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Reacting to some criticism of 12-step programs, a reader writes movingly in support of AA and NA:

For both of my brothers and myself, 12-step recovery programs have literally been the difference between life and death. My younger brother had recently switched from heroin to crack cocaine by the time he entered the Fellowships of NA and AA; my entire family was quite sure that if a drug overdose didn’t kill him, some of the people to whom he owed money would see to it themselves. Eight years later, he has a wife, a lovely daughter, and a college degree, all thanks to working a 12-step program.

As for me, my drug of choice was alcohol.

I had chronic liver pains by age 26, and my hands shook so badly my mother thought I had Parkinson’s Disease. I needed at least 12 beers a day to feel normal, and a minimum of 24 to make myself forget that I just wanted to crawl into a hole and die. And even then I wasn’t miserable enough, and needed two more years of research into self-inflicted anguish before I’d reached as low of a bottom as I cared to discover. Seven years later, I am clean, sober, healthy, very successful in my chosen profession, and working a decent program.

Can I throw all of that away? Could I or my brothers or anyone else in a 12-step program pick up tomorrow? Absolutely. Drugs and alcohol are everywhere in this country, and plenty of people are eager to sell me my suicide on the installment plan. But relapse is a conscious choice by the individual, not a failing of the program. AA (my program) works 100 percent of the time for people who are 100-percent committed to the program, while they maintain that level of commitment. (The only exception being those who are “constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.” I interpret this to mean those with severe underlying mental ailments such as antisocial personality disorder. You certainly encounter them in the rooms of AA meetings, but you also find them everywhere else in society.)

The problem is that the disease never goes away; it is only in remission. It constantly informs an addict or alcoholic that he’s not really addicted, that his success in life proves it was only youthful excess or poor surroundings or bad luck or anyone’s fault other than his, that science can and will “cure” him like it has “cured” so many others. The disease speaks from the depths of the person’s own sickness, so the script may vary, but the objective never changes – to get the recovering addict alone and despairing, outside of their program, cutting themselves off from their friends in recovery and in a position where they’d rather resume the full course of their misery than stay in the half-measure misery of white-knuckle, program-less sobriety.

(I will never know why Philip Seymour Hoffman relapsed, but I’ve met people with even more time in recovery than he had who have relapsed and died – or, who almost relapsed, but said a prayer instead and returned to the rooms to talk about it. Was the program a failure if one of my friends chose to stick with it, and one decided to abandon it?)

If I speak of this in harsh terms, it’s because it hits close to home for me. Recovery programs are not social clubs or straw-man scapegoats for snake-oil salesmen touting miracle drugs and secularized rehab. Recovery programs are a triage ward where the successful do what the other survivors do and the failures stop doing those things; by four years in recovery I lost count of the number of acquaintances who’d gone back out and died out there, and I knew three friends who joined them in the morgue. This is the program that keeps me alive in those dark nights and reminds me there’s a dawn.

Another reader, an Episcopalian deacon who is also a recovering alcoholic, was struck by Sacha Scoblic’s statement, “AA is an incredible program and a true American achievement for the millions of addicts around the world who desperately needed help when absolutely no one else was offering it”:

Think about that – ”absolutely no one else was offering it.” I’m a Christian, and enough of a believer in the institutional church that I’m willing to don robes and a stole Sunday by Sunday and hold a chalice full of “the Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation” to the lips of adults and children who approach the altar for the gifts of grace. And yet I am a member of a church that offered “absolutely no help” to alcoholics in Bill Wilson’s day, and even today relegates me and my alcoholic companions to basement meetings. In fact, the (well-meaning) parish I serve is no better than a landlord to the AA group that meets weekly in the bowels of their building complex. They’re no better than the yacht club across town that lets its space for the morning meeting I attend. They’re a good landlord, but too often it stops there.

The Church doesn’t talk enough about addiction. We Episcopalians sometimes joke about our heritage as drinkers: for us, the light-bulb joke is about booze (it takes three Episcopalians: one to screw in the bulb, one to mix the martinis, and one to complain that the old light bulb is better … har har). We are better than this, and I hasten to add that I would not be sober without the support of a few good Episcopalians who say their prayers and befriend me with courage, love, and insight. I’m not bitter. But I often feel discouraged that churches can and should do more.

