Month: November 2013

Was Arafat Poisoned?

9th death anniversary of Yasser Arafat

This week, Swiss forensic scientists examining the bones of the late leader of the Palestinian Authority found an unusually high level of polonium, leading to the conclusion of assassination. Clayton Swisher surveys the possible culprits:

There are lots of reasons to suspect Israeli responsibility. The former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was vocal over the years in admitting he had tried but failed to kill Arafat. Israel had famously botched its 1997 attempt to poison the political leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal. It appears logical for the PA – under Israeli military siege in the Muqata when Arafat suddenly became violently ill on 12 October 2004 – to claim Israel alone is to blame.

But there are many other possibilities that [lead Palestinian investigator Tawfik] Tirawi prefers to ignore. He himself was with Arafat during the siege; he was wanted by Israel, the CIA was shunning him, and he was accused of orchestrating suicide attacks against Israelis. That he was in close proximity when Arafat fell ill makes him at best a witness. For him to lead the investigation now is almost as farcical as the PA’s entire approach to date.

If Arafat was assassinated, David Harsanyi doubts that Israel carried it out:

[B]y 2004, the Israelis had little reason to do it.  If anything they were probably happy to keep him alive. Inept, confined to his crumbling headquarters in Ramallah, caught between numerous factions within his own circles, and without any genuine American support, why would Israel have picked that moment to kill him? Certainly, Israel had no interest in making Hamas stronger. It wouldn’t have made much sense. It is just as likely, perhaps more plausible considering the access they had, that a political rival would have murdered him. That’s if, of course, he was murdered at all.

To that point, David Barclay, a forensic scientist, backs the idea of poisoning:

From death statistics, the chance of this happening accidentally must be less than one in several billions for any individual living on this planet, and maybe even smaller for Arafat since his food and drink supply was apparently controlled. We are less certain, scientifically, that the calculated levels of [polonium] Po210 caused his illness and death simply because the lethal dose is less well established; but as forensic scientists, we are obliged to take into account the context, including the fact that he had no other obvious cause of death. And of course neither he, nor any of us, would have any reactor-made Po210 in our blood anyway. That fact alone would satisfy most juries that something really sinister was going on in 2004.

Deborah Blum is more skeptical, noting that “Arafat didn’t demonstrate the classic symptoms of acute radiation syndrome. He suffered no hair loss, for instance, and no signs of the usual bone marrow damage”:

The best-known example of Po-210 as a murder weapon is the 2006 killing of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London after meeting a couple former police colleagues for drinks. The killers apparently slipped the element into his tea; he was desperately sick within hours. It was later discovered that the suspected assassins had left a radioactive trail that tainted their hotel room and even the aircraft they had traveled on so as to set up the lethal meeting. …

A crucial difference, though, between the Litvinenko case and that of Arafat has to do with time elapsed. Po-210 is a highly active element in the uranium decay chain. Its half-life – the amount of time in which half the element decays away – is only 138.4 days. It was still fizzing away in Litvinenko’s body during the investigation. In the case of Arafat – who died about nine years ago – the element has essentially burned itself away. Meaning that it’s “found” in a circumstantial way, such as tests that look for residual radiation at energies typical of Po-210 emission, or the presence of a certain lead isotope (Pb-206) which is a known end-product in polonium decay.

Jeffery Goldberg leaves us with a quote from a 2001 interview he conducted with Ariel Sharon. Jeffrey wrote at the time:

Sharon was blunt on the subject of Arafat. “He’s a murderer and a liar,” he said. “He’s an enemy. He’s a bitter enemy.” Sharon has devoted a great deal of time and energy to Arafat. By Arafat’s own count, Sharon has tried to have him killed thirteen times. Sharon wouldn’t fix on a number, but he said the opportunity had arisen repeatedly. “All the governments of Israel for many years, Labor, Likud, all of them, made an effort — and I want to use a subtle word for the American reader — to remove him from our society. We never succeeded.”

Update from a reader:

The Russians did a test and said Arafat wasn’t poisoned, which contradicts the Swiss test.  At the same time, the Russians are the ones we know of who like to poison people with polonium, and 97% of the world’s polonium production occurs in Russia. Does anyone think the Russians or one of their surrogates did it? I do.

