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The Canary Islands Government Allowed "Fast & Furious 6" To Destroy Their Highway With a Tank

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 24 May 2013 22:43:42 +0000

Fast & Furious 6
Universal Pictures
130 minutes

Hands down, Fast & Furious 6 is by far the best movie ever made to feature Ludacris and Tyrese trapped in a Jeep dangling inches off the ground from an imperiled cargo plane.

And there is so, so much more to cherish about the film.

The Fast & Furious franchise has become genuinely fascinating over the last couple of years. One of the most fascinating things about the series is the addition of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as the ultra-brawny Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs, a character who seemingly cannot go ten minutes without torturing somebody for information. Another fascinating thing is that after a long stretch of churning out barely passable B-movies, the series somehow managed to produce critically acclaimed entertainment, starting with 2011's Fast Five. (The sixth film has received similarly high marks.) Credit for the newfound critic-and-crowd-pleasing goes to Taiwanese-born American filmmaker Justin Lin, who initially demonstrated the full extent of his directorial talents with the stereotype-subverting independent film Better Luck Tomorrow in 2002.

But the single most fascinating thing about the series so far is the enormous tank in Fast & Furious 6. The tank is arguably the main character in the movie.

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Obama's Drug Czar Cites Useless Stat to Dismiss Legalizing Pot

Gavin Aronsen — Fri, 24 May 2013 19:05:24 +0000

Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), dismissed calls for pot legalization on Thursday, citing a recent study by his agency to claim that marijuana is the drug most commonly linked to crime. During an Urban Institute panel discussion, while calling for a "21st century approach to drug policy reform," Kerlikowske rejected legalization as a "bumper-sticker approach." But the study (PDF) doesn't actually show a causal relationship between pot and crime: Marijuana is far and away the most commonly used illegal drug, so it stands to reason that it would show up most often in drug tests.

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Friday Cat Blogging - 24 May 2013

Kevin Drum — Fri, 24 May 2013 18:55:00 +0000

It's probably time for another round of quiltblogging, but that will have to wait until next week. Why? Because this week I got my lovely new Mother Jones T-shirt and Domino immediately curled up on it.

I'll bet you didn't know I was a union thug, did you? Well, I am—though, disappointingly, I've never received a union card. Domino, however, misunderstood when I told her California wasn't a right-to-work state, figuring that this meant it must be a right-to-not-work state, which exempts her from paying union dues. Probably all for the best. The discipline of a picket line is not for her.

Today in Grandstanding Senators

Kevin Drum — Fri, 24 May 2013 18:29:02 +0000

The Economist's Jon Fasman reports on the latest political pandering from a member of the Greatest Deliberative Body On Earth:

On Wednesday David Vitter (pictured), a Republican senator from Louisiana, proposed—and the Senate agriculture committee accepted—an amendment to the farm bill that would, in Mr Vitter's words, "prohibit convicted murderers, rapists and pedophiles from receiving food stamps." It's not hard to see why this amendment passed. All Mr Vitter needed to do was propose it []. Then the tacit question arises: Does anyone in this chamber want to stand up and say that taxpayers should feed murderers, rapists and pedophiles? No? Of course not.

This is revolting. It obviously has no fiscal impact worth mentioning, and just as clearly does nothing to reduce the future rate of murder, rape, or pedophilia. It's just pure political grandstanding from a guy who knows an amendment like this will play well with the rubes back home. It's a mindless glorification of barbarism for the sake of a few votes.

If you think the current sentencing standards for murder, rape, and pedophilia are too lenient, then lobby to change them. Until then, though, anyone who's released from prison is someone who's done their time and paid their debt. Their punishment at the hands of the justice system is sufficient. They don't deserve more at the hands of every showboating senator with his next election on his mind.

NASA: We've Made Progress on Obama's Asteroid-Lasso Initiative

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 24 May 2013 17:35:11 +0000

In April, the Obama administration unveiled its 2014 budget proposal, which included $145.8 billion for agriculture, $520 million for the International Trade Administration, and a bunch of other stuff. It also included a $105-million initiative to lasso an asteroid, tow it toward Earth, place it into the moon's orbit, and claim the space rock for the United States of America. The idea is to eventually have astronauts travel to the asteroid to conduct mining operations, test technology for missions to Mars, and research strategies for deflecting future world-ending asteroids.

On Thursday, NASA chief Charles Bolden got a good look at the progress being made. The Associated Press reports (emphasis mine):

Bolden checked on...the mission, which may eventually cost more than $2.6 billion. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and Glenn Research Center in Ohio are developing a thruster that relies on ion propulsion instead of conventional chemical fuel...NASA is under White House orders to fly humans to an asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars. Instead of sending astronauts to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, as originally planned, the space agency came up with a quicker, cheaper idea: Haul the asteroid close to the moon and visit it there..."If you can't get to the asteroid, bring the asteroid to you," Bolden said.

President Obama had previously established a goal of landing astronauts on a near-Earth asteroid by 2025. This plan bumps the date up to 2021. Last month, an administration official with knowledge of the mission filled in some of the details. For one thing, the ambitious lasso-the-asteroid proposal would not increase NASA's budget; the agency would simply redirect existing funds to the project. And if the audacious-sounding mission goes through, NASA would make a point to only drag small asteroids toward Earth and into lunar orbit. That way, if something does go horribly wrong, the relatively small size of the target asteroid would ensure that the rock is harmless to our planet. Lest there be any confusion: Barack Obama is not going to accidentally throw a killer asteroid at mankind.

Asteroids have enjoyed some time in the political spotlight lately. In March, a Senate panel grilled scientists about the consequences of an asteroid striking earth and the best ways to fight back against ruinous asteroid aggression. That was in response to two high-profile events—an asteroid the size of a city block coming sorta, kinda, maybe close to smashing into Earth, and a truck-sized meteor exploding over Russia's Chelyabinsk region and injuring roughly 1,500 people.

