You Have The Power

An interesting admission in an otherwise unrelated post:

We have a policy here not to write about political web videos, because they are meaningless. They don't actually do anything--unless, that is, if political blogs write about themWe have a policy here not to write about political web videos, because they are meaningless. They don't actually do anything--unless, that is, if political blogs write about them.

Of course, drawing the line there is arbitrary. Why stop at web videos? Why are right-wing politicians appearances in front of right-wing audiences or on talk radio treated as "news"? Why is Drudge given the agenda setting power that he appears to have? The decisions to elevate certain voices are the result choices made by people, and they can be unmade, "competitive pressure" be damned.

I'm not necessarily saying that reporters should ignore appearances in front of favorable audiences--sometimes you get a more candid conversation that way--and of course web videos are an attempt by partisan or activist outlets to garner free media with basically no effort. But there's no reason that they should be treated uniquely by the press.

Friday Obama Caption Contest & Kitsch Cover

Original caption: "President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama dance together during the Governors Ball in the East Room of the White House, Feb. 21, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)"

Today's cover is CONFIDE covering The Postal Service's "Such Great Heights". Turn the volume down a little:

Janet Yellen And The Ornithology Of Macroeconomics

How did this become the ornithology of macroeconomics?

President Barack Obama intends to nominate Janet Yellen, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, to take over as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, a person familiar with the selection said Friday.

Yellen is considered a dove on monetary policy, meaning she is more concerned about high unemployment than rising inflation. As vice chair she would be the second highest ranking Fed official.

The dove/hawk metaphors are odd in the first place. Why are we taking bird metaphors for war and peace and extending them to consequences of monetary policy? This just leads to silliness. Is Al Gore a CO2 hawk? Is James Inhofe a pollution dove? How about Mario and Luigi -- Koopa Troopa hawks?

And then there's the question of why we tie the bird metaphors to inflation rather than unemployment. Why isn't Yellen called an unemployment hawk? When I read these terms, I get the feeling that somebody won a terminological battle a long time ago, and the other side had no idea that the battle was going on.

But anyway, thanks for finally getting around to this, Barack. (Paul Krugman is happy with our new avian friend. I don't understand the issues well enough to know what to make of Brad DeLong's semi-positive response.) Now go appoint two more birds who will fly around and eat all the unemployment rats, or whatever.

The Articles Of Confederation

The Revolutionary War, and the events leading up to it, are the kind of things that stick in your mind. There's dudes dressed as Indians throwing tea into the ocean and "no taxation without representation!" and Washington crossing the Delaware and a ragtag band of ewoks defeating the Empire.

And then there's the utterly forgettable period during which we had the Articles of Confederation. Until I went on wikipedia and looked it up, all I knew about this period was that in some vague way things weren't centralized enough and didn't work. (Which is embarrasing, because actual historians sometimes read this blog.) And as far as I can see, things were pretty awful. Without the power to tax, we couldn't raise an army or give veterans their pensions. Since we didn't have a proper navy, Barbary pirates would enslave our sailors. The money of an insolvent federal government became worthless. Since we hadn't assembled into any sort of functional economic bloc, Europeans would abuse us in trade wars.

Of course, this is mostly the boring kind of awful. You can easily make movies about American patriots triumphing over the British in the Revolutionary war, but the move away from the Articles and towards the central government that made America a functional and eventually awesome nation isn't summer blockbuster material.

This is an unfortunate thing. More attention to this time period would make the valuable point that having a strong central government is a very helpful thing in the modern world. Without taking lots of power away from states and establishing a working federal government, we'd be in chaos with a failed currency, no army, a terrible economy, and enslaved sailors. The way we got out of those problems deserves to be a bigger part of our national myth than it is.

The Real World: More Mundane that Academia

A commenter relays these comments from a teacher in relation to my last post:

The writer would never, ever, say that about the other professions, such as playing soccer and being a lawyer, to which she compares teaching.

Well, I don't know about this writer specifically, but the between academia and the real world is well known. Actual professional lawyers frequently complain that law school spends too much time preparing students to be appellate court clerks and not enough time on nuts and bolts things like contract drafting and review, even though far more law students will go on to draft and review contracts rather than become Circuit Court clerks. The disconnect between computer science departments and actual tech firms is also substantial, though the variance between schools is large and in almost any school a motivated student can find time for real-world programming instead of mucking around in Lisp or Haskell. Still, there's no course in "defensive programming" in any department that I know of, so it's something that people pick up almost entirely after graduation, or if they're lucky, by osmosis from students who have internships or who read articles on the subject. Doctor's famously resisted Atul Gawande's error-reduction checklist on the grounds that they were already competent enough to avoid most of these mistakes.

