Monthly Archives: May 2013

Staying in Bounds

May 27, 2013 – 1:05 pm

We must define our effort not as a boundless “global war on terror,” but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America. …  As our fight enters a new phase, America’s legitimate claim of self-defense cannot be the end of the discussion.  To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power — or risk abusing it. 

— President Obama, Thursday at the National Defense University

This week everybody was talking about the Oklahoma tornado

I assume you already know the basics, which have gotten 24/7 coverage.

A side issue is whether or not we can blame global warming. In general, as the planet warms there is more heat in the ocean and more moisture in the atmosphere, creating the potential for more violent storms. However, from year-to-year or even decade-to-decade, the tornadoes in one particular area are subject to a lot of other factors.

So, for example, the U.S. had unusually few tornadoes in 2012, probably because of the drought in Tornado Alley. Did climate change cause the altered precipitation patterns that created the drought? Maybe, but we’re getting a little speculative now. (I’m always suspicious when both too much and too little of something — i.e., tornadoes — produce the same explanation.)

I know that conservatives claim global warming is refuted whenever some town gets late-season snow. So it sucks to feel obligated to stick to facts and reason. But as Grist’s Susie Cagle puts it:

the science on tornadoes and climate change isn’t clear enough to OMFG about it just yet.

Here’s my rule of thumb: Am I willing to accept the validity of this measurement if it turns against my favored theory in the future? In other words: If for the next year or two the number and severity of tornadoes in Oklahoma goes down again, will I feel like global warming is refuted? My answer is no, which means I shouldn’t put too much stock in the global-warming/tornado connection now.

On the other hand, I would reconsider if the Earth had a genuinely cold year — colder than the 100-year average — with no obvious event like a major volcano to explain it. So when April turned out to be the 338th consecutive month with an average global temperature above the 20th-century average, I thought that was significant. In other words: If you’re 28 or younger, you’ve never experienced a globally cool month.

and President Obama’s speech

Thursday at the National Defense University, President Obama recognized that American democracy can’t survive an endless global war. I summarize in “This War Must End”.

and the IRS

As no trail to the White House emerges and the scandal hinges on how the regulations define 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s, you have to wonder: What Happens to a Scandal With Boring Details? Prediction: The mainstream media will lose interest, but the conservative media will invent whatever exciting details it needs to keep its audience aroused.

and the I-5 bridge collapse in Washington

The cartoon is actually a reaction to the 2007 bridge collapse in Minneapolis, but nothing has really changed. Which bridge will go down next? New York Magazine suggests that it could be one of the busiest bridges in the Northeast: the Tappan Zee.

Since no one died this time, I don’t think I can be accused of “politicizing the tragedy” to point out that President Obama’s American Jobs Act of 2011 included $50 billion for infrastructure improvements. It could not overcome a Republican filibuster. The proposal has been back every year since, and is now part of Obama’s 2014 budget proposal.

It’s entirely legit for Republicans to wonder how the necessary work will be paid for, but it’s not legit to just block Obama’s proposal. If Republicans don’t offer an alternative infrastructure plan, then their plan is to keep watching our bridges fall down.

and atheism

I can’t remember a week where atheism popped up in so many stories.

Wednesday, Pope Francis raised eyebrows (and hopes, maybe) by seeming to say that atheists can go to the Heaven they don’t believe in:

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!

Then Father Thomas Rosica — quoted on CNN’s Belief Blog as a “Vatican spokesman” in a post that countless other articles linked to — seemed to take it all back, saying that Pope Francis’ homilies speak to the typical Catholic as a “pastor and preacher”, not “in the context of a theological faculty or academy”, and that the Pope had “no intention of provoking a theological debate on the nature of salvation”. Rosica reiterated that

Catholics believe that it is only in Jesus Christ that this salvation is conferred, and through Christianity and the one Church that it must be mediated to all people.

Fine, except … Rosica wasn’t writing as a Vatican spokesman and didn’t claim to be. He was an official spokesman during the transition from Benedict to Francis, but Wikipedia says “He completed his service upon the election and inauguration of Petrine Ministry of Pope Francis.” So although Rosica probably understands the Pope’s mind far better than I do, in this case his opinion is just his opinion. [BTW: Need I mention how disappointed I am that CNN didn’t get this right? It’s not hard.]

Tuesday, Representative Juan Mendez delivered a secular humanist invocation to begin a session of the Arizona legislature.

I would like to ask that you not bow your heads. I would like to ask that you take a moment to look around the room at all of the men and women here, in this moment, sharing together this extraordinary experience of being alive and of dedicating ourselves to working toward improving the lives of the people in our state.

Wednesday, another legislator said, “That’s not a prayer” and led the legislature in a second daily Christian prayer as “repentance” for the previous day. That display of Christian supremacism led third member to object:

I want to remind the House and my colleagues and everybody here that several of us here are not Christianized. I’m a traditional Navajo, so I stand here every day and participate in prayers … This is the United States, this is America, and we all represent different people … and you need to respect that. Your God is no more powerful than my God. We all come from the same creator.

Most striking of all was the viral video where CNN’s Wolf Blitzer described Rebecca Vitsmun (an Oklahoma tornado survivor) as “blessed” and pushed her to “thank the Lord” for her and her baby escaping harm, prompting her to confess “I’m actually an atheist.” She was very gracious and dignified about it: “I don’t blame anyone for thanking the Lord.”

The Oklahoma Freethought Convention is selling “I’m actually an atheist” t-shirts. Proceeds will help Vitsmun rebuild her home.

Blitzer’s clumsy interview points out the amount of religious propaganda we take for granted whenever natural disaster strikes. (Funny how nobody on TV ever says, “The randomness of this destruction reinforces my belief that sometimes stuff just happens and you can’t take it personally.”) Slate’s Mark Joseph Stein called out the tunnel vision in ABC’s reporting of the “miracle ending” at Briarwood school, where no children died.

The families and friends of the seven children who died at Plaza Towers would not consider this ending really all that miraculous.

Which reminds me of something Bertrand Russell wrote in 1943:

God’s mercies are curiously selective. Toplady, the author of “Rock of Ages,” moved from one vicarage to another; a week after the move, the vicarage he had formerly occupied burnt down, with great loss to the new vicar. Thereupon Toplady thanked God; but what the new vicar did is not known.

and you also might be interested in …

Last week I talked about how Jonathan Karl’s dishonest journalism on Benghazi briefly made it look like there really was a White House cover-up. It turns out we should have seen that coming. Two years ago, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) had him pegged as a “right-wing mole at ABC News“. He comes out of the same conservative program that gave us Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, Michelle Malkin, Rich Lowry and Laura Ingraham.

Words you never thought you’d read here: Go, Jan Brewer.

This “shocking news” about ObamaCare is good news: The California exchanges are offering healthcare policies for less money than expected.

Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook testified to a Senate committee about the tricks that allow his company to make many billions of dollars and pay very little tax in the U.S. or anywhere else. The business-news blog Quartz has a good summary of the problems in corporate tax law and how Apple abuses them.

Corporations and their political sock puppets often make the case for a “tax holiday” that would allow companies to bring overseas profits to the U.S. at a lower tax rate. It’s worth noting that a lot of this money is “overseas” only in some theoretical tax-law sense. Quartz reports: “Most of the $102 billion Apple is keeping ‘overseas’ is in US banks.”

