Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 375

Picking Up Dinner In Your Backyard

Tama Matsuoka Wong, a food forager and author of Foraged Flavor, tells the story of how she went from being a corporate lawyer to finding food and ingredients – for some of the finest restaurants in New York City – among wild plants:

[I]t’s healthy, because you’re outdoors, getting sunshine, breathing in fresh air. I read that spending time in nature reboots your mind—you become more creative. The little time we have outside of work is so goal-oriented for people. “I ran a mile, and my heartbeat went to this,” or “I only ate so many calories today.” I think that makes people unhappy because it’s unnatural. Foraging unwinds all the goals we drive ourselves crazy trying to achieve. You’re doing less weeding, mulching, spraying, mowing. You don’t have to do—you just have to undo. It’s so easy.

To me, we’ve been going after all the wrong things, the things that make you happy for five seconds, and then, you know, you want the next one. I can’t get into all this tidiness—my yard has to look like this, my house has to look like this, my body has to look like this. Let’s change the way we think of what’s beautiful. We’ve gotten everything turned upside down. The things people think are oddball are actually the things that are more real and fundamental to how people lived since the beginning.

Check out her site “Meadows and More” here.

A Good Death, Ctd

A reader recommends a film for the thread:

For an example of a good death, to my mind there’s no better example than that of Cody Curtis, the “star” of the 2011 HBO documentary How to Die in Oregon. To summarize briefly, Cody was diagnosed with untreatable liver cancer and given only months to live. Using Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act, she prepared to end her own life and set a date. But when that date approached, she realized that she felt pretty good and cancelled her plan. She lived through the summer and fall, relatively pain-free, but then her health began to fail rapidly. Her brave meditations throughout all this were a wonder to behold.

Everything progresses, even our thoughts about death.

Another:

This thread may be older than you realize. In Book I, chapters 30–32 of his Histories, Herodotus tells the story of King Croesus, the wealthy king of Sardis, and his meeting with Solon, the great lawgiver of Athens. Croesus, having entertained his guest richly, finally asked him who the famously wise man thought the happiest man in the world to be – assuming, of course, that the answer would be himself. Instead, Solon told him that the happiest man he knew of was one Tellos the Athenian, for he had lived in a well-run city-state, saw his sons grow up and have children of their own, and died well, to the mourning of his peers.

In fact, Solon refuses to call any man happy whose life has not yet ended. Only he who “dies with grace” is reckoned happy, since the most fortunate man is subject to the whims of fate whilst alive.

The Passing Of Pete

A reader was up late last night:

I lost my childhood hero today, and America lost its greatest advocate and critic. I was surprised to see that you didn’t mark the passing of Pete Seeger. Maybe you’re busy with SOTU blogging, but all the more reason to take note; he was a man who acted as our national conscience for decades. He fought against war and hatred, and was an exponent of free speech, racial equality, and environmental justice. He gave all of his royalties to charity and lived in a simple cabin he built along the Hudson. He believed in the fundamental goodness and strength his fellow Americans, and he had a deep faith in this strange notion that people coming together around music could change the world. They did change the world because of Pete, and it frightens me deeply that in this divisive age we have no analogous figure.

Clean Coal, Dirty Water, Ctd

Katie Valentine follows up on the chemical spill that contaminated 300,000 West Virginians’ drinking water two weeks ago:

Though the water ban has been lifted in West Virginia, many residents are still wary about using their tap water. On Monday, Kanawha County started distributing its final round of bottled water, and one resident told the Charleston Gazette that he’s still not drinking or cooking with the water. In the days after the water was deemed safe by officials, chemical-related hospital emissions doubled in Charleston, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also gave West Virginians a scare by saying pregnant women shouldn’t drink any tap water, despite water company assurances that the water was safe. And yesterday, West Virginia Delegate Tiffany Lawrence said using flushed water after the ban was lifted led to an staph infection, and said she “should have known better” than to use the water after seeing the sediment left by it in the sink.

Freedom Industries, the company behind the spill, waited until last week to inform officials that there was a second chemical involved in the spill, which they declined to identify precisely because it is proprietary:

Stripped PPH was mixed in with the other chemicals in the drum at a concentration of about 6 percent. A material safety data sheet (MSDS) provided to state officials says stripped PPH contains a complex mixture of polyglycol ethers. “The specific chemical identity is being withheld as ‘trade secret,’” the company wrote in the safety document, which was dated Oct. 15, 2013. According to the MSDS, stripped PPH causes skin irritation and “serious” eye irritation. Workers are warned to wear protective gloves, goggles, and face protection whenever they work with it. And in case of a chemical spill? “Persons not wearing protective equipment should be excluded from the area of the spill until cleanup has been completed.”