Now, neither lawyering or software engineering nor medicine nor teaching can be reduced to a series of rote techniques. They're not sufficient to making a good professional. And they may not even be necessary. But on average they're almost certainly an improvement. Great teachers who haven't specifically learned these techniques are likely to follow them. Great programmers are likely to engage in some defensive practices whether they were taught them or not. But we really have to get away from the idea that just because you have a professional degree means that you've figured out how to be good at your profession. People who have gone to school for a long time like to think that they have some special wisdom they've earned over the years, and that minor tweaks can't possibly make a big difference. But in fact that opposite appears to be true; minor tweaks can turn good surgeons into fantastic surgeons, or good programmers into great ones.

In addition, the specific case of teachers brings up the problem that the US needs a fucking lot of teachers. There are more teachers in the U.S. than there are military personnel, and the education requirements are such that the applicant pool is even smaller. To think that we're going to be able to make a significant improvement in teacher quality without resorting to some mechanical changes that can be taught with relative ease to low-performing teachers is the height of folly. And the same goes for other professions as well.

The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Teachers

With the latest NYT Magazine piece on training better teachers putting the subject front and center, it's worth adding this month-old Atlantic article to your reading list. Over the past decade, Teach For America has overhauled their application process in the hopes of getting a higher number of teachers who are effective in the classroom. It turns out that the best way to do this is to (a) hire candidates who have demonstrated  some organizatoinal managment and/or who have overcome adversity, and (b) pick candidates who's performance during a practice teaching session demonstrate instincts that are similar to the advice given in Lemov's Taxonomy. Here's the money quote:

Strong teachers insist that effective teaching is neither mysterious nor magical. It is neither a function of dynamic personality nor dramatic performance," Farr writes in Teaching as Leadership, a book coming out in February from Farr and his colleagues. The model the book lays out, Farr is careful to say, is not the only path to success. But he is convinced it can improve teaching--and already has. In b2007, 24 percent of Teach for America teachers moved their students one and a half or more years ahead, according to the organization's internal reports. In 2009, that number was up to 44 percent.

As best I can tell, this is a real golf shot in the field of education. There's a huge difference between a school where a quarter of the teachers are great and a school where almost half the teachers are great. Now, Teach For America is obviously in the fortunate situation of having a large applicant pool of high caliber students for a small number of slots, but even an urban school district could use this knowledge to try to shift teachers who met TFA's criteria to high-need schools.

Improving teacher quality will probably involve a two-track approach. If the average teacher salary were around $75,000 instead of $50,000 that would make a big difference in the set of people that apply for teaching jobs. But even then, the country simply needs so many teachers that we will have to identify classroom techniques and lesson plans that help turn low-performing teachers into mediocre teachers, mediocre teachers into good teachers, and good teachers into great teachers. There's no reason that we can't do both of these things at the same time.

Dentures Beat Reconciliation

While there are plenty of horrendous things that the pre-2005 Democratic leadership can be criticized for, I don't blame them too much for not raising a fuss over the Republican use of budget reconciliation to pass tax cuts back in 2003. (Of course, we ought to blame them for not attacking tax cuts for the rich head-on.)

It's not only because of the conservative noise machine that "Even if congressional Democrats had tried to make an issue out of reconciliation in 2003, they probably wouldn't have gotten much traction." It's because process complaints about things like the use of budget reconciliation are wussy in the court of public opinion. Now, there are some genuinely freaky details in this case, like the fact that the Republicans fired the previous Senate Parliamentarian because he didn't rule like they wanted. Overall, however, it's hard for me to see how process complaints against a passed bill get much headway against substantive praise for the benefits of the legislation.

I'm happy enough to see Media Matters step up and point out the unequal coverage -- that's what they do. But if you're a Congressional candidate in a debate and your opponent starts complaining about budget reconciliation, don't bother rebutting him in detail. You want to get to the point about how the insurance companies can't deny you coverage for pre-existing conditions. Or tell your district's version of Louise Slaughter's story about the old woman who had to scavenge her dead sister's ill-fitting dentures because she couldn't afford her own. Reconciliation complaints are forgotten. Denture stories are remembered.

