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Obama’s Border Crisis Plan

Late last week, Obama rolled out a proposal to start processing refugee status applications from young, would-be migrants in Honduras before they make the treacherous northbound journey (NYT). The pilot plan, which could be expanded to El Salvador and Guatemala, envisions receiving around 5,000 refugee applications and accepting 1,750 of them over the first two years, at a cost of $47 million. Alec MacGillis applauds:

There is no shortage of questions that immediately spring to mind. Doesn’t 5,000 applicants seem awfully low, given that since October 1 more than 16,500 minors have traveled to the U.S. border from Honduras alone? How would the U.S. personnel at the embassy in Tegucigalpa decide which young applicants were so threatened by gang violence that they qualified for the coveted status and entry to the U.S.? What would this new approach mean for the young Central Americans who already made the risky journey to the U.S. in recent months?

But the proposal comes with two clear benefits, one substantive and one political. First, it is a big step toward addressing the immediate humanitarian crisis: It will deter at least some young people from making the dangerous trip, thereby reducing demand for the migrant traffickers who are profiting off the children’s desperation. … Shifting the entry point for at least some of the young Central Americans to their countries of origin will hopefully redefine the problem as what it is: a challenge to our country’s laws and policies on asylum, which as now written do not directly address the plight of young people in gang-ravaged societies; and, more broadly, a reckoning with our responsibility to our southern neighbors.

But Roberto Ferdman outlines why the proposal won’t be enough on its own and could have unintended consequences:

The current proposal, which assumes that some 5,000 children will apply in Honduras, would cost nearly $50 million over the course of two years. And Guatemala and El Salvador might see a similar program implemented if the pilot is deemed successful. But less than 2,000 children would be selected from those that apply in Honduras. That’s a mere fraction of the more than 16,000 that have been apprehended at the U.S. border this year (and the thousands more that are likely still in transit).

There’s also the potential for confusion over the definition of the word refugee. The U.S. launched similar screening programs in Vietnam in the 1970s and in Haiti in the 1990s. But those were set up in the aftermath of a war and devastating hurricane, respectively. “There’s serious worry that if the proposal is enacted it will stretch the current meaning of the word refugee,” [Columbia University political scientist Carlos] Vargas-Ramos said.

Why Honduras, any way? Well, because it’s the worst off:

Honduras has the highest murder rate of any country in the world. According to the latest report from the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime, the Central American nation saw 90.4 homicides per 100,000 people in 2012. The majority of the violence in Honduras is carried out by two main gangs, Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and Barrio 18. Both were created in Los Angeles by Salvadoran immigrants, between 2001 and 2010. The U.S. deported more than 100,000 convicted members of both gangs back to Central America, where corrupt law enforcement and political instability—particularly in Honduras, which underwent a coup d’état in 2009—allowed them to spread out and take control of entire cities, kidnapping, torturing, and brutally murdering anyone standing in their way. San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second largest city and a gang stronghold, is considered the most dangerous city in the world. According to the CIA World Factbook, Honduras had 17,000 refugees or people displaced within the country as a result of extortions, threats, or forced gang recruitment in 2013.

Jeremy Relph reports from the country’s Bajo Aguán region, where land disputes and government corruption are keeping the violence going:

These days Bajo Aguán is virtually off-limits to the country’s army and police. Campesinos have been the victims of private security and government forces, and the Honduran government has done little to halt it. The ruling right-wing National Party protects rich landowners. They’ve focused on maintaining security and addressing violence with force. The left paints the campesinos as victims and pacifists. At stake is fertile land, and massive profits.

Bajo Aguán is the rural center for palm oil production and land rights battles. Palm oil is in everything from Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to Johnson’s baby shampoo to Pringles. During the last decade, large energy companies like BP have begun heralding palm oil as the next green biofuel. Across Africa the spread of plantations has threatened chimpanzees with extinction. In Indonesia and Malaysia, the world’s leading producers, its extraction is linked to human rights abuse. Honduras is no different.