Paul Barrett finds that pretty galling:

Let that sink in. The company that stored dangerous chemicals on a river bank, a mile and a half upstream from the intake to the region’s public water supply, wants to protect trade secrets about its polyglycol ethers recipe. In New York, we call that chutzpah. Are the people who own and run this company aware that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Charleston is conducting a criminal investigation?

No word yet on whether the EPA will force the company to disclose the composition of PPH. Previous Dish on the spill here, here, and here.

Roving Against The Dying Of The Light

Just weeks after Jade Rabbit landed on the moon, the Chinese rover is breaking down in a mysterious and poetic fashion:

What makes this story so tantalizing is not just the state’s intentional vagueness surrounding the “abnormality,” but the fact that the Jade Rabbit appears to have responded to the news by penning a heartrending farewell to humanity through its unofficial Weibo page (a Chinese version of Twitter). Further magnifying the drama was the fact that the national news agency picked up the tweets (weibs?) and published them in its official dispatches. …

“Although I should’ve gone to bed this morning, my masters discovered something abnormal with my mechanical control system,” Yutu was quoted as saying in Xinhua. “My masters are staying up all night working for a solution. I heard their eyes are looking more like my red rabbit eyes. Nevertheless, I’m aware that I might not survive this lunar night.”

Patrick George has more:

As [the rover] sits on its cold, rocky deathbed deep in space, it’s starting to get a little philosophical, according to the Xinhua story.

“Before departure, I studied the history of mankind’s lunar probes. About half of the past 130 explorations ended in success; the rest ended in failure,” noted the Jade Rabbit in its report. “This is space exploration; the danger comes with its beauty. I am but a tiny dot in the vast picture of mankind’s adventure in space.

“The sun has fallen, and the temperature is dropping so quickly… to tell you all a secret, I don’t feel that sad. I was just in my own adventure story – and like every hero, I encountered a small problem,” said the Rabbit. “Goodnight, Earth,” it said. “Goodnight, humanity.”

Fucking dark, man.

The problem appears to be “abrasive lunar dust.” Meanwhile, millions of miles away on Mars and a year and a half after its landing, NASA’s rover Curiosity continues to collect data across the Martian surface. America fuck yeah.

SOTU 2014: Reax

David Graham doubts tonight’s speech will change much:

As expected, Obama didn’t offer many huge initiatives. But this was not a downcast president, nor—with a couple notable exceptions—was it a stern scold attacking Congress. Obama seemed energetic and ready for his “year of action.” Yet many of the policies he talked about tonight were exactly the same ones he mentioned last year. With midterm elections on the horizon, is he likely to make more progress in 2014 than he did in 2013?

Josh Marshall’s view:

[A]s much as anything he seems comfortable (perhaps in some way liberated) with the fact that the legislative phase of his presidency is most likely over and seemed to be announcing what we call its rhetorical phase, using the bully pulpit to point a path for the country to move forward, using executive authority to nudge it forward where he can but mainly leaving a Congress that refuses to function to its own devices.

Ponnuru thought it was forgettable:

It seemed like a laundry list of mostly dinky initiatives, and as such a return to Clinton’s style of State of the Union addresses. Those speeches got some bad reviews as oratory but were pretty popular and I suspect this one will go over well too. The speech gives the president the opportunity to present himself as a reasonable guy working hard for the American public, and he did an effective job of that. A few of the ideas in the speech may even be good ones: the “myRA” proposal, for example, seems like it’s worth considering. But nobody is going to remember this speech two days from now–with the exception of Obama’s very moving closing remarks about Sergeant First Class Cory Remsburg.

Drum liked the speech:

Before the speech, the big buzz was about how Obama was going to focus on executive powers. If Congress wouldn’t give him what he wanted, he’d do it himself with the stroke of a presidential pen. And thanks to that buzz, this is something that every talking head was emphasizing in the postgame wrap-ups. But in reality, there was very little of that in the speech itself. Obama repeatedly used phrases like “if Congress wants to help me, they can _____” but very few of them sounded to me like ultimatums. They sounded like pretty sincere desires to work with Congress, and I’m pretty sure that’s how they came across to viewers who listened to the speech without benefit of all the pre-speech framing. If there was an iron fist of executive orders behind this, it was mostly wrapped in a velvet glove.

