The Dish

by Chris Bodenner

Santa responds.

by Andrew Sprung

A month ago, in a review of Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, Michael Crowley claimed that Clinton had given birth in May to an accidental Israel policy:

Crowley further reported that Clinton's subsequent praise of Netanyahu's partial settlement freeze as "unprecedented" was also unauthorized and made the White House unhappy, since it came across as a cave-in after the White House had insisted on a total freeze.

It was also, however, true.  Today, Ethan Bronner in the Times lends a sympathetic ear to the theory that Netanyahu is seriously seeking a deal. The story highlights the extent to which Clinton's original  gaffe (if gaffe it was) may have distorted perceptions of Israeli policy:

Yet skepticism would be a polite way of describing the reaction of the Palestinians and much of the world, who view his steps as either too little too late or a ruse aimed at buying time to pursue his real agenda.

To put this in perspective, most Israelis are almost as skeptical as the Palestinians that Netanyahu would really pull a Begin and negotiate seriously for a two-state solution. But as Bronner notes, all but the rabid right wing in Israel are aware that the country cannot afford further diplomatic isolation.

It's worth noting too that thanks in part to Netanyahu's actions, new facts on the ground are being created — by Palestinian economic development.  A recent account of rising prosperity on the West Bank by Tom Gross in the WSJ struck me as ideologically slanted, casting Palestinian progress largely as a result of Israeli largess. But the rising prosperity Gross reports is doubtless real:

As Andrew would say: know hope.

by Patrick Appel

It's a line you hear from critics of health care reform on both the right and the left. Ezra Klein gives his take:

[If] I could construct a system in which insurers spent 90 percent of every premium dollar on medical care, never discriminated against another sick applicant, began exerting real pressure for providers to bring down costs, vastly simplified their billing systems, made it easier to compare plans and access consumer ratings, and generally worked more like companies in a competitive market rather than companies in a non-functional market, I would take that deal. And if you told me that the price of that deal was that insurers would move from being the 86th most profitable industry to being the 53rd most profitable industry, I would still take that deal. And that may be the exact deal we're getting. The profit motive is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.

by Conor Friedersdorf

The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it’s the fact that the country has become ungovernable.

— Matthew Yglesias

As President Obama and Congressional Democrats struggle to reform health care and pass legislation on climate change, we're starting to hear a lot of progressive wonks complain that structural impediments are responsible for our woes.

"Ungovernable America." That's the headline on the post linked above. Isn't it strange that the folks making these arguments don't even feel a need to grapple with the fact that the United States has prospered more than any society in human history during the 220 years that we've operated under our current governing structure?

James Joyner makes the same point:

There’s a general consensus, which I’m part of, that our national politics have gotten more polarized and ugly in recent years.  We’re not where we were in the early 1800s, much less the mid-to-late 1800s, but it’s bad.   The filibuster, once a rare tool used to fight truly major changes, is now a routine legislative tactic.  And that’s frustrating and perhaps should be changed at the margins.  (For example, presidential appointees should get an up-or-down majority rule vote.)

That said, the institutions have not changed substantially in recent memory.  Some readers may recall the days of the George W. Bush administration, when a president with narrower margins in both Houses of Congress managed to get all manner of legislation passed, including a massive expansion of the Medicare entitlement and the authorization to fight two wars.  Off the books, no less!  During those days, Tom Daschle and then Harry Reid used every tool at their disposal to block legislation.  Sometimes, they were successful, as with Social Security privatization, perhaps the signature domestic plank of Bush’s re-election campaign; sometimes, less so.

But I actually think there is another wrinkle worth raising here. Let's return to something I argued back in July while guest-blogging at The Dish:

The worst thing about "comprehensive reform" efforts are that they shut the average citizen out of the legislative process by making bills so complicated that it is nearly impossible for the average citizen to properly evaluate whether on balance it is a wise or unwise measure. Who can predict all the effects of a 3,000 page bill spanning all manner of issues? Often times not even the legislature itself. Certainly not the press, which often focuses on bits of the legislation that won't actually have the most impact, sometimes because legislators themselves are deliberately obscuring what's actually at stake.

Comprehensive reform also seems more prone to capture by narrow lobbying interests who take advantage of its complexity to insert provisions they'd be hard pressed to get away with were more discrete questions being addressed.

And in August, I wrote:

If health care reform is defeated, one lesson should be that it is easier to scare people in misleading ways when your legislative reform package is so ambitious, ill-defined, complicated and all-encompassing that confusion about what exactly it entails and the probably consequences are rational, even inevitable. Politicians should conclude that their time is better spent taking smaller, discrete steps to reform the health care system, even though incremental legislative efforts aren’t the stuff of historical legacies or televised ceremonies where parchment is signed with a fancy pen.

Perhaps you've heard the counterarguments — that health care reform has to be comprehensive. Or let's broaden the conversation. Remember when we had to have "comprehensive immigration reform" during the Bush Administration? Or let's look back to 1994, when it was Bill Clinton who sought comprehensive health care reform. Instead America got years more with the status quo.

Of course, that isn't the only way to address policy problems.

The Senate is, to borrow a famous description, a saucer where legislation is cooled — that is its design. Thus it is extremely difficult to comprehensively reform anything. But that hardly means that problems cannot be addressed by chipping away at them a bit at a time. It merely means that they cannot be addressed in a way that is emotionally satisfying to wonks who aspire to write a white paper that comprehensively solves a problem, or presidents who want a legacy like FDR's, or Congressional reps who want to pass landmark legislation with their names on it, or a political press that loves covering things that are "historic" or "the biggest in a generation."

Progressives who find this a big rather than a feature should recognize that without this feature of the Senate, that Ronald Reagan would've done far more to gut the New Deal's legacy, and that President George W. Bush would've privatized Social Security shortly before the stock market tanked. Well, they'll respond, that doesn't change the fact that health care is a historic challenge, and that it cannot be addressed by piecemeal reform. Really? So there isn't any discrete improvement to America's health care system that you can pass?

Maybe they'd even be better than the "comprehensive bill" that may still pass!

by Chris Bodenner

The Freedom Tower is finally reaching for the sky (at the fourth of 94 floors, to be exact).

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I work in politics in Arizona.  I've been involved in nonprofit advocacy work, campaign work, and I've worked with legislators.  Everything I've done has been on the Democratic side for the most part, but we've worked across the state with lots of groups and I've interacted with Republicans in many different contexts.

Bottom line – Arpaio is perhaps the best representative of the true base of the GOP in this state.  The more people attack him, the higher his ratings go up.  Most establishment Democrats in Arizona believe that, especially considering what's happened in previous years.  One person I've worked with closely in the past worked at the highest levels in the Napalitano administration for most of her time in as Governor.  This person explained to me that Janet got heat from the left over most of her tenure for not being tougher with Joe and holding him accountable.  But her people knew that Janet walked a tight rope – she won by less than a point in 2002 – and was really the only thing keeping the right-dominated legislature from passing whatever they wanted.  So she erred on the side of a general hands-off approach, and won Joe's silence for the most part.  His aggression was not something they wanted to have to deal with, particularly because of how intrusive and invasive Arpaio's methods are.

But let's not forget we're in a state that effectively voted by referendum NOT to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the 90's.  There are several very conservative blocs in our state, ranging from Mormons to Minuteman supporters, and they all seem to love Arpaio.  He brings constant attention to the issue of illegal immigration and knows how far he can push the limits of the law.  Some of us feel like we live in a police state, but he makes a lot of people feel safer (though I imagine they would feel differently if they were Hispanic).

This anecdote sums it up nicely, I think.  Last week I was at a get together at a friend's house.  There were a few of us there that work in politics, and there were also several students from Arizona State University.  One of the students brought up a study they had done on Arpaio's prison culture (tents, concrete floors, pink clothing+handcuffs, etc.).  "It's just unnecessarily cruel," he said, "and I don't think it should be legal to treat someone like that if they're being incarcerated by the state."

Another student in the group, someone who we've hung out with occasionally and is generally a pretty quiet guy, spoke up.

"I don't know.  I mean, he is pretty effective."

"Pretty effective."  There are some people who are focused only on ends.  It's not about what Joe Arpaio does.  It's why he does it.  And to these people, a man who won't stop at degradation and home invasion to keep illegal immigrants out of the country is a patriot, and nothing less.

Another:

His most ardent reliable base is in the retirement (55+) "communities" developments where fear of immigrants and nostalgia for "law and order" play very well for his fund raising and vote generation.  His tactics will cost this county bankrupting insurance premiums in the near future from wrongful death lawsuits and countless investigations by his staff and those investigating him. His egomania and paranoia are unbounded. All of this is abetted by media puff pieces with the exception of the Phoenix New Times. I moved from there last year. When I return I will live in Tucson.

A 25 year resident of Arizona:

 …Arpaio is media-savvy, and picks his enemies well.  By this I don’t mean his foes in county government or in the media, I mean the groups on whom he concentrates the resources of his office.  Last night, as every year about this time, all of the TV stations showed footage from this year’s deadbeat dad roundup, along with the smirking Sheriff talking about how terrible it was that kids were going to have a lousy Xmas because these deadbeat dads hadn’t been paying child support.  He also goes after animal cruelty cases with a vengeance.  I think he has a finely-tuned sense of which “others’ are particularly viewed with scorn by his target supporters, and goes after them with a vengeance.  There is no doubt that many Maricopa county residents feel safer as a result of his policies, but also equally that his policies are never designed to impact negatively those supporters who see themselves as law-abiding (and hence won’t ever be in jail), are white (and hence will never be racially profiled), and don’t fit into any of the other classes that he has singled out for opprobrium.

Another reader

I think I may have some insight into why exactly Joe Arpaio is celebrated here in Arizona.  Let me explain by way of a story.
 
My mother and father are both fairly staunch conservatives from the Goldwater school of thought.  They both voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004.  In 2006, my father was called to serve on a jury relating to the death of one Charles Agster III, who died inside one of Joe Arpaio's jails. 

Details of the verdict are here.

The perspective from the token liberal paper in town that has been hectoring Arpaio for years is here.
 
My father spent 7 weeks in the courtroom reviewing the facts of the case.  When it was also over and I had been told what case he had been on, I went to him to hear his side of it.  My father has always been a very stoic and organized man, so the jumbled and emotional tale he told me struck me.  He found very little fault with the individual officers or the poor nurse in the situation and directed most of his ire towards the leadership of Sheriff's department.  He specifically recalled the testimony Sheriff Joe gave as a low point in the trial.  It was a great moment of bonding for us, because I had been following and talking about my negative views of Sheriff Joe for some time before this.
 
A couple years later, Joe was facing a very hard re-election from the Democratic challenger.  Every politician and paper, even the conservative major daily the Arizona Republic endorsed the challenger.  And despite it all, Joe won again.

I know that my mother voted for Arpaio that year.  She loves the way he 'enforces all the laws', which is conservative code in my family for cracking down on illegal immigration.  The story of my father's experience in the trial merely led her to blame Charles Agster's family for letting their son be so out of control.

Most tellingly, my father would not tell me how he voted.  He votes every year without fail, and usually a straight Republican ticket.  But even after being forced to look straight into the depth of corruption that has occurred under Joe's administration, he wouldn't or couldn't reject it outright.
 
Sheriff Joe's whole shtick is about how tough he is on crime.  And my parents don't really care about the particulars of how that happens.  To them, stories of immigrants skirting the law or committing crimes are tragedies that must be stopped.  And just how Palin's supporters rally behind her more as people point out her mistakes and shortcomings, people like my parents rally around Joe the more it seems he's being ganged-up on.

by Patrick Appel

A few days ago, I noted Ed Morrissey's criticism of Yglesias's call to repeal the filibuster:

Funny, but I don’t recall Yglesias demanding those changes while Democrats were in the minority in the Senate.”

Yglesias proved Morrissey's recollection fallible yesterday. On a related note, Nicholas Stephanopoulos has an article in TNR advocating for a filibuster phase-out:

It asks too much of senators–among the most self-interested of creatures–to approach the filibuster as though they were behind a veil of ignorance. They know all too well who would benefit (President Obama and the Democrats) and who would be harmed (Republicans and grandstanding centrists) were the filibuster suddenly to be amended or eliminated. It is naïve to think they might put this knowledge aside.

The passage of time, however, creates an opportunity to drape a veil over politicians’ eyes. There is no way Republican senators would agree to the immediate abolition of the filibuster. But what if the proposal on the table was to get rid of the filibuster in 2017? By then, even a potential second Obama term would have ended. Every sitting senator would have faced re-election at least once. And, most importantly, there is no way to know which party would be in the majority and which would be in the minority.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

In response to this. So I'm curious, where does that leave the average voter in the process? With politicians caring more about lobbyist issues than those of their constituents, we may as well not have even taken time out of our day to visit the polling booth. We voted the *politician* in to office to be our voice in the halls of congress. Why should the voters and/or activists then have to enlist "opposing powerful elements" to fight for influence by proxy?  I mean hell, if that has become business as usual, why not just dissolve congress altogether and bring the back lines (and the back rooms) to the front.

Voters' interests and special interests can overlap and the balance between the two can shift. The characters and political philosophies of politicians matter, but the money trading hands cannot be ignored. It is easier to understand DC if one treats politicians as rational actors chasing incentives rather than ideological absolutists. Garnering votes is an important incentive but only one of many. My point was that separating special interests completely from government is both impossible and undesirable, not that the current balance between greater interests and special interests is ideal or the best we can do.

We shouldn't dissolve Congress because the alternatives are worse. In a democratic system the most powerful interests are almost exclusively interested in wealth creation. In a system like Iran's, to take as example a government the Dish has spent a good deal of time studying, power is concentrated in fewer hands and power is likely to infringe more upon the personal sphere. Those in control might want to impose religious law or demand the imprisonment or execution of certain individuals, to name just a few abuses of power, in addition to hoarding wealth. Banks lobbying for the right to impose larger ATM usage fees is rather mild in comparison.

This is not to say that I am enamored by lobbying in DC, but our system of horse trading is a compromise that contains the worst corruptions of power.

by Chris Bodenner

Gawker gets an exclusive on an internal video circulated by the group:

In perhaps the most sinister segment, it seems that Scientology has literally taken over the police force and part of the navy in Colombia — the cult is now part of the training courses for both bodies. The Colombians have even started to use the terminology, talking of the religion, as followers do, as 'technology'. A cited statement from the police force, for example, says "we would like with your help, to generate as leaders of the Colombian community a training center exclusively for police in every part of the country where the technology of Mr. Hubbard can be delivered."