Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 6
April 18, 2011
A sentence I would not have written | Michael Tomasky
While trolling the NYT this morning for interesting political news, my eye was averted by this story, about the president-elect of the American College of Surgeons resigning the post before even taking it because of a controversial editorial (leader) he wrote in the publication Surgery News.
It was February, and in an attempt to tie that issue's editorial to St. Valentine and l'amour..well, I'll let the Times take it from here:
The editorial cited research that found that female college students who had had unprotected sex were less depressed than those whose partners used condoms. It speculated that compounds in semen have antidepressant effects.
"So there's a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there's a better gift for that day than chocolates," it concluded.
If you wish to dismiss this as mere political correctness, I beseech you to ask yourself if you would have written and published, in a respected journal that goes to fellow surgeons no less, that last sentence. Wowzers. Epic brain fail, as the kids say (they say something like that, don't they? Jabs?)
The article goes on to discuss a more general set of greivances held by women surgeons, and one can well imagine that that is a field in which female practitioners have a difficult time of it. Surgeons are rock stars in the medical profession, and these 2009 statistics show that while half of all medical school enrollees are women, only 20% of surgeons are female, so it's a pretty male preserve.
I still have a crystal clear memory of an All in the Family episode from maybe 1973. The debate is over feminism and the proper place of women. Gloria presents a riddle. A father and a young boy are driving in a car and have an accident. The father has minor injuries and is taken to the (yes, the - this was America) hospital. The boy suffered more serious injuries and was rushed into surgery.
The surgeon showed up and said, "I can't operate on that child. That's my son." How, Gloria asked, could this be possible?
Well, it's a marker of our progress that it's obvious to us today what the answer is. But in 1973, no one knew. I didn't. My mom didn't. Even Meathead, the liberal sword-bearer, didn't know.
Finally at the very end, Edith says in her gravy-thick New York accent, "I know! Da soigeon was da boy's muthah!" At which point there was a loud collective "aaaahhh" of recognition from the audience, which means the audience didn't know either.
As is the case on so many of these fronts, we've come a long way, but we've still got a long way to go.
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April 15, 2011
The House goes on record for the Ryan plan - and worse | Michael Tomasky
The House of Reps wound down its week by voting to make the Ryan plan its official policy. The vote was 235-193. Four Republicans voted against, one of whom was Texas libertarian Ron Paul. More importantly, I report with some pleasure and relief that not a single Democrat voted for it.
That's an unusual unanimity. Not even Dan Boren of Oklahoma, or Mike Ross of Arkansas, or Heath Shuler of North Carolina, to name three moderates who very often vote with the Reps. So now it's teed up. The R's can't even say one Democrat is with them. Fox can't even find that one lonely Democrat to come on their air and prostitute himself. In this war, there's no Lieberman.
In fact, things were almost a lot more interesting than even this. There's another plan from a right-wing group within the House GOP (imagine that!) called the Republican Study Committee. Their plan, which raises the Social Security eligibility age to 70, makes Ryan's look kind of nice. It came up for a routine vote. I'll let TPM take it from here:
Normally something like that would fail by a large bipartisan margin in either the House or the Senate. Conservative Republicans would vote for it, but it would be defeated by a coalition of Democrats and more moderate Republicans. But today that formula didn't hold. In an attempt to highlight deep divides in the Republican caucus. Dems switched their votes -- from "no" to "present."
Panic ensued. In the House, legislation passes by a simple majority of members voting. The Dems took themselves out of the equation, leaving Republicans to decide whether the House should adopt the more-conservative RSC budget instead of the one authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. As Dems flipped to present, Republicans realized that a majority of their members had indeed gone on the record in support of the RSC plan -- and if the vote closed, it would pass. That would be a slap in the face to Ryan, and a politically toxic outcome for the Republican party.
So they started flipping their votes from "yes" to "no."
In the end, the plan went down by a small margin, 119-136. A full 172 Democrats voted "present."
It gets even better. For some reason, 16 Democrats voted no (maybe they voted before the "present" strategy was devised). Do your math. If these Democrats had also voted present, the thing would have lost by one vote. And if one septuagenarian had gotten flustered and hit the wrong button, the GOP would have been on the record in support of raising the Social Security age to 70!
Anyway, points to the Democrat who came up with the "present" strategy. As for the larger story, a clear battle line is now drawn.
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Tomasky Talk: Cuts, the budget and the debt ceiling - video
Tomasky Talk: It's all money matters on Capitol Hill this week as Michael Tomasky analyses the big four stories from Washington
Michael TomaskyDonald Trump would be a really horrible president | Michael Tomasky
Yesterday, in a radio interview with journalist Fred Dicker on an Albany, New York station, Donald Trump said:
"I have a great relationship with the blacks. I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."
