Later On

Good review of several books on Mark Twain:

The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works

by Shelley Fisher Fishkin

A review by Jonah Raskin

It is hard to believe — because he looms so large in our national letters — that Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens in 1835, died 100 years ago, on April 21. The anniversary of his death provides an occasion to reappraise his work and rethink his life. Fortunately, critics and biographers have been sifting through Twain’s published writings and rummaging through his archives. A half dozen new books delve deeply and from nearly every possible angle into perhaps our most profoundly divided writer.

The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works offers a diverse body of work about Twain, with a perky introduction by Stanford Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin. The word American comes up repeatedly, as in William Faulkner’s comment that Twain was "the first truly American writer."
While Asians, Latin Americans and Europeans have praised Twain, his most ardent admirers have been white American men: H.L. Mencken, William Dean Howells and Leslie Fiedler, who pointed out in an essay included here that American novels like Huckleberry Finn are often about the bonds of love and friendship between males of different races. Toni Morrison tries hard in a 1996 essay to like Twain’s classic about Huck, the poor, white teenager, and Jim, the escaped, black slave, but never resolves her ambivalence. Ralph Ellison wasn’t the least bit conflicted. Of Twain, he said, "He made it possible for many of us to find our own voices."

Of course, it’s Huck’s inimitable voice that animates the novel. "I reckon I got to light out for the Territory," he declares as he flees all attempts to "sivilize" him.

In Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain, the historian Roy Morris Jr. describes Samuel Clemens’ adventures as a young man in Nevada and California, often with his older brother Orion. Morris focuses on the years 1861 to 1867; the story he tells is largely a prologue to the paramount drama of Twain’s life. Still, there are pleasures in these pages; Morris has done his homework, and he showcases Twain’s earliest literary gems.

Interestingly, before he fixed on Mark Twain, Clemens tried out more than a half dozen pen names, some very silly (Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass). Morris reprints the article in which the Mark Twain byline first appeared. "I feel very much as if I had just awakened out of a long sleep," he wrote. That awakening altered his own life, and changed the course of American literature…

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Rozina Ali in Salon:

On Monday, federal Judge James Robertson ordered the release of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, a Guantánamo Bay detainee who had petitioned for habeas corpus back in 2005. The explanation for the decision is now classified, but Robertson stated he would make it public in the next few weeks. Slahi is the 34th prisoner to be released from Guantánamo since the Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that detainees could challenge their detention in U.S. courts.

But Slahi is also what authorities called a "highly valued detainee." He is suspected of helping recruit the 9/11 hijackers in Germany and of involvement in the attempted millennium bombing in Los Angeles. He has also been held illegally in Guantánamo for eight years without criminal charges.

Like most things pertaining to the war on terror, Monday’s ruling produced some gross misinterpretations. Several Fox News hosts, for instance, suggested that Robertson’s decision was a result of President Obama’s push for civilian trials for some Guantánamo detainees. But the chain of events that brought the Slahi case to Robertson actually began years before Obama’s presidency.

In March 2004, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, the prosecutor in Slahi’s military trial, halted that process, claiming that the evidence against Slahi had been obtained through torture and was thus inadmissible under U.S. and international law. It is this mistreatment, ultimately, that allowed Slahi to win his release this week.

Indeed, what is most notable about the Slahi case is how severe and well-documented his mistreatment was. A report released last April by the Senate Armed Services Committee highlighted the interrogation techniques used against Slahi, who has become a notorious example of mistreatment of U.S. prisoners of war.

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Joe Conason in Salon:

Has public opinion on a major issue ever spun around so swiftly? Having predicted that the negative voter reaction to healthcare reform will shift before November — if only because Democrats finally stood up for their convictions — I must admit that the pace of change reported by Gallup today is a bit stunning.

Democracy Corps pollsters Stan Greenberg and James Carville  traced significant movement on the issue away from the Republicans just before Sunday night’s vote — as Greenberg  explained in a New York Times Op-Ed yesterday – but the trend seems to be picking up speed.