In an interview with Susan Glasser, Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández articulates his understanding of how the American drug war has contributed to his country’s crisis and what the US should do differently:

We all share responsibility, from those who produce the drug to the transit countries, but also the country that uses the drugs. And the United States is the great consumer of the drugs. The advantage that you have here—if you can call it an advantage—is that the violence has been separated from the transit of drugs. That’s why for many officials and public servants the drug problem in the United States is one of public health. In Central America, the drug problem is life or death. That’s why it’s important that the United States assume its responsibility. … A Central America at peace, with less drug violence, and with opportunities, is a great investment for the United States. On the contrary, if they are only investing in border security and not in the source of the problem, in the genesis of the problem, then we will have more of the same.

The Passion Of The Israeli Liberal

Jonathan Freedland senses “a weariness in the liberal Zionist fraternity,” as the Gaza war once again forces the Israeli left to wrestle with the dissonance of their principles and their loyalties:

But underlying this fatigue might be a deeper anxiety. For nearly three decades, the hope of an eventual two state solution provided a kind of comfort zone for liberal Zionists, if not comfort blanket. The two-state solution expressed the liberal Zionist position perfectly: Jews could have a state of their own, without depriving Palestinians of their legitimate national aspirations. Even if it was not about to be realized any time soon, it was a goal that allowed one to be both a Zionist and a liberal at the same time.

But the two-state solution does not offer much comfort if it becomes a chimera, a mythical notion as out of reach as the holy grail or Atlantis. The failure of Oslo, the failure at Camp David, the failure of Annapolis, the failure most recently of John Kerry’s indefatigable nine-month effort has prompted the unwelcome thought: what if it keeps failing not because the leaders did not try hard enough, but because the plan cannot work? What if the two-state solution is impossible? That prospect frightens liberal Zionists to their core. For the alternatives to two states are unpalatable, either for liberal reasons or for Zionist reasons.

Former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin believes Netanyahu’s decision to reject the Hamas-Fatah unity agreement was a mistake:

Israel should have been more sophisticated in the way it reacted. We should have supported the Palestinians because we want to make peace with everybody, not with just two-thirds or half of the Palestinians. An agreement with the unity government would have been more sophisticated than saying Abbas is a terrorist. But this unity government must accept all the conditions of the Middle East Quartet. They have to recognize Israel, renounce terrorism and recognize all earlier agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. … But I would warn against believing that the Palestinians are peaceful due to exhaustion from the occupation. They will never accept the status quo of the Israeli occupation. When people lose hope for an improvement of their situation, they radicalize. That is the nature of human beings. The Gaza Strip is the best example of that. All the conditions are there for an explosion.

With Israel losing “on the battlefield of perception”, Goldblog restates his argument for an Israeli-led, two-state settlement:

I don’t know if the majority of Palestinians would ultimately agree to a two-state solution. But I do know that Israel, while combating the extremists, could do a great deal more to buttress the moderates. This would mean, in practical terms, working as hard as possible to build wealth and hope on the West Bank. A moderate-minded Palestinian who watches Israel expand its settlements on lands that most of the world believes should fall within the borders of a future Palestinian state might legitimately come to doubt Israel’s intentions. Reversing the settlement project, and moving the West Bank toward eventual independence, would not only give Palestinians hope, but it would convince Israel’s sometimes-ambivalent friends that it truly seeks peace, and that it treats extremists differently than it treats moderates. And yes, I know that in the chaos of the Middle East, which is currently a vast swamp of extremism, the thought of a West Bank susceptible to the predations of Islamist extremists is a frightening one. But independence—in particular security independence—can be negotiated in stages. The Palestinians must go free, because there is no other way.

