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February 20, 2010
Saturday AM
1. Ol' PJ's got a new hip-hop mix for you, so go get it. He writes:
I got into hip-hop in high school right around the time of getting my turntables, but from a DJ standpoint I approached it with a very un-hip-hop mentality. I never had any doubles routines or even attempted to learn to scratch, I was just content, as I am now, to get a nice flow going. Apart from the recent vintage of the songs, this mix could have been the product of a 16-year-old Jones (or Turnstyle, as I called myself back then) bedroom session. It's definitely not going to be heavy in the streets and because of its construction, pacing, lack of sound FX and drops, and complete absense of any actual DJ trickery, the songs are really the only thing that make it a hip-hop mix. But here it is! What an occasion.
In other Jones news, he'll be back East for a few nights next month. More on that later on.
2. Writing in Slate, Deborah Blum explores how and why the federal government deliberately killed 10,000 Americans via poisoning during Prohibition.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
3. Newly released color footage of JFK & Jackie arriving in Dallas on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963. Fifteen-year-old Ward Warren captured the couple, along with VP LBJ, exiting Air Force One and making their way through an adoring crowd. It's remarkable to watch - incredibly melancholy, as we of course know the impending horror that a smiling Kennedy could not. The colors, too: the blue sky, the fuzzy pink of Jackie's coat and hat.
4. E.J. Dionne Jr. - one of my favorite columnists - on what's wrong with the Democrats as of late:
On health care, months of delay in a futile quest for Republican support got the Democrats the worst of all worlds. The media gave them no credit for reaching out to the other side but did blame them for an ugly, gridlocked process.
The demands of moderate Democrats for concessions -- remember the politically lethal Nebraska payoff for Sen. Ben Nelson? -- made the process look even seamier. The bill's conservative opponents shrewdly focused on such side issues and on made-up issues such as the "death panels." Nobody wants to admit that on health care the moderates won all the big fights. Single-payer was out at the start. The public option died. A Medicare buy-in died. The number of Americans who would be covered shrank. The insurance companies kept their antitrust exemption. If a bill eventually becomes law -- as it must if the Democrats are not to look like a feckless, useless lot -- the final proposal will be much closer to the moderate Senate version than to the more progressive bill passed by the House.
And if the Republicans refuse to cooperate, this will not mean that the bill isn't moderate. It will mean only that Republicans refuse to vote for a moderate bill.
5. Relatedly - and this should be read immediately following Dionne's op-ed - here's Jonathan Chait on the impending conservative freakout over the use of reconciliation to tweak the provisions of health care bills that have already passed the House and Senate:
Some of us realized all along that there was no rational reason that the Massachusetts election had to kill health care reform. Fundamentally, the main barrier -- getting sixty votes in the Senate -- had already been crossed. The remaining obstacles are puny. All the Democrats needed to do was have the House pass the Senate bill. If they insisted on changes, most of those could easily be made through reconciliation, which only requires a majority vote in the Senate. Most conservatives paid no attention to this basic reality, though they did indulge in some gloating mockery of those of us who pointed it out. (I've "gone off the deep end." "It is all rather pathetic." Etc.)
But the mustache-twirling bonhomie has started to give way to the realization that the legislative door to health care reform is wide open, and Democrats simply need to walk through it. By no means is it clear that they'll succeed. But I've been waiting for conservatives, filled with hubris at having swept liberalism into the dustbin of history, to wake up to the fact that health care reform is very far from dead, and start to freak out.
Posted by caps at February 20, 2010 12:07 PM