The Optimist Is In The House

I think this analysis from Nate Silver about the probability that the health care bill will pass (he's at about even-money) is too pessimistic on at least two counts.

First, the picture looks a lot better if you make the likely assumption that Pelosi had a fair number of extra votes lined up, but that she didn't need to call on because she already had enough for passage, and the members in question felt that if they weren't needed they'd rather not stick their necks out. The vote total for the bill fits this interpretation pretty well. She needed 218, but if she got exactly 218 everybody would've been 'the deciding vote to pass health care reform' and some people from marginal districts probably didn't want that. Add one more to avoid that problem and then the Republican Anh Cao, who she might not have felt she could count on, and you've got the 220 she had. This suggests the possibility that there were a few members who said, "Okay, Nancy, I'll be there if you need me, but I'd rather not be seen doing this in case the Senate can't pass the bill and it ends up being a Thing That Failed."

Second, Nate's point that "nobody who voted against the bill before has yet affirmed that they'll switch to vote for it" is less significant than he thinks. Once you declare yourself in favor, you lose your leverage in future negotiations. This is especially important in light of his concern about how none of the Blue Dogs are being drawn in by the more conservative Senate bill. Why would they come out early in support of the legislation and give up leverage?

Sidenote: it's one of the bizarre features of the Senate negotiations that the people who exercised maximum leverage basically used it in ways that ruined their public image -- Ben Nelson's Cornhusker Kickback was roundly derided, and Joe Lieberman dropped dramatically in the polls after killing the public option. Hopefully no Blue Dog will come out and demand, I don't know, a big naked statue of themselves in exchange for voting yes.

Watch Him "Focus On Jobs"

I rather enjoyed "A History of Obama Feigning Interest In Mundane Things."

If the public option were more mundane, this sentence would be a better joke.

Raul Grijalva, Progressive Stuntman?

I'm thinking that these two criticisms of Raul Grijalva, if right, synthesize pretty well into a defense of what he's doing. First, Matt Yglesias:

He deems it a “slap in the face” that certain things, especially HSA expansions, were added in exchange for zero GOP votes while progressives are getting nothing from the White House on a public option. And it’s true, Grijalva and other public option advocates have been slapped in the face. That said, the bill at hand is a boon to low-income Americans who desperately need help affording health insurance for their families. If you vote “no” and kill the bill, Barack Obama’s family will still be fine. Its families in Grijalva’s district who’ll pay the price.

Second, Jonathan Bernstein just before he went off to blog for Andrew Sullivan:

I'm definitely getting the feeling that Grijalva isn't going to be up on whatever Arizona's version of Mt. Rushmore is. The guy has one move, right? Step One: Raul Grijalva threatens that he'll vote against health care reform because the bill isn't far enough to the left. Step Two: No one pays any attention. Step Three: Raul Grijalva supports the bill. Step Four: The bill moves a little bit further away from Grijalva's preferences. Step Five: Repeat.

Matt's definitely right about bill > no bill. And while I've been very worried about this at various points in the past, I'm coming around to the view that Jonathan is right about Grijalva always seeing reason and eventually getting aboard.

So assuming Jonathan is right, what's gained by Grijalva's empty threats? Well, his only real power is his ability to shape whether legislation is seen as being liberal by complaining about it or not. If the chairman of the Progressive Caucus calls it a slap in the face, that weighs against it being treated as liberal, and people in the traditional media treating it that way helps it pass. It's kind of odd that somebody's best way of helping a bill is by being a political stuntman doing scenes where authors of legislation slap him around, throw him off bridges, and otherwise abuse him in picturesque ways. America, this is your politics.

Addendum: If I were a blogger of great significance (?!) and I posted this, would I be messing up Grijalva's game by calling attention to it? I don't think so. For the media to understand what he's doing, they'd have to come to terms with their own role in the process of determining whether something is treated as liberal, and how screwed up it is. And they're not going to do that.

Hooray For Budget Reconciliation And "Budget Reconciliation"!

A while ago, Ezra had a post encouraging people to find a better name for budget reconciliation. I know where he's coming from, but as I watch Republicans complain about it, I'm really starting to warm to the boringness of the name. When you incorporate the words "budget reconciliation" into some political attack you're making, its emotional appeal drops by about 70%. And if you're using the word "reconciliation" alone, well, that's a six-syllable word for what two people do when they want to start being nice to each other. Convincing a non-tuned-in swing voter that he should dislike Democrats or universal health care because of reconciliation is going to be a comically difficult task.

Where Jim Bunning Comes From

Jim Bunning has finally ended the ridiculous stalling tactics that were holding up people's unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies. It's kind of ridiculous that anything like this could actually begin in the first place. In any normal workplace or organization, if you're thinking about doing something this bonkers, your co-workers are going to step up and say, "No, dude, don't do that." And you won't.

But if you were a Senate Republican, and you knew that Jim Bunning was going to do something like this, would you have any incentive to pre-emptively stop him? I really don't see how. Nobody is going to hold it against James Inhofe or Jon Kyl that Bunning did his crazy thing. Bunning is retiring, so it's not like you need him to win re-election so you can be in the majority again. And worst of all, ordinary people in your state who are affected may not have any idea that Jim Bunning is the asshole responsible for all this shit. Ordinary people don't know who all the Senators are or what they're doing. When they go into the voting booth, the effect of Bunning's stunt may just be to make them think, "Well, the first two years of Obama have been awful" and vote against the president's party.

Of course, you can't let Bunning keep doing this forever, or it becomes a really big spectacle that hurts you. And there are opportunities for Olympia Snowe or whoever to score moderate points by publicly dissing Bunning (which is no reason for them to privately stop him beforehand). But I really don't see that Republicans lost anything by letting him get started.

More nakedly partisan use of the presidential megaphone, with forceful attacks on the Republican Party when they allow this kind of garbage, would probably be better for Democrats. It'd hurt Obama himself, too, and Obama's desire to keep his hands clean, stay above the fray, and refrain from blaming even the blameworthy may be part of why he's got a positive net approval rating even with the economy in bad shape. But two-party electoral competition is a zero-sum game, and we might be doing better in a bunch of House and Senate races if people understood that the Republicans in Congress are ridiculously horrible people who obstruct your unemployment benefits and then complain about how they've worked so hard at doing so that they didn't get to watch a basketball game.

And if you haven't been following this closely -- yes, I'm serious. Bunning said: "I have missed the Kentucky-South Carolina game that had started at 9 o'clock, and it's the only redeeming chance we had to beat South Carolina since they're the only team that has beaten Kentucky this year."

The Straight Line Projection Is For Suckers

This is a pipe, but it's also a straight line.

The WSJ points to the latest Quinnipiac poll, which puts Arlen Specter modestly ahead of Pat Toomey in the general election. Across the pond, Labour appears to be close enough to the Conservatives that they might squeak out a plurality and form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, despite earlier predictions of a Tory landslide.

All of which is a fancy way of saying that there's never, ever, any reason to assume that the today's polling will persist until election day, and that forecasting outcomes years on months in advance based on current poll numbers is a sucker's bet. It's entirely plausible that the public may sober up a bit and reject GOP rule as we get closer to election day. It's also plausible that the unemployment rate might drop to 9% and give some people confidence that things are getting better. It's also plausible that some terrible scandal will engulf Democrats. Many things are plausible. That's what makes the future so exciting--we don't know what's going to happen in it! The best way forward is for Democrats to put their heads down and get to work, so that economic circumstances are on the up-and-up and they can put themselves in a situation where they can hold more seats.

There Can Be Only One?

With the release of Warren Buffett's latest letter to shareholders (PDF), the Oracle of Omaha is in the news. Which brings up what strikes me as a huge oddities in American business: why is there only one Warren Buffet? There is no rocket science involved in Buffet's investment strategy, and in the aggregate his portfolio does significantly better than the S&P. Doesn't this point to a gigantic market inefficiency? Shouldn't other investors be able to engage in strategies similar to those adopted by Warren Buffett and reap long term returns while being significantly shielded from risk?

Microreconciliation

There's a certain amount of freakout occurring over this quote from Kent Conrad (D-ND):

"Reconciliation cannot be used to pass comprehensive health care reform," said Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. "The major package would not be done through reconciliation"

But as Congress Matters helpfully points out, that's just fine; it has never been the official plan A to pass health reform through reconciliation. Indeed, even in the current situation, reconciliation would only be used to pass modifications to the bill. The bill has already passed the Senate and is waiting to be passed by the House under regular order in traditional Schoolhouse Rock fashion; one chamber passes a bill, and then the other chamber decides it's good enough that they'll pass it too.

To review, reconciliation has been used to pass the Bush tax cuts; the 1993 Deficit Reduction Act; a number of other bills such as the original CHIP, COBRA insurance continuation, and two budgets under President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich; and welfare reform. All of these bills represent substantially more significant bills than the sidecar modifications to health reform. Meanwhile, thanks to de facto gerrymandering in the Senate, the 55 or so Senators who vote for the reconciliation sidecar will end up representing about 63% of the population. There's no cause to freak out about some sort of abuse of power here. None.

Admiral Ackbar For Ole Miss

Count me among the fans of the effort to make Admiral Ackbar the new mascot of Ole Miss. The old mascot was "Colonel Reb," who often would ride around in confederate regalia. There's no excuse for making mascots of people who went to war so that they could keep what's now 37% of the state's population as slaves. The "Rebel Alliance" interpretation of the whole "Rebel" concept takes Mississippi out of the horrific past and into the awesome present/future,/long ago in a galaxy far, far away. I'd have a hard time rooting for a team whose mascot was all about the Confederacy, but I'll definitely cheer for Admiral Ackbar.

It's probably not going to succeed and I imagine there would be serious copyright issues. But still, cool.

What Digby Said

One of the reasons I've been out of The Game a lot, in addition to having lost the illusion of making a difference in anything, is that I felt like I had lately only provided insights nearly equivalent to other well-written versions you might find elsewhere. Take Digby on the summit:

As a good liberal political junkie I watched the summit today and saw Democrats staying within the bounds of reality in discussing the various ideas on the table and I saw the Republicans making things up. The president was in command of the facts, competently defended the Democratic position and successfully batted back many of the GOPs misrepresentations. The Republicans were effective in repeating their usual talking points and non-sequitors.

This is the basic dynamic of the health care debate. Democratic elected officials by and large want to solve this problem. Republican elected officials by and large don't. Sure, there are exceptions—The Ryan-Nunes-Coburn-Burr bill is a serious GOP attempt to grapple health care; Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh don't seem particularly interested in getting things done—but the leadership and most of the rank-and-file on both sides fit the bill. Negotiations can't exist under these conditions; there's no set of compromises Democrats could make that would attract any Republican votes. If John Boehner had sat down and said "We're prepared to deliver 75 votes for something that looks like Ryan-Nunes", or been willing to deliver a dozen or so votes if Obama had tacked on more aggressive malpractice award caps, things might be different. But he didn't, and Mitch McConnell more or less signaled all out opposition to everything the day after the election. Whether the press is going to wake up to this dynamic, or whether they will continue to allow Republican carping about process issues as though they're legitimate complaints is entirely unclear.

The Votes Of The Doomed

"Health care votes in play in the House" has a good deal of overlap with "People who are at risk of losing their Congressional seats this year". For these reasons, it's going to always be like that. And if people are at risk of losing their seats, they're going to have some thoughts about what they'll be doing next year.

I wonder how this is affecting their votes. On one hand you have the incentives the pro-reform side can offer, like positions somewhere in the Administration. On the other hand you have the things that major corporations on the anti-reform side can offer, like hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in bribes, to be paid after retirement. (The more polite term for this is a 'lobbying job'.) I don't know a lot about this stuff, so I'm curious about how this dynamic is playing out.

Harry Reid At 14

I didn't know this, but damn:

a young Reid had to cope with a pair of hard-drinking parents and a father who beat his mother until Reid was 14. The beatings stopped when Reid and his brother pinned their father down and demanded he stop.

The political context is that Harry Reid said that bad economic conditions are more likely to result in men beating their wives. This resulted in a bunch of of Republicans making disgusting jokes about how Reid might lose his job and beat his wife after November's elections. People who work on domestic violence have generally stood behind Reid's remarks.

Olympic Pole Dancing And Extreme Sex

I liked the thoughts at the end of Tracy Clark-Flory's post on the people asking for an Olympic pole dancing event:

What does bother me about the mainstreaming of pole dancing -- particularly elevating it to the apotheosis of sportsmanship and nationalistic pride -- is that it doesn't come with a greater acceptance of or respect for actual sex work. In fact, if anything it does the opposite, merely redrawing the virgin-whore line: Some girls do it for money (for shame!), some do it for flirty fun (or, maybe one day, gold medals). It's just another symptom of our cultural schizophrenia when it comes to sex.