After a British soldier was hacked to death in London Wednesday, Glenn Greenwald raised this question: Is there any reasonable definition of the word terrorism that includes this act, but not U.S. drone strikes in places like Pakistan or Yemen?

Can it really be the case that when western nations continuously kill Muslim civilians, that’s not “terrorism”, but when Muslims kill western soldiers, that is terrorism? … Once you declare that the “entire globe is a battlefield” (which includes London) and that any “combatant” (defined as broadly as possible) is fair game to be killed – as the US has done – then how can the killing of a solider of a nation engaged in that war, horrific though it is, possibly be “terrorism”?

What could be cooler than a solar airplane?

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

“This War Must End”

May 27, 2013 – 12:33 pm

The issues on which President Obama has most disappointed liberals (and strayed farthest from his 2008 campaign rhetoric) have centered on the War on Terror. Yes, he got our combat troops out of Iraq (slowly) and is winding down the Afghan War (finally). He did renounce torture as an interrogation technique. But rather than reverse Bush administration’s expansion of presidential power and paint it as a one-time over-reaction to an emergency (like the Japanese internment camps of World War II), Obama has largely ratified Bush’s power-grab, and in some cases even grabbed more. As many of us feared at the time, it is hard for a president to cut back his own power, even if that’s what his principles say he should do.

Thursday, in a major speech at the National Defense University at Fort McNair, President Obama sounded a lot more like Candidate Obama in two ways: He took civil liberties issues more seriously than he has in some while, and he talked to us as if we were adults who can think about complex issues. In that second sense, it was his best speech since his campaign speech about race.

To put a few of my own words in Obama’s mouth: War is bad for democracy. A government at war needs to keep secrets, and it needs to favor security over freedom. The bigger the war, the worse for democracy.

Modeling the threat as a “Global War on Terror” amalgamates every little extremist group and home-grown terrorist into one giant enemy that justifies fighting one giant war. Maybe there was some justification for that framing immediately after 9-11, when Al Qaeda had a unified leadership that seemed to be able to direct multiple efforts all over the world. But:

Today, the core of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on the path to defeat.  Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us.  They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston.  They’ve not carried out a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11.

Instead, what we’ve seen is the emergence of various al Qaeda affiliates.  From Yemen to Iraq, from Somalia to North Africa, the threat today is more diffuse … Unrest in the Arab world has also allowed extremists to gain a foothold in countries like Libya and Syria.  But here, too, there are differences from 9/11.  In some cases, we continue to confront state-sponsored networks like Hezbollah that engage in acts of terror to achieve political goals.  Other of these groups are simply collections of local militias or extremists interested in seizing territory.  And while we are vigilant for signs that these groups may pose a transnational threat, most are focused on operating in the countries and regions where they are based.  And that means we’ll face more localized threats like what we saw in Benghazi, or the BP oil facility in Algeria

What we face now, in other words, are a lot of little threats, not one big threat like Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda of 2001.

the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11. [my italics] … if dealt with smartly and proportionally, these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11. … Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless “global war on terror,” but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.

And he recognizes that he can’t promise a perfect defense against those threats.

Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror.  We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society.  But what we can do — what we must do — is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger to us, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all the while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend.

I read this as a rebuke of President Bush’s sweeping statement three days after 9-11: “our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

If that’s our goal, then we are never done and we have never gone far enough. But if we have a more manageable goal (say, to reduce the risk of terrorism to below the level of many other risks we live with), then democracy might have a chance to survive.

The rest of the speech is more specific and tactical.

Drones. Obama defends drone strikes as “effective” (“measured against the history of putting American troops in distant lands among hostile populations”) and “legal” (i.e., in accordance with the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress after 9-11), but admits the discussion can’t end there.

America’s legitimate claim of self-defense cannot be the end of the discussion.  To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power — or risk abusing it.

Obama claims that “clear guidelines, oversight and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance that I signed yesterday” embodies that needed discipline.  (I haven’t studied those guidelines — which he partially outlines — but I doubt I’m going to buy their sufficiency, given how easily Obama or some future president could change them or just ignore them. He later mentions options for moving some oversight outside the executive branch, but doesn’t commit himself.)

He specifically defends the targeting of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen:

when a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens, and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot, his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team.

“Force alone cannot make us safe.” Obama says we need to increase foreign aid, and that we should support transitions to democracy in places like Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya “because the peaceful realization of individual aspirations will serve as a rebuke to violent extremists.”

In this country, we should “work with the Muslim-American community” to “prevent violent extremism inspired by violent jihadists”. Speaking in my own words: The guy who is a committed member of a American Muslim community mosque is not going to blow himself up, any more than a Baptist deacon is going to blow up an abortion clinic. In any religion, the people to worry about are the alienated loners who want to go from loser to hero in one big step.

Civil liberties. Even after the Boston bombings, Obama says, “we do not deport someone or throw somebody in prison in the absence of evidence.” He also says we need “careful constraints on the tools the government uses to protect sensitive information, such as the state secrets doctrine.”

His defense of press freedom, calling for a shield law for journalists and saying “Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs” in some ways misses the point. The targets of the AP investigations are leakers, not journalists. But a journalist’s ability to investigate the government is compromised if sources suspect their communications are going to be intercepted.

Repeal the AUMF. The  AUMF was a very sweeping grant of power that Congress gave President Bush after 9-11. It didn’t have a time limit, but maybe its mission has been accomplished.

I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate.  And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further.  Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue.  But this war, like all wars, must end.  That’s what history advises.  That’s what our democracy demands.

Close Guantanamo. Finally, he discusses closing Guantanamo, which was one of the first things he pledged to do after taking office. In asking Congress to cooperate with him this time, he invokes the judgment of history.

Imagine a future — 10 years from now or 20 years from now — when the United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not part of our country.  Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are being held on a hunger strike.  … Is this who we are?  Is that something our Founders foresaw?  Is that the America we want to leave our children?  Our sense of justice is stronger than that.

And that  may be the best reason to hope that President Obama is serious this time, and that he might really start to disassemble the wartime presidency that Bush built. As he gets closer to leaving office, the temptation to shore up presidential power should wane, and the judgment of history may start to weigh on his mind.

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What Happens to a Scandal With Boring Details?

May 27, 2013 – 9:47 am

The IRS scandal is starting to look like one of those movies with a cool title and a heart-pounding trailer that ends up delivering two hours of excruciating boredom.

The initial headline “IRS Targeted Tea Party Groups” promised conspiracy, duplicity, and suspense. Surely we’d find a bloody trail leading towards the White House. Investigating that trail would lead to a series of exciting confrontations, where ever-higher-level members of the administration would face the choice of flipping on their bosses or falling on their swords. Eventually, the story might culminate in a presidential resignation (like Nixon) or impeachment (like Clinton).

Excitement! Headlines! Ratings!

Instead, the unfolding details sound more like scenes from David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King (also set at the IRS) which explores the spiritual dimensions of boredom.

Nobody has found any trail pointing towards the White House. More and more it looks like bureaucrats broke the rules for the same reason bureaucrats usually break rules — to make their tedious jobs easier. Like cops profiling black teens, IRS agents profiled conservative groups because (i) from their (possibly biased) point of view, that’s who they expected to be cheating, and (ii) it was simpler than thinking up legal ways to generate suspects.

