Last month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid(D-NV) took to the floor of the Senate to declare the all of those Obamacare “horror stories” you keep hearing are “untrue.” While that was taken by some as a bit of an overstatement, there is one prominent ad from conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity in which people who are definitely actors share their completely made up Obamacare “horror stories.”
“The ad isn’t based on anyone’s real story,”Stephen Colbert explained Monday night. “It’s based on everyone’s fake story.” To combat all the misleading information out there, Colbert found his own Obamacare horror story from a totally real Louisiana resident who was definitely not legendary actor Sir Patrick Stewart.
Asked directly if he is an actor pretending to have had a bad experience with Obamacare, “Chuck Duprey” told Colbert, “No, I have never trod the boards, I am an average American Joe who prefers to crack open a domestic beer and watch the NASCAR.” From there, the man described the devastating moment that he monthly health insurance premium went through the roof. He only had to break character a handful of times.
Michele Bachmann is deeply disappointed with the American Jewish community for supporting President Barack Obama, whose policies she believes will reduce Israel to “rubble.”
The Minnesota Republican on Monday took particular issue with President Obama’s recent deal with Iran, after he successfully lobbied Congress to temporarily hold off on additional sanctions in hopes of reaching a larger deal on nuclear weapons. Bachmann also chided the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which boosted Obama by backing off its push for a swift vote on new sanctions.
“The Jewish community gave him their votes, their support, their financial support and as recently as last week, 48 Jewish donors who are big contributors to the president wrote a letter to the Democrat senators in the U.S. Senate to tell them to not advance sanctions against Iran,” Bachmann told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, as quoted by Right Wing Watch.
“This is clearly against Israel’s best interest. What has been shocking has been seeing and observing Jewish organizations who it appears have made it their priority to support the political priority and the political ambitions of the President over the best interests of Israel,” she added. “So in some respects, they sold out Israel.”
Senators debate sanctioning Russia over Ukraine, Obama unveils his 2015 budget, and more
1. Senators consider sanctions against Russia’s Ukraine intervention
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Monday began considering whether to imposesanctions against Russia for sending thousands of soldiers into Ukraine’s Crimea region following the ouster of the country’s president, Viktor Yanukovych. Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said the intervention was “a clear violation of international law.” Russia’s United Nations ambassador said Russia sent the soldiers at Yanukovych’s request. [Reuters, CNN]
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2. Obama unveils his new budget
President Obama is rolling out his 2015 budget on Tuesday. The White House says Obama is proposing closing tax loopholes for the wealthy and giving 13.5 million others tax breaks, including an expanded income tax credit for people without children and bigger child- and dependent-care tax credits for families. The shift follows the populist tone of Obama’s State of the Union address and the Democrats’ midterm election year pitch to voters. [TIME]
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3. Snow and ice shut down Washington, D.C.
A deadly winter storm struck the mid-Atlantic coast with snow and ice on Monday. A Virginia man was killed when he drove off an embankment in the snow. Early Tuesday, temperatures dipped below zero in parts of northern Virginia, the coldest March temperatures for the area in decades. Government offices shut down in Washington, D.C., on Monday, and were scheduled to open late on Tuesday, as crews tried to clear four inches of snow. [The Washington Post, Reuters]
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4. Bin Laden son-in-law goes on trial
Jury selection began Monday in the trial of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, son-in-law of the late Osama bin Laden. Abu Ghaith is the highest ranking bin Laden aide ever prosecuted in a U.S. civilian court since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “Abu Ghaith held a key position in Al Qaeda, comparable to the consigliere in a mob family or propaganda minister in a totalitarian regime,” said George Venizelos, director of the FBI’s New York office. [The New York Times]
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5. Many soldiers have suicidal tendencies before enlisting
Most U.S. soldiers with suicidal tendencies already had them when they enlisted, according to research released online Monday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry. The papers found that one in 10 soldiers had “intermittent explosive disorder” — a rate five times that of the general population. The studies sought to bring together the results of five years of research into the doubling of suicide rates in the military from 2004 to 2009. [The New York Times]
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6. Gates returns to the top of Forbes‘ list of billionaires
Bill Gates is once again the richest man in the world. The Microsoft co-founder saw his fortune rise by $9 billion to $76 billion, edging out Mexican telecommunications tycoon Carlos Slim Helu, who had held the top spot on the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people for four years. This year’s list, released Monday, included record tallies of 172 women billionaires and 152 from China. [Forbes, International Business Times]
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7. Report finds that national parks stimulate local economies
The National Park Service released a report Monday saying that the U.S.’s national parks brought $14.7 billion in spending to nearby communities in 2012. The report said that the money brings 243,000 jobs to towns and rural communities within 60 miles of the entrance to a park, and contributed $26.8 billion to the national economy. “Our parks are economic engines for local communities,” said Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell. [NBC News]
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8. Nets keep Collins around for another 10 days
The Brooklyn Nets reportedly signed Jason Collins, the first openly gay NBA player ever, to a second 10-day contract starting Wednesday. After that the team will have to decide whether to keep Collins for the rest of the season. Collins, who came out after finishing last season for the Washington Wizards, said he would let his agent deal with the contract. “He’ll do his job and I’ll do my job, which is basketball,” he said. [Daily News]
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9. James has a record night for the Heat
LeBron James scored a career-high 61 points Monday night as his team, the Miami Heat, trounced the Charlotte Bobcats. It was the most any player had scored for the Heat in the team’s 26-year history. James, an All-Star forward, made 22 of 33 shots from the field, including eight of 10 three-pointers. He said he was in such a groove he felt he couldn’t miss. “It felt,” James said, “like I had a golf ball, throwing it into the ocean.” [Sun-Sentinel]
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10. Ellen DeGeneres sets a Twitter record with an Oscar selfie
Ellen DeGeneres smashed Twitter records with a selfie she posted from Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony. The photo, taken by American Hustle star Bradley Cooper, featured DeGeneres surrounded by A-list movie stars, including Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lawrence, and Oscar-winning newcomer Lupita Nyong’o. The pic got 2.7 million retweets, smashing a record set by President Obama, whose reelection-night pic got 778,000 retweets. [Los Angeles Times]
In the days since Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into the Crimea, it has been amateur hour back in Washington.
