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...

Must-read on Afghanistan

Rory Stewart, a journalist and candidate for parliament in Britain (whose book "The Places in Between," documenting his walking trip across Afghanistan in 2002-2003 is also a must-read) has the best discussion of Obama's Afghanistan strategy that I've read in this month's New York Review of Books. It's a bit lengthy, but for anyone who's looking to understand what's going on in Afghanistan, please read it here- http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23562.

Name that Tune Cntd.

In response to Adam's post below, I believe there's already technology that will do that, which you can put on an iPhone. You can hum, sing, whistle etc. a tune, and the app searches for it and gives you the name of the song. About a year ago, a couple friends and I cobbled together a pretty neat party game using it. One player calls out the name of a relatively well-known song, and then assigns it to another player. That player then has to sing/humm the song well enough for the app to recognize it. Then that player picks the next song and singer. This works particularly well to get otherwise shy singers to belt out the chorus to "living on a prayer."

NaNaNa.com? Name that tune 2010?

I have an idea. After talking to a friend who works at a certain social networking company that shall remain nameless, I don't think I could ever make money on it, so I'm just throwing it out there to the universe. I hope someone who reads this can run with the idea and make the world a happier place, for a little while at least.

I want there to be a website where that allows people to do two things:

1) People can upload sound or video clips of themselves humming, whistling, or singing nonsense lyrics to songs that they know, but don't know the names of, and

2) Other people can log in and try to figure out what song it is.

For people who upload songs, the website might have some parameters. For example, you could say whether you think the song is in a certain genre, from a certain time period, or has certain words.

For people who try to guess songs, you could log in and hear a series of songs picked at random, or you could choose to just hear country songs, or something along those lines.

Good luck to all you web people out there who know how to do this kind of thing!

(If any of you ever do find a way to make money off of this, please consider making a sizeable donation to charitable organization. Among others, I would recommend the as the Dr. Marnie Rose Foundation, which supports brain cancer research and works for the needs of sick children in Houston, Texas.)

What we're fighting for

It's critical to remember that health care reform is not about scoring points or roughing up Lieberman or even "winning." It's about the chance to make life tangibly better for millions of Americans. Josh Marshall posts an email from one of them:

If I feel abandoned, it's not by Obama and the Democratic party, it's by those on the left advocating to kill the bill.

I am unemployed and have a pre-existing condition that requires daily medicines, quarterly doctors visits and an annual test. I am on COBRA, which runs out mid-2010, when I will have to find new health insurance. I will need to purchase some kind of health insurance, assuming I can find provider who will insure me

I don't pretend to understand all the intricacies of the health care reform bill, but I do read a lot. From what I can glean, if the bill passed, I would be able to find health insurance because I could not to be turned down due to my pre-exisiting condition. And based on my income at the moment, my premuims would be subsidized.

Believe me, it's scary being 52 and unemployed with a medical condition. Any form of security is vital.

Why the "Obama didn't fight hard enough" and "Obama got out-negotiated" memes are wrong

Megan McArdle has a great post about the realities of the bargaining situation for the healthcare bill that must be read by everybody who thinks that Obama, Reid, Pelosi etc. got rooked by the GOP and conservative dems in the negotiating process:

Krugman, and the commenters, seem to imagine that negotiation is a process where you ask for huge concessions, and then bargain your way down to splitting the difference. So naturally, the reason that liberals have ended up with nothing in the way of a public option is that they were too nice to Republicans and conservative Democrats, and did not start out demanding single payer, and the nationalization of the coal mines.

Negotiation doesn't work that way. There is a zone of possible agreement (known to those who study this sort of thing as the ZOPA). You can't negotiate your way out of that zone no matter where you start. Nor does starting from a more aggressive bargaining point always mean that you will do better in the negotiation. It can often mean you do worse, because you poison the process.
...

This bill is, at this point, hideously unpopular. I'm pretty sure you've got a bunch of senators who would really, really love not to vote for it. Ultimately, the moderates had a very good alternative to negotiated agreement, and the progressives didn't, and that was crystal clear from Day 1. That meant the progressives were never, ever going to get very much. This was not a failure of political will or political skill. It was the manifestation of a political reality that has long been obvious to everyone who wasn't living in a fantasy world. If progressives decide that the lesson from this is that they haven't been sufficiently demanding and intransigent, they are going to find themselves about as popular with the rest of America as the Bush Republicans, and probably lose their party the House next year.

