultural practices of a Saudi Muslim, when it comes to the role of women in society, are largely irrelevant to a Muslim in a more secular society like Turkey or Indonesia.

But is the huge Egyptian majority for the death penalty for apostates merely some kind of cultural identity? Of course not. These people believe that Islam is the only way to achieve happiness, the sole guide for a good life and death, and that nothing should stand in the way of this ultimate goal. Paradise matters. Just because that seems utterly odd to many secular American liberals doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Why should we not take the views of the Muslims of the Middle East at face value? Why are we actually condescending to their sincere beliefs?

Yes, we need to make careful distinctions with respect to Islam in different places at different stages of development. Conflating the Islam of America and the Islam of Malaysia and the Islam of Saudi Arabia is, well, dumb, especially as it relates to foreign policy. But to deny the core religious element of the violence in the Middle East, to ignore the fact that Islam, to a much greater degree than other faiths, is still resistant to some core freedoms of modernity, to ignore the fact that fundamentalism of this kind can do extreme damage to other Muslims and infidels … well this strikes me as another form of denial.

But what I find deeply dismaying is the lazy assumption that understanding these religious teachings and being troubled by them is a form of irrational Islamophobia or racism. I usually admire Max Fisher’s work, but the reflexive notion that any criticism of contemporary Islam in the Middle East is ipso facto bigotry is extremely reductive and toxic to open debate. This is facile:

After cutting to a video, Lemon asked, with a straight face, “Does Islam promote violence?” Imagine if Lemon had demanded a prominent American Rabbi answer “Does Judaism promote greed” or asked a member of the Congressional Black Caucus to acknowledge the merits of the KKK’s arguments. Then you can start to understand how Lemon’s question looks to the 2.6 million Muslim-Americans who have to listen to this every day.

I take the point about the crudeness of the question and the way it can sound to Muslim-Americans. But when incredible violence is being committed throughout the Middle East in the name of Islam, and when Islam’s own texts are purloined to defend such violence and empower it, of course the question is not a function of prima facie bigotry.

(Photo: Iraqi children carry water to their tent at a temporary displacement camp set up next to a Kurdish checkpoint on June 13, 2014 in Kalak, Iraq. Thousands of people have fled Iraq’s second city of Mosul after it was overrun by ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) militants. Many have been temporarily housed at various IDP (internally displaced persons) camps around the region including the area close to Erbil, as they hope to enter the safety of the nearby Kurdish region. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.)

Who’s Winning On Weed: Colorado Or Washington?

Josh Voorhees believes it’s “too early to predict” and that “it’s a mistake to judge either [state experiment] based on the speed at which each hits subjective checkpoints along the way”:

Washington’s slow and steady march could still pay dividends when it comes to the business of weed. While Colorado allows for—and in part requires—vertical integration between growers, processors, and sellers, Washington forbids it. That’s been an early burden for shops that need to spend their time searching for pot to sell, but regulators maintain that it will prevent the market from eventually being dominated by big businesses. As an added bonus for the state, it also provides three distinct points to impose a tax: between grower and processor, processor and store, and store and consumer.

And while the lack of medical marijuana regulations has caused Washington a string of headaches in the early days of retail pot, officials are optimistic that an eventual crackdown on the semi-illegal medical market will push many consumers into retail stores, where the pot is both taxed (good for the state) and tested for safety (good for the consumer). In Colorado, meanwhile, medical marijuana—cheaper than retail weed, and still legal—will remain relatively easy to buy for any resident who takes the trouble to secure a state-issued red card. So closing the gap between the medical and retail markets there will likely take longer and prove more difficult. Of course, given that the market is already regulated, harmonizing the two is also less urgent.

May the best state win. And if you missed new revelations from previously unpublished Carl Sagan letters on drug policy and cannabis, check them out here.

The Nobel’s Mysterious Winner

Today, the French writer Patrick Modiano was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. The Guardian notes that “Modiano is well known in France but something of an unknown quantity for even the most widely read people in other countries”:

[The Nobel Academy’s permanent secretary Peter] Englund said: “Patrick Modiano is a well-known name in France but not anywhere else. He writes children’s books, movie scripts but mainly novels. His themes are memory, identity and time. His best known work is called Missing Person. It’s the story about a detective who has lost his memory and his final case is finding out who he really is; he is tracing his own steps through history to find out who he is.”

He added: “They are small books, 130, 150 pages, which are always variations of the same theme – memory, loss, identity, seeking. Those are his important themes: memory, identity, and time.”

Modiano spoke to Julien Bisson in a rare interview in 2011:

“Actually, I never thought of doing anything else,” he says of his literary career. “I had no diploma, no definite goal to achieve. But it is tough for a young writer to begin so early. Really, I prefer not to read my early books. Not that I don’t like them, but I don’t recognize myself anymore, like an old actor watching himself as a young leading man.”

Modiano’s novels all delve into the puzzle of identity:

How can I track evidence of my existence through the traces of the past? Obsessed with the troubled and shameful period of the Occupation—during which his father had engaged in some shady dealings—Modiano returns to this theme in all of his novels, book after book building a remarkably homogeneous work. “After each novel, I have the impression that I have cleared it all away,” he says between two silences. “But I know I’ll come back over and over again to tiny details, little things that are part of what I am. In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time in which we were born.” The place, for him, is Paris, the city he writes about constantly, describing the evolution of its streets, its habits and its people. In fact, Modiano might very well be to Paris what Woody Allen is to New York: a memory and a conscience.

In a 2010 piece for The Millions, J.P. Smith wrote about reading Modiano in French:

His theme is unchanging; his style, “la petite musique,” as the French say, is virtually the same from book to book. There is nothing “big” about his work, and readers have grown accustomed to considering each succeeding volume as an added chapter to an ongoing literary project. His twenty-five published novels rarely are longer than 200 pages, and in them his characters, who seem to drift, under different names, into first this novel, then another, wander the streets of Paris looking for a familiar place, a remembered face, some link to their elusive past, some ghost from a half-remembered encounter that might shed some light on one’s history. Phone numbers and addresses are dredged up from the past, only to bring more cryptic clues and, if not dead ends, then the kind of silence that hides a deeper and more painful truth.

In a review of Missing Person, Ted Gioia emphasized that “Modiano doesn’t hesitate in shaking up the conventions of the mystery genre”:

The missing person in the title … is the detective himself. Guy Roland suffers from amnesia, the period of his life before launching his career as a private investigator is almost a complete blank. Even his name and nationality are a mystery to him. Now after a career of solving other people’s problems, he turns to his own. …

Those who like the mystery genre for its neat resolutions and the comforting sense of closure from a crime solved, justice up-held, and a perpetrator punished, will only get a queasy sensation from Missing Person. In this quest for identity, the very notion of self begins to fade under close scrutiny. “Do not our lives dissolve into the evening?” our narrator concludes, as he accepts the possibility that the person he is seeking will never be found, his identity as ephemeral as “the sand holds the traces of our footsteps but a few moments.”

Meanwhile, Emma Brockes uses Modiano’s win to explore the politics of the Nobel awards, remarking that “the real scandal of Patrick Modiano’s Nobel win is that Philip Roth is a huge loser – again”:

There are lots of theories about Nobel “bias”, few of them involving the possibility that writers from non-English speaking countries, many of whom readers in the west have neither read nor heard of, might actually be quite good. The Royal Swedish Academy’s appointed judges themselves say they don’t like the effects of the creative writing school battery farms on the New York publishing scene. More widely, the Nobel is seen as the perfect platform from which to counter US cultural hegemony; and there’s a notion that the snobbish Nobel judges don’t like to reward authors who actually sell. …

Anyway, Modiano won. Good for him and his many fans around the world. Now on to the more important question: Who becomes the next Philip Roth, champion novelist whose once-a-year loss we can all get behind?

New Dish New Media Update

It’s been two months since my last post on this, because, well, I was still recovering from Burning Man this time last month. So here’s our revenue flow since April, including September:

Screen Shot 2014-10-06 at 3.31.03 PM

You can see we are in a cyclical decline, especially with new subscriptions (the blue part of the graph). But we are above the total number of subscribers since my last report – marginally. At the beginning of August, we were just below 30,000 subscribers; right now, we’re slightly above – 30,164. Effectively, we’ve reached a plateau of 30,000 – losing about as many old subscribers to expired credit cards or non-renewals each day as we win new ones. Total revenue in September 2014 – at just under $20K – compares with $12K last September. Our renewal rate for subscriptions is 83 percent.

Our year-on-year revenue is now at $964K – compared with $879K for all of 2013. When you add in affiliate and merchandise revenue (we’re projecting about $50K from the two for all of this year), we’re bumping up against $1 million.

Howler Beagle (tr)As for traffic, the last three months have been up and down: July was great with 900,000 unique visitors (compared with 673,000 and 681,000 the previous two months respectively), but August and September declined to 780,000 and 690,000 respectively. For a site with a pay-meter, that’s still solid, but we could do better. The silver lining to these ups and downs in traffic is that they do not really have an impact on our finances – because, unlike almost everyone else in online journalism, we’re completely subscription based. That guides us away from the sirens of clickbait, and allows us to provide content that we think matters – even though we know it won’t rack up pageviews.

If you believe in supporting that kind of journalism, please subscribe, if you haven’t. There are 31,000 of you who have reached the meter’s free-content limit – which means you’re dedicated but still reluctant to jump in. A subscription is just $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year. So subscribe here if you really want to support a rare journalism model that is not reliant on sponsored content and clickbait. If you have already subscribed and want to help some more, you can always add a little to your subscription here; or purchase a gift subscription here; or simply share a post with a friend and encourage them to join the conversation.

The good news is: we have survived into our second year and have no debt, which is quite something for an independent site in this day and age. But with your help, we can also thrive. And we hope to.

A Path Through Washington’s Gridlock?

Gerald Seib imagines that “full GOP control of Congress might well shift Republicans’ focus from stopping him to making things happen.” Chait doesn’t buy it:

Washington already has divided control. Now, to be sure, Republicans control just one chamber of Congress at the moment. Seib argues that the calculus might change if they win control of the other chamber as well.

For this to be true, you would have to imagine that there are deals that could be struck between the Republican House and President Obama that the Democratic Senate would block but that a Republican Senate would agree to. What reason is there to think that any such deal exists? Has Harry Reid actually blocked an agreement between John Boehner and Obama?

Maybe, argues Brian Beutler:

A better way to think about the difference between a Democratic and GOP Senate is to look at where along the political spectrum the center of negotiations will lie. Right now, because Democrats control the Senate, it lies further to the left than it would under GOP control, which makes all tentative agreements much harder to sell to the Republican House.

Move things to the right a bit, and the question becomes whether Obama would be willing to cut more conservative deals that aren’t currently in the offing. I don’t know what the answer is, but it isn’t crazy to think a lame-duck president might sign off on legislation that would, under the current arrangement, be tantamount to surrender. And when you look at it that way, it’s reasonable to imagine that Obama-Boehner-McConnell might cut more deals than Obama-Boehner-Reid. They’d just be worse deals.