On a related note, here's the trailer for Asteroid, a 1997 NBC miniseries about the president of the United States and a FEMA director scrambling to stop asteroids from destroying America:

Chart of the Day: Sequester Cuts Are Starting to Bite

Kevin Drum — Fri, 24 May 2013 17:07:23 +0000

The number of people who are feeling the effect of the sequester continues to rise. It's now up to 37 percent, and unsurprisingly, that's affecting what people think of it:

More Americans continue to disapprove than approve of sequestration, now by 56-35 percent — again, a view influenced by experience of the cuts. Eight in 10 of those who report serious harm oppose the cuts, as do about two-thirds of those slightly harmed. But the majority, which has felt no impacts, divides exactly evenly — 46 percent favor the cuts, vs. 46 percent opposed.

Further, this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, finds that 39 percent overall “strongly” disapprove of the cuts — but that soars to 66 percent of those who say they’ve been harmed in a major way.

Despite these results, I'll stick to my earlier prediction: this isn't enough to affect Congress. Overall, disapproval of the sequester has gone up only three points since March, and by the time that number gets much higher, September will be here and the dumb sequester cuts will be gone. Congress will replace them with more targeted cuts in the FY2014 budget, and those targets will be selected to minimize the yelling from interest groups they care about. Republicans may need to gut things out a bit this summer, but they'll manage to hang on.

Sadly for Republicans, Obamacare Not Likely to Be a Train Wreck

Kevin Drum — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:35:58 +0000

Is Obamacare fated to be a "train wreck"? Matt Yglesias says no, but warns us of what to expect as it rolls out:

You have to remember a few basic facts about ACA implementation coverage over the next 18 months. One is that the media has a large negativity bias. The other is that the aspirations of the law are quite high, and the status quo is quite bad. That means any time the situation improves but doesn't improve as much as the Obama administration wanted things to improve, that will tend to be covered as "bad news for Obamacare." That tendency will be re-enforced because Republicans will be eager to trumpet Obamacare's shortcomings (to make Obama look bad), and advocates for the poor will also be eager to trumpet Obamacare's shortcomings (to build pressure for improvement). So you'll hear lots of completely accurate stories about things not working quite as well as proponents had hoped. Just recall that this is always how things go.

Obamacare will suffer from what I call the "big country problem": in a big country, even a tiny percentage is a big absolute number. This means that even something rare can be made to look common. Obamacare is a classic case: it's a gigantic, bureaucratic program that affects tens of millions of people, and that means it will inevitably run into lots of problems. A 99 percent success rate, after all, would still mean hundreds of thousands of horror stories. This is going to give the Fox News set plenty of opportunities to insist that the sky is falling.

But it probably won't be. Obamacare will have plenty of growing pains, and on a broader scale it will have unintended effects that genuinely need to be addressed. This will be harder to do than usual since Republicans are rooting for failure and will be generally unwilling to tweak the law to improve it. Hopefully this will change over time as constituent pressure mounts, but we'll have to wait and see about that.

In the meantime, if you want to know where the "train wreck" metaphor came from in the first place, and how it's been mangled beyond recognition over the past few months, Dave Weigel has you covered.

Leaks and the First Amendment

Kevin Drum — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:02:42 +0000

I hate to say this, but the media is losing me. I'm mostly on their side when it comes to subpoenaing journalists' phone records, but the level of outrage and special pleading has gotten so palpable that I'm starting to waver. Aren't they supposed to at least feign objectivity, even when the subject is something that affects the press?

It's worse in some places than others. Roger Ailes, for example, released a histrionic statement yesterday about "the administration's attempt to intimidate Fox News." Sure, Roger. Other places it's only slightly more subtle. This morning's LA Times, for example, greeted me with the headline on the right. If the subject were, say, wiretaps on organized crime rings, would the Times have written a headline about "spying on mafia dons"? I don't think so.

I'm not sure what precisely has caused the big increase in leak investigations during the Obama administration. Maybe it's because electronic communication makes it easier to investigate them. Maybe it's because electronic communication makes it easier to leak in the first place, so there are more leaks. And certainly some cases are more troubling than others. The harassment of Thomas Drake, for example, is hard to defend. Conversely, the prosecution (though not always the treatment) of Bradley Manning is entirely justified.

The two cases that have everyone exercised at the moment mostly seem to be justified. As Cheryl Rofer points out, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim basically acted like an idiot, apparently leaking information to James Rosen without even quite realizing how damaging it was. There's no government in the world that would tolerate that kind of behavior from someone in a sensitive position who knew the rules. We know less about the AP case, but it certainly seems to have involved the release of information (the existence of an Al Qaeda mole) that the government had a legitimate reason for keeping secret.

Does this mean the government should be able to pursue these cases by getting warrants for reporters' phone records? I think the bar should be very, very high for that. Should the government be able to prosecute reporters for publishing classified information? I'd say the bar should be almost insurmountable for that. Even making the suggestion in a warrant application, as they did in the case of Rosen, is going too far for my taste.

Nevertheless, the government has an obvious interest in trying to keep its intelligence operations secret. The existence of an Al Qaeda mole and the existence of high-level sources within North Korea are both classic cases of this. There's no whistleblowing or government misconduct here. When those kinds of secrets are blown, the feds legitimately want to know which nitwit is doing it. Sometimes that may justify getting a warrant to look at journalists' phone records. The rules for this ought to be more stringent than they are, but the First Amendment isn't a magic pass here.

Progess on Chemical Regulation, At Last?

Kate Sheppard — Fri, 24 May 2013 15:23:33 +0000

A bit of positive news this week may have gotten lost in the shuffle. On Wednesday, two senators announced bipartisan legislation to fix our nation's outdated and ineffective chemical regulations. New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg and Louisiana Republican David Vitter announced an agreement to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), a 37-year-old law governing the use of tens of thousands of hazardous chemicals. I've written before about how the law's failures have left dangerous chemicals largely unregulated.

That these two lawmakers agreed on the new legislation, dubbed the Chemical Safety Improvement Act of 2013, is a big deal. Lautenberg has made strengthening TSCA one of his legacy issues in the Senate, from which he is retiring in 2015. Vitter is known as a industry booster how has blocked progress on chemicals in the past.

The bill would, for the first time, require the EPA review the safety of all chemicals used in products, whereas TSCA grandfathered in a lot of chemicals without testing their safety. It would also make it harder for companies to claim "confidential business information" as an excuse for not disclosing what's in their products. TSCA reform advocates will note that this latest bill is not as tough as the Safe Chemicals Act that Lautenberg had previously championed. The Environmental Working Group slammed the proposal as "unacceptably weak" and listed the areas where it falls short.

But others see the agreement as movement in the right direction. As Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, told Energy & Environment Daily:

"I've worked for a number of years trying to improve a statute and a program that is hamstrung at every turn by that statute," Denison said. "My reference point is whether this bill improves EPA's ability to work relative to current TSCA. And there's no question that it does.

"If one measures it against an ideal, the kind of bill I'd write if I were king, then this doesn't meet all the criteria," he added. "But this bill has a higher likelihood of passing."

Obamacare Gets Some Good News From California

Kevin Drum — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:56:44 +0000

A few days ago I mentioned some good news out of Oregon: competition among health insurers was forcing down the price of coverage on the state's new Obamacare exchanges. Yesterday we got more good news from a much bigger state: mine. Wonkbook has the deets:

In 2009, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that a medium-level "silver" plan — which covers 70 percent of a beneficiary's expected health costs — on the California health exchange would cost $5,200 annually. More recently, a report from the consulting firm Milliman predicted it would carry a $450 monthly premium. Yesterday, we got the real numbers. And they're lower than anyone thought.

As always, Sarah Kliff has the details. The California exchange will have 13 insurance options, and the heavy competition appears to be driving down prices. The most affordable silver-level plan is charging $276-a-month. The second-most affordable plan is charging $294. And all this is before subsidies. Someone making twice the poverty line, say, will only pay $104-a-month.

Sparer plans are even cheaper. A young person buying the cheapest "bronze"-level plan will pay $172 — and that, again, is before any subsidies.

For some people—mostly young people with good incomes—individual rates may go up from what they're paying now, though that depends on what kind of coverage they select. The table on the right shows a few selected rates for a silver plan in California's biggest cities. (Tax credits will lower these rates further for residents with moderate incomes.)

Nonetheless, competition seems to be doing its job on the exchanges and this is generally good news. Healthcare still costs too much, but if these early results hold up, Obamacare's structure seems to be doing a pretty good job at its core mission of controlling prices.

Expert: Congress Shouldn't Listen to Apple's Tax Plan

Erika Eichelberger — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:54:02 +0000

The revelation that Apple used a web of baroque tax strategies to legally pay little to no taxes on tens of billions of dollars it earned overseas has re-ignited the debate over reforming the US tax code. But the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) warned this week against proposals pushed by Apple and other large multinational corporations that would reduce taxes on offshore profits in order to encourage companies to bring that money back home.

Offshore profits are currently taxed at the same rate as onshore profits: 35 percent. Big US corporations have lobbied aggressively for the United States to shift to what is called a territorial tax system, in which foreign profits would be subject to low or no US taxes. The idea was a cornerstone of former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s economic platform last year. Now, Apple CEO Tim Cook is calling for a single-digit tax rate on overseas profits, as well as a reduction of the overall US corporate tax rate to the mid-20s.

Chuck Marr, the director of federal tax policy at the CBPP, explains that such a system would only make overseas profit-making more attractive—and that would weaken the US economy:

Multinational companies like Apple currently have a strong incentive to defer US corporate taxes by shifting and keeping profits overseas… [A] territorial system would create greater incentives for those companies to invest and book profits overseas rather than at home—and that, in turn, risks reducing wages at home by encouraging investment to flow overseas, increasing budget deficits by draining revenues from the corporate income tax, or raising taxes on smaller companies and domestic businesses to offset the revenue loss.

Democrats and trade unions agree, arguing that the United States should move in the other direction and tax foreign profits in the years they are made. They contend this would stem the corporate practice of deferring tax payments until the cash is brought back to the United States.

"We are dismantling vital government services because we don’t have revenue to support them," Damon Silvers, the policy director of the AFL-CIO told the Financial Times earlier this week. "And we have one of the most profitable corporations in the world [Apple] stashing $100 billion in [low-tax] jurisdictions."

Other high-tech companies are increasingly shifting profit-making overseas. The revelations about Apple's shenanigans—which apparently are legal—have drawn attention to similar behavior by many high-tech firms, including Google, HP, and Microsoft. "These [tax] incentives are creating unfair advantages for multinationals and draining much-needed tax revenue," says Marr. "The president and Congress should resist the lobbying campaign and instead focus on reducing the incentive to shift profits and operations overseas."

Elizabeth Warren Attacks House GOP on Student Loan Bill

Erika Eichelberger — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:52:34 +0000

On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) slammed a Republican student loan bill the House just approved that would allow interest rates on student debt to skyrocket.

"The student loan bill passed by House Republicans takes a bad situation and makes it worse," she said in a statement.