Now, some of our conservatives are going to write in to say, what's wrong with that? People say "the Catholics" or "the Jews."
Nonsense. They know very well what's wrong with it. I bet they don't say it themselves. You don't say "the blacks," or for that matter "the whites" or "the browns" or "the yellows." THE + COLOR = TROUBLE.
Without the "the" the statement probably wouldn't have attracted much attention. What is it about the innocuous word "the"? I think it's the history in the phrase "the blacks," which was used in the past by many a racist in sentences like, "Then the blacks moved in" or "The blacks don't know how good they have it" or "We've got to keep the blacks out of here." Every American knows this, and so reasonable people quit saying it, except ironically and even then rather carefully, about 15 years ago.
Anyhoo, the Donald's (now see, there, "the" is perfectly fine!) relationship with "the blacks" is highly unlikely to be as good as he thinks it is, especially once people examine the history for a moment or two. In 1989, New York experienced one of its most horrific crimes, the seeming gang rape of a young female jogger in Central Park. The Central Park jogger case became known around the world. The phrase "wilding" entered the lexicon - a coarse and sickening verb: young men like hyenas, no moral compass at all, out hunting for women to conquer.
I don't know if I ever saw New York more convulsed in racial rage. Tawana Brawley, up there. The Goetz shooting. These were the big three, and it would be awfully hard to rank them. It was searing. In the midst of the controversy, Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York papers. ''I want to hate these muggers and murderers,'' Trump wrote. ''They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.''
Five African American juveniles confessed and were charged. They confessed. No DNA evidence linked them to the crime. They were convicted.
Thirteen years later, a man stepped forward to say that he had done it alone. DNA evidence backed him up. The five defendants' convictions were vacated in 2002.
Trump is obviously going out of his way to offend half of America, and it's perhaps hard to know how serious he is about this birther business and using phrases that mark one as something close to a racist. But I tend to take people at their word. And we seem to be learning that we knew very little about this man who's been in the public eye for a quarter-century.
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Union leaders tee off on Obama | Michael Tomasky
It makes me sad to read things like this, from Politico:
Top labor leaders excoriated President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in a closed session of the AFL-CIO's executive board meeting in Washington Wednesday, three labor sources said.
Furious union presidents complained about budget cuts, a new trade agreement and what some view as their abandonment, even by their typically reliable allies among Senate Democrats.
Now, not only are we getting screwed by the Republicans but the Democrats are doing it too," said one union official, characterizing the mood at a summit of labor leaders who are worried that Democrats seem unlikely to go to the mat for them as an election year approaches...
...A case in point: The AFL released yesterday a deliberately measured statement on the budget.
"President Obama does not yet have the balance right between spending cuts and new revenue," said President Richard Trumka calling for "significant new revenues." Last week, the federation released a stronger, "deeply disappointed" statement on the free trade pact with Colombia.
I don't blame them. They spend many millions electing Democrats and then Democrats do very little for them. Not nothing: Democratic presidential administrations always appoint better, pro-union people to the National Labor Relations Board, make certain administrative changes that make it easier for people to try form unions, and put people in charge of investigations like the one into the West Virginia explosion that killed 29 men who are actually qualified to lead such investigations, instead of absurd corporate shills as Republicans tend to.
The unions' problem is that they have loads of clout inside the Democratic Party, because they spend millions electing Democrats, but virtually no clout outside of it. Come to think of it, they may not even have that much clout in the Democratic Party. They have clout within it during election time. During legislation time, they have rather little. Remember when some people thought card-check legislation might actually happen? Geez...
Even so, this kind of thing, a public rebuke of a Democratic president by a union leader, is fairly rare. The problem unions face is that they can't sit out elections, because that would weaken them even further: if, for example, they ditched the Dems and ran a third-party candidate, they wouldn't even get the crumbs they're passed now. And remember, Trumka stuck his neck out for Obama. It wasn't too easy for a guy who represents a bunch of miners to lecture them about racism, as he did, and make a passionate case for Obama.
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Friday quiz: don't mess with Mother Nature | Michael Tomasky
First of all, sorry about the delay this morning, team. Some technological snafus, mysterious, and equally mysteriously resolved just by shutting off the box and starting it up again.
But the headaches that arrive on our doorsteps with technology provide a perfect segue into a discussion of the ease and grace of nature, so segue we shall.
