Iraq War Critic:Withdrwl was a Mistake

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE:

Audio: Iraq War critic says Iraq withdrawal may have been the worst strategic mistake of all.

“Dexter Filkins has long been a skeptic and critic of the Iraq war, from his tenure at the New York Times to his current assignment at the New Yorker. Still, that hasn’t kept Filkins from reporting honestly on developments in the theater; in 2008, while at the NYT, he wrote extensively about the success of the surge just a few months before the presidential election. A month later, Filkins wrote again about the “literally unrecognizable” and peaceful Iraq produced by the surge.

Six years later, Filkins was among the skeptics reminding people that the Iraqis’ insistence on negotiating the immunity clause for American troops was more of a welcome excuse for Obama to choose total withdrawal — and claim credit for it until this year — rather than the deal-breaker Obama now declares that it was.

Yesterday, Filkins told Hugh Hewitt that while one can argue whether the 2003 invasion was ill-advised, the total withdrawal in 2011 was the worst strategic mistake made by the US.”

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/09/25/audio-iraq-war-critic-says-iraq-withdrawal-may-have-been-the-worst-strategic-mistake-of-all/

The Recovery That Left Out Almost Everybody

America's economy has not worked for average families since the Clinton administration ended

William A. Galston

Sept. 23, 2014



If they were judging the economy by the monthly jobs report, working Americans would be popping champagne corks. Total employment has risen every month for more than four years. According to the Current Population Survey, more than eight million jobs have been created since the trough, while the number of unemployed has been cut by nearly six million. The unemployment rate has declined to 6.1% from 10%, and the number of Americans enduring long-term unemployment (27 weeks or more) has fallen to three million from 4.3 million in the past 12 months.



Yet average Americans remain gloomy about the current economy and anxious about its future.



According to a Pew Research Center report released this month, only 21% rate current conditions as excellent or good, versus 79% fair or poor. Only 33% say that jobs are readily available in their communities; when asked about good jobs, that figure falls to 26%. Only 22% believe the economy will be better a year from now; 22% think it will be worse, while fully 54% think it will be the same.



More than five years after the official end of the recession, the Public Religion Research Institute finds, only 21% of Americans believe the recession has ended.



Two recent reports help explain the disconnect between the official jobs numbers and the economic experience of most Americans. Every fall, the U.S. Commerce Department issues a detailed analysis of trends in income, poverty and health insurance. Although economists have some technical quibbles with the Commerce data, the broad trends are unmistakable.



This year's report found that median household income was $51,939 in 2013, 8% lower than in 2007, the last year before the recession. Households in the middle of the income distribution earned about $4,500 less last year than they had six years earlier. No wonder 56% of Americans told the Pew Research Center that their incomes were falling behind the cost of living.



The Federal Reserve's triennial Survey of Consumer Finances confirms these findings. Between 2010 and 2013, the Fed reports, median family income fell by 5%, even though average family income rose by 4%. This is, note the authors, "consistent with increasing income concentration during this period."



Only families in the top 10%, with annual incomes averaging nearly $400,000, saw gains during these three years. Families headed by college graduates eked out a gain of 1%, while those with a high-school diploma or less saw declines of about 7%. Those in the middle—with some postsecondary education—did the worst: From 2010 to 2013, their annual incomes declined to less than $41,000 from $46,000—an 11% plunge. Families headed by workers under age 35 have done especially badly—even when the heads of those young families have college degrees. The economic struggles of the millennials are more than anecdotal.



What's going on? The Census report offers a clue. The median earnings for Americans working full-time year round haven't changed much since 2007. But more than five years into the recovery, there are fewer such workers than before the recession. In 2007, 108.6 million Americans were working full time, year-round; in 2013 only 105.9 million were doing so. Although jobs are being created, too many of them are part-time to maintain growth in household incomes.



This is not by choice. About the same number of Americans were employed last month as in December 2007. But during that period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of Americans working part time who wanted a full-time job jumped to 7.2 million from 4.6 million. Not only are hourly wages stagnating; America's families want more hours of work than the economy is providing.



Although the Great Recession was the most severe since World War II, in many ways it underscored trends that have been under way for decades. Adjusted for inflation, median earnings of men working full time, year-round are no higher than they were in 1980. Median household income is almost $5,000 lower than it was in 1999, and no higher than it was it 1989.



