The Dish

Reviewing Ed West’s e-book The Silence Of Our Friends, Michael Brendan Dougherty laments how little attention the West pays to the plight of Christians in the Middle East:

Western activists and media have focused considerable outrage at Russia’s laws against “homosexual propaganda” in the lead-up to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. It would only seem fitting that Westerners would also protest (or at the very least notice) laws that punish people with death for converting to Christianity. And yet the Western world is largely ignorant of or untroubled by programmatic violence against Christians. Ed West, citing the French philosopher Regis Debray, distils the problem thusly: “The victims are ‘too Christian’ to excite the Left, and ‘too foreign’ to excite the Right.”

Church leaders outside the Middle East are afraid to speak out, partly because they fear precipitating more violence. (Seven churches were fire-bombed in Iraq after Pope Benedict XVI quoted an ancient criticism of Islam in an academic speech in Germany.) Oddly, unlike Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Russia, the U.S. and the U.K. are the only powers acting in the Middle East that do not take any special interest in the safety of those with whom they have a historical religious affinity.

Josh Green puts the latest Obamacare numbers in perspective:

[T]he Congressional Budget Office predicted that 3.3 million people would sign up for insurance through the exchanges by the end of last year. That obviously didn’t happen. But after essentially losing two month to technical problems, Obamacare appears to be gaining ground. It’s nearly reached that 3.3 million figure two-thirds of the way through January. It no longer seems inconceivable that 7 million could sign up by March 31st, as the CBO had originally projected.

Philip Klein adds a caveat:

HHS still hasn’t disclosed how many of those who have selected a plan through the health care law have actually paid for it, which is how insurers typically define enrollment.

Cohn’s analysis:

[T]he new figure does mean that people are using the system, in large numbers.

And while total enrollment is still short of what initial projections had suggested, the rate of enrollment seems to be right in line with what the experts, including government forecasters, had expected. A now-infamous internal HHS memo had predicted that a little more than 1 million people would sign up for coverage in January. The newly released data means that about 800,000 have signed up this month—and there’s still a week to go.

Sargent reviews Obamacare polling:

A solid majority thinks there are good things in the law, even if it needs changes, while barely more than a third supports the idea that it’s a disaster that must be eliminated entirely. The latter is driven almost entirely by Republicans. Among them, 69 percent support repeal, while independents tilt in favor of keeping it by 65-35.

One part of Obamacare that is proving popular:

A solid majority of Kentucky Republicans support the state’s decision to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, according to a new poll, standing in stark contrast to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s opposition to the provision.

The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky poll, reported by NPR-affiliated WFPL, found that 60 percent of self-identified Republicans said they support expansion. In total, 79 percent of Kentuckians agree with Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear’s decision to expand coverage to low-income people under the health care reform law.

For those like me who need a primer on American football:

Steve Almond wonders whether watching the Super Bowl is immoral (NYT):

There are two basic rationalizations for fans like myself. The first is that the N.F.L. is working hard to make the game safer, which is flimsy at best. The league spent years denying that the game was causing neurological damage. Now that the medical evidence is incontrovertible, it has sought to reduce high-speed collisions, fining defenders for helmet-to-helmet hits and other flagrantly violent play. Its most significant response has been to offer $765 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by more than 4,500 former players, but a judge recently blocked the settlement. It simply wasn’t enough money.

The second argument is that players choose to incur the game’s risks and are lavishly compensated for doing so. This is technically true. N.F.L. players are members of an elite fraternity that knowingly places self-sacrifice, valor and machismo above ethical or medical common sense. But most start out as kids with limited options. They may love football for its inherent virtues. But they also quickly come to see the game as a path to glory and riches. These rewards aren’t inherent. They arise from a culture of fandom that views players as valuable only so long as they can perform.

Update from a reader, who points to the below video to say it “reminds me of what Bill Maher said a coupla years ago” – comparing the economic systems of professional football and baseball:

 
Update from another reader:

Not only is the NFL socialist internally, it’s socialist externally. So are other major league sports. They get the city or the county or the state or a combination of them to build them stadia. I don’t have a source for this, but the only NFL stadium built without government subsidies of one sort or another is Met Life in East Rutherford, which is shared by the NY Jets and the NY Giants. But there are other hidden subsidies lurking. The massive roadways to support the Meadowlands. The train station that makes it possible for them to use the Met Life stadium for the Superbowl. The work NJTransit did at Seacaucus Junction station. NJTransit is going to be running a modified weekday schedule for that Sunday. That’s costing a lot of money. And giving ticket holders bus service if they don’t want to use the train.

The subsidizing goes on and on and one. In the meanwhile they get billions of dollars for the telecasts, merchandizing etc. And pay themselves very very well. It’s not just the players pulling down millions a year. It’s the coaches and the assistant coaches and the marketing director etc. And it’s not just the NFL. I’m sure you read a bit about what went on with the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn. The Port Authority is busy spending 100 million to rebuild the PATH station in Harrison so a minor league soccer team can have games a few blocks away. They suck great big drafts of socialistic subsidies out of the system.

Recent Dish on Beinart’s moral qualms with the sport and his son here. Recent coverage of the blocked NFL settlement here.

Zack Beauchamp kicks national interest off its pedestal:

In getting a handle on the basic foreign policy issues of our day — how to think about the NSA leaks, or what the hell to do about Syria — the basic intellectual divide isn’t the one you’d immediately think of. It’s not the split between Left and Right, or civil libertarians and security state hawks, or interventionists and non-interventionists.

It’s between those who buy into the cult of America’s national interest and those who don’t.

The cult worships at the altar of American selfishness, the idea that the United States is justified in doing anything — including invading a “crappy little country” and ignoring the systematic slaughter of innocent foreigners — if it further America’s “interests” in some vague fashion.

Damon Linker argues instead that American foreign policy is “far more often led astray by an excess of moralism”:

In political terms, it is perfectly legitimate for a resident of Wichita to feel more of a duty to help the victims of a natural disaster in the city’s downtown than for residents of other parts of Kansas, and for residents of Kansas to feel more of a duty to help than residents of other states, and for citizens of the United States to feel more of a duty to help than citizens of other countries. Morality makes no such distinctions, but politics does. And there’s nothing shameful about it. (For more on the legitimacy of politics, I recommend the writings of its greatest living theorist, Pierre Manent.)

None of which is meant to deny that the parochialism of politics needs to be tempered by universalistic moral considerations. It does. But the U.S. has quite enough of it already. The nation’s founding documents and civil religion conceive of democracy in emphatically moral and universalistic terms. The Judeo-Christian faith of many Americans draws on concepts derived from natural law as well as the prophetic tradition of moral exhortation and denunciation. And finally, progressive ideology appeals to universalistic imperatives and ideals of universally accessible public reason.

All of this adds up to an over-abundance of moralism in American public life. And nowhere is its influence more pernicious than in the realm of foreign affairs, where do-gooderism far too often leads to confusion, misguided policy recommendations, and (paradoxically) immoral outcomes.

For its 2016 nomination process, the RNC has adopted several new rules intended to avoid an extended primary that ground up Romney in 2012 (but which ultimately helped Obama in 2008 following his marathon run against Clinton). Over to Weigel:

The new rules, as just approved, allow only four states to lead the first month of balloting: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. (The rules put these contests in February, but in previous years an arms race has ended up putting the contests at the front of January.) Florida will not jump into the first month.

What’s left? Any election (presidential preference caucus, primary) between March 1 and March 14 will operate under proportional representation. Any contest after March 14 can go proportional, or assign delegates on a winner-takes-all basis. Any state that defies these rules (or the timing rules) will lose one-third of all delegates, or nine elected delegates plus the normal three RNC member-delegates—whatever’s larger.

Ambers’ takeaway:

The end result is that the party has conspired to nominate the most electable conservative candidate and quickly. Challengers must prove themselves much earlier. Deep pockets and good field organizations will become more important relative to free media generated by tactical maneuvers and conservative radio hosts.

But not everyone in the party agrees that a shorter process is a good idea:

“Anytime you talk about limiting access and [debate] opportunities, it helps the frontrunner. It really makes me nervous,” said former Iowa Republican Party Political Director Craig Robinson, who is now editor in chief of the state party’s website. “There’s not much time to compete once you figure out who’s real or not. You don’t want to space it out so if you don’t win Iowa or New Hampshire, you don’t have a chance.”

Larison doubts the shorter schedule will have its intended effect:

Now that they are going back to a more compressed schedule, that greatly improves the chances of whoever fills that front-runner role ahead of the voting. This makes it much more likely that what could potentially be the most wide-open, competitive Republican nomination contest on record will be turned into a rapid coronation of whoever happens to be in the lead at the start. That will probably mean that the party will once again choose another relative moderate distrusted by large numbers of conservatives, and who will suffer from the same lack of enthusiasm that afflicted McCain and Romney.

Jonathan Bernstein thinks a shorter primary season makes a fringe candidate more likely, not less:

By compressing the calendar, you increase the danger that a mediocre or worse candidate could get hot at just the right time and wrap up the nomination before the party has time to stop it.

Drum downplays those fears but concedes that he could be unpleasantly surprised come 2016. His advice to both parties:

Make your primaries as similar to a general election as possible. That would mean, for example, ditching the Iowa caucuses, since the kind of retail politics that win in Iowa are irrelevant to success in November. What you want is a candidate that can raise lots of money; appeal to lots of people; and has a good media presence. That’s what wins general elections these days, and a successful primary season is one that gives the advantage to those qualities.

Cillizza theorizes that Rand Paul could benefit from the new rules:

The compression of the calendar and the likelihood that Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada will have February all to themselves makes coming out of those four states with some momentum all important. No potential candidate — up to and including Jeb Bush — is better positioned, at least at the moment, to run strong in all four states.

FHQ considers how the states are likely to react:

The bottom line for now is that the national parties are doing exactly what one would expect them to do. While they are still susceptible to rogue states, the national parties have gotten more sophisticated in their responses to them. The traditionally-exploited loopholes have largely been closed.

Want rogue states in 2016? Look at the usual suspects FHQ has been mentioning for months. It won’t be Florida. It’ll be Arizona, Michigan, Missouri and North Carolina. And start looking to the end of the calendar too. We may see some creative rogue states in 2016.