Here’s my question for conservatives

The New Neo Posted on by

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

Will anyone be left standing at the Brandeis commencement?

The New Neo Posted on by

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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.]

NY Times vs. Jill Abranson, and the Sulzberger family

The New Neo Posted on by

I confess I’m more fascinated than I should be (and perhaps than you are) by the evolving story of the firing of Jill Abramson by the NY Times.

It has a little bit of everything: the hypocrisy of a newspaper I grew up respecting but which I’ve grown to despise in the last fifteen years, the clash of competing liberal protected victim groups, and most of all the mystery of what really happened. We think we know the general outlines by now, but I’m pretty sure there’s quite a bit we don’t know.

One of the unknowns is what really sparked the final denouement. Even writer Ken Auletta, who seems to be the go-to guy on the story and who points out that Abramson’s fall from grace seemed to happen quite quickly at the end, remains puzzled as to what actually transpired.

Today one of his sources tried to retract a statement she allegedly made to him that could get the Times into hot water because it indicated that Sulzberger may have terminated her in part because she hired a lawyer to speak to the paper about her claim that her salary was less than that of her male predecessor. If true, that would be strong evidence of a wrongful firing, and actionable (although it also seems to be the case that Abramson may have signed an agreement not to sue as part of her settlement).

The paper’s attempt to retract seems absurd on its face. Here’s the original quote in the Auletta piece:

Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, argued that there was no real compensation gap, but conceded to me that “this incident was a contributing factor” to the firing of Abramson, because “it was part of a pattern.”

And here’s Murphy’s “correction,” conveyed in a later email to Auletta:

I said to you that the issue of bringing a lawyer in was part of a pattern that caused frustration. I NEVER said that it was part of a pattern that led to her firing because that is just not true.”

Murphy would have us believe that there was a whole “pattern” of behavior by Abramson that had caused long-term and repeated “frustration” on the part of management and colleages, that bringing in a lawyer upped the frustration ante that was already high, but that the Times management had carefully constructed a firewall between all that seething frustration and their precipitous firing of Abramson that occurred shortly after the lawyer incident. Nice try, Murphy, but that dog won’t hunt.

My favorite article so far about the whole thing is by Matthew Continetti:

Reading the New York Times’ report on the defenestration of the paper’s executive editor, Jill Abramson, and the coronation, at a hastily arranged meeting Wednesday, of her replacement Dean Baquet, I could not escape the feeling that the Soviet press must have covered the comings and goings of Politburo members in much the same way…

What makes the story so enjoyable, on the most superficial level, is its lurid combination of identity politics””Abramson was the first female editor of the Times, and Baquet is its first African-American editor””and liberal hypocrisy. Equal pay has been one of the rallying cries of the American left, a category that very much includes the New York Times, and the possibility of sexism at the paper is rich indeed. But I have to say I am less interested in equal wages, in comparable worth, and in what the New Yorker calls the “inescapably gendered aspect” of the Times’ latest scandal than I am in how that scandal confirms one of my pet theories. The theory is this: The men and women who own and operate and produce every day the world’s most important newspaper are basically children.

If you’re interested in this story, Continetti’s article is worth reading in its entirety. However, I would add something he leaves out—which is that, when he uses the word “children” to describe the people who operate the Times, the appellation is quite literally true, and not just in the sense that he meant it.

Sulzberger, the main player here, inherited the Times from his father. Like many newspapers, the Times is (among other things) a family business passed down mostly from father to son (although initially through a daughter). As with most such enterprises, the founder is often a person of great drive and accomplishment, and the children often represent a drop-off in the latter if not the former:

Sulzberger was born in Mount Kisco, New York, the son of Barbara Winslow (née Grant) and the previous Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, grandson of Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and the great-grandson of Times owner and publisher Adolph Ochs.

As such, Sulzberger himself is pretty much immune from firing, and probably knew from the start where he’d end up. Here’s the bio of his father and predecessor, and here’s the story of his grandfather (who, although a Reform Jew, was a noted and vocal anti-Zionist who played down the Holocaust in the paper’s pages during the war).

Here is the family’s first NY Times owner Adolph Ochs, who was a self-made man. Note the irony in the following [emphasis mine]:

After borrowing money to purchase The New York Times, [Ochs] formed the New York Times Co., placed the paper on a strong financial foundation, and became the majority stockholder. In 1904, he hired Carr Van Anda as his managing editor. Their focus on objective journalism, in a time when newspapers were openly and highly partisan, and a well-timed price decrease (from 3¢ per issue to 1¢) led to its rescue from near oblivion. The paper’s readership increased from 9,000 at the time of his purchase to 780,000 by the 1920s…

Ochs was engaged in crusading against anti-Semitism.

How did the Sulzbergers get into the act? Ochs’ only daughter married Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who inherited the mantle and passed it on to his descendents.

Here’s an article discussing the state of the Times’ ownership by the Sulzbergers. Harry Reid may rail against the Kochs, but they can’t hold a candle to the Sulzbergers:

While other families have had more power for a time””the Roosevelts and the Kennedys come to mind””their time of great power eventually waned. By contrast, the Ochs/Sulzberger dynasty has had a seat at the table in every administration since Adolph Ochs helped put William McKinley in the White House. The family has effectively occupied an ex officio cabinet post that has been a family birthright, passed intact from generation to generation. There is nothing comparable in American history.

Ponder that.

Michael Totten goes to Cuba…

The New Neo Posted on by

…so you don’t have to.

And believe me, after you’ve read his article, you won’t want to. It’s a brilliant article about a wretched place. Here’s an excerpt:

In the United States, we have a minimum wage; Cuba has a maximum wage””$20 a month for almost every job in the country. (Professionals such as doctors and lawyers can make a whopping $10 extra a month.) Sure, Cubans get “free” health care and education, but as Cuban exile and Yale historian Carlos Eire says, “All slave owners need to keep their slaves healthy and ensure that they have the skills to perform their tasks.”

Even employees inside the quasi-capitalist bubble don’t get paid more. The government contracts with Spanish companies such as Melié¡ International to manage Havana’s hotels. Before accepting its contract, Melié¡ said that it wanted to pay workers a decent wage. The Cuban government said fine, so the company pays $8”“$10 an hour. But Melié¡ doesn’t pay its employees directly. Instead, the firm gives the compensation to the government, which then pays the workers””but only after pocketing most of the money. I asked several Cubans in my hotel if that arrangement is really true. All confirmed that it is. The workers don’t get $8”“$10 an hour; they get 67 cents a day””a child’s allowance…

Tourists tip waiters, taxi drivers, tour guides, and chambermaids in hard currency, and to stave off a revolt from these people, the government lets them keep the additional money, so they’re “rich” compared with everyone else. In fact, they’re an elite class enjoying privileges””enough income to afford a cell phone, go out to restaurants and bars, log on to the Internet once in a while””that ordinary Cubans can’t even dream of. I asked a few people how much chambermaids earn in tips, partly so that I would know how much to leave on my dresser and also to get an idea of just how crazy Cuban economics are. Supposedly, the maids get about $1 per day for each room. If they clean an average of 30 rooms a day and work five days a week, they’ll bring in $600 a month””30 times what everyone else gets. “All animals are equal,” George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, his allegory of Stalinism, “but some animals are more equal than others.” Only in the funhouse of a Communist country is the cleaning lady rich compared with the lawyer. Yet elite Cubans are impoverished compared with the middle class and even the poor outside Cuba.

It didn’t have to be this way. But Communism does that, doesn’t it?

[NOTE: Read the comments to the article as well, and you’ll see that there’s a contingent of leftist Cuba-defenders there who say it’s all America’s fault.]

The NY Times’ war on women

The New Neo Posted on by

Or rather, on this woman:

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson was abruptly fired from the paper Wednesday, sources familiar with the news informed POLITICO.

Managing editor Dean Baquet will take over as executive editor, effective immediately…

“I choose to appoint a new leader for our newsroom because I believe that new leadership will improve some aspects of the management of the newsroom,” Sulzberger said. “This is not about any disagreement between the newsroom and the business side.”…

Throughout her tenure, Abramson suffered from perceptions among staff that she was condescending and combative…

The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta reported that Sulzberger had grown frustrated with Abramson after she pushed for more pay upon learning that her salary was significantly lower than that of her male predecessors.

Whatever the truth may be, Abramson apparently alienated some of those above her, and below her. The “above her” ones seem to have included the key figures of Sulzberger and the “below her” ones her replacement, Dean Baquet, an African-American man who is reported to have been well-liked at the Times and in this previous job.

The Abramson firing has caused a big brouhaha and engendered many articles and much blog commentary. But perhaps the best I’ve seen, the one that strikes me as containing more of the truth than the others (without being the whole truth, of course) is this one that appeared in New York Magazine. It describes a situation in which Sulzberger never wanted Abramson anyway and gave her the job reluctantly at the outset, only to become more annoyed by her. Most of his annoyance seems to have stemmed from her bluntness in telling some people (one of them being Baquet, whom Sulzberger seemed quite tight with) that they weren’t doing their jobs all that well:

“Her relationship with Dean [Baquet] was never ideal,” a senior staffer said. The complicated relationship spilled into public when Politico published a controversial piece last April that detailed Baquet punching a wall in frustration after one encounter with Abramson ”” an outburst instigated by some front-page stories Baquet had approved, which Abramson critiqued with one word: “boring.”

