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Why Don’t Americans Have Bike Barriers?

They’ve been proven to save lives in countries such as the Netherlands and Canada, so why their absence in the US? Architectural historian Steven Fleming argues that macho bike culture deserves some of the blame:

A sad irony in the history of bicycle transport is that keen cyclists aided and abetted motoring lobbyists, who wanted the whole road for cars.

Bike store owner John Forester was a keen “vehicular cyclist.” He could keep pace with cars, assert his right to a lane, and gracefully somersault onto the grass if ever a driver looked but didn’t see him. He published these tips in his 1976 book Effective Cycling, with some good intentions, but also a hint of male pride. By the way he opposed the Dutch-modeled cycle tracks he feared would spread to the US, you could be forgiven for thinking his secret fear was being made to ride beside women and children.

Authorities throughout the Anglosphere nations where Forester’s book was read most were happy to listen to a male voice of cycling. There was no way though that Forester’s ideas were going to have sway with the Dutch. Too many Dutch mothers were already active in the Stop the Child Murder rallies that began in 1973 after 450 children were killed on their bikes in one year. The Netherlands was developing feminine and juvenile bike infrastructure that did not exclude men. Australia [and] the U.S. did the opposite.

(Photo of a separated bike lane in Vancouver by Paul Krueger)

Hill Staffers Speak Out

Lizza e-mailed congressional staffers about the Vitter amendment, which would deprive them of any employer contribution to their health insurance. A response from a Democratic staffer:

I guess what I find most outrageous about the Vitter Amendment is that it most hurts the youngest, least well paid staff who already make 25-35k a year in one of the most expensive cities in the country. We have several who fit that description in my office—they all went to top schools, got sterling GPAs, have awesome resumes that could get them hired at an Investment Bank or anywhere else, but they came here to try to make a difference. I make a somewhat healthier salary, and I’m married so I can hop on my wife’s insurance if necessary. But they don’t have those options. We’ll do what we can to make them whole if Vitter becomes law, but most offices won’t—especially on the R side. They’ll just ask another group of 22-25 year olds who came here for the right reasons to live on $20k a year. And they’ll get them to do it, but they’ll be less qualified, less intelligent, and they’ll be looking for the exit almost immediately.

It’s especially galling since they also could achieve the exact same purpose of being able to tell their base that they repealed Congress’s fake exemption from ACA by the “Vitter-lite” proposal which would only hit Members, and not staff. That they apparently decided that wasn’t good enough leads me to the conclusion that screwing staff is a feature, not a bug. The GOP would like to hollow out Congress, just as they have tried to do to many other federal agencies. The only thing better than getting rid of a federal agency is keeping it on life support, while the political hacks take their swings at it.

It’s short-sighted, it’s cruel, it’s unnecessary. I just don’t get it.

Weigel got similar e-mails about the Vitter amendment. One House staffer’s thoughts:

I can guarantee you that if our subsidy were taken away, I would immediately start looking for work in the private sector. I have absolutely no problem with participating in the health exchanges—this is, as many have pointed out, not about Obamacare. But there is no way I could stay in this job indefinitely if I had to shoulder the entire burden of my family’s health care. I care deeply about Congress and have always felt extremely privileged to work here and more than willing to sacrifice the higher pay, better hours and other perks I might find off the Hill. But there’s a limit to what we can absorb, and I know I speak for a great many of my colleagues.

The Vitter End

So in a battle to save the country from the alleged “catastrophe” of Obamacare, the GOP has decided to risk pushing the country to the unpredictable brink of a real catastrophe, a default, and, in return, get … a punt on the debt ceiling and c0ntinuing funding the government at current levels. But wait! There’s something vital left for them to save face!

What many seek is a provision that would eliminate government contributions to the health plans for members of Congress and their staff members — as well as for the president, vice president and members of the cabinet — who would obtain their insurance through the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. The sticking point for many conservatives is the exception for Congressional staff members, as a plan endorsed earlier by House leadership contained. That idea was borrowed from Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, and it passed in the House but was later stripped by the Senate…

Under a wrinkle that dates back to enactment of the law, members of Congress and thousands of their aides are required to get their coverage through the insurance exchanges. The proposal floated by Republicans would eliminate the federal government’s share of the premiums for coverage.

