Later On

Take a look.

I’m not talking just Sarah Palin and McCain and the like. Steve Benen:

A couple of weeks ago, Ezra Klein had a helpful summary, noting the historical trajectory of the debate over health care reform in America. The significance of the evolution in Republicans’ thinking still matters.

To briefly summarize, when Truman tried to pass what was, in effect, Medicare for all, Republicans balked and said they preferred a more market-based pay-or-play system. When Clinton endorsed the market-based pay-or-play system, Republicans balked again, saying that they preferred a mandate/subsidies kind of system. When Obama endorsed the mandate/subsidies system crafted by Republicans in the ’90s and adopted by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, Republicans balked again, this time saying they don’t want to address the problem at all.

But it’s that mandate that continues to be the key area of interest. It was, whether conservatives like it or not, a Republican idea, eventually (grudgingly) incorporated into the Democratic proposal. And yet, it was the central point of a court filing last week filed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), arguing that the mandate is unconstitutional.

The Kentucky Republican filed the brief last week in federal court in Florida, arguing that the individual mandate portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is unconstitutional because it gives Congress too much power to regulate citizens’ activities. Thirty-one fellow Senate GOPers joined him. The rest did not.

"Where, as in this case with respect to the PPACA’s Individual Mandate, Congress legislates without authority, it damages its institutional legitimacy and precipitates divisive federalism conflicts like the instant litigation," argues the senators in the brief. "The long term harms that the PPACA may do to our governmental institutions and constitutional architecture are at least as important as are the specific consequences of the PPACA."

The Huffington explores an interesting angle to this: the brief was endorsed by 32 Senate Republicans, led by McConnell. But the article explores why the other nine GOP senators decided to withhold their support — and the fact that some of them don’t want to talk about it.

What I find especially noteworthy, though, are double-dippers — those Republicans who endorsed (and in several cases, co-sponsored) legislation to make an individual health care mandate the law of the land, but nevertheless signed onto McConnell’s brief declaring an individual health care mandate unconstitutional.

It’s quite a motley crew: Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Kit Bond (R-Mo.), Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), John McCain (R-Ariz.), and John Thune (R-S.D.). All seven supported the individual mandate, right up until Democrats agreed with them, at which point they decided their own idea was unconstitutional. (My personal favorite is Grassley, who proclaimed on Fox News, during the fight over Obama’s plan, "I believe that there is a bipartisan consensus to have individual mandate.")

I realize that congressional Republicans are just lashing out wildly, and aren’t concerned about niceties like intellectual consistency, but if you’re going to co-sponsor legislation on an individual mandate, it takes a fair amount of chutzpah to turn around and sign McConnell’s brief.

And, of course, there’s this (Benen again):

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They’re raising the price for DVD rental and making it easier to watch instantly. From Netflix:

We now offer a new $7.99 a month plan which lets you instantly watch unlimited TV episodes and movies on your computer or TV. This plan does not include any DVDs. All the titles you can watch instantly on your current plan are also available on this new plan, and as a reminder, not all titles on DVD are available to watch instantly. This new plan is available immediately – if you’d like to switch to this new plan at any time, simply visit Your Account.

The office was created by Nancy Pelosi, and it worked—among others, Charles Rangel was brought up on ethics violations. But our Representatives—particularly the GOP side—do NOT want any independent investigations of their wheeling and dealing because they generally are unethical and often are illegal. So they will kill the office. Steve Benen:

The last time Republicans had a congressional majority in either chamber, the results weren’t pretty — the infamous "culture of corruption," especially in the House, ended up putting members of Congress literally behind bars. The widespread misconduct very likely contributed to the Democratic wave of 2006.

Most voters have probably forgotten all about this, or for those who do remember GOP corruption, at least hope Republicans won’t go back to their nefarious ways. But just a few weeks after the midterm elections, one of the first orders of business appears to be Republicans quietly eyeing the elimination of the Office of Congressional Ethics.