If you want to take viewers deeper than that, you’ll need describe how the regulations define and treat 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations differently from 527 organizations. You’ll have to send cameras to the offices of victimized Tea Party groups and re-enact them filling out unnecessary forms. I’m sure people will be glued to their TVs.

Thursday on Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word, Chris Hayes explained how he looks at this as a TV host:

My feeling is that as it comes out — as the media is forced to cover what is essentially a somewhat boring story of bureaucratic malfeasance or overwhelmedness or bureaucratic incompetencies or just bureaucratic bureaucraticness — it becomes less interesting. I’m genuinely curious the degree to which this can have legs.  … I have hopes that just from a sheer I-have-to-produce-a-television-show-every-day level, is this interesting? Like, it’s not. … I think the actual details of it end up not sustaining the drama. … What was in the headline was dramatic. … The third through 15th paragraphs are not dramatic.

But Nate Silver makes a different prediction. His model recognizes that a scandal “having legs” involves more than just whether the charges are important or true. He judges a scandal’s potential by (i) whether the accusation is easier to describe than the defense; (ii) how well the story fits or contradicts some pre-existing narrative; (iii) whether the opposition can push the scandal without getting tarred by it; and (iv) whether the media has anything shinier to pay attention to.

By that measure, the IRS scandal looks to have a future: Again, it’s got that great initial headline. It fits two standard conservative narratives: that conservatives are persecuted, and that government is out of control. It figures in the duel between liberal and conservative narratives about Obama: Is Obama basically a good guy doing his best in a difficult job, or is he a ruthless Chicago politician? Since Republicans don’t have their own IRS, this can’t backfire on them the way the Clinton adultery scandal did. And finally, 2012 is over and 2016 is a long way off, so political reporters are looking for excitement like bored 8-year-olds at the end of summer vacation.

How can we reconcile these two conflicting predictions? I think they describe two different universes: For the general public, the IRS scandal will strangle on its own tedium, as Hayes predicts. But it will reach its full scandalous potential inside the conservative media bubble, where the exciting details necessary to keep it going will be invented from whole cloth.

The best insight into the conservative media comes from a series of posts by Tod Kelly on the League of Ordinary Gentlemen blog. His theme has been: “America’s conservative media machine is slowly but surely killing America’s conservative party.”

In the late 90s through the early and mid 00s, the GOP found that it could increase both number of voters and voter passion by aligning itself with a media machine that was initially created to build ratings from shock value. … An inherent flaw with this type of model is that while it leads to quick ratings and advertising profits, it can be difficult to sustain. If you spend one week calling the President a liar and an idiot, it’s not going to be long before calling him a lying idiot isn’t really all that shocking. You have to continually push just a little bit more as you go, or risk being irrelevant in the shock-media world.

… Somewhere along the line, however, this model has to break down – partly because you eventually reach a ceiling where the base that believes the ever-increasingly shocking claims is small enough to make the party you’re backing politically irrelevant, and partly because to those that aren’t part of the machine or the base you begin to look increasingly out of touch. Birtherism is a fairly good example of this ceiling being reached, as are the Death Panels and Obama/Hitler youth programs. Unfortunately for the Right, however, once you tie yourself and your success so inexorably to the machine it becomes almost impossible to untangle yourself from it.

Republican politicians initially thought they would define a narrative that their media machine would trumpet to the world. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the rest would serve their governing agenda and help them win elections.

Instead, the conservative media defines a narrative that is shaped to build ratings, and Republican politicians have had to get in step, even if it ultimately means marching off a cliff. The result is a party that can’t put together a governing agenda and can’t win national elections.

But the ratings are good — because media companies don’t need a majority, they just need a small core of dedicated viewers and listeners. (Glenn Beck’s subscribers pay $100 per year; a tiny fraction of the voting public can make him very rich.)

Kelly outlined how the primacy of ratings shaped four bogus stories leading up to the 2012 election.

the story that the President order[ed] his own people be abandoned in Benghazi, the story that the president started Operation Fast & Furious to overturn the second amendment, the story that UN forces will soon be entering the United States to collect the guns of private citizens, and the story that once reelected, the President is set to enact some kind of national Sharia law.

Each of these started as real stories about actions taken by the current administration.  As we will see, however, in each case a pattern begins to emerge:

1. The original story, while absolutely showing a potential miscalculation by the White House, isn’t really damning as initially reported (usually by FOX).

2. The story is then taken by bloggers, talk radio show hosts, and FOX “expert” commentators and reworked to better fit the narrative of Obama as evil usurper.  The facts are changed entirely, but no real journalism is used to gather new information; instead, the media machine relies on self-referencing its own continually shifting commentaries on the original story until a very different and far more nefarious sounding story emerges.

3. The huge whirlwind of the media machine is assumed to itself be indicative of “unreported” news, and thus the original reporting source (again, usually FOX) re-reports the story with the new “facts.”  (Reminding one of that moment in the children’s game Telephone when the original child announces what their starting phrase has morphed into).

4. The media machine and its audience point to the mainstream media’s ignoring of the new, factually dubious story as “proof” that the new story is true.

It’s not hard to apply that model to the IRS story. Tedium will not be a problem for Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity any more than it is for Stephen King. Boredom is never a problem if you let the story generate its own facts.

Republican politicians — even if they know better — will feel that they have no choice other than to pander to the invented story, even if it sounds crazy to most voters. They may even find themselves believing it, until confronted with reality, as Mitt Romney was in the presidential debates.

So even if the trail the White House remains totally bloodless and cold, we may well see impeachment hearings. Beating the drum for impeachment is great for ratings, and what Republican politician is in a position to say no?

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (2)

The Monday Morning Teaser

May 27, 2013 – 8:55 am

Two main articles this week: One covering President Obama’s surprisingly thoughtful speech about the future of the War on Terror, and the other wondering what happens to the IRS scandal now that boring details are starting to emerge. (Prediction: Mainstream media will get bored and move on. Fox News and talk radio will manufacture the exciting details they need to keep their audiences entertained.) The IRS article will be out momentarily, and the War on Terror article a couple hours later.

In the weekly summary: the Oklahoma tornado, the I-5 bridge collapse, a strange coincidence of stories involving atheism, good news for ObamaCare, and a solar airplane.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (1)

This Nasty Phase

May 22, 2013 – 10:13 am

[This is coming out two days late due to a glitch I still don’t understand.]

I believe in humanity. We are an incredible species. We’re still just a child creature, we’re still being nasty to each other. And all children go through those phases. We’re growing up, we’re moving into adolescence now. When we grow up – man, we’re going to be something!

— Gene Roddenberry

This week everybody was talking about scandals and pseudo-scandals

As the week went on, though, the scandals mostly fell apart — particularly after it came out that Republicans had faked the “White House emails” that led to ABC’s big scoop.

I summarize the current state of the Benghazi, IRS, and AP stories — and explain why Republicans feel compelled to manufacture these pseudo-scandals —  in Blow Smoke, Yell Fire.

Oh, and I forgot to cover UmbrellaGate.

and Angelina Jolie

If you’d told me last week that Angelina Jolie’s breasts would be front-page news, I’d have pictured a very different scenario. But Tuesday she announced in the New York Times that she had chosen to have a preventive double mastectomy, replacing both of her (apparently healthy) breasts with implants to reduce her risk of breast cancer.

