Congress is finally being roused to do something about the sequester. Part of it, anyway:

Complaints about air-travel delays in recent days have prompted Democrats in Congress to reconsider their strategy for dealing with across-the-board spending cuts.

….”We have to admit that some things are very problematic,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), who on Wednesday introduced a bipartisan bill with Sen. John Hoeven (R., N.D.) designed to give the Department of Transportation more flexibility to manage the cuts with the goal of reducing furloughs at the FAA….Another Democrat, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, on Wednesday announced legislation that would reinstate air-traffic controllers using funds generated by ending a tax break for corporate jets. Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware said he would prefer to generate additional user fees to keep the travel system running at full capacity for the next five months.

“The public’s going to be furious when they find out that this could have been prevented,” said Sen. Dan Coats (R., Ind.), who supports the bipartisan proposal to give the Department of Transportation more flexibility in dealing with the FAA cuts. The aviation agency has said it can’t avoid furloughs in the course of complying with the mandated budget cuts.

The tediously obvious point to make about this is that Congress can’t do much more than yawn about cuts to services for the poor, but a few days of air traffic delays and they’re practically tripping over themselves to offer up solutions. Why is this? Here are a few possibilities:

• Flight delays affect lawmakers themselves, and they’re not happy about being personally inconvenienced.
• Flight delays affect the rich and the upper middle class, and as Larry Bartels and Martin Gilens have taught us, these are the only voters that legislators actually care about.
• Flight delays affect the media, so they write about it relentlessly.
• Flight delays are an annoyance for everyone who flies. Other cutbacks are parceled out differently: most beneficiaries continue to get full benefits, while a small percentage lose access completely.
• Flight delays are random, which adds to their annoyance.
• Airport havoc is just generally more visible than most things.

You will be unsurprised to learn that I mostly chalk this up to items 1-3, especially item 2. Feel free to argue in comments.

Today, Dave Weigel reads Olympia Snowe’s upcoming memoir so we don’t have to. In particular, he highlights just how hard President Obama worked to win her support for Obamacare:

As woe-is-the-Republic texts by retired moderates go, it’s got nothing on 2012’s Arlen Specter offering….But it does tell us just how hard the president flop-sweated to bring Snowe into the cloture vote for health care. Snowe recounts a conversation with POTUS after she approved of the Baucus version of reform in committee….Obama kept calling, reaching Snowe “more than a dozen times,” meeting with her in person eight times. The final meeting occured five days before the Senate’s cloture vote, in 2009.

That’s more than 20 meetings with Snowe! And she was a famous moderate. But she voted against the bill anyway.

Is this because Obama didn’t twist her arm hard enough? Wasn’t willing to cut a deal with her? Or because he just sucks at persuading people? Maybe. But you wilfully ignore Occam’s razor at your own risk. The more likely answer, if you want to avoid being cut to ribbons, is simply that no Republican was ever going to vote for Obamacare, full stop. No amount of sweet talking, not from Obama, not from Joe Biden, not from Harry Reid, and not from anyone else, was ever going to change that. It explains everything that happened in the simplest and most persuasive manner possible.

Rinse and repeat for nearly every other piece of significant legislation of the past four years. And now, grasshopper, at last you understand.

Here’s the lead headline at the Washington Post right now:

Feds spend at least $890,000 on fees for empty accounts

This kind of stuff drives me crazy because it preys on the innumeracy of the general public. Should agencies be more careful about shutting down bank accounts they no longer use? Sure. And does reporter David Fahrenthold acknowledge that the money involved is “a tiny fraction of the federal budget”? Yes he does.

But seriously, folks, “tiny fraction” barely even begins to describe this. In numbers, it represents about 0.000025 percent of the federal budget. But even that’s too small a number to really get a feel for, so let’s put this into terms that the Washington Post can understand.

Annual revenues at the Washington Post hover somewhere around $500 million. So how much is 0.000025 percent of that? Answer: $125. Would the Washington Post run a lengthy story about two empty bank accounts that the Washington Post hasn’t closed yet, which cost the Washington Post’s shareholders $125? No. The story is so self-evidently ridiculous that they’d laugh at anyone foolish enough to even mention it.

Look, I get it. The empty bank accounts are just being used as an example of “old bugs, built into the machine of government, that make spending money seem easier than saving it.” The problem is that dumb stuff like this is what convinces people that government is wantonly wasteful, when the fact is that every corporation in America has inefficiencies this large. It’s just part of human beings running a human organization.

And focusing on this stuff is lazy. If you want to demonstrate that the federal government wastes money, then write a story about actual, substantial waste. Is that too hard? If the government truly is wasteful, it shouldn’t be. In a $3.5 trillion operation there ought to be dozens, even hundreds, of easy examples that cost real money. If there aren’t, then perhaps the real story is that the federal government is actually about as efficient as any other big organization.

