Tag: Premium

Brian Merchant marks the three-year anniversary of the rig explosion by checking in on the damage:

Billy Nungresser, the president of Plaquemines Parish, which covers the part of Louisiana most heavily hit by oil after the initial spill, says that the oily fallout continues to this day. Just yesterday, Nungresser told a local TV news station that “oil is still washing ashore in places like Bay Jimmy.”

Meanwhile, fishermen say their catch is still drastically lower than it was before the spill—and the onslaught of chemical dispersants BP used to try to contain it. “The damage is still ongoing right now. My shrimp is down 40 percent and my oysters are down 93 percent,” George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fisherman’s Association, recently told Eyewitness News. He believes that the dispersant—a proprietary cocktail called Corexit that is believed to be comprised of butoxyethanol, organic sulfonates, and a small concentration of propylene glycol—interrupted the reproductive cycle of the shellfish in the region.

Mark Hertsgaard focuses in on the controversy surrounding Corexit at the time:

Wilma Subra, a chemist whose work on environmental pollution had won her a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, told state and federal authorities that she was especially concerned about how dangerous the mixture of crude and Corexit was: “The short-term health symptoms include acute respiratory problems, skin rashes, cardiovascular impacts, gastrointestinal impacts, and short-term loss of memory,” she told GAP investigators. “Long-term impacts include cancer, decreased lung function, liver damage, and kidney damage. (Nineteen months after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, a scientific study published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Pollution found that crude oil becomes 52 times more toxic when combined with Corexit.)

BP even rebuffed a direct request from the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, who wrote BP a letter on May 19, asking the company to deploy a less toxic dispersant in the cleanup. Jackson could only ask BP to do this; she could not legally require it. … Knowing that EPA lacked the authority to stop it, BP wrote back to Jackson on May 20, declaring that Corexit was safe.

Meanwhile, Shiva Polefka is disappointed by Congress’ inaction since the accident:

[T]he legislative branch has yet to pass a single law strengthening federal oversight of offshore oil and gas development. Congress did enact the RESTORE Act which allocates 80 percent of BP’s civil penalties to the affected Gulf Coast states, so they can apply it directly the environmental restoration and economic recovery. …

[O]ther than the RESTORE Act, Congress has done “nothing about the many other critical issues the Commission identified to improve safety and environmental protection.” A year ago, my colleagues at the Center for American Progress highlighted the need for Congress to raise the absurdly low $75 million limit on spill liability that oil companies currently face. While BP voluntarily excluded itself from the cap, the cleanup cost for Deepwater Horizon to date stands at over $14 billion, demonstrating starkly the fiscal as well as environmental risk to the American public from Congressional inaction. Similarly, Congress has refused to codify any new safety standards for offshore drilling. As a result, the gains made through Obama administration rulemaking, and voluntary industry efforts, could easily be easily lost to the whims of the next administration.

(Photo: Crude oil released following the sinking of the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, washes ashore on June 9, 2010 on Grand Terre Island, Louisiana. By Benjamin Lowy/Edit by Getty Images)

Daniel McCarthy attributes the bump in Bush’s favorability to nostalgia:

Republicans have reason to be a little wistful for the Bush years. And there’s a feeling among centrists that whatever his mistakes, the party Bush led wasn’t as nasty as it has since become.

Larison suspects it’s a function of politics in the present:

If I had to guess, I’d say that Bush’s higher approval mostly comes from people that want to express their disapproval of the current president, and this includes quite a few people who disapproved of Bush while he was in office. One way to do that is to affirm that Bush did a good job. If we look at the results by party identification and ideology, that tells us part of the story. 84% of Republicans and 45% of independents say they approve of how Bush “handled his job as president.” Both figures are much higher than they were in 2008. This reflects the perverse rally effect that causes some people to embrace their disastrous leaders simply because people on the other “side” keep attacking him.

Weigel agrees after speaking to the Tea Party crowd:

This is just desperate counter-factual denialism. Some were blaming the debt Bush’s wars, spending and Wall Street collapse almost as soon as Obama took office! And that kind of denialism is not a way out of the Republican hole but burrowing deeper into it. Bouie argues that Republicans need to make a clear break with Dubya or perpetually suffer guilt by association:

[T]his is a recipe for failure. The GOP’s losing streak, from the 2006 wave election to Obama’s re-election victory in 2012 (with a brief respite in 2010), has everything to do with George W. Bush, and Iraq in particular. It’s what gave Democrats the House and the Senate in 2006, and it’s a large part of what gave Barack Obama the presidency in 2008. And for as much as election fundamentals could predict the outcome of last year’s election, it’s also true that Democrats got a lot of traction out of tying Republicans to the “failures of the past.” Americans still remember the Bush years, and as long as Republicans are committed to same policies, they’ll still hesitate to give them the reins of state.

