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The EU’s “Right to be Forgotten” Starts to Take Concrete Shape

Mother Jones

A few days ago, Google announced that it was beavering away on the 41,000 requests it had gotten from people demanding that it remove links to unflattering articles about themselves. So just what kind of people are making these requests? Brad DeLong directs me to the BBC’s Robert Peston, who gives us a clue:

This morning the BBC received the following notification from Google:

Notice of removal from Google Search: we regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/thereporters/robertpeston/2007/10/merrills_mess.html

What it means is that a blog I wrote in 2007 will no longer be findable when searching on Google in Europe….Now in my blog, only one individual is named. He is Stan O’Neal, the former boss of the investment bank Merrill Lynch.

My column describes how O’Neal was forced out of Merrill after the investment bank suffered colossal losses on reckless investments it had made.

Is the data in it “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”?

Hmmm.

I wonder if there’s a way to make this backfire? How hard would it be to create an automated process that figures out which articles Google is being forced to stuff down the memory hole? Probably not too hard, I imagine. And how hard would it then be to repost those articles in enough different places that they all zoomed back toward the top of Google’s search algorithm? Again, probably not too hard for a group of people motivated to do some mischief.

Maybe someone is already working on this. It wouldn’t surprise me. And I wonder if Google’s surprisingly quick response to the EU decision isn’t designed to spur exactly this kind of backlash. That wouldn’t really surprise me either.

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The EU’s “Right to be Forgotten” Starts to Take Concrete Shape

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Does America Finally Have World Cup Fever?

Mother Jones

I’ve been reading a lot of articles about how this year’s World Cup is a lot more popular in America than any previous World Cup. I’ve also read several backlash pieces debunking the idea that we’re all about to go soccer mad. I’m not sure which to believe.

But there really does seem to be something different this year. I’ve personally watched all or most of the World Cup games so far, and I’m pretty sure that in past years I’ve hardly watched any. Why? Beats me. I’m not really any more interested in soccer than I’ve ever been.

Or am I? As kind of a joke, I started rooting for Manchester United back in 2008 because they were sponsored by AIG. After the US government basically took over AIG, I figured that meant Man U was America’s team. But joke though it may have been, over the last few years I have indeed found myself checking the Premier League standings periodically and even watching the odd match when it appears on American TV. Perhaps that’s primed me to look forward to the World Cup.

Or maybe it’s just time zones. This is the first World Cup since 1994 that Americans could watch live at a reasonable hour. And we all know that being able to watch live is critical to sports viewership.1 So maybe that’s all it is.

How about you? Have you been watching more World Cup than usual this year? Why? Is it because you care more about soccer than you used to? Or something else?

1Except for the Olympics, for some reason.

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Does America Finally Have World Cup Fever?

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Obama Wasn’t a Silver Bullet, and Neither Is Hillary Clinton

Mother Jones

Noam Scheiber has a piece in the current issue of the New Republic about Hillary Clinton’s imminent takeover of the Democratic Party, and today Ezra Klein interviewed him about it. Klein was especially interested in the argument that Obama’s 2008 supporters were so disillusioned by Obama’s failure to change Washington that they’re now eager to support an old-school politico like Hillary. Here’s Scheiber:

Back in 2008, Hillary Clinton made this kind of snide, but in retrospect apt, critique of Obama where she said that Obama thinks he’ll get to Washington and the heavens will part and the Republicans will cooperate, but that just won’t happen. So I asked some of these Obama supporters if she was right. And a lot of these people remembered those comments and being annoyed by them. But they all said she was actually a bit right. We were a bit naive then, they said. People used the word naive a lot in these conversations.

I’m not sure I’ve ever fully fessed up to this, so this is as good a time as any. For years, I really didn’t believe the conservative snark about how Obama supporters all thought he would descend on Washington like a god-king and miraculously turn us into a post-racial, post-partisan, post-political country. Kumbaya! The reason I didn’t believe it was that it never struck me as even remotely plausible. Did Obama give soaring speeches? Sure, he’s a politician. Did he promise to change the way Washington works? Sure, he’s a politician. Did he promise to pass historic legislation in dozens of different areas? Sure, he’s a politician.

