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Boehner and the Benghazi Emails: Been There, Done That?

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| Mon May. 13, 2013 7:55 AM PDT
John Boehner

House Speaker John Boehner, according to Politico, is obsessed with Benghazi. And last week, after ABC News revealed the revised talking points crafted by the Obama administration following the September 11 attack that left four Americans dead, Boehner demanded that the administration release emails related to these talking points. "The truth shouldn't be hidden from the American people behind a White House firewall," Boehner declared. "Four Americans lost their lives in this terrorist attack. Congress will continue to investigate this issue, using all of the resources at our disposal." But thanks, in part, to the Republicans, the truth isn't being hidden. Boehner and his fellow Republicans had access to those emails—and used them for a public report they issued weeks ago that scooped the ABC News story.

In March, Boehner, according to a senior administration official, was invited to a White House-arranged briefing where the emails and other Benghazi-related material could be privately reviewed. Boehner did not attend; he sent staff, who attended with other House Republicans. Asked why Boehner did not participate in this session and why he did not at that time demand the release of the emails, Brendan Buck, his press secretary, says, "This is embarrassing pushback. Do you recall the report we put out in April? The committees were compiling information as part of their investigation and when the report was done, the committees requested the release of the emails." In an April 23 letter, five GOP House committee chairs did ask the White House to turn over to their committees the documents it had allowed the GOPers to review.

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Electric Car Guru Elon Musk Ditches Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us Group

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| Mon May. 13, 2013 7:31 AM PDT
Tesla Motors CEO Elon MuskTesla Motors CEO Elon Musk. jdlasica/Flickr

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and the private space travel company SpaceX, has parted ways with FWD.us, the tech-centric political group that Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg launched last month. So, too, has investor and entrepreneur David Sacks, who created the social network Yammer and financed the satiric 2005 movie Thank You for Smoking. The tech news website AllThingsD first reported the departures of Musk and Sacks, and their names have been removed from the list of nearly two-dozen "major contributors" to FWD.us.

Zuckerberg and Facebook "Causes" creator Joe Green founded FWD.us to lobby on behalf of Silicon Valley firms in Washington. They quickly earned the endorsements of a host of other tech superstars. The group—which, as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, does not have to disclose its donors—has reportedly raised more than $25 million so far. The group chose the ongoing fight over comprehensive immigration reform as its first foray into Congressional politics, seeking to expand the number of visas available to engineers and other high-skilled workers that tech companies would like to recruit. By all accounts, FWD.us' message has gotten a warm reception on Capitol Hill.

But the group caused a political firestorm recently when it ran TV advertisements praising Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) for supporting more oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Another ad depicted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) criticizing Obamacare and President Obama's refusal (so far) to green-light the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. FWD.us ran the ads to give Begich and Graham some political cover on immigration reform, the theory being that by touting the senators' conservative bona fides, they could give them the space to take a moderate position on an immigration reform bill. The Begich and Graham ads ran for a week and are no longer on the air. Liberal and environmental groups reacted furiously to FWD.us' conservative and anti-environmental message, protesting at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. And last week, nine progressive groups, including MoveOn.org, Progressives United, the Sierra Club, and Daily Kos, pledged to pull down their existing paid Facebook ads or cancel future ad buys for at least two weeks.

It's not surprising that Musk would break with FWD.us. Tesla Motors builds high-end electric cars; its entire business model is built around a clean-tech economy. Musk also sits on the board of SolarCity, a company that delivers, installs, and maintains solar panels powering homes, businesses, and government offices.

Musk sent this statement to AllThingsD: "I agreed to support Fwd.us because there is a genuine need to reform immigration. However, this should not be done at the expense of other important causes. I have spent a lot of time fighting far larger lobbying organizations in DC and believe that the right way to win on a cause is to argue the merits of that cause. This statement may surprise some people, but my experience is that most (not all) politicians and their staffs want to do the right thing and eventually do."

FWD.us spokeswoman Kate Hansen emailed this statement to Mother Jones: "We recognize that not everyone will always agree with or be pleased by our strategy—and we're grateful for the continued support of our dedicated founders and major contributors. FWD.us remains totally committed to supporting a bipartisan policy agenda that will boost the knowledge economy, including comprehensive immigration reform."

