Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

If you haven’t already heard, Scott Brown, the Republican candidate for Senator from Massachusetts, just won the special election to replace the late Ted Kennedy. You heard that right. Massachusetts, which hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since 1972, just voted for a Republican to replace Ted Kennedy. Of the Kennedy family.

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun can surmise how I feel about all this. And if you want to read some informed commentary about the implications of this vote for the country, you can check it out here, here, here, here, and here. Suffice it to say, this is a big deal.

And look, I’ll probably be fine tomorrow, and if not then, then the next day. But right now, I have a hard time having any faith in the Democratic party. Which is nuts, right? They still control 59 seats in the Senate, which is a bigger majority than either party has enjoyed in years. This should be a drop in the bucket. But let’s not talk about how arcane and despotic procedural rules in the Senate mandate a 60-vote supermajority to get anything done, except to say that James Madison and Alexander Hamilton are no doubt joining Senator Kennedy in grave-spinning tonight.

My buddy is fond of saying that the voters get what they deserve. I’m not really sure what else to say. After eight years of allowing George Bush to enmesh us in two wars, let financial institutions leverage themselves beyond all logical comprehension based on the seemingly unassailable notion that housing prices would keep going up forever and hence miring us in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, enact unfunded mandates (No Child Left Behind), pass deficit-crippling entitlements (the prescription drug benefit), and drag our country’s good name through the mud (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay), the voters of my beloved Commonwealth of Massachusetts were ready to send a message to the Democratic party that, you know what? You guys had all of a year to turn the ship around, and you only sorta kinda started to succeed. We’re ready to put the guys that ran the ship aground in the first place back in charge. Whatever. At the most fundamental level, I’m a believer in representative democracy. I think that the people that just elected Scott Brown are wrong, but this is the system by which we hold our elected leaders accountable. This was clearly an accountability moment for the Democratic party, and they only have themselves to blame.

Paul Krugman wrote about this in a column in the New York Times on Monday, and I’m about to quote liberally from it.

It’s instructive to compare Mr. Obama’s rhetorical stance on the economy with that of Ronald Reagan. It’s often forgotten now, but unemployment actually soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Reagan, however, had a ready answer for critics: everything going wrong was the result of the failed policies of the past. In effect, Reagan spent his first few years in office continuing to run against Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Obama could have done the same — with, I’d argue, considerably more justice. He could have pointed out, repeatedly, that the continuing troubles of America’s economy are the result of a financial crisis that developed under the Bush administration, and was at least in part the result of the Bush administration’s refusal to regulate the banks.

But he didn’t. Maybe he still dreams of bridging the partisan divide; maybe he fears the ire of pundits who consider blaming your predecessor for current problems uncouth — if you’re a Democrat. (It’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.) Whatever the reason, Mr. Obama has allowed the public to forget, with remarkable speed, that the economy’s troubles didn’t start on his watch.

When it comes to low-information voters, narrative is the most important thing. I’m a junkie, so I read about politics every day. I represent a tremendously small fraction of the electorate. I know many, many smart, capable, respectable people who just don’t keep up with politics. Plus, there are scores of just blithering idiots who still happen to vote. For these people, overarching narratives are key. And the sad truth is, the narrative was stacked against Democrats in this election. Massachusetts voted for Barack Obama by a 62 to 36 margin in 2008. Did his brand, objectively, become so odious in a year since his inauguration? Or did the perception change. Deep down, you know the answer.

Which is why I find the scapegoating of the Coakley campaign to be insidious. She was a lousy candidate, for sure. But guess what? Irregardless of Scott Brown’s “People’s Seat” talk, Martha Coakley is a Democrat. In Massachusetts. It’s unseemly to say that a certain party takes a certain seat for granted. But please be honest with yourself. This is Massachusetts we’re talking about here. A Kelly’s roast beef sandwich should be able to get elected if it has a (D) next to its name. So I don’t want to hear anything about Coakley taking her win for granted.

The fact is, she should have been able to take it for granted. The national Democratic Party had as much skin in this game as Coakley herself. We’re talking about President Obama’s agenda here, to say nothing of the votes that various fringe Democrats stuck their necks out for in the hopes of the health care bill passing. So to hear about backbiting and infighting taking place before the polls even closed is sincerely disheartening.

There are two possible scenarios. Either the national party and the White House gave Martha Coakley all the support she needed, and they failed miserably. That would be pretty bad. What would be worse is if they barely gave her any help at all. That would represent a level of arrogance, gall, and incompetence that’s almost unforgivable. Either way, to lay the blame at the feet of Martha Coakley, who had the opportunity to become the first female senator that Massachusetts has ever elected, is to focus on all the wrong sort of details.

I’m reminded of the sad tale of Trey Junkin. Many of you are no doubt perplexed that I’m about to make a long-snapper analogy, but the Giants fans among Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s readership should know exactly what I’m talking about. It was the wild card round of the 2002 playoffs, and the Giants were facing the 49ers. The Giants were able to jump to a seemingly insurmountable 38–14 lead with four minutes left in the third quarter. Only one team had ever come back from a bigger deficit in the playoffs: the Buffalo Bills trailed the Houston Oilers 34–3 in 1993, only to come back and win 41–38. You can see where this is going.

San Francisco led 39–38 when New York was about to attempt a 41–yard field goal with seconds left on the clock. But Junkin, who came out of retirement for the sole purpose to long snap for the Giants in this game, botched the snap, leading to an incomplete pass from the kicker as time expired. Game over, Giants lose.

Trey Junkin is a presence of folkloric proportions in the annals of Giants history, but until I just looked up that link up there, I couldn’t remember the name of the kicker who, because it was a third down play, could have spiked the botched snap and bought the Giants another opportunity for points. (Matt Allen, btw.)

Point being, everybody remembers the very memorable Trey Junkin fuckup, but far fewer probably remember the guy that could have made that fuckup moot. And barely anyone cares to pore through the game and look at the myriad different defensive stops that could have been made, offensive plays that could have been executed, or schemes that could have been drawn up that could have prevented San Francisco from scoring just two additional points. Junkin is a convenient patsy, so he gets remembered. Martha Coakley is going to be the Trey Junkin of this election. She bears responsibility at the end of this election, but there are a host of factors that went completely and utterly wrong in order to put her in a position to lose. Whatever.

There’s a special election in Massachusetts tomorrow to fill the Senate seat held by the late Ted Kennedy. As per this blog’s tradition, I’m encouraging all of my Massachusetts readers to get out there and vote tomorrow. It’s an incredibly important election. I’d love nothing more than to tell my more Republican-inclined readers to just stay home and stay dry, but that wouldn’t be very sporting of me, would it?

I’ll be voting for the Democrat, Martha Coakley, and if being represented by someone that opposes perpetual war, believes that people shouldn’t be sentenced to die for want of health insurance, supports women’s reproductive rights, and supports marriage equality is important to you, I suggest you do the same.

I had a job doing layout and ad design for the Boston Haitian Reporter during my senior year of college. It was a small outfit (I also did layout and ad design for sister publications the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston Irish Reporter), but it was valued by Boston’s Haitian immigrants. (Apparently, the Boston area has the third largest Haitian community in America. Who knew?) It was an exciting time to be around, because the first elections since the 2004 rebellion that ousted then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were taking place in the beginning of 2006, so there was a lot of news coming out of Haiti that was of great interest to immigrants here in Boston.

I learned a lot at that job, in particular about just how difficult it is to run an election in a country so gripped by poverty, corruption, and violence. And, in general, just how gripped by poverty, corruption, and violence Haiti really is. Eighty percent of its people live in poverty. The literacy rate is around 53 percent. It ranks 149th among 182 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index. It’s cruel and counterproductive to have a pissing match about which country is the worst on earth, but Haiti is certainly in the argument.

It seems like it’s been that way forever. Which is why this latest tragedy to befall Haiti seems so cosmically cruel. Natural disasters on this scale are always bad, of course, but Haiti is a country that was uniquely postured to be affected in an outsize way should a terrible disaster occur. And outsize is probably the most delicate way to put it, with the death toll still indeterminate but with estimates in the tens of thousands, most of the capital city of Port Au Prince in ruins, and barely a semblance of law and order in the streets. You can’t read a description of the devastation without imagining hell on earth. And this was a place that could have been classified as hell on earth already.

It’s all just incredibly sad, especially given Haiti’s history. In 1804, Haiti became only the second state in the Western hemisphere to throw off the yoke of colonial oppression. (Guess which was the first.) That’s a fact which, at least in my limited and tangential experience, Haitians (rightfully) wear like a badge of honor. These people are our sisters and brothers in revolution and independence. And I won’t get into how Western meddling has tipped the scales against the people of Haiti for years.

Suffice it to say, they need our help. My friend Sam, who researches this type of thing far more than I do, recommends giving to Partners in Health, which apparently has a lot of people already on the ground and a fair amount of infrastructure in place (or as much infrastructure as a nonprofit can have in a disaster area.) I’m going to throw a few bucks their way. I won’t twist any arms, but every little bit helps. And if you want to express your own self-determination, the Globe has set up a good fact sheet about various global and local nonprofits that are helping out. And as usual, if prayer is your sort of thing, say some words to the close and holy darkness for the people who have been affected by this disaster.

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun understand my intense love for my home state of New Jersey. But I can’t muster much love, or even civility, after the goddamn farce that occurred in Trenton today.

That’s right, precious readers: the Garden State joins such luminaries as Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Utah, and Mississippi as a state that can’t muster the courage to extend basic civil rights to its citizens.

You all know that this sort of thing fires me up. It bothered me when California voters defeated gay marriage. It bothered me when Maine did the same. But you know what? That was California and Maine. New Jersey should be held to a higher standard. We’re smarter than those people. We’re richer than those people. But now? In the vital metric of extending the most basic human rights to oppressed minority populations, New Jersey is in league with the most backwards, bigoted, fearful, and ignorant states in the Union. I don’t think I’ve ever been more ashamed of the state I love so much.

Here’s a roll call of which New Jersey senators voted yes and no. I’ve had a lot of critical things to say about Bayonne’s senator, Sandra Cunningham, but at least she had the good sense to do the right thing. As for Nick Sacco, I’ll see him in hell.

Then again, at least Sacco is on record with his villainy. How about the three nebbish, callow Democrats who abstained? Like Stephen Sweeney, who is somehow about to become Senate president. “Senator Stephen M. Sweeney . . . said publicly that he thought voters would look unkindly on the Legislature if it pushed for a social issue at a time of economic suffering. Senator Sweeney did not cast a vote on the measure on Thursday.” What the hell does economic suffering have to do with anything? There’s no one in the New Jersey Senate that can look in the mirror and say “New Jersey’s horrific economic condition isn’t my fault.” And now they’re going to blame their own feckless incompetence for further displays of spinelessness? What a joke. And fuck Gloucester County.

I’m honestly having a hard time mustering outrage any more. I’m not going to say I’m good at it, but I at least try to make an attempt to see things from other people’s perspective. But seriously, what does a fat, straight, moron have to fear from two men getting married? What does someone who never has to worry about visiting her spouse in the hospital, or inheriting his wife’s property when she dies, or having her union recognized for what it is, have to worry about two people who love each other enjoying the same civil rights as the rest of their fellow citizens?

And what does a state legislator have to fear from a horde of ignorant bigots? Criticism? A tougher reelection? Give me a break. Do your fucking job. This isn’t a political issue, so I have no fucking patience for political calculations. This is about recognizing the fundamental humanity of gay people. As I said earlier, the line between the right side and the wrong side of history is stark. Dick Codey, (God bless the man, he should be the governor right now) said it best: “One day people will look back and say, ‘What were they thinking?’ And, ‘What were they so afraid of?’”

Who fucking knows, senator. Who knows.

The Washington Monthly, on the Texas textbook approval process.

And if this topic piques your interest enough to compel you to read a book about it, I suggest Diane Ravitch’s excellent The Language Police.

I don’t mean to be flip in that title. Health care reform IS a big effing deal. I haven’t written much about Congress’s effort to pass comprehensive health care reform because honestly, things are changing every day, and while I get worked up about every little development in real life, I don’t feel compelled to expose you, my precious and treasured readers, to that sort of madness.

But it’s definitely worth taking a step back and looking at the larger effort, how it’s progressed, and what the consequences are. This is where my ambivalence comes in. Because, on the one hand, it’s become painfully apparent to liberal supporters of reform that most of the store has been compromised away. Even though any reasonable objective observer will recognize that a Canadian-style single payer system would be the most effective way to achieve both universality AND cost control (notice I said “reasonable objective observer,” which disqualifies pretty much every Republican critic of reform), that idea wasn’t even put forward as a serious starting point for debate. Consequently, the so-called public option, the next-most-progressive idea for reform, got whittled down and exposed to ridiculous right wing obfuscation and misinformation, to the point that even the most feckless shadow of the public option became anathema for conservative and moderate Democrats. Here’s the inimitable and heroic Matt Taibbi discussing the latest compromise, a proposed expansion of Medicare to folks age 55 and over:

I get that some people think this is a good idea, and it’s hard to argue that any kind of expansion of Medicare is a bad thing, given that the program has been popular and successful throughout its history. But this move just smacks of the bass-ackwards Solomonesque bargaining that has marked this whole health care effort from the start. If expanding Medicare is good for people aged 55 and up, why isn’t it good for everybody? Why isn’t it a good idea to provide cheaper insurance for people in their preventive care years, so that they cost Medicare less as they do get older?

Answer: because it’s a political non-starter, because hospitals and doctors won’t tolerate having to take Medicare rates from everyone, nor will the pharma companies or the insurance companies tolerate having to compete with Medicare for their most profitable customers.

So what they’ll do instead is expand Medicare for people aged 55 and up in exchange for the preservation of subsidies everywhere else in the system, as well as an individual mandate that increases the revenue flow for private insurers by forcing millions of new (and relatively young and healthy) customers their way. This isn’t a health care strategy, it’s a big baby that’s been hacked up into parts and fed in descending size order to the administration’s weightiest political lobbies. I almost can’t wait to see what the next “compromise” is.

It’s hard to argue here. If you start from a position where you have to appease doctors, insurers, the pharmaceutical industry, and the conservative members of your own party, it’s very difficult to construct meaningful, coherent reform.

But then you’ve got the equally inimitable Ezra Klein taking a different sort of long view, and discussing liberal ends versus liberal means:

The first year of the Obama presidency has been a long tutorial on the difference between liberal ends and liberal means. If I told you America has a president determined to pass large amounts of Keynesian stimulus spending (that’s particularly concentrated in impoverished areas), a near-universal health-care plan, and a bill addressing climate change, you’d say liberals had recaptured the White House. Ambitious liberals, even.

But though Obama’s program is quite liberal, he doesn’t seem to care much how it’s achieved. A public option would be nice, but if it’s not there, then that’s fine, too. Full auction of permits is a good idea, but if most get given away to corporations, then that’s how it goes. Infrastructure spending is good, but if tax cuts are the price of passage, then tax cuts there shall be. The best description of the administration’s ideology probably came from Rahm Emanuel when he said, “The only nonnegotiable principle here is success.”

He’s sort of right. The stimulus may not have been everything liberals hoped for, but it passed. Health care reform will pass, and while it may not include a state-run system, it will result in meaningful regulation of the insurance industry and coverage for millions more Americans. I’m a zealot, so I want the most liberal possible program with a trail of broken Republicans behind it. But at the end of the day, Obama is enacting a pretty liberal agenda. This is not to say that we should just sit back and be satisfied; Obama is a pragmatist who needs to be prodded from the left at every turn. But things might not be as bad as we think.

In the meantime, it’s important to look for silver linings wherever we can. In that spirit, here’s another writer with upper management written all over him, Atul Gawande, writing about how the Senate draft of health care reform, with its mish-mash of pilot programs and wacky ideas, might actually succeed in controlling the cost of health care. It’s not much, but it’s a tiny ray of hope. We’ll see what happens.

To do the right thing, that is. The New Jersey state senate will be considering a gay marriage bill in the coming week, with a vote possible late in the week.

There was a bit of scuttlebutt after the recent gubernatorial election that some Democratic lawmakers were uneasy about going through with the gay marriage bill. You see, outgoing governor Jon Corzine is in favor of marriage equality; incoming governor Chris Christie has promised to veto any such bill. And, you know, this is politics, so it would be unseemly for a Democratic legislature to do anything that would appear like they were trying to pass a bill at the eleventh hour before the opposition took control of the State House. Because it’s more important for Democrats to reap the rewards that come with decorum and proper comportment than actually, you know, do their fucking jobs.

Here’s the thing: at the end of the day, nobody CARES what manner good bills are passed in. And about this there can be no debate: a marriage equality bill is a good bill. Not just good, but entirely necessary and overdue. This isn’t some routine appropriation. This is civil rights. Please, New Jersey, do NOT fuck this one up.

Or, in other words, make New York look stupid for not doing the same thing last week. As Daily Intel says:

How would a huge defeat for same-sex marriage on Wednesday create momentum for the bill’s prospects, and not against them? Maybe it’s the irresistible opportunity to show New York what a progressive Northeast state with balls looks like.

So the blogosphere is abuzz (well, not abuzz, but I’ve seen more than three different posts in the past two weeks) with stories about the North Pacific Gyre, and the attendant environmental crisis. The interest has been spurred along by this piece in the New York Times, and this photo essay of garbage-stuffed bird carcasses. It’s really dreadful stuff.

My first reaction upon reading these posts and looking at these pictures was obviously disgust and self-loathing. That should be self-evident. My second reaction, though, was “Old news.” Why? Because I read Cracked.

I’m specifically referring to the June 6, 2009 list “6 Real Islands Way More Terrifying Than The One On ‘Lost‘” (scroll down to #2). The Pacific Gyre has been haunting my nightmares since June! Welcome to my world.

Those of you who are familiar with Cracked know about all the dick-and-fart jokes and user-submitted Photoshop parodies, but their bread and butter is the daily list, like “The 9 Most Racist Disney Characters,” “6 Insane Discoveries that Science Can’t Explain,” and “7 Secrets Only Two Living People Know (For Some Reason).” If you’re not familiar with Cracked, get familiar! I’m willing to say that I learn more from reading a week’s worth of Cracked than I did in college. Sorry, Mom.

The Chronicle of Higher Education finally catches on to something that any undergrad who knew someone who “studied” in Barcelona for a semester knows all too keenly.

College Humor, of course, takes a cheekier tack.

For those of you keeping score at home, former South American military dictatorship Uruguay just edged out the 27th state in the Union in the “Extending No-Brainer Civil Rights / Doing Right by Orphans” race.