Are my eyes really blue?

“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.” — ANDY WARHOL

The less said about the training the better.  My brains were running out my ears like melted butter by the end of it. No, this is about the good part – the eight nights on Oahu (or as the Irish call it, O’ahu).  The Cayce Pollard soul-lag was effectively eliminated, thanks to powering on my phone on arrival and finding that Vanderbilt had beaten Florida at football for the first time since the Dead Sea was only sick.

The front end of the trip was very good – three nights in a Kailua bed-and-breakfast, one big room with the long horizontal blinds and low ceiling that evoke Disney-style Polynesian.  And when the rain is absolutely caning it down outside, it makes for an amazingly relaxing and restful night’s sleep.  For a town of almost 40,000, it feels small and sleep and relaxed, possibly thanks to a very compact downtown, possibly because we were only a 5-minute stroll through residential neighborhoods to a pristine white beach chock-full of para-surfers.  The market/coffeeshop/neighborhood hangout that provided me with my morning Kona only added to the feel of a place where I’d be more than happy to retire and just chill…provided with satellite TV and high-speed broadband, of course.

The back end of the trip was also good for different reasons.  Waikiki is exactly the sort of tourist nightmare that leads to bumper stickers on cars in Kailua reading “Go Back To Waikiki” – as if one took the Vegas Strip and replaced all the gambling with Japanese people. (Seriously, the one-every-ten-feet ABC Stores will take yen instead of dollars if asked.)  But away from the hustle and bustle of tacky souvenirs, luxury goods purveyors and wildly assorted dining, there’s one of the oldest hotels on the beach: the Royal Hawaiian, also known as the Pink Palace, now known as the apotheosis of the Vandy Lifestyle meme.  Because one of the shopping developments sits between it and the street, with the back wall facing the jungle perimeter of the back lawn, it is amazingly quiet and feels almost secluded, which takes some doing.  But if you just want to relax, that’s the spot.

Because it seems almost impossible to be stressed in that hotel.  There are no doors to speak of on the main level – all the lanais and patios and pretty much the entire reception area are wide-open archways, they’re draping leis and bead necklaces over your as soon as you step out of the car (which the valet will whisk away), the “low-end” Wi-Fi runs for free at a 10-megabit clip, there’s free guava juice at check-in and free Mai Tais waiting at the beachside bar, there’s maid service in the morning and turndown service in the evening, and endless drinks and refreshments are summoned and dismissed with a pen stroke under your room number – basically the experience of laying around and doing nothing is made as frictionless as possible. Hell, I went an entire day without ever putting on shoes at once point.

It’s not the sort of vacation we’d normally take, but after a year as trying as this one – health and work and everything-wise – it’s exactly what we needed.  We had a few sightseeing things, but rarely more than one a day and with no pressure to get anything done, and by Saturday, the only thing we had to do all day was lounge by the pool, reading and soaking up the sun.  We were free from the existence of a wider world, and it was glorious.

Hawaii was a good place, too.  When you’re a kid growing up in the South in the 70s, all you know of Hawaii is the intro of the original Hawaii-Five-O, the prize on the Showcase Showdown, or the moment Christmas afternoon when six buff dudes in their lava-lavas are furiously paddling to shore in an outrigger carrying Santa Claus in shorts and a flowered shirt at the beginning of the Aloha Bowl.  And there’s so much more to it than the beach at Waikiki.  Personally, I’d be just as happy to reinstate the royal family and see if monarchy can make a better fist of it than our current system of government.  And next time out, I want to make sure I can take in a Hawaii football game…and maybe even order the spam breakfast at McDonald’s.  As it is, I’ll wait for my two bespoke aloha shirts to arrive, save my kukui nut lei, and hope that it won’t be another forty years before I can relax in the tropical foliage waiting for either the mai tais or the afternoon showers…

* I’m going to be in training pretty much all week, and on vacation after that, so this is the quickie dump of everything I might have been blogging about.  Hang on tight, here we go…

 

* So the Nexus 5 has dropped at long last, alongside an Android 4.4 that’s meant to be lighter and easier to put on more limited hardware.  Between that and the Google Play layer, it’s possible Google might have licked the fragmentation problem going forward, as evinced by Moto putting the updated camera software for the Moto X onto the Google Play store to circumvent Verizon’s reluctance to push the update.  Notable too is the fact that the Nexus 5 doesn’t work on Verizon, alone among national carriers.

 

* Unfortunately, if you have the Galaxy Nexus, you’re out of luck; there will be no Android 4.4 support for it.  This is tantamount to Apple declaring that iOS 7 won’t run on the iPhone 4S at all; it may seem like an outrage but Google explicitly commits to no more than 18 months’ update support for Nexus devices. Still, it’s more than you’ll get from most phone manufacturers or their carrier partners (see Verizon above) and goes a long way toward explaining why Google is moving more and more stuff into Google Play Services rather than Android proper.  Of course there are other reasons too.

 

* The Nexus 5 includes a chip to enable some of that voice-recognition a la the Moto X, which is apparently part of the Android 4.4 code. That plus the tight integration of Google Now suggests that the forthcoming Google Watch will basically be a Google Now terminal that connects to your phone for its network connection and location info – and that, all by itself, is a far more intriguing and attractive package than the dog’s breakfast Samsung slapped together for the sake of being first out of the gate.

 

* Samsung actually had a developer conference in San Francisco last week or so, pushing its own ecosystem that sits atop Google.  Amazon went this route, sort of, what with building on top of the Android Open Source Project and forking from there, but Samsung is basically just slapping their own stuff over top of full Android and then asking people to develop for that rather than Android proper because of their commanding market share among Android devices. Shameless doesn’t begin to cover it, but then, Samsung’s entire approach to mobile phones has always, always been “better to seek forgiveness than permission, and better to just pay the court costs than either.”

 

* Meanwhile, the wife has finally gotten her iPhone 5S, which means I will finally be able to risk replacing the battery in my old 4S without leaving her high and dry.  A 4S in very good condition (year and a half old with protective plastic on it most of the way) and a fresh battery, running iOS 7.0.3, ought to be a perfectly viable everyday phone for at least another year and maybe two…and thus insurance against suddenly no longer having my work-provided device.  Also insurance against doing anything rash like splashing out on an unlocked Nexus 5. =)

 

* Speaking of electronics, the nerdosphere is going crazy today at the news that the FAA is revising rules on use of electronic devices during flight.  And yet, the main thing is merely the prospect of having them on during takeoff and landing – they must be held in the hand or placed in the seatback, they have to remain in airplane mode, and voice calling is still a no-no.  It’s not the olly-olly-oxen-free that they seem to be crowing about on Gizmodo or the Verge, and it drives home one of the most annoying things about flying: the people for whom having to stop playing Candy Crush long enough for the plane to reach 10,000 feet is an insurmountable crime against their freedoms.

 

* And while we’re on crimes against freedoms – it should be obvious right now that the main result of Edward Snowden’s revelations has been to give the entire rest of the world a club to beat the United States with.  I thought the big bugaboo was that O NOEZ WE R SPYIN ON MERICANZ!!!!! and yet all we seem to hear these days are details about how foreign citizens were having their metadata harvested and how other countries’ leaders were being spied on.  

Seriously.  Google “ECHELON”.  Or “ONYX.” This is not exclusive to the United States.  In fact, a lot of this isn’t even news.  I present to you an excerpt from William Gibson’s Zero History, published in 2010, between Hollis Henry and Hubertus Bigend:

 “Two,” he said, “counting you.”

“I can’t work that way,” she told him. “I won’t.”

“It won’t be that way. This is entirely less…speculative.”

“Wasn’t the NSA or someone tapping your phone, reading your email?”

“But now we know that they were doing that to everyone.” He loosened his pale golden tie. “We didn’t, then.”

Yes, three years ago, the ubiquity of NSA access to electronic communications was enough of a fait accompli for a major author to include it as a throwaway plot reference.  This is not new, and it didn’t remotely start with Obama, and the idea that it could – or should – be somehow made to go away altogether is to betray a profound ignorance of how the world works and how easy it is to put toothpaste back in the tube.

And now it appears that some left-wingers in Germany want Snowden to testify in person about US spying in Germany. And it appears he is amenable. Basicaly, Edward Snowden’s biggest accomplishment has been to completely compromise the discussion of how we as a society come to terms with the technological potential of mass surveillance, because he’s managed to bury it under an avalanche of homeless-man’s James Bond skullduggery and some very legitimate questions about his motives and conduct.  

If Fast Eddie Snowden is serious about the freedom of American citizens from ubiquitous surveillance, he needs to get on the next plane to JFK and face the guns from within the United States.  His profile is high enough that merely disappearing him is probably not an option, and it’s a lot harder to ignore a potentially enormous legal kerfuffle when it’s right under your nose than when it’s packed away asking Russians if they’ve tried turning it off and on again.  Basically, the biggest impact of the Snowden incident was to score a crap-ton of money for Glenn Greenwald to take his high horse private with eBay capital,  Left, right, glibertarian, whatever: freedom means the ability to cash the check.

 

* The thing is, we knew this was happening years ago.  Hell, we asked for this years ago.  People assumed that the government could see and hear everything and wanted to know why they weren’t able to magically see the evil Mandarin terrorists before they struck.  And then – because they were evil Mandarin terrorists unstoppable by any means, instead of a bunch of holy-rollers who hit the one-outer of a lifetime – the government naturally proceeded to do what everybody assumed they could.  And they got exposed.  And everybody shrugged.  And then, for whatever reason, this guy makes a big deal of it and clutches the pearls, and it’s a story again – mainly because while the right will always lay down for a Republican president, the American left seems to love nothing as much as slagging off Democrats.  Better perfection than half-measures…with predictable results. “We should only spy on the bad guys” makes as much sense as “the airport screeners should only search the terrorists,” but nobody wants to draw the line – so much easier to just scream that we shouldn’t be spying, period.

 

* Ironically, Fast Eddie is now working for the Russian version of Facebook, which is ironic in the extreme.  Facebook and Google have built their entire business on data-mining your content to sell your info to advertisers, and the ever-deeper integration of Google Now is the biggest disincentive to take the Android route. Technically speaking, you don’t have to use Apple’s services on your iPhone – you can get all your music from Amazon, you can rip your DVDs with Handbrake for movies, you don’t have to use iPhoto Stream or iTunes Match or Find My iPhone if you don’t want.  Apps themselves you still have to get through the App Store, but hell, the original iPhone didn’t have apps.  You certainly don’t have to use Apple’s mail. You don’t even have to use a Mac – it’s not that difficult to minimize your contact with Apple goods beyond the iPhone to only the iTunes you use for sync.

But if you want to use the Nexus 5 and Android 4.4, it’s almost worthless unless you use Google services.  In fact, the entire home screen – the basic interface from which everything else proceeds – has been replaced outright with the Google Search app. That’s the point; Android is a mechanism to steer you to Google services so they can get the data and sell the ads.  If it were about selling Android devices, Google wouldn’t still be churning out iOS apps that are in some areas superior to their Android alternatives.  Google doesn’t care about the hardware; Google is selling services.  And Apple is selling atoms.  And Microsoft finds themselves caught in a world where software is increasingly free as in beer or too cheap to make money for any business with double-digit employees…and Microsoft still doesn’t have a new CEO.

 

* Speaking of people who are at a loss, it’s now basketball season.  And Vanderbilt doesn’t have enough scholarship players to scrimmage 5-on-5; in fact, technically speaking, we are two-deep at point guard and only ONE deep at shooting guard and small forward.  With some shifting and shoveling, you can kind of fudge it, but the fact of the matter is we have a total of three true guards for two starting slots and a glut of power forwards. So it’s going to be interesting to see how an undermanned and lopsided squad, picked to finish 11th in a 14-team league, plays out the season when they know they have nothing at all to lose.

 

* Kids these days don’t know how good they have it.  If I were ten years old and I could’ve had a Tony Stark arc-reactor shirt that glowed under the fabric AND a Nerf revolver that shot 60 feet and could be hammer-cocked and fired one-handed AND a Nerf sword or axe or MACE even AND five X-Men movies and three Iron Man plus Avengers and actual Marvel Lego sets AND a weekly Star Wars cartoon series?  I would have sold my soul on the spot for pennies on the dollar for that stuff.

 

* Tech support problems in a nutshell: “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”

 

* And now, we shut down the laptop for two weeks.  Won’t open it back up until Monday the 18th.  I hope.  We’ll see how it goes.

I don’t have a lot of the detritus that builds up around group memberships.  No varsity jacket, no fraternity jersey, no exclusive standard-issue paraphernalia – and what little I do have normally reposes in a repurposed humidor atop my dresser.  And one of the things in there, which I pulled out and wiped and charged up last night, is my original iPhone.

I was there, you know.  I was sitting in Caffe Macs watching the keynote from the “skybox” – the one remaining booth bench after they cleared out all the tables to make way for rows of chairs, a bench that we routinely squatted three hours before kickoff to be sure our gang would be relaxed and comfy.  And it took me a second to get that the revolutionary new iPod, brand new phone and amazing Internet device were, in fact, one thing, and at that moment I was all in.  I saved my cash, and then, a week before the thing was released, Himself sat on a stool in Town Hall and told us we would all be given an 8 GB iPhone, gratis, a couple of weeks after the launch.

Looking at it now, you can tell it’s old.  It maxes out at iOS 3.1.3, which is before it was even called iOS if I remember right, and the 480×320 screen is a little on the muddy side after three years of looking at retina displays.  But it feels compact in a way that even the iPhone 4/4S don’t, despite being the same height and the 4/4S being slightly narrower. Maybe it’s to do with the way the 3G and 3GS looked, with the plastic back that was tapered at the edges but ultimately thicker in the back, and which had that same naff quality as a vinyl “crocodile” wallet.  I mean, yes the plastic was necessary for improved antenna performance, but it also took away the premium feel of the device.

Something else I didn’t realize is that both the 3G and 3GS shipped with a smaller battery than the original iPhone.  Which makes sense.  All the compromises that the original iPhone made were deliberately made in the cause of making the battery stretch as long as possible.  Thus no 3G in the original model – coverage wasn’t built out enough to make it worthwhile relative to the hit the battery would take. Thus no GPS in the original model – one more antenna, one more chip to draw power. Thus no CDMA in the original model – GSM, besides being the standard everywhere but Korea and parts of the US, was also less battery-intensive.  Thus no apps, so you couldn’t install anything that would pummel the battery to death.  I guess by the time the iPhone 3G and 3GS shipped, they’d figured out how to make the battery stretch – enough to add things like 3G and GPS to the first upgrade and then a faster processor and an improved camera with video capture to the 3GS the year after that.

Really, when you think about it, the S-path might have been the better one.  Original iPhone, then move to the 3GS and get faster everything plus GPS and a video camera.  If you moved to the 3G a year after the original iPhone, as I did, you only got GPS and 3G for your trouble – same RAM, same processor, and a smaller battery. And you had to go an extra year at the old speed and with no video until the iPhone 4 shipped.  (Of course, then you got the sexy new Dieter Rams-esque design first and the retina display, but you also got the dicky antenna and had to wait an extra year for HSPA+ support or Siri or an 8 MP camera with 1080p support. And you got the iPhone 5 first, which gave you a bigger screen and LTE, but you miss out on the 5S with its improved LTE support, amazingly better camera and TouchID…)

But that’s neither here nor there.  The point is, the original iPhone still feels dead solid perfect in the hand.  Not too big, not too small, of a comfortable weight, with pleasantly rounded edges and – despite six years of scratching and a couple of corner dents – the look of a device that could change the world.  Which it kind of did, despite everything. No apps, at launch, not even a way to bookmark pages on the home screen.  No MMS support, or 3G, or GPS, or even cut and paste. No video capture, and a muddy little 2-megapixel camera that was barely table stakes for a high-end phone at the time.  And yet, it’s still as attractive a package as Apple offered in a phone for the first three years of the iPhone age.

And in the beginning, I had it.  It was our standard-issue phone for the last two months I was around – everybody had it, because we’d all been given it free.  It was our lightsaber, it was our power ring, and it was something that I could take to Paris and Punxsutawney alike and feel like I had dropped in from the future.  The newest phones, like the 5S or the Moto X, are amazing indeed.  But that first phone was magic.

I don’t know why that song in particular.  I don’t know how I even came by that song in particular.  But as I stood in the Oasis Laundromat in Mountain View, California, watching game 6 of the American League Championship Series, I kept hitting the “back” button on my new (ish) gold iPod Mini over and over, and listening to the Pogues play “Thousands Are Sailing.” There was a full moon, there was Curt Schilling bleeding through the sock, and I was watching the baseball postseason in a new place for the first time since 1997, and the Boston Red Sox were trying to pull off the single biggest comeback in human history since Our Lord rose on the third day.

I wasn’t remotely a Red Sox fan in 1997.  I was aware of the existence of the Sox, was becoming vaguely aware of the whole mythology around the CURSE, had met several folks that year from the general area of Red Sox Nation.  I suppose that by the time I left DC, they were my American League team of record.  I’d been to a game at Fenway, but that wasn’t saying heaps; I’d been to an ALCS game at Yankee Stadium in 1998 and a World Series game at the Jake in 1997, plus games at Kaufmann Stadium in Kansas City, Shea Stadium in New York and – of course – Oriole Park at Camden Yards.  And I suppose from a fandom standpoint, I was already much more invested in the San Francisco Giants, whose own World Series trip in 2002 had gone pear-shaped.

But Boston meant some very good friends – some of my best, actually – and it also meant a whole lot of the DC Irishness from the Four Provinces and thereabouts. I did plenty of screaming along with the McTeggarts’ version of  “Charlie on the MTA” at half-past midnight.  I’d read all the pertinent literature by then, of course – Updike and Shaughnessy and the like – and I’d been a shirttail participant in 1999 and 2003 postseason failings.  To say I was part of Red Sox Nation was completely incorrect, but I could at least claim a valid visa good for six months without recourse to public services.

The song is all about the Irish who had to leave their own country to escape the poverty, the famine, the general hopelessness, and I suppose in a way it rang true with me. By the time I left DC, I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to have to leave.  I suppose maybe if the last couple of years hadn’t been such a battle, if I hadn’t felt like we were never, ever going to break through against idiot users and even stupider upper management – if I’d had a shred of hope that we could win, I would have wanted to stick it out and keep fighting. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen, and I knew which way the future lay, and I went.

Standing there in the laundromat, watching Schilling bleed through the sock like some sort of arcane mystical act of blood expiation, I guess I was hoping for a symbolic victory of my own.  By proxy, if the Red Sox could climb out of the grave and do the unthinkable, if they could do something that had never been done, then maybe we’d have a win. And maybe it would mean eventual victory in the real world, somehow, and that the fight hadn’t all been for nothing.

I don’t miss the fight.  But since I still have the fight, I miss not having to go it alone.  And if I can’t have my crew, Monday to Friday and weekend nights to boot, shoulder to shoulder, I wish I at least had the cigars back.

Pretty much as we expected.  New thinner iPad, new retina iPad mini, new Mac OS X, new updates to the software all round, speed-bumped MacBook Pros.  The only real surprises were that OS X 10.9 can be downloaded gratis…and that Apple is still selling not only the previous generation iPad mini, but the iPad 2 as well.

