November 2014 – Page 48

All-Too-Common Pleas

US District Judge Jed S. Rakoff notes the near-ubiquity of plea bargaining:

In 2013, while 8 percent of all federal criminal charges were dismissed (either because of a mistake in fact or law or because the defendant had decided to cooperate), more than 97 percent of the remainder were resolved through plea bargains, and fewer than 3 percent went to trial. The plea bargains largely determined the sentences imposed. While corresponding statistics for the 50 states combined are not available, it is a rare state where plea bargains do not similarly account for the resolution of at least 95 percent of the felony cases that are not dismissed; and again, the plea bargains usually determine the sentences

The cause, he says, is a power imbalance between prosecutors and defense attorneys:

[W]hat really puts the prosecutor in the driver’s seat is the fact that he – because of mandatory minimums, sentencing guidelines (which, though no longer mandatory in the federal system, are still widely followed by most judges), and simply his ability to shape whatever charges are brought –can effectively dictate the sentence by how he publicly describes the offense. For example, the prosecutor can agree with the defense counsel in a federal narcotics case that, if there is a plea bargain, the defendant will only have to plead guilty to the personal sale of a few ounces of heroin, which carries no mandatory minimum and a guidelines range of less than two years; but if the defendant does not plead guilty, he will be charged with the drug conspiracy of which his sale was a small part, a conspiracy involving many kilograms of heroin, which could mean a ten-year mandatory minimum and a guidelines range of twenty years or more. Put another way, it is the prosecutor, not the judge, who effectively exercises the sentencing power, albeit cloaked as a charging decision.

The defense lawyer understands this fully, and so she recognizes that the best outcome for her client is likely to be an early plea bargain, while the prosecutor is still willing to accept a plea to a relatively low-level offense. Indeed, in 2012, the average sentence for federal narcotics defendants who entered into any kind of plea bargain was five years and four months, while the average sentence for defendants who went to trial was sixteen years.

Daring To Be Dull

Daphne Merkin describes overcoming a fear of boring her therapists:

My father, who had married at 42 and was more of a distant bystander than an engaged parent, barely took me in at all. My mother was mercurial and easily distracted, brisk rather than lingering in her affections. I learned early on not to take anyone’s interest for granted and was in the habit of checking whether people were actually attending to me — “Are you listening?” I would ask, interrupting whatever I was saying; “Are you really listening?” — or just going through the motions, their thoughts elsewhere. I suffered, you might say, from the anxiety of insignificance — my own insignificance — and assuaged it by developing a dramatic raconteur’s voice, primed with ironic asides meant to keep my audience with me. …

And then came the moment several years ago when I stopped trying to be an entertainer and took the risk of narrating my life more straightforwardly, in all its mundane details and interludes of stuckness, with the broken-record aspects left in, rather than edited out for a smoother delivery. I did so because I was growing older and more desperate for relief and it seemed to me I had found a therapist who wasn’t interested in being charmed by me so much as he was focused on helping me. I did so in the full knowledge that I might end up boring him to tears, even though he was paid to be attentive.

It was just this possibility, of course, that I had always feared and endeavored to avoid. In doing so, it now seems to me, I was denying myself one of the things therapy allows for, which is precisely the repetitive nature of a person’s inner life, the constant regurgitation of ancient grievances and conflicts.

(Photo by Karen Apricot)

President Obama arrived in Burma today for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and East Asia summits. Given how the country has backslid on reforms since Obama’s groundbreaking visit two years ago, his return highlights how the rehabilitation Burmese junta didn’t quite go off as planned:

Skeptics warned at the time that the presidential visit and the relaxation of most U.S. sanctions were mistakes because they gave Myanmar’s military leaders too much of a reward for the changes they’d made and diminished U.S. leverage going forward. “Two years after that trip, there have not been a lot of big changes. There has been a lot of backsliding and a lot of inertia,” said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch. “Once the bulk of the financial sanctions were lifted, right after that, reforms began to stall, which is why we urged them not to do it in one go.” After that push in 2012, he said, “There was very little motivation for [the generals] to continue to move.”

