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Chait’s article on Republican opposition to Obamacare is worth a read. What it clarifies for me is something quite simple. There’s absolutely a role for an aggressive opposition to any large new initiative like this. At the same time, we live in a constitutional system which requires adherence to some simple norms. The first is that a general election, especially when an issue is front-and-center in it, should count. Two general elections should count as well. Obama has been elected and re-elected on a specific pledge to bring both cost discipline to the healthcare sector (now hugely more inefficient compared with others in the world) and to expand coverage to as close to universal as is feasible. The legislative maneuvering for it was messy; and the roll-out of such a plan is bound to have glitches and surprises.

The opposition could use weaknesses in the law to propose fixes; it could urge for a more radical severing of employment with insurance; it could fight for more effective and competitive healthcare exchanges; it should keep an eagle eye on cost over-runs. But if it only controls the House, it should not stop already-passed legislation from being implemented out of partisan spite or ideological zeal. It should not threaten the very functioning of all government or a credit crisis to stop something that cannot – and should not – be constitutionally stopped. That’s not opposition; it’s sabotage – especially the campaign to get young people not to opt in. It is a form of nihilist vandalism, based, as Chait carefully explains, on a whole slew of contradictions, fantasies and alternative universes.

Chait’s worried – but not too worried – about the effects of this unprecedented and anti-constitutional campaign:

It is hard to imagine that the news about Obamacare over the next few months will be good. The rollout of Medicare, and the addition of prescription-drug coverage under George W. Bush, both provoked mass confusion and complaint, and those laws were not fighting off an angry rearguard insurgency. The question is whether the glitches and failures amount, in either reality or perception, to the sort of catastrophic failure that leads panicked insurance companies, potential customers, governors, and state legislatures to pull out.

Conservatives have portrayed their war against the exchanges as a desperate last stand against Obamacare and for freedom as we know it. History is replete with previous examples of last stands. Ronald Reagan warned conservatives in 1961 that if Medicare passed into law, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” The conservative movement sustains itself by constantly disregarding its warnings of the last mortal threat to liberty and redirecting itself onto the next one. Yet it has made opposition to Obamacare completely central to its identity. If the Obamacare train does not wreck—or, to put it more accurately, if conservatives fail to wreck the train—it will be fascinating to see: What will they do next?

Drum sizes up the politics of Obamacare sabotage:

Given the tiny percentage of non-tea-partiers who approve of the deliberate sabotage strategy, a scorched-earth campaign by Republicans could backfire on them pretty badly. It all depends on how well the rollout of Obamacare goes, and how that affects public opinion. That makes the next few months pretty critical for both sides. If the rollout is relatively smooth, support for Obamacare will rise—especially among the people who benefit from it, many of whom are still skeptical that it’s for real. But if the Fox News crowd manages to convince the public that every minor problem represents an epic disaster unfolding in front of their eyes, then who knows? Maybe the sabotage strategy will pan out.

Waldman’s view:

[C]ome January, the ACA will be transformed. It will no longer be a big, abstract entity that would be possible to undo. Instead, it will be what it truly was all along: a large number of specific reforms and regulations that in practical terms are entirely separate from one another. What this means is that once it takes effect, “Obamacare” for all intents and purposes will cease to exist.

It’s always easier to oppose an abstraction than a reality. We saw that with marriage equality. Maybe the opposition to Obamacare will fade away as fast as opposition to gay equality. Because it is based on the same ignorance, panic and fear.

(Photo: Sen. Ted Cruz  speaks during a town hall meeting hosted by Heritage Action For America at the Hilton Anatole on August 20, 2013 in Dallas, Texas. Cruz is staging events across Texas sharing his plan to defund U.S. President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. By Brandon Wade/Getty Images.)

In today’s video from Book Of Matt author Stephen Jimenez, he details how the hate-crime narrative of Shepard’s murder took hold as fast as it did, noting the easy symbolism, frequently inaccurate media reports and how at that moment in 1998, both the gay community and president Clinton were under siege:

Responding via our Facebook page, a reader points out that the reaction to Shepard’s murder was not without historical precedent:

As someone who’s researched historical tragedy, memory and memory construction, I can see how the accepted narrative of Matthew was created. Often when societies and communities are dealt blows like what happened in 1998, we collectively go through a process of grieving and attempt to form some sort of meaning. This meaning usually leads to the construction of a narrative of purpose.

Essentially, these are answers to the . The end part of this narrative is usually [about] what can we do to stop this from occurring again. These can be calls to action or denouncements of occurrences, and there are often many different and competing narratives. Usually one sticks though, and often it’s the one with the most mass appeal, and [this] is what I believe occurred [in the case of Shepard]. This has happened countless times through out our history. We over-simplify stories, often glossing over the actual facts in favor of an easier and [more] usable form of history. Pick an event or person and history, and you can see this process at play. The Revolutionary War and the various cults surrounding certain american presidents are prime examples.

I understand – but I’m not so forgiving of the journalists and activists involved. The utter lack of curiosity, the damning of those (like yours truly) who raised some flags about the incident, the lock-step identity politics mantra about “hate-crimes”, and the simply shameless exploitation of the event for fund-raising to pass redundant hate crime laws truly made me sick to my stomach.

One part of the context is that the biggest gay rights lobby, the Human Rights Campaign, was fiercely opposed to dealing with marriage equality at the time, committed to a paradigm of gay victimhood, and was still living with the rank failure to pass federal employment non-discrimination laws (still not passed!). The federal hate crime law package was a product shaped and designed by pollsters and marketers to raise money, and make HRC seem relevant. Nothing was allowed to get in the way of the countless direct mail pitches urging gays to give money to HRC – or somehow be complicit in a brutal murder of a gay man. It is not good enough, I believe, simply to say: we were wrong but it served the purpose of advancing hate crime laws, so the truth is pretty much irrelevant. No civil rights movement based on untruth deserves to win.

In Kenneth S. Stern’s response to the Book Of Matt, he makes a similar point:

Five years before the Shepard murder, I wrote a report on the Academy Award-nominated film “Liberators.” The film’s premise was that a segregated military unit — the all-African American 761st Tank Battalion — had liberated both the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. The film came out when Black-Jewish relations were particularly strained, in the aftermath of the Crown Heights riots. This was a healing story, and leaders from both communities saw the value in promoting it. Except that it wasn’t true.

While this unit was heroic and deserved to be celebrated for what it accomplished during the Second World War (despite the raw bigotry its members suffered), it was nowhere near either camp. The film’s producers were interested in a good story, not a correct one. And when the film was pulled from PBS because of concerns about its factual inaccuracies, some supporters of the film complained that the facts didn’t really matter.

But the facts did matter, even though Holocaust deniers exploited the film’s problems for their own purposes. Most insistent on the truth were the members of the 761st — they had their history denied first by prejudice, and then by political distortion. They only wanted to be acknowledged and remembered for what they did, not what they didn’t do.

The Book Of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard comes out next week (pre-order it here). From Kirkus’ summary of the book:

An award-winning journalist uncovers the suppressed story behind the death of Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student whose 1998 murder rocked the nation. Jimenez was a media “Johnny-come-lately” when he arrived in Laramie in 2000 to begin work on the Shepard story. His fascination with the intricate web of secrets surrounding Shepard’s murder and eventual elevation to the status of homosexual martyr developed into a 13-year investigative obsession. The tragedy was “enshrined…as passion play and folktale, but hardly ever for the truth of what it was”: the story of a troubled young man who had died because he had been involved with Laramie’s drug underworld rather than because he was gay.

Drawing on both in-depth research and exhaustive interviews with more than 100 individuals around the United States, Jimenez meticulously re-examines both old and new information about the murder and those involved with it. Everyone had something to hide. For Aaron McKinney, one of the two men convicted of Shepard’s murder, it was the fact that he was Shepard’s part-time bisexual lover and fellow drug dealer. For Shepard, it was that he was an HIV-positive substance abuser with a fondness for crystal meth and history of sexual trauma. Even the city of Laramie had its share of dark secrets that included murky entanglements involving law enforcement officials and the Laramie drug world.

So when McKinney and his accomplices claimed that it had been unwanted sexual advances that had driven him to brutalize Shepard, investigators, journalists and even lawyers involved in the murder trial seized upon the story as an example of hate crime at its most heinous. As Jimenez deconstructs an event that has since passed into the realm of mythology, he humanizes it. The result is a book that is fearless, frank and compelling. Investigative journalism at its relentless and compassionate best.

Steve’s previous videos are here. Our full video archive is here.

Glenn’s latest Snowden scoop from last week is a memo between US and Israeli intelligence agencies outlining a broad agreement to share information, reported to include “intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens”:

The five-page memorandum, termed an agreement between the US and Israeli intelligence agencies “pertaining to the protection of US persons”, repeatedly stresses the constitutional rights of Americans to privacy and the need for Israeli intelligence staff to respect these rights. But this is undermined by the disclosure that Israel is allowed to receive “raw Sigint” – signal intelligence. The memorandum says: “Raw Sigint includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.” …

Although the memorandum is explicit in saying the material had to be handled in accordance with US law, and that the Israelis agreed not to deliberately target Americans identified in the data, these rules are not backed up by legal obligations.

You can read the memo here. Matthew Brodsky isn’t too alarmed by the story:

Absent is the crucial fact that the MOU lays out the terms of the sharing agreement, recognizing the need for more procedures to minimize any information on American citizens. It obligates the NSA to perform routine checks on the program to measure the quality and fidelity of the information being shared and it places a similar obligation on the Israeli Signit National Unit to identify, exclude, and destroy any information it finds about US citizens.

