Tag: Premium

Bouie questions the point of Rand Paul’s speech this week at Howard University, a historically black college:

I’m not sure Paul deserves any praise for his performance. It would be one thing if Paul had gone to Howard eager to listen as well as speak. Instead, he condescended with a dishonest and revisionist history of the GOP. “He didn’t say anything I didn’t expect,” said one student, a senior majoring in sociology and economics. I couldn’t agree more.

I have to say the sheer lack of any grace among some liberal commenters on what was an obvious outreach to African-Americans depresses me. Josh Marshall piles on:

Yesterday morning Sen. Rand Paul went over to Howard University. And it didn’t go terribly well. One might say that’s only to be expected in a case like this – perhaps even the whole point – since the aim is to break the ice between communities either antagonistic to each other or thoroughly out of communication. But it’s more an example of what happens when a staunch conservative steps out of the GOP’s tightly-drawn racial nonsense bubble and hits an audience not dying to be convinced that the GOP’s problems with non-whites are the results of boffo misunderstandings about a Republican party that is actually the best thing that ever happened to black people.

That’s too harsh, in my view. But maybe it’s because I’m a libertarian and see some key grounds for coalition politics with the specific victims of the drug war: disproportionately young black men. Weigel gets it right:

No one applauded until Paul got to some actual policy. “I am working with Democratic senators to make sure that kids who make bad decisions such as nonviolent possession of drugs are not imprisoned for lengthy sentences,” said Paul. “I am working to make sure that first time offenders are put into counseling and not imprisoned with hardened criminals.” Barack Obama and George Bush did drugs, after all, and they turned out okay because they got “lucky.” … When he left the campus, past the students still holding the “White Supremacy” banner and conducting interviews, Paul remained the Republican most likely to reform mandatory minimums. He remained the most prominent Republican supporter of drug law reform.

Freddie takes Chris Hayes to task for mocking Paul’s speech and overlooking Paul’s comments on the drug war:

The drug war, of course, is one of the most damaging weapons that is employed in this country’s ongoing war on black people. It’s also one of the few places where I ever feel genuine optimism about our coming to legislative progress on race and class injustice. I can actually imagine a Republican coalition working with progressive legislators to help gradually decelerate our ruinous, racist, cruel drug policy. I can’t see that happening, though, if prominent liberal voices like that of Hayes are so busy chuckling and snarking on national television that they give up every opportunity to find common cause.

Right on.

There is simply no question that Margaret Thatcher was a great admirer of the Jewish people and promoted and was influenced by Jewish Brits in a way never seen before:

“As half of one percent of the British population, Jews in the Margaret Thatcher era held 5 of 20 cabinet positions. Her high office Jewish contingent included Nigel Lawson (Chancellor, who resigned over the “Westland Affair”), Leon Brittan (Trade and Industry Secretary), David Young (Minister without portfolio, Malcolm Rifkind (Foreign Secretary), and Keith Joseph… “I was born to a Lithuanian father and am of Jewish descent,” noted Minister David Young. “My only brother, Stewart, is chairman of the BBC. My father used to say, ‘One son deputy chairman of the government, another chairman of the BBC — that’s not bad for immigrants.”

The former Tory prime minister, Harold MacMillan, quipped that there were more “old Estonians in her cabinet than old Etonians” – an almost classic trope of an upper-class Tory condescension toward Jews. She shattered that kind of attitude – and was absolutely right to. Which is why the neocons fall all over her. Kirchick’s piece is insightful when it comes to the cultural and religious affinities Thatcher’s Methodism had with what she saw as Jewish virtues (he could have no better source than John O’Sullivan).

But Jamie simply ignores the factual record of her dealings with the Jewish state. If Thatcher were to do to Israel today what she did in her time in office, I have no doubt that Kirchick would be calling her an anti-Semite. Why? She was often infuriated by Israel’s foreign policy and firmly and consistently opposed the project of Greater Israel, which is now the unspoken goal of the Israel Lobby in America. Ali Gharib examines the official records of her actual history with the state of Israel:

Documents released by the British archives reveal Thatcher as a hard-nosed opponent of Israel’s West Bank settlement project. Just weeks after taking the premiership in May 1979, she hosted Begin, the Israeli leader who’d formed the country’s first right-wing government in 1977, at No. 10 Downing Street. The meeting was reportedly tense: Thatcher’s foreign minister railed against the settlements. Thatcher, as many world leaders then did and today do, believed that settlements imperiled a potential deal that could end the Mideast conflict.

