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No, There Really Isn’t Much We Can Do To Retaliate Against North Korea

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago I wrote a post suggesting that there might not really be much we can do to retaliate against North Korea for the Sony hack. So I was curious to read “A Reply to Kim’s Cyberterrorism,” a Wall Street Journal editorial telling us what options we had. I figured that if anyone could make the best case for action, it was the Journal.

Unfortunately, they mostly just persuaded me that there really is very little we can do. After clearing their throats with a couple of suggestions that even they admit are mostly just symbolic, they get to the meat of things:

Earlier this year Rep. Ed Royce introduced the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, which gives Treasury the power it needs to sanction banks facilitating North Korea’s finances. It passed the House easily in July but has since been locked up in Harry Reid’s Senate at the behest of the Obama Administration. Mr. Royce tells us he plans to reintroduce the bill as a first order of business in the new Congress. New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez has introduced similar legislation in the Senate; a bill could be on Mr. Obama’s desk by the second week in January.

So….that’s it. And even this is weaker tea than the Journal suggests. For starters, the bill has a serious structural problem because it puts severe limits on the president’s power, which is why Obama hasn’t supported it in the past. It’s a bad idea in foreign relations for Congress to mandate sanctions that can then be lifted only by Congress. This makes it almost impossible for presidents to negotiate future agreements because they have no carrots to offer in return for good behavior.

But that could be fixed. What can’t be fixed is the fact that North Korea learned a lesson from our previous attempt at tightening economic sanctions in 2007, when we cut off the US links of Banco Delta Asia, a Macau-based bank suspected of doing business with North Korea. This in turn panicked other Macau banks into cutting off their relationships with North Korea, which severely restricted the regime’s access to dollars. As the Journal notes, this genuinely hurt North Korea, and the Bush administration agreed to resolve the BDA issue during the Six-Party nuclear talks later that year.

Unfortunately for us, sanctions like this would hurt North Korea a lot less now than they did back in 2007. Stephan Haggard explains:

Post-BDA, and since the ascent of Kim Jong-un in particular, North Korea has also sought to diversify its trade, investment and financial links. The KPA and its associates have developed relationships with financial entities that are not concerned with access to the U.S. market, both in China and outside it; Russia will be particularly interesting to watch in this regard but there is also the open field of the Middle East….While this legislation might raise the costs of proliferation activities if implemented, it is unlikely to staunch them completely and could simply forge new networks beyond the law’s reach.

Another question is whether the sanctions will have the broader strategic effect of moving the North Koreans toward serious negotiation of its nuclear program….The paradoxical feature of sanctions is that they rarely have the direct effect of forcing the target country to capitulate. The HR 1771 sanctions will have effect only when coupled with strong statements of a willingness to engage if North Korea showed signs of interest in doing so. The legislation provides plenty of sticks; the administration will have to continue to articulate the prospective carrots in a way that is credible. Strong sanctions legislation makes that difficult to do if the legislation places a series of binding constraints on the president’s discretion. Why negotiate with the U.S. if there is no return from doing so?

With changes, Royce’s sanctions bill might be an appropriate response to the Sony hack. However, it’s unlikely to have a severe effect on North Korea. Even worse, past history shows that a single-minded “get tough” attitude toward the DPRK can backfire badly, as it did on George Bush when his refusal to negotiate with Pyongyang in 2002 led in short order to the ejection of UN inspectors and the construction of plutonium bombs from a stockpile that had previously been kept under lock and key.

As the cliche goes, there are no good options here, just bad and less bad. I wouldn’t necessarily oppose a modified version of the sanctions bill, but it’s unlikely to have a major impact. It might even make things worse. If this is the best we can do, it’s pretty much an admission that there’s not really much we can do.

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No, There Really Isn’t Much We Can Do To Retaliate Against North Korea

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Here’s How the Sony Hack Is Like 9/11

Mother Jones

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I doubt that I’m the first to say this, but has anyone noticed a striking a similarity between 9/11 and the Sony hack? Not in terms of scope or malevolence, of course, but in terms of—what’s the best word here? Creativity? Bang for the buck?

Here’s what I mean. The 9/11 attack wasn’t especially sophisticated. In fact, it was famously crude and butt cheap. All it took was a few guys who learned rudimentary piloting skills and then carried some box cutters on board four airplanes1. The reason it worked is that it was brilliant. Nobody had ever considered that hijackers could take control of a plane without so much as a single cheap handgun, and even if they could, no one had really figured that they could do anything much worse than fly the plane somewhere and maybe engineer a hostage crisis. But al-Qaeda thought different. They understood that (a) box cutters would be good enough to hold pilots and passengers at bay for an hour or two, and (b) this was long enough to fly their airplanes into a pair of iconic skyscrapers, killing thousands in an extraordinarily gruesome way. They took a crude, simplistic weapon and figured out a way to cause damage that was both tangibly enormous and emotionally outsized.

The Sony hack is a far smaller thing, but it shows a lot of the same hallmarks. Despite what press reports say, it wasn’t really all that sophisticated. It was, to be sure, a step up from box cutters, but it’s not like North Korea tried to hack into a nuclear power plant or the Pentagon. They picked a soft target. In fact, based on press reports, it sounds like even in the vast sea of crappy IT security that we call America, Sony Pictures was unusually lax. Hacking into their network was something that probably dozens of groups around the world could have done if they had thought about it. And like al-Qaeda before them, North Korea thought about it. And they realized that a Sony Pictures hack, done right, could have an outsized emotional impact. Like 9/11, it was a brilliant example of using a relatively crude tool to produce a gigantic payoff.

So what happens next? The 9/11 attack was huge, but even for its size it provoked a mammoth overreaction that continues to this day. Will the Sony hack do the same? After the dozens of credit card hacks of the past couple of years corporations are finally getting the news that they need to secure their networks better, and the Sony hack might prompt even more companies to finally get serious about IT security. That would be good. On the other hand, it could also provoke an overreaction that ends up locking down corporate infrastructure so tightly that workplaces turn into digital gulags. That would be dumb.

So then. Better corporate IT security: good. Massive overreaction: bad. Let’s get things right this time.

1It also required recruiting 19 guys willing to die for a cause. This is definitely uncommon. But it doesn’t really change the basic nature of how al-Qaeda managed to pull off such a massive attack.

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Here’s How the Sony Hack Is Like 9/11

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Mystery Chart of the Day: What’s Up With All the Skinny Economists?

Mother Jones

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The chart on the right is excerpted from the Wall Street Journal. It shows which occupations have the lowest obesity rates, and most of it makes sense. There are folks who do a lot of physical labor (janitors, maids, cooks, etc.). There are health professionals who are probably hyper-aware of the risks of obesity. There are athletes and actors who have to stay in shape as part of their jobs.

And then, at the very bottom, there are economists, scientists, and psychologists. What’s up with that? Why would these folks be unusually slender? I can’t even come up with a plausible hypothesis, aside from the possibility that these professions attract rabid obsessives who are so devoted to their jobs that they don’t care about food. Aside from that, I got nothing. Put your best guess in comments.

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Mystery Chart of the Day: What’s Up With All the Skinny Economists?

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Is Vladimir Putin Ready to Make a Deal?

Mother Jones

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In his yearly press conference, Vladimir Putin appeared to be trying to cool down the rhetoric over Ukraine:

Mr. Putin recognized the efforts of President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine in ending the conflict in the southeast of that country, but he suggested that others in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, may be trying to prolong the conflict….“We hear a lot of militant statements; I believe President Poroshenko is seeking a settlement, but there is a need for practical action,” Mr. Putin added. “There is a need to observe the Minsk agreements” calling for a cease-fire and a withdrawal of forces.

Russia has toned down its talk on the Ukraine crisis in the past month, and some of its most incendiary language, like “junta” and “Novorossiya,” a blanket term used for the separatist territories, is no longer used on state-run television news. Mr. Putin also notably omitted those terms, which he had used in other public appearances, on Thursday.

So does this mean Putin is adopting a more conciliatory attitude toward the West? You be the judge:

In general, he blamed “external factors, first and foremost” for creating Russia’s situation — accusing the West of intentionally trying to weaken Russia. “No matter what we do they are always against us,” Putin said, one of a series of observations directed at how he said the West has been treating Russia.

Putin attributed Western sanctions that have targeted Russia’s defense, oil and gas and banking sectors for about “25 percent” of Russia’s current difficulties.

