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You may recall, even though it feels like a couple of centuries ago now, that there was quite some debate about the decision to hand over responsibility for Syria’s chemical weapons program to the UN, headed up by the Russians. Here is Mike Doran, who was on AC360 Later with me on Sep. 10:

It wouldn’t surprise me if, weeks from now, President Obama were attending the United Nations General Assembly while still holding meetings about a U.N. resolution to compel Assad to give up his chemical weapons. I guarantee you that as we speak, Assad’s chemical weapons team is frantically pouring bottles of Chanel No. 5, which Hezbollah stole from Lebanon, into missile shells that it will deliver to the U.N. in an elaborate demonstration of compliance with the agreement. We will take one whiff, call it perfume, and cry foul.

Surprise!

Russian officials and Secretary of State John Kerry have lauded the Syrian government for its cooperation with the preliminary work of the experts, sent by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a group based in The Hague that ensures compliance with the treaty banning them. Syria’s government joined that treaty last month after having spent decades amassing an enormous stockpile of the munitions and refusing to acknowledge it possessed them.

Syrian state television released a brief video on Tuesday showing the organization’s experts at work. The experts oversaw the first destruction of components on Sunday, with the goal of rendering inoperable all of Syria’s production, mixing and filling equipment by Nov. 1.

Perhaps Doran still believes this is all a “Potemkin disarmament effort,” as he once tweeted. I’d like to see him defend that posture against the current facts on the ground. Speaking of people who know nothing and never get called on it, here’s a statement about the UN agreement from Senator John McCain and Butters from less than a month ago:

We cannot imagine a worse signal to send to Iran as it continues its push for a nuclear weapon. Without a U.N. Security Council Resolution under Chapter 7 authority, which threatens the use of force for non-compliance by the Assad regime, this framework agreement is meaningless. Assad will use the months and months afforded to him to delay and deceive the world using every trick in Saddam Hussein’s playbook. It requires a willful suspension of disbelief to see this agreement as anything other than the start of a diplomatic blind alley, and the Obama Administration is being led into it by Bashar Assad and Vladimir Putin.

And yet what we learn today is that by November 1, “all of Syria’s production, mixing and filling equipment” will be inoperable. Will this buffoon ever concede this? Of course not. The same statement accuses Assad of deceiving the world like Saddam. But Saddam’s ultimate deception was leaving the impression that he had WMDs, when he didn’t. It appears McCain has yet to absorb the most basic fact of the last war he successfully lobbied for (he’s unsuccessfully lobbied for a few dozen since, if memory serves).

Here’s Jeffrey Goldberg who knows so much about the complexities of the Middle East:

This plan probably won’t work. Assad is a lying, murdering terrorist, and lying, murdering terrorists aren’t, generally speaking, reliable partners, except for other lying, murdering terrorists.

Wrong again! More neocon wrongness from Jon Tobin at the magazine that roasts war criminals, Commentary:

[T]he Russian-sponsored process to get rid of Assad’s chemical weapons is an invitation for the Syrian tyrant to delay and obstruct any efforts to actually remove the toxic material and lock the U.S. into a partnership with a man that even United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon labeled as a criminal.

So why are the UN, the US, and Russia so happy with how things have worked out thus far? Now, of course, this is still an early stage, and we may have to wait a much longer time to see the real truth. But I seriously doubt any of these alleged hard-nosed foreign policy experts would have predicted the thoroughness of the Syrian cooperation so far, do you? I doubt it just as much as the idea that they will ever concede error, even when it is staring them, like newly-charred bodies in Baghdad, in the face.

(Photo: U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) speaks about recent developments in Syria September 17, 2013 in Washington, DC. The senator was speaking during a forum at the Council on Foreign Relations. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images.)

Timothy B. Lee passes along the above chart illustrating how complicated the Obamacare system is:

If the exchanges were just insurance marketplaces, getting them to work might have been a lot easier. Much of the complexity comes from the fact that the exchanges are used to administer the complex system of subsidies the Affordable Care Act provides to low-income consumers. Figuring out whether a customer is eligible for a subsidy, and if so how much, requires data from a lot of federal and state agencies.

A reader argues – persuasively to me – that the system could have been much simpler:

David Auerbach does a good job describing the poor execution of the federal exchange, and I’m sure there’s more of this kind of investigation to come.  But the federal government also made an infinite number of policy decisions, and one of those is, perhaps, the original sin of the design. They decided, very intentionally, not to allow window-shopping.

