Month: April 2014

Willa Paskin is optimistic about Letterman’s replacement:

This has been a tumultuous time for late night: Leno just left to be replaced by Jimmy Fallon who was in turn replaced by Seth Meyers. ABC got serious about Jimmy Kimmel, and bumped him up a time slot. And not that long ago, Conan O’Brien moved to a whole new network. And yet through all this change, late-night network TV has remained remarkably static. None of the white men with their names in the title have seriously altered the monologue-desk-interview format. …

But Colbert is in a unique position to do something about all this sameness. He, unlike almost all the aforementioned gentleman, is starting in one essential way from scratch: Audiences don’t exactly know him. Stephen Colbert, the man, has had a long career doing things other than playing Stephen Colbert, the blowhard— you can see clips of him out of character here—but America is not particularly familiar with that first guy.

Emily Bazelon will miss duking it out with “Stephen Colbert”:

I’m excited for Colbert to remake network late night. But I’m also mourning, for a moment, the passing of his character. It was such a distinct performance, a lark that also took all of us, as viewers, on a deep dive into American politics. I never worry when people tell me their main sources of news are The Daily Show and The Colbert Report because we learn a ton while we laugh. And in fact, Colbert’s greatest skill is that he asks great questions. That part he’ll take with him.

I feel exactly the same way – and not just because I will miss my epic struggle with Neil DeGrasse Tyson to be the most booked guest ever on the show. I truly think “Stephen Colbert” is the best piece of political performance art since the Palin candidacy. To lose that mask will be a loss for all of us. Allahpundit expects Colbert’s parodic style to carry over into his new gig:

I don’t think he’s comfortable playing comedy any other way; I’d be surprised if his CBS show is any different. Instead of playing the faux-conservative, which works during Comedy Central’s 11 p.m. hour of right-bashing power for a millennial audience but might not work for an older, more diverse crowd on CBS, he’ll probably play the faux-late-night-host, mocking the conventions of the format. Which wouldn’t be terrible: After 50 years of the same crap, right down to the demographics of the various personalities, anything different at that hour is good.

James Poniewozik certainly hopes so:

What Colbert has done with The Colbert Report is, arguably, the greatest innovation in late night since Letterman launched NBC’s Late Night in 1982. The Report was a talk show, it was a satire, it was a real-time improv performance in character, week in and week out. But more than that, it was a creative work that didn’t end when the credits rolled; it was bigger than its time slot, bigger even than TV. He extended his parody to runs for office, to the White House Correspondents Dinner, to the American campaign finance system. He created a participatory performance, enlisting his Colbert Nation to vote in polls and to back charitable initiatives. …

Just please God, don’t let that thing be a middle-of-the-road, Hollywood-centric, let’s-roll-a-clip, something-for-everyone 11:35 p.m. talk show. Colbert is smart, quick, personable and likeable, but that likeability comes from—weird as this is to say about someone who’s hosted a show in character for nine years—authenticity. Colbert is specifically not for everyone; he’s geekily intelligent, blisteringly funny and has a distinct, often political, point of view. Take that away and you take away everything.

Alyssa agrees that Colbert’s politics are an essential part of his act:

One of the biggest fears about Colbert’s move to CBS seems to be a sense that he will have to drop the political angle of his show in order to appeal to a mass audience. But while Letterman’s overall audience is larger than the one Colbert draws on Comedy Central, the men draw roughly similar numbers of viewers in the coveted 18-49 demographic. If the rest of the show is going to move away from the crazed act that Colbert has sustained since 2005, why not let the politics stay? The portion of the show dedicated to politics overall and cable news in particular will probably have to shrink on CBS, where Colbert will be making a general-interest show rather than a very particularized critique. But the perspective can still be his, even if it’s expressed differently. And Colbert’s liberalism seems like a reasonably durable draw. CBS should have the guts to let him keep it.

But as Cillizza points out, we don’t know for sure what his real opinions are:

The assumption — among Democrats and most Republicans — is that the real Colbert is a Democrat, a perception largely due to his viciously biting satire of conservatism as “Stephen Colbert”.

