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Please Help Me Interpret Michael Kinsley

by MiguelDelgadill Posted on May 29, 2014

Mother Jones

Yesterday I was pondering whether to write something about the great Kinsley-Greenwald-Sullivan-Etc. contretemps related to Michael Kinsley’s unflattering review of Glenn Greenwald’s latest book. Long story short, I think the entire thing is idiotic, and maybe I’ll blather about that at greater length someday. Then again, maybe not.

But there is one thing I’d like to get a crowdsourced opinion about. Here’s a paragraph Kinsley wrote about whether people like Greenwald have the right to expose secrets that the government thinks are dangerous to reveal:

The question is who decides. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government. No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay. But ultimately you can’t square this circle. Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald.

So here’s my question: what do you think Kinsley is trying to say in the bolded passage? Here are a few possibilities:

  1. The government should adopt policies that reduce the number of secrets it keeps.
  2. When the press gets its hands on a secret, it should “tilt” in favor of publication—but the government should still get the final say.
  3. When the press gets its hands on a secret, it should “tilt” in favor of publication—but it should also listen seriously to the government’s arguments in favor of continued secrecy.
  4. Something else.

For what it’s worth, my interpretation of this was #2. Is this wrong? Help me out in comments. What’s your reading of this?

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Please Help Me Interpret Michael Kinsley

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Here’s Why Trade Schools Continue to Suck So Badly

by EricUmifqgovmol Posted on May 29, 2014

Mother Jones

For-profit colleges—aka trade schools—have a terrible track record. On average, their students rack up tons of debt and very few of them ever graduate. So why is it so hard to do something about them? Henry Farrell asks Suzanne Mettler about the politics of these schools:

Democrats worried about poverty used to defend for-profit colleges against fiscally conservative Republicans. Now Republicans (together with a few Democrats) are defending for-profit colleges against Democrats and reformers. Why did the partisan politics of for-profit education change so dramatically over a couple of decades?

During the Reagan Administration, Secretary of Education William Bennett criticized the for-profits as “diploma mills designed to trick the poor into taking on federally-backed debt,” and in 1990, Sens. Bob Dole and Phil Gramm introduced legislation to regulate them. Since the mid-1990s, however, GOP critics vanished after some party leaders began to champion the for-profits as a private-sector alternative to the higher education establishment. Given the dynamics of rising partisan polarization, the rank-and-file quickly fell in line. Some Democrats now seek to represent constituents who have been taken advantage of by such schools and incurred unpayable debts, but others continue to defend them.

Lovely, isn’t it? Democrats were finally ready to concede a point to Republicans, but apparently the horror of bipartisan agreement was too much for them. Still, I suppose there was never any real prospect of agreement anyway. I imagine that Republicans merely wanted to axe federal funding and let it go at that, while Democrats probably wanted to make for-profit schools perform better. The fundamental chasm between wanting to help poor people and not caring about poor people was undoubtedly never in any danger of being bridged.

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Here’s Why Trade Schools Continue to Suck So Badly

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Obama: Some of America’s "Most Costly Mistakes" Come From Relying Too Much on the Military

by BelleCorrigan Posted on May 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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President Obama today:

To say that we have an interest in pursuing peace and freedom beyond our borders is not to say that every problem has a military solution. Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences, without building international support and legitimacy for our action, without leveling with the American people about the sacrifices required. Tough talk often draws headlines, but war rarely conforms to slogans. As General Eisenhower, someone with hard-earned knowledge on this subject, said at this ceremony in 1947, “War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.”

….America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership. But U.S. military action cannot be the only, or even primary, component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

It’s nice to hear Obama say this so directly. Oh, the usual suspects will howl, but no one who has paid even the slightest attention to the history of the past 50 or 60 years can really question this. Our world isn’t yet beyond the need for war, but for war to be an effective instrument of policy it needs to be used judiciously. It needs to be used when core interests are at stake and, equally importantly, it needs to be used only when it’s likely to succeed on its own terms. If we don’t know how to win, or if we have unrealistic ideas of what it even means to win—both of which were the case in Afghanistan and Iraq—then we shouldn’t fight. This isn’t a matter of deep foreign policy thinking, it’s just common sense. Like it or not, there are lots of problems in the world that US military force can’t solve.