Despite publicly promising more transparency and disclosure of the inner workings of Congress, behind closed doors, the GOP leadership has made moves indicating the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) may be targeted for cuts or extinction.

According to an email seen by ABC News, Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif., called the OCE on Friday, Nov. 5, just three days after the midterm elections in which Republicans regained a majority and control of the House. During that phone conversation, ABC’s source said, the California representative asked for justification of its continued existence.

A 22-member transition team has been convened to craft operating rules for the new GOP-led House, but it’s worth noting that some of the members of this team — most notably Reps. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) and John Campbell (R-Calif.) — have themselves been targets of ethics investigations.

To clarify, the Office of Congressional Ethics is tasked with reviewing complaints against lawmakers, and deciding whether to refer the disputes to the House ethics committee (technically, the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct) for investigation. If Republicans shut down OCE, the process of holding members accountable for ethics transgressions would either have to be immediately replaced with a new system, or the process would simply cease to function.

It’s not surprising, of course, that some Republicans would want to scrap the office; one assumes arsonists would want to shut down fire departments, too. But the effort, if it proceeds, should send quite a message to voters about GOP priorities — the party promised to change the way Congress operates, but voters may not have realized that meant making it easier for representatives to get away with ethics violations.

Warren Strobel in McClatchy:

KABUL, Afghanistan — A corporate whistleblower, whose evidence of fraud led to one of the largest fines ever against a war-zone contractor, said that he was ordered to facilitate bribes, keep information from government auditors and inflate overhead rates.

Former Louis Berger Group employee Harold Salomon, in his first interview since the case was settled earlier this month, said he came to believe the New Jersey firm hired him because executives calculated the Haitian immigrant would not uncover their defrauding of U.S. taxpayers.

"Me being an immigrant would be easy prey," he said. They thought, "I would not understand anything."

Louis Berger agreed Nov. 5 to pay $69.3 million in civil and criminal penalties and accept a "deferred prosecution," which means federal charges would be dropped only if the firm complies with its court agreement with the government. The deal, however, allows the firm to continue competing for U.S. government contracts.

Louis Berger is among the U.S. Agency for International Development’s largest contractors in Afghanistan.

Salomon, who worked as a financial analyst for Louis Berger from 2002 to 2006, described a culture of fraud that permeated much of the company.

He said his first clue that something was amiss came just three months into the job, when he was told to send an inexplicable $35,000 wire transfer to an individual overseas. He questioned his superior, who told him to send the money anyway, and then asked for a confirmation email from the overseas recipient. The response he got: "I was told it was ‘grease money’," in other words, a bribe.

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Joe Klein in TIME:

The release of another budget-balancing proposal, this from the Obama deficit-reduction commission’s co-chairmen, has unleashed a volcanic eruption of hurrahs from the Olympian peaks of the Establishment — and reflexive harrumphs from the left and right. In the past, I’ve been a reliable hurrah monger. We do have a long-term structural deficit problem. The largest items in the budget — old-age entitlements, especially — are likely to grow in the future, and we have to pay for them. The solution to this problem is simple: pay for them. Bill Clinton proved the relative ease of starting along this path. He raised taxes on the wealthy and balanced the budget, with the help of a strong economy. (Clinton might have enacted some humane entitlement reform in 1998, but for an intern problem.) Even George W. Bush lets slip in his autobiography that the tax increase imposed by his father in 1990 "benefited" — that is, helped close — the budget deficit. Young Bush then helped reopen the deficit with outlandish tax cuts and two wars for which he refused to pay. These were policies endorsed by many of those yawping the loudest about the need for deficit reduction now. (See how to restore the American dream.)