(Photo: Palestinian youth sit in front of a mural of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, at al-Shati refugee camp, as Palestinians mark the ninth anniversary of his death, in Gaza City on November 11, 2013. Arafat died in Paris on November 11, 2004 at 75 after falling sick a month earlier. Doctors were unable to specify the cause of death and no post-mortem was carried out at the time. By Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Yes, Alec Baldwin Is A Homophobic Bigot

I’m glad Dan agrees with me on the core point. But why on earth does he feel the need to qualify it? That is the question. Why are progressives held to a lower standard than conservatives? Should they not be held to higher standards? Many readers – depressingly – take Dan’s position or worse:

I feel slimy doing this but I am going to “defend” Alec Baldwin. I am now 38, I do not consider myself homophobic or a bigot. I am from the San Francisco bay area and I have had family, friends, employers are co-workers who are gay. I will vehemently advocate for gay rights during discussions with co-workers and I will not vote for bigoted politicians. I have frequented many gay bars with my wife because the partying is better.

However, when I am angry, I frequently use the phrases, cocksucker, faggot, bitch or a combination of the three words. Does this make me homophobic? Perhaps. Unfortunately I also use racial slurs. I am a third-generation American of Mexican descent and I use all type of slurs – anti-white, anti-Mexican, anti-black. I did grow up in a racially diverse area and we would always joke around with each other using racial slurs. I can only say in my heart and in my head I do not have negative feelings towards gay people or any race. I consider myself a conservative but voted for Obama in small part because the racist strategy used against him was so offensive to me.

Here’s a question. When my reader says he uses racial slurs, he doesn’t cite them. Does he use the word “nigger” or “kike” in public, in anger, I wonder, as Baldwin did in a homosexual context? If he did, would it be relevant to qualify it by saying he voted for Obama or loathes racist political demagoguery – and that he should thereby be given a pass? Ask yourselves that.

Another reader:

As you stated, Baldwin’s anger was merited. But you and everyone else should be very careful in throwing around the word “homophobe”, since being implicated as a homophobe is sort of a big deal. To say that Baldwin has contempt for gays is ridiculous. People who protest gay pride parade and spit on gays are homophobes. People who fire gays for their sexual orientation are homophobes. People who get cut off in traffic, lose their temper and yell “you stupid bitch” aren’t male chauvinists – they’re just being assholes at that moment.

Baldwin was pissed off and threw out a word that invokes the most pain possible.

I want to unpack this sentence, because it is important:

Baldwin was pissed off and threw out a word that invokes the most pain possible.

So Baldwin regards calling another man a “cocksucking fag” a way to inflict the most pain possible. That means he has to buy into the logic of the stigma in order to wield it as a weapon. What he’s implicitly asserting, by choosing those words, is that a man who sucks another man’s cock is a terrible thing to be. It’s a classic form of demonizing gay sexuality. It’s laden with the tones of schoolyard anti-gay bullying.

Then he uses a term that is routinely used in this context (there are other much more benign contexts I have no trouble with) to imply another man is inferior to other men, because he is effeminate, i.e. a fag. I’m sorry, but this is homophobia in its rawest form. If I heard someone yelling “cocksucking fag” to another man on the street, I’d immediately know what was going on, wouldn’t you? And whenever I have witnessed such a thing, I have intervened and protested.

There are many ways to vent in public. “Asshole,” “douchebag”, “fuck you!”, to cite a few more obvious ones. Since living in New York, I have heard many more variations on the theme. But a man who instinctively uses misogynistic or homophobic slurs as weapons in public is not just another angry New Yorker. If this were a one-off, it would be one thing. But Baldwin’s record on all this is appalling. Two years ago, he allegedly had another confrontation with a photographer:

At one point, at the beginning of the confrontation, It sounds like Alec says to the photog, “I know you got raped by a priest or something.” Then, in an effort to assert his dominance, Alec got right in the pap’s face … and in a menacing tone said, “You little girl.”

Baldwin again denies it and there may be some confusion over the precise wording. But this is textbook schoolyard homophobia, laced with the familiar memes of anal sex and the threat of thuggish violence against a gay man demeaned as a woman. (Notice the obvious rank misogyny embedded in that as well.) Even Mel Gibson – for all his foul anti-Semitism – never physically threatened a Jewish person while calling him a “kike.” Then there were the infamous tweets of earlier this year, directed not at a random person, but someone he actively knew was gay:

George Stark, you lying little bitch. I am gonna f%#@ you up … I want all of my followers and beyond to straighten out this fucking little bitch, George Stark. @MailOnline … My wife and I attend a funeral to pay our respects to an old friend, and some toxic Brit writes this fucking trash … If put my foot up your fucking ass, George Stark, but I’m sure you’d dig it too much … I’m gonna find you, George Stark, you toxic little queen, and I’m gonna fuck…you…up.