(Photo: Used artillery shells litter the ground on the morning of July 28, 2014 near Kafar Azza, Israel. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

The Color Of Homeownership

Kriston Capps notes a new study indicating that recent changes in the housing market “essentially wiped out the gains made by black homeowners since the 1970s”:

The survey controlled for “trigger events” that increase the likelihood that homeowners will lose their homes, including divorce, death, or job loss. (And more mundane factors, such as when a kid leaves home for college.) [Researchers Gregory] Sharp and [Matthew] Hall also accounted for homeowners who developed disabilities. The study found that about six percent of the sample transitioned from homeowners to renters. But black homeowners experienced an exit rate 68.2 percent higher than white homeowners. Although racial differences in trigger events were “minimal,” the report said, black homeowners were nevertheless more likely to “see their households shrink, to lose their jobs, and to suffer from substantial income losses” than white homeowners. So, even accounting for events that can lead to downward life trajectories, African Americans were much more likely to lose their status as homeowners – suggesting they are more vulnerable and subject to predatory, exploitative, and racially motivated lending practices.

Jamelle Bouie elaborates:

In addition to showing the consequences of past discrimination, Sharp and Hall argue that African-Americans have been victimized by a new system of market exploitation. Banks like Wells Fargo steered blacks and other minorities into the worst subprime loans, giving them less favorable terms than whites and foreclosing on countless homes. In a 2012 lawsuit, the ACLU and National Consumer Law Center alleged that the now-defunct New Century Financial, working with Morgan Stanley, pushed thousands of black borrowers into the riskiest loans, leaving many in financial ruin. As early as 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported that blacks were twice as likely to receive subprime loans. And in a New York University study published last year, researchers found that black and Hispanic families making more than $200,000 a year were more likely to receive subprime loans than white families making less than $30,000.

Together, all of this means that – according to Sharp and Hall – African-Americans are 45 percent more likely than whites to lose their homes.

Best Cover Song Ever?

A reader recommends an extreme genre-bender:

Great contest. Let me nominate an unconventional, but brilliant, submission by Girl Talk. You want genre mixing? How about something that includes parts of Black Sabbath, Ludacris, Dorrough, the Ramones and Missy Elliot, among others (plus equally amazing video):

Is it a traditional cover song? No, but if this is the future of the cover song, we are in extremely good hands …

Previous coverage of the Dish’s favorite mashup DJ here. Another reader:

I can’t be the first to submit Cowboy Junkies covering Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane”. This version is so good Reed himself changed the way he performed the song live:

Another:

How could I forget this one?! Another example of the cover being better than the original. This time it’s Sheryl Crow covering Cat Stevens’ “The First Cut is the Deepest”:

Another:

Please consider the Fine Young Cannibal’s cover of “Suspicious Minds”. Both Elvis and FYC had a hit with this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibx5-nTLIns

Check out all the nominees here. Update from a reader:

Might I advocate for keeping the covers contest limited to “clean” covers and saving mashups for, possibly, a later contest? You’ll be hard pressed to beat Girl Talk at his own game, but you’ve got stuff like Pogo (with gardyn being among my faves there, and this boosh remix) competing for the “repurposed splicing” title (though let’s be honest. Girl Talk is in a league of his own with the breadth and depth of his mashups). Hell, you could have individual Girl Talk and Pogo contests (I would put “Minute by Minute” up against “Oh No” for Girl Talk)

But then beyond that, you’ve got other more focused, less all-over-the-place mashups:

DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album (Jay-Z’s Black Album vs. the Beatles’ White Album) [probably the gold standard as an album, but individual tracks out there can at least compete]
Sham Sham’s 99 Hearts (Jay-Z’s 99 Problems v. Architecture in Helsinki’s Heart It Races)
Psycosis’ In da G4 Over the Sea (Neutral Milk Hotel vs. various rappers)
Amerigo Gazaway’s Yasiin Gaye (Mos Def [Yasiin Bey] vs. Marvin Gaye)
the Notorious XX, Wait What (Notorious B.I.G v. the XX)

I find all of these, in their own way, to be amazing examples of how someone can make something completely new out of two songs that seem wildly different. Or maybe I’m just hoping you’ll crowdsource my efforts to find more mashups like this.

More Block Than Grant?