One former senior administration official recalled that “there were plenty of arguments about how and when to lift a set of sanctions” to encourage the government’s opening. Now, despite the easing of financial and investment sanctions and the president’s and secretary of state’s visits, he acknowledged that “some of those things have actually gotten worse in the last year,” with officials in Myanmar not allowing a “real opening of the political process” and having done a “horrendous job in their treatment of the Rohingya minority.”

The stalling of the reforms also puts a pallor on Hillary Clinton’s legacy in the State Department, of which the opening of Burma was supposed to be a bright spot. Thomas Maresca reminds us of the continuing plight of the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority, some 140,000 of whom are living in squalid displaced persons camps while another 100,000 or so have fled to neighboring countries:

“The problems facing the Rohingya are among the most desperate human crises in Asia today,” said Murray Hiebert, deputy director of Southeast Asia Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “With thousands of Rohingya fleeing on boats for Thailand and Malaysia, this problem stretches far beyond the borders of Myanmar.”

In Baw Du Pha, the camp where [Ousman] Gani is confined, families share 10-by-10-foot rooms and subsist almost entirely on rations of rice, chickpeas, salt and palm oil delivered by the United Nations World Food Program. Health care is at a crisis level ever since the Myanmar government expelled the aid group Doctors Without Borders in February, accusing it of favoring Muslims. Death and illness have become grimly commonplace around the Baw Du Pha camp. Noor Jahar, a widow, showed visitors empty medicine packets and photos of her daughter, Sham Sida, who died in April after treatment for her tuberculosis ran out. Others in the camp said 11 children have died in the past month from diarrhea caused by lack of sanitation and clean drinking water.

In an interview with The Irrawaddy, Obama himself acknowledges Burma’s backsliding, but says he plans to put more pressure on the government regarding reforms:

My message to the government … will be that it has a responsibility to ensure the well-being of all the people in the country, and that the fundamental human rights and freedoms of all people are respected. This is one of the most basic duties of any government. Victims deserve justice, and the perpetrators of crimes and abuses must be held to account in a credible and transparent manner. At the same time, every person has a role to play in Burma’s renewal. For example, much of the violence against the Rohingya and other Muslim communities in Rakhine State is being committed by local residents, but the government has a responsibility to work with the people to improve the humanitarian situation, and to address the underlying challenges. That’s why, when I spoke at the University of Yangon two years ago, I spoke directly to the people of the country about the importance of tolerance and the inherent dignity we all share as human beings. All of us in our own lives have to be vigilant aside bias and prejudice. Burma, like all nations, will be stronger and more successful if it draws on the strength of all of its people. Its remarkable diversity should be seen as a strength, not a threat.

(Photo: Burma President Thein Sein (R) walks with US President Barack Obama after the latter arrived at the Burma’s capital Naypyidaw on November 12, 2014. By Christophe Archambault/AFP/Getty Images)

Dissent Of The Day: My “Scorn Of Feminism”

A reader writes:

I see you’re jumping into commentary against feminism again. First, let me just note that I snorted in amusement when you wrote: “Or is it simply that WAM believes that women cannot possibly handle the rough-and-tumble of uninhibited online speech?” You must admit that that is a funny thing for you to write, given your policy of not allowing comments on Dish posts. If it is such a good thing, this rough-and tumble, and if it’s so easy to handle it, why don’t you turn commenting on?

I’m also disappointed in the continuing scorn that you heap upon feminism. You don’t seem to understand even the most basic facts about it and the sneering tone that you take is unbecoming and not like you. You seem to lose all ability to understand nuance when you write about it. I’m a “straight white male” and even I realized that, in that video, my demographic “as a group” was not being disparaged. You’re like a walking poster child for the #notallmen hashtag and the enraged, entitled, petulant man-boys who complain on it.

And the strawmen – could you just stop with that? You wrote: “Instead of seeing the web as opening up vast vistas for all sorts of voices to be heard, they seem to believe … that women are not strong or capable enough of forging their own brands”. Um, what? Show me a feminist who thinks that women are “not strong or capable enough.” Go on, show me one, anyone, anywhere. You cannot, because they don’t exist. It’s the anti-feminists who think that. Just look at the words of Phyllis Schlafly, for example, and the immeasurable damage that she has done.

