Posts Tagged ‘Lucy and the football’
Tuesday II: The Wrath of Trump!
* A Storify of tweets from the #ShapingChange Butler conference, from the great Moya Bailey.
* Come for the Sputnik Awards, stay for the impossibly byzantine voting system…
* Star Trek as critique of Robert Heinlein. An excerpt from the new book Trekonomics, which I’ve been enjoying a lot.
* A new study, published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), draws a link between human smarts and an infant’s dependency, suggesting one thing led to the other in a spiraling evolutionary feedback loop.
* Incredible: Erie debt collectors held fake court hearings.
* Republicans Express Shock at Trump, but Stand By Him. What’s Going on in the Republican Party Right Now is Shocking. ‘Trump U’ scandal gets worse for Florida’s AG. Texas Governor Linked to Alleged Cover-Up of Dropped Trump University Investigation. Kirk out. Here Comes Hillary the Hawk.
* Leopard escapes at Utah zoo, visitors take shelter. Quick, find me some parents of a four-year-old to blame!
* Rethinking Judicial Selection.
* 10 Theoretical Megastructures, From Big to Massive.
* It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Clara Oswald.
Happy Birthday Connor Links!
My son is being born today, so the posting will probably be sporadic even by summer standards. Sorry! And hooray!
* FindingEstella from @amplify285 is an awesome Octavia Butler Archives Tumblr.
* NASA: ‘Our plan is to colonize Mars.’ Well, then, let’s go!
* Breaking: The Constitution is a shell game.
* Why Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is A State Of Matter, Like a Solid, A Liquid Or A Gas.
* This fantasy has survived the 1980s, of course, even as the action genre that spawned RoboCop has faded. Meanwhile, the market fundamentalism and “tough-on-crime” rhetoric that the film makes fun of, still relatively novel in 1987, have today become normalized. The idea of redemptive violence—mass incarceration, a heavily armed police force—is now so deeply embedded in our political culture that we may no longer be able to see it well enough to mock it. RoboCop is thus both more dated and more current than ever. Its critical edge comes from a pessimistic vision of the future that is getting closer all the time.
* If social and labor movements are to break out of this cycle, it will have to mean an actual break to the left of the Democratic Party. Or not?
* Politics in Times of Anxiety.
* Is soccer finally becoming a mainstream TV sport in America? These charts say yes.
* Bazillionaires! They’re just like us!
* Sherlock Holmes is officially out of copyright. Start your slashes!
* Podcast of the week: Rachel and Miles x-Plain the X-Men.
* Danger Close: The Iraq War in American Fiction. Almost certainly a factor in the prevalence of Iraq War stories being (1) science fictional (2) set in narrative situations that recast us as the victims of our own invasion.
* US v. Portugal: It was the worst. See you Thursday.
* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has your improved Turing Test.
It Is a Far, Far Better Thing That I Do Than I Have Ever Done
Earlier today, Reid appeared to reverse course, saying climate/energy would be the next logical issue to address, followed only afterward by immigration reform. So everything’s groovy, right?
Far from it. Tonight, Graham told me that he will filibuster his own climate change bill, unless Reid drops all plans to turn to immigration this Congress.
I hope all the people who’ve been so eager to defend Lindsey Graham’s reasonableness these last few days take the time to weigh in on this. Can’t we all agree this is obviously a transparent attempt to take a losing issue off the table for the GOP? Now, that’s fine—I wish the Democrats would play this sort of hardball more often—but his tantrum is not some noble gesture, and we don’t have to give the guy cover while he throws it.
And this doesn’t even get into the near certainty that in the end he’ll find some reason to vote against his own bill anyway. How many times have we already seen this exact scenario play out?
UPDATE: Or, via Brad DeLong, what Greg Sargent said.
But we’ve been here before: Earlier this spring, Graham issued the same threat, saying that if Dem leaders moved forward on health reform it would kill the chance of compromise on immigration.
“The first casualty of the Democratic health care bill will be immigration reform,” Graham said in March, adding that movement on health reform would “kill any chance of immigration reform passing the Senate this year.” Time to wise up to Graham’s game?
And Schumer?
Chuck Schumer’s signing of the public option letter has turned a lot of heads today. Cantwell has only said maybe, but Feingold is on board too. as are Lautenberg, Mikulski, and Shaheen. Even Reid is so far noncommital, which I take as a good sign.
Even hard-nosed realist Ezra Klein says there could be something here:
Adding the public option into the legislation would give [disaffected, demoralized liberals and progressives] something to fight for, and something to be excited about. If you believe, as most people do, that midterm elections are largely about base mobilization, and that Scott Brown’s victory was in part assured by demoralized Democrats who didn’t feel much affection for either Martha Coakley or the Democrats in Washington, this may be the party’s last, best hope to give its passionate supporters the win that would reinvigorate them for 2010. “I don’t think that was the original strategy behind signing this letter,” one Senate aide told me. “But that may be the strategy we fall backwards into.”
For all that, I’d still bet against the public option. For one thing, there’s sharp resistance to this idea in the White House. The administration has just spent weeks rebranding itself as a bipartisan outpost in a sea of bickering hacks. Resuscitating the most controversial element of the bill and running it through reconciliation looks less like reaching out and more like delivering a hard left cross to the opposition.
One way or another, however, Senate Democrats and the White House need to choose their path and communicate it clearly. If Democrats want to use the public option to reinvigorate their base and attack the insurers and push this bill over the finish line in a final blaze of populist fury, more power to them. If they decide that the process is fragile and Americans want bipartisanship and this is a bad time to introduce uncertainty into chaos, that makes sense, too.