spin the cat

The Chicago Way

2013-05-21T14:38:00.000-04:00

Know your place. [Link]

This is America, I said.

"Are you in your good senses?" said my father. "We have lives here. We have businesses. If we get involved in politics, they will ruin us."

And no one, not the Roosevelt Democrats or the Reagan Republicans, disagreed. The socialists, the communists, the royalists, everyone nodded their heads.

This was Chicago. And for a business owner to get involved meant one thing: It would cost you money and somebody from government could destroy you.

The health inspectors would come, and the revenue department, the building inspectors, the fire inspectors, on and on. The city code books aren't thick because politicians like to write new laws and regulations. The codes are thick because when government swings them at a citizen, they hurt.

And who swings the codes and regulations at those who'd open their mouths? A government worker. That government worker owes his or her job to the political boss. And that boss has a boss.

The worker doesn't have to be told. The worker wants a promotion. If an irritant rises, it is erased. The hack gets a promotion. This is government.

So everybody kept their mouths shut, and Chicago was hailed by national political reporters as the city that works.

I didn't understand it all back then, but I understand it now. Once there were old bosses. Now there are new bosses. And shopkeepers still keep their mouths shut. Tavern owners still keep their mouths shut.

Even billionaires keep their mouths shut.

One hard-working billionaire whose children own the Chicago Cubs dared to open his mouth. Joe Ricketts considered funding a political group critical of Obama before last year's campaign. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former chief of staff, made it clear that if the Cubs wanted City Hall's approval to refurbish decrepit Wrigley Field, Ricketts better back off.

It happened. He backed off. It was sickening. But it was and is Chicago.

And now — with the IRS used as political muscle and the Obama administration keeping that secret until after the president was elected — America understands it too.

Good tools for thinking

2013-05-20T09:57:00.001-04:00

Also, he has an impressive beard. [Link]

2 RESPECT YOUR OPPONENT

Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticising the views of an opponent? If there are obvious contradictions in the opponent's case, then you should point them out, forcefully. If there are somewhat hidden contradictions, you should carefully expose them to view – and then dump on them. But the search for hidden contradictions often crosses the line into nitpicking, sea-lawyering and outright parody. The thrill of the chase and the conviction that your opponent has to be harbouring a confusion somewhere encourages uncharitable interpretation, which gives you an easy target to attack.

But such easy targets are typically irrelevant to the real issues at stake and simply waste everybody's time and patience, even if they give amusement to your supporters. The best antidote I know for this tendency to caricature one's opponent is a list of rules promulgated many years ago by social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport.

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

1. Attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."

2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.

4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

One immediate effect of following these rules is that your targets will be a receptive audience for your criticism: you have already shown that you understand their positions as well as they do, and have demonstrated good judgment (you agree with them on some important matters and have even been persuaded by something they said). Following Rapoport's rules is always, for me, something of a struggle…

An answer to the 'Malice or Incompetence' on Benghazi

2013-05-17T15:41:00.000-04:00

In their own words, Incompetence. [Link]

Obama administration officials who were in key positions on Sept. 11, 2012, acknowledge that a range of mistakes were made the night of the attacks on the U.S. missions in Benghazi, and in messaging to Congress and the public in the aftermath.

The officials spoke to CBS News in a series of interviews and communications under the condition of anonymity so that they could be more frank in their assessments. They do not all agree on the list of mistakes and it's important to note that they universally claim that any errors or missteps did not cost lives and reflect "incompetence rather than malice or cover up." Nonetheless, in the eight months since the attacks, this is the most sweeping and detailed discussion by key players of what might have been done differently.

"We're portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots," said one Obama administration official who was part of the Benghazi response. "It's actually closer to us being idiots."

Where is the Benghazi cover-up Republicans promised?

GOP wants more Benghazi docs after White House release

Full coverage: U.S. Consulate attack in Benghazi

The Obama administration's chief critics on Benghazi, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., remain skeptical. They see a pattern, even a conspiracy, to deflect attention from the idea that four Americans had been killed by al Qaeda-linked attackers, on the president's watch. "There is no conclusion a reasonable person could reach other than that for a couple of weeks after the attack, [the Obama administration was] trying to push a narrative that was politically beneficial to the president's re-election," Graham told CBS News.

The list of mea culpas by Obama administration officials involved in the Benghazi response and aftermath include: standing down the counterterrorism Foreign Emergency Support Team, failing to convene the Counterterrorism Security Group, failing to release the disputed Benghazi "talking points" when Congress asked for them, and using the word "spontaneous" while avoiding the word "terrorism."

The emergency response: "I wish we'd sent FEST"

The Foreign Emergency Support Team known as "FEST" is described as "the US Government's only interagency, on-call, short-notice team poised to respond to terrorist incidents worldwide." It even boasts hostage-negotiating expertise. With U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens reported missing shortly after the Benghazi attacks began, Washington officials were operating under a possible hostage scenario at the outset. Yet deployment of the counterterrorism experts on the FEST was ruled out from the start. That decision became a source of great internal dissent and the cause of puzzlement to some outsiders.

Thursday, an administration official who was part of the Benghazi response told CBS News: "I wish we'd sent it."

Benghazi timeline: How the attack unfolded

The official said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's deputy, Patrick Kennedy, quickly dispensed with the idea. A senior State Department official Thursday told CBS News, "Under Secretary Kennedy is not in the decision chain on FEST deployment" but would not directly confirm whether Kennedy or somebody else dismissed the FEST.

Equestria Girls

2013-05-13T16:11:00.003-04:00

This must be just for cosplayers, right? [Link]

“We are responding to the desire by our fans to experience the brand in more ways,” said John A. Frascotti, Hasbro’s chief marketing officer. “They imagined themselves as which pony they would be or which pony they identified with the most.”

So Hasbro created Equestria Girls, a parallel world in which the My Little Pony characters were reconceived as teenage girls in high school. To maintain continuity, Hasbro retained the same creative talent, animation style and message of friendship.

“Our goal is to stay true to who those characters are,” said Meghan McCarthy, the head writer for the movie, adding that the high school setting allowed for new storytelling possibilities. “It’s new but still an extension of our mythology.”

The movie — titled “My Little Pony: Equestria Girls” — will be released on DVD later in the United States and other markets worldwide, followed by a television debut on the Hub network in the fall.

“It is a major strategic initiative for us,” Mr. Frascotti said, one that will feature toys, apparel, publishing and accessories. Multimedia components include an interactive Web site, content on YouTube and a partnership with Stardoll.com, a fashion Web site for girls.

Hasbro does not break out revenue for My Little Pony, but in its earnings statement in April, the company said its girls’ category rose 23 percent in the first quarter compared with the same period last year, growth that was helped in part by the My Little Pony brand.

Equestria Girls offers an opportunity to build on that growth, said Michael Vogel, vice president for development at Hasbro Studios. “This is a bold new direction,” he said.

Actual 'Green' energy

2013-05-13T15:27:00.001-04:00

Electricity from plants. [Link]

[T]hey've discovered a way to generate electricity from plants through hijacking the photosynthesis process. By altering the proteins inside a plant cell's thylakoids, which store solar energy, scientists can intercept electrons through a carbon nanotube backing that draws them away before they're used to make sugar. While the resulting power isn't phenomenal, it's still two orders of magnitude better than previous methods, according to the university. The protein modification method may have a rosier future, as well: the team believes that it could eventually compete with solar cells

Heads I win, Tails you lose

2013-05-13T15:15:00.001-04:00

Media portrayals of Republicans and Democrats. [Link]

When a Republican targets Democrats, the story is how the Republicans took advantage and the Democrats have been victimized. When a Democrat targets Republicans or conservatives, the story is how the Republicans will take advantage politically and how the Democrats will thereby be victimized.

And that is how we get I.R.S. Focus on Conservatives Gives G.O.P. an Issue to Seize On:

Name game

2013-05-13T11:42:00.001-04:00

When you name something, you have some control of it. [Link]

In a May 3 Q&A with the New York Times’s John Harwood, former Obama strategist David Axelrod put a demographic spin on the president’s analysis. When Harwood asked why gun background checks failed in the Senate, Axelrod responded, “The Republican Party today is, at its core, a mostly Southern, white, old, evangelical party.”

This is, at its core, false. A majority of Romney voters were from outside the Old Confederacy, under 65 years old, and not evangelical. But truth is not the point, nor is the purpose of Obama’s “permission structure” analysis merely to explain why his legislative program has stalled. Instead, it is to define the president’s conservative opposition as out of the mainstream of American society. Obama’s opponents, so the logic goes, are so out to lunch that their opinions should not be taken seriously.

The Obama team employed this approach successfully in 2012. Mitt Romney may have been a family man who gave nearly $2 million to his church in 2010, but by the time Team Obama finished defining him, he was a heartless plutocrat. It worked: The exit polls showed an electorate either split or tilted to the right on the top issues, with Obama defeating Romney because the latter simply was distrusted.

Social scientists call this the mobilization of bias. Marxists refer to it as the establishment of cultural hegemony. More plainly, it is a common trick pulled by Team Obama any time they are in a jam: Define your opponents in such a way that their views are not really taken seriously.

Of course, politicians are always trying this stunt. It makes sense to convince fickle swing voters that the opposition is just no good. Yet Obama’s attempts to mobilize bias stand out, for two reasons.

First is the total commitment to the strategy. Listen to any Obama flack long enough (usually just a matter of minutes), and he or she will reference how extreme the opposition is. Last month when discussing entitlements, Jay Carney said the president was looking for the “common-sense caucus.” And, of course, the media echo this: Last week Politico repeated the “common-sense caucus” phrase to report on the president’s golf game with Republican senators. The result is to paint conservatives as so far outside the mainstream that there is nothing that this president can do with them.

Second is the hypocrisy behind the tactic. This, after all, is the president elected because he promised to bring fundamental change to Washington. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama goes on at length about respecting the views of those who disagree with him, especially on abortion. Instead, we have sustained partisan warfare and a first-ever presidential address to Planned Parenthood, in which the president proclaims that the people whose views he once professed to respect are trying to return America to the 1950s.

Political inbreeding

2013-05-13T11:33:00.001-04:00

The media is a little too cozy to those in power. [Link]

CBS News President David Rhodes and ABC News President Ben Sherwood, both of them have siblings that not only work at the White House, that not only work for President Obama, but they work at the NSC on foreign policy issues directly related to Benghazi. Let’s call a spade a spade.
Let’s also show you why CNN did not go very far in covering these hearings because the CNN deputy bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Hillary Clinton’s deputy, Tom Nides.

After marrying her progeny into the royal houses of Germany, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Greece and Spain, Queen Victoria was known as the grandmother of Europe. The inbreeding among Obama’s court and its press corps is more like one of those “I’m my own grandpaw” deals.

It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s old news.

2013-05-12T22:17:00.001-04:00

What difference does it make? It looks like it may make some difference after all. [Link]

NBC’s David Gregory: Carney’s explanation on revised Benghazi talking points “not accurate”

In an earlier post here at Legal Insurrection, we also noted that NBC’s David Gregory Called Carney’s Explanation on Revised Benghazi Talking Points “Not Accurate”. Gregory asks Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who has led the state department’s review of Benghazi, “is the administration guilty of playing politics with terrorism?” Watch the video.

Rep. Mike Rogers: “I do think we’re going to see more whistle-blowers”

Congressional Republicans called Sunday for depositions of high-ranking officials and more testimony from whistle-blowers, indicating that additional whistle-blowers have contacted congressional committees since three others testified last week. From FOX News:

Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told “Fox News Sunday” that more potential and self-proclaimed “whistle-blowers” might come forward after three of them – career State Department foreign service employees – testified last week before the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee.
“We have had people come forward because of the (hearing) and say we would also like to talk,” the Michigan Republican told “Fox News Sunday.” “I do think we’re going to see more whistle-blowers. Certainly my committee has been contacted; I think other committees as well.”
Rogers’ remarks came as Thomas Pickering, the former U.S. ambassador who helped write a report on security at a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, defended his assessment but absolved Clinton.

Robert Gates: some Benghazi critics have “cartoonish” view of military capability

Meanwhile, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates described some critics of Benghazi as having a “cartoonish” view of military capability. He scoffed at critics’ suggestions that the presence of an aircraft overhead might have served as a deterrent or that a small number of special forces could have been sent in to assist during the 2012 attack.

“It’s sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces,” he said. “The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm’s way, and there just wasn’t time to do that.”

That may very well be true, but still doesn't give a good reason for trying to obfuscate/cover up what happened and why.

Another 'Improvement' brought to you by the government

2013-05-10T11:06:00.000-04:00

Gas cans no longer work correctly. I'm sure this was ordered by our betters for our own good. [Link]

The gas gauge broke. There was no smartphone app to tell me how much was left, so I ran out. I had to call the local gas station to give me enough to get on my way. The gruff but lovable attendant arrived in his truck and started to pour gas in my car’s tank. And pour. And pour.

“Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days,” he grumbled. “There’s no vent on them.”

That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.

I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.

Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.

It took one quick search. The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. Regulations began in 2000, with the idea of preventing spillage. The notion spread and was picked up by the EPA, which is always looking for new and innovative ways to spread as much human misery as possible.

An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: “Starting with containers manufactured in 2009… it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically.”

The government never said “no vents.” It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans are supposed to do.

And don’t tell me about spillage. It is far more likely to spill when the gas is gurgling out in various uneven ways, when one spout has to both pour and suck in air. That’s when the lawn mower tank becomes suddenly full without warning, when you are shifting the can this way and that just to get the stuff out.