On July 1, rates for federal student loans called Stafford loans are set to double from the current rate of 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. The GOP bill, which passed the House on a mostly party-line vote of 221 to 198, would allow interest rates on those loans to rise or fall from year to year with the government's cost of borrowing, ending the system in which rates are fixed by law. Because market rates are low right now, the initial rate for those loans would be about 4.4 percent, but in coming years it could increase up to a cap of 8.5 percent.

Warren, who has proposed her own student loan plan which would cut student loan rates to near zero, accused Republican lawmakers of making students into cash cows:

Our students should not be a profit center for the government, and the July 1 deadline should not be turned into an opportunity to make more money at the expense of young Americans who are working hard to get an education. This is about our values. We should be investing in higher education to strengthen our economy and grow the middle class.

The student loan bill proposed by Warren, a version of which was introduced in the House by Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.), is called the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act. Under Warren and Tierney's plan, student loan interest would be cut to the low .75 percent interest rate that banks pay to the Federal Reserve for short-term loans. After a year, a longer-term student loan solution would be drawn up.

"If we can invest in big banks by giving them low interest rates on government loans," Warren said in the statement, "we certainly can do the same to help students get an education."

The Republican bill faces opposition in the Democratic-controlled Senate, and President Obama has threatened to veto it.

Progressive Dems Spar Over Who Will Succeed Markey

Tim Murphy — Fri, 24 May 2013 13:42:58 +0000

If Rep. Ed Markey wins the special election to become Massachusetts' junior US senator next month, it'll have at least one unintended consequence: A potentially ugly fight between two progressive Democrats for Markey's seat as the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee. After Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio launched his candidacy by getting 20 prominent congressmen—including Georgia Rep. John Lewis and two former chairs of the committee—to sign onto a letter on his behalf, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) is pushing back, winning the endorsement, on Thursday, of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

The battle-lines are familiar, if not not entirely related to the actual responsibilities of the Natural Resources Committee: immigration reform and the Keystone XL pipeline. "DeFazio actually has a very anti-Democratic record on immigration," argues Grijalva spokesman Adam Sarvana. As proof, his office is sending around a fact-sheet highlighting a vote DeFazio cast in 2012 that would have authorized the Keystone XL pipeline as part of a larger transportation package—in contrast to DeFazio's otherwise outspoken criticism of the project. Sarvana is also touting support DeFazio received from the anti-reform outfit Numbers USA. (The group does not endorse candidates but has praised DeFazio's backing of universal electronic citizenship checks as a condition of employment.)

In a statement provided to Mother Jones, DeFazio, who is still considered the front-runner for the job, dismissed the Keystone vote as a procedural oddity: "I just helped lead the fight in two committees and on the floor against the Keystone Pipeline. In 2012, I voted for a transportation bill designed to bypass Tea Party obstructionist and get a much needed transportation bill to conference. As a conferee, I had assurances from Senator Barbara Boxer the Keystone provision would be stripped out of the final bill."

Markey's job isn't open just yet—the special election isn't until June and recent polls have shown a tight race. But the Democrat has never trailed, and his possible successors aren't waiting around for clarity.

Here's the CHC letter backing Grijalva:

Eliminating Hunger, One 3-D-Printed Meal at a Time

Tom Philpott — Fri, 24 May 2013 10:00:11 +0000

Hunger remains a massive problem here on planet Earth. Globally, nearly 870 million people—1 in 8 of us—live with "chronic undernourishment." Meanwhile, obesity stalks us, too—about 1.4 billion people worldwide count as overweight, 500 million of whom are full-on obese.

The scourge of lingering hunger amid rising obesity is notoriously complex and difficult to solve. It raises knotty questions about our shockingly unequal global economic system, about European and US farm policy, about the rise of global agrichemical/GMO firms, about global commodity markets and land grabs.

But what if we could just ignore all of that unpleasantness and hack our way to answers with novel technologies?

For example, what if we could deliver food to the globe's hungry millions through 3-D printing? Here's Chris Mims, writing about an engineer whose company "just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer":

He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth's 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store.

While global population is expected to top off at 9 billion, not 12 billion, I guess the idea here is to reduce humanity's dizzying variety of foodstuffs to a set of "powder and oils," to be combined at home by a gadget. By stripping raw ingredients of their uniqueness—"a powder is a powder," as Mims puts it—food can be really, really cheap, and within reach of even the poorest people. This is an intensified version of the the promise of today's industrial agriculture—produce lots and lots of a few commodities like corn and soy, which can then be processed into a variety of cheap products, from burgers to breakfast cereal. This "universal food synthesizer" represents the apotheosis of the industrial food dream.

And what about obesity? An enterprising engineer is hard at work on that, too—this time Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway. From PopSci:

A valve gets surgically implanted in the user's stomach, and the gadget sends a tube through it into their belly. About 20 minutes after eating, the gadget sucks out some food, and when the user squeezes a bag filled with water, the liquid gets sent back into the stomach instead. Rinse and repeat until up to 30 percent of your meal is gone.

Wait, what? PopSci digs into the Kamen's website for details on how it works:

The aspiration process is performed about 20 minutes after the entire meal is consumed and takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. The process is performed in the privacy of the restroom, and the food is drained directly into the toilet. Because aspiration only removes a third of the food, the body still receives the calories it needs to function. For optimal weight loss, patients should aspirate after each major meal (about 3 times per day) initially. Over time, as patients learn to eat more healthfully, they can reduce the frequency of aspirations. [Emphasis mine.]

Got that? You eat as much as you want, and then deposit a third of it directly into the toilet, undigested.

Better yet, why not combine these two innovations—3-D-printing optimum amounts of those powders and oils directly into the stomach, using Kamen's contraption hacked to work in reverse? By the time we're dining on home-synthesized combos of industrial goo, it's hard to imagine overeating being a problem, anyway.