But Putin stood firm over the actions that brought on the Western backlash, including Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula after pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine began an uprising earlier this year….“Taking Texas from Mexico is fair, but whatever we are doing is not fair?” he said, in comments seemingly directed at the United States.

Putin also suggested that the West was demanding too many concessions from Russia, including further nuclear disarmament. Likening Russia to a bear — a longtime symbol of the country — he chided the West for insisting the Russian bear “just eat honey instead of hunting animals.”

“They are trying to chain the bear. And when they manage to chain the bear, they will take out his fangs and claws,” Putin said. “This is how nuclear deterrence is working at the moment.”

For what it’s worth, I’d say Putin is probably right about sanctions being responsible for around 25 percent of Russia’s economic problems. As for his guess that those problems will last two years before Russia returns to growth? That might not be far off either, though I suspect growth will be pretty slow for longer than that.

It’s hard to render a real judgment here without being fluent in Russian and watching the press conference in real time, but based on press reports I’d say Putin’s anti-Western comments were milder than they could have been. My guess is that events in Ukraine really haven’t worked out the way he hoped, and he’d be willing to go ahead and disengage if he could do so without admitting that he’s conceding anything. The anti-Western bluster is just part of that. (Of course, the bluster is also partly genuine: Putin really does believe, with some justification, that the West wants to hem in Russia.)

Oddly, then, I’d take all this as a mildly positive sign. The rhetoric seemed fairly pro forma; Putin obviously knows that sanctions are hurting him; and there were no serious provocations over Ukraine. I’ll bet there’s a deal to be made with Putin as long as it’s done quietly.

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Is Vladimir Putin Ready to Make a Deal?

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Fine. I Retract My Defense of Optics.

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday morning, conservatives were all atwitter over the fact that President Obama had been photographed playing pool and drinking a beer the previous night in Denver. A mere thousand miles away, there was a humanitarian crisis on the border! How out of touch can a guy get? Clearly this was Obama’s Katrina moment.

This combined two of the right’s favorite Obama-era tropes. First, it was about his millionth Katrina moment. Conservatives still can’t get it through their heads that George Bush’s Katrina moment was never really about those famous photographs of him mugging with a guitar while the levees were being breached in New Orleans and later staring moodily out an airplane window at the flooding below. It was about “heckuva job, Brownie.” It was about his casual near-destruction of FEMA over the previous four years. It was about the startling contrast between his laggard response to Katrina and his near-frenetic response to the Terry Schiavo panderfest just a few months earlier. But conservatives simply refuse to believe this. They’re convinced it was all about an unfair photographic comparison, and they’re determined to make a Democratic president suffer the same fate.

Second, it’s become practically a parlor game for conservatives to chastise Obama for engaging in some kind of social activity while there’s a serious crisis somewhere. This is an evergreen faux complaint. After all, there’s almost always something serious going on somewhere, which means you can always figure out an excuse to haul out this chestnut.

Now, to some extent none of this matters as long as it’s just a partisan response from the professional right. But yesterday it metastasized into something more over Obama’s answer to a question about why he wasn’t heading down to the border to see the refugee crisis for himself. “I’m not interested in photo-ops,” he said. “I’m interested in solving a problem.” This almost instantly turned into a misquote: “I don’t do photo-ops.” And with that, the mainstream press started piling on too.

This was, obviously, ridiculous. First of all, Obama didn’t say that he doesn’t do photo-ops. That would have been idiotic. What he very plainly said was that in this particular case he wasn’t interested in doing a photo-op. He had introduced a plan to address the crisis and he was in Texas to discuss it with state officials. That’s where he wanted to keep the focus.

And with that, as if to mock me, the whole thing exploded into a moronic national conversation about the optics of shooting pool in Denver but not going to the border to have his photograph taken with wistful-looking Latin American children. This came just a couple of days after I had defended the word optics against Jamison Foser, and plainly Foser had turned out to be right. The mere availability of the word seemed to change the whole tone of the coverage. As Dave Weigel put it, “The president is the star of most D.C. political stories, obviously, so many stories end up being about whether they help or hurt him. The problem is that the press can’t be sure if they will, or won’t.” So they just guess.

