Month: July 2013

TNC is unimpressed by its track record:

I am not totally opposed to policies in which individuals surrender some of their rights for the betterment of the whole. The entire State is premised on such a surrendering. But at every stop that surrendering should be questioned and interrogated, to see if it actually will produce the benefits which it claims. In the case of Stop and Frisk you have a policy bearing no evidence of decreasing violence, and bearing great evidence of increasing tension between the police and the community they claim to serve. It is a policy which regularly results in the usage of physical force, but rarely results in the actual recovery of guns.

Sullum adds that “debate about the effectiveness of New York’s stop-and-frisk program is interesting, but it should not be dispositive”:

For that matter, the demograpic profile of the people who are usually hassled by the cops, while it certainly should bother anyone who claims to be concerned about racial profiling or the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, is not the most decisive argument against stop and frisk, which is the Fourth Amendment. As Mike Riggs noted yesterday, [NYPD Commissioner Ray] Kelly seems to think everyone detained by the cops must be guilty of something. “The notion anyone stopped has done absolutely nothing wrong is not really the case,” he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, because police “need reasonable suspicion to stop someone and question them.” Kelly not only confuses reasonable suspicion with guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; he assumes his cops really do have a sound legal basis for every stop they make and every pat-down they perform. That assumption is hard to credit, given that stops result in an arrest or summons only 12 percent of the time and pat-downs almost never discover guns. If the stop-and-frisk program is unconstitutional, as it appears to be, its putative effectiveness does not make it less so.

(Chart from a 2010 report (pdf) by the Center On Race, Crime And Justice)

Josh Barro analyzes Obama’s economic speech from yesterday, the first in a series of speeches the president has planned on the subject:

It’s likely the White House’s real goal with these speeches is one they can’t say out loud: Defend status-quo policy, and the tepid recovery it is allowing, against any future crises that Republicans might manufacture.

Andrew Sprung sharpens that point:

If an extremist GOP, drunk with its budget war victories over Obama since 2011, rivets the entire nation by shutting down the government because Obama won’t agree to defund Obamacare, or threatens the nation with default because Obama won’t agree to ruinous new spending cuts on top of sequestration — then Obama’s sane, sober, repetitive, essentially centrist calls for long-term investment and commitment to the middle class should trigger a public opinion backlash against the GOP, just as Bill Clinton’s did when the Republicans shut down the government because the president wouldn’t agree to massive cuts to Medicaid and Medicare …  Obama has said that he won’t negotiate over the debt ceiling. He most definitely will not agree to spending bills that defund Obamacare implementation. Will events finally drive him to hold firm in some kind of full-scale showdown with intransigent Republicans?

That’s how I saw it. Obama shows his persistent attention to the economy, which has improved on his watch, while the GOP tends to their fanatical base and moves toward shutting down the entire government because they lost the last election and cannot bear to see the winner actually govern, even from the banal center. Beutler is on a similar page:

Whether this is the White House’s true intent or not, the speeches will have the effect of reminding the country, implicitly, that of all the things the government can do to improve the economy, a debt default threat is among the worst. Addressing the issue obliquely is actually key to preserving the fragile governing coalition he’s helped to build in the Senate, and to avoid the sense that he’s the one drawing battle lines. And If voters have the question of the country’s economic future in mind through the summer, it will make picking a debt limit fight all the more dangerous for the GOP, and certainly be preferable to blindsiding the country with a new round of brinksmanship that puts the fragile recovery on the line once again.

How Jon Cohn understood the purpose of the president’s speech:

Obama mentioned Republican obstructionism in his speech, not once but several times, and not in short bursts but for extended soliloquies. There’s a reason. Major fiscal fights loom—over how to pay for government services, and under what conditions to raise the nation’s borrowing limit. House Republicans are already warning of new attempts at brinkmanship—like threatening to shut down the government if Obama won’t agree to de-funding of his health care plan.

Wednesday’s speech was the beginning of an effort to remind the American people about the stakes in those fights, and who supports what. Obama’s not going to win over the conservative base of the Republican Party, obviously, but he’s having at least some success working with less extreme members, like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Not coincidentally, Obama chose his words carefully, criticizing a “a sizable group of Republican lawmakers” who have threatened not to raise the debt limit but also praising the “growing number of Republican Senators [who] are trying to get things done.”