"Arrested Development" Was the Best TV Satire of the Bush Era

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 24 May 2013 10:00:07 +0000

Arrested Development is finally (for real this time) coming back. On May 26 at exactly 12:01 a.m. PDT, the series' fourth season will debut exclusively on Netflix, the on-demand streaming service that on any given weeknight accounts for nearly a third of internet traffic in North America. It's a hotly anticipated premiere that fans are praying will not crash the website.

This TV series—about a spoiled family wading through a glut of personal, financial, and international scandal—occupies a place in popular culture that few other shows have managed to reach. Fans have even witnessed Arrested Development burrow itself into Western politics. In March 2011, before NATO forces launched an air war that would help topple Moammar Qaddafi's mass-murdering regime in Libya, The New Republic ran a fantastic slideshow comparing the notorious Qaddafi family to Arrested Development's Bluth clan. During a speech this month in the House of Commons of Canada, opposition leader Thomas Mulcair quoted a famous episode of Arrested Development while criticizing the prime minister for over $3 billion in unaccounted anti-terrorism funding. And as the series revival neared, Republicans started dropping Arrested Development references to ridicule the Affordable Care Act, Democratic leadership, and the Obama administration.

The series has also found its way into the syllabi of college courses, and onto the pages of academic essays. "The writers worked miracles addressing philosophical and social issues," says J. Jeremy Wisnewski, an associate professor of philosophy at Hartwick College who served as a volume editor on the book Arrested Development and Philosophy. "To see the way race, gender, sexual orientation, and class are handled in the show is to witness genius at work."

There's something else the show handled so well that's often taken for granted: During its original run on Fox from 2003 to 2006, the series delivered what was arguably the sharpest satire of the Bush era and the Iraq War that has been broadcast on television.

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Obama Nominates Benghazi Scapegoat for Promotion

Kevin Drum — Fri, 24 May 2013 00:58:05 +0000

Oh yeah, this is going to be fun:

The State Department spokeswoman who earlier this month found herself in the middle of the controversy surrounding key revisions to the Benghazi talking points appears to be in line for a promotion. The White House announced Thursday that President Barack Obama intends to nominate Victoria Nuland as assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs, a position that requires Senate confirmation.

On a substantive basis, I know nothing about Nuland and have no opinion about whether she's well qualified for this position. On a political basis, hoo boy. Obama is waving a red cape in front of a bull here. The only question is, on a scale of 1 to 10, just how loathsome and shameless can the attacks from the Fox News set get over this? I'm going to predict it'll be about an 8. Give Ted Cruz a few minutes to warm up and he'll be claiming that Nuland's suggested changes to the Benghazi talking points should be prosecuted as a war crime.

What's more, this comes on the heels of rumors that Obama plans to appoint Susan Rice as his National Security Advisor. Rice, of course, has already been attacked by Republicans about as viciously and shamelessly as any State Department lieutenant in recent memory. But it's worth keeping in mind that there is a difference between the two women. In the Benghazi affair, Rice did nothing wrong, but she also did nothing especially noteworthy. Nuland, as near as I can tell, actually did yeoman work. The first draft of the CIA talking points was sloppily drafted and full of information that needed to be kept classified. Nuland firmly pushed back on this stuff, and eventually got it removed—which is exactly what she should have done. No good deed goes unpunished, of course, as I think we're all about to find out.

On a gossipy note, this sure seems to suggest that Obama is tired of kowtowing to the know nothings in the GOP. And good for him. This is obviously a political risk, but apparently he doesn't care anymore. He thinks Nuland is the best person for the job, so he's nominating her. If the whackjobs start frothing at the mouth over it, let 'em froth.

Corn on MSNBC: Obama Speech Grapples with Security and Civil Liberties Issues

Thu, 23 May 2013 23:22:02 +0000

Wednesday, US attorney general Eric Holder acknowledged that four Americans have been killed in drone strikes, though only one was targeted. Today, the president spoke on the future of counterterrorism in the US. DC bureau chief David Corn discusses the speech with John Podesta, president of Center for American Progress, and host Chris Matthews on MSNBC's Hardball:

Corn also analyzed the speech with The Grio's Joy Reid on MSNBC's Martin Bashir:

David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He's also on Twitter.

Boy Scouts: You Can Be Gay Until You Turn 18

Dana Liebelson — Thu, 23 May 2013 22:49:10 +0000

Boy Scouts and their families deliver signatures protesting the ban. GLAAD

Today, on a muggy afternoon in Grapevine, Texas, members of the Boy Scouts of America's National Council voted 61-38 percent to stop discriminating against kids in the program on the basis of sexual orientation, overturning a national ban on gay Scouts that the organization has enforced for decades. The BSA will continue barring gay adults from serving as scoutmasters and volunteers, meaning that teenagers who come out during their time with the program could be booted after they turn 18. The decision is seen as a compromise between church groups that partner with the Scouts and those eager to see the program fully end its discrimination against gays.

"No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone," states the new resolution, acknowledging that "[y]outh are still developing, learning about themselves and who they are, developing their sense of right and wrong, and understanding their duty to God to live a moral life."

"It's an incomplete step, but still a step in the right direction," Zach Wahls, an Eagle Scout raised by two lesbian mothers, and founder of Scouts for Equality, tells Mother Jones. His organization, along with Scouts, parents, and volunteers who support overturning the ban, have been rallying in Texas for days, across from the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center, where more than 1,400 BSA voting members from across the United States cast their votes this afternoon. Scouts in uniform faced off against about two dozen protesters supporting than ban—and "a couple local guys driving by in trucks, saying anti-gay stuff," Wahls says.

