Almanacs “The Return of ObamaCare, Part II: The Political Context - RealClearPolitics” plus 2 more |
- The Return of ObamaCare, Part II: The Political Context - RealClearPolitics
- It’s a good day to rid your house of evil spirits - Jamestown Press
- Tropico 3 Review - Gamespot News
| The Return of ObamaCare, Part II: The Political Context - RealClearPolitics Posted: 24 Feb 2010 09:25 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. In the last essay, I argued that the legislative process is going to complicate the passage of Obama's health care reform proposal. Just how complicated it will be is too early to say. The politics are at least as complicated, if not more so. The biggest trouble will be in the House, not in the Senate. Consider: -The vote on final passage of the Affordable Health Care for America Act was 220 to 215, with 38 Democrats voting with Republicans. Additionally, striking the Stupak abortion language from the bill will satisfy the left flank of the House caucus, but it will scare off pro-life Democrats who voted with the Speaker in November. There are 15 Democrats who voted for the Stupak amendment and for final passage with a lifetime National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) score of 70% or higher. 6 have a score higher than 90%. For any votes held between the time that Abercrombie resigns and Wexler's replacement is seated, the Speaker will need to flip at least one Democratic vote to get the bill to pass. Factor in the Stupak Democrats, and the real number is probably between 5 and 20. That is, she'll have to convince between 5 and 20 Democratic House members who voted nay in November to vote yea this time around. Next question: who are these House Democrats that voted nay in November? Here are some relevant details on them: -Obama's median share of the presidential vote in their districts was just 45%. Nothing conveys a political problem quite like a map. Here is how their districts are distributed geographically.  Put simply, these will be some tough nuts to crack. It's important to note that whatever changes the reconciliation bill ultimately embodies are not really being done for the sake of these 38 members. They are instead meant to bring on board the House liberals. So, getting 50 votes in the Senate for a reconciliation bill is not directly related to securing any of these 38 defectors. It's far too early to put any probability numbers on anything occurring. Instead, I think it's more worthwhile to highlight some salient political themes. There are a few that help the Democrats in their efforts to flip some of these members, and a few that hurt them. Themes That Help 1. Pocket Votes? Among scholars of Congress, relatively few think that legislative parties operate primarily by influencing their members directly on roll call votes. That's not to say that the parties in the House are powerless. The most compelling work on party power in recent years has suggested that the party organizations are set up as agenda-setting cartels, making sure that items that would split the majority in half do not get brought for a vote on the House floor. Simply put, the leadership's job is to make sure that the floor vote always goes with a "majority of the majority." Still, there has been research suggesting that "pocket votes" are indeed an important factor at the margins. An example of such a pocket vote, or option, is offered by David King and Richard Zeckhauser of Harvard in Legislative Studies Quarterly. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (D-PA)...cast the deciding vote on President Clinton's 1993 budget-reconciliation bill. As the last legislator to vote on August 5, 1993, the outcome was hers to determine, and most observers expected a "no" vote. Margolies-Mezvinsky voted "yes" instead. Congressional Quarterly tells the story: "She had pledged during her campaign and even the day before the vote that she would vote against a bill that increased taxes. But Democratic leaders extracted a private promise from her to support the deficit-reduction package if her vote proved necessary to pass it" (CQ Almanac 1993, C39). This was a classic "if you need me" pledge, which we shall label an "option." Although it was widely predicted that the tax package would be handily defeated, President Clinton and House leaders got matters close enough that calling in the option on Margolies- Mezvinsky's vote was worthwhile; the bill triumphed by a single vote. How many such "options" does Nancy Pelosi have among these 38 nay voters? That's the big question, and it is impossible to pin down a precise answer. However, it's important to note that the Stupak amendment is precisely the kind of bill that the party leadership does not allow onto the floor - it passed, but with a majority of the majority voting against it. That Pelosi allowed this to happen suggests that she needed the Stupak voters, which in turn suggests that they are (or at least, were) more numerous than however many pocket votes she had. I would suggest, then, that Pelosi's pocket votes are probably not enough to get the bill to passage absent the Stupak language. Still, her pocket votes could cut down on the number of Democrats she has to flip. In particular, I'd look at the announced three retirees who voted against the bill in November - Brian Baird of Washington, and Bart Gordon and John Tanner of Tennessee - as the most likely pocket votes for the Speaker. 