Month: November 2013

James Gibney tires of the endless investigations:

So far, Republicans have yet to unearth a grand political conspiracy or cover-up by the Obama administration involving Benghazi. This week, they’ll interrogate Central Intelligence Agency security officers who were on site. That will shine more light on some decisions that, absent the fog of war, might have been made differently. Yet if something truly damaging was likely to surface, it surely would have done so by now. Put another way, could the architects of the current health-care debacle really engineer a cover-up capable of withstanding the frantic digging of five congressional committees?

What Congress could do, if it really cared about preventing future attacks:

Congress should be making sure the State Department actually implements the review board’s recommendations, which cover knotty areas from language training and building security to threat analysis. Past experience suggests compliance will be spotty at best.

But that is not, I suspect, what it’s about. This story thrives on the far right – i.e. most of the right – because it advances a couple of memes. The first is that Obama failed as commander-in-chief because an al Qaeda group in North Africa used the anniversary of 9/11 to attack a diplomatic compound disguising a CIA base. So he tried to cover it up, by claiming it was a response to an incendiary video. But the trouble with this argument, it seems to me, is that it cannot connect to a broader theme about the president. He has done far more damage to al Qaeda than his predecessor, decimated their ranks in the region whence 9/11 came, ramped up surveillance, and killed Osama bin Laden. So the political logic of the Benghazi obsession is weirdly off-track. But it’s what they always intended to say about the first black president whose middle name is Hussein from the get-go: that he’s soft on terrorism, so they stick with it, even though it’s patently untrue.

The real force behind the powerful meme, I’d wager, is the usual (usual!) argument that the president is a covert traitor and ally to al Qaeda.

So he deliberately left American diplomats to be gunned down by Jihadists in Benghazi, barely lifted a finger to help them, lied about it to cover his tracks, and generally cares more about foreign people with dark skin than those on sovereign American soil. They need to prove this horrifying truth because it would blow up this presidency and render it totally illegitimate. And they still dream of erasing the first black president from the history books as an asterisk. The whole thing is eerily similar to the way the far right in the 1950s believed Eisenhower was a Communist sympathizer and ally. (That meme now extends to FDR as well in the fever swamps!)

I have no problems with endless hearings if that’s what the GOP wants. But we should have few illusions about the paranoid fantasies that fuel this foul stuff. I’d be offended and enraged by their disgusting insinuations of treason – “and where was the president that night?” etc – but seriously, after six years of this stuff, my rage buttons are worn down.

A new, ridiculously early NBC poll finds Christie trailing Clinton by 10 points. Aaron Blake thinks the top-line numbers are misleading:

The most telling numbers in the NBC poll … are Christie’s deficit in the South (43-35) and slim lead among white voters (41-37). Regardless of who the GOP nominee is in 2016, he or she isn’t going to lose the South or come close to losing white voters. Christie’s under-performance in the NBC poll is all about people not knowing who he is.

And a closer look at the NBC numbers above suggests Christie is actually better-positioned than Mitt Romney was in 2012. While Romney lost the Hispanic vote by 44 points, Christie trails by just 11 (and is notably already ahead of Romney’s 27 percent showing, despite a about a quarter of Latino voters being undecided). And while Romney lost young voters by 23 points, Christie trails by just 14. All of this despite Christie’s name ID deficit.

If Christie could lose by only those margins among those demographics, he would probably win.

I stick to my view that Christie would be a formidable opponent to Clinton. I just can’t see how he gets past the primaries. And his total vacuousness on national policy is a sight to behold. He’s not a candidate right now; he’s a walking attitude.

Yesterday, Noam Scheiber made the case that she is. Bouie is skeptical:

It’s noteworthy that, in his piece, Scheiber doesn’t say much about Warren’s signature on a secret letter urging Clinton to run for the Democratic nomination. At most, he argues, it’s a pledge that won’t stand if Warren decides the presidency is key to advancing her policy agenda.

But, to my eyes, that letter says everything about where Clinton stands vis a vis the rest of the Democratic Party. In short, 2016 won’t be 2008, where Clinton was a powerful but contentious figure in the party, and a well-organized challenger could capitalize on grassroots anger and establishment discontent to derail her path to the nomination. Now, Clinton is a wildly popular figure, with one of the highest statures in American politics. Among Democrats, 67 percent favor her for the nomination (compared to 4 percent for Warren) , and in an early poll of potential New Hampshire primary voters, she has the highest favorability ratings—near 80 percent—of any potential candidate. This is a far cry from 2006, where—at most—she had support from a plurality of Democrats.

Scott Lemieux agrees:

One thing to add is that the younger voters who are more supportive of economic populism are also the least likely to vote in primaries, which will make it harder to break Clinton’s hold on the party’s base. And as admirable as Warren is as a public figure, given that she ran 7 points behind Obama in Massachusetts whether she can appeal to a broad enough based of Democratic voters in a wide enough variety of states to pose a serious threat to Clinton is an open question.