Controversy over the ban picked up last fall, when major backers like the Intel Foundation and UPS stopped funding the program because of its discriminatory policy. In January, the BSA said it would vote on the issue. The following month, President Obama said he supported overturning the ban, and celebrities like Carly Rae Jespen and Dr. Phil followed suit. There have been over 1.8 million signatures submitted through Change.org in favor of overturning the ban, according to Rich Ferraro, vice president of communications at GLAAD, a gay right group, in contrast to 19,000 signatures in favor of it, delivered by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian organization.

The Boy Scouts, which was founded in 1910 with an oath promising that Scouts would be "morally straight," have a long history of discriminating against gay members. In 1980, an Eagle Scout and aspiring Scout leader was kicked out for attending his prom with a male date. In June 2000, the US Supreme Court affirmed in a 5-4 decision that the Boy Scouts could continue barring gay Scout leaders. And as recently as April, 2012, an Ohio mom and den leader named Jennifer Tyrrell was forced out of the organization for being gay.

The new policy, which kicks in January 1, makes it so that member troops can no longer discriminate against gay youth. But anyone who is gay and over 18 years old still won't be allowed to be a Scout leader or volunteer. (The Boy Scouts' coed Venturing program, aimed at young adults, will allow gay members until they are 21.) This means that gay Scouts like 16-year-old Pascal Tessier can continue to participate in the program without fear of being kicked out, and will have the opportunity to earn the prestigious rank of Eagle Scout like his older brother has. But under the new policy, he would still be banned from the program when he turns 18.

When Mother Jones asked BSA whether or not it would eventually consider voting on the ban on gay adult members, a spokesperson said: "This is not about a step or progression…It is the option that did not, in some way, prevent kids who sincerely want to be a part of Scouting from experiencing this life-changing program and to remain true to the long-standing virtues of Scouting."

Tyrrell, the mom ousted for being gay and still unwelcome under the new policy, said in a press release, "I'm so proud of how far we've come, but until there's a place for everyone in Scouting, my work will continue."

Obama Kinda Sorta Narrows the Scope of the War on Terror

Kevin Drum — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:22:38 +0000

A couple of hours ago I had a choice to make: spend the next hour writing a reaction to President Obama's big national security speech, or go to lunch. I went to lunch.

That was all for the best, since I had mixed reactions to the speech and wasn't quite sure what to say about it. It was long and thoughtful, and in a lot of places its tone was welcome: Al-Qaeda is on the run, Obama said, and the danger we now face is of a much smaller scale than it was 12 years ago. So it's time to rethink just how we want to prosecute our eternal war against terrorists:

America is at a crossroads. We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us, mindful of James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror. We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society. What we can do — what we must do — is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend. To define that strategy, we must make decisions based not on fear, but hard-earned wisdom. And that begins with understanding the threat we face.

Afterward, administration officials told reporters that Obama had announced a new drone policy in his speech, though you could be excused for missing it: in the future, "strikes will be authorized only against militants who pose 'a continuing, imminent threat,' aides said, instead of 'a significant threat,' which had been the previous standard." That's a mighty thin difference, especially with no external oversight to ensure that it's followed. And aside from that there were damn few specifics. Generally speaking, Obama defended drone attacks, defended the targeting of U.S. citizens abroad, and defended his aggressive prosecution of leakers. And while he suggested he was open to both more executive oversight and to a change in tactics, I think Dave Weigel was shrewd to highlight Obama's insistence that he couldn't do this on his own. Ed Kilgore summarizes:

Obama four times shifted responsibility for current dilemmas at least partially to Congress: on drones (where he insisted the appropriate congressional committees have known about every single strike); on embassy security; on the 9/11-era legal regime that still governs anti-terrorist efforts; and on Gitmo (where Republicans have repeatedly thwarted effort to transfer detainees to U.S. prisons). [And a fifth: a media shield law to protect journalists who report classified information. –ed.]

Is this a reflection of reality or an example of buck passing? I'm not sure we know yet. As someone who has consistently highlighted the power of Congress over policy—even foreign policy—I'm inclined to say the former. But it all depends on exactly what Obama does going forward. If Congress takes him up on his offer to rein in executive power and provide more oversight, will he cooperate or fight? He didn't say enough today to make that clear. He just said he was ready for a conversation.

So let's have it. As Heather Hurlburt points out, Obama's speech was a beginning, not an end. David Corn has more here.

Conspiracy Theory Watch: Hillary Sold Stingers to Al Qaeda!

Kevin Drum — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:32:50 +0000

Seriously. This is the latest fever dream from the right. They believe that the reason Ambassador Chris Stevens was in Benghazi on September 11 was to negotiate the return of Stinger missiles that Hillary Clinton had sold to Al Qaeda groups over the objections of the CIA.

I am not making this up.

Why couldn't the wingers be happy with their old complaint: that Obama had done too little after the Libya war to secure Muammar Qadafi's arsenal of shoulder-mounted antiaircraft missiles,¹ thus allowing them to fall into the hands of assorted bad guys in the Middle East? That's at least based on a kernel of truth. Beats me. Because it didn't involve Hillary Clinton, I guess, and therefore wasn't a perfect conspiracy theory.

¹For the record, old Russian SA-7s, not Stingers. More here.

A Brief Primer on Where the Whole "YouTube Video Thing" Came From

Kevin Drum — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:23:25 +0000

Bob Somerby catches Greta Van Susteren asking House Speaker John Boehner about Benghazi last night:

VAN SUSTEREN: Have you determined why the whole YouTube video thing was brought up in Benghazi in the first place, whose idea it was, and why they seized upon it and held onto it for so long?

BOEHNER: Don't know yet, but we're going to find out.

