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Live Coverage: Obama Takes His Boldest Step Ever to Fight Climate Change
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Today is snoozing day. Much like every other day, in fact. I recommend that if you’re having trouble falling asleep, take this picture to bed with you and stare at it until you fall serenely into a zenlike feline state. Let Domino be your sleep guru.
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Why are there more moderate Democrats than moderate Republicans? This has never been because Democrats are spineless wimps who won’t stand up for liberal values. The main reason is simple: there aren’t very many self-identified liberals in America. There never have been. Self-IDed conservatives have outnumbered self-IDed liberals by 10-15 percentage points for decades. This means that Democrats are forced to appeal more to the center than Republicans are.
But Gallup reports that this is changing. On social issues, the ID gap has narrowed to nearly zero. On economic issues conservatives still have a healthy 21 percentage point lead, but that’s way down from 2010. Here’s the chart:
In one sense, you should take this with a grain of salt. Sure, there are now more self-IDed liberals, but that’s compared to 2010, a high-water mark for conservative identification.
In another sense, this is pretty unusual. Normally, the country gets steadily more liberal during Republican presidencies and steadily more conservative during Democratic presidencies. This is, presumably, because voters get increasingly tired of whoever’s in power and more open to the idea that the other guys might have better answers. But this time that hasn’t happened. There’s too much noise in the Gallup chart to draw any definitive conclusions, but if you compare the numbers now to the average from the last few years of the Bush presidency, the country has actually gotten a bit more liberal. That’s something that rarely happens six years into a Democratic presidency.
The trend is more noticeable on social issues, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. On gay rights in particular, the country has plainly moved in the direction of more tolerance, and conservatives are just flatly out of step. As this trend continues—and it’s inexorable at this point—the conservative position strikes more and more people as not merely misguided, but just plain ugly. And you don’t self-ID with an ideology that you think is ugly.
It’s a funny thing. People say they don’t like President Obama’s foreign policy, but it turns out they approve of the specific things he’s doing. They say they don’t like Obamacare, but they like the things Obamacare does. They say they don’t like Obama’s economic policy, but they largely approve of his actual positions. You see this over and over. It doesn’t look like Obama is doing much to move the country in a more liberal direction, but in his slow, methodical, pragmatic way, he’s doing just that. A lot of people might not know it, but they’re attracted by his no-drama approach to incremental social change. It frustrates those of us who want to see things change faster, but in the end, it might turn out to be pretty effective.
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Update, Thursday, 2:25 EDT: The NSA has released the email it received from Edward Snowden on April 5, 2013. In the email, Snowden posed questions regarding a training session. He asked whether presidential executive orders supersede federal laws. He also asked about Department of Defense regulations and Office of Director of National Intelligence rules, wondering which has greater precedence. This email did not refer to any concerns about NSA surveillance programs. Three days later, the general counsel’s office replied that EOs “cannot override a statute” and that DOD and ODNI regulations “are afforded similar precedence.” The email noted, “please give me a call if you would like to discuss further.”
The National Security Agency is firing back against former contractor Edward Snowden, who insists he reported his concerns about illegal surveillance activity directly to the agency in writing before leaking his treasure trove of super-secret documents. The NSA says it will today release an email it received from Snowden that undercuts his assertion.
Snowden’s Odd Email to the NSA Deepens the Mystery
Snowden has maintained that he alerted intelligence officials internally more than “10 times” about his concerns about NSA activities prior to becoming a leaker. Last night, as part of its interview with Snowden, NBC reported that two US officials confirmed that Snowden had sent at least one email to the NSA’s general counsel raising “policy and legal questions.” The network’s revelation drew attention; the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald called it the “biggest news” from the interview. After all, NSA officials have previously denied that Snowden reported wrongdoing to senior officials. In a speech on April 15 in Tampa, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that “Snowden isn’t a whistleblower.” He asserted that Snowden “could have reported concerns to seniors at NSA…he chose not to go to any of those places.”
Now that NBC has confirmed that Snowden did contact the NSA legal brass—undermining the NSA’s previous claims—the agency is acknowledging that it heard from the contractor before the leaks. But it is claiming that Snowden’s communication with the general counsel’s office does not back up his story.
