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Obama Promises To Act On Immigration

What he said at his press conference last night:

Zeke J Miller summarizes Obama’s remarks:

On immigration reform, Obama vowed to plow ahead with unilateral action. On minimum wage, he pledged to keep up the fight despite GOP opposition. Shaking up his White House staff? “Probably premature,” he said. He called, for the umpteenth time, for Congress to take up the banner of additional transportation infrastructure spending, which has fallen on deaf ears in each previous iteration.

Dickerson imagines how Obama taking executive action on immigration will play out:

If the president goes forward, he weakens House Speaker John Boehner and McConnell’s leverage with their members. House and Senate leaders are never going to get their members to agree to any future deals on immigration (or any other issues that require trusting the president) if he takes unilateral action on immigration. That’s because their voters are going to think individual Republicans are turncoats for working with a president who would act like that.

Maybe the president wants to exacerbate existing tensions within the GOP by playing hardball on the executive orders. But that’s a pretty aggressive bet. And since Republicans are most irritated by the president’s unilateralism, it’s safe to say that action in advance of legislation would swamp any more happy talk.

Jonathan Alter somehow still believes that the GOP and Obama can hammer out a deal on immigration:

Of course the odds against achieving anything more than bills on Ebola, ISIS, and maybe infrastructure are steep. Lots of Republicans feel they were sent to Washington to beat up on immigrants. That’s where old-fashioned backroom deal-making comes in. During the 1940s and 1950s, House Speaker Sam Rayburn hosted an informal gathering in a Capitol hideaway office that was dubbed “The Board of Education.” No panderers or demagogues allowed.  Many of the great bills of the post-war era emerged from those sessions.

David Corn isn’t counting on such bipartisanship:

The fundamental political dynamic of the Republican Party has not shifted; it’s advance has been fueled by its Obama-hating tea party wing. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Cory Gardner of Colorado will be two new GOP stars in the Senate, and they both hail from the far-right region of their party. Their model senator will likely be Ted Cruz of Texas, who on election night refused to endorse the newly reelected Mitch McConnell of Kentucky as Senate majority leader, signaling his intention to lead what might be called the Monkey Wrench Caucus. And in the House, the tea party club—which blocked House Speaker John Boehner’s deal-making with the White House and pushed for government shutdowns and a debt ceiling crisis—will likely have a few more members when the new Congress convenes in January. The lesson the House tea partiers will probably draw: Obstruction pays off, big-time.

Eleanor Clift highlights other parts of Obama’s presser:

Now that the Republicans are in charge, Obama said he’s looking for them to put forward a very specific governing agenda, so they can find areas of agreement. He singled out the rebuilding of the country’s infrastructure, an area where in the past Republicans and Democrats have found easy agreement. And he listed three specific items he wants from the lame-duck Congress: more resources for U.S. troops and the medical community to combat the spread of Ebola; a new authorization to use military force against ISIL; and a budget. Congress passed short term legislation in September to keep the government open. they’ve got five weeks to pass a budget, he said, adding that he hopes they will do it in a “bipartisan no drama” way. “We don’t want to inject any new uncertainty” into the economy, he said.

“What Do The Democrats Stand For?”

Frank Rich is asking:

If the GOP’s only overriding strategy was to run against Obama, the Democrats’ only coherent national message was to run away from Obama, including his signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act. It’s only on social issues that the Democratic party has a clear profile, and as was seen last night most spectacularly in Mark Udall’s defeat in Colorado, running a narrowcasting campaign focused on the GOP “war on women” is not a blueprint for victory.

Yuval Levin calls the election “a warning about [the Dems’] overwhelming intellectual exhaustion”:

They have very nearly nothing to say to or offer the country at this point, and their approach to politics has been reduced to little more than a series of tired rote gestures and slogans disconnected from the present and the future. The cupboard is bare and the energy is depleted. That is President Obama’s fault in part, but it is also the fault of the Left’s broader failure (shared in common with the Right to some extent of course) to think seriously about some basic realities of 21st-century America.

This exhaustion is powerfully evident in the Democrats’ preparations for 2016, which at this point are astonishingly lacking in energy and intensity. The Democrats appear to have just one reasonably plausible presidential contender and may be embarking on an essentially uncontested and content-free primary in a non-incumbent year. This kind of extended yet empty process — no excitement and no tussle, just the long, grim coronation march of an uninspiring leader whose followers dearly hope is in fact “likable enough” — could seriously exacerbate their problems.