The other thing to note here, for folks who think Obama should have "fought harder" for the bill is that there's a very limited amount of leverage that he has over the Senators who have been the key choke points. In Nebraska, Obama is less popular than Ben Nelson - Ben Nelson repeatedly wins statewide elections in Nebraska, and Obama lost the state (other than Omaha). Obama polls below Nelson in Nebraska. If Obama went to Nebraska and went around talking about what a jerk Nelson is, the end result would not be that Ben Nelson would be replaced by a more liberal senator -- Ben Nelson would either win anyway and then work against everything else Obama does, or else liberals would stay home or vote for a non-viable 3rd party vandidate and Nelson would lose to a Republican who would be vastly more hostile to progressive policy goals than Nelson is. The same thing is pretty much true for Blanche Lincoln.

Obama has some better leverage in bluer states, but even there it's somewhat limited. In 2006, Obama backed Ned Lamont against Lieberman, and Lieberman won anyway and is now hostile to Obama. Historically, it's just very hard for even very popular presidents to purge troublesome senators from their own party. FDR tried it in 1936, at the very height of his popularity, and it was a dismal failure. A homegrown, viable primary opponent can make something happen (witness Joe Sestak pushing Arlen Specter ever-leftward in PA), but it's just not that helpful for a sitting president to get into a public pissing match with senators from his own party.

It's also critical to remember that, as big a deal as the healthcare bill is, Obama has 3 or 7 more years of governing left, and a lot he wants to accomplish- climate change, energy policy, education reform, Afghanistan and Iraq. All of those things are going to require 60 votes in the Senate- which means they'll need Lieberman, Nelson, Lincoln, etc. Would it feel great to have Obama grab Lieberman by the jowls and toss him bodily from his committee chairmanship? Sure. But one of the reasons a lot of us supported Obama for president over the hot-headed other guy was because he takes the long view.

Thoughts on the drinking age

At one point in college, I served on a joint student/faculty/administration counsel on student alcohol consumption (something my friends at the time thought was highly amusing), and one of the members was Barrett Seaman, a college trustee. Since that time, Seaman has written a book on college binge-drinking ("Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess") and has started a group called Choose Responsibility that has been lobbying to overturn the Federal mandatory 21 year old drinking age.

Seaman's argument, which makes a lot of sense to me, is that the the mandatory drinking age creates a college culture where drinking is pushed underground, leading to dangerous excess (a greater tendency to poison yourself drinking shots of vodka in your dorm room instead of waiting in line to get a beer at a party or a bar). It also socially separates adults from teenagers at a critical moment in teenagers lives. They lose the chance to see adults responsibly consuming alcohol, and also removes a way for students and professors to bond outside of class. A number of times my fraternity tried to invite professors to our more, er, "upscale" events, but they never showed up because of the risk of being around a lot of underage drinking. That brings up the third problem- because underage drinking is so pervasive in college, it creates a situation where large numbers of otherwise law-abiding folks are forging government documents, endangering the welfare of minors, etc - which is risky for the people involved, and also breeds a general contempt for the law.

Seaman also notes that the main selling point of the current drinking age is a sham:

The other side almost invariably trots out the same statistics supporting their claim that MLDA 21 has reduced drunk-driving fatalities by some 13 percent, allegedly saving nearly 1,000 lives a year on the nation's roads. I know I can knock that one right out of the park with the simple observation — backed by peer-reviewed studies — that Canada, during roughly the same period, had an even greater reduction in drunk driving deaths without changing any of its provinces' 18- or 19-year-old drinking age limits.

This is an interesting area where, much like marijuana legalization, you'll find that a lot of policymakers tacitly agree there should be change, but right now the politics are so toxic it's almost impossible to do. Any governor who opted to buck the Federal highway money (the Federal Government basically bribes the states to go with a 21 year drinking age by making a condition to get a portion of the state's federal highway dollars) and drop the drinking age back to 18 would inevitably have the DWI deaths of every 18-21 year old hung around his neck at the next election- even if the overall rate of DWIs for that category stayed the same.

In any event, Barret's piece in the Hamilton College alumni mag (available here) is a good read on this topic.

Laura Ingraham can't even trivialize the holocaust properly

Rightwing squawker Laura Ingraham has her take on the classic holocaust poem "First they came..." -

"First they came for the rich. And I did not speak out because I was not rich. Then they came for the property owners, and I did not speak out because I did not own property. Then they came for the right to bear arms, and I did not speak out because I was not armed. Then they came for me and denied me my medical care, and there was no one left to speak for me,"

Not only is this in pretty terrible taste, but it also makes no sense. In the original , when the Nazis "came for the communists," or the trade unionists or the Jews, they actually showed up, carted them away and imprisoned or killed them. That's why the kicker- "there was no one left to speak for me" works, because all of those people were actually gone and thus not able to speak.

Unless Ingraham is vastly more paranoid than I think she is, she can't actually believe that people are coming for the rich. At the worst, maybe the government will take a bit of money from the rich, or insist that gun owners put trigger locks on their guns so their kids don't shoot themselves accidentally or what have you... but never fear Laura, when they come to take your healthcare or whatever, the rich, armed, property owners will still be around to speak for you.

Don't Kill the Senate Healthcare Bill

Howard Dean, for whom I generally have a lot of respect, today calls for liberals to unite to "kill the bill" - scrap the Senate healthcare reform bill and try again later by going back to the House for a new bill that would be easier to get through the Senate using budget reconciliation- and critically needing only 51 votes.

The problems with this are numerous- There's a lot of chance that, having failed once in the Senate, the House (which only passed their bill by a small margin) won't pass it- many reps will be loathe to stick their necks out for what they perceive to be a failing process. Even if it gets through the House, there's no guarantee that there is any willingness in the Senate to push it through the reconciliation process.

Are there problems with the compromise bill? Sure- removing the medicare buy-in and the public option makes it much less likely that the bill will "bend the curve" of healthcare costs. Does it rankle that Lieberman and Ben Nelson are shoving progressives around? Yeah, it really does.

However, passing the bill will have real consequences- 30 or so million Americans who currently don't have health insurance will get it. That's huge- by far the biggest progressive domestic legislation since LBJ. Over time it will save hundreds of thousands or millions of lives. This country will have made an affirmative statement that healthcare is a right and not a market commodity. That's what's at stake.

We can always go back and try to add the public option or medicare buy-in later - and frankly we'll probably have to do so, as something will have to be done about geometrically rising costs. We can punish Lieberman by stripping him of his Homeland Security Committee chair. These are all things for tomorrow, but for today- let's keep our eyes on the prize.

Cowardly silence from Senators opposed to marriage equality

During this week's "debate" in the NY State Senate leading up to the 38-24 defeat of the marriage equality bill, there were a number of heart-wrenching statements by those in favor the bill, particularly Sens. Diane Savino and Ruth Hasswell-Thompson. On the "no" side, however, only Democratic Senator Reuben Diaz spoke, in a rambling statement largely complaining about how Dems had stabbed him in the back and how gays never gave him any money.

The "no" voters need to explain themselves- they didn't do it in the Senate and they haven't done it for their constituents. The video below shows a constituent of Western New York's George Mariaz asking why he's opposed to letting the questioner marry her partner, and get all the legal security that comes with it. Mariaz, coldly and cowardly, merely says that he doesn't support marriage equality because he believes marriage is between a man and a woman.

After seeing the video, I sent Mariaz the following email, with questions that need to be asked of every Senator who voted "no" this week:

You owe your constituents and the citizens of this state a real answer about why you don't support marriage equality, not a mere conclusory statement that you oppose the bill. Why do you believe marriage is only between a man and a woman? If your only basis for that belief is religion - say so, and then explain why your particular religious beliefs are a legitimate basis for state legislation. If you have another reason, explain it. Your constituents and this state deserve better.

The Price of Torture

Last night I watched a pretty amazing interview on the Daily Show with journalist Maziar Bahari who was imprisoned by the Iranian regime for several months after he covered the protests this summer. One of the most amazing things Bahari said was that, despite the fact that the interrogators beat him, they tried to win him over by saying that what they were doing was not nearly as bad as what the US did at Abu Ghraib- no leashes and dog collars, no waterboarding. It's a pretty sad spectacle when a morally bankrupt and brutal regime like Ahmadenijad's can try to make itself look better by comparing themselves to the US.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Maziar Bahari
http://www.thedailyshow.com/
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