On Thursday, in an email sent to Mother Jones, NSA spokeswoman Marci Green Miller said that the NSA has “found one email inquiry by Edward Snowden to the office of General Counsel asking for an explanation of some material that was in a training course he had just completed. The e-mail did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse, but posed a legal question that the Office of General Counsel addressed. There was not additional follow-up noted.”
She added, “There are numerous avenues that Mr. Snowden could have used to raise other concerns or whistleblower allegations. We have searched for additional indications of outreach from him in those areas and to date have not discovered any engagements related to his claims.”
She noted the NSA will make the email public later today.
Given that Clapper and the NSA previously denied that Snowden had made any contact with the higher-ups, the agency’s discovery and release of this email will certainly be seen as somewhat suspicious by some. But Snowden’s claim and the NSA’s response are now good material for his next interview.
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NSA Fires Back at Snowden and Claims His Email Didn’t Raise “Concerns About Wrongdoing”
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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:
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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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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I don’t usually spend too much time on local horse race stuff, but Kentucky is a little different. After all, Mitch McConnell is the minority leader in the Senate, and his Democratic challenger this year, Alison Lundergan Grimes, is running a surprisingly strong campaign. So perhaps Kentucky deserves some extra special attention. Surprisingly, it turns out that Obamacare, of all things, is causing McConnell some serious heartburn.
You see, unluckily for McConnell, Kentucky has possibly the best, most popular Obamacare exchange in the country—though nobody calls it an Obamacare exchange, of course, since Obamacare is the work of Satan. It’s called Kynect. Everybody loves Kynect. So when McConnell was asked recently if he favored getting rid of Kynect, he had a problem. It’s Obamacare, and he’s on record favoring the root-and-branch repeal of Obamacare. But Kynect is popular. Nobody wants to see a root-and-branch repeal of Kynect. What to do?
So far, McConnell has taken a creative approach to this dilemma: He basically denies that Kynect has anything to do with Obamacare. McConnell remains in favor of total repeal of Obamacare, but says this wouldn’t cause any problems with Kynect. It would just keep motoring along without missing a beat.
Now, this is a little peculiar. Politicians tell whoppers all the time, but usually they do it cleverly enough that they can somehow defend themselves. This, on the other hand, is just a flat-out fantasy. Without Obamacare, there’s no exchange; there’s no federal funding; there are no subsidies; there’s no community rating; and there’s no mandatory coverage of people with pre-existing conditions. Kynect is dead, and everyone knows it. It’s hard to imagine even Fox News somehow twisting this to claim that McConnell is staking out a defensible position.
So far, Grimes has been a little tentative about attacking McConnell over this. After all, she has exactly the mirror-image problem: She wants to express her undying support for Kynect but without ever mentioning the dreaded word “Obamacare.” Greg Sargent says he feels her pain, but nonetheless thinks this is a good opportunity to tighten the screws on McConnell further:
As Joe Sonka points out in a good piece, McConnell is betting that press coverage won’t clearly explain to voters just how absurd his position really is. But perhaps now that Grimes is engaging on the issue — to some degree, at least — that could serve as a hook for top shelf reporter and commentator types to take a peek at what’s really going on here.
It should be self evidently newsworthy that the leader of Senate Republicans, who have based their entire 2014 strategy on the idea that Obamacare is a long term political disaster and massive repudiation of liberal governance, refuses to take a clear position of his own on the law’s future in the state he would represent, and on whether hundreds of thousands of his own constituents should continue to enjoy its benefits.
Well, we’ll see. McConnell is a crafty old survivor, and the odds remain pretty strongly in his favor even if he isn’t making any sense about Kynect. Still, stuff like this makes me wonder if Grimes has a better chance of beating him than I would have thought. There’s some real opportunity here if she can figure out how best to keep McConnell twisted into knots over this.
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Mitch McConnell Digs Himself Deeper and Deeper Over Obamacare
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The VA hospital scandal is basically composed of two separate things:
We’ve heard a lot about #1, but this is largely a policy problem, not a scandal. No administration has ever secured enough resources from Congress to properly staff the VA system, and the result has been waiting lists and backlogs. In the past few years this has started to improve as more vets have been allowed into the system; funding has increased; mental health has become a bigger priority; the paper-based approval process has become more automated; and the backlog of vets waiting for approval has been cut in half.