The basic problem here is that it’s hard to grapple with the sheer size of the numbers involved. Any corporation in America that kept wasteful spending down to 1 percent would be pretty happy. That number represents a tightly run ship. But the federal government is so large that 1 percent waste amounts to about $35 billion. That’s a scary sounding number, but in fact, it’s pretty small. The truth is that if you can’t dig up at least that amount in wasteful spending—not spending you dislike, but actual wasteful spending—you don’t have much of a story.

Ed Kilgore points us today to the latest state-of-the-art healthcare thinking from conservatives. House Republicans have a plan to take money away from Obamacare implementation and shift it to a high-risk pool that’s currently underfunded. Some conservatives are apparently objecting to this because they think it “fixes” Obamacare and they want nothing to do with that. One of the bill’s supporters sets them straight:

Instead, it effectively cannibalizes ObamaCare to impede its implementation. The bill would transfer $4,000,000,000 (four billion dollars) from an ObamaCare implementation slush fund to a program called the Pre-Existing Condition Plan, or PCIP. The slush fund is a big pot of money the Administration is using to set up exchanges in states that refuse to set them up (a resistance we’ve strongly encouraged). 

….PCIP is not, in itself, a good program. But if Congress had enacted only PCIP in 2010, instead of ObamaCare, America would be in a much, much better place today. Now, I agree with those conservatives who hold that preex pool programs should be state- rather than federally run. But the harm here is slight, because PCIP is scheduled to expire on December 31st of this year. It’s a temporary subsidy, remember.

There’s an almost charming honesty to this. Here’s the plan:

1. Take money away from the program to set up federal exchanges.
2. Use the money to temporarily fund an admittedly crappy program.
3. Victory! By 2014, the crappy program will be gone and federal exchanges won’t exist. Obamacare will be in tatters.

I can’t respond too much better than Ed: “Pretty plain, eh? Give sick people without insurance temporary access to crappy private plans at exorbitant rates as part of a strategy aimed at pulling the rug out from under them entirely at the end of the year, all the while mewling about one’s concern for sick people.”

I hear a lot these days about “reformist” conservatives who are trying to move the Republican Party in a new, more serious direction. I’ve become pretty skeptical of this whole movement, which seems to be about an inch deep, but I’d be a lot less skeptical if they took on nonsense like this and actually fought it.

The latest from Iraq:

Security forces for the Shiite-led Iraqi government raided a Sunni protest camp in northern Iraq on Tuesday, igniting violence around the country that left at least 36 people dead.

The unrest led two Sunni officials to resign from the government and risked pushing the country’s Sunni provinces into an open revolt against Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite. The situation looked to be the gravest moment for Iraq since the last U.S. combat troops left in December 2011.

….”A minority of hard-liners are using these protesters as human shields and have infiltrated these demonstrations. They want to drag the country into a civil war between the Sunni and Shiites,” said lawmaker Sami Askari, who is close to Maliki. “The majority [of Iraqis] reject this.”

But even as Askari and others vowed to stave off disaster, the government appeared hobbled by mistrust. Kurds have boycotted the Cabinet along with most Sunnis. The Sunni education minister, Mohammed Tamim, resigned Tuesday after trying to broker a peaceful resolution between the protesters and security forces in the hours before the early-morning raid. The minister of technology, Abdul Kareem Samarrai, also resigned.

This is all Obama’s fault, amiright? George Bush—currently enjoying a sudden resurgence of love from conservatives this week—was right on the verge of working everything out and bringing peace and harmony to Iraq when Obama was elected and ruined everything. That’s the story I’ve been hearing for the past couple of years from the neocon rump, anyway.

The New York Times reports today on a petition asking the SEC to require public companies to disclose their political donations. Needless to day, business lobbying groups are unamused:

Earlier this month, the leaders of three of Washington’s most powerful trade associations — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable — issued a rare joint letter to the chief executives of Fortune 200 companies, encouraging them to stand against proxy resolutions and other proposals from shareholder activists demanding more disclosure of political spending.

….“The Chamber believes that the funds expended by publicly traded companies for political and trade association engagement are immaterial to the company’s bottom line,” said Blair Holmes, a spokeswoman for the business group, who added that the advocates’ “apparent goal is to silence the business community by creating an atmosphere of intimidation under the cover of investor protection.”

You have to admire the chutzpah, don’t you? Who else but the Chamber of Commerce would have the balls to claim that corporations don’t believe that political donations have any effect on their earnings? I mean, that’s pretty much the whole point of political donations, no?

Aaron Carroll reports today on a recent study about the effect of calorie labeling on restaurant menus. Four different menus were randomly assigned to different diners:

(1) a menu with no nutritional information, (2) a menu with calorie information, (3) a menu with calorie information and minutes to walk to burn those calories, or (4) a menu with calorie information and miles to walk to burn those calories. 

There was a significant difference in the mean number of calories ordered based on menu type (p = 0.02), with an average of 1020 calories ordered from a menu with no nutritional information, 927 calories ordered from a menu with only calorie information, 916 calories ordered from a menu with both calorie information and minutes to walk to burn those calories, and 826 calories ordered from the menu with calorie information and the number of miles to walk to burn those calories.

For the moment, let’s assume the study was done properly and these results are actually meaningful. Why would people respond so differently to minutes walked vs. miles walked? Here are a few possibilities:

• Minutes don’t sound so bad. People vaguely figure they’ll do a few hundred minutes of walking just in the ordinary course of their day.
• “Miles” strikes people as inherently more athletic. It’s the kind of distance you hear in the Olympics.
• Most of us walk so little that we overestimate just how long a mile is.

To be honest, the first option is the only one that really sounds plausible to me. What am I missing? Assuming this isn’t just a statistical aberration, what would account for the large difference in response to minutes vs. miles?

Here is the opening anecdote of a New York Times story devoted to demonstrating that President Obama is a wimp:

Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska, asked President Obama’s administration for a little favor last month. Send your new interior secretary this spring to discuss a long-simmering dispute over construction of a road through a wildlife refuge, Mr. Begich asked in a letter. The administration said yes.

Four weeks later, Mr. Begich, who faces re-election next year, ignored Mr. Obama’s pleas on a landmark bill intended to reduce gun violence….But Mr. Begich’s defiance and that of other Democrats who voted against Mr. Obama appear to have come with little cost. Sally Jewell, the interior secretary, is still planning a trip to Alaska.

….The trip will also reinforce for Mr. Begich and his colleagues a truth about Mr. Obama: After more than four years in the Oval Office, the president has rarely demonstrated an appetite for ruthless politics that instills fear in lawmakers.

Wow! Obama really is a wuss. LBJ never would have put up with that kind of behavior. He would have reared right up on his haunches and — hold on a second. What’s that? There’s more to this story? OK, Olivier Knox, you have the floor:

The real reason for [Jewell’s] visit—and the reason Obama agreed to give the road project a second look despite fierce opposition from environmentalists (and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)—was a deal last month between the administration and Alaska’s Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Murkowski had vowed to block Jewell’s confirmation by any means necessary unless the Interior Department reconsidered. The administration, eager to see the former REI executive confirmed, relented….Murkowski voted for Jewell’s confirmation on April 10. She got what she wanted; the administration got what it wanted. If there was arm-twisting, the administration appears to have been the twistee. But the road’s not built yet, Jewell is Interior secretary, and reports of the death of Obama’s ability to work with Congress appear to have been greatly exaggerated.

So the reason that Jewell is still planning to visit Alaska is because of a promise Obama made to Murkowski, not Begich. She kept her end of the deal, so Obama is keeping his. That’s it.

This was Exhibit A in the case against Obama’s willingness to work his steely will on Congress. In fact, in the Times story, it was the only exhibit. And it was completely bogus. Next, please.

Apple has just announced increased revenues for its fiscal second quarter ($43.6 billion vs. $39.2 billion last year) but considerably lower earnings ($9.5 billion vs. $11.6 billion last year). More dramatically, their gross margins have plummeted from 47.4 percent to 37.5 percent. Channel inventory of iPads was up by over a million units. Mac sales declined 2 percent.

And the future looks to be even worse. Apple is forecasting that revenues will be flat or slightly down next quarter and gross margins will continue to decline a bit to 36-37 percent. CEO Tim Cook calls this “frustrating.” To assuage shareholders, Cook announced that Apple would increase its share repurchase program to $60 billion and would raise its dividend by 15 percent. All told, its total “capital return program” has been doubled to $100 billion by 2015.

Bottom line: Apple is a bit adrift; competition is squeezing margins; and they have no good ideas about what to do with their cash hoard. Cook, in a rather pro forma tone of voice, insisted that Apple has lots of great ideas coming soon, but it’s hard to know what those might be. Apple TV? Anything else?

Here’s the latest on the Tsarnaev brothers:

Accused Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told FBI investigators that he and his brother were operating alone and did not receive assistance from outside terrorist groups, officials said Tuesday.

….Investigators separately have tentatively concluded that his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died early Friday morning after a shootout with police, did not meet with Islamist militants during his six-month visit to Russia last year, according a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official.

Experts say the brothers increasingly appear to have been self-radicalized “lone wolf” operators who worked independently, using bomb recipes gathered from websites.

I’m not really sure what this means, and obviously Dzhokhar might be lying. But apparently the current state-of-the-art thinking among interrogators is that the Tsarnaevs were motivated by “extremist Islamic beliefs”—specifically by “the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”—but acted on their own.

There sure is something odd about that six-month trip to Russia, though. The story we’ve been told is that the Russians warned the FBI back in 2010 that Tamerlan might be connected with Islamic radicals. The FBI checks it out and finds nothing. Then Tamerlan goes to Russia in 2012. So what happened then? Did the Russians track him while he was there? If so, did they pass anything further along to the FBI? If not, why not? They’re the ones who were supposedly convinced that Tamerlan was up to no good. So what happened?