Warning: Please put your head in a vise before reading further.
Andy Revkin has just written the most illogical climate post on Earth. Or maybe he’s written the most logical climate post on the Bizarro World Htrae.
“Minority Rights” and the US Senate
Lamar Alexander on reconciliation:
The reconciliation procedure is a little-used legislative procedure — 19 times, it’s been used. It’s for the purpose of taxing, spending, and reducing deficits. But the difference here is, that there’s never been anything of this size and magnitude and complexity run through the Senate in this way. There are a lot of technical problems with it, which we could discuss. It would turn the Senate, it would really be the end of the Senate as a protector of minority rights, the place where you have to get consensus, instead of just a partisan majority.
As to the historical use of the budget reconciliation process this is hypocritical nonsense. But it’s also worth taking this “minority rights” business on.
As everyone knows, in a democracy you normally do things with a majority-rules or plurality-rules decision procedure. But as everyone also knows, part of building a sustainable liberal democratic polity is that you don’t just have “the tyranny of the majority.” A strong framework of individual rights is necessary. The idea is that you shouldn’t have the few subjected to oppression by the many. And all that’s fine as far as it goes. But it has to be seen clearly that the US Senate’s countermajoritarian aspects are rarely if ever used to protect “minority rights” in any relevant sense of the word. The Senate fought a lonely battle on behalf of Jim Crow segregation, not against it. And I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an example of a vulnerable minority being subjected to majoritarian persecution by the House, the White House, and the Supreme Court being saved by the heroics of the filibuster.
Luce & Machiavelli on Leadership
Edward Luce in the FT: “American presidents with the greatest record of bipartisan legislative achievement, notably Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, got their way by intimidating opponents, not by splitting the difference. As Machiavelli famously observed, it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. For all his intelligence, nobody fears Mr Obama.”
Exactly. Arguably this trend started with the decision to appoint Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. I have no complaints with her job performance, but it didn’t exactly send an “I will crush my enemies” message.
Copyright and Author Starvation
Jason Epstein has a pretty thoughtful article in The New York Review of book about the future of digital publishing. It’s worth pointing out, however, that he engaged twice in a kind of badly overblown rhetoric about the consequences of a possible world in which copyright collapses and nobody can earn money selling books:
This future is a predictable inference from digitization in its current stage of development in the United States, its details widely discussed in the blogosphere by partisans of various outcomes, including the utopian fantasy that in the digital future content will be free of charge and authors will not have to eat. [...]
Traditional territorial rights will become superfluous and a worldwide, uniform copyright convention will be essential. Protecting content from unauthorized file sharers will remain a vexing problem that raises serious questions about the viability of authorship, for without protection authors will starve and civilization will decline, a prospect recognized by the United States Constitution, which calls for copyright to sustain writers not primarily as a matter of equity but for the greater good of public enlightenment.
Obviously, if you couldn’t make money selling books it’s not that people would write books full-time and starve to death. Nor is it that nobody would write books. Instead, an even larger share of books would be written by people with jobs at universities or other non-profit organizations (this blog is free to read!) or grants of some kind. You’d also no doubt still have an endless flood of self-help books that serve as loss-leaders for conferences or other sources of revenue. Presumably if books were free, then municipalities and universities wouldn’t need to spend money acquiring books for libraries—maybe that would free up more money for grants and stipends to support the creation of new works.
Maybe in the future the United States will be an Yglesias-style social democracy, and committed authors will work part-time jobs secure in the knowledge that even low-income people are served by excellent health care & mass transit and can live in safe neighborhoods that feature good schools for their kids. Or maybe it will be a Brazil-style center of massive inequality and authors will be patronized by vain billionaires.
I dunno. I don’t want to be too pollyannish about this. Realistically, all of the scenarios I can think of still lead to fewer books being published. And maybe more but more expensive books better serves the “greater good of public enlightenment.” Or maybe fewer but cheaper books does. Epstein, to his credit, has the right criteria in mind. But the subject of what actually meets that criteria deserves serious consideration. Books were being published, after all, long before there was effective copyright enforcement.
