Jonathan Chait's Blog, page 120

Post-Apocalyptic Chicago

Great photo from the L.A. Times:

 

Life In Ohio, A Continuing Series

This is the story that has it all:

John F. Kennedy High football player and Ohio State University recruit Chris Carter was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of fondling as many eight girls while pretending to measure them for JROTC uniforms.

Carter, 18, was held overnight in City Jail and is not expected to be released before Thursday morning.

Cleveland police said a 15-year-old girl told officers that Carter took her out of her classroom and into a room behind the JFK auditorium and told her he needed to measure her for the uniform. ...

Carter,a three-star recruit, described his commitment to Ohio State last year as the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. 

Individual Mandate Foe Inadvertently Refutes Self

National Review's Iain Murray argues, "Now that the individual mandate has been found unconstitutional, some on the left are starting to claim it was a conservative idea originally." (Actually, some on the left have been pointing this out for a couple years, but never mind.) Nonsense, writes Murray, citing this 1994 paper from the Cato Institute:

It’s worth noting, though, that most of us in the free market movement have never embraced the health insurance purchase mandate. And I’m proud to dig out of the archives an old Cato Institute paper (pdf) written by my former CEI colleague Tom Miller(now at the American Enterprise Institute), which roundly criticizes the 1993-94 Republican compromise legislation. Tom found a lot of faults in those bills, and he singled out the individual purchase mandate as being especially egregious. While acknowledging that, from a political perspective, “any legislative alternative to the Clinton plan must guarantee universal coverage,” he wrote:

"The most troubling aspect of the Nickles-Stearns legislation, as introduced on November 20 [1993], is the mandate that it imposes on all Americans to purchase a standard package of health insurance benefits. By endorsing the concept of compulsory universal insurance coverage, Nickles-Stearns undermines the traditional principles of personal liberty and individual responsibility that provide essential bulwarks against all-intrusive governmental control of health care."

Wait. He's citing a paper criticizing the Republican health care plan, co-sponsored by arch-conservative Don Nickles, for including an individual mandate. Murray seems to think this refutes the fact that Republicans used to support the individual mandate.

Now, clearly, there were some fringe elements on the right who opposed an individual mandate (though not until until the entire GOP had abandoned the idea for political reasons did any of them think to argue it was actually unconstitutional .) The point is that Republicans, even very conservative Republicans, both created and supported the individual mandate for years before deciding en masse it was not only undesirable but an affront to liberty and the Constitution.

Obama Is Dropping The Ball On Egypt

As I wrote not long ago, the violence now being deployed by Mubarak's thugs against demonstrators changes the calculus. And, based on Robert Gibbs' briefing today, the administration has not responded. Gibbs has alluded multiple times to private conversations the administration has had with Mubarak, but its public stance remains measured. Gibbs would not even acknowledge multiple reports that violence is being undertaken by pro-regime forces. It's unacceptable and it has to change very quickly. You can't have an administration cautiously supporting (or tepidly criticizing) a regime as it carries out a Tienanmen Square massacre. This administration moves slowly but there's just no time right now.

Fox Geezer Syndrome, Cont'd

The voice of Sideshow Bob has fallen prey:

"We didn't even do that. He was too busy watching Fox News, he didn't want to cuddle."

-- "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" star Camille Grammer telling Joy Behar on Monday what went wrong in her marriage to her estranged husband Kelsey Grammer.

But why can't you cuddle while watching Fox News? Wait... oh.

Time For Obama To Cut Mubarak Loose

One thing I think is overwhelmingly clear from the events today in Egypt: the American alliance with Hosni Mubarak is over. The alliance was justifiable on strategic grounds. Mubarak was a dictator, but he retained just enough of a mask of legitimacy to tip the American calculation in his favor. But now the public has shown its overwhelming opposition to his rule -- not Iran-level opposition but something closer to Romanian-level opposition -- and his recourse is pure brutality:

Today President Mubarak seems to have decided to crack down on the democracy movement, using not police or army troops but rather mobs of hoodlums and thugs. I’ve been spending hours on Tahrir today, and it is absurd to think of this as simply “clashes” between two rival groups. The pro-democracy protesters are unarmed and have been peaceful at every step. But the pro-Mubarak thugs are arriving in buses and are armed — and they’re using their weapons.

In my area of Tahrir, the thugs were armed with machetes, straight razors, clubs and stones. And they all had the same chants, the same slogans and the same hostility to journalists. They clearly had been organized and briefed. So the idea that this is some spontaneous outpouring of pro-Mubarak supporters, both in Cairo and in Alexandria, who happen to end up clashing with other side — that is preposterous. It’s difficult to know what is happening, and I’m only one observer, but to me these seem to be organized thugs sent in to crack heads, chase out journalists, intimidate the pro-democracy forces and perhaps create a pretext for an even harsher crackdown.