The administration knew that letting consumers shop anonymously and look at what is available, including the general price ranges, was an important factor.  However, they also knew that the federal subsidies reducing those ultimate prices would be a vital enticement.  They decided that letting consumers know about the subsidies was the more important policy.  But to make that happen, the site would have to require people to actually sign into a formal account, provide financial and other information, and only then proceed to the products available to them.  That is a very intensive technological process, particularly in light of privacy concerns, and is a considerable part of the problem most consumers are having to suffer through.  The benefit is that once through the application stage, they will know not only what products are available, and at what price, but also that they will get a subsidy if the information they’ve provided qualifies them for one.

Placing the subsidy as the primary policy goal came at the expense of allowing people to enter a few basic pieces of information anonymously (age, family structure, zip code, say) and simply explore the options and general prices.  If they see something attractive, they can then either go into the application process at that point, or come back to it at a more convenient time (since no one needs to sign up immediately for coverage that won’t begin until January 1 at the earliest). That would have virtually eliminated the front-heavy technology that was enormously hard to manage, and was predictably glitch-prone.  Anonymous shopping is far easier to design and implement, makes for a better consumer experience, and allows people more time to gather the necessary (and necessarily complicated) information they must have when they are finally ready to actually buy health insurance.

The problems in execution are blameworthy, but it is more than fair to hold the administration’s feet to the fire over their policy decision to prioritize subsidies over shopping.  State-based exchanges had the same options available to them, and many chose shopping as the priority.  Score one more for the wise decision in the ACA to let states take the lead in health care reform, and one more shake of the head at the states who chose to let the federal government do the job rather than doing it themselves.

When is Kathleen Sebelius going to be fired?

Richard Marshall reviews a new biography, Kafka: The Years Of Insight:

He was popular, smart, good looking enough to attract women, a joker and a writer with enough fame to feed the ego whilst not so much that would distract from the business. He was capable of acts of kindness but his erotic escapades were pretty dismal. Kafka was a creepy womanizer – at thirty he was stalking with the help of Max Brod some sixteen year old he saw one time at Goethe’s house and he built himself an impervious persona who was cruel, calculating and decisively self-serving when dealing with his never-ending erotic interests. …

Kafka writes letters and diaries that make clear that he has only one subject and that is himself as literature. ‘I have no literary interests; I am made of literature. I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.’ Decisive in this identity, Kafka frees himself from ties that bind those with merely an ‘artistic bent.’

John Banville considers another new volume, Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt, and how the man’s enigmatic sexuality probably informed his fiction:

[Author Saul] Friedländer follows the Kafka scholar Mark Anderson in thinking it “highly improbable that Kafka ever considered the possibility of homosexual relations.” Nor does he for a moment seek to suggest that the “imagined sexual possibilities” Kafka may have entertained are a key to unlock the enigmas at the heart of the Kafka canon. All the same, once this particular genie is out of the bottle there is no forcing it back inside. Repressed homosexual yearnings certainly would account for some of the more striking of Kafka’s darker preoccupations, including the disgust toward women that he so frequently displays, his fascination with torture and evisceration, and most of all, perhaps, his lifelong obsession with his father, or better say, with the Father—the eternal masculine.

(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Joseph Winkler praises It’s Always Sunny as the fun, nasty antidote to the bright sincerity of most other shows, such as “Parks and Recreation, Modern Family, Raising Hope, and even 30 Rock”:

[If] any sin can be said to exist in the amoral world of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, it is the sin of boredom, which is perhaps its most scathing satire and commentary in the world of sitcoms. A sitcom essentially takes life situations and makes them less boring through unlikely, quirky, and slightly absurd twists. Something always happens in a sitcom — someone gets sick, or a miscommunication causes problems — but there is always a resolution, and in hindsight, the conflict was wholly innocuous. Sitcoms often try to depict TV life as a considerably less boring version of our lives, but that their reach is so limited often makes the shows boring in of themselves. (A county fair gone awry, Tracy Jordan is acting up again!). That our sitcoms, embroidered versions of our lives, start to feel boring is a testament to the prevalent sterility and innocuousness of our daily lives (Wake up, go to work, come home, family time, watch TV, et cetera). It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, if only for a mere twenty-two minutes a week, gives us a chance to enter a world without stakes; their idle schemes are the elixir for our idle generation.

Justin Wolfers introduces us to Obama’s Fed chair nominee:

Many will be keen to characterize Yellen’s appointment in the usual hawk-dove spectrum, with most analysts suggesting that she’s more concerned about reaching full employment than controlling inflation, making her a dove. This framing misses something important: While it’s true that Yellen has forcefully advocated for more monetary stimulus in recent years, what’s more notable is that she has gotten the big calls right. Those who argued for tighter monetary policy have been proven wrong. Inflation rates that have been persistently below target, and unemployment has been too high.

Dylan Matthews argues that Yellen is less dovish than she is made out to be:

As Evan Soltas and Matt O’Brien have noted, Yellen is plenty hawkish when the situation requires it. In the mid-1990s, when she served on the Fed Board of Governors, she made it clear that she thought unemployment was dangerously low, low enough that employers have to hike wages, which in turn leads to higher prices, i.e. inflation. “We have an economy operating at a level where we need to be nervous about rising inflation,” she said at one meeting. “We can’t dismiss the possibility that compensation growth will drift upward, raising core inflation and in turn inflationary expectations. This is a major risk. Obviously, we need to be vigilant in scrutinizing the data for signs of rising wages and salaries.”

So inflation hawks, take heart — if and when it’s actually worth worrying about inflation, Yellen will be ready to handle it.

Noam Scheiber hopes that Yellen will be tough on Wall Street:

Yellen’s social circle … consists mostly of tweedy professors and government officials. She strikes me as sufficiently devoid of attachments to bankers and money managers that she can imagine them having some truly terrible ideas—even the smart, witty, seemingly upstanding ones. This is in fact more true of her than the average senior Fed official in New York or Washington. Much of her tenure at the Fed was in San Francisco, thousands of miles away from Wall Street special pleaders.

Neil Irwin notes that “the Fed Yellen inherits is even more complicated than those led by Bernanke and Greenspan, so too will be her challenges”:

What unpredictable ripple effects is the multi-trillion Fed balance sheet having for the global economy, and how much should Fed leaders account for those in their policymaking? What is the interplay between the Fed’s low interest rate policies and excessive risk-taking in different corners of the financial world that could create new bubbles? How do you apply the lessons of the crisis to regulate banks and other institutions more effectively, implementing the immensely complicated Dodd-Frank Act? Does the very transparency that Bernanke has spent his chairmanship pushing create problems of its own, markets hear so much information about what the Fed is thinking and doing that there is unnecessary volatility?

Yellen has made her greatest mark as a thinker about employment and monetary. But as chairman, it will now be her problem to come up with answers to this full gamut of questions.

Yglesias sees Yellen’s nomination as a victory for women:

She’ll be the most important woman in economic policy in American history: It’s probably no coincidence that it took someone so super-duper-duper-qualified to break this particular glass ceiling. No woman has ever chaired the Federal Reserve. Nor has any woman ever chaired any of the other major central banks. We’ve never had a woman run the Treasury Department or the National Economic Council.

Hanna Rosin predicts that the focus on her gender will fade:

If all goes as planned, we will soon forget about the fact that she is a woman. Stories about the first female head of a major central bank will die down. Instead, much as happened with Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton as Secretaries of State, we will start debating her policies, her interest rate decisions, her inflation targets, her easy money programs. We will move one step closer to not having to discuss or even think much about the fact that the person deciding our monetary policy wears lipstick sometimes.

Bernie Sanders says the Texas GOP wants to abolish Social Security, V.A. health care. False. http://t.co/ct6jxmsMB2

— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) October 2, 2013

New evidence points to yes:

During last year’s election, [Brendan] Nyhan and [Jason] Reifler picked nearly 1,200 state legislators in states with active affiliates of PolitiFact, the nonpartisan website based in Florida that seeks to evaluate politicians’ claims and rate their validity. To one-third of the lawmakers, chosen at random, Nyhan and Reifler sent a vaguely threatening letter. It alerted the lawmakers that PolitiFact was monitoring them and speculated about the potential consequences to their careers. … Another one-third of the legislators got a “placebo” letter: It told them they were part of a political-science experiment “studying the accuracy of the political statements made by legislators,” but no more. The final one-third got no letter.

At the end of the election, the researchers looked at the politicians’ record. How many had been called out for lying, either by their state’s PolitiFact affiliate or in a news story? The results were impressive: The politicians who didn’t get reminder letters were more than twice as likely to be criticized for inaccuracy than those who did. “Our results indicate that state legislators who were sent letters about the threat posed by fact-checkers were less likely to have their claims questioned as misleading or inaccurate during the fall campaign—a promising sign for journalistic monitoring in democratic societies,” the researchers concluded.