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Beutler feels that Obama has temporarily calmed his fellow Democrats:

We’ll know Democrats are warring with each other, or in full retreat from the law, when Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi can’t restrain rank-and-file members from forcing legislative sabotage on Obama. That hasn’t happened yet. Obama’s administrative fix staved it off for the time being. But the scenario’s not outside the realm of possibility if the relaunch isn’t smooth, and enrollments fail to reach escape velocity.

Sargent urges Democrats to close ranks:

In a general sense, the handling of Obamacare’s rollout in the weeks ahead has the potential to be a defining moment for Democrats. Health reform has been a chief goal of Democrats for decades. It’s the latest effort to build on the great reforms that defined the party in the 20th century, in a way that will update the liberal project for the 21st. Will Dems stand by the law and against serious efforts to undermine it, even if it requires walking through political fire to do so?

Drum’s advice:

There’s no running away from Obamacare if you’re a Democrat. So put all the pressure you want on Obama to get things fixed, but you’d better stick together even if things get tougher than they are now. If you don’t hang together, you will surely all hang separately.

Kenneth Roth, who leads Human Rights Watch, makes the case:

Existing legal frameworks [regarding privacy] were devised in an analogue age, when cross-border communication was rare and online communication and social media were unheard of. In that pre-internet age, surveillance techniques were labor-intensive and time-consuming, which helped to constrain arbitrary and abusive practices. The law has to catch up.

A good place to start would be a set of principles unveiled in September by a coalition of non-governmental groups and technology experts aimed at keeping communications surveillance lawful, necessary, proportionate, and subject to adequate safeguards against abuse. It’s time for governments to come clean about their practices, and not wait for the newest revelations. All should acknowledge a global obligation to protect everyone’s privacy, clarify the limits on their own surveillance practices (including surveillance of people outside their own borders), and ensure they don’t trade mass surveillance data to evade their own obligations.

Benjamin Wittes is unconvinced: 

Roth says that “Western allies should agree that mass, rather than narrowly targeted, surveillance is never a normal or proportionate measure in a democracy.”

The implication is that the legal obligation to privacy involves proportionality and also that the US’s privacy obligation to citizens of democratic countries differs somehow from its obligation to citizens of non-democratic countries. As a preliminary matter, I’m not sure why that latter point should be the case. It seems a bit unfair to the poor Iranians to say that it’s okay for the US to collect in bulk on them just because their own government behaves tyrannically. Talk about adding insult to injury!

More fundamentally, the distinction between mass surveillance and targeted surveillance seems to me inherently unstable. We actually do forms of “mass surveillance” all the time—including of our own citizens domestically: traffic enforcement cameras, airport security screening, anthrax testing of physical mail, to name only a few examples. None of these are narrowly targeted at people suspected of doing something wrong. They sweep in everyone who engages certain systems. What’s more, the whole idea of foreign intelligence collection is to gobble large volumes of material and then try to make sense of it. SIGINT is only one example of this.

What about satellite and drone surveillance of wide areas for long periods of time? Does that not also presumptively violate people’s international human right of privacy to the extent it is not targeted at individuals? What about requirements that banks report transactions over a certain size?

David Cole joins the debate:

I confess that working out the proper contours of a right of privacy on a global scale would be challenging.  It’s hard enough to get the Democrats and Republicans in Washington to come to consensus these days, much less China, Russia, the US, Germany, and Venezuela.  But that challenge is faced by all international rights norms.  It doesn’t mean that they are inconceivable, or not worth working toward. …

In the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, for example, we require the FBI to make individualized showings that a target is an agent of a foreign power before authorizing wiretaps and physical searches – as long as the target is here in the United States. Why couldn’t such a requirement apply to targets abroad?

Wittles replies:

I confess I’m left very much where I started: With no idea, either procedurally or substantively, what it would mean to respect the privacy rights of everyone in the world while conducting espionage—except, perhaps, to not “intrude” on anybody. So while I don’t doubt that it is possible to imagine a worldwide privacy right that extends beyond borders, I still don’t think Cole has done so, beyond telling us that maybe such a right looks like FISA and maybe it doesn’t.