The modest income increases of the past two generations have occurred because women have surged into the paid workforce—and because their real wages have grown at a compound annual rate of 0.8%. But both these trends peaked in 2000. Not surprisingly, the years after the 2001 recession witnessed the only postwar recovery in which median incomes failed to regain their previous peak.



The American economy hasn't worked for average families since the end of the Clinton administration. A recovery that leaves them out is no recovery at all, and they know it. This simple fact goes a long way toward explaining the tone of our current politics and the temper of our society. It will not change for the better unless we can recreate an economy in which work is rewarded and family incomes rise.



That is the great task of the next decade—and must be the prime focus of the next presidential election.

• 
  

Money Is Pouring Into Tech Like It’s 1999—And That’s Not Good

By Marcus Wohlsen  
• 09.22.14

When respected venture capitalist Bill Gurley said tech startup investors are taking on a level of risk not seen since the dotcom bubble days, the reaction in Silicon Valley was a collective sigh of relief: Finally, someone was saying what everyone was thinking.



In a piece published last week, Gurley told The Wall Street Journal that the huge amount of capital pouring into startups—and the great expectations all that money represents—is forcing new companies to spend more, and faster, than they have in 15 years. So much spending sets companies up for a fall if the funding dries up and they still have big bills to pay.



‘Saying we’re not in a bubble because it’s not as high as 1999 is like saying that Kim-Jong-Un is not evil because he’s not Hitler.’



Despite Gurley’s warning, however, many companies and investors are in too deep to restrain themselves. If your competitors are spending, you must spend too. According to public data, the industry doesn’t appear to be as overextended now as it did at the height of the dotcom bubble. But Gurley isn’t reassured.



“Saying we’re not in a bubble because it’s not as high as 1999 is like saying … Kim-Jong-Un is not evil because he’s not Hitler,” Gurley, a partner with big-name VC firm Benchmark Capital, told WIRED during a recent sit-down at his San Francisco office. “It doesn’t have to match 1999 in order to be madness.”

The Dollars That Aren’t Counted

At the height of the bubble in 2000, according to the National Venture Capital Association, VCs poured more than $105 billion into startups—nearly double the amount of the previous year and almost 10 times the amount invested during the web’s earliest days. A year later, even after the dotcom downturn had already taken a firm grip, venture capital investments still topped $40 billion.



By comparison, funding over the past five years appears to have hummed along steadily in the modest $20 billion to $30 billion range. But this year could see a significant uptick. During the second quarter of 2014, venture capital funding hit its highest level since 2001—nearly $14 billion, according to venture capital research firm CB Insights. And there’s no reason to believe that pace is slipping.



Funding already has hit more than $23 billion for the first half of 2014. And Gurley believes those figures don’t reflect all the money sloshing around in Silicon Valley. “I would argue that a lot of this late-stage money isn’t being counted in those venture dollars,” he says. “If you look at the bigger rounds that are being raised, the majority of the dollars there aren’t being counted.”‘It’s a Rather Bizarre Situation’



He also feels the capital “burn rate” among startups is much higher than during the first dotcom bubble, though he’s not sure there’s a way to prove that. You could look at how frequently companies are raising money, but as he notes, many companies will take funding even when they still have money in the bank. “With the companies that have access to this type of capital, there’s a long list of people that will just hand it to them. It’s a rather bizarre situation,” he says. “They may not even be in the market for money and people are proactively trying to give it to them.”



An apparent irony in Gurly’s anxiety about burn rates is his firm’s stake in Uber, one of the most well-funded and highly valued tech startups since the 2008 crash. From its vast new San Francisco offices to its blistering expansion into hundreds of cities around the world, Uber is not shy about spending its billion-dollar war chest. Clearly, the Uber investment reflects that Benchmark motto: “Be the first venture investor in technology companies that seek to create new markets.” The question is how hard Uber will have to work—and how much it will have to keep spending—to maintain its hold on the markets it’s created.



As Gurley tells WIRED, there may not be a good way for Silicon Valley to get out of this situation. “You’re forced to play the game on the field,” he told us. “It becomes an arms race, and that’s the real problem…If you say ‘I’m going to be prudent and I’m not going to have a high burn rate’ and then the other guy hires four times the sales force you do, it might not work for you.”



Gurley says that the best you can do is remain “pragmatically aggressive.”