A wrinkle in the healthcare law that affects an infinitesimal number of people, in the grand scheme of things, is apparently a must-have for the GOP. It would make their Democratic colleagues and their aides pay more in premiums under Obamacare.

Or to put it in more explicable terms: “Nyah. Nyah.”

Seriously, this is the level of pettiness involved here, even as the hours tick by before a potentially crippling default on the country’s debt. Plus: we all have to go through another government shutdown just before Christmas, if they don’t let more from this adolescent hostage taking.

Hats off to Robert Costa who seems to have a channel to the GOP deliberations. But, Jesus, check out this quote he just got:

“The leaders are giving us one more chance to get something passed out of the House before the Senate does its thing,” says a veteran House Republican. “I think we’ll get it through, at least that’s my sense of things now. We want to do something that marks our position, so we don’t end up swallowing whatever terrible bait the Senate casts our way. Now, I know, and the majority of us know, that this is futile. But believe me, even getting to 218 on this plan will be an achievement.”

“I know, and the majority of us know, that this is futile …” Just think about what that says about how this “veteran” of the House views the crazies now holding the country and the world hostage; and what it says about the coherence of the GOP House majority. This is why the world is watching the US right now with a mixture of terror and resignation. This is the way a great power dies, isn’t it?

(Photo: Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) joins other Republican members of Congress while they hold a press conference on the Vitter Amendment as the U.S. legislative body remains gridlocked over legislation to continue funding the federal government on September 30, 2013. By Win McNamee/Getty Images.)

Is The Republicans’ Loss The Democrats’ Gain?

Ezra parses recent polling on the shutdown:

No one involved in this mess is particularly popular. But a two-party political system with first-past-the-post elections is a zero-sum affair. And Republicans are not only less popular than Democrats, their popularity isfalling faster than Democrats’. They are, in other words, losing, and badly.

Sides counters:

[T]he Post’s numbers suggest this: if Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in the electorate approved of congressional Republicans as much as Democrats approve of Obama (71% do), congressional Republicans would be no less popular than congressional Democrats are.

Why does this matter? Because the politics of these approval numbers do not suggest that the GOP’s disadvantage would redound to the Democrat’s advantage in the midterm election in any clear zero-sum fashion. As Lynn Vavreck and I noted in our piece for CNN, party identification predicts the vote in congressional elections very well. The Republicans who don’t approve of the GOP’s handling of the budget negotiations aren’t likely to go vote for a Democrat.

How Masket understands the political impact of the shutdown:

If you want to do something with a bit lower profile, like changing logging rules or greenhouse gas regulations in order to satisfy some of your activist base, go for it. Most voters will never hear about it, and the people who do already have their mind made up about you anyway. But start a war, try to create or kill a piece of the social safety net, raise taxes, or shut down the government and its major services, and people will definitely notice, and they may punish you for it. That’s way outside of the blind spot, and if you operate there, you’re courting a reprisal. (Another way to operate outside the blind spot is to shrink it by drawing attention to what you’re doing, as Senator Ted Cruz did during his marathon Senate speech.)

But another thing to keep in mind is that voters are notoriously myopic. To the extent that they punish officeholders for their behavior, it’s usually for things that happened very recently. Sam Wang draws upon recent public opinion polls to find that the Democrats’ chances of taking back the U.S. House next year have gone from 13 percent to 50 percent, but that election is still more than a year away. (It’s not a coincidence that this standoff is happening now, and the last debt ceiling standoff occurred in 2011—both off-years for elections.) Lots of other things that voters may care about will happen between now and then. Congressional elections will also be affected somewhat by the economy, but voters will be evaluating an economy that doesn’t yet exist. Basically, they’ll be looking at economic growth in early 2014.

What Broke Washington?

Frum zooms out:

Why are American politicians playing so rough? We have moved into an era of scarcity. Once it seemed possible to have the spending Democrats wanted, financed at the tax rates the Republicans wanted, while paying for sufficient national security and running bearable deficits. That sense of expansiveness is gone. The trade-offs between Obamacare and Medicare, between spending and taxes, suddenly seem acute, imminent, and zero sum.

These disputes are not merely economic. As the United States becomes more ethnically diverse, debates over fiscal priorities inescapably become conflicts between ethnicities and cultures.

The Medicare population is more than 80 percent white. On the eve of the 2008 recession, the uninsured were 27 percent foreign born. Similar group dynamics are at work in debates over fiscal and monetary stimulus: inflation is a lot more frightening to a retiree who lost a great part of his or her savings in a stock-market crash than to a young family struggling with student loans and a mortgage. And again, America’s retirees are much more likely to be white and native-born than are America’s struggling young families. They are visible again in debates over taxes, where people who earn relatively more feel suddenly intensely vulnerable to the demands and resentment of those who earn less. Those were the feelings Mitt Romney channeled in his notorious crack about the 47 percent.

You don’t have to endorse any of these fears to recognize how they constrain even the best politicians. And not all politicians are best. There will always be people in political life who regard one man’s fear as another man’s opportunity. Such people have enjoyed a very prosperous half-decade.

“Excruciatingly Embarrassing”

That’s how Robert Gibbs describes the disastrous Obamacare rollout:

Ezra is equally blunt:

We’re now negative 14 days until the Affordable Care Act and most people still can’t purchase insurance. The magnitude of this failure is stunning. Yes, the federal health-care law is a complicated project, government IT rules are a mess, and the scrutiny has been overwhelming. But the Obama administration knew all that going in. They should’ve been able to build an online portal that works.

To my mind, it’s by far the biggest error Obama has made since taking office. To bungle the rollout of his core domestic initiative is unforgivable. To have known about it long before and kept quiet is inexcusable. To offer no real explanation or to take any serious responsibility is governmental malpractice. At some point, the president has to reassert control and explain what has gone so horribly wrong and chart a course for correction. Those responsible must be fired. McArdle thinks the government took far too long to begin building the website:

I’m a longtime critic of federal contracting rules, which prevent some corruption at ruinous expense in money, quality and speed. But federal contracting rules are not what made the administration delay writing the rules and specifications necessary to build the system until 2013. Nor to delay the deadline for states to declare whether they’d be building an exchange, in the desperate hope that a few more governors might decide — in February 2013! — to build a state system after all. Any state that decided to start such a project at that late date would have had little hope of building anything that worked, but presumably angry voters would be calling the governor instead of HHS.

Suderman examines the enrollment window:

Obama administration officials are downplaying problems, and framing current troubles as a rocky start that won’t necessarily doom a six-month enrollment project. Open enrollment, they note, doesn’t actually end until March 31 of 2014.

But in order for Obamacare to have any chance of success, the exchanges will need to be functional long before then. In order for coverage to start on January 1, individuals will have to complete applications by December 15. And in order to avoid the law’s penalty for remaining uninsured, they’ll have to be enrolled by February 15 of next year—not the end of March.

In other words, the administration doesn’t really have six months to fix problems with the exchanges. Political pressure will build well before the end of March.

Previous Dish on the disastrous web-launch here.

The House’s New Demands

The latest from the star reporter of the shutdown:

What's in the works now: adding FULL Vitter language to House plan, prob only way to get 218+

— Robert Costa (@costareports) October 15, 2013

Allahpundit translates:

In other words, the House bill as modified will be even less palatable to the Senate. All both sides are doing now is killing time when there’s not much time left.

Beutler adds:

Harry Reid called the House GOP position “a blatant attack on bipartisanship” and vowed that it “won’t pass the Senate.” Boehner is already reacting, scrounging for more GOP votes by promising to stick it to Congressional staff. National Review’s Robert Costa reports that Boehner is reversing his position that aides should be held harmless in this fight, and will agree to nix the federal government’s contribution to their health insurance as well. It could move further right still. And as before it may not pass anyhow.

Tim Murphy reports that the House GOP is considering other additions:

[S]everal Republican legislators said there was another provision they wanted included in the legislation: a so-called “conscience clause” that would exempt employers from having to provide coverage for birth control as part of the health care plans they offer employees. This idea has been on the Republican wish list for years—Obamacare already has this sort of exemption for churches, mosques, and other places of worship—and with Washington in full-on crisis mode, GOPers are looking to exploit current circumstances to win this long-running fight.

Kilgore says a “conscience clause” won’t fly:

That’s a big deal-breaker with Democrats in both chambers and in the White House. If conservatives get behind that demand, it’s another way of saying Boehner doesn’t have the votes for his proposal, and will have to rely on Democratic votes for passage. And if that’s the case, he might as well just go along with the Senate proposal, which would shorten the end-game by several crucial days.

And Chait explains why the House Republican leadership is committed to these petty demands:

The only point of the demands is to maintain the precedent that the House can hold the debt ceiling hostage. But of course the chaos and frenetic timing of the events serve only to show why it is so crucial that Democrats — or any sane American — not allow this precedent to be enshrined. The white-knuckle terror being inflicted on the world economy is the conservative movement’s vision of how divided government should be conducted from now on. Paying even a tiny ransom now means that debt-ceiling ransoms will continue in perpetuity until one party finally miscalculates and the explosives go off.

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #175

A reader writes:

Mediterranean I suppose, and I’m going to lay a marker down that those are terraced almond trees cut into the hillside. That peak in the background is probably some famous hill and the reason the pic was taken. But wait a minute – I call Shenanigans! This is the View from your Window Contest, and the goal has always ultimately been to find the window. But this week’s view is clearly shot from a vehicle pulled over to the side of the road. The barricade gives it away, as does the sloped angle of the shotgun window.

Finding good photos for the contest – interesting locations that are not too easy but not too challening – is much more difficult than you would imagine, so we have to bend the usual parameters for the contest sometimes. Another reader:

This one is quite problematic. The terrain and the fortified structure on the hill suggest Israel. The window, however, seems to be an automobile window, so its location is up for debate. My guess, the passenger window of a 2012 Honda Pilot, blue:

Another:

Route 66, 12 miles west of Kingmam, Arizona, shot from a 2010 Toyota Camry SE with leather trim and the six-speaker Infinity sound system, but no sunroof.

Another:

This is a view out into the Arizona high country from Paolo Soleri’s “urban laboratory,” Arcosanti. The poured cement, with a very un-laboratory-like railing, and the view into the valley just look very familiar from my visits there. Arcosanti is a mind-trip: Soleri imagined that thousands would flock to what we would now call a low-impact commune and re-imagine what a city would be. No one showed up, and now 65 or so people live there. The place supports itself by the very capitalist project of selling bronze bells.

Another:

Not much to go on other than flora and landscape! With all the talk about Breaking Bad, I was tempted to go for the Southwestern US – that hilltop compound would be an ideal meth-lord stronghold. But, I seemed to recall from geography that Southern Italy was once well known for terraced farming, which those giant “steps” in the hillside look like. And a Google search told me that the Ragusa region is also well known for the limestone walls the farmers built after excavating the land.

Another:

My first impression is Andalucia, Spain, based on it looking dry, with olive trees and pine trees, and scrub brush, and pastel buildings in square shapes that remind me of Moorish architecture. But mostly because there was a British TV show on PBS last night called Rosemary and Thyme, about two female gardeners who solve murders, and the episode was set in Andalucia and it looked just like this photo.

Another:

It could be anywhere in Spain (or, for that matter, half a dozen other Mediterranean countries), so I’ll hedge my bets and put the marker rather centric – the mounts of Toledo, Spain. To pointlessly narrow it down, let’s say road CM-403 south of Las Ventas con Peña Aguilera, Spain (my grandfather’s birthplace).

Another:

Somewhere in northern Jordan? Or perhaps it’s the site of the fictional “Deressa” from the French-Canadian film Incendies.

Another:

I got this!

I probably don’t really have this at all. I suck at this contest. But this looks to me a heck of a lot like the island of Cyprus where I had, a couple years ago, the best vacation of my life. Just a wonderful place, that island. But I remember this is how it looks in the winter out in the countryside – out in the patch of sort of rolling mountains between the resort city of Paphos on the western coast heading up towards the lesser resort city of Polis on the north coast. You can rent out little houses in villages out there, most of the time way cheaper than you could get a hotel room in the city. Really a cool experience, seeing the villagers wake up in the morning, go out hunting, go to church, go shout at each other in the street because they’re still hung over from the night before. God help you though if you get lost.

But anyway, the scrubby, Mediterranean trees look right to me. So does the way the hills are terraced for little fruit groves. The road switch backs look right because the roads there are so windy you can barely go more than twenty miles an hour. Even the way the valley sprawls out with the villages clinging to the tops of hills. Even the beige color of that building on the right and its pink wall and its water tank on the roof. All says Cyprus to me. All makes me want to go back.

