From Greenwald’s column at The Intercept:
Come on, Obomber: Can’t you drone some Presbyterians or something?
Open thread.
The Greenwaldiest Greenwald Headline EverPost + Comments (219)
by Betty Cracker| 219 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!
From Greenwald’s column at The Intercept:
Come on, Obomber: Can’t you drone some Presbyterians or something?
Open thread.
The Greenwaldiest Greenwald Headline EverPost + Comments (219)
by David Anderson| 76 Comments
This post is in: Election 2016, Foreign Affairs, Bring On The Meteor, OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!
Jonathan Bernstein describes the invisible primary as being far more important than the visible primaries of people voting as the invisible primary sets the conditions for the visible primary. He sees the selectorate involved in the invisble primary as such:
Remember, we’re in the “invisible primary” stage, in which party actors politicians, party-aligned groups, campaign and governing professionals, activists, formal party officials and staff compete and coordinate over candidates. We’re still two years from the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire getting involved, but for people whose business or passion (or both) is party politics, the nomination contest has been under way for at least a year, and probably a lot more….
The evidence suggests that party actors communicate with each other to some extent through high-profile endorsements. Fundraising matters too, of course, especially to those within the party network. So does recruitment of staff. In each of those realms, the universe of party actors is large, but signs that one candidate is winning a lot of support along with a large share of party-controlled (or at least party-connected) resources is a good sign that a candidate is performing well in the invisible primary.
Balloon-Juice, as a community, is part of the extended party that takes part in the invisible primary. Quickly doing a google search, I see that we’ve raised at least a quarter million dollars on Act Blue in the past couple of years. The commenters and frontpagers here routinely are quoted, massaged and memed in liberal arguments ( eg: peak wingnut, anthrax and tire rims, Equitablog, NY Times and LA Times columnists etc). We have some influence, not much, but some.
The question is how to use that influence as a community if there is a consensus that more bombs and more drones in Iraq is not a particulary wise idea.
by Betty Cracker| 314 Comments
This post is in: Election 2016, Politics, General Stupidity, OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg recently interviewed Hillary Clinton, and Goldberg showcased a remark Clinton made about what some people are calling the Obama Doctrine, “Don’t do stupid shit.” The remark suggests Clinton finds the doctrine lacking:
Professional Clinton-watchers (and there are battalions of them) have told me that it is only a matter of time before she makes a more forceful attempt to highlight her differences with the (unpopular) president she ran against, and then went on to serve. On a number of occasions during my interview with her, I got the sense that this effort is already underway….
At one point, I mentioned the slogan President Obama recently coined to describe his foreign-policy doctrine: “Don’t do stupid shit” (an expression often rendered as “Don’t do stupid stuff” in less-than-private encounters).
This is what Clinton said about Obama’s slogan: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
She softened the blow by noting that Obama was “trying to communicate to the American people that he’s not going to do something crazy,” but she repeatedly suggested that the U.S. sometimes appears to be withdrawing from the world stage.
It’s no accident that blogs and media outlets are making this out to be a huge split between Clinton and Obama; Goldberg sets it up that way. I think it’s worth reading the entire interview that quote came from — it’s a lot more nuanced than the sound byte suggests. Here’s the exchange from which the above was excerpted:
HRC: Great nations need organizing principles, and “Don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organizing principle. It may be a necessary brake on the actions you might take in order to promote a vision.
JG: So why do you think the president went out of his way to suggest recently that that this is his foreign policy in a nutshell?
HRC: I think he was trying to communicate to the American people that he’s not going to do something crazy. I’ve sat in too many rooms with the president. He’s thoughtful, he’s incredibly smart, and able to analyze a lot of different factors that are all moving at the same time. I think he is cautious because he knows what he inherited, both the two wars and the economic front, and he has expended a lot of capital and energy trying to pull us out of the hole we’re in.
So I think that that’s a political message. It’s not his worldview, if that makes sense to you.
The Villagers are going to feast on any suggestion of daylight or discord between the Obamas and the Clintons because they love a soap opera that drives a wedge between Democrats. And some of us are going to make their job easier by looking for a pea of criticism under 25 mattresses of praise.
That quest will be made incredibly easy by the fact that HRC and whomever else runs for the Democratic Party’s 2016 nomination is going to separate him or herself from President Obama’s policies on multiple fronts. They are not going to say Obama is fucking up, but they’ll talk about how they would do things differently or how they see events playing out in the future. That’s the way it works, and if you read Goldberg’s transcript, that’s all HRC is doing.
That said, my major concern about HRC is her hawkishness. That’s why I supported Obama instead of HRC back in 2008 — he recognized the Iraq War as “stupid shit” from the beginning; she didn’t.
The remark highlighted above doesn’t tell us much about Clinton’s organizing principles. When Goldberg questioned her directly on it, her response was “peace, progress and prosperity,” which could have come from a Miss World pageant script.
But she did have a lot to say about the situation in the Middle East, Russia, etc., and also here at home, which, while not as interesting from a purely salacious point of view as a suggestion that she’s criticizing Obama, provides a better indication of how she might act as president. I’d urge anyone who’s interested in that to read the whole damn thing.
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right
Go check on your friendly neigbhorhood Sus scrofa. Examine the potbellied porker ambling down your too-hip avenue. Make sure the boar in the corner sty (you could name it Dick Cheney if you’re that kind of person) is still properly rooting about in his muck. Now look extra carefully: any ailerons, flaps, wings?
