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Looking For a Benghazi Talking Points Villain? It Was David Petraeus, Not Barack Obama

Kevin Drum — Wed, 22 May 2013 04:31:48 +0000

After reading through the Benghazi "talking points" emails and doing some additional reporting, Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung confirm what's been pretty obvious for a while now. The House committee that originally asked for the talking points wanted only some basic facts so that no one would mistakenly disclose classified information to the press, but CIA Director David Petraeus—"a master of the craft of media cultivation"—understood the reputational stakes immediately and acted accordingly:

A close reading of recently released government e-mails that were sent during the editing process, and interviews with senior officials from several government agencies, reveal Petraeus’s early role and ambitions in going well beyond the committee’s request, apparently to produce a set of talking points favorable to his image and his agency.

The information Petraeus ordered up when he returned to his Langley office that morning included far more than the minimalist version that Ruppersberger had requested. It included early classified intelligence assessments of who might be responsible for the attack and an account of prior CIA warnings — information that put Petraeus at odds with the State Department, the FBI and senior officials within his own agency.

This was especially galling to the other participants in the review process because (a) the Benghazi annex was a CIA installation and CIA was responsible for its security, (b) the talking points were supposed to be limited to what we knew about the attack, and (c) the whole point of producing the talking points was to avoid endangering the investigation by revealing classified information about suspects and methods.

In the end, as Wilson and Young point out, "The only government entity that did not object to the detailed talking points produced with Petraeus’s input was the White House, which played the role of mediator in the bureaucratic fight that at various points included the CIA’s top lawyer and the agency’s deputy director expressing opposition to what the director wanted." This entire controversy has been much ado about nothing from the beginning, but if you absolutely insist on singling out a villain, the choice is now pretty obvious. David Petraeus was the Machiavellian manipulator of the narrative here, not Barack Obama.

The Most Absurd Religious War in Geek History is in the News Today

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 23:53:15 +0000

The creator of the GIF, Steve Wilhite, caused a firestorm today by weighing in on the correct pronunciation of his creation:

He is proud of the GIF, but remains annoyed that there is still any debate over the pronunciation of the format. “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

This is not the first time Wilhite has handed down this decree. It's never been the end of the story before, and needless to say, it was not the end of the story this time either. But I bring this up not to declare my own allegiance, but to ask a different question. I need some honest input from old timers here.

As near as I can remember, controversy over the pronunciation of GIF has existed practically from the day of its birth. Nevertheless, my recollection is that 20 years ago, most people pronounced it JIF. The hard-G contingent was a distinct minority. But that seems to have changed over time. Today, my sense is just the opposite: most people pronounce it with a hard G, and the Jiffies are now a small rump fighting a rearguard action.

Everyone has such strong opinions about what the pronunciation should be that it's hard to solicit opinions on the purely empirical question of how it has been pronounced. But I'm going to ask anyway. Please don't bother answering unless you were born before 1970. For those of you who were, and especially for those of you who worked in the tech industry in the 80s and 90s, what's your recollection? Has the favored pronunciation changed, or has the hard G always been the more popular choice?

How the World's Dullest Story Became the Target of a Massive Leak Investigation

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 21:07:41 +0000

Four years ago, Fox News reporter James Rosen wrote a story saying the CIA had learned that North Korea planned to carry out a nuclear test if the UN approved additional sanctions:

What's more, Pyongyang's next nuclear detonation is but one of four planned actions the Central Intelligence Agency has learned, through sources inside North Korea, that the regime of Kim Jong-Il intends to take — but not announce — once the Security Council resolution is officially passed, likely on Friday. The other three actions include the reprocessing of all of the North's spent plutonium fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium; a major escalation in the North's uranium-enrichment program; and the launching of another Taepodong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile.

The Justice Department immediately launched a leak investigation, which culminated in charges against Rosen's source, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, an analyst at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who had been detailed to the State Department. As part of this investigation, DOJ tracked Rosen's movements and subpoenaed his phone records. Journalists are apoplectic about this, but Jack Shafer wonders just what Rosen thought he was doing:

Although Rosen's story asserts that it is "withholding some details about the sources and methods ... to avoid compromising sensitive overseas operations," the basic detail that the CIA has "sources inside North Korea" privy to its future plans is very compromising stuff all by itself. As Rosen continues, "U.S. spymasters regard as one of the world's most difficult to penetrate."

Hmmm. There's really no other way to get information this detailed except from a source inside North Korea, so it's not clear to me that Rosen really gave anything away with that line. At the same time, it's not clear why Rosen published this story at all. As Michael Tomasky says:

No offense intended to Rosen, but...I don't even see where that's such big news. Of course North Korea was going to do something to protest a UN sanctions vote. Do what? Well, missile tests is what it's been doing for the last several years now to scare people, so...a missile test. I mean, if I'd read that on June 11, 2009, I'd have stopped after three paragraphs and thought tell me something I don't know. So why was the government so up in arms about it in the first place?

Tomasky's point is that it's outrageous that DOJ would go ballistic over a story that basically revealed nothing. But that misses the point. The story is completely uninteresting. And yet, by its very publication, it alerted North Korea to a possible mole in high places. So why would you run a piece like this? Here's Josh Marshall:

It’s difficult for me not to be more shocked by the self-interested preening of fellow journalists over a comically inept reporter and source than the arguable dangers this episode holds for press freedoms. Indeed, I’ve tried and failed. I can’t.

