You can wear anything, I say.
Well, maybe not:
At the moment, it still looks good for Republicans in 2014
At the moment, anyway.
Polls taken in states with competitive Senate races and many contested Congressional districts indicate that people are leaning Republican for 2014. The reason seems to be Obamacare, Obamacare, Obamacare:
As for Obamacare, only 16 percent favor keeping the law as it is. 36 percent favor modification. 48 percent favor outright repeal. 89 percent of voters consider the issue important in deciding how they will vote and 49 percent consider it very important.
On immigration, it’s not at all clear:
The pro-amnesty crowd will emphasize that, by a margin of 71-28, those surveyed favor “comprehensive immigration reform.” But the result is meaningless because respondents weren’t asked whether they favor legalizing illegal immigrants, much less whether they favor allowing them to become citizens. Nearly every conservative I know favors some form of comprehensive immigration reform
Why ask a question so general it can be used by nearly anyone to prove nearly anything? Perhaps that’s the goal.
The VA hospital scandal spreads
I haven’t yet written a big post on the mess at the VA hospital system, and this won’t be that post. But the news on the VA is one of those outrages that even the left can’t quite coverup, it is so blatant.
What went on with the VA hospitals in recent years has been an escalation of the disorganization in what was already a flawed and seemingly cold-hearted system. The news taps into what most people already knew about the VA system in general and for many decades, which is that there’s been a lot to complain about. In turn, all of that undermines the left’s arguments for a government-run healthcare system.
Here’s a thread to talk about it.
Why the Jill Abramson story interests me
I know a lot of you aren’t interested in it. After all, who cares what’s going on at that leftist Pravda the Times, except for the fact that the story vaguely embarrasses the paper and exposes its hypocrisy and disorganization?
I confess to a bit of fascination with the story, but it’s probably for different reasons than most people who are taken with it. I’m not especially interested in whether there was gender discrimination involved, for example. If there was, it wouldn’t be the first or last time, and if there are merely false accusations of it, it wouldn’t be the first or last time, either. No, it’s the ins and outs of workplace power struggles and personalities that interest me, something like the problems of families or of any group, the interpersonal brouhahas that get people going.
Workplace intrigue stories have many of the same qualities as problem families. They involve groups of people interacting, miscommunications and misunderstandings, power struggles, and intense feelings. The workplace is a little like the family, minus the love and the sex (although, come to think of it, sometimes plus the love and the sex). There are no children in the workplace, but there are certainly people there who can be very very childish.
I don’t read detective novels, but I do like to try to figure out how people tick and especially how groups of people interact with each other. With the Abramson story, we get a tiny little window of the information we’d need to figure out how this snafu happened, and I like to try to guess. That’s it for me—a sort of real-life whodunnit and why.
You can skip the rest of this post if you’re utterly and completely bored by such things. But I’m still interested, and I was happy to see today that David Carr of the NY Times has revealed what I had suspected from the very start, which is that Dean Baquet, who ascended to Abramson’s job when she was canned, had not only complained about her to his buddy Sulzberger but had threatened to leave the Times if she stayed. Baquet played his biggest card, and he triumphed.
Carr’s column, which appeared in the Times itself, is pretty bold considering that fact, and worth reading if you’ve followed the story at all:
When The Times’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., stood up at a hastily called meeting in the soaring open newsroom where we usually gather to celebrate the Pulitzers and said that Jill was out, we all just looked at one another. How did our workplace suddenly become a particularly bloody episode of “Game of Thrones”?
It is one thing to gossip or complain about your boss, but quite another to watch her head get chopped off in the cold light of day. The lack of decorum was stunning…
Mr. Sulzberger, working with Mr. Baquet and Mr. Thompson, may have failed to understand the impact Ms. Abramson’s firing would have, both internally and with the public. Planning went into immediately erasing her name from the masthead, but not so much into the splatter it would create…
The current mayhem aside, Mr. Sulzberger’s real failing has been picking two editors who ended up not being right for the job.
Sulzberger is Carr’s boss, too. Wonder if Carr has a back-up offer from another newspaper?
Trey Gowdy: “You were supposed to provide oversight”
This video of Trey Gowdy speaking to the press on Benghazi demonstrates a few things simultaneously.
The first is why Gowdy was a very successful prosecutor. The second is that the manner in which the Obama administration has handled the Benghazi debacle is an outrage and a disgrace. And the third is how negligent and/or collusive with that administration the press has been in covering (or rather, covering up) the Benghazi incident.
If it were possible for the press to reflect and to feel shame, Gowdy’s words would make them do that and feel that. But I’m afraid it’s not.
I don’t remember the first time I ever saw Gowdy, but I do remember thinking that he was a bit strange-looking. But when he opened his mouth and spoke, it almost immediately struck me that he was one of the smartest and most articulate members of Congress I’d ever heard. And nothing I’ve ever heard him say since then has disabused me of that notion.
I listed three things the video demonstrated. But I’d like to offer a fourth: how rare and refreshing it is to hear a politician speaking with clarity, focus, brains, and conviction.
More on the Abramson story: what’s this “public mistreatment” bit?
To me, the most curious phrase in the newest Sulzberger statement about Jill Abramson is this one [italics mine]:
During [Abramson’s] tenure, I heard repeatedly from her newsroom colleagues, women and men, about a series of issues, including arbitrary decision-making, a failure to consult and bring colleagues with her, inadequate communication and the public mistreatment of colleagues…
So, did Abramson put some writer or editor in the stocks? Institute public floggings at the Times? Did she administer a series of public tongue-lashings? Or just criticisms? Is there a rule at the Times that, in order to avoid offending egos and tender sensibilities, an executive can only say negative things about an employee in private? And if this “mistreatment” perpetrated by Abramson was indeed, “public,” could Sulzberger mention more specifically (without naming the recipient of the mistreatment) what she allegedly said or did, so we could get an idea of what sort of offense he might be talking about?
Another curious thing to me is Sulzberger’s repeated use of the word “colleagues.” Now, my own experience with a corporate workplace was very short, and so long ago that I hesitate to even say. So maybe things are completely different now. But my recollection is that the boss is the boss and colleagues are more your peers, people at approximately a similar level to you in ye olde hierarchy.
Abramson was the boss for most everyone at the Times, although she had two bosses above her, Sulzberger (the owner) and Thompson (the CEO). Everyone else was under her, not a “colleague” exactly (at least not in my definition of the word), although she certainly had to interact with them and could not afford to brutalize them or their egos. Obviously, quite a few people felt stomped on—but were they actually stomped on, or were they being ultra-sensitive? At this point we really don’t know. Does Sulzberger know? Or maybe it doesn’t matter what the reality was; if the perception is too widespread, something is wrong, and a boss becomes ineffective and probably has to go.
Any boss faces the dilemma of how to walk the line in exerting his/her authority. How much is too much and will be perceived as tyranny or insult, causing a backlash? How little is too little and will be taken advantage of and perceived as weakness? And then of course there’s the gender question of whether these things are perceived differently when practiced by a man or by a woman, or when received by a man or by a woman.
[ADDENDUM: This is pretty good, too.]
Lactose and me
People often claim they’re lactose intolerant. But few people know for sure because few people have been tested for it.
I am one of those lucky, lucky few. For some reason (sadism?), a doctor subjected me to the test many decades ago. I even lived to tell about it.
And what I have to tell you is this: if you are truly lactose intolerant, the test is a cruel one. The way it works is that you fast overnight and then they take some blood and determine your fasting blood sugar. There are newer tests that don’t involve blood drawing, but they all involve the next step, which is the crucial one as far as I’m concerned: they give you a nice big drink of lactose.
Ever drink a lactose solution? It’s not all that pleasant, but the taste is not really the problem. A huge glass of it—I can’t recall whether it was 12 ounces or 16, but whatever it was it was a lot—can be swilled down even by those who hate milk, as I do. But if you really are lactose intolerant, it means you cannot digest the lactose in it, and there’s an awful lot of lactose in it, and so…well, you figure it out. Suffice to say you become very ill, and the bathroom becomes your very best friend.
Every half hour after ingesting the stuff (or was it every hour?) you return to the lab for another blood drawing. The idea is that if you are actually absorbing the lactose, which is milk sugar, your blood sugar level will rise initially and then fall over time in a certain pattern. This will determine not only whether you are in fact lactose intolerant, but to what degree.
For those of you who don’t know how lactose intolerance works, here’s the scoop:
Most mammals normally cease to produce lactase [the enzyme that digests milk], becoming lactose intolerant, after weaning, but some human populations have developed lactase persistence, in which lactase production continues into adulthood. It is estimated that 75% of adults worldwide show some decrease in lactase activity during adulthood. The frequency of decreased lactase activity ranges from 5% in northern Europe through 71% for Sicily to more than 90% in some African and Asian countries. This distribution is now thought to have been caused by recent natural selection favoring lactase-persistent individuals in cultures in which dairy products are available as a food source.
