REWARD GOOD BEHAVIOR.

So now he has a searing ethical dilemma: should he call the offices of fence-sitting Congressmembers, say that he is from their districts, give them a fake zip code, and tell them to vote yes?

What would Kant say?  And what would LBJ do to him once he said it?

Perriello might be my favorite member of Congress.  He represents Virginia’s 5th district, which covers much of the state’s southside, and has a cook PVI of R+5.  Not only did Perriello defeat the odious Virigil Goode in the 2008 elections, but he represents a particularly compelling brand of conviction politician: he worked as a human rights prosecutor in Sierra Leone and has founded a series of faith-based political activist organization, including Faithful America and 24 Hours for Darfur.

Giffords represents Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, which is sort of ground zero for nativist sentiment.  Her district borders Mexico, but she has resisted crude anti-immigrant bias and has called for a comprehensive immigration reform bill.  Recall that the Arizona GOP has brought us such winners as JD Hayworth, Matt Salmon, john Shadegg, Trent Franks, and Rick Renzi.  There must be something in the cactus juice.

Both Giffords and Perriello are endangered incumbents this year: Stuart Rothenberg listed Perriello as one of the most endangered house members this fall.  You know the drill.

REWARD GOOD BEHAVIOR.

But Sarah Palin may have gotten a bit more than she bargained for when she decided to go after him. Here’s what she said, in his home district:

I got to meet quite a few candidates who are lining up in a contested primary who want to take out Alan Grayson. And I think Alan Grayson — what can you say about Alan Grayson? Piper is with me tonight, so I won’t say anything about Alan Grayson that can’t be said around children. But thank you, Florida, for allowing candidates in a contested primary to duke it out over ideas and principles and values, all with the same goal, and that is unseating those who have such a disconnect from the people of America. That’s what the goal is here in this race against Alan Grayson. Please fight hard, and do this for the rest of the country. Fight hard, and send a conservative to Washington, DC.

And here’s the response from Grayson’s website:

Palin, the former half-term Governor, current-nothing and future-even-less, charmed the all-Republican audience with her folksy folksiness and her homespun homespunnery. Atypically, Palin was wearing clothes that she had paid for herself. At the end of the event, she shared her recipe for mooseface pie.

In response to Palin’s attack on Rep Grayson, Grayson actually complimented Palin. Grayson praised Palin for having a hand large enough to fit Grayson’s entire name on it. He thanked Palin for alleviating the growing shortage of platitudes in Central Florida. Grayson added that Palin deserved credit for getting through the entire hour-long program without quitting. Grayson also said that Palin really had mastered Palin’s imitation of Tina Fey imitating Palin. Grayson observed that Palin is the most-intelligent leader that the Republican Party has produced since George W. Bush.

When asked to comment about what effect Palin’s criticism might have, Grayson pointed out, “As the Knave’s horse says in Alice in Wonderland, ‘dogs will believe anything.’” Earlier, as the Orlando Sentinel reported, Grayson said, “I’m sure Palin knows all about politics in Central Florida, since from her porch she can see Winter Park,” which is part of Grayson’s district.

Grayson said that the Alaskan chillbilly was welcome to return to Central Florida anytime, as long as she brings lots of money with her, and spends it. “I look forward to an honest debate with Governor Palin on the issues, in the unlikely event that she ever learns anything about them,” Grayson added, alluding to Politifact’s “liar, liar, pants on fire” evaluation of much of what Palin has said .

Scientists are studying Sarah Palin’s travel between Alaska and Florida carefully. They hope to learn more about the flight patterns of that elusive migratory species, the wild Alaskan dingbat.

But that puts me in a tough position on the eve of the historic health care vote: how do I influence a congressmember who does not represent my district?  Calls won’t work.

So here’s an idea.  Someone — probably Act Blue — should set up escrow campaign accounts, payable if the members on it vote the right way on a particular bill.  Note that there need be no direct contact with the Representative at all: somehow I get the impression that if these things were set up, members’ finance chairs would know how to check them.  Each member could have an escrow account that would pay off if certain conditions were satisfied.

Would the right try to hijack this?  Maybe, but I doubt it, because it would involve “centrist” Dems whom they want to knock off anyway (which is why these Dems shouldn’t vote their way, but that’s another story).

Most corporate lobbyists do this anyway, although with language that gets them out of the bribery trap.  This could be the way that small donors, who don’t stand to get legislative favors anyway, could influence congressmembers — and the congressmembers would have the transparency of knowing what they will get upon a particular vote.

What if the Congressmember votes the wrong way anyway?  The money could be stored in an escrow account with ActBlue, available for any other candidates on the ActBlue list.

And no — I have no idea if it’s legal, but I think it would be.  It’s no different that major lobbies promising to run ads under certain contingencies (either positive or negative).

In the wake of Citizens United and the corporate sloshing of money through the Hill, there has to be some way in which small donors can actually influence Congress.  This is a place to start.

Kerls, wollt ihr ewig leben?

(Dogs, would you live for ever?)
I fear the answer is ¨yes.¨ But then, why go into politics at all if you are frightened of dangerous achievements?
Note to language police: I know the dog metaphor is not in the original, but it is the traditional translation.

“Bibi has three political principles,” Moishe told me.  “First, divide and conquer.  Second, divide and conquer.  And third, divide and conquer.”

So this week’s developments are hardly a surprise to me.  In fact, I pretty much predicted it a year ago.  But they point to the central problem in modern US-Israel relations: they rest upon a premise that is demonstrably false, viz., that the way to Middle East peace lies in direct negotiations between the parties.

This premise originated because Israel was concerned that in an international conference, it would be outnumbered and face pressure from the United States.  Moreover, an international conference would not force the Arab states to take the political risk of negotiating it.  This political risk was necessary because Israel was going to trade tangible land for intangible promises, so it had to know that Arab leaders had skin in the game.  Anwar Sadat demonstrated this both literally and figuratively.

But the operative factors behind this assumption are no longer true.  Egypt and Jordan have peace treaties with Israel.  In any event, the issue now is no longer Arab-Israeli relations, but Palestinian-Israeli relations.  And that relationship now matches a weak and dysfunctional Palestinian leadership with a weak and dysfunctional Israeli leadership.  There is simply no way that these parties can make the concessions necessary for peace –giving up settlements and achieving genuine compromise on Jerusalem for the Israelis, giving up the right of return for Israel.

So instead of hemming and hawing about what Hillary Clinton should say to AIPAC next week, or how George Mitchell will start “proximity talks”, the time has come simply for the United States to go around the various leaderships, and adopt Sari Nusseibeh’s brilliant proposal to demand a referendum in each population on an American Plan, which should resemble the People’s Voice accord.  My own preferred addition is push the People’s Voice through as a Security Council resolution, although whether it could attract a non-vetoed majority is anyone’s guess.  Maintaining the current posture of endless attempts to bring the parties together is degenerating into farce.

The direct talks approach has worked in several iterations for more than three decades.  It’s time to give it a decent burial.

Democratic leaders and President Obama have mounted a major persuasion campaign, trying to get the party on board with the all-speed-ahead push on health care reform legislation. They are offering wavering members – who voted “No” the first time around or are thinking to switch and oppose health care this time – in-person talks with the president and are walking members through how health care reform would help constituents in each lawmaker’s district.

Better late than never, and the President has a superb sense of political timing: he’s pushing when he needs to. 

At least sometimes.  As the Los Angeles Times notes today,  the administration has been pathetically lax and inattentive on filling judicial appointments.  A good chunk of that derives, of course, from the GOP’s scorched-earth policy, but it is also true that

Key slots stand without nominees, including two on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the body that reviews decisions by federal agencies and a court that is considered second in importance only to the Supreme Court. Federal judicial vacancies nationwide have mushroomed to well over 100, with two dozen more expected before the end of the year. To date, the Obama administration has nominees for just 52 of those slots, and only 17 have been confirmed.

“It’s just a missed opportunity,” laments Geoffrey Stone, a professor at the University of Chicago who has known Obama since he lectured at the school. “I don’t know how committed he is to it.” Stone was one of a dozen law professors from schools including Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Stanford who sent Obama a letter late last month urging him to act with “far more energy and dispatch” on the issue.

But of course this latter dereliction of duty isn’t happening, because Obama is a political genius who never makes mistakes and must never be criticized.

By the way, Mark, you can get a good deal on the necessary accessories here.

By portraying Barbara Boxer as a giant, floating head (and calling her “it”), Fiorina deftly expresses her love of substantive solutions and impatience with empty political talk. Leaving this aside, Carly shows herself to be down with the language of working people like her: “she leaned the company to profitability” (at 4:28), and “she shaked” (at 4:40).  Count on it—the Head of the Senate’s out-of-touch liberals would have used the elite Washington word: shook.

… he and his highly organized following paved the streets, put in new street lights, set up schools, built a hospital, organized a militia which elected its own officers, and much more. How did Franklin do it? By persuasion and organization. He was one of the few public men who understood that politics, apart from its military aspects, was not action, but patience; that persuasion took time and cunning and talk, not “deeds.”

Remind you of anyone?

By the way, the health care bill, which involves a permanent redistribution of $200B per year down the income scale, is now a clear favorite to pass in the Intrade betting: passage by June 30 is 61 cents bid, 69 cents offered.

No, really.

If anyone spots a Red blogger criticizing this, please note it in comments. So far, Memorandum shows only support.

