Hire this woman

I'd have a lot more blog traffic If I could quote myself as enticingly on Twitter as The American Prospect's Jaime Fuller quotes everyone else. Based on my sampling of one, she has a click-through rate of over 50%. Her best tweets are all quote.  A sampling from the last few days (and last few minutes):

"'We’ve come for the poem about the duck,' the cop would say, as I pumped a shell into the chamber." oxfordamerican.org/articles/2013/…
— Jaime Fuller (@j_fuller) May 21, 2013

"A man with a camera mounted on the handlebars of his bicycle lifted up the bike in order to film Weiner walking." capitalnewyork.com/article/politi…
— Jaime Fuller (@j_fuller) May 23, 2013

Another rung down for "Afghan good enough"

If it's possible to define success in Afghanistan down any further, Obama may have done so in his speech seeking an end to perpetual war yesterday:

In Afghanistan, we will complete our transition to Afghan responsibility for that country’s security.  Our troops will come home.  Our combat mission will come to an end.  And we will work with the Afghan government to train security forces, and sustain a counterterrorism force, which ensures that al Qaeda can never again establish a safe haven to launch attacks against us or our allies.

Not, "we'll work with the Afghan government to train security forces to support and sustain a democratic government that serves its people." Not even a force to fend off the Taliban. Keeping al Qaeda out is thesole goal. [5/28 update: I believe I misread this a bit, helped by an ambiguous pronoun. It's the U.S. counterterrorism force that "ensures that al Qaeda can never again establish a safe have." Not clear what the Afghan security forces will "ensure," if anything.]

That went along with a retroactive redefinition of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan in the Obama years:

Obama on counterterrorism: will "redefines" become "unwinds"?

It is true, as Matt Welch avers, that Obama could amend much of what is wrong with the current U.S. response to terror by executive order, without the help of Congress. Also true, by extension, is that much of what is wrong -- excessive use of targeted killings, failure to release those Guantanamo prisoners cleared for release, disproportionate punishment of leakers -- is his responsibility [Update, 5/25: See Joe Nocera today on Obama's responsibility for the continuing hell of Guantanamo].  Also, that while yesterday Obama articulated important intentions -- paring back and ultimately repealing AUMF, closing Guantanamo, finding a way out of the indefinite detention trap -- he was lighter on announced action -- though paring back the drone campaign and transferring it to the military (which he didn't mention, but has signaled clearly through other channels) is certainly significant, as is getting the ball rolling with Yemeni detainees.

And yet, we should not under-emphasize the import -- or the courage required -- in redefining the conflict for the American people, taking us back to the future in our response to terrorism, and warning -- as pointedly as Eisenhower did about the military-industrial complex -- about the dangers of perpetual war.  And in this regard, my response to Obama's rhetoric in his speech redefining U.S. response to the terror threat is, once again, almost Pavlovian. He is so analytical, so precise, so nuanced, and so clear in laying out the threats we face, and the need to balance threats to security and freedom, that I can't help but feel renewed faith in his judgment, and to suspect, with one caveat I'll get to later, that he's balanced his responsibility for U.S. security and for the preservation of our civil liberties and standing in the world reasonably well -- constrained by our divided government, the hysterical existing terms of our national security discourse, an intellectually corrupt opposition, and the institutional machinery of the Pentagon and the security state .

Note the blend of analysis, classification and narrative below, the refusal of triumphalism, the parsing of threats -- Pre-, post- and post-post 9/11; regional vs. U.S.-aimed, terror generally vs. jihad, overseas vs. homegrown:

Kevin Drum's dangerous indulgence

Kevin Drum gave in to temptation this afternoon (and I gather it's kind of Obama's fault):

A couple of hours ago I had a choice to make: spend the next hour writing a reaction to President Obama's big national security speech, or go to lunch. I went to lunch.

Such lapses can put us in danger. So claims Screwtape, C.S. Lewis' devil and master tempter (in Lewis' imagining, each of us is assigned a guardian devil, so to speak, as well as a guardian angel, and they battle it out moment by moment until we die). Read and tremble, midday indulgers:

I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument, I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control, and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line, for when I said, "Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning," the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added "Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind," he was already halfway to the door.

Where Obama's Green Lantern lies

Sean Trende offers up a kind of excuse for pundits and centrists who indulge in what political scientist Brendan Nyhan calls Green Lanternism. --lambasting Obama for failures of ill-defined "leadership," i.e., for failing to charm the Republicans out of their scorched-earth opposition or to overcome the extreme constraints the Constitution imposes on presidential power in domestic affairs.   According to Trende, the expectation that Obama would exert magical powers to overcome opposition derives from the campaign Obama ran in 2008:

Many of the president’s supporters thought they were voting for the Green Lantern in 2008.

Remember, the actual policy differences between Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards were pretty limited. To help distinguish himself from the pack, and to attack Clinton indirectly, Obama all but dressed up in green tights, claiming that his candidacy would enable us to put old arguments behind us, bring people together, and transform the country.

There is an element of truth to this, as there was an element of malarkey in Obama's promise to usher in "a different kind of politics."  But only an element, on both sides of that equation. Obama's core pitch and promise in 2008 was more realistic and tough-minded than "I can melt the opposition."

Does Obama subject African Americans to "targeted scorn"?

Yesterday I put up some thoughts about Obama's commencement speech at Morehouse College, in blithe and admittedly self-imposed ignorance of what others had said about it (I plead lack of time, fatigue and eagerness to get my thoughts down -- and will also cop to not wanting to complicate that quick-stream).  I thought it was an awesome speech, in the pre-colloquial sense of awesome, as in awe-inspiring.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, however, greets the speech (and a parallel commencement address by Michelle) with a powerful indictment. In response to a passage in which Obama admonishes the Morehouse Men, "there's no longer any room for excuses" -- e.g., being held back by racism, Coates writes:

This clearly is a message that only a particular president can offer. Perhaps not the "president of black America," but certainly a president who sees holding African Americans to a standard of individual responsibility as part of his job. This is not a role Barack Obama undertakes with other communities.

Taking the full measure of the Obama presidency thus far, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this White House has one way of addressing the social ills that afflict black people -- and particularly black youth -- and another way of addressing everyone else. I would have a hard time imagining the president telling the women of Barnard that "there's no longer room for any excuses" -- as though they were in the business of making them. Barack Obama is, indeed, the president of "all America," but he also is singularly the scold of "black America."

There is undoubtedly a lot of truth to this. As Fallows notes in response, though, Obama has to walk a razor-thin tightrope when addressing African Americans directly or matters of race generally -- or, better, as Fallows put it, "a tiny, little rope suspended across a Grand Canyon." By way of additional mitigation, Fallows notes,  "We all take a different tone in setting expectations for "our own."

I would add three further mitigating thoughts. First, in his admonishments throughout the speech, Obama was channeling the historic messages of Morehouse itself -- including in the passage Coates focused on:

Obama gets personal at Morehouse

I have read or listened to several Obama commencement addresses over the years, and his address at Morehouse College yesterday struck me as something of a departure in several ways. While I may have missed or forgotten prior iterations of the parts that struck me, let me set down what I thought was singular.

First off: Morehouse is a men's school, and so Obama addressed men, which gave the talk a retro feel.  He talked about what it means to be a man, rather than simply a responsible adult, and what it means to be a black man in particular.

Addressing black men meant walking a fine line -- as Obama always does when he addresses African American audiences -- between the particular and the universal (in this case, particulars of gender as well as ethnicity).  Obama acknowledged as much in a rather meta moment:

Two takes on Obama from Fallows

In the long hot political summer of 2011, as Obama was sliding down the precipice toward the Budget Control Act (that wonderful deed that gave us the sequester), I was struck by a balance struck between admiration and anxiety about Obama in a note from James Fallows:

"We will hope that the qualities we admire in Obama outweigh the ones that make us nervous."