The daily tracking poll posted on the Gallup site is subject to greater error than a three-day poll, but it nevertheless indicates a sharp reversal almost overnight.

Nearly half of the respondents say that passage of healthcare reform is "a good thing," while 40 percent say it is a "bad thing," with the remaining 11 percent offering no opinion. A separate question that sought "emotional responses" found 50 percent answering that they feel "enthusiastic" or "pleased" about the legislation, while 23 percent say they feel "disappointed" and 19 percent are "angry."

Unsurprisingly, Democrats are elated, Republicans are mad, and independents are closely divided. Gallup offers no additional cross-tabulations, but USAToday’s  story provides a few more details:

The largest single group, 48%, calls the bill "a good first step" that should be followed by more action on health care. An additional 4% also have a favorable view, saying the bill makes the most important changes needed in the nation’s health care system.

To be sure, the nation remains divided about the massive legislation that narrowly passed the House late Sunday and was signed by Obama in an emotional East Room ceremony Tuesday morning. The Senate began debate Tuesday afternoon on a package of "fixes" demanded by the House.

The findings are encouraging for the White House and congressional Democrats, who get higher ratings than congressional Republicans for their work on the issue. The poll shows receptive terrain as the White House and advocacy groups launch efforts to sell the plan, including a trip by Obama to Iowa on Thursday.

No one gets overwhelmingly positive ratings on the issue, but Obama fares the best: 46% say his work has been excellent or good; 31% call it poor. Congressional Democrats get an even split: 32% call their efforts good or excellent; 33% poor.

The standing of congressional Republicans is more negative. While 26% rate their work on health care as good or excellent, a larger group, 34%, say it has been poor.

Excellent column by Juan Cole:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the American Israel Public Affairs Council on Monday that "Jerusalem is not a settlement." He continued that the historical connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel cannot be denied. He added that neither could the historical connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem. He insisted, "The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today." He said, "Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital." He told his applauding audience of 7,500 that he was simply following the policies of all Israeli governments since the 1967 conquest of Jerusalem in the Six Day War.

Netanyahu mixed together romantic, nationalist cliches with a series of historically false assertions. But even more important was everything he left out of the history, and his citation of his warped and inaccurate history instead of considering laws, rights or common human decency toward others not of his ethnic group.

So here are the reasons that Netanyahu is profoundly wrong, and East Jerusalem does not belong to him.

1. In international law, East Jerusalem is occupied territory, as are the parts of the West Bank that Israel unilaterally annexed to its district of Jerusalem. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907 forbid occupying powers to alter the lifeways of civilians who are occupied, and forbid the settling of people from the occupiers’ country in the occupied territory. Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem, its usurpation of Palestinian property there, and its settling of Israelis on Palestinian land are all gross violations of international law. Israeli claims that they are not occupying Palestinians because the Palestinians have no state are cruel and tautological. Israeli claims that they are building on empty territory are laughable. My back yard is empty, but that does not give Netanyahu the right to put up an apartment complex on it.

2. Israeli governments have not in fact been united or consistent about what to do with East Jerusalem and the West Bank, contrary to what Netanyahu says. The Galili Plan for settlements in the West Bank was adopted only in 1973. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave undertakings as part of the Oslo Peace Process to withdraw from Palestinian territory and grant Palestinians a state, promises for which he was assassinated by the Israeli far right (elements of which are now supporting Netanyahu’s government). As late as 2000, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak claimed that he gave oral assurances that Palestinians could have almost all of the West Bank and could have some arrangement by which East Jerusalem could be its capital. Netanyahu tried to give the impression that far right Likud policy on East Jerusalem and the West Bank has been shared by all previous Israeli governments, but this is simply not true.