Cole has the final word:

I have merely been arguing that we need to rethink our untested assumption that the only privacy rights worth caring about are our own. The point of my post was to refute Wittes’s contention that such a transnational right to privacy was literally unimaginable. I pointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which defines a right to privacy for US citizens and some foreign citizens – those residing here permanently — not as the only possible solution, but merely as an example demonstrating that it’s not impossible to both respect privacy rights and authorize intrusions on privacy for legitimate intelligence gathering purposes.

Just how bad is it for American wage-earners? This bad:

Today, the share of the nation’s income going to wages, which for decades was more than 50 percent, is at a record low of 43 percent, while the share of the nation’s income going to corporate profits is at a record high. The economic lives of Americans today paint a picture of mass downward mobility. According to a National Employment Law Project study in 2012, low-wage jobs (paying less than $13.83 an hour) made up 21 percent of the jobs lost during the recession but more than half of the jobs created since the recession ended. Middle-income jobs (paying between $13.84 and $21.13 hourly) made up three-fifths of the jobs lost during the recession but just 22 percent of the jobs created since.

In 2013, America’s three largest private-sector employers are all low-wage retailers: Wal-Mart, Yum! Brands (which owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken) and McDonald’s. In 1960, the three largest employers were high-wage unionized manufacturers or utilities: General Motors, AT&T, and Ford.

Harold Meyerson blames the death of unions:

The collapse of workers’ power to bargain helps explain one of the primary paradoxes of the current American economy: why productivity gains are not passed on to employees. “The average U.S. factory worker is responsible today for more than $180,000 of annual output, triple the $60,000 in 1972,” University of Michigan economist Mark Perry has written. “We’re able to produce twice as much manufacturing output today as in the 1970s, with about seven million fewer workers.” In many industries, the increase in productivity has exceeded Perry’s estimates. “Thirty years ago, it took ten hours per worker to produce one ton of steel,” said U.S. Steel CEO John Surma in 2011. “Today, it takes two hours.”

In conventional economic theory, those productivity increases should have resulted in sizable pay increases for workers. Where conventional economic theory flounders is its failure to factor in the power of management and stockholders and the weakness of labor.

The above scene is from The Queen of Versailles, a remarkable documentary that Ezra called “perhaps the single best film on the Great Recession”:

Midway through the movie, there’s a scene that might stand as the single most complete vignette on the mechanics of the financial crisis and the subsequent slow recovery. It’s almost Christmas and David Siegel, CEO of Westgate Resorts, the largest time-share company in the world, is hosting a party. The party is in his huge mansion. But it’s not in his hugest mansion — the 90,000 square foot, still under-construction “Versailles” [seen above] — which is, at that moment, falling into foreclosure because Siegel can’t keep up on the payments.

Siegel, slumped in a ratty armchair, is regaling some friends with a tale that is, simultaneously, a sob-story about the desperate state of his finances and an extended boast about his skill at financial engineering. As Siegel tells it, he owes the bank $18.5 million, and he can’t pay. But the bank won’t write down the loan. So Siegel tapped a third-party to approach the bank about buying the loan, which they were able to do, for a mere $3.5 million. And then Siegel bought his $18.5 million loan back from the third-party at barely more than a sixth of its original value. This, he says, is why the financial system — and the economy — are in the toilet.

It’s all there: The conspicuous consumption, the mania for ever-more real estate fueled by every-cheaper loans, the complicated financial engineering that made so many rich and then made their companies so poor, Wall Street’s destructive unwillingness to write down the principal on loans, and the way that, even during the depths of the recession, the rich were able to play by different rules — rules that helped them emerge from the downturn with more money than ever.

And on the other side of the spectrum?

Jackie Siegel [seen above], a beauty queen from a small town in New York, has reconnected with a high school friend. The friend didn’t move to the big city and marry a billionaire whose business relied on cheap money. But she got hit by the financial crisis nevertheless: her house is now in foreclosure. And it’s her real house, the one she actually lives in.

The bank says she needs $1,800, and Jackie sends her $5,000. But in a late-night call some time later, she confesses that she lost the house anyway. The bank, she says, wasn’t willing to reverse the foreclosure process even though she’d been able to come up with the money. There’ll be no buying her loan back at a cut-rate price.

Katy Waldman interviews Debra, one of the 47 million people who just had their food stamps cut:

It was bad enough before the cuts: We were eating lunchmeat all week, and we only had enough for a can of vegetables a day. Divide $203 by 30 days, and then by 3 meals, and then halve it for each person. It’s not a lot. And now it’s going to be much worse. I don’t know if we can still do the canned vegetables every day. One thing we won’t do anymore is have three-course meals on weekends. We used to buy a dinner on Saturday and Sunday that would have three courses: a vegetable, a starch and a meat. But meat is going to be a huge problem.

Relatedly, Derek Thompson dissects a new Pew survey showing who is at the highest risk for obesity:

Poorer women are the most likely to be obese among all ethnicities. But there are a few counter-intuitive surprises here. The richest men were, overall, more likely to be obese than the poorest groups. The groups with the lowest rates of obesity were rich white women and poor black men. Obesity rises with income for black and Hispanic men, but it falls with income for black and Hispanic women. The relationship is clearly more complicated than “a disease for poor people in a rich country.”

As the House pushes a bill to cut food stamps by $40 billion, there’s been greater attention paid to the relationship between food stamps, poverty, and obesity. The debate can be crudely summed up as: Are we paying poor people to become obese. The evidence suggests the answer is no.

Enten points out that Tea Party support is dwindling:

The latest George Washington University Battleground poll found that just 19% of Americans said they would consider themselves a member of the Tea Party. The NBC News / Wall Street Journal survey found a record high 70% of Americans would say they were not members. Asked slightly differently, the last CNN / ORC survey discovered that only 28% of Americans held a favorable view of the Tea Party movement, while a record high 56% of Americans held an unfavorable view.

This polling is a major change from just three years ago. Before the the 2010 midterms, NBC / Wall Street Journal pegged the percentage of Tea Party supporters at about 30%, while 60% said they were not. In terms of the margin between the two sides, it’s been a drop of 20pt against the Tea Party over the past three years.

But Sabato finds that the Tea Party still has a very strong hold on the GOP:

Tea Party supporters now dominate the activist base of the Republican Party. In 2012 they made up nearly two-thirds of those who reported voting in Republican presidential primaries, and in 2014 they may well make up an even larger majority of those voting in what are likely to be very low turnout congressional primaries. Some might argue that the recent special election GOP primary in Alabama’s 1st Congressional District might augur well for the Republican establishment as the establishment-backed candidate defeated the Tea Party-backed one. However, it was a narrow five-point win that saw overwhelming resources put at the establishment candidate’s disposal. If anything, the ANES survey data suggest that a more realistic scenario in next year’s primaries is that more establishment Republican incumbents will be unseated by Tea Party challengers.

Mariah Blake chronicles the collapse of the Unification Church:

[I]n recent years, [Rev. Sun Myung] Moon’s plans to remake America and salvage humanity had run into trouble. Followers had drifted away; his political influence had ebbed. With his ninetieth birthday approaching, he increasingly looked to his children to preserve his life’s work.

In Jin, Moon and his wife’s fourth child, seemed suited for the task. She had a modern American upbringing and a master’s degree from Harvard. In 2009, she took over the Unification Church of America and introduced a bold modernization program. Her aim, she said, was to transform the church into one that people – especially young people – were “dying to join.” She renamed the church Lovin’ Life Ministries, shelved the old hymn books, and launched a rock band, an offshoot of which played New York clubs under the moniker Sonic Cult. She also discarded the old Korean-inspired traditions: bows and chanting gave way to “Guitar Hero” parties, open mics, concerts, and ping-pong tournaments.

And then, early last year, she disappeared:

After several months passed with no sign of her, some parishioners began pressing for information on her whereabouts. They were blocked at every turn. Even the highest circles of church leadership couldn’t – or wouldn’t – say what had happened to In Jin Moon. Before long, it became clear that the House of Moon was crumbling and In Jin had become caught up in its downfall. But her disappearance was only one part of a much more complicated saga – one that involved illegitimate children, secret sex rituals, foreign spy agencies, and the family of Vice President Joseph Biden. Even by Moon’s famously eccentric standards, the collapse of his American project would turn out to be spectacular and deeply strange.

Previous Dish on the Moonies here and here.

(Video: From the Washington Times’ 15th anniversary dinner, in 1997)

Justin Gregg considers whether there’s reason to believe in a special dolphin-human bond. On the plus side:

The phenomenon of lone sociable dolphins — for whom human contact appears to substitute for the company of their own kind — is documented extensively in the scientific literature. Among the better-known examples are Pita from Belize, Davina from England, Filippo from Italy, Tião from Brazil, and JoJo from Turks and Caicos. One report from 2003 described 29 lone sociable dolphins that were regularly observed by scientists, and a number of scientific articles have been published since then on new ones. There is no doubt that these animals are exhibiting inquisitive behaviour, which lends weight to the idea that dolphins do in fact seek out human contact with some regularity.

On the other hand:

The marine mammal researcher Toni Frohoff, director of TerraMar Research in California, reported an incident in which dolphins suddenly fled the scene as soon as a shark was spotted, leaving her to fend for herself. There’s even a news report from 2007 of an intoxicated man who was attacked by a group of bottlenose dolphins after falling into the Black Sea in Ukraine. The animals allegedly tried to drown him, prompting the Russian news agency Interfax to declare that they ‘lack the reputation of friendliness and love of humans enjoyed by dolphins in wealthy nations’. Perhaps the homicidal-dolphin phenomenon is more prevalent than we know. As Kathleen Dudzinski, my research supervisor at the Dolphin Communication Project, used to say: ‘You never hear from the people that the dolphins didn’t save.’

Previous Dish on dolphins here, here, here, and here.

Tim Murphy examines the growing market for political intelligence:

As Wall Street has pursued ever more complex ways to make a buck, the political intelligence industry has boomed, bringing in $402 million in 2009, according to Integrity Research Associates, which tracks the PI sector. That’s still small potatoes compared to the $3.3 billion lobbying industry, but it has caught the eye of critics who worry that it amounts to selling special access to the public’s business.

The political intelligence industry began to take shape in the early 1980s.

As federal regulatory power expanded, big business wanted to know what happened in obscure subcommittee hearings—and didn’t want to wait for the next day’s papers to read about it. In 1984, investment banker Ivan Boesky hired lobbyists to attend committee hearings about a big oil merger and report back to him. It paid off: Boesky made a cool $65 million just by finding out first and buying low. “Investors started to realize that there was money to be made by knowing what was going on in Washington and knowing it as quickly as possible,” says Michael Mayhew, the founder of Integrity Research Associates.

As Wall Street put an ever-greater premium on speed, investing in supercomputers to place orders milliseconds before the competition, the industry took off. The biggest known score came in 2005, when Congress was weighing approval of a $140 billion trust fund for asbestos liability claims. … A few days before then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) announced a vote on the plan, hedge funds snapped up stock in companies that would be shielded from lawsuits if the fund were set up. The Securities and Exchange Commission suspected that advance notice of the vote had leaked from the senator’s office to lobbyists who then tipped off their political-intelligence clients. That the asbestos fund ultimately never came to be was beside the point; the hedge funds had already made their money.

 
Shaunacy Ferro points to a new study that shows that since 1999, “the rise in drug deaths hasn’t been evenly spread out across the country, but has gone up most dramatically in rural areas”:

In 1999, only 3 percent of U.S. counties had an annual drug death rate of more than ten people per 100,000. By 2008, 54 percent of counties did. However, the increase has been most dramatic for rural populations, which according to the CDC have some of the highest rates of prescription drug abuse and overdose. Rural counties saw higher increases in age-adjusted death rates between 1999 and 2009. As you can see, the maps show about the same death rates for rural and urban populations in 2008-2009, but most rural areas started out with significantly lower drug deaths than urban areas back in 1999.

Jason Koebler looks at the data and sees more than just a “rural” problem:

The CDC and law enforcement groups say that much of that increase has been driven by the availability of prescription opioids such oxycodone and anti-anxiety drugs. The abuse of prescription painkillers are often seen as a “rural” problem, but data broken up by county suggests that cities have almost as much to worry about.

Between 1999 and 2009, drug poisoning deaths grew by 394 percent in rural areas and 279 percent for large metropolitan areas, according to the CDC’s county-level look at the data. The highest death rates from overdoses occurred in heavily populated areas, according to the study, published Tuesday in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine.