The Dichotomous Economy and The Atlantic Monthly

28 February 10

“Mr. Burns, in light of your unbelievable contempt for human life this court fines you three million dollars.” – Judge Snyder

“Smithers, my wallet’s in my right, front pocket.” – C.M.  Burns

The cover story in the March issue of The Atlantic Monthly had an interesting premise.  Though we may have avoided a repeat of the Great Depression the general economic consensus is that high unemployment isn’t going to recede any time soon.  If that be true, then what does that mean for America?  What effects will unemployment in the 10% range mean for a country accustomed to unemployment in the 5% vicinity?

The article itself is quite interesting; it goes through a dizzying repertory of academics from a variety of fields as it tries to explain what kinds of social and cultural changes we may see.  One of its more depressing conclusions is that the inner cities, though they’ve never really prospered are for the most part a lot better than they were in the 70s and 80s, may slide back.  Other conclusions include the base failure of American manufacturing and the futility of mass education.  Long article short: it’s bleak.

What this particular article has a harder time with, however, is trying to put all that despair into a context that a relatively affluent and well educated readership cares about. That fundamental conundrum leads to quotes like this one from near the end of the article:

The research of Till Von Wachter, the economist at Columbia University, suggests that not all people graduating into a recession see their life chances dimmed: those with degrees from elite universities catch up fairly quickly to where they otherwise would have been if they’d graduated in better times; it’s the masses beneath them that are left behind.

Ah ha!  That Americans armored with even a bachelor’s degree from a name school will do just fine isn’t news in the least.  Though it may come as a surprise to the distinctly Ivy looking young man who graced the full page photo that opens the article.  I assure you that he, and more importantly those he represents, will not have any trouble in this brave new world of 10% unemployment.

Whoever dreamed up this image certainly earned their pay: a preppie with a hobo bindle!  That’s non-verbal brilliance!  But look at that kid: his shoes are polished to a mirror shine, his trousers have sharp creases, his tie is properly knotted, and there’s nary a scuff mark to be seen on his satchel/laptop case.  (I’d be curious to know why they went with the sweater instead of the suit coat, maybe it helps him look younger or something.)  This eminently employable stereotype, for whom all the doors of our world will automatically open, is the opposite of a poster boy for a thoroughly researched story about the horrors of unemployment.  An educated white male, young and sexy, is the definitional opposite of what this article describes.

There’s nothing really wrong with that.  Marketing is a fucker and pitching things directly to your affluent audience is a good way to stay employed.  But the more interesting thing here isn’t the content, it’s the presentation.  The concept that underlies everything about this is the same horrifying problem that makes gritty movies about “hardship” seem so topical: economic apocalypse.  There ought to be klaxons sounding all over the land to reduce the unemployment level, but there aren’t.  It takes a clever visual gimmick, an improbable picture postcard of upper middle class failure, to put a dire spin on things for people who will weather this crisis just fine, thank you very much.

It’s fun to talk about how we ought pay for medical care.  It’s fun to talk about the grinding horror that is the current economy.  But the people who do the prominent talking are the least justified to do so.  Educated and affluent Caucasians are not troubled, nor will they be.  It’s just telling that literary backflips are considered necessary to interest them in the reality of everyone else.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Of Apple and Naked Women

24 February 10
“I’m gonna go draw boobs on the Etch-a-Sketch!” – FBI Agent #1
“Go ahead, they always come out square!” – FBI Agent #2

There has been a recent dustup over Apple’s hypocritical enforcement of Helen Lovejoy style censorship at the App Store.  (For those who don’t lust after every swanky piece of technology that comes in rounded plastic, the App Store is how Apple distributes little software programs for iPhones and the like.)  Basically anything even the least bit sexual recently got banned, with the exception of sexual stuff from “well-known” companies like Playboy and Sports Illustrated (it’s the Swimsuit Issue time of year).

This produced well founded accusations of hypocrisy and corporate favoritism.  Apple was applying a very obvious double standard: if you’re a big company known for women in bikinis you’re A-OK.  If you’re some programmer who creates an app that involves women in bikinis you’re banned.  End of story.

What this means in practice is that Apple has quite willingly involved itself in a censorship problem that up until now private businesses have been more than happy to foist off on government.  The appetite of the general public for pictures of hot chicks (in all their forms) is basically unquenchable.  Yet polite society, of both the white gloved genteel stripe and the 21st century empowered women variety, finds these things uncouth.  It is a thankless task to be the ones who select what gets allowed and what doesn’t precisely because it is logically impossible to formulate a coherent policy of what does and does not cross the line.  The process is inevitably selective and arbitrary and that leads to a lot of criticism, especially from tech people who are opposed to such things on principle.

But the bigger hypocrisy here isn’t even related to what does or does not offend traditional morality or the dignity of women.  As MG Siegler of TechCrunch pointed out right in his headline: “Apple, There’s Pornography On My iPhone. The App Is Called Safari.”  iPhones, iPads and all the rest are designed to access the regular old internet where images (and more) of people with just the tiniest scraps of clothing are considered tame.  So let’s not kid ourselves, keeping porn (or just swimsuit models) off of those clean, sexily asexual devices isn’t the point.

The real reason Apple pulled the plug on small time smut is that it’s embarrassing.  Apple is one of the most respected brands in the world and to be associated in any way with silly little apps that get guys to titter is beneath them.  Which is not to say that large, respectable corporations shy away from profiting off of sex.  Television and movies will go out of their way to get actors and actresses in their skivvies or less, hotel chains rake in big bucks from in room porn, and virtually any product you can think of has been sold with ads that use overtly sexual ideas or imagery.  But those things (even the in-room porn by virtue of being discreet) are all more respectable than an app called “Asian Boobs”.

That’s why Sports Illustrated and even Playboy get to stay, it’s not that they’re “well-known”, it’s that they’re respectable.  They’ve been immunized (for a variety of reasons) from the taint of for profit sex and that means Apple can be associated with them at no cost to its immeasurably valuable brand.  And it’s not as though Apple needs the piddling amount of revenue it gets from these things.

This hypocrisy on Apple’s part shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, and it’s probably not even worth condemning.  The only thing they’re abandoning is the anything goes ethos of the internet, but, contrary to their free spirited marketing, they’ve always been one of the more restrictive technology firms (ask anyone who’s ever tried to get music in or out of iTunes).  They want to be the more policed technology platform and while that pisses off a lot of people who see a double standard, in the end Apple is big enough to do whatever it wants.

Leave a Comment » | App Store, Apple, Systems Analyst, The Information Superhighway, iPhone | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

The Potential Power of Shame

21 February 10
“I feel so full of . . . what’s the opposite of shame?” – Bart Simpson
“Pride?” – Marge Simpson
“No, not that far from shame.” – Bart Simpson
“Less shame?” – Homer Simpson
“Yeah.” – Bart Simpson

Bob Herbert, who really should get more on-line love than he does, had one of his typically great/depressing columns yesterday.  In it he goes another round on the crumbling nature of our physical and social infrastructure.  This time the specifics are about the horrendous state of some of our public schools.  Long story short, they’re bad and getting worse.

Herbert catalogues some rather embarrassing facts about the ancient and dilapidated nature of some of our school buildings.  It’s the kind of depressing horror story that an American eye is more accustomed to reading in relation to Third World shitholes.  Except that it’s not some equatorial, post-colonial kleptocracy, it’s the United States of America.

That we’ve allowed the physical foundations of our country to molder and decay is not exactly news.  It’s right in your face every time you see a story about sinkhole opening up or a bridge collapse, or even if you just hit a big pothole.  What’s interesting here is the angle Herbert takes, one that seems to be cropping up more and more often: shame.

Americans, traditionally, love few things more than lording how kick ass our country is over other people.  We spent most of the 20th century doing it, from sending strapping six foot tall Doughboys to fight against and alongside the malnourished poor of Europe through landing men on the moon and giving the world the internet while our former enemies eroded into oblivion.  One of our most cherished self confidences is the essential awesomeness of the U.S. of A.  And yet we store kids in asbestos laden school buildings that have been in service since their grandparents were learning the alphabet.

As fantastically wealthy as we are, our ability to afford to delude ourselves about (or simply ignore) these problems is beginning to run out.  Not that long ago, a mere three decades or so, California had a higher education system that was the envy of the world.  Now the right wing lunatics in the cockpit have put the thing into a cataclysmic dive while Stewardess Schwarzenegger tries to placate the screaming passengers with off brand cookies and filthy pillows.  The story is the same from sea to shining sea.

The objective realities Herbert’s describing are so shameful, so flat out embarrassing to any American who thinks America is a great country, that no argument should be necessary.  It’s the same tack that was once used by Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and though it’s fallen out of favor here in Nixonland America it might be time for shame to make a comeback.  It’s been away for far too long.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Google Buzz: Homogenization FAIL

17 February 10
“These uniforms are a godsend.  Horseplay is down 40%, youthful exuberance has been cut in half, high spirits are at an all time low.” – Principal Skinner
“They’ve even begun blinking in unison.” – Lunchlady Doris

Google has been getting a great deal of well deserved criticism over their haphazard and privacy destroying new feature Buzz.  The primary thrust of these criticisms is that Buzz, without the user’s permission and with a very convoluted opt-out process, makes information Gmail users believed was private available to a wide variety of people.  Google has blundered into a rather embarrassing mess for themselves and they would be wise to clean it up post haste.

But the most interesting aspect of this isn’t about privacy or opt-outs.  It’s about why Google thought this was a good idea in the first place.  It seems fairly obvious that Google watched in horror as the Facebook Death Star got closer and closer to fully armed and operational and decided to strike back before it was too late.  After all, there’s no iron law of the internet that says that search companies must be the dominant players.  Ten years ago plenty of very smart, very connected people believed all that crap about “portal” sites like Yahoo!, MSN and AOL being the internet’s gatekeepers.  Google ate their lunch and finished digesting it before the other sites realized what was happening.

But like any good predator Google knows that its place atop the food chain is never secure.  They are always on the lookout for new things and new threats, and all the stuff that falls under the rubric of “social networking” most definitely qualifies as a threat.  It’s an on-line behavior that doesn’t require massive indexing of disparate websites (which is what Google is good at).  Like any internet company Google doesn’t like it when people can use the internet without using them and Buzz was Google’s latest attempt to be a comprehensive internet company, one that has its fingers in every worthwhile pie.

The failure of Buzz, and make no mistake it is a failure already, was foreordained when Google attempted to leverage its dominant position in webmail into a jump start on social networking.  From Google’s perspective Buzz undoubtedly seemed like a very natural evolution of Gmail.  Google knows what percentage of Gmail messages go to other Gmail accounts, and based on the ubiquity of @gmail.com it’s probably a big number.  To an engineer it’s simple: if both sides of the conversation are running your software that means it’s easy to add more capabilities, so why not add them?

What they failed to take into account is that the level of on-line presence (and disclosure) with which people are comfortable varies enormously.  On an internet where Facebook expands like a brushfire and Twitter goes from unknown service to commonly understood verb in less than two years it’s easy to assume that everyone is rushing to place their whole lives on-line.  But it ain’t necessarily so.  Just as at a party there are prima donnas and there are wallflowers, some people will want to share their whole lives on-line and others won’t.

Even that is a gross simplification however, because the variety of ways for people to interact is always increasing.  Someone who abhors the idea of having a Facebook account may live and die on Flickr.  Someone who loves uploading YouTube videos may have no use whatsoever for Twitter and vice versa.  There is no generic internet user anymore than there is a generic person.  And this diversity, not only of the people on-line but of the different things they do on-line, is only going to increase as technology improves and broadband access spreads.

Buzz was an attempt to homogenize the way people operate on-line and that is why it’s been such a spectacular failure.  When people think of “e-mail” certain characteristics spring to mind, including the fact that any given message is directed at a finite and chosen number of recipients and that the communication is private between those people.  (Though any recipient can, of course, disseminate the message further.)  When people think of “social networking” a different set of characteristics spring to mind.  Blending the two in an effort to take another step towards some shimmering ideal of the Ultimate Communication Tool is a fool’s errand.

The greatest attraction of the internet is agreement.  You can find people who like the same things you do and you get to do things the way you want to do them.  Trying to force people to do things a certain way will never work.  The privacy problems of Google Buzz are just the symptom, the cause is that Google failed to understand that everyone gets to use the internet the way they want to and a lot of people don’t want anything to do with social networking.

Leave a Comment » | Google, Systems Analyst, The Information Superhighway | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

“An Avalanche of Shit”

14 February 10
“Ohhh, it’s everywhere.  Ahhhh!  It’s in my raccoon wounds!” – Peter Griffin

Bush the Younger has been out of office for a little more than a year now.  Yet the pall of his disastrous presidency still covers the land, in almost every conceivable way.  Perhaps nowhere are its gloomy effects clearer than in the festering hysteria that has greeted even the most timid efforts of his successor to change the way we deal with terrorist suspects.  The most recent casualty of the fear Bush the Younger instilled was the Obama Administration’s eminently sensible plan to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York City.

The attacks that scuppered that idea where wholly political in nature, motivated by little more than the desire to give the Administration a black eye.  They succeeded wildly and the Mohammed trial, far and away the most high profile interaction between al-Qaeda and the US justice system, has been thrown into limbo.  In the most recent issue of The New Yorker Jane Mayer lays out the cringe inducing details.

The entire article is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the Obama Administration’s approach to rectifying the Bush Administration’s scorched earth approach to civil liberties while still prosecuting the men they apprehended and tortured.  As if that weren’t difficult enough, they have to do it in a political environment that seems to have only two moods, panic and outrage.  (It goes almost without saying that both of those feelings are being aggressively stoked by well funded and high profile right wingers.)  One of Mayer’s sources described the legal situation Barack Obama inherited as an “avalanche of shit”.  But that phrase is just as applicable to the wider context.

Two things stand out in the article.  The first is the rather craven political calculation that resulted in the military commissions being retained instead of scrapped.  White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel does not come off well, chasing phantom Republican support that, it seems quite obvious, will never materialize.  The second is the unbelievable bureaucratic resistance to holding the Mohammed trial in New York City.  As the cost of the trial kept escalating there was neither bureaucratic nor public relations pushback from the Administration and the result was an outright fiasco.

The fact that all of this is getting mainstream exposure in The New Yorker is itself indicative of the problem.  The right wing made a concerted effort, headlined by A-list names like William Kristol and Elizabeth Cheney.  The Administration has an article in a literary magazine best known to the general public for its cartoons.  Mayer delved into some of this in an on-line question session with readers:

QUESTION FROM GUEST: What did you think of how Jon Stewart answered Newt Gingrich the other night on The Daily Show? When asked if he really wanted to see the 9/11 terrorists tried in NYC, Jon’s unequivocal answer was YES! Then he expounded on how tough New Yorkers were and would love to see these guys convicted and sentenced right here where it all happened.

JANE MAYER: I think the Obama Administration would have done a lot better if they got Jon Stewart and several dozen other real New Yorkers, including some of the 9/11 families who also favored holding the trial in NY, to speak up a little earlier.

That pretty well covers it.  Obama himself hardly spoke about the decision at all and the media vacuum was filled by cowardly wingnuts like Rudy Giuliani.  Both Attorney General Eric Holder and Obama himself come off quite well in Mayer’s piece, but their deep convictions and conversations with one another are publicly nonexistent and therefore politically useless.

It’s unknown whether a more concerted effort by the Administration would’ve led to a different outcome in this case.  But being correct on the legal and moral merits means very little when everything can be politicized.  Excellently reported New Yorker pieces are like attacking that avalanche with a plastic spork.  Whatever avenue towards a civilian trial the Administration tries next, they would be well advised to realize that so long as Bush the Younger’s shadow still covers the land the politics of the thing are far more important than the legalities.  That’s not a pleasant thought, nor is it the way things are supposed to be, but for now it’s how things are.

Leave a Comment » | America's Elite, Eric Holder, I Love America, Institutionalized Stupidity, Military Tribunals, Obama Administration, Torture, War on Terror | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Babes at Play

10 February 10
“Alright ninjas, let’s go protect the world.” – Stan Marsh
“Kickass.” – Eric Cartman

There is a childish naivete to the fiscal thinking of the Republican Party that would be endearing if it wasn’t costing the country so much damn money.  Talking Points Memo has been having some fun with this because it goes right to the heart of how disastrously dysfunctional the Republican Party has become.  On the one side you’ve got Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan and his Budget of Doom that calls for things so politically toxic they defeated Bush the Younger at the height of his powers in early 2005.  Ryan, by the way, won his last election by almost thirty points and outspent his token opposition more than $10-$1.  He can afford to say things that are politically unacceptable to the Red Leadership because his seat is as safe as safe can be.

On the other side you’ve got John Boehner who very much wants to be Speaker of the House and knows that if the general public begins associating House Republicans with Medicare cuts and the destruction of Social Security he’ll never get close to Nancy Pelosi’s gavel.  When asked what he disagreed with in Ryan’s Budget of Doom, however, Boehner said, “Off the top of my head, I couldn’t tell you”.  Boehner and other nationally minded Republicans are caught in a bind, Ryan’s ideas are ones they like and endorse, but they’re also massively unpopular.  So all they can do is mumble and hope that no serious national attention is directed their way.