On another note, I was intrigued, toward the end of Obama’s speech, at the parts that got applause from the West Point cadets. Here’s a sample:

Having other nations maintain order in their own neighborhoods lessens the need for us to put our own troops in harm’s way. It’s a smart investment. It’s the right way to lead. (Applause.)….What makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions. (Applause.)

And that’s why I will continue to push to close Gitmo, because American values and legal traditions do not permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders. (Applause.) That’s why we’re putting in place new restrictions on how America collects and uses intelligence, because we will have fewer partners and be less effective if a perception takes hold that we’re conducting surveillance against ordinary citizens. (Applause.)….We’re strengthened by civil society. We’re strengthened by a free press. We’re strengthened by striving entrepreneurs and small businesses. We’re strengthened by educational exchange and opportunity for all people and women and girls. That’s who we are. That’s what we represent. (Applause.)

The cadets were applauding multinational engagements, international law, closing Guantanamo, cutting down on the surveillance state, and the use of soft power. I confess that I wouldn’t have guessed that these points would get the strongest response from an audience of West Point graduates. But I’m not sure if that says more about them or me.

David Corn has some more thoughts about Obama’s speech here, and Max Fisher has a pretty good rundown here of both the benefits and the pitfalls of Obama’s approach. I think he goes too far when he describes it as a “superdove foreign policy doctrine,” but his criticisms are worth reading anyway.

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Obama: Some of America’s "Most Costly Mistakes" Come From Relying Too Much on the Military

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Teenagers Are No Longer the Scary Delinquents of 30 Years Ago

by IsabelM62ik Posted on May 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sarah Kliff says today’s teenagers are “the best-behaved generation on record”:

The Centers for Disease Control released a monster report last week on the state of Americans’ health. The 511-page report makes one thing abundantly clear: teens are behaving better right now than pretty much any other time since the federal government began collecting data.

The teen birth rate is at an all-time low….High school seniors are drinking less, smoking less, and barely using cocaine….

And, of course, the rate of violent crime has plummeted among teenagers, as Dick Mendel documents here. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’d suggest that all of this is at least partially the result of the end of leaded gasoline in America.

What’s happening today isn’t an aberration. Teenagers from the mid-60s through the mid-90s were the aberration. We managed to convince ourselves during that era that something had gone permanently wrong, but it wasn’t so. The ultra-violent gangs and reckless behavior that became so widespread simply wasn’t normal, any more than expecting teenagers to sit around in kumbaya circles would be normal. Nor had anything gone fundamentally wrong with our culture. It was the result of defective brain development caused by early exposure to lead.

I’ll never be able to prove this. No one ever will. The data is simply not rich enough, and it never will be. Nevertheless, what evidence we do have sure points in this direction. And here’s why it’s important. Even if we never clean up another microgram of lead, we’ve nonetheless cleaned up most of the lead that we poisoned our atmosphere with in the postwar years. So if the lead hypothesis is true, it means that our default fear of teenagers—beaten into us during the scary lead years—is no longer accurate. They simply aren’t as dangerous or as reckless as they used to be, and that isn’t going to change. We don’t need to be as frightened of them as we used to be. In the same way that we have to get over economic fears rooted in the 70s or the Great Depression that are no longer meaningful, we need to get over our widespread fear of teenagers that’s no longer meaningful either.

Today’s teenagers have grown up with more or less normal brain development. Some will be nice kids, some will become gang leaders. That’s always the case. But speaking generally, if you meet a group of teenagers today, they’re no more likely to be especially scary than they were in the 40s or 50s. They’re just teenagers. It’s probably going to take a while for everyone to adjust to this, but the time to start is now. Decently behaved teenagers are here to stay.

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Teenagers Are No Longer the Scary Delinquents of 30 Years Ago

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Patent Court Judge Steps Down After Cozy Relationship to Patent Attorney Becomes Public

by JanetteRichmond Posted on May 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tim Lee writes about a recent scandal at the federal circuit court that specializes in patent cases:

Last week Judge Randal Rader, the court’s chief judge, admitted that he wrote an effusive email to patent attorney Edward Reines. The email praised the attorney’s work and encouraged him to share the email with potential clients, a breach of judicial impartiality. The revelation has forced Rader step down as the court’s chief effective this Thursday. Rader plans to stay on the court as a circuit judge. The Federal Circuit was also forced to re-consider two cases involving Reines after Rader retroactively recused himself from them.