Scott Shackford argues along the same lines:

Up until this point in Obama’s presidential career the party has rallied around him and served him. Whatever Obama stood for is what the party stood for. Without Obama, the party is left with a bunch of progressive platitudes and outcomes that they find desirable (raise the minimum wage, reduce college debt) and no strategy on how to get there, especially now. When identity politics play much less of a role in an election outcome—note the lack of gay marriage issues on the ballot—they’re struggling. Illinois Democrats manufactured some progressive-friendly “advisory” votes in order to try lure out voters, and yet their incumbent governor still lost.

Prowlers And Perennials

In light of this year’s theft of an ultra-rare water lily from London’s Kew Gardens, Sam Knight examines the world of horticultural lawlessness:

One big problem with plant crime is that it is so difficult to distinguish from the act of botany itself. Many of those who stand tallest in the annals of plant science – Joseph Dalton Hooker (Kew’s most celebrated director), André Michaux (who introduced 5,000 trees to France), Robert Fortune (who brought tea out of China) – spent years traveling the world and uprooting tens of thousands of plants that they liked the look of. …

Even the acts that were recognized at the time as larcenous have rarely been remembered that way. The Dutch tulip industry was more or less founded on the repeated theft of bulbs from the gardens of Carolus Clusius, a botanist in Leiden, in the 1590s. In the summer of 1876, Kew paid £700 to Henry Wickham for thousands of rubber seeds that he smuggled out of the Amazonian rainforest and were subsequently planted in Singapore and Malaysia. In Brazil, Wickham became known as the príncipe dos ladrões (prince of thieves) and the carrasco do amazonas (executioner of the Amazon). In 1920, he was knighted by George V for services to the rubber industry.

But while plant theft is now decidedly against the law, its incidence seems likely to grow:

In this late, degraded chapter in our planet’s conservation, it is possible to see plant theft as part of a general, depressing quickening: as more plants become endangered, because their habitats are destroyed, they become more desirable to collectors, because they are rare, and so on. Around 20% of the world’s 380,000 plant species are now thought to be threatened by extinction, the same proportion as for mammals. (The only order of life in more trouble are the amphibians). We treasure things in the last second before the lights go out. That is certainly the case with the Nymphaea thermarum.

Update from a reader:

Here is a water lily theft story with a happy ending.

The Blowback Against Mindfulness

Melanie McDonagh not only warns against divorcing meditation from its religious context, she’s skeptical of what it really teaches its modern practitioners:

Sitting concentrating on your breathing is a good way to chill out and de-stress, but it’s not a particularly good end in itself. Radiating compassion is fine, but it doesn’t obviously translate into action. Where’s the bit about feeding the hungry, visiting the prisoner, all the virtues that Christianity extols? Where in fact is your neighbour in this practice of self-obsession? Given a toss up between going to church, where you rub shoulders with the old, the lonely, the poor, and anyone who cares to pitch up, and a mindfulness session where, for about 25 quid a pop, you can mingle silently with congenial souls in flight from stress, I know which seems more good and human to me. Mindfulness may be the new religion — but it’s no substitute for the old one.

Meanwhile, Jay Michaelson takes note of the tensions running through last weekend’s International Symposium for Contemplative Studies (ISCS):

“We risk being swept up in a marketing mania that is orthogonal to objectivity,” said former Wellesley President Diana Chapman Walsh at the event’s opening keynote, arguing for rigorous “norms, procedures, and evidence” as a corrective to potential enthusiasm.

… [S]cholars/practitioners’ enthusiasm may be tilting the data in exactly the way that Walsh worried about. For example, a “systematic review and meta-analysis” of 47 mindfulness studies that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association earlier this year “found no evidence that meditation programs were better than any active treatment (i.e., drugs, exercise, and other behavioral therapies).”

Ouch. Mindfulness is now big business—a drop in the bucket compared to mainstream medicine, to be sure, but still hundreds of millions of annual dollars in government grants and significant investment by corporations and capitalists as well. And it’s no more effective than jogging?

Some scholars, notably Willoughby Britton of Brown University (in whose department I am a visiting scholar), even argued at ISCS that meditation can be bad for you, especially if you dive into the advanced methods without a reliable teacher.

But Michaelson admits that “not everyone agrees with this review of the data” and that there “have been more than 1,400 studies of mindfulness, showing significant effects on problems like memory, immune response, self-control, attention, recovery from addiction, and emotional resilience.”

Check out our Book Club exchanges about Sam Harris’ Waking Up, which grapples with some of these very issues, here.