The reason for this all this misdirection and coyness is simple, the federal budget is in deep shit and there are only two ways to fix it: A) slashing federal spending or B) raising taxes.  (Those are simplifications, but they’re basically true.)  What’s so commendable about the budget put out by Ryan is that it shows what it would really take to implement Option A.  It means gutting the federal government’s two biggest programs, Social Security and Medicare.  (This is, of course, if we assume his little privatization gimmicks will work.  They probably wouldn’t but for the purposes of this discussion we can give him the benefit of the doubt.)  The problem, and the reason Boehner ran screaming from this budget like it was cursed by demons, is that Social Security and Medicare are extremely popular programs.  It’s not for nothing that Social Security is referred to as the “third rail” of American politics and Medicare is so popular that a lot of rightists can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge that it’s a government program.  So much for Option A.

All you’re left with then is Option B (raise taxes) which is philosophically anathema to the right wing.  So long as defense spending is sacrosanct there is no Option C and that means that you’re left with nothing at all.  If you’re not willing to implement either A or B, then you don’t have anything useful to say.  Boehner may or may not get his soft, improbably orange hands on a gavel, but until he and the rest of the Red leadership sack up and go for A or B (neither of which seems likely) no real progress can be made.  How does that old phrase go?  Lead, follow or get out of the way?

Nevermind.  That’s probably too much to ask all at once.  How about just stopping your enormously expensive game of Let’s Pretend?

Leave a Comment » | 2010 Election, Systems Analyst, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Why CNN Is Worse Than Fox News

8 February 10
“I’m sorry little girl, we don’t just put people on teevee . . . unless of course they’re replying to an editorial.” – Channel 6 Station Manager
“Uh, I am.  I’m strongly opposed to proposition, uh, 305.” – Lisa Simpson
“You’re against discount bus fares for war widows?” – Channel 6 Station Manager
“Uh, you bet I am.” – Lisa Simpson
“Okay.  Makeup!” – Channel 6 Station Manager

It is neither difficult nor uncommon for the ideological dishonesty that pervades Fox News to be exposed.  Just this week the intrepid Jon Stewart was on there criticizing them on their own network.  Last weekend Paul Krugman personally confronted Fox News president Roger Ailes with one of the innumerable examples of his network’s commitment to right wing spin at any cost.  (Ailes is no slouch, he ignored Krugman’s example and went right back to his talking points.)  Outside of its core audience you’ll have little trouble convincing someone that Fox has a distorting effect on the news, misinforms its millions of viewers, and is as uncaring about the damage it does as a far gone alcoholic.  But while Fox News may not have any integrity, they do have a viewpoint.  CNN has neither integrity nor a viewpoint, and that’s why they do considerably more damage to our politics than Fox does.

Whatever else can be said about Fox News they advocate for a point of view that is common to millions of Americans.  They spread and reinforce that viewpoint, no doubt about it, but it would still exist without them.  And while they push their ideological narrative in the shallowest possible ways (through mindless repetition from the mouths of skinny blond women), that is less a conscious choice than it is a natural consequence.  Their kind of messages work best in the shallow end of the news pool.  (Last week we saw what happens to those talking points when they are dropped in the deep end.)  CNN, on the other hand, seems to traffic in shallow gossip news for no reason other than vacuous emulation.

CNN’s wholesale adoption of endless “analysis” in place of actual news or reporting is a gimmick without a motive.  They try to present themselves as objective and even handed (“we’ve got people from both sides!” screams their advertising), but eschew the intellectual heft and gravitas that those things require.  Consider the embarrassing incident from last year when they fact checked a Saturday Night Live skit while rarely or never doing the same to their actual guests.  If they wanted to be trusted by the public that’s the kind of thing they’d be doing all the time.  But that would mean they’d need to abandon the petty back and forth that has become their bread and butter.

They have excellent production values, talented on air employees, and plenty of budget for research and fact checking.  If CNN had a daily program dedicated to comparing the statements made on the three political channels to verifiable facts it would set them apart from the crowd.  It would also give them a genuine claim to being what political journalism is supposed to be: impartial.  But these days CNN prefers the appearance of impartiality that comes with staffing and booking an equal number of lefties and righties, which is why they’ve got the empty suit that is Wolf Blitzer on for three hours, five days a week (plus an hour on Saturday) with a show whose title implies perpetual emergency.

That wholesale desecration of anything that could be called journalism can in some way be justified if you’re advocating for a position.  But it cannot be justified if your primary claim is that you’re the middle of the road network.  The entire premise of CNN is a contradiction: we do political journalism right by not doing it all.