Chait adds:

Obama’s ultimate goal is not merely to insulate himself from blame if and when House Republicans shut down the government or threaten to default on the debt, but to build a coalition with pragmatic Republicans to negotiate around Boehner’s back. It’s not totally hopeless: Mitch McConnell is fighting back a revolt among pragmatic Republicans, like John McCain, who want to compromise on the budget.

Suderman doubts that Obama can break the gridlock:

Obama’s insistence that he would do everything he could to break congressional gridlock only underscored how little there is he can do in response. “I will not allow gridlock, inaction or willful indifference to get in our way,” he said. “Whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it. Where I can’t act on my own, I’ll pick up the phone and call CEOs, and philanthropists, and college presidents – anybody who can help – and enlist them in our efforts.” That’s right: The president is willing to pick up the phone and call philanthropists and college presidents, if that’s what it takes.

There isn’t, in other words, much he can do—or at least not much he can do that he also wants to do. And in Obama’s view, that seems to be the real problem.

And Drum wishes Obama’s speech had been bolder:

In what possible universe would bold new proposals break through the brick wall of modern Republican opposition to anything that’s not a tax cut for the rich? Obama could announce that John Galt has invented a free energy machine and just needs a small federal grant to commercialize it, and Republicans would oppose it. Obama could announce anything at all, and Republicans will reflexively oppose it.

The reason Obama should be bolder is not because it might “break through the resistance.” He should be bolder precisely because it wouldn’t make any difference. If you’re going to meet an adamantine wall no matter what you do, why not shoot for the stars? At least that way you’ve made it clear whose side you’re on.

A reader understandably asks:

I think your readers are a little bit more interested in what Ken was thinking while he was in the closet and shepherding anti-gay marriage laws in several states as head of the Republican Party. Why hasn’t he been asked this?

Because he felt that he had adequately addressed that question already, and our policy in the Ask Anythings is not to insist on an answer for any specific question. We give a huge amount of autonomy to the guests – and that was no different for Mehlman than for anyone else. Here are his previous confessions:

In an interview with Salon, the chairman of President Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign says he personally apologizes to people who “were harmed by the campaigns in which I was involved.” Ken Mehlman came out as gay in 2010. At the time, he expressed regret that he didn’t push back against the Bush campaign’s support for a federal anti-gay marriage amendment and anti-gay marriage initiatives on state ballots. “I can’t change the fact that I wasn’t in this place personally when I was in politics, and I genuinely regret that. It was very hard, personally,” he said.

Earlier this year, he said: “At a personal level, I wish I had spoken out against the effort,” Mehlman said. “As I’ve been involved in the fight for marriage equality, one of the things I’ve learned is how many people were harmed by the campaigns in which I was involved. I apologize to them and tell them I am sorry.”

I know exactly why these responses may not feel sufficient to many Dish readers.

But the Ask Anythings are not designed as classic persistent interviews by a lone interviewer. They’re constructed to give the speaker a chance to say whatever he or she feels – to shine or not, in the eyes of the readers. I am not in the room when the sessions are recorded, (with a few exceptions). The questions are voted on by readers. And what a guest chooses to talk about is often as revealing as what he or she chooses not to talk about. Our policy is to let them prove or hang themselves – and let you be the judge.

I also totally understand the sentiment that the man should still be raked over the coals for the 2004 campaign, especially in Ohio. But I have a firm and long policy in these cultural wars. Those seeking heretics will always lose to those seeking converts. And Mehlman is not just talking the talk on this; he has made a real difference in recent years in advancing the cause – which seems to me more important than settling old scores. Given that Mehlman has publicly apologized (unlike, say, Bill Clinton) to the gay victims of his past, I was not going to force another one in a format where we never do that anyway. It was my call to maintain these rules, but, of course, if Mehlman had wanted to apologize and explain again, I would not have stood in the way. He chose not to.

Because of these very limitations on Ask Anythings, we’ll be offering subscribers this fall a series of podcast conversations between me and a variety of other human beings where, trust me, I follow up questions relentlessly. They will not be traditional interviews, as on cable news or TV generally, just as the Ask Anything isn’t like anything on TV. They’ll be conversations – wide-ranging, spontaneous and with no topics off the table. They have no fixed time limit – and vary wildly in length and content.

We’re calling them “Andrew Asks Anything”. We have several in the bag and I’ll be taping more this fall. Stay tuned. But these will only be for subscribers. To become one, [tinypass_offer text=”click here”]. It’s as little as $2 a month, and, without ads, is our only source of income.

Ken’s previous answers are here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.