But, Colbert himself is far more fuzzy about his own politics. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2009, Colbert was asked about a  study out of Ohio State University that showed most conservatives believed he was one of them. “I’m thrilled by it!” he said. “From the very beginning, I wanted to jump back and forth over the line of meaning what I say, and the truth of the matter is I’m not on anyone’s side, I’m on my side.” In October 2012, he told “Meet the Press” host David Gregory: ”I’m interested in the news, so people often think that I’m an ideologue or that I have a political intent … But I comment on things that are in the news.” And, he told Foxnews.com in the fall of 2013: “I’m not trying to make a point; I’m trying to make a joke. Sometimes my personal views are what I am saying, but it is important to me that you never know when that is.”

Josh Dickey asks who will take Colbert’s slot on Comedy Central:

Current Daily Show correspondents Aasif Mandvi and Samantha Bee are established enough for a step up, and would be hailed among the diversity-first crowd, as would alum Wyatt Cenac, who built a following but left the show in late 2012. Larry Wilmore’s devastatingly droll schtick seems too narrow for a full broadcast, while Jessica Williams and Al Madrigal are still too green to be considered contenders. The network loves Amy Schumer, but her show is just getting off the ground; and with an opportunity to truly innovate, it’s unlikely that Comedy Central would just shuffle an existing show into Stewart’s lead-out.

From outside the Comedy Central bubble, Aisha Tyler and Aziz Ansari’s names have come up, while Chelsea Handler, once rumored for a CBS slot, seems an odd fit for the network’s stable — as well as the newsy formula that’s worked so well in that slot.

Samantha!

Tim Alberta covers it:

The conservatives’ exasperation with leadership is well known. And now, in discreet dinners at the Capitol Hill Club and in winding, hypothetical-laced email chains, they’re trying to figure out what to do about it. Some say it’s enough to coalesce behind—and start whipping votes for—a single conservative leadership candidate. Others want to cut a deal with Majority Leader Eric Cantor: We’ll back you for speaker if you promise to bring aboard a conservative lieutenant.

But there’s a more audacious option on the table, according to conservatives involved in the deliberations. They say between 40 and 50 members have already committed verbally to electing a new speaker. If those numbers hold, organizers say, they could force Boehner to step aside as speaker in late November, when the incoming GOP conference meets for the first time, by showing him that he won’t have the votes to be reelected in January.

Beutler is unsure the mutiny will succeed:

From my own reporting, I can confirm that these conversations are ongoing, and not even particularly hushed. I can also confirm that the rebel faction (such as it is) hasn’t found an heir apparent. It’s not even clear anyone who could feasibly be an heir apparent would want to participate in the rebellion. That doesn’t mean a dedicated group of disaffected conservatives couldn’t deny Boehner the speakership. But without a prospective replacement, it’s the kind of bluff Boehner could probably call if he wanted to.

Allahpundit wonders if “this is all just a bluff to scare Boehner into appointing more conservatives to key committee posts”:

If, say, there are only 20-25 conservatives committed to ousting him, not 40-50, then he might survive a new insurrection from the right in January. By making him think now that their numbers are greater than they really are, House conservatives might muscle him into quitting or at least making concessions to them. (First concession: No more voice votes.) The problem, highlighted by National Journal, is that no one wants to risk Boehner’s wrath by volunteering to be the insurgents’ nominee for leadership. Both Jeb Hensarling and Jim Jordan have reportedly refused, maybe because they really don’t want to be in leadership or maybe because they fear stepping on Boehner’s toes right now when his future is still undetermined.

Bernstein doubts replacing Boehner would solve anything:

As long as Republicans have a House majority and Barack Obama is in the White House, the only way to get any measure enacted is for the House Republican leadership to vote for something that will be signed by the president conservative talk-show hosts describe as a Kenyan socialist. And as long as there are must-pass bills, the speaker is going to be perceived as a RINO. Yet even for the most conservative Republicans — though not the irresponsible radicals — things such as keeping the government open, avoiding a default, and second-tier issues such as the so-called Medicare doc fix, are must-pass.

