Later On

Even if they don’t work. Steven Benen:

We talked yesterday about the ways in which the Republican tax policy of the Bush era clearly didn’t work. While GOP leaders insisted that the massive tax cuts, geared towards the wealthy, would create jobs, generate robust growth, and balance the budget, none of those predictions came true. They actually had it backwards.

Oddly enough, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), currently the House Republican conference chairman, suggested yesterday that he doesn’t think his party’s tax policies worked, either.

"Jim DeMint and I are offering legislation on Capitol Hill today to say, look, let’s make all the current tax rates permanent, uh, and then let’s start to work from there toward putting in place the kind of policies that’ll really get this economy moving again. You know, I think it’s fair to say, if the current tax rates were enough to create jobs and generate economic growth we’d have a growing economy. It’s not working now. Let’s at least give some certainty there and then we’ll fight for more tax relief."

Those who watch Pence regularly know he’s not the sharpest crayon in the box, but this quote is pretty amazing, even for him.

Pence thought Bush’s tax cuts would work wonders. He was wrong. This leads Pence to now believe we should keep the policy that he knows didn’t work, and then do more of it. It’s the patented "fail and fail again" approach to economic policy.

The 112th Congress really is going to be a national nightmare

The Grosvenor badger/boar combo brush did a fine job in lathering, but it’s one of those brushes that must return to the soap for each pass: not really a problem, and the lather was excellent. Three passes of the iKon with a Swedish Gillette blade and then a splash of Old Spice (though labeled “original” it’s not the Old Spice from 1956, I would say).

Innovations—mutant memes—require new names. If you’re copying the innovation from another culture, you’ll just take their word for it. But if it’s something developed within your culture, you’ll make up a word in your own language for it, generally by using some existing root in a new way.

That’s why it is significant that the words for wheel, wagon, thrill (the thing that lets draught animals pull the wagon), and axle are native Proto-Indo-European words, and that they are relatively late words—signifying that previously the words were not needed.

And as the Proto-Indo-Europeans, flush with the wealth achieved through superior technology (wheeled vehicles), spread across Eurasia and Europe, their language came with them and evolved—for example, to include words like "spoke" (of a wheel) that the Proto-Indo-Europeans apparently didn’t need.

And, as always when cultures meet and memes are exchanged, the word for the meme often goes along as part of the package. Thus (and this story is from TYD), as the Proto-Indo-European wave took over Greece and began its evolution into Greek (an Indo-European language), some words from the earlier inhabitants were retained—presumably for memes new to the PIE. Place names, for example, that end with –ssos or –nthos (Corinthos, Knossos, Parnassos). And, The Younger Daughter points out with some glee, the word for "bath" in Greek was not from the Proto-Indo-European language.

One imagines the scene: Two men, one standing by a huge wagon drawn by two oxen, one in the village square.

"Welcome, stranger. What an amazing contrivance! A ‘wagon,’ you said. I am.." Sudden fit of coughing and gasping and a little lurching, then, "There, that’s better. I think you’ll like that breeze in your face…  I say, I can tell that you must have traveled quite a spell. I imagine you want to take a bath. Probably before dinner. Maybe even right now, it’s…  What? Oh, you don’t know the word ‘bath.’ Aha. I think I see the source of the problem. Walk this way, I have something to show you that, in its own way, is as amazing as that ‘wagon’ thing."

One thing that Pelosi did that raised a LOT of hackles in the House was to create an independent investigative body that looked into ethics complaints about Representatives. As you can imagine, Representatives hated this because—lo and behold—some turn out to be not so very ethical. (Charles Rangel is the latest person to get hit with charges.)

But not to worry: the GOP is going to put paid to that little embarrassment. Tanya Somanader at ThinkProgress:

This November, the future House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) rode the Tea Party rhetoric to power, promising to gut “business as usual” on Capitol Hill. Touting an earmark ban and public access to bills as clear moves toward transparency, Boehner seemed demonstrably clear on another accountability issue – congressional ethics. “I think the American people expect that their members of Congress should be held to a high ethical standard,” he said in August.

In spite of that expectation, Boehner is threatening to axe the Office of Congressional ethics.Established in March of 2008 after the Jack Abramoff scandal, the Office of Congressional Ethics is responsible for “launching investigations of wrongdoings by House Members” in order to “stiffen the spine of the House ethics committee.” Operating as an inspector general of sorts, the OCE has “won praise for reviving the House’s notoriously moribund and secretive ethics process.”

Despite strong conservative support for OCE, “GOP leaders are gearing up to kill the fledgling” OCE. In doing so, Boehner is clashing head-on with the rhetoric of many newly-elected Republicans and the driving force behind them — the Tea Party. In Boehner’s home-state, the Tea Party has not only noticed this fact, but has issued him a warning:

The Ohio Liberty Council, the main umbrella organization for 58 Tea Party groups in the state, supports efforts to strengthen the OCE and is warning House GOP leaders that any attempt to weaken it will upset Tea Party activists.

“I[f] they move in the opposite direction of transparency that this office provides, I think we will be very upset about that,” said Chris Littleton, president of the Ohio Liberty Council and the Cincinnati Tea Party. “Symbolically, it’s a huge problem for them … they should be as transparent as they can be. Any opposition to that would be inappropriate on their part.”

Boehner’s antipathy for the OCE is no secret. He voted against its creation in 2008 and has repeatedly questioned its value. Asked whether Boehner would “heed the call to strengthen, not shutter, the OCE,” his spokesman Michael Steel said “we haven’t made a decision” at this time, which, as the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel notes, “appears to leave open the possibility that it may be defunded.” Indeed, the Sunlight Foundation, which is working with the GOP transition leaders on their transparency agenda, said GOP leaders “won’t vote publicly to kill the OCE but will simply quietly defund it next year.” As the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington notes, Boehner is “an establishment, country-club Republican trying to embrace the tea party folks without making any of the changes they require.”

As a New York Times editorial notes, “outraged taxpayers who voted against business as usual in Washington” will undoubtedly be “dumbfounded” if Boehner weakens or eliminates this linchpin of congressional ethics. The destruction of the OCE will signal “a retreat to the days of good old boy self-policing and no real accountability.” To the Tea Party, that’s decidedly off message.

I don’t understand what Nancy Pelosi did to bring such condemnation. It’s easy to find evidence of how unpopular she now is, very difficult to find the reasons for it (other than that she was the Democratic Speaker of the House in a Congress that brought reforms to Wall Street and to healthcare. It’s easy to find people who dislike her, difficult to find substantive reasons for the dislike. Steve Benen:

The new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll asked respondents whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of various political figures and parties. President Obama continues to have the highest positive ratings, and Democrats continue to enjoy more popularity than Republicans.

But it’s the ratings for congressional leaders that stand out. The leader with the very lowest positive ratings is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — only 11% have a favorable view — but that’s only because most Americans have no idea who he is. Among the recognized figures, it’s outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) who fares the worst — 24% have a favorable opinion of her, but literally twice as many, 48%, hold her in low regard.

This is in keeping with what Nate Silver’s analysis found yesterday. In terms of favorability ratings, the American political figures with the highest positives are Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Al Gore, in that order. The figure with the highest negative is Pelosi.

After going through the available data, Silver concluded the current House Speaker is "among the least popular politicians in America today — perhaps the single least popular one that maintains an active political role."

A party leader’s principal goal isn’t necessarily to be popular, and Ms. Pelosi was exceptionally successful at advancing legislation through the House in 2009 and 2010, whipping votes to pass a stimulus package, an energy bill, and a health care bill (twice!), among many other pieces of the Democratic agenda.

Still, the role of the party leader changes when a party goes from being in the majority to the minority. And it noteworthy that, of the several reasons that Jonathan Allen and John F. Harris at Politico cite for why Ms. Pelosi is likely to retain her top position in spite of her poor public image, almost none have to do with any tactical or strategic advantage the Democrats might gain from selecting her; instead, they have to do with institutional politics.

I don’t mention this to bash Pelosi. On the contrary, I’ve long considered myself a great admirer of the Speaker.

Rather, I mention this as something of a case study. When Republicans decided they’d try to destroy Pelosi’s reputation in 2008, I scoffed. The vast majority of voters didn’t necessarily know who Pelosi was or what she stood for, so the crusade to tear down her name seemed like a waste of time. If people don’t know who Pelosi is, why invest resources in attacking her?

But Republicans have a knack for not accepting political circumstances as they are, but rather, using blunt force to create new political circumstances more to their liking. The GOP and its allies stuck with their anti-Pelosi campaign, directing as much fire at her as anyone, including President Obama. They set out to destroy her reputation, using "Pelosi" as a synonym for "radical liberalism," and in time their efforts paid off. Today, the House Speaker is poised to depart her post very unpopular, not because of any scandals, misjudgments, or mistakes, but because of a coordinated effort to convince the country Pelosi offends their values.

It’s almost impressive as a p.r. strategy — and by "impressive," I mean that in the same sense that it’s also impressive that tobacco companies manage to convince teenagers to smoke.

This can also serve as a reminder to Democrats. There was about a month in which Dems decided they’d try to make John Boehner something of a villain. It didn’t really go far, and most Americans still don’t know who he is. The point, though, is that it takes time and determination to sully a leader’s reputation in Americans’ eyes. Republicans were patient when it came to turning Pelosi into a monster; are Dems prepared to take their time with the new Speaker?

It’s amazing how quickly humans have ruined the planet once we got going. Modern human culture’s earliest roots probably don’t date back more than 12,000 years. I’m right now enjoying the fascinating book The Horse, The Wheel, And Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David W. Anthony, which describes the Proto-Indo-European culture from which sprang so much of the modern Western world. The way Anthony nails down the invention and roll-out of that technological marvel the wheel is wonderful.

I realized as I read it that I’d been brainwashed by all those cartoons of a pelt-clad caveman, cudgel in hand, admiring his giant stone wheel. Obviously, once one thinks about it, a wheel by itself is not of much use: one needs quite a few ideas and tools to make something worthwhile: an axle, for example, and a platform with some sidewalls: put that on two wheels and you have a cart, put it on four and you have a wagon: stable and better suited for large loads. But you also need a way to have an ox or horse pull the thing.

From the very oldest documents found, from one of the first human cities, we get a glimpse of this new invention.

Clay tablets with "wagon" signs impressed on them were found in the Eanna temple precinct in Uruk, one of the first cities created by humans. About thirty-nine hundred tablets were recovered from level IVa, the end of Late Uruk. In these texts, among the oldest documents in the world, a pictograph (figure 4.3.f) shows a four-wheeled wagon with some kind of canopy or superstructure. The "wagon" sign occurred jus three times in thirty-nine hundred texts, where as the sign for "sledge"—a similar kind of transport, but dragged on runners not rolled on wheels—occurred thirty-eight times. Wagons were not yet common.

These tablets date from 3300-3100 BCE, comfortably after the first appearance of wagons, probably in 3300-3400 BCE.

Making wheeled wagons calls for special tools and skills—it occurs to me that this invention much more likely came from  a city than an isolated farm—a city economy could support specialized craftsmen and also include enough wealth to finance the new technology: build and buy and use it.

It makes one wonder about daily life among the Proto-Indo-European people—and why was their culture so dominant in Europe and western Asia? Was it because they had wagons?

Wonderful book.

I have finally learned not to celebrate with a special meal when I finally do lose some weight: if I do, the weight promptly returns. This morning I’m finally under 215 lbs again: 214.7. So my celebration, such as it is, will be to add sparkling water and juice of half a lime to my glass of iced white tea.

The fact is that I still have quite a bit of fat to lose: 30 more lbs is not an exaggeration. But I assume if I hang in there I eventually will lose it.

I’m really liking the fragrance (and lather) of Sweet Gale: a lovely shaving soap. And you’ll see that I’m favoring the artificial badger brushes these days: trouble-free top performance is the main reason: they consistently deliver a great lather.

Three passes with the iKon bulldog open-comb—a very comfortable and smooth shaver—and a splash of New York sets me up for the day.

I certainly have found that to be true. David Roberts at Grist:

I wrote yesterday about the role of habit in human institutions and culture and the futility of trying to change habits through appeals to the rational mind. A few people asked, "Well then, smartypants, how do we change habits? What works?" I got a glimpse of an answer a few days ago.

I spent most of the day Sunday in an intensive workshop run by Dr. Doug McKenzie-Mohr, a professor, consultant, and author of the book Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing. At a broad level, the workshop was focused on how to encourage sustainable behaviors, but more specifically, it was on the nuts-and-bolts details of how to construct an effective behavior-change program.

I’ll spare you most of the gory details (though they were oddly fascinating) and just share the main insight I took away from it.

Many folks, including me, are bullish on the role that behavior change can play in the climate effort. You may have heard about the "behavioral wedge," the idea that changing consumer behaviors can be one of the famous wedges of the climate solution pie. Certainly the rest of the Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change Conference has been filled with some fairly grand pronouncements.

On that score, McKenzie-Mohr’s workshop was somewhat sobering. While the overall potential for behavior change may be high, changing people’s habits in a systematic way turns out to be a painstaking, labor-intensive undertaking.

Lots of people seem to hope/wish that it were simple. Many, many (many!) people cling to the notion that the way to motivate behavior change is simply to give people more information. Untold sums of money have been spent sending people brochures or sending them to websites where they can learn more; the results of those programs are almost uniformly dismal. Information is not motivation.

Others cling to a different illusion: that price alone can shift behavior, that financial self-interest is a kind of ur-motivation, trumping all others. Carbon pricing, according to the economist’s dream, will drive cascading behavior change across the entire economy. In fact, as McKenzie-Mohr illustrated at length, programs driven by economic incentives (rebates, etc.) have underperformed again and again. As he told me later, he’s a supporter of ecological tax reform, but we should be realistic:

The most that price can really do is enhance motivation to act. If we get the prices right, it does not make it any easier for the person who does not have a vehicle, or is physically disabled, to get down to the hardware to pick up a programmable thermostat. It just makes them feel more anxious about the fact that they ought to be doing it. How do we make it easier for people to make the transitions over to these other behavioral choices?

There is, it seems, no one-size-fits-all solution. In fact, McKenzie-Mohr stressed over and over that the first step in changing a behavior is to isolate it into a kind of indivisible unit. For each desired behavior change, there will be a unique set of barriers and benefits; successful programs will reduce the barriers and increase the benefits (or, he noted, raise barriers and reduce benefits of competing behaviors).

Here’s an example: . . .

Continue reading.

Steve Benen:

A month ago, the Obama administration lifted the moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, which at a minimum, should have meant that Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) would finally lift her ridiculous hold on Jack Lew’s OMB nomination.

Lew was poised to be confirmed easily as White House Office of Management and Budget’s new director, but Landrieu intervened, blocking the nomination until the drilling moratorium was overturned. What do Lew and the OMB have to do with drilling? Nothing. She was looking for a hostage, and he was a convenient choice.

More than a month later, the center-right Louisianan, still inclined to put the oil industry’s needs above all else, still can’t bring herself to do the responsible thing.

“My position is unchanged,” Landrieu, of Louisiana, told reporters on a conference call. “I’m very sympathetic to the administration’s position. I understand how difficult it is to go without a point person for the budget.”

Landrieu said she would consider lifting her block on Lew when a “clear path forward” is made for issuing permits for deepwater drilling in the Gulf.

“When that happens, I’ll consider releasing my hold,” she said.

Landrieu first demanded that the moratorium be lifted, and it was. But now she won’t release her hostage until she’s satisfied with the rate at which drilling permits are released — at which point she’ll “consider” letting the government function again as it should.

Keep in mind, Landrieu doesn’t object to Jack Lew. On the contrary, she’s described him as an “outstanding” choice to head the OMB, and would be more than happy to vote for his confirmation — just as soon as the oil industry seems fully satisfied. Until then, she just doesn’t care about the consequences.

In this case, those consequences aren’t just minor inconveniences. The Office of Management and Budget is poised to start writing the 2012 budget, and it needs a budget director. But there is no budget director, because Mary Landrieu, in a move that’s been fairly described as “both absurd and irresponsible,” has decided her demands are more important the administration’s ability to govern.

Landrieu’s reckless stunt is an embarrassment to the institution, and makes the need for Senate reform even more painfully obvious.

UPDATE: More here.

Matt Duss for ThinkProgress:

Dismantling the arguments against the New START treaty on the NewsHour last night, Richard Burt, the Reagan administration’s chief U.S. negotiator for the original START treaty, noted that “there are only two governments in the world that wouldn’t like to see this treaty ratified, the government in Tehran and the government in North Korea.”

Aside from the fact that nearly 75 percent of Americans want to see it ratified, Burt also warned that, if the treaty fails, not only would “we miss the opportunity to improve relations with the Russians, who have supported us on Iran and U.N. sanctions and increasingly in Afghanistan,” but the U.S. would also “lose all credibility on the problem of stopping nuclear proliferation.”

Discussing the jockeying over the treaty on Rachel Maddow’s show last night, The Cable’s Josh Rogin made a similar point, noting that a failure to ratify New START “hurts Obama’s credibility to negotiate future treaties with any other countries around the world.”

But as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has already — repeatedly — admitted, the GOP’s main goal is making sure that President Obama is “a one term president.” Severely handicapping the President’s ability to credibly conduct American foreign policy — regardless of the actual consequences — is just one tactic in that larger effort.

Very much related, a fairly comprehensive new report on Iran from the Stimson Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace describes how Iranian political jockeying has impacted U.S.-Iran diplomacy over the years:

Iran’s domestic politics have repeatedly undercut US efforts to engage Tehran. In a country where the political system is based in part on an enduring hostility to US political, economic, and even cultural power, Iranian leaders are fearful of any wider solution to the nuclear program that points to rapprochement with Washington. Supreme Leader Khamanei is the most powerful representative of this intensely suspicious view of the US, and thus may resist a wider normalization of relations with the US.

The rise of a new generation of ultra-hardliners, whose most visible spokesman is President Ahmadinejad, poses a host of further challenges. Iran’s president and his allies view the quest for an independent nuclear fuel cycle as central to Iran’s efforts to forge a new alliance of middle-size powers that can challenge the “hegemony” of the capitalist Western countries. That is why their on-going efforts to quell the Green Movement and seize political control from more mainstream conservatives poses a real threat, not merely to many Iranians, but to the region as a whole.

Leaving aside the obvious point about the mutually reinforcing relationship between Iran’s ultra-hardline neoconservatives and the U.S.’s, just as it’s important to try and understand how Iranian domestic politics affects Iranian foreign policy and U.S. perceptions of Iranian aims, we also have to consider this in the other direction: How might Iranians might view the ability of a small group of Republican ultra-hardliners to scuttle as manifestly reasonable and bipartisan a nonproliferation treaty as START? What does it say to them about President Obama’s ability to ratify any future treaty with Iran, which would likely be far more controversial? Will a failure of START strengthen those Iranian voices — either inside the government or out — who oppose nuclear weaponization? Or will it strengthen the hardliners who see the international nonproliferation regime as a joke, and argue that a nuclear weapon is essential for Iranian power and prestige?

In an op-ed in Politico today, Center for American Progress president and CEO John Podesta noted the importance of ratifying New START vis-a-vis Iran and Russia. “The U.S.-Russia “reset” has paved the way for greater Russian cooperation on pressuring Iran to end its pursuit of nuclear weapons and on supply and support for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. If New START goes down, or is further delayed, Russian cooperation could wane, if not end,” he wrote.

I simply do not understand how the GOP thinks. Their main goal seems to be to bring down Obama regardless of the cost to the nation.

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

Last weekend, a spokesman for the American Bankers Association — the banking industry’s largest trade group — explained that the financial services industry is eagerly anticipating conservative control of the House of Representatives. "We had been disappointed with a number of legislative outcomes with the past Congress, and so we look forward to better outcomes with this Congress," he said, adding that "banks expect a corrections bill to peel back some of the financial regulations passed into law this year." Indeed, Wall Street has made no secret of its desire to water down and roll back provisions in the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform law, which President Obama signed in July. Dodd-Frank is the most thorough upgrade of the nation’s regulatory structure since the Great Depression, and while complete repeal is unlikely due to the President’s veto power, the banks are counting on their House Republican allies to weaken the bill in other ways, such as withholding funds or scheduling hearings designed to slow the  regulators’ rule-making process. Already, the two leading candidates to chair the House Financial Services Committee next year — Reps. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) and Ed Royce (R-CA) — have made known their desire to weaken certain provisions, while incoming presumptive House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) told CNBC that Republicans intend to deny regulators the funds to implement Dodd-Frank. "The House has the power of the appropriations process and the leverage that comes with that essentially puts us in a position to deny the administration funding for promulgating the regulations," Cantor said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Scottish Heather today—and I find that I prefer Sweet Gale, though both soaps provide excellent lather, today worked up with an Omega artificial badger brush. Three smooth passes with the Fat Boy with a previously used Swedish Gillette blade, a splash of Klassik, and I’m ready for Pilates, more or less.

I highly recommend a subscription. Just in current issue:

Almost half of US could be obese by 2050 – Obesity will rise to around 42% of the population by 2050 and then stabilize at that level.

Human evolution was shaped by plate tectonics – Our remote ancestors preferred to live in tectonically active regions for reasons the article explains—and the evidence is convincing.

Born to laugh, we learn to cry – The two sounds we do not have to learn: laughing and the sound of relief.

Countdown to ‘thermogeddon’ has begun – Parts of the tropics will (with global warming) grow too hot for humans to survive. Projections say this could happen by 2100 and evidence shows that the process is underway. (The problem is that the stability threshold, which triggers cooling storms as a natural thermostat, will rise.)

And much more, including this note: “1 billion gigabytes of data will be uploaded or downloaded via US cellphone networks in 2010, up 112% from 2009.”

Editorial in New Scientist:

FOR believers in rationality, the modern world is often a frustrating and bewildering place.

Despite the many and manifest successes of science, it seems ever harder to penetrate the fog of superstition, magical thinking and prejudice that infects most human belief systems. Quack medicine, astrology, supernatural beings and denialist movements are not just alive in the 21st century, they are thriving. Herein lies a paradox for rationalists.

Those who find rational arguments persuasive naturally assume that others do too, and that the way to win a debate is simply to employ a cold-eyed blend of objectivity, data and logic. And if at first that doesn’t succeed, try, try again, but more forcefully.

Even then, success is far from guaranteed – and for good reason: the more we learn about irrational beliefs, the clearer it becomes that they are perfectly normal. Human beings are not wired for logic. Irrationality is our default state, and overcoming it is hard work. The dream of a glorious future when the march of progress automatically exorcises our demons will always remain a dream.

In How weird are you? Oddball minds of the western world we report on research revealing that rational, analytical thinking is alien to most people.

We like to think that western societies are more logical and rational. But there is a good reason why this 10 per cent or so of the world’s population is labelled "western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic" – aka WEIRD.

Among the WEIRD, irrational thinking proliferates – and always has. Take denial, for example. We tend to think of scientific denial movements as a modern phenomenon, but as our feature on page 48 shows, they are not.

Almost as soon as the theory of general relativity was published in 1915 it was being savaged by opponents on less-than-scientific grounds. Many opposed it because they saw it as a threat to the established order, part of the widespread social and political unrest of the time, while others were motivated by religion or anti-Semitism. That movement eventually dwindled, but has recently resurfaced in a different guise, showing that irrationality will always find a way.

What are we to do? Yes, rationality is the best way to solve problems and move forward, but we have to now focus the forces of rationality on developing an even deeper understanding of irrational thinking.

Stuart Vyse of Connecticut College in New London has highlighted our natural urge to find cause and effect in coincidences. And he suggests that superstitions are seen as an insurance policy, a variant of "Pascal’s wager", referring to how the 17th-century philosopher thought that it was rational to believe in God, just in case.

Shelley Taylor at the University of California in Los Angeles has done research to show how "positive illusions" – such as an unrealistic optimism, or an illusion of personal control – can offer psychological benefits, particularly in times of stress.

The more we understand about irrationality and why rational arguments fail, the better placed we are to apply rational thought to win over hearts as well as minds. Call it the rational case for irrational thinking.

Steve Benen:

In the last Congress, the House approved the Paycheck Fairness Act, only to see it die in the face of a Republican filibuster. This year, it’s happened again.

The first bill President Obama signed after taking office was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which made it easier for women to seek justice for pay discrimination. At the time, Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) joined with Democrats to overcome strong Republican opposition to the bill.

But today, all three Republican senators voted against a motion to proceed on the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that "would further strengthen current laws against gender-based wage discrimination." [...]

Women earn barely three-quarters of what their male counterparts make for the same work, but conservatives have invented a number of ludicrous reasons for opposing equal pay legislation. For example, the Heritage Foundation has suggested that equal pay laws actually hurt women because businesses simply won’t hire them if they are required to pay them fair wages. And Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has claimed that women would receive better compensation if they just had more "education and training."

The final tally was 58 senators supporting the measure, and 41 opposing. Because our Senate is often ridiculous, 41 trumps 58.

What’s more, note that this was only a vote on the motion to proceed. In other words, opponents didn’t just disagree with the proposal, they filibustered a measure that would have let the Senate debate the idea.

And what did those opponents have in common? Looking at the roll call, every Republican in the chamber voted to kill the Paycheck Fairness Act, while every Democratic except one supported it. The lone exception was, of course, Ben Nelson.

Soon after, President Obama issued a statement, noting, "I am deeply disappointed that a minority of Senators have prevented the Paycheck Fairness Act from finally being brought up for a debate and receiving a vote. This bill passed in the House almost two years ago; today, it had 58 votes to move forward, the support of the majority of Senate, and the support of the majority of Americans. As we emerge from one of the worst recessions in history, this bill would ensure that American women and their families aren’t bringing home smaller paychecks because of discrimination. It also helps businesses that pay equal wages as they struggle to compete against discriminatory competition. But a partisan minority of Senators blocked this commonsense law. Despite today’s vote, my Administration will continue to fight for a woman’s right to equal pay for equal work."

I’m reading a totally fascinating book, The Horse, The Wheel, And Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David W. Anthony.

The steppes are the great grass savannah that stretches from Bucharest and Odessa in the West all across Asia to the Great Wall of China. As Anthony points out, this great plain of grass was an impenetrable barrier so long as humans traveled by foot—but with the domestication of sheep, goats, and horses, and in particular with the invention of the wheel, it became instead a communications channel. And along that channel poured a people from whom sprang our modern languages and cultures.

Who were they? They were the Indo-Europeans, who spoke the Indo-European language—and that’s a story in itself, a story that in modern times begins with Sir William Jones, a British judge in India who wrote an electrifying sentence in 1786:

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure: more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer  could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.

Sir William was studying Sanskrit because Indian law depended on texts in that language. He already knew Welsh, English, Latin, Greek, German, and Persian—quite an amazing guy.

Anthony describes how the efforts to learn Indo-European took off, propelled by a variety of motivations. That in itself is fascinating. Then he turns to what we have learned from pursuing the Proto-Indo-European language.

The only aspect of the Indo-European problem that has been answered to most peoples’ satisfaction is how to define the language family, how to determine which languages belong to the Indo-European family and which do not. The discipline of linguistics was created in the nineteenth century by people trying to solve this problem. Their principal interests were comparative grammar, sound systems, and syntax, which provided the basis for classifying languages, grouping them into types, and otherwise defining the relationships between the tongues of humanity. No one had done this before…

Historical linguistics gave us not just state classifications but also the ability to reconstruct at least parts of extinct languages for which no written evidence survives. The methods that made this possible rely on regularities in the way sounds change inside the human mouth. If you collect Indo-European words for hundred from different branches of the language family and compare them, you can apply the myriad rules of sound change to see if all of them can be derived by regular changes from a single hypothetical ancestral word at the root of all the branches. The proof that Latin kentum (hundred) in the Italic branch and Lithuanian shimtas (hundred) in the Baltic branch are genetically related cognates is the construction of the ancestral root *k’mtom-. The daughter forms are compared sound by sound, going through each sound in each word in each branch, to see whether they can converge on one unique sequence of sounds that could have evolved into all of them by known rules. (I explain how this is done in the next chapter.) That root sequence of sounds, if it can be found, is the proof that the terms being compared are genetically related cognates. A reconstructed root is the residue of a successful comparison.