Anyone who claims the identity “Christian” – anyone who follows Jesus of Nazareth, who befriended people everyone else had abandoned – should do more. Let’s let my alcoholic friends know that there is life for them on the main floor of the church, too.

Previous Dish on Hoffman and 12-step programs here, here, here, here, and here.

(Photo of an AA “anniversary coin” marking 13 years of sobriety by Flickr user MTSOfan)

The House Republicans still want their pound of flesh for lifting the debt ceiling, but can’t seem to agree on what that flesh should be:

On Thursday, however, two ideas gained traction, with dozens of Republicans predicting that versions of the pitches could hit the floor next week once House members return to Washington. At the top of the list: a proposal to link a one-year extension of the debt ceiling to a restoration of recently cut military benefits. Another popular option is tying the “doc fix,” which would alter the way doctors are reimbursed for Medicare treatments, to an extension. Changes to the federal budget that would reduce fraud or mandatory spending levels also have been mentioned.

Danny Vinik explains the most popular option:

House leadership is considering undoing the changes that the budget agreement made to the cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) for military pensions. Of course, doing that costs money – you didn’t think that Republican debt ceiling extortion actually had something to do with the deficit, did you?

So, how are they going to offset the cost? Nothing has been settled on, but Politico’s Jake Sherman and Burgess Everett report that they may use a budget gimmick known as “pension smoothing” to do so. Pension smoothing allows companies to underfund their pensions in the next few years, boosting their profits, and thus increasing government revenues. Thus, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows this as reducing the deficit over the next decade. But beyond that, it increases the deficit, because those firms eventually have to make those pensions contributions, reducing their future profits and therefore government revenue as well.

Kilgore notices that fiscal restraint is no longer the point:

After years of linking the debt limit vote to proposed spending cuts (or mechanisms for forcing spending cuts, from sequestration to a constitutional balanced budget amendment), now suddenly you have Boehner talking about demanding increased spending in exchange for votes to accommodate more public debt. Whatever else this represents, it shows Boehner being more interested in registering a “win” for his conference than in making a coherent argument for reducing both spending and debt.

How Allahpundit sees the GOP’s game:

Reid also took a hardline “no negotiations” approach during the shutdown, you’ll recall, rejecting a bunch of House bills that would have restored funding for discrete parts of the government but not for ObamaCare. Fund everything or we’ll fund nothing, he insisted. The sole exception: He passed a bill right before the shutdown began to keep money flowing to the military so that troops wouldn’t miss a paycheck. Boehner’s counting on the same thing happening now.

Bernstein blames the GOP’s radicals for obstructing responsible policymaking:

Instead of “forcing” Democrats to accept something they oppose, Boehner now is seeking to use something many Democrats want. That’s what a normal party does: use marginal legislative leverage to attempt to win marginal gains. Of course, Democrats could still hold out for a clean debt limit increase, or they could pile on their own matching demands (say, the minimum wage, or restoring recently-passed cuts in food stamps, or any other Democratic priority that’s popular). Normal parties would then negotiate their way to a win-win deal, because policy doesn’t have to be zero-sum.

But that wouldn’t satisfy Republican demands for extortion for the sake of extortion.

Chotiner isn’t too worried:

[E]ven if Obama were to fold, there is something else that has rendered the debt ceiling hostage racket useless. John Boehner, who quite obviously does not want to rely on the good graces of Kevin Costner, has shown that he won’t let the country default. Not only is Obama unwilling to pay the ransom, then, but Boehner is unwilling to harm the economy. It’s sort of like when someone gets kidnapped in a PG-rated movie: you know nothing too bad will be allowed to occur.

Cillizza analyzes Boehner’s statement yesterday that “There’s widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws”:

Making President Obama the issue is never a bad thing for a Republican Speaker who wants to keep his job. If the narrow window to pass immigration reform closes entirely sometime between now and November, Boehner has now created a perfect political scapegoat on which to blame things. Look, President Obama never was willing to build the relationships with my members I told him he needed to, Boehner will now be able to tell both his conference and conservative Republican activists across the country. And, those folks are already more than willing to believe that narrative.

Immigration reform isn’t dead — yet. But Boehner’s assessment of its chances on Thursday are what sharp political minds have known all along: It’s a triple bank shot (or a Triple Lindy). Possible, but far from likely.