Today, in a view-from-China at our three scandals, Fallows concentrates on the one that troubles him -- the leak investigation -- and by the way expresses a similar toggle-switch assessment of the president's strengths and weaknesses (in an exception to the long-term rule):

It is one of the rare times I question not his effectiveness or tactics but his judgment. 

Housekeeping note*

A busy work week and a long graduation weekend have put xpostfactoid on unexpected semi-pause for a week. Back soon! - maybe even on the weekend.

We're coming back with this booty -- Sir Walter of the South. Yippee! Painted toenails not included.

* Is "housekeeping note" Bernstein's coinage, or in general bloggy parlance. Apologies to JB if the former.

Are "liberals" learning to love the sequester?

A while back, as the sequester took hold and Obama unfurled his budget, Greg Sargent framed up what he presented as a tough choice for Democrats (on the dubious chance that they would have any choice at all): Stand pat with the sequester in place, Medicare and Social Security left essentially untouched, and no new revenues beyond the $600 billion over ten years enacted in January -- or sign on to a grand bargain that would include entitlement cuts proposed in Obama's 2014 budget, e.g.,  chained-CPI and higher Medicare premiums for wealthier seniors, along with more targeted and gradual discretionary spending cuts than those mandated by the sequester, and some new revenue.

As of today, Sargent seems to have made his choice, or assumed a collective one for "liberals":

The Monica Lewinsky scandal may have helped save Social Security in the late 1990s. Now the scandal fever currently gripping Washington — IRS, Benghazi, Associated Press phone records — may save Social Security and Medicare two decades later.

Liberals who are dreading the scandal-mania that is taking hold should note that it contains a potential upside: It could make a Grand Bargain that includes cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits even less likely than it already is.

Save Social Security? From Obama's chained-CPI proposal, which by slowing cost-of-living increases would reduce payments from the current baseline by about 0.3% per year, with offsets for the very elderly? Save Medicare? From Obama's $400 billion/10 year grab bag of nips and tucks, little different from those proposed in his 2013 budget, the most notable difference being larger (but still quite incremental) premium hikes for wealthy seniors than those proposed in 2013?

Eloquent omission, Damian Paletta

I approve this messaging from the WSJ reporter on federal budgeting matters:

And while the short-term deficit is shrinking, both parties know it is projected to widen dramatically in coming decades as the U.S. population ages unless changes are made to curb the growth of programs like Medicare.

Conspicuous in its absence from this long-term budget snapshot: Social Security.  Again, later in the article:

Many Democrats have called for a broad budget deal that would reduce the deficit over many years by raising taxes and curbing the growth of Medicare and other entitlement spending.

I get nervous when I read sentences like this, cont.

from Greg Sargent:

And so, in the days ahead, you’ll hear top Democrats continue to amplify the case that the so-called “Boehner Rule” — in which Republicans insist on dollar-for-dollar spending cuts in exchange for the debt limit hike — is a dead letter. You’ll hear them continue to call on Republicans to stop allowing Tea Party intransigence to exert total control over budget strategy. You’ll hear them demand an end to chaos governing. But we’re probably stuck with chaos governing for the foreseeable future. Anyone see any way out of this?

As I've noted before, anticipations by Sargent, Beutler and other progressive close watchers of the budget battles that Democrats won't cave on a particular upcoming sticking point are pretty good indicators that Democrats will, in fact, cave on that particular point. In this case, Sargent does leave the outcome open, merely relaying what we'll hear from Democrats. And it's hard for me, too, to imagine Democrats making any new spending concessions without further tax increases. But still...

Picking at the healthcare Gordian knot

It's no secret that there's a grotesque hierarchy in U.S. healthcare pricing. Medicaid pays the lowest prices, followed by Medicare, then by private insurers.. and then, at the bottom of the totem pole, by uninsured individuals, who, as Steven Brill documented in grotesque detail, may pay three or ten or fifteen times what Medicare pays for a given procedure.

This system is not only grossly unfair, it's the chief reason Americans pay more than twice the OECD average per capita for healthcare than people in other developed countries. Notwithstanding a wide variety of payment systems, countries with universal health insurance -- that is, every other wealthy country in the world -- almost universally empower government to impose uniform pricing. In Japan, for example, where most people get health insurance through private, nonprofit plans provided by their employers (generally with a 30% patient co-pay), the government publishes a uniform price schedule. T.R. Reid, in The Healing of America, describes it:

[the medical price schedule is] published in a thick book--about the size of the Tokyo telephone directory--that anybody can buy. This hefty volume, the Shinryo Tensu Hyakumihyo ("Quick Reference Guide to Medical Treatment Points"), sets forth exactly what a doctor, therapist or hospital will be paid for any treatment or medication. There are tens of thousands of different treatments in the book: "throat swab,", "application of plaster cast, ankle," "sutures, outer arm," "X-ray, simple, neck region, rear," etc., etc. For almost all of these, the price is extremely low...(p. 91).

Vietnam as glimpsed from Camelot

When I was about four or five years old, I was sitting with my mother in our car outside the "Neighborhood House" community center in Riverdale in the Bronx, NY when I must have said something about war.

My mother said, "There are no more wars."  Then she thought about it for a moment and added (as I remember it), "well, there's a little war going on right now. It's not a real war."

I tried to picture a "not real" war. The visual backdrop of our lives was the Palisades, a long run of pristine blue flat-topped cliffs across the mile-wide Hudson River, which our apartment overlooked.*  I imagined Indians falling dead along the cliff line, then getting up again, like kids in a game, because it wasn't a real war.

This evening, as I came across the passage below in Stephen Ambrose's Rise to Globalism, I allowed myself to think that that remembered conversation took place in 1963 (it might have been 1964, but never mind):

Precedent Eisenhower

When justifying his major foreign policy decisions, Obama cites Eisenhower more than any other predecessor -- e.g., in his December 2009 speech announcing his time-limited Afghan surge:

As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests. And I must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces. I don't have the luxury of committing to just one. Indeed, I'm mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who -- in discussing our national security -- said, "Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs."

As calls mount for U.S. intervention in Syria, with exhortations to Obama to uphold U.S. "credibility," I find this summation by Stephen Ambrose in Rise to Globalism*  of Eisenhower's second term instructive:

THE OVERWHELMING FIRST IMPRESSION OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY from 1956 to 1961 was one of unrelieved failure. America’s inability to do anything at all to aid Hungary’s rebels made a mockery of the Republican calls for liberation. Eisenhower and Dulles were unable to contain the Russians, who succeeded in their centuries-old dream of establishing themselves in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Spectacular Soviet successes in rocketry, beginning with Sputnik, sent the United States into a deep emotional depression. Russia seemed to have won the arms race, and in 1959 it was Khrushchev who played at brinksmanship from a position of strength. After the Suez crisis, the French, British, and Americans could never fully trust each other. In Southeast Asia, Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam and Laos threatened to upset the delicate balance there in favor of the Communists. In Latin America, the Eisenhower administration was helpless in the face of a revolution in Cuba, which soon allowed the Russians to extend their influence to within ninety miles of the United States. 

Surface appearances, however, reveal only surface truths. Eisenhower’s outstanding achievement was to avoid war. However irresponsible Republican emotional appeals to the anti-Communist vote may have been, and despite the Russian shift to the offensive in the Cold War, Eisenhower refused to engage American troops in armed conflict. He was not immune to intervention, nor to provocative rhetoric, nor to nuclear testing, nor to the arms race (within strict limits), but he did set his face against war. It became the Democrats’ turn to complain that the United States was not “going forward,” that it was not “doing enough,” that America was “losing the Cold War.”

Kierkegaard, Julian, Obama

Who knows what governs how a moderately engaged undergraduate makes sense of abstruse philosophic texts? As a sophomore, my mind settled on a basic dichotomy: Hegel bad, Kierkegaard good. This was probably what you might call a gendered thought. Hegel's basic How-Things-Work was to my mind aggressive, imperialist, male: thesis absorbs antithesis in new synthesis. Man slays dragon, eats its heart, becomes (relative) superman. Kierkegaard, by contrast, kept apparently irreconcilable opposites in eternal balance, on an eternal toggle switch whereby they could be seen alternately as part of a unity and eternally distinct.