Gharib also relays Thatcher’s reaction to Israel’s ’82 invasion of southern Lebanon to root out the PLO:

Late last year, when previously undisclosed papers on the British reaction became public under the U.K.’s thirty-year rule, Jenni Frazer rounded up the Thatcher government’s sentiments: it was “more concerned with maintaining ostensible balance in the Middle East than in recognising Israel’s determination to stamp out terrorism from its northern border.” Frazer goes on:

Overwhelmed with managing the Falklands War, Mrs. Thatcher—though MP for Finchley and Golders Green—drew a comparison with invaded Lebanon in Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands. Francis Pym, Foreign Secretary, made it clear publicly that Britain wholeheartedly condemned Israel’s invasion. In private, the papers confirm, Britain was furious with Israel. A Foreign Office memo states: “It would be odd if we were now to conduct bilateral business with the Israelis as though nothing had happened.” An invitation to Israel to attend the British Army Equipment Exhibition was withdrawn and licences for arms sales were stopped… .

Today, the notion that the U.S. would stop buying weapons for Israel, let alone block their sales, is unthinkable.

Thatcher, unlike the neocons, believed in international law (she opposed the invasions of Grenada, the Falklands and Lebanon alike), as Scott McConnell notes. And she was not afraid to pressure and punish the Jewish state if she viewed its actions as violations of such law and a threat to long-term peace in the Middle East and British interests. That precise position today is regarded as proof of anti-Semitism by the Greater Israel lobby. I believe in suspending all aid to Israel until it stops the settlements. That’s enough to make me a Jew-baiter in today’s America.

Just one request: call Thatcher an anti-Semite too. Show a little fucking consistency.

The big cuts start to bite this month. What that may mean:

Unemployment checks for people who’ve been without a job for more than 26 weeks are about to get cut by 11 percent. Military contracts are about to get canceled. Medicare patients are being turned away from cancer clinics. Schools will lay off teachers. Infrastructure projects will stop. There will be much more demand for a compromise than there is now. There will be much more political anger than there is now.

This budget sets up that debate. Republicans are, at this point, out of excuses. They can’t say the president isn’t reaching out to them. They can’t say he’s not willing to make painful concessions — or, to rephrase, they can say that, but given all the on-the-record quotes of Republican leaders demanding the White House accept means-testing Medicare and chained-CPI, no one will take them seriously. The White House is calling their bluff. The question is whether, as the pressure mounts, they double down against compromise, or they begin to fold.

Meanwhile, cuts could prompt more government workers to become spies:

Lawmakers and officials who oversee security clearances say the abrupt cut to roughly 20 percent of federal workers’ pay is pushing tens of thousands into the category of financially strapped government workers for whom foreign agents look in recruiting moles and spies. It may sound far-fetched, but those with experience in espionage cases said the threat is genuine.

Waldman is unimpressed by the Senate’s gun control bill:

Toomey and Manchin’s proposal would close the “gun-show loophole,” meaning if you buy a gun at a show you’ll have to submit to a background check. It also covers sales over the Internet. What it doesn’t cover is private sales between one person and another. You’ve probably heard the figure that 40 percent of gun sales happen outside licensed dealers, and while the evidence for this figure is thin, nobody really knows if it’s too high or too low. Furthermore, nobody knows what proportion of that 40 percent occurs at shows, and what proportion happens when a guy sells a gun to his neighbor’s cousin or to some dude he met at a party or to one of the attendees at his garage sale.

Jacob Sullum asks how background checks relate to Sandy Hook:

Since Manchin describes that requirement as a response to the Sandy Hook massacre, you might reasonably surmise that Lanza bought the rifle he used in the attack from a private seller at a gun show or after seeing it advertised online. But you would be wrong, since the rifle belonged to Lanza’s mother, who purchased it legally from a federally licensed gun dealer after passing a background check. And if Lanza had tried to buy a gun on his own, it looks like he also would have passed a background check, since it seems he did not have a disqualifying criminal or psychiatric record, which is typically the case for mass shooters.

Judis would prefer that Congress focus on the economy:

It would be ridiculous to say that reducing inequality in the United States, and providing much greater opportunity in cities would eliminate homicide as a problem. But it would be equally ridiculous to say that an improvement in the country’s economic fortunes, and the reduction in the wild disparities in income, would have no effect on diminishing the homicide rate. Why, for instance, did the homicide rate in the United States start to decline in the mid-1990s? Some of it had to do with declining access to crack cocaine; but it also had to do with the economic expansion that took place. Gun control is part of the solution to homicide; but so, too, is economic improvement.

My thoughts on the feasibility of pay-meters for most bloggers:

On a related note, the Dutch continue to experiment with pay models:

De Nieuwe Pers recently launched in the Netherlands as an online platform for freelance journalists. Users pay €4.49 a month for access to all content on its app or website. But what stands out is the possibility to subscribe to individual reporters, for €1.79 a month. Think True/Slant, but with paywalls. “News has become more personal,” Alain van der Horst, editor in chief of De Nieuwe Pers, told me. “People are interested in the opinions, the beliefs, the revelations of a certain journalist they know and trust, much more than an anonymous person who writes for a large publication.”

Karskens concurs, stressing that a personal brand is key in this business model. “People read my stuff because I have a clear, crystalized opinion based on over 32 years of war correspondence,” he said. “This really works well for journalists with a distinctive character. It’s not for the average desk slave.”

Van der Horst also thinks paying per journalist is fairer to the readers than subscribing to a publication as a whole. “When you subscribe to a newspaper, you’ll get the full package. Even if you always throw out the sports section, you’ll still get it. With this model you decide: ‘This is what I want to read, so I’ll pay for it — what I don’t read, I don’t pay for.’”

We recently spotlighted another Dutch experiment, De Correspondent. Nieman Lab’s profile of the newspaper reveals several parallels with the Dish model:

De Correspondent’s record-breaking [$1.3 million crowdfunded] campaign is remarkable, not least because even those paying up aren’t clear on what the platform will look like when it launches in September. “That’s for a very good reason,” Wijnberg said — “we don’t really know yet.”

“When you try to sell an idea, it’s very easy to refer to what people know — ‘the platform looks like this, and you can compare the writing style with that’,” he said. “We didn’t want to do that, because we really wanted to be able to create something new — start with a clean slate.”

Here’s what we do know about De Correspondent: It promises to break away from the daily news cycle by focusing on context, not just what happened in the past 24 hours — new content that isn’t driven by “the news.” Individual correspondents, many of them famous or semi-famous in the Netherlands, will lead as “guides” — deciding the news agenda, and making their choices explicit. …

For an idea of what the new publication might look like, check out its 10-item manifesto (translated into English): Daily, but beyond the issues of the day. From news to new. No political ideology, but journalistic ideals. Themes and interconnections. Journalism over revenues. From readers to participants. No advertisers, but partners. No target groups, but kindred spirits. Ambitious in ideals, modest about wisdom. Fully digital.

A-fucking-men. And may sponsored content die on its corrupting vine. One reader who finally decided to pay for content writes:

I just wanted to pass along a thought on subscribing today. I’ve been mulling over subscribing since this all started, but hadn’t yet made the plunge, partly because I am unsure about the long-term feasibility of the direct pay-for-content model on the larger scale for the media. But this week I realized what it is about your site that’s different and worth stepping out and supporting this model: you don’t just offer a point of view on the blog, but a perspective. Except for the wire services, there’s little out there that doesn’t support a point of view, but you go beyond that in speaking personally, something I realized as I’ve read your pieces on David Kuo (as an evangelical living in DC with tangential connections to David) and Margaret Thatcher (as a struggling conservative) this week. I am grateful that you can admit to your readers that areas are only important when they are lived.
So, thank you for being authentic. It’s what makes the Dish rise above everything else out there today.

Erin Sheehy documents the latest extraction-based industry to hit Alaska:

Over the past few years, the number of reality television shows set in Alaska has skyrocketed. In 2012, more than a dozen aired on major cable networks. Most of the programming is of the “man versus nature” variety: shows like Deadliest Catch, Gold Rush Alaska, and even Ice Road Truckers tend to focus on the strange and dangerous professions of the Last Frontier. But forays into human drama have been made. This past fall the Military Wives series held a casting call in Anchorage, and in 2011, TLC aired the short-lived Big Hair Alaska, a show about Wasilla’s Beehive Beauty Shop, where Sarah Palin used to get her hair done. The film and television industry in Alaska has grown so rapidly that in 2010 the Anchorage Daily News started a blog called “Hollywood Alaska,” which reports on the latest industry news and routinely asks whether the state is getting enough return on this media gold rush.

The Lower 48’s obsession with the Last Frontier isn’t the only cause of the boom. In 2009, the Alaskan government began offering subsidies that allowed producers to recoup up to 44 percent of their spending in the state. The subsidy program—one of the most generous in the country—has been controversial.

Before 2009, shooting an entire feature film or TV series in Alaska tended to be prohibitively expensive. (Northern Exposure, the famous 1990s show about a Jewish doctor from New York who moves to a small town in Alaska, was shot entirely in Washington State.) More filming means more out-of-state film crews spending money on food and lodging, and could potentially be a boon for tourism, but the latest reports from the Alaska Film Office show that only around 15 percent of the total wages paid by these tax-subsidized productions have gone to Alaskans over the past three years. On the 2010 season of Deadliest Catch, Alaskan workers earned less than $20,000, while out-of-state workers took home more than $1.3 million. And although an Alaskan setting is central to the plotline of most of the films and shows that are shot here, some production companies have come under fire for abusing the subsidy. Baby Geniuses 3, a movie about crime-fighting babies and toddlers, paid less than 6 percent of all wages to in-state employees, and its plot brought little attention to “Alaskan issues.”

Several readers beg to differ with this one:

“The right to bear arms was an essential right in 1787 because of the risk of Indian incursion, not as a bulwark against tyranny or a defense against foreign invasion.” Your reader is missing a bit of history of the Revolution. The fact is that the British authorities were doing exactly what the correspondent suggests they were not – seizing arms (gunpowder and weapons) – in a bid to squelch resistance in New England. The inaugural event of the Revolution, the April 19 raid on Lexington and Concord, was in fact triggered by Army regulars (Redcoats) marching to seize these arms. Nor was this the first instance of this behavior, there were many raids on New England’s powder houses in the preceding year. What Paul Revere and his fellow riders achieved was to get word of the impending seizure out in enough time for the well-regulated militias of the towns to the West and North of Boston formed up and able to resist.

In short, a tyrannical government seizing arms in a bid to prevent citizens from protecting their liberty was a very real experience for the Constitution’s framers and to suggest otherwise “shows a complete lack of understanding of both the document and the history of its writing.”

Another:

If your reader is interested in knowing what the Founders actually considered a “well regulated militia” to be, I refer him or her to the Militia Acts of 1792 passed by the second Congress, in which a good number of those Founders were sitting and knew perfectly well what they meant by “well regulated”. And what they meant bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to what your reader just wrote.

Those acts conscripted every able bodied white male between 18 and 45 years of age in the country (with some exceptions based on occupation) into the militias. It mandated they be organized into divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions and companies organized by the state legislatures. It required all members in those militias to provide specific items of equipment (musket, ammo, knapsack, bayonet, gunpowder, etc.). To regularly report for muster and training. Militia members were subject to court martial for disobeying orders. And they were at the call of the president to either defend the nation against invasion or to enforce the laws of the nation if he felt it necessary to employ them to that end. One example is the Whiskey Rebellion, when President Washington personally marched 13,000 militia out to Pennsylvania to inform a bunch of farmers threatening tax collectors that, oh yes, they WOULD pay their taxes.

THAT is what the Founders idea of a well-regulated militia was. We know because they created them. The idea that it was any yahoo with a rifle who wanted to call himself a member of “the militia” is a modern invention created by people like the NRA.

Another:

I have to take issue with your reader’s relatively condescending comment that the earlier reader comment showed a “complete lack of understanding of the [the Bill of Rights] and the history of its writing.”  I think the evidence is strong that Madison modeled the Second Amendment after the English Declaration of Rights of 1689, and that the amendment’s inclusion was due to the fear in the Southern States that the centralization of military authority in Congress could subject them to the risk of slave rebellions if Congress were neglectful of the safety of the Southern slave owners.  (I recommend Volume 31 of the University of California at Davis Law Review (1998) on page 309 for the article “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment”, for an analysis of this point.)

What is clear is that the idea that the Second Amendment’s inclusion in the Bill of Rights was driven by some wish to arm insurrectionists so as to renew the Tree of Liberty in a Jeffersonian sense, is simply not supported by the records of the discussions leading up to it.  The 1994 article by Joyce Malcolm on insurrectionists rights theory,goes to great lengths to explain away English history for inclusion of arms provision in the 1689 Declaration, in order to come up with this right.  This fore-bearer to our Second Amendment provided “[t]hat the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their condition and as allowed by law.” It is more likely that the “as allowed by law” language was to define the right’s applicability to parliament as opposed to the King, and was not a call to create in individual right.