Weigel chides the media for making too much of the statement. Allahpundit thinks it makes more sense for the speaker to pursue reform after the elections:

Here’s the question: If he could get more of a Republican buy-in next year, why shouldn’t he wait? Matt Lewis argued the other day that amnesty opponents will always gin up some sort of excuse related to the timing to keep kicking the immigration-reform can down the road, but I simply can’t believe party leaders and their business backers will send the GOP nominee into battle in 2016 without arming him with some sort of amnesty to show Latino voters. It might be a limited one like DREAM, but something’s going to happen. Even Raul Labrador, who said this week that pushing immigration now could cost Boehner his gavel, says immigration is “one of the first things we should do” in 2015 once it controls the Senate again.

Sargent’s view:

[T]here’s just no reason to assume reform will be any easier for Republicans next year than it is right now, and there are multiple scenarios in which it could be harder next year. And if it doesn’t get done in 2015, Republicans will be heading into the next presidential election having failed to embrace reform yet again — after yet another contentious debate marked by who knows what sort of rhetoric — making relations with Latinos still worse, as demographic reality marches on.

Jay Newton-Small thinks immigration reform will stall. Among her reasons:

Most Republicans want to wait to pass immigration reform until next year, after the midterm elections. The problem with that scenario is that the 2016 presidential race will heat up the minute the midterms are over. And while Democrats have every incentive to push for a deal now, they could lose a powerful wedge issue at the polls in 2016 if they pass a deal next year. Sure, Obama probably would like to see something get done to burnish his legacy. But Democrats may argue that they could get a better deal in 2017, especially if they lose the Senate in November.

Larison sees a lose-lose scenario for Republicans:

Republicans stand to gain nothing if they help Obama achieve one of his legislative goals. Meanwhile, their “compromise” position of favoring legalization without citizenship so reeks of cynicism that it won’t be appealing to anyone outside the party. Indeed, favoring legalization without the possibility of citizenship is in some respects the most insulting position one can take, since it provides amnesty for those here illegally while keeping them as a non-citizen underclass that will continue to compete with American labor.

Benen summarizes the bad news:

The new report from Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the U.S. economy added 113,000 jobs in January, well below economists’ expectations. The unemployment rate dropped to 6.6% – its lowest point since October 2008 – but that’s cold comfort given the overall data, and is likely affected by congressional Republicans’ decision to cut off jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed. As is often the case, there was also a sizable gap between the public and private sectors – in January, businesses added 142,000 jobs, while spending cuts forced 29,000 government job losses.

Felix Salmon uses the chart above, which is from Betsey Stevenson, to cast doubt on the numbers:

[J]ust look at how we got to that 113,000 figure. We took January’s workforce, of 135,396,000 people, and then subtracted December’s workforce, of 138,266,000 people — for a total decrease of 2,870,000 jobs. But we know that the number of jobs in America always decreases in January — even when the economy is surging. It’s cold out, making outdoor jobs very difficult to do, and the Christmas seasonal jobs are all in the past. So the BLS institutes some seasonal adjustments. In this case, it subtracted 880,000 jobs from the December number, and it added 2,103,000 jobs to the January figure.

All of which means that the 113,000 headline figure is, in fact, 135,396,000 + 2,103,000 – 138,266,000 – 880,000. You want to trade on that being 70,000 jobs lower than you thought it would be?

Cassidy largely blames the numbers on bad weather:

The cold snap does bear part of the blame for this dramatic dropoff. When it’s freezing cold, consumers tend to stay indoors, spending falls, and firms tend to put off hiring new workers. The figures that the Labor Department publishes have already been adjusted to take account of normal seasonal variations. But we’ve been experiencing abnormal variations, which must have had some effect.

Jeffrey Sparshott disagrees:

“Weather was a clear drag on December, but this actually reversed in January,” said Morgan Stanley economist Ted Wieseman.

Indeed, nationwide the weather wasn’t that bad. While December registered the coldest temperatures for the month since 2009, the National Weather Service isn’t expecting a dramatically cold January relative to records from the last 120 years. It was warm in the Rocky Mountains and West, balancing conditions in East, a spokeswoman said.

Ylan Mui also doubts that the weather is playing a big role:

So if it’s not the weather, what is it? Why is the labor market still so weak? There are no easy answers to that question. Without weather as a scapegoat, it raises the uncomfortable prospect that the economy’s potential for growth is lower than we would like it to be.