For most of my adult life, "tourism" for me meant visiting cities, mostly, in America and around the world; oceanside towns, for a few days; other American towns in parts of the country where I hadn't spent much time.
Then it struck me about three years ago that I had turned my back completely on nature. Which is to say, I had turned my back completely on one great source of beauty in life. Did beauty exist only inside museums, in the facades of buildings – which is to say, in the hand of man? Of course not! Some would call the thought impious, but even if one is not a believer, one can agree that it was a ridiculous pose. I vowed to change (I am, as you know, a believer in change).
It was when we were going to Santiago in early 2008, a combined business-pleasure trip, that I became obsessed with going (while we were there) to Patagonia. The literal end of the earth. What could be more humbling a reckoning with nature's power than that? Unfortunately it didn't take long to learn that Patagonia was fully another six-hour flight from Santiago (!), and it just wouldn't work out. We weren't really "there" at all, which brings up a practical issue, i.e., that these kinds of sites are often fairly hard to get to.
I still haven't seen much nature, beyond that which I grew up with, which was in its way very profound. I mean, I've seen lots of nature – who hasn't, even if from airplanes. But I have not feasted mine eyes upon nature's great natural wonders. And that is the subject of our quiz this week. So let's dive in.
1. Which of these is generally thought to be the world's oldest existing active volcano, dating back 350,000 years and emitting its most recent lava flow in January of this year?
a. Mauna Loa, Hawaii
b. Mt. Etna, Sicily
c. Krakatoa, Indonesia
2. This archipelago was a whaling destination in the early 1800s, when New England-based ships came over and discovered vast quantities of sperm whales in the nearby waters; not long after that, it became known for its large number of species, including 13 or 14 different kinds of finches.
a. Hawaiian Islands
b. Canary Islands
c. Galapagos Islands
3. This 277-mile long marvel has mostly been thought to have formed 5 to 6 million years ago, although more recent scientific estimates date it back even farther; the government of the nation in question a few years ago obscured matters by insisting that the gift shop at the destination stock a book arguing that the site had been created 4,500 years ago by Noah's flood.
a. Alborz Valley, Iran
b. Grand Canyon, United States
c. Izmir plain, Turkey
4. This is the world's largest single structure made by living organisms.
a. The Great Barrier Reef
b. Greenland
c. Christmas Island
5. This phenomenon also occurs on other planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn, and evidently more intensely than on earth; even so, it is likely true that a certain former half-term governor can indeed observe the earthly version from her own backyard.
a. Aurora Borealis
b. The decennial "brightening" of the Milky Way, which last happened in November 2005
c. The annual occurrence (July in the north, January in the south) of shooting stars being clearly visible from near the Earth's poles
6. The harbor of this city, surrounded by mountains up to 3,500 feet (1,066 m) tall, is usually called one of the world's seven natural wonders; explorers who arrived there in the 1500s, confused by its massive size, originally thought they'd discovered a river.
a. Honolulu
b. Hong Kong (Kowloon)
c. Rio de Janeiro
7. The 2006 David Sharp controversy grew out of the fact that Sharp, an English math teacher, was seen by as many as 40 other people but left by them to die where?
a. In the tourist-friendly but shark-infested waters off of Cyprus
b. About 28,000 feet up Mount Everest
c. On the Serengeti Plain, cornered by two lions, but still rescue-able according to some witnesses
8. Rare six-option question: Which of these countries or international borders is not home to one of the world's most dramatic waterfalls?
a. United States/Canada
b. Argentina/Brazil
c. Iceland
d. China/Vietnam
e. Zambia/Zimbabwe
f. Croatia
9. The Puerta Princesa Underground River, a Unesco World Heritage site, runs about five miles and contains chambers that are as large as 400 feet (120 m) high and 200 feet (60 m) wide. Where is it located?
a. The Philippines, Palawan Province
b. Costa Rica
c. Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula
10. Temperature differences of as much as 50 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius) in the course of a single day are a regular occurrence in:
a. The Sahara Desert
b. The Australian Outback
c. Siberia
11. The world's largest ice caves, which run 24 miles in length and feature not only stalactites and stalagmites, but for some stretches are entirely covered in ice, are to be found in:
a. Canada
b. Norway
c. Austria
12. Who wrote these words, capturing the spirit of today's quiz more than a century before it was written:
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
a. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
b. Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
c. Henry David Thoreau, Walden
A little curve ball there on 12, but a rather lovely stanza, wouldn't you say? Let's check the answers.
Answers: 1-b; 2-c; 3-b; 4-a; 5-a; 6-c; 7-b; 8-d; 9-a; 10-a; 11-c; 12-b.
