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Bowe Bergdahl, Then and Now

by GuadaluMcclanah Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Speaking of Bowe Bergdahl, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt have a fascinating piece in the New York Times that just went up. They got hold of a detailed report that was written two months after Bergdahl walked off, and what makes it interesting is that it’s based on extensive contemporaneous interviews. This allows us to compare what people are saying now with what they were saying back then. For example, there’s this:

A classified military report detailing the Army’s investigation into the disappearance of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in June 2009 says that he had wandered away from assigned areas before — both at a training range in California and at his remote outpost in Afghanistan — and then returned, according to people briefed on it.

….Whether Sergeant Bergdahl was a deserter who never intended to come back, or simply slipped away for a short adventure amid an environment of lax security and discipline and then was captured is one of many unanswered questions about his disappearance. The issue is murky, the report said, in light of Sergeant Bergdahl’s previous episodes of walking off.

And this:

The report is said to contain no mention of Sergeant Bergdahl having left behind a letter in his tent that explicitly said he was deserting and explaining his disillusionment, as a retired senior military official briefed on the investigation at the time told The New York Times this week. Asked about what appeared to be a disconnect, the retired officer insisted that he remembered reading a field report discussing the existence of such a letter in the early days of the search and was unable to explain why it is not mentioned in the final investigative report.

And this:

Its portrayal of him as a soldier is said to be positive, with quotes from both commanders and squadmates — apparently including some of the men now criticizing him — describing him as punctual, always in the correct uniform and asking good questions. It quotes colleagues as saying that he expressed some boredom and frustration that they were not “kicking down doors” more to go after insurgents who were destroying schools.

And this:

The report is also said to contain no mention of any alleged intercepts of radio or cellphone traffic indicating that Sergeant Bergdahl was asking villagers if anyone spoke English and trying to get in touch with the Taliban, as two former squadmates told CNN this week in separate interviews that they remembered hearing about from a translator who received the report.

The moral of this story is simple: memories can change, and once you’ve taken sides you’re likely to embellish things considerably. The stuff that Bergdahl’s critics are saying today may be accurate, or it may be a product of anger growing out of control over the passage of time. We really need to wait before rushing to judgment.

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Bowe Bergdahl, Then and Now

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America Sucks at Eating Vegetables

by munrhexaa Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hold on a second. Kelsey McKinney draws my attention this morning to the latest USDA report on the kinds of foods we eat, and the chart on the right shows what it has to say about vegetables.

Is this for real? Since when are potatoes vegetables? I mean, I’m delighted by this news since it means my mother has been wrong all these years when she badgers me about not eating enough vegetables. Hell, it turns out that the bag of potato chips in my pantry apparently counts too. I’ll be sure to have some with my lunch today.

Still, I suspect that mom is right, which makes this a pretty depressing chart. Regardless of how the USDA classifies them, I’ll continue to put potatoes (and corn) into the starch food group. Aside from that, it appears that we eat plenty of salad (head lettuce, Romaine lettuce, tomatoes) but not much of anything else. All the things we traditionally think of as vegetables (broccoli, peas, beans, etc.) are consumed in such tiny quantities they don’t even show up.

That’s terrible. Eat your vegetables, America!

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America Sucks at Eating Vegetables

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Rich Doctors Like Republicans; Sorta Rich Doctors Like Democrats

by ElizaTSK Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

We jabber a lot these days about how the real action in income inequality lies in the 1 percent. That is, the big increases haven’t really been between the earnings of, say, teachers and computer programmers, but between computer programmers and Wall Street traders. And rising inequality is even more apparent within the 1 percent: The super rich in the top 0.1 percent are pulling away from the merely rich in the top 1 percent at an astonishing rate.

Today, Sarah Kliff points us to a kinda sorta related chart that’s pretty eye-opening. As high earners, you’d think that doctors would be more likely to contribute money to Republicans than Democrats. But it turns out that isn’t true. A new analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine shows that merely well-off doctors—your allergists, your pediatricians, your pulmonologists—favor Democrats. It’s only when you get into the territory of medical royalty—your surgeons, your urologists, your radiologists—that political contributions start to heavily favor Republicans. Even within one of the best paid professions in the country, there’s a class divide, with the haves favoring Republicans and the have-nots favoring Democrats. That’s fairly remarkable.

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Rich Doctors Like Republicans; Sorta Rich Doctors Like Democrats

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Here’s Why Phoenix Is Ground Zero for the VA Health Care Scandal

by ansonsten Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’ve steered clear of the VA story for the past few days, though not for the obvious reason. Basically, I got to the point where the collective hypocrisy over the whole thing became too much to take. Rather than write an epic rant I might later regret, I decided to just shut up.