There’s also the problem of the exploding can. On hot days, the plastic models to which this regulation applies can blow up like balloons. When you release the top, gas flies everywhere, including possibly on a hot engine. Then the trouble really begins.

Workarounds.

You are already thinking of hacks. Why not just stab the thing with a knife and be done with it? If you have to transport the can in the car, that’s a problem. You need a way to plug the vent with something.

Some boating forums have suggested drilling a hole and putting a tire stem in there and using the screw top as the way to close the hole. Great idea. Just what I wanted to do with my Saturday afternoon, hacking the gas can to make it work exactly as well as it did three years ago, before government wrecked it.

You can also buy an old-time metal can. It turns out that special regulations pertain here, too, and it’s all about the spout, which is not easy to fill. They are also unusually expensive. I’m not sure that either of these options is ideal.

It fascinates me to see how these regulations give rise to market-based workarounds. I’ve elsewhere called this the speak-easy economy. The government bans something. No one likes the ban. People are determined to get on with their lives, regardless. They step outside the narrow bounds of the law.

It wouldn’t surprise me to find, for example, a sudden proliferation of heavy-duty “water cans” in 1- and 5-gallon sizes, complete with nice spouts and vents, looking almost exactly like the gas cans you could get anywhere just a few years ago. How very interesting to discover this.

Of course, this law-abiding writer would never advocate buying one of these and using it for some purpose other than what is written on the package. Doing something like that would show profound disrespect for our betters in the bureaucracies. And if I did suggest something like that, there’s no telling the trouble that it would bring down on my head.

Scapegoat for Benghazi?

2013-05-09T16:06:00.000-04:00

Probably Hillary. [Link]

And let us establish once and for all what happened. The screwup was in two parts. The first was tactical: the administration made a judgement call on whether or not to (metaphorically) send in the Marines. They decided not to. People died. Did that make it a bad call? Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes the dice hate you. Maybe if the Marines had been sent in the whole thing would have gone spectacularly pear-shaped and we’d have a hundred people dead, not four. But then again, maybe nobody would have died at all. Generally speaking, it’s a lot easier to justify We don’t throw lives away for no good reason than it is to justify We’d rather let four people die than risk a hundred. Still, it’s a hard call to make when it’s you on the scene.

But the second part of the screwup is less forgivable. The general rule here isCommand takes responsibility. JFK survived the Bay of Pigs incident because he embraced that rule. Nixon didn’t survive Watergate because he didn’t. If Obama had said Well, we thought that we had good security up at Benghazi, only we didn’t, so al-Qaeda caught us by surprise and killed our people and that was something that I have to take full responsibility for and I’m never going to let that happen again then… well, he might have lost the election, actually. We didn’t realize at the time, but Obama’s 2012 re-election strategy had pretty much no margin for error. So the administration picked a narrative (it was all due to a YouTube video!) that cynically traded on stereotypes about foreign Muslims and their collective level of impulse control*, and did nothing but push said narrative for as long as they could. Which was, oddly enough,long enough for the election to be over.

And that was last year. But this is this year, and there’s nobody – well, except for the usual 1% fringe lunatics – who seriously believes that the Benghazi attack was due to a YouTube video. And now what’s coming out, and being put in the formal record, is that the executive branch of the government knew that their narrative about what happened in Benghazi was false when they pushed it out, and that we know that they knew this because the people who had survived the attacks told them what had actually happened. And it’s not just the testimony. From National Journal:

Curiously, the Obama administration also won’t talk about the footage that they have from the compound – video that some people who have seen it argue could clear up questions about whether the incident was a premeditated terrorist attack or something less.

As the National Journal then notes, “They just really don’t want to talk about this.” Which is not entirely true; they’ll be happy enough to talk about it if they can pass responsibility off to somebody else… and, hey: here we come back to Hillary Clinton. Who is, again, no Bill Clinton or George W Bush or even Barack Obama when it comes to navigating through controversial waters.

No Showboating at the Benghazi Hearings, Please

2013-05-07T13:29:00.001-04:00

Good advice. The cover-up is always worse than the 'crime'. 4 people dead, 2 of whom were alive for hours while those who were in a position to rescue them were prevented from doing so. Why? [Link]

Dear Republicans on the House Oversight Committee:

Please do not grandstand. Please do not take the time before the television cameras to tell us how outraged you are, even though what you are investigating is, indeed, outrageous. There will be plenty of time for that after the hearing. All day Wednesday, give us the facts, and then more facts, and then more facts.

Just ask the questions of the witnesses. Let them speak and don’t cut them off. Do not give the Obama administration any cover to claim that this is a partisan witch hunt from unhinged political opponents. Don’t waste time complaining about the media’s lack of interest or coverage so far. Just give them — and us — the facts to tell the story, a story that will leave all of us demanding accountability.

Sheryl Attkisson’s excellent reporting for CBS gives us a sense of what to expect, with three big issues.

First: Leading up to September 11, why did the State Department keep reducing the amount of security protecting diplomatic staff in Libya, in light of the increasingly dire requests from those in country?

The former deputy chief of mission for the U.S. in Libya, Gregory Hicks was interviewed by congressional investigators on the House Oversight Committee in April. He told them, “We had already essentially stripped ourselves of our security presence, or our security capability to the bare minimum.”

Second: Precisely what happened that night? Was there a time when a rescue could have been authorized, but wasn’t? Were any forces told to “stand down” and not attempt a rescue?

From Hicks’s interview:

A: So Lieutenant Colonel Gibson, who is the SOCAFRICA commander, his team, you know, they were on their way to the vehicles to go to the airport to get on the C-130 when he got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, you can’t go now, you don’t have authority to go now. And so they missed the flight. And, of course, this meant that one of the . . .

Q : They didn’t miss the flight. They were told not to board the flight.

A: They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it. So, anyway, and yeah. I still remember Colonel Gibson, he said, “I have never been so embarrassed in my life that a State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military.” A nice compliment.

Wait, there’s more from another witness:

On the night of Sept. 11, as the Obama administration scrambled to respond to the Benghazi terror attacks, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key aide effectively tried to cut the department’s own counterterrorism bureau out of the chain of reporting and decision-making, according to a “whistle-blower” witness from that bureau who will soon testify to the charge before Congress, Fox News has learned.

That witness is Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for operations in the agency’s counterterrorism bureau. Sources tell Fox News Thompson will level the allegation against Clinton during testimony on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Third, what happened afterwards, and was there an effort to lie to the American people about what happened?

Hicks, again:

Greg Hicks: . . . The net impact of what has transpired is the spokesperson of the most powerful country in the world has basically said that the President of Libya is either a liar or doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The impact of that is immeasurable. Magariaf has just lost face in front of not only his own people, but the world . . . my jaw hit the floor as I watched this . . . I’ve never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career as on that day . . . I never reported a demonstration; I reported an attack on the consulate. Chris’s last report, if you want to say his final report, is, “Greg, we are under attack.” . . . It is jaw-dropping that — to me that — how that came to be.

