From the National Journal, by Matthew Cooper: Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is showing no indication of being willing to fall on her sword. She has not drawn up a resignation letter, insiders tell National Journal. Her spokespeople take a hard public line: "The secretary works for the president and the American people," says HHS spokesperson Joanne Peters. "It is notable that many of the people calling on her to resign have also tried to repeal the law."
Sebelius’s determination to stay in the Cabinet, at least for now, owes something to her history, as well.
Sebelius, like George W. Bush, is a politician able to tout triumphs her father could not. Jack Gilligan was revered by Ohio Democrats but he was a one-term congressman and a one-term governor whose support of a tax hike led him to lose even in the 1974 post-Watergate Democratic landslide. By contrast, his daughter was re-elected governor of a red state and has never lost an election. Gilligan had planned to run for president like most Ohio governors but was pummeled by a tax hike before he had the chance. Sebelius was vetted twice for vice president — by John Kerry and (Barack) Obama — and, at least until now, has never wholly given up being on a national ticket.
If Sebelius is dug in, Obama has no objections. It’s a trait: This president has a profound unwillingness to chew out secretaries when he thinks it’s mere politics. “It’s not Obama’s thing,” says a former assistant secretary in the Obama Cabinet. …
Because the politics of the Senate make it hard to fire Sebelius, Democrats aren’t calling for her head. They know she’s there for the duration. “There is no way that (her replacement) could get out of the Senate,” says one former Democratic senator. “She’s solid. She’s not going anywhere.”
The level of spying we’re doing is a ‘dangerous departure’ from what’s right
From Foreign Policy, by David Rothkopf: … The core issues of the gross and excessive surveillance associated with the NSA revelations are not about spying on friends. Wholesale harvesting of the emails and phone records of Americans is a dangerous departure from the principles of limiting government access to private information that has existed since the beginnings of the republic. Creating back doors by which Americans can be eavesdropped on via collecting overseas data resources is another worrisome dimension of these programs. Serially violating the privacy of tens of millions of foreign citizens is another. So is the suggestion that the threat of terrorism warrants such sweeping violations. (It is a real threat, but it has been abused to justify overreach. Our fears have once again gotten the better of us — as they did when they were used to justify wrongheaded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or mistaken and abusive programs like the Patriot Act or the use of torture or the serial violation of sovereignty wrought via our drone programs.)
Stepping away from the moral, ethical and strategic concerns raised by such programs, there are serious questions to be asked about the practical management of intelligence programs. Were the benefits derived from such programs worth the risks they apparently entailed? Their discovery had to be seen by a prudent intelligence community senior officer as a risk in a system in which the number of people with top-secret clearance exceeded half a million. What possible tangible benefit came from listening in on a Brazilian oil company? What advantage was gained from listening in on German Chancellor Angela Merkel? And is it worth the fallout that this scandal is producing? …
These are reversals to American interests overseas that are far more damaging than anything terrorists could have done to us. Just as Iraq was. Just as Afghanistan was. Just as Abu Ghraib was. Just as the Patriot Act was. We are becoming victims not of terrorists but of terror, of our own fears and our emotional, ill-considered overreactions to them.
Nobody — and we mean nobody! — is immune from being spied on, apparently
From Rare, by Richard Thompson: After shocking reports of the National Security Agency's surveillance of Pope Francis, new information reveals that the agency spied on the son of God during his time on Earth.
Rare has obtained exclusive testimony from a source deep within the NSA detailing explicit monitoring of Jesus Christ.
“Name the event, we had guys on the inside,” the source said. “The Sermon on the Mount? We had it. The Last Supper? You bet.”
Keeping tabs on the founder of Christianity may seem like a strange way for the NSA to spend its resources, but the source explained the agency’s rationale.
“The subject’s association with tax collectors and sinners was something we needed to keep an eye on. Also, his ‘do-unto-others-what-you-would-have-them-do-unto-you’ mentality was considered a major threat at the time,” the source explained.
The source also confirmed that the NSA had undercover agents deep within Christ’s inner circle and that it was also targeting those closely associated with the miracle worker.
“Judas? Yes, he was one of ours. He provided us valuable information into all of the subject’s comings and goings,” the source said. “We weren’t just keeping tabs on the apostles, but on apostles of the apostles’ apostles. We were everywhere at all times. Omnipresent, you might say.”
The former agent suggested that potential leaks were a major problem throughout the course of the operation and that its top secret status was nearly compromised several times.
“You think turning water into wine was a miracle? Try spying on a guy who knows everything and whose father created the universe. It was no easy task to keep the operation under wraps.”
When asked whether tracking of the former carpenter from Nazareth is still ongoing, the source refused to comment.
It’s time for the Democrats to stop whining about Obamacare
From the National Review, by Rich Lowry: Henry Waxman made a plea at the end of Wednesday's House hearing grilling of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. The California Democrat and liberal lion asked Republicans to reach across the aisle to work with Democrats to improve Obamacare.
Yes, Henry Waxman, who has made a career of ideological witch hunts and smash-mouth partisanship, wants a cease-fire over Obamacare, or so he says.
Waxman was picking up a common liberal theme: It’s not fair that Republicans continue to oppose the president’s eponymous health care law and pick at its failures, deceits and irrationalities. If only they were more reasonable, Obamacare could be tightened up around the edges with a few technocratic fixes and go on to its glorious destiny.
It’s a little late to get or expect any Republican buy-in, though. That would have required serious compromise back in 2009, when Democrats, at the high tide of their power in the Obama era, saw no reason to make any. They ignored the polls, they ignored Scott Brown’s shocking win in Massachusetts, and they ignored normal parliamentary practices to pass the single most partisan piece of major social legislation in a century.
They insisted on this particular law, at this particular time. They own it. They own every canceled policy, every rate increase, every unintended consequence and every unpopular intended consequence. It is theirs, lock, stock and two smoking barrels.
But they can’t stop whining.
Like it or not, it’s too late to delay Obamacare
From The Atlantic, by Garance Franke-Ruta: It is too late to delay Obamacare. The private health-insurance market is in the throes of major changes, and there is no going back. Anyone who is calling for the system to be put on pause at this point is calling for the millions of people being moved out of existing private-market plans to have fewer options for new coverage, instead of more, and for them to be denied opportunities to find subsidies for plans. And anyone calling for a significant delay in imposing the individual mandate is putting at risk the affordability of the entire private individual-insurance market as it's been shaped to meet the law's requirements over the last three years, insurers warn.
“The individual mandate is inextricably linked to the insurance-market reforms included in the health-care-reform law,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the industry group America’s Health Insurance Plans. There are historical precedents for trying to overhaul the insurance system without mandates in the states, and those precedents are failure.
Even delaying the mandate past the March 31 deadline, which may sound intuitively like a fair thing to do, would fundamentally disrupt the markets in a way that increases costs, insurers warn. Everything insurers have done was designed around a fixed plan, and any significant changes in mid-course — and we are now in mid-course — will destabilize what’s being rolled out this year and for 2015 (open enrollment for 2015 will take place in late 2014).
This is something especially for Democrats calling for delays and extensions to consider: Rather than fixing a political problem for themselves and a practical enrollment problem for their constituents, delaying the mandate and extending enrollment would provoke a fresh round of problems with the exchanges during the fall of 2014. …
This would be great for Republicans, politically. But it’s hard to imagine it working out better for Democrats than focusing on making the process the nation is already in the middle of a success.
Worried about the NSA and privacy? Really, it all started with Facebook.
From Mother Jones, by Monika Bauerlein: "That social norm is just something that has evolved over time" is how Mark Zuckerberg justified hijacking your privacy in 2010, after Facebook imperiously reset everyone's default settings to "public." "People have really gotten comfortable sharing more information and different kinds." Riiight. Little did we know that by that time, Facebook (along with Google, Microsoft, etc.) was already collaborating with the National Security Agency's PRISM program that swept up personal data on vast numbers of Internet users.
In light of what we know now, Zuckerberg’s high-hat act has a bit of a creepy feel, like that guy who told you he was a documentary photographer, but turned out to be a Peeping Tom. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: At the core of Facebook’s business model is the notion that our personal information is not, well, ours. And much like the NSA, no matter how often it’s told to stop using data in ways we didn’t authorize, it just won’t quit. …
There will be a lot of talk in coming months about the government surveillance golem assembled in the shadows of the Internet. Good. But what about the pervasive claim the private sector has staked to our digital lives, from where we (and our phones) spend the night to how often we text our spouse or swipe our Visa at the liquor store? It’s not a stretch to say that there’s a corporate spy operation equal to the NSA — indeed, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.
Yes, Silicon Valley libertarians, we know there is a difference: When we hand over information to Facebook, Google, Amazon, and PayPal, we click “I Agree.”….
The truth is, for too long we’ve been content to play with our gadgets and let the geekpreneurs figure out the rest. But that’s not their job; change-the-world blather notwithstanding, their job is to make money. That leaves the hard stuff — like how much privacy we’ll trade for either convenience or security — in someone else’s hands: ours. It’s our responsibility to take charge of our online behavior (posting Carlos Dangerrific selfies? So long as you want your boss, and your high school nemesis, to see ’em), and, more urgently, it’s our job to prod our elected representatives to take on the intelligence agencies and their private-sector pals.
The NSA was able to do what it did because, post-9/11, “with us or against us” absolutism cowed any critics of its expanding dragnet. Facebook does what it does because, unlike Europe — where both privacy and the ability to know what companies have on you are codified as fundamental rights — we haven’t been conditioned to see Orwellian overreach in every algorithm. That is now changing, and both the NSA and Mark Zuckerberg will have to accept it. The social norm is evolving.
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