Now, I suppose I still have a feeble defense to offer. I did say there were good and bad uses of optics, and this just happened to be one of the bad ones. But the speed with which one photograph and one misquote saturated the punditocracy and morphed into an inane conversation about optics surely makes Foser’s case for him.

So I give up. There are still good uses of the word optics, but as long as the press remains so addicted to dumb uses that have such obvious roots in transparent partisan nonsense, it’s probably best to insist that they go cold turkey. No more optics, guys. Not until you demonstrate an ability to use the word like adults.

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Fine. I Retract My Defense of Optics.

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Americans Are Surprisingly Stressed Out About News and Politics

Mother Jones

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Via Wonkblog, here’s a fascinating little chart courtesy of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They just released a survey about the causes of stress, and things like health and money problems are predictably the biggest sources. But how about all those niggling little daily causes of stress? What are the biggest routine things that send you into conniptions?

Well, it turns out that two of the biggest contributors to high blood pressure are watching the news and hearing about what politicians are up to. And boy howdy, does this beg for a follow-up. I really, really want to know what news sources cause the most stress. Is it listening to NPR? Watching Fox News? Getting your daily Limbaugh fix? Reading Kevin Drum’s blog?

Perhaps the mere act of making you think about this is, at this very moment, making you red in the face. Then again, maybe not. I want to know more. Who’s most stressed out by the news? Liberals? Conservatives? Everyone? And what outlets cause the most stress? Obviously my money is on the Drudge/Fox/Limbaugh axis, but maybe I’d be surprised. I want to hear more about this.

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Americans Are Surprisingly Stressed Out About News and Politics

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Pundits, Start Your Engines!

Mother Jones

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So what’s the next step in the border crisis? President Obama has introduced an emergency proposal; he’s traveled to Texas to discuss it with his political opponents; and in order to stem the tide of immigrants he’s declined to engage in photo-ops at the border that might encourage the tide to continue.

Republicans, for their part, appear at the moment to be completely unwilling to do anything at all.

So here’s the next step: a barrage of columns from our nation’s pundits acknowledging Republican intransigence but then insisting that, ultimately, the lack of action is Obama’s fault. Because leadership. Because LBJ. Because schmoozing. Because lecturing. Because relationships. Because political capital. Because great presidents somehow figure out a way to get things done. Rinse and repeat.

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Pundits, Start Your Engines!

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Medicare Just Keeps Producing Great Budget News

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Medicare has been a bastion of good news lately. Every year, the CBO reduces its baseline estimate of Medicare costs, which have dropped by more than $1,000 since 2010. So what’s going on? Tricia Neuman and Juliette Cubanski of the Kaiser Family Foundation round up the evidence:

It is clear that the Medicare savings provisions in the ACA, such as reductions in provider payment updates and Medicare Advantage payments, have played a major role….In addition, the Budget Control Act of 2011 also exerted downward pressure on Medicare spending through sequestration that reduced payments to providers and plans by 2 percent beginning in 2013. And yet even after incorporating these scheduled payment reductions in the baseline, CBO has continued to lower its projections of Medicare spending.

So what else might be going on here? In addition to scheduled reductions in Medicare’s more formulaic payment rates, providers may be tightening their belts and looking to deliver care more efficiently in response to financial incentives included in the ACA, and it is possible that these changes are having a bigger effect than expected. For example, CMS recently reported that hospital readmission rates dropped by 130,000 between January 2012 and August 2013. It is also possible that hospitals and other providers are using data and other analytic tools more successfully to track utilization and spending and to reduce excess costs. Another more straightforward factor is that several expensive and popular brand-name drugs have gone off patent in recent years, which has helped to keep Medicare drug spending in check.

No one knows for sure if these reductions are permanent, or whether high growth rates will reappear in the future. But even if the low growth rates of the past few years can’t be sustained, I suspect that Medicare growth will continue to be lower than anyone expected. There are two reasons for this. First, the growth rate of medical costs in general has been declining steadily for the past 30 years, and this has now been going on long enough that it’s highly unlikely to be a statistical blip. After a surge in the 80s and 90s, we really are returning to the growth rates that were common earlier in the century, and obviously this will affect Medicare.

Second, Obamacare really will have an impact. Not everything in it will work, but it includes a lot of different cost-cutting measures and some of them will turn out to be pretty effective. And who knows? If Republicans ever stop pouting over Obamacare, we might even be able to experiment with different kinds of cost reductions.

