And approves:
For those readers who think Senator Cruz suffers from a charisma deficit, please be advised that he rocked the house last night. If Senator Cruz were the point guard running the team in a tight basketball game, he would have been knocking down threes and passing the ball with skill. Offense, not defense.
And here’s the NY Times with a brief report on the same event. Eggs over easy.
…seems to be in big trouble.
The country has been a walking contradiction for a long time:
Last week’s mass executions in Saudi Arabia suggest panic at the highest level of the monarchy. The action is without precedent, even by the grim standards of Saudi repression. In 1980 Riyadh killed 63 jihadists who had attacked the Grand Mosque of Mecca, but that was fresh after the event. Most of the 47 prisoners shot and beheaded on Jan. 2 had sat in Saudi jails for a decade. The decision to kill the prominent Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr, the most prominent spokesman for restive Saudi Shia Muslims in Eastern Province, betrays fear of subversion with Iranian sponsorship…
…Saudi Arabia finds itself isolated, abandoned by its longstanding American ally, at odds with China, and pressured by Russia’s sudden preeminence in the region. The Saudi-backed Army of Conquest in Syria seems to be crumbling under Russian attack. The Saudi intervention in Yemen against Iran-backed Houthi rebels has gone poorly. And its Turkish ally-of-convenience is consumed by a low-level civil war. Nothing has gone right for Riyadh.
Worst of all, the collapse of Saudi oil revenues threatens to exhaust the kingdom’s $700 billion in financial reserves within five years…
For decades, Riyadh has presented itself as an ally of the West and a force for stability in the region, while providing financial support for Wahhabi fundamentalism around the world. China has been the kingdom’s largest customer as well as a provider of sophisticated weapons, including surface-to-surface missiles. But China also has lost patience with the monarchy’s support for Wahhabi Islamists in China and bordering countries.
Good news, bad news—which is it?
…today about the 2016 campaign.
Isn’t that a relief? Although my fingers are just itching…
Remember that slogan, “repeal and replace”? There have actually been quite a few bills passed in the House to repeal Obamacare in the last couple of years, whether you’ve noticed it or not. Here’s an article about it from this past October:
House Republicans pushed forward with another vote to roll back the Affordable Care Act on Friday, passing a bill that would repeal several major pillars of President Obama’s landmark 2010 law, including the requirement that Americans have health coverage.
The legislation, the latest of more than 50 bills by congressional Republicans to repeal all or part of the health law, would also halt federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
The 240-189 vote will not change anything in the health law or Planned Parenthood, however, as Obama has indicated he would veto the bill if it ever reaches his desk.
People complain all the time about Republicans controlling Congress and yet being unable—or is it unwilling?—to do something. But the power of a presidential veto often seems to leave the majority Republicans with little recourse but a shutdown, a move they’ve been understandably reluctant to take, fearing a negative backlash (something you may or may not think would ever actually happen).
Whatever one thinks of the reasonableness of the Republican failure to do what was promised, something seems to be changing. It may be “too little, too late” for you (or even for the country), or you may think it’s a case of just more kabuki theater. However, I think it is a real change, albeit a moderate one. One question is how far it can go, and whether it will matter. Another question is, why now?
I believe the change is at least in part a reaction to the growing sense that Congressional Republicans must have that their base is very very angry. This has been brought home to them by the popularity of such non-establishment candidates as Fiorina, Carson, and of course Trump. It also is a result of conservative members of Congress using their influence to pressure Boehner to resign, something that underscores my own point of view that one of the best ways for conservatives to fight for what they believe is to support conservative candidates for Congress.
I wrote about the prelude to this move back in early December. The difference had occurred in the Senate, not just the House, even though McConnell is still in charge in the Senate. The mechanism by which it occurred was reconciliation, the hair of the dog that bit them:
While the House and Senate have voted scores of times to repeal portions of Obamacare, this was the first time they are using a special tool known as “budget reconciliation” that allow the measure to clear the Senate with just 51 votes instead of the 60 votes typically required for major legislation. That higher threshold has allowed Democrats to block all past repeal efforts.