When my results became available I was told by the doctor that, unlike most people who are lactose intolerant, I had absolutely no rise in blood sugar level, which indicated I am completely lactose intolerant. That is, I don’t seem to be able to squeeze even a smidgeon of lactase out of my gastric spigots. And yet in fact I can ingest a certain amount of ice cream without too much difficulty. Where there’s a will there’s a way, I guess.
The whole thing reminds me of the fact that those who suggest that everyone would do well to eat a certain diet—such as, for example, the so-called “paleo” diet—because humans evolved on that diet are ignoring the many thousands of years of human adaptation and evolution since then. Lactose intolerance is almost unheard-of in northern Europeans, for example, and very common in people of Mediterranean origin. It rises to a high of 80% to 90% of Asians, African-Americans, and Jews.
I always hated milk, anyway, even as a toddler. It tasted so, so…milky. So being lactose intolerant is no biggee for me.
Here’s my question for conservatives
Why would you believe anything Valerie Jarrett says about what John Boehner promised to do?
I know you neither like nor trust Boehner. I neither like nor trust him much, either. And I know you’re been betrayed by the GOP before, so often that you’ve come to expect it.
But seriously, what reason would Valerie Jarrett have to be telling the truth when she says this?:
President Barack Obama’s top adviser and confidant [sic] told a group of global elites on Thursday in Las Vegas, Nevada that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has made a commitment to the White House to try to pass amnesty legislation this year…Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s senior advisor, told attendees at the yearly invitation-only SkyBridge Alternatives Conference that Boehner would help the White House make a push [to] get immigration reform enacted in the next three months.
I can’t think of a reason to trust her. I can, however, think of a reason or two why she would lie. The first is to get people on the left pumped and enthusiastic about amnesty’s chances. The second is to get the right to start railing at Bohener and calling him a traitor (as the first person in the comments section at the article did). No down side to inciting a civil war among your opposition.
That said, I have no idea what Boehner will actually do on immigration, and as I said I don’t especially trust him. But I wouldn’t trust Jarrett as far as I could throw her to report accurately on Boehner’s true intentions or even on what Boehner told her his true intentions were, or to report on her own true intentions.
Boehner has denied making any such promises to Democrats, by the way. And Jarrett herself has backtracked and offered the following clarification:
Boehner has made [a] commitment to trying, not that he has made [a] commitment to us or time frame.
Everything clear now?
What do I think Boehner really intends to do about illegal immigrants? I think he’s torn. He may buy the idea that Republicans have to do something about this—or at least appear to do something about this—in order to appeal to Hispanic votes (I disagree that it would woo their votes from the Democrats, but he’s not consulting me). He also knows that the GOP’s big-money donors seem to want immigration reform passed, and he needs to placate them to keep the money flowing. So he likes to indicate that he would really really love to pass something of the sort (see also this). But every time he says it he is careful to add an interesting caveat, to the effect that “no action is possible until President Obama proves himself a trustworthy partner to Republicans.”
Does that seem very likely to happen? That’s Boehner’s out, I think, in case he decides not to do it or in case he can’t convince enough Republicans to do it. He can then say to everyone who wanted it, “I tried, but I couldn’t succeed because Obama’s not a trustworthy partner on this.”
Surprise, surprise: many Obamacare subsidies may have been calculated incorrectly
But of course:
The problem is that the income reported by more than a million consumers doesn’t match what the IRS has on file. And the procedure to match income with subsidy can’t be implemented because the back end of the healthcare.gov website still hasn’t been built.
We’re in the very best of hands. But you already knew that, didn’t you? More here:
…[A] large group of Americans…listed incomes on their insurance applications that differ significantly ”” either too low or too high ”” from those on file with the Internal Revenue Service, documents show.
The government has identified these discrepancies but is stuck at the moment. Under federal rules, consumers are notified if there is a problem with their application and asked to upload or mail in pay stubs or other proof of their income. Only a fraction have done so, according to the documents. And, even when they have, the federal computer system at the heart of the insurance marketplace cannot match this proof with the application because that capability has yet to be built…
Administration officials do not yet know what proportion are overpayments or underpayments. Under current rules, people receiving unwarranted subsidies will be required to return the excess next year.
I’ve already written about some of the problems with estimating income to determine Obamacare subsidies, for example here. I want to reiterate, though, that the problem is especially acute for the self-employed, and the individual insurance market (as opposed to employment-based insurance) is heavily weighted towards the self-employed.