Josh Voorhees spells out his main concern with the Ryan plan, i.e., that the block grant mechanism he proposes for assistance programs like SNAP will result in benefit cuts:

Under the current setup, any American who qualifies for SNAP benefits receives them, regardless of how much money Washington has already spent on the program that year. But switching to a block grant would effectively set a cap on SNAP spending by stopping the program from automatically increasing along with need. That, critics warn, could leave the program unprepared and underfunded when the next economic downturn sends more Americans than expected scrambling to put food on the table.

The best case for those who want to protect SNAP and other social welfare funding would be for Congress to freeze current funding levels for the foreseeable future. That technically wouldn’t be a reduction in funding, but inflation would tell a different story. That’s what happened to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program during Washington’s last attempt at major welfare reform. Since that program was block-granted in 1996, funding has remained pretty much flat at $16.6 billion per year while the program has quietly lost nearly one-third of its spending power to inflation. Under Ryan’s proposal, food stamps would risk a similar fate.

To illustrate this point, Andrew Flowers imagines that the Ryan plan had been in place during the recession that began in 2007 and calculates how big a hit the program would have taken:

At the end of 2007, the number of SNAP recipients totaled more than 26 million, with cumulative expenditures at more than $33 billion. By 2013, expenditures had more than doubled to nearly $80 billion, with recipients surging to about 47 million. If funding had remained constant, the average monthly benefit would have fallen from $133 (its actual number in 2013) to about $53.

The impact of these safety-net programs is dependent not just on how the funding is delivered — whether as separate programs or one catch-all Opportunity Grant — but also on how the programs respond to economic conditions. It’s the difference between leaning back too far in a rocking chair and on a bar stool.

Mike Konczal also looks to the 90s for historical clues as to how a block grant system would fare:

Rather than a “welfare reform — yay or nay?” conversation, it would be really useful if people arguing for the block-granting of the entire anti-poverty agenda would point out what they do and do not like about what happened in the 1990s. Especially as proponents hold up welfare reform as the model.

As Matt Bruenig notes, the work requirements and other restrictions go against the concept of subsidiarity. Greenstein writes, “the block grant would afford state and local officials tantalizing opportunities to use some block grant funds to replace state and local funds now going for similar services…That’s what happened under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant.” In retrospect, TANF didn’t survive the business cycle, and it clearly has cut spending by cutting the rolls. Is that what people want to accomplish with food stamps, which have done wonders to boost childhood life outcomes? If not, what can be done other than assert that this time will be different?

Meanwhile, Max Ehrenfreund argues that a universal basic income is a more conservative solution to poverty than what Ryan proposes:

Another reason to see why a universal basic income is more conservative than Ryan’s block grant proposal is to compare it to other aspects of his plan. The tax code offers a yearly bonus to poor people who work, called the earned-income tax credit. It is another one of Friedman’s good ideas, and liberals should support it as well because it helps the poor get by, as Matt O’Brien argues. Ryan, like President Obama, wants to expand the earned-income tax credit for adults without children.

Yet if the goal is really to reward the poor and out of work for finding jobs, then this tax credit isn’t a perfect solution. The bonus is not available for those who earn a little more money, so the working poor have less of a financial reason to aim for a raise. They’ll pay a larger share of their income in taxes when they do. A universal basic income would solve this problem. Your payment from the government doesn’t get smaller if you start making more money.

The Twilight Of Capital Punishment?

Following the recent debacle in Arizona, Ben Richmond determines that the death penalty is in decline:

Add up the 18 states where the death penalty is abolished, the three western states where the governors have placed formal moratoriums on executions, and the four states where lethal injection legal challenges have put a de facto moratorium on executions, and the states are split evenly. There are also seven states that, even without holds in place, haven’t executed anyone in at least five years. Add to that Ohio, Oklahoma, and now Arizona, where botched executions have at least temporarily halted the practice while the states review their procedures, and you’re looking at 70 percent of the states where the death penalty can’t happen, for the moment anyway.

