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Hmmm. What happened here? There is no documentary record, so perhaps if Hopper hides no one will connect her with it. Worth a try! Meanwhile, Hilbert hangs around absentmindedly, not realizing that his sister is doing her best to pin the rap entirely on him. That’s family values, folks.
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You may have seen the news that Sea World in San Diego will no longer be allowed to breed killer whales:
After an all-day meeting that drew hundreds of supporters and critics of the park, the California Coastal Commission moved to ban captive whale breeding and drastically restrict the movement of whales in and out of the park.
The California Coastal Commission? Why do they have any say over Sea World’s orca breeding? One of the charmingly idiosyncratic aspects of governance in California is that the Coastal Commission regulates all construction done within about 1000 yards of the coastline. As you can see, Sea World is well within that boundary, and it so happens that they wanted to build a bigger tank for their killer whales. But they could only do this if the Coastal Commission approved it.
Still confused? Well, the initiative that created the Coastal Commission didn’t really put any boundaries on the commission’s power. They can pretty much cut any deal they want, which is why they’re so furiously hated by every gazillionaire who lives near the coast. In this case, their deal was this: you can build the bigger tank, but only if you stop breeding whales and don’t bring any new ones in. And that was that.
This has been today’s California Explainer for all you poor folks who are forced to live in less desirable parts of the country and don’t understand our tribal customs. You’re welcome.
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Here’s Why Sea World in San Diego Can’t Breed Killer Whales Any Longer
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REPORT: John Boehner is personally asking Paul Ryan to step up and be Speaker. They have spoken twice today by phone….Boehner told Ryan he is the only person who can unite GOP at this crisis moment. Ryan undecided but listening, per source.
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Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Ben Carson:
Ryssdal: As you know, Treasury Secretary Lew has come out in the last couple of days and said, “We’re gonna run out of money, we’re gonna run out of borrowing authority, on the fifth of November.” Should the Congress then and the president not raise the debt limit? Should we default on our debt?
Carson: Let me put it this way: if I were the president, I would not sign an increased budget. Absolutely would not do it. They would have to find a place to cut.
Ryssdal: To be clear, it’s increasing the debt limit, not the budget, but I want to make sure I understand you. You’d let the United States default rather than raise the debt limit.
Carson: No, I would provide the kind of leadership that says, “Get on the stick guys, and stop messing around, and cut where you need to cut, because we’re not raising any spending limits, period.”
Ryssdal: I’m gonna try one more time, sir. This is debt that’s already obligated. Would you not favor increasing the debt limit to pay the debts already incurred?
Carson: What I’m saying is what we have to do is restructure the way that we create debt. I mean if we continue along this, where does it stop? It never stops. You’re always gonna ask the same question every year. And we’re just gonna keep going down that pathway. That’s one of the things I think that the people are tired of.
Ryssdal: I’m really trying not to be circular here, Dr. Carson, but if you’re not gonna raise the debt limit and you’re not gonna give specifics on what you’re gonna cut, then how are we going to know what you are going to do as president of the United States?
It sure sounds as if Carson doesn’t know what the debt limit is, doesn’t it? Kai Ryssdal tries manfully to get a straight answer out of him, and after the fourth try Carson rambles into a long disquisition on the infinite-time-horizon fiscal gap, at which point Ryssdal finally gives up. I guess I don’t blame him.
On the other hand, I’ll give Carson credit for something Ryssdal doesn’t: telling him what he’d cut in order to balance the budget. Carson is pretty clear about this: he would cut the government across the board by 3-4 percent via the simple expedient of keeping spending flat for everything. In real terms, this gets you to Carson’s 3-4 percent decrease. He says he’d do this for three or four years, and boom! Balanced budget.
Ryssdal badgers Carson about this, but doesn’t ask the obvious follow-ups: You’d cut Social Security 3-4 percent each year? Medicare? Defense? Veterans? If the answer is no—as it probably would be—then you ask Carson how he’s going to balance the budget with just the stuff that’s left over.