Joan Walsh advises the right to keep Bush out of the spotlight:

Bush’s ratings only improved because he went away. His comeback campaign is likely to remind people of the disaster he left in his wake, and backfire on him, his brother and his party.

Recent Dish on George Bush revisionism here.

(Photo: US President George W. Bush delivers remarks 01 May 2006 from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC on the recent trip to Iraq by US Secretary of Defense Donand Rumsfeld and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Three years after his famous photo-op before a banner hailing ‘Mission Accomplished’ in Iraq, Bush declared that the war-torn country had finally turned a corner in establishing security and democracy. By Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images.)

While members of Congress continue to question whether or not the FBI properly handled its 2011 investigation of Tamerlan, Eli Lake explains Russia’s likely ulterior motives:

Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, warned the FBI in 2011 about a young Chechen named Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who they believed had become radicalized and was prepared to join an underground organization in Russia. The FBI interviewed the man, searched its databases and found nothing, and closed the case the same year. … But there were good reasons that the tip didn’t trigger a more aggressive American investigation, current and former intelligence and law-enforcement officials tell The Daily Beast.

Those officials pointed to the FSB’s habit of treating much behavior by Chechens as suspicious, and nearly all such behavior as terror-related. The Tsarnaev request, they speculated, was likely triggered by the FSB’s concern that he would participate in or provide support to Chechen insurrectionists in Russia, rather that by any sense of a threat to American interests.

Hunter Walker speaks with a former FBI counterterrorism executive who further details why the US has to be suspicious of such requests from foreign governments:

“Generally speaking, certain foreign governments try to keep track of their expatriates, especially those who are outspoken on human rights issues,” the former [FBI] executive explained. “Countries will submit names to us and will say, you know, this guy’s a bad guy, a terrorist, or a drug trafficker, or whatever. And what you have to be careful about is, you may be being used as a proxy by a foreign government or a foreign intelligence agency to keep track of or to report back on their expatriate community in the United States. Their intent may not be as straightforward as determining whether or not they’re a terrorist or not.”

On the 70th anniversary of the famous children’s book, Amy Benfer criticizes the prince’s understanding of love:

He is driven off his home planet when made half mad over the love of a flower, a rose described as vain, weak, emotionally manipulative, “contradictory,” and given to “silly pretensions,” and who often coughs to hide her lies. “You must never listen to flowers,” confides the prince. “You must look at them and smell them.” This unflattering portrayal of romantic love seems even less appealing when one considers that the prince’s rose is widely considered to be a stand-in for [author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s] wife, Consuelo Sunsin, a tempestuous beauty from El Salvador (like the prince’s planet, home to three volcanoes), whom he often left alone during his travels, while he engaged in frequent adultery — the sin so singular to adulthood it shares its name.

Consuelo was no shy flower herself, but the portrait she created of their marriage in her posthumous memoir The Tale of the Rose: The Love Story Behind the Little Prince, published days before the centennial celebration of Exupéry’s birth in 2000, was damning enough to put quite a damper on the festivities.

Despite the devout love it has inspired in generations of impressionable teenagers about to cross over into courtships of their own, Le Petit Prince is not a particularly convincing love story. It is better at describing the platonic friendship between equals that sustain men wandering away from their women: the prince and the fox; the pilot and the prince. The prince protects his rose, shields her behind glass, but never understands her. In a grisly twist, the souvenir he brings back to his planet to commemorate his travels — the sheep in the box — may or may not kill her.

(Photo: Graffiti of the Little Prince in Bratislava by Flickr user bekassine)

Emily Schuletheis claims that the “immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.” She imagines what would have happened if illegal immigrants could have voted in 2012:

Key swing states that Obama fought tooth and nail to win — like Florida, Colorado and Nevada — would have been comfortably in his column. And the president would have come very close to winning Arizona.

Republican Mitt Romney, by contrast, would have lost the national popular vote by 7 percentage points, 53 percent to 46 percent, instead of the 4-point margin he lost by in 2012, and would have struggled even to stay competitive in GOP strongholds like Texas, which he won with 57 percent of the vote.

Harry Enten finds these calculations laughable. His analysis:

All told, it would seem that only about 1.7 million new Latino voters would be added if undocumented immigrants were granted citizenship. Nationally, this would be a net of about 775,000 votes. This would increase Obama’s vote margin, but not to 7pt; it would only go up to about 4.4pt – in other words, half a point from where it actually was in November 2012. Even adding in new Asian voters, who vote at a lower rate than even Latinos, and other undocumented immigrants (and controlling for the percentage who apply for citizenship, percentage of citizens who vote, and the percentage who voted for Obama), the margin probably only goes up to, at most, 4.6pt.

The amount this would shift individual states in elections is debatable. Take Nevada, where, at last count, there were 190,000 undocumented immigrants – the highest percentage of any state population. Most of them are Latino. Apply the same math we did above, Obama would have gained about 17,000 votes. It would have increased his state margin of victory by 1.4pt. That’s not nothing, but we’re talking about the state with the largest percentage undocumented immigrants.

Nate Cohn’s math is similar. Bouie’s read on the situation:

Democrats do stand to strengthen their advantage with Latino and Asian American voters. What Republicans gain, on the other hand, is a chance to compete. Which, given their current poor standing, is far better than nothing.

Dreher notes why extremist Islam may be even more susceptible to violent expression than other religions that have proven extremely bloody in the past:

When a Christian murders, as many have done, sometimes with church sanction, he acts in direct contravention of Christ’s example and command. When a Muslim murders, he sometimes carries out Muhammad’s command, which is to say, Allah’s. … Obviously many, many Muslims choose less bloodthirsty interpretations of these verses, and this is the sort of thing that non-Muslims should encourage, for the sake of peace. Nevertheless, the existence of these verses, and the extremely high regard Islam has for its holy book, makes it harder to come against those who wish to kill in the name of Islam.

Millman counters:

If we were to test the proposition, “Islam is inherently more violent than other religions,” we’d need to compare Islamic civilization across time and space to other civilizations (and control properly for other factors). Are Dreher and Sullivan quite sure of what the result of such a comparison would be? Are they quite sure that, say, things like cousin marriage, or a burgeoning population of underemployed males, or the legacy of Cold War-era arms races, or the coincidence of massive oil wealth in the hands of a particularly puritanical sect on the Arabian peninsula, or the intrusion of Zionism, or the demographic decline of Christian Europe (and Russia), or the ructions of modernization meeting a subordination of women that pre-dates Islam, or . . . well, there’s a long list of theories for why Islam’s borders are bloody now. Are we quite sure that those theories are less-correct than the theory, “they are getting their ideas from a bad book?”

But Millman is completely misrepresenting my post, the third sentence of which is the following:

All religion, including Christianity, is susceptible to the violence associated with tribalism and fundamentalism. Christianity’s murderousness through the ages is a matter of historical fact, from the Crusades to the Inquisition and beyond.

That was also the core point of the essay I wrote over a decade ago and linked to this week and stand by:

[Osama bin Laden’s theology has] roots in an extreme and violent strain in Islam that emerged in the 18th century in opposition to what was seen by some Muslims as Ottoman decadence but has gained greater strength in the 20th.

I have long believed that this kind of Internet-based, tradition-free, radical Islam is a creation of modernity – not integral to the faith as lived by countless Muslims for centuries. I have long put it in the historical context of Islam’s long heritage of peaceful governance and human charity. And in many ways, Christianity has more to account for than Islam over the centuries.

After all, it takes a lot more evil to turn a radical non-violent homeless pacifist like Jesus into the cause for a murderous Crusade than it does to select justifications of violence from the Koran and re-enact them. But my reader’s point about the unique challenge modernity poses to religions that claim territory as sacred and that insist that doctrines cannot be altered one iota from texts written centuries ago is a real one. Christianity has reason and clear doctrines of nonviolence to guard against this. But is bombing abortion clinics Christianist terrorism? Abso-fucking-lutely. Freddie reframes the debate:

To me … the question isn’t whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev believed he was waging jihad. The question is, what’s the difference for our next step? How and why would a religious motivation matter? Where the question of Islamic extremism is made relevant is in our perception that there is a larger network of extremists who are eager and able to launch violent attacks against this country. As you know, I’m a skeptic about the size and destructive ability of that network. But it is ancillary to the conversation, because all of our current best evidence suggests that the Tsarnaev brothers worked alone, and had no connection to Al Qaeda or any other anti-American group. The analogy for the Tsarnaev brothers shouldn’t be to the 9/11 hijackers but to the Fort Hood shooter or the DC snipers. Sure: individuals or small groups have the ability to be inspired (in whole or in part) by Islam, along with personal anger and feelings of inadequacy and grievance against American foreign policy and plain old sociopathy. And because of the reality of modern technology, these people have the ability to kill other people. What they do not have, and should not be mistaken for having, is the ability to represent a serious threat to the basic security and prosperity of this or any other country.