Finally, did the previous efforts to investigate this amount to a cover-up?

Jed Babbin:

Last week, we learned that the State Department’s Inspector General is investigating the Pickering-Mullen “Accountability Review Board” for, among other things, its failure to investigate and get statements from the Benghazi survivors. Before there were whistleblowers there were survivors, yet the comprehensively misnamed “Accountability Review Board” didn’t question them.

Which isn’t a surprise. The ARB did what it was paid to do: limit the damage and blame people under Hillary Clinton for the failures of leadership and management. It was, simply, a whitewash. We’ll probably wait a long time for the IG to report the facts — 2017 sounds like the right time frame.

In the press conference announcing the report, Adm. Mullen said something that’s been bothering me ever since. He said that no military assets could have been deployed in time. In time to do what?

Jed makes a good point here: Just how did the U.S. military and diplomatic folks outside of Benghazi know how long they had to rescue anyone? How did they know how long our guys would be able to hold out, or how long the attack would go on? After the fact, you can calculate that not enough forces could have reached the site in time, but how did they know that as the events were ongoing?

If that means, in Clintonian terms, that they wouldn’t have been in time to save Ambassador Chris Stevens, that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have been in time to save the SEALs.

If you parse Mullen’s words — as we learned we must when Hillary’s hubby was president — he almost certainly meant that the ambassador was killed in the early moments of the attack.

Unexpected Results in Oregon study on Medicaid expansion

2013-05-06T11:31:00.000-04:00

I don't think anyone expected this. [Link]

On Wednesday, a team of researchers released a new study on Oregon's Medicaid expansion, showing that people who gained access to treatment had no statistically significant improvement on physical health measures like blood pressure or cholesterol. I wrote: "Given this result, what is the likelihood that Obamacare will have a positive impact on the average health of Americans? Every one of us, for or against, should be revising that probability downwards. I'm not saying that you have to revise it to zero; I certainly haven't. But however high it was yesterday, it should be somewhat lower today."

But how should we update our beliefs? Does this mean there's a chance that health care doesn't work?

That's one possible interpretation. Let's look at the strongest case. Assume for a moment that if we could somehow study the entire population of the United States, we'd find that gaining access to health insurance doesn't improve blood pressure, blood sugar, or cholesterol control. What would that tell us? That health care doesn't work?

That's not actually as crazy as it sounds. Lots of treatments are bad for you, and gaining access to the health system may just give you opportunities to get sicker. Say you're an 88 year old with bad hips. Now, maybe sitting still and not exercising is making you sick. But going to get a hip replacement gives you all sorts of ways to die: blood clot, hospital acquired infection, adverse reaction to anaesthesia. If it's not covered by insurance, maybe you'll stay home, take aspirin, and live longer.

But I don't think that's the most likely read of the Oregon results. No, I think that this would tell us something different: not that health care is bad, but that health insurance doesn't actually improve access to necessary treatment that much. If someone else covers the cost, it can help with the financial burden of health care. But uninsured people will mostly find a way for the most important treatments, the ones we know improve health, from stitches to control bleeding, to antibiotics, to blood pressure medication. It's the expensive stuff on the frontier--the stuff that's as likely to be useless, or harmful, as it is to help--that the uninsured mostly forego.

A bunch of people sarcastically asked whether I was planning to drop my health insurance. The answer is no, because my employer pays for it. But if the question is "Has this caused you to revise downward your estimate of the value of health insurance?" the answer has to obviously be yes. Anyone who answers differently is looking deep into their intestinal loops, not the Oregon study. You don't have to revise the estimate to zero, or even a low number. But if you'd asked folks before the results dropped what we'd expect to see if insurance made people a lot healthier, they'd have said "statistically significant improvement on basic markers for the most common chronic diseases. The fact that we didn't see that means that we should now say that health insurance, or at least Medicaid, probably doesn't make as big a difference in health as we thought.

Certainly, this bolsters my belief that health insurance should provide financial protection from catastrophic events, not wrap-around first-dollar coverage. Those who used to read me on The Atlantic may recall that the McArdle Plan for Healthcare involved the government picking up the tab for any medical expenses above 15-20% of income: simple, progressive, and aimed at the actual problem we know health insurance can fix. Unfortunaely, Obamacare made that sort of coverage functionally illegal.

Where common ground doesn't exist

2013-05-06T09:41:00.000-04:00

Talking about guns in America. [Link]

I’ve come to realize after the Sandy Hook shooting that the reason we can’t have a rational gun debate is because the anti-gun side pre-supposes that their pro-gun opponents must first accept that guns are bad in order to have a discussion about guns in the first place. Before we even start the conversation, we’re the bad guys and we have to admit it. Without accepting that guns are bad and supplicating themselves to the anti-gunner, the pro-gunner can’t get a word in edgewise, and is quickly reduced to being called a murderer, or a low, immoral and horrible human being.

You might think that’s hyperbole too, but I’ve experienced it personally from people I considered friends until recently. And every day I see it on TV or in the newspapers, from Piers Morgan to the Des Moines Register’s own Donald Kaul, who among others have actually said people like me are stupid, crazy or should be killed ourselves. YouTube is full of examples, and any Google search will result in example after example of gun-owning Americans being lampooned, ridiculed anddemonized by the media and citizens somewhere.

Hell, it’s even gotten so bad that a little kid was expelled from school recently for biting a Pop Tart into the vague shape of a handgun during lunch break (it looked more like Idaho to me).

Liberals always make the common plea, “We need to get some experts to solve this problem!” for any public policy issue that comes along, which is a good thing. But when it comes to the gun issue, gun expertise is completely irrelevant to the anti-gunner — people who probably have never fired a gun or even touched one in real life, and whose only experience with guns is what they’ve seen in movies or read about in bastions of (un)balanced, hyper-liberal journalism, like Mother Jones. That a pro-gun person might actually know a lot about their hobby or profession doesn’t stand up against the histrionic cries of the anti-gunner.

How can we “gun people” honestly be expected to come to the table with anti-gunners when anti-gunners are willfully stupid about guns, and openly hate, despise and ridicule those of us who own them? There must first be respect and trust — even just a little — before there can be even the beginnings of legitimate discussion of the issue.

There is no trust.

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because they lie to us. President Obama directly says he won’t tamper with guns or the Second Amendment, then turns around and pushes Congress to do just that. We don’t trust anti-gunners because they appoint one of the most lying and rabidly (and moronically) anti-gun people in America, Vice President Biden, to head up a “task force” to “solve” the so-called “gun problem,” who in turn talks with anti-gun special interest groups instead of us to complete his task.

