Prairie Weather

Boehner in a bind (again)

When is he ever out of a bind?  The tea-baggers (it's the official name now, apparently, thanks to Obama) run the House even as that chamber looks more like an Italian legislature than an American branch of governance.  Boehner seems morose and badly weakened, the tan more and more manufactured. 

Now he's stuck with the NSA mess.

House Republican leaders are under pressure to allow a vote on legislation that would curb the National Security Agency (NSA).

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has defended the NSA's spying programs, but a growing bloc of his conference is signing on to a bill that would end the NSA's practice of collecting records on virtually all U.S. phone calls, which was revealed in leaks by Edward Snowden.

One House Democratic aide argued that the Republican leaders are boxed in. If they don't allow a vote on standalone NSA reform legislation, the aide said, members will demand NSA-related amendments to must-pass legislation like the defense and intelligence authorization bills.

"They're stuck. They would deal with this in the way they deal with a lot of things — by just not moving the legislation," the Democratic aide said. "Except how are they going to get other important pieces of legislation that they want to move unless they move this first?" ...TheHill

Of course, the vote is complicated by the relatively sane position of the baggers.  Republicans brought us aggravated, even vicious tribal warfare. Tribal cohesion, strengthened by an obscene amount of money, is what gives Republicans, a minority party, the political strength to win elections.  But cohesion is a thing of the past and the money seems less certain.  The breakdown will (we hope) give them a hard time in 2014 and beyond. 

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The race for governor and lieutenant governor in Texas is getting really interesting.  The Republicans have owned Texas for a long while.  Their 2o14 candidates are deep in muck.  And now the Dems are running filibuster hero, Wendy Davis, and a Hispanic -- albeit with a Belgian name -- for governor and lieutenant gov.  Meet long-time legislator, Letitia Van de Putte.

Van de Putte might be able to put some money together, especially if she and Davis can capitalize on the excitement displayed during last summer’s filibuster on abortion and women’s health.

Intangibles could help. Van de Putte is more charismatic than her putative running mate, and the race for lieutenant governor could draw some attention. ...

... The synergy might work. This is the first time either party has run two women at the top of a Texas ticket, and Van de Putte opened her campaign with a line designed to hit that note: “Mama isn’t happy. When mama’s not happy, ain’t nobody happy.” TexasTribune

A lot of Republican women seem to be unhappy with their party nationwide.  David  Brooks talked about it in the run-up to Ken Culcinelli's defeat in Virginia.

...The Republican Party has become more and more a white male party. And this is another sign of that. Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics did a very good analysis of where the vote have moved. His argument is not so much because of the government shutdown. It's not even changing demographics.

The Republicans have done quite well in the governor's races not too long ago, but just getting clobbered on gender issues, contraception issues and particularly on stridency. He's not only taking these positions, which other Republicans have won on. He's taken them in a very hard-line, strident manner. He's campaigned in a more strident manner. And it's just done him a disservice and opened up this gigantic gender gap. ...RealPolitics

Just try and imagine how well Ted Cruz, say, would do among Republican women.

Of course, what you could do this weekend...

...instead of rushing to the world where "Jingle Bells" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" are played over and over and over... see? you're humming them already! ... is watch all, most, or some of the top ten noir films of all times.

... it draws more on the blanket fatalism of film noir rather than the savage irony so often associated with the genre. Key to this is Jeanne Moreau as Tavernier's lover, Florence; in the film's signature sequence her man fails to turn up, so she walks the streets trying vainly to find him. Filmed on the fly without professional lighting, accompanied only by Miles Davis's brilliant, melancholy score, these few minutes capture the bleak and beautiful essence of Malle's film...

... lower her sunglasses and make it look like the last word in predatory desire. And she's not just a vamp: she's a psychopath. There are few shots in cinema as bone-chilling as the closeup on Stanwyck's face as Neff dispatches Phyllis's husband in the back seat of a car. Miklós Rózsa's fretful strings tell us throughout the picture: beware. Stanwyck had been reluctant to take the role, confessing: "I was a little frightened of it." Wilder asked whether she was an actress or a mouse. When she plumped for the former, he shot back: "Then take the part."

About corporations, contraception and the rights of employees

Three lawyers have been digging deeper into the matter of "whether large, for-profit corporations and their religious owners can assert rights of religious free exercise under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and, if so, whether their rights are violated by the government’s requirement that they pay for health insurance that includes coverage for various forms of contraception."

Apparently the government hasn't so far worked out its position in this issue.  The missing point here is that employees (whose health insurance is at the center of the issue here) haven't been heard from.

The Establishment Clause principle expressed in Caldor and Cutter constrains how RFRA[Religious Freedom Restoration Act] may be applied to grant exemptions to large, profit religious employers. If those exemptions impose substantial burdens on employees, then courts must reject them as violations of the Establishment Clause.

In subsequent posts, we will consider some objections to this as-applied Establishment Clause challenge. For now, though, we want to ask:  Why hasn’t this argument been made in the courts?

One answer points to the way in which the existing cases have been litigated. All of them involve large corporations and their religious employers raising challenges to federal regulations. There are no cases in which employees have intervened to defend their statutory rights and to challenge preliminary injunctions that threaten to impose significant costs on them. The lack of employee participation in these cases is understandable. It is risky to sue your employer, even if you have a strong constitutional basis for your claim. But because employees are not involved, we have not yet heard directly from those with the strongest interest in advancing an Establishment Clause challenge in these cases.

That leaves the question:  Why hasn’t the federal government raised this claim? ...Balkinization

Or you could stay home... But you know that.

It's called Black Friday because it's the beginning of the season when many stores go from being in the red to being in the black. That doesn't sound like much of an economic lesson for you, but that's the point. Black Friday isn't for you. It's for the stores.

The biggest mistake that people make on Black Friday is that they assume that the most popular day of the year to shop is the best day of the year to buy anything. If you're walking into a store at 5 AM Thursday morning, you're expecting floor-kissing prices in every corner. But store-wide discounts aren't in the best interest of the store. It's more common that a few tantalizing items will be sold at a loss to lure shoppers while smart floor design guides them toward more profitable (even full-priced) items. "Black Friday is about cheap stuff at cheap prices, and I mean cheap in every connotation of the word," Dan de Grandpre, a veteran deal expert, told the New York Times.

Stores know you're making this mistake, and they know how to manipulate floor traffic to their higher-margin stuff. ...DerekThompson,TheAtlantic

Thompson goes on to caution about what you're facing after a couple of hours of shopping (or sooner):  "...When you feel exhausted, your brain gets drunk with stupid. It's decision fatigue, it's leg fatigue, it's everything fatigue. Retail stores know this. So they put cheap stuff tantalizingly close to our arms in the checkout aisle. It's so cheap, and small, and cute, I have to have it, your decision-fatigued brain will plead. Don't listen."

You know whether your marriage would be a huge success or a predictable failure.

And you knew well ahead of time it would be.

The harbinger of an unhappy marriage may be your gut.

A new study by psychologists found that newlyweds had underlying positive or negative gut feelings about their spouses that many were unaware of and that predicted marital satisfaction years later. ...WaPo

It depends on whether you (are willing to?) recognize the signs.

The experiment used a photo of the newlywed spouse and a series of positive and negative words to elicit a so-called automatic attitude.

“Either people are completely unaware of this automatic attitude, or they’re completely aware and just not willing to talk about it,” said psychologist and study author James McNulty of Florida State University. The study was published online Thursday in the journal Science.

Automatic attitudes are unfiltered, knee-jerk reactions that can sometimes oppose the conscious thoughts. ...WaPo

In the end, it's about tolerance, attitude... So what else is new?

Obamacare is already a success.

No, really.  The original goal -- remember? -- was not to give us a poor cousin of a single-payer system.  It was to "bend the curve," as Paul Krugman points out.  It was about "slowing the seemingly inexorable rise in health costs."

Now not so inexorable.  In fact,  Obamacare is doing  its job very nicely.  No, we're not finding a way of killing off the poor.  Instead, we're looking at cost control that works.

Much of the Beltway establishment scoffed at the promise of cost savings. The prevalent attitude in Washington is that reform isn’t real unless the little people suffer; serious savings are supposed to come from things like raising the Medicare age (which the Congressional Budget Office recently concluded would, in fact, hardly save any money) and throwing millions of Americans off Medicaid. True, a 2011 letter signed by hundreds of health and labor economists pointed out that “the Affordable Care Act contains essentially every cost-containment provision policy analysts have considered effective in reducing the rate of medical spending.” But such expert views were largely ignored.

So, how’s it going? The health exchanges are off to a famously rocky start, but many, though by no means all, of the cost-control measures have already kicked in. Has the curve been bent?

The answer, amazingly, is yes. In fact, the slowdown in health costs has been dramatic. ...NYT

Caveat: We've seen fluctuations before. Costs were down during the Clinton years; costs went up during the W administrations.  But for now it's clear that, for example, savings in Medicare have contributed to a lowering of overall costs -- and that affects the whole system. 

Unless Congress refuses to do its job ...

The Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel with the power to impose cost-saving measures (subject to Congressional overrides) if Medicare spending grows above target, hasn’t yet been established, in part because of the near-certainty that any appointments to the board would be filibustered by Republicans yelling about “death panels.” Now that the filibuster has been reformed, the board can come into being.

The news on health costs is, in short, remarkably good. You won’t hear much about this good news until and unless the Obamacare website gets fixed. But under the surface, health reform is starting to look like a bigger success than even its most ardent advocates expected ...NYT