Drum thinks, in Scheiber’s piece, that Warren comes across as “a novelty candidate, the kind who enter the race mostly because they want the exposure it gives their cause, not because they have any chance of winning—or even of seriously affecting who does win”:

Now, maybe Scheiber is being unfair to Warren. Maybe she’s not quite as messianic as all that, and maybe over the next few years she’ll start to develop considered views on non-banking subjects at the same time that she develops shrewder political skills. That would make her a more dangerous contender. But if Scheiber is right about her, I think he’s pretty much undermined his own case.

 

In today’s video, Charles argues that the animal soul may resemble the human soul much more than we realize:

About his new book:

For Love of Animals is an honest and thoughtful look at our responsibility as Christians with respect to animals. Many Christians misunderstand both history and their own tradition in thinking about animals. They are joined by prominent secular thinkers who blame Christianity for the Western world’s failure to seriously consider the moral status of animals. This book explains how traditional Christian ideas and principles—like nonviolence, concern for the vulnerable, respect for life, stewardship of God’s creation, and rejection of consumerism—require us to treat animals morally.

His previous videos are here. A reader writes:

Thanks very much for this interesting series. Camosy says that we should not eat meat because we should live non-violent lives. I believe that violence should only be used in self-defense. When we eat eggs, meat, or dairy we are complicit in acts of violence against the innocent defenseless who do not threaten us. We would be choosing violence for no good reason. This is a compelling point. He goes on to say that animal products should only be used if there is a need, and that in modern society there is no need for these products. Eggs, meat, and dairy are totally unnecessary.

Camosy’s most important point is that factory-farmed animal products are a sin.

This should be obvious. Everyone should boycott those products completely, whether based on religion, basic morals, or both. Some people may feel that it is acceptable for them to use animal products that are not from factory farms. While I would not use them, I believe that these people are sincere. There is a massive problem with this approach though: there are almost no animal products that are not from factory farms, and the products that are labeled and marketed to suggest that they are not from factory farms really are from factory farms. When you see labels like “cage free”; “free range”; “grass fed”; “humane”; “natural”; “organic”; etc. you can very safely assume that these are all factory-farmed products. One would have to avoid all eggs, meat, and diary sold in stores and at restaurants, visit the producers oneself, visit their suppliers, and see where and how the animals are slaughtered. It would be a full-time job for most people and it would yield little food.

Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

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It’s an uplifting story that also makes you want to despair of government. Three 20-year-old programmers from San Francisco have set up a website – thehealthsherpa.com – that already does a huge amount of the work that the government website cannot effectively handle yet. No, you can’t enroll in Obamacare on it, but you can quickly see your options. What a concept! Available information! Money quote:

“They got it completely backwards in terms of what people want up front,” said Liang. He added: “They want prices and benefits, so that they could make the decision.” Liang showed CBS News how it worked. “You come to our website and you put in your zip code — in this case a California zip code. You hit ‘find plans,’ and you immediately see the exchange plans that are available for that zip code.”

It didn’t work for me, because they don’t have New York or DC plans yet in their system (California is their strong suit). But I did get instant access to both states’ exchange sites – no clogged system at all:

Using information buried in the government’s own website built by high-priced government contractors, they found a simpler way to present it to users. “That’s the great thing about having such a small team,” said Kalogeropoulos. “You sit around a table and say, ‘Okay, how does this work?’ There’s no coordination meetings, there’s no planning sessions. It’s like, ‘Well, let’s read the document and let’s implement this.'”

They’re busy updating and adding new features, like calculations for the various tax subsidies, as the video shows. So why not use this site or encourage other young geeks to set up similar ones outside the government just to convey information that is currently buried in healthcare.gov? You can then use that information to call up an insurance company or broker or navigator and buy your insurance. Then ask yourself: how did three 20 year-olds manage this in weeks while the feds had three years and fucked it up so bad it seems like an episode of computer Hell?

One reason is small scale. It reminds me of the difference working for the Dish as an independent, small group of peers rather than embedded in a larger media organization. If we have an idea, we execute it. Before, we’d have to run it up endless ladders, wait for approvals, get last-minute delays, persuade some busy guy to help us, lobby for resources, and on and on. Now I just click my fingers and say: “Get on it, Special Teams!” and we have House ads. Well, not quite like that. But we never want to grow too much for exactly these reasons. In technology and creativity, smaller is better.

We know Obama has the skills to do this. He did it in both campaigns to stunning effect. But then he was out of government, out of all those cumbersome contracting rules, able to be more nimble. Why, one wonders, did he not fight the entrenched ways of doing things and innovate more aggressively? Why did he not focus on this in ways that were not simply urging his officials to make sure they got it right?