Ann Friedman offers some suggested actions for people infuriated by the Stupak Amendment. But she leaves off what I think is the most objectively important consideration, which is to bring pressure to bear on both the composition of the inevitable conference committee and also the shape of its deliberations. If a bill emerges from conference all Stupak’d up, then it’s going to go like it did last night where a group of legislators who overwhelmingly oppose the Stupak language vote yes on a bill that includes it. If a Stupak-free bill emerges, then I think there’s every reason to believe it can be passed. This debate is far from over and it’s important to try to turn it around.

Representative Joseph Cao is a freshman Republican who won 49.6 percent of the vote against a corrupt incumbent in a district that’s 64% black and has a median income of $25,000. I think it should come as no surprise that someone in that situation might want to break with the GOP leadership now and then. For example, he voted for the health care reform bill last night. For his trouble, he’s being treated to some interesting tweets:

RT @RightBloggerPat: @AnhJosephCao You Bastard piece of shit fuck! GO BACK TO Saigon, South Vietnam where you fucking BELONG GOOK! #TCOT

There’s also a whole bunch of folks who’ve decided that it’d be hilarious to start referring to Rep. Cao as “Mao” because, you see, they’re both responsible for the deaths of millions Asians. Also this.

I think the conservative movement is going to continue to struggle in a decreasingly white American.

As soon as it emerged that the spree killer at Fort Hood was named Nidal Malik Hasan it was of course inevitable that people would start speculating about motives (“This Was An Act of Jihad” wrote New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz) and in some quarters we saw talk about the need to do more discrimination against Muslim Americans. Why bother, I figured, an actual investigation will happen. And it seems that “After two days of inquiry into the mass shooting at Fort Hood, investigators have tentatively concluded that it was not part of a terrorist plot.” Rather, they think he “acted out under a welter of emotional, ideological and religious pressures, according to interviews with federal officials who have been briefed on the inquiry.”

This is perhaps a moment to reflect on the fact that the murder of innocent people is not really made better or worse by deep inquiry into the precise nature of the crime. It’s not as if had Hasan left a note saying “despite my name I don’t practice Islam and am acting out of wholly non-religious motives” that his victims would somehow be less dead. Alternatively, suppose this had been part of a “plot”—they wouldn’t be any more dead. But the terrorism fears around this subject should also remind us that the fear of a “save haven” in Afghanistan continues to be an underscrutinized concept. Suppose there had been a terrorist plot here? What role would a safe haven have played in it? The key assets Hasan had, from the point of view of committing acts of violence against Americans, were access to weapons and a physical location inside the United States of America.

An interesting table from The New York Times profiles the House Democrats who voted “no” on health reform last night. Mostly it’s people from districts that went for John McCain, oftentimes heavily so. There’s also Artur Davis whose district suggests he ought to be a solid Democratic vote but who’s running for governor of Alabama and thus tacking way to the right of what his district requires. You’ve also got idiosyncratic nos from Brian Baird and Dennis Kucinich and a clutch of freshman Dems from districts Obama won.

This last group, I think, provided the House leadership with a margin of error on the vote. The leaders want to hold these seats, so are happy to let these folks vote no if their votes aren’t necessary. But it’s far from clear that a Larry Kissell or a John Adler (both from districts Obama won by five percent) actually does need to vote need to vote no in order to stay viable. Arms could be twisted in other words. Given how close the vote was in the end, it’s noteworthy that there was no real sign of nervousness from the House leadership all day—they had this in the bag.

Fred Kaplan explains the forgotten history of Berlin crises during the Cold War and ends on a familiar note:

Remains of the Berlin Wall (my photo, available under cc license)

The wall was built to bottle up an incipient revolt—a mass emigration that threatened to expose the Soviet system as inferior to the West, as an oppressive dungeon that its most educated young people yearned to escape. The wall not only blocked those yearnings; it also made clear to the brighter young Soviet and Eastern European leaders that the system itself—the ideological basis of their rule—was suspect, that it could not be sustained, much less compete with the West, without the internal imposition of force.

It’s interesting to reflect that it’s very much still the case that millions of people living in Ukraine and Russia and for that matter Mexico and Mozambique would love to engage in mass emigration to the West and expose the systems under which they live as corrupt and uncompetitive. Indeed, according to Gallup 700 million people would like to migrate permanently to a new country:

But of course the voters of the United States and Canada have no intention of letting as many people show up as might like to come, and the voters of Western Europe have even less desire for this, and those of Japan even less.