Whiny little gits: on legislation by version control

There's an idea that's been rattling around my head for some time now, probably originally seeded by some internet forum discussion, and it's now been rattling long enough without me seeing any deadly objections that I figured I'd put it down on e-paper.

Problem-setting: legislative process. It's weird, and convoluted, and in many cases the rules of a legislative chamber allow changes to be made to a bill which the members need not be aware of. This was borne out recently in Congress when a single member inserted a provision at the behest of Citigroup, and there was no way to excise the provision from the final version which was submitted to both houses for an up-or-down vote, without jeopardizing the passage of the whole bill.

To zoom out a bit: voters don't care about, pay attention to, or understand process. That's OK, in one sense -- voters really are supposed to care about results, in theory, and are supposed to trust their representatives to get good at process. The problem comes in when advocacy organizations start scoring process moves as position-taking. For example, there's a funny little quirk in the Senate rules that if the majority fails to break a filibuster, the only way to try later to break the same filibuster is if someone changes their mind. What this means in practice is that the Majority Leader will vote to sustain the filibuster if he's sure the logjam won't break -- this way he can "change his mind" later if they can whip up the votes to get the bill through. But this exposes him to an advocacy organization scoring his vote as being on the wrong side of their favorite issue.

There's even the very basic existential question of "what does the law actually say?". How are we to know, under the current way of setting up legislation, if the text on the paper distributed to Congress is the same as the text which is digitally available on the website of the Library of Congress; or if either is identical to the text on the page signed by the President? And in case of a discrepancy, which is "the law"? Typos happen, and humans aren't optimized to catch them on paper.

Matt Walsh Project I: Homeschooling

I'm going to start this series off light: responding to a post where my disagreements aren't with the main thrust, but with side (snide) comments.

In The Two Absolutely Worst Arguments Against Homeschooling, Walsh actually goes over ground that formed my very, very first paper in undergrad. Yes, Virginia, we've really been having the same damn arguments since the early oughts -- actually longer, since I think all the research that I cited in that paper was from the nineties and before. (Full disclosure: I was homeschooled for part of my K-12 career.)

Nostalgia aside, here are the two arguments he's referring to, in response to a reader email:

2. Homeschooled kids aren't properly socialized.

This one was known to be false very early on. I mean, yes, we've all known someone who was homeschooled and turned out -- weird. It's even possible that ordinary schooling (whether of the public or private variety) might have helped that person turn out a lot less weird (as it probably did for me). This, however, is not actually data in support of the contention. This is what is known as "availability bias": weird people stick out, whereas people who are well-socialized don't. You'd never ask someone who didn't stick out how they got to be that way: it's just the default that you interact fluently with people.

And it was known all the way back in the nineties that adults who came from a homeschooling background looked pretty similar to adults who'd come up through regular schooling. If I'm recalling correctly, some of the studies noticed a measurable trend that children in homeschooling, and adults who had been homeschooled, were more comfortable dealing with people who were older than them than with those their own age. I don't remember if that effect was robust over time, but it makes sense. (In regular school, you're mostly being socialized by people your own age; you take your cues from them, you adapt your language to theirs, etc. In a homeschooling situation, cues come from your parents and the other parents in the clique as much as or more than others your own age.)

Now, as I mentioned, some of Walsh's side comments are less reasonable:

Sure, you can probably tell me about a homeschooled kid you met once who was totally weird and awkward and stuff, but I could see your anecdote and raise you school shooters, the bullying epidemic, youth suicide rates, a youth culture utterly dominated by cliques, fads, and trends, and then this:

[beerbong.jpg]

Well adjusted adults?

Go to a college campus — any college campus — and tell me again how these public schooled ladies and gentlemen are such well adjusted adults.

For God’s sake, Dan, they literally cannot socialize without inhaling a barrel of urine-flavored light beer ahead of time.

I’m not claiming that homeschoolers don’t use smart phones or beer bongs, but I am saying that an overwhelming preponderance of our society has been exclusively public schooled, and if public school helped ‘socialize’ us, you’d think we’d see SOME positive results SOMEWHERE.