I don't like the fact that the Obama administration has been so aggressive at investigating leaks, and so aggressive at targeting reporters when they do. But it's stuff like this that prevents the American public from sympathizing much. When they look at a case like this, most of them don't see the government eroding a reporter's First Amendment rights. They see a reporter recklessly divulging legitimately sensitive information and destroying a career in the process —and apparently doing it just for the hell of it.

I still don't condone the DOJ actions in this case—especially since they basically had Kim's confession and didn't really need Rosen's phone records—but at the same time I'd sure be interested in hearing Rosen's defense. What was he thinking when he did this?

Are Republicans Getting Ready to Shoot Themselves in the Foot?

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 18:34:58 +0000

Greg Sargent has been arguing for a while that Republicans run the risk of turning off voters if they go overboard on scandalmania. A new Washington Post poll bolsters his argument:

The Post poll finds a majority believes the Obama administration is trying to “cover up” facts about the IRS scandal and that a plurality thinks it is trying to cover up Benghazi facts. These numbers are at odds with yesterday’s CNN poll, which found more Americans think Obama is being truthful. But that aside, in spite of these negative findings about the scandals, the Post poll also finds that Obama’s approval rating is holding steady, at 51 percent, and the economy may be the reason why: Majorities believe the economy is beginning to recover and are optimistic about where the economy will go in the next year.

I'll play devil's advocate here. First, I think 1998 was probably unique: The nature of the scandal was clear to everyone and a majority of Americans simply didn't think it was very serious. The nature of our current set of contretemps isn't yet clear, and the Post poll makes it plain that most Americans do take them seriously. As we learn more, there's every chance that the public could view them as even more serious. In fact, they probably will. After all, a big pile of scandals in the sixth year of a presidency usually spells trouble. 1998 is the sole exception, and I wouldn't hang too much on it.

Second, there's overreach and then there's overreach. In 1998, Republicans didn't just go a little overboard, they actually impeached Bill Clinton. As long as Republicans steer clear of impeachment this time around, they should be OK.

Third, I'd like to see the crosstabs for the Post poll. How partisan are the results? Where do independents stand? If this is already a pure partisan battle, it won't go anywhere. But if Democrats are wavering, or if independents are mostly agreeing with Republicans, that could spell trouble.

Finally, approval ratings have a certain amount of inertia. It's possible that there just hasn't been time yet for all of this stuff to affect Obama's approval rating. It may well start to suffer in the coming months, even if the economy does keep improving.

Do I actually believe all this? Sort of. But Republicans still have several problems. First, they're having a hard time tying anything serious to President Obama, and I don't expect that to change. Second, even if they avoid going down the impeachment rabbit hole, they show all the signs of a party just itching to shoot itself in the foot. The bogus email leaks are a case in point: you lose the press when you pull stunts like that. Finally, this is all happening too early. Maybe Republicans can keep up the outrage for a few months, but a year and a half? I really have a hard time seeing that.

Right now, Republicans are benefiting from a press corps that's offended by the AP subpoenas and Jay Carney's evasions over the Benghazi talking points. But their pique won't last forever. In the end, Sargent is probably right: these "scandals" are going to fade, and Republicans are going to get more and more desperate to keep them in the spotlight. That's pretty likely to lead them down a road to disaster.

Congress Can Make Apple Pay Any Taxes It Wants To

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:17:12 +0000

Sen. Rand Paul, obviously trying to follow up on the roaring success of his "Stand With Rand" filibuster, decided to go all #slatepitchy yesterday during hearings that revealed the stupendous extent of Apple's tax avoidance strategies:

I am offended by the tone and tenor of this hearing. I am offended by a $4 trillion government bullying, berating and badgering one of America's greatest success stories.

....I am offended by the spectacle of dragging in here executives from an American company that is not doing anything illegal. If anyone should be on trial here, it should be Congress.

I frankly think the Committee should apologize to Apple. I frankly think Congress should be on trial here for creating a bizarre and byzantine tax code that runs into the tens of thousands of pages, for creating a tax code that simply doesn't compete with the rest of the world.

I'm amused that a congressional investigation becomes "bullying, berating and badgering" when the topic happens to be taxes, but I'll allow Paul his histrionics. Because, roughly speaking, he's right. Congress sets the rules, and if they want to make sure Apple pays its taxes, all they have to do is write laws that require it.

That said, Paul's outrage is more than a little hard to take here since it's people like him that have been so successful at preventing Congress from writing a decent corporate tax code in the first place. His only concern is slashing taxes, not rationalizing them, and if someone introduced a bill to make Apple pay its fair share into the voracious federal maw, Paul would undoubtedly be grandstanding yet again with another filibuster. He doesn't really deserve to be taken very seriously on this subject.

Still, it's true that, in theory, Congress can address this anytime it wants. They set the rules, and they don't really have much standing to complain when companies exploit those rules to pay as little in taxes as possible. After all, what do you expect them to do?

The Fight For Our Precious Bodily Fluids

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:17:30 +0000

With Oregon in the healthcare news so much lately, it's only fitting that Portland is holding a vote today on water fluoridation. Sarah Kliff reports:

The fluoride vote will happen Tuesday and the most recent polls have the anti-fluoride camp up 50 percent to 43 percent. If Portland voters reject fluoridated water, it will follow in the path of many cities before it. Forty-four cities around the world — largely in the United States, Australia and Canada — have passed anti-fluoridation policies this year, according to the Fluoride Action Network.