The current leader of the loonytoon faction on the Board is a dentist named Don McLeroy. The good news is that McLeroy narrowly lost the primary this year (to the son of a former Lieutenant Governor) and won’t be back. The bad news is that Gov. Rick Perry, who stomped Kay Baily Hutchinson in the primary for Governor and is one of the current wingnut/Tea Party heroes, twice nominated McLeroy to the chairmanship. McLeroy was confirmed the first time, but the second time he was denied confirmation on a party-line vote (he needed two-thirds) in the Texas Senate. The big issue then was evolution versus “creation science;” McLeroy is a “Young Earther.”

It’s not an exaggeration, but the simple literal truth, to say that the contemporary Republican “base” hates the principles on which this country was founded. (Just imagine Karl Rove trying to tell George Washington or Abraham Lincoln about being “proud” of waterboarding.) And it’s not objective journalism, but ignorance or cowardice, to treat this profoundly un-American movement as if it were a normal participant in American politics.

It’s time – long past time, I’d say – for liberals and progressives, who since Cold War days have been wary about embracing patriotic symbols and slogans, to wrap themselves in the flag and defend “the Republic for which it stands” against Sarah Palin and her vertical barbarians.

If I were Barack Obama, worried about mobilizing the pointy-headed part of the base for November – and especially the schoolteachers, some of whom probably aren’t happy about Arne Duncan’s education-reform plans – I’d think hard about speaking out on this, or at least having Duncan and John Holdren do so. People who like the idea of textbooks that eulogize Stonewall Jackson and ignore Thomas Jefferson, and who don’t want their children to know that the Framers opposed the establishment of religion – aren’t likely to be potential Democratic voters anyway.

Whether or not the gallery-space option is preferable for the owner of the building, it’s clearly better for the owners of neighboring buildings, and for the entire commercial district of which the building forms a part. This is a classic “external-benefit” problem: easy enough to resolve when there’s a single beneficiary – orchard owners are happy to pay beekeepers – but hard when there are multiple beneficiaries because of the “free-rider” problem.

Encouraging this sort of activity is a natural role for Business Improvement Districts (associations of building owners given taxing power to promote local amenities) and for city art departments or arts councils. Somehow I doubt that the National Endowment for the Arts will show much interest, but it should.

In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.

Update Some actual data on the coccoon phenomenon, and its exaggeration in the Blogosphere, here.

Of course, this isn’t really happening, because the Obama Administration is a bunch of wimpy sell-outs without the nerve to take on the big interests.

Eleven months ago, I wrote you to share my expectations for the coming health reform debate. At the time, I expressed Democrats’ intention to work in good faith with Republicans, and my desire that – while we would disagree at times – we could engage in an honest discussion grounded in facts rather than fear, and focused on producing results, not playing partisan politics.

Obviously, the opposite has happened, as many Republicans have spent the past year mischaracterizing the health reform bill and misleading the public. Though we have tried to engage in a serious discussion, our efforts have been met by repeatedly debunked myths and outright lies. At the same time, Republicans have resorted to extraordinary legislative maneuvers in an effort not to improve the bill, but to delay and kill it. After watching these tactics for nearly a year, there is only one conclusion an objective observer could make: these Republican maneuvers are rooted less in substantive policy concerns and more in a partisan desire to discredit Democrats, bolster Republicans, and protect the status quo on behalf of the insurance industry.

In fact, the attacks on the health care bill are part of a broader pattern. As has been well documented, your caucus conspicuously shattered the record for obstruction last Congress by demanding gratuitous procedural votes on even the most non-controversial matters, and by stalling the work of the Senate despite the urgency of the serious problems facing our country. Senate Republicans are on pace to again break their own record this Congress, illustrated by Sen. Bunning’s effort to prevent the Senate from acting to extend families’ unemployment and health benefits even after those benefits had expired.

While Republicans were distorting the facts in the health care debate and inflicting delay after needless delay, millions of Americans have continued to suffer as they struggle to afford to stay healthy, stay out of bankruptcy and stay in their homes. Thousands of Americans lose their health care every day, and tens of thousands of the uninsured have lost their lives since this debate began. Meanwhile, rising health costs have contributed to a rising federal budget deficit.

The letter goes on to explain why it’s reasonable to use reconciliation to pass the patches to a bill that has already gotten 60 votes in the Senate.

Maybe this is all bluff, but Obama, Reid, and Pelosi are acting as if they’re in the endgame and like their position.

The Pope, of course, is the Bishop of Rome. As the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office of the Inquisition), then-Cardinal Ratzinger put into place procedures to ensure that cases of child sexual abuse by priests remained secret, and in particular to prevent victims from going to the police. Sounds pretty Satanic to me, even if you don’t count his politics.

O Dia, Rio, 7/03/2010

In this one, Gabriela de Souza Freitas, 3 years old, was sleeping with her grandmother. (The Brazilian poor have names like grandees with 10,000 acres). They both died, buried alive. O Dia´s paper edition carried her smiling photo; it¨s not on the website, perhaps from a belated concern for the family´s privacy. Still, I was irresistibly reminded of her contemporaries, my granddaughter Cassie and Lu´s nephew Gabriel.

Am I responsible for Gabriela´s death? Are you? If we are, to any extent, what should we do about it?

It´s difficult to think straight about this sort of thing. We are scared to admit an impossible burden that would overwhelm us with pain and guilt, so we shut our minds and pass by on the other side.

We are obviously talking here about a small share of responsibility – but a small share in something very large, the death of an innocent child. But let us at least try.

1. One of the probable effects of global warming is to increase the intensity of tropical storms. IPCC 4 in 2007 gave the odds for this link at better than evens for the past and better than than 2 to 1 for the future. This is common sense: heat is energy, so there is more energy in the atmosphere all the time, and we would expect all the processes to run that bit more actively. The unusually intense storm in Rio was, within normal standards of prudence, a foreseeable consequence of carbon emissions. These have come historically mainly in the rich North, and are now split between the North and fast-growing middle-income countries including China and Brazil.

2. The Rio storm was only just strong enough to cause casualties. A little bit weaker, and no-one would have died; a little bit stronger, and many more would have done. Gabriela´s death was at the margin, the tipping point of risk. It is therefore probable (around evens) that global warming was sufficient to take the storm past that tipping point and therefore caused her death.

3. The tragedy had other causes besides the storm: the shack built in a dangerous place (but the Rio poor don´t have much choice), lax or nil enforcement of building codes, general inequality and poverty, bad individual luck. Any one of these factors can also be fairly described as the critical one at the margin, although the social factors have been getting better in Brazil and only the climate change one has clearly been getting worse.

4. Moral responsibility isn´t additive but distributive. The law has this one right: if a Mafia don orders a hitman to take out a rival, they are both fully guilty of murder, not half each. Bush, Cheney, Yoo, Addington, Goss, two CIA staffers, and a guy in a cellar conspire to waterboard Abu Zubaydah: the responsibility for the war crime of torture is not ⅛ + ⅛ + ⅛ + …. but 1 + 1 + 1 +… (All right, we´ll knock down Bush and Yoo to ½ on rounds of mental incapacity, but the point holds.) So the fact that the Rio City Hall is also responsible by negligence for Gabriela´s death does not let you and me off the hook in any way.

5. So we can´t get round the fact that your and my past carbon emissions very probably contributed to Gabriela´s death. But, you say, there are a billion high-emission Northerners: our individual shares are a billionth each. Unfortunately there are at least a billion poor Southerners like Gabriela whose lives we have put at similar degrees of risk. Stern points out that a month before Hurricane Katrina, 1,000 people died from flooding in Bombay, and two years later Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh killed 3,000 and displaced 7 million. The scaling up on either side balances out roughly. To a first approximation, you and I, and Gabriela and her granny, are representative of our respective societies.

6. We are therefore at fault, even if we only personally contributed a few drops of water to the mud shrouding her little body, and should be ashamed.

What should we do about it? You could send some money to one of the many charities that work with Rio´s street children. The main deal is however stopping further harm to other Gabrielas from climate change.

As a citizen, I think I´m doing okay. My countries of citizenship (UK) and residence (Spain) both have decent mitigation policies, pushed along by the strong EU commitment. I blog here regularly (see the RBC climate change archive) and I hope constructively.

I´m not doing so well in my personal behaviour. On the plus side, I live in a warm country in a reasonably insulated and compact house without central heating or air conditioning, and my hot water is solar. On the down side, I drive 15,000 km a year (though in an efficient diesel that does 7litres/100km), and fly about as much. I can´t afford to change the car yet, and am waiting for plug-in hybrids to come on to the market. I offset carbon on flights when the airline offers it (Easyjet) but not when they don´t (Ryanair).

So my practical post-Gabriela resolution is to find a reputable carbon offset charity and pay for my flights in future. Stern uses this one, which is good enough for me. Let´s see, Rio to Seoul makes 3 tons, costing £27. OK.

That wasn´t too difficult. Is it enough in the circumstances? I don´t know. Is it something? Yes.

How about you?

And speaking of November, does a six-point Democratic advantage in the generic Congressional ballot (44-38) sound like a harbinger of a Republican wave election to you? Me neither.

Where have I heard this before?

Oh, yes.  Here:

A cacerolazo or cacerolada is a form of popular protest practised in certain Spanish-speaking countries – in particular Argentina – which consists in a group of people creating noise by banging pots, pans, and other utensils in order to call for attention.

It is believed that the first cacerolazos took place in Chile between 1971 and 1973, led by middle and upper class women who were opposed to the socialist Allende government, primarily because of shortages of basic goods.

So what Bachmann’s real models are the people who brought us Augusto Pinochet.  If the shoe fits…