Anyone who replaces Boehner, no matter how much of a True Conservative he or she might be before taking over, will end up in exactly the same position, and anyone in a position to be the next speaker knows it. Which is why they’ll want Boehner to stay at least two more years, when there is a possibility of a Republican president. It would be different if the main complaint against Boehner was that he is too willing to accommodate Obama.

Ryan Cooper suspects that Boehner’s job is secure:

The truth is that Boehner is probably the best speaker the ultras could reasonably ask for: he’s willing to indulge them to a seriously irresponsible degree, but not so much that they actually cause crippling damage to the nation. A true believer at the helm might actually allow the ultras to, say, default on the national debt for no reason. And that would keep them out of power for a long time.

In September 2012, historian Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School unveiled a papyrus fragment she called “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” which stirred debate because, well, that should be obvious. At the time readers sounded off on the discovery and I pondered its meaning at some length. In the intervening years the fragment has been rigorously tested to ascertain its age and authenticity, which some initially questioned. The results are in and, according to the HDS press release, they indicate it doesn’t seem to be a forgery:

Over the past two years, extensive testing of the papyrus and the carbon ink, as well as analysis of the handwriting and grammar, all indicate that the existing material fragment dates to between the sixth and ninth centuries CE. None of the testing has produced any evidence that the fragment is a modern fabrication or forgery.

Two radiocarbon tests were conducted to determine the date of the papyrus. In the first test, the sample size was too small and resulted in an unreliable date. A second test performed by Noreen Tuross at Harvard University in conjunction with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute produced a date of origination for the piece of papyrus from 659 to 859 CE. Other testing with FT-IR microspectroscopy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) confirmed the homogeneous chemical composition of the papyrus and examined patterns of oxidation.

James Yardley, Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Integrated Science and Engineering, Columbia University, and Alexis Hagadorn, Head of Conservation at Columbia University Libraries, used a technique called micro-Raman spectroscopy to determine that the carbon character of the ink matched samples of other papyri that date from the first to eighth centuries CE.

Emma Green interviewed King about these results, and she reiterated what the text does – and doesn’t – tell us:

“The question that the broader public immediately grabbed onto is, ‘Does Jesus have a wife?'” King told me. Although that’s obviously an interesting topic, the more important question is historical: What does this text say about his early followers? “Early Christians were grappling with the question of whether you should get married and have children, or whether it’s better to be celibate and virgin,” she said. “This fragment seems to be the first case we have where a married Jesus appears to be affirming that women who are mothers and wives can be his disciples.” …

“There are so many questions this fragment can’t answer,” King said.

“Is Jesus talking about a real wife, or the church, or a sister-wife? Who is the Mary—his mother, his wife, or some other Mary entirely?” She says that rather than trying to answer those questions definitively, it’s more important to analyze what this text might say about the historical Jesus. “Was anybody talking about Jesus being married or not, and how was that question being used? Were people arguing about who’s worthy of discipleship or not?”

All this coincides with the release of a new issue of the Harvard Theological Review dedicated to the fragment’s meaning and the scientific testing done on it which can be read in its entirety here. One of the rebuttals to King’s take on the fragment comes from Leo Depuydt, an Egyptologist at Brown University and a skeptic about the fragment from the start, who still isn’t convinced:

I find nothing in these documents that could change in any way the fact that I am personally 100% certain that the Wife of Jesus Fragment is a forgery. I have otherwise never deemed ink or papyrus tests necessary or relevant in light of the evidence set forth below. I will make three brief observations, however.

First, the ink tests show chemical composition, in this case carbon-based “lamp black,” not age. Carbon-based ink is exactly the type that I would have used if I had been the forger. Second, as for the papyrus, nothing is more common than for forged paintings to be painted on an old piece of wood. And third, in a letter of July 19, 2013, accompanying his report, the principal investigator of the radiocarbon dating test, Professor Greg Hodgins, states that certain stable isotope measurements “[cast] doubt upon the validity of the radiocarbon date.”