Sen. Alexander: Using Reconciliation To Pass Health Care Reform Would ‘End The Senate’
Today, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) appeared on ABC’s This Week to discuss last week’s bipartisan health care reform summit. During the summit, Alexander urged the President and Congressional Democrats to “renounce” the idea of using budget reconciliation to pass health care reform. Alexender went even further today, saying that the use of reconciliation would be “the end of the Senate“:
The reconciliation procedure is a little-used legislative procedure — 19 times, it’s been used. It’s for the purpose of taxing, spending, and reducing deficits. But the difference here is, that there’s never been anything of this size and magnitude and complexity run through the Senate in this way. There are a lot of technical problems with it, which we could discuss. It would turn the Senate, it would really be the end of the Senate as a protector of minority rights, the place where you have to get consensus, instead of just a partisan majority.
Watch it:
If using reconciliation were really “the end of the Senate,” the Senate would have died a long time ago, and Lamar Alexander would have been complicit in its death.
Reconciliation has been used to pass at least 19 bills, including major pieces of health care reform legislation like the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Medicare Advantage Program. Fourteen of the times reconciliation was employed it was used to advance Republican interests.
Furthermore, Alexander himself has personally voted for reconciliation at least four times, as Igor Volsky pointed out:
– 2003 Bush Tax Cuts: The Congressional Budget office, Bush’s tax cuts for the rich increased budget deficits by $60 billion in 2003 and by $340 billion by 2008. The bill had a cost of about a trillion dollars. [Alexander voted yes.]
– 2005 Deficit Reduction Act of 2005: The bill cut approximately $4.8 billion over five years and $26.1 billion over the next ten years from Medicaid spending. [Alexander voted yes.]
– 2005 Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005: The bill extended tax cuts on capital gains and dividends and the alternative minimum tax. [Alexander voted yes.]
– 2007 College Cost Reduction and Access Act: The bill forgave all remaining student loan debt after 10 years of public service. [Alexander voted yes]
In the end, Alexander’s mere presence on television this morning seems to indicate that using reconciliation does not, in fact, end the Senate.
January Was the Warmest Temperature in World History
The world is a big place, so despite unseasonable blizzards in the media/political center of the US Northeast on average the planet is still getting warmer:
“January, according to satellite (data), was the hottest January we’ve ever seen,” said Nicholls of Monash University’s School of Geography and Environmental Science in Melbourne.
“Last November was the hottest November we’ve ever seen, November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen,” he said of the satellite data record since 1979.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in December that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850, and that 2009 would likely be the fifth warmest year on record. WMO data show that eight out of the 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2000.
And yet, there’s still snow in my building courtyard. Obviously, Al Gore is a fool!
Kristol: ‘I Didn’t Watch’ The Health Care Summit, But I’ll Comment On It As If I Did
On the Fox News Sunday roundtable this morning, the panelists discussed President Obama’s health care summit. NPR’s Mara Liasson said that while it may have been “political theater,” it was also “very clarifying” because it “laid bare exactly where the two parties stand.”
Host Chris Wallace asked Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, “Have you been clarified?” — leading to this candid acknowledgement from Kristol:
KRISTOL: No, but I didn’t watch it, so — (laughter). I have a life. (laughter)
Everyone on the panel, particularly Wallace, appeared to find Kristol’s admission quite hilarious. More disturbing, however, was that Kristol continued to opine on the health care summit as if he did indeed watch it:
KRISTOL: You compared it at the beginning of the hour to a dog-and-pony show, and I thought to myself, that’s really an insult to dog-and-pony shows. I like the dog shows there on the Animal Planet. … Many people were impressive. The President showed his usual professorial ability to sort of say certain things and highlight certain facts, or alleged facts.