Specifically what town? BAH! How should I know? They’re all pretty much the same and I need to go to the gym and this person I don’t think is even in a house! Standing on the side of some road! Window of their car! THEIR CAR! That’s not how this works!

Still, I’m going to guess though. Like stab in the dark guess. I’m going to say they’re on this switchback by this itty-bitty village called Melamiou looking back towards the more substantial village of Polemoi. Mostly I’m picking that because that’s near where I stayed when I was out there and the switchback looks right.

Another:

Looks like a rain collector on the roof of the building and the architecture seems to be familiar drab design one sees a lot in Israel. Mountainous and rocky terrain seem like the Golan region.

Another:

We’re doing car windows now? Really? This could bring it to a new level of insane.

So my instinct was Spain, but after puttering around the south for awhile, my boyfriend pointed out that the guards on the side of the road are different. I quickly jumped to the other country it reminded me of, Israel, and found that those guards fit better. That is where it ends however, because rolling dry hills describes way too much of Israel. I’m going with somewhere just outside of the south of Jerusalem, just because the north is more green and Jerusalem seems like a likely candidate for a Dish reader to visit.

Having already won once, the pressure is off and I find I’m enjoying the contest more. Best of luck to the winner!

Another:

Hilly country, terraced slope with olive trees, dry but not arid – Northern Israel or the West Bank would be my guess, not that I’ve ever been there.

West Bank it is. Another:

The terraced hills and the green-brown landscape remind me of the stretch of the West Bank between Ramallah and Nablus. That windy highway and cinderblock architecture could be on any small-to-medium Jewish settlement in the Judean Hills, so after a quick browse on Google Images I’ve settled on Givat HaRoeh. With my luck, this’ll be Tuscany.

Another settles on the right location:

I’m really annoyed that I can’t get this one exactly. I was sure I was looking south at the mountains that slope down from Amman to the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea. But after scouring Jordanian mountains for a couple of hours I finally realized that if we are indeed in the hills above the Jordan Valley, we can’t be on the East Bank because the satellite dish on top of the house at right would be facing the wrong direction. So, assuming I’m right about this being somewhere in the Jordan Valley, we must be in the West Bank. I’m too pissed to keep looking, though, so I’ll just say Nablus because it’s plausible. Could be Syria, I guess, Turkey, Cambodia? Dunno. I’m sicking with Nablus.

Nablus it is. But the winner this week is much more detailed and has participated in more contests, thus breaking the tie:

Wow! This seemed to be one of those epically hard views that you throw at us every once in a while, so I’m pretty surprised to have stumbled on the answer. Between the terrain and the olive trees, I figured this was somewhere in the Mediterranean. Wikipedia gave me the world’s top olive-producing countries and I did image searches for the first few, dismissing places like Algeria and Tunisia and thinking Greece seemed close but not quite right. I thought this could be Israel, but Israel wasn’t on Wikipedia’s list. Palestine was on there, though, so I moved in that direction. Searching “Palestine valley town” in Google Images led me to an article featuring a picture of rocky hills and shrubbery that looked pretty similar to the view in question. The article mentioned “the Salfit area of the West Bank,” so I narrowed my search and found another picture/article combo that mentioned “Salim” and “Nablus.” Even though I felt I was close, you can imagine my surprise when a search for “Nablus valley” turned up this particular shot:

Remarkably, this is NOT the image from the contest … but it’s the exact same view! The caption on this photo, which was posted on the blog of a Fellow with the Kiva organization, reads, “Road to Nablus, north of Ramallah.” I Google’d the route between those two and hoped it would be an easy trot to the precise location, but several hours inspecting the main route yielded nothing. I finally decided to try one of Google’s alternate driving routes and, within a couple minutes, I came across this GPS-marked photo, which clearly shows the same pink/grey building displayed on the right side of the contest image:

The VFYW image itself was taken on Highway 60, about 3/4 km up the road from the Tapuach Junction, where Highway 60 meets Highway 505. In the distance of the contest photo is the Palestinian town of Huwara (alternate spelling: Hawara). Obviously there’s no address since this was taken from the road, but the coordinates are approximately 32°7’18.55″N, 35°15’21.53″E. Here’s an overhead view which shows the bend in the road and the terraced hillside on which the olive trees are planted, as well as the view over the white buildings and that distinctive tuft of trees atop the hill in the very center of the photo:

Thanks, as always, for hosting this contest!

