Hunger Games: Who’s Right About Food Stamps?

Beyond the anecdotes about lazy surfers and hungry kids, where do the savings really come from?

Thursday, the House passed a bill to spend $39 billion less on Food Stamps (than current law would spend) over the next ten years. All Democrats and 15 Republicans voted against it, but it passed 217-210. President Obama has pledged to veto it, but before it reaches his desk it still has to be reconciled with the Senate farm bill, which cuts Food Stamps by $4 billion.

Image vs. fact. The public debate around Food Stamp cuts has consisted almost entirely of imagery. Fox News’ hour-long special “The Great Food Stamps Binge” anointed lobster-buying surfer-musician Jason Greenslate “the new face of Food Stamps”, while MSNBC focused on kids and military families. Ezra Klein interviewed author and ex-sergeant Kayla Williams about growing up on Food Stamps, and quoted a blog post by an unemployed Afghanistan veteran currently receiving Food Stamps.

Each image is moving in its own way, but how well do any of them represent reality?

First, let’s establish some facts: We’re talking about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which cost the government $74.6 billion in FY 2012. As of last September, 47.7 million Americans — about 1 in 7 — were receiving SNAP benefits that averaged $134 a month. To be eligible for SNAP, your income must be lower than 130% of the poverty level, or about $30,000 for a family of four.

As you can see from the chart, the percentage of the population getting SNAP benefits fluctuated with the business cycle until Clinton’s welfare reform in 1996, then started increasing again when the 2002 Farm Bill loosened up eligibility. (The anomaly in the chart is the increase during the “Bush Boom” of 2002-2006.) It really took off when the Great Recession hit in 2008. Recently, the number of households receiving SNAP has roughly matched the USDA estimate of the number of households that are “food insecure”. Both numbers jumped between 2007 and 2009, and both are currently about 1 in 7.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the number of recipients would go back down to 34 million by 2023 even with no changes in eligibility. (I’d guess that follows from the assumption that the economy goes back to normal by then.) Benefits were increased in the stimulus bill of 2009, and those increases (a little less than 6%) will run out this November. (That’s already baked into the numbers and does not figure in the $39 billion of cuts.)

Lost in most of the discussion is the question of where the estimated $39 billion savings comes from. Anecdotes or even averages about SNAP recipients are meaningless in this discussion unless they apply specifically to the people who will lose their benefits.

The detailed CBO estimates show that most of the provisions of the House bill have little impact on cost. (It didn’t even bother to figure the savings from Section 110, “Ending supplemental nutrition assistance program benefits for lottery or gambling winners.”) The entire $39 billion comes from three changes.

Work requirements. The biggest chunk, $19 billion, come from Section 109, “Repeal of state work program waiver authority.” That also accounts for the most immediate impact: $3.3 billion in FY 2015.

This sounds like the waivers in welfare work requirements that Mitt Romney so brazenly misrepresented in 2012, but it’s actually different. The SNAP rules say that able-bodied adults without children are limited to receiving 3 months of SNAP benefits every 3 years, unless they are spending at least 20 hours a week either working or participating in a job training program. The 1996 law that established that requirement allowed governors to apply for waivers if their states had high unemployment, figuring that it’s not fair to require hungry people to work if there are no jobs. That’s what’s being repealed.

That change shouldn’t affect any children, but it should cut off both Fox’s freeloading surfer and MSNBC’s unemployed Afghanistan veteran. (I didn’t find national estimates, but adults without children who don’t work 20 hours a week are about 8% of SNAP recipients in Texas, according to the Dallas Morning News. ) How you feel about it largely depends on which one you think is more typical. I suspect the vet is more typical, but I don’t really know.

How you feel also depends on your mercy/severity bias. Some people would gladly feed ten freeloaders to save one person from going hungry through no fault of his or her own. Others feel justified in cutting off ten hungry innocents to force one Jason Greenslate back into the job market.

Categorical eligibility. The second biggest savings, $11.6 billion ($1.3 billion in 2015), comes from Section 105, “Updating Program Eligibility”, which eliminates something known as “categorical eligibility”. CE amounts to the idea that if you’ve already qualified for one needs-based government program, you can qualify automatically for some others, even if the eligibility requirements don’t match perfectly. This saves overhead costs for the government and shortens the lag time of waiting for your paperwork to go through, at the cost of giving benefits to people who might make a little more than 130% of the poverty level.

So the main folks this hurts are the working poor, those lucky couples with kids who get SNAP even though they make slightly over $30,000 a year. It hits them in multiple ways, because qualifying for SNAP can also automatically qualify their kids for free school lunches. Bread for the World estimates that 2-3 million people will lose SNAP benefits if CE is eliminated, and that 280,000 children will lose free school lunches. (It’s tricky, but not impossible, to make that estimate match the CBO’s $1.3 billion. Using the $133-a-month average benefit, we’d be talking about 10 million person-months. That could be 2 million people getting SNAP for an average of five months each during a year. My best guess, though, is that we’re more likely talking about 1 million people, with the other 1-2 million losing benefits only briefly while they re-apply and re-qualify.)

Heat and eat. $8.7 billion in savings ($840 million in 2015) doesn’t actually concern food at all. It comes from eliminating the so-called “Heat and Eat” program, through which SNAP recipients can get assistance paying their utility bills. Bloomberg’s article says this would affect 850,000 people currently getting about $90 a month. (Again, I think you make that work with the $840-million-a-year CBO estimate by assuming not everybody gets assistance for the full 12 months.)

So that’s the whole $39 billion right there. Everything else in the bill is window dressing. For example, drug-testing recipients — which the House bill does not mandate but allows states to do — will almost certainly cost the government more for the tests than it can save by denying benefits to drug users. That was already true when Florida tried it for welfare applicants, and since SNAP benefits-per-person are much less, the loss should be even bigger.

Dependence. The Republican rhetoric on this issue revolves around the word dependence: dependence on government, creating dependence, and so on. The implicit assumption is that people who are getting aid would otherwise take matters in hand somehow. (And that we would approve of how they did it. After all, isn’t Breaking Bad the story of a man realizing that no one is going to help him and taking matters in hand?) And that in turn is based on the assumption that poverty is caused by poor people; if they’d just get out and work, they wouldn’t be poor. A third assumption is that it’s OK for children to suffer for the misbehavior of their parents; seeing their children hungry is part of what’s supposed to motivate the poor not to be poor.

I see two things going on here. First, what I like to call the Musical Chairs Fallacy, which is a version of the Composition Fallacy. If a particular child is always the first one out in musical chairs, you could train him/her to be quicker and more alert. But if you trained all the kids, someone would still be the first one out, because there aren’t enough chairs.

