The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

End of day roundup

Oh, my, some doozies today:

  • Via Calculated Risk, Fermanagh, Ireland, has put up a Potemkin village to reassure all the G8 leaders that everything is fine. This includes, for example, putting photos of a thriving butcher shop over the boarded-up windows of a former butcher shop. It's a laugh-and-cry moment.
  • The New York Times Magazine published a story about a near-crash on a commercial airliner that...doesn't make sense. Aside from reading like an undergraduate creative-writing assignment, it's simply not plausible that it happened as described. James Fallows dissects it.
  • New Republic's Isaac Chotner puts Chris Kyle in context.
  • Chicago Public Radio examines why all our outdoor cafes are on the North Side.

More as events warrant.

The 114th Congress will be 40% saner than the 113th

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) won't be running next fall:

Mrs. Bachmann, defiant as ever as she insisted that she would have won re-election had she tried, also said the legal inquiries had nothing to do with her decision. She vowed to continue to fight for the principles she said she holds dear — religious liberty, traditional marriage, family values and protecting innocent life, she said.

“I fully anticipate the mainstream liberal media to put a detrimental spin on my decision not to seek a fifth term,” she said in a gauzy network-television-quality video posted on her campaign Web site. “They always seemed to attempt to find a dishonest way to disparage me. But I take being the focus of their attention and disparagement as a true compliment of my public service effectiveness.”

Yes, of course, because that's what the media do: they report facts that paint Michele Bachmann in a negative light. Or, as Krugman often says, "facts have a well-known liberal bias."

How about one of her House colleagues, then?

“Michele Bachmann is not retiring because she thinks her Tea Party views are out of touch. She’s retiring because she’s under investigation,” said Representative Steve Israel of New York, who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “What really concerns me now is the competition that will emerge in the House G.O.P. to fill her shoes. That competition is going to pull House Republicans even further to the right of where they are now.”

Yeah, I'm not sure how much farther right than Bachmann the Minnesota GOP can go. Her special brand of bat-shit-crazy simply defies the abilities of mere mortal politicians to recreate.

Bachmann will no doubt land on her feet, thanks to the right-wing sound machine that has gotten Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich lucrative speaking careers. I'm going to miss seeing Bachmann's smiling face on the Daily Show, though.

Update: The Onion has the truthy story:

Saying that it’s the Lord’s will, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann announced on her website Wednesday that she has decided not to seek reelection in 2014 because God wants her to earn millions of dollars working for a high-powered lobbying firm.

It sounds like it might be a true story, doesn't it?

All 45 GOP Senators lie to the Supreme Court

This morning, the Senate Republican caucus, representing a minority of the U.S. Senate, a minority of the States, and a minority of the American people, sent a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the President is thwarting the will of the people:

All 45 Republican senators co-signed an amicus brief filed Tuesday calling on the Supreme Court to curtail the President’s power to temporarily appoint nominees without the Senate’s approval.

“[R]ecess appointments have become a means to sidestep Senate confirmation,” the brief declared. “In any case, the President himself has made clear that he will resort to recess appointments, and indeed has done so, precisely to circumvent perceived Senate opposition.”

Presidents of both parties have used the recess-appointment power to fill vacancies. But it has taken on a new meaning under Obama, because Republicans have sought to neuter agencies whose functions they oppose — such as the NLRB and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — by seeking to filibuster all nominees to run them. The White House says the power is both constitutional and necessary to avoid a “significant disruption” in executive governance.

In other words, since the President used one of his Article 2 powers to circumvent the methods of thwarting the will of the American people Senate Republicans have tried so far, the Republicans are asking the branch of government they do control to step in. Because, hey, when you're a nihilist, do-nothing, know-nothing party, you have to stop at nothing to achieve nothing.

Obamacare picks up steam; Republicans nervous

Yesterday California rolled out is ACA Exchange, and it looks like a rousing success:

An estimated 5.3 million Californians will be eligible for coverage through Covered California, the state agency running the insurance marketplace. The lowest-income people will be referred to public safety net programs, while some 2.6 million middle-income residents will qualify for federal subsidies to help pay their premiums.