Thanks for the epic entry. Speaking of which, our grand champion nailed the right location yet again:

See, on Friday I was trying to get to Boston for a college friend’s housewarming (randomly, he’s one of the writers of League of Denial, the NFL/concussion documentary you’ve been discussing). Unfortunately, half of New York decided to book every train, plane and bus three days in advance and I didn’t make it up there. But the upside was a mostly free Saturday to work on the contest. So, off to the Holy Land I went.

And this week’s view comes from … Highway 60 near Huwara in the West Bank? I’m glad the rule against car views isn’t in effect for the contests, because this was a nice challenge. Though I’ve never been there, finding the right country was relatively easy, but tracking down the exact spot took some analysis and a bit of elbow grease. The view looks north by northeast towards the town of Huwara at center left, and the hilltop settlement of Bracha in the distance. For the die hards the exact coordinates are: 32°7’19.08″N, 35°15’21.01″E.

Here’s an image from a few hundred meters farther back on the same road with the viewer’s position marked just out of sight on the left:

(Archive)

The Sabotage Is Already Happening, Ctd

If the GOP’s plan is to continue to maximize economic pain under Obama, it’s working as it did in 2011. This graph is from Gallup. Expectations for future growth are also collapsing, with unknown but presumably dire effects on investment and employment:

This time, unlike 2011, it’s much clearer which party is inflicting the loss of jobs, confidence and growth on the American and global economy. And this time, the Republican partisans don’t even have the cynical motivation to make Obama a “one-term president.” This time, it’s a toxic brew of spite and ideology – at the expense of countless Americans without jobs, without healthcare security and with waning hope of a stronger recovery. I cannot remember a time when a political party deliberately sabotaged the very basis of a country’s economy, deliberately prompted a recessionary surge in debt because they want to reduce the debt, and deliberately ensured that countless jobs would be destroyed, because they allegedly want to create jobs.

Politicians are dangerous enough when they’re trying just to govern. But when they make an effort to destroy the global economy, the damage they can do is incalculable.

The Speaker’s Choice Narrows

Yesterday, Beutler predicted that Republican dead-enders in the House would oppose the Senate deal. They did. This morning, NRO’s Robert Costa predicted that “because the way the House GOP is running now, and given the internal politics, even THIS bill will have its challenges, let alone a Sen deal.” And he was right.

This morning, the GOP leadership could not get enough support from their own caucus for the alternative, tougher “compromise” they wanted. So we’re back to the Senate bill, which the House may have to reject and throw us into economic chaos or accept and step back from the brink. Beutler explains how the bill can still pass the House:

[A]s weak as his control of the House is, Boehner’s still officially the speaker — and as long as he’s officially the speaker, he controls the floor. The logical leap (really, the assumption) everyone’s making is that Boehner will put the Senate plan on the floor before midnight, rather than kowtow to the dead-enders to preserve his speakership. There are almost certainly 217-plus votes in the House for any deal that comes out of the Senate, which means we’ll only crash through the debt limit deadline if Boehner chooses to let the country default the same way he chose to shut down the government.

Ezra sees the logic of the Senate deal:

The timing of all this is designed to create a fight about sequestration.

The Jan. 15 deadline means funding for the federal government runs out at the exact moment sequestration’s deeper cuts kick in. The Dec. 13 deadline means that the full House and Senate would have time to consider any package of recommendations the bicameral committee comes up with, if the committee actually manages to come up with anything.

The deal isn’t official yet. It hasn’t passed the Senate yet. And it certainly hasn’t passed the House yet. But if it does clear those hurdles — and, again, that’s a big if — it’ll mean Republicans and Democrats have agreed to take what began as a fight over the Affordable Care Act and make it into a fight over sequestration.

If the Senate bill passes, Drum wonders whether we will get a “rerun of the whole mess next year”:

The evidence this time around has been pretty resounding that the public isn’t on the GOP’s side in this fight, and that might convince lot of Republican fence-sitters to nip things in the bud if the tea partiers try to start another hopeless war in February. Right now, public irritation with the budget fight probably hasn’t had any real effect on next year’s midterm elections, but if Republicans do it again and again, it might.

Which depends on the fallout within the GOP. Can they begin to rein in their nutters? Or are they all too afraid of them?

(Photo: Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, speaks after a House Republican meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, October 15, 2013. By Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images.)