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for fluoridation opponents. Not because I think fluoridation is harmful or ineffective. The evidence is overwhelming that it's neither, and Portland would be nuts to vote against it. And not because I have any sympathy for the John Birch Society loons who think fluoridation is some kind of global conspiracy theory.

No, it's just because I have a bit of sympathy for the slippery slope argument. This argument is simple: The goal of a water agency should be to provide clean water, period. So chlorine is fine because that's part of the core mission of making sure water is clean. But once you decide you can add other stuff because it provides some kind of societal benefit, where does it stop? If you can add fluoride, why not statins? Or anything else that a majority of the population thinks is a good idea?

Now, that said, I've never had more than a bit of sympathy for slippery slope arguments of any kind. The key question is whether or not we're actually likely to fall down the slope. We're human beings with intelligence and agency, after all, not rocks on a hillside. I believe, for example, that human beings are naturally cruel to outsiders, especially during war, so we need the strongest possible taboos against torture and ill treatment of prisoners. Even the smallest crack is likely to open the floodgates of rage and revenge. But fluoridation isn't like that. Are people really likely to start filling up their municipal water supplies with anything that sounds good once they've taken the fatal first step with fluoride? I don't think so, and history suggests I'm right not to worry too much about that. So fluoridation is fine.

Still, I sort of get the fear. And for those of you who think the fear is just some right-wing rube thing, take a look at the map on the right. The areas of the country with the highest fluoridation rates? The South and the Midwest. The areas with the lowest rates? The Northeast and the Pacific Coast.

GOP: Obama Is Responsible for "A Culture of Intimidation"

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 04:02:36 +0000

Apparently this is the latest Republican thing. They can't show that Obama has been actually involved in the IRS scandal—or in any of the other squabbles currently roiling Washington DC, for that matter—so now they've gotten together and agreed on a new party line: Obama is responsible for all of this stuff anyway because he's relentlessly stoked a "culture of intimidation" against his adversaries. "The president demonizes his opponents," Mitch McConnell said with a straight face on Sunday, and this is at the root of all our problems.

Paul Mirengoff correctly suggests that this sounds whiny—"the kind of thing I'd expect from Democrats." But he agrees with the basic premise that Obama demonizes his opponents, and points us to an NRO piece by Eliana Johnson that provides the proof. I was curious, so I clicked the link. Just what has Obama done to strike fear into Republicans' hearts?

Well, only three things apparently. First, he dissed Fox News and then tried to exclude them from the network pool. Second, at an explicitly partisan DNC fundraiser following the Citizens United decision, he castigated "groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country." AFP, of course, is supported by the Koch brothers. And apparently Obama has also said some uncomplimentary things about Rush Limbaugh. This is the full bill of particulars.

I'll give them the Fox thing. Trying to keep Fox out of the press pool was bush league nonsense. But really. Kicking back at the rancid bile that spews out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth on a daily basis? Telling a bunch of rich Democratic donors that they're up against lots of rich Republican donors, so please open your wallets? This is a culture of intimidation?

Conservatives, of course, have fostered a culture not of intimidation, but of rank hatred so insane you can practically see the spittle flecks every time they talk about Obama. And yet, when Obama returns fire, even with his trademark restraint, it's time to bring out the smelling salts. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.

When is 2 About the Same as 70 Million?

Kevin Drum — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:31:16 +0000

A "twin prime" is a pair of prime numbers that differ by two. For example, 11 and 13, or 857 and 859. The "twin prime conjecture" states that there are an infinite number of twin primes. To this day, nobody has ever been able to prove this. It's one of the great open conjectures of number theory.

Recently, however, an unknown mathematician proved a theorem that, according to the experts, is almost the same thing. It turns out that there are an infinite number of prime pairs that differ by some number N. And what is N? We still don't know, but Yitang Zhang of the University of New Hampshire has demonstrated that it's less than 70 million.

This is why I love number theory. I mean, what's a difference of 69,999,998 between friends? Also this:

Without communicating with the field’s experts, Zhang started thinking about the problem. After three years, however, he had made no progress. “I was so tired,” he said. To take a break, Zhang visited a friend in Colorado last summer. There, on July 3, during a half-hour lull in his friend’s backyard before leaving for a concert, the solution suddenly came to him. “I immediately realized that it would work,” he said.

Isn't that just perfect?

GOP Congressman: Calls for Impeachment "Will Likely Increase"

Kevin Drum — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:18:14 +0000

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R–Utah) talks to National Review about the I-word:

Behind the scenes, he says, House Republicans are frustrated by the White House’s evasiveness, and the calls for impeachment will likely increase. Chaffetz acknowledges that House speaker John Boehner is wary of moving too swiftly against the president....“Now, the speaker has more patience than I do,” Chaffetz says. “He has told me to be patient, that the truth will eventually surface. But I’m not a patient person, and if this administration makes us do this the hard way, that’s what we’ll do.”

....“This is an administration embroiled in a scandal that they created,” he says. “It’s a cover-up. I’m not saying impeachment is the end game, but it’s a possibility, especially if they keep doing little to help us learn more.”

See? All those calls from Republican elders to settle down and not get too crazy are working! According to Chaffetz, impeachment isn't a sure thing, it's only a possibility. That's totally non-crazy. All that's left now is to find some actual presidential wrongdoing. But I'm sure that's just a technicality.