Jolie’s situation is unusual: Her mother died of ovarian cancer at 56, and genetic tests showed a defective BRCA1 gene that is associated with high risk of both breast cancer and ovarian cancer. Still, her decision was a Rorschach test that produced strong reactions of all types, especially among women. (A good collection of links is here.)

Many were strongly supportive and appreciated the fact that Jolie had put a public face on a difficult issue. I was reminded of Magic Johnson’s announcement in 1991 that he had HIV. It’s easy to either ignore a medical problem or demonize the people who have it, until it hits someone you know. Celebrities play the role of someone-you-know for an entire society.

Some people reacted negatively. For people who are generally suspicious of the medical establishment, Jolie’s story is a Minority-Report-style nightmare, where drastic actions are taken based on predictions whose accuracy is unknowable. M.D. Daniela Drake describes her own experience.

Now I know why patients are so mad at us. This is supposed to be patient-centered care. But it feels more like system-centered care: the medical equivalent of a car wash. I’m told incomplete and inaccurate information to shuttle me toward surgery; and I’m not being listened to.

I came to discuss nutrition, exercise and close follow-up.

I’m told to get my breasts removed—the sooner the better.

The other issue this cast a light on is gene patents: Even if you think you might be in Jolie’s situation, getting the genetic test will probably cost about $3000, and insurance often doesn’t cover it. Why is it so expensive? Because Myriad Genetics “owns” the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes. It doesn’t just own the testing procedure; it has a patent on the genes themselves. Even a company that came up with a different test couldn’t market it. If that seems weird, that’s probably because it is weird. The Supreme Court is supposed to hear a case about that soon, though it’s hard to imagine the Roberts Court ruling against any form of property.

[Full disclosure: My wife is a breast cancer survivor whose mother died of breast cancer. She recently had the same genetic test as Jolie, which our insurance covered. If it had come out badly — it didn’t — she would have faced a similar choice.]

and the new Star Trek movie

OK, maybe my definition of “everybody” is skewed. Still, lots of people who ordinarily write about other things were writing about Into Darkness, the second step in the J. J. Abrams reboot of the Trek movie franchise. I haven’t seen it yet, but the reactions from people who have center on two themes:

It’s interesting that the serious-fan discontent is coalescing around Abrams’ second film, but I think I know why: For the first, fans were just glad the reboot was happening. They/we wanted the original characters back, but the original actors were too old to carry on. Plus, the reboot’s plot necessarily was about how to get the band back together without trapping them in a narrative universe where all possible suspense is killed by what we already know about the Federation’s future. Mission accomplished well enough to justify a new series of movies. Fine.

But the second movie has to answer the question: What are you going to do with the freedom the new timeline grants? All the challenges faced in the old timeline — Klingons, Romulans, Q, the Borg, the Ferengi, etc. — are still out there somewhere. That invites a long background meditation on fate: What has to turn out the way it did the first time, and what could change? Or we could forget all that and have a lot of starship chase scenes and shoot-outs with phasers.

Which raises the question: What is Star Trek about, really? Matt Yglesias (who usually doesn’t write about this kind of thing) sees the heart of the franchise in the optimistic liberal values of the mid-20th century: envisioning a future where humanity gets past its tribal struggles, overcomes scarcity, and devotes its most powerful starship to seeking knowledge and helping other species rather than aggrandizing its wealth and power. Star Trek celebrates the kind of courage you need to hang in an uncertain situation and not shoot, while waiting for a peaceful solution to emerge.

Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait sums up:

At its best [Star Trek] was a deeply thoughtful mythology about ourselves and our conflicts, an allegory of our modern problems and flaws of humanity—war, greed, bigotry, narcissism—and how we overcome them, told as science fiction. That’s why we’re still telling these stories nearly 50 years later.

This movie wasn’t any of that.

NYT’s A. O. Scott seems to agree:

it’s hard to emerge from “Into Darkness” without a feeling of disappointment, even betrayal. Maybe it is too late to lament the militarization of “Star Trek,” but in his pursuit of blockbuster currency, Mr. Abrams has sacrificed a lot of its idiosyncrasy and, worse, the large-spirited humanism that sustained it.

Atlantic’s Christopher Orr sees the surrender of Star Trek’s “deliberative, technology-obsessed, and science fictive” values to “visceral, imbued with mysticism, and space operatic” Star Wars values. (Abrams is the current custodian of both movie franchises.)

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir recalls Abrams complaining that previous Star Treks were “too philosophical” and accounts for Into Darkness like this:

the Abrams “Star Trek” movies feel as if they didn’t just depict an alternate universe but were created in one – a universe in which the original “Star Trek” was an action-adventure Marvel Comics title rather than a geeky, Enlightenment-saturated 1960s TV series. … There’s absolutely nothing wrong with “Star Trek Into Darkness” – once you understand it as a generic comic-book-style summer flick faintly inspired by some half-forgotten boomer culture thing.

He fantasizes “that those in charge of the ‘Star Trek’ universe could have entrusted its rebirth to someone who actually liked it.”

But hey, Into Darkness will probably make money, and that’s what counts. I think the Ferengi have a rule about that.

and you also might be interested in …

If Europe is proving that austerity economics doesn’t work, Japan is an interesting test case in the opposite direction. The Abe government has decided to stimulate its way out of the country’s decades-long funk, debt be damned.

Japan’s national debt is approaching 245% of GDP, more than double the U.S. ratio and considerably higher than even the famous bad example of Greece. The government has announced its intention to create inflation; it’s goal is 2% per year, reversing the current deflation. To do that it is prepared to double the money supply.

If the deficit hawks know anything about how the world works, Japan should crash and burn. Conversely, if it doesn’t, the Paul Ryans know nothing about how the world works.

Filibuster reform is being discussed again, as Harry Reid is admitting privately that he made a mistake in not pushing it harder at the beginning of this Congress.

It isn’t just the unprecedented number of filibusters that is causing this, but the broader ambitions behind them. In the past, both parties have at times filibustered nominees that they had some personal objection to: the nominee was too extreme, too acerbic, or had some scandal in his or her past.

During the Obama years, though, Republicans have been using the filibuster as part of a global strategy to monkey-wrench parts of the government they don’t like. No one has ever done that before.

For example, Republicans have blocked Richard Cordray’s nomination as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — not because they have uncovered something questionable about him, but because they don’t think the CFPB should exist. As a post on Senator Shelby’s web site put it in 2011: “44 Republican U.S. Senators today sent a letter to President Obama stating that they will not confirm any nominee, regardless of party affiliation, to be the Director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) absent structural changes”. The stalemate has continued ever since.

Now the monkey-wrenching threatens to shut down the National Labor Relations Board. Legally, the NLRB can’t function without a quorum, and unless some of Obama’s nominees are confirmed it won’t have one when the next member’s term expires in August. So come August, it will be open season on workers’ rights, because the federal government will be out of the picture. You don’t have to change the law if you can shut down the enforcement agency.

Nurses explain the healthcare law in 90 seconds.

Four political scientists did an interesting study about the causes of political polarization. Their research survey describes the polarization process like this:

People are often unaware of their own ignorance (Kruger & Dunning, 1999), they seek out information that supports their current preferences (Nickerson, 1998), they process new information in biased ways that strengthen their current preferences (Lord, Ross & Lepper, 1979), they affiliate with other people having similar preferences (Lazarsfeld & Merton, 1954), and they assume that others’ views are as extreme as their own (Van Boven, Judd, & Sherman, 2012).

