Planted Six Feet Under

Maybe my nieces and nephews will forgive our generation one day for failure on climate change, but I doubt it.

More than half of common species of plants and a third of animal species are likely to see their living space halved by 2080 on current trends of carbon emissions, a climate study said on Sunday.

Output of man-made greenhouse gases is putting Earth on track for four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100 compared with the pre-industrial 18th century, it said.

The unprecedented speed of warming will be a shock for many species, as it will badly affect the climatic range in which they can live, it warned.

Investigators from Britain’s University of East Anglia looked at 48,786 species and measured how their range would be affected according to models of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Fifty-five percent of plants and 35 percent of animals could see their living space halved by 2080 at current emission growth for CO2, they found. The figures take into account the species’ ability to migrate into habitat that may open up as a result of warming.

This is a greatly conservative estimate.  The other end of the spectrum is that 80 years from now, Earth will be largely a wasteland with a broken ecosystem, and humanity is going to have tremendous difficulty even surviving.  That's not taking into account the massive superstorms that will pound the planet as a direct result of climate change.

We're decades past being able to save ourselves.  It's now a question of how bad we'll let it get.  The answer appears to be "an unabated march to catastrophe."

Selling Doom And Gloom

The gang over at WIN THE MORNING tried to slip this one out there Friday, but it got run over by the IRS story.  Still, expect more of the notion that the Democrats are increasingly doomed, because, well, they're always doomed.  Even when they win.

One of the Democrats’ most veteran strategists warns that the party is “in decline” and “at considerable risk” when President Barack Obama is no longer on the scene.

“Since Obama was elected President, the Democrats have lost nine governorships, 56 members of the House and two Senate seats,” Doug Sosnik, the political director in Bill Clinton’s White House, writes in a new memo.

Oh gosh, a former Clinton political director is warning that Barack Obama is screwing everything up.  There's a shocker.  So who else should we blame?  Sosnick provides a helpful checklist:

• Obama’s personal popularity does not easily translate for other candidates. The president is not building the Democratic Party’s institutional apparatus in a way that it will thrive when he’s gone.

• The losses in the 2010 midterms gave Republicans control of the redistricting process, which will be in effect until after the 2020 census. This gives the GOP a structural advantage in keeping the House.

• Millennials, born 1981 to 1994, and Generation X’ers, born 1965 to 1980, are voting Democratic, but a plurality identify themselves as independents — which makes them less reliable.

• Democrats cannot count on the same level of African-American turnout without Obama at the top of the ticket. Sosnik cites new analysis showing that in 2012 for the first time ever eligible black voters turned out a higher rate than whites.

Obama lost the House in 2010, thanks to "unreliable" voters (anyone under 50) and black voters who will abandon the party once Obama is gone.

In other words, Sosnik is blaming Obama, and me.   Black voters under 48.  Specifically.  And he's setting us up for the fall in 2014 and 2016.

Expect that to be the theme going forward from the Hillary camp.  Not all Obama Derangement Syndrome sufferers are Republicans.

StupidiNews!

• The toll of those injured in yesterday's mass shooting at a New Orleans second-line Mother's Day parade has reached 19, including 2 children.
• Some 30 years after the bombings he was convicted for, infamous Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal heads back to a French court to appeal his sentence.
• Former Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif 's party won nearly an outright majority of seats in this weekend's election, vaulting Sharif back to power.
• Bangladesh's parliament is considering raising the country's minimum wage from $39 a month after last month's deadly factory collapse toll reached 1,100 dead.
• An experimental parasail-powered flying car crashed near a Canadian elementary school in British Columbia, no serious injuries reported.

Last Call

Nobody likes the IRS, folks.  Republicans especially loathe it, because if the IRS doesn't collect federal taxes, there is no federal government.  That's fine with a lot of them, frankly.  (Medicare and Social Security of course come from some other place, so government better keep their hands off of it, derp.)

But if you want to know why the wingers are full tilt bloodthirsty over the IRS specifically, keep in mind these guys think an army of tens of thousands of IRS agents are going to kick doors down over enforcing Obamacare regulations.  In actuality, it's a form.

Of course, a form is reason enough alone for folks like PJ Media's Rick Moran to advocate violence against the Obama administration.

How many millions of Americans will think the new form junk mail and toss it? How many millions won’t understand they have to file the form with their tax return and be assessed the penalty? How many millions will refuse to fill out some of the information — and probably be penalized?

I am trying to imagine colonial Americans (or Americans of just about any generation prior to WW II) being faced with a government that demands such compulsory behavior in such an intrusive manner. It’s not hard to think that the tar, feathers, and pitchforks would come out and government workers would be subjected to a storm of protests and even attacks.

Most of modern America, however, is not made of such stern stuff. Most will submit to our masters at the IRS — meekly and with hardly a whimper — grateful for this beneficence from Daddy Government and willing to fill the data banks in Washington with our most personal, private information.

Yes, it's too bad the Tea Party folks aren't ready to violently attack government workers.  I'm sure they're just waiting for Rick here to go burn down an IRS office, and then armies of mobility scooters will blitzkrieg the DMV while their at it, because DON'T TREAD ON ME.

I understand assault and battery of a federal worker is one of those federal crime things, enforced by courts and people with guns.  But I'm sure Rick is ready to take them on in the name of watering the tree of Liberderp.

How about it, Ricky?

And The Things That We Fear Are A Weapon To Be Held Against Us

And speaking of rampant paranoia and wingers on epistemic closure vindication highs over this IRS nonsense, I wonder what our friends on the right would make of the fact that, unlike the current case of extra scrutiny of Tea Party organizations for non-political tax-exempt status that resulted in zero actual investigations, when a liberal Episcopal church in Pasadena said some critical anti-war things about Dubya before the 2004 election, well that resulted in the church being targeted by the IRS in a two-year long probe that eventually resulted in the church being cleared but the IRS saying the church was guilty anyway.

Somehow, this failed to rise to the level of anyone giving a damn about impeachment at the time, nor did it raise the question by the administrations supporters about the tax-exempt status of organizations of all political stripes engaging in political business.  Somehow we're supposed to ignore this, and the whole US Attorney scandal where political enemies of the Bush administration really were being targeted by the executive branch.

Instead we're supposed to believe that the Tea Party groups were being unfairly singled out as political groups dedicated to the end of the Democrats.  Sure.

"Maybe churches and 501(c)3 political groups shouldn't be tax-exempt at all," would be the thinking person's response.  Instead, it's Clinton Rules time.

Instead of going after all the awful things Bush/Cheney did and President Obama instead chose to turn the other cheek and move forward, the Republicans decide to repay him by making everything an impeachable offense until something sticks.

The cartoon soundtrack continues.   Or as David Waldman reminds us:

Remember the outrage over IRS targeting of Emerge America, seeking nonprofit status to train women Dem candidates? nytimes.com/2011/07/21/bus…
— David Waldman (@KagroX) May 12, 2013

Remember the outrage over Bush-era IRS auditing of the NAACP? articles.baltimoresun.com/2004-10-29/new…
— David Waldman (@KagroX) May 12, 2013

Remember the outrage over Bush-era IRS audits of Greenpeace? democracynow.org/2006/3/24/irs_…
— David Waldman (@KagroX) May 12, 2013

But Obama did it, so Worse Than Space Hitler.

Douthat's Revisionist His Story

Don't worry, white Christian male conservatives.  Ross Douthat sees your freedom right around the corner and declares that your decades-long nightmare of oppression at the hands of liberals, minorities, non-Christians and women is almost over as the IRS vs. Tea Party fight is the bridge too far that will allow you to throw off your shackles and finally assume your rightful position in American society...

Where might an enterprising, public-spirited I.R.S. agent get the idea that a Tea Party group deserved more scrutiny from the government than the typical band of activists seeking tax-exempt status? Oh, I don’t know: why, maybe from all the prominent voices who spent the first two years of the Obama era worrying that the Tea Party wasn’t just a typically messy expression of citizen activism, but something much darker — an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings. 

You see, the massive spike in white supremacist activity and sovereign citizen groups, the major jump in Secret Service investigations of people making threats against the President, the folks screaming that Obama is the Kenyan Usurper, the Republican party officials sending racist emails about the President and his wife and kids,the accusations that Obama is a Socialist/Communist/Terrorist Muslim plant here to destroy our way of life...that has nothing to do whatsoever with conservatives or the Tea Party movement, because Ross Douthat says so.  And you should be ashamed for thinking otherwise.

The historical term for this kind of anxiety is “Brown Scare” — an inordinate fear of a vast far-right conspiracy, which resembles the anti-Communist panics of our past. As the historian Philip Jenkins wrote in 2009, Brown Scares no less than Red Scares recur throughout American history. They fasten on real-enough phenomena, from homegrown fascist sympathizers in the 1930s to the militia movements in the 1990s, but then wildly exaggerate both the danger these extremists pose and their ties to the conservative mainstream. 

See, liberals are the conspiracy freaks and nutjobs!  You all think there's a concerted effort to criminalize women making medical decisions about their bodies, to roll back voting eligibility among the poor, minorities, and the elderly, to criminalize the enforcement of and to nullify federal gun control laws at the state level, to criminalize LGBTQ Americans as second-class citizens who cannot marry those whom they love, and that the fringe elements that Douthat disavows aren't being completely embraced by potential 2016 presidential candidates in the GOP.  All of those things are filthy lies being told to you by the mainstream liberal media, clearly.

But moods and prejudices linger even after panics recede. The I.R.S. and the conservative movement have never been on the best of terms, and perhaps the recent abuses just reflect that longstanding tension. But I suspect it’s more than that, and that this episode will be remembered as one of the last embarrassments produced by our era’s Brown Scare. 

Years from now we'll all have a good laugh after these sane, not-insane, not-bigoted, completely average Republican conservatives impeach the President over the events of this week and eventually liberals will learn that they brought this upon themselves by going after white male conservatives, and then everything (and everyone) will be in their rightful place.  Just like 2001-2008.

You'll thank Ross for showing you the way.  And finally, white male conservatives will know the freedom they've always been entitled to.

Guns, Goons, And Goofballs

Tell me again how reasonable and smart Sen. Rand Paul is when he's fundraising for fringe nutjob groups like the National Association for Gun Rights, guys so deep into Black Helicopter land that they make the NRA look sane.  Ezra Klein:

The New York Times calls Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) one of the Republican Party’s “rising stars.” The Daily Beast says he’s “a smoother, more pragmatic political operator” than his father, former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-Tex.). All that seems true. So riddle me this: What’s the upside for Paul to put his name on e-mails like this one, which landed in my inbox this morning?

It’s one thing for no-name pols to work on the fringes. But Paul, at this point, has a lot to lose. Yet here he is, suggesting the current president of the United States is working with “anti-American globalists plot[ting] against our Constitution.” And for what?

He's just as nuts as his dad, if not more so.  Check these guys out:

Ever since its founding 65 years ago, the United Nations has been hell-bent on bringing the United States to its knees.

To the petty dictators and one-world socialists who control the UN, the United States of America isn’t a “shining city on a hill” — it’s an affront to their grand designs for the globe.

These anti-gun globalists know that as long as Americans remain free to make our own decisions without being bossed around by big government bureaucrats, they’ll NEVER be able to seize the worldwide power they crave.

And the UN’s apologists also know the most effective way to finally strip you and me of ALL our freedoms would be to DESTROY our gun rights.

Ezra has the entire letter, in all its frothing madness, at the top link.  This is a sitting US Senator signing his name to this absolute lunacy, and as his constituent I am once again embarrassed and angry at his staggering ignorance and depressing chicanery.

Rand Paul is different from his father.  He's far, far worse.

The Cost Of Doing Business In Texas

Business-friendly Texas has so brainwashed folks in the Lone Star state that even people who lost friends in the most recent chemical plant explosion in the state say there's no need for more regulation.

This antipathy toward regulations is shared by many residents here. Politicians and economists credit the stance with helping attract jobs and investment to Texas, which has one of the fastest-growing economies in the country, and with winning the state a year-after-year ranking as the nation’s most business friendly.

Even in West, last month’s devastating blast did little to shake local skepticism of government regulations. Tommy Muska, the mayor, echoed Governor Perry in the view that tougher zoning or fire safety rules would not have saved his town. “Monday morning quarterbacking,” he said.

Raymond J. Snokhous, a retired lawyer in West who lost two cousins — brothers who were volunteer firefighters — in the explosion, said, “There has been nobody saying anything about more regulations.”

Yeah, at this point the Mayor of the now half-flattened town is pretty much accepting that this is the way America is supposed to work.  You're supposed to occasionally lose  a dozen-plus people and hundreds of houses to a massive plant explosion every once in a while, because what's government going to do about it?  And hey, this is an elected government official saying this.

Paul Burka, senior executive editor at Texas Monthly, said he did not imagine that the West disaster would lead to much in the way of change. Tragedies rarely do, he said. “We’re not going to spend our money telling businesses what we should do with their premises,” said Mr. Burka, who grew up near Texas City, the site of the 1947 explosion.

Indeed, days after the accident near West, state lawmakers killed a proposal to provide $60 million in training and resources for volunteer firefighters. And a lobbyist for state firefighters, who backed Mr. Price’s effort, said the bill had little chance of passing because of resistance from the real estate industry.

“Businesses can come down here and do pretty much what they want to,” Mr. Burka said. “That is the Texas way.”

People be damned.  After all, the state's number one...in workplace-related fatalities over the last decade, that is.  Come on down to Texas.  Sure, your employees will die, but hey, the state doesn't care.

If you want to see where GOP America is headed, it's Texas.  If you think that's where the country needs to be, move on down there, preferably near a large fertilizer plant.

Good luck!

StupidiNews, Mother's Day Weekend Edition!

• A task force of parents, teachers, and elected officials in Newtown, Connecticut have unanimously voted to recommend demolishing Sandy Hook Elementary and rebuilding.
• The White House's west wing was temporarily evacuated early this morning as an electrical problem set off a smoke alarm, but nobody was harmed.
• A report written five days before the Boston Marathon bombing indicated the finish line was vulnerable and that local law enforcement should be aware.
• NOAA scientists say that CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere has crossed the 400 ppm threshhold, a level not seen for hundreds of thousands of years.
• An ammonia leak on the International Space Station prompted an emergency space walk for astronauts to repair the problem.

Last Call: North Carolina's Race To The Bottom

More austerity on the way for North Carolina's kids, because children are the future.  The dumb, uneducated, more easily-manipulated future, that is, as NC House Republicans slash free pre-K eligibility so they don't have to cut funding.

Under current law, a 4-year-old is considered at-risk and eligible for the program if his or her family makes less than 75 percent of the state's median wage, or about $39,000 a year for a family of three. Children are also eligible if they have an active-duty military parent, limited English proficiency, developmental problems or chronic illness.

More than 60,000 children a year in North Carolina are eligible for the program under the current guidelines.

The proposal would reduce the family income threshold to the federal poverty level, about $19,500 for a family of three. Children with limited English proficiency or chronic illness also would no longer be automatically eligible.

"We working on putting early childhood education back in track in this state," said sponsor Rep. Justin Burr, R-Stanly. "We need to focus on children who are most at risk."

To recap, $20,000 a year for a family of three is just too much income for pre-K education programs.  You clearly middle-class takers and moochers need to pull your weight, right?

Besides, government shouldn't be involved in education.  That's for churches and FOX News.

Some Men Just Want To Watch The World Burn

Republicans don't care about governing anymore. They just want the country to self-destruct. They want America so sick and tired of constant GOP obstruction, obstruction that at this point will cost lives, that they think you'll just throw up your hands and let them have what's left, so that they can finish sacking the treasury.

The top two Republicans in Congress informed President Obama on Thursday that they will refuse to fulfill their duty under the Affordable Care Act to recommend members of a new board with the power to contain Medicare spending.

It’s a dramatic power-play driven by the explosive partisan politics of Obamacare and with potentially important implications for federal health care policy.

In a letter to President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) noted their original opposition to Obamacare, reiterated their intent to repeal it entirely, and declared that they would not make any appointments to the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

So no, at this point they just don't care anymore and are confident you won't either.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee was scheduled to vote today at 9:15 on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to be the next EPA Administrator. Despite the fact that she has answered more than a thousand of the committee’s questions, Senate Republicans announced just before the hearing that they would be boycotting the vote, denying the committee quorum and postponing the confirmation hearing.

The committee rules require that at least two members of the minority party be present during a vote. Not a single Republican bothered to show up.

I keep hearing about how my generation simply doesn't believe government will ever work again.  We don't trust either party, we don't trust government, we don't trust the process of governing.  Chris Hayes's book, Twilight of the Elites, sums up this worldview, the endpoint of "Both sides do it!" politics.

Both sides do not do it.  One side, the GOP, does.  In this case, I'll let Alfred explain.

Alfred:  With respect Master Wayne, perhaps this is a man that you don't fully understand, either. A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So, we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never met anybody who traded with him. One day, I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne:  So why steal them?

Alfred: Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Indeed.  In this case, it's our elected leaders in the Republican Party. They want to watch the world burn.  If the Millennials (and the youngest Gen X folks like myself), those in our 20's and 30's, just give up on the political process and accept the structural screwing of America as standard operating procedure, they win.

And a lot of us have given up.  Some of us want to watch that world burn too, we think it'll cleanse the country of the tea party jagoffs.  It'll only make them kings.  It's happening at the state level right now, and as long as we continue to think voting is for suckers and there's no difference between the parties, Republicans will continue to take everything from us.  Yeah, some Democrats too.  But at some point you have to believe in the system, or you've got nothing.  Elections od Republicans versus Democrats will go on anyway, and one will win.

If you don't make the choice, it will be made for you.

Another Great Nate Debate: Sanford And Run

Nate Silver makes the argument that Mark Sanford's various scandals did cost him dearly in this week's special election, just not enough to actually cost him the race.

It would be wrong to conclude that voters did not punish Mr. Sanford at all for his extramarital affair. In fact, a reasonable number of voters did appear to hold it against him. Last November, Mitt Romney won South Carolina’s First District by 18 percentage points. Since Mr. Romney lost the election to Barack Obama by roughly four percentage points nationwide, that means the First District is about 22 percentage points more Republican than the country as a whole.

That's an interesting way of looking at how partisan a district is as a whole, but it is a reasonable benchmark with applicable data germane to the district in question.  Charlie Cook's PVI number for the district is R+11, so by that math, Sanford's indiscretions cost him next to nothing since Sanford won by 9, just a 2-point hit.  Nate has other evidence to back up that 13-point figure, as he always does.

Mr. Sanford defeated his Democratic opponent, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, by nine percentage points instead – so one quick-and-dirty estimate is that Mr. Sanford’s personal history cost him a net of 13 percentage points. It just was not enough to flip the election result in such a conservative district.

As it happens, this 13-percentage-point penalty almost exactly matches an academic analysis on how much voters hold sex scandals against candidates. A 2011 paper by Nicholas Chad Long of St. Edward’s University, which examined United States senators running for re-election from 1974 to 2008, estimated that scandals involving immoral behavior lowered the share of the vote going to the incumbent by 6.5 percentage points.

Which results in a total 13-point swing if there are only 2 candidates in the race (and none of the 6.5 points are going to a third party.)   That makes the case that Nate is correct on the impact.

Either way, the reason Sanford won was because he ran in an overwhelmingly Republican district created by gerrymandering and Tuesday night proved there are plenty of Republican voters willing to overlook any scandal to avoid voting for a Democrat, a far worse crime in their eyes than a question of character.

I can't think of a better example of what pundits mean by a "safe" district for a party:  there's basically no way the seat will change hands.  Keep in mind that for the vast majority of House seats, 80-85% of them, are this way for a reason (and yes, both parties do gerrymander, but only the party in charge in each state after the Census gets the benefit, which is why 2010 will hurt us for the next 4 House elections in 30+ states.)

Until more than 10% of House races are competitive, nothing will change.  Even in a "wave" election like 2010, the GOP picked up 63 seats, only about 15%.  But that's enough to all but assure they'll keep the House for the foreseeable future.

Oh, and long overdue tag:  Keep Calm And Trust Nate Silver.

StupidiNews!

• More than two weeks after the deadly factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh, officials confirm the death toll has reached 1,000 and is still rising.
• The US State Department has ordered gunmaker Defense Distributed to take down plans for its gun made from plastic 3-D printed parts.
• Advocates of America's herds of wild horses are up in arms over Interior Department plans to pay ranchers to corral the animals and keep them in pastures.
• Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis testified before Congress that his city needs more surveillance of public places for safety.
• Blizzard Entertainment's latest issue involves an in-game gold duplication exploit in Diablo III and the game's real-world currency auction house remains closed as a result.

Last Call: The Great Gun Giveaway

Rep. Steve Stockman is back in the news (yes, the same nutjob wanting to impeach Obama over gun control and the same guy who's not smart enough to understand Twitter) with yet another example of his amazing partisan stupidity:

Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, is giving away a fre Bushmaster AR-15 rifle, which he wants you to grab “before Obama does.”

Oh good.

“Enter the drawing to win a FREE Bushmaster AR-15 rifle, almost impossible to find in stores and the number one firearm on the gun banners’ wish list!” Stockman writes on his website. “Winner drawn July 4, 2013.”

Same guy who tweeted this:

Our campaign bumper sticker: If babies had guns, they wouldn't be aborted. stockman2014.com #gosnell #tcot twitter.com/ReElectStockma…
— Rep. Steve Stockman (@ReElectStockman) April 12, 2013

Yeah, what a mensch, huh?  Now he's giving away an AR-15 because eff Obama.  I'm betting the winner doesn't get a background check as part of his or her prize, which is of course what the gun bill Democrats were trying to pass would have done. 

Republicans do things just to piss off liberals, minorities, women and gays and really that's all that matters to them.

Dinosaur Steve Does The Right Thing

Here in Kentucky, Gov. Steve "I'd be a Republican in any other state!" Beshear announced this afternoon that he will be expanding Medicaid under Obamacare, giving more than 300,000 Kentuckians access to health insurance through Medicaid and another 300,000 plus through the state's insurance exchange.  He laid out the case on his website, including some sobering facts:

Kentucky Ranks at the Bottom in Health Outcomes. Kentucky continues to rank at the bottom in most national health rankings. This includes 50th in smoking, 40th in obesity, 43rd in sedentary lifestyles, 41st in diabetes, 48th in poor mental health days, 49th in poor physical health days, 50th in cancer deaths, 49th in cardiac heart disease, 43rd in high cholesterol, 44th in annual dental visits and 48th in heart attacks. Access to health insurance will improve health outcomes.

The Bluegrass State is about as unhealthy as it gets, folks.  A big reason is that staggering poverty along the Appalachians makes health care impossible for a lot of people.  Beshear made the right call.  And hey, let's not forget that Obamacare will create good health care jobs, even here in Kentucky:

Expansion Will Have a $15.6 Billion Statewide Economic Impact Between FY14 and FY21, Creating Almost 17,000 New Jobs. According to an independent analysis conducted by the University of Louisville, expanding Medicaid will lead to a cumulative economic impact of $15.6 billion between FY14 and FY21. This impact will result from new health care spending that will occur, the nearly 17,000 jobs that will be created because of this expansion, and the local and state tax revenue that will be generated from those jobs. UofL projects these jobs will have an annual average salary of more than $43,000.

But here's the best argument I've seen so far to tell your uncle that watches FOX News all day:

Not Expanding Means Kentucky Taxpayers Subsidize the 20 States That Are Expanding. Currently, 20 states have announced their decision to expand Medicaid. If Kentucky does not expand its Medicaid program, Kentucky taxpayer dollars’ will still go to the federal government, which will use them to pay for Medicaid expansion in these 20 states.

And folks, that argument here in Kentucky?  That alone will guarantee that the state will remain signed on to Medicaid expansion for a good, long time.

Good job, DS.