So you’ll excuse me if I muffle my deficit-reduction cheerleading this time. There is much of value in the co-chairs’ proposal. I like the fact that Social Security solvency is mostly achieved by increasing taxes on the wealthy and that there are additional benefits for the working poor. I don’t like the fact that the chairs would limit the earned-income tax credit, which benefits those same working poor. We could go through the proposal line by line — but why waste the lines? There is a larger problem: Why are we spending so much time and effort bloviating about long-term deficits and so little trying to untangle the immediate economic mess that we’re in?

Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that so many of the people whinnying the loudest are prominent members of the financial community, the sector that has had the most to do with hollowing out our manufacturing base and creating the Ponzi scheme in housing that caused the 2008 bust. After all that uncreative destruction, they need to polish their high-minded credentials. (See how some Americans are facing the prospect of long-term unemployment.).

There is, for example, Glenn Hubbard, who was featured on the New York Times op-ed page recently in defense of the deficit commission, describing the problem this way: "We have designed entitlements for a welfare state we cannot afford." This is the same Glenn Hubbard who served as George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser when Dick Cheney was saying that "Reagan proved deficits don’t matter." One imagines that if Hubbard was so concerned about deficits, he might have resigned in protest from an Administration dedicated to creating them. But, no, he’s here to speak truth to the powerless — to the middle-class folks whose major asset, their home, was trashed by financial speculators, thereby wrecking their retirement plans and creating the consumer implosion we’re now suffering. Hubbard is telling them they now have to take yet another hit, on their old-age pensions and health insurance, for the greater good.

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The first one, the prawn curry, garnered a comment on this blog just this weekend from someone who made it and loved it. Check ‘em out. (Photos and brief descriptions at that link; full recipe can be found at each link below).

Prawn Curry

Pea & Ham Soup

Slow Roast Pork Shoulder

Five Spice Duck Breast

Roast Pork Belly, cooked simply

Roast Pork & Black Bean Chili

Butternut Squash, Chickpea and Spinach Curry

Spiced Chickpeas with Spinach

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

One year ago, the right-wing media machine smeared climate scientists with the "Climategate" conspiracy theory, even as the climate itself continued to get hotter and more destructive and other countries seized the clean-energy initiative. Although the National Academies of Science says "the U.S. should act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop a national strategy to adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change," the Republican Party is now dominated by fossil-funded ideologues who repeat zombie myths about global warming. An exclusive survey by the Progress Report, with research support by Daily Kos blogger RL Miller, has identified the members of Congress from nearly every state in the union that are on record challenging the scientific consensus on climate change. This denier bloc is fueled by remarkable amounts of spending from fossil fuel polluters. The greenhouse pollution industry spent $543 million in lobbying expenditures since 2009 to shape or kill climate legislation — ExxonMobil alone spent more than the entire pro-environment lobby. Fossil interests spent more than $68.5 million this year on "misleading and fictitious televisions ads designed to shape midterm elections and advance their anti-clean energy reform agenda," and they have contributed over $48 million to candidates.

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A very nice Klar Seifen shave, using the three-razor method: Merkur Slant Bar for first pass, Progress for second pass, Milord for final pass. The Milord carried a brand new Astra Superior Platinum blade, the other two previously used Swedish Gillette blades.

I made the lather the way that Zach showed for making lather with a boar brush: I wet the brush, held the can above the sink on its side, and lathered vigorously, letting lather splash and fall where it wanted. The result was a brush fully charged with a generous, thick lather.

Three passes later, a splash of the Klar Seifen sent me on my fragrant way.

TSA pat-down leaves traveler covered in urine

TSA Agents Absolutely Hate New Pat Downs, Find Them Disgusting And Morale Breaking

Cancer survivor forced to show prosthetic breast to TSA agents during airport pat-down

Wednesday should be an interesting day in US airports.

UPDATE: Schneier on Security has a post that collects a number of incidents (including links).

This is unusual. James Fallows:

1) The TSA excesses are creating strange bedfellows. Charles Krauthammer writes today about the "idiocy" of the TSA’s approach to airline security, including the nuttiness of body-searching the same pilots who will soon have the flight controls in their hands. David Weigel, via Andrew Sullivan has his own analysis of why, as in the case of Krauthammer, the TSA is proving the one issue that can bring about previously elusive bipartisan unity.