Covered California provided examples of what a 40-year-old would pay depending on income and where that person lives.

A San Francisco resident earning more than $46,000 a year will be able to choose among five plans with a monthly premium ranging from $221 to $501.

Meanwhile, a 40-year-old resident in Fresno who earns about $15,400 a year will be able to pick from four plans and will be eligible for federal subsidies. That person can expect to spend between $53 and $102 on premiums each month on a middle-of-the road plan.

In other words, the exchange has done what it promised to do: make insurance available at reasonable prices to uninsured Californians. This is, of course, a disaster for Republicans:

Based on the premiums that insurers have submitted for final regulatory approval, the majority of Californians buying coverage on the state's new insurance exchange will be paying less—in many cases, far less—than they would pay for equivalent coverage today. And while a minority will still end up writing bigger premium checks than they do now, even they won't be paying outrageous amounts. Meanwhile, all of these consumers will have access to the kind of comprehensive benefits that are frequently unavailable today, at any price, because of the way insurers try to avoid the old and the sick.

Obamacare critics have long warned, and Obamacare defenders have long feared, that insurers selling plans through the new exchanges would inevitably jack up premiums—if not to pad profits, than to adjust to the regulations that the new law imposes....

For some young, healthy people who now have skimpy, dirt cheap coverage, the new prices really will seem rather high by comparison. But experts think the number of people who fit that category will be small. That's one reason why, on Thursday, officials and consumer advocates were talking about a very different kind of sticker shock: Premium bids that were lower than expected. “For plan after plan, we’re getting the best-case scenarios,” said Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California.

The availble figures back up that verdict.

Krugman is gleeful:

[T]hink about the political dynamics. Because the Supreme Court decided to let states opt out of the Medicaid expansion, some states — notably Texas — will have a pretty dysfunctional version of Obamacare in 2014, although even those systems will provide significant benefits to many people. Still, the whole political calculus was supposed to be that Republicans in red states could point to the horrors of Obamacare and ride them to political victory. Instead, it looks as if we’re going to see blue-state residents reaping the benefits of a functional health care system, while red-state residents are denied many of those benefits, for what looks like no better reason than mean-spirited spite — because what’s going on is, indeed, mean-spirited spite.

Suddenly 2014 just got a lot more interesting. Politics on one side, policies on the other...which will win?

Arcologies, already?

If you've ever played SimCity, you have probably encountered the Arcology, a massive self-contained building that houses thousands of people. They're almost here:

BSC is going to stuff 30,000 people into these self-contained skyscraper communities—a resident of Sky City will use up 1/100th of the land used by a typical Chinese citizen.

And it really is a city in and of itself—4,450 apartments, nearly 100,000 square feet of indoor vertical farms, 250 hotel rooms, 92 elevators, 30 foot courtyards for athletics, and a six mile ramp that can be used to walk or run around the entire city.

Once again, BSC intends to build this thing in seven months. How will that work? Treehugger's Lloyd Alter explains: "16,000 part-time and 3,000 full-time workers will prefabricate the building for four months and assemble on site in three months." (For a closer look at all of the design specs, see Alter's in-depth piece on the project.)

Imagine 7,000 apartments between 50 m² and 225 m² in size (as one variation calls for), and you've got either a really cool vertical city or Cabrini-Green to the third power.

When complete, the first one will be 828 m tall—10 m taller than the Burj Khalifa, but presumably better integrated with local water treatment and the local real estate market.

If they built it in Streeterville, it would look this scary:

I do not know whether this is a welcome idea or a truly horrifying one.

(Via Sullivan, of course.)

UK Commons passes marriage equality by huge margin

In the end, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron probably didn't need to go hat-in-hand to Ed Miliband, but the dead-enders in his own party forced him to. Regardless, marriage equality has passed the House of Commons tonight 375-70, will probably pass the House of Lords easily:

But the prime minister, who attempted to reach out to his party by emailing a "personal note" to all members saying that he would never work with anyone who "sneered" at them, suffered the humiliation of having to plead with the Labour party for support. He also saw more than 100 Tory MPs, including the cabinet ministers Iain Duncan Smith and Owen Paterson, vote against him on the first amendment of the day.