I don’t mean Barack Obama. He’s doing pretty much everything he can, with what are a very limited set of policy options at his disposal. No, I’m talking about the people who won’t stop weighing in on Obama’s lack of “action” in the Ukraine. Indeed, the sea of foreign policy punditry – already shark-infested – has reached new lows in fear-mongering, exaggerated doom-saying and a stunning inability to place global events in any rational historical context.
This would be a useful moment for Americans to have informed reporters, scholars and leaders explaining a crisis rapidly unfolding half a world away. Instead, we’ve already got all the usual suspect arguments:
Personality-driven Analysis
Let’s start here with Julia Ioffe of the New Republic, a popular former reporter in Moscow who now tells us that Putin has sent troops into Crimea “because he can. That’s it, that’s all you need to know”. It’s as if things like regional interests, spheres of influence, geopolitics, coercive diplomacy and the potential loss of a key ally in Kiev (as well as miscalculation) are alien concepts for Russian leaders.
Overstated Rhetoric Shorn of Political Context
David Kramer, president of Freedom House, hit the ball out of the park on this front when he hyperbolically declared that Obama’s response to Putin’s actions “will define his two terms in office” and “the future of U.S. standing in the world”.
Honorable mention goes to Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group for calling this crisis “the most seismic geopolitical events since 9/11”. Putting aside the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Arab Spring, Syria’s civil war and tensions in the South China Sea, Bremmer might have a point.
Unhelpful Policy Recommendations
Admiral James Stavridis, former Supreme Commander of Nato, deserves a shout-out for calling on Nato to send maritime forces into the Black Sea, among other inflammatory steps. No danger of miscalculation or unnecessary provocation there. No, none at all.
Missing from this “analysis” about how Obama should respond is whyObama should respond. After all, the US has few strategic interests in the former Soviet Union and little ability to affect Russian decision-making.
Our interests lie in a stable Europe, and that’s why the US and its European allies created a containment structure that will ensure Russia’s territorial ambitions will remain quite limited. (It’s called Nato.) Even if the Russian military wasn’t a hollow shell of the once formidable Red Army, it’s not about to mess with a Nato country.
The US concerns vis-à-vis Russia are the concerns that affect actual US interests. Concerns like nuclear non-proliferation, or containing the Syrian civil war, or stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Those are all areas where Moscow has played an occasionally useful role.
So while Obama may utilize political capital to ratify the Start treaty with Russia, he’s not going to extend it so save the Crimea. The territorial integrity of Ukraine is not nothing, but it’s hardly in the top tier of US policy concerns.
What is America’s problem is ensuring that Russia pays a price for violating international law and the global norm against inter-state war.The formal suspension of a G8 summit in Sochi is a good first step. If Putin’s recalcitrance grows – and if he further escalates the crisis – then that pressure can be ratcheted up.
But this crisis is Putin’s Waterloo, not ours.
Which brings us to perhaps the most bizarre element of watching the Crimean situation unfold through a US-centric lens: the iron-clad certainty of the pundit class that Putin is winning and Obama is losing. The exact opposite is true.
Putin has initiated a conflict that will, quite obviously, result in greater diplomatic and political isolation as well as the potential for economic sanction. He’s compounded his loss of a key ally in Kiev by further enflaming Ukrainian nationalism, and his provocations could have a cascading effect in Europe by pushing countries that rely on Russia’s natural gas exports to look elsewhere for their energy needs. Putin is the leader of a country with a weak military, an under-performing economy and a host of social, environmental and health-related challenges. Seizing the Crimea will only make the problems facing Russia that much greater.
For Obama and the US, sure, there might be less Russian help on Syria going forward – not that there was much to begin with – and it could perhaps affect negotiations on Iran. But those issues are manageable. Meanwhile, Twitter and the opinion pages and the Sunday shows and too many blog posts that could be informative have been filled with an over-the-top notion: that failure to respond to Russia’s action will weaken America’s credibility with its key allies. To which I would ask: where are they gonna go? If anything, America’s key European allies are likely to fold the quickest, because, you know, gas. And why would any US ally in the Far East want Obama wasting his time on the Crimea anyway?
You don’t have to listen to the “do something” crowd. These are the same people who brought you the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other greatest hits. These are armchair “experts” convinced that every international problem is a vital interest of the US; that the maintenance of “credibility” and “strength” is essential, and that any demonstration of “weakness” is a slippery slope to global anarchy and American obsolescence; and that being wrong and/or needlessly alarmist never loses one a seat at the table.
The funny thing is, these are often the same people who bemoan the lack of public support for a more muscular American foreign policy. Gee, I wonder why.
The Fifth Column 