Similarly, law professor David R. Dow, who represents death-row inmates, contends that the “end of the modern death-penalty era” is upon us:

Stephanie Neiman’s death was far worse than [Clayton] Lockett‘s, and [Joseph] Wood might not have suffered as much as his victims, Debbie Dietz and her father, Gene. But that does not alter the fact that the death-penalty regime is built on the myth that we as a society, when we execute someone, are better than he is. But when it takes 45 minutes or two hours to kill a man who helplessly strains against leather straps, no longer can we ignore the inherent violence of a sanction we have convinced ourselves is serene. Once you know how the magic trick works, you can no longer pretend.

But as Rebecca Buckwalter Poza notes in her report from Alabama – “the only state in which judges routinely override jury decisions not to impose the death penalty” – the picture looks very different depending on where you stand:

Today only Alabama judges still override jury recommendations of life in prison and sentence defendants to death instead. In two other states – Florida and Delaware – laws on the books technically still permit judges to adjust jury-recommended sentences. But both states have enacted restrictions that amount to abolishing judicial overrides in practice. None of Delaware’s death row inmates was sentenced by an override, and there have been no such judicial overrides in Florida in the last 15 years.

In contrast, the practice of judicial override in Alabama is so widespread that it accounts for one-fifth of death row prisoners. Thirty such overrides took place in Alabama in the 1980s; there were 44 in the 1990s, and there have been 27 since 2000. The most recent statistics show more than 40 current death row inmates were sentenced by judicial override, contrary to the judgment of the jury.

On the other hand, Josh Marshall observes the actors who are backing away from their role in executions:

[A]s the noose has tightened around the death penalty, both internationally and within the United States, fewer and fewer credentialed experts have been willing to involve themselves with state-mandated executions. Pharmaceutical companies have become more aggressive in making sure their drugs are not used to kill people. (Here’s a good run-down of the way in which Europe has sequentially banned exports of a series of drugs used in US executions – forcing states with the death penalty to keep switching from one drug to the next to evade the export bans, thus inevitably going further and further into unknown territory in terms of how these drugs work in an execution setting with relatively untrained staff.) Medical experts – or really anyone with serious life sciences expertise – just won’t participate anymore. I’m not saying never. But it’s become much more difficult.

Meanwhile, Florida death row chaplain Dale S. Recinella urges people not to overlook the “conditions of confinement”:

They’re extremely primitive. We have 412 men being held in six-foot-by-ten-foot cells with a toilet, a stainless steel shelf that serves as a bunk, and a small property locker for their legal materials and religious books. And that’s it. There’s no air conditioning in the summer when the heat indexes here are astronomical. So the first concern of someone ministering in these conditions is the plight of people in the cells, which is extremely difficult emotionally, physically and mentally. We’ve all heard of inmates who say, “Just give up my appeals and kill me,” and those are folks who don’t have the strength to endure these conditions. …

Especially with all of the botched executions recently, we’ve heard a lot of people defend it by saying, “It’s not as bad as what the criminals did.” Really? Should our standard of moral action be that we’re not as bad as the criminals in our midst?

Previous Dish on capital punishment here, here, here, and here.

Be A Man. Take Paternity Leave. Ctd

A new ad for Cheerios champions stay-at-home dads:

A reader responds to a recent post on paternity leave and masculinity:

There’s nothing more manly than taking paternity leave. Any stigma around it is tied to a general misunderstanding of its purpose. Paternity leave is the very opposite of time off: it’s a cruel parody of a vacation. Far from rewarding a new dad with a couple weeks to put up his feet and light a valedictory cigar, it’s meant designed to let a bewildered, anxious new dad support his exhausted, overwhelmed, frazzled spouse as much as possible and keep her from jumping out a window. But just as important, it creates the foundation of a lifelong bond with a child that no real man would want to break. A young single friend of mine recently suggested that paternity leave was bullshit—that new dads should be real men and get back to work. I somehow controlled my rage and gently explained to him that, after spending a couple of weeks in the trenches with an incomprehensible newborn and a spouse on the edge, I couldn’t wait to get back to work, where the office world, however imperfect, was populated with adults and routine and still made some kind of familiar sense.