Again: the classic, unreconstructed homophobia is so obvious it takes one’s breath away. He has called other men “bitch” and “girl” while threatening violence – hate crimes – against them. Again: note the stigmatization of gay sex: “I’d put my foot up your fucking ass … but I’m sure you’d dig it too much.” He is threatening to anally rape a gay man – and is only restrained by the foul thought that a gay man would actually enjoy being raped. How much more hateful can it get?

And in all of these cases, he reflexively and comically lies afterward. He either denies everything – even when you can hear him on tape, for Pete’s sake, even when it’s in his own tweet! – or claims preposterous ignorance. I mean seriously, he has subsequently claimed he had no idea that the word “queen” had homosexual connotations and yesterday tweeted this (and, again, I swear I am not making this up):

Rich Ferraro from @glaad informs me that c’sucker is an anti-gay epithet. In which case I apologize and will retire it from my vocabulary.

At this point, it has become a joke that could work pretty well on 30 Rock – where, by the way, he is a brilliant comic actor.

One final point: is this a witch-hunt of someone – exactly the kind of thing I really try not to engage in, especially on gay issues? Am I being too sensitive?

I’d say this: I hope that Alec Baldwin as a human being really isn’t a homophobe in the depth of his heart and soul. He may well not be or may try not to be. Friends speak well of him. We all harbor prejudices; we’re all human; of all people, I know what it’s like to get angry and say or write stupid things. People are complicated. They can be bigots in one context and the opposite in another. I’m a sinner as well.

The reason I cannot let this go is the precedent it sets. Baldwin is not just an actor; he hosts a political show on MSNBC. He behaves as a political actor with his support of various causes, all of them noble. He has set himself up as a pro-gay progressive. If we concede the point that because you are somehow formally pro-gay, it doesn’t matter if you hurl murderous homophobic threats against people in public, then we have sold our soul.

I’m not talking about poorly written sentences – like Richard Cohen’s. I’m not gleaning subtle tropes in someone’s prose that might lead to suspicions of bigotry. I’m talking about the crudest of anti-gay epithets yelled in public repeatedly, combined in most cases with a threat of violence. If we excuse even that for the greater cause, then it seems to me we have nothing but cynicism left. And that level of cynicism is deeply corrosive of a civil rights movement.

In my view, the gay rights movement is not, at its core, about enacting legislation, or merely a political struggle. It is a moral case for the equal dignity of gay people, and for mutual respect. What deeply troubles me is not so much that one hot-headed actor is a bigot, but that his public support for gay causes is effectively buying him a right to perpetuate the vilest canards and hatreds that have demeaned gay people for centuries. What disturbs me is that pro forma support for various gay organizations or causes gives this man permission to perpetuate the foulest forms of bigotry – and never take full responsibility for it, and to do it again and again, with no penalty or the faintest sense that he has really done something terribly wrong by his own alleged standards.

It isn’t Alec Baldwin who troubles me so much. It’s his liberal enablers.

Should Privacy Be A Human Right?

Kenneth Roth, who leads Human Rights Watch, makes the case:

Existing legal frameworks [regarding privacy] were devised in an analogue age, when cross-border communication was rare and online communication and social media were unheard of. In that pre-internet age, surveillance techniques were labor-intensive and time-consuming, which helped to constrain arbitrary and abusive practices. The law has to catch up.

A good place to start would be a set of principles unveiled in September by a coalition of non-governmental groups and technology experts aimed at keeping communications surveillance lawful, necessary, proportionate, and subject to adequate safeguards against abuse. It’s time for governments to come clean about their practices, and not wait for the newest revelations. All should acknowledge a global obligation to protect everyone’s privacy, clarify the limits on their own surveillance practices (including surveillance of people outside their own borders), and ensure they don’t trade mass surveillance data to evade their own obligations.

Benjamin Wittes is unconvinced: 

Roth says that “Western allies should agree that mass, rather than narrowly targeted, surveillance is never a normal or proportionate measure in a democracy.”