In any case, it’s pretty scary that a guy this ignorant of the basics of governance is doing so well in the Republican primary. Not surprising, maybe, but still scary.
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We all know that John Boehner quit the speakership because he was finally fed up trying to deal with the lunatics in his own party. But how about some of the tea party darlings, like Trey Gowdy or Paul Ryan? Apparently they feel about the same:
Gowdy insists he’s not interested in joining leadership, not in any capacity. He is funny, and biting, about the chaos of the present House.
“I don’t have a background in mental health, so I wouldn’t have the right qualifications to lead right now,” he says. Who wants you to be in leadership? “No friend does,” he says.
….“To me, just speaking as one member, the smartest kid in the class is Paul Ryan,” Gowdy said. “If I had one draft choice and I was starting a new country, I would draft Paul to run it. Not because I agree with him on everything, but because he’s super, super smart. And when someone is super, super smart and is not interested, that tells you something. It tells me a lot.”
By coincidence, this is sort of related to the conservative fantasy I talked about in the previous post. Folks like Gowdy and Ryan are smart enough to see it too, even though they’re both stone conservatives themselves. A leadership role wouldn’t give them the power to actually implement the conservative agenda, but too many conservatives these days don’t care. They’re living the fantasy that if only their leaders fought hard enough, they could win. So when they don’t win, it must mean that they didn’t fight very hard. Right now, there’s just no way to puncture that fantasy.
And why the squirrel illustration? Nothing to do with Gowdy or Ryan or the tea party or conservatives being squirrely or nuts. Honest! This is just our household squirrel, who was outside feeding his face a few minutes ago. So I went out and took his picture. And speaking of squirrels, here’s an interesting squirrel factlet: if you Google “squirrel saying,” 7 of the top 20 hits are about the difficulties that German speakers have saying “squirrel.”
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Quote of the Day: You’d Have to Be Nuts to Want a Leadership Role in the Republican Party
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A few days ago Matt Yglesisas wrote a #Slatepitch piece arguing that Hillary Clinton “is clearly more comfortable than the average person with violating norms and operating in legal gray areas”—and that’s a good thing. In a nutshell, Democrats can’t get anything done through Congress, so they need someone willing to do whatever it takes to get things done some other way. And that’s Hillary. “More than almost anyone else around, she knows where the levers of power lie, and she is comfortable pulling them, procedural niceties be damned.”
Unsurprisingly, conservatives were shocked. Shocked! Liberals are fine with tyranny! Today Matt responded in one of his periodic newsletters:
A system of government based on the idea of compromises between two independently elected bodies will only work if the leaders of both bodies want to compromise. Congressional Republicans have rejected any form of compromise, so an effective Democratic president is going to try to govern through executive unilateralism. I don’t think this is a positive development, but it’s the only possible development.
I don’t think I’m as pessimistic as Yglesias, but put that aside for a moment. Look at this from a conservative point of view. They want things to move in a conservative direction. But compromise doesn’t do that. In practice, it always seems to move things in a more liberal direction, with a few conservative sops thrown in that eventually wither away and die. This leaves them with little choice except increasingly hard-nosed obstructionism: government shutdowns, debt ceiling fights, filibusters for everything, voter ID laws, etc. etc.
And there’s a lot of truth to this to this view. The entire Western world has been moving inexorably in a liberal direction for a couple of centuries. It’s a tide that can’t be turned back with half measures. Conservative parties in the rest of the world have mostly made their peace with this, and settle for simply slowing things down. American conservatives actually want to reverse the tide.
That’s all but impossible in the long term. It’s just not the way the arc of history is moving right now. But American conservatives are bound and determined to do it anyway.