Then they did a series of experiments and found that people’s certainty about policy proposals goes up after they’re asked to give reasons why they hold their position, but goes down after they’re asked to explain how the underlying proposals are supposed to work.

Across three studies we show that people have unjustified confidence in their mechanistic understanding of policies. Attempting to generate a mechanistic explanation undermines this illusion of understanding and leads to more moderate positions.

And they suggest:

that political debate might be more productive if partisans first engage in substantive and mechanistic discussion of policies before engaging in the more customary discussion of preferences and positions.

This matches my experience during 29 years of marriage: We’re more likely to come to consensus on where to take a vacation if we first imagine what we would do in a variety of places, and only later express preferences.

To follow up on last week’s discussion of Syria, I found this map at Wikipedia. Red is Assad/Alawite/Shia controlled. Green is rebel/Sunni. Beige is Kurdish.

Since we’re already talking Star Trek, here’s a polarizing graphic:

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (0)

Blow Smoke, Yell Fire

May 20, 2013 – 12:07 pm

For a few days, it looked like the Obama administration might actually be in trouble. A week ago Friday, ABC’s Jonathan Karl released excerpts of White House emails that appeared to show the White House engineering a cover-up of the true nature of the Benghazi attack, and at the very least being way more involved in producing the Susan Rice talking points than the administration had claimed.

Across the country, Democrats felt that old sinking feeling. It was Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress all over again. After years of beating back outrageous Republican attempts to manufacture a scandal out of nothing — Bill Ayers, the birth certificate, death panels, Obama’s “real” father, Solyndra, Fast and Furious, and on and on and on (just like Vince Foster, Whitewater, Travelgate, and Clinton’s illegitimate black son the last time a Democrat was president) — the long fishing expedition finally had an actual fish.

And even if the rest of it was a typical fisherman’s exaggeration, there would always be that one fish to point to. The conspiracy-theorist’s eternal “What are they hiding?” had turned into the much more reasonable “What else are they hiding?”

Jonathan Chait wrote:

Karl’s report produced among mainstream and liberal reporters a sense of embarrassment at having dismissed the story as a weird partisan obsession.

Worst of all, Obama’s defenders had to wonder the same thing. What blue dresses were hanging in some closet, waiting to be found? If you spoke up, would you eventually look as foolish as all the people who insisted that Bill Clinton “did not have sex with that woman”?

Then came the announcement of an IRS scandal, and an AP scandal, and the sky seemed to falling. So much smoke! There must be a fire under there somewhere.

Then the counter-scandal broke: ABC had been tricked. The “emails” they released had been doctored by Republicans to make the administration look bad. When you read the actual emails, you saw the State Department and the CIA jockeying for advantage, with the White House playing more-or-less the hands-off role it originally claimed.

So there’s still no fish. It’s still “a weird partisan obsession”. It’s still “What are they hiding?” not “What else are they hiding?”

Likewise, as details of the IRS and AP affairs come out, each is disturbing in its own way, but the IRS story seems contained to one IRS office with no White House involvement, and the “scandal” in the AP story is the legal bipartisan policy the administration was faithfully carrying out.

The white-whale hunt for an impeachable offense will no doubt continue, but this pseudo-scandals are not it.

Let’s review where we are:

Benghazi. The four American deaths are a combination of (i) being a diplomat in an anarchic post-civil-war environment is dangerous; and (ii) some screw-ups from which lessons should be learned.  The report of the Accountability Review Board has 24 recommendations. Maybe Congress should be talking about them rather than faking emails and defrauding reporters.

The only intentional wrong-doing anybody has uncovered so far is the forging of the emails and Jonathan Karl’s lie that he had “obtained” the emails when actually Republican staffers had just told him about them. Karl, BTW, is digging in deeper and deeper, which really ought to end his career. He has expressed “regret” about quoting the emails incorrectly, and that he “should have been clearer about the attribution”. But his main regret is that this has “become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands.”

No, the story totally does not stand, unless you think the story is that the talking points went through 12 iterations, as talking points probably always do. Karl’s scoop was a smoking gun about White House dishonesty. That scoop was false, and an honest reporter would admit that.

Remember: When Dan Rather failed to properly authenticate documents that made President Bush look bad, people got fired and Rather ultimately had to leave CBS. Smearing a Republican president is a serious matter.

The IRS. The background here is that organizations that educate the public about political issues can receive tax-exempt contributions and don’t have to reveal their donors, while organizations that try to elect specific candidates can’t and do. It’s a fuzzy boundary frequently abused: A group might educate the public about how horrible Policy X is, and then also educate the public about how Yellow Party candidate Smith supports Policy X and the Orange Party candidate Jones opposes it. But as long as they don’t actually say “Vote for Jones”, they might maintain their tax-exempt status.

Citizens United opened floodgates of money for such organizations and a lot of new ones were established. All their applications for tax-exempt status went through one office in Cincinnati. Tuesday, the IRS inspector general issued a report “Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review“. Conservative groups, particularly Tea Party groups, were scrutinized more closely.

Everybody agrees that was wrong. The question is why it happened. If the idea was hatched in the White House as a way to hobble its enemies, then it’s a genuine Watergate-level scandal. But there’s not a shred of evidence for that. The practice apparently started with one guy, and so far nobody has asked him why. Atlantic reports:

The crux of the investigation by Congress and the administration will be why that employee started to flag those applications — and why, as the inspector general notes, it soon became an office-wide practice. Was it an attempt to streamline the workflow? Or was it politically motivated behavior meant to target Tea Party groups? So far, it appears to be the former;

A number of side issues crop up in this story:

The damage done is exaggerated. The typical result was that a flagged group needed to fill out some extra forms and provide some additional information. Approval of tax-exempt status took longer than it otherwise might have. Once an application’s review started, there’s no evidence that politics played a role in the ultimate decision.

Tarring ObamaCare. Republicans have been using this issue as a way to attack ObamaCare, because the IRS has a role in it. The worst of these arguments revive the “death panels” hoax, with the added wrinkle that your surgery might be denied because you’re conservative. But in reality, the IRS deals only with the tax issues that arise in ObamaCare: Are you in the income bracket that allows you to claim a health-insurance subsidy, or do you owe the individual-mandate penalty? There’s no mechanism for the IRS to affect treatment decisions, no matter how politically corrupt it might get.

The laws about political activity and tax-exempt organizations are screwed up. Jeffrey Toobin claims that the real scandal is what’s legal, and the way big-money organizations game the system.

Anecdotal reports of audits prove nothing. Now any conservative who gets audited can claim political persecution, in the same way that any white guy who applies for a job and doesn’t get it can claim to be a victim of affirmative action. The WSJ’s Kimberley Strassel claims victim status for the big Romney donor Frank VanderSloot based on … well, nothing really.

Was the White House involved in the IRS’s targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.

How can you argue with that? Peggy Noonan then picks up the ball and runs further, claiming victimhood for Billy Graham and a couple other people, and then concluding:

It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party’s foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently.

It’s true: If you imagine a systemic set of violations, then you need a systemic conspiracy to account for it. But again, it would be nice to have just a shred of evidence before going there.

Nate Silver brings some sanity to the topic.

The fact that Ms. Noonan has identified four conservatives from that group of thousands provides no evidence at all toward her hypothesis. Nor would it tell us very much if dozens or even hundreds of conservative activists disclosed that they had been audited. This is exactly what you would expect in a country where there are 1.5 million audits every year.