The prime minister will understand the dangers of relying on opposition support for a flagship measure after he personally ensured that Tony Blair's schools reforms survived with Tory support in 2006 three months after he became leader. Within months, supporters of Gordon Brown forced Blair to name the date of his departure the following year.

But who could become Tory leader next? William Hague? And how likely would that make an election before 2015?

I'm glad the U.S. isn't the only English-speaking country with swivel-eyed loonies, but still, can you imagine the U.S. House passing marriage equality by the same margin? (366 to 68, for those keeping score at home.) Hell, marriage equality has overwhelming support in Illinois but somehow it can't get to the house floor in Springfield. It's disappointing that the U.K. could have marriage equality before Illinois—but that's fine. The U.K. can teach the U.S. something about conservative values in the meantime.

Rumsfeld's Rules

Via Sullivan, American Public Media's Kai Ryssdal yesterday committed an act of journalism against the former defense secretary:

I don’t know if y’all had a chance to listen to Donald Rumsfeld being torn a new one on Marketplace yesterday, but it was glorious to hear. Rummy was no doubt expecting softball questions about his new book Rumsfeld’s Rules and instead was grilled about how the wisdom in his book is in stark contrast to his work with Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve never felt a man squirm through airwaves like that.

I had to rewind a couple of times during the interview. As Sullivan said, "this guy is dangerously out of touch with reality, even as he insists he alone grasps reality."

Racial tolerance worldwide

Via Sullivan, Max Fischer at WaPo found an interesting proxy for racial tolerance:

Among the dozens of questions that World Values asks, the Swedish economists found one that, they believe, could be a pretty good indicator of tolerance for other races. The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society.

Here’s what the data show:

Anglo and Latin countries most tolerant. People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The only real exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti. Scandinavian countries also scored high.

Here's the map:

I'd love to see this data mapped at the U.S. county level...

Meanwhile, in the reality-based community

Noam Scheiber shakes his head about the origins of the IRS-Tea Party scandal:

Fine—there’s no law against neurosis. But, to borrow a thought experiment from my colleague Alec MacGillis, consider all this from the perspective of the IRS’s Cincinnati office, which handles tax-exempt groups. You’re minding your own business in 2009 when you start to receive dozens of applications from right-leaning groups, applications you didn’t solicit and don’t require. You peruse a few of the applications and it looks like many of the groups, while claiming to be “social welfare” organizations, have an overtly political purpose, like backing candidates with specific ideological agendas. Suffice it to say, you don’t need an inquisitorial mind to decide the applications deserve careful vetting. One Tea Party activist from Waco, Texas, has complained that an IRS official told her he was “sitting on a stack of tea party applications and they were awaiting word from higher-ups as to how to process them.” The quote is intended to sound nefarious—an outtake from some vast left-wing conspiracy—but it’s actually perfectly straight-forward: The IRS was unexpectedly flooded by dodgy 501c4 applications and was at a loss over how to manage them.

So the crime here had nothing to do with “targeting” conservatives. The targeting was effectively done by the conservative groups themselves, when they filed their gratuitous applications. The crime, such as it is, was twofold. First, in the course of legitimately vetting questionable applications, the IRS appears to have been more intrusive than justified, asking for information about donors whose privacy it should have respected. This is unfortunate and intolerable, but not quite a threat to democracy.

Second, the IRS was tone deaf to how its scrutiny would look to the people being scrutinized, given that they all subscribed to the same worldview, and that they were already nursing a healthy persecution complex.

Meanwhile, the Tin Foil Hat crowd now has something that appears, at first glance, to be real government overreach for ideological reasons, and now the IRS will be even less likely to go after Astroturf groups.

This is what most people in the world call an "own goal."