Francis Watson argues (PDF) that the scientific data isn’t the main issue – it’s the fragment’s composition and construction that makes him believe it’s not the real deal:

In September 2012 I showed

that the text has been constructed out of small pieces – words or phrases – culled from the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (GTh), especially Sayings 30, 45, 101 and 1 14, and set in new contexts… The author has used a kind of “collage” technique to assemble the items selected from Thomas into a new composition. While this is a very unlikely way for an ancient author to compose a text, it’s what might be expected of a modern forger with limited facility in the Coptic language.

I do not see anything in Dr King’s response to cause me to retract that last sentence. Furthermore, I pointed out that the very first line of the fragment

begins in the middle of a word, at exactly the same place as in the equivalent passage in the one surviving Gospel of Thomas manuscript. And line 1 ends with the same ending as the following line in Thomas. This is quite a coincidence, and it suggests that the author of [the Jesus’ wife fragment] may have drawn his Thomas material from a modern printed edition.

Other scholars made equally damaging criticisms of the fragment following its initial publication. The question is whether there is anything in Harvard’s belated response to cause those of us who reacted negatively to the new papyrus fragment to think again. Perhaps there is. But it is not obvious how even the most scientifically rigorous investigations of the age of the papyrus or the composition of the ink take the debate forward.

A reader quotes me:

Yes, [Ayaan Ali Hirsi is] controversial. She has said some tough, tough things about Islam. But if she hasn’t earned the right to say those things, who has?

Come on.  I am an ardent defender of free speech (I worked at the ACLU for five years), but there is a difference between recognizing someone’s right to speak and honoring that person for what they’ve done and what they’ve said. Brandeis didn’t simply invite Ali to speak, they were going to give her one of the greatest honors a university can give.  That is an endorsement of someone.  And that inherently involves making judgments as to what and who is worthy of honoring.

Another reader:

How could you go through an entire post about Ali, Brandeis, The Left, and pc in general without any mention that Brandeis invited her join in an on-campus dialogue about the issues her work addresses? It may not be an adequate off-set, but it does indicate some openness to public discussion that your post implies is being murdered in the crib.

Another points to some of her most offensive views:

Below are snippets of Reason‘s interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Please link the article to your readers. I suspect quite a few don’t know what she really stands for.

These are not merely “provocative” ideas. She’s not challenging the religion of Islam as you wrote. These are very hateful anti-Muslim ideas. For goodness’ sake, she’s advocating war against Islam and Muslims. If you replace the words “Islam” and “Muslims” with “Christianity” and “Christians” or with “Judaism” and “Jews”, you could easily mistake her for a violent jihadist. How can you read those quotes (there are many more like them out there) and claim that she’s being unfairly characterized as a bigot by the so-called hard left? Her words speak for themselves. She is a bigot. A clearly deranged one too. Those are not a few quotes that you can just easily dismiss. They’re not out of context. They’re her beliefs. They represent who she is. Read the whole interview. See what she thinks about civil liberties and free speech. Oh the contradictions.

P.S. My name suggests I’m Muslim. I’m not. I’m an atheist with a Muslim background. So I’m not being tribal here. To reject and criticize Islam is one thing; to make a career promoting hate and advocating war against a religion and its 1.6 billion adherents is something else. You’re a very decent and admirable person. It’s disheartening to learn that you’re friends with such a vile character.

Reason: Should we acknowledge that organized religion has sometimes sparked precisely the kinds of emancipation movements that could lift Islam into modern times?…Do you think Islam could bring about similar social and political changes?

Hirsi Ali: Only if Islam is defeated.

Reason: Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?

Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period.

Reason: We have to crush the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, “defeat Islam”?

Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways….There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.

Reason: Militarily?

Hirsi Ali: In all forms, and if you don’t do that, then you have to live with the consequence of being crushed.

Reason: So when even a hard-line critic of Islam such as Daniel Pipes says, “Radical Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution,” he’s wrong?

Hirsi Ali: He’s wrong. Sorry about that.

Reason: In Holland, you wanted to introduce a special permit system for Islamic schools, correct?