Look, you'll get no disagreement from me that Natty Light is terrible stuff. But note how Walsh moves the goalposts from "well socialized" to "well adjusted adults"? Anyone who claims that most college students, from whatever background, are well adjusted adults needs their head examined, but that's not the claim here. In college, one has a few years to learn that, even if no one's looking over one's shoulder, there are limits to what a person can do. The hangover doesn't care whether you have an exam tomorrow. That paper isn't going to write itself. No one's going to crack the whip over your head -- and parental whip-cracking isn't just done by homeschooling parents.

Those students in [beerbong.jpg] don't look poorly socialized to me. They look like they've socially sorted themselves into a social group that is reinforcing their behavior. There are plenty of other students on that campus who are partying in a more sane manner, and some who aren't partying at all, no matter when that picture was taken.

One becomes a well-adjusted adult by learning one's own limits, taking responsibility for what one is responsible for, and finding answers to the existential questions and insecurities that plague every teenager with a brain. Some people do that with four years of college. Some people flunk out, or make a baby they didn't intend to and find out the hard way that they don't offer baby loans like they do student loans. Some people forego college altogether (although the expected value of that decision ain't so hot these days). But the only way to become an adult is to practice being an adult, out from the supervision of parents and guardians, and neither homeschooling nor regular schooling can offer that. (Don't talk about boarding school. That's a whole 'nother conversation.)

1. We should keep our kids in public school in order to help ‘the system.’

This was the proposition that I was writing that first undergrad paper in response to. Well, more precisely, I was arguing against an improved statement, something like "Homeschooling is unacceptable because it undercuts the role of the school in producing good citizens."

I'm not at all sympathetic to the proposition in the form Walsh quotes it: take it away, Matt:

Is this really a priority for parents? When my wife and I make a decision for our family, should we stop first and ask, “wait, but will this help the system?”

Would you REALLY put the welfare of ‘the system’ over that of your own children?

I’d hope that you wouldn’t, and I’d hope that this line of logic is unique to you, but I know that it isn’t. I’ve heard it before. I’ve heard it so often, in fact, that I’m starting to think I’m the strange one for having absolutely no desire to make my children martyrs for some bureaucratic machine.

I'm opposed to the argument even in the modified form I gave above. I do think that it's an important role of the school to instill shared values -- school, in other words, is not just about academics. Homeschoolers agree with me: overwhelmingly, they're not choosing to homeschool because the public school is academically weak, but because it's teaching evolution, or sex ed, or won't burn the copies of Harry Potter in the school library. Homeschooling is all about whose values get passed on to kids; and part of being a free society is that, if one feels strongly enough that the values embodied by some social institution are antithetical to one's own, one generally doesn't have to interact with or take advantage of that social institution.

(There are a few exceptions, of course. One can't simply decline to interact with the judicial system because one has problems with the values of that system. I have a deep problem with the lower value placed on black people's lives and welfare by the judicial system, but I can't just not show up to court when subpoenaed, even if I think the prosecution is unjust. One can't simply decline to interact with the IRS because one's values place a high premium on not paying taxes.)

Thinking that "the system" is unjust is a core right in a democracy [1]. Declining to abet an unjust system is a corollary right.

That all being said: society still has the right to set its own parameters of acceptable speech and ideas. Not that one who transgresses these parameters should be formally sanctioned under the power of the state, but there is plenty of room for people to exclude and privately sanction those who hold, say, bigoted views. One of the big goals of public school is training students what society now views as beyond the pale -- especially when they might not get it at home.

What I'm saying here is, don't dismiss too quickly the notion that the public may have an interest in students not being homeschooled, since those who are may be out of step with what society at large sees as the ideas one can or cannot hold while still being a full member in good standing.

From my own (progressive) position, for example, someone who literally wants to replace the separation of church and state with established state religion cannot be a member of American society in full good standing. It's just not possible. Likewise someone who advocates for child labor, or someone who wants to undo gender equality of the franchise. I don't want the government taking any action against holders of such ideas -- but I absolutely want them to be treated by their fellow citizens as objects of public distrust and scorn. I absolutely want them to be unelectable, unworthy of public trust.