2. Lieberman Over Waxman. The Senate bill will inevitably form the bulk of the final product. Now that Scott Brown is the junior senator from Massachusetts, the Democrats can only hope to make modest changes to it. This means that the nominal price tag - as assigned by CBO - should be lower than what the House passed. It also means that the public option is gone. Lefty number crunchers want us to believe that this is in fact a bad thing for moderate Democrats because the public option is the biggest hit since Saturday Night Fever - but the data buttressing this argument lacks external validity. Oh sure, have the pollsters at ABC News/WaPo define the public option for people, and it does pretty well. But these moderate members didn't get to Congress by relying on the ABC News/WaPo poll. They know better than that. They understand that a public option opens the door for a full-blown GOP campaign about a "government takeover of health care." Take another look at that map, and ask yourself if the moderates who are scared of the public option are acting as irrationally as the polls and their diviners on the left have suggested. No way. The reality is that the public option is a political nightmare for many of these members - and it's a blessing for them that it has been removed. So, having a bill whose guts are more like the Senate bill, i.e. more moderate, might make it easier to flip a few of these members. Themes That Hurt 1. Reconciliation. In the last column, I identified myself as a procedural Hobbesian. I don't think "right" and "wrong" enter into considerations on procedural matters. That does not mean, however, that reconciliation is not going to give the GOP another political angle. It is. Scott Brown's office offers a sneak peak (h/t NRO's Critical Condition): "If the Democrats try to ram their health-care bill through Congress using reconciliation, they are sending a dangerous signal to the American people that they will stop at nothing to raise our taxes, increase premiums and slash Medicare...Using the nuclear option damages the concept of representative leadership and represents more of the politics-as-usual that voters have repeatedly rejected." The Democrats will push back, but (again) look at that map and consider the audience. Is the GOP argument going to have traction in these districts? I'd say yes. 2. Who Goes First? Somebody has to. Either the Senate passes the reconciliation fix first or the House passes the Senate bill first. House liberals will want the Senate to act first. They do not want to pass the Senate bill, then have the GOP use the Byrd rule to gut the major compromises in the reconciliation bill. That would be as bad as passing the original Senate bill all by itself, which they just cannot do. Unfortunately for them, a key Senate Democrat is suggesting that the House has to go first. (Kent) Conrad (Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee) threw some doubt Wednesday on the plan that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been pushing, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has indicated he could accept -- to pass the sidecar reconciliation bill with the fixes before the House takes up the Senate bill, as a way to mollify House members who strongly oppose the more conservative Senate measure. The rules of the reconciliation procedure indicate that when multiple committees report bills for reconciliation, they all go to the Senate Budget Committee, and thus to Conrad. His opinion matters. 3. Declining Support. In November, CNN had net support for the bill at -3. Now, it is at -20. If you're a Senate Democrat who isn't up for reelection until 2012 or 2014, this is not a huge concern. But if you're a House Democrat, you have to stand before the voters in less than nine months. This is a major problem. Similarly, President Obama's net job approval was +7.7 in the RCP average on the day the health care bill passed the House. Today it is at +1.6. You can imagine where it is in those 38 districts. 4. It's a Scott Brown World. We're Just Living In It. The Democrats might be able to sidestep the legislative effect that Scott Brown's election has had - but what about the political effect? A heretofore unheard of Republican state senator won a Senate seat in Massachusetts by explicitly running against this bill. Politically speaking, this was a major event. It raises an important question: if the GOP can win in Massachusetts by running against ObamaCare, where can't it win? Toss in some other big-ticket political events - Evan Bayh's resignation, Byron Dorgan's resignation, and Charlie Cook now suggesting that a GOP takeover of the House could very well happen - and there is a growing sense among House Democrats that this is going to be a tough election year. Not a good political context for a nay-to-yea flip-flop. 5. "We got something done..." Or "I stood up to my own party..."? Suppose you are one of those 38 nay voters, and you flip your vote. What's your argument to your constituents? It would probably be something like this: "Obviously, this bill was not my ideal - that's why I voted nay in November. But it was so important that we Democrats get something done, that we proved we were capable of governing - that I had no choice but to change my vote." Granted that could be an effective argument for reelection in Manhattan or San Francisco - but these 38 Democrats don't come from there. They hail from Alabama, North Carolina, Tennessee, and so on. Big difference. Politically speaking, they would be much better off voting against the bill again, going back to their constituents, and saying something like this: "You voted for me because I promised to be an independent voice in Washington, D.C. That's exactly what I have been. The leadership and the President pushed me hard to change my vote, but I know how strongly opposed you are to this bill - and so I resisted them." Final Thoughts I've been thinking hard about this subject for a couple days. I tried my best to come up with as many political pro's and con's for passing the health care bill - and you can see that the final count is 5-2, con. Again, I'm not willing to put odds on anything, but this should make clear that there are major political hurdles left to jump, even if they can get a reconciliation bill through the Senate. Ultimately, the best news for reform advocates is that they only need maybe 15% to 50% of these previous defectors to come on board. In other words, most of them can continue to defy the President, and the bill can still pass. Still, it will be no little feat to get any of those who voted against the bill in the fall to support it in the spring. A lot of the political problems have to do with the decaying political environment Democrats face. House members are inherently more sensitive to politics. This is as it was designed to be all the way back in 1787. Forcing Representatives to stand for reelection every two years makes them more responsive to the desires of their constituents, i.e. to politics. It's one thing to pass a bill through the House in November, 2009. It's another thing entirely to try it in April, 2010. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| It’s a good day to rid your house of evil spirits - Jamestown Press Posted: 24 Feb 2010 10:01 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. It's a good day to rid your house of evil spirits
Wax floors? Does anyone still do that? I am referring to the astrology section of the 2010 Farmers' Almanac, in which both good and bad days for performing various mundane tasks are recommended for those who need guidance in these matters. For instance, if you were planning on potty training your toddler, you will have to wait until March 4. You will not get good results on a paint job today, but you can do it tomorrow and Saturday. I guess I can infer that today is probably a good day to choose a color and buy a paintbrush. What about more complicated tasks like dieting? Well, the prognosticators at the Almanac suggest Feb. 28 as a good day to begin a weight-loss program. The Farmers' Almanac has been publishing folksy wisdom and gardening advice from Lewiston, Maine since 1818. On a gray, cold day, it can be fun to pore over a copy with a cup of tea. I especially like the ads. Essiac Herbal Formula bought a full color page. You can buy some in powder, extract or capsules, but it doesn't say what it's for. In tiny print, it says, "This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease." So what does it do? And on what day should I use it, according to the astrological calendar? I like the down home sayings that are sprinkled throughout the book, such as, "Good character, like good soup, is usually homemade" and "To be happy, don't add to your possessions but subtract from your desires." These are the kinds of things I'd expect to hear Grandpa say on the Waltons. Grier's Almanac 2010 is published for the southern states. They have been around since 1807 and have their headquarters in Atlanta. They also offer old-fashioned advice, but do it southern style. They give a complete refresher course on the Ten Commandments, just in case we forgot them. In an ad for a "new" Bible, the sellers claim that this book is printed on "high-quality French bible paper." What exactly is "French bible paper?" Is that superior to others? Grier's ads also include mysterious unguents and creams like "Tetterine Ointment," which doesn't offer a single clue as to what condition it can help with. Then there's the Baridium Urinary Analgesic – a product name you'd surely have to whisper to your friendly pharmacist while trying to stifle a giggle. But the ads that intrigue me the most are those like the full page that hawks "Lucky Mojo Bags & Kits." The mojo bags come in regular strength for $15, double strength for $25 and, if you think you can handle it, triple strength for $35. You can get a "Love Bag" to strengthen a relationship or find a lover. The "Protection Bag" will drive away evil. These folks also sell "Lucky Lottery Perfume" for just $5, which, after you apply it, will help pick the winning numbers. There is a Rexall Drugs ad from a location in Atlanta that is advertising an herbal tea called Planta #32, which is used to stamp out "the evil crawling around and inside you like little worms or evil snakes." I'm totally serious. It costs $19.99. If I had that condition, I'm sure I would think that price was a great bargain. Another company sells a large selection of herbs, roots and oils. They offer a product called "Stop Evil Sprinkling Salts and Yard Dressing." It's only $5, and "works to move out all evil, enemies, and jinx on you and your home and family." It can be used inside or out, and the company says that instructions are included. I would hope so. The common theme in Grier's ads seems to be the riddance of evil – either by potion, mojo bags or reading Bible verses. In my experience down here, Southern folks tend to be more superstitious than northerners. On a Saturday afternoon, I can take a ride and find women with booths set up on the roadsides. They sell herbal cures and love potions. There is a lady that sells bottle trees nearby, too. The bottles are supposed to trap evil spirits before they get into your house. Many people down here paint their door and window trim a blue-green shade they call "haint blue" because evil spirits won't pass through a portal painted that color. I don't have a bottle tree, though I think they are pretty. My windows and doors aren't painted haint blue and I don't own a single mojo bag. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't seem to have any evil spirits or worms or snakes in my house either. Maybe it's just a southern thing. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Tropico 3 Review - Gamespot News Posted: 24 Feb 2010 07:02 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Shouting "Viva Fidel!" doesn't come quite as naturally as it used to in Tropico 3. The world's leading banana-republic-in-a-box simulation may have moved its groovy green caps, aviator shades, and stinky cigars from the PC to the Xbox 360, but the transition has not been an entirely smooth one. Even though the city-building gameplay and cheesy references to the Cold War remain habit-forming and often hilarious, this port can be as cranky as the US's least favorite bearded Communist. A few glitches have been picked up while shifting from one platform to another, resulting in some instability, a hiccuping interface, and frame-rate slowdowns. There's a good game in here somewhere, but it's buried beneath enough problems that you might give up before you find it.
What makes everything so entertaining and absorbing is the unique focus on running a shabby Caribbean dictatorship during the Cold War. The solo campaign, one-off challenges, and sandbox modes of play all focus on donning the sash and megalomaniacal ambitions of a tyrant running a corrupt tropical island of the sort typified by Fidel Castro's Cuba from the 1950s through the middle 1980s. This is a city builder at heart that shares a lot of concepts with traditional games in the genre, such as Caesar and Pharaoh, albeit with a thick layering of political cheese on top of everything. You start off either by creating an El Presidente-by-the-numbers from a selection of often-iffy personality traits (yes, you too can be a moronic womanizer) and selecting from various wardrobe options, or by picking from a rogues' gallery boasting the likes of Castro, Papa Doc Duvalier, and the man who launched a million hipster T-shirts, Che Guevara. So, as you might expect, this game isn't just about racing around keeping everybody happy with roads, schools, factories, and the like. Although commerce and citizen satisfaction are key, you also spend a lot of time playing God. Like those despots of decades past, you indulge in a lot of questionable-yet-fun activities, such as handing down draconian edicts, bribing opponents, diverting cash to a Swiss bank account, sucking up to island factions that include the entire political spectrum from nationalists to communists, and buttering up the US and USSR to weasel money out of the gullible superpowers. The main goal is always to stay in power, because the tropical paradises you rule are cesspools of anarchy filled with rebels plotting coups. As Pinochet and Peron could tell you, it's not all fun in the sun. At its very best, Tropico 3 is a unique political sim loaded with chuckles. At its worst, it's a relatively generic city builder in which you're afforded a lot of economic freedom without having to deal with tedious micromanagement. Scenario objectives fall between these two extremes, so gameplay sometimes feels fresh, sometimes too familiar. Routine objectives, such as meeting a set goal for happiness on your island and hitting targets when exporting resources like oil, exist side by side with spicier options, such as sticking a ton of money into a secret bank account in Zurich or staying one step ahead of the rebels for a few decades. Sometimes you win by avoiding retirement at the wrong end of a gun. Every mission is set up with a storyline--typically preposterous claptrap about your twin or about being a former spy with a dark secret--and is then given personality courtesy of postcard visuals and the constant accompaniment of a Latin American radio station that mixes the propaganda of deejay Juanito with mambo music. It gets to be a bit much after the first few hours, because the playlist of tunes and the lineup of jokes are a little brief (you'll be hearing the story about the llama assassinating El Presidente's favorite hat in your sleep). Atmospheric sound effects are brilliant with a good surround system. Zoom in on your city streets, and you can hear the boos of the crowd around the presidential palace, the clank of workers off in the distance, and the vrooming of cars. Visuals and sound combine to create a real place that you wouldn't mind visiting, at least after the rebels stop storming the palace and the secret police have disarmed the bomb in the lumberyard. A smart design lets you appreciate the depth of this sociopolitical mash-up without delving into any micromanagement. Resources are automatically collected, sorted to factories if you have them (such as a cigar factory for tobacco, a rum plant for sugar, and a canning processor for fish), and then shipped out via freighter, and the profits are tucked in the treasury. You just have to keep an eye on the bottom line and make sure all your buildings are stocked with employees. All of your moves seem to weave together, with everything you do setting off a chain reaction of events for good and ill. Appease the nationalists by choosing a "Love it or leave it" policy at the immigration office, and you can find yourself lacking the educated manpower needed to run power plants and hospitals. Go whole hog for the economy and build farms and mines in the beginning, and you might find yourself facing a coup even while your bank balance is growing to Madoffian proportions. Throw in your lot with bullying militarists by building army bases and jacking up their salaries, and you risk financial ruin, which always seems to bring down a US invasion when you get too deep in red ink. Balancing all these factors and still maintaining some mustachioed flair is challenging and rewarding. The only major flaw is the introduction, because the brief tutorial skips over core concepts that are vital to success.
As much as Tropico 3 can easily turn into a compulsion, there are a number of niggles that bring the whole experience down a few pegs. The game isn't entirely stable, causing it to feel a bit rough and ready. Crashes occur every so often, and you might lose a fair bit of unsaved progress if, for example, the cursor takes off on its own for the edge of the screen and resists all efforts to bring it back. Random lockups regularly freeze the controls when you're scrolling through build menus. One moment you might be queuing up a condominium or a cigar factory, and the next your left stick is frozen for four or five seconds while the music and visuals continue as if nothing is wrong. Button responsiveness is another problem. Many commands require numerous pushes, especially when you're trying to order up a special worker to the island for an educated position requiring a high school or college graduate. Frame-rate slowdowns are constant, especially when you scroll across an island or when a building is onscreen about to be placed. The controls don't feel natural, and they rely on some off-putting choices, such as using the right trigger to activate a sub-menu that allows you to call up functions like edicts or the almanac that details island stats. It's also weird to use a combo of the A button and the D pad to set wages and perform other functions in building menus. Granted, it's not that easy to set up a gamepad control scheme for a PC game of this kind, but this feels a little slapped together. It's hard to ever get comfortable. Even in this somewhat hamstrung form, Tropico 3 is still a good way to spend some time pretending to be a Caribbean strongman with delusions of godhood. This is one of those "just a few more minutes" games that can keep you up so far past your bedtime that you might as well grab some breakfast. It isn't the best way to experience the game, however; the PC version is clearly superior technically and otherwise. Just keep that news hush-hush for now, in case the phones are tapped and El Presidente is listening. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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