It just never occurred to me that anyone took this stuff seriously. It’s a presidential campaign! Of course he’s promising a chicken in every pot. That’s what presidential candidates do. I believed then, and still believe now, that Obama is basically a mainstream Democrat who’s cautious, pragmatic, technocratic, and incremental. In fact, that seemed so obvious to me that I never really credited the idea that anyone could seriously see him any differently.

Well, I guess that was naive on my part. By now, the evidence is clear that millions of Obama voters really believed all that boilerplate rhetoric. Naturally, then, they’re bitterly disappointed at the real-world Obama. Well, I’m disappointed in some ways too—mostly in the areas of foreign policy and national security—but I continue to think he’s a pretty good president because my expectations were tempered to begin with.

Nor do I think Hillary would have done any better. Probably worse, I’d say. After all, once he was in office, it’s not as if Obama acted like he believed his campaign-trail rhetoric. He hired a bunch of pretty ordinary staffers and got to work passing pretty ordinary legislation. Is the theory here that Hillary would have figured out some magical points of leverage that Obama didn’t? That she would have done better because Republicans like her more than Obama? Please.

I have pretty mixed feelings about a Hillary Clinton candidacy. On the one hand, I’ve long admired her obviously sincere dedication to public service in the face of abuse that would destroy a weaker person. On the other hand, another Clinton? This is no fault of hers, but I’m not sure I’m any more excited about that than I am about the prospect of another Bush. Maybe it’s time to move on.

Either way, though, I sure hope all those folks who are disappointed by Obama don’t think that Hillary is some sort of silver bullet either. If she runs and wins, she’ll be dealing with exactly the same kind of Republican obstructionism as Obama—and she’ll have just as much trouble getting anything done.

If disappointed Dems really want to change things, they have only one option: figure out a way to take back Congress in 2016. That’s it. Until and unless that happens, George Washington himself wouldn’t be any more effective than Obama has been.

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Obama Wasn’t a Silver Bullet, and Neither Is Hillary Clinton

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There’s Some Serious Weirdness Up In the State of Maine

Mother Jones

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You wouldn’t normally expect Maine to be an epicenter of crackpottery, but ever since they elected tea party darling Paul LePage as their governor, things have been a little weird up north. Actually, more than a little. Over at TPM, they’re running an excerpt from Mike Tipping’s new book about LePage’s tenure, and it turns out that LePage has been surprisingly fascinated by the claims of a local “sovereign citizen” group called the Aroostook Watchmen, which claims that pretty much everything that both Maine and the United States are doing is blatantly illegal. To make their point, they submitted a set of “remonstrances” to a variety of Maine officials, including LePage:

The remonstrances the group submitted to LePage and the legislature accused Maine’s government of being unlawful, of having illegally accepted and used unconstitutional currency (anything other than gold and silver), and of coordinating with UNESCO, UNICEF, NATO, and the UN to deprive Americans of their property rights. An e-mail sent to the governor’s office by Constitutional Coalition spokesperson Phil Merletti, along with the remonstrance document, declared that legislators who had violated their oaths in this way were committing treason and domestic terrorism.

….LePage’s staff, including executive assistant Micki Muller, who reviews the governor’s e-mails, had previously shunted aside requests from Merletti to meet with LePage….This time, however, word of the remonstrances and the press conference made it past the executive office gatekeepers and to the attention of Governor LePage himself. Rather than ignoring the submission and its radical claims, LePage called Merletti at home at 9 a.m. the next morning in order to set up a meeting for that Saturday with members of the Constitutional Coalition. According to a note that Merletti sent to his e-mail list later that day and that was forwarded to LePage and members of his staff, the governor was angry that he hadn’t heard about the remonstrances earlier, and during the call he pledged to fire any staffers found to have been keeping the information from him.

….The Watchmen describe—and e-mails and documents obtained from LePage’s staff through Maine’s Freedom of Access laws confirm—at least eight meetings over a period of nine months in 2013, almost all more than an hour in duration and some lasting almost three hours.

During these regular meetings, according to the participants, the governor was “educated” by a series of “experts” brought in by the Constitutional Coalition on a number of their conspiracy theories. LePage also made a series of promises to the Watchmen that he would assist them in pressing their cases of treason against Eves and Alfond and in pursuing their wider antigovernment aims.

There’s much, much more at the link. If you want to read a case study of how someone can apparently go completely off the rails when he’s stuck inside a tea party bubble, this is for you.