Wilkinson weighs in:

This was the speech of a beaten-down president putting a brave face on his struggles. Mr Obama was zippy and upbeat, but the lack of an ambitious unifying vision and the vagueness of his proposals communicated the president’s resignation to his impotence in the face of the GOP’s unrelenting, stone-walling opposition. He’s not expecting much, and neither should we.

Jonah Goldberg calls it a “remarkably boring speech, intellectually and rhetorically”:

My general impression was this was a r. Not every idea was terrible. But no idea was particularly exciting, or all that significant. Because it lacked ambition, it was a far less offensive speech that I thought it would be. He soft-pedaled the inequality schtick, preferring instead to talk the more optimistic topic of “opportunity.” I thought this fell flat, at least in part because he tried to make it sound like the economy was going if not great, than really well. That’s a hard message to sell against the backdrop of Americans’ lived experience, not to mention the White House’s insistence that America desperately needs “emergency” extensions of unemployment payments etc.

Kilgore is more positive:

My general reaction was that this was kind of a minimalist version of one of those second-term Clinton SOTUs that covered a lot of ground and conveyed the sense that the president was snapping his fingers impatiently at the louts sitting down there on the other side of the aisle. I regret he didn’t hit the inequality theme a lot harder—profits sky-high, wages stagnant, long-term unemployed left behind—but he made for some uncomfortable moments for GOP solons on the UI and minimum-wage issues.

Yuval Levin’s take:

The fact is, the president and his agenda seemed exhausted in this speech. It’s not easy to remember any particular proposal or idea — except maybe another retirement savings vehicle, which might be fine, but the Treasury will probably have to work pretty hard to make it seem different than those that have long been available.

David Corn wanted more fireworks:

Obama barely called out Republicans in this speech; he did not exploit this high-profile moment to confront the obstructionist opposition. He delivered heartfelt anecdotes about Americans who need a raise or who rely on Obamacare. His tone was positive; his rhetoric was uplifting. He sought to move CEOs and citizens to action. But he did little to influence the political landscape.

Chait doesn’t blame Obama for not calling out the GOP:

A completely honest Obama speech about the economy would concede that he is nearly helpless to spur economic growth given the need to obtain consent from a Congressional party whose political interest lies in thwarting it. But he would be an idiot to say that. Americans tend to hold Obama accountable even for the actions of Congressional Republicans that lie beyond his control. (Many influential pundits do, too.) They equate the amount of time Obama devotes to talking about economic policy with his commitment to economic policy.

And so Obama is reduced to pretending the giant elephant in the room does not exist.

Galupo’s bottom line:

Say this for Obama: he seemed upbeat, despite low polling and talk of lame-duck-ery spreading like wildfire. If nothing else, he seems aware of the fact that there will be no more major legislative accomplishments of his administration. (Count me in the camp that immigration reform remains a long shot.) If he does nothing else than push the boulder of his approval rating a few points up the hill, and thereby maintain Democratic control of the Senate, he will maintain a semblance of relevance for the last three years of his presidency.

Who Obama Is Giving A Raise To

Plumer lists seven actions Obama said he would take unilaterally. The one that has gotten the most attention:

Boost the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $10.10 per hour.This will be phased in slowly, starting in 2015 — the federal government will give preference to companies that pay workers higher wages. This could raise pay for some 200,000 workers, although it will only affect future federal contracts, not existing ones. See here for more details.

All told, it’s a relatively incremental step. Boosting the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, by contrast, would require an act of Congress. (And here’s an earlier look at why economists disagree so much on whether a higher minimum wage helps or hurts unemployment.)

Jordan Weissmann expects this to make little difference:

A mere 16,000 federal employees made the minimum wage or less in 2016, and according to The Wall Street Journal, it’s unclear how many of them were actually contractors. To tabulate the full effect of the hike, you’d have to know how many federal hands-for-hire earn less than $10.10 an hour, but the general point remains: This is a useful, but largely symbolic move.

Jonathan Cohn looks at other data:

A 2013 report from the think-tank Demos (where I used to be a fellow) found that nearly 2 million workers paid through federal contracts and other arrangements made less than $12 an hour. And a 2009 report from the Economic Policy Institute, based on 2006 data, found that about 400,000 workers for federal contractors had wages lower than $10 an hour. And that’s despite laws, like the Davis-Bacon Act, that require federal contractors to pay “prevailing wages” in their communities.

Philip Klein throws cold water:

Though the 2 million figure [from Demos] has been widely cited, it’s worth clarifying several points. To start, the 2 million estimate didn’t only include people who were employed through federal contracts, but also workers whose wages Demos estimated were funded through other federal spending, such as Small Business Administration loans, Medicare, and Medicaid. According to the Demos study, the number of workers who are employed directly through federal contracts was 560,000. A spokesman for Demos told the Washington Examiner that this is the category of people the group believes to be covered by the executive order.

But the number covered by the executive order would still be less than this 560,000.

One reason is that Obama’s executive order would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, which is lower than the $12 threshold used by Demos.

Drum wonders about the politics of the executive order:

On the one hand, public support for a higher minimum wage is very broad. On the other hand, this reinforces the widening gap between private sector workers and those who are paid (directly or indirectly) by taxpayer dollars. One side watches its wages stagnate and its standard of living drop, while its taxes are used to fund ever higher wages for the lucky few working for the government.

McArdle seizes on this point:

At a time of great economic insecurity, it’s not great politics to make government workers the “haves” of the labor market: paid above-market wages and shielded from the chronic risk of job loss that most of the rest of America faces. Oh, sure, this is true for everyone — professionals often have to take a pay cut to work for the government. But to the average person sweating it out through rounds of layoffs at a job they don’t like very much, government workers seem to have it very good by comparison.

Jay Richards is against the executive order:

In many parts of the U.S., such as the Washington, D.C., metro area, it would be tough to provide for a family of four with one full-time job that pays only $10.10 an hour. So why does the president not call for raising the minimum wage for all workers to, say, $50 an hour? Because such a policy would lead to massive and demonstrable unemployment among those whose labor is worth less than that. The fact that the president is calling for a minimum wage of only $10.10 an hour suggests that he understands these economic realities can’t be dissolved by executive order. The proposed wage hike would still harm the least-skilled workers, but at $10.10, that harm will be much harder to identify.

Ryan Avent looks at the mixed research on raising the minimum wage:

Under what assumptions can forcing a business to pay a higher wage be good for its business? The White House press release, which also cites the example of retailer Costco which pays well above the minimum wage, seems to invoke efficiency wage theory. This theory, which incoming Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen helped develop, suggests firms may pay above the market-clearing wage because to pay less would damage morale and productivity and raise turnover. This theory can certainly explain why some firms, such as Costco, sometimes choose to pay above the market wage. But it cannot justify forcing all firms to do so all the time. This would presume that numerous firms are systematically hurting themselves through their small-minded refusal to pay more. Sure, there are situations where people can be forced into doing something that makes them better off (wearing a seatbelt, getting vaccinated) but is it plausible that WalMart or McDonald’s know their own business so poorly that they are systematically hurting themselves by paying too little?

Finally, Christopher Flavelle notes that raising the minimum wage is a really low priority for the public:

So long as the public rates aiding the poor so low on Washington’s to-do list, Republicans will continue to calculate that blocking a higher minimum wage carries no significant political cost — even if a majority of Americans say they support raising the minimum wage.

Quote For The Night

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race,” – Calvin Coolidge.

A Prime-Time Pitch

If you appreciate the Dish’s live coverage of nights like this one, and subscribed early last year, take a couple of minutes (that’s all it takes, promise) and renew. We’ve had an amazing response so far – almost matching last January’s out-pouring of support – but still have a ways to go to secure our future. You’re our only means of support – with no ads, no sponsored content, and no corporate shelter.

Renew here! Renew now! Or if you’ve always intended to subscribe and have never gotten around to it, subscribe for the first time here (for just $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year) and help us change the future of online journalism.

And stay tuned for the Dish’s comprehensive summary of reax to the SOTU. Update from a reader:

Just re-subscribed tonight. I hardly ever read the Dish anymore, mostly because I’m trying to disconnect from the relentless media. So I ignored the initial pleas. But that was effective to ask for renewals right after the SOTU! It made me realize that you’re the source I turn to when it really counts. Even if it’s only once a month or year, it’s important to me that this effort thrives. So that’s worth a renewal.

The View From Your Window

Naples, Florida, 5.09 pm