In other words, while I don't think Argument 1 represents any kind of case for a public policy banning homeschooling, I do think that there's a case implicitly for the following: If you are considering homeschooling on the grounds that the values embodied in the public schools are incompatible with your own, you must be thereby ready for others, who do subscribe to those values that you dislike, to treat you as withdrawing from your own full membership in the shared social project that they are undertaking. Homeschooling is an "exit" strategy, with a (possible, implicit) future "voice" strategy to be undertaken by the former child after they are grown. And exit strategies  are not how democracy is designed to operate. Exit strategies are a business-world response to disagreements.

OK, this response has gone on long enough, so I'll skip over the silliness at the beginning of Walsh's post about teacher's unions. (As always is my response to someone who ignorantly complains about being "unable to fire" union members: why you you hate the free market? It took two parties to sign that contract, and now you want to go back on it? That ain't how this shit works.)

[1] I'm using "democracy" in the broad sense here: a system of government in which those in power derive that power from the people; and are accountable to the people for its use; and can be removed from office for abuse of that power, either through ordinary means (elections) or other (extraordinary, but spelled out in law) means. There's also a narrow sense of the word (in which every decision is put to general vote by the people) which obviously doesn't apply to the U.S. Both meanings are correct. Get over it.

Today in features, not bugs

The House GOP: :

The proposal, which Republicans voted for in the House Ways and Means Committee earlier this month, would alter the definition of full time employment under the Affordable Care Act from 30 hours a week to 40 hours a week and exempt more businesses from penalties for not offering employer-based insurance or lower the overall penalty burden. Under existing law, employers with more than 50 workers pay a penalty if their full-time employees (defined as working an average of 30 hours a week) receive subsidized coverage in the law’s health care exchanges. CBO concluded that the GOP proposal would lead to the very same problems Republicans have identified in Obamacare. H.R.2575 would reduce the number of people receiving employment-based coverage by 1 million, increase “the number of people obtaining coverage through Medicaid” or the health care exchanges by between 500,000 and 1 million, and raise the budget deficits by $73.7 billion. The ranks of the uninsured would also grow by “less than 500,000 people.”

Until the Republican Party learns to choose their desired policy outcomes first and structure their legislation around achieving those outcomes, no one has any business voting for them at any level.

Dear Patty Murray: let's show the GOP how to filibuster the Senate

It's too bad that Senate Democrats only stand up and fight battles they're pretty confident they can win, but it's heartening that they think that defending the right of women to reproductive health care is a winner.

But in an interview this morning, a key member of the Democratic leadership, Senator Patty Murray, said any such effort is dead on arrival in the Senate. “I can tell you this: No matter who introduces it, it is not going anywhere in the Senate,” Murray said. “We are not going to let it come up in the Senate. There is no reason for it. This is settled law. We are not going to be sidetracked by a debate on women’s health yet again.” Anonymous Senate Dem aides had previously said the anti-abortion push is an all-but-certain non-starter, but Murray’s on-the-record declaration makes it official: The measure will not get any floor debate or see the light of committee.

 However, I think this is a bit of a missed opportunity. I say bring every woman (and man too) to Washington who wants to testify to the care they've received, that this bill would do away with. I say form a mile-long parade of women down the Capitol steps, and have the committee (or even the whole Senate body) listen to their testimony.

And in particular, to all those women who got shut out of their right to testify before the Texas legislature: we'll pay your ticket to DC.

Marco Rubio wants to show his ass about abortion? Great, let's have that discussion. Because people are getting mad now, and it's about time someone told the GOP in a way they can't ignore. Don't deep-six this piece of shit bill: filibuster it.

...and then when elected, they prove it!

So there's a story that the right-wing noise machine has picked up on this weekend, with predictable results: WaPo:

The Obama administration announced Friday that it would significantly scale back the health law’s requirements that new insurance marketplaces verify consumers’ income and health insurance status. Instead, the federal government will rely more heavily on consumers’ self-reported information until 2015, when it plans to have stronger verification systems in place.

Now, combined with the other announcement, of a different Obamacare-related enforcement mechanism being slow-rolled during 2014, this is starting to paint a few dots that might be connected.

So far, all the commentary on Memeorandum is from right-wingers, and they're all pushing the narrative that this is A WIDE-OPEN INVITATION TO FRRRAAAUUUDDD!!! Naturally. I think my favorite headline is from Glenn "The pride of the Tennessee highlands" Reynolds, who think that "it's basically like Pigford".

Please, your honor, don't explain your Pigford theory to us... we already know that you're just using the word as code for "reparations". Instead, please do explain exactly who could defraud what out of whom, in this story?

You see, no one is getting paid at the point of the exchanges. When you sign up for insurance on the exchanges, you still have to pay your premiums. It's ain't gonna be free. However, if your income is low enough, you'll get some (perhaps even all, I suppose) of your premium back as part of your tax refund.

But lying about your income when you sign up for insurance on the exchange won't help you get a larger refund at tax time. So a little bit of critical thinking is all you need to realize that there's no new opening for fraud here.

Ah, you say, but what about people who aren't eligible for insurance on the exchanges in the first place? That sounds awful. But wait, remind us again how someone could be ineligible for exchange-based insurance? Oh, right, that would be if their employer already offers group coverage.

You know what would be a really important first step in checking and enforcing that eligibility requirement? Mandated reporting by employers of health coverage.

Oops.

So yeah, to whoever came up with their fraud theory:

But there is still a story here, because regulatory agencies don't just start announcing that they're not enforcing stuff without a reason. This is Washington we're talking about here, and that's essentially giving up power. What we're seeing is, I think, the result of Congressional sclerosis. The usual order of business would be that the executive sub-branch tasked with implementing a law would find a knot in the text of the law, or find that the administrative structure laid out in the law was somehow causing problems, and would get a fix to the chair of the relevant committee, who would insert it into an unrelated bill by unanimous consent.

But we don't see that happen anymore, because one of our parties isn't interested in governing any more. They're simply not interested in solving problems -- they've decided their interests lie in creating and perpetuating them. Specifically when it comes to Obamacare, the Republican party has decided that their interests lie with the law being implemented with all mistakes intact. In particular, one aspect of this story appears to be that the relevant administrative departments are understaffed and subject to contradictory requirements in the law.

Remember that old line: Democrats run for office preaching the gospel of how government has the power to solve problems. Republicans run on how bad government is at solving problems...

Talking out my ass

...about the Obama administration's decision to delay implementation of the employer mandate.

The principal argument, as articulated by Jared and Ezra, is that the provision as written in law is poorly formulated and onerous. I'm all for the government recognizing when provisions of law and regulation are poorly formulated and onerous, but this bears a bit more scrutiny.

To wit: the mandate requires all employers with more than 50 full-time employees to provide adequate health coverage or be fined. The number getting cited in the links above is that "95%" of these employers already provide insurance, though it remains unclear whether those plans need any tweaking (or major revisions) to comply with the law. I don't see anything onerous yet, however.

What appears to be the actual crux of the issue, instead, is the "full-time" part of the provision, which (it is claimed) will result (is already resulting?) in employers near the 50-employee cutoff restructuring their labor arrangements so that they will fall on the lower end of the bright line. For example, supposedly employers can pull a Wal-Mart and ride their workers up to 35.999 hours a week (numbers also sourced from ass), provide no benefits, and not fall afoul of the law. That would be a genuine problem, especially considering the already short supply of work for the average hourly worker. However, I don't see how delaying implementation of the law makes any sense as a solution; instead, a regulatory interpretation should have been issued (and given public comment period a year ago) that the DOJ would be interpreting the requirement as 50 full-time-equivalent employees (50*40*52 wage-hours in a year) rather than 50 individuals working more than 36 hours a week or whatever the numbers might actually be.

Seriously, people: don't reward obvious loophole-ducking. Close the damn loophole with an administrative rule.

Please proceed, Senator

Shorter Mitch McConnell: If Harry Reid makes the Senate a functional body on the matter of Executive and Judicial nominations, I hereby threaten to make the Senate a functional body on all matters, as soon as the American people hand us back the majority in that august deliberative body.

Oddly absent from Reid's response: Please, please don't throw us into that briar patch!

Torture is a bipartisan value

I was talking to Ms Heel-Filcher about the new report out, that says that responsibility for torture went up to the highest levels of the executive. Most of those in that chain of command are still employed by the U.S. in positions of authority and trust: in the CIA, Defense, State, and elsewhere.

Ms Heel-Filcher asked the question "How likely is it, do you think, that Obama doesn't know the extent of who's responsible for the U.S. torture program?"

My answer, as of this week? Zero. Total impossibility.

You see, as long as there was plausible deniability, as long as the "a few bad apples" parry was viable, Obama's choice not to prosecute those few bad apples was understandable. Wrong, reprehensibly wrong, even on its own terms, but understandable: why would you want to drag the country's collective consciousness through the pit of evil that such a prosecution would represent? (Because if the victims had been sorority girls instead of brown men with beards...)

Now the situation has changed. Supposing for a moment that Obama had been lied to by the intelligence and defense agencies -- had been convinced by his internal accounting that the responsibility lay near the leaves and not at the root -- then the conclusions of this report would, if allowed to become the new normal, spell the end of Obama's actual use of power. If the defense/intelligence structure can pull that kind of coverup on POTUS himself, and face no consequences when it's exposed? Then they're running the show, and POTUS himself is a muppet.

I'm fairly sure that Obama's not a muppet; and I'm damn sure that he doesn't see himself as one. Which leaves him with two options:

Either the President was actively complicit in the covering up of the chain of command giving orders to torture; or anyone in that chain, above the level that the President did know about, needs to spend the rest of their life in Leavenworth. Not just for torture, though that's enough on its own to put you there -- but for trying to make a muppet out of the President in the process.

The angle of the dongle is disproportionate to...

The story going around my circles of the internet this week involves a female tech blogger, Adria Richards, who reacted to a couple of dudes in the row behind her at PyCon making sexual jokes. Since you're hearing about this story all over the internet, one of two things happened: either Richards (1) publicly shamed them on the Internet, or (2) confronted them quietly and told them to knock it off, and one of them made the story public.

Boom, bitches

Hey Marsha Blackburn (and the rest of the right wing noise machine): do you ever get tired of playing checkers when the President's playing chess?
Blackburn:

"If he is a skeet shooter, why have we not heard of this? Why have we not seen photos? Why has he not referenced it at any point in time as we have had this gun debate that is ongoing?"

Obama:

Look, people: the POTUS is an infuriating negotiator to watch... but he's a heluvagood poker player. And this kind of story is poker, and Marsha, bless your heart but you've got a pair of threes.

In which Harry Reid balks

Outside The Beltway is reporting that Harry Reid is blinking on filibuster rule changes.

Morons.

Look people, here's a sports metaphor. If baseball managers were to find a way to use the pitching rules to kill all possibility to steal bases, what do you think would happen? "Oh, sorry fans, but that's just the rules. I guess Ricky Henderson's record is safe forever." Fuck no. They'd add a clause to the balk rule and get the basepaths hot again.

But what's good for baseball is apparently too revolutionary for the World's Greatest Deliberative Body. The GOP has been exploiting an unintended bug in the rules for four years, and making the "baseball game" unplayable. It used to be that there was a gentlemen's agreement to not exploit this bug; that agreement has broken down. Everyone agrees that it's a hackable exploit, and the Democrats have no intention of exploiting it this way when they are not in power. So why then are the leadership of the Senate leaving the exploit unpatched?

When this happens, YOU CHANGE THE FUCKING RULES to restore the game to a playable condition.

UPDATE:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is giving Republican colleagues 36 hours to agree to a deal on filibuster reform or he will move forward with the nuclear option.

Now that's more like it.