They’ve got to be there. See this, from our old friend BoBo:
The Iraqi state is much weaker than the Rwandan one, but, even so, this quick survey underlines the wisdom of the approach the Obama administration is gesturing toward in Iraq: Use limited military force to weaken those who are trying to bring in violence from outside; focus most on the political; round up a regional coalition that will pressure Iraqi elites in this post-election moment to form an inclusive new government. [Emphasis added.]
Now I confess to deep uneasiness about everything David Brooks writes, given the argument from negative authority.* I lack the knowledge to assess but have no faith at all that his potted history of post-genocide Rwanda is reliable. And then there’s Brooks’ usual reflexive nod to the political value of elite authoritarianism. Most of all, nowhere does Brooks acknowledge explicitly that the Bush years were a colossal f**king mistake/moral disaster, nor that he was a complicit cheerleader in that catastrophe.
But here you see Brooks implicitly acknowledging the failure of the neocon adventure and, mirabile dictu, stating without a hedge, an “on the other hand,” or any other qualifier that President Obama is getting it right, is wise.
Smacked in the gob am I.
All I can say is: be careful standing under today as those flocks of pigs fly by.
*I.e. While it’s never reliable to say that because someone is labelled an expert in something, anything they say is likely right (see, e.g. Shockley, William…), it is a very useful heuristic to assume that someone who is wrong a lot is going to be similarly wrong going forward. That’s especially true for someone — so many in our pundit class — who are wrong for a living.
Image: Max Liebermann, Schweinekoben, Wochenstube [My German sucks, but the Google machine tells me that this could be read as “Pigsty, Maternity room” — any help from the commentariat gratefully received], 1887
Porcine Flight 476, You Are Cleared For LandingPost + Comments (79)
by DougJ| 91 Comments
This post is in: OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!, Rare Sincerity
Obamacare has won. And that’s why Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius can resign.
Calls for Sebelius’s resignation were almost constant after Obamacare’s catastrophic launch. The problem wasn’t just that Sebelius had presided over the construction of a fantastically expensive web site that flatly didn’t work. It was that she didn’t know healthcare.gov was going to instantly, systemically fail. And so the White House didn’t know that healthcare.gov was going to instantly, systemically fail. The demands that Sebelius to step down — or be fired — were as deafening inside the building as outside of it.
But President Obama refused. As National Journal’s Major Garrett reported, Obama believes that “scaring people with a ceremonial firing deepens fear, turns allies against one another, makes them risk-averse, and saps productivity.” Moreover, there was too much to be done to fire one of the few people who knew how to finish the job. Sebelius would stay. The White House wouldn’t panic in ways that made it harder to save the law.
I love the smell of resignation in the eveningPost + Comments (91)
by John Cole| 51 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!, Security Theatre
Assange apparently will benefit from our somewhat deference to the press:
The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials.
The officials stressed that a formal decision has not been made, and a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks remains impaneled, but they said there is little possibility of bringing a case against Assange, unless he is implicated in criminal activity other than releasing online top-secret military and diplomatic documents.
The Obama administration has charged government employees and contractors who leak classified information — such as former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning — with violations of the Espionage Act. But officials said that although Assange published classified documents, he did not leak them, something they said significantly affects their legal analysis.
Alright lawyers, what say you?
by David Anderson| 42 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!
President Obama’s press conference this afternoon threw out a series of numbers concerning interest in subsidized health insurance on the Exchanges. What do these numbers actually mean from an insurer’s perspective?
So far, the national website, HealthCare.gov, has been visited nearly 20 million times. Twenty million times.
This means very little. For comparison’s sake, Balloon Juice has had slightly less than 10% of that traffic in the same time span. These hits are not particularly informative as they could be the curious bloggers, they could be people who are looking and then walking away, and they could be people who are interested.
We know that nearly one-third of the people applying in Connecticut and Maryland, for example, are under 35 years old.
If these numbers hold up and can be nationalized at scale, then the financing of the Exchanges works out very easily. I am slightly curious as to why these two states are examples as the demographic/actuarial concerns are national lack of interest in young people in these products. I would love to see what the age profiles look like in California (as it is the biggest), Texas, and Kentucky look like.
And all told, more than half a million consumers across the country have successfully submitted applications through federal and state marketplaces.
The actual number is 476,000 or more applications have been submitted for eligibility verification. This is an important number. These are the subscribers who have created an account, filled out the first round of applications with family size, birth dates, and income information and sent it in for verification. A very high percentage of these applications will result in added medical coverage. The question is what is the average number of people on an application and what is the conversion rate to Medicaid versus Exchange. As an insurance geek, 476,000 applications indicates 476,000 potential contracts, and probably 800,000 or more actual covered lives. Initial numbers out of states indicate a 40% to 50% Medicaid eligibility rate, so assuming a fairly high buy rate for Exchange eligible applicants, we’re looking at 5% to 7% of the Exchange goal population has already applied.
Trained representative, it usually takes about 25 minutes for an individual to apply for coverage, about 45 minutes for a family. Once you apply for coverage, you will be contacted by email or postal mail about your coverage status.
That actually is really impressive for initial intake and application.
Right now, the enrollment numbers are low as insurers don’t consider someone enrolled until either the check has been received or the credit card swiped for the first month’s premium. January 1st is the first day of coverage, and payment is not due until Dec. 15th, so quite a few people are making choices and getting in line to get on a plan but have not written the check or authorized the automatic charge against the credit card.