The latest issue of The American Interest carries an essay I wrote called “The Outpatient Prison,” arguing that the combination of effective sanctioning (swift, sure, minimum-dose) for probation and parole violations and close monitoring of offenders’ drug use and location could provide a large fraction of the social control provided by prison at a tiny fraction of the cost in money and suffering.
Comments welcome.
I was no fan of Murtha, but he was a reliable vote for Nancy Pellosi when it came down to it. He represented a slightly conservative Pennsylvania district that went for McCain in 2008. The odds are slim that his replacement — who will be chosen via a special election, will support health care reform.
And no, that’s not shallow: millions of people’s lives depend upon health care reform passing.
Pelosi has shown an amazing ability to get votes when she needs them. She will have to be even more wizard-like now.
Steve Benen has it right. The basic fact about the failure of bipartisanship in Washington today is that Republicans won’t take “Yes” for an answer. It’s not just health care, where there are currently zero Repubilican votes for a bill incorporating half-a-dozen Republican demands. Cap-and-trade, for example, is distinctly market-friendly approach to environmental regulation. The Republicans don’t want compromise. They want to destroy the President and the Democratic Party, and don’t mind at all destroying the country in the process – as they’ve already destroyed the State of California.
That’s the brilliance behind Obama’s challenge to a televised negotiating session. Of course the Republicans aren’t going to compromise, but he’s going to make them refuse to compromise in public. As President, he has the power to force things onto the agenda, and he’s going to use it.
I’ll take “political catchphrases” for $200.
It’s a Latin word that translates into English as “Commander-in-Chief.”
I’ve heard dogs snarling.
I’ve heard wolves snarling.
I’ve even heard bears snarling.
I’ve heard hens clucking.
I’ve heard hens chirping.
I’ve heard hens cackling.
But never before have I heard a hen … snarling.
A lot has been said about the motivation gap in the midterm elections: Republicans are much more likely to say they’ll vote in November than Democrats. That’s true as far as it goes. But it obscures the bigger pattern in ways that may make Democrats more scared than we should be.
Take the recent Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll (in which, by the way, Obama’s approval ratings are very good, and Democrats have regained the lead in the generic Congressional poll). Look at the cross-tabs.
Lumping together people who say they will “Definitely” or “Probably” vote in November, 79% of Republicans are likely voters, against only 52% of Democrats. That sounds dire. But only 22 percent of the sample are self-identified Republicans; 31 percent are Democrats. This multiplies out to a statistical (and substantive) dead heat. If the election were held today on these assumptions, 17 percent of the electorate would be Republicans who turned out; 16 percent, Democrats who did.
In other words, the reason Republicans are more likely to be die-hard voters is that the only people who still identify as Republicans are the die-hards. The motivation gap doesn’t necessarily represent a disillusioned Democratic base. It represents the fact that the Democratic party, unlike the Republican, consists of more than its base.
Finally, Republicans are much more geographically concentrated than Democrats. In the South, the Republican Party’s net favorables are at +34 (63-29). But in no other region does the GOP do better than minus 44. The GOP could win the election in a walk in the one region where it still has supporters, and still not do that well overall.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry, and doesn’t mean that we don’t need to give partisan Democrats reasons to turn out (as well as looking out for Independents, who favor generic Democrats over Republicans by ten points, though “not sure” swamps both). It does mean that there are no grounds for panic. On current evidence, this will be a tough race—but no rout. Time for some sangfroid.
I don’t watch the Sunday talk shows. But did anyone ask anyone about the Shelby Shakedown?
Update Steve Benen reports that of the five shows, three ignored it, one brushed over it, and only Jake Tapper actually covered it:
PODESTA: But, you know, I come back to — to attack the FBI for their conduct in this case as the Republican leadership has done, I think is unconscionable.
By the end of the week, we had — we had Senator Shelby putting a hold on 70 nominees, including the head of the intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security, the head of intelligence at Department of State. I mean, what gives here? Are these people serious or are they just playing politics?
TAPPER: Well, and then that’s interesting, because all this debate, all this partisanship comes during a period, a two-week period, where President Obama is really hitting home the idea that there needs to be more bipartisanship. In fact, here’s the president speaking yesterday at the Democratic National Committee’s winter retreat.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA: I’m proud to be a Democrat. I’m proud to be a leader of this great party. But I also know that we can’t solve all of our problems alone. So we need to extend our hands to the other side. We’ve been working on them. Because if we’re going to change the ways of Washington, we’re going to have to change its tone.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
TAPPER: So, Al, that speech came one day after the White House attacked Senator Shelby for the very thing John was just talking about. He had put blanket holds on all nominees because he was concerned, he says, about some national security issues. What’s going on here?