This is a little strange.  Sure, keeping the iPad mini as a cheap entry level option is crucial – but it still gets kicked pretty hard by the 2013 Nexus 7 tablet, which brings a retina-class display for $100 less than the non-retina iPad mini.  But the iPad 2 – a tablet two and a half years old! – for the same money as the retina MBP?  Is having a display just a hair under two inches larger that desirable, especially when the larger screen has half the resolution?

Part of the case to be made, I suppose, is that every inch matters (PAUSE) – that a 10-inch tablet is somehow materially superior to an 8-inch version, even with inferior resolution on the 10-inch display.  And that people are willing to pay the difference, to the tune of even hundreds of dollars.  I could almost see this working for most Android tablets, given the lack of a real tablet ecosystem and the constant risk that you’ll never get an OS update for an Android device…but then, there’s the Nexus 7 for $229 for a 16 GB (undercutting the retina 16 GB iPad mini by $170) or the 32 GB with LTE for $349 (as opposed to a whopping $529 for the iPad mini-retina).

And then there’s the Kindle Fire series.  Amazon has blown off Google altogether, taken the core of the Android Open Source Project and built their own OS around it, with their own media ecosystem and their own app store, and for their trouble they have technically become the leading Android tablet vendor.  And they’re offering something completely unique in the tablet world…real live remote tech support.

Basically, Apple’s continual offering of the older version is of a piece with the iPhone 5C or even the iPhone 4S still being on the market.  There is a sense than the two-year-old hardware, equipped with iOS 7, is good enough – basically that the iPad will be replaced on more of a laptop timetable than a phone timetable.  If hardware from spring 2011 is still salable as new, there’s probably not going to be a whole lot of reason to run out and replace your tablet just because you’re approaching 24 months.

Which is good.  I’m in very little hurry to run out and buy a new tablet; the old Dynabook is still a complete laptop replacement for 90% of my purposes.  The interesting question would be…would a free first-generation non-retina iPad mini be a satisfactory alternative? Asking for a friend…

So after tons of messing about with the phone, I think the battery life is more or less sorted. Twitter is the main culprit – lose the Twitter app, and the addictive need to keep refreshing constantly (thus taxing the screen and the data connection constantly too) and everything’s fine. Downloading and playing podcasts, some music, mail, Instagram, Wikipedia lookups, what have you – in mixed use without plugging in, I project out to about 10-12 hours mixed use. The last two days at work, I’ve come home with the battery above 50%.

The key thing is, I haven’t turned off that much. I ditched parallax view and animated wallpaper, and shut off auto-updating of applications, but some background data is still updating and location services are full-tilt including Frequent Locations. Work MDM is enabled, and I’m seeing the “right now it would take you X minutes to drive home” in the Notification Center. So this is more or less full featured…and we’re good.

The next big test is Saga. I considered Google Now, but if I don’t use Gmail, there’s really nothing it can give me that I don’t already have in the OS, save for transit directions (not that big a deal since I started driving to work every day). Similarly, what Donna does isn’t really necessary with the Today features. But Saga does more comprehensive location-logging and rolls in Dark Sky notifications to boot (saving me downloading Dark Sky itself – all I need is the precip, not the notoriously erratic temps) so it gets the nod. If it works without slaughtering the battery during a normal workday (tomorrow), I dare say our issues are truly licked. And I haven’t even tried the T-Mobile SIM yet…maybe later.

Ars Technica (which is an everyday read for me, and it should be for you too) absolutely goes in on Google’s control of Android, and how their much-vaunted “openness” is being modified (where by “modified” they mean “kicked to the curb”) for the sake of consolidating control.  The tl;dr version: while Android launched with open source for the OS and the apps, those apps are being replaced with closed-source alternatives and the old ones deprecated to the point of uselessness, and if you want to make a Google app-equipped Android device, you can’t make devices with any other flavor of Android.

Those of you who remember the old days of Microsoft dominance will recall that if you wanted to make Windows systems, you couldn’t make anything else – Hitachi tried to install BeOS as a dual-boot option and had to engage in all kind of shenanigans to make it invisible unless you really wanted it to run, so that Microsoft wouldn’t strip their Win license. To date, the only Android device-maker willing to go that route – to eschew the Google apps and Google Play store and take a chance on going it alone – is Amazon, which has the money and the media library and the server back-end to make it feasible.  It also explains why so many phone makers – Samsung most prominently – are bundling their own versions of what seem like standard apps: it’s a hedge against the possibility that they’ll ever have to cut ties with Google and go it alone.

Ultimately, this drives home how untenable the open-source model is for handsets – it’s no longer enough to have hardware and an OS; you now need services and applications.  Android may technically be “open”, but out in the real world it’s anything but.  There might be a niche for something like the Fairphone or the Phonebloks approach, but you’re really, really, really going to have to want to roll your own to make it remotely worthwhile…especially when a Nexus phone is only $350 off-contract or an iPhone 5C can be had for $50 on contract.

It’s Linux all over again: it can be made easier and many of the edges filed off with the cunning use of Ubuntu, if someone’s willing to create the Android equivalent (maybe Ubuntu themselves?) but for 99% of the world, the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.  Meanwhile, Google really has become the mobile Microsoft; the only difference this time is that when Apple got there first, they fortified their position a hell of a lot quicker and stronger than they ever did on the desktop.  If we’re going to have a virtual duopoly, at least they’re punching at relatively equal weight this time.

If there’s been one hard rap on Barack Obama as President, it’s that he’s too stuck into his own “let us now reason together” shtick.  He’s interested in bipartisan negotiation and dealing for its own sake, rather than lining up Democrats and cracking the whip and saying “you’ll hew to the party line or we’ll find somebody who will.”  It’s how the Affordable Care Act wound up without so much as a public option, let alone a single-payer model.  It’s how the original 2009 stimulus package wound up too small.  And it’s how the Republicans were able to leverage the debt limit increase in 2011 into the sequestration model that afflicts us now…and it’s why they were convinced they could do it again.

Hopefully, Obama has learned his lesson.  You can’t negotiate with zombies. He was an idiot to try it to begin with – when prominent Republicans are publicly announcing that they’re rooting for your failure and they’re going to be the universal “NO” before you’re even sworn in the first time, you have to start with at least the idea that you might have to do things without their help.  But I guess at some level, he had to try it his way and be forcibly disillusioned in the process. Then again, anyone who looked back at the original Clinton budget in 1993 and saw zero Republican votes for it, at all, should have known what was up.

But they held the line this time. Hopefully it’s the start of a different approach.

Ted Cruz is absolutely the huge winner here.  He got to be the ringleader fighting the good fight against the hated brown usurper, without the hassle and inconvenience of actually being on the hook for the credit default.  Notice that Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, his likely rivals in two years, also made sure to vote against the deal.  They’re going to be smoking the straight Dixie all the way to 2016, because whenever Ted Cruz wakes up in the morning, he looks in the mirror and sees the 45th President of the United States.

If he’d won, he’d have to face the consequences of sandbagging Obamacare – restoring discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, kicking freshly-minted college grads off their parents’ insurance, eliminating options for people who can’t get insurance now – and the consequences of trashing the economic system associated with an American default.  But without those, he can howl about “friendly fire” and say that if only the Senate had more like him, they would win.  In the classic “Folkways of the US Senate” dichotomy, Ted Cruz is the Platonic ideal of the show horse.

But he’s learned one lesson that so many in the GOP have learned.  After all, the Democrats have only had complete control of the elected federal government (House, Senate, Presidency) for a whopping total of 8 years since 1969.  The Republicans only had it for 4 or 5, but they also had at least two pieces of the puzzle from 1981-86 and 1995-2007.  And they’ve had a majority of the Supreme Court appointees since about 1990 as well.  So…why isn’t there prayer in school?  Why is abortion still broadly legal?  Why is there no flat tax? 

The GOP at large and Ted Cruz in particular have learned a lesson that any profession wrestling aficionado has always known.  The money isn’t in winning the championship…the money’s in the chase.