I can't tell you at this distance whether my abstract caricature is accurate, but it has stayed with me all my life, and I tend to class thinkers on one side or the other of this divide. In retrospect, I'm sure that I placed the subject of my dissertation, the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich (an achoress, i.e. a nun in self-imposed solitary confinement) on the Kierkeaardian side of the ledger, though I never zoomed up the centuries to probe the association. *
 
Julian had a brilliant trick of subordinating the harsh elements of Catholic dogma that she didn't like (the damned are damned forever) to those that she felt by force of direct revelation to be true (all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well).  Her basic dynamic was that God-as-man maintains two "cheres," or points of view: the human, limited one, whereby we must see and condemn our own sin, and the "inward, more ghostly" and more strictly divine one, whereby no one does anything except by God's will, and God is delighted with all, and sin is merely an instrument of human self-education.

Intransigence got them the win. Intransigence keeps them from taking it.

Brian Beutler has an intricate and well-sourced account of how the Obama administration scopes out the task of creating a "permission structure" for Republicans to compromise on a budgetary grand bargain. Broadly, it's Gang of Six II, a new attempt to jump off the presidential shadow by staying in the shadows, averting what Ezra Klein called the paradox of power: "If you take a strong position, the other side will immediately take the opposite position."

So once again, as Beutler puts it, "Obama’s putative absence is key to creating the political space Senate Republicans need to negotiate in good faith." But the master hurdle is in the House, where the GOP majority is way more recalcitrant than the five-odd GOP senators who would be needed to get a bill through the Senate.  And there, Beutler's framing caught my eye, because it illustrates a second paradox:

Of consumer cathedrals and Catholic capitalists

Can you love capitalism and hate the forms of commerce that the world's most capitalist economy creates? You can if you're Catholic and acculturated to cathedrals. Like Andrew Sullivan:

The striking paintings of Wal-Marts we featured this morning are not alone. Michelle Muldrow targets, among other supermarkets, Target. She calls these photographs paintings “Cathedrals of Desire.” Cathedrals used to function as a way to transcend desire into love, the worldly into the unworldly. Now these new consumer cathedrals make the worldly sacred and turn desire into a virtue.

I have to say that Target in particular engenders in me an instant version of what some hyper-lefty Germans called Konsumterrorismus: a total panic caused by the option of limitless shopping. (The definition is not undisputed). In my case, this phobia is compounded by the lighting – especially in Target. Aaron took me there once and I could not really get past the doorway. It was just horrifying. If I go to Hell, I will not have my ankles licked by fire. And I will not be lit from below. I will be subjected to giant, constant, overhead fluorescent lighting – what Michael Cunningham once called less lighting than the “banishment of all darkness.”

That gets it right, I think. All darkness must be banished to promote and encourage the purchase of things. This is what a huge amount of our culture now rests upon: the purchase of things. I guess you have to banish the literal darkness to disguise the shallow yet impenetrable darkness our shopping civilization represents.

Serendipity!  Yesterday, Andrew linked to an excellent review (by John Gray) of what sounds like an excellent biography of Karl Marx (by Jonathan Sperber). While unsparing about the harm wrought by Marx's "incoherent mishmash of idealist philosophy, dubious evolutionary speculation, and a positivistic view of history," Gray also credits Marx with an insight into the dynamics of capitalism to which the right is generally blind:

A severed wasp: Democrats and the sequester

When Democrats voted last Friday to jigger the rules of sequestration to allow the FAA to ease flight delays, the conviction took hold on the left that Democrats have lost on sequestration, as Ezra Klein declared.  If that's true, it means that the budget battle that began when Republicans retook the House is over, and Republicans have won.  The ten-year vice grip on discretionary spending is closing.  Since spring 2011, Obama has agreed to some $3 trillion in spending cuts over ten years, while securing just $600 billion in new revenue. 

You could say no one has won -- Klein again -- as Republicans have failed to cut entitlements and acceded (so far) to huge defense cuts.  But they've achieved their more nihilist (and perhaps dominant) ends -- foreclosing on the kinds of long-term investments Obama has urged throughout his presidency, and crimping the economic recovery for which Obama would get the principal credit.

For progressive writers, realization has dawned in agonizing stages. I'm reminded a bit of George Orwell's account of  "a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him.”

Progressives have consistently underestimated the capacity of Obama and the Democrats to fold -- at the fiscal cliff, at the passage of continuing resolutions implementing the first tranche of the sequester through FY 2013, and at the FAA kerfuffle. Let's flash back a bit and watch awareness unfold, first that Republicans were going to focus their efforts on sequestration, then that they were going to let it happen, and then that they could induce Democrats to help cram the budget into the sequestration strait jacket.

A different path for education reform

Recent readings about education reform and conversations with teachers have convinced me that the current emphasis on high-stakes testing is misguided, and that education reform as we know it is more about enriching for-profit educational testing and curriculum companies and privileged charter school networks than about strengthening public education. That's not to say that national standards for what children should know are a bad thing, but that the current punitive improve-scores-or-die regime creates all kinds of perverse incentives for a system ill-equipped to meet those standards.

An article in the current issues of Foreign Affairs, Why American Education Fails and How Lessons from Abroad Could Improve It, by Jal Mehta of Harvard, charts an alternate course that's in line with my longstanding sense, based in part on my experience as a parent, of what's wrong with our current system. While I have some caveats, three of Mehta's core premises seem to me to get at the heart of the problem:

1) You can't 'raise the bar' for students without first raising it for prospective teachers:

From what planet comes this one?

This headline, that is, or rather large caption to a front-page photo in today's Wall Street Journal (not onine):

Shooting Mars Swearing-in Ceremony

The photo [scroll down] is of a man lying flat with a gun pointed at his head. I did wonder whether someone was shooting an action movie set on the red planet. Its sandwiching between two gerunds (or a gerund and a gerund phrase, or whatever) added to the red fog.

Add this to my collection of headlines in which it's hard to pluck the verb from a dense mesh of (often monosyllabic) ambidextrous verb-nouns:

Verbal noun mashup dazes headline reader
Newspaper taxes readers' decoding chops
Five noun run spurs brain freeze

The Obamaquester

As the deadline for the sequestration cuts to take effect loomed last March, Republicans used that label to try to pin them on Obama. The sequester was his idea, they said. They were willing to substitute more intelligent, targeted cuts, but he insisted on new revenue, and "he already got his revenue" in January.

On one level, this argument was absurd.  The administration only "proposed" the sequester because Republicans threatened to let the country default on its debt if Obama did not agree to cut a dollar of spending for every dollar the debt ceiling was raised. Sequestration was a device designed to give the Democrats a later negotiating opportunity to replace some of those cuts with revenue. Obama was willing to compromise to prevent the meat ax from coming down; Republicans were not.  Obama does not want to cut spending by the amount stipulated in the sequester; Republicans do.

In another sense, though, the sequester does belong to Obama.

Two assessments of the Bush presidency

By any normal human reckoning, you would have to call President Obama's selective precis of the George W. Bush presidency, delivered at the dedication of the Bush Library, generous and gracious, First he paid tribute to the man:

So we know President Bush the man.  And what President Clinton said is absolutely true -- to know the man is to like the man, because he’s comfortable in his own skin.  He knows who he is.  He doesn’t put on any pretenses.  He takes his job seriously, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously.  He is a good man.

Then, to an edited version of his record: 

But we also know something about George Bush the leader.  As we walk through this library, obviously we’re reminded of the incredible strength and resolve that came through that bullhorn as he stood amid the rubble and the ruins of Ground Zero, promising to deliver justice to those who had sought to destroy our way of life...

