“Stop Kidding Yourselves”: No, Conservatives, You Won’t Stop Watching Football If The NFL Markets Obamacare
News broke last week that the Obama administration had reached out to the National Basketball Association about a partnership to promote the president’s health reform law. Now, it is seeking a similar deal with the National Football League that will involve “paid advertising and partnerships to encourage enrollment” in Obamacare’s new programs, according to The Hill.
I’ve explained why the Obama-NBA partnership makes sense for both parties, and that reasoning holds true for the NFL–and more importantly, the networks that air the games–too. Given the enormous amount of money television networks pay for the right to air football games, they’re unlikely to turn down advertising that will help them reach the break-even point on those investments. And for the Obama administration, football is a logical target. The NFL has the largest audience of any sport in America. It reaches people in demographics that the Obama administration needs to reach with basic information about. And beyond the ads, such a partnership meshes nicely with other corporate citizenship efforts the NFL has undertaken, like its health-driven Play60 campaign. Plus, it’s the law.
Conservatives, to no one’s surprise, are nevertheless outraged. The Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey Anderson said it would be “yet another reminder that football is best watched on Saturdays,” and Twitchy highlighted tweets from conservatives who said it would cause a “mass exodus of support.” “If the NFL backs Obamacare,” one Twitchy tweet says, “they can kiss this season goodbye.”
It’s unlikely the NFL is rethinking its strategy based on a few tweets, but here’s a word of advice in case they are: the idea that people are going to stop watching football because of a few pro-health care ads, most of which will likely deal more with the details of new programs instead of advocating for it on ideological grounds, is absurd. I might personally share Anderson’s view that football is, indeed, best watched on Saturdays, but the NFL is the most popular sport in America. Its TV ratings are sky-high from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. The league has endured two lockouts, the beginnings of a concussion crisis, and plenty of other on- and off-field controversies without turning the masses away. It’s going to take much more than a few health care ads to get people to stop watching.
The NFL, of course, knows that, but that doesn’t mean the partnership is going to happen. The cost of advertising may be too high for the government to pay on a regular basis, or the two sides may just fail to reach an agreement on other collaborations. If it does happen, though, conservatives might kick and scream and send angry tweets that the Twitchy team aggregates into a post every Sunday afternoon. To suggest that people will stop watching, though, is an exaggeration on the same level as cries of “government takeover of health care” and “death panels.”
By: Travis Waldron, Think Progress, June 28, 2013
“Well Shut My Mouth!”: Paula Deen Played With Fire And Got Burned
I take no pleasure from the trouble food “personality” Paula Deen got herself into this last week, culminating in her firing by the Food Network after she stumbled through efforts to save herself via heavily massaged apologies. I admit to have enjoyed a couple of her recipes over the years. And I usually found her over-the-top “Well Shut My Mouth” embodiment of outworn southern cultural stereotypes annoying rather than deeply offensive–just another Cracker playing the fool for the tourists, basically.
But as a Cracker myself, not that much younger than Deen, I know that she cannot plead ignorance or even innocence of the dynamite of the South’s racial history, and how perilously and inherently her own Old South shtick has skirted the thin line that separates the light side from the dark side of our heritage. The Southern Cooking Icon who occasionally forgets she needs to play error-free baseball when it comes to race is a lot like the southern white politicians who occasionally forget they represent African-Americans.
Paula Deen will do a lot to redeem herself if she refuses to let herself be used as a martyr to the cause of anti-anti-racism–a victim of “political correctness” and all that. The campaign is already developing:
Todd Starnes, who also hosts a Fox News Radio segment, wrote on his Facebook page that the “liberal, anti-South media is trying to crucify Paula Deen. They accuse her of using a derogatory word to describe a black person. Paula admitted she used the word — back in the 1980s – when a black guy walked into the bank, stuck a gun in her face and ordered her to hand over the cash. The national media failed to mention that part of the story. I’ll give credit to the Associated Press for telling the full story.”
Starnes also defended Deen via Twitter, writing: “The mainstream media hates Paula Deen […] I think it’s because most of them don’t eat meat.”