Notes:
1. Probably a tough one, unless maybe you follow that sort of news closely and knew about the time it blew this year. Why does Italy have all these massive volcanoes but not (as far as I know) Croatia or Greece or other nearby places?
2. Since 1 was tough, I made this easy; finches.
3. Heh heh.
4. Fascinating, eh? But coral reefs are the calcium carbonate secreted by corals, so they're animal-made.
5. Couldn't resist. Did any of you actually go for one of the fake answers?
6. Big hint in the question's last word. Rio. River. Got it?
7. I did not know this. I guess you Brits did?
8. Tricky, cuz I could see people choosing either Iceland or Croatia, but this list says they both have awesome falls.
9. This is another I didn't know about. Sounds astonishing.
10. Daily temperatures vary greatly in the Outback, but not by that much. Siberia, not so much.
11. Hard one, but here's my backup.
12. Well, Walden wasn't a poem, and Leaves of Grass was really mostly about America, not nature.
Tell us how you did, and especially – I hope this thread might be great for this – about your travels to wondrous natural destinations.
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April 14, 2011
The House budget vote | Michael Tomasky
One way you can tell which party is running the House is whether things happen on time. If they do, it's the Republicans in charge. And so it came to pass that the budget vote actually occurred around 4 this afternoon. In a Democratic era you can be sure it would have been 11 tonight.
The vote was mildly surprisingly to me in that only 57 Republicans opposed, while 179 supported. That was few enough, obviously, that John Boehner had to rely on Democratic votes for the thing to go through. Some are trying to spin this as a bit of an embarrassment for Boehner, but there was never any serious doubt that around half the Democrats would indeed vote for it, so he always had some wiggle room.
The Democratic tally was 81 for, 108 against. The liberals and the hard-shell tea partiers were against, obviously for different reasons, and the moderate Democrats and the merely conservative Republicans were for it.
We could be entering a period, after a decade of very stringent GOP unity, of a pretty seriously splintered GOP caucus. Assume the debt ceiling vote passes but under similar circumstances. That'll be strike two. It'd be nice if these two factions were moderates and conservatives, you know, in the way that Democrats have moderates and liberals, rather than conservatives and ultras. On the other hand ultras can be amusing to watch. Too bad there are no witches.
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The tax-raiser vanishes | Michael Tomasky
A tip from wise source not long ago sent me in the direction of the blog of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist's powerful group. Norquist, as you should know, is the fellow who makes GOP candidates sign a pledge saying they'll raise a tax of any kind on any thing.
It's pretty fascinating reading, because are clearly written to do heavy political signaling. This guy's okay. This one's not. This policy is kosher. This one not. Etc. One gets the sense that reading Pravda in the old days might have been like this:
Some are arguing now that because these cuts are not reflected in outlays, or the money that actually goes out the door, they are not "real." This is not only disingenuous, it is totally ignorant of the way the federal government budgets.
What's more, it is an entirely nonsensical conservative position to argue that rescinding permission to spend money does not equate to spending cuts. To reform the federal budget process, small government advocates need to address the way government spends money – as the process is driven by BA, and not outlays, it is unhelpful to discuss budget-cutting in terms of outlays. It is especially malevolent to do so now in the eleventh hour of the budget fight...
Does that prose not carry a distinct party-line-ish aura about it? More:
Just in time for tax day, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Mike Enzi (R-WY) are expected to unveil a bill shortly that would permit - for the first time - states to collect taxes on Internet, catalog, and other sales when the seller is not based in the state. All told, the estimated $23 billion Internet tax hike would permit a small cartel of states to reach outside of their borders to force individuals and businesses who aren't even residents to collect taxes.
The Durbin-Enzi bill is not just an enormous tax hike, its a threat to federalism...
Mike Enzi, watch yer back! And interestingly, look at who they like, an assessment many tea partiers no longer share:
Given Senator Scott Brown's [R-Mass] success in supporting conservative solutions while representing one of the most historically liberal states in the nation, it is no surprise that he has become the target of disingenuous attacks by the Boston Globe...
These are amusing. Of greater moment is the blog's criticisms of the Senate "Gang of Six," the bipartisan group of senators who are allegedly finding common ground around shared sacrifice, i.e., entitlement reform, cuts and revenue hikes. Republicans Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, one of the sextet, is quoted regularly saying that he and the other two Republicans have definitely put revenues on the table, although to my knowledge the Gang of Six hasn't actually said one specific thing and is planning on releasing its proposals after Easter.
