Month: February 2011

Today on the Dish, Andrew inquired as to just when the adult conversation on the budget might begin. He tackled Medicare cuts, and others even if they might hurt people now, because they'd hurt more later. Heather Mac Donald urged Obama to call the GOP's bluff, Andrew examined debt in the Golden state, and parsed Wikileaks on Uganda and the gays. We kept tabs on the protests across Bahrain, Yemen and Libya. Mousavi went missing, and Joshua Tucker tallied the lack of violence that usually characterize successful revolutions. Andrew downed Clive Crook's straw man attacks on Facebook, Amy Davidson marveled at the moving Twitter cloud of Mubarak's resignation, and Anand Gopal reported on strikes across Egypt. Ursula Lindsey catalogued sexual harassment in Egypt (readers wrote in about the US), John R. Guardiano reminded us that Muslims saved her, and Ann Friedman argued female journalists also get greater access to stories. Hamilton Nolan broadened the debate,

Frum outed Chris Christie as the RINO-proof nominee, we dug deeper into the Patriot Act reauthorization, and Birtherism is a shibboleth. The GOP's foreign policy muscles deteriorated, FBI may have fooled us twice, and Palin was still thinking about running. John Cassidy viewed the deficit through the bond market lens, and Bruce Bartlett urged Republicans to take a big bite out of the apple. Edward Glaeser pointed to urban schools as the great challenge of our era, Norm Geras weighed voting for convicts, and Mike Konczal exposed why the budget can't help reform prison policy. Reihan applauded the advantage of the English language, gay marriage isn't a slippery slope, and Seth Godin was curious about your overlooked gems. Readers nerded out on Watson, Ken Jennings relived his battle, Keisel sacrificed his beard for charity, and we checked out the Asscam.

Cool ad watch here, app of the day here, FOTD here, MHB here, VFYW here, and the real recipe for Coke here.

–Z.P.

As has long been known, the FBI bungled its initial investigation into the athrax attacks of 2001, accusing an innocent man of the crime. Now, newly released is casting doubt on the guilt of Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide while under investigation for the crime. The FBI maintains that he's the culprit, but its forensic evidence is less conclusive than previously thought. Greenwald:

That there's so much lingering doubt about who was responsible for this indescribably consequential attack is astonishing, and it ought to be unacceptable.  Other than a desire to avoid finding out who the culprit was (and/or to avoid having the FBI's case against Ivins subjected to scrutiny), there's no rational reason to oppose an independent, comprehensive investigation into this matter.

Reflecting on the violence in Bahrain, Joshua Tucker points out that successful revolutions often manage to avoid this sort of bloodshed:

 For those of us who study protest from an individual based perspective (here and here for my own work on this) we are particularly interested in the costs and benefits to individual protesters of participating in protest. The first three of the original Colored Revolutions – Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine – were conspicuous for their relative lack of violence and the fact that the military stayed out of the way of protesters, thus keeping the cost of protesting significantly lower; indeed, getting killed is the highest possible "cost" of protesting. (The fourth, the Kyrgyz Tulip Revolution, was a little more violent, but again the military restrained from a violent crackdown.) Both the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions shared this characteristic of the military and (for the most part) the security services restraining from a violent crackdown. 

 

As if the federal budget mess weren't bad enough, America's largest state is laboring under its own impending fiscal disaster:

At press time, California was being governed under a state of economic “emergency” declared by Brown’s predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in light of a staggering $28 billion budget shortfall expected in the next 18 months. 

It gets worse. Medium-term unfunded liabilities for government employee pensions are pegged by the Legislative Analyst’s Office at $136 billion—and that’s a lowball figure. Legislative analyst Mac Taylor acknowledges in his current fiscal outlook report that the estimate leaves out billions in funding shortfalls at the pension funds for public school teachers and University of California employees. In the next 10 years, taxpayers will most likely be on the hook for somewhere between $325 billion and $500 billion. (Over the past five years, state revenues averaged $94.5 billion per year.)

The Golden State's legislature is deeply beholden to public employee unions, so reformers are looking to Governor Jerry Brown for answers. And like his analogues at the national level, making good policy for the people will require him to go against his political interests.

Several readers have written to make this point:

Street harassment is not a "middle eastern" problem. It is not something that the US has figured out.

Organizations like ihollaback.org demonstrate this well–women are harassed on the street daily, and often their cries for justice are ignored or belittled. Any action that dehumanizes or threatens a person because of their sex (or heck, any other reason) should be seen as a public faux pax.

Just as in that Egyptian sample, most American men would likely deny they've ever harassed a woman. But any woman who has walked down city streets knows that there are many who either have or who have sat by complicitly while women are made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe. Unwelcome attention is harassment…and I hope that this tragic assault on Ms. Logan does not precipitate even more "holier-than-thou" xenophobia about the middle east. Yes, there are obviously degrees of difference here, but the underlying culture of macho masculinity is the same.

I'm sorry but analogizing the treatment of women in many Middle Eastern cultures to American sexual harassment is not just a degree of difference; it's a huge difference. How many Bahrainian women, after all, would produce an ass-cam video? I don't want to deny the repellent aspect of dehumanizing and objectifying women in public anywhere. But please, on women's rights, I think the West is largely holier than them. And I think many women are capable of dealing with men in public is a little more robust than my reader implies.

A woman dressed as a traditional Nicaraguan character known as "The Widow" looks to the camera as she attends a symbolic burial of the "Sadness and Poverty of the soul" during the celebrations of the International Poetry Festival in Granada, Nicaragua, Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2011. By Esteban Felix/AP.

That's Heather Mac Donald's advice for President Obama, which bears a striking resemblance to the Dish's:

Why doesn’t President Obama call the Republicans’ bluff?  His 2012 budget ducks any significant entitlement cuts, and ignores the recommendations of his bipartisan deficit commission.  Obama’s budget director explains that the administration is not willing to make the first move into politically risky terrain.  But why not propose meaningful entitlement reform and force the Republicans to take a stand?  If Republican-Tea Party rhetoric of fiscal responsibility is mere posturing, a fiscally responsible Democratic plan would force Republicans into the awkward position of arguing against reform that they have paid constant lip service to.  But if they truly do mean to rein in entitlement spending, they would (in theory) go along with an Obama proposal to make cuts and would share the political heat.   (Of course, Obama himself may not have the slightest interest in cutting the entitlement juggernaut, but still, he has before him a wonderful opportunity to put Republican political rhetoric to the test.)

This is as plausible as the arguments that it's a political loser for Obama to propose entitlement cuts. Even so, the most compelling reason to put forth a budget that actually addresses the fiscal issues plaguing the United States is that it's the right thing to do. Partisans can always fool themselves into the proposition that public policy is served better in the long run by doing the politically expedient thing in the short term.

But here's the thing: for pols who focus on short term expedience, the long term never arrives. There's always a theory that explains why serious reforms are best pursued during the next session of Congress, or after the next election.

Hamilton Nolan broadens the debate:

Reporting, in certain situations—wars, revolutions, assorted uprisings of all types—is an inherently dangerous business. To the extent that we mitigate that danger, we often mitigate the value of the reporting, as well.

Embedding journalists with a battalion of Marines is safer for the journalists themselves than roaming free; it also severely limits the scope of their reporting, and tends to encourage a sort of Stockholm Syndrome that's not conducive to free and independent journalism. Likewise, covering a revolution from a hotel balcony, or covering the Iraq War exclusively from inside the Green Zone, means being willing to leave unknown such a large part of the story that your entire justification for being there is thrown into question. …

So what's the bright idea that will keep a Lara Logan incident from happening again? It doesn't exist. We have no magic solution. All we have are a series of choices, trade-offs between safety and freedom of movement, between protecting the reporter and letting the reporter do his or her job to the fullest.

TDW captions:

A good looking woman with a pretty posterior attaches an “asscam” to her backside and takes to the street to blow the lid off the story of the century: Men like checking out women’s butts.

Comment number one:

I’m 99% sure they’re looking at the camera attached to her ass.

No shit, Freddie. DeBoer doesn’t hold back while attacking the Dish’s plea for fiscal seriousness. He argues that “actual seriousness means wrestling with the very serious and real costs of the harsh measures you’re advocating”:

Here’s what you won’t find at the Daily Dish, or at the Corner, or in any of the other places showily demanding seriousness: the actual, human, negative consequences of harsh entitlement cutbacks.

I mean, from reading online today, you’d be hard pressed to know why we have Social Security and Medicare at all. I’ll tell you why: because our winner-take-all economic system leaves defenseless, impoverished people in its wake. We have Social Security because the sight of so many elderly people left literally homeless and starving, too old and weak to work, was unseemly to an earlier generation that was willing to take less for themselves to provide for others. We have Medicare because it is an obscenity for a country responsible for the atom bomb and the moon landing and the Hoover Dam to allow suffer and die from lack of health care access due to the vagaries of birth and chance. That’s why those programs exist.

Cutting them will lead to human misery and death. It will. Cutting Social Security will mean the difference between subsistence and a pitiful existence for untold thousands of senior citizens. Cutting Medicare will mean some people won’t get the health care they need when they need it and will suffer the physical pain and indignity that comes with that. That’s just the way it is. Yet I keep reading all of these very serious people today failing to mention this reality at all. It’s as if we have entitlement programs for no reason.

Megan responds as well as I could:

I’d say that at least this pundit wants to get serious now precisely because I don’t want to see punishing cuts in pensions and health care services, or 15% unemployment.  The way that you avoid making those kinds of cuts is that you start early, before there’s a crisis.  You refocus social security on people with low lifetime earnings, giving those with higher earnings plenty of warning that they need to save.  You put tight(er) means tests on Medicare and Medicaid to encourage the development of markets for private health insurance and long term care insurance for the carriage trade.  You start cutting back military priorities relatively slowly, so that companies, workers, and redundant troops have time to transition into something else.  You phase out tax breaks like the mortgage income deduction slowly enough that neither budgets nor the housing market break.  If this was on the table now, most of us budget hawks would be perfectly fine with the current deficit.

I concur entirely. The current math simply demands either massive tax hikes or massive benefit cuts in the future. Adjusting now will make the future, relative suffering less rather than more painful. And like Megan, I’d like to see the cuts focus on those who are most able to afford it. To use the obvious example: why should we be sending Warren Buffet a social security check?

But my worry is that not only will acting now make the pain more bearable later, but not acting now may precipitate a financial collapse of confidence in the US that would mean far worse misery than the government actually balancing its books. Borrowing to help people now – at the great expense of people later – is not a responsible policy. And financial panics and crises tend to happen with little warning.