And then there is this: “They want gender quotas for all media businesses, equal representation for women in, say, video-games, gender parity in employment in journalism and in the stories themselves.” Gender quotas, huh? Well, I looked through WAM’s “About us” page, the “What we do” page, and the “Action center” page, and didn’t see a thing about “gender quotas.” In fact, what they seem to want to do is simply to raise awareness of the disparities – there is no call for legal action to implement and enforce some quota. It’s intellectually dishonest, Andrew, to write things like that when you know them to be untrue.

First up, the Dish has long opted for an edited and curated version of dissents, rather than a comments free-for-all. And that’s because Dish readers have voted down a comments section multiple times and because we want to create a different atmosphere of civilized debate than in many troll-feeding sites. If we were not publishing strong dissents – like my reader’s – it would be one thing. But we do all the time.

Second: let me address the assumption that I am pouring scorn on feminism. I’m really, really not. I favor the removal of any formal or legal barriers to women’s success. And I’m happy to celebrate moments of women’s cultural, political and social success – and they are many and multiplying. But I’m still a conservative-libertarian. I don’t believe in an identity politics that seeks to remove structural oppression by forcing others to say things they may not want to say, or do things they may not want to do, or by ostracizing people for whatever-ism they are found guilty of. And I’m still a believer in some irreducible differences between men and women that have nothing to do with culture, except to shape it.

This is what animates my contrarian skepticism about groups like WAM who seek to police the culture in pursuit of social justice. (No, I won’t use the SJW term again, since it seems to rile people up unnecessarily.) And if you think I’m just singling out feminists, you should see what I have said about the gay equivalent, GLAAD, when they seek to do exactly the same thing.

If you think my opposition to a certain kind of left-liberalism is merely about women, then why is my position identical when it comes to gay rights? Why am I defending the rights and free speech of bigots who refuse to marry gay couples, or the boy scouts (of old), or the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade? It’s because I really believe that the best response to injustice is more free speech rather than less of it. It’s because I believe in maximal freedom of expression – especially by those segments of the society who are rightly reviled by most of us. A defense of free speech that did not include the speech of racists, misogynists, homophobes and bigots is no real defense of free speech at all. And it says something depressing about our contemporary culture that if you make this classically liberal point, you are immediately told you are in favor of misogyny or racism or homophobia.

I can see that an argument on these grounds is hard to make after the extreme polarization and emotional wounds of the past few months over #gamergate and other gender issues. In a pitched battle, you are supposed to pick sides and stick with it. But I have chosen sides. On the question of real harassment, stalking and personal threats, I’m strongly against them on both sides, and emphatically against them when they are laced with foul misogynistic language and hatred. I find the big majority of #gamergate tweets to be repellent. I have no problem with Twitter deciding that that kind of abuse should lead a user to be suspended. I’ve said this in virtually every post I’ve written on this.

Have I misrepresented WAM? Go read their site as I urged readers to do in my first post. Does “gender justice” require that half of all reporters be one gender? Or that half of all media organizations be owned by women? They don’t explicitly say those things but they sure do imply many of them. And I do think they are claiming that abusive rhetoric and language online makes the web an unsafe space for women, in a way it does not for men. But, while such abuse is vile, there’s plenty of evidence that it flies both ways toward men and women – see Cathy Young’s exploration of that here. And I don’t think women need special protection from this. That’s what I think is condescending. We are all capable of having thick skins and that isn’t restricted to one gender or another.

Am I being overly provocative? I plead guilty to some degree. It’s sometimes my job to take a highly unpopular position if I think there’s something awry in the popular consensus. It’s not trolling – because there’s an issue of principle here that I strongly believe in. But it can be seen as tendentious in a broader context. My hope is that what you read here on the Dish every day balances that out. Posts where I take a strong and sometimes counter-intuitive viewpoint are balanced by reader dissents, aggregation of other views of the subject elsewhere online, and an open debate. This is not a one-person blog any more and hasn’t been for years. Whatever your views of me, I hope you’ll see that we’ve tried to create a place where my bias is balanced. Judge us on the whole rather than the part. And keep the dissents coming.

Update from another dissenter:

You: “we want to create a different atmosphere of civilized debate than in many troll-feeding sites. If we were not publishing strong dissents – like my reader’s – it would be one thing. But we do all the time.”

First, cut the shit. You tend to publish dissents that serve your own agenda: those that you can use to reinforce your own views and easily juxtapose the “correct” view from that which is obviously “wrong.” Your response to this dissent is quite typical of how this works; it’s as disingenuous as it is self-serving. But hey, it’s your website, so I guess you have a libertarian right to use it as you choose.

Second, if by an “atmosphere of civilized debate” you mean that you intend to frame the debate as you want it framed, well, you may be on to something. But my sense of “civilized debate” is that everybody is entitled to make a contribution as well as frame the debate itself in the way that one sees fit. Your website does not do this. True, neither do many troll-feeding sites. Sites like the New York Times, however, allow for a much freer and open exchange of ideas than the Dish does. Yet they’re also able to keep the trolls at bay.

Third – and this gets to the heart of the previous two points – I would challenge the statement that the Dish publishes dissents “all the time.” I don’t know what percentage of dissents you publish, but I’m guessing it’s pretty low. I haven’t written many dissents – maybe two or three since I started visiting the site five or six years ago. But I do know this: never were they published or even acknowledged with a response. And I don’t expect this one to be any different.

We get hundreds of emails a day, a large percentage of which are long and thought out – two qualities increasingly scarce in a comments section – so it’s difficult to feature all of your feedback within the concise reading experience of the Dish. But we try our best. You can browse all our Dissents of the Day here and here to determine for yourself if we publish them “all the time”. And critical feedback on the Dish isn’t confined to the Dissent feature; it just contains the most cutting and persuasive examples. Dish editor Chris Bodenner selects almost all of the dissents, thus creating a layer of critical distance that greatly decreases the chance of selection bias on my part. It’s a system that has evolved over the years and we think it’s the best fit for the blog, but we are always open to further change. So keep the feedback coming.

By the way, below are the two other emails our Update dissenter has sent to the Dish in the past, posted here in the spirit of continued dissent. Here’s one from six days ago, in response to my post, “No, Mr President: Wait Some More On Immigration Reform“:

With all due respect, are you fucking kidding me? Obama already delayed executive action on immigration, and what did he get from it? Recent immigrants didn’t vote, while Pryor and Landrieu lost their seats anyway. If he had moved on immigration before the election, it would have likely brought more Democrats to the polls and enabled Democratic politicians to draw a clearer distinction between themselves and the xenophobic Republicans. Given how Pryor and Landrieu voted as senators, Obama simply should have said to them good riddance and moved ahead with securing more of the Latino vote. This is just the latest example of this president’s political ineptitude.

Now you’re suggesting that Obama further delay executive action. So what’s he going to get out of it?

There are two possibilities. The first is that he gets an immigration deal done, but in the process he has to compromise to the point that Republicans will get virtually everything they want while the Democrats will have to fuck their Latino constituents over. The second (and more likely) is that Republicans will continue to bait Obama and lead him on, making him look even weaker and out of touch than he already appears.

What will this mean for Republicans? With the former, they could claim that they’re able to govern and accomplish for immigrants what the Democrats could not. With the latter, Republicans will boast how principled they are because they refused to compromise with the Kenyan Socialist. In either case, though, the Democrats will come off looking as they do today: a bunch of feckless, spineless, cowering milquetoasts.

Now, what happens if Obama takes executive action without delay?

He and the Democrats come off as principled and thus willing to stand up and fight for what’s right. Meanwhile, the Republicans go apeshit over what Obama has done, revealing themselves as the xenophobic assholes that they really are. It might even provoke some in the Cruz caucus to pursue impeachment, which would be the gift that keeps on giving for Obama and the Democrats.

Andrew, I’m fucking tired of this “only adult in the room,” “no red state or blue state,” “meep meep motherfucker” bullshit about Obama. Say what you will about the Clintons and their triangulation strategy, at least they had the balls to stand up to Republicans and dish out as much as they took. What did we get from Obama? It’s nearly impossible to overstate what the 2010 and 2014 debacles mean for Democrats. They are now assured of remaining a minority party for an entire generation, and likely many more years after that. So what about Obamacare? Do you really think that there’s going to be anything left of it now that Republicans control both houses in Washington, to say nothing of all the state legislatures that they took over? Fat fucking chance.