VAN SUSTEREN: You have no sort of conceivable theory about, like, you know—

After more than eight months of investigation, neither Van Sustern nor Boehner has even a clue about where the "YouTube video thing" came from! So let's make this as easy as possible for them. Here's what the CIA talking points said in the very first draft. This is before anyone else had seen them, commented on them, or asked for changes to be made:

We believe based on currently available information that the attacks in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex.

This is also what the final draft of the talking points said. And here is Susan Rice on Meet the Press a few days after the attacks:

Putting together the best information that we have available to us today, our current assessment is that what happened in Benghazi was in fact initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo, almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which were prompted, of course, by the video.

Rice said basically the same thing on the other Sunday shows too. And here is David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times reporting directly from the scene a month after the attacks:

To Libyans who witnessed the assault and know the attackers, there is little doubt what occurred: a well-known group of local Islamist militants struck the United States Mission without any warning or protest, and they did it in retaliation for the video....The fighters said at the time that they were moved to act because of the video, which had first gained attention across the region after a protest in Egypt that day.

Bottom line: The CIA said Benghazi was inspired by the Cairo protests. That's precisely what Rice said on the Sunday shows, noting correctly that the Cairo protests were prompted by the video. What's more, the Benghazi fighters themselves claimed that they were motivated by anger over the video. That's where the "YouTube video thing" came from. There's no mystery here.

Now, was the CIA correct? Were those on-the-ground reports correct? To this day, we don't know for sure. But it doesn't matter. At the time, that was the intelligence community's best assessment. And that's why Susan Rice said what she said. So once and for all, can we please stop pretending we have no idea where she came up with this stuff?

Virginia Lt. Gov. Candidate E.W. Jackson: Gays Are "Ikky"

Tim Murphy — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:18:54 +0000

That's an actual tweet from the Rev. E.W. Jackson, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia.

Jackson, a social-conservative activist with no record of electoral success, was nominated on the first ballot at the state GOP's convention on Saturday and almost immediately triggered an acute case of heartburn among the party's establishment due to his far-right views on gay rights and abortion. (Among other things, he favors the reinstatement of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and said the Democratic party's platform was in line with the Antichrist.) Jackson is, as Daily Kos Elections' David Nir puts it, "an oppo researcher's mescaline-fueled fantasy bender riding on pegasus-back."

And we're only starting to scratch the surface. A quick survey of Jackson's now dormant Twitter feed, @ewjsr (he now tweets at @Jackson4VA) shows that he is been remarkably consistent in his attacks on the gays, Muslims, and communists he believes are destroying the country from within.

"The 'homosexual religion' is the most virulent anti-Christian bigotry & hatred I've ever seen," he tweeted in October of 2009. "They have threatened me, but not vice versa."

That was around the same time he concluded that "[t]he homosexual movement is a cancer attacking vital organs of faith, family & military - repositories of traditional values." After President Obama addressed the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT rights group, Jackson groveled that the organization wanted to "homosexualize the country." After Family Research Council president Tony Perkins was disinvited from an event at Andrews Air Force Base, Jackson called the Obama administration "the Gestapo." When Rush Limbaugh invited Elton John to perform at his wedding, Jackson called it "utterly disappointing." He referred to Democrats as "Demoncrats."

Elsewhere, Jackson describes President Obama as the "first homosexual President," and endorses an argument by Frank Gaffney that Obama is also the "First Muslim President."

Jackson, a Harvard Law School graduate and former student at Harvard Divinity School, recognized the contradiction in these statements, and openly struggled with it: "It will be interesting to see how Obama reconciles Islamicizing America with homosexualizing America," he tweeted. "Babylon v Sodom & Gomorrah." (The Baylonians weren't Muslim, but that's hardly the point.) Jackson considered it "tragic" that American foreign policy was, in his view, now "pro-Islam."

He was also bothered by the presence of practicing Muslims in the administration:

Jackson's fear of Muslims was such that after an Air France flight crashed into the Atlantic Ocean and a gunman opened fire at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, in 2009, he immediately alleged—citing absolutely nothing—that both events had been acts of Islamic terrorism. (The Holocaust Museum gunman was a white supremacist, and the Air France crash was ruled an accident). Responding to a report that Obama was hoping to use his space agency as a way of reaching out to to the Muslim world, he was indignant: "Obama's new mission for Nasa, not to explore space, but expand Islam! Huh?"

Given the last few days, this last tweet seems somewhat fitting. It's from 2010, and it's a stirring defense of another conservative activist whose unlikely nomination cost Republicans a once winnable race:

Who Will Stick Up For the IRS?

Kevin Drum — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:08:11 +0000

Perhaps this is just because I read David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel The Pale King recently, but I actually feel kind of sorry for the IRS. Frankly, their job seems almost impossible. Think about it: they have to process over a hundred million claims a year, several million of which are highly complex. That means they need a huge number of people. And these people need to be fairly smart, because this isn't simple work. But it is boring work. In other words, the IRS needs tens of thousands of people who are (a) smart, (b) willing to do really tedious work, (c) for moderate wages, (d) while working for a soul-crushing bureaucracy, and (e) being loathed by all right-thinking people.

Does this sound to you like a recipe for disaster? Me too. Frankly, the biggest surprise about the tea party targeting scandal isn't that it happened, but that there haven't been a lot more like it. After all, it wouldn't take much. Nobody ever lost an election by demagoguing the IRS, which means they're always under a high-powered microscope from ambitious politicians. Or in some cases, under something more like a proctoscope, as in the case of the infamous 1998 Roth hearings, described here by yours truly a while back:

One of the great scams of the 90s was the Roth Hearings, a brilliant piece of performance art staged by Senator William Roth as an attack on the Internal Revenue Service. The hearings were deliberately dramatic: Roth held them in a committee room designed to block electronic eavesdropping and had guards search everyone before they entered the chamber. IRS employees called as witnesses were blocked by black curtains and had their voices electronically altered, like mobsters afraid of being murdered in their sleep.