I'll trade you one hostage now for two in three months

"Big news. Eric Cantor has just made it official: The GOP leadership is prepared to agree to a three month debt ceiling hike. This is a major de-escalation of the crazy and effectively means Republicans have all but taken the threat of default off the table completely."
- Greg Sargent, Washington Post
There's a critical piece of this story that I haven't seen anywhere: the Democratic response. Because the correct response is to thank the Republicans for their gracious offer, and counteroffer that the government have the power to borrow to cover all the spending that Congress has appropriated (since tax receipts are both seasonally variable and dependent at all times on the state of employment and the economy).
I think the consensus view is correct as far as it goes: the Galtian Masters of the Universe have told the Republicans to knock off Silly Season, and shooting the hostage is no longer seen (at least by Boehner, probably also Cantor and Paul Ryan) as a valid tactical move. But the Tea Party Caucus is not much known for listening to either reason or the GOP leadership, which is why the Democrats absolutely need to respond with a clear articulation of their initial negotiating position -- one very different from this offer to take more hostages in a few months.

UPDATE: We have statements:

Pelosi:

 This proposal does not relieve the uncertainty faced by small businesses, the markets and the middle class. This is a gimmick unworthy of the challenges we face and the national debate we should be having. The message from the American people is clear: no games, no default.

The White House:

 The President has made clear that Congress has only two options: pay the bills they have racked up, or fail to do so and put our nation into default. We are encouraged that there are signs that Congressional Republicans may back off their insistence on holding our economy hostage to extract drastic cuts in Medicare, education and programs middle class families depend on. Congress must pay its bills and pass a clean debt limit increase without further delay.

 This is the correct response. When your opponent is in retreat, don't stop pushing.
 

This is not the Nuclear Option

Good christ, people, do your homework before filing a story: The Hill:

Changing rules with a simple majority vote is considered so controversial it is sometimes called the nuclear option. Democrats backing the maneuver have described it as the “Constitutional option.” 

And TPM:

Changing the rules of the Senate ordinarily requires 67 votes. But the majority also has the option of approving rules changes with 51 votes at the beginning of a new Congress — what reformers call the “constitutional option” and opponents dub the “nuclear option.”

Neither of these is correct. The Constitutional/Nuclear Option is a risky in-session parliamentary maneuver primarily anticipated in the event of a filibustered nominee (somebody the President and majority party want to make a hill to die on). The maneuver involves appealing to the Parliamentarian for a ruling on the constitutionality of the filibuster rule (the argument being that the ability of the minority to filibuster a nominee is incompatible with the "advise and consent" clause). Upon a negative ruling, the rule is voided and a new rule is put in place without the offending provision, which most expect to only need a simple majority to pass.

What is being proposed now, by contrast is a perfectly usual first-day-of-session change in a rule, which never requires a two-thirds majority. The operative principle is that an earlier Congress cannot bind later Congresses to any course of action: the original adoption of rules was by simple majority, so changes of rules "in the normal order of business" (interpreted to mean "at the beginning of a session") cannot require a greater majority than the original adoption.

This is complicated by the fact that, while the House gets refreshed every two years, the Senate thinks of itself as a continuing body, and senators who oppose any particular rule change are fond of arguing that there is no true opening day on  which to change rules. Which, if you look at the history of this argument, is always deployed in the most rankly opportunistic fashion.

Everyone repeat after me...

... Single-seat districts are bad for democracy.
FairVote.org | It’s Not Just Gerrymandering: Fixing House Elections Demands End of Winner-Take-All Rules

How the good guys are fighting the good fight

Hat tip to Rick Hasen: a must-read long form on how savvy political organizing has turned the tide on marriage equality.

The Marriage Plot: Inside This Year's Epic Campaign for Gay Equality - Atlantic Mobile

Nashville's vote is apparently false, or at least off-kilter

Via Rachel Maddow, it seems that someone in the Davidson County Election Commission has decided that Nashville is insufficiently Republican:

A leader of Tennessee True the Vote attended poll official training with the Davidson County Election Commission by invitation of the Republican administrator of elections. Along with fielding 1 million poll watchers, this group is clearly laying the groundwork to field poll officials. When you go vote in November, the person checking your ID and looking you up in a poll book or instructing you on the use of the voting machines may be affiliated with voter suppression.

Just a reminder, everyone: True The Vote is a "nonpartisan" outfit which oh-so-coincidentally wants to challenge the right to vote of lots of people, all of whom coincidentally come from demographics which lean Democrat.

Zombie Eyes

At time T = minus 12 hours, Mitt Romney's campaign announced that they would be unveiling their running mate ... at 9 AM eastern on a Saturday, a time when the ranks of the awake comprise only those too young to vote, those too old to not vote, those too amped to quit coding, and bus drivers.

At time T = minus 11 hours and 59 minutes, the lovely Ms Heel-Filcher and I wondered what on earth Mitt is thinking, playing his last high card while the Olympics are still on, when the Republican convention is still (a couple of) weeks away, and while most nice conservative families' kids still haven't gone back to school and given their parents a moment to breathe have sexytimes catch up with the news.

At time T = minus 11 hours, 57 minutes, 57 seconds, NBC announced on the basis of three corroborating but anonymous sources, that this pick will be Paul Ryan.

At time T = minus 11 hours, 57 minutes, and 56 seconds, we were wondering if Mitt has forgotten that the U.S. electorate features a large bloc of voters too old to not vote, or possibly forgotten that Paul Ryan has devoted the last couple years of his life to cutting "entitlements", meaning in plain English the Federal programs ensuring that those old folks get to indulge what Malcolm Reynolds refers to as the powerful need to eat sometime this month.

The Obama campaign doesn't need my assistance scripting great commercials, but here's one I'd love:

[BLACK BACKGROUND; NO MUSIC; TEXT ONLY, NO VOX]

Paul Ryan has spent every minute of his Congressional career

working to destroy Medicare.

[HOLD 5 SECONDS]

Mitt Romney wants Paul Ryan to be his Vice President.

[HOLD 5 SECONDS]

What will happen to Medicare in a Mitt Romney presidency?

You do the math.

Primaries again

An update on primaries: Balloon-Juice picked up on this story (and links to Gary Wills doing a much better job than I do demolishing Unger's suggestion), and the comment thread is... vigorous.

One question you see in response to an expressed desire for a primary from the left (eg here) is that, since Obama is quite popular with Democratic voters (true) and would win such a primary in a landslide, what the point of such an exercise would be?

And indeed, we saw no primary challengers to Obama this cycle, despite there being any number of career Democrats (e.g. Feingold) and big-name upstarts (including Keith Olbermann) who found themselves un- or underemployed recently. The reasons not to run are not hard to find: "I don't stand a snowball's chance" is a powerful deterrent to someone whose goal is to win the election. However, I think it speaks to the skillful way that Obama has led the contingent of the party that actually holds power (as opposed to the netroots) that a primary challenge from the left, from anyone who is anyone, would be seen as an act of political disloyalty -- the first and only sin in politics.

I think this is a mistake, but it's an easy one to make, especially if Obama's like virtually everyone else who gets power in that he will use that power to stay in power.

The point of the exercise, the gain that accrues to the party and Obama's presidency from a vigorous primary, is that even if we're going to re-elect, the party should get the chance to take stock of its own successes and failures of the past term.

You don't just do a performance review when you're going to fire an employee. You do a performance review if they're still an asset to you, but need to make a few changes.

In this particular instance, the Democratic electorate needs a formal process where a challenger billing themselves as representing working-class and middle-class interests can stand up and force the president to talk about his decision to repeatedly "pivot" away from fighting unemployment to fighting the deficit. (That same person will have to give props to the president for the Lily Ledbetter act.) We need a process where someone billing themselves a defender of civil rights and civil liberties can force the president to talk about denying GWOT detainees a fair trial in open court (note: lots of Democrats in both houses of Congress ought to have a bit in their performance review on this question too). We need a process where someone billing themselves as standing up for the US being a nation ruled by laws, not men, can force the president to talk about why there have been virtually no prosecutions for a decade or more of Wall Street fraud, theft, perjury, and abuse of mathematics.

OK, that last one isn't a federal offense. But I'm considering founding a Society for its Prevention.

Primary campaigns are performance reviews

There's a story that's been on memeorandum today, getting recirculated by a few conservative blogs, about how one of Obama's old profs at Harvard has come out to argue that he must be defeated in November because he has failed the progressive cause. And he's got one thing right: the more progressive your self-identification, the more disappointing you've found the Obama presidency, between complete immunity for crimes against humanity and complete immunity for frauds perpetrated mainly before he assumed office, to committing crimes against humanity and normalizing many of the illegal practices of his inestimable predecessor.

Don't ask me to defend Obama's record on these and any number of other points of law and policy. I think they're indefensible. But I will defend my decision to vote for him this November, despite all of this.

That decision is made much easier by this year's Republican presidential field, currently winnowed down to a bot and a crazy person. But it really would be a stretch to imagine voting for any Republican, no matter how much he or she might themself be sane and reality-grounded -- because the party caucus is not sane and reality-grounded, and the bills that got to that person's desk would be written by the lunatics running the asylum. You really think Jon Huntsman would veto all the batshit crazy nonsense that a united Republican House and Senate would fling his way? If so, I've got some beachfront property in Utah to sell you cheap.

All of which is neither here nor there, since what I wanted to talk about are the relative roles of primaries vs general elections. Here's the point, people: general elections are referenda on caucuses -- on the large political constellations of power, far larger than the individual president, let alone the individual legislator for whom one is voting. Primary elections are referenda on the intra-party divisions -- or, if you like, referenda on the individuals running, since it is pretty rare that you'll have candidates for the same seat who are indistinguishable in terms of policy preferences and ideological emphases.

With all due respect to Professor Unger, it's an idiotic suggestion to start campaining against Obama from the left now, after the primaries are done.

OK, I didn't spend a lot of time digging here. Maybe he's been campaigning against Obama for a while now, and that sneaky liberal media just decided to pick up on the story now because it needs fodder for its "This is bad news ... for Obama" cycle. Whatever, it's not my concern, since I only want to address the top-level point. Once the primaries are over, you've lost your chance to swing the balance of power within your own coalition; your only play now is to lift your own coalition over your opponents.

Now I was a big fan of a primary challenge to Obama from the left, for a number of reasons. The first is that I'm tired of the screwy location of the Overton Window; tired of Equal Time for Right-Wing-Nutjobs and no time at all for the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill; tired of right-wingers sincerely believing that Obama is the leftiest lefty who ever threw out the first pitch at Nationals Park with his left hand, because they've never heard anyone on their TV who actually represents the progressive ideas. Those people can ignore the guests on Up With Chris Hayes because Up isn't broadcast on any network they know of. But they can't ignore it if an actual progressive stands up and highlights how the President has handed them, the right wing, victory after concession after tax cut. The second, and this may be my academic predilections talking, but you get better public policy out of enlightened, technical, public debate, than you do out of rallying around the flag and anointing the incumbent regardless of his actual performance.

Primary season is job review season for an incumbent politician. And that review is done by the people in his or her own coalition, the ones with the vested interest in how well he or she plays the game and plays it for their team, the people whom that politician most directly represents, the people who made up the critical bulk of the votes that got him or her into office in the first place, who now get to pass judgement on how well they are represented. Did the candidate vote with the party when he or she should have objected? Or object when he or she should have gotten in line? Was the candidate a compromise candidate between coalition factions, and if so did he or she represent all those factions fairly? What were the problems that office-holder was sent to address and solve? What progress was made? What unexpected bumps in the road did we encounter?

We have a very strong meme in the USA, that one should vote for the person, not the letter by their name. Bollocks. Individuals don't make policy or laws, individuals don't wield power in a constitutional system: blocs do. (Yes, I know, the office of the presidency is powerful, but the president is neutered if both houses of Congress are arrayed against him. It's his bloc that gives him room to swing.) Your vote in November is for (or against) a bloc, and that is all. If you want finer control over what your vote means, vote/volunteer/campaign in the primary.