Needless to say, this is not just a matter of which party deserves to be in power; it’s not about whether the blue team or the red team is winning. What’s likely to occur for the next 25 years is further erosion of economic and social equality in this country – above all for African-Americans – further demonization of the federal government and the role that it plays in assuring a level playing field and providing basic services, and further destruction of the environment and denial of climate change. You want to hear something really scary? Do you realize who’s about to become the new chair of the Senate committee on the environment? None other than the climate-change-is-a-hoax-in-chief, James Inhofe. With dipshits like these in power, this nation – if not the whole global environment – is absolutely fucked.

Meep meep motherfucker my ass.

The other email, from 2010:

I’m very much enjoying the YouTube clips that you are putting up regarding your recent talk at Princeton. It has provoked a lot of thought in my own mind regarding not only homosexuality, but more broadly how it should be understood within a free and democratic society – to say nothing of the faith tradition that we happen to share, but which I have recently abandoned for some of the reasons that your blog has helped make consistently clear.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that your position is rife with inconsistency regarding the very principles on which your talk is based, namely reason and freedom. On the one hand, you make an eloquent critique of the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality, showing how its concept of sex being solely for the purpose of procreation is inconsistent – from a rational point of view – when it concerns the heterosexual infertile, pregnant, post-menopausal, or practitioners of natural family planning. On the other hand, though, you made it very clear in the latest clip that “religion is not about reason.” But if the latter is true, it seems to me that your argument against the Church’s position on homosexuality is thoroughly useless and without merit.

You can’t have it both ways. The only plausible conclusion, then, is that Religion IS about reason in many significant ways; to deny otherwise – particularly when you are discussing a tradition in which faith and reason have perennially been seen as complementary – not only undermines your own argument, but makes a caricature of religion itself.

Similarly, you criticize liberalism as being a bastion for protecting minorities and in effect infantilizing them. At the same time, however, you argue that in your fight against the religious right you have taken shelter behind the First Amendment, which of course guarantees your right to free speech and emboldens you. But if the First Amendment is not based on the principle of liberalism, then the very term, “liberalism,” is thoroughly meaningless. Moreover, was not First Amendment adopted for the express purpose of protecting those who, precisely because they find themselves in a vulnerable minority, are liable to suffer negative consequences for what they say? In other words, you run to liberalism when it benefits your argument and enables you to express it, yet you deride it whenever it is an inconvenient reminder of your need for, and dependence on, minority protection. Your selectivity about liberalism also strikes me as a caricature of this ideology than anything else.

In the end, why not simply admit that your position is as riddled with inconsistency as those against which you argue? And if indeed that is the case, then what the argument really comes down to is a matter of which inconsistencies are more convenient to one’s own intrinsic beliefs, values, and assumptions. In such a case, nevertheless, I’m much more likely to side with you than those against whom you argue.

(Image of “anti-sexist” street-art from Jonathan McIntosh)

Where Do Climate Skeptics Come From?

Jesse Singal flags a new study on the question:

The basic idea here is that people are less likely to believe that something’s a problem if they have “an aversion to the solutions associated with the problem,” as the authors put it. Strictly speaking, this doesn’t make sense — when determining whether or not to believe in a problem, all that should matter is evidence for the existence of that problem. (Just because you believe it will be expensive to replace that leak in your roof shouldn’t make your belief in the leak any less likely.)

But it fits into a broader framework of what psychologists call “motivated reasoning” — the human tendency to form beliefs not based on a strictly “objective” reading of the facts, but in a way that offers some degree of psychological protection.

Chris Mooney chimes in:

[T]he new study has its weaknesses. For instance, we probably shouldn’t assume based on this paper that running out and singing the praises of clean energy and green tech, framed as a free-market solution, would actually work to depolarize the climate issue. Other research, for instance, implies that the issues of clean energy and energy efficiency have also become infected with partisan emotions, to a significant extent.

Still, it is very useful to bear in mind that often, when we appear to be debating science and facts, what we’re really disagreeing about is something very different.

Andrew Revkin draws “positive lessons” from the study:

As the “Six Americas” surveys run by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication have shown, there’s plenty of common ground on energy innovation and incentives for efficiency, so it’s possible to have a constructive conversation on global warming science and at least some solutions across a range of ideologies. … And, of course, this doesn’t mean that those with strong views about the merits of a carbon tax or climate treaty or other solution involving strong governance should clam up. They just might do better by speaking in two sentences instead of trying to mash the science and a particular prescription into a single sound bite.

The President Wall Street Wants

Hillary Clinton:

While the finance industry does genuinely hate Warren, the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president. Many of the rich and powerful in the financial industry—among them, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, Tom Nides, a powerful vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, and the heads of JPMorganChase and Bank of America—consider Clinton a pragmatic problem-solver not prone to populist rhetoric. To them, she’s someone who gets the idea that we all benefit if Wall Street and American business thrive. What about her forays into fiery rhetoric? They dismiss it quickly as political maneuvers. None of them think she really means her populism.

Although Hillary Clinton has made no formal announcement of her candidacy, the consensus on Wall Street is that she is running—and running hard—and that her national organization is quickly falling into place behind the scenes. That all makes her attractive. Wall Street, above all, loves a winner, especially one who is not likely to tamper too radically with its vast money pot.

Our Climate Pact With China

Jeff Spross summarizes it:

The pledge commits the U.S. to cut its emissions 26 to 28 percent below their 2005 levels by 2025. This builds on the current target of a 17 percent reduction below that baseline by 2020, and could actually double the pace of emission cuts set by that initial goal — from 1.2 percent a year to as high as 2.8 percent per year. The White House has actually been looking into the possibility of expanding beyond the 2020 target since 2013, and has been involved in occasional interagency meetings to that effect.

For its part, China is committing to get 20 percent of its energy from non-fossil-fuel sources by 2030, and to peak its overall carbon dioxide emissions that same year. China’s construction of renewable energy capacity is already proceeding at a furious pace, and this deal will require the country to deploy an additional 800 to 1,000 gigawatts of zero-carbon energy by 2030. For comparison, 800 to 1,000 gigawatts is close to the amount of electricity the U.S. current generates from all sources combined.

Rebecca Leber questions whether China and the US will follow through:

The administration says this will be achievable under existing law. It assumes the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations to slash carbon pollution from power plants 30 percent by 2030 are in full swing. But there is also intense Republican opposition to the EPA’s plans, and to Obama’s. The new Congress is led by climate change deniers, who will obstruct the president’s plans. The next Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, has suggested he will use must-pass appropriations bills as leverage to force Obama into delaying or weakening his own climate regulations.

Xi may not have to deal with Congress, but China has its own challenges ahead. The next step to watch for is specific regulations and goals that are outlined in China’s next five-year plan. It won’t be easy to meet these pledges: Non-fossil fuels made up 9.8 percent of China’s energy sources energy in 2013. To achieve 20 percent of its energy from non-fossil fuels, China will need to add clean and nuclear energy at an enormous scale.

Sam Roggeveen is skeptical:

This deal is good news for all sorts of reasons, but it’s worth remembering that these are just targets (the UK set targets too, and is on track to miss them) which are not really enforceable. And given the long lead times (2025 for Washington to meet its new emissions targets; 2030 for Beijing’s emissions to peak), it’s going to be difficult to hold both countries to their commitments.

Plumer remarks that it’s “debatable whether either pledge is sufficient to avoid drastic levels of global warming — particularly if China lets its emissions keep rising until 2030”:

Some analyses have suggested that China’s emissions would need to peak in 2025 or earlier for the world to meet its goal of preventing more than 2°C (3.6°F) of global warming. (The White House said it thinks China can peak earlier, particularly if it meets that ambitious clean-energy target. But that’s not certain.) And more crucially, the deal only includes two countries. As climate modeler Chris Hope points out, this deal in isolation still puts the world on course for a likely 3.8°C (6.8°F) rise in temperatures. “These pledges are only the first step on a very long road,” he concludes.

Michael Levi analyzes China’s side of the deal:

The difference between a 26 and a 28 percent cut in U.S. emissions is on the order of 120 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually. That’s smaller than the EIA’s projected annual growth in Chinese energy emissions for each year between 2025 and 2030. Very loosely speaking, a mere one-year shift in the Chinese peaking year could matter at least as much to global emissions as the difference between the various U.S. targets that have now been announced.