Norquist has a pretty major interest in these goings on. If somehow, this year or next, Republicans do agree to a deal that includes revenues, then his "pledge" becomes a dead letter. Or so it would seem to me. Beyond that, as I'm sure the savvy GN knows, the day Washington passes a tax increase is the day the whole context of our national politics changes, and perhaps dramatically. That's why he is as against that day's arrival as I am for it.
Anyway, clock the blog from time to time. I may think he's had a malign influence on my country but I'm not above sending him readers.
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Did the GOP get hosed? | Michael Tomasky
I spent an hour Tuesday reading through the specific cuts agreed to last week and thought to myself: well, I don't have enough specific budgetary knowledge to really know, but these don't look all that bad.
Last Saturday, the conventional wisdom was that the GOP had won a great victory (or decent or good from a tea party point of view) and that Obama had caved. Now, that's flipping around fast. Check this out:
A Congressional Budget Office analysis of the fiscal 2011 spending deal that Congress will vote on Thursday concludes that it would cut spending this year by less than one-one hundredth of what both Republicans or Democrats have claimed.
A comparison prepared by the CBO shows that the omnibus spending bill, advertised as containing some $38.5 billion in cuts, will only reduce federal outlays by $352 million below 2010 spending rates. The nonpartisan budget agency also projects that total outlays are actually some $3.3 billion more than in 2010, if emergency spending is included in the total.
The astonishing result, according to CBO, is the result of several factors: increases in spending included in the deal, especially at the Defense Department; decisions to draw over half of the savings from recissions, cuts to reserve funds, and mandatory-spending programs; and writing off cuts from funding that might never have been spent.
The House votes today on the Obama-Boehner deal. Sneaky timing on the CBO's part, eh? Or, more straightforwardly, efficient timing, so that members can see what they're voting on. A few Republicans have already cited it to say they'll now vote against.
Remember, this bill funds the government through the end of this fiscal year, Sept. 30. It has to pass the House and the Senate and be signed by the president to become law and actually appropriate that funding.
What if the House, led by conservatives, doesn't pass it today? I rate the chances of this as "not very," but I'm not up on the Hill, where I'm sure there is blind fury. But the price of not passing it is that the R's take 100% of the blame in the eyes of most Americans for a possibly extended shutdown. And yes, this just shows how hard it really is to cut the budget, especially when you increase money for the Pentagon.
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A typical American's question about William and Kate | Michael Tomasky
I direct your attention to this marvelous essay in the current New York Review of Books by your friend and mine, our own Jonathan Freedland, on a certain upcoming wedding, which article appears under one of the finest headlines I've encountered recently, "The Windsor Knot."
Freedland concludes by musing, quite interestingly to me, that the monarchy is basically fine as long as Elizabeth stays around (which, he notes given her mother's track record, may yet be a while), for one simple reason: she is a living link to Britain's finest hour:
Pupils in UK schools now study the Third Reich more intensely than they learn about the Tudors. History before 1939, with all its imperial complications, is glimpsed only vaguely. Britain alone, Churchill, 1940, the Blitz—this is the tale of unalloyed heroism that the country likes to tell and retell to itself. And as long as Elizabeth sits on the throne, Britons remain tied to those events directly.
This is the bedrock on which the current monarchy stands. While the Queen lives, no republican will be able to shake it. After she is gone, she will leave a gap that her son, her grandson, and his new wife—no matter how charming—will have to struggle to fill.
So your long and glorious history, except that spot of bother you ran into in the form of that crushing military spanking you absorbed in the 1780s, is so elided in your schools?
But here's the part that was even more interesting to moi:
As Prince William Arthur Philip Louis of Wales, second in line to the English throne, and his girlfriend since student days, Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, are heralded into Westminster Abbey on April 29 by a Ruritanian phalanx of footmen and flunkies in gilt-edged robes, watched by a bejeweled congregation of aristocratic cousins including several crowned heads of Europe, their domestic television audience will include a good many who will have just received redundancy notices, sharply reduced welfare payments, or notification of the removal of much-cherished social services. April is the start of the financial year, when many of the Conservative-led government's most stringent deficit-cutting measures begin to bite.
Seems to me a good point. Should they, as we Yanks say, tuck it in a little? Has there been broad debate about this? I don't really follow these things. I always have to stop for a moment and ask myself whether the groom's name is William or maybe Andrew or indeed perhaps something else. I did read one profile of Kate, in Vanity Fair, which (perhaps unfairly) suggested that her chief expertise is shopping. Not that my opinion matters, but I'd be slightly impressed if they ratcheted down the pomp a bit under the circumstances.
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