Similarly, you can imagine individual parents watching their children plead for more food and getting a burst of desperate energy that propels them into jobs they might otherwise not have found. But if all the poor get desperate at once, will that desperation create enough jobs to feed all their children? Or are a certain number of people going to go out of the game when the music stops (no matter how quick or alert everyone is) because there aren’t enough chairs?

Second, there’s the problem of the working poor. Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage is lower than it was when I made it back in the 1970s.

And our economy is creating more and more part-time and minimum-wage jobs. The increasing numbers of people on food stamps is how we’re dealing with those trends. If you’re working 30 hours a week at WalMart, you can’t feed your kids. Politicians who are against raising the minimum wage and also against Food Stamps need to spell out their plan for those kids.

Summing up. The $39 billion saved by the House bill comes from three places: Cutting off benefits for unemployed adults without kids and trusting that they will find legal jobs rather than go hungry or turn to crime; stopping benefits for the working poor who make slightly too much money; and poor families being hotter in the summer and colder in the winter.

What’s next? The Senate passed much smaller Food Stamp cuts (about $4 billion over ten years) back in June. That was part of a bipartisan farm bill that got 48 Democratic and 18 Republican votes. Now the House and Senate have to meet in a conference committee to work out a compromise bill, though it’s hard to imagine what that might look like. Like all the other spending bills that are hung up in this Congress, it has an October 1 deadline.

September 23, 2013 – 9:02 am Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The Sift is going to run a little long this week, because there are two featured articles, plus a lot of news to discuss.

The first article “Who’s Right About Food Stamps?” should be out shortly. It arises from my general frustration over the quality of the public conversation about the House’s attempt to cut $39 billion from the SNAP program in the next decade. Fox News anointed a California surfer bum “the new face of Food Stamps” and talked about lottery winners, while liberal commentators focused on starving kids. I realize details are boring, but couldn’t we talk just a little about what the House bill actually changes and where that $39 billion comes from?

The second article follows up on a short note from last week. I linked to Amanda Marcotte’s article on AlterNet about how the media and the general public should pay more attention to the crazy things right-wingers say, because often it’s not just one guy spouting off. There’s a whole subterranean layer of crazy over there, and we shouldn’t let pundits and politicians play to that craziness without paying a price.

My interpretation was not that the Sift should cover more right-wing trolling like Rush Limbaugh or Ted Cruz; frequently they’re just looking for attention and glorying in the left-wing outrage they provoke. But ten days ago a professor at Patrick Henry College (an institution you should know more about) gave the annual Faith and Reason lecture. A few other bloggers have covered the outrageous sound bites from that speech, but I think the speech-as-a-whole gives a lot of insight into the psychology of the Religious Right, particularly how their lack of self-awareness reveals itself in criticisms of others that apply better to themselves. That article “Pots, Kettles, and the Projections of the Religious Right” will be out later this morning.

And finally, the weekly summary: The battle over ObamaCare is heading towards a government shutdown. We had another mass shooting that raises all the gun issues again. And the Syria peace process keeps moving forward in spite of the near-universal opposition of the pundit class. How will they survive without a war to cover?

September 23, 2013 – 7:37 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Without Fighting

To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy’s plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy’s army in the field; and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

This week’s featured articles: The Summer of Snowden I: language of denial and A brief meditation on white twerking.

This week everybody was talking about eliminating Syria’s chemical weapons without war

Saturday, the Syrian government agreed to the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the US and Russia agreed on a plan to eliminate Syria’s chemical stockpile. If the plan works, then the Obama administration will achieve one of its main goals in Syria without using force.

As I wrote last week, though, American motivations in Syria have been muddled. So you should be happy if what you mainly wanted was to uphold international norms against chemical weapons. If, on the other hand, you wanted Assad overthrown, this plan won’t do that. The civil war in Syria, with all its civilian casualties and displaced people, will go on. If you just wanted America to stay out of a situation that doesn’t seem to have any clear solutions, you should be ecstatic.

Meanwhile, the UN inspectors are presenting their findings today. So far they seem in line with what the Obama administration has said: Sarin was used. According to a summary by The Guardian, the Secretary General “did not mention the Assad regime by name but the findings implicated forces linked to Assad.”

On the issue of threatening war and then stopping short of it: WaPo’s Dylan Matthews collects historians’ work on how important it is for a world leader to follow through on his threats. Not very, it turns out.

Paul Huth (now at Maryland) and Bruce Russett (Yale) analyzed 54 historical cases and concluded, “deterrence success is not systematically associated…with the defender’s firmness or lack of it in previous crises.” … The University of Washington’s Jonathan Mercer’s book, Reputation and International Politics, finds that there is no predictable effect of backing down in crisis.

Summarizing and over-simplifying a little: The usual reason leaders don’t follow through is that their threat turns out to be stupid. Your opponents understand this, and if it wouldn’t be stupid to carry out your next threat, they will take it seriously. Dartmouth’s Daryl Press imagines how our failure to attack Syria might be viewed in Iran:

When Iran’s leaders are trying to figure out if we’ll really mess with them if they interfere with tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, they’ll ask, “Does the U.S. really care about global oil flows?” and “Can the US Navy really keep those sea lanes open?”, and the answers are “Yes, we care deeply,” and “Yes, the Navy can,” It would be foolish in the extreme to think that our willingness to intervene in a civil war in which we have no allies and no friends is a good indication to how we’d respond to attacks on genuine national interests.

The weirdest part of this whole story has been the reaction of American conservatives, who somehow see Putin getting an advantage over Obama. Whose ally is giving something up? I guarantee you, if Putin had threatened war unless Israel gave up some kind of weapon, and Obama pressured Israel into promising to do it, conservatives would not be saying Obama had gotten the better of the deal. Steven Benen summarizes in “Revenge is a dish best served coherent“.

and inequality

New numbers from economists Saez and Piketty show what you probably already suspected: The vast majority of the income gains from the post-2008 economic recovery have gone to the wealthy.

The WaPo’s Wonkblog has a great set of graphs explaining “how everyone’s been doing since the financial crisis”. The short version: bankers, corporations, and the rich are doing fine; workers and families not nearly so well.

and whether the government will shut down on October 1 or two weeks later

The fiscal year ends on September 30, and the House Republicans still seem not to have decided on a negotiating position. Most recent estimates say the government will hit the debt ceiling by mid-October. President Obama is refusing to negotiate over that issue. (I agree with that position, BTW. You negotiate over issues where you want to do one thing and your opponents want to do another. But the debt ceiling is more like a hostage crisis. Nobody wants the US to default on its debts or promises; Republicans are just counting on Democrats not wanting it more than they do.)

but I wrote about the NSA

This week begins a series I call The Summer of Snowden. Part I of the series examines what the NSA’s words really mean.

Just an aside: Foreign Policy reports that the NSA’s “Information Dominance Center” was

designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a “whoosh” sound when they slid open and closed.

