Month: December 2013

Fournier Digs In, Ctd

Kilgore has a point-by-point takedown of Fournier’s latest:

Let’s look at the two parties’ records on “partisanship.” In Bush’s first term, he got sizable and crucial help from Democrats on his two biggest domestic initiatives (aside from tax cuts, where a few Senate Democrats gave him a lot of help, too), No Child Left Behind and the Medicare Rx Drug Benefit. Democrats notoriously gave Bush the power to wage the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars … There was nothing, nothing like the right-from-the-beginning GOP obstructionism Obama faced, as best evidenced by the refusal of the GOP to offer even a single vote in either House for a health care plan modeled explicitly on Republican precedents in the Senate and in Massachusetts.

Ambers defends his former boss:

Fournier’s worldview is this: Obama, as president, has a responsibility to lead, even if Republicans are the worst, most implacable, most irresponsible group of American politicians on the face of the continent, which, by the way, they are.

Fournier has written presciently and regularly on the racially-tinged appeals that Republicans resort to, and how it’s hard to come to any other conclusion that the party is “clueless, heartless and gutless” at its core. Its leaders do not have the moxie to defy their base, and the party has shamefully attempted to dismantle and discredit government wherever it is vulnerable.

But Fournier doesn’t write primarily about Republican dysfunction. More often, he writes about Obama’s failure to lead. And leadership is not an abstract conception. It is not the same thing as shouting more loudly than Republicans. It is not the same thing as forcing the other party to bend to your will. Fournier believes that leadership is about the slow and cumbersome and often frustrating process of putting one foot in front of the other and bringing more and more people along with you.

Specifically, Obama promised too much, overestimates how weak he is institutionally, overestimates how strong Republicans are, and retreats to the comfort of a small group of advisers who exacerbate his worst instincts. Like President Bush, he became a captive of a city he was sent to reform.

It would have been interesting to read that piece. But it was not the one Fournier wrote.

Yglesias Award Nominee

“I think [Pope Francis] is a complicated man. And I wrote at the time of his ascension, because I knew something about his passion/compassion for the poor, that he should not simply be judged on where he stands on gay marriage or abortion, but that we evaluate him also and think about him and the fact that he lives a life of such humility. He wants to feel connected to those at the bottom. My qualm, right now, with the political left is that it is so taken over by sexual issues, sexual questions, that we have forgotten the traditional concern of the left was always social class and those at the bottom. And now we’re faced with a pope who is compassionate towards the poor and we want to know his position on abortion. It seems to me that at one point when Pope Francis said, “You know the church has been too preoccupied with those issues, gay marriage and abortion…” at some level the secular left has been too preoccupied with those issues,” – Richard Rodriguez.

Exeunt The Theocons, Ctd

Pope Benedict XVI Appoints New Cardinals At The Vatican

My take is here. Pierce praises the Pope’s latest actions:

This is smiling Pope Francis’s declaration of war against the legacies of the institutional theological reactionaries who preceded him in office. Both John Paul II and Benedict salted the world’s dioceses with hardbars like Bishop Raymond Burke, guaranteeing that their ideas would plague us long after they died or, in Benedict’s case, retired. Francis has wasted no time in rooting out these nasty walking land mines. Monkeying with the Congregation for Bishops is a serious business. It is a clear attempt to restructure the entire Church bureaucracy to fit your ideas, and it’s what good Pope John did 50 years ago.

Dreher’s view:

American conservative Catholics who defend Pope Francis keep saying that Francis is truly orthodox, despite the fact that the liberal US media love him. Maybe they’re right. But the further we go into this pontificate, the more I wonder if liberals understand something about Pope Francis that conservatives do not. The Advocate‘s editors, for example, probably don’t expect Francis ever to endorse same-sex marriage, or even gay sexuality; if they do expect this, they’re delusional. But they have every reason to hope that Francis will undermine the Church’s formal opposition to same-sex marriage and the broader gay-rights agenda. I think the Advocate made a savvy choice, frankly.

David Gibson look ahead:

In February, Francis will have two more important opportunities to make his mark: His Council of Cardinals will give him a blueprint for reforming the Curia, and a few days later, he will appoint his first batch of new cardinals — some of the men who may one day gather to elect Francis’ successor and chart a new course or follow the one he is laying out.

(Photo: New cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, Archbishop of St. Louis, receives the biretta cap from Pope Benedict XVI in Saint Peter’s Basilica on November 20, 2010 in Vatican City, Vatican. Burke was just removed from Pope Francis’ Congregation of Bishops. By Franco Origlia/Getty Images.)

