Engaging the Opposition

During both his 2000 and 2008 campaigns, John McCain had a minor proposal that I thought would be fantastic - that the President should, every week, address the Congress in the manner of the British Prime Minister's Questions. This was derided as a gimmick (and after watching McCain in the debates would have been disastrous for him to pursue).

Today, Obama ventured into the House GOP's retreat and spent over an hour taking questions from GOP members of Congress. It's really pretty amazing to watch, and should dispel those rumors that Obama is just an empty suit with a great speechwriter. He clearly knows the policy cold, and does a nice job engaging the Republicans and demolishing a lot of their talking point arguments.

For example, Mike Pence, allegedly a GOP policy expert, questioned Obama about unemployment and the stimulus:

Now, last year about the time you met with us, unemployment was 7.5 percent in this country. Your administration, and your party in Congress, told us that we'd have to borrow more than $700 billion to pay for a so-called stimulus bill. It was a piecemeal list of projects and boutique tax cuts, all of which was -- we were told -- had to be passed or unemployment would go to 8 percent, as your administration said. Well, unemployment is 10 percent now, as you well know, Mr. President; here in Baltimore it's considerably higher.

Now, Republicans offered a stimulus bill at the same time. It cost half as much as the Democratic proposal in Congress, and using your economic analyst models, it would have created twice the jobs at half the cost. It essentially was across-the-board tax relief, Mr. President.

Obama's response:

You're absolutely right that when I was sworn in the hope was that unemployment would remain around 8 [percent], or in the 8 percent range. That was just based on the estimates made by both conservative and liberal economists, because at that point not all the data had trickled in.

We had lost 650,000 jobs in December. I'm assuming you're not faulting my policies for that. We had lost, it turns out, 700,000 jobs in January, the month I was sworn in. I'm assuming it wasn't my administration's policies that accounted for that. We lost another 650,000 jobs the subsequent month, before any of my policies had gone into effect. So I'm assuming that wasn't as a consequence of our policies; that doesn't reflect the failure of the Recovery Act. The point being that what ended up happening was that the job losses from this recession proved to be much more severe -- in the first quarter of last year going into the second quarter of last year -- than anybody anticipated.

So I mean, I think we can score political points on the basis of the fact that we underestimated how severe the job losses were going to be. But those job losses took place before any stimulus, whether it was the ones that you guys have proposed or the ones that we proposed, could have ever taken into effect. Now, that's just the fact, Mike, and I don't think anybody would dispute that. You could not find an economist who would dispute that.

Now, at the same time, as I mentioned, most economists -- Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative -- would say that had it not been for the stimulus package that we passed, things would be much worse. Now, they didn't fill a 7 million hole in the number of people who were unemployed. They probably account for about 2 million, which means we still have 5 million folks in there that we've still got to deal with. That's a lot of people.

The package that we put together at the beginning of the year, the truth is, should have reflected -- and I believe reflected what most of you would say are common sense things. This notion that this was a radical package is just not true. A third of them were tax cuts, and they weren't -- when you say they were "boutique" tax cuts, Mike, 95 percent of working Americans got tax cuts, small businesses got tax cuts, large businesses got help in terms of their depreciation schedules. I mean, it was a pretty conventional list of tax cuts. A third of it was stabilizing state budgets.

There is not a single person in here who, had it not been for what was in the stimulus package, wouldn't be going home to more teachers laid off, more firefighters laid off, more cops laid off. A big chunk of it was unemployment insurance and COBRA, just making sure that people had some floor beneath them, and, by the way, making sure that there was enough money in their pockets that businesses had some customers.

It mostly went like that. Video of the event below, and the transcript (definitely worth reading if you don't have 66 minutes to kill this weekend on the video) is here.

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Stuck on "No"

Capitol maintenance workers should check the wiring on the voting buttons for GOP senators, I think they're stuck on "no."

Yesterday the Senate voted to reinstate the "pay-as-you-go" or pay-go rules for budgeting, under which any new expenditures have to be paid for either by increasing tax revenues or cutting something else - so basically you can't borrow and spend. The rules were in place from 1991 through 2002 (you know, when we balanced the budget and had a surplus) and then were discarded in 2003 when the Bush administration wanted to cut taxes (drop revenue) and implement the Medicare prescription drug benefit (increase spending) and didn't want to cut anything to pay for it.