Rader’s indiscretion is the last straw for Jeff John Roberts of GigaOm (no relation to the chief justice, as far as I know), who writes: “the Federal Circuit looks beyond salvaging. It’s time for Congress to disband the court.”

The problem with the patent court is that it seems to have suffered the equivalent of regulatory capture. I don’t know the backgrounds of the judges on the court, but they’re awfully prone to upholding patent claims. They’re sympathetic in terms of broad legal interpretations, widening the scope of software patents far beyond what Supreme Court precedent requires (or even suggests), and they’re sympathetic in terms of specific cases, where they rule in favor of plaintiffs well over half the time (see chart on right).

I don’t know if getting rid of the patent court and simply allowing patent cases to be heard by ordinary circuit courts is the right answer. That’s how patent cases used to be heard, but there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Besides, that would require congressional action, and what are the odds of that? What’s more, if Congress did rouse itself to do something about this, a better course of action would be legislation that explicitly reins in the scope of software patents and does more to make patent trolling less lucrative. That would be the right thing to do. We can keep hoping, anyway.

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Patent Court Judge Steps Down After Cozy Relationship to Patent Attorney Becomes Public

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Obamacare and the Hack Gap: A Case Study

by d2wk58 Posted on April 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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“Watch the right search desperately for bad news on Obamacare,” says the headline to Michael Hiltzik’s piece a couple of days ago about the right, um, desperately searching for bad news on Obamacare. And it’s true. Obamacare is a great example of the famous hack gap.

Don’t get me wrong. We lefties generally try to portray Obamacare as a success. You won’t find Diogenes on either side. But I read lots of lefties who write about health care, and they’ve generally been willing to acknowledge Obamacare’s problems. The federal website rollout was a disaster. The insurance pools so far seem to have fewer of the young and healthy than we’d hoped. Narrow networks are a significant problem, especially in some states. We don’t know yet how many Obamacare enrollees were previously uninsured—and in any case, the number appears to be less than CBO projected earlier this year. Etc.

But unless I’m reading the wrong conservatives, you simply see nothing of this sort on the right. Their coverage of Obamacare is simply an endless search for increasingly strained ways to deny that anything even slightly positive has happened. The Obama administration is lying about its numbers. If they’re not lying, the figures are meaningless anyway until they’ve been unskewed. Premiums are skyrocketing. People are being tossed off their plans and thrown in the street. The budget projections are a joke. Cancer patients are dying for lack of doctors to see them. Hours are being cut back and part-time workers are being fired. Fewer people have coverage now than before Obamacare started up.

I could go on. And on. And on. This is the hack gap in all its glory. There’s simply no willingness on the right to acknowledge any success at all. And even when they’re forced to concede that maybe there are a few people benefiting from Obamacare, it’s just an opportunity to rail about Democrats handing out bennies to inner-city moochers like a modern-day Boss Tweed. Welcome to America, ladies and gentlemen.

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Obamacare and the Hack Gap: A Case Study

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Senate Torture Report Starts to Leak

by EnriqueBarrier Posted on April 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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In an entirely unsurprising development, it appears that the Senate report on CIA torture is starting to get leaked. Today, McClatchy reports the complete list of findings from the report, including these:

The CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques did not effectively assist the agency in acquiring intelligence or in gaining cooperation from detainees.
The CIA inaccurately characterized the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation techniques to justify their use.
The CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques was brutal and far worse than the agency communicated to policymakers.
The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making. The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program. The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General.
The CIA manipulated the media by coordinating the release of classified information, which inaccurately portrayed the effectiveness of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

The whole story is here, along with the complete list of findings. I expect more like this in the future unless the CIA stops slow rolling its declassification process and allows the report to be substantially released.

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Senate Torture Report Starts to Leak

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Two French Unions Ban Work Email After 6 pm

by FilomenaBrother Posted on April 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Huh. A couple of white-collar unions in France have signed a new labor agreement:

The legally binding deal, signed by employers’ federations and unions representing almost one million workers in the digital and consultancy sectors, stipulates that employees should be left alone when they are out of the office.