Well, at least it’s not the Death Star.

and you also might be interested in …

America makes the best TV shows because our dysfunctional systems produce more drama. (Could The Wire have been set in a clean, prosperous, well-managed city? Hats off to Baltimore!) Cartoonist Christopher Keelty observes:

One thing that really interests me about [Breaking Bad] is how it juxtaposes two of America’s most catastrophic policy failures: The for-profit health care industry and the failed War on Drugs

The next Fed chair won’t be Larry Summers. As Treasury Secretary under Clinton, he championed the financial deregulation that prepared the ground for the Crash of 2008. And as President Obama’s first Director of the National Economic Council he was one of the architects of the save-Wall-Street-first strategy. So I’m not sorry to see him shuffle off the stage.

I’ve had a policy of avoiding outrage-of-the-day articles, so I’ve barely mentioned Pat Robertson or Glenn Beck at all lately. AlterNet’s Amanda Marcotte makes the case for covering them more closely, because otherwise they get to maintain one image for the general public and another for their followers.

There’s a widespread and concentrated effort on the right to keep the crazy talk as far out of sight of the opposition as possible, while simultaneously disseminating their ideas among the true believers. This reality doesn’t comport with the claim that they benefit from mainstream media attention, but the opposite.

September 16, 2013 – 1:31 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

A brief meditation on white twerking

One of the more interesting discussions to come out of Miley Cyrus’ controversial performance at the Video Music Award (which I gave links for two weeks ago) concerns cultural exploitation: When is it OK or not OK to steal or borrow from an ethnic culture not your own?

White people (like me) have trouble wrapping our minds around this topic, because we’d prefer to ignore power imbalances and express everything in terms of universal principles. When you do that, examples of whites “stealing” from black culture (like Elvis, Eminem, and even Paul Simon) look just like blacks participating in European genres like opera or classical. If you want to get stupid about it, you can make your principles so sweeping that whites shouldn’t make tacos and only Greeks should teach Plato.

I’ve been looking for an analogy that would bring the power dynamics back into the equation, and I’ve finally got one that works for me.

Imagine you own the only restaurant in a small mostly-segregated town where whites are generally richer than blacks. A black family opens a new restaurant in the black part of town, but it doesn’t affect your business much because white people don’t want to go there and blacks don’t have enough money to eat out much anyway.

But they do have one fabulous dish that’s like nothing on your menu. You go there and try it, and it’s every bit as good as you’ve heard. And you immediately have a bunch of motives to imitate it. First, just as a lover of food and a creative chef you can’t help thinking: “I could do this! It would be great!” Second, as a businessman you think: “My customers would love this!”

There’s nothing wrong with either of those motives. But take a step back and ask why your customers would love to order the dish off your menu, but they won’t go to the black restaurant for it. Well, in a word, racism. If the town weren’t racist, they’d get the dish from the family that invented it. If you can figure out how to make it better, you might win some of those customers honestly. But as it stands you’ll get those customers just by being white.

So what you’d be doing by imitating the dish is lowering the cost of racism. Without your imitation, your racist customers would have to do without something they want.

And while you might argue you’re providing your white customers a bridge to black culture, it would be a toll bridge, and you’d be collecting the tolls. So you’re profiting from racism, and the money that you make (and the black family doesn’t) is a tangible measure of your white privilege.

The same considerations probably don’t apply if the black restaurant imitates your strudel or goulash. They may be able to profit if they make it better than you do, but they won’t profit just by being black.

So the question to ask when you’re borrowing from some other ethnic culture is: To what extent am I participating in a field that is open to everybody, and to what extent am I collecting a toll from racism? And if I am collecting a toll, is there some way I can share that profit with the community I’m borrowing from (i.e., Paul Simon popularizing South African groups) rather than keep it all for myself?

September 16, 2013 – 11:23 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Summer of Snowden I: language of denial

We now have seen enough NSA denials to decrypt what they’re really saying.

Liberal, conservative, or independent, our news media does a bad job covering stories that play out over months. “News” is what’s happening right now — the newest revelation and the latest denial — embedded in a cloud of speculation about what might happen tomorrow. That focus on today’s scoop increases political polarization: When today’s headline contradicts yesterday’s and tomorrow’s is different yet, it’s tempting only to remember the ones that fit your prior bias. The one’s that don’t fit, well, they were all refuted by later developments, weren’t they?

In this series I’m going to take a longer perspective. What do we know about the NSA’s domestic spying that we didn’t know (or weren’t as sure of) in May? And I’m going to begin the series with a topic that would fit better in a college-course syllabus than a news article: vocabulary.

That may sound boring, but it’s the right place to start. The big reason this story keeps ping-ponging between alarm and reassurance is that the words the NSA uses in its comforting denials don’t really mean what you think they mean.

Ping-pong. Since June 5, when The Guardian and The Washington Post began publishing NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, revelations about the NSA’s spying on Americans have had a back-and-forth quality. Something alarming comes out, then more details are released that make the initial story seem overblown, then we discover that the comforting safeguards in the second round of stories are often violated in practice, and on it goes.

So, for example, the public’s initial worries (ping!) about domestic spying were countered by assurances (pong!) that it happened only under warrants from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which had been established by Congress in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). That felt familiar, like the police-procedural shows on TV; authorities have to convince a judge they have a good reason to be suspicious of you before they can invade your privacy.

Then Snowden revealed just how open-ended those orders can be: Verizon was ordered not to turn over not just data about specific people connected to a particular terrorism investigation, but data about all calls going through its system. Apparently, the NSA was building a database of all phone calls in the United States — who called who, when, from where, and for how long. Ping!

But then we found out (pong!) that further FISC orders were required whenever the NSA used the database, and the database itself had auditing procedures to make sure analysts weren’t just messing around with it whenever they wanted. The Week reports:

In order to access the stored data sets, the NSA needs to have a real tangible reason. … [The] law has been interpreted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to relate only to the way in which the data is used.

And then last month (ping!) it came out that the FISC had reprimanded the NSA for lying to it about what it was doing:

The court is troubled that the government’s revelations regarding N.S.A.’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program.

Those abuses, we are told, were all corrected in 2011 (pong!), so everything is hunky-dory now.

Meanwhile, another Snowden leak (ping!) gave us an internal audit in which the NSA found it had violated its own safeguards 2776 times during the year ending in March 2012. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that even this report is incomplete: “the thousands of violations only include the NSA’s main office in Maryland—not the other—potentially hundreds—of other NSA offices across the country.”)

But the violations appear to be accidental and trivial. (Pong!)  Senator Feinstein assured us that the Senate committee overseeing the NSA “has never identified an instance in which the NSA has intentionally abused its authority to conduct surveillance for inappropriate purposes.” Well, except for NSA officers who spied on their partner or spouse. (PIng!) But that almost never happens (assuming we caught them all) and usually is abusing the NSA’s foreign intel, not domestic intel. (Pong!)