The implication is that the legal obligation to privacy involves proportionality and also that the US’s privacy obligation to citizens of democratic countries differs somehow from its obligation to citizens of non-democratic countries. As a preliminary matter, I’m not sure why that latter point should be the case. It seems a bit unfair to the poor Iranians to say that it’s okay for the US to collect in bulk on them just because their own government behaves tyrannically. Talk about adding insult to injury!

More fundamentally, the distinction between mass surveillance and targeted surveillance seems to me inherently unstable. We actually do forms of “mass surveillance” all the time—including of our own citizens domestically: traffic enforcement cameras, airport security screening, anthrax testing of physical mail, to name only a few examples. None of these are narrowly targeted at people suspected of doing something wrong. They sweep in everyone who engages certain systems. What’s more, the whole idea of foreign intelligence collection is to gobble large volumes of material and then try to make sense of it. SIGINT is only one example of this.

What about satellite and drone surveillance of wide areas for long periods of time? Does that not also presumptively violate people’s international human right of privacy to the extent it is not targeted at individuals? What about requirements that banks report transactions over a certain size?

David Cole joins the debate:

I confess that working out the proper contours of a right of privacy on a global scale would be challenging.  It’s hard enough to get the Democrats and Republicans in Washington to come to consensus these days, much less China, Russia, the US, Germany, and Venezuela.  But that challenge is faced by all international rights norms.  It doesn’t mean that they are inconceivable, or not worth working toward. …

In the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, for example, we require the FBI to make individualized showings that a target is an agent of a foreign power before authorizing wiretaps and physical searches – as long as the target is here in the United States. Why couldn’t such a requirement apply to targets abroad?

Wittles replies:

I confess I’m left very much where I started: With no idea, either procedurally or substantively, what it would mean to respect the privacy rights of everyone in the world while conducting espionage—except, perhaps, to not “intrude” on anybody. So while I don’t doubt that it is possible to imagine a worldwide privacy right that extends beyond borders, I still don’t think Cole has done so, beyond telling us that maybe such a right looks like FISA and maybe it doesn’t.

Cole has the final word:

I have merely been arguing that we need to rethink our untested assumption that the only privacy rights worth caring about are our own. The point of my post was to refute Wittes’s contention that such a transnational right to privacy was literally unimaginable. I pointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which defines a right to privacy for US citizens and some foreign citizens – those residing here permanently — not as the only possible solution, but merely as an example demonstrating that it’s not impossible to both respect privacy rights and authorize intrusions on privacy for legitimate intelligence gathering purposes.

Working For A Smaller Slice Of The American Pie

Just how bad is it for American wage-earners? This bad:

Today, the share of the nation’s income going to wages, which for decades was more than 50 percent, is at a record low of 43 percent, while the share of the nation’s income going to corporate profits is at a record high. The economic lives of Americans today paint a picture of mass downward mobility. According to a National Employment Law Project study in 2012, low-wage jobs (paying less than $13.83 an hour) made up 21 percent of the jobs lost during the recession but more than half of the jobs created since the recession ended. Middle-income jobs (paying between $13.84 and $21.13 hourly) made up three-fifths of the jobs lost during the recession but just 22 percent of the jobs created since.

In 2013, America’s three largest private-sector employers are all low-wage retailers: Wal-Mart, Yum! Brands (which owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken) and McDonald’s. In 1960, the three largest employers were high-wage unionized manufacturers or utilities: General Motors, AT&T, and Ford.

Harold Meyerson blames the death of unions:

The collapse of workers’ power to bargain helps explain one of the primary paradoxes of the current American economy: why productivity gains are not passed on to employees. “The average U.S. factory worker is responsible today for more than $180,000 of annual output, triple the $60,000 in 1972,” University of Michigan economist Mark Perry has written. “We’re able to produce twice as much manufacturing output today as in the 1970s, with about seven million fewer workers.” In many industries, the increase in productivity has exceeded Perry’s estimates. “Thirty years ago, it took ten hours per worker to produce one ton of steel,” said U.S. Steel CEO John Surma in 2011. “Today, it takes two hours.”

In conventional economic theory, those productivity increases should have resulted in sizable pay increases for workers. Where conventional economic theory flounders is its failure to factor in the power of management and stockholders and the weakness of labor.