Obama on kinks in the arc of history

One passage in Peter Beinart's stirring ode to Obama's gun control efforts set me thinking again about how Obama views (and frames) U.S. history:

Republicans often describe America as a country that was once pure—at its founding, before the New Deal, or before the 1960s—was sullied and now must now be redeemed. Obama, by contrast, describes America as a protracted struggle to honor our best ideals by overcoming our evil past, a struggle in which heroes often die without ever seeing their labors bear fruit. It’s no coincidence that a month after Newtown, he swore his inaugural oath on the bibles of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, and spoke of “the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall.” It’s no coincidence that he so often quotes King (who was himself quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker) as saying, “Even though the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice.”

I would slightly edit this acute observation, altering "overcoming our evil past" to "overcoming the evils in our past" or "overcoming our more limited past."  Due in part perhaps to political necessity, Obama puts a relentlessly positive spin on the national historical saga, casting it as a tale of continual progress toward a more perfect union.  The circle of those included in the "all are created equal" widens in concentric historical ripples, "through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall." It's a presentation of American history modeled on Lincoln's concept of what Garry Wills tagged in Lincoln at Gettysburg as "continual approximation" of the ideals embedded in the Declaration of Independence.  Wills cites Lincoln setting forth that concept in the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

In which Alyssa Rosenberg scolds like it's 1562

[reposted]

Alyssa Rosenberg* does not find Romeo and Juliet dramatically satisfying or morally wholesome:

Romeo and Juliet—a play about children—is full of terrible, deeply childish ideas about love. And as much as I want to see more interracial couples in pop culture and more diverse casts on stage and screen, I don’t want to see them cast in material that is so horribly depressing.  

Romeo and Juliet itself hasn’t aged well. The story follows Juliet Capulet, who is 13 when she meets Romeo Montague at a party, falls head over heels in love with him, and marries him within a day of meeting him. Romeo's age isn't specified in the play, but the quickness with which he throws over a former flame for Juliet doesn’t suggest a particularly mature man. ..

..the vision of Romeo and Juliet's deaths uniting their families is an adolescent fantasy of death solving all problems, a "won't they miss me when I'm gone" pout. There's a reason that, in the best modern riff on Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Maria lives after Tony's death to shame the Sharks and the Jets, her survival a seal on the truce between them. Dying is easy. Living to survive the consequences of your actions and to do the actual work of reconciliation is the hard part.

Perhaps inadvertently, Rosenberg has reproduced the moral judgment first leveled by the author of Shakespeare's source story, Arthur Brooke, whose Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, published in 1562, begins with a preemptive strike against any reader tempted to identify with the star-crossed lovers: 

In which Paul Krugman gets cutesy with causality

ICYMI, this week serious questions were raised about a controversial and influential paper by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that purported to show -- or at least has been taken to show -- that when a country's national debt reaches about 90% of GDP, that debt acts as a significant drag on growth.  On April 15, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Polin published a paper alleging that Reinhart and Rogoff's paper contained, along with various methodological errors, a coding error in an Excel spread sheet. In response,  Reinhart and Rogoff acknowledge the error, but defend their methodology and  maintain that the error does not materially affect their conclusions. They also claim that they never stated categorically that higher debt caused lower growth. It's that question of how a politically freighted point is communicated and received that interests me here.

On his blog, Paul Krugman cried "casuistry" on that last point:

And the everyone hyping Reinhart-Rogoff very much included Reinhart and Rogoff themselves. Matt O’Brien has the goods. It’s true that their papers never said outright that the relationship was causal, but they weren’t anywhere near that scrupulous in op-eds and other media presentations. And the truth is that the papers may not have stated causation flatly, but it was clearly insinuated. By trying to claim now that they never meant to imply such a thing, R-R are falling down seriously in the menschhood test.

Today, Krugman, austerity's most stalwart enemy, devoted a whole column to the kerfuffle. And while I'm happy to see him hammer away at the foundations of the case for austerity, I must say that he replicates the alleged rhetorical error. That is, he gets cutesy with causality. The whole essay is set up to convey a conclusion that he somewhat airily dismisses in the final sentence.

The opening paragraph poses a pretty grandiose premise: 

"They deserve a vote," cont.

Five long days ago, when the Senate broke a filibuster to allow debate on the Manchin-Toomey bill extending background checks on gun sales to gun shows and the internet, I wondered whether public shaming was not a better response to filibuster-everything obstructionism in the Senate than rule changes ending or sharply curtailing the filibuster.

Naive hope, at least in the short term. But Obama shares it. Last night, responding to the successful filibuster of the actual bill, he turned the spotlight not only on the moral cowardice of senators who voted to block the bill, but on Senate dysfunction:

Obama calls out the cowardice caucus

Rarely will you hear a president, or any elected official, accuse those who oppose a piece of legislation of moral failure as starkly Obama did this evening, reacting to the successful Senate filibuster of legislation that would have expanded background checks to gun shows and internet sales (full video here).  Flanked by parents and siblings of Sandy Hook victims, along with Gabby Giffords and Joe Biden, he accused the bill's opponents of lying, caving, and failing in their duty. A sampling of the direct rebukes:

• Families that know unspeakable grief summoned the courage to petition their elected leaders –- not just to honor the memory of their children, but to protect the lives of all our children. And a few minutes ago, a minority in the United States Senate decided it wasn’t worth it.


•  But instead of supporting this compromise, the gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill.

Peace at Antietam, Carnage in Copley Square

On this just-past beautiful spring Sunday, my wife and I took our first visit to Duke Farms, the 2600 acre Jersey estate of the tobacco heiress, philanthropist and passionate horticulturalist Doris Duke. The foundation has just launched a free bike share program, and we spent three happy hours tooling around the meadows, wooded ridges, and huge network of man-made, landscaped lakes, all in perfect 60-degree sunshine.

At the heart of the estate is a house that was never built - preserved foundations at the top of a low bluff, with grand marble stairs leading down to a large circular meadow.  At about 5:30 I took a short solo walk down the giant stairs, which felt like something out of Narnia, into the meadow, where you're flanked with grasses maybe two or three feet high.  There, in the late afternoon sun, I flashed back to the battlefield at Antietam, which includes a cornfield you can traverse, and which we also visited on a still, sunny afternoon.

At Antietam you are at pains to imagine unspeakable carnage, and what struck me late in the afternoon sun there, and came back to me this past Sunday, was the sense of deep domestic peace in the ensuing 150 years, and what  a rare blessing that is.  I know that peace is marred by a further hundred years of peonage for African Americans in the south, and almost equally brutal discrimination in the north, and to this day by urban war zones, and a brutal criminal justice system, and a thousand other social ills and injustices. But human social well-being is relative, and the peace for most of us is real, and an accomplishment and a blessing.

I gather that a similar sense of felicity and festivity was in the air in Boston yesterday, until 2:50 p.m.:

"They deserve a vote"

The lede to this Hill article dredged up a thought that had flitted half-noticed through the ol' necktop a day or two ago:

The White House has tilted the gun control debate in its favor by centering its public relations effort around one pivotal message: the legislation deserves a vote.

The thought: maybe the best response to the Senate's galloping filibusteritis is not new rulemaking, but public shaming.

We are the 34%!

who "like" or "love" doing our taxes, according to Pew:

When asked why they like doing their income taxes, 29% say that they are getting a refund, while 17% say they just don’t mind it or they are good at it; 13% say doing their taxes gives them a sense of control, while the same percentage cites a feeling of obligation – that it is their duty to pay their fair share.

"Like" is a bit strong for me. But I do get some satisfaction out of the process, disfigured a bit by anxiety over the possibility of owing more money than I thought (I pay quarterly estimates).  Here's what I do like:

Alyssa Rosenberg thinks Romeo and Juliet "hasn't aged well," but her complaints are ageless

[reposted, with postscript]:

Alyssa Rosenberg* does not find Romeo & Juliet dramatically satisfying or morally wholesome:

Romeo and Juliet—a play about children—is full of terrible, deeply childish ideas about love. And as much as I want to see more interracial couples in pop culture and more diverse casts on stage and screen, I don’t want to see them cast in material that is so horribly depressing.  

