by Graeme Wood
I wish every David Brooks column resembled this one. (Every Bob Herbert column, too, but let's not be greedy.)
I am led to believe Norwegians now spend more time during their long dark winters eating huge quantities of frozen pizza, and less time cutting off their toes to evade Nazis. This would appear to be a good trade-off, though any softening of the Norse hardiness depicted in Brooks's column is surely to be lamented.
by Jonathan Bernstein
I think, looking back on the health care reform battle the biggest puzzle I'm going to have is the surprising failure of the Republicans to focus more attention on what I always thought was its most vulnerable point: the individual mandate.
Now, of course, conservatives have attacked the individual mandate (to the point of casting votes on the Senate floor calling the mandate unconstitutional), but I think it's pretty clear that it was never their main avenue of attack. Back in the summer it was "government takeover," complaints that Members of the House had not actually read the bill, and, of course, death panels. In the fall, more government takeover. In the Senate debate, medicare cuts were really the main focus of the GOP attack. Oh, and the size of the bill. Since then, it's been a mix of the importance of following the electoral mandate of the people of Massachusetts, the tyranny of using reconciliation, and finally, at the summit, the importance of starting from scratch with a clean slate, or piece of paper, or Etch a Sketch.
Consider "starting over." Republicans have a whole day of maximum media attention, and that's the best they could come up with?
I'm sure that starting over polled well (as I'm sure Democratic talking points did — I'm certainly not going to claim that only one side uses focus groups and polls to test their messages). But it's not exactly a long-term argument, is it? I mean, put aside the obvious fact (certainly obvious to every reporter who covered the summit) that the Republicans didn't actually want to start over — they wanted to kill the bill. The real point, here, is that however "start over" tests, it's not actually an argument against health care reform. Neither is the size of the bill. Or whether Members have read it. Or reconciliation (and, yes, it is possible that extremely rare and disruptive parliamentary procedures might have some effect on public opinion polls, but reconciliation is neither). And of course "start over" is immediately irrelevant if and when the bill passes, and to my ears at least it's not much of an argument for anyone to oppose the bill. Look at it this way: for marginal Democrats in the House, does actually starting over and spending a few more months on this issue sound appealing? Hard to believe.
Had Republicans managed to demonize the individual mandate, which I would have thought — in fact, as Barack Obama apparently thought in 2008 — was fairly easy to do, then it would have caused plenty of trouble for the Dems. The policy people all make the point that the individual mandate is interlocked with so many other pieces of the overall reform effort that it would have been very difficult to give that up. I can certainly picture wavering Congressional Dems begging, in that scenario, for relief from having to vote for the dreaded mandate. If you do that, however, can you really have a functioning policy?
In other words, I think the Republicans are doing a lot worse in the spin war on health care reform than they could be doing. Now, I should emphasize that the spin war is a lot less important than other parts of the battle, but it's still interesting in itself, and of course in a very close contest, whether in elections or legislating, any small thing could make the difference (oh, and I should add that while I do think it's very likely that health care is going to pass, it certainly is possible that it will break down at the end). What I don't know is why. On the one hand, the whole thing sounds to me like Frank Luntz, who ( I guess I should add an in my opinion) has led Republicans down the wrong track before by emphasizing words that sound good, rather than policies that voters actually like. On the other hand, it also sounds like the effects of a party that is so good at spreading their talking points to like-minded voters that they've become lazy about the content of those talking points. I don't know — but it's yet another thing that I hope is explained in the terrific behind-the-scenes books that I'm confident will be produced by some of the reporters who have been covering this fight.
Rube Goldberg gone wild:
by Chris Bodenner
by Chris Bodenner
A government-commissioned report in the UK recommends a variety of media restrictions aimed to "tackle the early sexualisation of children" and counter the objectification of women. Tracy Clark-Flory is sympathetic but unconvinced:
Putting racy magazines on the news stand's top shelf only makes them more alluring. The same goes for all the other targeted vices: It isn't as though kids won't eventually find out that such things exist — and by the time they do, these adult secrets are imbued with an added electric charge. It seems a disservice to kids to so completely and thoroughly shield them from the realities of our sexualized culture, because they'll have to face it themselves eventually.
Not to mention, it's awfully hypocritical to try to protect teenagers from these "bad" things, while consuming said "bad" things ourselves — and kids are smart, they'll notice. […] It's less about protecting them and more about allowing ourselves to maintain a certain level of cognitive dissonance — because, hey, at least we're looking after the children.
The report's recommendations range from reasonable nudges – "Games consoles should be sold with parental controls already switched on" – to ridiculous regulations – "Forcing airbrushed and digitally altered photographs to display ratings symbols to show the extent to which the images had been changed." But the following is downright offensive – and doesn't seem to involve children at all:
Escort agencies, lap-dancing clubs, massage parlours and television sex channels should be banned from advertising vacancies in job centres arguing that it promotes the "normalisation" of the adult entertainment industry as a "viable career choice".
Wouldn't the stigmatization of sex-related jobs actually reinforce the view that such women are merely sex objects? I think we all agree that we are much more than our jobs.
by Patrick Appel
Ackerman reads Mitt Romney's No Apology: The Case For American Greatness so you don't have to:
There are two salient global facts Romney never considers in his book. The first is that it is actually possible to obtain positive-sum relations with rising powers. The rise of China does not have to equal the decline of the United States. If, as Romney argues — following Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer — decline is a choice, so is permanent international competition. The concept of diplomacy is completely foreign to Romney. He dismisses the State Department as “assistant secretaries and… bureaucrats” and proposes designating regional relations to “one individual” who would become a “presidential envoy or the ambassador from CENTCOM or any of the other regional military commands.”
by Alex Massie
Sometimes it's useful to be reminded that our generation has it pretty damned lucky. A remarkable story, even by the standards of a war full of remarkable stories. From the Times today:
Denis Avey, even at the age of 91, cuts a formidable figure. More than 6ft tall, with a severe short back and sides and a piercing glare, he combines the panache of Errol Flynn with the dignity of age. This is the former Desert Rat, who, in 1944, broke into — yes, into — Auschwitz, and he looks exactly as I expected. He removes his monocle for the camera, and one of his pupils slips sideways before realigning. It is a glass eye. I ask him about it. He tells me that in 1944, he cursed an SS officer who was beating a Jew in the camp. He received a blow with a pistol butt and his eye was knocked in.
[Having been captured in North Africa,] Avey was a troublesome prisoner. In the summer of 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz, in Poland, and interned in a small PoW camp on the periphery of the IG Farben factory. The main Jewish camps were several miles to the west. “I’d lost my liberty, but none of my spirit,” he says. “I was still determined to give as good as I got.”
But he knew immediately that this was a different order of prison. “The Stripeys — that’s what we called the Jewish prisoners — were in a terrible state. Within months they were reduced to waifs and then they disappeared. The stench from the crematoria was appalling, civilians from as far away as Katowice were complaining. Everybody knew what was going on. Everybody knew.”
Remarkably, Avey was able to think beyond the war. “I knew in my gut that these swine would eventually be held to account,” he says. “Evidence would be vital. Of course, sneaking into the Jewish camp was a ludicrous idea. It was like breaking into Hell. But that’s the sort of chap I was. Reckless.”
[…] Avey shaved his head and blackened his face. At the allocated time, he and the Dutch Jew sneaked into a disused shed. There they swapped uniforms and exchanged places. Avey affected a slouch and a cough, so that his English accent would be disguised should he be required to speak.
“I joined the Stripeys and marched into Monowitz, a predominantly Jewish camp. As we passed beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei [work makes you free] sign, everyone stood up straight and tried to look as healthy as they could. There was an SS officer there, weeding out the weaklings for the gas. Overhead was a gallows, which had a corpse hanging from it, as a deterrent. An orchestra was playing Wagner to accompany our march. It was chilling.”
They were herded through the camp, carrying the bodies of those who had died that day. “I saw the Frauenhaus — the Germans’ brothel of Jewish girls — and the infirmary, which sent its patients to the gas after two weeks. I committed everything to memory. We were lined up in the Appellplatz for a roll call, which lasted almost two hours. Then we were given some rotten cabbage soup and went to sleep in lice-infested bunks, three to a bed.”
The night was even worse than the daytime. “As it grew dark, the place was filled with howls and shrieks. Many people had lost their minds. It was a living hell. Everyone was clutching their wooden bowls under their heads, to stop them getting stolen.” Lobethall had bribed Avey’s bedfellows with cigarettes. “They gave me all the details,” he says, “the names of the SS, the gas chambers, the crematoria, everything. After that, they fell asleep. But I lay awake all night.”
The whole thing, as you can see, is worth a few minutes of your time and a reflection that, despite everything and the daily temptations to think differently, this is a vastly better, happier, gentler world than that into which our grandparents were born and subsequently fought.
Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, 9 am
by Jonathan Bernstein
Ross Douthat says that "when non-politicians who actually know something about policy — be they political journalists, think-tankers or public intellectuals — get involved in government, it’s almost always as spokespeople, speechwriters and policy advisers, rather than as actual candidates for office"
[T]here’s certainly no current American equivalent of Britain’s Boris Johnson, the magazine-editor-turned-Tory M.P.-turned-Mayor-of-London — or Michael Ignatieff, the historian, essayist and academic who’s now the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party.
I'm all for people getting involved in politics as politicians — I think we undercelebrate politicians as heroes of democracy — but I think Douthat needs to look around a bit. Parochially speaking, he could start with the political scientist and Member of the House David Price (D-NC), who is currently Chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. Indeed, there are twenty-three Members of the current House who hold a Ph.D., although the CRS doesn't detail what their fields are. I can't say that I'm as impressed as Douthat is with former history prof and Speaker Newt Gingrich, but if you like people with an academic or semi-academic background, there are plenty in Congress. Alas, CRS doesn't have a breakdown of how many of them were think-tankers, how many were professors, or what other careers they may have had before politics…I'm not remembering any other political scientists off the top of my head, but there are a lot of very well-educated people.
If, however, Douthat is looking for something a little more media-oriented, CRS reports that at least one current Member is a former talk-show host, and another was a television commentator (and I think . Douthat is no doubt also thrilled that public intellectual J.D. Hayworth is resuming the politician portion of his career, after an involuntary return the media). I say "at least" one current talk show host, because I don't think that CRS included Al Franken, so that would make two.
And, you know, I'm sorry about doing this, but there's no way around it — there is one more pol…there's a guy who used to teach law school, and wrote an acclaimed memoir. You know, a real book, the kind real authors write, although perhaps not quite as serious as these fine examples of American snake-oil salesman statesmanship. Granted, it does make Douthat's point: I think we would be better off with a few more Barack Obamas in American politics.
The Dish 