3. Romantic nationalism imagines a "people" as eternal and as having an eternal connection with a specific piece of land. This way of thinking is fantastic and mythological. Peoples are formed and change and sometimes cease to be, though they might have descendants who abandoned that religion or ethnicity or language. Human beings have moved all around and are not directly tied to any territory in an exclusive way, since many groups have lived on most pieces of land. Jerusalem was not founded by Jews, i.e. adherents of the Jewish religion. It was founded between 3000 BCE and 2600 BCE by a West Semitic people or possibly the Canaanites, the common ancestors of Palestinians, Lebanese, many Syrians and Jordanians, and many Jews. But when it was founded Jews did not exist.

4. Jerusalem was founded in honor of the ancient god Shalem. It does not mean City of Peace but rather "built-up place of Shalem."

5…

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Never. Science is not about "settling". John Cook at Skeptical Science:

A common skeptic refrain is that "the science isn’t settled", meaning there are still uncertainties in climate science and therefore action to cut CO2 emissions is premature. This line of argument betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science. Firstly, it presumes science exists in a binary state – that science isn’t settled until it crosses some imaginary line after which it’s finally settled. On the contrary, science by its very nature is never 100% settled. Secondly, it presumes that poor understanding in one area invalidates good understanding in other areas. This is not the case. To properly answer the question, "is the science settled?", an understanding of how science works is first required.

Science is not about absolute proofs. It never reaches 100% certainty. This is the domain of mathematics and logic. Science is about improving our understanding by narrowing uncertainty. Different areas of science are understood with varying degrees of confidence. For example, while some areas of climate science are understood with high confidence, there are some areas understood with lower confidence, such as the effect on climate from atmospheric aerosols (liquid or solid particles suspended in the air). Aerosols cool climate by blocking sunlight. But they also serve as nuclei for condensation which leads to cloud formation. The question of the net effect of aerosols is one of the greater sources of uncertainty in climate science.

What do we know with high confidence? We have a high degree of confidence that humans are raising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The amount of CO2 emissions can be accurately calculated using international energy statistics (CDIAC). This is double checked using measurements of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere (Ghosh 2003). We can also triple check these results using observations of falling oxygen levels due to the burning of fossil fuels (Manning 2006). Multiple lines of empirical evidence increase our confidence that humans are responsible for rising CO2 levels.

We also have a high degree of confidence in the amount of heat trapped by increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This is otherwise known as radiative forcing, a disturbance in the planet’s energy balance. We can calculate with relatively high accuracy how much heat is trapped by greenhouse gases using line-by-line models which determine infrared radiation absorption at each wavelength of the infrared spectrum. The model results can then be directly compared to satellite observations which measure the change in infrared radiation escaping to space. What we find in Figure 1 is the observed increased greenhouse effect (black line) is consistent with theoretical expectations (red line) (Chen 2007). These results can also be double checked by surface measurements that observe more infrared radiation returning to Earth at greenhouse gas wavelengths (Evans 2006). Again, independent observations raise our confidence in the increased greenhouse effect…

Continue reading. Graphs at the link.

She has her own blog now (check links at the right when you get there). And Max has been joined by a new sibling, Pattison. McGee is still doing a good job of bringing food. The Wife reports:

McGee’s schedule: 7:58 pm (bonding, no food), 8:03 pm (big rabbit), 8:13 pm (pocket gopher), 11.54 (rodent), 3.24 am (rodent)

I’m just back from going out for breakfast at the Victorian Corner Restaurant in Pacific Grove. No signs of Armageddon yet, though I believe that was due yesterday, right after the healthcare bill was signed. The sky was clear, the weather mild, and altogether a beautiful day.

Of course, my Armageddon experience is limited, so maybe this is Armageddon. If so, it needs to hire a new publicist because it’s gotten a bad rap.

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

As support grows within Congress, the Pentagon and the public for repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy, a new Center for American Progress (CAP) report provides a blueprint for how to finally give gay men and the women the right to serve their country openly.

Noting that the Pentagon’s ongoing review of DADT is designed to study how, rather than whether, the policy should be overturned, the report argues that Congress should act swiftly and decisively to repeal the policy as "[s]ubstantial research finds that transitioning to an inclusive policy would be significantly less difficult than proponents of  ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ claim."

