Smart Librarians Saved The Timbuktu Manuscripts

It appears that many of the ancient manuscripts of Timbuktu were given to families who would take care of them, so they wouldn't be available for Islamists in Mali to destroy as they left the city. As a result, the people trying to destroy the library ended up not destroying very much. Apparently 28,000 of the 30,000 manuscripts were moved to safety.

These manuscripts are the records of a highly developed African civilization in the middle of the last millennium. There's a tendency to see Africa as a backwards Dark Continent where everything has remained primitive to this day. The records of Timbuktu challenge this view and stand against racist views about the abilities of Africans to build a flourishing and sophisticated society. It would be a tragedy if they were destroyed, and human memory of the details of this civilization was lost. I hope the endangerment of the manuscripts will get more scholars to visit Timbuktu and digitize them. 

There's more information on this at the Timbuktu Manuscripts Project page.

Filibuster Reform Demographics Are Good

I've copied Chris Bowers' awesome chart of the Senators who supported and opposed the talking filibuster, listed by seniority. Unsurprisingly to anyone who follows the debate, seniority is correlated with opposition to reform. So this issue may play out a lot like gay marriage, with support for reform growing stronger with time, as we get more young people who support it and fewer old people who oppose it. The fact that young Senators consistently support reform is also a sign that persuasive momentum is going the right way.

I'd hope for something much bigger than the talking filibuster, which doesn't seem to me that likely to make big changes. Really what I'd like to see, rather than passing anything great or small right away, is that we could get a 50-vote Senate by 2017. If we can win the presidency and overcome our problems with House districts to win the chamber because of a rising economy, and steal a few of the many Republican Senate seats at risk that year, Democrats could pass a lot of amazing legislation. There's some hope for having 60 seats at that point, but even if we do, the left-wing possibilities just get better if it's a 50-vote Senate. We've gotten rid of pointlessly destructive moderates like Nelson and Lieberman, but if we don't even need Manchin or any of the oil-staters, serious climate change legislation becomes a major possibility. It's time to dream big.

One tangential note about this chart -- it shows how fresh the Democratic caucus is. The majority of them have taken their seats in 2007 or later. We've got only three people who have been in the Senate since the 70s. Sherrod Brown's class just won their first re-election campaigns, and they're already halfway up the seniority ladder.

"Very Important And Difficult Work"

Ezra has a list of five interesting things in the new bipartisan immigration reform framework.  This one is number 2, and I liked it:

“Individuals who have been working without legal status in the United States agricultural industry have been performing very important and difficult work to maintain America’s food supply while earning subsistence wages. Due to the utmost importance in our nation maintaining the safety of its food supply, agricultural workers who commit to the long term stability of our nation’s agricultural industries will be treated differently than the rest of the undocumented population.”

Now, I don't know what exactly 'treated differently' means, and it'd be great to help all the dishwashers and janitors too. And there aren't details yet because it's just a framework, and who knows if anything can pass the House. But if the recognition of the importance of agricultural labor is a sign that things will get better for farmworkers, that's wonderful.

Behold, The Power of (Donkey) Cheese!

Congratulations to the new Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic, last seen buying the entire world's supply of donkey cheese.

Clearly this is the food of champions.

Well ... That Was Quick!

In the grand tradition of Senate gangs, a gang of eight has emerged from behind closed doors with some sort of preliminary framework quasi-agreement relating to immigration. Some assorted thoughts.

• Everybody hang on to your butts. This is the opening salvo in what will almost certainly be a long and arduous negotiation between lots of competing political and interest group currents. Don't get too excited. After all, various gangs have emerged with agreements on budget issues, carbon pricing, and all sorts of other goodies over the past four years, but very little has come of it.
• Whiplash. John McCain (R-AZ) in 2004 -- comprehensive reform! In 2006 -- build the danged fence! 2013 -- comprehensive reform! Meanwhile, junior Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who was the most conservative House member -- was a part of these negotiations? Elsewhere, Governor Jan Brewer (R-AZ) is accepting Obamacare dollars to subsidize health care coverage for poor people? When do I get to meet Bizarro George & Bizarro Jerry?
• The useful kind of bipartisanship. There are four ways you can build a bipartisan coalition.
• Left-in coalition. aka all Democrats and a handful of Republicans. The biggest examples of this sort of bipartisanship are the stimulus bill and Dodd-Frank.
• Center-out coalition. The classic Georgetown cocktail party sort of bipartisanship. Max Baucus & Chuck Grassley hammer out a deal with a couple of their centrist buddies--people like Mark Warner--liberals decry the deal as a sellout, conservatives complain that it doesn't show any principles, the op-ed pages of the Washington Post write glowing editorials about bipartisanship and the era of Tip O'Neill & Ronald Reagan having drinks together and "making tough choices", and everyone pats themselves on the back before going home.
• Strange bedfellows coalition. A collection of outsidery folks, say, someone like Ron Wyden (D-OR) and former Senator Bob Bennet (R-UT), who sometimes come up with a "cleaner" legislative solution to a problem, but which may not create as many clear concrete winners (or too many losers) and is therefore less favored. Usually these coalitions fail to pass anything, but if they're lucky they have a positive influence on the bill that finally does pass.
• Right-in coalition. aka all Republicans and a handful of Democrats. We saw a lot of this in the Bush era, mostly around taxes, but also things like the Energy Policy Act or the bankruptcy bill.
  
  Note that because Republicans are on average more conservative than Democrats are liberal, there is an asymmetry here. Right-in coalitions produce very conservative policy, while left-in coalitions produce center-left policy.
The eight Senators negotiating this not-yet-a-bill--Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Michael Bennett (D-CO) for the Dems, Marco Rubio (R-FL), John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsay Graham (R-SC), and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) for the Republicans--make up something closer to a left-in coalition than anything else. Durbin & Menendez are quite liberal; Schumer is at the dead center of the Democratic coalition and in the left half on non-tax & financial services issues; leaving Michael Bennett  as the only moderate. On the GOP sideMcCain has been hard to pin down, but now seems to be settling in as a moderate Republican -- not as moderate as he was in 2000, but someone you can negotiate with. Rubio is quite conservative, but has always been a wet on immigration issues. Lindsay Graham continues to be all over the place but he clearly loves being part of these sorts of negotiations. The only real oddity is Jeff Flake, who's incredibly conservative. I have no idea why he would be willing to put his name on something that had the phrase "path to citizenship" in it, unless Arizona Republicans have simply decided they're going to reverse course on how they deal with the large Latino community in the state.
• That sound you heard out of South Carolina ... was anyone with a political pulse calling their campaign manager and biggest fundraisers, asking if they could start raising money for a Senate race before Lindsay Graham announces his retirement.
• Ours is a government of men (and not enough women!), not of parliamentary procedures. This drives home one of the points I've been making lately, that the specific rule changes in filibuster reform are almost less important than whether or not Senators decide to stop adhering to the norm of "it takes sixty votes to get anything done around here" and maximalist obstruction by the minority party. It's possible that this sort of agreement is a sign of things to come, but it's too early to tell.
• It's not clear how much the Senate matters. The real veto point remains House. What sort of immigration bill can get through the lower chamber? And what are the mechanics for passing it? If Boehner simply lets the bill pass with a minimum of Republican votes, you can probably get something pretty good. But if there's some sort of unwritten Hastert rule, or otherwise an attempt to corral lots of Republicans into voting for "comprehensive immigration reform", then things get tricky.