The Stale Gaze

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Photographer John Rosenthal explains how taking photos of people, “strangers especially, can be a very tricky thing to do, ethically tricky”:

A photograph can extract people from the flow of their lives (and to some people that flow is everything). It can crop them from the lively space in which they live and have their being. A photograph can also secretly juxtapose people and objects in a highly suggestive way. Sometimes that’s a form of cruelty.

I recall a photograph I saw many years ago—I won’t say who took it—of a woman in a mink coat staring into a glittering jewelry store window on Madison Avenue.

She may have been idling away her time, as the rich often do, or she may have been returning home from a hospital visit to a friend who was ill. Her expression was haughty. The mink coat made it so. The photographer, of course, knew nothing about this woman, but she had turned her into a symbol of the bored rich. She’d played into a collective hunch about women in mink coats on Madison Avenue, and many viewers have undoubtedly nodded their heads at this faux profundity.

Of course, there are many occasions in which a stranger is the person you photographed, but that’s because they’ve already been reduced. They are holding a sign. They are angry. They want attention badly. And sometimes strangers simply want or need a photographer to tell their story. But, generally speaking, we need to be careful about what our photographs claim to know. The knowledge is often, as Susan Sontag once pointed out, “unearned.”

I rarely photograph people anymore.

(Photo by Marc Brüneke)

Red States, Blue Policy

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Several Republican-leaning states approved minimum wage hikes Tuesday:

In Alaska, an overwhelming 67 percent of voters endorsed a minimum wage increase to $9.75 by 2016. In Arkansas, 65 percent of voters said “yes” to bumping the current minimum of $6.25 (many businesses still had to pay the federal minimum of $7.25) to $8.50 by 2017. Voters were almost as enthusiastic in Nebraska, with 59 percent approving a bump from $7.25 to $9 by 2016. The vote was closer in South Dakota, with 53 percent of supporting a hike from $7.25 to $8.50 an hour by 2015.

The raises happened despite big losses for Democrats in all those states. Late Tuesday just a single Democratic candidate was poised to win a federal election among them, even though the party made the issue a key political priority. Such a strong consensus for raising the minimum wage shows bipartisan support for an issue that has been contentious in Washington, where Obama and many congressional Democrats have backed raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016.

Ben Casselman isn’t that surprised to see red-state voters taking this sort of action:

[It’s] striking to see voters in state after state support raising the minimum wage even as they elect Republicans who, for the most part, oppose such policies. Looked at another way, though, the votes make more sense. In exit polls, voters across the country reported being dissatisfied with the state of the economy. Seven out of 10 voters said the economy is in bad shape, and only 28 percent said their own financial situation had improved over the past four years. Those responses are pretty consistent with the hard data: Wages have been stagnant in the recovery, and median household income is still 8 percent lower than when the recession began seven years ago.

In other words, voters are pessimistic about the economy and want new leadership, hence their support for Republicans. But they’re also worried about their low pay and want to see a higher minimum wage. From a policy perspective, those two votes seem at odds with one another. But they both reflect the same economic frustration.

Mariah Blake adds, “Given how popular the state-level measures were, most conservatives realized that opposing them was futile”:

Jackson T. Stephens Jr., the chairman of the Arkansas Club for Growth, sued to block his state’s ballot initiative on technical grounds but gave up fighting after the Arkansas Supreme Court rejected his challenge. “This is an overwhelmingly popular initiative,” he told the New York Times. “This thing is going to pass whether I jump up and down or spend all my money.”

Danny Vinik tries desperately to find some good news for Democrats:

Senate Republicans have steadfastly blocked the president’s plan to raise the minimum wage to $10.10. In all likelihood, they will continue to do so with Mitch McConnell as majority leader. Even if Senate Republicans somehow compromised with their Democratic counterparts on a smaller increase in the minimum wage, it would still face very long odds in the House.

It’s not hard to see the political problem here. How long can the GOP reject a policy idea that not only has support of both Democrat and Republican voters but has been implemented individually in 29 states, often through ballot measures? … After Tuesday night’s shellacking, the Democrats aren’t in a position to make any demands. But if there is any issue that they can point to and declare victory, it’s the minimum wage. As we turn the pages on 2014 and start thinking about 2016, it—and not immigration reform—may pose the biggest political threat to the GOP

Meanwhile, Danielle Kurtzleben notes that inflation will chip away at some of these hikes:

[I]n Arkansas and Nebraska, there’s a catch: The value of those minimum wages will actually decline in subsequent years, because the new wages are not indexed to inflation. Inflation isn’t always a bad thing, but it does erode the value of a fixed hourly wage over time. Minimum-wage advocates often point out that the federal minimum wage suffers from the same problem. Although the value of the minimum wage has gradually been raised to $7.25 per hour, it is actually now worth less than it was in 1968, when adjusted for inflation.