"You need to do it quickly. The longer you drag it out, the more it’s going to cause problems," CAP Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb, who served as an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan, said at a panel discussion on the report yesterday.

The report reviews the experiences of the 25 nations that allow openly gay men and women to serve in their militaries, with an emphasis on the United Kingdom, Canada, and Israel, and outlines eight key areas "where we believe the military must change rules and regulations in order to effectively implement the new policy."

The report finds the needed changes to be "fairly limited and manageable." "The experiences of the United Kingdom, Canada, and Israel make it clear that integrating openly gay men and women into the armed forces need not be the laborious and contentious process some fear," the report adds.

Once repeal is implemented, "the country is going to realize it’s a big yawn," said retired Rear Adm. John Hutson, a former Navy judge advocate general, who also sat on the CAP panel. "The country and the military, I would say, are so ready for this," Hutson added.

The Pentagon said yesterday that Defense Secretary Robert Gates said "will lay out elements of the department’s strategy to repeal the prohibition on openly gay and lesbian servicemembers later this week."

A sort of related story, quite interesting, in the LA Times. Hurling looks like one hell of a sport.

We’re gradually poisoning our planet. Probably not a good idea. Janet Raloff at Science News:

Chemists have been showing for years that bisphenol A, an estrogen-mimicking building block of polycarbonate plastics and food-can coatings, can leach into food and drinks. But other materials contain BPA — and leach it — such as certain resins used in nautical paint. And Katsuhiko Saido suspects those paints explain the high concentrations of BPA that his team has just found in beach sand and coastal seawater around the world.

Saido, a chemist at Nihon University’s College of Pharmacy, in Chiba, Japan, reported his findings here, March 23, at the American Chemical Society’s spring national meeting.

At the last ACS national meeting, Saido showed that Styrofoam and related polystyrene-based materials can degrade in seawater and taint the coastal environment with styrene, a toxic building block of the foams. When he announced his styrene findings last September, reporters asked him: What about BPA? Does this potentially toxic breakdown product of the widely used plastics also show up at the beach?

He hadn’t a clue. So he went back and reanalyzed samples of seawater and sand that he had collected for the polystyrene study. And sure enough, BPA was there. Sometimes in fairly substantial quantities, he now reports. Of the 28 sites sampled, he found BPA at all, often at values in seawater at or near 100 parts per billion in Puerto Rico, Guam, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. Concentrations of BPA were orders of magnitude higher in sand. For instance, they exceeded 50 parts per million on a French beach and ranged closer to 100 ppm on sandy shores in East Asia, Florida and Costa Rica.

But the hot — especially boiling temperatures — shown to break down polycarbonates in many food-chem studies don’t exist at the beach. So Saido went to the lab to see if he how low he could go and get the plastics to leach BPA. His starting materials: polycarbonate baby bottles that he purchased from around the world…

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Nathaniel Irons at Cool Tools:

s an alternative to the previously reviewed Mozy, I prefer CrashPlan for offsite data storage. It’ll back you up to external hard drives, or computers on your network, or flat-rate cloud storage, but its great innovation is the ability to back up over the internet, with permission, to another CrashPlan user. This is terrific for maintaining your own automatic offsite backups between work and home, or spreading backup religion to friends and family. All you need is broadband and spare disk space.

You need a backup buddy (which could easily be yourself, if you have computers in different locations) if you want to use the offsite backup features. If you don’t have a buddy, it won’t find you one anonymously, though you can pay $55/computer/year (or $100/household/year for unlimited computers) to back up to Code 42’s cloud storage, which they say lives in a converted bank vault. There is no obligation for backups to run in both directions. The advantages of a "peer to peer" backup are cost, control, and reciprocity. With a Drobo or a big RAID I can hold secure backups for my whole far-flung family, at no additional cost per year. It’s a feature that turns two (or more) people who weren’t backing up at all into people with offsite backups they never have to think about. I think that’s as close to magic as software gets.

Bandwidth and disk storage are conserved through …

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Annie Jacobsen in the LA Times:

Area 51. It’s the most famous military institution in the world that doesn’t officially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada’s high desert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear testing ground.

Then again, maybe not—the U.S. government refuses to say. You can’t drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restricted—all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those that have been declassified for decades.

It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with UFOlogists positing that the Pentagon reverse engineers flying saucers and keeps extraterrestrial beings stored in freezers. Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. In 2001, Katie Couric told Today Show audiences that 7 percent of Americans doubt the moon landing happened—that it was staged in the Nevada desert. Millions of X-Files fans believe the truth may be "out there," but more likely it’s concealed inside Area 51′s Strangelove-esque hangars—buildings that, though confirmed by Google Earth, the government refuses to acknowledge.

The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk—in fact, five men are, and their stories rival the most outrageous of rumors. Colonel Hugh "Slip" Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in "What Plane?" in LA‘s March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world’s most famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117). Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton "T.D." Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base’s half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels. Here are a few of their best stories—for the record:

On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51′s restricted airspace in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds.

Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: …

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John Dorschner at McClatchy:

The lawsuit against the health care overhaul filed Tuesday by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum is focused on a provision that has long been advocated by conservatives, big business and the insurance industry.

The lawsuit by McCollum, a candidate for governor, and 12 other attorneys general, focuses on the provision that virtually all Americans will need to have health insurance by 2014 or face penalties.

The lawsuit calls this an "unprecedented encroachment on the liberty of individuals." It states the Constitution doesn’t authorize such a mandate, the proposed tax penalty is unlawful and is an "unprecedented encroachment on the sovereignty of the states."

"The truth is this is a Republican idea," said Linda Quick, president of the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association. She said she first heard the concept of the "individual mandate" in a Miami speech in the early 1990s by Sen. John McCain, a conservative Republican from Arizona, to counter the "Hillarycare" the Clintons were proposing.

McCain did not embrace the concept during his 2008 election campaign, but other leading Republicans did, including Tommy Thompson, secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush.

Seeking to deradicalize the idea during a symposium in Orlando in September 2008, Thompson said, "Just like people are required to have car insurance, they could be required to have health insurance."

Among the other Republicans who had embraced the idea was Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts crafted a huge reform by requiring almost all citizens to have coverage.

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Well worth watching:

Yet another perfect shave. The ebony-handled Sabini worked up a fine lather from Honeybee Spa’s Coffee Mocha shea butter shaving soap, and my trusty 1940′s Gillette Ambassador with a brand new Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge gave me a great shave with no nicks. A splash of Acqua di Parma, and I’m ready to prepare for the cleaning ladies.

DougJ at Balloon Juice:

Ever since I read that crazy Tom Shales hit piece on Christiane Amanpour, I’ve been thinking of Jeff Rosen’s similar hit piece on Sonia Sotomayor. I guess I’m not the only one (Adam Serwer via Atrios):

As with Sonia Sotomayor, no amount of personal excellence can calm certain kinds of skepticism, because the question really comes down to one of resources and tribalist rivalry. Amanpour would be the only woman hosting a Sunday morning show on one of the major three networks, just as Sotomayor became the first Latina on the court. Because of her gender and ethnic background, she is another challenger to a professional space traditionally reserved for white men.

So of course she’s not “objective.” Only white men can be “objective.” Which is how you know “objectivity” in this context is anything but.

There’s some kind of progress here, though. From what I understand, forty years ago, John F. Kennedy struggled with objectivity as a Catholic. And now Bart Stupak is as objective as they come.

Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

Merrill Goozner points out another little-noticed provision in the bill: “Drug and device companies will soon have to report payments to physicians in a national database, thanks to a little noted section of the health care reform bill called the Physician Payments Sunshine Act.”