You would think that, after all their complaints about "sky high deficits" and "irresponsible spending" that the GOP would be all in favor of reinstating pay-go... but not so. Yesterday's vote passed 60-40 in a straight party-line vote with such famed deficit hawks as Mitch McConnell and "Debt and Deficit Dragon"-slayer Chuck Grassley voting against.

Gotta be the wiring, right? Nobody would be that cynical...

Working the Refs

The blogs are abuzz this morning with video of Justice Samuel Alito mouthing "not true" after Obama's swipe at the Supreme Court over the recent Citizens United decision that overturned decades of campaign finance law.

Obama's speech:

It’s time to put strict limits on the contributions that lobbyists give to candidates for federal office. With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.

I don’t think that American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse by foreign enemies; they should be decided by the American people. And I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps correct … some of these problems.

Alito's reaction:



Some people feel that it's completely improper for Obama, as a member of a co-equal branch of government, to criticize the Court (to their faces) in a major speech. Others think that it's equally improper for Alito to be "talking back." Still others generally bemoan the further politicization of the court.

I'm pretty much fine with how this went down. Anyone who's followed the Supreme Court since 2000 or so knows that the Court is already heavily politicized, and the public (rightly, in my opinion) views it thus. Even if the Court is a completely neutral arbiter, Obama's just working the refs, the same way that Boeheim or Belichick or any other coach (representing a particular team) will jaw at the referees in a game if he or she thinks that they've made a bad call.

Part of being a ref is having to be able to take a little of that and then go on and do your job fairly for the rest of the season. I don't mind if Alito complains under his breath - I'm sure most of the zebras do that to, they just don't have the cameras on them at the time. What i will care about is if Alito or anyone else on the court uses this as an excuse to rule less than fairly on an issue important to Obama in the future.

Oddly, it didn't take the Taliban 10 years...

The Times reports: Even before the conference started, President Karzai said in a BBC interview that it could take 5 to 10 years for Afghan forces to take over from the American-led coalition fighting the Taliban and even longer — 10 to 15 years — to end his country’s dependence on financial aid to sustain its military.

So let me get this straight... Afghan forces are supported by the US, which is spending five times Afghanistan's entire GDP on the war, much of it going to training, yet it's going to take 5 to 10 years to train Afghan soldiers to beat the Taliban. The Taliban, of course, is also made up of soldiers from Afghanistan. Why is it that the Taliban's training methods are so much more effective than ours that, despite living in hovels and caves and being hunted by predator drones, they have managed to already train their soldiers?

This "5 to 10 years" stuff couldn't at all be related to the fact that Karzai is widely considered to be corrupt, incompetent, and to have rigged his recent election, and that when the US leaves he'll be kicked to the curb, could it?

State of the Union reaction

A lot of stuff, and a lot of good stuff in tonight's speech, which I'm sure will be dissected all over the media for the next few days. My off-the-cuff take:

• The tone was great- Obama came across as above the fray, successfully chiding the squabbling congress (specifically the Senate) and even going after the Supreme Court's recent campaign finance decision. I think he looked loose, comfortable and confident, and successful - and nothing sells like success (or, as Ezra Klein put it, "the best defense is not being on defense")
• Very glad to hear him make a stand on financial reform, and specifically state that he'll veto a bill that doesn't actually accomplish it. I think this is an area where, in the short term, there may be more to gain by vetoing a shoddy bill, because it will show the financial world that he's serious, and allow him to show the GOP as obstructionists.
• I thought the move on climate change and clean energy was great- gently mock the fools who don't believe in climate change, and then engage them with the arguments that, even if they don't believe climate change is real, energy efficiency = saving money and green tech means jobs.
• I like the focus on entrepreneurs and exports - the best way to dig ourselves out of the financial hole is to grow our way out in a sustainable way, and that means building businesses and selling stuff to other countries. Nice to see a Dem who understands that this is important, and that business isn't always the bad guy.
• On the way he handled healthcare reform, I agree with Matt Yglesias: I think he made the right call. The speech is a speech to the American people, especially to people who follow politics pretty casually, and regular people don’t want to hear about congressional process. The reality is that this is going to have to be worked out behind the scenes, behind the dread closed doors. But one of the main points of the speech was to get the focus on Obama and Obama’s themes and off closed door dealmaking. So he emphasized the need for action and correctly situated the call for health reform in a broader context of economics reform.
• The budget freeze is a ridiculous gimmick- in comparison with the overall deficit there's not enough money in discretionary, non-security spending to make any difference, and that spending disproportionately impacts the poor. I think it also falls into the GOP's rhetorical trap that "spending" means social programs, and that social programs are the only things that get cut. I'm all for cutting waste and bad programs, but don't tell me that there's no waste in military or veterans spending (really? we need rudolph the red-nosed laser-plane?)

All in all I think it succeeded in the ultimate goal, which Ezra Klein argues is: The longer-term political project was to put Obama on the side of those who are disgusted by Washington rather than letting him become one of the reasons people are disgusted by Washington. Obama spoke of "the deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works," and Congress's "credibility gap." He hammered the Supreme Court for inviting corporations to consume our politics and lamented the tendency to treat "every day [as] Election Day." He reminded Democrats that "we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills," and then told Republicans that if they insist on filibustering everything, then Scott Brown's election means "the responsibility to govern is now yours as well."

Actually, we still do make things in America

A common complaint by folks on all points of the political spectrum is that "we don't make stuff in America anymore, people just sit in offices shuffling papers around." It turns out that this is in fact just not true, as you can see from the chart below, which shows that, except for periodic recession-related dips, industrial production in the US has grown at a pretty steady clip and is currently more than double what it was in the 1970s. In fact the U.S. manufacturing sector, at $3.7 trillion in 2008, was bigger than the entire economies of all but Japan and China.

I think the reason we hear so much about "America not making things anymore" is threefold.

First, we don't make a lot of the name-brand commercial goods that actually carry a tag: clothes are made in Indonesia, Mexico etc., TVs in Taiwan or Japan, etc. Many of the products made in the US don't have "made in the USA tags" because they're things like industrial chemicals, computer chips, or building materials; or they're things like planes (Boeing) or heavy equipment (Caterpillar). The big change from the 1950s is that, other than cars, the US doesn't make a lot of durable consumer goods, other than computers.

Second, another big change from the 1950s is that the American manufacturing sector employs far fewer people. Companies have automated many of their processes, so as a percentage of the workforce, factory workers are far fewer than they used to be.

The third reason we hear the "we don't make things in this country any more" refrain so often is that the media (who are often the ones pushing this story) are typically quite isolated from areas where actual factories are located. Back in the 1950s (and earlier) factories were often located in central cities to be close to the workforce. For various reasons (white flight, rising land cost in popular downtown areas, taxes) factories decamped to smaller cities, rural or exurban areas, and especially to low-tax and anti-labor areas in the South. At the same time, the national media concentrated even more heavily in the very coastal cities (NY, DC, LA) being vacated by manufacturers. During this same period, the US experienced increasing educational stratification, where starting as early as elementary school, kids bound for desk jobs and kids bound for the factory floor wound up in different classes or different schools. Increasing population mobility meant that more people left their hometowns (and their hometown friends) when they went to college. The upshot of this is that in many cases, political and media elites don't actually know anybody that works in manufacturing - they know their classmates from college or law school or journalism school or whatever, but have lost touch with their former neighbors who may have gone on to work in factories. Of course to these people (myself included) it seems like we don't make anything anymore - we don't know anyone who makes anything!

The ultimate lesson from this is that a.) we should stop freaking out about how we don't make stuff anymore. (We do! However, we do need to figure out how to export more goods to other countries); and b.) as Matt Yglesias (from whom I borrowed the above graph) notes, this means that the problems of displaced industrial workers are to some degree different from the issue of whether the US is doing enough manufacturing.

FYI: The Debt and Deficit are Different

A relatively minor, but important point:


The deficit is the annual gap between money received by the government and money spent by the government. For instance, say the federal government brings in $1.5 trillion in tax revenue in 2010, but spends $1.8 trillion. The deficit, or gap between income and expenditure, is $.3 trillion (or $300 billion).


The national debt is the accumulation of each year's budget deficit, so to find it you add up each year's deficit (and subtract any time there's a surplus), so the current national debt = budget deficit for year 1 + deficit for year 2 + deficit for year 3 - surplus for year 4 + deficit for year 5, etc.


Thus, the NY Times should know better than to say:


"The payoff in budget savings would be small relative to the deficit: The estimated $250 billion in savings over 10 years would be less than 3 percent of the roughly $9 trillion in additional deficits the government is expected to accumulate over that time."


This should be $9 trillion added to the national debt. Again, this is a minor point, but it's really important to note, when you're trying to, say, describe how much debt Obama is adding to the country (on top of mountains of debt added by Reagan and Bush) vs. the current gap (largely caused by the fall in tax revenues) in government income vs. expenditures.

The Stimulus and the Bank Bailout are DIFFERENT THINGS

At a local political meeting last week, a number of Upper West Side Dems were complaining about the failures of the Obama administration to "get anything done," and that all that's been accomplished is bailing out the greedy bad guys at big banks.

Not only only does this kind of talk back up GOP talking points and demoralize progressives, it's also flat wrong. The public, many Dems included, have a tendency to conflate the bank bailout and Obama's stimulus package. These are completely different programs.

The bank bailout, or TARP, was signed into law by President Bush in the fall of 2008, and loaned funds to troubled financial institutions. The stimulus package was passed by Obama, and had nothing to do with bailing out banks. The chart below lays out what the stimulus money is going for:

Note for a second that huge blue more-than-quadrant of the pie - $275 billion of the stimulus went to tax cuts, equal to about $1,000 per person in the US. The Obama administration made the decision to cut payroll taxes (which everybody pays) over the course of an entire year, so that people would get the money slowly and spend it as they got it, for a maximum stimulation of the economy - instead of sending a big check (with an accompanying letter from the Prez of course) which most people use to pay off credit cards or mortgage, which has a much smaller stimulating effect.

Also take a look at the $41 billion for local school districts and $79 billion for state fiscal relief - almost all of that money went directly to making sure that teachers, cops, firefighters and other state and local government employees kept their jobs. That's around 500,000 jobs saved over two years.

Now take a look at the $20 billion for health IT (information technology), $32 billion for transforming the energy transmission and generation system, $10 billion for scientific research, $6 billion for expanded broadband and $10 billion for mass transit. Pre-2008, this was only-in-your-dreams money for progressive domestic projects. That's a huge, $88 billion dollar investment in our nation's R&D, energy and transportation infrastructure that's going to have an enormous payoff down the road (on top of the immediate jobs it's providing).

Contrary to the Glenn Beck's of the world, this is not some huge giveaway to big corporations or to the lazy poor - the stimulus bill combined massive relief for working families with an enormous investment in America's future. And, surprise surprise, it's actually working. A USA Today survey of 50 prominent economists found that the stimulus saved 1.2 million jobs.

So before you complain that the administration only cares about banks, and that Obama hasn't done anything, make sure you know what you're talking about.

Governing by Political Pressure

Matt Yglesias has a very good post on the underlying problem with Obama's attempt t governing so far:

What I’ve come up with is that neither of these are really the crucial game. What’s been missing from Obama’s approach is what, for lack of a pithy name, I’ll call “objective political pressure.” One of the striking things about the Obama presidency is that throughout his time in office not a single Republican Senator has been in serious fear that he or she is going to lose her seat in 2010. That was true even when Obama’s approval ratings were in the high-sixties. And it’s true even though Obama won a number of seats represented by Republicans.
...

The Obama/Baucus theory of writing a bipartisan health care bill seemed to basically amount to “have a lot of meetings with Chuck Grassley.” A different theory would be “have Tom Vilsack run against Chuck Grassley with a nice war chest so Grassley feels it’s in his interests to strike a deal.”

One can think of a number of states where this would be helpful - Iowa definitely. Maine, which has gone Democratic in the last 4 or 5 presidential cycles (and where Collins or Snowe could be pressured). Delaware. This is also applicable to conservative dems, although you have to pick your challenges with care. FDR in 1936 tried to purge conservative/obstructionist Dems from the Senate and failed miserably. A senator like Ben Nelson, in deep-red Nebraska, is significantly more popular than Obama or the generic democratic party, and only stays elected by running on the theme that he's "not really a Democrat". An attempt to primary Nelson would at best lead to a victory for the primary candidate (who would then go down in flames in the general) or would maybe just irritate Nelson so that he's less interested in any of Obama's other priorities (or alternately jumps ship to the GOP).