Tuesday’s votes mean that 15 states plus the District of Columbia now either currently index or have plans to link their minimum wages to some type of price index or cost of living formula, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Indexing the minimum wage doesn’t mean that it increases in value every year — rather, it just means the minimum wage maintains the same value as overall prices rise. Without indexing, the roughly $15,100 that a full-time minimum-wage worker earns right now buys less and less each year.

Pre-election analysis of these minimum wage hikes here.

A Half-Baked Idea For A Half-Baked Planet? Ctd

Given dramatic declines in global biodiversity, E. O. Wilson continues to support the idea of making half the Earth a nature reserve. He recently explained to Joseph Stromberg why he thinks such dramatic action would be feasible:

[T]hink of it this way: currently, the ecological footprint of the average American is about 20 acres — that’s the amount of land required to support all needs of the average person. So this means that to achieve a US standard of living all around the world, it’d require three or four planet Earths. So it can’t be done.

But now consider the digital age — especially the industries of biology, nanotechnology, and robotics. These and other developing technologies can shrink the size of our ecological footprints. For instance, nowadays, people are buying smaller and smaller electronic devices. This is what they want to buy, not for any environmental ethic, but because they’re more sophisticated. But they also use fewer materials, and less energy is required to run them. …  So by making use of these scientific disciplines and technologies, we can help save the living world and secure more safety for our species. It lies in an unintended consequence of the post-industrial and digital revolution.

George Dvorksy argues that Wilson’s idea isn’t so half-baked after all:

He’s right when he says that our collective ecological footprint is set to decrease over the coming decades. Once it’s down to manageable levels, humans won’t require much living space. We seem to like collecting ourselves in large cities, anyway. One of the main challenges as I see it, however, is reducing the ecological footprints of emerging nations. Disseminating these technologies to all the world’s people will be a monumental challenge.

Further, as a resource-crazed civilization – whether it be trees or oil – we’d have to resist the temptation of grabbing whatever we want from Wilson’s preserved areas. Petro states like Canada and Russia won’t be too happy to see huge swaths of their territory set aside for nature. And what about those people who live in these areas? Would they be forced to relocate? But that’s not to say these are intractable problems. They’re political problems, and an issue of collective will.

The Capital Of Cannabis

Kleiman wants DC to allow the growing but not selling of marijuana. Katherine Mangu-Ward rejects that idea:

[T]he addiction, safety, and health costs associated with alcohol use aren’t caused by the fact that people can legally buy and sell the stuff. Money changing hands for a bottle of clearly labeled, cleanly manufactured gin in a well-lit store with regular hours is by far the most wholesome part of the whole life-cycle of booze.

By taking the money out of legal weed in D.C., the city will not somehow elevate the exchange of marijuana to a higher, more altruistic plane. Instead, it will force users and providers to continue to operate outside the law and live with dangerous uncertainty about what they’re buying, who they’re buying it from, and what happens if the deal goes bad.

Claire Groden warns federal employees against toking up:

[U]nlike private employees, federal employees in every state remain subject to Ronald Reagan’s 1986 “drug-free federal workplace” executive order, which banned employees from using illegal drugs on- or off-duty. In the wake of legalization out West, federal employers like the USDA and Colorado National Park Service issued staff-wide memos reminding workers that all pot use is considered unacceptable. Marijuana use also remains illegal on federal property, and in D.C., that means legalization won’t touch places like the National Mall and Rock Creek Park, a wooded recreational area that covers a large part of the city’s northwestern quadrant. Plus, many of the people who work in D.C. during the day don’t actually live in the district, but in Virginia and Maryland, where pot remains illegal. D.C. marijuana enthusiasts, who filled up a city bar Tuesday night to celebrate (including a rendition of “Blessed Ganja Herb”), might be cheering too early: Until federal law changes, there’s still a large chunk of their fellow D.C. residents who are left out of the high times.

Regardless, Christopher Ingraham sees major momentum for the legalization movement:

The symbolic importance of legalized marijuana in the nation’s capital, home to the Drug Enforcement Administration and the command center of the so-called “war on drugs,” is not lost on anyone. But the biggest effects of last night’s votes may be felt internationally. When Washington and Colorado legalized marijuana in 2012, they created political space for other nations to experiment with drug reform.

North Korea’s Charm Is Offensive

Paul Haenle and Anne Sherman take stock of the country’s shifting relations with its neighbors:

Much to Kim Jong-un’s alarm, Chinese leaders have raised their level of criticism and reduced their patience for Pyongyang’s provocations accordingly. China supported a UN Security Council resolution to expand sanctions against North Korea for its third nuclear test in March 2013. A vibrant domestic debate about China’s North Korea policy has been allowed in Chinese traditional and social media circles. Most notably, President Xi was the first Chinese leader ever to visit South Korea before the North in June 2014. This snub was compounded when China failed to acknowledge in state media or send an official to celebrate Beijing’s 65th anniversary of diplomatic relations with Pyongyang this October.

Pyongyang has taken notice. … Among its acts of defiance, North Korea executed Jang Song-thaek, China’s most trusted interlocutor, in December 2013 on treason charges that included underselling resources to China. More worrisome however, is North Korea’s charm offensive.

In July, Kim Jong-un agreed to cooperate on investigations into Japanese abductees. In October, the North cooperated in human rights talks with the European Union and released an imprisoned American tourist. A surprise visit by several of North Korea’s most senior leaders to Seoul in October 2014 marked the highest level summit between the two sides in years and a potential interest in improving relations.

And now the dictator is even trying to attract more tourists:

The Hermit Kingdom is, paradoxically, in the midst of an unprecedented tourism push (one that was reportedly put on hold last week out of concern about Ebola). Since Kim Jong Un came to power in 2011, several prestige projects have sprung up in North Korea: a waterpark, a dolphinarium, an equestrian club, a shooting range replete with live pheasants. These cheerful and contemporary sites are on an ever-expanding list of permitted destinations for foreign visitors.

And there are more in the pipeline. Pyongyang Sunan International Airport is undergoing expansion. There are plans for an underwater hotel complex in Wonsan, a sleepy resort town by the sea. Soon, the regime hopes 1 million foreigners will visit the country annually—a number that would put North Korea roughly on par with Sri Lanka as a tourist destination. Still, that’s just a fraction of the 12 million tourists that visited South Korea last year.

Bullet Initiatives

Voters in Washington state decisively approved a ballot measure that closes the “gun-show loophole” by requiring almost all gun sales to be transacted through a dealer, so that buyers are subject to background checks. Kate Pickert discusses how state-level referenda are becoming the new focal point for gun control advocates:

The new national strategy is to largely bypass Congress, where recent gun control efforts have gotten little traction even in the wake of the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. Instead, gun control activists say they are redirecting their attention and money to states—and to voters directly. … Appealing to voters through ballot initiatives has helped advance other progressive causes in recent years, including minimum wage increases and the legalization of medical marijuana. It’s a lesson gun control advocates have taken to heart. “I think it does represent a subtle shift,” says Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who favors gun control. “What we’re seeing is a renewed effort by gun control advocates to take this issue to the voters directly.”

Frum approves of the new strategy:

When Michael Bloomberg and other deep-pocketed donors pledged themselves to gun reform after Sandy Hook, some observers imagined that he and they would waste their resources besieging the NRA on battlefields of the NRA’s choosing: state legislatures where intensely committed minorities can thwart even large-but-less-engaged majorities. The success of 594 in Washington shows the way to a very different political contest, in which majorities can make themselves felt over and against small pressure groups. Look for more such initiatives in 2016—a year when, with a president on the ballot, the electorate will be both larger and less conservative than in 2014. 594 is not the turning of the tide, of course. But it’s a harbinger of a possible new politics of guns, in which the nation’s gun rules will no longer be written by a fanatical and fearful minority of a minority.

But Charles Cooke downplays the significance of the vote:

This will presumably be touted as a great victory. But it’s really not. For a start, universal background checks represent the most modest of all the Left’s aims in this area. This was not a ban on “assault” weapons, which remain legal in Washington. It was not a reduction in magazine sizes. It was not a ban on open carry. Instead, it was a law that requires residents of the state to involve a gun dealer when they transfer a weapon to another resident within the state. (Transfers between immediate family members and between spouses or domestic partners are exempt.) I’m against these rules because I think that they are pointless and because they seem invariably to ensnare innocent and unaware people. Nevertheless, the significance of Washington’s having adopted the measure should not be overstated. That a blue state such as Washington should have convinced only 6 out of 10 people to support a billionaire-backed law that does very little in reality is a testament to the strength of support for the right to keep and bear arms even in nominally progressive areas.

And at the same time, Alabama voters approved a constitutional amendment affirming the right to bear arms and instructing the judiciary to apply strict scrutiny to any restriction thereof.