The above scene is from The Queen of Versailles, a remarkable documentary that Ezra called “perhaps the single best film on the Great Recession”:

Midway through the movie, there’s a scene that might stand as the single most complete vignette on the mechanics of the financial crisis and the subsequent slow recovery. It’s almost Christmas and David Siegel, CEO of Westgate Resorts, the largest time-share company in the world, is hosting a party. The party is in his huge mansion. But it’s not in his hugest mansion — the 90,000 square foot, still under-construction “Versailles” [seen above] — which is, at that moment, falling into foreclosure because Siegel can’t keep up on the payments.

Siegel, slumped in a ratty armchair, is regaling some friends with a tale that is, simultaneously, a sob-story about the desperate state of his finances and an extended boast about his skill at financial engineering. As Siegel tells it, he owes the bank $18.5 million, and he can’t pay. But the bank won’t write down the loan. So Siegel tapped a third-party to approach the bank about buying the loan, which they were able to do, for a mere $3.5 million. And then Siegel bought his $18.5 million loan back from the third-party at barely more than a sixth of its original value. This, he says, is why the financial system — and the economy — are in the toilet.

It’s all there: The conspicuous consumption, the mania for ever-more real estate fueled by every-cheaper loans, the complicated financial engineering that made so many rich and then made their companies so poor, Wall Street’s destructive unwillingness to write down the principal on loans, and the way that, even during the depths of the recession, the rich were able to play by different rules — rules that helped them emerge from the downturn with more money than ever.

And on the other side of the spectrum?

Jackie Siegel [seen above], a beauty queen from a small town in New York, has reconnected with a high school friend. The friend didn’t move to the big city and marry a billionaire whose business relied on cheap money. But she got hit by the financial crisis nevertheless: her house is now in foreclosure. And it’s her real house, the one she actually lives in.

The bank says she needs $1,800, and Jackie sends her $5,000. But in a late-night call some time later, she confesses that she lost the house anyway. The bank, she says, wasn’t willing to reverse the foreclosure process even though she’d been able to come up with the money. There’ll be no buying her loan back at a cut-rate price.

There’s Little Fat In A Food Stamps Budget

Katy Waldman interviews Debra, one of the 47 million people who just had their food stamps cut:

It was bad enough before the cuts: We were eating lunchmeat all week, and we only had enough for a can of vegetables a day. Divide $203 by 30 days, and then by 3 meals, and then halve it for each person. It’s not a lot. And now it’s going to be much worse. I don’t know if we can still do the canned vegetables every day. One thing we won’t do anymore is have three-course meals on weekends. We used to buy a dinner on Saturday and Sunday that would have three courses: a vegetable, a starch and a meat. But meat is going to be a huge problem.

Relatedly, Derek Thompson dissects a new Pew survey showing who is at the highest risk for obesity:

Poorer women are the most likely to be obese among all ethnicities. But there are a few counter-intuitive surprises here. The richest men were, overall, more likely to be obese than the poorest groups. The groups with the lowest rates of obesity were rich white women and poor black men. Obesity rises with income for black and Hispanic men, but it falls with income for black and Hispanic women. The relationship is clearly more complicated than “a disease for poor people in a rich country.”

As the House pushes a bill to cut food stamps by $40 billion, there’s been greater attention paid to the relationship between food stamps, poverty, and obesity. The debate can be crudely summed up as: Are we paying poor people to become obese. The evidence suggests the answer is no.

Losing The Long Game?

US-POLITICS-OBAMA-ECONOMY

Yuval Levin notes that Obama’s announcement yesterday “makes it more likely that the exchanges will not be able to achieve the volume and the risk-balance necessary for them to function.” He suspects the administration thinks “the risk is worth it not just because the immediate political danger is so great but also because the chances of the exchanges actually functioning anyway seem lower and lower all the time”:

That, to my mind, is what Thursday’s announcement really signals, and why I think it’s so significant. Prior instances of reckless presidential expediency in the debate over Obamacare have involved efforts to get past some immediate obstacle and just get the system into place, in the hope that once it was working the criticisms would fade away. This latest instance, however, involves roughly the opposite impulse: to sacrifice the prospects of the new system itself in the service of avoiding immediate political pain and embarrassment and without some larger goal in view.

It suggests that the administration is giving up on the long game of doing what it takes to get the system into place and then trusting that the public will come around and is adopting instead the mentality of a political war of attrition, fought news cycle by news cycle, in which the goal is to survive and gain some momentary advantage rather than to achieve a large and well-defined objective. It suggests, in other words, that the administration is coming to the view that Obamacare as they have envisioned it is not really going to happen, that they don’t know quite what is going to happen (and no one else does either), and that they need above all to keep their coalition together and keep the public from abandoning them so they can regroup when the dust clears.

That’s a very sobering thought, although I very much doubt the administration is as bearish on the law as Yuval. For my part, I thought the president should take the deserved hit but not tweak the law. Bill Clinton made that a lot harder – and boxed Obama into a classic Clinton triangulation: allowing insurance companies to restore their current clients’ canceled plans, and shifting the onus onto them. But Obama should have resisted it. For the sake of the entire law – which will be a core part of his legacy in history – he should have done a Reagan Iran-Contra Oval Office address, candidly confessing that the fact is he misled people, and is sorry. To regain that kind of credibility, you have to be one-on-one. A presser, even though I thought he showed calm and grace in it, keeps the feeding frenzy going.

It seems particularly unwise to me to weaken the law’s momentum roadrunner-midair and coherence when it is already beleaguered by the malfunctioning website, which may make a death spiral more likely next year anyway. Could he have survived the short-term political nightmare? Not without serious damage. But he is not George H W Bush, who faced re-election after breaking his No New Taxes pledge – for honorable reasons. He’s president for the next three years. If the Democrats bolted and the Congress united in trying to over-rule him, he has a veto. He may well use it anyway, to stop the Upton bill. He could have used it against any temporary fix to the law, taken all the blame, allowed Dems to defect, and then engaged on a real, actual campaign to sell the ACA to the American public. In other words: show true political conviction and finally make the unabashed moral and fiscal case for the reform he and the Democrats have so far shied from, for fear of political damage.

The great flaw of Democrats is their cowardice, which they sometimes mistake for caution.

I saw it up close in the long fight for marriage equality. For a decade, instead of actively making the case for marriage equality, they ran from it. They thought somehow they might be able to advance gay rights quietly. The gay lobby kept wanting to effectively bribe the Democrats to pass various bits and bobs which could be disguised or somehow kept from the public. I can’t tell you how many times I was effectively told: “Shhh.  The American people are too bigoted to accept this openly, so we’ll try to advance it legislatively on the downlow.” But did they really think the American people wouldn’t notice if we tried to get gay marriage by stealth? Please.

Ditto with healthcare reform. The assumption was you could not make the case that there will be winners and losers in this reform – and still pass the law. If you mentioned the losers, you’d be dead in the water. If you acknowledged the risks, you’d be done for. And so the Democrats have long been on the defensive – and their utter lack of conviction couldn’t be better illustrated by their sudden flight for the hills this week. They never truly went on the offensive – lacerating the past, touting the hugely popular aspects of the reform (pre-existing conditions, stable insurance policies, and end to free riders, etc.). And so when the going got rough, they were marooned on their own defensive island. Since they told us no one would ever lose anything with this, since they never really sold the law aggressively, since they hadn’t built popular legitimacy around it, any flaws or costs now seem like a form of deceit or failure, rather than the inevitable costs of a huge and necessary reform.

I don’t think the president can win this struggle defensively. Yet that is how he has begun it. He needs to regain the initiative and offensive or wither under a constant assault of nay-sayers, spitballs, and no-alternative opportunists. It can still happen. This is the law – and a return to the past is not feasible. Maybe this is the beginning of the real debate rather than the end. Only now are the costs as well as the benefits being revealed. Maybe in the forthcoming struggle over the law, we will finally cone to grips with the real crisis in healthcare, and the opposition will finally actually have to take some responsibility for it, and propose a genuine alternative. That may not happen until the presidential primaries take place. But if this law unravels, it will not just be brutal for Obama. It will force the Republicans at some point to say what they are for, rather than simply what they are against. And that is the real long game. And it has barely begun.

(Photo: Jim Watson/Getty.)

The Tea Party Is Unpopular, Powerful

Enten points out that Tea Party support is dwindling:

The latest George Washington University Battleground poll found that just 19% of Americans said they would consider themselves a member of the Tea Party. The NBC News / Wall Street Journal survey found a record high 70% of Americans would say they were not members. Asked slightly differently, the last CNN / ORC survey discovered that only 28% of Americans held a favorable view of the Tea Party movement, while a record high 56% of Americans held an unfavorable view.