What has been reported as fact provides fertile ground for worrisome speculation: How hard it would be to hide a needle in that haystack of violations? And what if there’s a further layer to this onion, and malevolent or overzealous analysts have ways to circumvent the audits? The NSA, after all, is supposed to have the best hackers in the world. What if a few of them have hacked the NSA’s own systems? Snowden himself must have circumvented a few internal procedures to escape with all those documents.

Decrypting the NSA. Here’s the first lesson to learn from the Summer of Snowden: When the NSA makes those comforting denials, it is choosing words carefully and using them in non-standard ways. This summer we’ve heard so many denials that we’re now able to properly interpret statements that were constructed to obfuscate. (This work builds on the glossary that the Electronic Frontier Foundation started compiling during the Bush administration.) Ironically, this is a standard code-breaking technique: If you can induce your opponent to send a lot of coded messages, you have much more data to use in breaking the code.

Collect. In the  Free Online Dictionary, this is the first definition for collect:

To bring together in a group or mass; gather.

So if someone were gathering information about you and storing it in a database, you would probably say they were collecting information about you. Conversely, when the NSA says they aren’t collecting information about you, you probably think they are denying the existence of such a database.

They aren’t. In NSA parlance, information hasn’t been collected until it comes to the attention of a human analyst. If no database query returns your information to a person, it hasn’t been collected.

And so we can have public exchanges like this one in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 12:

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon): Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper: No, sir.

Senator Wyden: It does not?

Director Clapper: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.

Three months later we found out about the Verizon court order. Clapper undoubtedly knew in March that the NSA was assembling a database containing information on everyone who uses a phone, but since the number of Americans whose information is seen by a human analyst is less than “millions”, he could say no.

A small-scale analogy: Imagine that your neighbor raids your mailbox every day before you get home from work, steams the letters open, photocopies them, files the copies, and then reseals the envelopes and returns them to your box before you notice. In NSA terms, as long as he is just filing the copies and never reads them, he’s not collecting your mail.

Content. In the NSA’s public statements, only the body of an email or phone call is considered content. Anything in the header of an email — including the subject line — is metadata and not content. Likewise, the fact that you called so-and-so at a certain time from a certain place and talked for so many minutes is not content, even if what you said is easily deducible from that information. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer quotes the following example from Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau:

You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.

The Guardian has a good summary of what metadata means in the context of email, phone calls, web browsing, Google searches, photographs, and posts to Facebook or Twitter.

The EFF points out that content is defined much more broadly in the FISA law itself:

any information concerning the identity of the parties to such communication or the existence, substance, purport, or meaning of that communication

If the NSA used the law’s definition, it could not deny that it’s accessing the content of your communications.

Conversation and communication. Similarly, the NSA makes a distinction between communications and conversations. Your conversation is in the content of your phone call, while the communication includes the metadata. So in 2006 Director of National Intelligence Michael Hayden was able to say:

the activities whose existence the president confirmed several weeks ago … is not a driftnet over Dearborn or Lackawanna or Freemont grabbing conversations that we then sort out by these alleged keyword searches or data-mining tools or other devices that so-called experts keep talking about. This is targeted and focused. This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States. This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America involving someone we believe is associated with al Qaeda.

In reality, Hayden did have a driftnet gathering up metadata to feed into data-mining tools, as he later acknowledged. He just wasn’t feeding in conversations.

Specificity. Director Hayden’s statement is an example of another kind of trickery, which I made a little more obvious by the way I edited his quote: Denials are almost always about specific programs, not about the totality of the NSA’s activities.

The typical scenario goes like this: Questions will be raised about PRISM or XKeyscore or some other NSA program, and the official response seems to deny that the NSA is doing a certain kind of thing. But if you read the response carefully, all it really says is that the NSA isn’t doing that thing under that program.

Take another look at what Hayden said. If some other NSA program actually were scanning the content of conversations for keywords, he would not have lied.

Target. In an interview with Charlie Rose in June (beginning at about the 26-minutes-to-go mark), President Obama said:

President Obama: What I can say unequivocally is that, if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA. cannot target your e-mails.

Charlie Rose: And have not?

Obama: And have not.

The law does not allow the NSA to “target” an American’s phone calls and emails. But the ACLU explains how your privacy can be violated without “targeting” you.

if an American is communicating (however innocently) with a foreign “target” under the [FISA Amendments Act of 2008], the law allows the government to collect, inspect, and keep the content of that communication. … The target need not be a suspected terrorist or even suspected of any kind of wrongdoing. … While official defenses have flatly stated that targets under the FAA must be both foreign and abroad, the statute only requires that the government “reasonably believe” those things to be true.

The Washington Post elaborates:

Analysts who use the [PRISM] system from a Web portal at Fort Meade, Md., key in “selectors,” or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness.” That is not a very stringent test. …

Even when the system works just as advertised, with no American singled out for targeting, the NSA routinely collects a great deal of American content. That is described as “incidental,” and it is inherent in contact chaining, one of the basic tools of the trade. To collect on a suspected spy or foreign terrorist means, at minimum, that everyone in the suspect’s inbox or outbox is swept in. Intelligence analysts are typically taught to chain through contacts two “hops” out from their target, which increases “incidental collection” exponentially.

In July, AP reported that the system sucks in data about a vast number of non-targeted people.

For the first time, NSA Deputy Director John C. Inglis disclosed that the agency sometimes conducts what is known as three-hop analysis. That means the government can look at the phone data of a suspected terrorist, plus the data of all of the contacts, then all of those people’s contacts, and all of those people’s contacts.

If the average person calls 40 unique people, three-hop analysis could allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist.

Or, as Ben Brooks summarizes: “Two hops is a lot of people, three hops is basically anyone.” The ACLU concludes:

these exceptions and loopholes open the door to the routine interception of American communications. And this doesn’t just result from the odd mistake; this is what the law was designed to do. … Domestic communications can be retained forever if they contain “foreign intelligence information” or evidence of a crime, or if they are encrypted or aid “traffic analysis.” That’s a lot of exceptions. And even communications that do not meet any of these criteria can be stored in the NSA’s massive databases for as long as five years.

Once your information has been pulled out of the general database by such a search, it enters “the corporate store“, a database which NSA analysts can access without further court orders — even though you were never “targeted”.

Who does this fool? Notice that the exchange between Director Clapper and Senator Wyden wasn’t on some Sunday talk show; it was in a Senate committee hearing. We also have writings from FISC judges who complain about being misled by the NSA. And that leads to Part II of the Summer of Snowden series (which might appear next week if space allows): Why constitutional checks and balances aren’t working.

