Month: August 2009

Ezra Klein doesn't think so:

I feel for Karen Ignani, head lobbyist for the health insurance industry. For the last year, her group has been by far the most cooperative of any major industry stakeholder. […] The big question right now is whether the focus on the insurance industry refashions the insurance industry into an enemy of reform. Many in Ignani's organization want her to dump $100 million into an aggressive ad campaign that will return some fire.

But I don't think she will. Insurers might be taking a few more hits publicly, but nothing has changed for them. As Ignani herself says, they've already signed onto the set of consumer protections envisioned in health-care reform. There's no further cost to having the president talk about the unsettling practices that led to those protections.

Paris, France, 7.25 pm

The WSJ reports that White House counsel Gregory Craig could be out of a job. Ackerman speculates:

[L]ook at the paper’s body of evidence for why Craig has enemies:

He mishandled the closure of Guantanamo Bay;

He argued for the unredacted release of the Office of Legal Counsel’s 2002 and 2005 legal justifications for the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation regime”;

He played some role in the administration’s plans for preventive detention (this is pretty much a vague and undeveloped point in the piece)

So whose ox is being gored here? Marcy Wheeler, no fan of Craig’s, notes that in these cases “he supported the right decisions on policies, but the political people in the White House mismanaged implementing those decisions.” Maybe. A complimentary explanation is that on the torture memos disclosures, Craig and Attorney General Eric Holder angered the leadership of the intelligence community […including] John Brennan. They might see their chance to build an anti-Craig constituency with a White House political team that wants a scapegoat for the Guantanamo failure.

Sean Kelly makes a card for the president.

More insight into the anti-gay background noise in the world of sports, featuring Greg McMackin, head football coach at the University of Hawaii. Recording here.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

“Given the lack of substantive alternatives to real communal problems, they strike me as simply a form of emotional reaction to the end of the far right’s dominance of American discourse.”

This one sentence describes what is happening in America today vis-a-vis the right-wing’s completely disproportionate reaction to what are really mildly left-of-center proposals by the President and Congress better than any column or article I have read on the subject.

Here’s another example. There’s a groundswell of grousing on the right about the cash-for-clunkers program, because the feds were caught off-guard by its popularity. The argument is that if the government can’t run cash-for-clunkers, how can it run healthcare?

To which one might respond: but cash-for-clunkers is one example of the government actually doing something right, helpful and popular. It’s the kind of pragmatic experimentation that FDR tried repeatedly. So you have a practical, targeted measure that seems to have helped abate a deeper recession in the auto industry, and the right is obsessed with the ideological abstraction of “government.”

What conservatives have to do, in my view, is not demonize government, but to champion limited government. If government can do tangible practical things that help everyone, while balancing its budget, it’s doing what conservatives think it should. Smart, practical initiatives that address problems that the private sector has failed at: what else is government for? The rest is ideology – and it seems to be all the Republicans have left.

Bob Kaplan on US and Israel:

Don’t miss David Ignatius on World of Warcraft:

And not just for books:

[T]he Iraqi government moves to ban sites deemed harmful to the public, to require Internet cafes to register with the authorities […] The government, which has been proceeding quietly on the new censorship laws, said prohibitions were necessary because material currently available in the country had had the effect of encouraging sectarian violence in the fragile democracy and of warping the minds of the young.

“Our Constitution respects freedom of thought and freedom of expression, but that should come with respect for society as a whole, and for moral behavior,” said Taher Naser al-Hmood, Iraq’s deputy cultural minister.

In fact, the constitution only guarantees free speech if it “does not violate public order and morality.” So these new laws should not come as too much of a surprise. But freedom as the West understands it is not exactly on the march in Iraq. The entropy of history prevents it.