What’s so galling about this is that no national outlet save The Daily Show ever gives CNN the same level of coal raking that Fox gets.  For proof, we can look to The Daily Show itself.  On November 3rd of last year Stewart et al. ran one of the most brutally accurate satires of CNN ever to grace television.  It was largely ignored by the left side of the internet and as of this writing that specific clip on thedailyshow.com has been viewed 116,011 times.  Two days later, on November 5th, Stewart did an impression of Fox News’ latest star, Glenn Beck.  That item was linked in more places on the left side of the internet than I can count and as of this writing that clip has been viewed 871,050 times.

Partly we can chalk this up to the combined star wattage of Stewart and Beck, but there’s something more as well.  From Media Matters on down the reality based community takes glee in pointing out the foibles of Fox News.  They represent the enemy and it feels good to expose their hypocrisy and aversion to facts.  But Fox will always be that way because that is the very purpose of having a right wing network.  CNN is just as bad but their mushy lack of an ideology makes them a less satisfying target, even though there is at least some hope of redeeming them should the critical fire ever be trained more heavily their way.

Fox argues in their chosen way, that’s their prerogative and while it serves their base it has little appeal to the majority of Americans.  But CNN lowers the entire debate by engaging in the same sensationalist crap while cloaking it in claims of impartiality.  The existence of the former is probably unavoidable (if Fox News ever went under something would replace it), but the latter is a bleeding wound on the way we conduct politics in this country.

Leave a Comment » | America's Elite, CNN, Fox News, Institutionalized Stupidity, The Vast Wasteland | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Um, . . . What He Said (Part 3)

3 February 10
“Stockdale, if we don’t deliver this pizza in thirty minutes it’s free.  What’s the holdup?” – Ross Perot
“Gridlock!” – Adm. Stockdale

The current sense amongst people whose political opinions I respect is that if the Blues cannot get anything significant done with numbers as favorable as these then we really are all doomed.  The knee jerk reaction to this grim but increasingly plausible conclusion is to slather blame on Barack Obama, feckless Congressional Blues, really anyone with a D anywhere near their name.  That’s understandable and certainly at least partially true, but there’s a shallowness to it that I find disconcerting.

Then I read two excellent posts at James Fallows’ blog.  They were messages he received from “someone with many decades’ experience in national politics”.  The first begins:

“GOP member: ‘I’d like this in the bill.’

“Dem member response: ‘If we put it in, will you vote for the bill?’

“GOP member:  ‘You know I can’t vote for the bill.’

“Dem member:  ‘Then why should we put it in the bill?’

“I witnessed this myself.”

There is considerably more at the original post, but the really disheartening stuff comes in the follow up post from the same anonymous person:

“A closely related development fascinates and infuriates me, partly re the GOP and partly re the press.  In the Senate, the GOP votes against cloture.  But when the Dems finally manage to get the 60 votes, lots of GOP senators typically vote for the bill on final passage.  “What’s up with THAT?” I’ve asked several times.  In the past, if you opposed a bill getting to a vote on the floor, typically (admittedly not always) you would also oppose it IN the vote on the floor.  That was the only reason to oppose it getting to the floor – because you opposed it!  The answer, I’ve been told several times (by Democratic staffers, who don’t seem at all surprised or perturbed), is that a lot of Republicans don’t want to be on record as voting against a bill they believe the public or their constituents favor.  Huh?  Trying to kill it without a vote is somehow safe politically, but voting against it on final passage is not?  Now that, I submit, is an anomaly the blame for which we can lay at the feet of the much-diminished news media, and the shortcomings of the Senate Democrats.”

Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for your modern media-political complex!  Not only are Red senators allowed to act like spoiled children, they’re able to get away with it scot free.  If you have any interest in how the American government works (or doesn’t) read both posts in full.

None of the above absolves Obama, Congressional Blues or the rest of our only non-insane political party.  But if Fallows’ correspondent is correct then they are facing something genuinely new under the sun.  Which is another way of saying that for once the hoary old canard “nobody could’ve predicted” is in some way true.  They expected resistance, but they expected it within the usual framework of Congress.

The only question that remains is what, if anything, they can do about it.  Because they have nine months (and probably two years after that, but that’s just my guess) with Congressional majorities but no Senate super majority.  I don’t know enough about how the Senate operates to know whether or not the Blues can find a way to circumvent or short-circuit this kind of exploitative obstructionism.  But if a way cannot be found then we have a far bigger problem in this country than budget deficits, health care costs, and wars no one seems to want to talk about.

Leave a Comment » | The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos