Lev is a software developer and political observer/sometime activist in the East Bay region of California, with a great interest in the game of politics and many areas of policy. He started a personal blog in 2006 and loves the form for its author/reader interaction.
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The Conservative Vision On Guns

by Lev on 19 April 2013

Sen. Murphy gets it just about right here:

“The story here is a Republican filibuster,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy after the vote. “The filibuster stopped it. That’s hard to explain to these senators, why a majority in the Senate doesn’t prevail. I don’t think you can explain this filibuster just based on the influence of the NRA. There’s a significant portion of the Republican caucus who are gun control Darwinists. They just believe everyone should have guns, and the good guys should shoot the bad guys.” And what explained the Democratic noes? “A lot of ‘em had concerns about the impact of the bill in rural areas. We thought we solved that. I’ll be interested in the reactions they get when they head back home.”

I’m not sure this gets quite at the nuances in play though. I grew up in a place with a fair amount of gun nuts, and the analogy I heard more than once was that of the Wild West. As in, if everyone has a gun, then the possibility of massacres dips extremely low. The flipside of this is that there’s some larger level of ambient violence because of all these guns, but this is a tradeoff they’re more willing to make.

Of course, I tend to see this as a false choice. Fewer guns around in general can mean less ambient violence and fewer massacres. Won’t end murder or anything like that, but the psychological resistance to killing a person with a knife, say, is much higher than with a gun, so it won’t help but result in fewer deaths. But I tend to think that the conservative vision of society in general is sort of an idealized Wild West, one more rooted in television programs from the ’50s and ’60s rather than any sort of reading into history and what really went on then (hint: desperate poverty, unceasing danger, extreme boredom). Actually, that does sort of overlap with the gist of their policy outcomes, come to think of it.

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Note to DCCC: Spending Money Against Mark Sanford Now Is A Good Investment

by Lev on 17 April 2013

No

Now that the wheels are falling off the Sanford for Congress wagon, to the point where he’s a likely loser in a safe GOP seat, the Republicans’ campaign committee is dropping out of the fun. This might seem less urgent now, but Democrats really ought to make a big investment in the district for the following couple of reasons:

  1. House math. It’s going to be really tough for Democrats to claw back the 17 seats needed to take back the House. Colbert Busch would have a difficult time holding the seat in 2014, but any incumbent is a better bet than almost any challenger given incumbency rates. An investment now (when it’s arguably not needed) could strengthen Colbert Busch and make a stronger and broader first impression upon the people she needs to hold onto in a year and a half. And the best part is that, given Sanford’s fumbling campaign, you could stay positive and exclusively define Colbert Busch positively, which would pay great dividends.
  2. Despite the odds, she’s the best bet of holding the seat. SC-01 is a staunchly Republican district, but it’s more fiscally- than socially-conservative. So Colbert Busch, a social liberal but pro-business fiscal conservative, isn’t the worst fit for the district. The odds of her winning a full term would have to be strongly against her, but then again, Mark Sanford had six opponents for the Republican nomination and they fell around him like a house of cards. It’s not unheard of that sometimes parties get complacent in their strongholds and fail to maintain a strong bench for safe seats–Hello Martha Coakley! These are, admittedly, reasons full of caveats. However, barring a wave, the way to taking back the House seems to lie in defeating lots and lots of incumbent Republicans, a difficult task. Any way to get around that…
  3. Establishing a bench in South Carolina. The state is actually not as out of reach as some might think: Obama got 45% of the vote there, though it’s not an elastic state. It’s more like the GOP equivalent of Pennsylvania than, say, Vermont. But being competitive requires running actual, credible candidates for things, and Democrats don’t have many of those in the state. For sure, if Teahardist Nikki Haley gets shown the door, a Democratic governor could jump-start this, thanks to cabinet appointments and such. That, however, is speculative for the moment. Colbert Busch wouldn’t be all that formidable as a part-term incumbent, but if she won again in 2014, she’d be very credible for a statewide race.
  4. Narrative setting. Special elections don’t tell you all that much about the national mood. Democrats won a bunch of them in 2009 and 2010, and then got wiped out. They also won one in 2011 in Upstate New York that revolved around the Ryan Budget (which mostly served as a wake-up call for Republicans to muddy the waters and dissemble about said budget), while the GOP won one in New York City centering around frenzied anger about the “9/11 Mosque” that faded right afterward. Neither of these elections predicted anything. But both got quite a bit of coverage, and what those elections “meant” to any extent a person can tell did in fact shape the discourse for a time. Even if all we get out of SC-01 is “Mark Sanford is an idiot and a pig” that’s one less day spent on discussing, say, a grand bargain. Politics is zero-sum and a Sanford loss could be a political boost.

Also, isn’t just tearing through Mark Sanford’s personal foibles and awful politics like Bruce Campbell with a chainsaw a reward in and of itself.

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On A Positive Note

by Lev on 17 April 2013
The Obama Administration is threatening to veto SOPA/PIPA’s cousin CISPA. Much as I rag on those guys at times, they have a very good record on opposing these sorts of internet invasion bills, and I’m happy to give credit when it is due.
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Actual Living Pro-labor Republicans Sighted?

by Lev on 16 April 2013
Given that the bill itself seems to be redundant–a bill requiring the NLRB to observe quorum rules?–to the extent that voting for it is essentially a slap at labor, the Republican no votes here are probably a legit accounting of which House Repubs aren’t completely antagonistic to labor. The number appears to be ten, though Rep. Ros-Lehtinen didn’t vote and is moderate on some things, so who knows. Could even be eleven. Actually, that’s a bit higher than I expected.
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Enjoy The Silence

by Lev on 12 April 2013

One of the interesting aspects to the chained CPI story has been how little we’ve heard from Democrats about it. Not much going on in the ol’ RSS reader about Democratic reactions to the idea, so I went ahead and searched to see what top Democrats and key Obama allies had to say about it. The answer, it turns out, is nothing. Harry Reid, who one would figure would be a key figure in making any deal happen, said nothing. No statements of any kind. Max Baucus, another person who one would figure would be key in a grand bargain, also said nothing. One of Obama’s closest Senate allies, Claire McCaskill, has similarly kept mum. And Steny Hoyer, #2 House Democrat and one of the biggest grand bargaineers in all of D.C., chose not to mark the event of the President’s new budget with any sort of formal remarks. He has, in fact, gone nearly a month without issuing any statement on the subject, which is pretty amazing, and shows the lack of intensity in finding a deal within D.C. but outside of the White House. In fact, just about the only left-leaning senator to chime in so far has been Bernie Sanders. He is, unsurprisingly, not a big fan of Obama’s idea.

Now, to be sure, it’s easy to read too much into this. And you could argue that these folks quietly support Obama’s bargain in concept but don’t want to get nailed for saying it publicly. Could be! But I’m not sure that fits best. That might account for, say, Max Baucus, who is up for re-election next year and would be in trouble from both sides if he enthusiastically supported and worked on the project. But not for the others. I mean, Hoyer isn’t going to be primaried like ever (though that wouldn’t be the worst idea I’ve ever heard), and it’s actually more noticeable that he isn’t commending the president for his serious, bracing vision than if he’d put out a pro forma statement that said nothing. Is he afraid the whip job would be imperiled if he gave it a hearty cheer? Or could it be even too far for him? One wonders.

I don’t know what it means, but my guess is that the highly vocal intramural resistance to chained CPI has not gone unnoticed by officeholders. My working theory is that there’s significant Democratic resistance to this idea, but keeping quiet avoids breaking with the White House over a deal that will most likely never come to pass in any form. This is perhaps why Obama feels the need to go so far to the right with his proposals, as there’s not much support on the left for this kind of bargain. Of course, there’s not much support for it on the right either. In any event, the pattern is pretty interesting.

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Let Us Now Swiftly Enact Marriage Equality

by Lev on 12 April 2013

To fulfill the beauty of one man’s vision:

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Jonathan Pollard

by Lev on 11 April 2013
I honestly hadn’t given it too much thought, and was probably disposed against it just because of who was for it, but Emily makes a very strong case for why Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard ought to be released from prison. She argues that it makes sense on humanitarian and political grounds, and I agree with her.
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