HUNT: Well, first of all, Senator Shelby is totally fraudulent on this to begin with. He was concerned about pork for his home state of Alabama. This is as bad as the Nebraska carve-out. It’s outrageous what he did. It’s, I think, an abuse of senatorial prerogative.
Neither George Will nor Peggy Noonan rose to Shelby’s defense, but neither one bothered to criticize him, either. We’re at war in two theaters, and neither the State Department nor the Department of Homeland Security has an intelligence chief because Richard Shelby wants some pork, and “conservatives” like Noonan and Will have nothing to say.
From a reader:
While writing a fax to send to our Congresswoman urging her to “pass the damn bill,” I found it disturbingly time-consuming to locate “the damn bill” so I could double-check some provisions in it.
The Senate bill is a substitute amendment to a House bill utterly unrelated to health care: Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009 — “Amends the Internal Revenue Code to: (1) exempt members of the uniformed services, the Foreign Service, and employees of the intelligence community on official extended duty service from the recapture requirements of the first-time homebuyer tax credit; (2) extend the first-time homebuyer tax credit through November 30, 2010, for individuals serving on official extended duty service outside the United States for at least 90 days in 2009; (3) exclude from gross income payments to military personnel to compensate for declines in housing values due to a base closure or realignment; and (4) increase penalties for failure to file a partnership or S corporation tax return. Amends the Corporate Estimated Tax Shift Act of 2009 to increase corporate estimated tax payments in the third quarter of 2014 by an additional 0.5%.” Yup, that’s where I would’ve thought to look for health-care reform.
I suspect others might experience a similar difficulty. Here are the links I’ve added to my “Favorites” so I don’t have to retrace last night’s efforts:
The Senate bill – H.R. 3590 (as amended and passed the Senate) – The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
Senate Amendment 2786 to H.R. 3590 (as introduced): http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-111hr3590AS/pdf/BILLS-111hr3590AS.pdf
Information page for H.R. 3590, as amended by the Senate
Senate Democratic Policy Committee: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (collection of links)
The House bill – H.R. 3962 – Affordable Health Care for America Act (enrolled version; as passed on 11/7/2009)
Information page for H.R. 3962
Speaker Pelosi’s page on Affordable Health Care for America Act (collection of links)
1. John McCain is a man of integrity. I know this because he has said so himself, over and over and over, and because every reporter in Washington seems to believe him, even in the face of all the evidence.
2. A man of integrity keeps his commitments. Otherwise what does “integrity” mean?
3. John McCain promised to fight for campaign finance reform “Until I draw my last breath.” Dana Milbank, self-described “original McCainiac,” says so.
4. The man now in office as the senior Senator from Arizona refuses to fight for campaign finance reform in the wake of the Citizens United decision. That same man has also disowned all of McCain’s other “maverick” stances, for example by voting against the budget commission that was one of the main planks in his campaign platform.
5. Therefore, John McCain has, in fact, drawn his last breath, and the man now voting and blathering in his name is an impostor.
What the right wing loves to mock as “politically correct speech” is simply the application of the principle that groups of people, especially those whose social status is marginal, should not be referred to by demeaning names. Sarah Palin, for example, the mother of a developmentally disabled child, objects to the use of “retarded” as an insult. (At least, she objects to it when Rahm Emmanuel does it.) And she’s right to do so. Whether she also objects to “illegitimate” or the older “bastard” as ways of referring to the grandson born to her unmarried daughter is not, so far as I know, on the record, but if she does object she has some work to do with some of her fellow wingnuts. She seems to have no problem calling children brought to this country, through no fault of their own, before they were old enough to speak “illegal aliens.”
The entirely praiseworthy effort to be polite is not without its ironies, all relating to what J.K. Galbraith called the Iron Law of Euphemism. Even a neutral-sounding label will soon become pejorative if attached to an unpleasant reality or a despised group. Recall that the Hoover Administration introduced “temporary depression of economic activity” as a less-scary substitute for “crash” or “panic.”
In the case of developmental disability, the clinical terms “idiot,” “moron,” and “cretin” were introduced in the 19th Century to replace the demeaning ordinary-language “natural fool” or “dummy” (which latter served also to label those whose hearing impairment made it hard for them to learn to speak). Later, physicians who didn’t want to tell parents that their children were “idiots” started to tell them that those children were “slow learners,” or, more fomally, “educationally retarded.” It took some years for “RE-tard” to gather its insulting potency.
If Rahmbo had called an idea “idiotic” or “moronic,” (or, for that matter, “lame” or “crazy”) no one would have thought twice about it.
As my teacher Mark Moore likes to say, a good democratic citizen should be reluctant to give offense and slow to take offense.
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