So the snafu described at the beginning of this post (a million people) is likely to actually be an even bigger snafu than that, because it’s probably not going to just be a question of people misstating the income that was on their 2013 tax returns. Many people who estimated their income as being exactly what it was on their 2013 tax forms will also turn out to be wrong about their income for 2014 when they have to actually take a good look at the hard figures and file their tax returns for that year. Self-employment income varies naturally, and often quite a bit. So even good faith estimates can often be very very wrong.
It’s always been clear that Obamacare will have to deal with that fact by either giving the person more money or clawing back a government overpayment. Good luck with that. It also has long been clear that this will take a vast amount of resources, that the government may not be quite up to figuring it out correctly, and that many people will be only too eager and willing to game the system.
Spambot of the day
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Will anyone be left standing at the Brandeis commencement?
They’re dropping like flies.
First, Hirsi Ali’s invitation to receive an honorary degree was withdrawn.
Now, Jill Abramson has voluntarily pulled out:
The Justice student newspaper reports that Abramson told the university’s president she won’t be present Sunday to get an honorary degree she had been scheduled to receive.
A Brandeis spokesman confirms that Abramson informed the Boston-area university that it was “not my year to be there.”
If Brandeis doesn’t watch out, it’s going to be awfully empty on that podium. Fortunately, commencement speaker Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone, is still on, even though he will be resigning from the group in July. Two more are still standing, although I’d feel a little shaky if I were they: Eric Lander, one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project, and Brandeis University Trustee Malcolm L. Sherman.
In a strange move, although she canceled at Brandeis for Sunday, Abramson is still scheduled to be commencement speaker at Wake Forest on Monday. Go figure.
[NOTE: Elsewhere, Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter thanks the Class of 2014 for not disinviting him. Funny stuff, and he makes some serious points, too. Carter (whom I’ve never heard of before) seems like an interesting and accomplished guy.]
Robert J. Birgeneau is the latest casualty of our embryonic Red Guards
Another would-be commencement speaker bows out in response to pressure from students who deem him insufficiently pure for their tender sensibilities.
Birgeneau refused to say sufficient mea culpas, the price he would have had to pay for the privilege of addressing the august students and faculty of Haverford:
Some students and faculty members at Haverford, a liberal arts college near Philadelphia, objected to the invitation to Mr. Birgeneau to speak and receive an honorary degree because, under him, the University of California police used batons to break up an Occupy protest in 2011. He first stated his support for the police, and then a few days later, saying that he was disturbed by videos of the confrontation, ordered an investigation.
Those at Haverford who objected to his being honored asked Mr. Birgeneau to apologize and to meet a list of demands, including leading an effort to train campus security forces in handling protests better; he refused.
And this despite the fact that Birgeneau is of the liberal persuasion:
Campus activists on the left have long objected to appearances by more conservative figures like Ms. Rice, though usually the events proceeded despite the protests. What is far more unusual is to see them block appearances by figures like Ms. Lagarde, a trailblazing woman usually seen as a centrist, who faced criticism over I.M.F. policies toward poor nations that predated her tenure; or Mr. Birgeneau, who was known for liberal policies toward students who were gay or not authorized to be in the country.
My “Red Guards” reference in the title of this post is, of course, to this [emphasis mine]:
The Cultural Revolution was orchestrated by the Chinese leader, an effort to build a utopian society through class struggle. It drove the country to the brink of civil war and, by some estimates, cost more than 1 million lives.
The early phases of the Cultural Revolution were centered on China’s schools. In the summer of 1966, the Communist Party leadership proclaimed that some of China’s educators were members of the exploiting classes, who were poisoning students with their capitalist ideology. Indeed, the educated classes in general were marked as targets of the revolution.
The leadership gave Communist youth known as Red Guards the green light to remove educators from their jobs and punish them.
My comparison is hyperbole. The current crop of American students isn’t killing or beating anyone—yet. Nor is their target their professors, but that’s probably because their professors have for the most part already been purged and are pure. In fact, at Haverford and at other colleges where commencement speakers have been recently driven out, the protesting students are joined by professors. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, with professors leading the way.
Some of you who were appalled at the campaign against speakers Hirsi Ali, Condoleezza Rice, and Christine Lagarde, all of whom are women, two of whom are black, and none of whom are liberals, may not be as upset about this action against the liberal Birgeneau. Hoist by his own petard, as it were. But I see this as the most ominous of the four events, precisely because it represents evidence of an ever-increasing fanaticism and power on the part of this group. The Red Guards started small, too.
[NOTE: I hadn’t read this article by Scott Johnson before I wrote this piece, but he seems to agree about Birgeneau, likening his treatment to the “Reign of Terror” stage of revolutions where the rebels start devouring their own.]