September 16, 2013 – 10:18 am Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

After getting crowded out by more urgent questions (like whether we should attack Syria) for several weeks, my Lessons From the Summer of Snowden series starts today. The first installment, “The Language of Denial”, explains the bizarre but consistent ways the NSA defines the words it uses, and how that usage allows the Agency’s denials that sound comforting when the facts are not comforting.

Depending on how the word counts go, I might also do a brief post on the cultural exploitation issues raised by the Miley Cyrus controversy. It took a while to find an analogy that works for me, so if there’s space I’ll share it.

As for the weekly summary, of course everybody is talking about the possibility of getting rid of Syria’s chemical weapons without war. As I laid it out last week, the American political problem around Syria was that we have multiple motives and no way forward addresses them all. So if you wanted Assad overthrown, you’re disappointed in a result that looks like an inexpensive victory to the people who were mainly worried about chemical weapons. And if your main goal is just to oppose and denigrate whatever Obama does, that’s the path you’ll take.

Meanwhile, the 1% continue to run away from the rest of us, and there’s still no clear path to keep the government running past October 1.

September 16, 2013 – 8:00 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Applying Pressure

What I’d like is if news accounts on pressure to intervene in Syria made it clear that the “growing calls … for forceful action” aren’t coming from the people, or Congressional majorities, or an expert consensus. The pressure is being applied by a tiny, insular elite that mostly lives in Washington, D.C., and isn’t bothered by the idea of committing America to military action that most Americans oppose.

— Conor Friedersdorf, “How an Insular Beltway Elite Makes Wars of Choice More Likely”
The Atlantic, August 28, 2013

This week everybody was talking about Syria

and so am I. This is one of those rare times when making yourself heard could change history, so say something, and try to get it right. I lay out my own thought process as methodically as I can in Congress Is Listening. What Should You Say?

Some of this week’s Syria talk was amusing, like the Onion’s Poll: Majority Of Americans Approve Of Sending Congress To Syria and Assad Unable To Convince Putin That He Used Chemical Weapons On Syrians.

and the hits just keep coming at the NSA

If you think that little lock icon in your browser is keeping them from watching you, think again. Also, they’re building back doors into software security. Even if you trust the NSA, what if somebody else finds those doors?

and you also might be interested in

All over the world, people tie sneakers together and throw them over wires. And all over the world, people have explanations of what it means.

A couple links to remind you that we’re not anywhere near a “post-racial America” yet. In Charlotte, a church tries to put its best foot forward by making sure that “only white people” greet newcomers at the front door. Meanwhile, a private school in Tulsa sends a little girl home for having dreadlocks.

Have you ever wondered whether those sponsor-a-child programs make any difference? It turns out they do.

50 years after Michael Harrington’s The Other America launched the War on Poverty, poverty is still holding its own.

Grist examines the is-global-warming-slowing-down question. Conclusion: Heat cycles in the Pacific Ocean are slowing the increase in air temperatures, but the planet as a whole is continuing to get hotter.

September 9, 2013 – 12:03 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Congress is listening: What should you say?

I was for Obama, against the Iraq War, and I wish Clinton had stopped the Rwanda genocide. What should I tell my undecided representative in Congress?

When President Obama asked for Congress to authorize a strike against Syria, he created a chance for your voice to be heard.

I’ve long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And that’s why I’ve made a second decision: I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress.

It’s just a chance, mind you. Congress often does unpopular things when powerful interests are involved or inside-the-beltway opinion-makers decide that the People don’t really understand the situation. And while the President asked for congressional authorization, he also said that he didn’t need it and he didn’t promise not to act without it. So it’s entirely possible that the attack will go forward whether the American public approves or not.

Still, you have opportunity to be heard. Lots of senators and representatives in both parties are still reported to be undecided, and I believe a number of them honestly don’t know what to do. The White House and the leadership of both parties in Congress want some form of an authorization to pass, so there will be a lot of pressure coming from that direction. If representatives don’t feel countervailing pressure from their constituents, the path of least resistance will be to go along.

So you should definitely contact your representative and senators this week, before they vote. But what should you say?

Pro-Obama but (mostly) anti-war. Syria has been a difficult question for me, and it seems to be difficult for many of my friends, both the face-to-face and Facebook varieties. As this blog’s regular readers undoubtedly know, I generally (though not always) support President Obama. I voted for him twice, I believe in his overall good intentions, and I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I also am not a pacifist. I supported President Clinton’s bombing campaign in Kosovo, and I regret that the United States did not try to stop the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur. And though I was ambivalent about getting involved in the First Gulf War, when I saw how it played out I gave the first President Bush credit for engineering a broad international effort that achieved a decisive victory.

But I also grew up watching the Vietnam War unfold on television, and was glad that the draft ended before I had to decide what to do. While I initially supported the Afghan War (as part of the broad national consensus that we had to chase down the 9-11 planners no matter what government stood in our way), I soon became disillusioned with it. And I opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, because the second Bush administration’s multiple, conflicting justifications just didn’t add up. I supported anti-war candidates like Howard Dean in 2004 and (I thought) Barack Obama in 2008.

So now I have to think about Syria.

Make it stop. In some ways, Syria resembles Rwanda or Darfur: Civilians are being killed by the thousands — more than 4,000 in August, according to PBS. The UN estimates that more than 2 million people have left the country, and another 4.5 million are displaced inside Syria. In a country with a prewar population around 22 million, that means that more than 1/4 of the country has been displaced.

So it’s hard to argue with that voice in your head that says: “Make it stop.” But how?

The August 21 attack. The trigger for the current crisis was the chemical weapons attack on August 21, which the US government has estimated to have killed 1,429 people, mostly civilians, including 429 children. The Assad regime had been accused of using chemical weapons before, prompting President Obama to make his “red line” comment. (Assad’s ally Russia has put out a report claiming that the Aleppo chemical attack in March happened, but anti-Assad rebels were responsible. France, Britain, and the US have accused Assad.) But the evidence for the August 21 attacks near Damascus is clearer.

Multiple independent accounts make it fairly certain that somebody used chemical weapons near Damascus on August 21. You can argue how certain it is that Assad is responsible.  The most persuasive case I’ve heard that he wasn’t behind the August 21 attack comes from the octogenarian foreign policy analyst William Polk. Polk’s argument is basically that (because he was already winning the civil war) Assad had little to gain and a lot to lose by launching a chemical attack that would further destabilize Syria and give the United States a reason to intervene. Conversely, the rebels had reason to want to shake things up.

The German newspaper Bild Am Sonntag quotes German intelligence sources as saying that Assad’s forces launched the chemical attacks without his authorization, which seems a little far-fetched, particularly if you believe the Aleppo attacks happened. Assad also seems to be in no hurry to bring his war-criminal underlings to justice.