The Dish also addressed paternity leave back in December. Another reader:

Before you get too far arguing for paid paternity leave, can we first get a quarter of employers to offer paid maternity leave?

According to Working Mother magazine, just 16% of employers offer paid maternity leave. And frankly, women really need leave after giving birth. It is extremely hard on your body! Lack of sleep because you spend one of every three hours ’round the clock in the first weeks as The Boob. If you have a C-section you are advised not to drive for two weeks. There are other TMI-ish side effects, too.

We could go a long way towards socializing boys and young men to care for children so they are better prepared for active parenthood. My husband, who is an amazing father, spent the first four weeks of fatherhood hiding in the scary unfinished basement of our colonial-era house under the guise of “putting together an IKEA bureau.” (He was a student on holiday break, so he didn’t have a workplace to hide in.) When he couldn’t hide anymore, his default action whenever the baby cried was to hand her to me. I tried to speak his language, engineering, and put together a Baby Management Flow Chart mapping out the basics of caring for a newborn. It helped, a little.

Update from a reader:

I’m a business school professor and a long-time advocate for fathers’ work-family concerns, including paternity leave (also a proud Dish subscriber!). In fact, I recently spoke at the White House Summit on Working Fathers and the Working Families Summit to advocate for these very issues. I was also a national spokesperson for fathers to support the FAMILY Act for paid parental leave for both moms and dads. I know this may be poor form, but I recently wrote a blog post about my paternity leave experience, how it affected my family, and why it is important for more dads to have access to leave. I think it melds the personal and the policy well, and it may be of interest to Dishheads.

Another Dishhead:

I wanted to mention my own experience with this, although it wasn’t paid paternity leave. When my ex and I found out she was pregnant with our first child in 2002, I was able to get permission from my company to take four weeks off – two weeks was my paid vacation, and two weeks was unpaid time off. We had 9 months worth of paychecks to save up, so I just set aside enough from each paycheck to cover the two weeks that would be unpaid.

Unfortunately, when my son was born in November of 2005, I was working for a different company, and we were evacuated to Dallas at the time due to Hurricane Katrina. It made for an extremely stressful pregnancy, particularly since no New Orleans area code phone numbers were going through, and we weren’t able to reach our OB. Luckily, the one woman I knew in Dallas was married to a a guy who was a nurse, so he was able to recommend an excellent OB for us, and everything went fine. I was only able to take two weeks off for my son’s birth, but I was probably lucky to get those, considering the conditions.

I can’t say for sure whether that time with my newborns has made us any closer, or made me a better dad. But I’m glad I was able to have it. And I’m baffled by the fact that the majority of dads I’ve asked about it say they took one or two days off, and don’t seem to think it’s that big a deal. But then I’m baffled at a lot of things some parents do.

Off topic, I’ve written you before, but I don’t think I ever told you before that I started out as a liberal as a young adult, then became a die-hard conservative for many years. And during some of those right-wing years, I actively avoided reading your site. Finally came back right around the time of the 2008 elections, and between your writing and Sarah Palin being chosen as McCain’s VP candidate, I’ve become a fairly die-hard liberal again, although hopefully a more informed one than when I was 20. Amusingly, I’m even to the left of my ex-wife now on some subjects. One of them being marijuana legalization.

So thank you for making me see the other side of a lot of issues I had my mind made up about. And I guess I should thank Sarah Palin for being bat-shit crazy, but I don’t think I will.

Russia Grows More Brazen

Over the weekend, the US released “proof that not only is Russia delivering heavy artillery for pro-Russian rebels, but it is actually firing rockets in eastern Ukraine from its own territory.” Rosie Gray collects further evidence:

On Wednesday, a Russian soldier, Vadim Grigoriev, posted several photos of Russian artillery positions on Russian Facebook clone VK with the caption, “We pounded Ukraine all night.” After Ukrainian media noticed his posts, Grigoriev deleted his profile and told Russian state media that his account had been hacked.