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because they tell us they don’t want to ban guns, only enact what they call “common sense gun laws.” But like a magician using misdirection, they tell everyone else they want to ban every gun everywhere. While some are busy trying to placate us with lies, another anti-gunner somewhere submits a gun ban proposal — proposals that often would automatically make us felons for possession. Felons, for no good reason. And you anti-gunners can roll up your grandfather clauses and stuff them where the sun don’t shine. If it ain’t good enough for our grandchildren in 60 years, it ain’t good enough for us right now.

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because they make horrifying predictions about how there will be blood in the streets, gunfights on every street corner and America will become the Wild West again if citizens are allowed to carry concealed firearms. We don’t trust anti-gun people because we know that despite the millions of Americans who have carry permits, those who carry guns commit crimes at a much lower rate than people who don’t. We know because we know ourselves and we’re not criminals. We know because concealed carry is now legal nearly everywhere, and guess what? Violent crime continues to go down. What a shocker.

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because they say gun control is about crime control. Anti-gunners claim that ending crime and “saving children” is why they want to ban so-called “assault weapons.” Yet our very own government says that assault weapons are used in less than two percent of all gun crimes and Department of Justice studies say the last assault weapons ban had little or no effect on crime. Other studies suggest gun control may even make crime worse (one need only look to high crime rates in places where there’s a lot of gun control to see the possible connection).

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because when it comes to their “We need gun control to save the children” argument, many of us can’t understand how an anti-gun liberal can simultaneously be in favor of abortion. Because you know, a ban on abortion would save a child every single time. I’m personally not rabidly against abortion, but the discongruence makes less sense still when the reason abortions are legal is to protect a woman’s individual rights. That’s great, but does the individual rights argument sound familiar? Anti-gunners think that for some bizarre reason, the founding fathers happened to stick a collective right smack dab at the top of a list of individual rights, though. Yeah, because that makes sense.

A story they weren't ready to hear

2013-05-03T13:32:00.001-04:00

Glenn Burke, a player for the Dodgers in the 70's was out to his teammates but the press was not interested. [Link]

Burke made no secret of his sexual orientation to the Dodgers front office, his teammates, or friends in either league. He also talked freely with sportswriters, though all of them ended up shaking their heads and telling him they couldn't writethat in their papers. Burke was so open about his sexuality that the Dodgers tried to talk him into participating in a sham marriage. (He wrote in his autobiography that the team offered him $75,000 to go along with the ruse.) He refused. In a bit of irony that would seem farcical if it wasn't so tragic, one of the Dodgers who tried to talk Burke into getting "married," was his manager, Tommy Lasorda, whose son Tom Jr. died from AIDS complications in 1991. To this day, Lasorda Sr. refuses to acknowledge his son's homosexuality.

Burke, who also died of AIDS-related causes in 1995, came out to the world outside baseball in a 1982 article for Inside Sports and even followed it up shortly after with an appearance on The Today Show with Bryant Gumbel. But his story was greeted by the rest of the news media and the baseball establishment, including Burke's former teammates and baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, with silence. Even his superb autobiography, Out at Home, which published the year he died, failed to stir open conversation about homosexuality in sports. Practically no one in the sports-writing community would acknowledge that Burke was gay or report stories that followed up on his admission.

He told People magazine while promoting his book in 1995, "My mission as a gay ballplayer was the breaking of a stereotype ... I think it worked ... They can't ever say now that a gay man can't play in the majors, because I'm a gay man and I made it."

And yet Burke is remembered less today as a pioneer for gay rights and more as the man who, along with Dusty Baker, invented the "high five."

The media in general and the sports media in particular found Burke's homosexuality an inconvenient truth. He told People, "I think everyone just pretended not to hear me. It just wasn't a story they were ready to hear."

Top CEO Pay Ratios

2013-05-02T09:12:00.001-04:00

High ratios do not guarantee success as JCPenney would probably be the first to admit. [Link]

It’s been almost three years since Congress directed the Securities and Exchange Commission to require public companies to disclose the ratio of their chief executive officers’ compensation to the median of the rest of their employees’. The agency has yet to produce a rule.

Most companies don’t disclose median worker pay, so Bloomberg calculated ratios based on the U.S. government’s industry-specific averages for pay and benefits of rank-and-file workers. This table, searchable by company name, CEO or industry, shows the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index top 250 companies by ratio. Each was offered a chance to respond; their edited comments are listed. READ THE FULL STORY.

I dislike the idea of mandating a maximum wage to reduce pay inequality. At the same time, executive pay keeps ratcheting up from the need to stay competitive to the boards voting to increase each other's pay.
Reporting this seems like a good way to slow that down through the embarrassment of a high ratio.

Malice or incompetence?

2013-05-01T10:41:00.000-04:00

When two different countries send independant warnings to the US government about a possible terror suspect, you would think action would be taken. It wasn't. [Link]

NOT PAYING ATTENTION: Saudi Arabia ‘warned the United States IN WRITING about Boston Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2012.’ “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sent a written warning about accused Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2012, long before pressure-cooker blasts killed three and injured hundreds, according to a senior Saudi government official with direct knowledge of the document. The Saudi warning, the official told MailOnline, was separate from the multiple red flags raised by Russian intelligence in 2011, and was based on human intelligence developed independently in Yemen.”

So we were warned about him by both the Russians and the Saudis and still did nothing? What exactly are all those hundreds of billions for Homeland Security going for?

Relevance

2013-05-01T10:36:00.002-04:00

If you have to claim you do, you don't. [Link]

“Mr. President, you are a hundred days into your second term…my question to you is do you still have the juice to get the rest of your agenda through this Congress?” asked ABC’s Jonathan Karl — eliciting a surprised chuckle and “goll-y” from the commander-in-chief during a Tuesday morning press conference in the White House briefing room.

“You know… as Mark Twain said, you know, rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated at this point,” said Obama, who seemed a lot less lighthearted than during his sharp-elbowed stand-up routine at the White House Correspondents Association dinner on Saturday.

NPR is confused. [Link]

Announced shortly after 8:30 a.m. and slated for 10:15, this was to be the first such media availability in two months — and just the third this year. A mood of expectation arose in the briefing room, especially as the start time slipped to 10:30 and then 10:45.

It felt as though something newsworthy must be happening. But as it turned out, not so much.

The president had no announcement to make — not even an opening statement. Instead, he plunged right into the queries, nearly all of them posed in a challenging tone. What about Syria, the Boston Marathon bombing, Mexico, the Republicans in Congress and the challenge of administering Obamacare?

The president wound his way through the session, wrapped it up and then returned to respond to a shouted question about Jason Collins, the NBA player who announced Monday that he is gay.

As usual, the president was mostly calm and explicative. But what stood out were the moments when he seemed at a loss to deal with the ongoing frustrations of dealing with Congress.

Again and again, the president seemed to be saying: "OK, that didn't work out so well, but I tried to do what needed to be done and the Republicans wouldn't let me."

No one should doubt that the Republicans are working to thwart this president on a host of issues. They would be the first to say so.