Staff will be ordered to switch off their professional phones and avoid looking at work-related emails or documents on their tablets and computers. Businesses will be required to ensure that workers are under no pressure to check their messages.

The ban takes effect at 6 pm each night. Remarkable.

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Two French Unions Ban Work Email After 6 pm

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Can Anyone Win the 2016 Republican Nomination?

by XavierT89k Posted on April 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ben Smith pours cold water on the idea of Jeb Bush running for president:

The notion that Jeb Bush is going to be the Republican presidential nominee is a fantasy nourished by the people who used to run the Republican Party. Bush has been out of a game that changed radically during the 12 years(!) since he last ran for office. He missed the transformation of his brother from Republican savior to squish; the rise of the tea party; the molding of his peer Mitt Romney into a movement conservative; and the ascendancy of a new generation of politicians — Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, among them — who have been fully shaped by and trained in that new dynamic. Those men occasionally, carefully, respectfully break with the movement. Scorning today’s Republican Party is, by contrast, the core of Jeb’s political identity.

There’s more, and Smith makes a good case without even bothering to mention Bush fatigue.

But I have to say that I’m mystified right now. In 2012, from the very start, I thought Mitt Romney would win the nomination. Basically, the whole contest boiled down to Mitt and the Seven Dwarves, and eventually I figured Mitt would stomp each dwarf and then, battered and bruised, win the nomination.

But this time around, it’s just dwarves. Like Smith, I have a hard time seeing Jeb Bush making a serious run. Chris Christie still seems terminally damaged by Bridgegate, though I suppose that’s still up in the air depending on what future investigations reveal. Beyond that, I guess Scott Walker is still a possibility—though, in the immortal words of Ann Widdecombe, it’s always seemed as if there’s a bit of the night about him. And Paul Ryan, of course, though it sure doesn’t seem like he’s seriously interested in running.

Beyond that, it’s just the usual clown show of nutballs and C-list wannabes. You can make a great case for why none of them can possibly win. And yet, someone has to win. It’s a mystery.

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Can Anyone Win the 2016 Republican Nomination?

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Guess What? Greece Is Finally Starting to Recover

by LibbyHammqmm Posted on April 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Apropos of nothing in particular, I want to highlight this column from Hugo Dixon that I found at Counterparties yesterday:

Greece is undergoing an astonishing financial rebound. Two years ago, the country looked like it was set for a messy default and exit from the euro. Now it is on the verge of returning to the bond market with the issue of 2 billion euros of five-year paper.

There are still political risks, and the real economy is only now starting to turn. But the financial recovery is impressive. The 10-year bond yield, which hit 30 percent after the debt restructuring of two years ago, is now 6.2 percent….The changed mood in the markets is mainly down to external factors: the European Central Bank’s promise to “do whatever it takes” to save the euro two years ago; and the more recent end of investors’ love affair with emerging markets, meaning the liquidity sloshing around the global economy has been hunting for bargains in other places such as Greece.

That said, the centre-right government of Antonis Samaras has surprised observers at home and abroad by its ability to continue with the fiscal and structural reforms started by his predecessors. The most important successes have been reform of the labour market, which has restored Greece’s competiveness, and the achievement last year of a “primary” budgetary surplus before interest payments.

I don’t have anything to say about this, but once a narrative takes hold we sometimes don’t realize it when things change. If you had asked me last week how Greece was doing, I would have answered, “Oh, they’re still screwed.” But apparently they’re doing better. Not out of the woods yet, but doing better. Update your priors.

POSTSCRIPT: If this keeps up—and that’s still a big if—it also might be a lesson in the virtue of kicking the can down the road. Back in 2012, lots of commenters, including me, believed that the eurozone had deep structural problems that couldn’t be solved by running fire drills every six months or so and then hoping against hope that things would get better. But maybe they will! This probably still wasn’t the best way of forging a recovery of the eurozone, but so far, it seems to have worked at least a little better than the pessimists imagined. Maybe sometimes kicking the can is a good idea after all.

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Guess What? Greece Is Finally Starting to Recover

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