Year: 2013

His reason? The neocon-funded LCR campaign against Hagel. Remember: LCR gave a qualified endorsement to Mitt Romney who favors amending the constitution to ban all gay partnerships, who opposed repeal of DADT, and a federal law banning employment discrimination against gays. Romney was fine, but Hagel is "too little, too late"?

It's surreal to see Log Cabin target a Republican nominee who has clearly evolved on gay issues, while endorsing a presidential candidate who has actually gone in the opposite direction. It's surreal to see them standing side by side with the far left and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. But money talks, doesn't it? The question they still refuse to answer: whose money?

A one-trillion coin, it is said,
Could be minted and shipped to the Fed,
In order to pay
What the US of A
Might be forced to renege on instead.

– From Limericks Economiques (Humorous Poems on the Dismal Science of Economics by Dr. Goose), proof that on the Internet, there is always more to discover.

Friedersdorf criticizes my post on the Brennan nomination:

Sullivan is uninclined to oppose Brennan because "people change," though Sullivan neither possesses nor presents any evidence that Brennan has changed. Sullivan adds that the Brennan confirmation hearings could be useful. "We have an unusual opportunity to grill a nominee over the vital issues of torture and accountability, drones and secrecy," he argues. "We need more sunlight – including public access to the Senate Intelligence Committee's definitive report on the torture program under Bush-Cheney. But the Brennan hearings are a start."

So will Sullivan pledge to oppose Brennan's nomination until we fill the significant gaps in information about his role in torture and his prosecution of Obama's secretive, unaccountable drone war? Or will Sullivan support Obama's choice even if the confirmation hearings don't result in what he agrees is important information being made public? I suspect he'll back Obama's choice regardless, as he's already begun to do, and the fact that so many Obama supporters will behave that way is part of the reason transparency advocates are unlikely to get answers.

Actually, I do have evidence that Brennan has changed, in so far as I take Dan Klaidman's reporting seriously, and my own inquiries about his position on the legal framework for the drone war. That the head of the CIA is at the forefront of checking the president's powers to kill by drone seems to me an encouraging development. But, sure, I'd like a grilling of Brennan on whether this is true, why he has begun to worry about the drone program, and his views on its future. And if he has nothing salient to say, or gives us the usual spook-speak, I may well be inclined to change my mind. That's what hearings are for. But if he asserts the need for more transparency and buy-in from other branches of government, that's a plus, right? Serwer's view:

Everything that civil-liberties advocates feared might have come to pass if Brennan had been appointed at the CIA happened anyway. Which is to say that it's impossible to make a case against Brennan running the CIA that isn't also a case against Obama. It's Obama, not Brennan, who is ultimately responsible for the policies of the past four years. Those won't change unless Obama wants them to, whether Brennan runs the CIA or not.

David A. Graham wonders whether or not Brennan will succumb to the desire to work "within the system":

Will he continue to work to restrain the role of intelligence agents in killing suspected terrorists? Or, once he's ensconced at the agency, will he decide that perhaps he's still the best person to oversee the program after all — even if that requires a de facto delegation of authority over it to the CIA? Panetta was reportedly viewed with wariness when he arrived at the CIA, but quickly won loyalty for pushing back at liberal demands for serious investigation and sanctions over the torture program. Brennan might feel compelled to defend agency turf, as well — but he also might feel empowered to go his own way, relying on his quarter-century career to grant him legitimacy.

Meanwhile, Ackerman and Shachtman write that "Brennan suddenly looks like the most powerful member of Obama’s national security team."

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama, left, listens as his nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, White House chief counterterrorism adviser, speaks during an announcement in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Monday, Jan. 7, 2013. By Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg via Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

I know there are a lot of shady folks in my industry, but I have always had a tough time buying the idea that advertising is evil. It takes a lot of money and privilege to say that you prefer to pay than to have your reading experience sullied by, ick, advertising! Advertising keeps your experience free. It keeps walls from going up all over the web. I can tolerate seeing an ad for a discount airline in my favorite blog if it means I get to read it for free.

There is a movie theater here in San Francisco that charges a $1 surcharge so that you can enjoy an ad-free movie experience. It always sticks in my craw. I'll subject myself to the ads and not pay the fee, thank you.  So that is the one part of your new monetization plan that I don't quite get.

But for the years of enjoyment of your blog, I'll donate come February. Just please consider adding ads to bring down the subscription cost. Remember your View From Your Recession series? Those were all Dish readers, too.

I emphatically do not regard advertising as "icky," let alone "evil". We are one of the few big sites that regularly features the best of the advertising industry in our "Cool Ad Watch." And in time, we may well try ads out, depending on the success or otherwise of the meter. Another:

There are NO REASONS whatsoever for you to not offer two models for your new site: paid with no ads and unpaid with ads.  That is actually a very common choice these days.  I will contribute through an ad-sponsored site.  I'll pay if my finances reach a point where I'm more comfortable.  In the meantime, I guess I'll no longer view anything you create because I don't think you have provided an option that works for me.  Ads suck, but they allow those who can least afford a pay model to participate.

We should again remind our reader and others that roughly 80% of Dish content will remain free for all readers, regardless of paid membership, after the new Dish launches with a meter in February. Only "Read On"s will be blocked for non-members after a certain number of clicks, and even then the meter will be relatively easy to get around – just inconvenient. So consider the $19.99 a convenience charge for regular readers who want a smooth, seamless experience on the Dish. Another has a clever idea:

You will surely have ads in the new Dish, you just won't be paid to run them. I'm talking specifically about the 1000 installments of "Cool Ad Watch". You wrote:

And we have emphatically not ruled out advertizing for ever. It's just that, right now, it's more trouble for a site like ours than it's worth.

I disagree. Just call up those "cool ad guys" and ask for a $1000 donation to the Dish AFTER you post their ad. That way, there's no quid pro quo, and you can even post how much they chose to donate. That info should be provided for full disclosure, but also so Dishheads start patronizing companies that support the Dish. That could easily raise $200k per year… not enough to cover expenses, but a nice buffer.

Another:

I hope you reconsider the use of advertising on your site. There are many ways to build a lucrative web business without intrusive advertising. And honestly, I want you and your venture to be as lucrative as possible so that you can keep doing what you're doing. One of my favorite blogs, Daring Fireball, appears to do quite well with advertising that is not only non-intrusive, but often useful to me and other readers. You can see the pricing here. Yes, that's $8,500 a week (or $442,000 a year) for the RSS feed alone. I have no idea what he gets for the actual ad on the web page, but I do know that, in total, he does alright for himself. Please consider as many creative revenue streams as possible.

We are open to exploring all options down the line. But for the time being, we felt pure subscriptions was the place to start. And there are just five of us who both drive this car as we build it. We ask merely for some patience as we feel our way forward. The membership link is here if you haven't yet taken the plunge. How one reader thinks about it:

If I were to calculate the true worth of The Dish I would start this way: I drink pricey San Francisco coffee every day (Philz – you must have some if you are ever in the neighborhood). The cost of one cup is $3.75. I usually make it last for a couple of hours. I visit The Dish many times a day and spend more time following links or reading other sources connected to Dish posts. So a daily fee for my Dish consumption should be work at least $3.75.

I also share Dish posts on FB and with friends, both online and in conversation. I guess that is like sharing a cup of coffee with friends. So let's add another 3.75 into the equation. 

That is $7.50 a day for 365 days a year, which totals an annual fee of $2737.50. So the $60 I paid is a very good deal. I wish I could pay more and my fingers are crossed that you do not raise the fee to reflect it's true value. I would hate to give up my coffee. 

(Photo of delicious looking Philz Coffee by Flickr user Jason Eberle. $1000 donation please?)

From the Guardian yesterday on the Hagel nomination:

Mr Hagel's philosophy is not always consistent but he is an enemy of cant, and wins top marks for fresh thinking about America's place in the world. (That's enough German philosopher puns.)

“To understand how extraordinary this obsession with Israel is, just imagine the uproar if any senator raised objections to a US cabinet nominee over, say their ‘commitment’ to Canada, France or Turkey, even though those countries, unlike Israel, are actually NATO allies,” – Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada.

@stanford @rosebowlgame @stanfordfball You had to beat us in mouthguards too, didn’t you? #rosebowluw — UW-Madison (@UWMadison) January 8, 2013

Sam Harnett reports on efforts by Stanford researchers to “see brain trauma in real time”:

[David] Camarillo and his team have outfitted the football team with mouth guards that measure the physics of every hit. At practices, they use ultra-high-definition, slow-motion cameras to observe those collisions more closely and look for ways to prevent them. The first startling discovery of the research is how little is known about the “injury mechanism” for concussions, that is, exactly how they are caused… How hard does a hit need to be to cause a concussion outright? How many small, low-impact hits before a player begins to exhibit concussion symptoms?

Some of the findings are downright scary:

Camarillo says the mouth guards have already captured some startlingly hard hits, like the one that ended the season for a wide receiver. That collision registered an acceleration of 150 Gs, that’s 150 times the acceleration gravity. “Pretty serious business,” he says, “a standard boxing punch is probably between 10-20 Gs.”

That’s just acceleration in one direction. The player’s head was also spinning at 2000 degrees per second—which means his head would have rotated five and a half times in one second if it weren’t anchored to the neck.

While it has long been suspected that this kind of angular acceleration plays a role in concussions, Camarillo says no one has gathered data on it. What’s more disturbing is that angular acceleration has been completely ignored when it comes to football safety measures.

The entire Dish thread on concussions in football here.

Matt Steinglass engages me:

Mr Sullivan writes that if Barack Obama "pretends that we can resolve this by revenues alone, he is part of the problem, not the solution." David Brooks echoes that point in an op-ed today, saying "there are no conceivable tax increases that can keep up" with rising Medicare spending. This sounds very hard-headed, but it's not really correct. America has one of the lowest tax burdens of any advanced country. We may not want to fix our debt problem solely by increasing revenues, but if we wanted to, we could.

He does the math:

[B]y gradually increasing our total tax burden by 7% of GDP through 2023, we could balance the budget; we might eventually have to raise it by perhaps 10% of GDP. That would leave us with a much higher tax burden than we have now, but it would still be only 34% of GDP, as high as Britain's is today. And that's assuming we don't change a penny of our wasteful spending habits on Medicare and defence.

I left Britain for a country with a less intrusive government. Douthat, meanwhile, sees no evidence that Democrats are prepared to carry out the tax hikes necessary to deal with the deficit:

The Republican Party is an unserious party in many ways, but it has leaders (from Paul Ryan to Tom Coburn) who understand that crucial point, and who have spent the last few years elaborating the kind of entitlement reforms that the conservative vision of government requires, and putting their fellow Republicans on the record in support of them. From Barack Obama on down, I don’t see the same thing happening on the Democratic side; instead, I see a party that’s still loath to acknowledge that its program requires sacrifice from anyone save the wealthy, and that just responded to a moment of maximum leverage by narrowing its definition of who constitutes the rich. If Democrats want to raise middle class taxes — and I mean really raise them, not just cut deals that nudge revenue upward a little here and there — they need to lay the political and policy groundwork for that kind of push, and they need to start relatively soon.

An interesting development from one segment of Israeli opinion.