Month: January 2015

After The Failed Revolt Against Boehner

Speaker Votes

Cillizza’s takeaway as the dust settles:

Caveats aside, what’s clear from that list of Boehner opponents is that even though he will operate with an increased majority in the 114th Congress, there’s little reason to think the travails of the 113th won’t be repeated again. If more than two dozen House Republicans are willing to stand up and voice their discontent with him in a vote that is almost certain to go his way, what will the prognosis be for Boehner when the legislative outcomes are less certain? (Worth noting: Several Boehner detractors who are likely to cause him agita in the coming weeks and months — most notably Idaho Rep. Raul labrador — voted FOR him as Speaker.)

If past is prologue — and today’s Speaker vote suggests it very likely is — Boehner’s next two years might well be as rocky as his last two as the leader of a GOP conference that, at least in parts, does not want to be led.

Cassidy has a soft spot for Boehner:

Compared to Gohmert and his ilk, Boehner seems like a conservative but ultimately rational member of the Rotary Club. To be sure, he mouths all the usual G.O.P. lines about President Obama usurping the constitution with his immigration reforms, and about the Affordable Care Act destroying the economy. But he has shown little enthusiasm for responding to points of contention with the drastic measures that some Republican ultras favor, such as impeachment or shutting down the government. “I don’t do anger,” he told Politico’s Glenn Thrush, whose new profile of Boehner is well worth reading.

Ezra calls him the speaker the GOP needs:

There have been many, in recent years, who wished for a stronger speaker, a speaker who sought compromise more aggressively and did more to marginalize House conservatives. Perhaps that speaker would have made the last few years more productive. Or perhaps he would’ve been broken by conservative dissatisfaction and replaced with a more authentic tea partier.

Conservatives, meanwhile, have often wished that they had been led by one of their own — someone willing to truly maximize his leverage, someone who wasn’t, in his heart, so afraid of defaulting on the debt and defunding the government and launching impeachment proceedings. That would have been a disaster for the country, but it would have been a particular disaster for conservatism, which would have been blamed for the consequences.

Boehner has managed to steer his conference between these extremes, and the result is, today, Obama is unpopular, his legislative agenda is dead, and Republicans have the largest House majority since the Truman presidency and a real chance to win in 2016.

John Patty wonders “how the insurgency will affect Mitch McConnell’s approach in the Senate”:

[E]ven setting aside worries about the possibility of passing legislation that the president will sign, to even get a piece of legislation to his desk will require at least a modicum of bipartisan support in the Senate, because the GOP does not control 60 seats in the Senate.

Thus, for the GOP to come across over the next two years as a party that can govern as opposed to simply obstruct, Boehner and McConnell must work together with at least a handful of (presumably conservative) Democrats in the Senate.  The question, then, is whether and how Boehner can manage this without angering the 20+ members of his own party that were happy to break with him on what is typically the most visible and partisan procedural vote of each Congress.

However, Harry Enten observes that “the trend toward more opposition to leadership is also going on in the Democratic Party, and there are few people who would argue that Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi doesn’t have control of her caucus”:

Pelosi’s share of the vote for minority leader in the past three minority leader elections is the lowest for a minority leader since 1991.  … The movement to voicing opposition in a public vote is probably much more of a performance art than anything else. It’s a way for members of Congress to show they haven’t gone “Washington.” With every part of a representative’s record being scrutinized in the media, members may find it worth their time to score points with supporters at home and potential donors on the web.

The Showdown Over Keystone

Obama has promised to veto the Keystone bill making its way through Congress. Bill McKibben savors this victory:

It’s not as if we’re winning the climate fight – the planet’s temperature keeps rising. But we’re not losing it the way we used to. If the president sticks to his word, this will be the first major fossil-fuel project ever shut down because of its effect on the climate. The IOU that the president and the Chinese wrote in November about future carbon emissions is a nice piece of paper that hopefully will do great things in the decades ahead – but the Keystone denial is cash on the barrelhead. It’s actually keeping some carbon in the ground.

But Charles Pierce isn’t counting his chickens yet:

The White House veto threat is not a categorical threat to the pipeline’s construction. The president is saying that the bill in question is premature, that it is short-cutting established procedure that already is underway, and that it is an improper federal infringement upon the function of the state judiciary of Nebraska. The president has not eliminated any of his options.

Josh Green sees Keystone as relatively unimportant:

Keystone has attained tremendous symbolic importance for both Democrats and Republicans. But this is the opposite of how it should be — the political fight has become completely divorced from reality. The pipeline’s actual importance to oil markets, the economy and the environment has steadily diminished. Whoever wins, the “victory” will be pointless and hollow.

First Read also wonders why Keystone should be the first order of business:

Republicans now have complete control of Congress, and the first thing they want to get done is … the Keystone XL pipeline? That’s the statement they want to make after their midterm victories? “The president’s going to see the Keystone XL Pipeline on his desk, and it is going to be a bellwether decision by the president,” Sen. John Barrasso said on “Meet the Press” this past Sunday. We get the politics of Keystone; we’ve been covering the issue for years now. But it’s such small ball — and it’s even smaller now in the midst of the lowest gas prices in years and 200,000-plus jobs being created each month. We’ve got to ask: All that money spent on the midterms, all that jockeying for control of the Senate, and first real statement from the new GOP majority is Keystone? It’s small-ball politics, whether you’re on the right, left or in the middle. It’s certainly no Contract with America.

Taking A Stand On The Can, Ctd

another-grout

The popular thread on bathroom graffiti continues:

I was going to write to say that your other reader‘s college was not unique in featuring restroom grout puns.  I remember a similar collection in one of the men’s rooms at my large university. But it turns out this phenomenon goes far beyond our two schools. A quick Google search reveals a tumblr collecting photos of grout puns called “The Groutlands”, a reddit thread, and even an Urban Dictionary definition of groutfitti:

It involves writing in the tiny space of grout in between tiles in public toilets. The phrases always are made up of some pun using the word grout. Other examples include movie titles, like “The grout, the bad, and the ugly” or simple words, like “groutrageous.”

One of the photos from The Groutlands is seen above. Back to many more submissions from readers:

I can’t believe I’m actually writing about this to someone whom I consider to be the most intelligent person in the blogosphere.  But here goes. From the bathroom stall of my university, in 1994.  Imagine Julie Andrews singing this:

Blowjobs and handjobs and licking Clitoris,
Watching my grandmother douche with Lavoris,
Flossing my teeth with an old tampon string,
These are a few of my favorite things!

Another:

At Stevenson College, UCSC, in the men’s room across from the main classroom, circa 1993, someone had written on the condom dispenser: “THIS GUM SUCKS.”

Another goes geopolitical:

This was in the early ’00s in a Safeway bathroom. It’s the only piece of bathroom graffiti I remember, because I’m still trying to figure out quite what it means: “Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon should eat pork together.” Can’t tell whether it’s just a big Fuck You or a call to compromise and find common ground by doing something unpleasant and unthinkable together.

Another political stand:

Princeton University, early 1980s: “SAVE SOVIET JEWRY”. Underneath, in another hand: “WIN FABULOUS PRIZES!”

Another:

From a Jamaican restaurant in Madison, WI, circa 1993:  “If you jerk it, they will come.”

Another:

High school was a rich vein for this. One of my favourites: “Flush hard, it’s a long way to the cafeteria.”

And another:

Spray-painted on a concrete seawall: “Man’s downfall will be his own intelligents.”

Another notes:

Your other reader neglected the essential preamble to the “paid a dime but only farted …”

In days of old when men were bold
And toilets were not invented
Men left their load by the side of the road
And walked away contented.

But here I sit, broken-hearted …

There. Nothing like a nice high-brow contribution to start off the new year!

Another agrees:

You know what I love about The Dish? Where else can you read a lengthy post about bathroom graffiti followed by a post about the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta? And feel the same level of enthusiasm for both?

Off-Off-Off Broadway

After moving back to Baltimore, Alec MacGillis was impressed by its dirt-cheap, high-quality cultural offerings:

What gives? Call it the Rust Belt theory of low-cost high culture. Baltimore is one of a handful of cities where the economic might and urban scale of a bygone era (Baltimore was the sixth-largest city in the country as recently as 1960) created both premier cultural institutions and a foundation of local wealth—aka old money—that, however dissipated by time, lingers to this day and continues to provide support for the institutions. At the same time, however, these cities’ decline in population and prominence has left these institutions perpetually on the hunt for new patrons.

The result is a disequilibrium that represents a kind of golden middle: On the one hand, these cities have a richer cultural legacy than younger but more economically ascendant cities such as Phoenix and Charlotte; meanwhile, their offerings are far more affordable than those in creative-class capitals such as New York and Boston, where theaters and concert halls can fill seats with deep-pocketed local elites and high-spending tourists.

How Liberalism Was Launched

In a review of Edmund Fawcett’s Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, Katrina Forrester takes stock of his revisionist account of how the approach to politics began:

For Fawcett, liberalism is, at its simplest, about “improving people’s lives while treating them alike and shielding them from undue power.” To understand its history, “liberty is the wrong place to begin.”

Liberalism wasn’t created in the seventeenth century but in the nineteenth, after a trio of revolutions—American, French and industrial—shattered the old order. Liberalism’s first job wasn’t simply to defend private individuals and limit the size of government, but to cope with the rise of capitalism and mass democracy amid the aftershocks of a postrevolutionary world. In Fawcett’s history, there’s nothing on Locke, little on toleration, and America isn’t seen as special. The focus instead is on social conflict, political economy and capitalism, and the story Fawcett tells clears away the distortions produced by Cold War histories of liberalism. It also reflects how our own preoccupations have changed since the crisis of 2008.

For Fawcett, liberalism “as a political practice” was born in the years after 1815. Early liberals believed a new society was emerging that would change politics for good. Political and economic revolution had created a new kind of person, “the individual,” with changed beliefs and interests, who would demand more from government and put up with less. Society was in conflict, rife with clashes between rival interest groups and between capital and labor. Fundamental to liberalism was the idea that such conflict could only be contained, never eliminated. That was the primary task of politics. Institutions were designed to prevent domination by any one group and to embed the liberal “habits of bargaining, persuasion and compromise.”

The Amateur’s Advantage

Noah Berlatsky laments the way arguments and debate are often shut down by appeals to narrowly-defined expertise:

The problem with demanding a certain kind of knowledge or a certain kind of expertise in criticism … is that it can end up presupposing, or insisting upon, a certain kind of conversation. And often that seems like the point: expertise is used as an excuse to silence critics — and especially negative critics. Gamergate’s response to Anita Sarkeesian is the most obvious example, but you can see it in virtually any fandom. Folks who adore, say, Game of Thrones, are way more likely to have read all the books and seen all the episodes of Game of Thrones. People who dislike Game of Thrones are less likely to put in the time. How can you watch one episode of Game of Thrones and dismiss it? How can you read half of Maus and think that it’s boring and pompous? What gives you the right? Expertise becomes a quick, efficient way to shut down naysayers. Those who love video games, or Game of Thrones, or Wonder Woman are the only ones who can truly understand; the haters are, almost by definition, stupid.

And sometimes haters are in fact stupid, just as fans are sometimes stupid. But other times skeptical folks who don’t identify as fans can have interesting things to say despite, or maybe even because of, the fact that they’re outsiders.

“Ghost Ships” That Carry Live Souls

Last week, two separate ships packed full of Middle Eastern migrants were found floating off the Italian coast, having been abandoned by their crews:

The cargo ship Ezadeen, which set sail under a Sierra Leone flag from a Turkish port this week, was discovered drifting without a captain 40 nautical miles from the Italian coast. Italian coastguards were forced to intervene to prevent a disaster and possibly save the lives of the estimated 450 people on board, many of them thought to be Syrian refugees. … The Ezadeen was the second vessel in four days to be found sailing without a crew. Earlier in the week, 800 migrants on the Blue Sky M, a Moldovan-registered ship, were rescued by Italian coastguards when it was discovered sailing without an active crew five miles off the coast. The two incidents have left observers of migrant routes in the Mediterranean fearing that people-smugglers have found a new and ruthless way of working in the area despite a recent decision to scale back Italian rescue operations.

The plight of the Blue Sky M and Ezadeen point to a new tactic by migrant smugglers in the Mediterranean. It’s less awful than deliberately shipwrecking them, as smugglers did on one voyage in September, drowning hundreds of refugees. Still, these “ghost ships” underscore the danger of the Mediterranean crossing and the desperation of those who make it. Barbie Latza Nadeau revisits an interview from December with Moutassem Yazbek, a Syrian refugee who had made the crossing last year and explained how the smuggling system works:

In many cases, he says, the smuggler kingpins hire refugees with seafaring experience to work as crewmembers on the ships in exchange for discounted passage. They are not the actual traffickers, Yazbek says, so generally the other refugees protect their identity. On his boat that came into Sicily three weeks ago, Yazbek says the refugee “crew members” hired by the smugglers were never exposed. Instead the refugees told the authorities that they abandoned the ship at sea, when in reality the men who piloted the ship blended in and were treated no differently than the other refugees.

“We weren’t protecting the smugglers—we were protecting the poor people that helped the ship to reach that stage,” he says. “Those people are refugees who worked as a crew to save some money. In my opinion I think that the smugglers are real criminals. If not, they wouldn’t make the prices so high; they would accept a smaller margin. I think they are anything but heroes.” Frontex estimates that the smugglers on the two large cargo ships that arrived in Italy last week cleared more than $3 million after the price of the aging vessel was subtracted.

But Melanie McDonagh isn’t sure how much sympathy she has for these particular refugees:

The Syrians now arrived in Italy paid between $4,000 and $6,000 for their passage. Many of those on deck were young and seem relatively fit. We are not talking here about the huddled masses, the human debris of the Lebanese or Jordanian refugee camps, but the more prosperous of those displaced by the conflicts in Syria and Eritrea.

If we, Europe, were to take the neediest refugees it might not be these. And if their efforts are rewarded with permanent residency in Europe, ultimately with citizenship, and in the case of those who get to Sweden, with the right to bring their families with them, then the gamble will have paid off. They have jumped the queue ahead of those perhaps more deserving of refuge abroad. They made a rational calculation about the terrible risks of going to sea with criminal traffickers and, more fortunate than those who died during the year crossing the Mediterranean (an estimated 3,500), they got lucky.

Meanwhile, Patrick Kingsley notes that the “Arab Spring” has generated the world’s largest wave of migrations since World War II:

Wars in Syria, Libya and Iraq, severe repression in Eritrea, and spiralling instability across much of the Arab world have all contributed to the displacement of around 16.7 million refugees worldwide. A further 33.3 million people are “internally displaced” within their own war-torn countries, forcing many of those originally from the Middle East to cross the lesser evil of the Mediterranean in increasingly dangerous ways, all in the distant hope of a better life in Europe.

“These numbers are unprecedented,” said Leonard Doyle, spokesman for the International Organisation for Migration. “In terms of refugees and migrants, nothing has been seen like this since world war two, and even then [the flow of migration] was in the opposite direction.”

A House Of Their Own

Kassia St. Clair reviews the dollhouses on display at the V&A Museum of Childhood in East London:

For most of the period covered here—the 18th to 20th centuries—the dolls’ houses would be the closest to property ownership women would get.

They were passed from mother to daughter, moving with them from the full-sized homes of their fathers into those of their husbands. The Tate Baby House [virtual tour here], modelled after a late-18th-century country home, spent 170 years descending the female line of a single family, traipsing from Covent Garden to a Cambridge mansion to a country manor house and finally back to London.

Female empowerment comes late in the exhibition. The jewel-coloured Jenny’s Home modular system, created in the 1960s in conjunction with Homes & Gardens magazine, is set up here as a high-rise apartment block. But it could just as easily be slotted together as a sprawling villa or a two-up, two-down town house. As women’s rights progressed it was accepted that they could be architects, designing buildings and their interiors. And as the decades march on, more women can expect to be homeowners, too.

How Do We Cut America’s Healthcare Bill?

Malcolm Gladwell reviews a book that addresses that question, America’s Bitter Pill:

At the end of [the book, Steven] Brill offers his own solution to the health-care crisis. He wants the big regional health-care systems that dominate many metropolitan areas to expand their reach and to assume the function of insuring patients as well. He talks to Jeffrey Romoff, the C.E.O. of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who is about to try this idea in the Pittsburgh area, and becomes convinced that the same model would work throughout the country. “The [hospital’s] insurance company would not only have every incentive to control the doctors’ and hospitals’ costs, but also the means to do so,” he writes. … A system like this, Brill estimates, based on a few back-of-the-envelope calculations, could slice twenty per cent off the private-sector health-care bill.

It’s at moments like this that Brill’s book becomes problematic. The idea he is describing is called integrated managed care. It has been around for more than half a century—most notably in the form of the Kaiser Permanente Group. Almost ten million Americans are insured through Kaiser, treated by Kaiser doctors, and admitted to Kaiser hospitals. Yet Brill has almost nothing to say about Kaiser, aside from a brief, dismissive mention. It’s as if someone were to write a book about how America really needs a high-end electric-car company that sells its products online without being the least curious about Tesla Motors.

In an interview, Brill spells out his primary complaint about Obamacare:

The basic deal that the Obama administration and the Democrats in the Senate had to make was we’ll get more coverage for people. But we’ll get more coverage for people at the same high prices that allow the drug companies to be so profitable, that allow the non-profit hospitals to be so profitable, that allow the device-makers to be so profitable — and that is the result that is Obamacare.

So the good news is this couple I interviewed in Kentucky who hadn’t had access to doctors in years suddenly had access to health care. The bad news is that you and I and all the other taxpayers are paying the same high prices for that health care that dominated and completely screwed up the system in the first place.

He continues that thought in another interview:

It is great that more people are getting health care, but we cannot continue to be a country where health care prices are 40, 50, 60 percent higher than they are in every other country where the health care results are as good, or better, than ours. It’s unsustainable.

So the only ray of hope I have is that if Obamacare will force changes in the cost structure just because there are going to be so many more people buying health care that it will just have to change the cost structure. That was sort of the implicit expectation that Gov. [Mitt] Romney had in Massachusetts, which is if we enact this plan and give more people health care, then when they have it, we’ll see that we have to do something about the cost and we’ll get the political will together to do that. The question is: Does Washington today, tomorrow, next year, in five years, even in the face of daunting health care costs — will they ever be able to summon the political will to do something about it?