Category: The Dish

Rodent Residents

A new analysis has found one rat for every four people in the Big Apple. Only one in four? Compared with the bed bugs …  I was going to jump on this for another unpopular rant about NYC. But DC’s at least as bad, if not a little worse:

The District was the nation’s third rattiest city in 2013, faring better than just Chicago and Los Angeles, according to pest control company Orkin. Orkin compiled these ranking based on how many rat treatments it performed in 2013, so take this ranking with a large cluster of rat dropping–sized skepticism … In Orkin’s ratings, New York City ranked as the fourth rattiest city, coming in behind D.C. But, it should be noted, City Desk spoke to D.C.’s very own rat consultant, Robert Corrigan, back in November, who declared New York City as “probably the No. 1 ratropolis in the United States.”

It’s still pretty bad – but way better than I remember. My habitual bike ride down the alley-way behind my apartment would routinely enter an Indiana Jones environment. There were so many rats it was close to impossible to avoid them. And the feel of a writhing, scurrying rat beneath your bike wheels is a particular form of eww. Meanwhile, Ben Richmond offers a brief history of the creature:

[W]hile we all agree that there are too many rats, no one has been sure of just how many we’re up against here. Jonathan Auerbach, author of the rat population study, traced the one-to-one ratio to a 1909 book by W. R. Boelter called The Rat Problem, “which assumed that there lived one rat per acre of land in England.” Since the country had, at the time, both 40 million residents and 40 million acres, Boelter concluded that England had a rat for each person. “The hypothesis was erroneously applied to New York City and is widely quoted to this day,” Auerbach’s paper states. Boelter probably wasn’t right about England, and there’s no reason to think what he found applies to New York.

The estimated number of rats has varied widely over the years: from 250,000 estimated in 1948 – a ratio of 36 people for every rat– to twice as many rats as people, according to unnamed experts cited by the New York Post. The city government isn’t into putting a number on its rat residents, but it does track the number of properties that could be housing them. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Office of Pest Control Services reported that, in 2013, 10,800 property inspections had conditions able to harbor rats and 11,128 had active signs of rats.

What Parts Of Obamacare Will Republicans Repeal?

Medical Device Tax

Jason Millman explains why the medical device tax is at the top of the list:

With more than 7,000 device companies spread across the country, the industry has large concentrations of employers in California, Minnesota, Massachusetts and New York. The map [above], which shows the location of companies and employees who have signed onto a letter opposing the tax, helps explain why the issue keeps resurfacing.

How much would repealing it cost?

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the tax, which was added to the law to help pay for expanding coverage to an estimated 25 million people, will bring in $29 billion over a decade. That’s much less than other the funding sources in the law, like the tax on health insurers ($101.7 billion) or the requirement on medium-sized and large employers to offer coverage ($130 billion).

Sarah Kliff notes that opposition to the tax is bipartisan:

Nearly every industry has lobbied against its own assessment since Obamacare passed; insurers, for example, have run an extensive campaign against the health plan tax. But what might have given medical device makers an extra boost is that a decent number of Democratic senators want to see that fee gone, too. Both Minneapolis and Boston are hubs for medical device making. So it’s not especially surprising that Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Al Franken (D-MN), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) all support medical device tax repeal.

Suderman agrees the “most likely item on the list is a repeal of the law’s medical device tax.” Other brewing fights:

Republicans will try to make an issue out of the individual mandate which is widely disliked, but Obama won’t let that one get through. The employer mandate, however, might be a successful target: The administration has delayed and undercut the provision on multiple occasions, and liberal policy shops have argued that it’s not necessary.

Paul N. Van de Water criticizes another item on the Republican wish list:

House Speaker Boehner and Senate Minority Leader McConnell called this week for a major change in health reform’s requirement that larger employers offer health coverage to employees who work 30 or more hours a week or face a penalty.  Claiming that the 30-hour threshold is “an arbitrary and destructive government barrier to more hours,” they propose raising it to 40 hours.  In reality, however, that step would lead to fewer hours and more part-time work — the exact opposite of what their rhetoric about “restoring” the 40-hour work week implies. …

Only about 7 percent of employees work 30 to 34 hours (that is, at or modestly above health reform’s 30-hour threshold), but 44 percent of employees work 40 hours a week and thus would be vulnerable to cuts in their hours if the threshold rose to 40 hours.  (See figure.)  Under the Boehner-McConnell proposal, employers could easily cut back large numbers of employees from 40 to 39 hours so they wouldn’t have to offer them health coverage.