The testimony was equally dramatic: IRS agents, they said, routinely made false accusations against people, busted into people's homes and waved guns in their faces, and once even forced a girl caught in a raid to change her clothes while agents watched.

As it happens, virtually none of this was true, but that didn't matter. Republicans lined up to denounce the IRS as "Gestapo-like" and a law was quickly passed that handcuffed agents and slashed the budget for audits and enforcement, especially against high-income taxpayers. It was a boon for the rich in the same way that it would be a boon for drug dealers and street criminals if Congress slashed the budgets of local police departments.

Generally speaking, the end result of all this was a reduced auditing budget, which made life much easier for America's millionaires and billionaires, and a reined-in operating budget, which made the IRS less able to do its job efficiently and more likely to screw up in some kind of spectacular way. Mission accomplished! Noam Scheiber reviews the recent cuts in the IRS budget since Republicans took over the House in 2010 and concludes that they had pretty much the same effect:

The just and logical result of this chain of events would be to discredit the people intent on starving government. Instead, the [tea party targeting] scandal has become a convenient talking point for opponents of government itself. The IRS uproar “probably represents the last shovelful of dirt on the central mission of Barack Obama’s presidency: rehabilitating Big Government’s reputation as a necessary first step toward a new Progressive Era,” wrote the economics commentator James Pethokoukis in National Review. More alarmingly, mainstream pundits are echoing this conclusion. “The IRS flap eats away at the underpinnings of what President Barack Obama promised when he first ran in 2008,” wrote the centrist columnist Jerry Seib the following week. “A revival of confidence that government is capable of solving problems in a smart and nonideological manner.”

I’m afraid Seib is right. As it’s currently playing out, the scandal probably is sapping confidence in government. But how we got to this point is no accident. It was the plan all along.

I'm happy to have the tea party targeting scandal thoroughly investigated. It looks to me mostly like a failure of management and overworked staffers, not a partisan hit job, but hey—you never know until you investigate. So investigate away. But I sure hope this doesn't turn into a rerun of the Roth hearings. Those were not just a travesty, but a travesty that's all too likely to repeat itself since no one, Democrat or Republican alike, ever wants to stick their necks out for the universally reviled IRS. Because of that, this could turn into a Roth-esque feeding frenzy just through sheer unchecked momentum. Hopefully, there's someone in Congress with the guts to keep this investigation on track, even if it does mean running the risk of being branded pro-IRS.

Obama's Counterterrorism Speech: A Pivot Point on Drones and More?

David Corn — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:03:13 +0000

In recent years, conservative and liberal reaction to President Barack Obama's national security policies has often converged. Conservatives note that Obama has continued (or expanded) many of the Bush-Cheney policies and methods—drones, indefinite detention, military commissions, use of the state secrets privilege—and this, they proclaim, proves that the Bush-Cheney regime was not excessive or unlawful. Liberals, pointing to Obama's decisions in these areas, complain that the fellow who once campaigned against the excesses of the Bush-Cheney years has gone over to the dark side. A Justice Department white paper leaked in February explaining the administration's justification for targeted killing abroad of US citizens suspected of terrorism embodied the sort of executive power overreach associated with Obama's predecessor. And the Obama administration's fierce pursuit of national security leaks—which led the Justice Department to collect secretly information on the communications of the Associated Press and James Rosen of Fox News—reinforces the view that Obama has taken a step or two toward an imperial presidency.

White House aides rankle at any comparison to Bush and Cheney. They dutifully note that in his first days in office, Obama ended the use of torture (a.k.a. enhanced interrogation techniques) and declared his intention to shut down Guantanamo. (Gitmo remains open, but that's mainly because congressional Republicans and Democrats thwarted the White House effort to develop a high-security facility in the United States to house the detainees.) And the Obama-ites contend they have reformed some of the Bush-Cheney policies, such as the use of military commissions, to justify maintaining these practices. Also, they are not reluctant to add that Obama did end the war in Iraq and is downsizing the war in Afghanistan (at a faster pace than then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA chief David Petraeus urged in 2011). But much of this defense has tended to get lost as the administration has fired off drone strikes without acknowledging the individual attacks and has, following in the path of previous administrations, resisted certain congressional oversight efforts.

Continue Reading »

Sadly, 20-Second Cell Phone Charging Probably Still Just a Dream

Kevin Drum — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:26:13 +0000

Last night, I wrote about Ionut Budisteanu, a Romanian teenager who won an Intel science award by inventing some cool technology that could make driverless cars cheaper. Today, Matt Yglesias picks up on this story, but also tells us about another award winner:

Eesha Khare, an 18 year-old from California, also did something with some major potential commercial applications and "developed a tiny device that fits inside cell phone batteries, allowing them to fully charge within 20-30 seconds." We're told that "Eesha’s invention also has potential applications for car batteries."

I hadn't noticed that, but a bit of googling produced several dozen breathless media reports about a new invention that will charge your cell phone in 20 seconds. I was a little skeptical: this didn't sound like merely an Intel award winner, it sounded like a patentable invention that would turn Eesha Khare into an instant billionaire. So I checked into it a bit.

Long story short, it turns out that Khare did some interesting work in supercapacitors. This is obviously impressive for a teenager, but no, it's not a fabulous new invention. Lots of companies have been working on supercapacitors for a long time, and lots of companies have investigated the specific chemistry that Khare used. The account here is perhaps a bit more dyspeptic than it should be, but I suspect the wrap-up is about right: "Add it all up and the central conclusion we can draw from all of this is that the mainstream media is stupid."

Which is too bad. It would be nice to charge my cell phone in 20 seconds and my tablet in two minutes. Oh well.