1A) Bonus idiocy point about strip-searching the pilots, as a United pilot pointed out to me yesterday. I don’t know this first hand, but I’m told that most airline cockpits come equipped with a safety device known as the "crash axe." This is to allow the flight crew to break through cockpit windows or doors, if needed for escape from a crashed plane. Even my little Cirrus propeller airplane comes with a crash-hammer, whose "safety" purpose is to let you get out through the cockpit windows but which, like the "crash axe," would work perfectly well to brain someone.

So, pilots must be patted down, to make sure they have nothing hidden in their underwear; and we insist on this safety-first step before trusting them not only to fly the plane but to do so with an axe in arm’s reach? Where in God’s name is the logic of taking pen knives or over-3-ounce tubes of toothpaste away from them in these circumstances? I think this is the kind of "security" "strategy" for which the term WTF was invented. [I think a pilot should try to take this axe in through security, and when security seizes the axe, telling them that it's required equipment in the cockpit and could they please see that it's delivered there? – LG]

2) Back to flying pigs: Mark Steyn, serving today as guest host for Rush Limbaugh, spent much of the show railing against the stupid ineffectiveness of relying on pat-downs-for-everyone, rather than emphasizing the intelligence-based approach that has actually thwarted recent  attacks. He also wrote today in the same vein:

We caught the millennium bomber at the British Columbia Washington State boarding [sic - he means 'border'], not because we were examining his hair gel or because we were feeling around in his underwear, but because the agent used simple human judgment about how nervous and shifty he was. If we had had this system in place, he would have whizzed through and he would have wound up blowing up LA Airport.
This is the insanity.

2A) Back to the Weigel/ Sullivan analysis: Yes, it’s probably true that the "Red State" side of this Red State/Blue State anti-TSA alliance reflects a standard anti-government attitude — which, with the passing of the Bush-Cheney era, finally dares express itself against the national security state too. That’s OK with me. I will disagree with these people on other issues, like medical care. I’m with them on this one.

3) Back to idiocy. An executive-branch official in Washington writes to remind me of a reality familiar to people who have attended official events here:

I know you’re trying to cut back on the security theater posts, but the metal detector comment in the last one reminded me of something. You have probably gone to public events with the President. Screening is always by metal detectors – no backscatter machines or shoe removal or whatever.

Exactly so.

4) Gee, for whatever surprising reason, neither TSA’s director, John Pistole, nor its main new-media voice, "Blogger Bob," has yet taken up the invitation to explain their side of the story to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and/or me.  I’m sure we’ll hear from them soon.
(And, yes, I’m resisting the standard jokes about what kind of inspection the pigs would need to go through before they could fly.)

I’m now on page 227 of The Horse, The Wheel, And Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David W. Anthony and am still fascinated. I’ve been thinking about why this book is so compelling:

a. Interesting questions: Who invented the wheel and domesticated the horse? And how did they do it? And when? And how do we know?

b. Good style: At least, good for me: over and over, just as I’m formulating a question or objection, Anthony is there ahead of me, already launched upon the answer. At least some of this is because he stimulates the question (as an excellent teacher can do) to interest us in the answer.

c. It’s a mystery: I am a great fan of mysteries and in particular like the logical inexorability of the technical procedural mystery: the systematic investigation of clues in an evidence-driven investigation. That’s what I liked about CSI, and that’s exactly what this book is: a procedural, carefully assembling and investigating the evidence and drawing conclusions are in some cases are the only explanation of the evidence and in others are highly probable.

If you really enjoy a good mystery, I think you’ll probably like this book. And the mystery in this case is serious and significant and real, not just a made-up plot. It’s a big case, with a lot of evidence to consider, and they’ve been working on it for more than 200 years.