Romeo and Juliet itself hasn’t aged well. The story follows Juliet Capulet, who is 13 when she meets Romeo Montague at a party, falls head over heels in love with him, and marries him within a day of meeting him. Romeo's age isn't specified in the play, but the quickness with which he throws over a former flame for Juliet doesn’t suggest a particularly mature man. ..

..the vision of Romeo and Juliet's deaths uniting their families is an adolescent fantasy of death solving all problems, a "won't they miss me when I'm gone" pout. There's a reason that, in the best modern riff on Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Maria lives after Tony's death to shame the Sharks and the Jets, her survival a seal on the truce between them. Dying is easy. Living to survive the consequences of your actions and to do the actual work of reconciliation is the hard part.

Perhaps inadvertently, Rosenberg has reproduced the moral judgment first leveled by the author of Shakespeare's source story, Arthur Brooke, whose Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, published in 1562, begins with a preemptive strike against any reader tempted to identify with the star-crossed lovers: 

The perceptual alchemy wrought by chained-CPI

As I noted once before, Obama is getting a lot of rhetorical mileage (for whatever that's worth) out of adding chained-CPI to his 2014 budget. Here's Damian Paletta's lede in the Wall Street Journal's account of the unveiling:

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama's $3.778 trillion spending proposal for next year incorporates for the first time a number of measures to slow the growth of spending on Social Security, Medicare and other federal benefits, hoping to draw Senate Republicans to the table for negotiations.

Obama's 2013 budget contained virtually all these "measures to slow...growth" except chained-CPI. But apparently, the grab-bag of nips and tucks to Medicare, Medicaid, federal employee benefits and other mandatory spending did not qualify as "a number of measures" until chained-CPI alchemized them.

To boost the impression of a sea change, Paletta cites one entitlement cut that's been significantly boosted over last year's budget proposal:

The White House also proposed about $370 billion in cuts over 10 years to Medicare, the health-care program for close to 50 million seniors. Almost half of these reductions would come from lower payments to drug companies, but the budget would raise $50 billion through higher premiums for some recipients over 10 years, much more than previously proposed. 

Last year's budget included about $350 billion in cuts to government healthcare spending, most of them from Medicare.  And it proposed $28 billion in higher Medicare Parts B and D premiums for wealthier benefits. The boost this year to $50 billion is substantial, but hardly game-changing.

Compare the 2014 premium boost:

The three-quarters GOP win on offer

It seems to me that in sketching out possible budget battle endgames, Greg Sargent is missing the middle ground. Or call it three-quarters ground, since Obama continues to move the goalposts in the GOP's direction.

Obama's new budget includes about $800 billion in new revenue over ten years and $800 billion in spending cuts, not counting savings from chained-CPI, to replace the sequestration cuts. The chained-CPI method of inflation calculation, which reduces Social Security spending and also boosts revenue (by slowing the upward adjustment of income tax brackets for inflation), is included as a concession to Republicans demanding the Obama propose "entitlement cuts" (Obama cut $716 billion over ten years in Medicare spending in the ACA and last year proposed another $400 billion in federal Medicare spending reductions, but never mind). Chained-CPI, with Obama's offsets for low-income seniors, saves a projected $130 billion over ten years. Sargent, trying to scope out administration intentions in light of Obama's new budget, writes:

Senior administration officials who briefed a number of us late yesterday repeatedly insisted that the White House will not move any further in the GOP’s direction if Republicans try to pocket the entitlement cuts while refusing to make any concessions. The officials say that without new revenues, no deal is possible.

And then, assessing the import of Obama's chained-CPI "concession" (which he had already put on the table, publicly, in December):

It’s welcome that the White House is vowing not to budge off its current offer, but only the White House can ensure that this promise holds over time.

The White House has not vowed not to budge off its current offer. It has vowed not to deal if Republicans put no revenue on the table. As his been true since the 2011 negotiations, Republicans can clean Obama's clock by offering some revenue.

When the public supports the president's position...then what?

I have learned from political scientists including Brendhan Nyhan and Jonathan Bernstein that presidents generally can't sway public opinion via appeals from the bully pulpit.  National Journal report George Condon, relaying the thoughts of political scientist George C. Edwards III, encapsulates the accepted wisdom:

“It is true for all presidents. They virtually never move public opinion in their direction,” Edwards tells National Journal. Citing polling numbers for six decades and multiple presidents, he says, “It happened for Ronald Reagan. It happened for FDR. It happens all the time. You should anticipate failure if you’re trying to change people’s minds. The data is overwhelming.” What Edwards learned is that presidents succeed in rallying the public when the public already agrees with them.

With regard to Obama, however, Edwards' cited examples do not fit his categories. His analysis -- perhaps sharply abbreviated by Condon -- glides over the ambiguities involved in "rallying the public when the public already agrees":

How binding is Justice Roberts' finding that the ACA's individual mandate exceeds Congress's Commerce Clause authority? - update

Last July, I posed the question in the title in the post below, prompting a bit of a lawyer's debate in the comments. Ratman, an acute critic of the reasoning accepted by Chief Justice Roberts on this question, has just rejoined that debate after a nine month hiatus-- prompting me to wonder whether the question has been addressed in legal literature.

So, attorneys: What do you think of Ratman's argument below?  Has "the Supreme Court ruled" that Congress can't regulate inactivity, or can't mandate a purchase in the unique case posed by insurance?

A quick question of law
Thursday, July 05, 2012

How many of Chief Justice Roberts' brethren signed onto his finding that "the individual mandate is not a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause"?  None.

Justice Ginsburg, writing for the four liberal justices with regard to the mandate, concurred with Roberts' finding that the mandate was a constitutional exercise of Congress's taxing power, but dissented strongly on the Commerce Clause question. Justices Alito, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas officially concurred with no part of Roberts' decision, though their reasoning with regard to the Commerce Clause mirrored his.  And of course, the Chief Justice's own finding that the mandate is constitutional rendered his Commerce Clause judgment moot with respect to the fate of the individual mandate.

A question, then, for legal scholars: does the finding that Congress cannot regulate inactivity have any force of law for future cases?

Abraham Lincoln: African Americans secured their own liberation

I am no Civil War historian, so I will just share the remarkable discourse below attributed to Abraham Lincoln without comment. This conversation must be well known to historians, as it appears in the biography by Lincoln's secretaries Hay and Nicolay (long the definitive Lincoln biography). While the imperative Lincoln expresses to use emancipation as a weapon of war was familiar to me, his categoric assertions below brought me up short and made me want to hit the 'share' button.

This conversation took place (assuming it is relayed accurately) in the dark days of August 1864, when Grant's assault on Lee's army was stalled with appalling slaughter, Sherman had not yet taken Atlanta, and a wave of war weariness was overcoming the electorate.  Lincoln's honest parsing of personal ambition and love of country at the outset is itself remarkable, if characteristic, but his read on the military/political/economic forces at work is even more remarkable -- at least to this moderately informed reader. The source below is Hay's short version of the ten-volume biography he wrote with Nicolay. I don't know whether the ellipses appear in the full biography.

Mr. Lincoln realized to the full the tremendous issues of the campaign. Asked in August by a friend who noted his worn looks, if he could not go away for a fortnight's rest, he replied: "I cannot fly from my thoughts—my solicitude for this great country follows me wherever I go. I do not think it is personal vanity or ambition, though I am not free from these infirmities, but I cannot but feel that the weal or woe of this great nation will be decided in November. There is no program offered by any wing of the Democratic party, but that must result in the permanent destruction of the Union."

In which Obama publicly negotiates with himself

It's become a cliche that Obama is a poor negotiator because he "negotiates with himself." In his weekly address, he makes it literal. Here's what he says about the budget he's releasing on Wednesday:

This is the compromise I offered the Speaker of the House at the end of last year.  While it’s not my ideal plan to further reduce the deficit, it’s a compromise I’m willing to accept in order to move beyond a cycle of short-term, crisis-driven decision-making, and focus on growing our economy and our middle class for the long run.  It includes ideas many Republicans have said they could accept as well.  It’s a way we can make progress together.

Of course he's willing to accept this compromise, because he proposed it. The Republicans, however, didn't accept it. Putting it on offer now signals that he's willing to accept a new compromise further to the right.

In which Alyssa Rosenberg scolds like it's 1562

Alyssa Rosenberg* does not find Romeo & Juliet dramatically satisfying or morally wholesome:

Romeo and Juliet—a play about children—is full of terrible, deeply childish ideas about love. And as much as I want to see more interracial couples in pop culture and more diverse casts on stage and screen, I don’t want to see them cast in material that is so horribly depressing.  

Romeo and Juliet itself hasn’t aged well. The story follows Juliet Capulet, who is 13 when she meets Romeo Montague at a party, falls head over heels in love with him, and marries him within a day of meeting him. Romeo's age isn't specified in the play, but the quickness with which he throws over a former flame for Juliet doesn’t suggest a particularly mature man. ..

..the vision of Romeo and Juliet's deaths uniting their families is an adolescent fantasy of death solving all problems, a "won't they miss me when I'm gone" pout. There's a reason that, in the best modern riff on Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Maria lives after Tony's death to shame the Sharks and the Jets, her survival a seal on the truce between them. Dying is easy. Living to survive the consequences of your actions and to do the actual work of reconciliation is the hard part.

Perhaps inadvertently, Rosenberg has reproduced the moral judgment first leveled by the author of Shakespeare's source story, Arthur Brooke, whose Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, published in 1562, begins with a preemptive strike against any reader tempted to identify with the star-crossed lovers: 

Here comes Obama's new centrist budget...much like his old centrist budget

To progressives, President Obama's inclusion of chained-CPI in his 2014 budget looks like another case of Obama moving the goalposts on his opponents' behalf. Yesterday, Jared Bernstein offered this forlorn hope:

–No chained CPI!  No $100 billion more in NDD (non-discretionary spending) cuts!  These were both Obama offers to Rep Boehner in a grand bargainy sort of deal during the fiscal cliff squabble in December.  Neither should be on the table in the budget.  To put them there would be to meet the R’s way too far on their side of the field for no good reason.

I think I understand the strategy that says “don’t worry, progressives…we won’t enact either of these measures unless we get significant revenues.  And that’s unlikely.”

Tru dat.  But my game theory says keep your offers off the table until you’ve got their offers.  The problem doing it the other way is that you’re allowing the negotiations to start where you want them to end.  There’s the risk that the bargaining starts with with the stuff you’ve put on the table and goes down from there.  So the R’s say, “OK, we’re willing to nudge on revenues, but we’re going to need more cuts—beyond what you’ve already given us in the budget.”

 You could tell when you read that that Bernstein knew that Obama was going to do it.

If, however, the political goal is to make it look like Obama is moving far further in Republicans' direction than he has actually moved -- in effect leveraging their caricature of him as someone unwilling to reform Medicare and Social Security -- then he is getting a lot of rhetorical bang for the buck. " “Now THIS is a real budget. … THAT’S a real budget … exciting … a place to start.”

A "real budget" indeed: Pretty much the same as Obama's last budget, with the exception of chained-CPI, which everyone knows Obama put on the table last December. More subtle than Scarborough's displayed ignorance is Jackie Calmes' rhetorical merger of old proposed entitlement cuts with new (formally) proposed entitlement cuts:

Chait all wet on high-stakes testing

Jonathan Chait has been a critic of the perverse incentives that distort our healthcare delivery system.  But he is willfully oblivious to the perverse incentives created by overemphasis on high-stakes testing in public school systems. 

Here's his reaction to the Atlanta cheating scandal, in which former Superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 other 34 teachers, principals and administrators were indicted on allegations that they “conspired to either cheat, conceal cheating or retaliate against whistle-blowers in an effort to bolster C.R.C.T. scores for the benefit of financial rewards associated with high test scores”:

[Eugene Robinson's] factual premise — that connecting teacher and principal incentives to student achievement leads to more cheating — is probably true. Is this a reason to get rid of incentives? No, it isn’t.

Back to basics with gay marriage

I've been allergic all my life, and for the last 15 years or so plagued by nasal polyps. A couple of months ago I started taking Nasonex and for the first time since I can remember I've been consistently breathing clear through my nose. I enjoy this immensely. I lie down in bed on my back, close my mouth and fill up my lungs. Breathing has become a thing.

I also enjoy being married -- happy to come home in the evening when my wife is home, happy to spend every weekend together, etc. And with gay marriage filling the headlines, I notice the pleasure and privilege of it a bit more.  Marriage has become a thing.

Gay activists, or simply the rising visibility of gay couples, have made marriage cool again. They've raised its value in my eyes, or rather made me a little more conscious of its value, which is pretty much the same thing.  And I think that the drive for gay marriage has raised the institution's value materially by making the whole society think hard about what it's really about.

The west has valorized marriage for true love, as the free choice of two people who decide they're right for each other, for more than a century. That ideal was getting a little worn around the edges, pecked at by perspectives from biology, and psychology, and probability, and economics, and political ideology -- and by postmodern skepticism generally. In real terms, too, the institution as we knew it has eroded, thanks first to divorce and then to the advancing tide of out-of-wedlock births.

Gay marriage is not going to change that, or arrest change in this ever-changing but indestructible human institution. But it has made the enduring reality of individual choice and the eternal viability of lifelong commitment and the value and utility of two-parent families a bit clearer.

David Frum raises a crucial non-issue for Democrats

I love David Frum's diagnoses of what's wrong with the Republican party (for many years now, he's had the no doubt unsettling experience of being admired more by his political adversaries than by his putative allies). But as he now takes a turn at prescribing a healthy political evolution for Democrats, he's spinning his wheels.

Frum warns (or concern-trolls) Democrats that if they simply anoint Hillary Clinton in 2016, they'll miss a revivifying debate on core elements of the party's future direction, defined thus:

* Were President Obama's counter-terrorism policies effective and necessary? Or did they over-reach and violate important liberties?

* Is Obamacare a charter for regulated competition among private health insurers? Or is it a deeply flawed half-way step on the way to Medicare for all?

HHS guidelines for privatized Medicaid expansion

The Department of Health and Human Services issued a FAQ on Friday regarding its receptivity to state proposals, like the one floated by Arkansas, to use the federal funds for Medicaid expansion through the ACA to offer private insurance through the ACA exchanges to Medicaid-eligibles.

HHS points out that outside the ACA expansion, states already can use Medicaid funds to buy private coverage  (mostly through private group health plans) for Medicaid recipients, provided that the plans are deemed "cost effective" -- that is, "that Medicaid’s premium payment to private plans plus the cost of additional services and cost sharing assistance that would be required would be comparable to what it would otherwise pay for the same services."

The new departure would be using federal money to buy qualified health plans on the new ACA exchanges for those covered by the ACA's Medicaid expansion. It's important to note the context in which HHS will consider "demonstration projects" of this sort: it will do so to "inform policy for the State Innovation Waivers that start in 2017."  In 2017, states can apply to "pursue their own innovative strategies to ensure their residents have access to high quality, affordable health insurance" providing the proposed plan

Guess what happens when you tie teachers' (and administrators') pay directly to student test scores?

This:

Ms. Parks admitted to Mr. Hyde that she was one of seven teachers — nicknamed “the chosen” — who sat in a locked windowless room every afternoon during the week of state testing, raising students’ scores by erasing wrong answers and making them right. She then agreed to wear a hidden electronic wire to school, and for weeks she secretly recorded the conversations of her fellow teachers for Mr. Hyde. 

In the two and a half years since, the state’s investigation reached from Ms. Parks’s third-grade classroom all the way to the district superintendent at the time, Beverly L. Hall, who was one of 35 Atlanta educators indicted Friday by a Fulton County grand jury. 

Move over, Michelle Rhee (test cheating was also apparently rife in the D.C. schools under her tenure).  So often it's the icons of toughness, the lionized apparent miracle workers who create a culture of fear and greed that breeds corruption:

God evolves

It's good news, I suppose, that more and more pastors and theologians are finding scriptural sanction for gay marriage, as  Evan McMorris-Santoro reports -- a nice illustration of Robert Wright's thesis that God grows kinder and better as human society evolves socially and ethically.

The process involves obvious self-delusion, as interpretation of texts invested with supreme authority always does. Here, for example, is Obama ally and megachurch pastor Delman Coates putting his "flexibility" on display:

Coates is a Biblical scholar and said his own views on marriage equality came from studying his faith's holy book....He said his understanding of Christian faith has always required flexibility and open-mindedness.

"We are evolving. Not just in our understanding of civil marriage, but we're also evolving in our understanding of what the scripture is affirming and what it is condemning," Coates said. "I think as more reasoned Christians take a look at scripture, it's pretty clear."

A hat-tip to ARRA for the freight rail boom

The Wall Street Journal's Betsy Morris reports on an investment boom in freight rail and freight rail infrastructure that's aiding the nascent comeback of U.S. manufacturing.

Welcome to the revival of the Railroad Age. North America's major freight railroads are in the midst of a building boom unlike anything since the industry's Gilded Age heyday in the 19th century—this year pouring $14 billion into rail yards, refueling stations, additional track. With enhanced speed and efficiency, rail is fast becoming a dominant player in the nation's commercial transport system and a vital cog in its economic recovery.

This time around, though, the expansion isn't so much geographic—it is about a race to make existing rail lines more efficient and able to haul more and different types of freight. Some of the railroads are building massive new terminals that resemble inland ports. They are turning their networks into double-lane steel freeways to capture as much as they can get of U.S. freight demand that is projected to grow by half, to $27.5 billion by 2040, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. In some cases, rail lines are increasing the heights of mountain tunnels and raising bridges to accommodate stacked containers. All told, 2013 stands to be the industry's third year in a row of record capital spending—more than double the yearly outlays of $5.9 billion a decade ago.

As the examples of infrastructure upgrades in Morris's article suggest, freight infrastructure is financed mostly by private capital.  The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's  $8 billion in high speed rail grants, while focused mainly on passenger service, do include projects that improve infrastructure for freight rail, however. Describing rail upgrades in his book on the stimulus, The New New Deal, Michael Grunwald illustrates how passenger and freight rail infrastructure are often intertwined:  

Two presidents on popular sovereignty

Last week, Andrew Sullivan rather arrestingly juxtaposed George Washington's warning against a nation indulging "passionate affection" for another nation and Obama's declaration in his speech upon arrival in Israel that "our alliance is eternal, it is forever – lanetzach.”

So now we know that Obama laid on the schmaltz as precondition to challenging Israelis a day later to secure their own future by offering justice to the Palestinians. In that challenge, Gershom Gorenberg sees a vital fusion of  venue and message:

The first breakthrough was in method: Obama started by negotiating with the Israeli public. The choice of venue, an auditorium full of university students rather than the Knesset, was not a glitch, as many people thought beforehand. The venue was the message: The politicians have been too slow, so I'm stepping around them to talk to normal Israelis first.

That appeal directly to popular sovereignty suggests another presidential pairing across the centuries.  First, consider Obama's understanding of bottom-up sovereignty in the Jerusalem speech:

Gone shellin'

for a few days in Sanibel, FL, which I imagine many people before me have dubbed Sanishell, as it is the mollusk exoskeleton capital of the universe. I am a nonexpert but very enthusiastic shell-hunter.  As someone who generally can't shut the stream of consciousness down or do anything that might broadly be called meditative, I find hunting for my favored sea treasures mesmerizing.

Today, as I was standing ankle deep at the water's edge scanning a small mountain of tiny shells getting bathed by alternate waves, a similarly engaged sixty-something asked me what I was looking for. I said shark's eyes, a kind of bulbous chestnut-shaped shell that spirals to a kind of nipple, just to say something. This gentleman managed to tell me in short space, after mentioning a couple of shell names that meant nothing to me, that he owns a foundry in Michigan, making auto parts among other things, that manufacturing has made something of a comeback but is nothing like before, and that wages have been hollowed out first by the women's movement and then by Asian competition. He then launched into a series of arch-conservative credos about the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution and how its uniqueness is founded on faith in God, how wealth is created (manufacturing, mining, farming), how the Second Amendment is the key to all our freedoms. I listened to all of these and parried some, mildly, while meanwhile this guy keeps pulling the most amazing micro-turrets and ice castles, all under an inch long, out of the shell heap and handing them to me.  I said he was teaching me dependence on handouts; he said he was teaching me to fish; I contemplated starting an encore career giving shelling lessons, meanwhile pulling out two or three of these augurs and ceriths, or whatever you call these amazing little leaning towers of Pisa, myself.

It's ridiculous to suggest that Obama and Boehner could have cut a deal if they'd played golf together more. What's obviously called for is a shelling summit in Sanibel.

Look what the GOP can get for $300 billion

In July 2011, Obama was reportedly ready to sign off on a grand bargain for deficit reduction that would include $800 billion in new revenue and somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 trillion in spending cuts over ten years. David Brooks said that Republicans would be crazy not take such a deal.  And that decision may pay off for them.

If Republicans can stomach the sequester and withstand pressure from defense contractors and other constituent groups, they can close the books on ten-year deficit reduction with some $2.7 trillion in spending cuts and the measly $600 billion in new revenue that Obama unaccountably settled for on Jan. 1 (plus additional interest savings).

The double catch is that even Republicans profess to dislike the sequester's indiscriminate swing of the meat ax, and Republicans also purportedly want to cut and "reform" entitlements -- though they would prefer to induce Obama to do the dirty work on that front.  And the funny thing is that he will -- if Republicans would only give ever so little on revenue. My educated guess is that if they would agree to say $200 billion worth of tax loophole closures or tightenings, Obama will go quite far in altering the structure of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

There's one other catch. Republicans would have stop doing their utmost to strangle Obamacare in the crib. That's their ticket to privatizing Medicaid and Medicare.

Consider the Rubicon on Medicaid that's been stealthily crossed in the last month. Sarah Kliff explains:

I get nervous when I read sentences like this

from Greg Sargent:

But there is no realistic scenario under which Democrats agree to serious entitlement cuts without new revenues, so until this position changes, we’re very likely going to remain stuck in extended sequestration.

It seems to me that progressive watchers of the budget wars like Sargent and Brian Beutler tend to underestimate Obama's capacity to move the goalposts on itself. Remember his alleged retort to Boehner's opening offer late last year to raise about $800 billion in new revenue over ten years via (unspecified) loophole closures: "I get that for free"?  He didn't. And as Sargent's post implies, he won't any time time soon. Relatedly, remember Obama's not-quite-hard line about the Bush tax cuts -- that they would not be extended for households earning over $250k? They were (up to $450k).

The counter-scenario: Republicans cave on sequestration

Since January, I have periodically vented my mounting frustration over the apparent fact that Obama, by yielding at the pressure points of the debt ceiling on Aug. 1, 2011 and the fiscal cliff on Jan. 1, 2013, effectively inflicted the sequestration cuts on the country.

For the record, I am inclined by character toward regret and self-reproach, which I'm arguably projecting onto Obama. There is always the possibility that his chosen pressure point, the pain imposed by the sequestration that the Republicans have learned to love, will work.  A few days ago, I cited a Times article by Robert Pear about the rising chorus of lobbyist lamentation over the cuts as evidence of the long-term damage the sequester will inflict. The article could also be read, however (and in fact more or less asked to be read), as evidence that the lobbying pressure will at some point prove irresistible to the GOP:

Jack Goldsmith's disillusionment

John Podesta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, has an op-ed calling on Obama to release the legal memos setting forth the administration's rationale and guidelines for targeted killings. Good for him. As he notes, he has standing to weigh the competing imperatives of national security and public disclosure -- and with respect to the administration's legal deliberations, he comes down firmly on the side of disclosure.

I am more interested, though,  in the thinking of someone with even more standing to address the legal issues arising from the administration's covert operations: Jack Goldsmith, the short-term head of George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel who countermanded the insane torture memos that authorized the Bush administration's torture regime.  There's a link to a Feb. 5 Goldsmith op-ed at the bottom of Podesta's. Goldsmith's latest tells a sad story of disillusionment when compared with Goldsmith's 2009 writings.

Goldsmith takes a step back to consider not just the need for disclosure regarding the drone memos but the need to develop a new legal framework for "secret warfare":

The truest thing you will read today

Really, I promise. Think about it.

How overreaction has become the touchstone of our era:bit.ly/12VCBUw
— Lenore Skenazy (@FreeRangeKids) March 15, 2013

In this case, the overreaction is to a paring knife accidentally baked into the bottom of a birthday cake:. Never mind the parental hysteria: here's Walmart:

Obama, the GOP's enabler

The president's powers are limited. The president's powers are limited. The president's powers are limited.

It's the mantra both of political scientists and progressive commentators like Greg Sargent and Steve Benen, driven mad almost on a daily basis by "both-sides-are-to-blame" commentators on the budget impasse who won't acknowledge that Republicans refuse to compromise, i.e. consider any new revenue as a component of deficit reduction.

In the legislative arena, the president really has one concrete power: the veto. When it comes to budgetary matters, that power is closely related to his ability to "set the agenda," since appropriations must be renewed on a regular basis (and new debt authorized) or the government ceases to function. Sunsetting legislation like the Bush tax cuts also sets up deadline/crisis points.

As a funding (or tax) deadline looms, the president can set out parameters for what he regards as fair and prudent legislation and say, I will sign when satisfactory legislation reaches my desk.

That's what Bill Clinton did in response to the massive cuts to Medicaid and Medicare that the GOP-controlled Congress wrote into their bills in 1995. He faced down their threats not to raise the debt ceiling (not taken too seriously at that stage in our development) and to shut down the government by not sending funding bills that met his terms (which happened twice).

That's what Chris Christie did in his first legislative battles in New Jersey. He set his terms and announced that he would sit back, crack open a beer and wait for legislation that met them.

The catch is, you have to be willing to trigger a crisis if the "qualifying" legislation never arrives. That's what Obama has never been willing to do.

Political science consensus judgment of the day

The U.S. District Court of political commentary, xpostfactoid division, affirms in part and vacates in part Peter Beinart's remediation order* for the GOP [n.b. note update at bottom for second appeal ruling] :

...to seriously challenge for the presidency, a Republican will have to pointedly distance himself from Jeb’s older brother... It won’t be enough for a candidate merely to keep his or her distance from W. John McCain and Mitt Romney tried that, and they failed because the Obama campaign hung Bush around their neck every chance it got. To seriously compete, the next Republican candidate for president will have to preempt that Democratic line of attack by repudiating key aspects of Bush’s legacy. Jeb Bush would find that excruciatingly hard even if he wanted to. And as his interviews Sunday make clear, he doesn’t event want to try.

Upheld:  it would be a good idea for the next GOP presidential candidate, and probably all GOP candidates for the foreseeable future, to distance themselves from W.  David Frum saw the writing on the wall back in February 2008:

Ryancare hits the workplace

The voucherization of American health insurance may already be upon us.

No, Paul Ryan has not gotten his proposed "premium support" system for Medicare enacted.  But increasing numbers of employers are adopting or considering a shift from "defined benefit" to "defined contribution" insurance plans -- a shift that mirrors the transformation of pension benefits over the past twenty years (as Peter Orzag pointed out in a Dec. 2011 column).

Under a defined contribution model, as described in a recent Booz & Co. report, "instead of designing and offering defined health benefits, companies make cash contributions to savings accounts that employees use to purchase insurance products of their choice. This model allows the company to cap its healthcare cost at a desired threshold" (p. 4).

To meet the nascent and anticipated demand for this model, health insurers and benefits consultants are rolling out private healthcare exchanges enabling employers to outsource the benefits management. these exchanges provide a menu of health insurance options to the employees of companies that buy in. Such exchanges have been a feature of health plans for retirees for some time; companies are now beginning to offer them to current employees.

Adoption of this system may be accelerated by the coverage mandates the ACA imposes on employers that provide health insurance -- e.g., the ban on annual and lifetime benefit caps, the requirement to offer coverage to employees' children up to age 26, the free provision of preventive care, and other mandates.

Question: given the ACA requirement that employer plans cover a minimum 60% of participants' average medical costs, and cap participants' annual out-of-pocket expenses at $6250 per individual/$12500 per family, and meet the minimum essential benefit requirements that govern the ACA exchanges or potentially pay a penalty,* how can an employer control its costs by capping its "defined contribution"?

Learning to love Obamacare, cont.

Recently, conservative healthcare policy commentator Avik Roy pivoted from a long history of denouncing the Affordable Care Act to acceptance of its status as law of the land and thence to a happy vision of a marriage between Obamacare and Ryancare, whereby seniors are progressively migrated onto the ACA's exchanges, and Medicare's remaining "public option" (traditional Medicare) becomes available to non-seniors on the ACA exchanges.

This pivot highlights the Heritage Foundation pedigree of the ACA: Democrats embraced "premium support" and healthcare exchanges because the combo seemed the only form of universal healthcare provision that Republicans could support; Republicans promptly demonized the effort even as they proposed migrating its structure into Medicare. In any case, the ACA exchanges should indeed serve as a proving ground for the dubious notion that managed competition among insurers will reduce healthcare costs.

A recent article by two partners at Mercer Health and Benefits, a major HR consultant, highlights another effect of the ACA that should cheer conservatives.  The ACA's coverage mandates, Tracy Watts and Eric Grossman assert, have raised the cost of coverage and so led more employers toward a form of health insurance that shifts more costs to policyholders and possibly lowers them overall:

Medicare for all, or Obamacare for seniors? Or both?

Many have noted that the Medicare reform plan included in Paul Ryan's 2012 budget, though sketchy in detail, looked a lot like Obamacare for seniors plus a public option -- the public option being traditional Medicare, which would compete with private plans on an ACA-like exchange.  Throughout the presidential campaign, Ryan emphasized that his plan would not affect current seniors, only kicking in for those under 55 when the plan was enacted.

This year, to meet the GOP target of balancing the federal budget within ten years, Ryan is reportedly planning to move the migration age up.

That possibility has led Avik Roy, the most vocal spox for conservative health reform ideas, to stop worrying, love the ACA, and envision its fusion with Ryancare:

There has been an important development since last year’s House budget: the reelection of President Obama. Obama’s victory means that Obamacare will be implemented, warts and all, making it politically impossible to repeal, even if Republicans are fortunate enough to retake Washington in 2017.

Speaker for the dead? Nasr indicts Obama's AfPak policy in Holbrooke's name

Vali Nasr, a former aide to the late Richard Holbrooke when he was Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan, has put the gist of his book-length brief against the Obama administration's conduct of foreign policy in a j'accuse published in Foreign Policy.

In Nasr's narrative, Obama's conduct of war and diplomacy in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- Holbrooke's bailiwick --  was controlled by a narrow coterie of White House staff. The policy, according to Nasr, was overmilitarized, diplomatically disengaged, driven mainly by domestic political considerations, and undermined by Obama's timeline and swift withdrawal. The wound that drives the whole is Nasr's conviction that his patron, master diplomat Richard Holbrooke, was undercut at every turn and never given a chance to operate.

The heart of the strategic indictment (motive is a separate story) is that the admnistration first slow-walked and then mis-timed and undercut its negotiation with the Taliban, which Holbrooke had urged almost from the start. Here's the gist: