Tag: Premium

Sighting Elvis

Elvis

Today would have been the music legend’s 80th birthday, assuming you believe he’s dead. Adrienne LaFrance ponders our varied perceptions of the man and his demise:

The tricky thing about Elvis [is] that people can’t agree on the Elvis they think they know. There’s the Elvis who died in 1977, and the Elvis who’s still alive and eating cheeseburgers in western Michigan. There’s Elvis the hip-swiveling hunk who could break your heart, and Elvis the doughy 40-something who couldn’t get through a performance without stumbling over his words. This duality was strong enough that it prompted debate about which Elvis ought to be depicted on a postage stamp. From The New York Times in 1992:

“Postal authorities are not sure which Presley likeness to use: the young, svelte, hip-gyrating Elvis of the rock-and-roll ’50s, or the rotund, road-worn Elvis who died in 1977 near the end of the Age of Aquarius, reportedly after a struggle with drugs.”

If conspiracy theories are a way to impose order on events that can’t be controlled, Elvis sightings are perhaps a way of rejecting mortality, and preserving the American dream he came to represent. After all, it wasn’t just Elvis’ death that challenged his place in American culture, but his actual life. Insisting Elvis never died is also, then, a way of rejecting what he had become.

Update from a reader:

If you’re talking about Elvis, why not include the finest Elvis-related song if all time, Mojo Nixon’s “Elvis is Everywhere”:

On a higher brow note, I recommend the Philip K Dick award-winning novel Elvissey by Jack Womack. This sci-fi novel has corporate commandos sent to an alternate version of Earth to kidnap a young Elvis in order to use him as their nouveau Messiah in a world where Christianity has been discredited.

Another:

Your post made me think about Bubba Ho-Tep, one of the strangest and most delightful films I have ever seen. It centers around an elderly Elvis living in a rundown retirement home in East Texas, having switched places with an Elvis impersonator in the early 1970s in order to get away from all the fame and the pains that came with it. He befriends a man, played brilliantly by Ossie Davis, who believes himself to be JFK (a harebrained and delightful explanation is given) and together they fight a mummy who is sucking the souls of their fellow residents through there assholes.

As I said, it is a very strange story. But it is also a story about death, fame, old age, family, heroism, peace of mind and above all else, Elvis himself. It received a very small theatrical release but after very positive reviews from several top critics (and tremendous praise for the performance of Bruce Campbell who played Elvis) it gained a cult following. As Roger Ebert said:

The King explains all of this in a thoughtful, introspective voice-over narration that also deals with other matters on his mind, such as the alarming pustule on that part of his anatomy where it is least welcome. He talks about Priscilla and Lisa Marie, about his movies (not a single good one), about his decision to disappear, and about how he broke his hip falling off a stage. This narration is not broad comedy, but wicked, observant and truthful. “Bubba Ho-Tep” has a lot of affection for Elvis, takes him seriously, and — this is crucial — isn’t a camp horror movie, but treats this loony situation as if it’s really happening

(Photo by Flickr user Cliff)

Face Of The Day

Temperatures Drop Near Zero Degrees In Chicago

A woman tries to stay warm as she waits on an L platform in Chicago during the early morning rush while temperatures hovered around zero degrees Fahrenheit on January 7, 2015. Most of the city’s schools were cancelled today as wind chill temperatures were expected to exceed -30. By Scott Olson/Getty Images. Update from a proud Chicagoan, who contests Getty’s caption:

It actually gets into some serious linguistic issues. “A woman tries to stay warm as she waits on an L platform in Chicago . . . “ The L – sans punctuation, lone capital letter – is not how Chicagoans refer to their train system.

The Chicago Transportation Authority insists that it’s ‘L’ (single quotations marks, or inverted commas for you Brits).  The scare quotes probably were originally meant to indicate “slang” usage, and probably originated when the vast majority of the system was elevated (now 2/3 of it is at or below grade, including lines down the medians of expressways). But this official usage is contested.  Many great Chicago authors, including Nelson Algren, write El – short, obviously, for Elevated, sans punctuation.  Like the T in Boston. I have worked on a number of books and other publishing projects where this conflicted usage has mattered, so I thought I’d share this Chicago minutia with the Dish’s discerning audience.

So it’s the El I take: to L with all other versions.

The Shrinking Economic Payoff Of Keystone

Michael Levi considers how plummeting oil prices might affect the pipeline:

Lower oil prices reduce both the costs and the benefits of approving the Keystone XL pipeline by reducing the odds that it will ever be fully used. There’s an outside chance that, if prices are sustained at an extremely low level, the Keystone XL pipeline won’t get built. That scenario isn’t likely – among other things, if Canadian production doesn’t grow, the odds of sustained low prices decline substantially – but it’s not zero. Lower prices also raise the odds that the pipeline will be built but not fully utilized. In that case, you still get the up-front construction stimulus, but you get less benefit from greater oil production, and less climate damage from the same. You also have a waste of economic resources.

The more likely scenario, though, is that the Keystone XL pipeline gets built and used. In that case, lower oil prices reduce its economic benefits without any clear impact on its climate costs.

Jordan Weissmann contends that “Keystone is neither irrelevant, nor especially critical to the future of Canadian oil”:

Keystone would probably be a small boon to the American fossil-fuel industry, even at this late date. Remember, the pipeline would send crude to refiners on the Gulf Coast. And what do refiners do? They buy oil, then transform it into gasoline, diesel, and other products to sell. The less expensive the oil, the easier it is for them to turn a profit, and the heavy crude found in the tar sands—which gulf refiners are specially equipped to process—is especially cheap, even compared to similar low grades from Mexico and Venezuela. This week, for instance, Western Canadian Select has traded at around just $33 a barrel. The refinery owners of Houston would surely love to get their hands on more it, but in a world of generally low oil prices, doing so isn’t exactly a matter of life and death for them.

Rebecca Leber wishes the Dems’ amendments to the Keystone bill didn’t focus on jobs:

Keystone emerged as a national issue when it became a symbol of climate change. Democrats ought to be marshalling their resources to remind people that Keystone is more about polution than it is about jobs. The pro-environment amendments have a slim chance at passing anyway. If Democratic amendments are hopeless from the start, they might as well go for bolder proposals, like a carbon tax, that will help at least to remind us of bigger things at stake than a few dozen jobs.

But Morrissey imagines that those amendments might get Obama to sign the bill:

If Democrats offer amendments that Republicans can support, the White House can claim that the bill has changed enough to their satisfaction — in essence, declare victory and depart the field before anyone asks too many questions.

Update from a reader, who corrected the first sentence of this post:

“Michael Levi considers how pummeling oil prices might affect the pipeline:”

“Plummeting”?  The Dish’s own eggcorn?

Busted. But apparently we’re not alone this week, as another reader attests:

It has been fixed now, but when I first read Chait’s column on the conservative glee over Harvard faculty outrage at having to pay copays, I’m sure it read:

As the Times reports, the changes are a response to Harvard’s own health-care experts, many of whom advocated for Obamacare. The story has thus entered the conservative mind as a case of liberal elites suffering under the yolk of a liberal program.

Busted With An Eggcorn, Ctd

Another day, another batch:

When my daughter was four, I asked her to go get me a beer (as it happens, a Budweiser) from the refrigerator. She was happy to make her dad happy and when she returned she said, “Here’s your buzzwater, Dad.”

Another tosses in a mondegreen:

For years, my favorite beer advertisement on the radio was a heavy metal tune with lyrics that went “AMSTEL LIIIIIIGHT, Enter night! Off to never never land!” I was too young to drink beer, and evidently too sheltered to have heard of Metallica.

From a reader with a Mozambique-born wife:

Her favorite tea is Early Grey.

Many more eggcorns below:

In my first real journalism job, my first big assignment was a feature on the head of an investment fund. He’s a very smart guy surrounded by a very smart team. I interviewed a partner in the firm for some background and, in my draft, quoted the partner using the phrase “a sort of Damocles.”

Fortunately, my editor asked me if that’s what he actually said. It was, I insisted. I went back and listened to the recording of our conversation multiple times, and that’s what I heard him say. Then I thought, “I don’t actually know what a ‘Damocles’ is.” So I did a little research and learned about Cicero and the Sword of Damocles and figured out quickly that I had a long way to go if I wanted to be any good at my job.

Another:

One of our ER psychiatrists referred in a note yesterday to the “Bloods and Crypts.”

Another:

I grew up in a small town, the kind where the newspaper would report on anything and everything that was happening if it was even mildly interesting. Sometime around my senior year of high school, the newspaper editor/reporter retired and was replaced by someone much younger. One of the first stories that the new editor ran was a story about the new tow truck that one of the two service stations in town had purchased. The new tow truck had a 15,000 pound winch on the back of it. Unfortunately, the newspaper article instead stated that the truck had a 15,000 pound wench in the back.

It’s unclear whether this ultimately helped or hurt the tow truck owner’s business.

Heh. Another:

When I was student-teaching, I taught To Kill a Mockingbird to a 10th grade class, and somehow we got onto the subject of ghosts (that was 20 years ago, but most likely we were referencing Atticus Finch’s remark that “there were other ways of making people into ghosts”). A female student then made a comment and used the idiom “the ghost is clear.” Everyone looked at her, puzzled. “You mean, the coast is clear,” I said. “No,” she responded, “that’s not the saying – ghosts are clear, aren’t they?”

Dina would appreciate this one:

When my son was four, we took a month-long camping trip following the Lewis and Clark Trail from our home in North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean.  At one point we told my son that at the end of the trip we were going to Seattle. He got this really puzzled look on his face, and asked, “Who’s Attle, and why are we going to see her?”

Another of sorts:

​I was holding back on sending this because it’s more related to an accent than an actual “eggcorn”, but somebody in the thread brought up the Boston accent and I couldn’t resist. In graduate school I worked in the produce department of the Cambridge, Massachusetts Bread & Circus Market (eventually purchased by Whole Foods). I was relatively new and sometimes overwhelmed at the bizarre array of produce that was for sale.

One day a call comes in and I take the phone. Caller: “Do you carry staff root?”

Me (after checking the display): “No, sir. We have celery root, burdock root, taro root and ginger root. We don’t have any staff root.”

Caller: “No, no, no. Fruit shaped like a sta!”

He was, of course, a Bostonian looking for ‘star fruit’.​

One more:

I’m always sorry I didn’t save this clipping from our local newspaper … but the cut line under a picture of local school children dancing in a circle holding ribbons tied to a pole said: “Children Demonstrating the Maple Dance.” Makes me laugh to think of the circumstances of the likely over-the-phone interview between a young journalist and a grade school teacher, “Yeah, can you send me photo of the kid’s dancing? What’s it called again?”

Lovely thread. It probably should be recategorized into Mental Health Breaks.

Nous Sommes Charlie, But Do We Really Want To Be?

Yglesias, for one, is dismayed that yesterday’s attack made martyrs of cartoonists whose work he found distasteful in the extreme:

Viewed in a vacuum, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons (or the Danish ones that preceded it) are hardly worthy of a stirring defense. They offer few ideas of value, contribute little to any important debates, and the world would likely have been a better place had everyone just been more polite in the first place.

But in the context of a world where publishers of cartoons mocking Mohammed have been threatened, harassed, and even killed, things look different. Images that were once not much more than shock for its own sake now stand for something — for the legal right to blaspheme and to give offense. Unforgivable acts of slaughter imbue merely rude acts of publication with a glittering nobility.

One of Dreher’s readers makes a similar point:

I am a francophone European, and I sometimes read Charlie Hebdo. I am shocked by these murders and I hope the assassins will be caught and will pay dearly for their crimes. This being said, je ne “suis” pas Charlie et je ne l’ai jamais été: I am not Charlie and I never was.

I’ve always thought that Charlie’s brand of “humour” was despicable and part of the problem, not a solution. I’m not going to change my mind about this because of the murders. The people who died have become martyrs of the freedom of expression, but they were hardly the best defenders of the freedom of expression. First because the freedom to express your opinions does not imply that these opinions are correct – and Charlie was a far left, violently anti-religious rag. It is not because you are free to be vulgar, unfair and insulting that all these things are good. Moreover Charlie was not very good when the freedom of expression of its adversaries was at stake: look at the “Dieudonné” affair for instance.

Dieudonné M’bala M’bala is a controversial French comedian and political activist who’s been convicted many times of antisemitism. Diana Johnstone is on the same page as Dreher’s reader when it comes to Charlie Hebdo‘s spotty record on free speech:

In 2002, Philippe Val, who was editor in chief at the time, denounced Noam Chomsky for anti-Americanism and excessive criticism of Israel and of mainstream media.  In 2008, another of Charlie Hebdo’s famous cartoonists, Siné, wrote a short note citing a news item that President Sarkozy’s son Jean was going to convert to Judaism to marry the heiress of a prosperous appliance chain. Siné added the comment, “He’ll go far, this lad.” For that, Siné was fired by Philippe Val on grounds of “anti-Semitism”.  Siné promptly founded a rival paper which stole a number of Charlie Hebdo readers, revolted by CH’s double standards. In short, Charlie Hebdo was an extreme example of what is wrong with the “politically correct” line of the current French left.

Indeed, many Muslims on social media are wondering why free speech seems a bit freer than usual when Islam is the target. One such Muslim is a Jordanian friend of Dish editor Jonah Shepp, who didn’t want to reveal her name:

Screen Shot 2015-01-08 at 12.19.55 PM

Meanwhile, responding to calls for other publications to reprint Charlie’s most controversial work in solidarity, Arthur Goldhammer cautions against sacralizing artists and journalists who saw profaning the sacred as their life’s work:

Reproducing the imagery created by the murdered artists tends to sacralize them as embodiments of some abstract ideal of free speech. But many of the publications that today honor the dead as martyrs would yesterday have rejected their work as tasteless and obscene, as indeed it often was. The whole point of Charlie’s satire was to be tasteless and obscene, to respect no proprieties, to make its point by being untameable and incorrigible and therefore unpublishable anywhere else. The speech it exemplified was not free to express itself anywhere but in its pages. Its spirit was insurrectionist and anti-idealist, and its creators would be dumbfounded to find themselves memorialized as exemplars of a freedom that they always insisted was perpetually in danger and in need of a defense that only offensiveness could provide.

Update from the in-tray:

Long-time reader (and francophone) here. I just saw you forward a tweet regarding Charlie download (1)Hebdo‘s alleged racism in its cartoon “Rassemblement bleu raciste” [Update: the Twitter user deleted that tweet, but the image in question is embedded to the right]. I am not 100% certain of the background behind that cartoon. Unfortunately, the Charlie Hebdo website isn’t showing much in the way of past content at this time. That said, a quick google search reveals that this caricature – albeit maladroit – might have been put forth as a criticism of the French extreme right’s racist references to Minister Taubira. I invite you to look at the following links – here and here – which give a bit more detail on the text that allegedly accompanied the caricature. I may be wrong here, but I’m pretty sure that caricature was not the whole story and is mischaracterizing Charlie Hebdo’s position.

The first link is to a web forum and the second is to an article in French, so if any other readers, especially French-speaking ones, have something more conclusive, please let us know. Update from another:

As a French citizen, I was infuriated by your understanding of this drawing by Charlie Hebdo.  This drawing was made as a response to racism found in the French weekly newspaper Minute, which depicted Taubira as a monkey.  This shocking (and I concede awkward) drawing is meant to denounce the racists from Minute and the Front National, the nationalist extreme right party (their logo at the bottom left of the drawing).  The drawing is meant to exemplify how racist and shocking their words were.  I found that title/question insulting the memory of Charlie Hebdo.

Another adds further context:

Charlie Hebdo’s picture of Minister Taubira was indeed posted in the context when many Front national supporters and representatives made racist comments about Christiane Taubira, who supported legalizing gay marriage. They constantly compared her to a monkey and on some occasions taught their children to throw bananas at her.

The title is in fact a pun on the new name Marine Le Pen wanted to give to the Front national so as to nominally distance her own political agenda from her father’s (who was well known for his antisemitic and racist comments). She called her own movement « Rassemblement Bleu Marine » (this name itself included a pun since it means both a « Blue Navy Rally » and a « blue rally around Marine Le Pen » ). Charlie Hebdo just added a pun on her pun, replacing “Bleu Marine” with “Bleu raciste”. It was meant to show that the new Front national around Marine Le Pen was in fact just as racist as the former one and the caricature of Taubira as a monkey was meant to represent the so-called new Front National’s vision of a black female Minister of Justice.

Regarding “freedom of speech”, Dreher’s reader’s comments about a double standard are quite off the topic. From a legal point of view, in the US sense, freedom of speech is restricted in France. The cases that reader mentions does show an obvious double standard when it comes to antisemitism on the one hand and islamophobia on the other, but rather the fact that there is room for prosecution in France if you make public comments that suggest that you support racial inequality or that you deny the existence of events such as the Holocaust. There is no room for prosecution for any kind of religious blasphemy. Charlie Hebdo fought against the idea that anything was too sacred not to be ridiculed or laughed about. Such was their idea of freedom. They were irreverent by principle, but never racist nor in any way comparable to ideologues such as Dieudonné.

In any case, thank you for your coverage of the Charlie Hebdo attack and for pointing out the MSM’s lack of courage in reproducing the caricatures. Below is a picture I took at yesterday’s march in Place de la République around 8pm:

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Kids, students, anonymous people are absolutely not afraid of showing these caricatures in public in France. It’s important that they are not and to some degree they are less than they ever were.

Taking A Stand On The Can, Ctd

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Your toilet humor continues:

I gotta say my all-time favorite piece of bathroom graffiti is “All in all you’re just another prick in the stall.”

Another reader:

Personal fave: DYSLEXICS UNTIE!

Another:

From my college dorm circa 1970: “Free the Jackson five!”

Many more after the jump:

This poem is from my high school lavatory:

Here you sit in silent vapor;
The person before you used all the paper.
The bell has rung, you must not linger.
I feel for you; You must use your finger.

Another:

Here’s a personal favorite, in the bathroom at The Chapter House in College Town right outside Cornell: “Don’t drop acid.  Just take it pass/fail.”

Another:

This was actually a small sign that we saw in some random pub somewhere in England, quite a while ago: “If you feel like the bottom is falling out of your world, drink Real Ale and you’ll feel like the world is falling out of your bottom.”

Another:

From the men’s’ bathroom at the University of Texas Business school, in 1981: “Save the whales … collect the whole set!”

Another:

On a condom dispenser in Cambridge, MA about ten years ago: “Insert baby for refund.”

Another:

Posted in a latrine at the VFW in in Wisconsin over the urinal: “Bucks with short horns stand close. The next Brave might be barefoot.”

One more for now:

Someone wrote something filthy along the lines of “I’m going to fuck your mother so hard your Dad walks funny”, which itself wasn’t so funny, except someone else came along later and in different pen and wrote underneath “- Tom Hanks”.

I wonder how long they stood there thinking of the best name to put, because I thought about it a while, and I think Tom Hanks really is the funniest name you could put there.

(Photos from the tumblr Notes from the Stall)

Did Terrorists Just Elect Le Pen?

James McAuley worries that the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo will empower France’s xenophobic far-right:

An additional dimension to this tragedy is that it plays directly into the hands of those public figures and politicians who would like to see France Screen Shot 2015-01-08 at 12.45.23 PMregress into an organic national community of blood ties, rather than of citizens. The Islamic extremists who executed the attack on Charlie Hebdo may have murdered journalists and artists, but surely their crime is also against other Muslims in France, who are now likely to be viewed as enemy aliens hostile to the essence of the Republic itself, regardless of their own beliefs. Michel Houellebecq, for instance, who often paints Muslims as a dangerous fifth column, might now perhaps be vindicated in the eyes of unreflective readers; and, in the words of one Lebanese blogger, today might very well be the day that Marine Le Pen became President of France. Le Pen, by the way, has compared the Muslim presence in France to the German occupation of the 1940s. After today, we can only hope that others will not start doing the same.

Le Pen was quick to express her own outrage, calling for France to bring back the death penalty and demagoguing against “Islamists who have declared war on France”. It’s a bit rich, given that Le Pen herself has been ridiculed in Charlie more than the Prophet Muhammad and once sued the magazine for its depiction of her (the cover on the right is one of its kinder representations of the far-right leader). And as Juan Cole astutely observed, inflaming anti-Muslim sentiment is a feature, not a bug, of Islamist terrorism. Kaj Leers reinforces that point today:

The danger now is that populists will hijack the debate and push the press into an anti-Islam frenzy. As this was being written, nationalist organizations and proponents of identity wars, such as supporters of the Pegida movement in Germany, were already using the Charlie Hebdo massacre as justification for their anti-Islam stance. This is precisely what religious fundamentalists seek:

to divide the world neatly into pro- and anti-Islam parts, leaving no distinction between mainstream Muslims and the fundamentalist fringe. In reality, no group has suffered more from violence by Islamist extremists over the past decades than Muslims themselves. At around the same time the hitmen exited Charlie Hebdo headquarters, where they killed 12 people, a bomb attack in Yemen killed 37 people and injured scores more. The last thing media should do now is give the terrorists the divided world they seek.

And it’s not just Le Pen; Bershidsky discovers that the attack is driving more Frenchmen into the arms of right-wing nationalist and anti-immigrant groups:

After the Paris attack, the number of people who “liked” the Facebook page of the German anti-immigrant group Pegida, which holds big and ever-growing weekly demonstrations in Dresden, moustachejumped by about 7,500 to 120,500. … After the killings, Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right Front National, made a politically correct speech condemning Islamic fundamentalism, but one of her top lieutenants, Wallerand de Saint-Just, explained in an interview before she spoke that the problem was Islam, which “has a tendency to create fanatics more than any other religion,” and the French nationality of the suspected terrorists, which makes it impossible to deport them.

Wednesday’s act of terrorism is clearly encouraging anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant forces. They also don “Je suis Charlie” buttons, even though Charlie Hebdo was a leftist publication that made fun of them more often than it went after Muhammad.

But Kevin Lees sounds a more hopeful note, stressing that France hasn’t been instantly engulfed in anti-Muslim hysteria:

Instead of instinctively falling into some cartoon mould of right-wing xenophobia, most of what we saw from Paris, from France and much of the rest of the world were precisely those things about which France should be proudest — the freedoms and rights that necessarily follow from the liberté, égalité and fraternité that have formed the heart of French public life since the 1789 revolution. Far from embracing knee-jerk anti-Muslim sentiment, the world watched as France, implausibly, united behind Hollande, who actually looked like a president for perhaps the first time since his election. They rallied in city after city, from Paris to Marseille and beyond, not to excoriate a religion or five million French Muslims, but to defend freedom of expression and speech. No one’s burning down banlieues tonight in France.

But there been at least three attacks on mosques throughout the country so far, so Lees may be speaking prematurely here. Aurelien Mondon pushes back on Le Pen’s “clash of civilizations” posturing:

Le Pen told us that we should not be in “denial” but should name things for what they are. It is time to talk about Islam openly, she suggested. This is, at best, out of touch with contemporary French fillettesociety. Currently, two of the best-sellers in France are filled with virulent anti-Islam rhetoric and countless vocal anti-Islam commentators are given air in the mainstream media on a daily basis. Islam is definitely not absent from the public debate.

What is absent from our mainstream media and politics is a careful analysis of what Islam is in France today. This would show once and for all that the Muslim “community” is not the monolith Le Pen would like us to believe. The terrorists who massacred 12 people on 7 January are apparently Muslim but so was the policeman who lost his life trying to stop them. Mustapha Ourrad, Charlie Hebdo’s copy-editor killed in the attack, was born in Algeria.

If yesterday’s events do catapult Le Pen into the presidency, Marian Tupy mulls over what that would mean:

While, as libertarians, we despise much of what Ms. Le Pen stands for, the two mainstream political parties in France, Mr. Sarkozy’s socialist center-right UPM and Mr. Hollande’s Socialist Party, have totally failed to address the legitimate concerns of the French citizens, chief among them the failure of multiculturalism and high unemployment. The country is ready to hand the reins of power to someone else.

Second, the euro will end its role as a global currency and remain a legal tender in something akin to Großdeutschland greater Germany, composed of Germany and her satellites, like the hapless Slovakia. … Third, on day two of a Le Pen presidency, border guards will return to the French frontiers. Of course, the end of the freedom of movement will be in full breach of all sorts of European treaties and conventions. (The British, by the way, would love to do the same, but cannot, because the British, being British, follow the rules. In contrast, the French, being French, will do what they have always done: follow their national interest.)

Slaughtered For Satire, Ctd

After their accomplice turned himself in, “reportedly after he saw his name circulating on social media,” the gunmen have been identified – but they remain at large. Their affiliation with terrorist organizations, if any, remains unclear:

On at least one jihadist website, the group calling itself the Islamic State, but more widely known as ISIS or Da’esh, appeared to claim responsibility for the shooting, which also injured 11 people, four of them seriously. But many jihadist groups have grievances against France because of its leadership in the war against them in Mali, its participation in the coalition fighting ISIS in Iraq, its laws imposing secularism in public offices and schools, and the ban on full-face veils, known as niqabs or burqas, on Muslim women.

The Kouachi brothers may be linked to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the branch of the organization active in Yemen. Noah Feldman thinks through the implications:

If indeed the Paris attack is the work of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the franchise that includes Yemen, then its purpose is almost certainly to regain public attention from Islamic State and remind the world, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, that the old jihadi terrorist paradigm is still effective. France has no troops in the Middle East right now, so the attack needed another excuse. A satirical magazine that has made fun of the Prophet was just a convenient reason to get the al-Qaeda approach back in the headlines.

Of course, it’s possible that an Islamic State connection may still be found to this attack. If it is, that would be evidence that the group wanted capture the traditional al-Qaeda terrorism market for its own brand. That would be important and interesting, because it would mean Islamic State was trying to monopolize the global terrorism franchise.

Josh Rogin points to a recent ISIS video that urged followers to attack targets in France:

“If you are unable to come to Syria or Iraq, then pledge allegiance in your place — pledge allegiance in France,” a French jihadi identified as Abu Salman al-Faranci says in the video. “Operate within France. Terrorize them and do not allow them to sleep due to fear and horror.” He then offers more practical advice, implying that there were IS assets already in place to aid in such attacks. “There are weapons and cars available and targets ready to be hit,” he said. “Even poison is available, so poison the water and food of at least one of the enemies of Allah. Kill them and spit in their faces and run over them with your cars.”

But it’s not clear whether the Kouachi brothers were acting on specific orders from above or on their own, but Allahpundit finds it hard to believe that an attack this well-executed was the work of lone wolves:

It’s possible, I guess, that two French Muslim amateur terrorists fancied themselves members of the group in spirit, if not in fact, and wanted to do something sensational to earn their jihadi stripes. In that case, though, why didn’t they go to Syria to fight with ISIS as so many budding western mujahedeen do? And if they’re amateurs, they’re awfully precocious — taking time to learn the Hebdo publication schedule and keeping cool while executing staff members, all the while knowing that police could descend on the building at any moment, demonstrates a degree of poise you wouldn’t expect to find in a rookie. …

These two degenerates not only assassinated their targets individually, like ISIS does in lining up Shiites and noncompliant Sunnis to be shot, they had the balls and skills to leave the building and get away. When was the last time there was a major terror in the west that didn’t end up with the perpetrators splattered on the ground when it was over? And where exactly did these guys get AKs and a rocket launcher?

Juan Cole notes how the brothers were radicalized:

[I]n early 2003 at the age of 20, Sharif Kouashi and his brother Said started attending the al-Dawa Mosque in the Stalingrad quarter. They had showed up with long hair, smoking, and lots of bad habits. The mosque gave them a sense of purpose. Sharif told his later lawyer, “Before, I was a delinquent.”

One member of the congregation at the al-Dawa Mosque was Farid Benyettou. He was only a year older than Sharif, but was learned in Muslim texts, and taught informal classes at his apartment after prayers at the mosque. The boys began spending time with Benyettou. They stopped smoking, stopped getting high. At his apartment, Benyettou took them on the internet, and showed them images from Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. Sharif said, “It was everything I saw on the television, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, all that, which motivated me.” …

Without Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, it is not at all clear that Sharif Kouachi would have gotten involved in fundamentalist vigilanteism. And if he hadn’t, he would not have gone on to be a point man in murdering out the staff of Charlie Hebdo along with two policemen.

Joshua Keating points out that “recent days have also seen a series of smaller attacks in France”:

On Dec. 20, French police shot dead a man who had shouted “Allahu Akbar” while stabbing three officers in a police station near the city of Tours. Just before Christmas, the country saw two attacks, one in Nantes and another in Dijon, involving cars hitting pedestrians, which fit a pattern of similar recent attacks around the world. In the car attacks, prosecutors specifically said the men were mentally unbalanced and that these were not instances of political or religious terrorism, though that definition seems a little hard to parse given that the Dijon driver was a recent convert to Islam who was reportedly upset over the treatment of Chechen children.

And today, there was another shooting in Paris, this time of a policewoman, which authorities believe may be linked to yesterday’s slaughter:

Officials described Thursday’s shooting as another terrorist attack. Paris Deputy Mayor Patrick Klugman said they were braced for a “wave” of terrorism. “It’s probably not the end,” he said. “We are ready to face it. We will fight.” Heavily armored commando units were deployed at the southern edge of Paris as a second major manhunt got underway on what was supposed to be an official day of mourning. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who rushed out of an emergency cabinet meeting about the previous attack, arrived in the suburb of Malakoff to say that the gunman had escaped. Three armed killers are now at large.

Follow all Dish coverage of the terrorism in France here.

One Way Obamacare Is Clearly Working

The uninsured rate keeps ticking down:

Uninsured

Kliff captions:

There are lots of ways to judge Obamacare is working: whether its helping lower health care costs, if its improving our access to doctors, and (perhaps the holy grail) if its making Americans health care. (The New York Times has an excellent package working through many of these issues). This graph shows that Obamacare is accomplishing at least one of its main goals: expanding health insurance coverage to millions of Americans.

Drum cheers:

The uninsurance rate has dropped the most among blacks, Hispanics, the young, and the poor. It’s dropped by only a small amount among the middle classes, since they’re mostly insured already by their employers. But even right smack in the middle, uninsurance rates have dropped by three percentage points. Obamacare just keeps on working, and it’s working for everyone.

Sargent notes that “the uninsured rate has fallen by 6.9 percentage points among those making less than $36,000″:

McConnell and other leaders of the incoming GOP Senate majority are openly looking to the Supreme Court to gut Obamacare subsidies as a means to accomplish what Republicans failed to do legislatively and politically.

Whether or not you think the consequences of a SCOTUS decision against the law should weigh on the Justices, the declining insurance rate — among lower income Americans in particular — should theoretically increase pressure on Republicans to think about how they will respond if such a decision does come down (such as a fix or an alternative). Indeed, even some diehard opponents of the law, and someGOP Senators, agree with this. Of course, it’s an open question as to whether this will actually happen in any meaningful sense: One alternative possibility is that Republicans will float the general idea that they’re interested in a fix solely in order to make the consequences of a SCOTUS decision against the law appear less dire.

A Million To Be Kicked Off Food Stamps

It’s happening next year:

Roughly 1 million of the nation’s poorest people will be cut off SNAP (formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) over the course of 2016, due to the return in many areas of a three-month limit on SNAP benefits for unemployed adults aged 18-50 who aren’t disabled or raising minor children.  These individuals will lose their food assistance benefits after three months regardless of how hard they are looking for work.

This will cause some serious hardship:

As our new report explains, the affected people will lose an average of $150 to $200 per person per month.  For this group, that’s a dramatic loss.  People subject to the three-month limit have average monthly income of about 19 percent of the poverty line (about $2,200 per year for a household of one in 2014), and they typically don’t qualify for other income support.

Part of the 1996 welfare law, the three-month limit hasn’t been in effect in most states in recent years because states can waive it temporarily in areas with high unemployment.  But as unemployment rates fall, fewer areas will qualify for waivers, even though many people —including many lower-skilled workers — who want to work still can’t find jobs.  People subject to the three-month limit generally have limited education and skills and limited job prospects.

Joan McCarter points out that there’s “another way that the law allows for this population to keep the benefit—if they spend 20 hours a week in job training, workfare, or another work program”:

But here’s the kicker; states weren’t required to create these job training programs for the unemployed, and so very few do. In most areas, private job training programs just don’t have the resources to extend to the entire population who would need them.