Who Will Own Our Future Robot Overlords?

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| Mon May. 13, 2013 5:45 AM PDT

Robots! That's the topic of my latest piece in the current issue of the magazine. I've blogged on this subject a fair amount, but this is the first time I've tried to put everything together and explain what I really think robotics is likely to mean over the next few decades. Some of you are going to nod right along, some of you are going to think I'm crazy, and any economists in the audience are going to be rolling their eyes at my rather casual use of macroeconomic trend statistics to help make my point. But I'm pretty sure none of you will be bored.

So what is my point? First off, it's the obvious one that I think computer hardware and software are progressing fast enough that we're not very far away from true artificial intelligence. Along the way I break exciting new ground in describing Ray Kurzweil's "back half of the chessboard" analogy, which illustrates how continuous growth can look insignificant for a long time and then suddenly explode. After immense amounts of research, I decided on Lake Michigan as the key to my explanation of the chessboard analogy, but you'll have to click the link to see what this means. It even comes with a nifty little graphic that our art department created to illustrate how Lake Michigan is just like a digital computer.

Why spend so much time on all of this? Because whenever the subject of AI comes up, everyone wants examples but people like me can't come up with any. That's because AI doesn't exist yet. So we haul out Watson and driverless cars and so forth, and it all seems like pretty weak tea. But Lake Michigan explains why it's not. All these examples that seem pretty lame and not really very AI-like are exactly what you'd expect as mileposts along the road to AI. They aren't demonstrations of how far away we are, but exactly the opposite. They're demonstrations of how close we are. When this all finally happens, it's going to happen fast.

That's the first half of the piece. The second half is about what all this means. If AI is coming—and coming quickly—what does it mean for the economy? In the long run, it will be great, an era of both infinite leisure and material progress. But in the medium run I think the consequences will be fairly grim: more and more people will be put out of work, and no, there won't be new jobs that open up for them along the way. This will very decidedly not be a replay of the Industrial Revolution. What's worse, it will all happen so slowly that we're going to spend a long time denying what's unfolding before our eyes, and a whole lot of people are going to suffer because of it.

In fact, I think automation has been affecting our economy in nontraditional ways since about 2000 or so. Only by a tiny amount, though, which means it's impossible to demonstrate its impact conclusively. Still, you can amass evidence, and that's what I do. There may be other explanations for each of the trends I talk about, but when you put them all together I think the simplest collective explanation is that they point in the direction of automation already having a slight effect on employment and capital intensity. Slight but growing. Two or three decades from now, the Warren Buffetts of the world will own all the robots and a big chunk of the world will be permanently unemployed.

Do I prove this? Not by a mile. But in the end, I meant for this piece to be read as provocation more than anything else. So go ahead and be provoked, one way or the other. Click the link.

Short Takes: Our Nixon

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| Mon May. 13, 2013 3:00 AM PDT
Our Nixon

Our Nixon

DIPPER FILMS

One morning in 1972, Nixon chief of staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman gave press secretary Ron Ziegler some big news: Nixon had just gone to meet with Mao Zedong, head of China's Communist Party, marking the first thaw in a quarter century of US-China relations. In his shock, Ziegler bit into an unpeeled clementine without realizing it. This obscure clip is one of many you'll experience in Our Nixon, a curated collage of 500 Super 8 film reels shot by Haldeman and Nixon aides Dwight Chapin and John Ehrlichman—ambitious men who obsessively documented their lives in the West Wing. The footage, seized by the FBI after Watergate, offers an intimate glimpse into a notoriously secretive administration. "It was a very unnatural kind of life," Ehrlichman reveals. "You had the feeling you were in the middle of a great big, brilliantly lighted, badly run television show."

Quick Reads: "Any Way You Slice It" by Stan Cox

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| Mon May. 13, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing

By Stan Cox

THE NEW PRESS

In this lucid and lively book, Stan Cox, an environmental writer whose last book charted the effects of air conditioning on the American landscape, explains how "rationing" has become a dirty word. Through examples ranging from post-Hurricane Sandy gas shortages to China's one-child policy, he depicts a society anxious about our right to consumer choice. "Whenever there's a ceiling on available goods, no one is happy," Cox writes. But sooner or later we'll almost certainly have to ration food, water, and fossil fuels. "If rationing becomes unavoidable, the way it happens—justly or harshly—will depend very much on whether we have managed to build a more just society."

Review: The Handsome Family's "Wilderness"

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| Mon May. 13, 2013 2:30 AM PDT
Brett and Rennie Sparks, Handsome FamilyBrett and Rennie Sparks Jason Creps

The Handsome Family
Wilderness
Carrot Top

The Handsome Family, Wilderness
Wilderness

Albuquerque-based spouses Brett and Rennie Sparks have crafted their idiosyncratic version of Americana for more than two decades, blending his low growl of a voice with her askew lyrics to offer a subtly surreal take on traditional music. In songs like "Frogs," "Caterpillars," and "Eels" (you get their drift), the slow-cooking Wilderness, out this week, charts the uneasy interaction between humankind and the natural world, often to scary effect. "The owls they mock me and have stolen my pills," Brett murmurs on—what else?—"Owls." Things turn downright creepy on "Spider," his account of how "a million little teeth tore me to pieces." Amid familiar fiddles and banjos, the Handsome Family's absorbing vision of decay and entropy is quietly unsettling, and makes most other modern roots music seem like child's play.

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Here's Why Benghazi May Finally Have Legs

—By

| Sun May. 12, 2013 5:33 PM PDT

Alex Koppelman takes a fresh look at the Benghazi affair this weekend and tries to come up with something outrageous about it. He doesn't, really, until he gets to the very end. So what is it that he finds most outrageous? Not, it turns out, the poor security in Benghazi; nor the military response to the attacks; nor even the editing of the infamous talking points. Not really. He pinpoints the outrage much more precisely, and I think it's instructive to read what he says:

This past November (after Election Day), White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters that “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Remarkably, Carney is sticking with that line even now....This is an incredible thing for Carney to be saying. He’s playing semantic games, telling a roomful of journalists that the definition of editing we’ve all been using is wrong, that the only thing that matters is who’s actually working the keyboard. It’s not quite re-defining the word “is,” or the phrase “sexual relations,” but it’s not all that far off, either.

If Benghazi continues to have legs, it won't be because Fox is hyping it. They've been hyping it for eight months now. It won't be because the initial talking points were wrong. We've known that since the end of last September. It won't be because there were military assets on the night of the attacks that could have been used but weren't. This is the "stand down" conspiracy theory, which keeps morphing into something new whenever the old version is debunked, and it's long since been thoroughly hashed out. It won't be because references to al-Qaeda were removed from the final draft of the talking points. David Petraeus explained that last November. And it won't be because we learned that the editing of the talking points involved some squabbling between State and CIA. Nobody over the age of five is surprised or scandalized by that.

No, it will be because the small group of reporters who are credentialed to the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room feels aggrieved that the press secretary told them something to their faces that concealed a bit of unseemly bureaucratic squabbling. It doesn't matter if the subject matter itself was important. In this case, it wasn't: the nickel version is that the State Department objected to the CIA adding a sentence making sure everyone knew they had warned about possible attacks beforehand, a statement that was both gratuitous and off subject. But trivial or not, Carney misled the reporters in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room about this, and that makes it personal.

Never underestimate the power of a press corps that suddenly decides the story is personal. It may be a while before they let go of this.

The IRS Shoots Itself in the Foot, Then Reloads

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| Sun May. 12, 2013 2:51 PM PDT

Here's the thing that really puzzles me about this whole business of the IRS targeting tea party groups for extra scrutiny: the agency's clumsy handling of the whole thing. And I'm being charitable by calling it "clumsy." I mean, did they really think they could just announce this during an ABA conference on Friday morning and that would be the end of it? Of course not. It's explosive. So why were they seemingly so unprepared for any followup questions?

It's very peculiar. Especially since the evidence suggests this affair probably wasn't quite as outrageous as it seems at first glance. Roughly speaking, what seems to have happened is that three years ago the IRS was facing an explosion of newly formed 501(c)4 groups claiming tax exempt status, something that's legal only for groups that are primarily engaged in promoting education or social welfare, not electioneering. So some folks in the Cincinnati office tried to come up with a quick filter to flag groups that deserved extra scrutiny. But what should that flag be? Well, three years ago the explosion happened to be among tea party groups, so they began searching their database "for applications with 'Tea Party,' 'Patriots,' or '9/12' in the organization's name as well as other 'political sounding' names." This was dumb, and when senior leaders found out about it, they put a quick stop to it:

On June 29, 2011, Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, learned at a meeting that groups were being targeted, according to the [inspector general’s] report....Lerner instructed agents to change the criteria for flagging groups “immediately,” the report says.

The problem is that the explosion of 501(c)4 groups is a genuine problem: they really have grown like kudzu, lots of them really are used primarily as electioneering vehicles, and the IRS has been either unwilling or unable to regulate them properly. So the fact that some of the folks responsible for processing these applications were looking for a way to flag potentially dubious groups is sort of understandable.

But understandable or not, they bungled it horribly, leaving themselves open to equally understandable charges of politicizing the IRS. Conservative groups are as outraged as liberals would be if the Bush-era IRS were flagging groups with "environment" or "progressive" in their names. So even if, as seems likely, this whole thing turns out to have been mostly a misguided scheme cooked up by some too-clever IRS drones, it doesn't matter. Conservatives are right to be outraged and right to demand a full investigation. They suspect there might be more to it, and so would I if the shoe were on the other foot. We need to find out for sure whether this episode was just moronic, or if it had some kind of partisan motivation.

What's really unfortunate about all this is that it will probably put an end to any scrutiny of 501(c)4 groups, and that's a shame. The IRS should be scrutinizing them, and it should be doing it on an ongoing basis. More than likely, though, Congress will step in to neuter them completely on this score, and the current Wild West character of 501(c)4 fundraising will continue unabated.

Bonus Mother's Day Cat Blogging

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| Sun May. 12, 2013 8:01 AM PDT

Happy Mother's Day! What better way to celebrate than to post a picture of my mother's cats? These are the two sibs, Tillamook and Ditto, claiming dibs on my mother's favorite chair. Because, after all, Mother's Day goes just so far, right?

USDA Sticks It to Monsanto and Dow—at Least Temporarily

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| Sat May. 11, 2013 10:51 AM PDT

Back in early 2012, the US Department of Agriculture seemed on the verge of approving new genetically modified crops from agrichemical giants Monsanto and Dow. The two companies were pushing new corn and soy varieties that would respond to the ever-expanding problem of herbicide-tolerant superweeds by bringing more-toxic herbicides into the mix—and likely ramping up the resistance problem, as I explained at length in a post at the time.

Even some mainstream ag scientists were alarmed at the coming escalation in the war against weeds. Scientists at Penn State University—not exactly a hotbed of alternative ag thinking—delivered a damning analysis of the novel crops, which would be engineered to withstand not only Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, but also the highly toxic old ones 2,4-D (Dow's version) and Dicamba (Monsanto's).

Yet in August, the USDA again signaled that approval would be imminent—and by the end of 2012, people who follow ag regulatory issues were telling me that the USDA would almost certainly approve the crops over Christmas break, timing the decision in an effort to minimize the inevitable uproar.

But then Christmas came and went with no announcement—leading Dow to issue a January press statement about how the unexpected delay meant it could not sell its new product to farmers for the 2013 growing season. Yet the company remained confident about the prospects for approval in time for planting in 2014—it told the trade journal Delta Farm Press it "expects all approvals will be in place for sale in late 2013," in time for its novel seeds to be used over a "broad geography" in 2014.

But on Friday, the USDA essentially trampled on those expectations—it announced it was delaying approval of the crops until it could generate full environmental impact statements (known as EIS's) on them. The move effectively means that the crops won't be planted in fields next year, either, a Dow spokesperson told Bloomberg News.

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