A relatively brief TWiA this week, because we put a lot of time into Thursday's special report.
This Week in Israeli Politics
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his campaign stop in Congress this week. Before he did, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, who knows a lot more about the Middle East than we ever will, assessed the damage Netanyahu could be doing to the relationship between our two countries--and how much Netanyahu just doesn't care. This is about keeping his job, and nothing else. Goldberg writes:
"All of this is not to say that Netanyahu isn’t worried about Iran, and isn’t worried about a set of (for now, theoretical) concessions by the West that could put Iran on a slow but steady path to the nuclear threshold. But there is no reason—none, zero, efes—to believe that his putative goal, to stiffen the spine of Congress in advance of a framework agreement, could not have been achieved a) immediately after the election; b) in intensive one-on-one, or one-on-two, or five, lobbying meetings with senators; or c) in a way that didn’t so obviously disrespect the president of the United States, or place Democratic supporters of Israel in an atrocious bind. 'If this didn’t have an electoral quality to it, why not just say to Boehner, "Invite me after the election"?' Dennis Ross, the former Middle East peace negotiator, asked me.
"Netanyahu is engaging in behavior that is without precedent: He is apparently so desperate to stay in office that he has let the Republicans weaponize his country in their struggle against a Democratic president they despise. Boehner seeks to do damage to Obama, and he has turned Netanyahu into an ally in this cause. It’s not entirely clear here who is being played."
Goldberg's piece closes with a quote from former Obama administration peace envoy Martin Indyk:
"'What happens if the president succeeds in doing a deal despite the speech of the prime minister?' he asks. 'Instead of the United States and Israel talking about ways to provide strategic reassurance to Israel, there’s going to be an ongoing fight over this deal. And what if the prime minister then succeeds in killing the deal? How will the president relate to the destruction of one of his signature policy initiatives? And if the sanctions then collapse, as seems likely, and Iran continues moving towards a nuclear weapon, how does the prime minister propose to stop Iran? He will certainly manage in the process to create the impression that he wants the United States to go to war with Iran. I don’t think the American people, in their war-weary state, will appreciate that.'”
No, we won't. Certainly, there remain some neocons who would love nothing more, for perverse reasons of their own, than to see us in another Middle Eastern ground war. Most Americans, though, understand how much there is to lose, and how little to gain, if we let Israel goad us into such a quagmire. (Although a disturbing number of them want us in a ground war against ISIS, with apparently little understanding of what that would entail or what we'd face in Iraq when/if we left again.
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In the Washington Post, the Brookings Institution's Robert Kagan ponders what the event could mean for domestic politics--American domestic politics, not Israeli ones.
"Is anyone thinking about the future? From now on, whenever the opposition party happens to control Congress — a common enough occurrence — it may call in a foreign leader to speak to a joint meeting of Congress against a president and his policies. Think of how this might have played out in the past. A Democratic-controlled Congress in the 1980s might, for instance, have called the Nobel Prize-winning Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to denounce President Ronald Reagan’s policies in Central America. A Democratic-controlled Congress in 2003 might have called French President Jacques Chirac to oppose President George W. Bush’s impending war in Iraq.
"Does that sound implausible? Yes, it was implausible — until now. Now we are sailing into uncharted waters. Those who favor having Netanyahu speak may imagine this is an extraordinary situation requiring extraordinary measures, that one side is so clearly right, the other so clearly wrong. Yet that is often how people feel about the crisis of their time. We can be sure that in the future the urgency will seem just as great. The only difference between then and now is that today, bringing a foreign leader before Congress to challenge a U.S. president’s policies is unprecedented. After next week, it will be just another weapon in our bitter partisan struggle."
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Finally, Bibi gave his speech. It was, by most accounts, almost entirely what everybody expected to hear. Iran bad, Israel good. Never mind that Netanyahu warns us about almost every country in the Middle East, as if he wants us to go in with our own nukes and wipe out everyone except the Israelis.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's (D/CA) reaction was on the money: "I was near tears throughout the prime minister’s speech—saddened by the insult to the intelligence of the United States as part of the P5+1 nations, and saddened by the condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran and our broader commitment to preventing nuclear proliferation."
It is a little hard to accept the nerve of someone who runs a country that has nuclear weapons but won't admit it, lecturing us about another country's possible future nuclear weapons (especially when back in 1995 he said Iran would have nukes "within three to five years," and has steadily been moving up Iran's supposed timetable ever since). Then again, a man who claims to speak for all the world's Jews displays arrogance on an epic scale.
Yes, Iran has caused trouble for the US on many occasions, and Israel has been largely a staunch ally. But we shouldn't forget that after 9/11, Iran offered to help us bring the perpetrators to justice (their aid was rejected, because President Bush had called them part of the "Axis of Evil" and didn't trust them). And now they have jets in the sky and boots on the ground in the fight against ISIS. They were once a modern, progressive country, and if they could throw off the yoke of religious fundamentalism, could be again. Engaging with the rest of the world, instead of being isolated from it, might help.
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Netanyahu apparently has no compunction against flat-out lying. His determination to make somebody other than him invade Iran seems to know no bounds. Talking Points Memo reminds us that "Testifying before Congress in 2002, Netanyahu warned that Iraq was operating 'centrifuges the size of washing machines' and asserted that there was 'no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and working and is advancing toward the development of nuclear weapons.'” Here are some of his dishonest talking points from this week's speech.
When it comes to persuading us to invade his enemies, we here at TWiA World Headquarters think Bibi has done more than enough harm, and we hope Israeli voters retire him.
This Week in SCOTUS
The Supreme Court heard arguments this week in King v. Burwell, the nonsensical lawsuit ginned up to challenge the Affordable Care Act in court on the basis of a clumsily written sentence. If that were legitimate grounds for lawsuits, we writers would have to keep attorneys on retainer at all times.
Steven Brill, who writes about health care possibly better than any other journalist today, looks at the basis of the suit, and finds it wanting.
"Congressional intent will be hotly debated in the U.S. Supreme Court this Wednesday in King v. Burwell, the latest litigation vehicle being deployed by opponents of Obamacare. 'Congress could not have chosen clearer language to express its intent to limit subsidies to state exchanges,' the plaintiffs, represented by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, argue in their brief.
"That is fiction. Provable fiction.
"Congress knew exactly what it wanted to do when it passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and contrary to the plaintiffs’ claim, that included wanting subsidies for buying health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges to be available to all citizens, even those residing in the 36 states that did not set up their own exchanges, instead relying on the exchange set up by the federal government.
"I’m a reporter. I hate to take sides. And I certainly didn’t in what has been widely reviewed as my even-handed treatment of the merits and demerits of Obamacare in my recently published book about the broken American healthcare system and how Obamacare was conceived and implemented to fix it. But this is one of those issues where reporters err if they write an “on the one hand, on the other hand” story that creates patently false equivalency."
Brill goes on to describe some of his own reporting, for his book, during which none of the many people he interviewed or documents he studied challenged the obvious notion that Congress intended subsidies to be available to all Americans who needed them, whether through a state-run or federal exchange.
"I know what the legislators intended because in researching my book, I interviewed pretty much everyone involved in the conception and writing of the law. Moreover, I did that long before King v. Burwell had become the Obamacare opponents’ favorite new weapon, which means that those opponents had no reason to spin the fairytale that Congress did not intend for those subsidies to go to the millions of Americans signing up on the federally run exchange. At the time, no one had a dog in a fight over congressional intent, because there was no fight.
"I also reviewed reams of internal emails and memos generated by congressional staffers working for both Democrats and Republicans. In no document from start to finish, in a legislative process that spanned more than two years, is there even a hint of anything but the unambiguous assumption that the law, whose first section is titled “Quality, Affordable Health Care for All Americans,” would indeed provide these insurance subsidies for all Americans who needed them."
His ultimate conclusion is obvious to all but the most bitterly partisan:
"Again, congressional intent is a fact-based inquiry, not a matter of opinion. Given the unambiguous mountain of facts arrayed for the defense (and well-presented in the briefs submitted by the defense side), it is hard enough to see how the lawyers on the plaintiffs’ side could actually believe in their case. Their zeal in wanting to kill Obamacare is acceptable advocacy, I guess.
"But if a majority of supposedly objective justices decide to ignore the facts and buy their argument, they will have engaged in a breathtaking act of political activism. For those of us who have always regarded our highest court as a national monument to the rule of law, it will be profoundly depressing. "
It's hard for us to even imagine Constitutional grounds that would merit bringing this case to the Court. Brill aptly describes the dispute: "King v. Burwell hinges on one poorly worded sentence cited by the plaintiffs in a 961-page law that seems to negate a linchpin of that law — the availability of those subsidies to middle-class families so they can buy health insurance. The question is whether that sentence should somehow outweigh all the other provisions in the law that contradict it."
Even if all the evidence--we do mean ALL the evidence--didn't support the defendant, the issue could be resolved by adding three or four words to the sentence in question. Congressional Republicans have already announced that they have no intention of allowing such a fix to come up for a vote, yet have offered no real solution of their own. It's sad to see an entire political party salivating so ferociously over the chance to kick millions of needy Americans off their health insurance, but that is indeed the spectacle before us now.
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One of the geniuses--and we use that word with extreme sarcasm, because he's about to prove he's anything but--behind King v. Burwell revealed a few weeks ago how absurd his lawsuit is. As the New Republic reports, "For instance, to combat the impression that the plaintiffs' standing problems stem from a legal argument that only appeals to unreliable kooks and zealots, one of the King architects now lays these difficulties at the feet of the IRS. 'They don't want to get audited,' Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon told USA Today, 'and this administration has a history of using the IRS for ideological purposes.'"
Yeah, no it doesn't. The right wing has a long history of pretending this administration has used the IRS for ideological purposes. Every actual investigation into actual facts has shown that it hasn't--that even if the IRS had singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny, which it didn't, it would have been doing so because the law compels it to check when a seemingly political group declares itself a not-for-profit, nontaxable "social welfare" organization that doesn't engage in politics. There was no collusion between the administration and the IRS, no conspiracy--there were just IRS employees doing their jobs. UFO reports have more factual basis, because in those cases, the people reporting at least saw something, or believe they did. In the IRS case, there was no flying saucer, much less an optical illusion. Nobody saw a thing. Some people at conservative groups got their noses out of joint because the IRS looked sideways at them, before approving their nontaxable status, as it did in the case of every conservative group it investigated.
Everybody who cares about this--outside of those who live in the right-wing bubble, like Michael Cannon apparently does--knows these things. Cannon not only doesn't, but he uses this entirely unrelated non-scandal to justify a nuisance lawsuit that should never have been filed. If he's among the best they've got, the Cato Institute should hang an "Intellectually Bankrupt" sign on the door and close up shop.
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In years to come, should law students ever need an example of a "frivolous lawsuit," King v. Burwell will serve them well. It's not good for anything else.
This Week in Prison
Dr. Ben Carson, possible Republican candidate for president in 2016, says prison rape makes men decide to be gay, because being gay is "absolutely" a choice people make. "A lot of people who go into prison go into prison straight -- and when they come out, they're gay. So, did something happen while they were in there? Ask yourself that question."
We're not sure how his (demonstrably incorrect) theory applies to gay men who haven't been in prison. But then, this is the guy who not so long ago compared homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality, so we get the feeling he's not a real deep thinker.
This Week in email
We learned this week that former Secretary of State and likely presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used a personal email account, instead of a State Department one, during his tenure in that job. We can't quite imagine how State allowed that to happen, and have to wonder how big a problem it will become for her.
Huge, if the right-wing message machine has its way.
Clinton is not alone in use of a personal email account while in official office--Colin Powell did it when he was Secretary of State in the Bush administration. So did Jeb Bush, in Florida. But the rules have changed since Powell's time. But Bush's White House had its own email scandal, as did Mitt Romney. And emails exchanges she had discussing government business were archived, since the government email addresses they were sent to archive everything.
It's too early to say whether this will be a big problem, or a small one. Generally, a "scandal" that plays to an existing narrative will stick better than one that doesn't, and the right is already trying to paint Clinton as lacking transparency (which is not altogether incorrect--the Clintons have always played their cards close to their vests). This story feeds right into that one, even if every single email she ever wrote winds up online. Obviously the right, desperately hoping to avoid facing Clinton in 2016, will do everything it can to blow the story way out of proportion. On the other hand, the right has thrown everything it could against the Clintons since 1992, and still she has an exceptional record of public service. We'll have to wait and see what happens.
Side Note: We don't blame Secretary Clinton if the State Department wanted to make her use Microsoft Outlook.
This Week in Maryland
Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski (D) has announced that she'll retire when her current term is up, rather than seek a sixth term as senator. Mikulski was the first Democratic woman elected to the Senate (previous women had finished off their husbands' terms--Mikulski was elected on her own merits), and is the longest-serving female senator in the country's history. She was first elected to that body in 1987, after serving in the House for a decade. She's been a voice of reason, a conscience, an advocate, and a thorn in the side of those who resist change. In 1993, she led a "rebellion" that finally allowed women to wear pants in the Senate. Her presence will be missed, but her impact won't be forgotten.
This Week in Arizona
According to this article in the Arizona Republic, America's Most Corrupt SheriffTM might soon cost Maricopa County taxpayers even more millions of dollars. Lots of them, as the court's contempt charges against him might result in payouts for the many, many victims of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office's constant and unlawful racial profiling.
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Arizona's new governor, Doug Ducey (R) is already involved in some pretty shady attempts to funnel state money into the coffers of private corporations (and away from public schools and universities), When a governor's first impulse is to savage the futures of his constituents--and the state's economy, which more than ever relies upon an educated workforce--to make a few people richer at taxpayer expense, one has to wonder why anyone voted for him. Ducey came to politics via the corporate world, but he appears to think of politics as a continuation of that world, and doesn't quite grasp the "public service" concept.
This Week in Bears
The only people who are enjoying this winter's snowfall are polar bears.
Undead teleporting bear? Two separate stories of people fined for illegally killing a bear, in Virginia and Louisiana, both published on the same day, and the same black bear photo accompanies both. The fines are the least of their worries...
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