Linguists have reconstructed the sounds of more than fifteen hundred Proto-Indo-European roots. The reconstructions vary in reliability, because they depend on the surviving linguistic evidence. On the other hand, archeological excavations have revealed inscriptions in Hittite, Mycenaean Greek, and archaic German that contained words, never seen before, displaying precisely the sounds previously reconstructed by comparative linguistics. That linguists accurately predicted the sounds and letters later found in ancient inscriptions confirms that their reconstructions are not entirely theoretical. If we cannot regard reconstructed Proto-Indo-European as literally “real,” it is at least a close approximation of a prehistoric reality.

The recovery of even fragments of the Proto-Indo-European language is a remarkable accomplishment, considering that it was spoken by nonliterate people many thousands of years ago and never was written down. Although the grammar and morphology of Proto-Indo-European are most important in typological studies, it is the reconstructed vocabulary, or lexicon, that holds out the most promise for archaeologists. The reconstructed lexicon is a window onto the environment, social life, and beliefs of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European.

… But the proto-lexicon contains much more, including clusters of words, suggesting that the speakers of PIE inherited their rights and duties through the father’s bloodline only (patrilineal descent); probably lived with the husband’s family after marriage (patrilocal residence); recognized the authority of chiefs who acted as patrons and givers of hospitality for their clients; likely had formally instituted warrior bands; practiced ritual sacrifices of cattle and horses; drove wagons; recognized a male sky deity; probably avoided speaking the name of the bear for ritual reasons; and recognized two senses of the sacred (“that which is imbued with holiness” and “that which is forbidden”).

All that by page 15. Terrific book.

They really, REALLY did not want American to have affordable access to healthcare. Lee Fang reports at ThinkProgress:

This morning, Bloomberg reporter Drew Armstrong broke anincredible story revealing that health insurance companies, like UnitedHealth and CIGNA, funneled $86.2 million into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2009 to pay for the Chamber’s multifaceted campaign to kill President Obama’s health reform legislation. In January of this year, the National Journal’s Peter Stone reported that insurers had pumped $20 million into the Chamber for its anti-health reform campaign. Armstrong’s report exposes the true extent to which insurers worked to fool the public and defeat health reform. However, the report also poses new questions about the role of insurance companies in the health reform debate.

Why did insurance companies try to hide their donations to the Chamber’s anti-health reform campaign? Given their own unpopularity and Obama’s pledge to be the first leader to successfully reform America’s broken health system, the health insurance industry hatched a plan to fundamentally deceive the public, the press, and politicians. Instead of fighting reform tooth and nail, the insurance industry worked to manipulate the process and ultimately kill reforms by adopting what ThinkProgress termed “The Duplicitous Campaign.” In public, health insurance lobbyists and executives promised to support reform and work closely with reform advocates. The top health insurance lobbyist, Karen Ignagni, went to the White House early in the reform debate and promised Obama, “You have our commitment to play, to contribute and to help pass health-care reform this year.”

In private, the health insurance industry worked with conservative think tanks and media, right-wing front groups, and highly ideological trade associations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber to kill the bill. By using third party groups and ideological covers, the health insurance industry sought to trick Americans into hating reform. In September of 2009, while many in the media still believed insurance executives were honestly supporting reform, ThinkProgress released a report detailing the ways in which the health insurance industry secretly worked to undermine the process and poison public opinion (read it here). We also produced a video with health insurance whistle-blower Wendell Potter, who explained how insurers control the debate to defeat reform:

ThinkProgress busted several anti-reform groups, like Conservatives for Patients’ Rights,Coalition to Protect Patients’ Rights and Center for Medicine in the Public Interest as industry-created fronts used to deceive the public. As ThinkProgress has also first reported, health insurance companies like WellPoint and Blue Cross Blue Shield have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to anti-reform talking heads like Newt Gingrich. In December of 2009, ThinkProgress produced an exclusive investigation showing how health insurance executives are also secretly working to undermine and undo reform on the state level by orchestrating state-based constitutional challenges to the law. The question for the press and for politicians becomes: we now know that health insurance companies absolutely lied to the public about its role in the reform process in 2009. How much are health insurers funding efforts to repeal the law and weaken health reform regulations?

According to a new report by HCAN, health insurers posted a 22 percent increase in profits for 2010, largely by shedding customers. How much of that money — money from health insurance premiums — is being used on right-wing lobbying campaigns instead of actual treatments and health care for the sick?