And then there’s the matter not of when Chinese emissions peak but where they peak. Do they peak 25 percent above current levels? 15 percent? 10 percent? That makes an enormous difference for global emissions.

Fallows puts the announcement in context:

Many people thought, hoped, or dreamt that Xi Jinping would be some kind of reformer. Two years into his watch, his has been a time of cracking down rather than loosening up. Political enemies and advocates of civil society are in jail or in trouble. Reporters from the rest of the world have problems even getting into China, and reporters from China itself face even worse repression than before. The gratuitous recent showdown with Hong Kong exemplifies the new “No More Mr. Nice Guy” approach.

A nationalistic, spoiling-for-a-fight tone has spilled over into China’s “diplomatic” dealings too. So to have this leader of China making an important deal with an American president at this stage of his political fortune is the first news that even seems positive in a long while.

We’ll wait to see the details. But at face value, this is better news—about China, about China and America, and about the globe—than we’ve gotten for a while.

That progress gives Brian Merchant hope:

The two biggest polluters, who have never agreed on much of anything about climate change at all, are issuing a deal that seriously reflects the scope and depth of the problem. The agreement will have a profound effect on the international community, and it’s already sending cheers through the climate circles around the world. The two immobile pillars propping the up the bulk of the world’s fossil fuel infrastructure finally feel like they’ve budged.

The challenges in meeting the targets put forward—and pushing them further—will of course be myriad. But in the face of an unfolding planetary disaster that can seem immune to government action, this deal is, at the very least, a much-needed beacon of hope.

(Photo: US President Barack Obama (L) and China’s President Xi Jinping reach out to shake hands following a bilateral meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 12, 2014.By Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

The Midterm Mandate

It’s is anti-Democrat, not pro-Republican, according to YouGov:

Pew also takes the public’s temperature:

As was the case four years ago, the public is divided over GOP leaders’ policy plans. About as many approve (44%) as disapprove (43%) of Republican congressional leaders’ policies and plans for the future. Following the 2010 election, 41% approved and 37% disapproved of Republican leaders’ plans. The public by wide margins approved of Democratic leaders’ future plans and policies in 2006 (50% to 21%) and Republican leaders’ proposals in 1994 (52% to 28%).

Cillizza focuses on the uncompromising Republican base:

Sixty six percent of Republicans said the they would prefer party leaders “stand up” to Obama “even if less gets done in Washington” while just 32 percent preferred GOP top brass “work with Obama, even if disappoints some GOP supporters.” That view stands in direct opposition to the view of the broader electorate on that question; 57 percent of all Americans prefer that Republicans work together with Obama while 40 percent favor GOP leaders standing up to the president. Among Democrats, a majority (52 percent) say that Obama should work with Republicans “even if it disappoints some Democratic supporters” while 43 percent would prefer they “stand up” to Republicans even if it means getting less done.

These numbers vividly paint the challenge before Congressional Republicans as they prepare to take over total control of Capitol Hill next year. McConnell and Boehner — longtime institutionalists — undoubtedly will feel tugged toward trying to find some common ground with Obama in hopes of proving, on some small level, that they are not simply the opposition but can lead on a policy front too. And yet, there is a clear majority of Republicans who have absolutely no interest in seeing their leaders cut deals — large or small — with the president.

The Consequences Of A Clinton Coronation

Noah Millman asks, “how would a serious challenge to Clinton, even if it failed, affect the Republican contest?”

It seems to me that a Clinton coronation makes life much easier for those who don’t want to think too hard about what the GOP stands for. The GOP would really like to run a largely negative campaign against the Clinton-Obama record without having to declare itself too clearly on any issue. A Clinton coronation would make that easier, because it would take away the need for Clinton to define herself in any specific way.

Take foreign policy.

Clinton is at the extreme hawkish end of the Democratic Party. She pushed hard for the intervention in Libya, favored a more forceful and earlier intervention in Syria, a tougher line on Iran, and so forth. If she faced a serious primary challenge from, say, Jim Webb, she’d either have to defend that record forcefully, or moderate her stance. Now, if she did the first, then what happens on the Republican side at the same time? First, Rand Paul says he agrees more with Jim Webb. Second, the other GOP contenders have to decide whether they want to echo Clinton, echo Paul, or come up with an alternative way of explaining their views while remaining hawkish. Whatever they do, they have to provide more clarity.

Larison expects a “debate over Libya on the Democratic side could have some very interesting and desirable effects on the intra-Republican debate and on Clinton’s ability to use her time as Secretary of State to her advantage”:

Clinton “owns” the Libyan war in a way that she isn’t similarly responsible for other policy decisions, and that war was a terrible mistake that she urged the president to make.

Webb could attack her consistent support for recklessly hawkish policies without having to recall a debate from a decade earlier, and Paul could use the intervention to highlight an episode where he demonstrated better judgment than the then-Secretary of State. The more that Clinton is forced to defend her record on the Libyan war itself, rather than endlessly relitigating the 2012 attack in Benghazi, the worse it will be for her. The record shows that she was one of the architects of a major policy blunder that is still having destructive effects on the country that “benefited” from the intervention.

Michael Brendan Dougherty advises Democrats to “derail Hillary Clinton.” He calls her “a mortal threat to the next generation of social democratic reform”:

Obama beat Hillary by pointing out that he had been right on the most consequential foreign policy issue since the Vietnam War, and she had been wrong. Amazingly, he appointed her secretary of State, where she pushed hard for military engagement in Libya, which quickly turned into a stateless region dominated by terrorist gangs — a dumpster fire along the Mediterranean.

Hillary Clinton was molded by the Cold War liberal’s fear of looking soft on foreign policy, and she has become the John McCain of the Democratic Party. Already smarting from Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo Bay, his eager embrace of drone warfare, and his expansion of the surveillance state, do liberals really want to lock all that in under Madame Smart Power?

The Mother Of All Premium Hikes

Jonathan Cohn calculates that, should SCOTUS gut Obamacare subsidies in states without their own exchanges, the “underlying premiums for all people buying insurance on their own in these states would rise by an average of 43 percent, while the number of Americans without insurance could be as much as 7 million higher than it would be otherwise”:

More than 800,000 Floridians would see their monthly insurance premiums rise, from an average of around $70 to an average of around $350, or roughly a factor of five. More than 600,000 people in Texas, about 325,000 in North Carolina, and another 275,000 in Georgia would see insurance premiums soar by similar amounts.

Nationwide, more than 4 million people living in 37 states would be in situations like these. Most would have no way to pay the higher bills, forcing them to drop insurance coverage altogether. Their sudden absence would destabilize insurance markets in those states, giving carriers reason to raise premiums by additional amounts or to flee the states altogether—which would, in turn, lead more people to give up insurance.

Relatedly, Suderman points out that affordability is the primary reason individuals go without insurance:

Before last October’s Obamacare rollout, a Kaiser Family Foundation study found that the main reason people had no health insurance was cost. Then, midway through the first enrollment period, the polling firm PerryUndem again asked individuals who hadn’t signed up for Obamacare why they were uninsured. Seven in ten said, simply, “I can’t afford it.”

This makes sense when you realize that a lot of these individuals are barely getting by on many fronts. The Kaiser poll also found that 71 percent were very or somewhat worried they wouldn’t be able to pay their rent or mortgage. Some 61 percent said they were struggling to afford gas or transportations costs, while 45 percent said the same about affording food.

Eight in 10 agreed insurance generally is “something I need.” But given the opportunity, they still weren’t buying it. It seems that the type of “comprehensive” health policies Obamacare requires people to purchase are viewed as a luxury among this population.

Looking on the bright side, Ezra touts Obamacare’s success thus far in holding down premiums:

In September, the Kaiser Family Foundation looked at insurance premiums for Obamacare’s benchmark silver plan in 16 major cities and found, to their surprise, that prices were falling by 0.8 percent on average. On November 11th, they updated the analysis with data for 32 more cities — and found that the initial finding held. On average, prices are falling by 0.2 percent.

“Falling” is not a word that people associate with health-insurance premiums. They tend to rise as regularly as the morning sun. And, to be fair, the Kaiser Family Foundation is only looking at 48 cities, and the drop they record is modest (though this is the same methodology they used in 2014, and to good results). But this data, though preliminary, is some of the best data we have — and it shows that Obamacare is doing a better job holding down costs than anyone seriously predicted, including Kaiser’s researchers.

Month: November 2014