Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 905

Romanian Art Thief Wants to Sue Museum for Making Theft Too Easy

Radu Dogaru is one of six Romanian art thieves on trial for one of the biggest art heists in the modern era. He admitted to stealing the art works, but is now claiming the museum made it too easy and wants to sue them for negligence. "I could not imagine that a museum would exhibit such valuable works with so little security," Dogaru told the Bucharest court on Tuesday, claiming that the Kunsthal museum's alarm system was not up par when he and his cohorts allegedly stole masterpieces by Gauguin, Monet, Picasso and others — seven in total — back in 2012.

Dogaru is threatening this lawsuit because if Rotterdam's Kunsthal museum is found guilty of negligence, they'll have to help split the millions in claims Dogaru is facing, the AFP reports. "We are considering hiring Dutch lawyers to start a legal case in The Netherlands or in Romania," his lawyer said. 

The millions in claims have to do with the seven missing masterpieces. Earlier this year, Dogaru's mother said she burned some of them, then retracted that statement. A separate investigation in trying to determine whether or not his mother burned those paintings to ash is still underway, though Dogaru swears they weren't destroyed. "The paintings were certainly not destroyed. I don't know where they are but I believe they have been sold," Dogaru told the court on Tuesday. The seven paintings are worth an estimated $24 million. 

       

Of Course Reporters Should Report on Healthcare.gov's Problems

Some conservatives were, perhaps, surprised to see reporters and writers who are perceived to lean left going after President Obama's disastrous roll-out of the Healthcare.gov insurance exchange site.

It turns out that some liberals are also surprised that a terrible muck-up from the administration on a critical piece of its signature legislative achievement had earned widespread criticism. In a Salon piece on Tuesday, Joan Walsh found this trend of reporting and discussing a high-profile story alarming. Why? because "they only encourage the completely unbalanced and unhinged coverage of whatever the problem may be." Walsh adds that Obama is clearly aware of the Healthcare.gov issues "without my telling him," as if the role of liberal reporters is primarily to tell the president (and not the public) what's up with stuff. She goes on: 

Does anyone think if the website worked perfectly, dishonest conservatives wouldn’t be pointing to other alleged problems? The sight of people from Sen. John McCain to wingnuts on Twitter, who didn’t want the government to help the uninsured get health insurance, now lamenting the trouble those uninsured are having navigating a new website – well, it would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad and corrupt.

Walsh is not the first to point out that the Healthcare.gov problems are politically loaded. Conservatives just shut down the government because they believe Obamacare will destroy the economy, and the web site's problems help to feed that false argument. In recent days, conservative politicians and White House officials have pushed hard on their respective versions of the story. For the Obama administration, the story is this: sure, the site has problems, but officials are working hard to fix it up, so don't worry. Plus, some of those problems are good problems — the capacity issues, for instance, mean that a lot of Americans want Obamacare. The conservative narrative is essentially variations on a theme: if the Obamacare website is so bad, that must mean Obamacare is bad. Therefore, repeal all of Obamacare.

It turns out that neither version is correct. The site's problems run deep, programmers knew of a number of red flags before the launch date, and it's not a sure thing that that administration will fix the site before a series of critical deadlines. But Obamacare itself is not, in fact, ruining the economy, or any number of other apocalyptic divinations from the right. We know this in part because of the reporting and analysis on the actual extent, causes, and implications of the Healthcare.gov disaster. Those are the same stories feeding the liberal criticism of the administration that Walsh would like disappeared, just because they might be used by Walsh's political opponents. 

Kind of shocked at this piece from @joanwalsh. My job is to cover Obamacare accurately, not instrumentally. http://t.co/Naao9xWtpm

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 22, 2013

Here is Walsh's fear coming true — Louisiana Rep. John Flemming claimed (falsely) that even the liberal Ezra Klein agreed with him that Obamacare was the biggest threat to the nation. And House Speaker John Boehner's spokesman approvingly cites the work of Walsh's colleague Brian Beutler:

I agree with @brianbeutler -- if the administration had a real handle on the problem, they'd be forthcoming w/ an explanation and the fixes.

— Brendan Buck (@Brendan_Buck) October 22, 2013

Even so, Beutler has already pushed back against Walsh's argument, based on some actual reporting he's done on the website roll-out. "If the website doesn’t get fixed, it will mean big problems for Obamacare. It would be a tragedy, and an unforced error of massive proportions," he writes. It's a polite reminder to anyone buying Walsh that the consequences of a non-functional Healthcare.gov would hurt uninsured Americans along with the White House, and that some reporters actually care about the former problem over the latter. Yes, it's important for reporters and commenters to examine misinformation on the health care law pushed by its opponents, for the sake of informing the public. But not at the expense of discussing the administration's failures, and its consequences, honestly. 

       

Does Anyone Remember 'Avatar' Anymore?

Today Mike Fleming Jr. over at Deadline broke some big Avatar news. Huh? Who? What? Oh right, the sequels to James Cameron's 3D Na'vi-fest are lurching into production.

If you had forgotten, the 2009 ultra-blockbuster Avatar is getting not one, not two, but three sequels, news that was received with a general "Whatever" when it was announced. Recently, there's been a boom in Avatar news, though none are really capturing the nation's fancy. Last week, star Sam Worthington—remember him?—revealed that the sequels would start filming October 2014. Fleming today reports that Stephen Lang will be back as the film's villain for all three movies. This is notable because his character, Colonel Miles Quaritch, died at the end of the first film. Did you remember that? We didn't. 

People have tried to explore why Avatar, despite being the highest-grossing film of all time, inspires so little residual fan passion. Devin Faraci at Badass Digest has said that the movie is  "weirdly absent from pop culture." David Haglund wrote at Slate that "While Avatar was arguably instrumental in pushing more filmmakers to use 3-D (for better or worse), it really does seem to have otherwise largely vanished from the cultural landscape." Haglund enumerated reasons Avatar might have failed to have any sort of lasting impact. It's meant to be watched in a theater, for instance, or the "movie really is weaker than many of the other all-time cinema hits." 

For whatever reason, Avatar proved completely unmemorable. Of course we can recall the basics of the film: the dragon-riding, the eco-friendly plot line, the weird hair connection stuff. Beyond that, though, everything is pretty blurry. Maybe Worthington was simply too unremarkable a star, who never became the sought-after hero the industry hoped he would be, thus imbuing Avatar with some star-making mythos. Perhaps it was because Avatar ended up simply being about the visual spectacle, rather than the intricacies of the storyline. Maybe we just didn't like the movie as much as the neat technology tricked us into thinking we did at the time. 

So while the announcement that Lang is coming back should get us riled up—Fleming writes that he "sounds like he’s the closest thing to a mix between Star Wars’ Darth Vader and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character"—all we can muster in response is a simple, "Oh." Whatever retcon Cameron performs likely won't have that much of an emotional impact, because Lang's character's death barely registered. 

Avatar surprised us the first time around, overcoming bad buzz to become the biggest hit in movie history. And maybe Cameron will hit pay dirt the second, third and fourth go-arounds too. But it seems like he's got a lot of work to do before enough people are excited about taking another trip to Pandora to make it worth the cost of gas.

       

The Suit Against Obamacare Subsidies Could Be Very Bad for Obamacare

On Tuesday a federal judge denied a request from the Justice Department to dismiss a lawsuit aiming to block health care subsidies in states not running their own healthcare exchange sites. Put another way, if the plaintiffs in Halbig v. Sebelius win this case, low- and middle-income individuals in 34 states won't get subsidized health care. The only good news for people expecting those subsidies is that the judge, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman, decided not to block the subsidies while the case moves forward. 

Friedman heard arguments on Monday from the Justice Department and the plaintiffs, four individuals and three employers from states that declined to run their own exchanges. The Affordable Care Act offers subsidies in the form of tax credits to people who buy insurance through exchanges "established by the state," and the case comes down to what Congress actually meant by that. The Justice Department is arguing that Congress obviously meant all the exchanges, and that the Department of Health and Human Services intended to "stand in the shoes” of the states that allowed the federal government to run their exchanges for them, according to The Washington Times. The challengers are arguing that the Internal Revenue Service ignored the wording in the bill when it publicized that applicants on both kinds of exchanges would get subsidies. They also believe Congress used the subsidies as a way to motivate states to create their own exchanges, meaning the states that didn't create their own exchanges are out of luck. 

Friedman thought both sides kinda had a point, and they kinda do. According to the Affordable Care Act's Section 1401, subsidies in the form of tax credits are available to individuals who "enrolled in through an Exchange established by the State under 1311 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." Section 1311 defines an Exchange as "a governmental agency or nonprofit entity that is established by a State." Of course, in Section 1322 the law gives the federal government power to create exchanges in states that fail to or elect not to establish exchanges. The challengers argue that the IRS disobeyed the law when it said enrollments in both federal and state-run exchanges (sections 1311 and 1322) qualify for healthcare premium tax credits. 

[image error]Of course, this would be bad, bad news for Obamacare, Democrats, President Obama, and everyone who was planning on buying health insurance through the federal exchange, whenever it starts working. How bad? Well, a couple of weeks ago we fact-checked a claim made by Ashley Dionne, a 26-year-old Michigan resident who claimed that the Affordable Care Act would raise her premiums from $75 a month to over $300. "This law has raped my future," Dionne wrote in a tumblr post that later went viral. Dionne, who makes approximately $14,000 a year (rounded up), is eligible for Medicaid, but her mom claimed she'd never go on the program. If Dionne stuck by that choice, Dionne would be eligible for a $2,272 subsidy, which would mean the silver plan would cost her just under $25 a month. Take away that subsidy — Michigan doesn't run its exchange — and Dionne would pay $216. 

That's bad for Dionne and the rest of the country's underemployed millennials, but it's also bad for Obamacare. The more it makes sense financially for young people to opt-out of Obamacare, rather than pay for affordable insurance, the less likely they'll be to enroll in Obamacare. By 2016, the fine for being uninsured will be at least $695 per person, which is way more than Dionne's subsidized $280 a year insurance, but a quarter of the $2,552 unsubsidized rate. If the courts rule in favor of the challengers (or in favor of the three other challenges to Obamacare subsidies) then all the Ashley Dionnes of America may opt-out.  

       

The Daily Caller Publishes Public Service Announcement on Why Feminism Exists

[image error]"The bogus 'war on women' is really nothing but liberal women acting out against bad fathers" is a sentence Mark Judge wrote and posted to the internet on Monday in response to the new Book of Jezebel based on the feminist web site. There were a number of other sentences before and after the one above, which you can read at the Daily Caller. Or, you could let us summarize them for you. While the women who wrote the Book of Jezebel are capable of "humor and a high level of intelligence," Judge writes, their humor is overshadowed by an "angry" tone, something the reviewer doesn't understand but nonetheless believes is destroying America. 

The Book of Jezebel is styled after an encyclopedia, edited by Jezebel founder Anna Holmes. While it touches on a bunch of things, Judge seems to take issue the most with the book's depiction of a handful of groups who advocate for anti-feminist policies. Those entries are so problematic that Judge seems to think they speak for themselves: he quotes entries for "Homosexuality," "Antichoice," and "Antifeminists" with virtually no explanation of what, exactly, he finds to be inaccurate. Those entries satirize the core readership of Judge's Daily Caller audience, so perhaps it's obvious to his readers why Antifeminists are not any of these things: "People who object to feminism’s goals, i.e. people who often (willfully) misunderstand feminism and/or huge assholes." But hey, Judge likes the book's entry on hipsters, so maybe peace in our time after all. 

Judge's response to the book hits on two major negative responses to feminism found on, but not limited to, the right: that feminists aren't nice, and that things are great for women at this point, so women must be angry about something other than inequality. Judge posits that the entire feminist movement is a result of daddy issues, which feminists avoid addressing by advocating for "a matriarchal utopia," in order (presumably) to punish men for wronging them. There are many different takes on this idea, of what's really wrong with feminists, and what everyone else should do about it. Earlier this weekend, sociology professor Lisa Wade riffed on an anti-sexism UN ad campaign by documenting what Google's autofill said for a variety of search prompts about feminists, like "Feminists are," "Feminists should," and "Feminists can't." Google's results based on past searches? "Feminists are wrong," "Feminists are crazy," "Feminists are annoying," "Feminists need to die," "Feminists need to shut up," and "Feminists need men." 

People who oppose feminism are happy to tell feminists these things to their faces. A transgender journalist at a presentation of Microsoft's XBox one was called "it," "thing," and "this one." Pax Dickinson, a man (formerly) with hiring power for tech jobs at Business Insider, openly talked about excluding women from positions in tech on his public Twitter account. Women are told to "lighten up," or to ignore discriminatory remarks and behavior because the person doing it says he or she has good intentions. Women who act with agency against these and other discriminatory, misogynist words and acts are met with desperate, sometimes successful, attempts to remove that agency. Judge infantilizes feminists by comparing them to unloved children, insinuating that feminists contribute an irrational response to American society that deserves to be ignored. Other responses can be more vicious — death threats, insults, public shaming directed at someone who speaks out of turn. While Judge paints feminists as a threat to American society, Hanover, New Hampshire is debating whether a skit by a bunch of high school football players in which a group of them simulated group sex with a woman after she refused their advances depicts a "gang bang" or a "gang rape," as if one term would make the sketch OK for prime time. And those are just examples from the borders of feminism imposed by Judge's response — those of visible, American discourse and media. Some of these responses can and do prompt anger, both from activists and, one would hope, any human being with a beating heart. Others just prompt exasperation from the repetition of it all. 

Despite what Judge may think, feminist acts still require asking, or demanding, space in rooms that have for so long been 100 percent men. This is not a made-up problem, and it is hilariously far from demanding the matriarchal utopia that Judge imagines as the endgame. Maybe that's why the absurdity of Judge's overreach has prompted something akin to amusement, and not the feared feminist rage that apparently keeps him up at night. 

       

CeeLo Green Faces Jail Time on an Ecstasy Charge

CeeLo Green could go to jail for up to four years after prosecutors charged the musician with one count of furnishing a controlled substance on Monday afternoon. That charge stems from accusations that the "Voice" star slipped ecstasy into a 33-year-old woman's drink while the two were having dinner in Los Angeles in the summer of 2012. Green pleaded not guilty to the felony charge on Monday. Prosecutors have requested a bail of $30,000. 

Prosecutors declined to file any sexual assault or rape charges against Green, whose given name is Thomas DeCarlo Callaway. The unnamed woman accusing Green of drugging her has said that Green brought her back to his hotel room after dinner that night. The woman filed a police report last year accusing Green of assault. In a statement, Green's lawyer claimed partial victory based on the lack of assault charges: 

"We are pleased that the Los Angeles County District Attorney has completed its investigation and concluded that the evidence did not support the false and unfounded claims made over a year ago. Mr. Green encouraged a full and complete investigation of those claims and he was confident once conducted he would be cleared of having any wrongful intent and it would be established that any relations were consensual. CeeLo had faith that if the true facts were known the District Attorney would reject those charges. As it relates to the one charge of furnishing or sharing ecstasy, Mr. Green will responsibly address that matter in a court of law but not comment on it further out of respect for the process.”

Green is due back in court on November 20th. Green has won 5 Grammy awards, and is scheduled to star in his own reality show in 2014. 

       

Tim Burton May Actually Be Making 'Beetlejuice 2'

Wasn't the whole moral of Beetlejuice not to raise unnecessary spirits from the grave? Well, according to Jeff Sneider of The Wrap, Tim Burton is not taking that lesson to heart. Sneider reports that Burton is "officially in talks" to direct the sequel to his 1988 film, and that Michael Keaton is likely to reprise his role as the troublemaking "bio-exorcist."

Now, it's not like this is completely out of the blue as there has been talk of a Beetlejuice sequel for years. The earliest example we could find was a 1988 press release from The Geffen Film Company (which produced the original) claiming it had "definite plans to make a sequel to Beetlejuice." The archives of the trades are littered with various reports of writers being hired to take a crack at a script. In a 1992 Miami Herald story about how Daniel Waters came to write the script for Batman Returns, he explains that he first met with Burton about the Beetlejuice sequel.
"Tim had this attitude that he was deathly afraid he was going to have to make this movie," said Waters. "It was like, 'I dare you to write a script that will rouse me from my Batman stupor.'" In a 1996 Liz Smith column for Newsday, Michael Keaton was quoted at the premiere of Multiplicity as saying Burton was still looking for a writer. "I'd love to do a Beetlejuice' followup. It's something Tim Burton and I have discussed endlessly," Keaton said 17 years ago. "It's a matter of the right script, but I hope it happens." Interviewed by Vulture in January, Burton himself said he'd "have to see what the script was like and if it was worth doing."

So, this has been a long time coming. The latest report Seth Graeme-Smith, who wrote Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, taking a crack at the script. Apparently, Burton was impressed. Maybe also helpful is that Graeme-Smith is partners in production company KatzSmith with David Katzenberg, the 30-year-old son of Jeffrey Katzenberg who founded DreamWorks with David Geffen and Steven Spielberg. 

So, who knows if this will get any further than the past attempts. But we share Burton's wariness: with new Jurassic Park and Terminator films are on their way out and it's long odds that they will recapture the magic of the originals from the 80s and 90s.  But if it does come to pass, we can only hope it involves bringing Winona Ryder back to play an adult version of her teen goth role and returning Alec Baldwin to his younger, hunkier self. Cue the Harry Belafonte.

       

Here's the Dumb Video Shown at Dick Cheney's Roast

As you could probably have predicted, the video created as humorous tribute to former Vice President Dick Cheney at his roast earlier this month is neither humorous nor, frankly, much of a tribute.

[image error]Shared on Twitter by John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine (whose father appears at right), the eight-minute long video is basically one joke that goes on for about seven minutes and 45 seconds too long.

The gag: What if Dick Cheney were, for some reason, a 1960s folk rock singer except his songs were actually about, like, shotguns and war and stuff, but he still got popular anyway? And then, apparently, if he was featured on VH1's Behind the Music, a show which there is absolutely zero chance Dick Cheney has ever seen. (Imagine that darkened room, mild chuckles breaking as the video gets underway, Liz Cheney leaning over to her dad to explain the premise.)

If you like your hippies punched more thoroughly than a dead horse, this video is for you. If, on the other hand you like any these things …

Good jokes Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, or The Beatles Decently Photoshopped images (see image at top of article) The 2008 election results

… you may not find this terribly funny. Not because it's so edgy and puts liberals in their place, mind you. Because it's dumb.

We will reserve one point of praise. The guy who was obviously heavily involved in the making of the video and who makes multiple appearances as several different characters (including Cheney's mother lol) within it had clearly been looking for an outlet for his "ashram yogi" schtick. Congrats to him for finding it.

       

Rand Paul Wants John Roberts to Sign Up for Obamacare

In the unending Obamacare war in Congress, Sen. Rand Paul has raised the stakes: he is proposing a constitutional amendment that would stop lawmakers from passing legislation that doesn't apply equally to U.S. citizens and members of Congress, the executive branch, and the Supreme Court. It's a move aimed squarely at Obamacare, and more specifically, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

Paul told the Daily Caller on Sunday:

"My amendment says basically that everybody including Justice Roberts — who seems to be such a fan of Obamacare — gets it too. See, right now, Justice Roberts is still continuing to have federal employee health insurance subsidized by the taxpayer. And if he likes Obamacare so much, I’m going to give him an amendment that gives Obamacare to Justice Roberts."

Roberts wrote the opinion that upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act last year.

Conservatives in the Senate have raged against a so-called Obamacare "exemption" for lawmakers since 2010. It was then that Sen. Chuck Grassley proposed an amendment mandating that all lawmakers and their staffs buy into the exchanges — losing their coverage on the federal health insurance plan — so that Congress would have a stake in the efficacy of the health care law. Democrats agreed, and the amendment was passed. Later, the Office of Policy Management ruled in August that the government could still contribute to employee health plans bought through the exchanges. As The Atlantic Wire has noted, this does not make Obamacare "apply" to Congress — it makes a special rule for Congress.

This summer, Vitter proposed his own amendment, which aimed to take away these employer contributions to the health care of members of Congress and their staff. The Vitter amendment became one of the main points of contention during the shutdown fight, and GOP staffers anonymously spoke to The New Yorker and Mother Jones, expressing frustration that their bosses wanted to get rid of employer contributions to their health care. GOP lawmakers responded by kicking their staffers out of Vitter amendment discussions. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz advocated expanding the amendment to include all D.C. federal workers, like teachers and police officers.

In the end, the Vitter amendment was killed during shutdown negotiations, and staffers breathed a sigh of relief that they would not be handed a big pay cut so that their bosses could take a stand against Obamacare. But now that the shutdown is over, Paul is back hammering away at the same issue.

As Politico points out, Paul has a tough road ahead of him if he wants to amend the Constitution. It's "no easy task, requiring super majorities in both chambers of Congress before going to the states for ratification."

       

The Onion Takes the Redskins Name Debate to a New Level

The controversy over the Washington Redskins' name escalated on Monday in a piece from The Onion provocatively titled "Redskins’ Kike Owner Refuses to Change Team’s Offensive Name." The five-sentence story and its anti-Semitic language are so startling that journalists and bloggers aren't even sure how to react.

In its efforts to turn the debate on its head, the piece refers to the Jewish owner of the Washington football team, Daniel Snyder, as a "hook-nosed kike" and "shifty-eyed hebe." (For example: "'The Redskins represent 81 years of great history and tradition, and it’s a source of pride for our fans,' said the hook-nosed kike, stressing that the team’s insulting moniker is 'absolutely not a racial slur by any means.'") Those anti-Semitic words are written in satire, but still, they appear pretty shocking. Which is, of course, the point. Would Snyder really defend the Redskins name if he were Native American? This story fits into other similarly focused attacks on the name that imagine how Redskins supporters like Snyder would feel if the team name were another minority. Consider, for example, the San Francisco Chinamen or the New York Jews, as