Kristol of course couldn’t comment on what “certain things” or “certain facts” were particularly insightful, since he “didn’t watch it.” Being knowledgeable on the subject matter apparently isn’t a requirement to be a Fox News pundit. Watch it:
Introducing the panel, host Wallace asked Liz Cheney how her father was recovering from his mild heart attack. “He’s doing well,” she said, noting that he was “probably watching” Fox News this morning. “We’ll try to do nothing to upset him,” Wallace responded.
The Amphetamines Era
The new biography of Willie Mays sounds interesting, but the notion that “[a]bove all, the story of Willie Mays reminds us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy” is either naive or dishonest.
Amphetamines have been widely used for decades, dating well back into Mays’ time as a player and even earlier. And why wouldn’t they have been used? Using them without a prescription wasn’t illegal until the 1970s, and there was no baseball rule against using them until even earlier. There’s good reason to believe that uncontrolled amphetamine use is dangerous, so it makes perfect sense to try to create an enforceable ban on their use to prevent a downward spiral that has bad health consequences, but the fact of the matter is that there was no such enforceable ban when Mays played and amphetamines were widely used. They’re drugs and they enhanced performance.
There was no time “before” people tried to get an edge by ingesting useful substances (I drink a lot of coffee while writing blog posts in a rush in the morning) and there never will be. Sports have rules for a reason, and rules that aim to restrict consumption of potentially dangerous drugs seem like a good idea to me. And players shouldn’t break the rules. But the idea that some vast moral transformation occurred circa 1995 to which the great ones of yore were immune is silly.
Improving How Scientists Communicate About Climate Change
The need is urgent for climate scientists to communicate more effectively to policymakers and the public. This article details some of the problems with how climate scientists communicate and offers practical suggestions for improvement. For example, scientists can improve their effectiveness by avoiding jargon as well as words that mean different things to scientists than to non-scientists. They can use appropriate metaphors and re-frame poorly framed questions. As policymakers grapple with the climate challenge, scientists should take the opportunity and responsibility of clearly communicating what the wider world needs to know about this issue.
Saying scientists are not doing a terribly good job communicating climate science is like saying the status quo media are not doing a terribly good job communicating climate science. But then the media doesn’t suffer the consequences of that failure. At least not more than, say, the American pika….
Our guest blogger is Susan Joy Hassol, an expert in climate communication. She was lead author of “Impacts of A Warming Arctic,” the synthesis report of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, and helped author or edit many major climate reports in the past decade. In 2008, she wrote “Improving How Scientists Communicate About Climate Change,” which is reprinted below with her permission:
Pelosi Welcomes Tea Partiers To Join Progressives In Fighting Against Special Interests
Last year, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) proclaimed that the tea party movement is “astroturf [and] not really a grassroots movement. It’s astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class.” Pelosi has been repeatedly attacked since then by many on the right who object to the notion that the tea party movement is being hijacked by Republican operatives.
Today, during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” with host Elizabeth Vargas, Pelosi reiterated her belief that much of the tea party movement is “orchestrated from the Republican headquarters.” But, she also explained that progressives “share some of the views of the Tea Partiers in terms of the role of special interest in Washington” and welcomed tea partiers to join progressives in battling special interests:
PELOSI: the Republican Party directs a lot of what the Tea Party does, but not everybody in the Tea Party takes direction from the Republican Party. And so there was a lot of, shall we say, Astroturf, as opposed to grassroots. But, you know, we share some of the views of the Tea Partiers in terms of the role of special interest in Washington, D.C., as — it just has to stop.
Watch it:
Indeed, as ThinkProgress has documented, many of the principal organizers of the local tea party events are the well-funded right-wing astroturf organizations Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. Both provided logistical support and public relations assistance, including “sign ideas, sample press releases, and a map of events around the country.”
Yet, as Pelosi states in the interview, opposition to entrenched special interests cut across party and ideological lines. She rightly notes that for example, Americans overwhelmingly oppose the recent Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case that eliminated decades of campaign laws that restrict corporate spending in election campaigns. A recent poll found that 80 percent of Americans oppose the decision with 85 percent of Democrats, 76 percent of Republicans, and 81 percent of independents opposed.