This is the fundamental problem. British conservatives, in theory, could turn back the clock if they wanted to, but they don’t. Their parliamentary system allows them to do it, but public opinion doesn’t—which means that if they want to retain power, there’s a limit to how far they can fight the tide. If American conservatives were in the same situation, they’d probably end up in the same place. Once they actually got the power to change things, they’d very quickly moderate their agenda.
It’s in this sense that our system of governance really is at fault for our current gridlock. Not directly because of veto points or our presidential system or any of that, but because these features of our political system allow conservatives to live in a fantasy world. They dream of what they could do if only they had the political power to do it, and they really believe they’d do it all if they got the chance. Thanks to all those veto points, however, they never get the chance. Full control of the government would disabuse everyone very quickly of just how far they’re really willing to go, but it never happens.
We are living through an era in which conservatives are living a fantasy that can never be. But our system of governance denies them the chance to test that fantasy. So it continues forever. It will stop eventually, either because conservatives somehow do gain total political power and are forced to face up to its limits, or because it burns itself out through continual head banging that gets them nowhere combined with demographic changes that decimate their base. Probably the latter. It’s only a question of how long it takes.
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How Our Constitution Indulges the Great Conservative Fantasy
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Back in August, Maureen Dowd wrote several hundred words about what a horrible person Hillary Clinton is. No surprise there. She could pretty easily write a million if the Times gave her the space. But then, having obsessed over Hillary’s sinister psyche for the thousandth time, she turned to the possibility of white knights jumping into the presidential race to save us all. In particular, there was Joe Biden, who was now reconsidering a run after the death of his son Beau:
When Beau realized he was not going to make it, he asked his father if he had a minute to sit down and talk….“Dad, I know you don’t give a damn about money,” Beau told him, dismissing the idea that his father would take some sort of cushy job after the vice presidency to cash in.
Beau was losing his nouns and the right side of his face was partially paralyzed. But he had a mission: He tried to make his father promise to run, arguing that the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.
It’s a touching scene, but also an odd one: Dowd didn’t attribute it to anyone. Not even “a friend” or “someone with knowledge of the situation.” In Politico today, Edward-Isaac Dovere says there’s a reason for that:
According to multiple sources, it was Biden himself who talked to her….It was no coincidence that the preliminary pieces around a prospective campaign started moving right after that column. People read Dowd and started reaching out, those around the vice president would say by way of defensive explanation. He was just answering the phone and listening. But in truth, Biden had effectively placed an ad in The New York Times, asking them to call.
….“Calculation sort of sounds crass, but I guess that’s what it is,” said one person who’s recently spoken to Biden about the prospect of running.
….At the end of August, while friends were still worrying aloud that he was in the worst mental state possible to be making this decision, he invited Elizabeth Warren for an unannounced Saturday lunch at the Naval Observatory. According to sources connected with Warren, he raised Clinton’s scheduled appearance at the House Benghazi Committee hearing at the end of October, even hinting that there might be a running-mate opening for the Massachusetts senator.
Needless to say, I don’t have any independent knowledge of whether Dovere is right about this. But it sure sounds plausible, and it’s a good illustration of why you should take claims of “authenticity” with a big shaker of salt. Biden is an outgoing guy and gets along well with the press. But that just means he’s an outgoing guy who gets along well with the press. Authenticity has nothing to do with it.
It’s one thing for people close to a candidate to leak information that makes their man look good—that’s so common I’m not sure it even has a name—but for the candidate himself to use his son’s death as a way of worming his way into a weekly column written by a woman who detests Hillary Clinton more fanatically than anyone this side of Ken Starr? I’m not quite sure what to call that, but authentic isn’t it.
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Perhaps We Should Retire the Idea That Joe Biden Is "Authentic"
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Suppose there’s a complex public policy proposal being debated and you want to know where you should stand. However, you really don’t want to devote a huge amount of time to diving into all the details. There are just so many hours in the day, after all.