A tangential observation: Despite all the porn on the internet, there are many awesome and unusual kinds of sex that we can't see, and that a more sexually liberated culture would probably make available for public viewing. Like, sex between people who are ice dancing or hang gliding. Or sex in amazing places that are hard to get to, like the peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro. I'm guessing that among the people capable of doing these things, a few are exhibitionistic enough that they'd want people to see them make love doing the thing they love. If extreme ironing can catch on, extreme sex should too, because sex is more awesome than ironing.

I think some sexual feats in this category would qualify as genuine human achievements, on par with many athletic feats highly regarded in society today. They might not be that titillating, in part because it's hard to have and properly film good sex under extreme conditions. But when Vince Carter jumped over the 7'2" French guy in the Olympics and dunked, that wasn't titillating either. It was just awesome.

Unfortunately, there are enough negative consequences to being publicly naked the few people who are both sufficiently exhibitionistic and capable don't do this stuff. In fact, a bronze medal winning snowboarder had to leave the Olympics early just for photos where a fan did naughty things with his medal. I'm generally optimistic about cultural progress, so I imagine that we'll see these barriers (and the ones that Tracy is concerned with) get dramatically weaker in our lifetimes.

The Wages Of Heroism

Jonathan Chait has a fun story to tell:

In 1994, Democrats had to wring some members to vote for the Clinton budget -- which reduced the deficit by reducing spending and raising taxes on upper-income households and was therefore unpopular. For the 218th vote, they got Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, a freshman Representative from a GOP-leaning district who had declared herself against the budget. Republicans -- who, naturally, were describing the Clinton budget as a radical left-wing big government power grab -- sang "Bye-bye Marjorie" on the House floor. (Mezvinsky did lose her seat, which she would have anyway, but she gained hero status and her son wound up marrying Chelsea Clinton. Vulnerable Dems with Sasha and Malia-aged sons who might like to be an Obama in-law might bear this in mind.)

Despair, The Public Option, And Near-Death Experiences

Why isn't the Democratic leadership pushing for the public option? Ezra says: "The problem is that it's not popular policy with the handful of conservative House and Senate votes that you need to push this bill over the finish line." The leadership isn't to be blamed for this, though the conservative Democrats are. Ezra again: "I don't think conservative Democrats will pick up even a single vote if the final plan doesn't include a public option"

As both Ezra and Matt say, I'm sure that there will be some resentment among the base about Democrats not pushing for the public option when they could've got it through reconciliation. But I don't think it'll have that big an effect. There probably are some very small number of votes to be gotten by super-exciting the base with the public option. But at this point you get most of the votes just for passing a comprehensive bill.

We've just gone through a one-month period where it looked to many people like health care reform was dead. Of course Pelosi worshippers like me kept the faith, but even we're a bit shaken. Except for crazy Kill Biller types who are a minority, we're just hoping that some comprehensive bill passes. Pass a bill and we'll vote.

Moreover, many of us had already mourned the public option before that and despaired of ever getting it passed when Joe Lieberman made the self-destructive decision to name its removal as the price for his supporting the Senate bill. After you've despaired of something, it doesn't seem like you have it and are entitled to it anymore. It becomes a bonus. That's where I think the public option is now in the minds of many Democrats. I don't think they'll be infuriated by the refusal to pass it now, in any way that matters. Democrats will be happy enough to go out and vote if they get some kind of comprehensive bill. I'm thinking the public option would get a couple extra votes here and there, but I don't think this is anything huge.

Of course, if House and Senate centrists had all been reasonable folk, we'd have the public option. But what else is new? Now I think we're just going to content ourselves to passing it sometime in the years to come.

Addendum: So what do we make of Obama here? Well, if he left out the public option because he's got good evidence that it'll keep the bill from getting 218 in the House, he did the right thing. If that's not how it is, he did the wrong thing. If Hoyer's right, he did the wrong thing.

Stimulus Fact Pwns Stimulus Opinion

When you've got a GOP spokesman mocking the stimulus because more people believe Elvis is alive than believe the stimulus created jobs, and a Media Matters guy who responds citing CBO statistics according to which the stimulus created a number of jobs probably in the low seven digits, the Media Matters guy wins the debate.

If you care about the economy, you care about actually existing jobs, not opinions about jobs. The former pay better than the latter and are more likely to come with health benefits. As a piece of career advice, I'd recommend that you strive for having a job, rather than giving people the opinion that you have a job. Real jobs are what matter in evaluating the stimulus, and that's what the guy at Media Matters is talking about.

I hope that's the thought Glenn Thrush's readers left with when they saw his post reporting the two quotes. If not, philosophy professors like me have a lot of work to do.

Obama Has A Plan

My political thoughts while I was in India, away from the internet for a week, mostly were of the "Gee, I hope health care reform isn't collapsing right now" variety. I was relieved when I came back and things had moved smoothly forward. And now that Reid says reconciliation and Obama's introduced a plan and Republicans have little idea of how to handle the summit, I'm feeling good. You've all seen the graphic on the right before during the campaign. Remember Obama taking control and rendering a bunch of bad news cycles irrelevant? That's where we are today.

As for the public option, Jonathan Bernstein is right -- it's not passing this time, but the efforts of Jeff Merkley, Sherrod Brown, Kristen Gillibrand, and Michael Bennet to raise it from the dead will make it more viable in the future. Well done, freshmen, and we'll remember this.

Adventures In India

I'm back from India! Most of these pictures are from an area of rural West Bengal where my extended family lives. It's roughly a hundred miles west of Kolkata (also called Calcutta).
These are the rice fields. Rice basically needs to be in a shallow pond to grow, so the farmers have a clever way of using gates made of thick clay-like mud in the boundaries between the fields to raise and lower water levels. They pull out a bunch of mud to make the water flow from one place to another, and when they have enough water, they put the mud back. This rice is pretty recently planted. West Bengal is so fertile that you can have three or four harvests in a year, with some crops.

One day three large monkeys appeared! They're not an everyday sight and children started running after them in excitement, so the monkeys ran away up into the trees. When standing erect, they're about the size of a small person. I don't know what kind of monkey they are. Apparently they don't bother anybody, though they might steal food you leave around. Villagers regard them with the kind of amused interest that you'd expect nice people to have for large monkeys.

These are my cousins Somnath (flexing) and Bikramjit in a mustard field. When the mustard flowers are in full bloom, it becomes a solid field of bright yellow. When you look down at the crazy quilt of Indian farmland from an airplane during the right season, you see these little patches of solid yellow and you know what they're growing right there.

As I wandered around the fields with Somnath and Bikramjit, I came upon a group of villagers preparing to have a series of cockfights. About a dozen roosters were tethered like this on the already-harvested rice fields. For the fight, they untether them and the roosters start fighting (apparently this is a thing that roosters naturally do, and the rooster on the left seemed eager to get it on even while he was tied up). I didn't really want to watch the fighting, so I left before that happened. Even the losers are probably living happier total lives than their debeaked and caged kin on factory farms, so I didn't get too agitated about this.

I didn't realize that people cultivated sunflowers in the area until I saw this. It's for the oil from their seeds.

Cousin Koushik stands in front of the little temple beside his house. I think it's a temple to Vishnu, and I really don't know how old it is. The carvings are wonderfully intricate but damaged -- little statues have lost their heads and stuff. It was closed so we couldn't go inside.

Here's my photogenic cousin Priyanka with herds of cows and goats behind her. The cuteness of goats is underrated.

Lunch is served! For the most part, the women prepare the food and serve the men, and have their meals when the men are done. This can create serious inequalities, especially in situations where there's less food to go around. Fortunately, my dad's family is doing well foodwise and that particular thing isn't an issue. Priyanka is freed up to eat with the boys because she's in school and doesn't cook. Daughters of her generation in the family are getting good educations and teaching in schools or taking your outsourced IT job rather than cooking and cleaning for a living, which is a very positive development.

Here I'm sitting with the ladies who do the cooking -- two of my cousins-in-law and two aunts. They've all had arranged marriages (as my mom did) but their views on relationships were quite open-minded. They were eager to see pictures of a girl I'm hoping to spend some time with when I come to the States this summer, so I got my laptop and showed them. I tried to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, because these ladies were especially fun to talk to.

The object on the lower left is a cooking implement that I haven't seen elsewhere -- a flat board with a curved blade going upwards. It's called a "boteen" and it takes advantage of the fact that people are going to be sitting on the ground so they can put a foot on the board to hold it in place while they slice vegetables by pulling them through the blade.

Here's a relatively prosperous section of Bikrampur, where my mother grew up. That big hay thing in the front is a haystack, not a house, though there is a thatched roof a bit further out. Indians are really good at building these big house-shaped haystacks, as you might expect from people who farm lots of long-stalk plants and need to feed their animals.

My aunt in Bikrampur was able to quickly assemble these plates out of leaves and long thin bits of wiry wood. I was astonished. She needed them to cook gorgora pita, small cakes with a sweet filling that will stick to metal surfaces if they're cooked there. It's a favorite food in the region.

The mustard fields were blown sideways by a big storm. I think these are after their flowering period. Anyway, it allowed for a nice picture of me and Priyanka.

Cousin Shantinath, who is an accountant for a construction company, told me that he once saw a German tourist in Calcutta who had smoked a cigarette and was looking in vain for a wastebasket to through the butt in. Shantinath went up to the guy and explained that in Calcutta, you just throw your trash in the street. I probably should've taken some pictures of the place, as I flew though there coming and going, but it was so drably unpleasant that I really didn't feel like it. There's the poverty and the dirtiness and griminess of everything, and on top of that the fact that about a third of the city smelled like shit. Literal shit. It's the worst city I've ever been to. This site explains, "Calcutta's sewage system was created under the British around the turn of the century to serve a city of 600,000. The system has had little added to it and the original structure has significantly deteriorated yet it is supposed to serve a city of now about 14 millions and growing. " So instead of stinking Calcutta with its horrible smells and constant noisy traffic, I give you cousin Shantinath in this idyllic setting.

Mom and I are drinking from green (unripe) coconuts on the train back to Calcutta. It's a tasty and nutritious source of clean water. They cost ten rupees (25 cents) each.

So, that's the best of the pictures. Some other odds and ends:

Americans honk at somebody to send a message that they're doing something wrong. Indians honk to give other drivers (and cyclists and pedestrians and people driving ox-carts) auditory awareness of their location. It's as if they're trying to keep you aware of where they are with sound as well as sight. In other words, they're honking constantly. This is one of the reasons why traffic in Kolkata is absolute cacophonous hell.

India is what mathematicians call "mosquito-dense" -- between any two mosquitos there's a third mosquito. Okay, that's a joke, but it's to the point where slapping mosquitoes in the air just doesn't help. There's so many of them that one less isn't going to make a difference. Even the Kolkata airport was full of mosquitos. My feet just got eaten like crazy.

The toilets on the West Bengal trains look like toilets at the top, but as you look into them you see that they're really just holes going down to the train tracks. In other words, if somebody shits, the shit spatters all over the tracks. A sign says that you shouldn't use the toilets while the train is in the station, I think so that people waiting at the station won't have to be around your shit. But anyway, this is just disgusting.

On the upside, my relatives all have electricity now. 15 years ago when I last visited, only a few of them did and it was very shaky. This time it sometimes went down, often during storms, but it returned before long.

There was a horrible terrorist attack while I was in West Bengal, in which Maoist rebels called Naxals rode in on bikes and killed 24 policemen who were sitting down to eat. True to the usual ways that groups on the communist left relate to each other, the Maoists' most intense hatred is for the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which governs West Bengal. The CPI(M) accuses its rivals in the more centrist Congress Party, which rules India as a whole, of being soft on the Naxals.

One of the things you have to deal with if you're traveling in West Bengal is the possibility of a bandh -- a general strike in which nobody does any business and transportation stops. The word comes from bondho, meaning 'closed'. These are forms of political civil disobedience, and there are 40-50 of them a year in West Bengal, ranging from a few hours to two days.

February is exam month in West Bengal, and a bunch of my younger cousins were studying or had already done their exams. I took a look at what they were studying. Cousin Koushik from the temple picture above is in the 12th grade and he was doing what looked like second-semester calculus. The little kids knew math ahead of what I recall from good US school districts at their age. Really, I'm impressed with these kids.

My ability to speak Bengali progressed freakishly well over the course of one week. I hadn't spoken it that much for 15 years, since it had been that long since my last visit. Shantinath told me that he was totally astonished.

I didn't get sick! This is because I was absolutely sure not to drink any local tap/well/pump/river water, only bottled water, and Mom made my relatives aware that local water would make me sick, so they were very careful. I even brushed my teeth with bottled water. Also, I didn't eat any unpeeled fresh fruit. The last few times I came, I experienced painful stomach problems, but not this time.

The food was wonderful. Thanks to all my aunts and cousin-in-laws who lovingly cooked so many yummy things (in ways that didn't make me sick)! I would've had some photos, but like a lot of Indian food, you can't really tell how good it tastes from how it looks. You just put it in your mouth and if you hadn't had Indian food before, you'd feel like you were experiencing flavor three-dimensionally for the first time.