However, in one of my last posts on the topic, I urged everyone to keep at least two things in mind. First, there’s a difference between the backlog of vets trying to establish eligibility for VA health care and wait times for vets who are already in the system. Second, always ask: “compared to what?” If you’re claiming that VA health care is terrible on some metric or another, tell us how that compares to private sector health care.

Today, Phil Longman comes along to write knowledgeably about both topics. In particular, he takes on the second one. Here’s Longman on wait-times:

Here’s a key relevant fact that is just the opposite of what most people think. For all the wars we’ve been fighting, the veterans population has been falling sharply….I have visited VA hospitals around the county and often been unnerved by how empty they are. When I visited two of the VA’s four state-of-the-art, breathtakingly advanced polytrauma units, in Palo Alto and Minneapolis, there was hardly a patient to be found.

But at the same time there is a comparatively small countertrend that results from large migrations of aging veterans from the Rust Belt and California to lower-cost retirement centers in the Sun Belt. And this flow, combined with more liberal eligibility standards that allow more Vietnam vets to receive VA treatment for such chronic conditions as ischemic heart disease and Parkinson’s, means that in some of these areas, such as Phoenix, VA capacity is indeed under significant strain.

This regional imbalance in capacity relatively to demand makes it very difficult to manage the VA with system-wide performance metrics. Setting a benchmark of 14 days to see a new primary care doc at a VA hospital or clinic in Boston or Northern California may be completely reasonable. But trying to do the same in Phoenix and in a handful of other sunbelt retirement meccas is not workable without Congress ponying up for building more capacity there.

VA managers have known for years that some of their facilities were gaming the system by using paper lists and other tactics to mask long wait times. Mariah Blake has the whole story here. In other words, contrary to the legion of pundits who seem to have discovered the phrase “perverse incentives” just last week, VA managers aren’t drooling idiots who didn’t realize that incentive systems can be gamed. They knew it perfectly well and were trying to fix it. Rather, the problem was that (a) they failed to set different goals for different facilities, and (b) they’re apparently lousy at oversight.

Regional imbalances also explain why these problems show up only in some facilities and not in others. And it also explains why, on average, VA wait times are actually pretty good and why VA patients generally rate their care higher than private-sector patients. It helps you get a handle on the “compared to what?” question.

Longman’s piece isn’t an apology for the managers who gamed the system in order to spike their bonuses—or for their higher-ups who failed for years to get this under control—but it does explain why it’s happening in some places and not in others. And there’s more to come:

As I’ll argue further in future posts, the key question to ask when confronting the real deficiencies of the VA is “compared to what?” Once that context is established, it becomes clear that VA as a whole continues to outperform the rest of the American health system, making its true lessons extremely important to learn.

Longman is well worth reading if you genuinely want to understand more about how the VA works and how it compares to health care elsewhere. He’ll make you smarter, not dumber.

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Here’s Why Phoenix Is Ground Zero for the VA Health Care Scandal

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Courts Should Be More Willing to Weigh in on "Political" Disputes

by CeceliaEllery Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Does the Bowe Bergdahl outrage on the right have legs? Yesterday I didn’t think so. Today I’m not so sure. We’ll see.

I want to steer clear of the fever swamp stuff for now,1 but one aspect of all this prompts me to finally get around to writing something that’s been on my mind for a while. One of the questions surrounding the Bergdahl prisoner swap is whether President Obama broke the law by releasing five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo without giving Congress its required 30-day notice. Republicans says it’s a clear violation of the law. Obama says the law is an unconstitutional infringement of his Article II authority as commander-in-chief. Who’s right?

Here’s the thing: these kinds of disputes happen all the time in various contexts. Federal and state agencies take various actions and then go to court to defend them. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. It’s pretty routine stuff.

And that’s what should happen here. Congressional Republicans should challenge Obama in court and get a ruling. This would be useful for a couple of reasons. First, it would be a sign of whether Republican outrage is serious. If it is, they’ll file suit. If they don’t file, then we’ll all know that it’s just partisan preening. Second, we’d get a ruling. The scope of the president’s authority would become clear. (Or at least clearer.)

But this doesn’t happen very often. Sometime problems with standing are at issue, but not usually. Congress has standing to challenge this. No, the more usual reason is that it’s hopeless. Courts traditionally treat disputes between the president and Congress as political, and decline to weigh in.

This is fine if a dispute truly is political. But this, like many other so-called political disputes, isn’t. It’s a clear question of how far the president’s commander-in-chief authority extends and what authority Congress has to limit it. If Republicans truly believe Obama violated the law, they should be willing to go to court to prove it. And courts should be willing to hand down a ruling. It’s a mistake to simply wash their hands of these kinds of things.