A variety of conspiracy theories blame third parties for the attacks: Obama did it, the Israelis did it, and so on. (I haven’t found a space-alien theory yet, but why not? It sounds like exactly the kind of thing the Founders from the Gamma Quadrant would do to foment internal discord among the humans.) I have a high evidence threshold for such theories, so I’m ignoring them until I hear something a lot more substantial than what’s come out so far.

Maybe this is my general give-Obama-the-benefit-of-the-doubt assumption talking, but I find the argument the US government is making more convincing: Simultaneous attacks on multiple locations implies a level of coordination the rebels don’t have. The locations correspond to places the regime was shelling anyway. Satellite images show rocket launches from regime-controlled areas. And:

We intercepted communications involving a senior official intimately familiar with the offensive who confirmed that chemical weapons were used by the regime on August 21 and was concerned with the U.N. inspectors obtaining evidence. On the afternoon of August 21, we have intelligence that Syrian chemical weapons personnel were directed to cease operations.

Now, you and I can’t check the satellite imagery and the communication intercepts; all we have is the word of people like John Kerry. Presumably the classified briefing given to Congress had more details. According to the Washington Post, after hearing the briefing

Lawmakers from both parties said there was widespread agreement with the evidence that Bashar al-Assad’s regime carried out the chemical attacks

(That includes Ron Wyden, a Democrat who is skeptical of administration claims on other intelligence-related issues.) I interpret this to mean that if you doubt Assad is responsible, you have to believe that the Obama administration is fabricating evidence out of whole cloth. After the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq, that kind of villainy in high places is not unthinkable. But I just don’t believe Obama is that dishonest, and I don’t see his motivation for trumping up an unnecessary war. (I know about the Iran pipeline theory, but I’m not persuaded.)

So I’m assuming the Assad regime used chemical weapons on August 21 near Damascus, and quite likely in March and April near Aleppo. I don’t see why we can’t or shouldn’t wait for the UN inspectors to confirm that conclusion — former UN inspector Hans Blix made this point to Rachel Maddow — but I expect that they will confirm it.

Why attack? The next step in the administration’s case is that we have a responsibility to enforce the international norms against chemical weapons use. Secretary of State Kerry put it like this: Our response

matters because a lot of other countries, whose polices challenges these international norms, are watching. … They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they too can put the world at greater risk.

This is where they lose me, in the steps from “Assad has done something evil.” to “Somebody should do something about it.” to “The United States should launch an attack.”

Inconsistent motives. The problem is that we’re juggling two very different motives: The humanitarian desire to make it stop (where the chemical attacks are only one slice of “it”) and the desire to punish Assad for using chemical weapons, in the belief that his punishment will deter governments in general from using chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in the future.

Punishment produces the vision of a surgical strike: We’ll launch a wave of cruise missiles that destroy a bunch of stuff Assad values, convincing him that future chemical attacks will cost him more than he’ll gain. The whole thing will last a couple of days and then we can stand aside again. But make-it-stop requires a much more involved commitment: We need to hit Assad hard enough (with the threat of more later) to convince him he can’t win militarily, then broker a peace settlement and maybe provide peacekeeping troops to enforce it. (That’s the Kosovo scenario.)

Make-it-stop pushes us to act quickly: People are dying every day. That’s why we can’t wait for a laborious (and possibly broken) UN process to assess Assad’s responsibility and do something about it. But the punishment scenario is much less time-sensitive. If Assad winds up deposed and facing the World Court in five or ten years, the point will be made.

I’m worried that the combination of motives will get us in trouble: We’ll move quickly and imagine we can disengage quickly, only to discover we haven’t really accomplished either objective. Then what?

The Emperor of the World. The punishment motive also has two roots: Are we punishing Assad for violating international norms against chemical weapons, or for doing something the President of the United States told him not to do.

Much of the inside-the-Beltway talk revolves around the second root: President Obama drew a red line, and now he has to back it up. We have to prove that we mean what we say. Otherwise the United States will lose face in the world, with dire consequences like Iran going forward with a nuclear weapons program.

This is imperial thinking, and I believe it’s dangerously misguided. It frames the President as the Emperor of the World, empowered to decide who is allowed to fight whom and which countries can be granted which kinds of weapons. If we think this way, we will always be fighting a war somewhere, until ultimately our economy breaks under the strain.

I totally understand the temptation to fantasize about ruling the world and making everyone behave. Without that fantasy, the future is filled with fears I have no answer for, what-if-Iran-gets-the-bomb being only the beginning. But it is a fantasy and we need to plan for the real world, where not even the United States has the power to make everyone behave. It is simply insane to be debating whether we can afford Food Stamps or Social Security while at the same time imagining that we have the resources to rule the world.

Another example of imperial thinking: We always imagine that our opponents will submit to whatever moves we make rather than respond with moves of their own. We imagine that the battlefield will be the one we define, and the enemy won’t step outside it. What if we’re wrong about that? What if Assad or Iran or Hezbollah decides to expand the battlefield with assassinations or subway bombings or hostage-taking or something else we’re not discussing? If you’re prepared to take the first step, are you prepared to take more steps if that’s not the end of it?

The international process. I spent a little time this week looking into the international-law aspect of chemical weapons, and it turns out to be iffier than you might think. (Ezra Klein does an excellent summary.) The Geneva Protocol of 1925 (which Syria signed) does ban chemical weapons for “use in war”. At the time, everybody was thinking about World War I, so whether it was intended to ban governments from gassing their own people is still a dubious point. (Is Assad “at war” in the Geneva-1925 sense?) The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 is more sweeping, but Syria never signed it.

Still, let’s assume that taken together, these and other international agreements establish a global consensus against chemical-weapon attacks. How should that be enforced?

The CWC creates the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to monitor the agreement and delegates enforcement to the UN. Article XII says:

The Conference shall, in cases of particular gravity, bring the issue, including relevant information and conclusions, to the attention of the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council.

Rajon Menon at The National Interest summarizes the weakness of Obama’s international-law case:

The president has also stated that it’s essential to ensure that the bans on chemical weapons are respected. Yet the 1925 Geneva Protocol contains no provisions for unilateral enforcement by states, let alone via military force. The same goes for the Chemical Weapons Convention (which Syria has not signed). It calls for “collective measures…in conformity with international law” to address serious breaches. There’s no basis for the United States to don the mantle of self-styled enforcer.

And the legal case for unilateral action is further weakened by the lack of a self-defense rationale under the terms of the UN Charter: Assad has not used chemical (or any other) weapons against the United States.

Our case would also be stronger if we supported international law across the board, rather than only when it suits us.

Everyone is assuming Russia will veto any action against Assad in the UN Security Council. But we don’t actually know that, and if it happens, we could still appeal to the General Assembly. (Both steps depend on the UN inspectors agreeing with our assessment that Assad used chemical weapons, or at least not contradicting it.) If that failed, we could still assemble a coalition of nations outside the UN. Assembling that coalition will be easier if the UN process is demonstrably broken, rather than if we just assume it won’t work and don’t try it.