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There’s Some Serious Weirdness Up In the State of Maine

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Hobby Lobby Wasn’t About Religious Freedom. It Was About Abortion.

Mother Jones

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Elsewhere at Mother Jones, Dana Liebelson collects the either best lines from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent in the Hobby Lobby case. Here’s what I consider the most telling passage from Samuel Alito’s majority opinion:

Kinda reminds you of Bush v. Gore, doesn’t it? Alito takes pains to make it clear that his opinion shouldn’t be considered precedent for anything except the narrowly specific issue at hand: whether contraceptives that some people consider abortifacients can be excluded from health plans.

I think it’s important to recognize what Alito is saying here. Basically, he’s making the case that abortion is unique as a religious issue. If you object to anything else on a religious basis, you’re probably out of luck. But if you object to abortion on religious grounds, you will be given every possible consideration. Even if your objection is only related to abortion in the most tenuous imaginable way—as it is here, where IUDs are considered to be abortifacients for highly idiosyncratic doctrinal reasons—it will be treated with the utmost deference.

This is not a ruling that upholds religious liberty. It is a ruling that specifically enshrines opposition to abortion as the most important religious liberty in America.

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Hobby Lobby Wasn’t About Religious Freedom. It Was About Abortion.

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Immigration Reform: It’s Finally Officially Dead

Mother Jones

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I’ve had a friendly argument with Greg Sargent for some months about whether immigration reform was dead, or was merely on life support and still stood a chance of resuscitation. But in a way, it may turn out we disagreed a little less than we thought. He points me today to this Politico story:

Last summer, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) privately told the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference that if reformers won the August recess, then Republicans would move a bill in the fall. But the Syria crisis, the government shutdown and the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov consumed attention through the end of 2013.

….As recently as this month, however, there was more movement in the House than previously known….But then Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) lost his Republican primary election. And young children from Central America crossed illegally over the southwestern border in record numbers. Those two unforeseen events killed any remaining chance for action this year.

….For their part, reformers underestimated how impervious most House Republicans would be to persuasion from evangelicals, law enforcement and big business, and how the GOP’s animus toward Obama over health care and executive actions would bleed into immigration reform.

Before last summer I didn’t think immigration reform was irretrievably dead. I thought it was damn close, but it wasn’t until fall that I was pretty sure it was, indeed, completely dead. And that’s pretty much my read of what Politico says. (Though, as it happens, I wouldn’t actually put much stock in John Boehner’s promise to the NHCLC, since it sounds mostly like something he said merely to avoid gratuitously pissing off a constituency, even though he knew perfectly well the reformers weren’t going to win the August recess.)

I’d say the last paragraph of the excerpt is key. The reformers may have kept up their hopes, but for some reason they simply didn’t understand just how hellbent the tea partiers were against any kind of serious immigration reform. I, on the other hand, being a cynical liberal, understood this perfectly. They were never going to bend—not no how, not no way—and Boehner was never going to move a bill without them.

The canary in the coal mine was always Marco Rubio. He genuinely wanted reform; he genuinely worked hard to persuade his fellow conservatives; and he genuinely had credibility with the tea party wing of the GOP. But by the end of summer, he understood the truth: it wasn’t gonna happen. At that point, he backed away from his own bill, and that was the death knell. No base, no bill. And by the end of summer, it was finally and definitively clear that the base just wasn’t persuadable.

In any case, Republicans have now abandoned even the pretense of working on immigration reform, and Sargent says they’ll come to regret this:

The current crisis is actually an argument for comprehensive immigration reform. But Rep. Bob Goodlatte — who once cried about the breakup of families — is now reduced to arguing that the crisis is the fault of Obama’s failure to enforce the law. Goodlatte’s demand (which is being echoed by other, dumber Republicans) that Obama stop de-prioritizing the deportation of the DREAMers really means: Deport more children. When journalist Jorge Ramos confronted Goodlatte directly on whether this is really what he wants, the Republican refused to answer directly.

….This is the course Republicans have chosen — they’ve opted to be the party of maximum deportations. Now Democrats and advocates will increase the pressure on Obama to do something ambitious to ease deportations in any way he can. Whatever he does end up doing will almost certainly fall well short of what they want. But determining the true limits on what can be done to mitigate this crisis is now on him.

I don’t know what Obama is going to do. For years, he followed a strategy of beefing up enforcement in hopes of gaining goodwill among conservatives. In the end, all that accomplished was to anger his own Hispanic supporters without producing anything of substance. At this point, there’s no downside to taking maximal executive action, so he might very well do that. But will he do it before or after the midterms? Or just give up and move on to other things? Hard to say.

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Immigration Reform: It’s Finally Officially Dead

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Contact: Jolie Holland’s Sound Goes "Huge"

Mother Jones

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Jolie Holland in Brooklyn. Jacob Blickenstaff

Since the release of her 2003 album, Catalpa, Jolie Holland‘s music has evolved from close adaptations of pre-war blues and ballads into deeper, more complex works. Holland grew up in Houston, boxed up inside a strictly religious family. She left home after high school and was essentially homeless for more than years, squatting and bouncing between Houston, Austin, and New Orleans. In this environment, her musical education was direct and unmediatedthe music of Blind Willie McTell as influential and intoxicating as that of John Cage.

Holland has often been pigeonholed as a folk-blues-soul singer, but even from the beginning there has been something experimental and immediate about her approach. With Wine Dark Sea, her just-released sixth album, Holland exerts more control as a bandleader, setting her voice, as serpentine and wily as a rattlesnake at a Pentecostal meeting, against a more improvisational ensemble consisting of two drummers, three additional guitarists, bass and reeds. Photographer Jacob Blickenstaff spoke with Holland recently in New York City. The following is in her words.

I have a really tight relationship with the I Ching. You can see the lyrical influence all over the record. One of the basic statements of the I Ching is there’s a time when the most effective thing is to just do nothing. It’s really enormous. It’s about the flow of circumstance and of seasons. Songs like “Waiting for the Sun,” “All the Love,” and even the Joe Tex cover, “The Love You Save,” say that:

I want you to stop! Find out what’s wrong
Get it right or leave love alone
Because the love you save today
May very well be your own

Observation and engagement with ideas without explicit teachers is the global norm of how to learn things. So many people aren’t ready to go to art or music school, because it destroys their own agency in the work. I remember that feeling when I was a young teenager and was learning how to play. When you’re an undeveloped musician or artist, learning too much about theory can put the cart in front of the horse.

The voice is at the center of the compositions. You have to make sure that the band is augmenting that while expressing themselves, but at the same time not flattening out that complexity. Indigo Street takes the first solo on the record on “On and On.” When I gave her direction for that solo, I said I just wanted her to sound like she didn’t know what a guitar was, like something started a fire in her hand. I’ve been playing with her for a long time and I was trying to get her to play more noise. But with the absence of drums, it was harder for her to feel like she could go there. She said that me having a “pretty” voice held her back.

The approach on this album is more about bandleading than anything else. On past albums, I couldn’t get people to do what I wanted them to do. More volume helped; getting more people on stage and not being polite. A track like “Wine Dark Sea” is totally huge. There are no overdubs on that song, we’re playing live. To make this album we had to find the right room to get two full drum sets in with enough separation to record but still together. There are three electric guitar players in that same room. I was in the isolation booth with piano or guitar. Recording it was a real challenge. Douglas Jenkins, my co-producer, had never engineered something like that before.

We developed the sound during a weekly residency at a small place called the Jalopy Theater in Brooklyn. We’d have two drum sets on the stage and we’d go through the songs, and then we’d also have an improvisation set. I would tell stories from the book that I’m working on—true ghost stories and strange occurrences told to me by friends—and the band would play behind me so they could get used to moving together. I think some of my nerdier fans didn’t like it but fuck it. I warned them, “This is not a normal show.”

My friend Stefan Jecusco has a great saying: “It’s impossible to be sexy and nostalgic at the same time.” Most people listen to old music and they experience it as nostalgic; they can’t get inside it and don’t have a nonlinear sense of history. When I first heard Blind Willie McTell, I just had a crush on him, it just felt real even though he was speaking and playing in a different way than people do now. I hear melody in a more complicated way than other people do—so much of it comes from Blind Willie McTell. He is the guy who taught me how to sing. It’s all about microtones and internal phrases.

One thing about old songs, if we are listening to them now, then we know they’re good. They went through the filter, they stood the test of time: McTell, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Beyoncé—a good song is a good song.