But, according to the Guardian, the memo allows Israel to retain “‘any files containing the identities of US persons’ for up to a year. The agreement requests only that the Israelis should consult the NSA’s special liaison adviser when such data is found”. So another government has the ability to spy on American citizens and retain that information for up to a year, and need merely consult with the NSA afterward. Effectively it fuses US intelligence with Israel’s – with respect to spying on Americans. I have to say I am not terribly thrilled by the idea of having my phones tapped by the Israelis in concert with the NSA. Joshua Foust unloads on the Guardian report, pointing out that the memo, from 2009, gives no idea of “how much, if any, American information actually gets passed along”.  He also notes the following unanswered questions in Greenwald’s story:

What the final version of this MOU says;
Whether it changed after minimization rules strengthened later in 2009;
What those “additional procedures” to minimize American citizen information are;
How much, if any, American information actually gets passed along;
What the periodic, annual reviews have said;
What the two biannual program reviews have said;
If the program is even ongoing; or
What the actual implementation of this program looks like

Still, giving this level of access to a foreign government that is, in some cases, clearly at odds with US foreign policy, seems like an awful amount of trust to me. And this reassurance does not reassure:

The truth is that the US probably did not sign a binding document with Israel with official “teeth” because it does not need to. Israel is on a very short list of countries which receive massive intelligence information from the NSA. If Israel abuses the relationship, the US can just turn off the faucet. The one extra-legal scenario which still would likely not be covered would be where the NSA is winking at Israel to look under a rock which the NSA itself is not allowed to check.

Tomasky wants more focus on results:

But McArdle argued last week that judging the process is valid:

Human beings tend to judge failure or success by outcome, rather than process. It’s an easy heuristic, but as in so many things, the easy way out is often disastrous. Having unprotected sex with a short-term partner isn’t a good idea just because you didn’t get pregnant last month, and neither is launching a space shuttle with faulty O-rings because hey, the shuttle didn’t explode last time. In an uncertain world, good decision-making heuristics sometimes have bad outcomes (people get pregnant even if they are using birth control perfectly); bad decision-making heuristics sometimes — maybe even often — produce perfectly fine results. A doctor or nurse who doesn’t wash his or her hands consistently will usually not kill the patient. But failing to wash your hands consistently will kill many patients every year.

Kevin Carey tackles the elder statesman’s new book on education:

Paul’s misguided philosophy is rooted in a radically simplistic view of education. To him, education is just a matter of assigning students books to read and papers to write, using an “ideologically safe” curriculum. He deplores educators who “assume that the parents are not competent to be the sole providers of education.” But parents aren’t competent to be the sole providers of many important things. Ron Paul is an Ob-Gyn with an M.D. from DukeUniversity. Does he think babies should be delivered by people who learned everything they know from books and YouTube?

But the Ron Paul school revolution actually does make sense in one particular way.

His plan is explicitly designed to catch students on the cusp of adolescence and direct them toward an isolated learning experience focused exclusively on reading, writing, and debate, with no exposure to heterodox views. He is aiming for the Atlas Shrugged window, when young people have an excess of conviction and a deficit of experience, when they are more clever than wise. His program will shield students from the evils of liberalism and, worse, Keynesianism, and train them to argue their cause with facility and zeal. It is a plan for the mass creation of crackpot autodidacts who are impervious to any evidence that contradicts their simple worldviews.

Adriana Valdez Young visits KidZania, an work-themed amusement park in Kuwait City:

We pass a modeling school, where a line-up of little girls are learning to sashay down the runway; a hospital, where kids in scrubs are escorting patients from the back of an ambulance; and a telemarketing center, where kids in swivel chairs are intensely working the phones. Each storefront in KidZania is backed by a real-world business, which offers 15-30 minute activities for kids to receive training or work for pay. Kids learn to swirl yogurt at Pinkberry, deliver packages at DHL, and fill gas tanks at Exxon Mobil. Each service job requires a uniform and a disposable hair net.

While KidZania was born in Mexico City and has a universal appeal in the 10 additional countries where it is located, the industrious city bears particular resonance in the small oil-rich nation of Kuwait. It is a country with extreme reliance on imported labor—85 percent of the total workforce is made of expats—and it is a social welfare state that guarantees 100 percent employment for Kuwaiti nationals. To counter the imbalance between the national and foreign labor pool and reduce pressure for more state jobs, the government recently introduced a program called ‘Kuwaitization,’ which sets hiring quotas for private companies to employ Kuwaiti nationals. But enticing Kuwaitis to work has been so challenging that many companies are left in a position of simply adding names of Kuwaitis to the payroll to avoid government fines and then scrapping any hope that those citizens will ever show up to work for their pay. Therefore, KidZania could rear a new generation itching to expand the private sector.