On that I am in total agreement. I don’t think there’s much we can do to stop this kind of thing, except constitutional surveillance, public vigilance, and withdrawal of our troops from Muslim countries. The Tsarnaev brothers do not represent a resurgence of al Qaeda; they represent the permanent threat religious fundamentalism poses to modernity, especially if that religion believes itself under siege and has texts that sanction the murder of infidels and apostates. Of course, this threat may be magnified by psychological distortion, personal history, contingent events, and pure chance. But that does not mean it is a chimera. The blood on the streets of Boston was real and red enough.

For Netflix:

The company added more than 3 million subscribers (2 million in the U.S.) last quarter, which, at $7.99 per subscription, means revenue nearly equaled the full price of the $100 million “House of Cards” series that debuted early this year.

Did “House of Cards” lure 2 million more people, alone? No. We don’t know how many Netflix subscribers watched the series, and we certainly don’t know what share of the new subs joined just specifically because of the Kevin Spacey vehicle.

So what did “House of Cards” really buy? Allegiance. Nearly 90 percent of Netflix subscribers said “House of Cards” made them less likely to cancel, according to a survey by Cowen and Co.

Notice how content matters commercially. People will pay for good stuff – not listicle crack. Zachary M. Seward points out that “Netflix now has 29.2 million people in the US subscribed to its $8-a-month streaming plan, which is, for the first time, greater than HBO’s domestic subscription base of 28.7 million”:

The comparison between Netflix and HBO isn’t perfect, but they increasingly appear to be on similar trajectories. Both started by offering only movies that had long been out of theaters, then ventured into original programming—HBO in 1997 with Oz and Netflix earlier this year with House of Cards. Meanwhile, all of HBO’s customers buy it as an add-on to existing cable TV subscriptions, but HBO Go now offers all of the network’s programming over the internet, like Netflix. At the moment, it’s just a free perk for existing subscribers, but executives at HBO parent Time Warner have been hinting at a future when HBO Go is sold directly to consumers.

“The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us,” Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, put it recently.

(Video: Trailer for the Netflix Original Hemlock Grove, which has gotten bad reviews but appears to be popular with Netflix users.)

Greenwald goes another round:

The only evidence [Andrew] can point to shows that the older brother, Tamerlan, embraced a radical version of Islam, something I already noted. But – rather obviously – to prove that someone who commits violence is Muslim is not the same as proving that Islam was the prime motive for the violence (just as the aggressive attack by devout evangelical George Bush on Iraq was not proof of a rejuvenation of the Christian crusades, the attack by Timothy McVeigh was not proof of IRA violence, Israeli aggression is not proof that Judaism is the prime motivator of those wars, and the mass murder spree by homosexual Andrew Cunanan was not evidence that homosexuality motivated the violence).

Islam or some related political ideology may have been the motive driving Tamerlan, as I acknowledge, but it also may not have been. You have to produce evidence showing motive. You can’t just assert it and demand that everyone accept it on faith. Specifically, to claim this is terrorism (in a way that those other incidents of mass murder at Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson and Columbine were not), you have to identify the “political or social objective” the violence was intended to promote: what was that political or social objective here? Andrew doesn’t have the slightest idea.

I have much more than the slightest idea. I have massive amounts of evidence, outraged testimonies from the family, a horrifying web history, bombs that follow to the letter instructions from an al Qaeda publication, public, extremist spats with his own mosque, and on and on. And this is slippery language:

[T]o prove that someone who commits violence is Muslim is not the same as proving that Islam was the prime motive for the violence …

But Tamerlan was not just a Muslim. He was an extremist, fanatical Muslim who had quite obviously self-radicalized. I have made that distinction repeatedly. If all we had was evidence that he attended a mosque and called himself a Muslim, I’d agree with Glenn. But we have a mountain of evidence that Tamerlan was far more extremist than 99.9 percent of the entire American Muslim population. Why will Glenn not acknowledge this?