The real scandal—in the normal sense of “scandal” as opposed to inefficiency and underfunding—is #2. As scandalous as these charges are, however, they’re localized; small; and entirely nonpartisan. Everyone agrees that heads need to roll if they’re confirmed. That’s in stark contrast to a far, far larger denial of medical services to sick Americans that could be fixed instantly if there were the political will to do it. Ezra Klein explains:
It’s a relief to see so much outrage over poor access to government-provided health-care benefits. But it would be nice to see bipartisan outrage extend to another unfolding health-care scandal in this country: the 4.8 million people living under the poverty line who are eligible for Medicaid but won’t get it because their state has refused Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.
As appalling as the wait times are for VA care, the people living in states that refused the Medicaid expansion aren’t just waiting too long for care. They’re not getting it at all. They’re going completely uninsured when federal law grants them comprehensive coverage. Many of these people will get sick and find they can’t afford treatment and some of them will die. Many of the victims here, by the way, are also veterans.
….All in all, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that more than 7.5 million uninsured adults would be eligible for Medicaid but live in a state that has refused the expansion….The point here isn’t to minimize the problems at the VA, which need to be fixed — and fast. But anyone who feels morally outraged over the extended wait times at the VA should be appalled by the literally endless wait times the poor are enduring in the states that are refusing to expand Medicaid.
Fat chance of that, I suppose. Nonetheless, it’s at least as big a scandal as VA #1, and far, far bigger than VA #2.
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In response to the mass shooting that took place near the University of California, Santa Barbara, on Friday night, Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday wrote that the killer’s YouTube manifesto was a “sad reflection of the sexist stories we so often see on screen.” While pointing to a broader “sexist movie monoculture” that can be “toxic for women and men alike,” Hornaday specifically highlights Neighbors—a recently released, critically acclaimed comedy starring Seth Rogen—and Judd Apatow movies:
How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like “Neighbors” and feel, as the shooter Elliot Rodger did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of “sex and fun and pleasure”? How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, “It’s not fair”?
Movies may not reflect reality, but they powerfully condition what we desire, expect and feel we deserve from it. The myths that movies have been selling us become even more palpable at a time when spectators become their own auteurs and stars on YouTube, Instagram and Vine. If our cinematic grammar is one of violence, sexual conquest and macho swagger — thanks to male studio executives who green-light projects according to their own pathetic predilections — no one should be surprised when those impulses take luridly literal form in the culture at large.
Part of what makes cinema so potent is the way even its most outlandish characters and narratives burrow into and fuse with our own stories and identities. When the dominant medium of our age — both as art form and industrial practice — is in the hands of one gender, what may start out as harmless escapist fantasies can, through repetition and amplification, become distortions and dangerous lies.
Hornaday goes on to discuss the important issue of the state of women in Hollywood. But her Apatow and Rogen-related commentary is what caught the very public attention of, well, Apatow and Rogen.
Here’s Rogen, responding on Twitter on Monday:
.@AnnHornaday I find your article horribly insulting and misinformed.
— Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen)
.@AnnHornaday how dare you imply that me getting girls in movies caused a lunatic to go on a rampage.
— Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen)
Apatow weighed in more heavily, and shared his thoughts on how he believes American media outlets profit from mass murder:
@AnnHornaday at least you are not writing another thoughtless article. Maybe keep the computer shut off for a while and think more.
— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow)
“@Sethrogen: .@AnnHornaday I find your article horribly insulting and misinformed.”She uses tragedy to promote herself with idiotic thoughts
— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow)
Remember everyone – ads next to articles generate money. They say something shocking and uninformed & get you to click on it to profit.
— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow)
Here is how it all works. Anne says something thoughtless. I say it is wrong then CNN asks everyone to debate and it becomes TV.
— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow)
I said no. I wonder if Anne can prevent herself from going on and becoming part of how these tragic events become profit centers for media
— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow)
Hornaday did not immediately respond to Mother Jones‘ request for comment.
UPDATE, May 27, 2014, 3:04 p.m. EST: Hornaday responded to Rogen, Apatow, and her other critics in the following Washington Post video:
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Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow Are Pissed at This WaPo Critic Over UCSB Shooting Column
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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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