AP. I’ll let AP itself make the charge:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news. …

The government would not say why it sought the records. Officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.

Like the IRS story, this is bad. But once again the badness is what is legal: During the Bush administration, Congress changed the law to give the government the power to do this kind of stuff. It ought to be unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court has managed to either excuse it or dodge cases where it might come up — and the worst justices on this issue are the conservative ones like Thomas and Scalia.

Just like the overall policy, the AP case has a bipartisan origin:

The two leak inquiries were started after Republicans in Congress accused the Obama administration of orchestrating news stories intended to demonstrate the president’s toughness on terrorism and improve his chance for reelection. The Republicans sought a special prosecutor, but Holder instead named two veteran prosecutors to handle the inquiries.

Jonathan Chait sums up:

The AP story is a more audacious step in a long government campaign, spanning two administrations, to ruthlessly prosecute leaks about the fight against Jihadi terrorism. In every single step of this fight before this one, Republicans occupied the far-right flank. They voted down shield laws; they demanded more vigorous prosecution of leakers than Obama was carrying out.

So absolutely, let’s have a new shield law and let’s get some people on the Supreme Court who take the First Amendment seriously. Let’s reverse the get-the-whistleblower policy that has stood since 9-11. But this is not a political scandal, it’s Obama carrying out a bipartisan policy.

Why? Finally, we need to examine why the Republicans are doing this. Why is everything that goes wrong force-fit into a now-we-can-impeach-Obama frame?

Heritage Action, a PAC associated with the conservative Heritage Foundation, explained in a letter to John Boehner and Eric Cantor:

it would be imprudent to do anything that shifts the focus from the Obama administration to the ideological differences within the House Republican Conference. To that end, we urge you to avoid bringing any legislation to the House floor that could expose or highlight major schisms within the conference.

In other words: Don’t try to legislate, because Republicans can’t agree on any legislative agenda. The only thing they can agree on is that they hate Obama. So stick with that. Investigate everything. Make mountains out of molehills if you have to. Just don’t try to do anything constructive, because that will divide the party.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (2)

The Monday Morning Teaser

May 20, 2013 – 7:43 am

This week’s main article “Blow Smoke, Yell Fire” will describe the fizzling of the latest Republican attempts to find or manufacture a scandal they can use to impeach Obama. With the base getting ever-more-radically conservative and the party establishment beginning to realize how suicidal that is, impeaching Obama is the only agenda they can agree on. Now they just need some high crimes and misdemeanors.

In addition to the wannabee scandals, everybody was talking about Angela Jolie’s breasts — everybody except the people who always talk about celebrity breasts. They were strangely silent. Lots of people (in my world, at least) were also talking about the true meaning of Star Trek and whether this new movie gets it or not.

Maybe we should have been talking about filibuster reform, the bold economic experiment happening in Japan, and some fascinating research about how to keep political discussions from polarizing.

I’m moving slowly this morning, so stuff may appear a little later than usual. The main article somewhere between 10 and noon, New Hampshire time, and the weekly summary not long after.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

Magical Deliverance

May 13, 2013 – 12:57 pm

 The statement that God won’t allow us to ruin our planet sweeps aside ethics, responsibilities, consequences, duties, even awareness. It comforts us with the anodyne assumption that—no matter what we do—some undefined presence will, through some undefined measure, make things right, clean up our mess. That is seeking magical deliverance from our troubles, not divine guidance through our troubles. So is God really here just to tidy up after our sins and follies, to immunize us from their consequence?

— Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, 5-8-2013

This week everybody was talking about the Cleveland captives

Last Monday, Amanda Berry, Georgina “Gina” DeJesus, and Michelle Knight were rescued from their 9-to-11-year captivity after Berry escaped and contacted police. The story has been all over the news ever since (to the undoubted consternation of Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, who saw his mega-hyped Benghazi hearings upstaged).

Perversely, when a story gets this much coverage it’s hard to keep track of the facts. Coverage focuses on whatever new detail has just come out, seldom taking a step back to put it all in context for the non-obsessed viewer. The 24-hour news channels feel that they have to keep covering the story or lose viewers, so rather than endlessly repeat the few known facts, they fill the air with speculation. As a result, it’s easy to lose what-actually-happened inside the cloud of what-at-some-point-looked-like-it-might-have-happened.

I rely on Wikipedia to sort it out. We’re not used to thinking of “encyclopedia” and “current events” at the same time, but Wikipedia ends up doing exactly what you need: telling the whole story from the beginning, while constantly updating it with the latest details.

A sub-genre of the Cleveland-kidnapping articles are personal reflections about why stories of captivity and sex-slavery are so arresting, both in real life and in fiction. Slate’s Emily Bazelon expresses just how disempowering this dark fascination can be.

These ordeals are our gothic horror stories, our Bluebeards come to life. I fight my own obsession with them because it fills me with morbid fear and not much else. … [The Silence of the Lambs] terrified me so much that I turned down a summer job I’d wanted as a caretaker on a stretch of the Appalachian Trail. Suddenly I couldn’t handle the idea of being alone and exposed.

What particularly disturbs Bazelon is the thought of being tamed, of reaching the point where you cooperate with your captor. She recommends the novel Room by Emma Donoghue. Being older and male, I flash back to the related horror of John Fowles’ The Collector, where insane fantasies gradually come to seem like plans any guy might carry out if he had the opportunity.

and whether to intervene in Syria

The situation in Syria just keeps getting worse. NATO commander Admiral James Stavridis estimates the number of killed around 100,000, with 1.4 million refugees leaving Syria and another million displaced within the country. That’s from an original population around 22.5 million (just slightly less than Iraq).

What started out as a revolution against a secular dictator has little by little turned into a religious war. The Assad government has never been particularly devout, but the Assad family is from the Alawite branch of Shia, which lives mainly in the coastal areas north of Lebanon. Alawites are 12% of a majority-Sunni country that also has a sizable Christian minority (13%). Alawites dominate Assad’s secret police, and the revolution’s initial support came largely from the inland Sunni areas.

Worse, the war is starting to look like Al Qaeda vs. Hezbollah, as the roles of the primary Sunni and Shia terrorist groups keep growing. The Guardian reports that “entire units [of the rebel Free Syrian Army] have gone over to [Al Qaeda-linked] Jabhat al-Nusra”.

“Fighters are heading to al-Nusra because of its Islamic doctrine, sincerity, good funding and advanced weapons,” said Abu Islam of the FSA’s al-Tawhid brigade in Aleppo. “My colleague who was fighting with the FSA’s Ahrar Suriya asked me: ‘I’m fighting with Ahrar Suriya brigade, but I want to know if I get killed in a battle, am I going to be considered as a martyr or not?’ It did not take him long to quit FSA and join al-Nusra. He asked for a sniper rifle and got one immediately.”

Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s long-rumored involvement in the defense of the Assad regime is getting more explicit. Which is why Admiral Stavridis asks: “Who do you arm? And what happens to those weapons afterward?”

As reports increase that Assad is either using or planning to use chemical weapons, the pressure for the United States to intervene is growing. But Russia is Assad’s main backer, and China also blocks a UN resolution that an anti-Assad international coalition might gather around. So at best this would be another coalition-of-the-willing, not a true international police action.