Quote For The Day

VATICAN-RELIGION-CHRISTIANITY-POPE-UNITALSI

“When God meets us he tells us two things. The first thing he says is: have hope. God always opens doors, he never closes them. He is the father who opens doors for us. The second thing he says is: don’t be afraid of tenderness. When Christians forget about hope and tenderness they become a cold Church, that loses its sense of direction and is held back by ideologies and worldly attitudes, whereas God’s simplicity tells you: go forward, I am a Father who caresses you” – Pope Francis, from his most recent interview.

(Photo:  Pope Francis hugs a disabled man during a meeting with the UNITALSI, the Italian Union responsible for the transportation of sick people to Lourdes and the International Shrines in Paul VI hall, at the Vatican, on November 9, 2013. By Filippo Monteforte/AP/Getty.)

The Politico Premise

The magazine of the website has a somewhat classic, fifth-year piece on how a president can get his mojo back – or if a nine-point decline in the polls in one year is an irretrievable position in a second term. What’s interesting is that, in order to sustain this narrative, you have to describe a scenario which would be success, so as to contrast it with what pundits would call failure. And so we get this sentence:

The next six months could be decisive: If the president can’t move past the Obamacare debacle to reset the agenda through executive action and targeted legislative campaigns on climate change, immigration and the minimum wage, he might never be able to regain his footing.

Now maybe Glenn Thrush is correct and these are the areas in which to judge this presidency over the next year. But it seems likelier to me that these are merely the areas in which the Beltway will try to judge his presidency, because they can posit something that should have happened that hasn’t. But, in reality, much has already been set. If the ACA survives and sticks and even works, then the next three years will not be about “moving past” the Obamacare debacle, but about making sure that near-universal access to healthcare is now standard for the US. By any measure in history, that would be a seismic achievement, a watershed in the social history of the United States. But within the Politico timeline, it means close to nothing at all. Ditto a potential detente with Iran – which will be decided in the next year or so. Again, if a comprehensive deal is achieved and sticks, the Middle East is transformed, and the full response of the Obama presidency to the crime of 9/11 – and the acute religious polarization that followed – will become clearer. But again, this defining event isn’t even in the sight-lines of Politico at all.

And what does a “targeted legislative campaign” mean?

If the GOP House wants to, it can stop anything the president wants – and it has, again and again and again and again. So is he going to sneak through a raise in the minimum wage? C’mon. Immigration reform, meanwhile, is still on the table, the president has clearly taken the side of reform, while the GOP has doggedly resisted any constructive change at all. And the Politico question of the next year is: what can Obama do to somehow make this happen? Surely the apposite question is what can the GOP do to make this issue less of a threat to their standing as a national party? And the odds there are that in the run-up to the next general election, the first real internal pressure will come to bear on the Congressional GOP on the issue. And if reform then gets passed in Obama’s final year, that will count against him?

Look: I know we have to churn out copy and I do so myself on a daily basis. But sometimes, what’s striking about Washington is how the long-term shifts in policy and culture we are now going through are almost perfectly mismatched with the press’ ever-more-intense short-term perspective.

Is This Tweet An Ad?

And you thought native advertizing was just for what used to be called magazines. The truth is: following the Peretti-fueled takeover of journalism by public relations, social media is now fast becoming a blur of p.r. and, you know, real messages from real people. The growth is staggering:

Native social advertising is growing significantly faster than social display, with native revenue growing 77% this year, according to the fall update to BIA/Kelsey’s U.S. Social Local Media Forecast. The native category is expected to generate $2.4 billion this year, up from $1.4 billion in 2012, driven primarily by the surge in social media activity across mobile platforms, the firm says … Social display ad revenue in the U.S. will grow from $4.3 billion in 2013 to $6.8 billion in 2017, or 12.6% annually, according to the forecast. During the same period, native social advertising — propelled by the category’s main players, Facebook’s Sponsored Stories and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets — will more than double, from $2.4 billion to nearly $5 billion, a 20.3% annual growth rate.

If that pace continues, there may be no old-school advertizing left: just countless tweets and posts created by corporations to sell things. Good luck finding out where the real world begins.

Christmas Hathos Watch

Since that season is at our throats once again, and since I’m always cranky about it, I thought it might be fun to vent some collective Christmas angst by posting the most hathos-filled Christmas videos that Dish readers love/hate. Remember:

Hathos is the attraction to something you really can’t stand; it’s the compulsion of revulsion.

It might make it all more enjoyable. So let me start the ball rolling with this vintage McDonalds ad from the 1980s.

Now let’s see some serious yuletide hathos, shall we? Let the in-tray rip.