The State Department had previously accused Russia of shelling Ukraine from across the border, but had not released evidence for this until now.

Meanwhile, Kate Brannen keeps tabs on the “steady buildup of Russian troops along the border with Ukraine”:

The U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Douglas Lute, told the Aspen Security Forum Friday that 15,000 Russian troops were amassed along the border with Ukraine. U.S. officials say that Putin had 28,000 troops deployed along the Russian-Ukrainian border earlier this year, but withdrew all but roughly 1,000 of the soldiers in the run-up to June ceremonies marking the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. Since then, however, Putin has returned roughly 15,000 troops to the border, effectively restoring half of the initial drawdown.

What Can Liberals Do With The Ryan Plan?

Ramesh argues that liberals can and should play ball with Paul Ryan and embrace some of the ideas in his anti-poverty plan:

For a politician, Ryan has shown a lot of willingness to revise his proposals in light of reasonable criticism. His ideas for reforming Medicare, for example, have been refined over time. In this plan, too, Ryan has addressed some of the strongest objections to previous versions of conservative ideas. When federal payouts to states have been suggested before, critics have noted that they might leave states and poor people in a bind during recessions. So Ryan’s plan includes proposals — such as tying the amount of aid distributed to the unemployment level in a given state — intended to make the grants counter-cyclical. … The bigger question to my mind, though, isn’t what Ryan will do next. It’s whether liberals will give his good ideas a fair hearing.

Ryan and Obama are actually on the same page on several issues, including college expenses. Both men, Libby Nelson observes, want colleges to be held accountable for providing an education that’s worth the money:

Where Ryan and Obama differ is on how specific they’re willing to be about what “skin in the game” might look like or what outcomes they want to measure. Ryan’s higher education plan includes concrete proposals for Pell Grants and for capping loans for parents and graduate students. He also suggests specific ways that the federal government could ensure quality in two-year degrees and online programs. Ryan is much more vague when it comes to bigger philosophical shifts that would affect all of higher education.

That might be because he runs into ideological difficulties. Ryan’s explanations of the problems with higher education draw heavily on research and policy analysis from the New America Foundation. The think tank, which has influenced Obama’s higher education policy as well, proposed solutions in its reports too. But those solutions often call for a more muscular government role.

They also see eye-to-eye on the Earned Income Tax Credit, Dylan Matthews adds, but again, the devil is in the details:

[B]oth parties have accepted a norm in recent years where all budgetary proposals must be at least deficit-neutral, so both Obama and Ryan include measures to pay for the idea.

And neither set of pay-fors is remotely acceptable to the other side. Obama would pay for the expansion by raising taxes on hedge fund managers and rich self-employed people, while Ryan would cut other safety net programs and “corporate welfare,” which is this case means specifically energy subsidies the Obama administration likes. Ryan has explicitly rejected Obama’s funding mechanism, and it’s hard to imagine Obama accepting Ryan’s.

Earlier Dish on Ryan’s plan here. A reader sounds off:

You quoted Callie Gable:

A key element of the contracts would be encouraging work, which, currently, only cash welfare requires. Food stamps, federal housing aid, utilities assistance, and more don’t have work requirements — this would essentially mandate that states opting for the Opportunity Grant implement work requirements.

This gets the food stamp program, now called SNAP, wrong. SNAP requires that able-bodied adults without dependents (“ABAWDs” in federal bureaucratese) work or attend job training. Otherwise, they are cut off from SNAP benefits after three months. SNAP also includes a work incentive in the form of an earned-income deduction: for every dollar a SNAP household earns, its benefits decline by only 30 cents. There is reason to believe that these incentives are effective: according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in more than half of SNAP households containing at least one working-age, non-disabled adult, recipients are employed.

The fundamental reason why more SNAP recipients aren’t employed is that many are not able to work. Almost half of all SNAP beneficiaries are children, and many more are elderly or disabled. Others live in areas where the state government – not individual applicants – have received permission to waive work requirements because unemployment is so high that people can’t get jobs.