UPDATE: d. The incredible range of knowledge called into play: Linguistics, history, metallurgy, cooking, stockbreeding and herding, equine dentition, zoology (ancient languages talk a lot about the natural world), and so on. Like a regular CSI squared.

We can actually do some things that were impossible when we started. I like when that happens.

Interesting how medical knowledge can simply be discarded and then forgotten. Note that the knowledge wasn’t "lost"—it was deliberately discarded. Fred Vogelstein reports in the NY Times Magazine:

Once every three or four months my son, Sam, grabs a cookie or a piece of candy and, wide-eyed, holds it inches from his mouth, ready to devour it. He knows he’s not allowed to eat these things, but like any 9-year-old, he hopes that somehow, this once, my wife, Evelyn, or I will make an exception.

We never make exceptions when it comes to Sam and food, though, which means that when temptation takes hold of Sam and he is denied, things can get pretty hairy. Confronted with a gingerbread house at a friend’s party last December, he went scorched earth, grabbing parts of the structure and smashing it to bits. Reason rarely works. Usually one of us has to pry the food out of his hands. Sometimes he ends up in tears.

It’s not just cookies and candy that we forbid Sam to eat. Cake, ice cream, pizza, tortilla chips and soda aren’t allowed, either. Macaroni and cheese used to be his favorite food, but he told Evelyn the other day that he couldn’t remember what it tastes like anymore. At Halloween we let him collect candy, but he trades it in for a present. At birthday parties and play dates, he brings a lunchbox to eat from.

There is no crusade against unhealthful food in our house. Some might argue that unhealthful food is all we let Sam eat. His breakfast eggs are mixed with heavy cream and served with bacon. A typical lunch is full-fat Greek yogurt mixed with coconut oil. Dinner is hot dogs, bacon, macadamia nuts and cheese. We figure that in an average week, Sam consumes a quart and a third of heavy cream, nearly a stick and a half of butter, 13 teaspoons of coconut oil, 20 slices of bacon and 9 eggs. Sam’s diet is just shy of 90 percent fat. That is twice the fat content of a McDonald’s Happy Meal and about 25 percent more than the most fat-laden phase of the Atkins diet. It puts Sam at risk of developing kidney stones if he doesn’t drink enough. It is constipating, so he has to take daily stool softeners. And it lacks so many essential nutrients that if Sam didn’t take a multivitamin and a calcium-magnesium supplement every day, his growth would be stunted, his hair and teeth would fall out and his bones would become as brittle as an 80-year-old’s.

Evelyn, Sam’s twin sister Beatrice and I don’t eat this way. But Sam has epilepsy, and the food he eats is controlling most of his seizures (he used to have as many as 130 a day). The diet, which drastically reduces the amount of carbohydrates he takes in, tricks his body into a starvation state in which it burns fat, and not carbs, for fuel. Remarkably, and for reasons that are still unclear, this process — called ketosis — has an antiepileptic effect. He has been eating this way for almost two years.

Curiosity bordering on alarm is the only way to describe how people receive this information. “In-teresting,” one acquaintance said. “Did you make this up yourself?” Another friend was more direct: “Is this a mainstream-science thing or more of a fringe treatment?” We are not surprised by these reactions. What we are doing to Sam just seems wrong. The bad eating habits of Americans, especially those of children, are a national health crisis. Yet we are intentionally feeding our son fatty food and little else.

But what we are doing is mainstream science. Elizabeth Thiele, the doctor who prescribed and oversees Sam’s diet, is the head of the pediatric epilepsy program at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. In fact, the regimen, known as the ketogenic diet, is now offered at more than 100 hospitals in the United States, Canada and other countries. We’re not opposed to drugs; we tried many. But Sam’s seizures were drug-resistant, and keto, the universal shorthand, often provides seizure control when drugs do not.

The idea of food as medicine has been a controversial topic in this country in recent years. For decades the fight that the late Robert Atkins and his low-carb acolytes had with mainstream medicine has been as vitriolic as a religious war. There are food cures for everything from cancer and heart disease to cataracts. Doctors talk about diet as a part of basic good health all the time. But talk to them about a diet instead of drugs to stop an infection or treat a tumor and most would be visibly alarmed, and in many cases, they would have good reason to be. A decade ago most doctors held the same contempt for keto. An Atkins-like diet that worked as well — and often better — than antiepileptic drugs? Common sense suggests that’s crazy.

But when it comes to keto’s impact on pediatric seizures, there is wide acceptance. There are about two dozen backward-looking analyses of patient data suggesting keto works, and, more significant, two randomized, controlled studies published in 2008. One of the trials, by researchers at University College London, found that 38 percent of patients on the diet had their seizure frequency reduced more than 50 percent and that 7 percent had their seizure frequency reduced more than 90 percent.

Those numbers may look low, but they’re not. These were patients for whom antiepileptic drugs had already failed. For children with certain kinds of drug-resistant seizures, Thiele’s clinical data show an even better response: 7 out of 10 were able to reduce their count more than 90 percent with the diet. Those statistics are as good as those for any antiepileptic drug ever made. Other pediatric neurologists get similar results. The diet has cut Sam’s seizures by 75 percent…

Continue reading.

This Steve Benen post is one to read. Click through. It begins:

Consider a thought experiment. Imagine you actively disliked the United States, and wanted to deliberately undermine its economy. What kind of positions would you take to do the most damage?

You might start with rejecting the advice of economists and oppose any kind of stimulus investments. You’d also want to cut spending and take money out of the economy, while blocking funds to states and municipalities, forcing them to lay off more workers. You’d no doubt want to cut off stimulative unemployment benefits, and identify the single most effective jobs program of the last two years (the TANF Emergency Fund) so you could kill it.

You might then take steps to stop the Federal Reserve from trying to lower the unemployment rate. You’d also no doubt want to create massive economic uncertainty by vowing to gut the national health care system, promising to re-write the rules overseeing the financial industry, vowing re-write business regulations in general, considering a government shutdown, and even weighing the possibly of sending the United States into default.

You might want to cover your tracks a bit, and say you have an economic plan that would help — a tax policy that’s already been tried — but you’d do so knowing that such a plan has already proven not to work.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Matt Yglesias had an item the other day that went largely unnoticed, but which I found pretty important. . .

Continue reading.

Benen:

House Republicans have not yet decided who’ll chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee, but we’re down to three finalists. The competition tells us quite a bit about the state of the GOP caucus.

A leading contender is currently the committee’s ranking member, Texas’ Joe Barton, best known for apologizing to BP for its oil spill and being Congress’ most pro-pollution lawmaker. He’ll fight for the gavel with Illinois’ John Shimkus, who’s made a name for himself by refuting science with his understanding of the Bible.

The third competitor is Michigan’s Fred Upton, a conservative Republican, but a relative moderate by 2010 standards. He’s facing far-right attacks this week over, of all things, light bulbs.

Hoping to counter attacks from his right, Rep. Fred Upton is promising to reexamine a controversial ban on incandescent light bulbs if he becomes chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The Michigan Republican told POLITICO on Thursday that he’s not afraid to go back after an issue he once supported but that has come under withering assault on the conservative airwaves, including on Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck’s talk shows.

"If I become chairman, we’ll be reexamining the light bulb issue, no problem," Upton said.

Upton’s bid to be the next Energy and Commerce Committee leader has been rocked by allegations that he’s too moderate for the post.

Beck called him "all socialist" for cosponsoring legislation phasing out incandescent light bulbs that made it into a 2007 energy law signed by President George W. Bush. An unsigned 22-page document highlighting Upton’s voting record on a range of fiscal, social and policy has also been circulating around Capitol Hill this month.

Just so we’re clear, one of the central issues for Republicans in the 21st century, when picking a lawmaker to chair a committee dealing with energy, is protection for a 19th-century-style light bulb.

For the record, Upton did some admirable work on this in 2007, putting in place a phase-out of the energy-inefficient incandescent bulbs. The provision was approved with bipartisan support, and the larger legislation was easily passed and signed by President Bush.

But that was 2007, and the party has moved even further to the right since. Now, in order to even be considered for a post, Upton not only has to endure attacks from the likes of Limbaugh and Beck, he also has to promise to revisit his sensible bill. Dave Weigel jokingly referred to this as "Lightbulbgate."

The lesson, apparently, for congressional Republicans: if you intend to get ahead on the Hill, neverdo anything the right-wing might not like.

To emphasize: "One of the central issues for Republicans in the 21st century, when picking a lawmaker to chair a committee dealing with energy, is protection for a 19th-century-style light bulb."

Steve Benen:

I find it genuinely insane that Senate Republicans would ignore U.S. national security interests and kill the pending arms control treaty with Russia, New START.

But imagine how Russia feels.

Russians are mystified. They can’t quite believe that the U.S. Senate might fail to ratify the nuclear arms treaty, and they see no good from such an outcome.

The list of possible harmful effects they cite encompasses a minefield of global concerns: no more cooperation on Iran, a setback for progressive tendencies in Russia, new hurdles for Russian membership in the World Trade Organization, a terrible example for nuclear countries such as China and India, dim prospects for better NATO relations. And to top it off, the United States and its president would look ridiculous.

Sergei M. Rogov, director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, told the Post he simply didn’t believe Republicans would go through with this, unambiguous threats notwithstanding. “In arms control, Russian and American cooperation is crucial,” Rogov said. “I really don’t think Republicans want to kill arms control.”

The problem, I suspect, is that much of the world assumes Republican officials in the United States place the country’s well being above all else. International observers, in other words, believe elected American politicians want to do things that would benefit America. It’s a simple matter of self-interest, which tends to motivate practically everyone in international affairs.

In this case, we’re talking about a treaty that would keep tabs on Russia’s long-range nuclear bases, bolster American credibility around the globe, weaken Iran and North Korea, improve Russian cooperation in Afghanistan, and diminish the political strength of hard-liners in Moscow. For Americans who want to help America, it’s a no-brainer.

But Obama Derangement Syndrome doesn’t just lead right-wing activists to believe ridiculous things, it’s also a sickness that causes powerful Republican officials to put partisanship over patriotism.

Note that Senate Republicans who intend to kill New START can’t even explain themselves. They’re not holding out for some new concession; they don’t have a list of demands; they haven’t identified flaws in the measure they find intolerable. Their opposition is simply mindless. The White House needs the treaty to improve our national security, so Republicans are against it to deny the White House a victory.

No wonder Russians are “mystified.” Since when do American leaders deliberately act against American interests? The world is watching Washington, assuming that President Obama can’t convince Americans to do the right thing. But the problem isn’t with the country; it’s with a few dozen people in the Senate, whose partisan hatred has clouded their judgment in ways that are literally hard to believe.

In related news, we also learned this morning that the U.S. intelligence community will likely have to move spy satellites away from Iraq and Afghanistan, and towards Russia as a consequence of GOP obstinacy on New START.

It’s tempting to think Republicans would hear this and want to prevent it. But that would presume that they actually care.

Benen asks, “Since when do American leaders deliberately act against American interests?” I call his attention to the new GOP Majority Leader in the House, Rep. Eric Cantor, who quite explicitly said that the GOP in the House would support Netanyahu against the US President: favoring a foreign government’s position over the US. That fairly takes my breath away. (Later, Cantor said the exact opposite, but only because his initial (true) statement got; a negative reaction. Clearly, the initial statement is the true one. (And, clearly, one of the two is a lie, but we already knew that the GOP lies continually.)