There's no going back now. Either Mubarak will be driven from power, or he will hold onto power in such a way that the U.S. can't touch him anymore.

Unlike Leon, I think Obama's measured response to the failed Green Revolution was sensible. Iran was a political culture deeply divided between supporters and opponents of the regime, and one in which the accusation of pro-Americanism was powerful. The Egyptian populace seems almost totally united in opposition to Mubarak, with the only significant support coming from those in Mubarak's pay. The opposition has all the nationalist and religious legitimacy it needs. At this point Obama needs to forcefully cut Mubarak loose. The only delay, I would hope, is his slowness to respond to events, a trait he has consistently displayed since the campaign. Sometimes that caution has served him well, but here it hasn't. If Obama does not act soon it will be a black mark.

Bayh Low, Sell High

Andrew Gelman rises, somewhat, to the defense of Evan Bayh:

[T]hink of this from Bayh's point of view. After being one of 100 U.S. senators (and near the median, at that), it's natural to want to stay near the action and have some effect on policy. Lobbying is a natural way to do this. From this perspective, it's a direct extension of what he's been doing before. And if it pays well, so be it.

As a Senator, Bayh's role was to influence policy on behalf of the citizens of Indiana and Americans as a whole, and if those policies conflicted with certain narrow interests, so be it. As a lobbyist, his job is to influence policy on behalf of whoever pays him, and if those policies conflict with the interests of Americans as a whole, so be it. Both those jobs constitute "having some effect on policy," but the goals are, in theory, quite different. If Bayh's behavior as a private lobbyist is a 'direct extension" of his public service, then that is a devastating indictment of him.

Trust Me, I'm A Doctor

Jeffrey Anderson, writing in the Weekly Standard, has discovered yet another data point against the Affordable Care Act -- doctors in the House voted to repeal it:

What do doctors think of Obamacare? One good gauge is the views of doctors serving in the House of Representatives.  Of the 16 doctors currently serving in the House -- perhaps an all-time high -- all but one voted for Obamacare's repeal.

Why would doctors oppose Obamacare? Perhaps it's because, as the recently released National Physicians Survey of nearly 3,000 doctors showed, by a margin of well over 3 to 1, doctors think that during the next five years (in the wake of ObamaCare's passage), the quality of American health care will "deteriorate" (65 percent) rather than "improve" (18 percent). Perhaps it’s because more than 9 out of 10 doctors in that same survey expect Obamacare's "impact" on doctors to be "negative" (78 percent), rather than "positive" (8 percent). Perhaps it's because, due to what appears to be naked political favoritism, Obamacare would effectively ban doctors from owning hospitals and from expanding those that they already own. 

Or... perhaps it's because every doctor who voted for repeal is also a Republican. If you don't even mention that fact -- and Anderson doesn't --you're not even making the appearance of actually trying to inform your readers, as opposed to merely repeating GOP propaganda. Also, the American Medical Association endorsed the Affordable Care Act, another data point Anderson must have forgotten to mention.

 

A Preliminary Breakdown Of The GOP Contenders

The entry of Jon Huntsman into the Republican primary field has created strong competition for what has to be a tiny number of Republican voters who want a nominee who's both sane and Mormon:

Note that while the GOP field has two sane Mormon candidates, which is probably two more than there's room for, the "sane, non-Mormon"and "insane Mormon" fields are wide open. I'm not sure who's the best fit for the former category, but the latter is just screaming for Glenn Beck.

Problem: You're Viewed As Sinister Moguls. Solution: Hired Goons

Politico's Kenneth Vogel reports on the Koch brothers' campaign to push back against media characterizations of them as secretive billionaires funneling vast sums of money to make the political system more congenial to rich people in general and carbon polluters in particular:  

Inside the resort at the beginning of the conference, “there was an atmosphere almost of paranoia,” said Gary Ferdman, a Common Cause official. 





Ferdman had reservations at the resort and stayed there Thursday and Friday night. He said he was told Saturday that his lunch reservations at the resort restaurant had been canceled and was urged to check out and leave promptly by a member of Koch’s large security detail. 





Security manned every doorway and stairwell near the ballrooms where Koch events were held, and threatened to jail this POLITICO reporter while he waited in line at the resort’s café, after he stopped by a Koch conference registration table. 





The resort grounds were “closed for a private function,” the resort’s head of security, James Foster told POLITICO, ushering the reporter outside, where private security guards, wearing gold lapel pins bearing Koch’s “K” logo, threatened “a citizen’s arrest” and a “night in the Riverside County jail” if the reporter continued asking questions and taking photographs.

If those hired goons don't dispel the image of the Kochs as sinister moguls, I don't know what will.