Paul Ryan has some ideas that are great, including streamlining services and providing more assistance in the form of cash. Some of his other ideas, including turning programs into block grants, are terrible for reasons that others have explained. But it drives me crazy to see people talking about SNAP as though it doesn’t include work requirements or support people who work.

Can Israel “Win” This War?

Daniel Berman doubts it:

In effect, what Israel can do militarily is to kill a lot of people, the majority of which will probably be Hamas members or supporters, but which will do nothing to politically advance Israeli security beyond demonstrating to Palestinians and their supporters that in favorable circumstances Israel can do what it wants with international support. I do not necessarily think that such a demonstration is value-less; I authored a piece earlier this week arguing that a key prerequisite of any peace agreement is a Palestinian recognition that Israel as the stronger party will get the better half of any possible deal. As such, I think demonstrating Israeli superiority could be of value.

Yet the Israeli superiority that needs to be demonstrated is political not military; no sane Palestinian believes they can defeat the Israelis in battle. … In the end there will be a cease-fire, and Hamas will have survived by virtue of the campaign they forced Israel to wage, even if every single current Hamas member in Gaza is somehow killed by the IDF. After all, Hamas is already being treated by mediators as an almost equal of Israel while the Palestinian Authority is all but forgotten. At that point what truly will have been accomplished?

That helps explain the Israelis’ furious response to the Kerry proposal. But all Kerry is recognizing is what Netanyahu has wrought. It is Netanyahu who proved that the PA’s moderate strategy is futile – since Israel has only rewarded that moderation with more aggressive settlements. It is Netanyahu’s hysterical and belligerent exploitation of the deaths of three Israeli teens that elevated Hamas to a position it would never have achieved on its own. And this awful cycle of extremism from Jerusalem has now forged a unanimous Security Council resolution for an immediate ceasefire. But once the dogs of war have been released, it’s hard to rein them back in:

Young men who were only first-graders during Operation Defensive Shield are now soldiers invading Gaza by land. In each of these operations there have been right-wing politicians and military commentators who pointed out that “this time we’ll have to pull all the stops, take it all the way, until the end.” Watching them on television, I can’t help but ask myself, What is this end they’re striving toward? Even if each and every Hamas fighter is taken out, does anyone truly believe that the Palestinian people’s aspiration for national independence will disappear with them?

Before Hamas, we fought against the P.L.O., and after Hamas, assuming, hopefully, that we’re still around, we’ll probably find ourselves fighting against another Palestinian organization. The Israeli military can win the battles, but peace and quiet for the citizens of Israel will only be achieved through political compromise. But this, according to the patriotic powers running the current war, is something that we’re not supposed to say, because this kind of talk is precisely what’s stopping the I.D.F. from winning. Ultimately, when this operation is over and the tally is taken of the many dead bodies, on our side and theirs, the accusing finger will once again be pointed at us, the saboteurs.

Noting that Israel has carried out over 2,400 airstrikes since the start of the war, Robert Beckhusen explains why Israel’s air power is so ineffective against Hamas:

Whether Israel is justified or not in attacking Hamas, the choice the Israeli military to rely heavily on air power to achieve its objectives has resulted in disproportionate civilian losses compared to the threat Hamas poses. … The result is that either way, Hamas will probably come out of the fight with enough Israeli dead on its hands to claim some kind of victory. Hamas will likely be hurting badly. But Israel’s reliance on air power to destroy Hamas’s rockets will also likely fall short. Without a political solution, the conflict will almost certainly resume again.

(Photo: The bodies of at least ten children arrived at Al-Shefaa Hospital morgue, having been killed by an Israeli strike on a camp public park on July 28, 2014 in Gaza. At least ten Palestinian children were killed and others injured on Monday by an Israeli strike on the western Gaza City Al-Shati Camp. Israel launched a series of aerial strikes on different parts of the Gaza Strip on Monday, the first day in the Islamic minor feast. By Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)