There’s a fair amount of year-to-year variability in health care inflation, and we should expect to have some years of high growth. But I’ll bet the average over the next decade is somewhere around 2 percent above the general inflation rate. That’s not too bad.

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Medicare Just Keeps Producing Great Budget News

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Fox News Really Needs to Up Its Push-Polling Game

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen alerts us to the latest ridiculously-worded question in a Fox News poll:

In the aftermath of the Benghazi terrorist attacks, the Obama administration incorrectly claimed it was a spontaneous assault in response to an online video, even though the administration had intelligence reports that the attacks were connected to terrorist groups tied to al Qaeda. Do you think the Obama administration knowingly lied about the attacks to help the president during the ongoing re-election campaign, or not?

I’m not even going to bother pointing out all the ways in which this is wrong. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while and you still don’t know, then I’ve failed utterly.1

But here’s the funniest part: as Benen points out, the question Fox asked is roughly like saying “The administration totally lied. Do you think the administration knowingly lied?” And even so, Fox could only muster 51 percent agreement. Try harder, guys.

1Oh, all right. Here are the facts yet again: (a) Benghazi was an opportunistic assault, carried out with no more than a few hours of planning. (b) Reporting on the ground confirms that the video did, in fact, play a role in provoking some of the attackers. (c) Neither Susan Rice nor anyone else denied that Al Qaeda-affiliated groups were responsible. In the first few days after the attack they said only that we didn’t know yet. (d) In any case, Ansar al-Shariah is primarily a local group with local grievances, and is only tenuously affiliated with Al Qaeda. Abu Khattala, who also led some of the attackers, had no ties to Al Qaeda at all.

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Fox News Really Needs to Up Its Push-Polling Game

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Will Only the Rich Benefit From the EU’s New Right to Purge Google?

Mother Jones

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Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation isn’t happy about the new EU court decision that requires Google to delete links to information that people find troublesome:

When a newspaper publishes a news item, it appears online….Attempting to limit the propagation of that information by applying scattergun censorship will simply temporarily distort one part of the collective record in favor of those who can take the time and money to selectively edit away their own online blemishes….Meanwhile, a new market is created for mining and organizing accurate public data out of the reach of the European authorities. The record of the major search engines will be distorted, just as it was by Scientology and the Chinese government. Outside of Europe’s reach, rogue sites will collect the real information, and be more accurate than the compliant search services.

There are two interesting points here. First, that the EU ruling will mostly benefit the rich, who can afford to hire people to police their image and make legal demands to have links deleted. Second, that this will prompt the rise of “rogue” search engines that can bill themselves as uncensored.

The first point depends almost entirely on just how broad the court ruling turns out to be, and right now that’s deeply unclear. In the case at hand, the court ruled that Google had to delete a link because it was now “irrelevant,” a standard that’s fuzzy to say the least. Could I demand that links to dumb articles I wrote for my campus newspaper a few decades ago be deleted? How about a failed business from the 90s? Or bad student evaluations on an anonymous website? The court provided very little guidance on this, so only time will tell how broadly this gets interpreted. Either way, though, it’s almost certainly true that, in practice, only the fairly affluent will be able to take advantage of it.

The second point is also something to keep track of. The court ruling specifically targeted search engines as a way of exerting EU control even when the source information itself is held on a site outside of EU jurisdiction. But will this work? Creating a search engine isn’t all that difficult. It’s hard to create one as good as Google, but it’s not hard to create one that’s pretty good. And if that search engine is located solely in the United States and does no business in Europe, then the court’s ruling doesn’t affect it. However, residents of Europe would still have access to it unless the EU gets outrageously heavy-handed and tries to firewall unapproved sites, much as China does. That seems unlikely.

Now, it’s true that your average searcher would still get the censored Google results. At the same time, if a few uncensored sites pop up in response to this court ruling, it wouldn’t be all that hard for anyone who cares to use them. What’s more, the very act of filing a demand to delete a link would itself be a public record, and might produce more bad PR than the original search results ever did.

I remain opposed to this ruling, which seems vague, overbroad, and just plain bad public policy. But just how bad it is depends a lot on how things unfold over the next few years. Stay tuned.

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Will Only the Rich Benefit From the EU’s New Right to Purge Google?

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