This kind of pressure work if used judiciously. Arlen Specter was a moderate Republican, and I would have expected him to be a moderate-to-conservative Dem when he switched parties. However, because he's being primaries by Joe Sestak, he's now a pretty liberal Dem. Kirsten Gillibrand was a conservative House member, who has become much more liberal as a Senator, partially because of the threat of primaries from the left. In states that are fairly liberal, or states that Obama won (like Indiana), it's reasonable to think that the threat of a viable primary opponent might make the Evan Bayhs of the world a bit more willing to play ball.

Message to "start over" Dems: if you couldn't get the public option with 60 votes, you're not getting it with 59

Anthony Wiener this morning on CNN said that the Dems should "hit the reset button" on healthcare and go back to the drawing board because "Somewhere in all of the machinations here, in all of the insider deals" to get to 60 votes, they've "walked away from some of those popular things" in the bill, such as restoring "choice and competition with the public option."

Apparently Wiener has much higher hopes for the new, non-filibuster-proof Senate. I fail to understand how you take a Senate that had 60 votes and would not pass a public option, swap Ted Kennedy for a Republican and get a Senate interested in restoring the public option to the bill.

Wiener of course is not foolish enough to believe his own asinine ramblings. He wants to run for Mayor of NYC in four years, and he knows that NYC democratic primary voters want a public option. Consequently, for Anthony Wiener (who, as a congressman, currently has great health insurance) it's better to be seen as the guy fighting for a completely unrealistic "reset in order to get a public option" than to be a bit player in a compromise bill that a lot of lefties are unhappy with, but still covers 35 million currently uninsured Americans.

No health care reform = 45,000 preventable deaths each year.

Every wavering Democrat (and all the obstructing Republicans) need to be hammered again and again with this message: right now Congress has the power to pass a healthcare reform bill that will cover almost every American. Because they have the ability to pass it, if they don't (because they're afraid, or bought off, or think it's a political advantage not to pass it) it will be their fault that people are going to die because they don't have insurance.

Their votes for this bill are not a game, it's not just a "win" or a "defeat" for one party or another, it's not a way to stick it to the Ivy League guy in the White House or prove your populist cred. This bill would cover 35 million Americans who don't have health insurance, and 45,000 of them died last year because they didn't insurance. A classmate of some of my wife's colleagues, a student at John Jay, took a semester off from grad school and in doing so lost his insurance. During the period where he had no insurance, he started feeling sick, and knew that he needed to see a doctor but wanted to wait until he had insurance again through school (because in NY, insurance for the period while you're waiting for the semester to kick in again can cost up to $700 a month). While he was waiting to get insurance again, he died, alone in his apartment.

That's what's at stake.

For Congress, Party Affiliation is the Only Thing that Matters

I think that, in a couple of days or weeks or months, many of the Dems who voted for Scott Brown tonight are going to be kicking themselves. Don't get me wrong, Martha Coakley was an abysmal candidate, she had a ton of gaffes, didn't try very hard, and clearly condescended to the electorate. From what I've read, Brown was smart, energetic, compassionate, and reasonable. It was also a terrible idea for anybody who cares about progressive policy to vote for him.

Congressional elections (particularly for the House) in this hyperpartisan age are becoming increasingly like parliamentary elections. In the UK, you may be voting for MP from Pole-otter on Teacozyshire, but really you're voting for whether you want Gordon Brown or David Cameron to be Prime Minister. Same thing applies in the US House of Reps. Party discipline is so strong that even "moderates" in the House vote with their party 80-90% of the time - and they always vote with their party on the all-important questions of which party gets the majority (and thus the committee chairmanships and the ability to introduce or totally block legislation). It may be tempting to cross party lines to vote for a moderate, reasonable, not-at-all-like-Sarah-Palin guy like Scott Brown, but you have to remember that a vote for Scott Brown is a vote for wacko Mitch McConnell for Majority Leader. Charlie Rangel is my current Congressman. In my opinion he's crooked and half-senile, but in a close race between him and a reincarnated Teddy Roosevelt I'd vote for Rangel if TR was going to caucus with John Boehner and Eric Cantor.

I'm sure this will appall my independent readers, but party affiliation is essentially the only thing that matters in races for Congress. If you truly care about passing legislation (particularly domestic legislation) favored by your party but not the other, you basically do not have the luxury of caring about whether the candidate of your party is competent, nice, qualified, attractive, or even honest. Your congressman can be boiled down to a vote for Pelosi or a vote for Boehner; a vote for health care reform or a vote against it; a vote for going to war in Iraq or a vote against. Everything else - constituent services, bringing pork to the district, whether he or she shows up at your ethnic group's parade, whether he or she knows something about the local team, even not sounding like a fool when asked a basic question, is just a sideshow.

Even with Mass. Loss, Dems can still Pass Healthcare Reform

Even with the loss of the 60th vote in the Senate, the Dems have a couple possibilities to still pass the healthcare bill. One option is to try to work out a deal really quickly, before Scott Brown is seated - that's going to be a struggle, and passing the bill with an already-voted-out lame duck appointed Mass Senator is going to seem awfully illegitimate to a lot of people. Another option is to use the budget reconciliation process in the Senate to pass the final bill, which you can do with only 50 votes (more about this later this week). The third (and at the moment, most likely) plan is to have the House go ahead and pass the bill passed earlier by the Senate. That bill has a number of differences with the House bill, 2 of which are going to be difficult to finesse (other differences are listed here):

• The first is the means of paying for the healthcare subsidies which will allow lower-income folks to buy healthcare. The House bill pays for subsidies through a surtax on couples or individuals making more than $1m a year (the tax would only be on income above $1m). The Senate bill pays for subsidies through a 0.8% increase in the medicare tax on couples making over $250k, as well as a fee on insurance plans with premiums over $8,500 for individuals or $23k for families (this fee would be paid by insurance companies). The Senate's plan has been opposed by unions, whose members usually have pretty expensive healthcare plans. Prior to tonight's loss, unions had been negotiating to have their members (anyone whose healthcare is provided by an employee pursuant to a collective bargaining agreement) exempt from the fee for 2 years. I don't think that unions will allow the whole reform project to go under on this score.
• The second issue is the "Stupak amendment" passed by the House, under which nobody who gets a subsidy to help pay for health insurance can pick a plan that covers an abortion. The Senate's bill does not have this restriction. This is going to be a significant sticking point, because the House would have to back off the Stupak restrictions that they passed just a couple months ago. I think that there's some wiggle-room here, because I imagine that some of the people who voted for Stupak did so understanding that it might be removed by conference committee, and would be willing to vote for the Senate bill without those restrictions. I bet that pro-life organizations will be putting an enormous amount of pressure on those members of congress over the next couple weeks to try to keep them from voting for a "Stupak-free" bill.

The original House bill only passed by 5 votes, which has some commentators thinking that there's no way that, without the pro-life language or the pro-union financing provision, the Senate bill will get enough votes to pass the House. This argument fails to note that Nancy Pelosi gave permission to many House Dems in marginal districts to vote against the bill, knowing that their votes weren't necessary to pass it. These Dems aren't going to get that dispensation again.

They are going to have to look back to 1994 and recall what happened the last time Congress dropped the ball on major domestic policy legislation- it lead to a Republican tidal wave that swept a lot of folks out of office. If that happens again, the most vulnerable Dems will be the very people in those marginal seats. They need to realize that if they face a tea-party tidal wave, voting against the healthcare bill will not save them - it will only alienate progressives. Tea-party voters aren't going to vote for a Democrat under any circumstances, even one who voted against healthcare reform. The only hope for vulnerable House Dems is to nip the tidal-wave in the bud, by getting a big win for health care reform.

Ford sides with GOP on healthcare in attempt to win NY Senate Democratic primary

I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Harold Ford Jr., as he's the guy who served as the example in a story by my buddy Pearl that taught me the etiquette of giving your drink on the rocks a couple swirls with the straw and then laying it on the bar (if I recall correctly, in the story Pearl took offense to Ford drinking a screwdriver through the straw at a bar in DC
Memphis). Fuzzy feelings aside, this is a.) pretty poor policy, and b.) a lousy way to start off an attempt to woo New York's Democratic primary voters:

Q. You would oppose the health-care overhaul as it now stands?

A. I couldn’t support a health-care bill that places the kind of burdens on New York State that this one does. I am for health-care reform, and I think there is a way to correct this, and understand, Michael, I have a relationship with MSNBC, and I have talked about the increased taxes on business and increased burdens placed on states. At a time when projections show states like New York face the kinds of projected deficits, it does not seem smart to place that kind of extra burden on them at this moment.

The Ideology of Avatar

I watched Avatar a week ago, and came away thinking it was a movie with great 3-D visuals and lousy 2-D characters - essentially a totally unserious roller-coaster kind of experience, not anything that anyone would take seriously. After looking at this article, which discusses "fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora," it's clear that audiences are in fact taking this movie seriously.

Other commentators have discussed the lousy dialogue, massive plot holes, predictability (although I'll note that, about 40 minutes into the movie, I leaned over to my wife and whispered that I was pretty sure the movie would end with Sully fighting the old colonel in the mechanical suit ripped off from Alien), and the degree to which the movie rips off FernGully: The Last Rainforest. What really bothers me about Avatar is the ideology behind the relationship between Sully and the Na'vi.

The really troubling part of the ideology is how Sully wound up leading the Na'vi rebellion. For 4 generations or whatever, nobody had been able to hop onto the larger red flying thing until Sully came along to do it (although it actually appeared easier than taming one of the smaller flying things ). The Na'vi were unable to themselves organize their clans into a larger federation, until Sully showed up. He was essentially made their chief (or at least their top general). None of this was because he had special insight into the modern attack plans of the humans, or had access to human weapons, but because, despite telecomuting into the role, he was better at being a Na'vi than the Na'vi were.

Given the seriousness with which James Cameron took this movie and the Na'vi society (he hired linguists to craft the language, biologists to figure out how all the flora and fauna would actually work), and the marked similarities between the Na'vi and Native Americans, this shows a pretty serious disdain for native cultures. It essentially suggests that, not only do the humans (Europeans/Americans) have their own culture, which is significantly more technologically and organizationally advanced, but they also, within a couple weeks of hanging around other cultures, can be "better" at the primary activities of those cultures than the people themselves are.
Despite Cameron's attempts to make the Na'vi the wiser, more heroic race, they're completely devalued by this. Imagine a "Dances with Wolves" where, after a month with the Lakota, Kevin Costner was better at riding and shooting buffalo, organized the Sioux, was made chief, and then lead them to victory over the US Cavalry, which retreated behind the Mississippi. I don't think that anyone would think that it was a particularly liberal or pro-Indian movie. Just because Avatar blew up the obviously pro-greed and militaristic humans, it doesn't mean that the underlying ideology of the movie wasn't completely disdainful of the "natives."

Ben Nelson - Federal dollars should only go to support Nebraska

I expect Senators and members of Congress to favor their states or districts - those are the people who elect them and they need to curry favor. That said, Ben Nelson takes this to a ridiculous extreme. On the section of his (federally funded) senate webpage labeled "Earmarks" (http://bennelson.senate.gov/for_nebraskans/earmarks/), Nelson states High-speed rail between the major US economic centers on the east and west coasts? Saving endangered species in Alaska? Layoffs in Detroit? Bridges in Minnesota? Levees in New Orleans? Only if they're "worthwhile for the state" of Nebraska.

This is a particularly ballsy stance when, for the past 25 years or so, Nebraska has consistently gotten about $1.40 back from the federal government for every tax dollar it sends to DC.

Glad to see that a Senator with the ability to dictate the terms of all domestic legislation doesn't give a damn for the rest of the country. At some point you have to wonder why he bothers being in the Senate and doesn't just become King of Omaha or something.

hat tip to Matt Yglesias

Update:

It looks like, in the last hour while I was putting this together, somebody on Nelson's web staff went in to change the wording to make Nelson look less ridiculous.

As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Nelson believes it is critical to only use federal taxpayers’ dollars to fund projects that are worthwhile and have the support of Nebraskans.

But we know how he really feels...