1Speaking of which, you should have seen my Twitter feed after yesterday’s Bergdahl post. Hoo boy.

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Courts Should Be More Willing to Weigh in on "Political" Disputes

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Good News for August

by Cesar2853jg Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hey! Rick Perlstein’s final (?) volume in his account of the rise of the modern conservative movement, The Invisible Bridge, is coming out on August 5. How did I not know this until now?

In any case, this is good news. I’ll have something good to read in August. And so will you.

UPDATE: I just got an email from Rick:

not final….

Just signed contract to write fourth and final volume taking story through 1980 election.

Hmmm. This is sounding very Game-of-Thrones-ish. It keeps expanding. When volume 4 is released, will we learn that Rick decided the 1980 election really deserved a book 5 all of its own?

In any case, I’ve long felt that that the 70s are one of the most underrated decades. An awful lot of what’s happened since was germinated in the froth of the 70s. It was a decade in which a lot of things—political, cultural, and economic—were in flux; and whether we knew it or not, we were making choices that determined which direction we were going to take over the next few decades. I’m looking forward to Rick’s take on this.

Originally posted here – 

Good News for August

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Yes, Let’s Gid Rid of the White House Press Secretary

by EmiliaKeaton Posted on June 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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After President Obama announced Jay Carney’s resignation as White House press secretary last Friday, a number of people suggested we just do away with the position. Dave Weigel’s take was typical:

The tragedy of the White House beat, as hacks like me keep pointing out, is that the White House is forever innovating ways to make it useless. A specific question about the administration? Why, there’s another department you can direct your questions to. What news there is gets generated by reporters acting on their own, not by anything pulled from the White House press secretary. Jay Carney’s role, and Josh Earnest’s role, is to dodge….

Why do we need this particular public official? As the White House pioneers ways to avoid questions, what’s the point of the job Jay Carney’s now leaving?

This is all true. And yet….I wonder if this lets reporters off too easily? Every once in a while I happen to catch a White House press briefing, either live or on YouTube, and what strikes me is that reporters are less interested in gaining actual information than in simply playing gotcha. Do press secretaries dodge? Sure. But then again, if you ask whether the president still has confidence in Eric Shinseki (this is Weigel’s example), what do you expect? It’s a dumb question, designed to produce theater, not information. Everyone knows perfectly well that you have to express confidence in your deputies until the day you don’t. If you ask about it, you’re just going to get mush.

Ditto for lots of other press room fodder. White House reporters seem to be in love with asking questions that they know perfectly well aren’t going to be answered, for no reason except that it provides a soundbite for the evening news that shows them being “tough.”

If I had to guess, I’d say this culture started with Ron Ziegler and Watergate. In that case, tough, relentless questioning was legitimate. In general, it’s legitimate whenever you’re probing a genuine scandal of some kind. But after Watergate was over, White House reporters somehow got in the habit of treating everything like a scandal, and press secretaries got in the habit of treating every question as an attack. After 40 years of this, it’s become a dysfunctional relationship that does no one any good.

So yeah, get rid of the press secretary. Get rid of the televised daily briefing. Maybe the president should just have a low-level staff that distributes schedules, answers basic questions about presidential actions, and coordinates interview requests. Since these would be low-level aides, nobody would expect them to have direct access to the president, and therefore there’d be no point in badgering them.

And then, everyone could go back to doing actual reporting, instead of pretending that either the press secretary or the president himself will ever produce real news. Tough questioning hasn’t produced any real news from either one of them for years, and that’s unlikely to change.

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Yes, Let’s Gid Rid of the White House Press Secretary

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Surprise! Democrats Benefit More From Obamacare Than Republicans.

by ZHOAlyceiwatjt Posted on June 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sarah Kliff points today to an interesting new Kaiser poll about Obamacare. The question is whether Obamacare has directly helped or hurt your family. It turns out that far more Democrats think it’s helped them than Republicans.

Now, there are some reasons to think this is objectively true. Obamacare exchanges have generally been more effective in blue states, signing up more people. Medicaid expansion has been almost entirely limited to blue states. And Obamacare is directed primarily at those with low incomes, who lean heavily Democratic. Put all this together, and you’d expect that a lot more Democrats have benefited from Obamacare than Republicans.

However, Kliff thinks this doesn’t explain the entire gap. A lot of it is just plain partisanship: “Democrats likely overestimate the health law’s reach, Republicans underestimate and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.” I suspect that’s true, and it’s the chart on the right that demonstrates it most clearly. Take a look at the question in the middle. A full 34 percent of Republicans say they personally know someone who lost their insurance thanks to Obamacare. Given the rather small number of people who actually fall into this category, it’s vanishingly unlikely that 34 percent of Republicans truly know someone who lost coverage. But since they don’t like Obamacare, I suppose they’re more likely to count friends of friends, or someone that Aunt Millie told them about, or someone they heard about at that party last Christmas. Democrats probably act the opposite.

On the other hand, the results of the question about gaining coverage actually seem fairly reasonable to me. I’d expect about a 2:1 difference between Republicans and Democrats, and that’s what we see. For some reason, I suspect that people are answering questions about gaining coverage fairly honestly. It’s only on the issue of losing coverage that partisan loyalties are skewing the results.

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Surprise! Democrats Benefit More From Obamacare Than Republicans.

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Chris Wallace Demands Answers to Yet More Benghazi Questions That Have Already Been Answered Dozens of Times

by JeannetteHuddle Posted on June 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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I was channel surfing this morning and happened to catch a few minutes of Chris Wallace talking to Claire McCaskill. The subject, yet again, was Benghazi. Why did Susan Rice blame the video? Also: Two sources said they knew it was a terrorist attack immediately, so why didn’t Rice say that? We need these questions answered!

I know, I know. It’s my fault for watching TV. But Jesus. Chris Wallace knows the answers to these questions. He has to know. But just in case he still doesn’t, here they are:

Why did Susan Rice blame the video?

On Chris Wallace’s own show aired four days after the Benghazi attack, here’s what Susan Rice said:

Well, first of all, Chris, we are obviously investigating this very closely. The FBI has a lead in this investigation. The information, the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack. That what happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video. People gathered outside the embassy and then it grew very violent and those with extremist ties joined the fray and came with heavy weapons, which unfortunately are quite common in post-revolutionary Libya and that then spun out of control.

But we don’t see at this point signs this was a coordinated plan, premeditated attack. Obviously, we will wait for the results of the investigation and we don’t want to jump to conclusions before then. But I do think it’s important for the American people to know our best current assessment.

Rice was very clear that she was providing a preliminary judgment. She was very clear about the role of the video: It had inspired protests in Cairo earlier in the week. She was very clear that we believed the Cairo protests sparked protests in Benghazi. She was very clear that we believed this provided extremist groups with a chance to launch an opportunistic attack.

In the end, almost all of this turned out to be true. The video did spark protests in Cairo. Some of the Benghazi attackers were motivated by the video. The attack wasn’t premeditated: it was planned no more than a few hours previously. The only part Rice got wrong was that there were, in fact, no initial protests in Benghazi. That was the best reporting we had at the time, but it turned out to be incorrect.

A couple of sources said they reported immediately that it was a preplanned terrorist attack. Why didn’t Rice and the rest of the Obama administration say that?

Because the intelligence community had multiple sources of reporting about Benghazi, and they conflicted. How hard can it be to understand this? Besides, the best evidence we have today is that it wasn’t a preplanned attack. It was an opportunistic attack organized in less than a day. What’s more, the groups that led the attack had only the most tenuous ties to Al Qaeda.

Aside from that, there’s this continuing weird totem around the word “terrorist.” What’s the point of this? Hillary Clinton called the attackers a “small and savage group.” Susan Rice called them extremists. Others used different words. It’s hard to understand why this matters. The attack was carried out by mostly local militant groups with mostly local grievances and no serious ties to Al Qaeda. The precise word you use to describe these folks can’t possibly be that important, can it?

And an aside….

Critics have focused heavily on the fact that the Obama administration blamed the “Innocence of Muslims” video for the violence that had erupted around the Middle East and then, indirectly, provoked the attacks in Benghazi. But I think everyone needs a trip down memory lane here. That video was a very, very big deal at the time. Maybe everyone has now forgotten this, but it did spark riots all over the region and it was the subject of nearly constant coverage in the local media both before and after the Benghazi attacks. The notion that it was responsible for regional violence at the time and at least partially responsible for what happened in Benghazi was hardly some bizarre flight of fancy.

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Chris Wallace Demands Answers to Yet More Benghazi Questions That Have Already Been Answered Dozens of Times

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Who’s Watching the National Spelling Bee Tonight?

by EmmaY68hrsarhc Posted on May 29, 2014

Mother Jones

I’m just curious: Am I the only one who thinks the National Spelling Bee jumped the shark years ago? The escalating ridiculousness of the words, the World Series-esque television coverage, and the inexplicable geek chic surrounding the event have made the whole thing kind of nuts.

Besides, we all have spell check these days, right?

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Who’s Watching the National Spelling Bee Tonight?

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