Chait points out that all of tweaks Republicans are advocating for would increase the deficit:

The GOP’s Obamacare conundrum in a nutshell is that they have condemned the law for its fiscal irresponsibility, but its political weakness stems precisely from its fiscal responsibility. The law made a lot of enemies because it had to make the numbers add up. Republicans have spent five years promising to get around to proposing their own plan, but they haven’t done it because if you want to make the numbers add up, you have to take things away from people.

The Wrong Way To Win In Texas

Douthat ponders the failed Wendy Davis campaign:

Yes, the social conservatism of Hispanics, while real enough, is sometimes overstated; yes, polling on abortion is always fluid and complicated, in red states as well as blue. But it still should be obvious that if your long-term political vision requires consolidating and mobilizing a growing Hispanic bloc in a state that’s much more religious and conservative than average, nominating a culture-war lightning rod is just about the strangest possible way to go about realizing that goal, no matter what kind of brilliant get out the vote strategy you think you’ve conjured up or how much national money you think she’ll raise.

It would be a little bit like, I don’t know, nominating a political-novice Tea Partier who owed her prior fame to a pro-abstinence campaign to contest a winnable race in a deep-blue, more-secular-than-average northeastern state. Not that the Republican Party would ever accidentally do anything like that, of course. But even that joke is part of the point: The Christine O’Donnell thing really did happen more or less by accident, because she happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch an anti-establishment wave and win a primary in which she was supposed to be a protest candidate. Whereas the Davis experiment was intentionally designed: She was treated to fawning press coverage, lavished with funding, had the primary field mostly cleared for her, and was touted repeatedly as part of an actual party strategy for competing in a conservative-leaning state.

Earlier Dish on the Davis campaign here.

The 2016 Tea Leaves

Nate Cohn reads them:

Last week’s results suggest that Republicans would be taking a big risk if they count on nonwhite turnout falling so low again. The vaunted Democratic mobilization effort did not replicate the 2012 electorate — something it could never do given the tendency for nonwhite and young voters to stay home — but it did produce a notably more Democratic electorate in states like North Carolina and Colorado than in 2010. … There is no way to be sure that the Democrats will remobilize young and nonwhite voters in 2016, even if it is the outcome most consistent with the available data on turnout and demographics. But if they do, the Republicans may need to perform still better in 2016 than they did last week.

But Larison warns that “most voters may have grown fatigued of having the Democrats in control of the White House by the time it comes to vote in 2016”:

In order to make the prospect of at least another four years of a Democratic president interesting, the party would probably need to put forward a fresh candidate with new ideas, but that is the opposite of what Clinton’s candidacy will be.

The very inevitability of Clinton’s nomination reeks of stagnation and intellectual exhaustion. So it’s possible that some other Democratic candidate might have been able to translate recent Republican success into a clear political advantage for the next election, but Clinton appears to be uniquely ill-suited to do that. That doesn’t mean that she won’t win in 2016, but it does mean that she is in a considerably worse position now than she was six months or a year ago.

Bernstein sees an improving economy as the Democrats’ best hope:

[C]umulatively, the odds are increasing that voters are finally going to believe the economy is growing. The economic picture is hardly perfect, but it’s also not unusual for perceptions to lag any improvement. For example, 20 years ago, Republicans would tell you that the recession that began in 1990 had ended well before voters went to the polls in 1992 and kicked President George H.W. Bush out of office because of the economy’s performance. But that electorate turned around and punished the Democrats in 1994 for that same long-ended recession. It took about three or four years for voters to acknowledge good times.

But what if the good times remain worse than in recent memory? Will the voters be taking it out on every president for the foreseeable future? I remain of the view that the key to winning elections is to present solid and fresh ideas for resolving clear and emergent national problems, and to find a candidate able to do that and to govern if she wins. Which means to say that Hillary Clinton needs a radical makeover in persona and policies if she is truly going to occupy the Oval Office.

Quote For The Day

“Many of us Canadians are confused by the U.S. midterm elections. Consider, right now in America, corporate profits are at record highs, the country’s adding 200,000 jobs per month, unemployment is below 6%, U.S. gross national product growth is the best of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The dollar is at its strongest levels in years, the stock market is near record highs, gasoline prices are falling, there’s no inflation, interest rates are the lowest in 30 years, U.S. oil imports are declining, U.S. oil production is rapidly increasing, the deficit is rapidly declining, and the wealthy are still making astonishing amounts of money.

America is leading the world once again and respected internationally — in sharp contrast to the Bush years. Obama brought soldiers home from Iraq and killed Osama bin Laden.

So, Americans vote for the party that got you into the mess that Obama just dug you out of? This defies reason. When you are done with Obama, could you send him our way?” – a letter to the editor of the Detroit Free Press from a baffled Canadian.