Oh good God. The multi-millionaire celebrity Paula Deen is hardly up there on the cross, and I can testify there’s at least one white southern carnivore–a biscuit eater as well–who thinks that those who work so hard to identify themselves with southern cultural stereotypes are courting controversy and disaster if they don’t watch their mouths. There are many, many southern white chefs and TV stars and book authors and even politicians who don’t set themselves up as regional paragons, yet also manage to steer clear of discrimination suits and admissions of casual, “innocent” racism. Paula Deen played with fire and got burned. She can best heal herself by refusing to be used by those who aren’t “innocent” at all.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 22, 2013
“An Incompetent Glory Hound”: Darrell Issa Is Really Terrible At His Job
In case you lost track of the IRS scandal, here’s where it’s at right now: House Oversight Committee members are releasing dueling transcripts of witness testimony to the press. There is a big fight about it. It is maybe kind of boring.
Darrell Issa, Republican chairmain of the committee, has been selectively releasing snippets of testimony to the press, all of it designed to support his contention that the IRS targeting of conservative groups for additional scrutiny of their nonprofit status was a political maneuver ordered or somehow directed by the White House. There is literally no evidence for that claim and it’s not true but Issa is sort of bad at his job in many important respects. Democratic ranking member Elijah Cummings asked Issa to please release full transcripts of witness testimony, but Issa refused, so Cummings just did so, with a full transcript of the committee’s interview with an IRS employee who seems to have been the first one to flag a “Tea Party” group’s application for tax-exempt status for further review.
This employee describes himself as “a conservative Republican” and he states outright that there was no political motivation, and certainly no White House responsibility, for the IRS’s actions.
Issa’s response to this is to claim that releasing the testimony will hurt his investigation because it will provide a “road map” for future witnesses wishing to mislead the committee. (Denying that politics had anything to do with it, who else would have independently come up with that?) The right-wing media response has been to basically ignore the content of what Cummings released and to trash him for attempting to defend the White House.
Cummings isn’t trying to sway right-wing bloggers, though. He’s not even trying to sway the public at large. What he’s trying to do is get the press to say outright what everyone in Washington already knows: Issa never has the goods to back up his claims. Cummings is trying to make it possible for the press to challenge Issa’s credibility without violating their own rules of objectivity.
Of course, everyone in the political press knows that Issa is a publicity hound who regularly makes outrageous accusations and insinuations and rarely has any evidence supporting his more outrageous claims. Everyone in the press knows this, but conventions of objective journalism prevent them from saying as much to their audiences, and so 47 percent of Americans believe the White House directly instructed the IRS to target conservative groups.
In that respect the IRS investigations looks like a huge success. But Issa’s record is actually really terrible. He has investigated everything he can think of and nothing went anywhere.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s one job is to get scalps. He is supposed to force embarrassing resignations. He has not yet forced a single one. When Issa took control of the House Oversight Committee in early 2011, he announced plans to investigate WikiLeaks, Fannie Mae, corruption in Afghanistan, the FDA, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and business regulations. He has investigated Solyndra and Fast and Furious and Benghazi and come up with nothing. So far the acting commissioner of the IRS has resigned, because the president asked him to. Issa hasn’t managed one single clean hit.
What Issa has managed to do is create a series of very silly graphics hyping his investigations in the style of funny image macros and film posters. He has managed to make conservatives agree with him that Barack Obama is the most corrupt president in history and he has managed to make a large minority of voters feel that the White House is probably hiding something.
In terms of the 2014 elections, he is, so far, probably helping the GOP more than he is hurting it. So Issa’s record, honestly, is mixed. He is quite bad at his job in most respects, but not quite as historically useless as Tea Party mascots like Louie Gohmert. But it does seem to me that Republicans would be better served by not having an incompetent glory hound chairing the most politically useful House committee. I guess they don’t have a lot of great options, considering the rest of the House GOP.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, June 19, 2013
“Little Evidence”: On Civil Liberties, Comparing Obama With Bush Is Easy, And Mostly Wrong
Nearly a dozen years after the passage of the PATRIOT Act — rushed through Congress in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation — informed debate over the balance between liberty and security is long overdue. That includes a public examination of how widely and deeply the National Security Agency (and other elements of the “intelligence community”) may monitor Americans’ telecommunications without violating the Bill of Rights.