I think it is clear that there were multiple reasons for the Second Amendment, but insurrectionists’ rights were not high among them.  At one level, the amendment supported conscription for the militia by having a source of guns among the population, and at another, the right to have the militias addressed the fears in the south that inadequate financing or deployment of the militia could be used by the Northern states to end slavery.

One more:

Your reader’s criticism of another reader who had earlier referred to the NRA’s having found a Court willing to ignore the words “militia” and “well-regulated” in the Second Amendment is itself flawed, at least with regard to its reliance on the amicus brief filed in the McDonald case by Jack Balkin and other constitutional law professors.  That amicus brief addresses only the issue whether

the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to protect substantive, fundamental rights, including the individual right to keep and bear arms at issue in this case.

That’s from the first page of the amicus brief. Remember that the Court had found the individual right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment earlier in Heller.  But the amendment only limits the power of the federal government. The question in McDonald was whether the ruling in Heller applied to the States and their political subdivisions via the Fourteenth Amendment.  This was the narrow legal issue the amici law professors argued was settled among legal scholars of the left, right and center.  The brief specifically disclaimed taking any position on the question whether the Court’s reading of the Second Amendment was right, and certainly cannot be read as supporting that interpretation.  Immediately after the passage quoted above, the amicus brief states:

Amici do not, in this brief, take a position on whether the particular regulation challenged in this case is constitutional in light of the individual privilege to bear arms, which, as the Court noted in District of Columbia v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2816 (2008), may be regulated to a certain extent.

Brad Leithauser praises the passing down of casual but poetic sayings:

Of all the helpful lessons [my grandfather] imparted to me, I recall nothing in any detail. No, after all these years, I can retrieve verbatim only one thing he ever said, and this didn’t originate in his dutiful tutoring. It was a spontaneous remark. One December day, he and I were sitting in the family room. I was probably seven or eight. I glanced out the window and beheld a miracle: the first snowflakes of the year. I uttered an ecstatic cry: “Look! Look! It’s snowing!” And my grandfather replied, “Never be glad to see the snow.”

I loved my grandfather dearly and felt the loss sharply when he died. That I fail to recall anything else he said sometimes seems like a moral failure. But mostly I see it as an example—again—of the fateful caprices by which certain word clusters survive the decades. For this particular advice reverberates within me still: “Never be glad to see the snow.” It’s an apt follow-up to “You think you’re happy now,” or “This may look like a good thing.” And it’s a line that would fit neatly into any iambic tetrameter verse. It would make a perfect refrain in an old-fashioned poem about the disillusionments of youth: “The road is longer than you know. / Never be glad to see the snow.” Or “We hear his echo as we go: / Never be glad to see the snow.”

Similar catchphrases, in which casual comments are promoted into a sort of immortality, doubtless exist in nearly every family, every close friendship. I find this notion deeply heartening—that people are everywhere being quoted for lines they themselves have long forgotten. And of course each of us is left to wonder whether, right at this moment, we’re being quoted in some remote and unreckonable context.

Whether or not companies can hold onto your data forever has become a pressing question for advocates of online privacy. One of those advocates is Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, who tells Kate Connolly that being able to forget something is an essential part of being human:

Our brains reconstruct the past based on our present values. Take the diary you wrote 15 years ago, and you see how your values have changed. There is a cognitive dissonance between now and then. The brain reconstructs the memory and deletes certain things. It is how we construct ourselves as human beings, rather than flagellating ourselves about things we’ve done.

But digital memories will only remind us of the failures of our past, so that we have no ability to forget or reconstruct our past. Knowledge is based on forgetting.

His solution?

Mayer-Schönberger, who advises companies, governments and international organisations on the societal effects of the use of data, advocates an “expiration date” (a little like a supermarket use-by date) for all data so that it can be deleted once it has been used for its primary purpose. “Otherwise companies and governments will hold on to it for ever.”

Josh Keating explores the complications:

More media is moving online, and digital records will increasingly be the only ones available.

If a politicians made racist comments in a newsletter in the 1980s, the record has hung around for future journalists to discover. Should they be allowed to disappear just because they’re written on a blog?

Responding to the objection that Google’s backups will make full deletion impossible, Mayer-Schönberger says “But if you can be deleted from Google’s database, ie if you carry out a search on yourself and it no longer shows up, it might be in Google’s back-up, but if 99% of the population don’t have access to it you have effectively been deleted,” he said.

Under this scenario, Google would have access to information that 99 percent of the population didn’t. Right to be forgotten laws may aim to empower users, but it seems to me that they would leave the search engines with the power in the relationship.