Year: 2013

Michele Catalano shares her recent run-in with the FBI and Homeland Security [see update] a “joint terrorism task force”, whose agents searched her home after her family’s combined search history produced keywords like “pressure cooker” and “backpack”. It’s a vivid reminder of the police surveillance state we now live in to protect ourselves from deaths by terrorist. Philip Bump speculates how the feds could end up at her door:

It’s possible that one of the two of them is tangentially linked to a foreign terror suspect, allowing the government to review their internet activity. After all, that “no more than two other people” ends up covering millions of people. Or perhaps the NSA, as part of its routine collection of as much internet traffic as it can, automatically flags things like Google searches for “pressure cooker” and “backpack” and passes on anything it finds to the FBI.

Or maybe it was something else. On Wednesday, The Guardian reported on XKeyscore, a program eerily similar to Facebook search that could clearly allow an analyst to run a search that picked out people who’d done searches for those items from the same location. How those searches got into the government’s database is a question worth asking; how the information got back out seems apparent.  It is also possible that there were other factors that prompted the government’s interest in Catalano and her husband. He travels to Asia, she notes in her article. Who knows. Which is largely Catalano’s point.

Update from a reader:

The Atlantic updated their story to clarify that this was not the feds. From there the speculation is all nonsense. There are any number of ways that this could be happening. None of them have much to do with XKeyscore which, judging by the map in the slide show, doesn’t have enough data collection points in the US to cover all of this. One very explanation is that Boston area ISP’s are flagging these searches since the terrorist attack. This sounds like a possible violation of the wiretap act on the part of the authorities to me. I’m looking forward to hearing how they legally justify it.

After reading Beutler’s autopsy of the Republicans’ transportation and housing bill, Sargent sighs:

It turns out that cutting spending is difficult and unpopular. This and the recent House GOP farm bill fiasco again suggest House Republicans will struggle to pass major governing items without moderating and enlisting the help of Dems, rather than moving ever to the right in search of conservative votes. … One House GOPer even openly lamented the GOP leadership’s misguided priorities. Rep. Thomas Rooney of Florida wanted to get the farm bill done, telling the Post: “I would have loved to go home, especially to my district, which is mostly agricultural … and been able to be like, ‘It’s a done deal. We’re good.’” But here’s what actually happened:

Instead, Rooney found himself voting Wednesday on measures with such flashy titles as “Keep the IRS Off Your Health Care Act” and “Stop Playing on Citizen’s Cash Act.” There’s also the STOP IRS Act — STOP stands for “Stop Targeting Our Politics” — that would permit the IRS to fire employees “who take official actions for political purposes.” And there’s a plan to bar the IRS from implementing or enforcing any aspect of the 2010 health-care law — the 40th time in recent years that the House has voted to repeal, defund or otherwise deconstruct the legislation.

This is talk radio insanity posturing as legislation. These people have no business being in the Congress at all. Dish coverage of the farm bill here and here. Yglesias zooms out:

It’s in the conjunction of these two failures [the farm bill and the latest one] that you see a mortal threat to the practical existence of the Republican governing majority in the House.

That’s because if you can’t find 218 Republicans out of 234 to vote for a bill, the other option is to start with 201 Democrats and try to add two dozen Republicans. And in many ways, that kind of coalition makes more sense given that to become law a bill also needs to pass a majority-Democratic Senate and be signed into law by a Democratic president. A “Pelosi Plus” House bill, in other words, can actually become law whereas a Boehner Majority House bill is at best a bargaining ploy. Now normally that kind of legislation simply can’t move in the House. The party that holds the majority forms a cartel and blocks bills from coming to the floor that don’t have support in the majority caucus. Boehner has allowed select violations of this so-called Hastert Rule (though in practice the rule predates Hastert) but there’s at least a chance that he’ll be forced to suspend it wholesale throughout the appropriations process.

A relevant precedent for this, in some ways, could be seen in the 1981-82 congress that gave us the Reagan Revolution. Republicans won the presidency in the 1980 elections and secured a majority in the Senate, but Democrats still held the House. A large faction of conservative Boll Weevil Democrats were willing to support a lot of Reagan ideas, but that was far from a majority of the House Democratic caucus. But in what I think you’d have to consider a rare concrete example of a “mandate,” Speaker Tip O’Neill let conservative bills come to the floor and let the Democratic majority get rolled by a GOP-Boll Weevil coalition on a bunch of key votes.

The dynamics of a meltdown of the GOP majority would be different from that and so would the legislative outcomes. There won’t be an “Obama Revolution” if the Republicans get rolled, but there just might be bipartisan deals to replace sequestration and reform the immigration system. The Republican majority, in other words, may be nearly immune to electoral defeat thanks to favorable district boundaries—but it’s not immune to its own dysfunction.