One possibility is to simply see what people on your side of the tribal divide think about it. But that’s surprisingly unreliable. A better approach is to take a look at who’s opposed to the proposal. That’s what Paul Krugman does today regarding the final draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement:
What I know so far: pharma is mad because the extension of property rights in biologics is much shorter than it wanted, tobacco is mad because it has been carved out of the dispute settlement deal, and Rs in general are mad because the labor protection stuff is stronger than expected….I find myself thinking of Grossman and Helpman’s work on the political economy of free trade agreements, in which they conclude, based on a highly stylized but nonetheless interesting model of special interest politics, that
An FTA is most likely to be politically viable exactly when it would be socially harmful.
The TPP looks better than it did, which infuriates much of Congress.
Krugman describes himself as a “lukewarm opponent” of TPP who now needs to do some more homework. I’d probably call myself a lukewarm supporter. One reason is that the dispute resolution provisions, which provoked a lot of anger on the left, never struck me as either unusual or all that objectionable in practice. The IP stuff bothered me more, and that’s been improved a bit in the final draft. It’s still not great, but it’s not quite as horrible as before. So you can probably now count me as a slightly stronger supporter.
But I wonder what Republicans will do? They’re the ones who are ideologically on the side of trade agreements, and they’ve spent a lot of time berating President Obama for not putting more effort into trade deals. But with campaign season heating up, it’s become more toxic than ever to support any initiative of Obama’s. Plus Donald Trump is busily working his supporters into a lather about TPP. I wouldn’t be surprised to see quite a few defections from the Republican ranks.
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Paul Waldman notes today that Marco Rubio is the latest beneficiary of the media spotlight. Why?
If history is any guide, the “outsider” candidates will eventually fall, and Rubio is the only “insider” candidate whose support is going up, not down. Scott Walker is gone, Jeb Bush is struggling, and none of the other officeholders seem to be generating any interest among voters. Rubio has long had strong approval ratings among Republicans, so even those who are now supporting someone else don’t dislike him. He’s an excellent speaker both with prepared texts and extemporaneously. When you hear him talk he sounds informed and thoughtful, and much less reactionary than his actual ideas would suggest. He presents a young, Hispanic face for a party that desperately needs not to be seen as the party of old white guys.
This is all true, but it gives the media way too much credit. Here’s the rule they use for deciding who to cover:
If you’re leading or rising in the polls, you get coverage.
That’s it. All the other stuff about Rubio has been true all along, and nobody cared about him. Now he’s rising in the polls and is currently in about fourth place. So he’s getting coverage.
This happened first to Donald Trump, then to Ben Carson, then to Carly Fiorina, and now to Rubio. Bernie Sanders, oddly enough, remains fairly immune. Maybe this rule only applies to Republicans this year.
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It’s pretty amazing. Ad blockers have been around forever. I’ve been using AdBlock Plus for nearly a decade and nobody ever cared. It was just a quiet little thing that a few power users knew about.
But as soon as Apple decided to allow ad blocking on the iPhone, suddenly the world went nuts. News headlines exploded. Half the sites I visit now check for ad blockers and hit me with guilt-inducing messages about how I’m bankrupting them if I decline to read their latest Flash creations and bouncing gif animations. Hell, I just got one of these messages on Phys.org. For a while, the Washington Post randomly declined to let me read their articles at all unless I removed my ad blocker.
I’ve got one question and one comment about this. The comment is this: Screw you, Apple. Everything was fine until you decided to barge in. The question is this: Is publisher panic over loss of ad revenue rational? Genuine question. I understand that mobile is where all the ad dollars are, and I understand that Apple accounts for a sizeable chunk of the mobile market. But is ad blocking ever likely to become a mass phenomenon, or will it continue to be used only by power users? I suppose there’s no way to know. In any case, the recent hysteria over ad blocking sure does show the incredible PR power of Apple. If you take something that’s been around forever—4G LTE, large screens, ad blocking—and slap it on an iPhone, everyone goes nuts. It’s Apple’s world and the rest of us are just pawns in the games they play.
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