There were a lot of complaints about the transparency of the health-care reform process. I think most of those complaints were wrong: It’s hard to identify another debate that stretched for this long, that featured this many legislative proposals and CBO analyses and interviews and op-eds and think-tank summaries and televised mark-ups, all of which were available to download on the Internet. There has simply never been a legislative debate that offered everyday Americans so much opportunity to read the primary documents and their explanations and estimations.

What got lost in this, however, is how much transparency the bill is going to bring to the health-care sector. It’s not that every doctor visit will be televised, or every meeting of insurance executives streamed over the Internet. But hospitals will have to post prices. Insurance products will be presented with standardized information, consumer ratings and quality measures. The payments physicians take from drug and device companies will be in a public database. There will be independent funding for research on the relative effectiveness of different treatments. Some of these changes are small and some are big, but put together, the system is going to become a lot more visible in the coming years.

I continue to watch the daily life of the owls with fascination. Their names are McGee (the male) and Molly, obviously named after Fibber McGee and Molly, a radio program. “Fibber” wasn’t McGee’s name—he was a a fibber, a compulsive teller of tall tales.

One egg has hatched (and Molly immediately ate the shell). The stuff on the floor is basically fur: Molly eats the mice, rabbits, possums, etc., that McGee brings her, and then she coughs up owl pellets: compressed bundles of fur and bones. These have little odor and are clean, and once they’ve dried, Molly picks them apart with her beak, the fur to be the nest and the bones she eats.

One owlet, Max, has hatched. (“Max” may be short for “Maxine”: we don’t know.) Four  eggs still to hatch with one due any moment.

Here’s the camera view.

Molly and McGee, BTW, are totally wild. The guy (Carlos Royal) set up the owl box and for two years it remained vacant until Molly and McGee came along and decided it was a good place to raise a family.

UPDATE: I just read the Wikipedia entry on Barn Owls, and I learned that this may be Molly’s only clutch of eggs. Life in the wild is tough.

Most individuals manage to breed only once in their life, falling victim to predators or accidents before being 2 years of age. While wild Barn Owls are thus decidedly short-lived, the actual longevity of the species is much higher – captive individuals may reach 20 years or more.

Excellent behind-the-scenes article by Ceci Connolly in the Washington Post, pointed out by Steve Benen at Political Animal:

It was the Barack Obama the American public rarely sees — irritated and wondering if he had arrived at the moment of defeat. Shortly after 6 p.m. on Jan. 19, with a political crisis about to explode, the president summoned the two top Democrats in Congress to the Oval Office for a strategy session. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sat alongside Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), the tension in the room acute.

Obama wasn’t waiting for the polls to close in Massachusetts at 8 that evening. He already knew that his Democratic Party was about to suffer an embarrassing loss. In the bitterest of ironies, the Senate seat held for nearly 47 years by Democrat Edward M. Kennedy, who had been the leading voice in Congress for universal health care, was about to fall into Republican hands.

Now the president was asking members of his assembled brain trust: What were they going to do?

Although they shared Obama’s desire to vastly expand the nation’s health-care system, they were divided over how to salvage his signature policy proposal.

Mathematically, Scott Brown’s impending victory would deny Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. With only 59 votes loosely under his control, Reid wanted the House to adopt the version of the health-care bill that had barely squeaked through the Senate on Christmas Eve.

No way, said Pelosi.

"The Senate bill is a non-starter," she said. "I can’t sell that to my members."

Pelosi lectured the others about the political realities of the House: Her Democratic troops did not trust the Senate, and she would face a mutiny if she asked them to do what Reid was suggesting.

They talked over each other, round and round, repeating the arguments Obama had heard for weeks.

"Let me finish," he broke in.

This was not how the president had envisioned things. He was just one day away from celebrating his first year in office. By now, he was to have signed into law a landmark bill guaranteeing health care to every American, the broadest piece of social policy legislation since President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

Instead, he was confronting the very real prospect of failure on an equally grand scale.

The remarkable change in political fortunes thrust Obama into a period of uncertainty and demonstrated the ability of one person to control the balance of power in Washington. On Jan. 19, that person seemed to be Brown.