But that needed discussion isn’t enhanced by hysteria or the partisan opportunism it encourages. As others have noted already, the supposed revelation that the NSA is collecting metadata on telephone use in this country isn’t exactly startling news. The fugitive ex-CIA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents concerning that program to the London Guardian and the Washington Post, may yet unveil more startling revelations from his peculiar refuge in China. But anyone paying attention has known about this program since 2006, when USA Today first disclosed its existence.
The most important difference today is that Americans are no longer too frightened by the constant “terror alerts” of the Bush administration to consider the boundaries of surveillance and security. Rather than hyping the terrorist threat, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, President Obama has repeatedly framed a calmer — if equally resolute — attitude toward Islamist extremism.
So while facile comparisons between the Obama and Bush administrations now appear every day in the media, they are quite misleading. Uttered by Republicans and their mouthpieces on Fox News, such arguments are hypocritical as well.
Consider the single most important surveillance controversy of the Bush era, namely the warrantless wiretapping undertaken on the president’s orders. In December 2005, the New York Times revealed that Bush had authorized the NSA to monitor phone calls and emails originating in U.S. territory, without obtaining warrants as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. (That’s why it was called “warrantless.”) For the first time since Watergate – and the intelligence reforms resulting from that true scandal — the U.S. government had eavesdropped on Americans’ conversations without seeking the permission of a judge.
Only months before, Bush had claimed publicly that he was a steward of civil liberties and that his agents always got a court order before implementing a wiretap. But his administration had been using warrantless wiretaps ever since the 9/11 attacks.
Those trespasses against liberty went considerably further than the collection of metadata by the NSA. No reports indicate that the Obama administration violated existing law to eavesdrop on any American — or listened to any calls without the sanction of the special FISA court.
Yet reaction to the recent stories about the NSA’s policies has been far more intense than eight years ago. Pundits and politicians have compared Obama unfavorably with Richard Nixon, berating him as a tyrannical betrayer of civil liberties. A few prominent Republicans even seem determined to ruin the NSA, solely because they wish to embarrass the president – a motive that other Republicans attribute to Snowden, whom they vilify as a traitor.
Not a peep was heard from Republicans on Capitol Hill when Bush, his vice president Dick Cheney, and their lawyers were practicing and promoting the theory of the “unitary executive,” under which any act ordered by the president in wartime, including warrantless wiretapping, is deemed inherently legal and exempt from judicial review. What exercised the Republicans in those days was the temerity of the Times in revealing what Bush had done.
As for Obama, the complicated truth is a mixed record on civil liberties. He tried and failed to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and he supported the renewal of the PATRIOT Act without changes. But he also substantially reformed the use of military commissions and abolished the use of torture, renditions, and secret prisons. In ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has rejected the “permanent war” ideology, which the Bush regime deployed as a political weapon against dissent.
So far there is little evidence that Obama shares the dangerous theories of Bush and Cheney – but no president should enjoy the kind of exemption from congressional scrutiny that his predecessors exploited. Whatever Snowden’s intentions may be, he has inspired members of Congress to provide stricter oversight of the government’s gargantuan data-gathering efforts, which are inherently prone to overreach even under the most responsible supervision. At the very least, Congress and the public need to know how the government wields its powers under the PATRIOT Act – an interpretation that remains classified and thus precludes democratic oversight.
The president’s response to that question will test his commitment to the Constitution he swore to uphold.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, June 14, 2013
“Apocalypse Not Now”: Just About Everything Is Getting Better
As a culture, we seem to be in an apocalyptic moment. Judging from the movie trailers, it looks like the human race is basically screwed this summer in After Earth, World War Z, and This Is the End—a comedy!—while Washington (and its black president) will be besieged by cyber-terrorists in White House Down. In the real world, we’re bombarded with warnings about our debt crisis, our economic crisis, and of course our political crisis, which is to say, our government’s inability to deal with all its other crises. Republicans in particular have become perennial prophets of doom, warning that President Obama’s foreign policies will destroy our standing in the world, that Obamacare will destroy our health care system, that out-of-control spending, growth-killing taxes, and loose monetary policy will turn us into a dystopia of inflation, high interest rates and economic paralysis.
Relax!
Things are OK. And while you can’t tell from following the news—the press doesn’t like to report on planes that land safely, or seemingly obvious stuff that didn’t happen yesterday—things are getting better. The apocalypse is not nigh.
We are now in the fourth year of a slow but steady recovery. The economy is adding about 200,000 jobs a month, and has added 6.8 million private-sector jobs since the end of the Great Recession. The stock market is at an all-time high, and has almost doubled since Obama took office. The housing market is rebounding. It’s true that 7.5% unemployment is way too high, but it’s better than the double-digit unemployment we had in the wake of the financial meltdown, when the apocalypse really was nigh. The government has even turned a profit on the reviled Wall Street bailouts that ended the meltdown.
Yes, the economy would be doing even better if it weren’t being dragged down by the “sequester,” $85 billion worth of haphazard spending cuts resulting from Republican demands for government austerity. Those were misguided demands after a financial crisis, the kind of demands that have turned Europe into an economic basket case. But so far, at least, fears that the sequester could scuttle the U.S. recovery have proven to be overblown. Consumer confidence just hit a six-year high.
What about the fears that inspired the sequester and the rest of the austerity push, the fears that spiraling deficits would turn us into Greece? Well, the Congressional Budget Office now estimates the deficit at $642 billion, the lowest since the crisis; it’s been cut in half since Obama took office, the fastest reduction since World War 2. We’re not Greece. The bond markets certainly don’t think so; interest rates are at historic lows. And the runaway inflation that Paul Ryan and other loose-money critics keep predicting has yet to materialize; inflation is actually below the official Federal Reserve target of just 2 percent.
In fairness, while America’s short-term deficit is shrinking fast, our long-term deficit is still a concern, because soaring health care costs have threatened the future of Medicare and Medicaid. But there’s good news there, too. According to the nonpartisan Kaiser Foundation, health care spending is now growing at the slowest rate in five decades, which is why Medicare’s trustees just upgraded the program’s budget outlook. And there is strong evidence that Obamacare’s efforts to reorient the medical system to reward providers who keep their patients healthy instead of providers who perform more services are working. For example, Obamacare imposes financial penalties on hospitals with high rates of readmissions and central-line infections; predictably, hospitals have improved their performance in both areas. The health information technology revolution—launched by Obama’s 2009 stimulus—is also bending the cost curve, dragging a pen-and-paper system into digital age.
Meanwhile, U.S. combat forces are out of Iraq, and they’ll be out of Afghanistan next year. U.S. carbon emissions are at their lowest level in two decades, and so are U.S. oil imports. By historical standards, taxes are very low and spending is very modest. General Motors and Chrysler, wards of the state four years ago, are posting their best sales numbers in years. Gays are serving openly in the military, solar installations have increased over 1,000% in four years, a cool robot is taking cool pictures of Mars, and Tesla just paid back its government loan with interest. Things are getting better, and better is better than worse.
But the headlines are all about supposed scandals—stupid IRS agents in Cincinnati, overzealous leak investigations at the Justice Department, a dopey dispute over Benghazi talking points. These are the kind of things that politicians can obsess about when there’s no crisis on the horizon; the last time the national outlook was this bright, Republicans impeached the president for sexing up an intern. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not as if the latest wannabe-scandals are distracting official Washington from any important work it might be doing. Sure, Congress ought to do something about climate change, but as long as Republicans control the House, Congress isn’t going to do anything about climate change.
I guess that qualifies as a crisis. But one of the lessons of the Obama era, along with the general advisability of DOING STUFF regardless of the political implications, is that positive change can happen in spite of a dysfunctional system. You couldn’t build a summer movie around that—”In a world where complex legislation is implemented effectively…”—but it’s still a feel-good idea, even if it seems to have limited box-office appeal.
By: Michael Grunwald, Time Magazine, June 9, 2013
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