Here’s what Jeff Sessions said about it at the time—and pay attention, all ye who say that a Republican president wouldn’t matter:
“It demonstrates that if you have a president prepared to support health care reform, it could pass next time,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama, a vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act who insisted this was not a show vote just because the President will veto the bill. “If this vote occurred after the next presidential election, instead of vetoing it the President would sign it. This would force a bipartisan reevaluation of health care in America and put us in a position to make major changes.”
That was a month ago. Now, we have this:
Within hours of reconvening Tuesday, the GOP-led Congress will finally act to fulfill a 2010 promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare.
The effort is set to begin Tuesday afternoon when the House Rules Committee meets on the repeal measure, with a full debate and vote as early as Tuesday. With the Republican-led Senate having already passed its version, GOP congressional leaders will send the measure to President Obama, daring him to veto it.
Obama will undoubtedly veto the measure to undo his signature health care law, and Congress has nowhere near the votes to override a presidential veto.
But Republicans hope the entire exercise might start to change the circumstance on Capitol Hill regarding the years-old argument about ObamaCare and its repeal.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is promising to unveil a bill to, in fact, replace ObamaCare…
…[W]ith Ryan now at the helm in the House and the GOP controlling the Senate, this may be one of the few chances the party has to come together around a bill which would replace the six-year-old law…
Ryan won’t be able to implement the replacement package either with Obama still in the White House in 2016 — if it does, in fact, get that far. But if Ryan’s successful, he’ll have come a lot further than anyone else has before.
Read the rest of the article, which describes the reconciliation process.
Obama will veto it, but:
The GOP hopes it can artfully message its plans to design and approve a replacement bill for ObamaCare — with something with a lot more policy teeth than the other parliamentary gymnastics of just voting to repeal parts or all of the legislation over and over again.
Republicans also are hoping the public embraces these policy ideas as a contrast to those propounded by Obama and Democrats with health care topping the list.
Republicans didn’t control the Senate until a year ago. But when they took control, many people (and I was one of them) were hoping that Congress would be placing bill after bill on Obama’s desk—bills he would veto, but which would highlight what he was blocking and show what the Republicans stood for in contrast. That didn’t happen, and the reason was probably threefold, in no particular order: Boehner’s “leadership,” the Senate filibuster giving the Democrats the power to block legislation there, and a lack of understanding on the part of some of the more moderate Republicans about how angry the base had become. Now Boehner is no longer in charge, and Congress seems to have received some of the message about the rage. The filibuster is still in place, and Republicans don’t want to jettison it for such relatively small gains—I write “small gains” because all they would get is the ability to put bills on Obama’s desk in order to have him veto them. It’s something, but is it worth it? I’m ambivalent about that, myself.
However, the reconciliation process—which can only be used for certain bills, not all of them—is perfect for this one. And it’s nicely ironic, because that’s the way Obamacare was sneaked by in the first place. The difference? Obama didn’t veto Obamacare.
I don’t know why—but today, as I was about to go to my computer, I thought, “I wonder if antibiotics can contribute to weight gain?”
It makes a certain amount of sense as a possibility. After all, it’s long been a practice to put antibiotics in animal feed in order to boost weight gain. In the past, when I’ve read about the practice, it’s been in the context of the perils of increased bacterial resistance to antibiotics as a possible result. But if animals gain weight from using antibiotics, why not humans? If you put it together with recent discoveries regarding gut flora and weight gain or loss, it makes perfect sense.
Sure enough, when I Googled it, I found not only a bunch of articles on the topic, but a recent one in The Atlantic entitled “Are Antibiotics Making People Larger?” An excerpt:
“Obesity is front and center,” [Andrew Johnson, professor of medicine and chief of gastroenterology at Eastern Virginia Medical School and the former president of the American College of Gastroenterology] said, “but also diabetes, fatty liver disease, some of the cancer pathways. The microbiome can change you very quickly. If I take a rat that is genetically bred to be a skinny rat, and I transpose the stool from a genetically bred fat rat into the skinny rat, I can make that rat fat. And the weight goes up within two weeks.”
In 2014, Martin Blaser and colleagues at New York University found that steady exposure of mice to penicillin early in life predisposed them to become obese. That and similar evidence has begun to win over many scientists, including Johnson and Lee Riley, chair of the division of infectious diseases and vaccinology at the University of California, Berkeley, who comes off even more assured that the relationship is affecting humans.
“We’re animals, just like food animals,” Riley said “We give them antibiotics so they get fat. We are exposed to those antibiotics. It seems like a very common sense idea.”
Riley has dedicated his career to studying drug-resistant infections, especially urinary tract infections and bacteria associated with food-borne illnesses like salmonella. “We’ve always had this idea that drug-resistant forms of bacteria often originate in food-animal reservoirs,” he said. “This argument against antibiotic overuse never really got us anywhere, though.”
In the meantime, he started seeing intestinal-microbiome studies that demonstrated that changes in intestinal microbiota are associated with changes in body fat in people. “So I put two and two together and said, what happened in this country in the last 20 to 30 years where you really see a surge in the obesity epidemic? Well, I don’t think there has been a tremendous change in the amount of food people consume. I don’t think that’s the only explanation.”
But for me, this really hit home:
With every dose of antibiotics you take, you do damage to the microbiome. It recovers, but never to the place that it was before.
Well, I already knew that, and I’ve known it for a long time. About twenty-five years ago I had to have a root canal done, and because I’d once been told I had a heart murmur—and I answered “yes” on the dentist’s form to the question about it—I was told I had to take a mega-dose of antibiotics beforehand. Even though I hate to take antibiotics—having had an allergic reaction to one while I was in college—I took it, telling myself my fears were groundless and everything would almost certainly be fine.
Without getting too graphic about what actually happened to me, let’s just say it involved my lower GI tract, it was severe, and it lasted at least a month and perhaps two. Although I recovered, my gut never got back to “the place that it was before.”
Also, as I’ve gotten older, weight gain has become easier and easier. If I were a cow, I suppose that would be great. But since I’m not, I’ve had to eat less and less in order to not look like one (and please, don’t start with that “go on Taubes, go on Atkins, go on paleo” stuff—we’ve hashed that out already ad nauseam here, here, here, and here, and don’t forget to look at the comments).
I’d always imagined the increased ability to put on poundage had to do with growing older and the changes in metabolism and weight distribution that come with it. That’s difficult enough, although I suppose in a famine it would be a marvelous benefit. But now it occurs to me that perhaps antibiotics had something to do with it. For example, I remember that at one or two points I experienced a sudden weight gain with no change in eating or exercise habits, so sudden that it caught my attention. The gain only amounted to 5 or 10 pounds, but 5 or 10 pounds on a person who’s not so very tall (me) is certainly noticeable. Could one of those sudden leaps have occurred after that root canal? At the time, I would never have connected the two, so I have no idea.
[NOTE: Not long after I had that root canal I discovered that I didn’t have a heart murmur after all, so the antibiotic experience was all for nothing. And about fifteen years later the root canal failed, and that loss engendered a whole other dental saga—fortunately, minus the antibiotics.]
I saw this trailer in the movie theater the other day and laughed out loud, especially at the sequence that starts at 1:51:
The poet Robert Frost, about whom I’ve written a good deal and whose Collected Works are pictured at the top of my blog, gave a great many campus talks in his day. I’m currently reading a book of excepts from them entitled Robert Frost: Speaking on Campus.
Here’s part of a talk he gave at Agnes Scott in 1962, over fifty years ago. Frost almost never gave prepared speeches; he just talked about whatever was on his mind, and his conversation had a colloquial cadence:
Robinson Jeffers has just died, my distant friend…I admired his pessimism…it was a fresh, original pessimism—very dark, bitter.
And what a fine figure this is for throwing life away, you know. It’s not my figure. But it’s his…”Give your heart to the hawks.” It’s the title of the poem…
I never tried to deal with that. I just took it as a good black spot in my thoughts…he [also] says “shine, perishing republic” to us—“shine, perishing republic,”…
What are you going to do with that? Either let it alone or include it in my book. And the way I include it is that everything that shines, shines by perishing—candles, the sun, and me.
And then I don’t know what he does with it. That’s what I do with it. I think he’s darker than that. Mine is everything shines by perishing, everything…
And how long will the United States shine before it perishes? (I always say—you know, talking about money—I tell ’em I always charge more for prophecy than I do for history.) I don’t know how long we’re going to last. The song says, “It shall wave a thousand years.”
That’s a good long time. We’ve only spent two hundred of it. Thousand is—if you look at history—a good long time. It’s longer than most have done it. The great days of a nation are seldom anything like that. You’ve got to think of that.
…We’re squandering our light, almost to the world. It’s wonderful we are, wonderful shining thing we are. But you wonder about the economy of it…
I’m not trying to frighten you. I’m not scared if you’re not. But a thousand years evolves, you know. We’ve got lots of time to turn around in that time.
But don’t think we’re forever. We can’t be. Nothing is forever. Everything shines to perish, perishes to shine…
We don’t need to just burn like a prairie fire. That was Tom Paine’s idea of democracy. It was going to be a prairie fire that swept the world. This isn’t like that. This is a great steady flame—like Sirius, like the star Sirius—
Nobody knows in the universe anything that isn’t spending.
Frost sometimes sounded like a simple guy, but he most assuredly wasn’t.
Tiny New Hampshire is always a very volatile and difficult-to-predict state. Its Republican voters are also considered somewhat atypical; more libertarian-leaning, with fewer social conservatives and more fiscal conservatives. But it does have a primary that occurs early in the game, and that gives it an exaggerated significance. New Hampshire’s primary really is primary, at least in the temporal sense.
So, for what it’s worth, let’s look at a recent poll in the state. It was taken December 20-22, with 600 Republican or lean Republican respondents interviewed by landline or cell phone, which is a pretty big sample for a state as small as NH.
Trump is still in the lead, but has fallen there to 21 per cent among likely Republican primary voters. In New Hampshire, a large percentage of people who are really members of one party or another do not register for a party, in order to give them flexibility in primary voting. Rubio is next with 15, and Cruz has 10, but Christie gets a whopping 12 and Kasich (of all people) has 13 percent of the vote.
That last peculiarity makes me wonder what would happen if Kasich dropped out. Not that he’d do so before the primary in New Hampshire, the place where he is probably polling best. He’s sunk a lot of time and effort into the state, and if the polls are any indication (always a question mark) it’s paid off for him. But doing well in New Hampshire does not a victory make, and at some point Kasich is going to have to drop out.
After that, where would his votes go? And the same could be asked of many of the others. If enough of the votes go to Trump, it could be game over with a Trump nomination. If they are dispersed evenly among the others, it would dilute the effect. But if the bulk of the dropouts’ votes go to one or two candidates, that could be a race-changer and ultimately give one of them the win.
Trump also has by far the highest “would not consider” percentage, something I’ve noticed in many polls. That’s why the very last question on that poll is that sort of thing I tend to look at: “I’m going to read the list of candidates again and for each one I’d like you to tell me if the candidate is someone you would consider voting for in the primary or is someone you would never vote for in the primary.” Trump has by far the highest “would never vote for”: 57% of respondents. Next up is Jeb Bush at 47%, followed by Rand Paul at 40%. In contrast, Carson (17%), Christie(15%), and Cruz (12%), as well as Fiorina (16%), are in the teens on that score. Rubio comes in lowest at 11%—who all must be commenters on conservative blogs, because there he’s often hated.
Having read other polls in other places that ask that same question, my recollection is that these New Hampshire results are not atypical of other “will consider or would not consider” results. I think this will be an issue of increasing importance as the race goes on and candidates finally—finally—drop out.
They will drop out, won’t they? Except for Jeb. His money can keep the non-energizer bunny going for a long, long time.
I’ve never much cared for the ballet “The Dying Swan.” It’s not really a ballet; more like a short vignette. It was choreographed by Mikhail Fokine near the turn of the century (19th-20th) as a vehicle for international star Anna Pavlova.
The steps are practically non-existent, consisting almost solely of a flurry of the quick movements on pointe known as bourées, meant to create a shimmering, gliding effect. It’s almost all arms, a tour de force for Pavlova, accentuating her ability to convey both swanlike movement and the pathos (close to schmaltz) of the death throes of a beautiful animal.
Despite my relative dislike of the piece, it still is a very precious thing to have one of the few extent films of Pavlova herself doing the dance. Ballet is somewhat of an old-fashioned art form, but fashions change even in ballet, and Pavlova’s century-old style looks a bit odd, somewhat like a silent movie. But it remains evident how very special she was.
Here she is, some time between 1905 (when the dance was choreographed) and 1925 (when she died). Unfortunately—very unfortunately—the film is missing the last few seconds, the actual death of the swan:
Recently I watched a clip of Galina Mezentseva doing the same piece, probably in the 1980s so it represents a modernized version (a couple of steps are added, for example) and with a slower tempo. I have written about this dancer before, here. When I watched her “Dying Swan” I found it to be a revelation, and the ending moved me, especially her absolute stillness in the final moment.
Her upper body seems made of some other material than the rest of us, far more pliant and expressive, and those impossibly long thin arms—even for a dancer—seem almost like wings that might actually be capable of raising her aloft. She is also the most stretched-out, pulled-up dancer I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something [I’ve cued it up to begin at the correct spot]:
Commenter “Ira” asks an interesting question—particularly for those among us who think that, if nominated, Donald Trump either would lose in the general or if elected would be a poor president (I happen to think both are true). Here’s what he wants to know:
I think we conservatives should be supporting a single candidate sooner rather than later to prevent Trump from gathering more momentum and to reduce the risk that good candidates will do harm to each other…
So, I ask who should that candidate be, taking into account conservatism and electibility?
That last sentence is the most important part of all. Conservatives would be likely to want someone who is conservative, and who will win—and the latter, always important, is particularly important this go-round because of the terrible inroads the left has made recently on almost all fronts, and because the almost-certain Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is almost certain to continue in that direction.
“Cruz” is the very obvious answer if the criterion is “conservative principles and the ability to articulate them, as well as demonstrated adherence to them.” But what about that “electability” factor? In other words, can Cruz win?
A lot of people would answer as commenter Richard Saunders did:
Cruz is a brilliant man and a great lawyer ”” but does anybody here actually think he could get any votes outside the Republican base? (I mean outside of our little corner of the Republican base?) The guy is so anti-charismatic I think he’s an actual phenomenon. If Cruz is the top of the ticket, we will go down to defeat as badly as Goldwater did in 1968. I know ”” I was there.
That is my fear as well, which is one of the many reasons I am strongly considering the alternatives to Cruz—and of course that’s one of the things, writ large and multiplied by many people, that keeps so many candidates in the race and splits the “anyone-but-Trump” vote into fragments, weakening it.
Understanding that a lot of this is hunch and guesswork at the moment, and that things can change over time, I turn to polls for information. They may not be such great prognosticators, especially this early in the game, but they still are pretty much the only fact-based indications we have right now. In particular, I notice trends over time, and averages of many polls indicating those trends, and I also give greater weight to polls that report their data in more detail and have higher sample sizes.
And so far, over time, Rubio has been the candidate who has done best in head-to-head battles against Clinton. He has consistently been beating her for months in these polls (Trump has consistently done worst* of all the candidates against her, but let’s not worry too much about that for the purposes of this post, although sometimes I’ll use him for comparison).
So at the moment, if we want a Republican with the best chance of actually being elected, I’d say Rubio. But what about his conservatism; Gang of Eight and all that? Yeah, I know, I’ve heard it all a million times. But still, he is a stalwart conservative compared to Hillary Clinton, and has received high ratings on everything but immigration from just about every conservative group. See this and this, for example:
The American Conservative Union gave Rubio a 96 rating (out of 100) for 2014 and 98 across his Senate career. Heritage Action handed Rubio a 94 last year and 91 lifetime. The equivalent Club for Growth numbers are 92 and 93.
Maybe Rubio’s Gang of Eight membership is a dealbreaker for you. Maybe you just don’t like him for other reasons. For me, he’s acceptable, and I am drawn to him for—yes, I’ll dare to say it—his electability, which I value especially highly this year.
Here’s an unusually detailed national poll that was taken relatively recently (December 17-21; there’s been no national polling that I’ve found on this since December 23). I chose it because it reports on a lot more data than most. In it, you can see the sources of Rubio’s electoral chops. He does well with men vis a vis Hillary (better even than Trump, for example, who is usually considered to do so well with men). Hillary is ever-so-slighly ahead of Rubio with women, but only slightly. Rubio does well against her with non-whites (he gets 30%) and very well with whites (56%) (and both these figures are somewhat better than Trump’s against her with the same groups, interestingly enough). Rubio does better with voters who lean Democrat (14% against Hillary’s 11% lean Republican and Trump’s 11% lean Democrat). Rubio does slightly better with Democrats than Trump does (12% vs. 11%). The biggest difference is that Rubio pulls in a lot more Independents than Hillary (and than Trump), beating her with them 52/40 versus Trump’s breaking even with her. You may look down on Independents, but they are a very important bloc, and there is where Rubio shines. But he does well with all demographics, including Republicans (he draws the same percentage as Trump, 86%), which could put to rest the fears that the base would stay home if Rubio ran (a fear I retain somewhat, by the way).
Then there’s the supposedly less-electable Cruz. Over time, he’s certainly been doing worse than Rubio has against Clinton, but recently he’s been rising. Similarly to Rubio, Cruz does well with men, and a bit more surprisingly he does just as well with women. Where Cruz drops a bit compared to Rubio is with Democrats (7% to Rubio’s 12%) and lean Democrats (95 to Rubio’s 14%). However, Cruz is very strong indeed with Independents, which I must say surprised me: 52% to Hillary’s 40%, which is exactly the same as Rubio (versus Trump’s breaking even with her with Independents).
So, at least in this poll, Cruz looks almost as “electable” as Rubio. If that trend continues, it could matter—a lot.
Unfortunately, the poll doesn’t break down other candidates’ support that way; I think probably they had too little support for the numbers to have a small enough margin of error. I’d be especially interested in a Christie breakdown, because I’ve been more impressed with him as time goes on (and no, I don’t care about the Obama-hug-that-wasn’t-really-a-hug).
[ * NOTE: By the way, this NY Times article from yesterday entitled “Donald Trump’s Strongest Supporters: A Certain Kind of Democrat” caught my eye for obvious reasons. But when I read it, I found it very odd. It had very few numbers, and I couldn’t find any links to anything that contained them. So it was almost impossible to evaluate, and of course we’re dealing with the NY Times here. The group doing the polling was described as “a Democratic data firm.”
Here’s the gist of it:
[Trump’s] very best voters are self-identified Republicans who nonetheless are registered as Democrats. It’s a coalition that’s concentrated in the South, Appalachia and the industrial North, according to data provided to The Upshot by Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm.
Mr. Trump’s huge advantage among these groups poses a challenge for his campaign, because it may not have the turnout operation necessary to mobilize irregular voters.
So Trump appeals to Republicans who are registered Democrats, and they are Republicans only by self-report? How many such people exist? I certainly don’t know any, which doesn’t mean much, since I mostly know liberal Democrats anyway. But why would a Republican register as a Democrat? An Independent, yes; but a Democrat? I don’t see these as the classic “Reagan Democrats,” either. Reagan Democrats were Democrats who crossed over for Reagan, not Republicans registered as Democrats. And apparently a lot of these Trump supporters may not vote, much less vote in the primaries.
In other polls, Trump does not do especially well with Democrats or those who lean Democrat, or with Independents, as I wrote in the post. I wish the Times had reported more detail about this survey of the Republican Democrats, whoever they are, so I could do a better evaluation of what’s going on here. All it really says is that the results are “estimates” based on 11,000 interviews since August (things have changed a lot since August) of those who are leaning Republican. The results only reflect these estimates of the support of each Republican candidate against other Republicans, not against Hillary in the general, so of course the non-Trump vote is split among all the other Republicans. What’s more, “The margin of uncertainty around the congressional district estimates is plus or minus 8.7 percentage points.” That’s rather large, to say the least.]
Greetings, 2016. Let’s be friends.
My resolutions are the same as usual—which tells you how successful I am at keeping them. The first is to stay away from sugar for a couple of months and see how that goes (now that I’ve written it down that way, it doesn’t seem all that resolute, does it?).
The second is to go to bed earlier. I’ve got a lot of room for improvement on that score.
And you? Or was your New Year’s resolution to give up New Year’s resolutions?
A very HAPPY NEW YEAR to all of you! Are you planning anything fun?