With singing covers, it’s not nostalgia; it’s happening right now. Being on stage is a responsibility, an opportunity. All of these people are paying attention to you. Your present psychological experience will be affecting everyone. The more you can release your resistance to being in the present moment, the more you are providing people an opportunity to do the same. If you are playing a song that you wrote, then you are still covering that song.

I love what Tom Waits said: “We all love music, but what we all really want is music to love us.” That kind of unity in your being on stage is what has that power. ­­

“Contact” is series of portraits and conversations with musicians by Jacob Blickenstaff.

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Contact: Jolie Holland’s Sound Goes "Huge"

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Invading Crimea May Have Cost Russia $200 Billion So Far

Mother Jones

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Russia’s military actions are costing it dearly:

Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region last month and the instability it created in Russian financial markets were cited by government officials for record capital flight and sharply downgraded growth forecasts for the country. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that instead of projected 2.5% growth this year, Russia’s economy might show no growth at all.

….U.S. and European sanctions to punish Russia for occupying and annexing Crimea have so far targeted only a few dozen officials and businessmen. But the prospect of broader penalties, such as a Western boycott of Russian oil and gas, have scared investors into cashing out their ruble-denominated assets for hard currency and taking their money abroad. Russia’s foreign exchange reserves were drained of a record $63 billion in the first quarter of the year, Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said Wednesday in an address to the lower house of the parliament.

….Russian stocks fell 10% last month, wiping out further billions in capital. The ruble has lost 9% of its value since the start of the year, boosting prices for the imported food and manufactured goods on which the Russian consumer market is heavily dependent. “The acute international situation of the past two months” was the cause, Ulyukayev said, referring to the Ukraine unrest.

That’s a helluva big drop in economic growth. Just by itself, it represents a cost of $50 billion. Add in the flight of cash and the stock market decline, and you’re somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 billion.

Is that enough to make Russia blink? Maybe not. But it hurts, and the prospect of losing even more has got be enough to give even Vladimir Putin a few second thoughts.

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Invading Crimea May Have Cost Russia $200 Billion So Far

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An Update From Our 1 Percent World: Southern California Housing Edition

Mother Jones

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The LA Times reports that the Southern California housing market is once again getting frothy:

But a deeper look at the market reveals a recovery divided between the rich and everyone else.

The market for high-dollar homes is hopping, with sales on the rise and buyers launching bidding wars. But sales of low- to medium-priced homes have plummeted during the same period — with many potential buyers priced out….Those declines came even as sales of high-end homes increased. Sales of homes costing $800,000 or more grew 12%, while sales of homes costing less than $500,000 fell at twice that rate.

….”We’re getting multiple offers on just about everything,” said Barry Sulpor, an agent with Shorewood Realtors in Manhattan Beach, where he said there is a new wave of tear-downs and new construction in prime beachfront locations. “The market is really on fire.”

I think partly this is a bit of a statistical artifact: a lot of investors were buying cheap houses a year ago, figuring they could rent them out and make a killing. That didn’t work out so well, and now a lot of those houses are back on the market. Long story short, some of the increase in low-end housing prices over the past year or two has been a bit of an investor-fueled mirage, and now reality is catching up to that.

Still, the overall picture is clear: At the lower end of the market, ordinary people have been increasingly locked out for a while, and that’s still the case. Nor is it any surprise. After all, median wages have stagnated during the entire period that we so laughingly refer to as a “recovery.” As always in our brave new 1 percent era, things are going pretty well for the rich. For the not-so-rich, not so well.

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An Update From Our 1 Percent World: Southern California Housing Edition

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Unsportsmanlike Conduct in the NBA Follows an Inverted U-Shaped Curve

Mother Jones

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Over at 538, Benjamin Morris asks “Just How Bad Were the Bad Boys?” The bad boys in question are the Detroit Pistons basketball team of the late 80s, who had a reputation for being unusually aggressive on the court. Did they deserve their reputation? To test this, Morris looks at how many technical fouls they racked up, a good measure of unsportsmanlike conduct. In fact, he takes a look at the total number of technical fouls for the entire league, and finds that the number rose steadily until 1995 and then started a long-term decline.

I promise this is just for fun, but I’ve overlaid another line against Morris’s chart. Not a perfect fit, granted, but not too far off, either. I’m sure a few of you can guess what it is, can’t you?

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Unsportsmanlike Conduct in the NBA Follows an Inverted U-Shaped Curve

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