Finally, What America Really Needs: A Joe Biden Super PAC

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

August 19, 2013

Welcome to the dog days of summer. August is known for three things: large swaths of America going on vacation; finding yourself watching preseason football even though you know nothing is at stake and most of the players you're watching will be cut soon anyway; and foreign crises (the Gulf of Tonkin crisis, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, a coup against Gorbachev).

Finally, What America Really Needs: A Joe Biden Super PAC

Oh please, oh please: "Political allies of Vice President Joe Biden have concluded that he can win the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination—even if Hillary Clinton enters the contest—and are considering steps he could take to prepare for a potential candidacy . . . One step under discussion by Biden backers is to form a political action committee he would use to funnel money to other Democratic candidates, which could build goodwill for a possible White House bid, people familiar with the talks said."

Please, please, please call it "MALARKEYPAC."

I can see it now: "My fellow Democrats, I've been there, right next to President Obama, in the most challenging moments and when he faced his toughest decisions! When he had to decide whether or not to authorize the bin Laden raid, I was right there next to him and I said, 'Mr. President, do not authorize this mission!' And I was wrong, and he didn't listen to me, and that's why you need me to be the next president of the United States!"

Nancy Pelosi Needs to Create a Campaign Web Site So We Can See What's On It

When we say that Democratic House minority leader Nancy Pelosi's district is so safe she doesn't need to put any effort into running for reelection, we mean it: "A Smart Politics analysis of the 419 U.S. Representatives who are not retiring, resigning, or running for higher office in 2014, finds that nine currently have no functioning campaign website as of Sunday, August 18th: Democrats Nancy Pelosi (CA-12), Rosa DeLauro (CT-03), Bobby Rush (IL-01), Luis Gutiérrez (IL-04), Danny Davis (IL-07), Donald Payne, Jr. (NJ-10), and José Serrano (NY-15) and Republicans Hal Rogers (KY-05) and John Duncan (TN-02)."

As the Middle East Burns, Obama Is Drawn to Water . . . Hazards

How much worse does the violence in Egypt have to get before it fits the definition of a "civil war"?

If you're a Christian in Egypt, chances are somebody — most likely a Muslim Brotherhood fan — has set fire or tried to set fire to your place of worship by now.

Throw that near-civil war in with the Syrian one (death toll now 106,000 or so) , the increasing sectarian violence in Iraq, Syrian violence spreading into Lebanon (a huge car bomb detonated in Beirut yesterday and another one was caught, a story that didn't even make headlines in the U.S.) and Afghanistan remaining to be Afghanistan, and it increasingly looks like the whole Middle East is on fire.

Credit Obama in one way: He currently accurately represents the view of a majority of the American people in that they don't want to think much about the Middle East, either.

Of course, we're fools if we think just shrugging and murmuring rote denunciations of violence will generate results where we're respected, feared, or trusted as an ally, as Mark Steyn notes:

Everywhere except Washington people are thinking strategically: General Sisi has made a calculation that he has a small window of opportunity to inflict damage on the Muslim Brotherhood that will set them back decades and that it is in Egypt's vital interest to do so. Grasping that, the Brothers are pushing back hard.

Out in the wider world, Putin figures there's a regional power play to be made, and that Moscow can be back in Cairo in a big way for the first time in four decades.

All these parties are pursuing their strategic interest. Does the United States have such a thing anymore? Not so's you'd notice. As a result, the factions in Egypt are united only in their contempt for Washington. Obama is despised by Sisi and the generals for being fundamentally unserious; by the Brotherhood for stringing along with the coup; by the Copts for standing by as the Brothers take it out on them; and by the small number of genuine democrats in Egypt for his witless promotion of Morsi's thugs as the dawning of democracy.

Out on the streets, Washington is reviled both for standing by Mubarak too long and for pushing him out too soon (eighty per cent of Egyptians say things are worse than under the old man). And, with the 2011 "Facebook Revolution" all out of "Likes", the King of Jordan and the Gulf emirs understand the meaning of the ailing, abandoned strongman in his military prison cell in purely geopolitical terms – that (as Bernard Lewis once warned) America is harmless as an enemy but treacherous as a friend.

We can try to ignore explosive violence in far-off lands that were once our allies, but . . . chances are, sooner or later, that will come back to bite us.

Meanwhile . . . "President Obama hit the links Saturday with comedian Larry David, the star of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, as his weeklong vacation in Martha's Vineyard comes to a close."

Obamacare: Ending Our Long National Nightmare of Inexpensive Basic Health Insurance

If you like your plan, you can . . . well, okay, no, under Obamacare, you're up a creek without a paddle:

The bare-bones health insurance policy that's been the plan of choice for New Jerseyans who can't afford something better is set to go away next year, thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

And what those policy holders will be left with may be a choice among pricey, pricier and priciest.

About 106,000 people in the Garden State are insured under what are known as "basic and essential," or B&E, health care plans, according to state data. Since 2003, all health insurers that operate in New Jersey's individual health market have been required to sell these plans which, as their name implies, offer only a thin layer of coverage for things such as doctor's office visits and procedures that don't involve a hospital stay.

But while B&E plans were meant to help young families get coverage and stanch the drop of enrollment in the individual health market, their relatively low price — as little as a couple hundred dollars a month for some people — made them the most popular option for those who don't get insurance through an employer or a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid. About 71 percent of those covered by the individual health market have a B&E plan.

Soon no longer.

In addition to requiring most everyone to carry health insurance, the Affordable Care Act — better known as Obamacare — starting next year will force health care plans to cover certain essential services while capping the out-of-pocket fees people pay in addition to their premiums.

As a result, after Dec. 31, insurers won't be able to sell or renew plans that don't meet this litmus test. That includes B&E plans.

Swell.

Coming Soon to a Heritage Stage Near You: A Privacy Debate, Featuring . . . Me

Check this out:

I have a feeling that we'll focus mostly on the recent NSA revelations, Edward Snowden, and other policy issues, and may not get a chance to discuss the cultural impact of our shrinking sense of privacy.

This weekend Peggy Noonan wrote about what Americans will lose if we lose our sense of privacy, quoting the libertarian journalist Nat Hentoff extensively.

The notion that social networks and the Internet were fueling a generation that didn't respect, understand, or care about privacy has been around a while. From a 2007 New York magazine cover piece:

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God's sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

"When it is more important to be seen than to be talented, it is hardly surprising that the less gifted among us are willing to fart our way into the spotlight," sneers Lakshmi Chaudhry in the current issue of The Nation. "Without any meaningful standard by which to measure our worth, we turn to the public eye for affirmation."

Clay Shirky, a 42-year-old professor of new media at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, who has studied these phenomena since 1993, has a theory about that response. "Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in something old people are not allowed to, it makes us bitter. What did we have? The mall and the parking lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we're mad about it now." People are always eager to believe that their behavior is a matter of morality, not chronology, Shirky argues. "You didn't behave like that because nobody gave you the option."

There's a reason young people accept the notion of a life without privacy: They're stupid. (Okay, they're not stupid, and if you had asked the early-twenty-something version of myself this question, I probably would have said that old fogey married suburban dads are stupid.) But the point is that most of the young people gleefully dismissing privacy haven't yet lived with a consequence of giving up that privacy, or of putting those once-private aspects of their lives up online for public inspection.

It's been mentioned to me that the first stage of the modern hiring process is googling the name of the applicant; if the first thing that comes up are Facebook photos of drunken debauchery, the resume ends up in the wastepaper basket (or its electronic equivalents). For the most part, the folks touting their lack of a need for a private life haven't experienced the loss of a job opportunity over it, or a potential boyfriend or girlfriend recoiling after a sudden revelation, or some other negative consequence of sharing something they shouldn't.

A friend of mine once said he was hesitant about setting up a Facebook account because he didn't want to share his whole life with the world. I pointed out that what most users put up on Facebook isn't our whole lives. It's just the parts of our life we want to share with others.

(If you've Facebook-friended me and I haven't replied, it's probably for one of three reasons: 1) I put up a lot of pictures of my kids, etc., that aren't meant to be shared with the world-at-large. 2) I presume you know me through work, and I don't talk politics or work much on the personal page. 3) We have met actually met in person, and I secretly fear you're an axe murderer. For everyone, including politically passionate axe murderers, I set up a work-related Facebook page here.)

It's related to the "I don't care what people think of me" trope. Most of the people who proclaim this are lying, because their loud proclamation of that is meant to ensure others think of them as bold, fearless, iconoclastic, etc. It's very, very tough to go through life not caring at all about what some people think of you — your co-workers, your boss, your relatives, your friends. The desire to be liked, admired, and appreciated by others is near-universal in humanity. If you run a business, you need your clients to think well of you. The only job where you can appear to genuinely not care at all about what people think of you is, apparently, mayor of San Diego.

I suspect that the young people posting everything to Facebook will, in time, grow to appreciate privacy.

Without privacy, there is no personal, hidden side; without those personal, hidden sides, there is no intimacy. Hopefully, what you share with your spouse is something you share with no one else. Hopefully your kids see a side of you that most others don't. The idea of opening every aspect of your life up to everyone means that there's no differentiation between the people who matter most to you and strangers.

ADDENDUM: Courtesy Dana Loesch:

NRO Digest — August 19, 2013

Today on National Review Online . . .

STERLING BEARD: The figurehead of the Left's anti-voter-ID crusade in North Carolina, 92-year-old Rosanell Eaton, will hardly be affected by the state's new law. Faux Martyr.

JOHN FUND: After reports of 2,776 privacy violations, even defenders of the NSA's surveillance programs are getting fed up. Time for Answers.

CHARLES C. W. COOKE: Surveillance defenders — and Dems who've defended executive overreach — now want NSA reform. NSA Critics, Right All Along.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: The president is obsessing over high growth in CEO pay rather than low growth for the rest of the economy, when there's hardly a connection. Obsessed With the Wrong 1 Percent.

JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: Ethanol mandates are driving up the prices of corn and putting feedlots out of business. The Corn That Broke the Cattleman's Back.

To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com

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