Is Obamacare In The Clear?

Reflecting on the new Obamacare numbers, Ezra claims that the “risk of a ‘death spiral’ is over”:

The The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that if the market’s age distribution freezes at its current level — an extremely unlikely scenario — “overall costs in individual market plans would be about 2.4% higher than premium revenues.” So, in theory, premiums costs might rise by a few percentage points. That’s a problem, but it’s nothing even in the neighborhood of a death spiral.

Bernstein, however, wants us to stop “thinking about whether the ACA will ‘succeed’ or ‘fail.'”:

Yes, as Ezra Klein says today, a premium death spiral isn’t going to happen next year (although that doesn’t mean it won’t happen down the road — after all, spirals start slowly!). But that doesn’t mean that health care will indeed be affordable down the road. Or, more precisely, it doesn’t tell us how affordable it will be, and how that will vary for different populations.

Yglesias joins the conversation:

[H]ere’s the problem. The federal Health Insurance Marketplace isn’t a single insurance risk pool.

Because insurance is regulated at the state level, even the “federal” exchange is essentially an administrative mechanism for a couple of dozen separate risk pools. Each state needs a demographically balanced set of clients, it’s not good enough to just be balanced on average. And even though the variance between the different states isn’t huge, it’s not nothing either. The odds that at least one or two states will fall short are much higher than the odds that the federal exchange on the whole will fall short. Now in a sense, a program that works in 48 states is doing a lot of good even if for some reason it doesn’t come together right in North Dakota and Maine (or wherever). But it would be a huge embarrassment for a program that’s already witnessed a lot of embarrassing failures.

Reihan considers other threats to the ACA:

I would emphasize the fact that if the threat of the individual mandate penalty helps keep the risk pool fairly balanced, it will be because there will have been a widespread public information campaign informing people that they are subject to a nontrivial penalty for failing to purchase insurance that at least some people will consider quite expensive (provided that they aren’t among those who’ve had their insurance policies canceled). And if insurers experience significant losses, as seems well within the realm of possibility, taxpayers will be obligated to make up much of the difference. This might be the right policy. It’s not at all obvious, however, that it will be popular. Rigorous enforcement of the mandate and the transitional mechanisms for protecting insurers might both be necessary to get the ACA exchanges up and running and they might endanger the ACA’s political health.

We Spilled Blood For What?

Iraq Archive 2007

William McNulty blames the high suicide rate among young veterans on the “amorphous nature” of the wars they fought in:

No amount of counseling can dispel the gnawing sense that one sacrificed for a bogus cause. From this stems despair — from a sense that so much of one’s life was given for so little purpose. Today’s vets do not see themselves as saviors, they cannot identify whom they defeated, they are not certain that they truly liberated anyone, and they fought, at best, a holding action against an ill-defined threat. Progress has been absent.

Joe Klein seconds McNulty:

McNulty makes an important distinction: between depression and despair. Depression is one of the prevalent symptoms of post-traumatic stress. It is a natural reaction to the unimaginable terror that comes with combat, the survivor’s guilt that comes with the loss of friends, the frustration that comes with the loss of a limb or a traumatic brain injury. Despair is more profound: it comes when you’ve experienced any or all of those things–and you come to the conclusion that it was all in vain, that there was no earthly reason to have invaded Iraq in the first place or extended the war in Afghanistan beyond the counter-terrorist effort to snuff out Al Qaeda.

Iraq veteran Elliot Ackerman has a different perspective. He reflects on the fall of Fallujah, where he fought almost ten years ago:

I wear a black bracelet on my wrist. It’s got Dan’s name on it, and the date 10 November 2004. I wear it for him but for others, too. Next to that bracelet is another one, a plastic one threaded with pink hearts and blue stars that my three-year old daughter made for me. If it weren’t for the black bracelet, the plastic one wouldn’t exist.

Does Fallujah falling into the hands of the ISIS make what Dan did for me and for the forty-six of us a waste? I wonder what he’d say.

When I think about my wars, and what happened, I do sometimes ask myself if it was worth it. I’m not thinking about Bush or Obama, or about Iraq or Afghanistan. I’m thinking about Pratt and Ames, and of course Dan, and unfortunately other friends like him. I hope they’d think what we’d did for each other was worth it.

(Photo: The remains of three US servicemen, their equipment, and a Humvee lay scattered on a dirt road after a massive IED vaporized their vehicle on August 4, 2007 in Hawr Rajab, Iraq. By Benjamin Lowy/Getty Images)

Mike Allen: The Smithers Of Roger Ailes

Erik Wemple has another blockbuster piece on the corporate public relations newsletter known as Mike Allen’s Playbook at Politico. This time, it’s about the constant, fawning press releases Allen writes for his favorite news channel and personal idol, Roger Ailes. The latest piece of puffery from Allen is a summary of the new Gabe Sherman book on the Republican operative running the Republican Party’s propaganda outlet. For some reason, almost none of the critical details about Ailes made it into Allen’s account, merely anything that Ailes himself would be happy with:

He chose far more flattering stuff, like the part about Ailes being “The Most Powerful Man in the World,” about Ailes’s rough childhood, about Ailes winning over Rupert Murdoch, about Ailes winning over employees, about Ailes’s marketing genius, about Politico scoring a presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan library, to Ailes’s dismay. Save for a nod to Fox News’s alleged deception over an infamous anti-Obama video from May 2012, Allen all but “Zevved up” the Sherman book. That is, he made it sound a lot like the very favorable Ailes biography that author Zev Chafets last year published with the network boss’s full cooperation.

To take a fair but highly critical book and make it seem like a hagiography is Allen’s mojo when it comes to Politico’s advertizing clients (including those whose sponsored content appears within Allen’s daily suck-up to power and money in Washington). But the Ailes-worship is close to pathological. Just read it all yourself and make up your own mind. But, to my mind, Wemple proceeds to cite case after case after case of fellatial coverage of Fox and Ailes from the perkiest team-player in the Washington Media-Corporate Village. Now, you might think that this is too easy. Selective pickings from Allen’s daily, lucrative plugs for the rich and powerful could find anything. But what makes Wemple’s pieces persuasive is that he also includes any examples he can also find of faintly-critical coverage. They’re there, but in such minuscule proportion to the relentless positive p.r. for Fox that they almost seem designed to bolster its credibility. And that’s why Allen’s disgracefully tardy response to this is so lame:

Over the past seven years, there have been more than 8 million words of Playbooks, including hundreds of announcements from every group under the sun. You could cherry-pick items to make any case you wanted: that I’m a conservative hack, or a liberal tool, or a bad writer or a good guy.

No you can’t. The mountain of evidence and counter-evidence that Wemple has assembled is proof that Allen will flatter anyone with power for access and suck up to anyone with money for cash. Now that does not mean that Allen does this in a conscious way. My own sense is that he is so eager to please the powerful, so desperate to be included in their circles, so obsessed with remaining a player in DC, that he may simply not see that his constant cooing into the power vortex of Washington is at best an exercise in public relations, rather than journalism, and at worst, an obvious inversion of the journalist’s core role, which is to challenge power rather than to celebrate it. In other words, subjective naivete and a desire to be accepted is not incompatible with objective corruption.

But Wemple has a coup de grace. He notes how odd it is that, given Allen’s constant suck-ups, Politico’s stars very rarely show up on Fox News. And yet it isn’t that odd at all, as Fox’s response to the charge reveals:

Former Fox News PR ace Brian Lewis told Jim Romenesko in 2012, “We do not have a do-not-deal-with-Politico policy. We deal with Mike Allen.” As they should.

And, when they need a mouthpiece to rebut telling criticism, they still do.

Marijuana Prices In Colorado Are Sky High

A major reason for the spike is Colorado’s decision to “vertically integrate all weed sales, meaning that any licensed pot stores must grow 70 percent of what they sell”:

Colorado, in other words, has adopted the brewpub model, with most of the product being produced on site. Washington, on the Kush_closeother hand, is something more like a liquor store, with production handled elsewhere. Both come with a fair share of red tape — Washington won’t be opening their retail outlets until spring of this year, so it remains to be seen which will be more resilient in the face of demand.

Nevertheless, growers and advocates seem to understand that cumbersome legislation is the best way to ensure legal marijuana as a lasting Rocky Mountain institution.

“I think this is going to be a slow, controlled, implementation,” says Elliott. “It’s going to take us months — maybe years — to reach the demand that’s out there. And while it’s frustrating that won’t happen faster, the public should be proud of how we are doing this.”

Many of the older customers don’t mind the high prices:

Despite what news stories (like teens dropping out of school because of marijuana use) suggest about the Colorado’s current pot mavens, the people who have been standing in the snow for hours to pay $80 for an eighth of an ounce aren’t kids. They’re [Citizen Jay Daily’s] peers.

“Our customers are grown-ups, adults. They’ll happily spend $80 because it’s not a matter of money, it’s a matter of access,” he says. Some of the people he meets have traveled across the world (“Argentina, Russia, Poland!”) to get here. But a large number are simply traveling back in time. Successful, hardworking parents who—with kids grown and out of the house—are ready to be themselves once more. Or, as Citizen Jay puts it, “come out of the pot closet.”

John McDuling warns that investing “in marijuana stocks is a lot more dangerous than smoking marijuana”:

The sudden explosion of interest in weed stocks even prompted FINRA, Wall Street’s self-regulatory organization, to last week warn investors about the potential for scams and frauds. It noted that some marijuana companies—though it didn’t name them—had been employing well-known tricks used in stock scams, like frequently changing their names and business focus. …

Kleiman bets that prices will plummet eventually:

Legal cannabis will be a commodity, and a cheap one at that. Maybe somebody has a clever branding strategy to make money anyway, but what are the odds you’re going to pick that lucky company to invest in as opposed to the 99 others that are going to go broke when pre-tax retail prices hit $3/gm. for sinse, with concentrates trading at a discount on a per-milligram-THC basis?

For Once, Congress Might Do Its Job

The new omnibus spending bill is likely to pass:

The lack of dramatic, controversial changes are likely to help smooth the way for the omnibus, which the House and the Senate are expected to take up this week. Outside conservative groups are already railing against the spending bill, but the reaction on the Hill has been more muted as many Republicans are eager to avoid a replay of October’s shutdown. “We’re not going to stop the process mid-year,” GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions, who voted against the December budget deal, told the National Journal. Democratic leaders and the White House are lining up behind the agreement.

If the omnibus passes without event this week, legislators and Hill-watchers alike will herald Congress for a return to normalcy. It will certainly be a departure from how members have operated for the past three years, lurching from one manufactured fiscal crisis to the next as they insisted on coming to a long-term deficit reduction deal that never actually happened.

Plumer breaks down the bill. Among the highlights:

Defense: 0.2 percent increase. Military spending basically gets kept at the same levels as last year, once you factor in the effects of the sequestration. And it’s about $29 billion less than the Pentagon wanted. The budget includes $486.9 billion for the Pentagon’s base budget and another $85.2 billion for operations overseas this year. The overseas budget is declining only slightly even as the war in Afghanistan winds down. Another highlight: There’s a 1 percent increase in pay for military personnel.

Benen flags other details:

A few things that jumped out at me:

* As ridiculous as this may sound, a Republican rider survived that would continue the sale of inefficient incandescent light bulbs.

* The school voucher program for the District of Columbia will continue.

* Efforts to defund the Affordable Care Act predictably failed, but at Republicans’ insistence, the package cuts $1 billion from the Prevention and Public Health (PPH) fund.

* The spending bill reverses some of the cuts to retirement pay for medically retired veterans and survivor benefits.

* Detainees still can’t be transferred from Guantanamo Bay to detention facilities on U.S. soil.

Drum expects little effect from the rider that cuts off funding for enforcing the new light bulb efficiency standards:

On the one hand, the lighting industry has completed the transition to newer, more efficient bulbs and has no interest in going back. What’s more, these newer bulbs provide just about all the options anyone could ask for. … At this point, suspending enforcement is mostly a symbolic gesture to please the tea party base of the GOP. It will have a modest effect, but for the most part the market has moved on.

The IRS is also getting its funds cut:

According to the House Appropriations Committee, the funding level would be lower than agency spending in 2009. The agreement would also require the IRS to spend more time and energy reporting to Congress on a range of activities. And, to the surprise of no one, it prohibits the use of any funds to single out groups based on their ideological beliefs or “to target citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Those restrictions, of course, explain what this budget is really about: More political payback for the IRS’s bungled efforts to sort out which non-profits qualify for 501(c)(4) designation.

Bloomberg’s editorial rails against other cuts:

Lawmakers unwisely denied funding increases to financial regulatory agencies, which need more resources to finish and enforce the Dodd-Frank financial reforms. This stinginess is what Wall Street wanted, of course. But it won’t protect the financial industry from regulation; it will only make the process more frustrating. Under the 2014 spending agreement, the Securities and Exchange Commission will get $1.35 billion, which is $324 million below President Barack Obama’s budget request. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees commodities and futures transactions worth $400 trillion in notional value – – up from $40 trillion before Dodd-Frank — gets a mere $215 million, or $100 million less than what the president sought.

This isn’t fiscal prudence. Both agencies return money to the U.S. Treasury in the form of fines and penalties in excess of what they spend. Presumably, better funding would result in more proficient enforcement and even fatter returns to taxpayers. And the penny-pinching can’t stop the agencies from implementing Dodd-Frank. The 2010 law offers no leeway on whether to regulate. Tight budgets just mean the work must be done by fewer staff, making it harder for industry representatives to get appointments to discuss the rules or enforcement cases.

Josh Green’s bottom line:

What’s remarkable is how something as unremarkable as this omnibus bill can pass through Congress (probably) without the headache-inducing, economy-damaging drama of maximal opposition that has accompanied nearly every piece of significant legislation in the past few years.

Democrats For War With Iran, Ctd

Cory Booker Marries Same Sex Couples As NJGay Marriage Law Goes Into Effect

Jeffrey Goldberg tries to talk sense into Iran hawks:

[A]t least in the short term, negotiations remain the best way to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold. And U.S. President Barack Obama cannot be hamstrung in discussions by a group of senators who will pay no price for causing the collapse of negotiations between Iran and the P5 + 1, the five permanent members of the security council, plus Germany. “You have a large group of senators who are completely discounting the views of the administration, the actual negotiators, the rest of the P5 + 1, the intelligence community and almost every Iran analyst on earth,” said Colin Kahl, who, as a deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East during Obama’s first term, was responsible for preparing all of the options that the President says are still on the table.

If these negotiations were to collapse — and collapsing the negotiations is the goal of some of the most hawkish hawks — the most plausible alternative left to stop Iran would be a preventative military strike, either by the U.S. or by Israel (Arab states, which are agitating for an American strike, wouldn’t dare take on the risk of attacking Iran themselves). Such a strike might end in disaster. …

The whole column is worth a read. Another sound point:

[W]hy support negotiations? First: They just might work. I haven’t met many experts who put the chance of success at zero. Second: If the U.S. decides one day that it must destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, it must do so with broad international support. The only way to build that support is to absolutely exhaust all other options. Which means pursuing, in a time-limited, sober-minded, but earnest and assiduous way, a peaceful settlement.

Beinart declares that “the sanctions bill is all about torpedoing a nuclear deal”:

An analysis of the legislation by longtime senate foreign relations committee staffer Edward Levine notes that to suspend the new sanctions indefinitely, President Obama must certify that “Iran will…dismantle its illicit nuclear infrastructure.” That’s pretty vague. But AIPAC’s summary of the bill helpfully explains that “Iran’s illicit nuclear infrastructure” includes “enrichment and reprocessing capabilities.”

Which would be fine, except that the Obama administration has already conceded that it can accept limited Iranian uranium enrichment so long as it’s not near weapons-grade and is closely monitored by inspectors. To suspend the sanctions, in other words, a final nuclear deal would have to include provisions that the governments of both Iran and the United States have already insisted it will not include.

Larison responds:

It’s not surprising that the bill has set such a maximalist requirement, since the bill’s co-sponsors have previously expressed their opposition to allowing Iran to retain any enrichment capabilities. This is why no one should take seriously the claim of the bill’s supporters that they are interested in a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear issue. According to their own standard, they will only accept a deal with conditions that Iran has repeatedly stated that it will never accept, which means that no achievable final deal can avoid triggering the sanctions that they wish to impose. It is little wonder that Iran views the passage of a new sanctions bill as a deal-breaker. If the bill became law, it would mean that the U.S. had already reneged on commitments that it made in the interim agreement.

Kilgore wants anti-war Democrats to make some noise:

You will hear some Democrats and even a few Republicans claim they are trying to strengthen the adminstration’s hand in their negotiations, but that’s a shuck. The whole idea is to torpedo the talks because Bibi Netanyahu believes they are aimed at the wrong goal: keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, as opposed to Bibi’s demand that Iran lose its capability of developing nuclear weapons. If that means war, so be it. This time around, of course, those in the Democratic Party opposing a drift into war have the White House on their side, and the precedent of what happened when a lot of Democrats supported a similarly avoidable war with Iraq. But if antiwar Democrats don’t start making some real noise, the configuration of forces in Congress will continue to deteriorate, and we could be looking at a war foisted on an unwilling commander-in-chief.

And now the House is preparing to pass the Senate’s bill, which “would speed the process of sending a bill to Mr. Obama’s desk because the two chambers would not have to go through the process of reconciling their different bills.” It’s also intended pressure Reid into allowing a vote on the Senate bill. Larison zooms out:

When it came to the questions of bombing Libya and Syria, the House leadership was perfectly happy to defer to the executive, but when it comes to the conduct of diplomacy that is properly part of the executive’s responsibility they are only too ready to butt in and meddle where they aren’t wanted or needed. The one constant in this behavior is that most members of Congress find a way to take whichever side makes conflict with other states more likely. If the executive wants to launch a war on its own, Congress will stay out of the way, but if it wants to strike a deal that makes a future war less likely to happen they are suddenly very concerned to make their views known.

(Photo: Senator Cory Booker, who is sabotaging his own president’s diplomacy on Iran, by Kena Betancur/Getty Images.)

A Death Blow To Net Neutrality?

Andrew Leonard outlines the effects of a Tuesday court ruling that invalidated the FCC’s net neutrality rules:

In a decision widely seen as a victory for the big telecommunication companies and a defeat for defenders of the “open” Internet, the D.C. Court of Appeals struck down the FCC’s “net neutrality” rules on Tuesday. The decision in Verizon v. FCC effectively gives providers of Internet access the right to discriminate in favor of particular Internet services —  to create “express lanes” on the good old information superhighway. … But the decision is not necessarily a clear-cut ruling that net neutrality is unconstitutional. The court based its decision on a more technical issue: whether or not the broadband companies could be classified as “common carriers” that are not allowed to give special preferences to any users of their network infrastructure. Since the FCC had previously decided that broadband ISPs are not common carriers, the court ruled that the FCC could not then turn around and regulate the ISPs as common carriers.

Juan Cole warns that the ruling could allow “the corporatization of the Internet”:

The reason readers of Informed Comment can reach it as quickly and conveniently as they can reach a multi-billion dollar corporate web site is the principle of internet neutrality, built into the system by Tim Berners-Lee and other architects of the World Wide Web, which went live in 1991. Large private corporations that have been allowed to build out the pipes through which internet traffic flows have long wanted to introduce a different system, of net metering. In essence, if a corporation paid the internet provider a million dollars a year, readers could get to that site immediately. But for a site like Informed Comment without those sorts of bucks, service would be deliberately slowed and readers would have to wait a minute or two for the site to load. Studies have showed that most people won’t wait that way. So the entire independent cybersphere would be made invisible and more or less swept away. A similar thing happened to radio, which was a grassroots medium at the beginning and then was corporatized with government help.

Marvin Ammori isn’t giving up:

Those of us who had been involved with the net neutrality debate knew that, without reclassification, the flawed FCC order would never stand. But there were 100 ways it could have fallen. I thought that the court’s decision would be a baby-splitting half-loss that could enable the FCC to wipe its hands of network neutrality and pretend everything was A-OK. I was wrong on that point. The loss was so definitive, the powers granted to cable and phone companies so outrageous, that the FCC has a live grenade in its lap.

Now, every side is settling on its narrative. AT&T, Verizon, and their allies will argue that the decision means network neutrality is illegal, full stop, and the FCC can never adopt an order. They will also argue that the FCC needs to go to Congress to get more authority. Both arguments are wrong, of course. The FCC has all the power it needs to clean up the mess, simply by doing what [former FCC Chairman Julius] Genachowski—who, it must be said, is a very nice guy—knew he had to do but lacked the spine for.

Drum peers into his crystal ball:

The next step might be an appeal to the Supreme Court or it might be an FCC decision to reclassify the internet as a common carrier. But that’s what it’s come down to. If the Supreme Court upholds this decision (or refuses to hear an appeal), net neutrality is dead unless the FCC or Congress decide to reclassify broadband internet as a telecom service regulated as a common carrier. If they don’t, it will up-end the internet as we know it, with carriers free to provide, say, Amazon or Google with preferred service in return for higher access fees. That could be a big problem for startups—or anyone the telecom providers consider a competitor—who would have to contend with slower service as they tried to build their businesses. The big telecom companies say that’s not what they have in mind, and maybe they don’t right now. But they will. It’s only a matter of time.

Pethokoukis calls the ruling a victory for consumers and the free market:

The FCC rules were meant to impose one-size-fits-all price controls on Internet service providers and force them to treat, as The Wall Street Journal describes, “similar content on their broadband pipes equally.” Sounds innocent enough. Sounds fair. Sounds neutral. But at its core “net neutrality” really is nothing more than an attempt at rent seeking by content providers who want the ISPs to pay the tab for future network upgrades. It’s kind of like Apple lobbying for price controls on shippers like FedEx when transporting iPads from China to America. Whenever the transport firm bought new planes, it would have to eat the cost or pass it downstream to some other customers. In this case, the customers would have been regular consumers.

Bret Swanson agrees:

The court’s basic finding is correct and good for the Internet economy. Common carriage style regulation is not appropriate for the Internet. The Internet is a fast changing, multipurpose network, built and operated by numerous firms, with many types of data, content, products, and services flowing over it, all competing and cooperating in a healthy and dynamic environment. Old telephone style regulation, meant to regulate a monopoly utility that used a single purpose network to deliver one type of service, would have been a huge (and possibly catastrophic) step backward for what is today a vibrant Internet economy.

Marriage Equality Update

Lyle Denniston unpacks yesterday’s news out of Oklahoma:

In ruling against the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, the judge declared that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of legal equality.  He ruled that the Supreme Court’s ruling last Term in United States v. Windsor actually provided some support both for the challenging couple and for state officials defending the state ban.

The Windsor decision, the judge said, supports a plea for marriage equality because much of the reasoning of the Court majority about the purpose behind DOMA could also be applied to state bans on same-sex marriage.  It supports the state, the judge added, because of the lengthy commentary in the opinion about states’ primary power to define marriage.

In the end, however, the judge decided that Oklahoma’s ban was based on intentional discrimination, with a “stark” negative impact on gay and lesbian couples.  “This is not a case where the law has a small or incidental effect on the defined class; it is a total exclusion of only one group.”

Allahpundit chimes in:

If they want to discriminate against gay couples, they need to show some rational reason for doing so.

“Moral disapproval” isn’t a rational reason per the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark case from 2003 that declared Texas’s anti-sodomy law unconstitutional. The upshot of Lawrence is that you can’t legislate morality when you’re targeting intimate relationships between consenting adults. You can regulate those relationships if you have some other rational reason for doing so, but the state couldn’t produce one here: “Encouraging procreation” doesn’t fly if you’re not also excluding straight infertile couples from marriage and “encouraging mother/father households” doesn’t fly if you can’t show how banning gay marriage would actually encourage the formation of those households. As I say, all of this is S.O.P. for federal SSM jurisprudence lately. The only real novelty is that, between this ruling and the ruling in Utah last month, the new legal battlefield over gay marriage lies in America’s reddest states. That may be an extra inducement for SCOTUS to deal with this sooner rather than later.

Schopenhauer On The Age Of Sponsored Content

The Dish constantly links to and loves Maria Popova. For me, she represents the best that the Internet has to offer. She gets paid by reader Schopenhauerdonations and affiliate income. She writes what she loves. She reads books. She has seized the limitless potential of the web – but by bucking the cult of contemporaneity, by digging up the old and true rather than the new and buzzy, by building a community of readers who flock to an oasis far away from what she has called the “Buzzwashing” of our collective online minds.

In some ways, her appeal is pretty straightforward as a writer. She is unmistakably genuine. Nothing she writes is obviously designed purely for getting money (although, of course, she has done really well by simply writing tirelessly about what she loves). And so you can see why re-reading some of Schopenhauer’s essays on writing and journalism appealed to her. His brutal take-down of writing for money is about as good a case for that position as I’ve read:

The author is cheating the reader as soon as he writes for the sake of filling up paper; because his pretext for writing is that he has something to impart. Writing for money [is], at bottom, the ruin of literature. It is only the man who writes absolutely for the sake of the subject that writes anything worth writing. What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as if money lay under a curse, for every author deteriorates directly [whenever] he writes in any way for the sake of money. The best works of great men all come from the time when they had to write either for nothing or for very little pay.

When I was very young, I used to wonder why the newspaper had the same size every day – as if what was actually news didn’t vary, when it obviously did. As a working writer for much of my adult life, I understand now why the economics of journalism operates that way, and probably has to. But an economics that directly rewards eyeballs at the expense of any other criterion – i.e. the current economics of most of the web – or a “journalism” that is paid for by corporations – i.e. sponsored content – would horrify Schopenhauer. His standards are impossibly high; his judgments overly broad and caustic. But he was onto something, as is Maria. And our culture could learn a lot from it.

(Painting by Jules Lunteschütz)

Telling The Truth About Iraq

Jeremy Lott hopes GOP presidential hopefuls will face reality:

Any Republican seeking nomination for the 2016 presidential election should at a minimum be willing to admit Iraq was a mistake.  It was an error that cost us upwards of $1.5 trillion, thousands of U.S. lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, while seriously hindering our efforts to track down the real culprits of September 11. (The war, incidentally, helped pave the way for a Nancy Pelosi-controlled House and a Barack Obama-controlled White House, as well.)

Larison sees this as improbable:

There are some obstacles to what Lott proposes. Chief among them is the difficulty that many hawks in the party still truly don’t accept that the Iraq war was a mistake. Despite the fact that by virtually any measurable standard the Iraq war was a senseless waste of lives and resources, they don’t consider this to be the truth, so they won’t greet it with relief. At best, many hawks will agree that the there were flaws in the execution, but they remain convinced that the original idea was sound.

Readers know how terrible a mistake this was and is, in my judgment. Listening to what passes for “debate” about the continued sectarian warfare in Iraq – which never ended, and was never resolved by the surge, and is the core reason why Iraq as a country remains a democratic impossibility – has been a sobering moment. Men like John McCain have obviously not internalized for a millisecond the awful error they made. Their response has been either utter denialism or silence – which was roughly their position throughout the entire, horrifying experience.

And that helps explain a little the total bafflement of these old warriors at the possibility of a rapprochement with Iran. Because they haven’t yet absorbed the uselessness of military force to advance our interests in the region – indeed, its capacity to make our position measurably worse – they still see warfare as the natural response to a country now so crushed by sanctions it has allowed a relative moderate to take control. They cannot even see that the only real option to advance some kind of peace in Iraq is through Tehran, a natural ally against Sunni extremists in that “country”. And they cannot see that further polarization between the Muslim world (especially its most pro-American population in Iran) and the West does nothing but hurt us, and our standing in the world at large.

Meanwhile, Crowley wonders whether Clinton’s support of the Iraq War will become an issue in 2016:

If Clinton runs for president in 2016, she’s likely to emphasize the more dovish aspects of her record—including her public diplomacy to repair America’s international image, her focus on building ties in Asia, and her attention to women’s rights and development issues.

But at a time when fewer Americans support an active U.S. role in foreign affairs, Clinton’s comfort with the harder side of American power could be a vulnerability. A liberal primary challenger might well reprise Barack Obama’s 2007 line that Hillary’s record amounts to “Bush-Cheney lite.” One potential contender, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, has already been zinging her over her 2002 Iraq vote. “When George Bush got a bunch of [Democrats] to vote for that war, I was just shaking my head in Montana,” he said recently. Whether such attacks will hold even a fraction of the valence they did at the Iraq war’s peak remains to be seen.

Friedersdorf adds:

There is next to no chance I’d vote for a Republican who thought the Iraq War was prudent, or showed an eagerness for more military interventions. But neither is it enough for a Democratic candidate to claim that the problem with the Iraq was the way that the Bush Administration executed it. Habitual hawks like Clinton have to clear a particularly high hurdle. And no one should be elected president without showing, beyond any doubt, that they understand why the war was a mistake and how to avoid like mistakes in the future.

I’m with Conor on this one, unreservedly. Clinton gets no pass. I want to know how she understands her own responsibility for the fiasco. And how she accounts for it.