Alan Pyke notes the continued disconnect between public and private sector jobs:

State, local, and federal government payrolls shrank by 29,000 jobs in January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday, continuing a damaging and historically unusual trend that has undermined the economic recovery throughout the past five years.

Despite spiking briefly during the 2010 Census, the public-sector workforce nationwide isnearly three-quarters of a million jobs smaller than it was when President Obama took office. In that same time, the private sector has added 3.5 million jobs on net, even after accounting for the millions of jobs lost in the economic free fall five years ago

Barry Ritholtz calls the report “mostly meaningless”:

To me, the most fascinating aspect of the employment report is the hoopla leading up to it. It is merely a single monthly data point in an ongoing series, one that 90 percent of the time is almost insignificant.

In a follow-up to his earlier post, Freddie continues to argue that online education is little help for disadvantaged students:

I keep pointing out: the record for educational technologies making an actual impact on educational outcomes is dismal. And that’s before we talk about the fact that these technologies are specifically endorsed as a method to spread education to marginal students from demographic categories with poor educational outcomes. As Alan Jacobs– the opposite of a technophobe– pointed out, the research we have suggests that it’s exactly the students who least need the affordability offered by online education who do best in online classes. Getting anything out of online classes takes great self-discipline and motivation; these are qualities that students who struggle typically lack.

When people talk about using online education to “scale up” education, that is necessarily saying that they are going to be giving students far less individual attention than they receive– despite the fact that individual attention, class time, and teacher investment are precisely what students need most to succeed.

This is an area where the media is particularly vulnerable to its demographic biases. So, so many people in our elite media have never been exposed to actual educational failure in any way, shape, or form. They come up through affluent suburban public school districts where all of the students come from stable and financially secure households. They go on to attend elite private high schools where the worst students are systematically excluded by test scores and an inability to pay. They attend Ivy League universities where all students were in the top five in their class and everybody was in the top 5% on the SAT. They then go to work at newspapers and magazines where everybody else is exactly like them. Of course, they think education can be fixed with apps or buzzwords or good ol’ American gumption. They literally don’t know what educational failure looks like.

Now that S&P has downgraded its bonds to junk status, Salmon expects Puerto Rico to default soon. But he notes that “there’s no chapter of the US bankruptcy code which encompasses Puerto Rico”:

My advice to the Puerto Rican government, then, is this: start having quiet conversations in Washington about a piece of legislation which would give the island the legal freedom and ability to restructure its debts in a clean, one-and-done manner. Such a law would not be a bailout: it would involve no money flowing from DC to PR. But it would allow Puerto Rico to default on its debt and come out the other side, without the risk of years of legal chaos. While bondholders would squeal, at least they would get certainty. And Puerto Rico would get something much more valuable still — an opportunity to finally drag itself out of its horrible recession.

Roberto Ferdman comments on the situation:

Puerto Rico is in a pretty precarious spot. But it’s hardly something that happened overnight. The island has been crawling its way toward today’s economic mess for quite some time. “If you look at the numbers, the economy has shrunk by something like 15% over the past six or seven years,” economist José J. Villamil told Quartz. Puerto Rico’s economy has been getting smaller for almost eight years, as the chart [above] shows.

The Economist worried about default back in October:

For decades Puerto Rico has been sustained by federal subsidies. Its people, far poorer than the American average, get lots of transfers, from pensions to food stamps. Until 2006 the economy was buoyed by tax incentives for American firms that manufactured there. As drug companies took advantage, the territory became a vast medicinalmaquiladora.

This tax break disappeared in 2006, and Puerto Rico’s economy has shrunk virtually every year since. It has been able to keep on borrowing, thanks to another subsidy: interest on Puerto Rican debt is exempt from state, local and federal taxes in America, making it artificially attractive to investors.

Glenn Thrush covers the revival of Pittsburgh:

The irony that a city built on an industrial working class has reclaimed part of its past industrial glory by developing machines designed, in some cases, to replace human workers is lost on exactly no one. Carnegie Robotics, a new CMU startup generating a lot of buzz, makes a machine that sorts strawberries and can do the work of 800 people; Aethon, a medical robotics company founded in 2002, automates much of hospitals’ tangled internal logistics chains. “We create jobs, we don’t take them away,” growls Whittaker, whose own firm, RedZone Robotics, which he founded while keeping his university research post, builds robots that inspect small sewer lines. “If you want to dig through shit for a living that’s your business. But a robot can get into a tiny pipe, and a person can’t do that, so I’m not taking anyone’s job away.”