I don’t pretend to know how things should play out, but I keep thinking of what General Petraeus said about Iraq in 2003: “Tell me how this ends.” American hawks have a bizarre tendency to think of war as a stabilizing force, when history shows the exact opposite. I’m plenty convinced that the situation in Syria is bad; what I’m waiting to hear is how American intervention makes it better.

Here’s Admiral Stavridis’ assessment:

We do have a fairly recent situation that’s somewhat similar to Syria, and that does not fill me with optimism: The Balkans in the 1990s. If you look at Yugoslavia — a nation that was constructed of different ethnic and religious groups. Tito departs the scene, and the region goes through a 10-year process throughout the 1990s. Several million are pushed across borders, requiring the intervention of tens of thousands of Western and Russian troops to bring the situation under control. I think that might be where Syria is headed.

but I wrote about Benghazi

I’ve been ignoring Benghazi, because as best I can tell there’s no there there. Like most things that turn out badly, you can look back and find bad planning, you can wish it had played out differently, and you can find examples of people spinning in hope that they won’t get blamed. But it has turned into yet another episode in the GOP’s Captain Ahab quest for The Scandal That Brings Down Obama. Just like Solyndra and Fast&Furious before it, Benghazi can’t carry that weight.

In Benghazi Hearings: Congress as Reality TV, I compare Republicans’ handling of Benghazi with Democrats’ treatment of 9-11, where there were plenty of conspiracy theories they could have winked at, but didn’t. I speculate about why: Democrats didn’t want to pander to a minority, because it takes a majority to win elections. But Republicans calculate differently, because their party has been taken over by the Conservative Entertainment Complex. A third of the country is a losing voter-block, but it makes one hell of an audience.

and you also might be interested in …

The death total in the collapse factory complex at Bangladesh has reached 1127 as the search for survivors ends. What I said last week here — that we need to act politically as citizens and not just individually as consumers — gets expanded and elaborated in an article I wrote for UU World.

Wednesday, Senator Whitehouse did something more liberals should do: He used religious rhetoric to denounce religion-based global-warming denial.

So why then, when we ignore His plain natural laws, when we ignore the obvious conclusions to be drawn by our God-given intellect and reason, why then would God, the tidy-up God, drop in and spare us?  Why would He allow an innocent child to burn its hand when it touches the hot stove, but protect us from this lesson?  Why would He allow a badly engineered bridge or building to fall, killing innocent people, but protect us from this mistake? Why would He allow cholera to kill in epidemics, until we figure out that the well water is contaminated?  The Earth’s natural laws and our capacity to divine them are God’s great gift to us, allowing us to learn, and build great things, and cure disease.  But God’s gift to us of a planet with natural laws and natural order has, as an integral part of that gift, consequences.

And he closed by pointing out where the real opposition to protecting the planet comes from:

We need to face up to the fact that there is only one leg on which climate denial stands: money.  The polluters give and spend money to create false doubt.  The polluters give and spend money to buy political influence.  The polluters give and spend money to keep polluting.  That’s it.  That’s it.  Not truth, not science, not economics, not safety, not policy, and certainly not religion, nor morality.  Nothing supports climate denial.  Nothing except money.

Meanwhile in the Halls of Mammon, the Wall Street Journal published Harrison Schmitt and William Happer’s “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide“. Unprecedented-in-human-history levels of atmospheric CO2, they tell us, “will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.”

So who are these guys? Botanists? Climate scientists? Specialists in global agriculture? No. One is a geologist and the other a physicist, and neither has done research in any field relevant to the claims they’re making. But the WSJ sees fit not to mention their most illuminating credentials: Both are connected to think tanks that get funding from the oil industry.

Media Matters debunks their article in detail, including this graphic from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Conservatives hate it when anyone implies they’re racists, but then they go and do stuff like this: The Heritage Foundation hired a new Ph.D. with a racist thesis, ignored his posting on white nationalist web sites, and made him a co-author on their study denouncing immigration reform.

Kevin Drum (extensively quoting Jonathan Bernstein — a political scientist not to be confused with economist Jared Bernstein) notes the “hack gap” between liberal and conservative economists. There are plenty of bogus correlation-implies-causation points liberals could be making that are comparable to the discredited Reinhart/Rogoff debt-kills-growth argument. For example: Medical costs have been slowing since ObamaCare was passed.

You don’t read stories like “Economist: ObamaCare Already Cutting Health Costs” in the newspaper, though, because liberal economists don’t bend that way. (The recession is the biggest reason for slowing healthcare inflation, and beyond that something is going on that we don’t understand yet.) But conservative economists do. Hence the apparent respectability of austerity economics despite the complete lack of evidence that it has anything to do with reality.

Speaking of austerity, the Washington Post showed its conservative economic bias in an article last Monday. The article reports (correctly) that revenue is up and spending is down, so the government won’t hit its debt limit until October — months later than originally predicted.

That might seem like good news, but it is unraveling Republican plans to force a budget deal before Congress takes its August break.

Say what? A smaller deficit is bad because it’s “unraveling Republican plans”?

If you’re up for some intellectual heavy lifting, Corey Robin’s article in The Nation about the relationship between Nietzsche and the Austrian school of free-market economists (Hayek, Von Mises) is very illuminating.

I had never thought much about whether the economic concept of “value” is connected to the moral concept of “values”, or what the will-to-power has to do with economic power. But the connections are fascinating.

Christian parents of 6th-graders who attend a public school in Arkansas are canceling the official class graduation ceremony (and holding an unofficial one in a church) because they’ve been informed that they can’t do what they did last year: open and close the ceremony with prayer.

In a classic example of privileged distress, the parents have managed to turn things around so that they are the persecuted ones. They’re not being exclusive; they’ve invited everyone to their Christian graduation ceremony. Says one parent: “We’re not trying to be pushy or ugly to anybody, we just want them to know there is a God who loves them. … We just want to take a stand for God because we felt like our rights were taken away.”

To everyone else, it’s obvious that the “right … taken away” from the Arkansas Christian parents is actually a special privilege that no other religious group in America has ever had: the option to insert their religious messages into government-sponsored programs. (I’m sure a lot of Buddhists and atheists also have some uplifting thought that they “just want people to know” and would like the government to provide a platform for.) American Christians are privileged, not persecuted; but their privileges are shrinking, so it feels like persecution to them.

I started with one sermon, so I’ll end with another one: Astronauts explain “the Overview Effect“, the way your point of view changes after you’ve seen the Big Blue Ball from space.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (0)

Benghazi Hearings: Congress as Reality TV

May 13, 2013 – 11:43 am

I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to write about Benghazi without becoming part of the problem. So much nonsense has been spouted that simply saying “Benghazi” in certain circles is code for “impeach President Obama“. And that puts the rest of us in the don’t-think-about-an-elephant zone, where even explaining why something is nonsense reinforces it.

This week it got worse. Wednesday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held new hearings on Benghazi, showcasing what Chairman Darrell Issa referred to as “whistleblowers” who “revealed new information that undermines the Obama Administration’s assertion that there are no more questions left to answer about Benghazi.” (When has there ever been a subject with “no more questions left to answer”? If that’s the goal, hearings will continue forever.)

In anticipation of those hearings, apparently without knowing exactly what the witnesses would say, Mike Huckabee predicted on his Fox News show: “I believe that before it’s all over, this president will not fill out his full term.” (Senator Inhofe at least waited for the hearings to happen before he predicted impeachment.) Repeating a talking point I heard elsewhere on Fox and saw in comments all over the internet, Huckabee claimed Benghazi was “more serious” than Watergate “because four Americans did in fact die” — a statement that could only make sense if President Obama had been part of a plot to kill them. (As Bob Cesca has pointed out, American embassies and consulates were attacked 13 times during the Bush administration, with far a death total far beyond four. You probably don’t remember any of those incidents.)

If you listened to such predictions at length — and they were made 24/7 on Fox and the rest of the conservative media — you were primed to jump straight from “new Benghazi revelations” to “high crimes and misdemeanors”.

Then we get to Wednesday. Three State Department insiders did testify, and they did provide new information that made the Obama administration look bad. However, none of the new information is on the scale that the hype predicted, and much of it contradicted conspiracy theories popular on the Right. But their testimony did give an excuse for headlines about “new Benghazi revelations” that then fueled even more discussion of some of the same conspiracy theories that the testimony directly contradicted.

Let’s see if we can sort this out. Before listening to anybody’s commentary, I recommend looking at the Wikipedia article on the attack as a whole. Seeing the basic outline of what-happened-when will immunize you to a lot of the obvious nonsense being thrown around.

Like any event that turns out badly, Benghazi leaves three avenues for criticism: lack of preparation and precautions before the fact, debatable decisions made during the event, and inaccurate statements made after the event. (A comparison to the “other” 9-11 is useful: The government ignored warnings that attacks were imminent; in hindsight, you can imagine pulling first-responders out of the second tower as soon as the first one collapsed; and clean-up crews were given bad information about the toxicity of the debris.)

At Benghazi, you can argue that the State Department sent people into too dangerous a situation with too little protection. You can blame the administration for the deployment and Congress for not appropriating enough for security.

You can also wish that some kind of rescue force could have been sent to save the four American lives. That’s the gist of the most quoted testimony Wednesday: Gregory Hicks talked very emotionally about four special forces soldiers who wanted to get from Tripoli to Benghazi, but couldn’t. When you look at actual timelines, though, the transport plane they failed to get onto arrived at Benghazi after the four victims were already dead. Hicks also wished an F-16 could have flown over Benghazi as a show of force that might have discouraged the second attack. But the Pentagon has made it clear that the nearest planes, based in Italy, are not on 24-hour alert and actually could not have been scrambled (together with the needed in-air refueling tanker) in time.

And finally, you can criticize what the administration said about the attacks afterward. This is probably the most legitimate criticism, but it’s also the least consequential, because at that point the attack had already happened and the four Americans were already dead. You can accuse the administration of making misleading statements — like no administration ever did that before — but nothing in the aftermath is remotely criminal or actionable. (It’s even arguable that what we see in the changing talking points is an ordinary bureaucratic turf fight, unrelated to the November election.)

Only a charlatan can say that Benghazi is “worse than Watergate” and then focus on Susan Rice’s performance on the Sunday talk shows. Nobody died because of what Rice said on “Meet the Press”.

To me, a story that is every bit as important as as Benghazi itself is: What has happened to our national conversation that has caused us to discuss Benghazi in such an outrageous way? It’s tempting to say, “Oh, that’s just politics.” But it really isn’t, or at least it didn’t used to be. Try to imagine the Democrats in Congress treating 9-11 this way: “It’s far worse than Watergate; thousands of Americans are dead.”

There was certainly no lack of 9-11 conspiracy theories that Democrats could have winked and nodded at. Plenty of crazies put up web pages claiming that 9-11 was an inside job. One poll claimed that a third of the country believed the Bush administration had at least some role in letting the attacks happen.

Democrats in Congress could have pandered to that view. The model Republicans have used with Benghazi (and Solyndra and Fast & Furious, both of which have fizzled as scandals, despite being “worse than Watergate” for a time) would have worked just as well: Don’t endorse any specific theory with checkable details, but announce over-the-top general judgments that only the most extreme conspiracy theories could justify. Lump all the theories under one vague label (Benghazi!) and leave your rhetoric slippery, so that you can encourage all the nutcases without pinning yourself down. Turn every new detail into a promise that more revelations are coming.

The Democratic leadership never went down that road. 9-11 was a national tragedy, not a political football. There were hearings and investigations, and some people in both parties asked tough questions, but that’s where the comparison ends. Getting tagged as a Truther was the kiss-of-death in the Democratic establishment. (Ask Van Jones.)

But the Republican leadership has gone down that road with Benghazi. And the result is that lots of the Republican rank-and-file will tell you that Obama should be impeached for Benghazi!, even though they can’t quite say what Benghazi! means, beyond “four Americans are dead”. On the Reality-Based Community blog, Andrew Sabl spelled it out:

At this point in the career of a scandal, or attempted scandal, there are often disagreements over whether the charges are true. But I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a scandal where I don’t even know what they are.

Sabl described what specific charges would look like and challenged his readers to come up with some. None did.

Steve Benen made a similar point:

Eight months after the attack itself, I know Republicans think there’s been a cover-up, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what it is they think has been covered up. For all the talk of a political “scandal,” no one seems capable of pointing to anything specific that’s scandalous. For all the conspiracy theories, there’s no underlying conspiracy to be found.

And so Wednesday, Chairman Issa advertised “whistleblowers”. But he never said what exactly they blew the whistle on.

Again, compare to Democrats during the Bush administration. Lots of liberals called for Bush’s impeachment, but they offered specific grounds: breaking the laws against torture, or fabricating evidence to invade Iraq. You could argue with their reasoning or their evidence, but you knew what it was. Democrats in Congress could have made hard-to-pin-down code words out of Abu Ghraib or Katrina, and linked them (deniably) to wild conspiracy theories, but they didn’t.

It’s tempting to stop there, with the implication that Democrats in Congress have more honesty or civic virtue than Republicans. But I think there’s a deeper level to examine. Democrats didn’t pander to the third of the country that was open to a 9-11 conspiracy theories because it was only a third of the country. You can’t win elections with 33% of the vote.

Republicans are clearly not thinking that way. As I listen to Republican politicians talk about Benghazi, they seem to be making no effort at all to speak to the majority of Americans or to offer evidence that might convince a swing voter. They are talking to their base, which is probably about a third of the country.

What’s going on? I think David Frum had it right: “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.” The point of Benghazi! isn’t to deliver a majority of votes for the next Mitt Romney. The point is to get ratings for Fox and subscribers for Glenn Beck. The Conservative Entertainment Complex has taken control of the Republican Party and is managing the Party for its own purposes. A third of the country? It may not win many elections, but it’s a fabulous audience for an entertainer.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

The Monday Morning Teaser

May 13, 2013 – 8:54 am

The featured article this week is about Benghazi, which I’ve been reluctant to discuss because it has been so blown out of proportion that anything you say about it just makes it worse. But then the circular logic of conspiracy theories says that you’re participating in the cover-up. So I’ll talk about Benghazi, but I’ll call attention to the way the story is being driven by the conservative entertainment complex’s search for ratings and subscribers.

The weekly summary mentions what everyone has been talking about this week: the Cleveland abductions and whether the U.S. should intervene in Syria. You should also read Senator Whitehouse’s sermon denouncing global-warming denial as bad religion, and watch a 20-minute video of astronauts talking about “the Overview Effect” — how seeing the Earth from space changes your point of view.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)