This polling is a major change from just three years ago. Before the the 2010 midterms, NBC / Wall Street Journal pegged the percentage of Tea Party supporters at about 30%, while 60% said they were not. In terms of the margin between the two sides, it’s been a drop of 20pt against the Tea Party over the past three years.

But Sabato finds that the Tea Party still has a very strong hold on the GOP:

Tea Party supporters now dominate the activist base of the Republican Party. In 2012 they made up nearly two-thirds of those who reported voting in Republican presidential primaries, and in 2014 they may well make up an even larger majority of those voting in what are likely to be very low turnout congressional primaries. Some might argue that the recent special election GOP primary in Alabama’s 1st Congressional District might augur well for the Republican establishment as the establishment-backed candidate defeated the Tea Party-backed one. However, it was a narrow five-point win that saw overwhelming resources put at the establishment candidate’s disposal. If anything, the ANES survey data suggest that a more realistic scenario in next year’s primaries is that more establishment Republican incumbents will be unseated by Tea Party challengers.

Poseur Alert

“The McRib is like Holbein’s skull: we experience it as (quasi-)foodstuff, as marketing campaign, as cult object, as Internet meme, but those experiences don’t sufficiently explain it. To understand McRib fully, we have to look at the sandwich askew. … The McRib’s stochastic return mcdonalds-mcribmakes visible the relationship between the eater and the McDonald’s menu. It produces a stain, a tear in the order of things that reveals the object-cause of desire for McDonald’s, but only briefly before it evaporates like faux-cartilage. The fragile conditions that make the McRib possible also insure that desire for McDonald’s food more generally speaking is maintained.

Desire is a delicate system. For Lacan, the lover “gives what he does not possess,” namely the objet a that incites desire rather than sustaining it. Likewise, McDonald’s sells what it does not sell: the conditions of predictability, affordability, and chemico-machinic automated cookery that make its very business viable. … Industrialism is also a kind of magic, the magic of the perfect facsimile. Eating at McDonald’s—eating anything whatsoever at McDonald’s—connects us to that magic, allows us to marinate inside it and take on its power,” – Ian Bogost, contemplating the return of the McRib. Update from a reader:

Does the Bogost piece really belong in that category? Seems pretty tongue-in-cheek to me.

Chart Of The Day

Approval Caucus Lost

Trende created the chart above on “the relationship between presidential job approval in the final Gallup poll before midterm Election Day and the share of the president’s party’s congressional delegation that went down to defeat”:

This isn’t a perfect relationship, but presidential job approval is still the most important variable for how his party fares in midterm elections, explaining about half of the variance. The relationship is highly statistically significant: For every point in job approval the president loses, his party loses 0.6 percent of its caucus. (The chart doesn’t measure drop in job approval; just job approval.) So, at 60 percent, the president should lose 5 percent of his caucus; at 50 percent, it is around 12 percent of his caucus lost; at 40 percent, it’s about 18 percent of his caucus lost — which would be 36 seats.

Now the latter is highly unlikely to happen. To pick up 36 seats, the GOP would have to win every seat that Obama won with 56 percent of the vote or less in 2012. Right now the GOP only holds five seats the president won with 54 percent of the vote or more, and only one seat he won with over 56 percent of the vote.

A Shadow Tax In The Spotlight

Barro hopes that the political blowback from Obamacare rate shock will teach future politicians “that shadow fiscal policy is not necessarily politically easier than explicit fiscal policy, and take their future expenditure programs on-budget”:

Obamacare’s explicit funding sources are mostly new taxes on people with high incomes and cuts to Medicare provider payments. But some of the “shadow fiscal policies” in Obamacare are effective tax increases on people with moderate incomes; these people didn’t expect to face a tax increase under Obamacare, and now that they’re discovering they are, they’re getting angry.

This is another example of the closing wonk gap: Members of the general public figuring out facts about Obamacare that policy wonks on both sides of the debate have known for years.

Obamacare relies heavily on cross-subsidies as it greatly expands the market for individually-purchased health insurance. Premiums in this market will be tightly regulated so young and healthy people pay more than they’re expected to get back in claims and older and sicker people pay less. This is a tax, of sorts, on a subset of young and healthy people that goes to finance health care for people who need more of it. And the individual mandate is designed to make sure they pay the tax, one way or another.