Kevin Drum


| Thu Jul. 10, 2014 12:31 AM EDT





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Quote of the Day: "This Isn't Theater"

| Wed Jul. 9, 2014 7:18 PM EDT


This isn't theater. This is a problem.


Medicare Just Keeps Producing Great Budget News

| Wed Jul. 9, 2014 2:20 PM EDT







Vladimir Putin Abandons His Erstwhile Allies

| Wed Jul. 9, 2014 10:31 AM EDT

Julia Ioffe writes about the latest from Ukraine:





Yet Another Day in Republican Scumbaggery

| Wed Jul. 9, 2014 1:00 AM EDT

Today President Obama asked Congress to approve $3.7 billion in emergency funding to help deal with the surge of minors crossing the border. You may color me unsurprised over the Republican response:

The proposal was quickly met with broad skepticism among Republican lawmakers, who were doubtful that the package would be approved quickly — if at all....GOP leaders, who have called on Obama to take stronger action, said they were reluctant to give the administration a “blank check” without ­more-detailed plans to ensure that the money would help stem the crisis at the border.

The president “is asking to use billions of taxpayer dollars without accountability or a plan in place to actually stop the border crisis,” Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.

Asked if he thought lawmakers would approve the proposal, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said, “No, given the mood here in Washington, I don’t have confidence it will happen.”

Well, of course it won't happen. The crisis along the border is tailor made for Republicans. It makes their base hopping mad, it juices their campaign fundraising, and anytime the government is unable to address a problem it makes Obama look bad. Why on earth would Republicans want to do anything to change any of this?

As long as Obama is president, chaos is good for Republicans. After all, most voters don't really know who's at fault when things go wrong, they just know there's a crisis and Obama doesn't seem to be doing anything about it. Exploiting that may be cynical and revolting, but hey, politics ain't beanbag. And in case you haven't heard, there's an election coming up.

Finally, Someone With the Guts to Call for Obama's Impeachment

| Tue Jul. 8, 2014 2:34 PM EDT

I see that Sarah Palin is apparently starved for attention again. Here's her latest:




Quite right. Minors are swarming our borders because American exceptionalism is at risk thanks to Obama's failure to help the Ukrainians which means our enemies no longer fear us and the dollar is being debased. Or was it because he failed to arm the Syrian rebels? I forget. Something to do with Putin, though. And the Fed. Plus, um, recess appointments and one-year extensions to TyrannyCare mandates. And Benghazi.

Whatever. Impeach Obama! I sure hope every Republican in the country is asked to weigh in on this.

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Will the Washington Post Destroy "Incidental" NSA Intercepts When It's Done With Them?

| Tue Jul. 8, 2014 12:27 PM EDT

A couple of days ago the Washington Post published an article based on a cache of thousands of surveillance intercepts that it got from Edward Snowden. That produced the suggestion—not widespread, I think, but still out there—that the Post was now violating privacy just like the NSA has been. Glenn Greenwald thought this was pretty dumb, but Julian Sanchez wasn't so sure:

Doesn't seem TOTALLY frivolous. I hope you & WaPo are destroying copies of intimate communications once reporting's done.

This is actually....a good point. The charge against the NSA isn't just that it ends up surveilling thousands of innocent people who are merely innocent bystanders in court-approved investigations. Even critics concede that this is inevitable to some extent. The problem is that once the NSA has collected all these "incidental" intercepts, they keep them forever in their databases and make them available to other law enforcement agencies for whatever use they want to make of them. At the very least, privacy advocates would like these incidental collections to be destroyed after they've served their immediate purpose.

So will the Post do this? Once they've finished their immediate reporting on this, will they destroy these intercepts? Or will they keep them around for the same reason the NSA does: because, hey, they have them, and you never know if they might come in handy some day?

There's always been a tension inherent in Edward Snowden's exposure of the NSA's surveillance programs: Who gets to decide? You may think, as I do, that the government has repeatedly shown itself to be an unreliable judge of how much the public should know about its mass surveillance programs. But who should it be instead? Snowden? Glenn Greenwald? The Washington Post? Who elected them to make these decisions? Why should we trust their judgment?

It's not a question with a satisfying answer. Sometimes you just have to muddle along and, in this case, hope that the whistleblowers end up producing a net benefit to the public discourse. But this time we don't have to muddle. This is a very specific question, and we should all be interested in the answer. Do Greenwald and the Post plan to destroy these private communications once they're done with them? Or will they hold on to them forever, just like the NSA?

POSTSCRIPT: Yes, there's a difference here. On the one hand, we have the government, with its vast law-enforcement powers, holding onto massive and growing amounts of incidental surveillance. On the other we have a private actor with a small sample of this surveillance. We should legitimately be more concerned with possible abuses of power by the government, both generally, and in this case, very specifically. But that's a starting point, not the end of the conversation. Sanchez is still asking a good question.

Quote of the Day: Bizarro John Boehner Joins Twitter

| Tue Jul. 8, 2014 11:42 AM EDT

Steve Benen points me to the latest foray into social networking from Speaker John Boehner:

Democrats like to say they want to fix #ObamaCare, but where’s their plan? They don’t have one.

It's not worth belaboring the fact that this is epically dumb. What I'm curious about is what Boehner thinks this will accomplish. Who is it supposed to appeal to? To the tea party true believers, it's too weak to be effective. They want red meat. To liberals it's just laughable. To folks in the middle it's incomprehensible. To the media—which knows perfectly well that Dems have plenty of ideas and Republicans are hopelessly fractured over health care—it's idiotic.

So who's the audience for this?

Defining Stalinoid Down

| Tue Jul. 8, 2014 11:05 AM EDT

Last night I was paging through the New Republic and, for some reason, ended up torturing myself by reading Leon Wieselter's latest exercise in pretension and self-regard. It was fairly ordinary, as these things go, but included this aside about supporters of the Iraq War:

(The other day Rachel Maddow, who has never been significantly wrong about anything, published this Stalinoid sentence in The Washington Post: “Whether they are humbled by their own mistakes or not, it is our civic responsibility to ensure that a history of misstatements and misjudgments has consequences for a person’s credibility in our national discourse.”)

Stalinoid? Seriously? For a very mild suggestion that people with a history of being wrong should be thought less credible in the future? That sounds more like a bare minimum of common sense than a cultural pogrom aimed at neocons and liberal hawks.

I've suggested in the past that we should all calm down a bit over analogies to Hitler and Nazis in popular discourse, so I'm hardly one to complain about using Stalin in the same way. But this is still a pretty reprehensible slur. Wieselter needs to find a better outlet for his frustration over being wrong about the Iraq War.

Yet Another Chuckleheaded Covert Op in the US-Cuba Relationship

| Tue Jul. 8, 2014 12:24 AM EDT

Remember that story a couple of years ago about Sen. Robert Menendez supposedly cavorting with teenage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic? Well....


....The intelligence information indicated that operatives from Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence helped create a fake tipster using the name “Pete Williams,” according to the former official. The tipster told FBI agents and others he had information about Menendez participating in poolside sex parties with underage prostitutes while vacationing at the Dominican Republic home of Salomon Melgen, a wealthy eye doctor, donor and friend of the senator.

....The allegations against Menendez erupted in public in November 2012, when the Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, quoted two Dominican women claiming Menendez had paid them for sex....Last year, three Dominican women who had initially claimed to reporters that they had been paid to have sex with Menendez recanted their story.

Is there any other pair of countries in the world responsible for launching more stupid covert ops against each other than Cuba and the United States? Apparently the brains of intelligence operatives in both Havana and Washington DC turn to tapioca at the mere mention of the other country. It's just astounding.