The Boycott Kabuki

The American Studies Association has voted to endorse an academic boycott of Israel:

The resolution approved by a plurality of ASA members cites as a rationale the lack of “effective or substantive academic freedom for Palestinian students and scholars under conditions of Israeli occupation” and calls for the association to boycott Israeli higher education institutions, which are described as being “a party to Israeli state policies that violate human rights and negatively impact the working conditions of Palestinian scholars and students.”

And we’re off! Goldblog asks why Israel is being singled out:

Another approach of the American Studies Association would be to study the reporting of such organizations as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as make lists of the countries that violate human rights on a regular basis (100 or so come to mind with minimum effort) and boycott them. Still another direction would be to boycott institutions in the U.S., which is occupying Afghanistan and conducting assassination campaigns in five or six countries around the world. Many members of the American Studies Association teach at institutions that receive research funding from the Pentagon. The most appropriate response by these academics might be to ban themselves from the conferences they organize and cease to read their own papers.

Scott McConnell defends targeting Israel:

A corollary to this point is that America, because of its “special relationship” with Israel, has a particular obligation to stand up against the injustices Israel is responsible for.

Beinart weighs in:

This is the fundamental problem:

Not that the ASA is practicing double standards and not even that it’s boycotting academics, but that it’s denying the legitimacy of a democratic Jewish state, even alongside a Palestinian one. I don’t think that position is inherently anti-Semitic, but I do think it’s profoundly misguided. Britain is not illegitimate because it has a cross on its flag and an Anglican head of a state. Germany is not illegitimate because its immigration policy favors members of a dominant ethnic group. Jews deserve a state that takes a special interest in their self-protection, just like Palestinians do. And disregarding both peoples’ deep desire for such a state is not a recipe for harmonious bi-nationalism (if such a thing even exists); it’s a recipe for civil war.

That’s not just my view. It’s the view of the most popular Palestinian leader alive, Marwan Barghouti, who said earlier this year that, “If the two-state solution fails, the substitute will not be a binational one-state solution, but a persistent conflict that extends based on an existential crisis.”

Chait sees the boycott backfiring:

The ASA buoyantly predicts its boycott will pressure Israel into ending its occupation. I predict the opposite effect. In recent years, the context of the American debate has changed markedly, as Jewish liberals have grown openly frustrated and angry with hawkish Israeli governments. The ideological and generational split has created a novel opportunity for critics of Israel’s occupation. Absurdly discriminatory academic boycotts make anti-occupation (but not categorically anti-Israel) liberals — like, say, J Street — forget what’s so terrible about the occupation and remember what’s so terrible about the anti-Zionist left. It’s the best news Netanyahu has had in months.

But Matthew Kalman suggests that the ASA boycott could also backfire and help the Palestinian leadership:

“No, we do not support the boycott of Israel,” [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas told reporters [at Mandela’s memorial last week]. “But we ask everyone to boycott the products of the settlements. Because the settlements are in our territories. It is illegal…But we don’t ask anyone to boycott Israel itself. We have relations with Israel. We have mutual recognition of Israel.” It wasn’t quite a denunciation of the BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] campaign, but the remarks threatened to transform the boycott from its self-image as the principled projection of native Palestinian policy to the bastard foreign child of freelance troublemakers. …

One of the motivating factors behind John Kerry’s current push for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is the belief of U.S. and European officials sympathetic to Israel that the BDS campaign is beginning to make inroads that will, left unchallenged, begin to nibble away at mainstream support for Israel in the democratic world. From Abbas’s point of view, this surely should be good news and strengthen his hand in the current peace talks, helping to speed up their glacial progress.

And the beat goes on.

Let’s Make A Plea Deal

Sullum reveals how mandatory minimum sentences translate into mandatory guilty pleas for those facing drug charges:

A recent report from Human Rights Watch highlights the tremendous pressure to plead guilty that mandatory minimum sentencing laws put on defendants like [Lulzim] Kupa. The pressure is so intense that only 3 percent of federal drug offenders exercise their Sixth Amendment right to a trial, down from about 15 percent before Congress began enacting mandatory minimums in the 1980s.

Prosecutors have long offered lenience in exchange for guilty pleas; that is what makes such arrangements possible. But the huge differences in punishment documented by Human Rights Watch make demanding a trial so risky that almost no one chooses that option.

The prosecutorial power to multiply penalties at will magnifies the injustice that results from rigid sentencing rules tied to drug weight. Even if a 10-year sentence were an appropriate penalty for a cocaine dealer, a life sentence plainly would not be appropriate for the same defendant.