The Iraq lesson. We always have these discussions in analogies. Is this Iraq or Kosovo or Vietnam or World War II? (BTW: I think it’s time to retire the Munich analogy. Assad is not going to conquer France if we fail to stop him now.)

Obviously, Syria is its own unique situation. So if we bring up another country from another time, we need to be specific about what lesson we’re trying to apply.

Here’s the lesson I bring forward from the decision to invade Iraq: It’s important to pin down one clear reason to act, with one clear goal for the action.

In the 2002-2003 Iraq debate, the Bush administration had at least half a dozen reasons to invade: Saddam was developing nuclear weapons, Saddam was evil to his own people, Iraq was a threat to Israel, we could make Iraq a beacon of democracy for the Muslim world, Saddam was responsible for 9-11, Saddam might give WMDs to al Qaeda, and on and on and on. None of them exactly held water, but if you challenged one, administration spokespeople would shift to another rather than answer your objections. So arguments with well-informed critics tended to go round and round rather than reach any clear conclusion.

The result of that muddle was that we invaded with no clear goal, so we could never declare victory and get out. We couldn’t get out quickly after toppling the regime, or later when we captured Saddam, or later when our inspectors determined there were no WMDs.

We’re out now. Do you feel victorious?

And so in Syria: Are we attacking to end the suffering of the Syrian people? To topple Assad? To punish a violation of international norms? To prove to Iran that we mean what we say?

You can’t say “all of the above” because there is no plan that accomplishes all those things. The only reason the administration is hinting in all those directions is that no single reason persuades enough people.

That’s dangerous. It invites mission creep, where we decide we’re doing a quick-and-easy strike to punish Assad, and then go further rather than explain why the strike didn’t accomplish all the objectives people had in mind when they supported it.

The objectives one-by-one. Make-it-stop is the motive I most sympathize with, but also the one that calls for the most open-ended commitment with the least chance of success. I like the goal, but I’m not willing to pay the price.

Punish-Assad-for-using-chemical-weapons is the low-cost scenario, but we need to be open about the limitations of the goal. We’ll hit Assad, stop, the killing will go on, and eventually Assad will probably win the war anyway. The public needs to understand that from the outset. So far, the administration has been hiding that limitation rather than explaining it clearly. I can’t support them until they discuss this more honestly, because otherwise we’re setting ourselves up for the mission to creep towards make-it-stop.

By itself, the anti-chemical-weapons motive is not time sensitive, and I think we’ll succeed better by playing a long game that goes through the UN process. Whether that process succeeds or fails, we’ll build a larger coalition that will be a more persuasive deterrent going forward.

Punish-Assad-for-defying-the-World-Emperor is part of a long-term delusion that will eventually crash the United States if we don’t root it out. We have to reject this thinking wherever it appears.

What I am telling Rep. Annie Kuster (NH-02), and what I hope you’ll tell your representative. The primary lesson of Iraq is that an intervention needs two things:

  • a single clear justification that gives us a single clear goal
  • a plan that leads to that goal at a price we are willing to pay

So far, President Obama has not identified that justification/goal/plan/price. Until he does, Congress should not authorize an intervention in Syria.

September 9, 2013 – 10:22 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Syria. Syria. Syria.

I’m sorry if you’re sick of hearing about Syria, but I believe this is one of those rare moments when ordinary people really might make a difference. Syria stands outside the standard Republican/Democrat polarization, so a lot of Congresspeople in both parties seem honestly undecided. And it’s possible (though not certain) that President Obama won’t attack if Congress says no.

So the featured article this week “Congress is Listening. What Should You Say?” is how I thought through the Syria issue, starting from the position of someone with conflicting pro-Obama and anti-war inclinations.  It should go up about 10 Eastern time, and the weekly summary before noon.

September 9, 2013 – 7:14 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (3)

Radical

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

— Martin Luther King “Beyond Vietnam” (1967)

This week everybody was talking about war with Syria

Saturday, President Obama more-or-less said: “I can attack Syria if I want, but there’s no hurry, so I’ll give Congress time to agree with me.” OK, what he actually said was:

I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets. … Yet, while I believe I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization, I know that the country will be stronger if we take this course, and our actions will be even more effective.

I didn’t hear any pledge to submit to the will of Congress if it follows the example of Britain’s Parliament and doesn’t give authorization. He’s just offering media exposure to “members of Congress who want their voices to be heard”.

What will this military action accomplish? Sadly, the person who summarized it best was satirist Andy Borowitz:

Attempting to quell criticism of his proposal for a limited military mission in Syria, President Obama floated a more modest strategy today, saying that any U.S. action in Syria would have “no objective whatsoever.”

The President is not claiming he can or will topple the Assad government or capture Assad for trial at the World Criminal Court or destroy Syria’s capacity to use chemical weapons. (The chemicals are in artillery shells and could be anywhere.) The only possible point is to punish Assad’s side in the civil war, thereby sending a message to all chemical-weapon-wannabees that the United States has appointed itself the enforcer of international norms. Doing nothing, on the other hand, would cause President Obama to lose face, because his talk of a “red line” and “serious response” would appear empty.

Anytime a problem can be solved by breaking things and killing people, the military is the tool for the job. But it’s lousy at sending messages and saving face.

For once I find myself wishing Obama would follow President Reagan’s example. Reagan dispatched Marines to Lebanon, and when a truck bomb killed hundreds of them, he pulled them back out. That was a huge loss of face for the United States and its president, but sometimes your best choice is to accept that all your options are bad and move on. Like a quarterback who realizes he called the wrong third-down play for a blitzing defense, you throw the ball out of bounds and punt.

and the anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech

It was ironic that President Obama spoke at the rally honoring America’s greatest advocate of nonviolence, and then announced his decision to strike Syria a few days later. I agree with almost everything he said Wednesday, but what he didn’t say was striking too.

To mark the anniversary, everybody but the white supremacists struggled to claim Martin Luther King’s legacy. Bill O’Reilly invoked King, Joe Walsh invoked King … it went on all week. Everybody, it seems, knows only the content-of-their-character quote, and is willing to bend that to support whatever position they favor. I protest this dumbing-down of Dr. King’s legacy in MLK: Sanitized for Their Protection. (Joan Walsh and Matt Berman also wrote on this theme.)

Joan Walsh pointed out somebody else who gets mis-represented: another 1960s liberal, Senator Moynihan. His 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action is often cited by conservatives for its focus on out-of-wedlock births and other signs of dysfunction in black families. Walsh puts that report in the larger context of Moynihan’s career:

Around the same time, Moynihan helped write President Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous Howard University speech on race, which committed the country not merely to equality of opportunity but demanded efforts to achieve a much more controversial “equality of results.” Working for Johnson’s Labor Department, Moynihan proposed public works jobs and affirmative action measures, as well as a guaranteed national income, to lift black families, whether they were headed by one or two parents, out of poverty. Later, under Richard Nixon (a career move that sealed his reputation as a proto neoconservative), he again proposed a guaranteed family income.

Wednesday’s celebration also underlined the continuing chaos in the Republican Party. No Republican elected officials spoke at the rally and I have yet to find any claiming to have attended. A spokesman for the event claimed:

This was truly a bipartisan outreach effort. All members of congress were invited to attend and the Republican leadership was invited to speak.

But they all had scheduling conflicts. Eric Cantor is supposed to have tried to find somebody to represent the Party, but failed.

and (God help us) Miley Cyrus

Cyrus became famous as Disney’s squeaky-clean Hannah Montana, so you knew she’d have to rebel against that at some point, just as Britney Spears and Christian Aguilera rebelled against their Mickey Mouse Club origins. So that inevitable event happened at the Video Music Awards. For the historical record, the video is here.

The subsequent flurry of commentary is more noteworthy than the performance itself (which — to me at least — seemed more desperate than sexy or shocking). My favorite is the Onion’s faux-CNN “Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning”. There was also a discussion of slut-shaming (why isn’t Robin Thicke’s role bringing him criticism?), the rich-white-girl-exploiting-black-urban-culture angle (when is cultural cross-pollination legit and when does it cross over into blackface-minstrel territory?), and female-black-bodies-as-props-for-white-sexuality.

but I wish more people were paying attention to this

Hugo-winning science fiction author Charles Stross, who visualizes the future for a living, gave Foreign Policy magazine a glimpse of what he sees in “Spy Kids”, an article that explains why the basic assumptions of post-World-War-II organizations like the NSA and CIA are incompatible with the lived values of the next generation. Unless the security state fundamentally changes its culture, he believes, we’re due for a generation in which Edward Snowden is the norm, not the exception.

These organizations are products of the 20th-century industrial state, and they are used to running their human resources and internal security processes as if they’re still living in the days of the “job for life” culture. Potential spooks-to-be were tapped early (often while at school or university), vetted, and then given a safe sinecure along with regular monitoring to ensure they stayed on the straight-and-narrow all the way to the gold watch and pension. Because that’s how we all used to work, at least if we were civil servants or white-collar paper-pushers back in the 1950s.

… To Generation Z’s eyes, the boomers and their institutions look like parasitic aliens with incomprehensible values who make irrational demands for absolute loyalty without reciprocity. Worse, the foundational mythology and ideals of the United States will look like a bitter joke, a fun house mirror’s distorted reflection of the reality they live with from day to day.

And that raises his concluding question:

If you turn the Internet into a panopticon prison and put everyone inside it, where else are you going to be able to recruit the jailers? And how do you ensure their loyalty?

and this was interesting too

You may have heard that Arkansas State Senator Jeremy Hutchinson “shot a teacher” with a rubber bullet. Not exactly. When a local police chief heard that Hutchinson supported arming teachers against a Sandy-Hook-style school shooting, he invited Hutchinson to take part in a police school-shooting exercise with rubber bullets. The chief wanted Hutchinson to understand how hard it is for police to tell the good guys from the bad guys when everybody is shooting at each other. And sure enough, in the course of a simulation of an armed teacher shooting it out with a bad guy, Hutchinson shot the “teacher” by mistake.

To his credit, Hutchinson got the point. (The story is public because he tells it.) He still supports armed security guards at schools, but not letting teachers have guns in their classrooms.

Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others in the Fort Hood shooting in 2009, was convicted by a military jury, which recommended a death sentence. A general still has to sign off before the sentence can be carried out.

In hopes of keeping the word terrorism from becoming completely meaningless, I’ll repeat something I’ve said many times before: Hasan is a military officer who attacked his own base, targeting soldiers and collaterally killing some civilians. It was treason and may well merit a death sentence under military law, but attacks against soldiers on military bases are acts of war, not terrorism.

Back in July I told you what happened to the bold claims of South Carolina’s attorney general that dead people had cast “over 900” votes in recent South Carolina elections: State police investigated the 207 cases from the most recent election, whittled the number of suspicious votes down to 4, came to no clear conclusion about those final 4, and recommended no action be taken.

Fox News gave the AG face time to make his claims, but the investigation debunking them wasn’t covered.

Well, similar story recently in Colorado: The Secretary of State identified 155 votes “possibly” cast by non-citizens. Boulder DA Stan Garnett investigated and found:

the 17 people suspected of voting illegally in the November election in Garnett’s district are citizens who were easily able to verify their status.

“Local governments and county clerks do a really good job regulating the integrity of elections, and I’ll stand by that record any day of the week,” Garnett said. “We don’t need state officials sending us on wild goose chases for political reasons.”

So once again: A big headline-grabbing story about voter fraud evaporates when somebody bothers to investigate.

He was an outstanding college quarterback: Heisman finalist and star of a national championship team. As an NFL rookie, he led his team to a series of miraculous come-from-behind wins that put him on the cover of Sports Illustrated. But his career subsequently floundered. Critics said his strong running but inaccurate passing had been a better match for the college game than the NFL. Recently he was competing to be the back-up to one of the NFL’s legendary quarterbacks, but this weekend he was released. No one is sure where his career goes from here.

Tim Tebow? No, I was talking about Vince Young, who just got cut by the Packers with very little fanfare. What a difference it makes to be white and outspoken about your Christian faith.

You know that rhetoric about big government draining the life’s blood out of the people? Well, in Tennessee it’s literally true: On this holiday weekend, police in at least a dozen counties are setting up checkpoints to look for drunk drivers. If you’re stopped and they find you suspicious, they can force you to give a blood sample. A similar law holds in Georgia.

I’m glad I live in a blue state, where we don’t tolerate the kind of big-government oppression they have in red states.

I continue to think that The League of Ordinary Gentlemen is one of the blogosphere’s best-kept secrets. In this post, Tod Kelly debunks the “pseudo-libertarian” argument that the free market will root out bigotry.

Businesses in the pre-civil-rights South that refused serve African Americans didn’t make less money for their bigotry – they made more; a restaurant owner’s primary motive for having a white’s only seating area (or entire establishment) was profit.  In those bigoted communities, allowing economically disenfranchised blacks to sit with far wealthier whites meant losing profitable customers at the expense of ones who couldn’t afford to pay as much.

and let’s end with something amusing

All the Katrinas and Sandies don’t deserve to have national disasters named after them, but climate-change deniers do. “Senator Marco Rubio is expected to pound the eastern seaboard sometime early tonight …”

September 2, 2013 – 10:33 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (7)