But as the next 61 days would show, culminating in Sunday night’s historic vote, the fate of the legislation ultimately rested in the hands of Obama, who in the hours before Brown’s victory was growing increasingly frustrated as Pelosi detailed why no answer was in sight.

There went health-care reform.

There went history.

"I understand that, Nancy," he finally snapped. "What’s your solution?" …

Continue reading.

Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress provides an example of the childishness and irresponsibility of the GOP, who seem to have zero interest in effective governing:

There is a little-known rule in the Senate stating that hearings can’t happen after 2:00 p.m. each day without unanimous consent. However, every day, at the start of business, the Senate generally agrees, by unanimous consent, to waive this rule and continue with the necessary business of holding hearings. Here is the rule:

5. (a) Notwithstanding any other provision of the rules, when the Senate is in session, no committee of the Senate or any subcommittee thereof may meet, without special leave, after the conclusion of the first two hours after the meeting of the Senate commenced and in no case after two o’clock postmeridian unless consent therefor has been obtained from the majority leader and the minority leader (or in the event of the absence of either of such leaders, from his designee). The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall not apply to the Committee on Appropriations or the Committee on the Budget. The majority leader or his designee shall announce to the Senate whenever consent has been given under this subparagraph and shall state the time and place of such meeting. The right to make such announcement of consent shall have the same priority as the filing of a cloture motion.

Republicans, however, are now refusing to give unanimous consent and are blocking the hearings. Today, during a Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee hearing on transparency, Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) announced that he had to stop the proceedings because of Republican blocks:

I have just been advised by my staff that on the floor of the Senate there has been a move to stop all the proceedings in hearings that are going on in the Senate, and we are compelled to stop at this point in time. And I regret it, but there are rules here when we reach point in time and unless there’s unanimous consent to proceed for — as you may recall — unless there’s unanimous consent in the Senate to be able to proceed, we can only go on for so long and then we have to stop our hearings. And the whistle has blown. Unfortunately, we and all the other committees and subcommittees that are holding hearings have to, at this time, cease. I feel very badly about that. It’s not my doing.

Watch it:

ThinkProgress spoke to a Homeland Committee staffer who said that the committee’s work would be significantly disrupted if Republicans refuse to give unanimous consent throughout the week. The AP also reported today that Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) had a hearing on the bark beetle canceled today “after Republicans angry over the passage of health insurance reform legislation blocked it by using an obscure Senate rule requiring a unanimous consent to hold hearings scheduled after 2 p.m.”

Democratic staffers on the Hill told ThinkProgress that they anticipate Republicans will not only continue blocking hearings for the rest of the week, but also delay or block all sorts of minor, routine measures. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) office did not reply to a request for comment.

UPDATE: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) office put out a statement this afternoon responding to the GOP blocks:

Senator McCain’s promised obstruction comes to reality just a day later. "The Party of No" wouldn’t even agree to let Senate committees meet today. Ironically, as they make false claims about transparency regarding health reform, they’re shutting down a committee hearing today on transparency in government.

The bottom line is that as millions of Americans are learning about the immediate benefits of health reform, Republicans are throwing a temper tantrum and grinding important Senate business to a halt.

I’m hoping that this is the death spiral of the GOP. I can’t believe that the American public will think that these actions are constructive in any way.

Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent:

If the Israelis’ announcement of new settlement construction in Jerusalem during Vice President Biden’s Israel trip was “insulting,” what’s this?

The Jerusalem municipality has given final approval to a group of settlers construct 20 apartments in a controversial hotel in East Jerusalem, Haaretz learned on Tuesday.

The announcement comes as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington smoothing over ties with the United States over the latest settlement-related tensions, and hours before the premier was to meet with President Barack Obama in Washington.

Apparently Netanyahu’s fiery speech last night was only a prologue of how disinterested the Israeli PM is in mending fences with the Obama administration. Marc Lynch of George Washington University tweets that Obama should cancel his meeting with Netanyahu at the White House, scheduled to begin in just a couple of minutes.