An Inside Look at How DOJ Goes After Reporters, Not Just Leakers

Kevin Drum — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:01:25 +0000

The Washington Post writes today about the extraordinary treatment of a reporter in a recent leak investigation. But this one isn't about the AP or an al-Qaeda mole. It's about North Korea:

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

....Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist — and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010. The case also raises new concerns among critics of government secrecy about the possible stifling effect of these investigations on a critical element of press freedom: the exchange of information between reporters and their sources.

Even more extraordinary, the Justice Department appeared to consider prosecution of not just the leaker in this case, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, but also the reporter, James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News. The charge? Acting as "either as an aider, abettor, and/or co-conspirator of Mr. Kim." In other words, trying to get access to confidential government information, something that reporters do every single day. The key section of the warrant is below.

In the end, Rosen was never charged with anything, but it sure sounds as if DOJ might have thought about it. Read the entire Post piece for more.

Peggy Noonan's Broken Soul

Kevin Drum — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:29:51 +0000

I've read a slew of blog posts over the past few days suggesting that Peggy Noonan has finally and comprehensively gone crazy. The evidence is her latest column, which starts with "We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate" and goes downhill from there. But I don't get it. This isn't Noonan's worst column ever. It's not even her worst column in the month of May. That would be last week's column, in which she accused President Obama of refusing to send rescue teams to Benghazi because he thought it might hurt his reelection chances. I'm not making that up, and I'm not exaggerating. Here's what she wrote:

The Obama White House sees every event as a political event. Really, every event, even an attack on a consulate and the killing of an ambassador. Because of that, it could not tolerate the idea that the armed assault on the Benghazi consulate was a premeditated act of Islamist terrorism. That would carry a whole world of unhappy political implications, and demand certain actions.

....All of this is bad enough. Far worse is the implied question that hung over the House hearing, and that cries out for further investigation. That is the idea that if the administration was to play down the nature of the attack it would have to play down the response—that is, if you want something to be a nonstory you have to have a nonresponse. So you don't launch a military rescue operation, you don't scramble jets, and you have a rationalization—they're too far away, they'll never make it in time. This was probably true, but why not take the chance when American lives are at stake?

Noonan basically thinks that Barack Obama sat in the situation room on September 11th last year and was asked repeatedly, Do you want to send in a FAST team? How about the C-110 force in Croatia? Should we scramble F-16s? Can we send in a team from Tripoli? And each time, Obama stroked his chin, stared up at the ceiling, and decided that attempting to save American lives might hurt his reelection chances. So he said no.

There is, literally, not a single politician in the country that I would suspect of doing something like that. Not even the ones I loathe. Not Dick Cheney. Not Richard Nixon. Not Darrell Issa. Not Newt Gingrich. Not anyone. I think you'd have to go all the way up the ladder to Josef Stalin to find that degree of cynicism and callousness.

But that's apparently what Noonan thinks of Obama. This is the work of a broken soul who happens to have a bit of writing skill. But broken nonetheless.

A Brief Reminder: Presidential Distance from DOJ and the IRS is a Good Thing

Kevin Drum — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:06:39 +0000

Dave Weigel notes that one particular conservative talking point has clearly caught on:

Score one for Republicans: The White House's insistence that Obama learned of every scandal "by reading the news" has become a punchline.

To the extent that this is just political attack-doggery, I don't really care about it. It's what you expect when the opposition party smells chum in the water. But we've been hearing this from mainstream reporters too, and it's a whole lot less defensible there. Chris Matthews, for example, was howling the other day about Obama's ignorance of the AP phone record subpoena, which he thought was indefensible. "You don't think Bobby would have called Jack?" he asked incredulously. And he's right: Bobby would have called Jack. And that would have been wrong, which is why the Justice Department is now kept at a much greater distance from the White House. This is universally considered a good thing, which explains Jay Carney's "Are you serious?" when he was asked about this by reporters a few day ago. Surely we haven't forgotten so soon after Watergate exactly why we prefer for the president to be kept very far away from criminal investigations?

Ditto for the IRS, which for similar reasons is an agency that we've deliberately set up to be independent of the president. We don't want the president to have any influence over the IRS, and we don't want him kept apprised of the details of ongoing inquiries. It would have been a scandal if Obama had known any details about the IG investigation of the IRS's tea party targeting.

By chance, two of our three current "scandals" happen to involve agencies that we really do want to retain their independence from the president. (Benghazi is different, but there's no scandal there in the first place.) As the feeding frenzy moves into high gear, I hope everyone remembers this. Ask all the tough questions you want, but let's not pretend, even jokingly, that Obama should have known more about investigations at DOJ or the IRS. That's exactly the opposite of what we want.

Who is the Most Reviled Person in America?

Kevin Drum — Mon, 20 May 2013 00:43:31 +0000

Here is the LA Times describing how the tea party targeting scandal at the IRS got its start:

In March 2010, a manager in a Cincinnati determinations unit asked a screener to get a handle on the issue, according to the report from the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration. The agent started pulling applications with political-sounding names, such as "tea party" and "patriots."

And just who is this screener? Here's the New York Times:

For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words like “patriots,” “we the people” — as a way to search efficiently through the flood of applications for groups that might not qualify for exemptions, according to the I.R.S. inspector general.

....It is not yet clear which manager in Cincinnati asked for an initial keyword search of Tea Party applications, Congressional aides said. One of the employees that the House committee is seeking to interview this week, Joseph Herr, had been a manager in charge of the group of specialists in Cincinnati from its inception through August 2010, according to the aides.

So we don't yet know who this poor schmoe is. But we're going to subpoena Joseph Herr and make him tell us! And when that happens, this mysterious lone specialist will officially become the most reviled person in America. I can hardly wait.

BY THE WAY: Both of these pieces are well worth reading. They are among the first in what is quickly becoming a whole new subgenre: the story about how the Cincinnati office of the IRS is completely and totally FUBARed. I expect this to culminate in a 20,000-word piece in the New Yorker.

Friday Cat Blogging - 17 May 2013

Kevin Drum — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:37:11 +0000

On Tuesday evening, one of my bicep muscles started misfiring. Every minute or so it would vibrate or spasm for a few seconds. But it only happened if I was sitting in a few specific places. Wednesday evening it happened again. Thursday it happened again, except it didn't go away. It just kept vibrating all evening. I got into bed and it started vibrating even more. I think it finally wore itself out around 4 am. So no sleep for me last night. Plus my bicep is still vibrating a bit, and I woke up with a massive headache. If today's blogging seemed a little subpar, that's why.

I'm getting seriously annoyed at growing old. Are more of my muscles going to start misfiring like this periodically? Or will some other random body failure attack me next?

I dunno. Maybe it was just a sympathetic reaction toward Domino, who was a little under the weather this week. She seems to be fine now, though. You can see her below. We tossed the comforter off our bed a couple of weeks ago when the weather warmed up, and ever since then Domino has claimed it as her little princess-and-the-pea napping spot. She's really quite taken with it, even if it does require her to jump a little higher than she'd like in order to get to it.

Getting By in America

Kevin Drum — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:18:22 +0000

The latest from Gallup:

The federal poverty threshold for a family of four is just under $24,000; however, Americans believe such a family unit living in their community needs more than double that — $58,000, on average — just to "get by.

Hmmm. By coincidence, that's almost exactly the median income of an American family. It makes you suspect that most people think their own income, by definition, is just barely enough to get by. Turns out that's almost the case:

Adults in households earning less than $30,000 think it takes an average of $43,600 to get by. However, the estimate rises to $55,100 among those earning between $30,000 and $74,999, and to $69,400 among those making $75,000 or more.

Poor people think they need a bit more than their own income; middle class folks think their own income is just barely sufficient; and upper middle folks are willing to concede that they could get by on slightly less than they make. Still, to a pretty close approximation, whatever income we make turns out to be the income we consider barely sufficient.

Filibuster Reform in July?

Kevin Drum — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:23:32 +0000

Greg Sargent reports that once immigration reform is safely finished (or killed, as the case may be), Harry Reid plans to revisit the topic of filibuster reform:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is increasingly focused on the month of July as the time to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” and revisit filibuster reform....Reid has privately consulted with President Obama on the need to revisit filibuster reform, and the President has told the Majority Leader that he will support the exercising of the nuclear option if Reid opts for it, the aide says.

....Reid is eyeing a change to the rules that would do away with the 60-vote threshold on all judicial and executive branch nominations, the aide says, on the theory that this is a good way to immediately break an important logjam in Washington — without changing the rules when it comes to legislation.

....Reid views three upcoming nominees as a key test for whether he will exercise the nuclear option: Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Thomas Perez as secretary of labor; and Gina McCarthy to head the Environmental Protection Agency. If Republicans block those three nominees, the aide tells me, “then our position will be very easy.”

So is Reid really planning to do this? Or is this merely a shot across the bow, warning Republican not to block Cordray, Perez, and McCarthy? Hard to say. But I think it's unlikely that Republicans will allow Cordray's nomination to go forward, since they're blocking him mainly as a way of blocking the operation of the CFPB itself. More than likely, then, they'll call Reid's bluff. Then we'll find out just how serious he is.

Here's Why the Government Went Ballistic Over the AP Leak

Kevin Drum — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:01:13 +0000

The subpoena of AP phone records over what seems like a fairly routine leak has puzzled me from the start. Why did the administration go so ballistic over this? Today, the LA Times helps me understand what was going on. Apparently the leak compromised the efforts of an al-Qaeda mole who had been recruited by British intelligence and was one of our prized assets:

His access led to the U.S. drone strike that killed a senior Al Qaeda leader, Fahd Mohammed Ahmed Quso, on May 6, 2012. U.S. officials say Quso helped direct the terrorist attack that killed 17 sailors aboard the U.S. guided-missile destroyer Cole in a Yemeni harbor in October 2000.

The informant also convinced members of the Yemeni group that he wanted to blow up a U.S. passenger jet on the first anniversary of the U.S. attack that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. They outfitted him with the latest version of an underwear bomb designed to pass metal detectors and other airport safeguards, officials say.

The informant left Yemen and delivered the device to his handlers, and it ultimately went to the FBI's laboratory in Quantico, Va. Intelligence officials hoped to send him back to Yemen to help track more bomb makers and planners, but the leak made that impossible, and sent Al Qaeda scrambling to cover its tracks, officials said.

Jack Shafer speculates a bit further:

The AP states in the article that it published only after being told by “officials” that the original “concerns were allayed.”....That may be the case, but the government was still incensed by the leak. In fact, it appears that officials were livid. As my Reuters colleagues Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria reported last night, the government found the leak so threatening that it opened a leak investigation before the AP ran its story.

Now, what would make the Obama administration so furious? My guess is it wasn’t the substance of the AP story that has exasperated the government but that the AP found a source or sources that spilled information about an ongoing intelligence operation and that even grander leaks might surge into the press corps’ rain barrels.

And that's the key. The AP story itself didn't mention anything about a double agent. But apparently, the fact that AP had found itself a leaker got officials scared that the existence of the mole might become public. And as Shafer documents at length, that's exactly what happened:

What not for the U.S. government to like here?

To begin with, the perpetrators of a successful double-agent operation against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula would not want to brag about their coup for years. Presumably, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula will now use the press reports to walk the dog back to determine whose misplaced trust allowed the agent to penetrate it. That will make the next operation more difficult. Other intelligence operations — and we can assume they are up and running — may also become compromised as the press reports give al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula new clues.

Likewise, the next time the CIA or foreign intelligence agency tries to recruit a double agent, the candidate will judge his handlers wretched secret keepers, regard the assignment a death mission and seek employment elsewhere.

Last, the leaks of information — including those from the lips of Brennan, Clarke and King — signal to potential allies that America can’t be trusted with secrets. “Leaks related to national security can put people at risk,” as Obama put it today in a news conference.

The ultimate audience for the leaks investigation may not be domestic but foreign. Obviously, the government wants to root out the secretspillers. But a country can’t expect foreign intelligence agencies to cooperate if it blows cover of such an operation. I’d wager that the investigations have only begun.

You can decide for yourself whether the government's reaction to all this was reasonable and proper. But for the first time I feel like I understand what might have motivated them, and I thought I'd pass that along.

Competitive Pricing in Oregon is a Test Case for Obamacare

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:32:57 +0000

Bad news about the implementation of Obamacare seems to pop up relentlessly. So here's some good news to balance it out. Once the exchanges get up and running, insurance companies for the first time will be offering similar products with very public prices, and in Oregon those prices vary from $169 a month to $422 a month for the same standard plan. Here's what happened last week when those prices went online:

On Thursday, a comparison of proposed 2014 health premiums became public online, causing two insurers to request do-overs to lower their rates even before the state determines whether they're justified.

The unusual development was sparked by a comparison that used to be impossible because plan benefits varied so widely. But under the federal reforms that take effect Jan. 1, health insurance is mandated and every insurer must offer certain standard plans.

....Providence Health Plan on Wednesday asked to lower its requested rates by 15 percent. Gary Walker, a Providence spokesman, says the "primary driver" was a realization that the plan's cost projections were incorrect. But he conceded a desire to be competitive was part of it.

A Family Care Health Plans official on Thursday said the insurer will ask the state for even greater decrease in requested rates. CEO Jeff Heatherington says the company realized its analysts were too pessimistic after seeing online that its proposed premiums were the highest.

The news isn't all good. Overall, rates in the individual market are likely to go up because insurance companies have to cover those with preexisting conditions and are required to offer a minimum set of benefits. But transparency is also likely to drive prices of some policies down. That's competition, baby.

The US Murder Rate Is on Track to Be Lowest in a Century

Kevin Drum — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:32:55 +0000

This is fairly preliminary data, but Rick Nevin reports that if current trends keep up, we'll end 2013 with the murder rate in America at its lowest rate in over a century.

America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

Is There Lead In Your House?

An Interview With Pioneering Toxicologist Howard Mielke

How Dangerous Is the Lead in Bullets?

Does Lead Paint Produce More Crime Too?

How Your Water Company May Be Poisoning Your Kids

More MoJo coverage of the dangers of lead.

Analytically speaking, murder is an especially interesting crime because we have pretty good homicide statistics going all the way back to 1900. Most other crimes have only been tracked since about 1960. And if you look at the murder rate in the chart below (the red line), you see that it follows an odd double-hump pattern: rising in the first third of the century, reaching a peak around 1930; then declining until about 1960; then rising again, reaching a second peak around 1990. It's been dropping ever since then.

This is the exact same pattern we see in lead ingestion among small children, offset by 21 years (the black line). Lead exposure rises in the late 1800s, during the heyday of lead paint, reaching a peak around 1910; then declines through World War II; and then begins rising again during our postwar love affair with big cars that burned high-octane leaded gasoline. Lead finally enters its final decline in the mid-70s when we begin the switch to unleaded gasoline.

This is powerful evidence in favor of the theory that lead exposure in childhood produces higher rates of violent crime in adulthood. It's one thing to have two simple curves that match up well. That could just be a coincidence. But to have two unusual double-humped curves that match up well is highly unlikely unless there really is an association. Put that together with all the statistical evidence from other countries; plus the prospective studies that have tracked lead exposure in individual children from birth; plus the MRI scans showing the actual locations of brain damage in adults who were exposed to lead as children—put all that together and you have a pretty compelling set of evidence. Lead exposure doesn't just lower IQs and hurt educational development. It also increases violent tendencies later in life. If we want less crime 20 years from now, the best thing we can do today is clean up the last of our lead.

It's Official: Those Bogus Email Leaks Came From Republicans

Kevin Drum — Fri, 17 May 2013 01:59:05 +0000

It's not as if we didn't know this already, but today Major Garrett made it official: last week's leaks that misquoted the Benghazi emails came directly from Republicans. Here's the report on the CBS Evening News:

On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: "We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don't want to undermine the FBI investigation." But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department.

....Republicans also provided what they said was a quote from an email written by State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland. The Republican version quotes Nuland discussing, "The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda's presence and activities of al-Qaeda." The actual email from Nuland says: "The penultimate point could be abused by members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings."

The CIA agreed with the concerns raised by the State Department and revised the talking points to make them less specific than the CIA's original version, eliminating references to al Qaeda and affiliates and earlier security warnings. There is no evidence that the White House orchestrated the changes.

So here's what happened. Republicans in Congress saw copies of these emails two months ago and did nothing with them. It was obvious that they showed little more than routine interagency haggling. Then, riding high after last week's Benghazi hearings, someone got the bright idea of leaking two isolated tidbits and mischaracterizing them in an effort to make the State Department look bad. Apparently they figured it was a twofer: they could stick a shiv into the belly of the White House and they could then badger them to release the entire email chain, knowing they never would.

But it was typical GOP overreach. To their surprise, the White House took Republicans up on their demand to make the entire email chain public, thus making it clear to the press that they had been burned. And now reporters are letting us all know who was behind it.

This has always been the Republican Party's biggest risk with this stuff: that they don't know when to quit. On Benghazi, when it became obvious that they didn't have a smoking gun, they got desperate and tried to invent one. On the IRS, their problem is that Democrats are as outraged as they are. This will force them to make ever more outrageous accusations in an effort to find some way to draw a contrast. And on the AP phone records, they have to continually dance around the fact that they basically approve of subpoenas like this.

A sane party would take a deep breath and decide to move on to other things. But the tea partiers have the scent of blood now, and it's driving them crazy. Thus the spectacle of Michele Bachmann suggesting today that it's time to start impeachment proceedings.

The GOP's adults can't keep their lunatic fringe on a leash, which means it's only a matter of time until they make fools of themselves on all three of the pseudoscandals that are currently lighting up the airwaves. The Republicans have met the enemy, and it is them.

Republicans Debate Their Ransom Demand For Next Hostage-Taking Opportunity

Kevin Drum — Thu, 16 May 2013 23:01:22 +0000

Lori Montgomery reports today that House Republicans no longer plan to block a debt-limit increase that would force the government into default. Hooray! They do plan to ask for a pound of flesh in return, though. But what? They met yesterday to spitball some ideas:

At the meeting, 39 lawmakers lined up at microphones to offer suggestions. They ranged from tax and entitlement reform to approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to passage of a bill that would require congressional approval for any federal regulation that would impose more than $100 million in new costs on business.

At least one person wanted to take on late-term abortion in the wake of the conviction of Philadelphia doctor Kermit Gosnell. Others suggested repeal or delay of Obama’s health-care initiative. But for the most part, lawmakers tried to be “realistic,” aides said, suggesting measures that could reasonably be expected to both improve the economy and pass the Democratic Senate.

Well, I'm glad to hear that Republicans plan on being realistic—though the fact that they're discussing this at all implies that they are, in fact, willing to block a debt limit increase and force the government into default. You can't have it both ways, after all. A hostage only does you any good if you make a credible threat to shoot him unless the ransom is paid.

So let's make one thing clear: President Obama would be insane to even hint that he's willing to bargain over this. That would institutionalize the whole idea that the debt ceiling should be a grand hostage-taking tool every time it comes up. This time around, he just needs to say no, and stick to it. I'm even willing to toss my principles in the gutter and go the trillion-dollar platinum coin route if that turns out to be the only option available. Enough's enough.

The Psychology — And the Cynicism — Behind Austerity

Kevin Drum — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:57:29 +0000

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Paul Krugman tries to explain the psychology that produces the impulse toward austerity as the cure for economic recessions:

Everyone loves a morality play. “For the wages of sin is death” is a much more satisfying message than “Shit happens.” We all want events to have meaning.

When applied to macroeconomics, this urge to find moral meaning creates in all of us a predisposition toward believing stories that attribute the pain of a slump to the excesses of the boom that precedes it—and, perhaps, also makes it natural to see the pain as necessary, part of an inevitable cleansing process....By contrast, Keynesian economics rests fundamentally on the proposition that macroeconomics isn’t a morality play—that depressions are essentially a technical malfunction. As the Great Depression deepened, Keynes famously declared that “we have magneto trouble”—i.e., the economy’s troubles were like those of a car with a small but critical problem in its electrical system, and the job of the economist is to figure out how to repair that technical problem.

....I’d argue that Keynes was overwhelmingly right in his approach, but there’s no question that it’s an approach many people find deeply unsatisfying as an emotional matter. And so we shouldn’t find it surprising that many popular interpretations of our current troubles return, whether the authors know it or not, to the instinctive, pre-Keynesian style of dwelling on the excesses of the boom rather than on the failures of the slump.

I think Krugman is subtly wrong here. Or maybe not all that subtly. In the United States, at least, I'd argue that plenty of ordinary people view the economy the way he describes it here. They think of the macroeconomy as merely a jumbo version of a household economy, and they know that when a household overspends and goes into debt, it really does have to pay a price. It has to cut back on consumption and start paying down its debt. The moral conclusions from this are both obvious and justifiable, and they figure the same thing is true of the national economy.

But is this what elites believe? Some do, probably. But I think for most of them, austerity is just a convenient facade. Their real motivation is simpler: they want to cut spending on the poor. Unfortunately, they've learned that this appeals only to voters who are already hardcore conservatives. To win over a broader audience, they need to appeal to the conventional view that a high debt level betrays a lack of national discipline and needs to be corrected at a national level. Like a household that spent too much redecorating its kitchen with a home equity loan, the country has spent too much and now needs to cut back. For most people, this argument is far more palatable than a simple appeal to cut spending.

So yes: a lot of people view the economy as a morality play. But among conservative elites, I suspect there's less of this than you might think. Rather, it's used primarily as a cynical way of getting the spending cuts they want without overtly bashing the poor.

POSTSCRIPT: And what about liberal elites? Beats me, but if I had to guess I'd say that too many of them were burned by the 70s and have remained in a fetal crouch ever since. For them, every recession is a rerun of the 70s and needs the same kind of medicine if we want to recover. It's kind of sad, really.

Guest Workers and Farm Labor: A Followup

Kevin Drum — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:17:36 +0000

Yesterday I wrote a post about a study showing that even when unemployment was high, native-born Americans weren't willing to take jobs picking crops. "Most Americans just aren't willing to do backbreaking agricultural labor for a bit above minimum wage," I said, "and if the wage rate were much higher the farms would no longer be competitive."

I got some pushback on this this. First, from reader BE:

Competitive against whom? If immigrant labor weren't available and Americans weren't willing to work that hard for that wage, the competitive landscape would change. Some crops might become less competitive relative to other crops and food prices might rise a bit (not much, though: according to the USDA, all farm and agribusiness wages account for less than 3% of food costs), but since farms would be competing against other farms, the change wouldn't make farms uncompetitive against each other.

That's a good point, though that 3 percent figure is an average that includes processed food. It's higher for fresh food, and higher for some crops than for others. That said, raising the wage of field workers wouldn't raise overall food prices very much. Food from other countries would become more competitive than it is now, but maybe not by very much.

Next up is reader DS, who makes the same point plus another one:

Farm laborers in Australia make much more than American ones. And yet they still have a functional agricultural sector. It turns out that allowing companies to import an unlimited number of foreign workers desperate to work at a wage of epsilon will create shitty working conditions and low wages!

Labor costs as a percentage of consumer cost of most fruits and veggies are pretty tiny. Even for fruits like raspberries, they're on the order of 15-20%, and for most crops they're much lower. You could double or triple labor prices and, even if all the costs are passed off to consumers and there are no productivity boosts, there still wouldn't be particularly large increases in produce prices.

This is not a subject that I've spent a lot of time on, so I'm mostly passing this along without comment.

Filibuster Mania Hits the Labor Department

Kevin Drum — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:34:46 +0000

Steve Benen rounds up the last few months of filibuster-mania for us:

In recent months, we've already seen the first-ever filibuster of a cabinet nominee and a filibuster of a CIA nominee. Republicans have filibustered judicial nominees they don't like and judicial nominees they do like. GOP senators have promised to use filibusters to stop the Obama administration from enforcing the law as it relates to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and to stop the president's nominee to lead the ATF and the EPA. All of this represents a level of abuse without precedent, and blocking Perez would only add weight to the argument that the status quo is untenable.

Next up is Tom Perez, Obama's nominee to head up the Labor Department. Republicans have delayed and obstructed and played games with the committee rules, all the time trying to create a sense of scandal among the Fox News set with some manufactured outrage over an obscure housing case. But Perez's nomination has finally reached the Senate floor, and now it's time for them to decide if they're going to filibuster yet another high-level executive branch appointment.

I halfway hope they do. Eventually, something needs to shake up centrist Dems from their dogmatic slumber and get them mad enough to change the filibuster rules. A few more like this might just do it.

Should President Obama Fire Eric Holder?

Kevin Drum — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:56:15 +0000

Michael Tomasky wants Eric Holder's head on a platter:

Did I, as a liberal columnist who called immediately on President Obama to seek Eric Holder’s resignation over the Associated Press scandal, provide aid and comfort to the enemy? First of all, I don’t care—what happened struck me as a serious abuse of power....And second, no, I don’t think I provided them aid and comfort anyway. In fact I think recent history shows beyond a doubt that foot-dragging and avoidance are the true aid-and-comforters; they always, always, always make these things worse.

…Obama may want to keep Holder because he thinks he’s a fine attorney general, and if that’s the case, well, then I guess it’s the case. But if he thinks this scandal is bad and Holder’s response is lame, he should cut him loose, and the sooner the better. I dispute in the strongest possible terms the mentality that says, “But that would just be giving the GOP a scalp.” No. It would be showing the American people, most of whom don’t think in terms of scalps, that some things cross your own moral line. It invests you with character.

A couple of things leap immediately to mind. First, I suspect that Obama heartily approves of what the Justice Department did in the AP leak investigation. It's probably a fantasy to believe that either Holder or DOJ were off the reservation here. Second, I suspect that the American public doesn't view this as a scandal in the first place, so firing Holder wouldn't do Obama any good. The public's view of the press is pretty dim—television news in particular ranks right up there with banks and HMOs—and I'll bet a sizable majority actively approves of reining in those elitist media bellyachers who are constantly hiding behind the skirts of the First Amendment as they carelessly compromise national security by publishing leaks of terrorist investigations.

Needless to say, this isn't my view. But the media is in a huge lather about the AP case because it affects the media, and I have a feeling that we journalist types are vastly overestimating how strongly the public is on our side over this. Sometime soon I imagine we'll get a few polls with a few different question wordings that will give us some idea of where we stand. Just don't be surprised if it turns out the public doesn't think as highly of us as we ourselves do.