(Hat tip: Addicting Info)

Another Neocon Nominee?

The Group Of Senators Dubbed The "Gang Of 8" Hold News Conference On Immigration Legislation

Douthat is torn between Marco Rubio and Rand Paul:

I admire Paul’s outreach to minority voters, and I was very skeptical of the immigration bill Rubio shepherded through the Senate last year. But I have agreed with practically every domestic policy stance the Florida senator has taken since, and his reform agenda seems more sensible on substance and more plausible as politics than Paul’s more stringent libertarianism.

But then on foreign policy my sympathies reverse. Paul’s ties to his father’s more paranoid worldview are problematic, but the realism and restraint he’s championing seem wiser than the G.O.P.’s frequent interventionist tilt.

Friedersdorf deems it “too risky to put another Iraq hawk in the White House, especially when they’ve given no indication of having learned anything from that historic debacle”:

Rubio would fill his White House with people who still regard the Iraq War as a good idea. Paul will tap people who believe it to have been an ill-conceived mistake. Rubio will ally with people who sing, “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” Paul represents the opposing foreign policy faction in the GOP. … Iraq is clarifying. Douthat may believe that a Rubio domestic agenda would serve America better than a Paul domestic agenda. But is the difference so great as to outweigh the risk of a Rubio war that kills 4,489 Americans, wounds tens of thousands, exposes hundreds to chemical agents, and triggers a PTSD epidemic? Is Rubio’s tax plan so good that its worth risking another $6 trillion war tab?

But, with a Jeb Bush run looking more likely, Larison is doubtful that Rubio will even run:

There isn’t room for two Texan socially conservative foreign policy hard-liners, just as there isn’t room for two Floridian pro-immigration “reform conservatives,” and so on. If both would-be candidates from any of these states run they are both bound to be much less successful. Both in each state should be able to see that they would be cannibalizing one another in the primaries, which is why many of them aren’t going to declare. That will leave us with a less interesting, but also less unwieldy field of candidates than many are expecting.

Incidentally, this is one reason why I now suspect that Rubio will end up deciding not to run for president for 2016.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty.)

The SJWs Now Get To Police Speech On Twitter

Well, you could see this coming. Twitter announced last Thursday that it was teaming up with a left-feminist activist group to investigate gender-based harassment on the social networking site:

A group called Women, Action, and the Media, which advocates for better representation of women, is testing a new reporting process for gender-based harassment. The group developed a tool for reporting harassment and will forward confirmed reports to Twitter. “If it checks out, we’ll escalate it to Twitter right away (24 hours max, hopefully much less than that) and work to get you a speedy resolution,” says the group, which abbreviates itself as WAM. “But please note: we’re not Twitter, and we can’t make decisions for them.”

I wondered what exactly this small non-profit believes in. You can check them out here or check their agenda from the statements in the video above. Their core objective is what they call “gender justice in media.” That means that they are interested in far more than curbing online harassment. They want gender quotas for all media businesses, equal representation for women in, say, video-games, gender parity in employment in journalism and in the stories themselves. They are outraged by the following:

Less than 1 in 100 of classical pieces performed in concert in 2009-2010 were written by a female composer (and 1 in 15 was written by Beethoven!). Women make up 2% of the standard repertoire of pieces (Repertoire Report 2009-2010).

Less Beethoven – more, er, women! The crudeness of their identity politics is of a piece with their analysis. Instead of seeing the web as opening up vast vistas for all sorts of voices to be heard, they seem to believe it is rigged against female voices, or that women are not strong or capable enough of forging their own brands, voices, websites and fighting back against ideas they abhor with wit and energy and passion and freedom. Instead, WAM’s goal is to police and punish others for their alleged sexism – along the well-worn lines of contemporary and controlling left-feminism. Here’s the mindset behind the project:

“I see this as a free speech issue,” Friedman said. She said she knew some would see the work WAM does as “censorship,” but that a completely open and unmoderated platform imposes its own form of censorship. It effectively prevents women, especially queer women and women of color, from getting to speak on the service.

How exactly? Does Twitter prevent women of color from using the service? Or is it simply that WAM believes that women cannot possibly handle the rough-and-tumble of uninhibited online speech? And WAM’s intent with Twitter is not merely to highlight physical threats, abuse or stalking. They are quite upfront about casting a much wider net against those insufficiently committed to “gender justice in media”:

“We’ll be escalating [harassment reports] even if they don’t fit Twitter’s exact abuse guidelines,” Friedman said. WAM intends to “cast a wider net” and see what Twitter’s moderators address.

I can find no reason to oppose a stronger effort by Twitter to prevent individual users from stalking or harassing others – but if merely saying nasty things about someone can be seen as harassment, then where on earth does this well-intentioned censorship end? Is it designed to censor only misogyny and not racism? What about blasphemy? Are the only suspects in this brave new Twitterverse the “straight, white males” disparaged as a group in the video above? And yet, among those liberals who might worry about policing free speech in this way – let alone handing over the censorship tools to a radical activist group bent on social transformation –  it’s hard to find anyone anywhere who has any qualms. Jesse Singal wonders if it’s enough to keep the trolls at bay:

There are two ways to look at this.

One is that it’s good that Twitter, in the wake of what the Verge calls “high-profile threats against game critic Anita Sarkeesian and other women” working in the gaming world, is working with an outside organization to potentially beef up its very ineffective harassment-reporting tools. The other, more cynical response is that this could be a useful way for Twitter to make it look like it’s doing something about online harassment without actually doing very much at all. After all, given Twitter’s massive resources, why should it need to outsource this job to someone else?

Marcotte is hopeful that this will help stem the tide of troll bile:

There’s reason to think that WAM!’s involvement will do some good. As anyone who has reported abuse on Twitter can tell you, pretty much anything is better than the current system. And a woman’s group might also be much better at sussing out what is and isn’t sexist harassment than the mostly-male staff at Twitter. But WAM! also has experience in this sort of thing. Last summer, the group decided to run a campaign shaming Facebook over the proliferation of pro-rape and other anti-woman hate groups that escaped censure by declaring themselves “humor” pages. Facebook responded by cracking down on this kind of content. Twitter has wisely chosen to work with WAM! directly rather than go through that sort of public shaming, and hopefully this collaboration will be mutually beneficial.

Mutually beneficial? Does she mean that WAM can get to advance their broader ideas about policing the speech of white straight males by this legitimizing alliance with Twitter?

Somehow, I suspect the culture wars online just got a little more frayed. Because Twitter has empowered leftist feminists to have a censorship field day.

(Update: Follow-up post here. A long reader dissent here.)

Who Isn’t Ready For Hillary?

Arkansas Politics

Lizza takes a close look at the Dems’ presidential field. Why it might not be a cake-walk for Clinton:

The 2016 Presidential primaries will be the first fought by Democrats since the Supreme Court opened the door for individuals to spend unlimited sums of money on an election. In 2012, those new rules almost cost Romney the Republican nomination, when nuisance candidates like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who in previous years would have never survived their early losses, were propped up by rich allies. Before 2012, it would have been difficult to find interest groups that might help fund someone like O’Malley, Webb, or Sanders. Now all it takes is a billionaire who cares about gun control, climate change, war, or inequality.

“What if you decided to have a really strong antiwar person run?” one Democratic strategist told me. “Don’t you think four or five crazy rich people from the Democracy Alliance”—a network of wealthy Democratic donors—“would be funding that?”

I would imagine that the Clintons have thoroughly weeded the donor class of such wild cards by now – and the obloquy and ostracism that would greet any non-Clinton moneybags would be formidable. But I do think that the mid-terms have hurt Clinton somewhat. Why? Because they were run on classic Clinton lines: don’t really stand for anything controversial, deploy demographic-style campaigning without giving those demographics any positive thing to support, assume a get-out-the-base over a new-agenda strategy will be enough, and, er, hope for the best. The election was a classic Democratic defensive crouch – at which the Clintons are experts. And it didn’t work. It turns out you need real issues and sometimes divisive causes to win an election – and yet those are exactly the kind of themes the Clintons have always been uncomfortable with.

Matt Latimer takes another view:

No longer will she have to worry so much about gaining distance from President Obama—though that’s certainly on her agenda. No longer will she have to defend or explain her position on issues pushed by a Democratic Senate.

No longer will she have to subtly run against her husband and his scandals. Instead, she can run squarely against the circus that will preoccupy Congress and the media with every passing day. The calm voice of wearied experience. The wizened wife and mother—now grandmother—who can keep those rambunctious boys in line.

She’s probably just about the only person in Washington today who’s even happier than Mitch McConnell.

But that kinda makes my point. If all Clinton really offers is opposition to the GOP (and support for their wars) I fail to see how she’ll bring many voters to the polls. Waldman thinks the Republican Congress puts Clinton in a tricky position:

Clinton can argue that a Republican president and a Republican Congress would be a terrifying combination, and some of us might believe she’s right. But if the only alternative is four more years of bitterness and gridlock, lots of voters could chose to give the GOP the chance to do its worst. If Clinton doesn’t already have a persuasive description of how she will govern if faced with a legislature controlled by Tea Partiers and Republicans afraid of Tea Partiers, who will fight her on every single thing she wants to do, Clinton sure ought to come up with one soon.

But that would mean taking a political risk. And that is something Clinton has taught herself never to do.

(Photo: Democrats buy Clinton buttons and t-shirts following the Arkansas Democrats’ campaign rally featuring former President Bill Clinton and Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., in Texarkana, Ark. on Sunday, Nov. 2, 2014. By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

Mission Creep In Iraq, And The President’s Bullshit

Let’s say you wanted to construct a narrative that perfectly fits the definition of mission creep. How could it improve on the following: at first you insist you are not going to be dragged into a new war in Iraq and Syria; then you rush military aid to avoid a humanitarian disaster; then you find that you need to make sure Kobani doesn’t fall; then you commit 1500 troops to “advise” the Iraqi “military”; and then you have the  Pentagon announce “that it had received authorization from Obama to send an additional 1,500 U.S. personnel to Iraq over the coming months”, which would double the number of American boots on the ground there. But no worries. Nothing to see here:

The new troops will be placed under the same noncombat restriction as those already deployed, but they will be moved closer to the front lines. … According to a senior administration official, 630 of the new troops will be performing an advise-and-assist mission — similar to the one being conducted today — primarily in Anbar in the west of the country. The Pentagon plans to establish “two expeditionary advise and assist operations centers, in locations outside of Baghdad and Erbil,” to provide support for the Iraqis at the brigade headquarters level and above. The remaining 870 troops will be doing a more traditional training mission at locations across the country, the senior administration official said. Both missions will move U.S. troops out of Iraq’s major cities and closer to where battles are currently being waged and where a likely counteroffensive would begin.

But no combat will be allowed! What if combat comes to them? What if one of them is killed? Are we not to respond and defend ourselves? One US soldier captured by the IS and we have a huge emotional story that could guarantee even more of a commitment. This is exactly how this operation with a few advisers becomes an unstoppable war in an unwinnable desert.

And then, as if to underline the fact that he could easily be ramping up for a third Iraq war (to be continued by the Clintons or by a neocon president), Obama stressed that he would “never say never” to more troops (video above). Juan Cole wants Obama to stop bullshitting about our presence in Iraq:

If ISIL really is a dire threat to US security, as administration officials maintain, then they should go to the US public with the news that they are going to have to put thousands of US forces on the ground in Iraq. So far they are trying to spin us, and to pretend that there are just some trainers and advisers. It is far more than that; US special operations forces will be operating in Iraq brigades, likely in part to paint lasers on targets for US warplanes to bomb.

Meanwhile, the counteroffensive may have already begun: an aide to ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was reportedly killed in an air strike Friday night, while Baghdadi himself may also have been injured or even killed, though the Pentagon can’t confirm that. The Iraqi army is also making gains against ISIS in the strategically important northern city of Beiji:

Exclusive images obtained by Al Jazeera on Monday showed government forces pushing ahead into the rebel-controlled city, with ISIL flag covered in an Iraqi security forces slogan. Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, reporting from Baghdad, said clashes continue and the armed rebels are fighting back. He said the oil refinery, located about 50km from the city centre, is the next big target. ISIL fighters remain in control of parts of the facility. The military advance is seen as a significant victory for the government, as Beiji and its nearby oil refinery were one of the first territories swept by ISIL in June.

The targeting of refineries like the one in Beiji is one reason why German intelligence believes the jihadist group’s oil revenues are much lower than previous estimates had calculated:

According to German English-language publication The Local, the BND (German equivalent of the CIA) estimate was obtained by several German news agencies. The BND estimate suggests that ISIS may make less than $100 million this year from oil — under $274,000 per day. Obviously, that’s still a lot, but it’s way lower than what most public estimates suggest. …

There are two big reasons the BND thinks most estimates are inflated. The first is coalition airstrikes: the United States and its allies have pounded the oil extraction rigs, which are after all right out in the open, and hit ISIS smuggling lines. As such, the BND believes that ISIS has gone from producing its highest oil production of 172,000 barrels per day to 28,000 in October. … The second reason the BND believes ISIS oil revenues are inflated has to do with ISIS governance itself.

But this is never enough. Now, the US has to fight the Iraqis’ fight for them – and somehow regain the territory lost to the IS. The goal will determine the forces. And whatever restraints this president tries to put on this will soon be busted – either by him or his successor.

This is exactly what we elected Obama to prevent, not to enable. But the war machine outlasts any president. And it has too easily coopted this one already.