His other point is a much more interesting one:

“[T]errorism” does not have any real meaning other than “a Muslim who commits violence against America and its allies”, so as soon as a Muslim commits violence, there is an automatic decree that it is “terrorism” even though no such assumption arises from similar acts committed by non-Muslims. That is precisely my point.

He means, I think, by “terrorism” how terrorism is viewed by the majority in contemporary America. And there is some truth to this point – unfortunately. But does Glenn ever wonder why? Extremist Islam has developed quite a reputation in the last couple of decades, wouldn’t you think? When an al Qaeda enthusiast and religious fanatic decides to bomb the Boston Marathon, is it really outrageous to infer some connection? If he were a Tim McVeigh type, with a web history of black helicopter paranoia, do you think we’d be hemming and hawing about his motives? These terrorist events are designed for maximal media exposure, and they deploy random civilian mass-murder to publicize a cause. They are rational plots.

So to take Glenn’s other examples, they are all hideous killing sprees by gunmen with grudges and fantasies and mental illness. There seemed to be no deeper motive. Fort Hood is a more interesting case – a gun attack on fellow soldiers, while yelling Allah. That seems to me to be clearly at core a terrorist event – but fused with what we can see were workplace issues. He was a Muslim, but the US government continues to describe the attack as an act of workplace violence – not terrorism. I think the evidence points to a confluence of religious radicalism and “going postal.” He attacked his own base and had previously given out cards calling himself a “soldier of Allah.” We have no such workplace frustration to ascribe to Tamerlan: he picked a classic terror target – a televised public event, symbolizing he unity of all people and all faiths in the simple act of running.

Extreme Islamism is a threat to us all. That does not mean we empower it more with Cheney-esque over-reaction or anti-Muslim bigotry (which can create more self-radicalized mass murderers). We can make the distinction between this kind of violent fundamentalism and mainstream Islam, practiced by 99.9 percent of American Muslims. We can stop invading Muslim countries. We can defuse the drama by trying one of the accused in a civilian court. We can ensure that next year’s Boston Marathon is overwhelmed with participants. We should not torture Tsarnaev the way Bush and Cheney did Padilla – on much flimsier grounds. And we can do all this without slipping into the see-no-evil denial that Glenn has, sadly sunk into.

(Photo: Victims are in shock and being treated at the scene of the first explosion that went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. By John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Andrew Stiles, who makes Rush Limbaugh seem bipartisan, wonders if the Obama administration is “trying to maximize the pain of sequestration”:

The FAA has insisted these cutbacks are unavoidable, but the administration has a clear political interest in maximizing the public’s outrage, so critics aren’t buying it. The airline industry has complained that it is caught in the middle of the political fight over sequestration and that the FAA risks interrupting services more than necessary. One industry insider tells National Review Online that the airlines are being used as a “political football” in this debate and suggests that the FAA’s cuts don’t “really have to be done in this way.”

Good try. But wrong: 

[A]ir traffic control slowdowns were totally predictable. At least 70 percent of FAA’s expenses are personnel-related so it was inevitable that the 5.1 percent across-the-board sequester cut would be felt in everything the agency does including — or especially — in its primary function: managing air traffic. When you set up a system like sequestration that requires an agency or department to cut every program, project, and activity by the same percentage, and when an agency’s spending is mostly for salaries and other compensation-related expenses, it’s not hard to see from the start that there has to be an impact on the number of people doing that agency’s work.

No amount of outraged statements from Senate and House Republicans changes that budget reality.

Recent Dish on the sequester here.

Millennials are getting behind the wheel much less:

Between 2001 and 2009, the average yearly number of miles driven by 16- to 34-year-olds dropped a staggering 23 percent. The Frontier Group has the most comprehensive look yet of why younger Americans are opting out of driving. Public transportation use is up 40 percent per capita in this age group since 2001. Bicycling is up 24 percent overall in that time period. And this is true even for young Americans who are financially well off.

Derek Thompson finds that young people “have swapped student loans for mortgage and auto loans”:

They’ve traded cars for college and homes for homework. And that’s okay! Compared to cars and houses, higher education is a much safer investment. For all the media criticism about college losing its luster, you could make a good argument that it’s never been more important. While the returns to college have flattened recently, wage growth has been even weaker (or negative) among non-college grads. As a result, the “bonus” that young workers get from going to college, which economists call, the “college premium,” has tripled in the last 30 years. Today, the share of the 18-24-year-old population enrolled in school is at an all-time high 45 percent today.