But no matter how frustrating a president finds this dilemma at the heart of our shared-power system, it does not advance his cause to wear his frustration in public. The chief executive is always better served if he can appear larger than the quotidian give-and-take. Yes, he must acknowledge the difficulties he faces, but he also needs to transcend them.

Silent Cal’s 6 Simple Rules

2013-04-30T10:04:00.001-04:00

Good advice for any President. [Link]

1.      “Don’t hurry to legislate.”

For Obama, more legislation is often the answer to our problems, whether it’s gun control, health care reform, or the economy. Obama’s roughshod push for the economic stimulus and various government bailouts reflected that same abiding faith in the healing power of legislation.

Coolidge, in a speech called Have Faith in Massachusetts, expressed a different idea: “Don’t hurry to legislate.” There are natural limitations to what human law can accomplish, and we should not delude ourselves with false expectations. “There is danger of disappointment and disaster,” Coolidge said, unless we understand and appreciate what law can and cannot do. What legislation cannot do, and should not attempt to do, is provide “some short cut to perfection.” As we saw recently during the gun control debate, “When legislation fails, those who look upon it as a sovereign remedy simply cry out for more legislation.”

Invoking the American founders, Coolidge often argued that law “loses its sanctity and authority” when it is “changed and changeable on slight provocation.” In other words, in order to inculcate respect and reverence for the rule of law, reform should be a difficult and arduous task, requiring much time and extensive deliberation. “It is much more important,” Coolidge said, “to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” because there is no immediate remedy and complete solution in any act of Congress. “There is no magic in government,” he cautioned.

2.      Don’t promise much.

If the public mind rests in the belief that there can be no limit to what the law can accomplish, there will also be no limit to what our elected officials will promise. This is well demonstrated by Obama’s grand claim that his election would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

“The country,” Coolidge said, “cannot be run on the promise of what it will do for the people.” “[A] sound and wise statesmanship,” he explained, “will undoubtedly find itself displaced by that type of public official who promises much, talks much, legislates much, expends much, but accomplishes little.” In that case, “The deliberate, sound judgment of the country is likely to find it has been superseded by a popular whim.” Coolidge here offers a warning against the very type of president that Obama proved to be.

Moreover, the habit of promising much, he says, precludes the possibility of sound and wise statesmanship. Americans are often fond of asking if there could ever be another Washington or Lincoln in the White House. If Coolidge were here today, he might say our expectations are too high for another Washington or Lincoln to satisfy.

3.      Economize.

More than any other issue, Obama could use a good lesson from ‘Silent Cal’ Coolidge on the issue of economy. As Amity Shlaes astutely notes, Coolidge “did not say ‘savings’; he said ‘thrift’ or ‘economy.’ Indeed, he especially cherished the word ‘economy’ because it came from the Greek for ‘household.’ To Coolidge the national household resembled the family household.” In other words, Coolidge used old words with their old meanings, and economy meant living within your means. In his Autobiography, Coolidge wrote, “There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means.”

Coolidge, the last president to pay down the national debt, would be aghast at the nation’s current sixteen trillion dollar debt and record deficits. While the Coolidge era enjoyed unprecedented prosperity—low unemployment, high wages, and low cost of living—the economic picture in the age of Obama continues to look bleak. The style of household management Coolidge brought to the national government saved money, yes, but he always saw the larger point – his purpose was “to save people,” not dollars. A strong economy could satisfy the American people in a way new legislation and empty political promises never could. For that reason, Coolidge said, “After order and liberty, economy is one of the highest essentials of a free government.”

Go read the rest.

Across the board spending cuts work

2013-04-30T09:51:00.000-04:00

Which is why the Democrats lost on the sequester. [Link]

The whole sequestration gambit has failed, to the point where even the Washington Post's Ezra Kleinadmits that "the Democrats have lost on sequestration." The idea was that even the comparatively minor cuts in spending caused by the sequester would be so painful that voters would demand higher taxes rather than endure cuts in spending.

Problem was, when the spending cuts came, nobody noticed. This led the Obama administration to try to up the pain by focusing cuts in places where people might feel the pain: canceling White House tours for schoolchildren, or furloughing air traffic controllers.

That didn't work either. The tour-canceling just looked mean, and the problem with targeting air travel is that members of Congress, and their top donors, fly a lot. Huge bipartisan majorities in Congress thus quickly passed legislation forcing the FAA to make cuts elsewhere instead.

The whole thing was a bust, and has me thinking that someone in Congress -- or, if he's smart, President Obama -- ought to propose more across-the-board cuts as a means of addressing our swollen deficit and national debt. Critics of across-the-board cuts always say that we should make "smart cuts" instead of using a "meat axe." But the reason why we have a ballooning national debt is that our politicians are clearly incapable of making "smart cuts."

When my own state, Tennessee, was facing budget difficulties a few years ago, our then-governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, ordered across-the-board cuts. Nobody liked it, but it brought things under control. Many other states have responded to budget difficulties in similar fashion. So why not try more of it at the national level?

The Central Park Five

2013-04-26T12:52:00.000-04:00

A whole lot of things were missed to wrongly convict five men of brutally raping a woman. [Link]

If ever there was a cautionary tale about why our system presumes innocence, this was it. Yet as Herbert has reflected, in 1990 New Yorkers, including himself, “wanted them to be guilty. And when a desire is strong enough it can overwhelm such flimsy stuff as facts and truth. Reality is a funny thing. It is what we say it is.” Alas, that’s not the definition of reality: it’s the definition of a lie, imposed violently, carelessly, with the full power of the state. So what is the takeaway from the ruined lives of five young men?

First, in direct response to the case, Donald Trump mounted a successful campaign to reinstate the death penalty in New York. But the only thing that could have made this miscarriage of justice worse is if the defendants had been executed with the dispatch Trump howled for. We must rethink myths about the infallible catharsis of the death penalty.

Second, the convictions resulted from a corrupt process. In a clear breach of ethics, the prosecution directed the police investigation from the moment Meili was found, even questioning the defendants before they were charged and in the absence of counsel. The police, too, broke more rules on collecting evidence and questioning suspects than I can list here: but, most unusual, they also testified to much of it—it’s right there in the court record.

Worst of all, the defense attorneys were beyond dismal. Only one was a public defender with real criminal experience. Like many unfamiliar with the criminal justice marketplace, the defendants mistakenly believed that a private attorney is better than a (generally more practiced) public defender. At one point in the film, Yusef Salaam recalls his alarm when he saw Robert Burns, his lawyer, sleeping through crucial testimony. Indeed, Burns fell asleep nearly every day. He slept in full view of the judge and the press. He slept so hard, he once woke up and objected to himself. I fault the judge in this: no responsible officer of the court should have allowed Burns to continue. Competency of counsel is a basic constitutional right. At a moment when law, lawyers and even law schools are under political assault, we ignore their role in a democratic system at our collective peril.

Third, why is it still so hard to make this case the focus of serious public reflection? Given that it was one of the best-covered criminal trials in our history, the 2002 exoneration slipped by with relatively little notice. There is also a great deal of hand-wringing about why “no one” saw the flaws in the case when it was prosecuted. This ignores the fact that the courtroom was visited daily by throngs of people who did see those flaws—and proclaimed them loudly: family, friends, neighbors, residents of Harlem. But they were poor and black and relentlessly mocked in the media as deluded apologists. There were also small cadres of activists who marched in the streets for the defendants, most visibly Al Sharpton. But sadly, a number of them, including Sharpton, squandered that spotlight by blaming the jogger’s boyfriend, for which there was no evidence.

Why we only buy five varieties of apples

2013-04-26T11:04:00.003-04:00

All the apples we eat are grafts from a specific tree, not from seed. [Link]

The fine points of apple sex were lost on most US colonists, who planted millions of apple seeds as they settled farms and traveled west. Leading the way was John Chapman, a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed, who single-handedly planted hundreds of thousands of seeds in the many frontier nurseries he started in anticipation of the approaching settlers, who were required to plant 50 apple or pear trees as part of their land grants. Even if they had understood grafting, the settlers probably wouldn't have cared: Although some of the frontier apples were grown for fresh eating, more fed the hogs or the fermentation barrel, neither of which was too choosy.

Every now and then, however, one of those seedling trees produced something special. As the art of grafting spread, those special trees were cloned and named, often for the discoverer. By the 1800s, America possessed more varieties of apples than any other country in the world, each adapted to the local climate and needs. Some came ripe in July, some in November. Some could last six months in the root cellar. Some were best for baking or sauce, and many were too tannic to eat fresh but made exceptional hard cider, the default buzz of agrarian America.

Bunk called this period the Great American Agricultural Revolution. "When this all happened, there was no USDA, no land grant colleges, no pomological societies," he says. "This was just grassroots. Farmers being breeders." As farms industrialized, though, orchards got bigger and bigger. State agricultural extension services encouraged orchardists to focus on the handful of varieties that produced big crops of shiny red fruit that could withstand extensive shipping, often at the expense of flavor. Today, thousands of unique apples have been lost, while a mere handful dominate the market.

When Bunk lays out his dazzling apple displays, it's a reminder that our sense of the apple has increasingly narrowed, that we are asking less and less from this most versatile of fruits—and that we are running out of time to change course. Exhibit A: The Harrison apple, the pride of Newark, New Jersey, renowned in the early 1800s for making a golden, champagne-like cider that just might have been the finest in the world. But the Harrison, like most of the high-tannin varieties that make good hard cider, disappeared after Prohibition. (The recent hard-cider revival has been making do largely with apples designed for fresh eating, which make boring cider.) But in 1976 one of Bunk's fellow apple detectives found a single old Harrison tree on the grounds of a defunct cider mill in Livingston, New Jersey, grafted it, and now a new generation of Harrison trees is just beginning to bear fruit. It's as if a storied wine grape called pinot noir had just been rediscovered.

Mugged by Reality

2013-04-26T09:57:00.001-04:00

The cognitive dissonance was strong after Boston. [Link]

What is most striking as one reads over the list is the ease with which we compartmentalized and discarded each plot as it was revealed, how simple it was to return to “normal” life in the midst of an ongoing and global terrorist campaign, how lazy to reason that these “isolated incidents” were nothing more than the false echoes of an organization “decimated” by presidential action.

But Boston was impossible to ignore. Two brothers, granted asylum and residency and citizenship and welfare benefits by the United States, who attended American schools and one of whom married an American girl, viciously turned against the country that had sheltered them. Before they were stopped, they killed four and shut down a major city. But these were not the only consequences of their actions. The insouciance with which Islamic radicalism was downplayed or dismissed or ascribed to “Islamophobia” in the halls of the executive branch and on air on MSNBC became another casualty of the attack.

The prejudiced individuals who said or wrote of their suspicions and hopes that the Boston bombers would turn out to be Tea Party activists or gun nuts or pro-lifers were exposed as fools. The writers who ostentatiously dismissed early reporting that instructions for pressure cooker bombs could be learned from the pages of the al Qaeda webzine looked willfully blind. The spokesmen for liberalism who said on television that the brothers Tsarnaev were more like Timothy McVeigh or the Columbine killers than like al-Awlaki or Bin Laden seemed naïve if not dishonest. I say dishonest because to downplay the obvious religious dimension to the Boston bombing is to obfuscate the known facts of the case. The surviving brother himself says he and his accomplice were motivated by religious belief.

The commentators who argued over whether Chechens are “white” were engaging in academic babble that put medieval scholastics to shame. The civil libertarians who falsely said terrorists have continued to talk to authorities after being read Miranda rights were shown to be dupes when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev shut up as soon he was charged. The self-congratulatory bureaucrats who insisted everything was under control found it difficult to explain why the name Tamerlan Tsarnaev was present in two government databases prior to the attack, or what made the Russians so worried enough to alert the FBI and CIA, or how Tamerlan could be interviewed once by the FBI and then disappear into a cloud of militant religious fervor. The media that so fastidiously examined every aspect of Dzhokhar’s life and personality, interviewing acquaintances who pronounced his goodness and in a preposterous search for what American society might have done to provoke his jihad, insulted the men and women whose lives have been irrevocably altered by this Millennial barbarian. And those who, before all the facts are known, so desperately denied that the Tsarnaevs may have had additional accomplices or overseas connections were openly evading the global aspect of brothers’ origin and ideology.

The response to Boston on the part of so many intellectuals, inside and outside government, was a sign of perplexity. They had been concussed when mugged by reality. Doing the opposite of what Bush had done did not, in the end, improve the global situation or make America safer. On the contrary, it may have made the situation worse. The plots against America continue. The ideology that motivates them has not died. Indeed, the space in which that ideology’s adherents operate is expanding: From Mali, to Libya, to Sinai, to Somalia, to Yemen, to Syria, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, those who act in the name of al Qaeda have more room to maneuver. Presidential outreach has not mattered. It has been dismissed. The Muslim world is growing more violent, and it is exporting that violence and conflict overseas.

What Boston showed was that some problems defy the easy answers proffered by American politicians, and that some problems cannot be hid from for long. Such problems include what to do about the Greater Middle East and the global jihad. In other news this week Iran, which continues its nuclear program, stands accused of complicity in the recently revealed plot against the Canadian rail system. The U.S. government said it has evidence Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his people. The Muslim Brotherhood strengthened its grip on Egypt. Ethno-sectarian conflict reemerged in Iraq.

The tide of war is receding, Obama says. But that is the old narrative, the narrative of the last four years, the narrative of peace and comity, the narrative being pulled apart by events. We know now that you cannot control the tide.

Lawmakers, aides may get Obamacare exemption

2013-04-25T11:35:00.000-04:00

Get the tar and feathers. If we are all going to be forced to use this train wreck of a program, they better damn well have to as well. [Link]

Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.

