Tag: Premium

The Resilient Success Of The Obama Presidency

Krugman makes the case:

[T]here’s a theme running through each of the areas of domestic policy I’ve covered. In each case, Obama delivered less than his supporters wanted, less than the country arguably deserved, but more than his current detractors acknowledge. The extent of his partial success ranges from the pretty good to the not-so-bad to the ugly. …

Am I damning with faint praise? Not at all. This is what a successful presidency looks like. No president gets to do everything his supporters expected him to. FDR left behind a reformed nation, but one in which the wealthy retained a lot of power and privilege. On the other side, for all his anti-government rhetoric, Reagan left the core institutions of the New Deal and the Great Society in place. I don’t care about the fact that Obama hasn’t lived up to the golden dreams of 2008, and I care even less about his approval rating. I do care that he has, when all is said and done, achieved a lot. That is, as Joe Biden didn’t quite say, a big deal.

wile_e_coyote_and_road_runner-cliffYes it is. The current indiscriminate pile-on about a “failed presidency” is just bandwagon bullshit. Unlike Krugman, I’ve long had confidence in Obama’s long game, even as I have had several conniptions in his term of office (his early prevarication on gay rights, that phoned-in first debate in 2012, his negligence with healthcare.gov, his caving into hysteria over ISIS). And I see little reason to question its broad thrust now.

Just a year ago, I had a conversation with a friend as the healthcare website was crashing. All that mattered, we agreed, was if, this time next year, the healthcare reform is working and the economy is doing better. Well, both those things have happened – Obamacare is actually a big success so far; the growth and unemployment rates are the envy of much of the Western world – and yet we are now told that he’s a failure. WTF? The architects of the Iraq War – like, yes, Clinton and McCain – somehow believe they have a better grasp of foreign affairs in the twenty-first century than he does. And the party that bankrupted this country in eight short years now has the gall to ignore the fastest reduction in the deficit ever, and a slow-down in healthcare costs that may well be the most important fiscal achievement of a generation.

Add to this two massive social shifts that Obama has coaxed, helped or gotten out the way: marriage equality and the legalization of cannabis. These are not minor cultural shifts. They are sane reforms, change we can absolutely believe in and have accomplished on his watch. Jihadist terrorism? It has murdered an infinitesimal number of Americans in the past six years, compared with almost any other threat. Yes, Americans are still capable of PTSD-driven panic and hysteria over it, and Obama has failed to counter that more aggressively, but to be where we are in 2014 is something few expected after 9/11.

The idea that he has “lost Iraq” is preposterous. We “lost” Iraq the minute we unseated the Sunnis, disbanded the Baathist army and unleashed the dogs of sectarian warfare.

The only sane response to continuing unrest there is to cut our losses, act as an off-shore balancing power, and protect ourselves. And one reason we have this capability is that Obama managed to pivot nimbly last fall to ensure the destruction of Assad’s WMDs. The Panettas and McCains and usual suspects still seem to believe that it would have been better to have bombed Assad, let him keep his WMDs, and … what exactly? Can you imagine ISIS with its hands on those weapons in a failed state with a deposed leader? Think Libya today with poison gas. Who prevented this? Obama. And he is still pilloried for it.

And over six long years, Obama has made it possible – still possible – to put Iran’s nuclear program in a safe box, and avoid another polarizing war in the region. If Obama ends his two terms having rid the Middle East of the threat of nuclear and chemical and biological warfare, he will have advanced our security almost as significantly as Bush and Cheney degraded it. Yes, he failed on Israel. But he has no real power over that. That tail has been madly wagging the dog for a long time now – and in some ways, Obama tried to restrain it more than any president since the first Bush. As long as fundamentalist Christians and even liberal Jews continue to support the ethnic cleansing and de facto apartheid on the West Bank, and do so with a fervor that reaches apoplectic proportions, no president will be able to establish a sane foreign policy with respect to the Jewish state.

Financial reform? Well, if even Krugman says it’s working better than he expected, chalk another one up. Torture? He has acted with more restraint than I would have and deferred far too much to the CIA, but the end-game has yet to be played. It is not unreasonable to believe that we will have established, by the end of his term, a clear and definitive account of the war crimes the last administration perpetrated. That is something. Maybe about as much as a democracy can handle in the time since the atrocities were committed.

Forget the media-click-bait pile-on. Just watch the economic data after the worst depression in many decades (and look at Europe or japan for comparison). Follow the progress in universal health insurance (itself a huge positive change in American life). Measure the greater security from WMDs. And observe the tectonic cultural shifts.

I’m not going to stop bashing him when I think he deserves it. But have I reason to question the long-term achievements of his long game? Fuck no. And we have two years to go.

Obama’s Syrian Quagmire

Clashes between ISIL and Kurdish armed groups

Fred Kaplan gets real:

The Syrian part of Obama’s anti-ISIS strategy was always a deferral. He seems not to have thought it through, perhaps because he didn’t think he’d have to. It would be hard, and take long, enough to “degrade and destroy” ISIS before he’d have to deal once more with Assad. He didn’t count on two factors. First, ISIS-in-Iraq and ISIS-in-Syria turn out to be inseparable; it’s hard to fight one without contending with the other. Second, America’s allies in the region—on whom Obama’s strategy depends—have interests that are at times at odds with American interests. This becomes a problem in coalition warfare. ISIS, in fact, gains much of its strength from the fact that the countries arrayed against it—which, together, could win in short order—can’t get their act together; they have too many conflicting interests tearing them apart.

He zooms out to conclude:

The international system in which we all grew up, the system of the Cold War, has shattered, and nothing has taken its place. There are no real power centers. Nations, even small and medium-sized ones, are freer to pursue their own interests, which often collide with ours. Large nations have less leverage than they once did, and it’s harder to coerce or persuade other nations to put our interests above their own. Obama is in a tight position (and future presidents should take note, because they will be, too): He may have to succumb to mission creep—or slowly, carefully, creep away.

I hope it’s the latter. There’s no way this clusterfuck can do anything coherent over the longer term. The Turks’ ambivalence – even with ISIS controlling a hefty chunk of their border with Syria – tells you everything you need to know. I agree with this reader:

1) In 1983, antecedents of Hezbollah bombed the shit out of military barracks in Lebanon, murdering over 200 US Marines. US officials made a bunch of noise about how they won’t be deterred. Less than 6 months later, Reagan had us get the fuck out of Lebanon. The Lebanese proceeded to murder each other for another 7 years before they got tired of it and stopped.

2) In 2014, two American journalists are murdered by a bunch of guys in the desert. Obama responds by having us get the fuck inside Iraq and Syria, two countries mired in slow burning civil wars.

And by publicly engaging with these idiots on the battlefield, Obama and every other US politician raises ISIS’s profile, drawing more recruits and terrorist funding to their cause.

I despair at how few Americans understand the psychology of power and lose their collective shit and demand engagement when a group — that is so self-destructive it would otherwise burn out on its own — cuts off a couple American heads. I also despair at the American politicians who understand the psychology of power intimately well, but (a) are too ignorant to understand it applies to foreigners as well, or (b) are too singleminded in their power games against Obama to care.

And finally, I despair at Obama, who I assume knows better.

I know it would have been tough to counter the politics of hysteria and fear this summer. But Obama should have been tougher in pushing back an unreconstructed neocon narrative that has now taken hold. God knows the Democrats are useless in articulating a policy of minimalism in confronting this kind of terror – but without a president leading with the case, actually proudly defending his reluctance to get mired in quag again, there’s no hope at all. He was just too weak.

Fredrik Logevall and Gordon Goldstein fear that Syria will become for Obama what Vietnam was for Lyndon Johnson:

War has a forward motion of its own. Most of Johnson’s major steps in the escalation in Vietnam were in response to unforeseen obstacles, setbacks and shortcomings. There’s no reason the same dynamic couldn’t repeat itself in 2014.

And there is a political logic, too: Then as now, the president faced unrelenting pressure from various quarters to do more, to fight the fight, to intensify the battle. Then as now, the alarmist rhetoric by the president and senior officials served to reduce their perceived maneuverability, not least in domestic political terms. Johnson was no warmonger, and he feared, rightly, that Vietnam would be his undoing. Nonetheless, he took his nation into a protracted struggle that ended in bitter defeat.

Larison holds the president responsible for setting the self-fulfilling logic of escalation on its course:

Presidents trap themselves into pursuing unwise escalation in foreign wars because their earlier decisions and past rhetorical overkill seem to compel it. Unfortunately, the administration has repeatedly combined careless rhetoric with a tendency to yield sooner or later to hawkish pressure. By indulging in the former (e.g., talk of “destroying” ISIS or claiming it is an “imminent threat to every interest we have”), Obama and his officials give hawks the opening they need to demand more aggressive measures. Having already endorsed most of the hawks’ assumptions about the conflict, the administration makes it very difficult for itself politically not to give in to those demands. At best, Obama has created an open-ended conflict that his successor will be forced to continue. Given Washington’s bias in favor of throwing more resources at a problem when a policy hasn’t succeeded, it is quite likely that the next administration will conclude that Obama’s policy didn’t “work” because it was insufficiently aggressive.

Waldman throws up his hands at the lessons America clearly hasn’t learned from our experience in the Middle East over the past 13 years:

It would be wonderful if the current campaign renders ISIS impotent. It would also be wonderful if the Syrian civil war wrapped up soon, with the Assad regime replaced by an inclusive democracy in which everyone’s human and civil rights are honored. But realistically, chances are that in two years time Barack Obama will bequeath to his successor a situation that is still unresolved and still bad (though perhaps in ways we haven’t even yet imagined). And no matter who that successor is, the answer he or she offers to the question of Syria and Iraq — and whatever questions follow — is likely to be more military actions. That president will either be Hillary Clinton, who throughout her career has been one of the most hawkish Democrats around, or it will be a Republican who is even more hawkish.

(Photo: Smoke rises from the clashes between Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) and Kurdish armed troops in Kobane (Ayn al-arab), Syria, on October 9, 2014. By Ibrahim Erikan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)

The Trouble With Islam, Ctd

I cede the floor to Hitch, peace be upon him:

It’s well worth twelve minutes of your time. And I think Hitch’s arguments about what must follow from a religious text still regarded as perfect and pristine and utterly unquestionable, and a caliph or Shi’a theocrat regarded as a “supreme leader”, and a politics saturated in apocalypticism, and a culture marinated in absurd levels of sexual repression, and an endemic suppression of blasphemy and apostasy as unthinkable offenses, stand the test of time.

The totalism of Islam is as dangerous as any other totalism – and liberals better understand that about it.

Yes, it is vital to make distinctions between the various ways in which Islam is practised across the world – which reveals some potential for reform, in the way that Christianity and Judaism have reformed and examined themselves over the past century. But the resilient absence of a collective understanding that religious violence simply is not worth it – the realization that most Christians came to after the Thirty Years War or, as Hitch has it, definitively after the First World War – is a real problem. It is the West’s problem in so far as we have badly mishandled our relation with that part of the world; but in the end, it is Middle Eastern Islam’s problem. Until the Shi’a and Sunni love the future more than they hate each other, until the Koran can be discussed and debated there and around the world the way any other religious text is discussed, until apostasy is respected and not criminalized, we will have more trouble in store.

Does this explain everything? Of course not. Culture, history, politics matter just as powerfully and can lead to different manifestations in time and place. Certainly there was a time in which Islam was far more tolerant than Christianity; and in the Middle East too. But that is no more, and central elements in the doctrine of Islam are all too easily compatible with its modern intolerance, and now post-modern virulence. The defanging of fundamentalism is the duty, in my view, of every person who claims to have faith. I see no reason why that shouldn’t apply to Islam as to an other religion. And it sure hasn’t been defanged enough.

The Pill’s Guinea Pigs

Ann Friedman reviews Jonathan Eig’s The Birth of the Pill. The book doesn’t shy away from the ethically dubious parts of the pill’s development:

Initially, [fertility expert John Rock and researcher Goody Pincus] sought out healthy American women for the hormone trials but didn’t tell them they were testing a possible contraceptive, or what the risks were. (At the time, there were no rules governing medical testing.) Nurses at the city hospital refused to participate. Inmates at a women’s prison refused.

Rock and Pincus finally found a couple of takers—women who hoped their participation would contribute to fertility research—but due to side effects like nausea, dizziness, and breast tenderness, as well as a demanding schedule of invasive checkups, most of those women dropped out of the study. And so Pincus and Rock decided to take their trials to Puerto Rico, where contraception was entirely legal and abortion readily available (wealthy American women with unwanted pregnancies would fly there for a “San Juan weekend”), due in large part to concerns about overpopulation on the island. McCormick worried that Puerto Ricans couldn’t be trusted to follow the testing regimen, and Rock was concerned he wouldn’t find “ovulating intelligent” women there. But, the researchers assumed, women there would be more compliant test subjects.

Their racist paternalism had real consequences, arguably hindering the development of the pill. Women in Puerto Rico dropped out of the study, too, and so they started looking for women they could force to participate, both at home and in Puerto Rico. Women locked up at a Massachusetts mental asylum were signed up. Women enrolled in medical school in San Juan were told they had to take part in the medical test or face expulsion. Many dropped out rather than comply.

Eig explains how the researchers got FDA approval:

This is the first pill ever created for healthy women to take every day. There’s never been anything like this and the idea of seeking FDA approval for something women are going to take every day without studying it for years and years and checking out the long-term side effects, this is scary stuff! But Pincus also feels like he’s racing the clock, that if the word gets out about this and the Catholic Church and the federal government realize what they’re doing, the opposition will mount and he’ll have no chance of getting it through. …

In 1955, when they’ve really only tested the pill on maybe 60 women for more than say, six months or a year, Pincus goes to a conference and declares victory. He declares that we’ve invented the pill. The media picks up on this and it becomes this huge story. … Thousands of women are writing to their doctors and writing directly to [Pincus and Rock] saying, “I’ve heard about this pill and I need it, I need it now!” … There was this huge outpouring and it had a huge effect on Pincus and on the other scientist working on this because they began to see there was an enormous demand for this and they began to see they had to push harder, they had to go fast.

The Battle For Kobani, Ctd

Air strikes on ISIS in and around the besieged Syrian border town continued to escalate today. Local Kurdish forces are still holding out against the militants, though there are conflicting reports of how much of the town ISIS currently controls:

The U.S. Central Command said five airstrikes south of Kobani since Wednesday had destroyed an Islamic State group support building and two vehicles, and damaged a training camp. The strikes also struck two groups of Islamic State fighters, it said in a statement. “Indications are that Kurdish militia there continue to control most of the city and are holding out against ISIL,” it said, using an acronym for the Islamic State group, which controls large swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq. …

The [Syrian Observatory for Human Rights] said the militants had seized more than third of Kobani, but Kurdish officials disputed that, saying their forces had recaptured several parts of the town. “I can confirm that they don’t control a third of the city. There is only a small part of Kobani under the control of Daesh,” said local Kurdish official Idriss Nassan, using an Arabic acronym to refer to the Islamic State group.

Turkey’s foreign minister stressed in a press conference that Ankara would not launch a unilateral ground operation to rescue Kobani. The government’s refusal to act has sparked protests among Turkey’s Kurdish community, leading in many cases to violence. Piotr Zalewski provides an update on the clashes, which by his count have left at least 21 dead:

In Diyarbakir, about 60 miles north of the border with Syria, members of Hizbullah, a local Islamist group allegedly sympathetic to ISIS, traded gunfire with Kurdish protesters, including PKK militants. Ten people were found dead by the morning. More clashes have been reported in a number of other cities across the southeast, as well as in Kurdish neighborhoods in Ankara, Izmir and Istanbul, with security forces firing tear gas and rubber bullets against protesters armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails. A curfew was imposed in six provinces, with soldiers patrolling the streets of several cities on Wednesday.

Tulin Daloglu analyzes the situation from the perspective of Turkish politics:

Turkey is going through a decade of polarization to an extent never seen before in its republican history. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s policies have divided the public and his decision to put imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan at the center of the peace process created serious controversy. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader, blamed Erdogan again Oct. 8 for having wrong-headed policies. …

Despite such serious disagreements about the country’s direction between Turkey’s ruling and opposition parties, all the legislators seem to agree that Turkey should use caution before ordering its ground forces to intervene in Kobani. Moreover, all agree that pro-PKK voices exaggerate linking the fall of Kobani to the fall of Ankara. Yet, they all believe that if IS captures Kobani, its jihadists will control a long stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border and that would pose a threat to the country’s national security. In sum, the situation is in a dire mess.

At yesterday’s Pentagon briefing, Rear Adm. John Kirby acknowledged that Kobani might still fall to the jihadists:

“We all need to prepare ourselves for the reality that other towns and villages, and perhaps Kobani, will be taken by ISIL.” Kirby reiterated a point he has emphasized before, which is that the U.S. military is fully aware that airstrikes alone will not be sufficient to roll back the Islamic State’s gains in Iraq and Syria. To do that, the United States, along with its partners, is going to have to retrain the Iraqi security forces, bolster the Kurdish Peshmerga, and build a ground force in Syria out of vetted and trained members of the Syrian opposition.

Kobani, in Ben Wallace-Wells’ view, “suggests one risk of the plan: that in the interim there may be atrocities on the ground that these forces are helpless to stop”:

The smart line in Washington ever since Obama took office, both from the administration and from foreign-policy thinkers, has been that the Bush adventures revealed some of the limits of what the United States could accomplish overseas, that we could no longer be everywhere at once. That is a sensible posture to take; it may be the only possible posture. But the cost of that posture is that there will be some very grim events that the United States allows to unfold, because they are not taking place at strategically important spots like “command and control centers,” because our allies aren’t ready, because we can’t be there and everywhere else, too. There will be some things that are unpleasant to stomach. Right now, it looks like Kobani may be one.

Morrissey doesn’t see how this ends well without someone sending in ground forces:

Air strikes may have bought a little more time for Kobani, but without any troops to bolster its defenses, those airstrikes are only delaying the inevitable. If Obama really wants to “degrade and destroy” ISIS, he’ll need to convince the Turks and other regional players to get on the ground, or he’ll have to send American troops to do it.

To Drum, the renewed calls for us to do something are fairly predictable:

Some of this will just be partisan opportunism, but most will be perfectly sincere protests from people with the memory span of a gnat. What they want is a magic wand: some way for Obama to inspire all our allies to want exactly what the United States wants and then to sweep ISIS aside without the loss of a single American life. Anything less is unacceptable.

But guess what? The Iraqi army is still incompetent. America’s allies still have their own agendas and don’t care about ours. Air campaigns still aren’t enough on their own to stop a concerted ground attack. This is the way things are. There are no magic wands. If you want quick results against ISIS, then speak up and tell us you want to send in 100,000 troops. If you’re not willing to do that, then you have to accept that lots of innocent people are going to die without the United States being able to offer much help. Make your choice now.

Changing Your Gender Retroactively

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Katie Zavadski describes a new NYC bill that would “change the requirements for updating the sex field on birth certificates, allowing it to correspond to a person’s identity rather than on steps taken to physically transition”:

New York State has had an expansive definition of sex for years, and current requirements simply require a physician to say that “appropriate clinical treatment” is occurring — a broad category that could mean hormonal treatments, or simply counseling. The state does not require proof of surgical intervention to update the sex marker. New York City, however, lagged behind on that shift.

Not anymore: The proposal, introduced Tuesday and backed by both the City Council speaker and Mayor de Blasio’s administration, not only changes the requirements, but also expands the range of health-care providers qualified to make this assessment. In addition to doctors and psychotherapists, physicians’ assistants, nurse practitioners, and midwives will now be able to confirm that a document change “more accurately reflects the applicant’s sex,” based on “contemporary expert standards regarding gender identity.” The new regulations would also nix a prior requirement for a name change.

Transgender people across the Hudson, however, shouldn’t get their hopes up:

Elsewhere, opponents to similar proposals have sometimes argued that the changes could be subject to fraud or abuse. In January, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey vetoed legislation that would have removed that state’s surgical requirement for birth-certificate changes, saying the bill’s sponsors sought to change the application process “without maintaining appropriate safeguards.”

Elizabeth Nolan Brown responds to such objections:

Opponents say that regardless of someone’s current gender identity or genitalia, their birth certificate is a historical document and shouldn’t be changed. But this same argument could be used against amending birth certificates post sex-reassignment surgery, also, and most states now allow that. (I’m not saying that’s necessarily a good argument for it, merely that it’s not as radical/unprecedented as some might think.) And it’s not as if the original birth documents or records are destroyed, though they are generally sealed. The basically administrative change simply allows transgender individuals to navigate more easily through official state paperwork and such.

What The Hell Is Happening In South Dakota?

The current state of the Senate races:

Senate Map

South Dakota has become a three-way race between Democrat Rick Weiland, Republican Mike Rounds, and Independent Larry Pressler. Aaron Blake summarizes a poll that came out yesterday:

A new poll of the South Dakota Senate race shows former three-term GOP senator Larry Pressler, now running as an independent, has surged into second place and is within the margin of error against former governor Mike Rounds (R). The poll, from automated pollster SurveyUSA, shows Rounds at 35 percent, Pressler at 32 percent and Democrat Rick Weiland at 28 percent.

Silver finds that this “is a challenging race to forecast — both because of the inconsistent polling and the three-way dynamic”:

But the logic programmed into the FiveThirtyEight model is as follows: because Pressler is more ideologically similar to Rounds than Weiland — at least according to the statistical measures that we use — the model assumes that Pressler and Rounds will mostly trade votes with one another rather than with Weiland. In other words, Pressler’s gains will tend to come at Rounds’ expense, and vice versa. (See here for a more technical explanation.)

That makes Pressler the more likely candidate to pull off the upset; he can gain ground relative to the frontrunner more quickly. The FiveThirtyEight model currently gives Pressler a 9 percent chance of winning the race, versus 3 percent for Weiland. Those chances will grow if more polls come along with results like SurveyUSA’s.

Alex Altman looks at Pressler’s ideology:

Pressler says he hasn’t decided which party he would caucus with if elected. But with the GOP’s lurch to the right, the former moderate Republican now sounds more like a Democrat. He voted for Barack Obama. He supports balancing the budget in part by raising taxes on millionaires, a new gas tax and the elimination of some corporate deductions. He wants to raise the minimum wage and teacher salaries, supports gay marriage, and says the U.S. should pare back its military spending. “I’m not an isolationist,” he adds. “I know we have to do some bombing.”

Kyle Kondik notes the cash Democrats are putting into the race:

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — which had seemingly written off this race — entered the race with guns blazing on Wednesday: Bloomberg reported that the DSCC will put $1 million in South Dakota in the final weeks of the campaign, mostly on television advertising to attack Rounds with the hope that Weiland or Pressler — who endorsed Obama in 2008 and 2012 — will prevail and then caucus with the Democrats. It also remains possible that one or the other will stop campaigning and endorse the other, which would really put Rounds in a bind.

Jonathan Bernstein disagrees. He figures, “If Rounds found himself in a head-to-head match with Pressler, he could unleash negative ads until Election Day with little worry about a backlash”:

The real danger for Rounds is that multicandidate races tend to be unstable. If Rounds attacks Pressler, Weiland might benefit; if Rounds attacks Weiland, Pressler might move up. Indeed, if Democrats believe that Pressler might caucus with them, the best play could be for Weiland to throw as much mud as possible at Rounds, in the hopes that both would be destroyed.

Nate Cohn is wary of making any predictions:

[T]he biggest reason to be cautious is that three-way races are particularly unpredictable. Fairly significant polling errors occurred in the three 2010 three-way statewide contests (defined as a contest in which three candidates entered Election Day with at least 20 percent of the vote in most polls). In governors’ races in Rhode Island and Maine, the error averaged about 8 points; in Alaska, the majority of pre-election polls showed Joe Miller in the lead, but Lisa Murkowski prevailed by about four points.

With this history and the race beginning to attract national spending, it wouldn’t be wise to dismiss anyone’s chances.

Walmart Part-Timers, Meet Obamacare

Ester Bloom fumes:

Wal-Mart has decided to cut benefits for PT workers, even though the Wal-Mart empire has produced so much money that individual Waltons take up four spots on the list of Top 10 Richest People in America. Christy Walton is the 6th richest American with a fortune of $38 billion, Jim is 7th with a fortune of $36 billion, Alice is 9th with $34.9B, and S. Robert is 10th with $34.8. Come on guys.

Peter Suderman attributes Walmart’s change to failures of Obamacare:

You can see the kind of impact the law is having just by looking at the news. Walmart is dropping health plans for about 30,000 part-time workers, about 5 percent of its workforce, according to the Associated Press. Target, Home Depot, and other big retailers have made similar moves. The retail giant isn’t specifically citing Obamacare as the cause. But it’s almost certainly a factor.

Paul Waldman disagrees. He claims that “this development is actually a good thing, and it shows that the Affordable Care Act is working”:

So why is this a good thing? It may involve some hassle for individual employees, as they’ll have to go to the exchange to figure out what plan to get. But most of those Walmart workers will likely come out ahead. Someone who’s earning $9 an hour working 30 hours a week at a Walmart would be making $13,500 a year. Depending on what their spouse makes and what state they’re in, they could be eligible for Medicaid and pay nothing at all for insurance, or get substantial subsidies that would make a private plan extremely affordable.

Sarah Kliff also argues that the shift should be celebrated:

[F]inancial help [from the ACA] can be a big deal for those with lower incomes. Think of the 36-year-old Walmart employee here in Washington, D.C. who works 29 hours per week at the company’s average wage of $12.73 per hour. She earns just about $19,000 annually if she works every week of the year.

If Walmart doesn’t offer her insurance, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s subsidy calculator shows that she qualifies for a $1,751 subsidy from the federal government to help buy coverage on the exchange. With that financial help, she can buy insurance for as little as an $7 per month. As a low-wage worker, she gets some of the most generous financial help.

But if Walmart does offer her coverage, it becomes her only option. She doesn’t qualify for federal help and the $7 plan disappears. Walmart’s plan, meanwhile, is way more expensive. The average premium there works out to $111 per month.

David Graham views the move as simply a sign of the times:

Take a step back and this story looks like another milestone on the changing road of the American health care system, even if there are only 30,000 employees affected by this particular step. And it looks more like a symptom of the same underlying issues that inspired the Affordable Care Act, rather than like a result of that law. In announcing the move, Walmart cited the rising costs of health insurance. Big companies are seeing their costs rise, but they also don’t have to worry as much about keeping their employees well, since they can be sure that they’ll be insured through exchanges anyway.

Health-policy experts and wonks on both the right and left tend to look askance at the American system of employer-based insurance, which is essentially a historical accident. (They differ on what do in the post employer-based-insurance world, of course: Progressives want a universal national insurance system, while conservatives want individuals to deal with it themselves.) As more and more American workers leave employer-based insurance plans, for one reason or another, the end of this anomalous system seems closer and closer.

The Trouble With Islam

Refugees Flee Iraq After Recent Insugent Attacks

Well, this debate really does have legs, so allow me to address some of the latest arguments. There seems to be a consensus that Islam in the contemporary Middle East is in a bad way. When you have hundreds of thousands killed in sectarian warfare, ISIS on the rampage, Saudi Arabia fomenting the more virulent flames of Salafism, Iran’s theocrats brutally suppressing peaceful protests, and Hamas cynically relying upon the deaths of innocents for strategic purposes, you can surely see the point. No other region is as violent or as inflamed right now – and since the battles are all on explicitly religious terms, it seems crazy not to see unreconstructed forms of Islam as part of the problem. Last night, I specifically mentioned the absence of any civil space for scholarly or historical examination of the sacred texts of the religion. Without such a space, it is impossible for this current Middle Eastern tragedy to resolve itself. And the lack of such a space is a key tenet of the religion itself. It’s a little amazing to me to watch some liberals who get extremely upset at religious people refusing to bake a cake for someone else’s wedding on religious grounds, suddenly seeing nuance when a religion believes that anyone who leaves it should be executed. If you’re against fundamentalism of the mildest variety here, why are you so forgiving of it elsewhere?

It’s also good to see Nick Kristof note the following today:

Of the 10 bottom-ranking countries in the World Economic Forum’s report on women’s rights, nine are majority Muslim. In Afghanistan, Jordan and Egypt, more than three-quarters of Muslims favor the death penalty for Muslims who renounce their faith, according to a Pew survey.

For me, that last statistic is a key one. Here you do not have a fringe, but a big majority in one of the most important Arab Muslim states, Egypt, believing in absolutely no religious freedom whatsoever. Democracy doesn’t cure this – it may even make it worse. To argue that this majority belief has nothing to do with Islam is also bizarre. The Koran is as complex as the Old Testament, and there are injunctions to respect religious freedom, but also deep currents in favor of suppressing it, for the sake of people’s souls. These latter currents are not unique to Islam, but they are now clearly dominant in one region, and they are a terrible threat to all of us when combined with modern technologies of destruction. It is legitimate to ask why core human rights, such as the right to follow one’s own conscience, are non-existent in much of the Middle East. It is legitimate to point out that Saudi Arabia forbids the free exercise of any religion except its own. It is legitimate to note the sectarian murderousness of the Sunni-Shi’a battle lines and the brutal assault on religious minorities in the region. These excrescences are all defended by the tenets of that religion and in the terms of that religion. Of course religion has something to do with it.

Does it actually help anyone to keep saying this? Here, I think, there is a pragmatic case for non-Muslims like yours truly to shut the fuck up for a change. Ed Kilgore notes regarding the Real Time exchange:

You don’t have to watch the segment in question to understand, a priori, that five non-Muslims, none of whom are in any way experts on Islam, aren’t going to do much of anything other than damage in dissecting a big, complicated, multifaceted World Religion in a single segment of a single television show.

It’s also true, as Reza Aslan argues, that religious identity is not all about the faith itself but embedded in culture and history:

As a form of identity, religion is inextricable from all the other factors that make up a person’s self-understanding, like culture, ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexual orientation. What a member of a suburban megachurch in Texas calls Christianity may be radically different from what an impoverished coffee picker in the hills of Guatemala calls Christianity. The cultural practices of a Saudi Muslim, when it comes to the role of women in society, are largely irrelevant to a Muslim in a more secular society like Turkey or Indonesia.

But is the huge Egyptian majority for the death penalty for apostates merely some kind of cultural identity? Of course not. These people believe that Islam is the only way to achieve happiness, the sole guide for a good life and death, and that nothing should stand in the way of this ultimate goal. Paradise matters. Just because that seems utterly odd to many secular American liberals doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Why should we not take the views of the Muslims of the Middle East at face value? Why are we actually condescending to their sincere beliefs?

Yes, we need to make careful distinctions with respect to Islam in different places at different stages of development. Conflating the Islam of America and the Islam of Malaysia and the Islam of Saudi Arabia is, well, dumb, especially as it relates to foreign policy. But to deny the core religious element of the violence in the Middle East, to ignore the fact that Islam, to a much greater degree than other faiths, is still resistant to some core freedoms of modernity, to ignore the fact that fundamentalism of this kind can do extreme damage to other Muslims and infidels … well this strikes me as another form of denial.

But what I find deeply dismaying is the lazy assumption that understanding these religious teachings and being troubled by them is a form of irrational Islamophobia or racism. I usually admire Max Fisher’s work, but the reflexive notion that any criticism of contemporary Islam in the Middle East is ipso facto bigotry is extremely reductive and toxic to open debate. This is facile:

After cutting to a video, Lemon asked, with a straight face, “Does Islam promote violence?” Imagine if Lemon had demanded a prominent American Rabbi answer “Does Judaism promote greed” or asked a member of the Congressional Black Caucus to acknowledge the merits of the KKK’s arguments. Then you can start to understand how Lemon’s question looks to the 2.6 million Muslim-Americans who have to listen to this every day.

I take the point about the crudeness of the question and the way it can sound to Muslim-Americans. But when incredible violence is being committed throughout the Middle East in the name of Islam, and when Islam’s own texts are purloined to defend such violence and empower it, of course the question is not a function of prima facie bigotry.

(Photo: Iraqi children carry water to their tent at a temporary displacement camp set up next to a Kurdish checkpoint on June 13, 2014 in Kalak, Iraq. Thousands of people have fled Iraq’s second city of Mosul after it was overrun by ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) militants. Many have been temporarily housed at various IDP (internally displaced persons) camps around the region including the area close to Erbil, as they hope to enter the safety of the nearby Kurdish region. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.)

Who’s Winning On Weed: Colorado Or Washington?

Josh Voorhees believes it’s “too early to predict” and that “it’s a mistake to judge either [state experiment] based on the speed at which each hits subjective checkpoints along the way”:

Washington’s slow and steady march could still pay dividends when it comes to the business of weed. While Colorado allows for—and in part requires—vertical integration between growers, processors, and sellers, Washington forbids it. That’s been an early burden for shops that need to spend their time searching for pot to sell, but regulators maintain that it will prevent the market from eventually being dominated by big businesses. As an added bonus for the state, it also provides three distinct points to impose a tax: between grower and processor, processor and store, and store and consumer.

And while the lack of medical marijuana regulations has caused Washington a string of headaches in the early days of retail pot, officials are optimistic that an eventual crackdown on the semi-illegal medical market will push many consumers into retail stores, where the pot is both taxed (good for the state) and tested for safety (good for the consumer). In Colorado, meanwhile, medical marijuana—cheaper than retail weed, and still legal—will remain relatively easy to buy for any resident who takes the trouble to secure a state-issued red card. So closing the gap between the medical and retail markets there will likely take longer and prove more difficult. Of course, given that the market is already regulated, harmonizing the two is also less urgent.

May the best state win. And if you missed new revelations from previously unpublished Carl Sagan letters on drug policy and cannabis, check them out here.