Day: December 14, 2009

Let it Snowe

I tend to agree with Josh Marshall here:

the key issue senate Democrats now have in dealing with Joe Lieberman isn’t his position on the the Medicare Buy-In [it’s that Lieberman] isn’t negotiating in good faith. […] it’s as clear to [Republicans] as it is to anyone else that he’s now basically mocking his Democratic colleagues by moving the goal posts every time a new agreement is struck.

[…]

it’s definitely time for the Democratic caucus to strip Lieberman of all the benefits he receives as a member of the Democratic caucus. But that doesn’t accomplish anything at the moment. The only path I can see for the Dems is that they need to try to put 60 votes together with Sen. Snowe.

Two birds, one stone: give Snowe the chairmanship of Homeland Security (and whatever the hell else she wants) in exchange for her cloture vote. She can do whatever she wants to on final passage. She keeps the chair so long as she votes for cloture. Every time, every issue. Period. Irregular as hell? Sure. But it would drive home the point that playtime is over. If you value your committee appointments and/or office accommodations and caucus with Democrats then YOU WILL VOTE FOR CLOTURE. Or you will find yourself in the Senatorial equivalent of Siberia. Likewise, if you’re a Republican willing to deal on the issues of the day: we’ll make your life much more comfortable in exchange for some painless votes on ending debate.

Either way, Lieberman should find himself so far down the power ladder that he has a hard time buying bean salad at the Senate cafeteria. Only then will this idiocy even begin to stop.

And, by the by, if you believe for one second this isn’t entirely about tweaking the smelly hippies that caused Joe all his problems: you are without a clue. That’s all it’s about. Joementum could care less about policy or what’s best for the most people. He’s got some petty axes to grind and the issue to do it on today happens to be insurance reform. Tomorrow: cap and trade. The Senate is, was, and will be 59-41. Plan accordingly. Find the trapping that Lieberman most prizes and strip it away. You might get it back when… It’s childish, but also the only way to proceed when dealing with a child.

AmericaLand in bad decline

Re: this and this prior post, Fake Steve Jobs reports on the chat he had with AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. Here’s some highlights:

Now, the thing about [“Meet the Beatles”] was, on the day [the album] hit the U.S. the whole world changed. Like, before that day, the world was one way, music was one way, culture was one way — and then after that day the world was never the same ever again, and as soon as you heard that album you knew that, and even if you were only nine years old, which I was, you just knew. You knew. Sales were crazy.

[…] there was a lot of demand for that record — so much that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz, the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do you think they said that? No, they did not. What they did was, they went out and found another printing plant. And another one and another one, until they could make as many records as people wanted.

Absolutely goddamned right. AT&T’s metaphorical Meet the Beatles response to the iPhone data-deluge seems to be:

“we need to figure out a way to keep people out of record stores. Prevent them from entering, dissuade them from buying the records if they’re already in there. That is the winning formula.”

Which is precisely the reaction that puts AT&T out of business. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon (and for a long time). Back to (fake) Steve:

Yes, 3% of your users are taking up 40% of your bandwidth. You see this as a bad thing. It’s not. It’s a good thing. It’s a blessing. It’s an indication that people love what we’re doing, which means you now have a reason to go out and double or triple or quadruple your damn network capacity. Jesus! I can’t believe I’m explaining this to you. You’re in the business of selling bandwidth. That pipe is what you sell. Right now what the market is telling you is that you can sell even more! Lots more! Good Lord. The world is changing, and you’re right in the sweet spot.

Indeed they are. Reaction? Let’s piss it away for some modest, short-term gains. The model, you’ll recall, is to sell crippled phones that, since people can’t actually use, don’t tax our network at all. AT&T simply doesn’t understand that the world has turned and left them there, in the past, with a shitty flip phones business while everyone else is up here, in the “future,” waiting on good pipes. Praying someone will take their money for those (still mythical) good pipes. That AT&T doesn’t see it that way is mostly because of the sentence to which I added emphasis: AT&T doesn’t want to believe that they are only selling pipe. They think they are selling something else entirely. I’m quite sure they can’t vocalize exactly what that thing is, but they inevitably deny the notion that they are, in fact, already a dumb-pipes company, though a very bad one. And this is why they fail. They think their subscribers care who is providing them with the dumb pipes instead of how well the dumb pipes work. And it is on this point that (fake) Steve really, really gets going:

Guys like you took over the phone company and all you cared about was milking profit and paying off assholes in Congress to fuck over anyone who came along with a better idea, because even though it might be great for consumers it would  mean you and your lazy pals would have to get off your asses and start working again in order to keep up.

[…] everyone focused on just getting what they can in the short run and who cares what kind of piece of shit product we’re putting out […and…] it was all about taking all this great shit that our predecessors had built and “unlocking value” which really meant finding ways to leech out whatever bit of money they could get in the short run and let the future be damned. It was all just one big swindle, and the only kind of engineering that matters anymore is financial engineering.

Empahsis added to point out (fake) Steve likely recapitulating the secret mission statement of AT&T. They sell pipes, for chrissakes. And yet they think it is in their interest to restrict and deny people access to those pipes, which said people feel they have contracted for access to and have every right to access. Worse, AT&T seems to feel this is a winning strategy. And maybe it is. For 2009, and even some of 2010. But 2011? Not so much. I guess Randall and his lot will have vested and retired to Nantucket by then.

That this sort of shit seems to be the organizing concept of American industry for the past half-century or so is, uh, totally unrelated and nothing to worry about, I’m sure. Fake Steve sums it up:

I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline.

Nate Silver on the Public Option

squashed notes “They’re good thoughts” in reference to this article. I’d call them indispensible. Particularly this:

1) The energy by progressive activists on behalf of the public option has done more good than harm, and by a wide margin.

2a) Nevertheless, the public option is/was a relatively minor part of the health care bill, at least once it became clear that it (i) wouldn’t be pegged to Medicare rates, and (ii) would only be available to a small fraction of the population.

2b) To claim that a health care bill without a public option is anything other than a huge achievement for progressives is, frankly, bullshit.

Absolutely right. It hurts to hear it, I know, but this is 100% the case. Sorry.

I think he’s both right and wrong on this, though:

Liberals have tended to underestimate what a significant political achievement it would be for Democrats to pass such a major bill that has become rather unpopular with the public.

Agreed on underestimation. What he leaves aside, though, is that Democrats in Congress don’t seem to appreciate that they are going to own this legislation. They’d better make it to their liking and damned effective too…because they are going to be the only ones defending it on the hustings in 2010 and 2012. That said, improvement over the current mire shouldn’t be too hard to achieve. The problem is, you need a group of policy-minded individuals who are genuinely looking to improve the situation rather than scratch the back of their favorite interest groups. So we’re in trouble.

Nate Silver on the Public Option