The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said.
Continue ReadingA source close to the talks says: “Everyone has to hold hands on this and jump, or nothing is going to get done.”

Yet if Capitol Hill leaders move forward with the plan, they risk being dubbed hypocrites by their political rivals and the American public. By removing themselves from a key Obamacare component, lawmakers and aides would be held to a different standard than the people who put them in office.

Democrats, in particular, would take a public hammering as the traditional boosters of Obamacare. Republicans would undoubtedly attempt to shred them over any attempt to escape coverage by it, unless Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) give Democrats cover by backing it.

There is concern in some quarters that the provision requiring lawmakers and staffers to join the exchanges, if it isn’t revised, could lead to a “brain drain” on Capitol Hill, as several sources close to the talks put it.

The problem stems from whether members and aides set to enter the exchanges would have their health insurance premiums subsidized by their employer — in this case, the federal government. If not, aides and lawmakers in both parties fear that staffers — especially low-paid junior aides — could be hit with thousands of dollars in new health care costs, prompting them to seek jobs elsewhere. Older, more senior staffers could also retire or jump to the private sector rather than face a big financial penalty.

Plus, lawmakers — especially those with long careers in public service and smaller bank accounts — are also concerned about the hit to their own wallets.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) is worried about the provision. The No. 2 House Democrat has personally raised the issue with Boehner and other party leaders, sources said.

“Mr. Hoyer is looking at this policy, like all other policies in the Affordable Care Act, to ensure they’re being implemented in a way that’s workable for everyone, including members and staff,” said Katie Grant, Hoyer’s communications director.

Several proposals have been submitted to the Office of Personnel Management, which will administer the benefits. One proposal exempts lawmakers and aides; the other exempts aides alone.

Why real life is not The West Wing

2013-04-24T11:04:00.003-04:00

In real life, Republicans and their policy arguments are not required to be easily beaten strawmen. [Link]

The American President and The West Wing are not searing portrayals of effective political management. They're drama. The first question a dramatist asks is not "Is this how it really works?" but "Is it entertaining?" And the second is "Can the audience understand this in less than thirty seconds?" Veracity is way, way down the list. If you want a clue to how realistic it all is, consider that Aaron Sorkin awarded Jed Bartlett the Nobel Prize in Economics. Then go interview some Nobel Prizewinning Economists and ask yourself whether a single one of them would have the desire, or the ability, to run for president.

Jed Bartlett doesn't win policy debates because of his amazing tactical skills, his overpowering arguments, or the sheer persuasiveness of his granite-faced brand of urbane folksomeness. He wins them because Aaron Sorkin is a liberal and he wants Republicans to lose on the major issues. Unfortunately for liberals, Tom Coburn and John Boehner don't have their lines faxed over from Hollywood every morning.

Walter Russell Mead had an even harsher reaction. You have to read the whole thing to get the full effect, but here's the nut graf:

This is a politician getting down to what the New York Times editorial page seems to think is a particularly fetching set of brass knuckles: reciting liberal talking points one after another in rapid fire sequence. That’s hardball, that’s brass tacks at least in the mind of Maureen Dowd, a woman who on the evidence of this column could and would teach her own grandmother to suck eggs.

If you want to actually understand why gun control failed, let's try a simple exercise. Raise your hand if you had a strong opinion about the background check bill that was in front of Congress.

Keep your hand raised if you know how your own Senator voted on it. Otherwise put your hand down.

Keep your hand raised if you actually live in a state that might plausibly elect a Republican to congress.

Okay, now keep your hand raised if that bill was in the top one or two issues that you'll be voting on in 2014 or 2016. By which I mean, if your Senator votes the wrong way on that bill, you will vote for anyone who opposes them. Anyone--even someone with the wrong opinions on gay marriage, social security reform, transportation subsidies, the Keystone XL pipeline, carbon taxes, marginal tax rates on people who make more than $250k per annum, the deficit, and student loan repayment programs.

Now look around. Aside from those three guys in the back from Handgun Control Inc., do you know who still has their hand raised? NRA members.

Support for new gun control laws was high in the immediate post-Newtown period. But that support was evanescent; it's already back below 50%, and probably still falling. Gun owners care year in and year out. And they vote on the issue.

This had little to do with the fearsome power of "the NRA", or their fundraising efforts. It had to do with gun owners who will do their best to unelect any politician who votes to deprive them of what they view as constitutional rights. Those gun owners are more likely to live in swing states than the most avid gun controllers: progressives who cram themselves into a handful of cities. And they vote on the issue, unlike progressives, who, for all their furor at the outcome, put a large number of issues--taxes, abortion, welfare programs, and so forth--much higher on their list of priorities. By 2014, the odds of any "No" vote losing their job over it are pretty slim.

Also from the same article, how Congress changed in the 70's and why Obama can't channel FDR or LBJ when he wants something from them. [Link]

Burton had promised that weakening the big shots would heighten the accountability and responsiveness of Congress. No question, Congress became more responsive. But it simultaneously became dramatically less effective and accountable. Under the old system, only a comparative handful of members had any power. If they abused that power, it would be noticed-if not by the press, then by their colleagues, and if noticed, then punished. But now dozens, maybe even hundreds, of congressmen controlled the fates of fines, industries, whole nations. Hundreds of special interests soon buzzed round those dozens, pressing money into their hands, lobbying, cajoling, persuading. The ambitious new subcommittee chairmen, hungry for campaign contributions to stave off the electorate's post-1978 Republican trend, all too eagerly responded to their donors' concerns. But since their most active constituents simultaneously expected them to flay those donors in the name of anticorporate liberalism, ghat responsiveness had to be disguised and concealed. The chairmen coped with their dilemma by evasion: by voting one way on procedural votes and then another on the merits of the hill, or voting "no" on laws they really favored after first establishing that the thing had the support to pass even without their vote. In this deliberately created muddle, nobody-often not even the congressmen themselves-could ever quite discern why things happened, who had made things happen, or even frequently what had happened. It was hopeless to imagine that an ordinary citizen could force his way through the buzzing cloud, much less exert any real influence. Very much to the surprise of the reform members, this new, more responsive, less hierarchical Congress got less done than the old oligarchy had. "The day is gone," said new Ways and Means chairman Al Ullman of Washington State, "when a chairman can wrap a neat little package in his back room. The open hearings and open markups, in which all members, not just a few, have a say, is the way this committee must work." The old unreformed Congress had enacted the Supplemental Security Income program in 1971. The new reformed Congress could never quite organize itself to enact anything on such a large scale ever again.

Lyndon Johnson could win with a little armtwisting because that's all he needed to do--a little armtwisting. Obama needed to armtwist half the house, and a substantial number in the Senate, thanks to the rise of the filibuster . . . which is arguably itself a result of the 1970s revolution that heightened partisanship and congressional responsiveness, at the expense of collegiality and party discipline.