The popular Baquet let it be known that he just might be leaving the Times for a more pleasant job elsewhere, and Sulzberger was loathe to lose a man he liked and felt he could work well with, as well as a member of a favored minority (black) which trumped even Abramson’s favored minority (female).

In a way I could hardly care less about all of this. The Times—as I’ve written in post after post—is a morally bankrupt lying tool of the Democratic Party and the left, and has been for quite some time. It’s also not doing so well, so this action is more or less the equivalent of arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. But, as I’ve also written many times, despite all this the Times is still highly influential. And so what happens there matters.

The Times’ hypocrisy is hardly news. But this is a particularly interesting example of it:

After a prolonged search in which the Times was without a CEO, casting an uncomfortable spotlight on Sulzberger, he finally chose former BBC director general Mark Thompson. After Thompson had been hired for the job but before he’d started, Abramson sent Matthew Purdy, a hard-charging investigative reporter, to London to examine Thompson’s role in the Jimmy Savile scandal at the BBC. Abramson’s relationship with the two executives never recovered. “Mark Thompson was fucking pissed,” a source explained. “He was really angry with the Purdy stuff.” So was Sulzberger. “He was livid, in a very passive-aggressive way. These were a set of headaches Jill had created for Arthur.”

In other words, Abramson did her job—if her job is supposed to be investigating important stories. If her job is supposed to be covering up for the Times and making all its decisions look good, and kissing the posterior of all the higher-ups there, then Abramson failed, big time.

This is unintentionally funny:

In his remarks, Sulzberger stressed that the shakeup was in no way a reflection of the Times’ editorial quality.

“It is not about the quality of our journalism, which in my mind has never been better,” he said. “Jill did an outstanding job in preserving and extending the level of excellence of our news report during her time as executive editor and, before that, as managing editor and Washington bureau chief. She’s an accomplished journalist who contributed mightily to our reputation as the world’s most important news provider.”

So it comes down to the fact that Abramson couldn’t get along with the rest of the guys, and they didn’t like her style. Which of course is their prerogative. Even Sulzberger doesn’t seem to be pretending otherwise.

[ADDENDUM: Ann Althouse offers a slightly different but not altogether dissimilar take on the firing.]

Obama: I could fix tons of things, but those darned Republicans have stopped me

The New Neo Posted on by

This fundraiser speech of Obama’s has gotten attention for his suggestion that a million New Yorkers moving to North Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming would help him and the Democrats out immeasurably.

In fact, it wouldn’t have to be as many as a million. Despite the fact that those states are strongly Republican, they are also very small in population.

But Obama was joking, of course. However, the only reason it was a joke—the only reason—is that New Yorkers aren’t going to do that. Their cultural suffering and dislocation would be too great. Only the most dedicated of political operatives would make the sacrifice, and fortunately (at least so far) there aren’t enough of them yet. But make no mistake about it: if Obama could compel people to do it, he would.

Another interesting part of his speech was the following. It’s interesting not just because it repeats Obama’s favorite blame-the-Republicans excuse, but because its language (“we’ve got tons of them”) is an example of something I first noticed about Obama back in April of 2008, his sloppy youth-oriented mode of speech when speaking off-the-cuff, combined with arrogance. I wrote back then that these are not very charming traits, but they’re even less charming in a two-term president who’s supposedly older and wiser. Nor is passing the buck, which Obama’s been doing for his entire presidency—not to mention his mischaracterizing the positions of Republicans, another favorite activity of his.

Here he is again at yesterday’s fundraiser:

It’s not as if we’ve got no good ideas on policy. We’ve got tons of them. I’ve got a drawer full of things that we know would create jobs, help our middle class, boost incomes, make us more competitive. But we have a party on the other side that has been captured by an ideology that says no to everything because they cling to a rigid theory that the only way to grow the economy is for government to be dismantled and let the market sort things out, and folks at the top doing very well will somehow automatically trickle down to everybody else.”

If only they would let me—I could do it! We could do it! Forget that the Senate has been in Democratic hands for his entire presidency, and the House in Democratic hands for the first two years of it. If only they had full control, everything would be perfect.

More child singers channeling older ones

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I wrote about a child singer from Norway who invokes the memory of Billie Holiday.

Here’s a British kid with a different old-fashioned style:

The original:

I’d never heard the full song in the original version before I did the research for this piece. It’s very beautiful. The lyrics were written by an American, Nat Burton, who’d never been to England and didn’t know there were no bluebirds there.

The Cliffs have a symbolic meaning for Brits, or at least they used to at the time the song was written:

The cliffs have great symbolic value in Britain because they face towards Continental Europe across the narrowest part of the English Channel, where invasions have historically threatened and against which the cliffs form a symbolic guard. Because crossing at Dover was the primary route to the continent before the advent of air travel, the white line of cliffs also formed the first or last sight of England for travelers.

Here’s a photo taken from the French coast:

WhiteCliffs