Any political system where one party is “nearly immune to electoral defeat” is a broken one. Bernstein’s take:

I’ll just add one bit that I don’t think is getting quite enough emphasis. … [E]ven these bills, bills too extreme to pick up any moderate Democrats, bill so extreme that they lose moderate Republicans … also are not extreme enough to get all of the conservatives. That’s what the reporting about Transportation-HUD says. See also: the vote on this appropriations bill, which lost 9 Republicans; or this one, where they lost 10. There are 234 Republicans in the House, but the cold hard fact is that on appropriations bills there are at least a handful who are probably out of reach.

Kilgore’s two cents:

No wonder some conservatives want to make the debt limit/appropriations battle this fall “about” Obamacare. At least they know how to say “No!” in unison.

My take on the GOP’s latest nihilism here.

(Photo: Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty)

The military is cracking down on the “hundreds” of officers and enlistees who use Craigslist Baghdad for hookups:

In Afghanistan, where commanders have forbid any sexual encounters between unwed people, virtually anyone who tries to set up a meeting online can become a target of investigators. One Marine lance corporal found that out in 2012, after he posted an advertisement on Craigslist for a sexual rendezvous. The guy he met at Camp Leatherneck, whom he thought was also looking to hook up, turned out to be an undercover agent with the NCIS.

My first thought: there’s a Craigslist Baghdad? Lester Brathwaite is indignant:

What is this, Baton Rouge? Officers entrapping sexed-up service members? Isn’t there a war or something going on? And considering the danger these brave and incredibly horny men face each day, what’s wrong with getting an innocent beej from a fellow soldier?

Laura Beck adds:

I guess whenever you confine a bunch of 23-year-olds in one place, they’re gonna get laid or post penis pics trying.

Amid dropping rates in the US, a married couple debates whether or not to perform the operation on their son:

[O]ne of my husband’s ex-jock friends wrote a surprisingly thoughtful, persuasive, and well reasoned emailed argument to my husband in favor of circumcising our son.  After the analysis though, his final—and key—factor was, “And it’s hard enough for a guy to get blowjobs as it is.” Shockingly, the misguided belief that uncircumcised men have more difficulties procuring oral sex is shared beyond the male college athlete demographic. An OBGYN mother-in-law asked my friend, who was carrying her grandson-to-be at the time: “Don’t you want him to get blow jobs some day?”

Still, it seems that a groundswell against circumcision has begun in our country. Circumcision rates in the United States are dropping. They decreased 8 percent from 1999 to 2009. Interestingly, in my circle, the movement against the procedure seems to be led not by men, but by women. Predictably, these are the same mothers who are also advocating for natural childbirth (more midwives and birthing balls) and less medical intervention (fewer oxytocin drips, monitors, and less laboring while laying one one’s back) during delivery.

Today, only about half of infant boys have their genitals mutilated and permanently scarred in the US. That’s a big shift away from the expectations of the past. It will surely provoke more questioning of the strange, ancient, religious practice as routine medical care in the US. In many parts of the US, especially the West, unmutilated men will soon greatly outnumber those whose sensitive, tiny dicks have been painfully sliced after birth. Razib Khan puzzles over the declining numbers:

One might think that this is due to demographic changes in the West, as Hispanics have lower rates of circumcision than non-Hispanics (black or white). But while California had circumcision rates of 22% in 2009, Washington state’s was 15%.

It seems that Medicaid coverage has a strong effect, but this can’t explain all of the variation. In the late 1970s the western states had the same circumcision rates as the northeastern states. Today northeastern states have circumcision rates two to three times higher than in the west. And it doesn’t map onto politics either. Extremely conservative (and western) Utah has circumcision rates of 42%. Blue Rhode Island has rates of 76%.

Finally, I want to observe here that the males who were born during the era of diverging circumcision rates are now entering sexual maturity en masse. This is going to shape the expectations of both sexes, and perhaps result in some surprises for those who relocate to the other coast as they transition to adulthood….

(Photo: A boy shouts as he under goes circumcision during ceremony in Kajang outside Kuala Lumpur on November 20, 2011. By Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images)

Yesterday we heard about a fictional President Palin, while today the author of Christian Nation explains his political motivation for writing the book, as well as how he believes there is still a “deep bench” of Christianist politicians worth worrying about:

Frederic Rich is an American lawyer, environmentalist and writer. His novel Christian Nation imagines what would happen if America became a theocracy. From the publisher:

When President McCain dies and Sarah Palin becomes president, the reader, along with the nation, stumbles down a terrifyingly credible path toward theocracy, realizing too late that the Christian right meant precisely what it said. In the spirit of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, one of America’s foremost lawyers lays out in chilling detail what such a future might look like: constitutional protections dismantled; all aspects of life dominated by an authoritarian law called “The Blessing,” enforced by a totally integrated digital world known as the “Purity Web.” Readers will find themselves haunted by the questions the narrator struggles to answer in this fictional memoir: “What happened, why did it happen, how could it have happened?”

Our full Ask Anything Archive is here.