This story of Pittsburgh’s reinvention, then, is very much about not only the new politics of urban renewal—but also about the future shape of an American economy that may well be smarter, faster and more innovative, but without the sheer number of good, stable middle-class jobs that powered the great postwar American boom.

Of course, it’s still not clear whether the widespread automation of repetitive tasks—the kinds of things a machine can do as well or better than a human—is responsible for the anemic pace of American job creation since 2000. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, productivity and overall employment have generally risen together, with advances in technology spurring a virtuous cycle of re-investment and job creation. In the last decade or so, they have diverged—leading some economists to conclude that robots and smart software are elbowing humans out of the workforce. Two MIT researchers, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, theorize that rapid technological advances have created a “great decoupling” of productivity and employment, which partially explains the malaise. Other researchers fiercely question that conclusion, and argue that the employment stall has as much to do with globalization and the accelerating boom-bust cycle of recent financial crises. “No one knows the cause” of the recent jobs slowdown,” economist David Autor told MIT’s Technology Review. “[It’s] a big puzzle… but there’s not a lot of evidence it’s linked to computers.”

Recent Dish on robots here.

Tanner Colby regrets that “there is rarely any thoughtful critique of the left when it comes to race.” He kicks off a multi-part series on the subject by criticizing the effort to integrate schools in the post-Brown south:

Bouie supports Colby’s broader point but thinks it’s unfair to discount the political circumstances:

“You have to realize that busing had been used for decades to promote segregation,” [Virginia Commonwealth University history professor Brian Daugherity said, pointing to one Virginia county that, for example, bused black students to the black school and white students to the white one. “For liberal policymakers in the 1960s, it wasn’t a stretch to say ‘You’ve been using busing to promote segregation, we want to use it to promote integration instead.’” …

I should say that I don’t disagree with Colby about the efficacy of busing. But one thing is clear to me: If you’re going to criticize the political approach of anyone, you need to consider the context in which they were working. If busing was a key part of the integrationist arsenal, it was because it was a key part of the segregationist one as well. And if liberals lost the war on segregation, it’s because there wasn’t—and isn’t—the will to win.

A reader goes beyond the utility of the language:

In my opinion, one doesn’t learn French for practical reasons (although one of your readers did make a case along those lines). Rather, one learns French because it is beautiful. Some of the most adventurously intellectual, rigorously philosophical, and inventive, artistic, and creative minds just happen to have been shaped by the French language. To mention only a few examples: the poets Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Jacob, Valéry, Artaud, et. al. The list of French philosophers is even longer: Abelard, Montaigne, Descartes, Voltaire, Diderot, Comte, Bergson, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Barthes, Foucault, and the rest.

I could go on listing French composers, playwrights, novelists, scientists, and the like. But to my mind the best defense for the French language is an Irishman:

Samuel Beckett wrote some of his most important works in French, including his masterpiece Waiting for Godot and the trio of novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. Beckett consciously chose to write in French, because it freed him creatively and allowed him to develop a style that he would not have developed otherwise.

Language both shapes culture and is a reflection of culture. To rate languages accordingly to how “useful” they are, as McWhorter does, is peculiarly vulgar and offensive. It also indicates an oblivious attitude toward the beauties and mysteries of all languages, not only French.

Another reader:

As a French major, I can say that studying la langue was great. But not for Molière or Rimbaud. (Yes, for Paris …) Rather, it’s the way one’s brain stretches and re-forms when confronted with alternate cultural architecture for seeing, sorting, and comprehending the world around you. To discover, for instance, that the French language has no word for “wilderness” – for a kid from the West, that was a mind-blower. “My cultural foundation does not exist in your worldview.” That is why language is such a powerful thing to study.

American children need more opportunities to be shocked out of their America-centric universe, and to see that meaning is fleeting and culture-dependent. If the temptation of croissants and a sweet tooth for Orangina gets a kid to study French, bravo. Whatever the language, the better a child (or adult) will be for it.