Hirsi Ali: I wanted to get rid of them. I wanted to have them all closed

Reason: Here in the United States, you’d advocate the abolition of—

Hirsi Ali: All Muslim schools. Close them down. Yeah, that sounds absolutist.

Unfiltered comments from readers are on our Facebook page. One of them:

I know plenty of Muslim women working in DV advocacy who owe Ayaan Hirsi Ali not a single goddam thing, and it’s not because they’re all inveterate leftists thoroughly marinated in their own victimology. Ayaan’s criticisms of Islam echo, and in fact reinforce, the most rank tropes of Islamophobia in the West. Yes, she has every right to criticize Islam from her own life experiences, but the logical endpoint of these critiques is the permanent marginalization of Muslims from the mainstream of Western society, not the empowerment and further integration of those already at the mainstream.

Hers is a drearily, irrelevantly euro-centric idea of how Muslims live in non-Muslim societies and that Brandeis – one of the institutional bulwarks of cultural Zionism and Jewish intellectual life in America – found her comments far beyond the pale is remarkable to me. Ayaan has a platform to make the type of sweeping generalizations about Muslims that no commentator in the States has been able to make about Catholics and Jews in a mainstream setting for decades now.

Ezra puts Sebelius’ resignation in a favorable light:

The White House says Sebelius notified the President in March that “she felt confident in the trajectory for enrollment and implementation,” and that once open enrollment ended, “it would be the right time to transition the Department to new leadership.”

In other words, the law has won its survival. The Obama administration can exhale. Personnel changes can be made. A new team — led by Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Matthews Burwell, who the White House calls a proven manager— can be brought in to continue to improve the law. And Sebelius can leave with her head held high. She can leave with the law she helped build looking, shockingly, like a success.

Jeez. Is Ezra working directly for the administration now? I’d have fired her months ago, but then I’m not the Zen Master POTUS. And there is a sense of fairness in giving her the time to make up for her disaster. Martin Longman is more critical:

[T]he White House is promoting the fact that she overcame the initial problems with the Healthcare.gov website and actually exceeded enrollment expectations and goals. Basically, they’re saying that Sebelius oversaw the HHS Department at a time when approximately ten million people got access to health care they would not otherwise have, and her critics cannot claim to have done anything of similar merit.

That’s a fair point, but it glosses over the lasting damage done to how the law is perceived, and Sebelius bears responsibility for that.

She sure does. By far the greatest act of political malpractice under Obama. And the political impact was even more brutal. It was the failed website that shifted the entire politics of last fall, and indelibly undermined the Obama administration’s rep for competence. The president and his party have still not recovered politically, even if the website recovered rather magnificently. Amy Davidson adds:

[T]he very solidity of the numbers makes the problems with the rollout look even more painful.

This was a good law, offering something that people wanted. The department Sebelius was in charge of was supposed to get it to them. Instead, what it presented to the world was a big mess. Obama was also humiliated when his assurances about people getting to keep their plans turned out to be false. From the perspective of the Obama Administration, the rollout—Sebelius’s rollout—made something majestic look grubby. Sebelius, for her part, told the Times that if she could take “all the animosity. If that could just leave with me, and we could get to a new chapter, that would be terrific.”

Cohn’s perspective:

Sebelius brought two main assets to her job. She had experience regulating insurers and, as a successful Democrat in Kansas, she knew how to work with Republicans. But what Obamacare needed more was a deft, aggressive manager. Case in point: By all accounts, Sebelius did not grasp the severity of tech problems at healthcare.gov until the day it went live and crashed. If she got the warnings, then she should have heeded them. If she didn’t get the warnings, then she should have appointed people who would have kept her better informed.

Still, it’s not as if Obamacare’s implementation difficulties are entirely, or even mostly, the fault of HHS. It’s a typical, if predictable, failure of Washington to demand a fall guy when things go wrong. But responsibility rarely lies with just one person. (That’s one reason Obama resisted calls to fire her.) And this case is no exception.

Jason Millman provides background on Sebelius’s replacement:

Burwell has extensive administration experience that includes budget oversight for major entitlement programs, like Medicare and Medicaid. Last summer, Burwell and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough led negotiations with a group of Senate Republicans who hoped to forge a grand bargain with the administration to raise taxes and rein in spending on health and retirement programs. The talks went nowhere, but Republicans gave Burwell high marks for a bedside manner that was seen as less prickly and much less political than her predecessor Jack Lew.

After the Senate talks petered out, Burwell helped manage the first shutdown of the federal government in nearly 17 years after congressional Republicans and Democrats hit an impasse over agency spending for the current fiscal year – though the real battle was over the fate of Obamacare, rather than taxes and spending.

David A. Graham thinks “Burwell’s appointment may be read as an implicit rebuke to Sebelius’s style”:

Her successor is known as an effective manager. “The president wants to make sure we have a proven manager and relentless implementer in the job over there, which is why he is going to nominate Sylvia,” White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough told the Times.

A West Virginia native and Rhodes Scholar, she served in the Clinton White House and as president of the Walmart Foundation. And while getting any nomination through the Senate has become a challenge, Burwell has two advantages. First, Majority Leader Harry Reid recently changed the rules of nominations so that they require only 51 votes to pass and are not subject to filibusters; and second, she was confirmed 96-0 just last year.

Philip Klein looks forward to the Burwell confirmation hearings:

The new secretary of HHS will have the ability to determine when the open enrollment period for the exchanges can begin or end; what type of insurance every American must have; and what constitutes enough of a “hardship” to exempt individuals from the mandate to purchase coverage, among other powers. As HHS secretary, Sebelius has proven herself willing to push the boundaries of her discretion to delay or modify key parts of the law without seeking congressional authorization.

Obama plans to replace Sebelius with current director of the Office of Management and Budget Sylvia Mathews Burwell. Republicans will no doubt want to turn the focus of her confirmation hearing on Obamacare. But the hearings should, specifically, be used as an opportunity to highlight the vast expansion of power granted to this one official through the health care law.

Ben Domenech also welcomes the upcoming confirmation fight:

Senate Republicans actually have an advantage here in the wake of the Nuclear Option’s implementation: they can easily come up with a list of facts they claim the administration has hidden, details kicked aside, statutes ignored, and a host of other challenging questions on accountability over the implementation (and non-implementation) of the law. A list of every question Sebelius has dodged over the past several years would suffice. By demanding answers before the HHS nomination moves forward and refusing to rubber stamp the president’s pick, Republicans could force more vulnerable Democrats to take a vote that ties them both to the Nuclear Option and Obamacare six months before a critical election.

Readers sound off on Facebook:

Yeah let’s blame Sebelius for the Republicans refusing to set up their exchanges, forcing the government to have a federal exchange bidding process at quite the last minute, a process that has been beyond broken in and of itself. Sebelius is not your scapegoat on this one. She got through a very complicated and difficult program implementation on schedule and on target. If anything, she should be praised.

Sarah Stillman addresses the crisis:

One of the strangest things about the H.I.V. epidemic in the Deep South—from Louisiana to Alabama to Mississippi—is how easily most Americans have elided it, choosing instead to imagine that the disease is now an out-there, elsewhere epidemic. It’s a plague from some anterior time, some exterior continent, something our kids will read about in books or that we glimpse as history in the movie “Dallas Buyers Club.” …

“If you think about where the rates are highest, it’s in the most conservative places,” [Deon] Haywood [director of the New Orleans-based prevention organization Women with a Vision] told me.

“It’s where the conversation is not being had, and where shame and stigma exist because of religion, because of culture, because of racism, because of homophobia—you name it, it exists for those reasons.”

The vast overlap between the social ailments of the South (like poverty) and the physiological ones (like disease) is not merely theoretical. “When you think about the South, we have the highest rates of H.I.V.,” Haywood continued. “But we also have the highest incarceration rates, and we don’t have comprehensive sex education—we have abstinence-only education.” Nationally, one in seven individuals living with H.I.V. passes through the correctional system annually, which tends to amplify their risk factors. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate not only in the country but in the world. It’s another reason that Haywood’s group has become increasingly involved in broader policy work.