The El Niño Effect

In his interview with the Journal, Gurley recalled a recent trip to the Galapagos Islands and the book he read, Beak of the Finch, a study of evolution in action among birds of the islands. During El Niño years, Gurley said, floods bring massive food surpluses, allowing the finch population to explode. The problem, he said, is the excess resources mean individual finches needn’t be as hardy to survive. When food levels return to normal, many of them die.



In the same way, Gurley said, too much cash in the startup economy means weaker companies can survive without having to generate cash for themselves. In a post praising Gurley’s remarks, high-profile venture capitalist Fred Wilson said he too worries about his own portfolio companies, some of which are burning millions each month. He says he’s pushed back on excess spending, in effect trying to encourage fitter finches.



“At some point you have to build a real business, generate real profits, sustain the company without the largess of investor’s capital,” Wilson said, “and start producing value the old fashioned way.”
Additional reporting by Cade Metz.

‘Hate Speech’: the Left’s Term for ‘Opposing Viewpoints’

‘Hate Speech’: the Left’s Term for ‘Opposing Viewpoints’

                  Posted By Spencer Klavan On September 19, 2014 s

Last week, a mass email went out at Yale University (my alma mater) protesting an upcoming visit from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a political activist and staunch critic of Islam. The subject line reads, “Dear Friends: More Speech, Not Hate Speech.” The email reveals that by “hate speech,” the writers mean what the Left usually means when they use that term: “opinions we don’t agree with.”

Thirty-two student organizations signed the email under the leadership of Yale’s Muslim Student Association (MSA). That’s a revised number after the MSA was forced to reveal that its original list of 36 organizations was falsified. So, not a good start.

The signees announced that they feel “highly disrespected” by the mere fact of the invitation, because Ali stands accused of “hate speech” against Islam. Her very presence on campus, they argue, would be “marginalizing” and “uncomfortable” for Muslim students and their allies.

Let’s get a few things straight.

At five years old, Ms. Ali suffered protracted genital mutilation at the instruction of her grandmother, who “circumcised” the defenseless child according to the traditional practices of her Islamic clan. The MSA refers to these events as “unfortunate circumstances.”

With unimaginable bravery and resourcefulness, Ali escaped a forced marriage in Africa and sought asylum in the Netherlands. She rose from desperation and obscurity to obtain a seat in the Dutch parliament. After painful introspection and extensive academic analysis, she began courageously speaking out against the institutionalized rape, mutilation, and murder of Muslim women and girls. She argued that those atrocities are supported by the principles of Islam.

In this, according to the MSA, she “overlooked the complexity of sociopolitical issues in Muslim-majority countries.” Presumably it was somewhere in between working as a translator for a Rotterdam refugee center and obtaining an advanced degree in political science that Ali allowed the finer points of intercultural analysis to slip her mind. Luckily, a clique of twenty-year-old undergraduates sheltered behind the walls of one of the world’s wealthiest institutions is here to remind her.

For the crime of daring to speak out against Islamic violence in the Netherlands, Ms. Ali was accused of “religious discrimination” and threatened with death by extremists. The intimidated Dutch authorities effectively abandoned her and chased her out of the country. They trumped up a technicality from her fourteen-year-old citizenship application, leading her to resign. Not to be deterred, Ali escaped to America to continue her heroic work. Perhaps she hoped that the U.S., at least, would protect her right to speak.

Except that Ms. Ali has been stonewalled once already this year from speaking at an American university. Last April, Brandeis cancelled its plans to award Ali an honorary degree after students petitioned in protest against her “hate speech.” A brazen move coming from the university that had already honored playwright Tony Kushner, who calls supporters of Israel “repulsive.

And now the MSA and its co-signees have proudly joined in the quest to silence Ali. To them, her life’s work of defending helpless young women against an ideology of systematic oppression constitutes “hate speech,” and it cannot be discussed. They offer a number of laughably inaccurate reasons why.

Perhaps the most egregious is the supremely arrogant assessment that a woman with Ms. Ali’s extensive experience and acclaimed erudition “does not hold the credentials” to discuss the religion in which she was raised and abused, and which she has studied throughout her life.

There’s also the assertion that Ali commits a “radical inaccuracy” by daring to suggest that the West is engaged in a “clash of civilizations” with Islam. Never mind that prominent clerics like Farook al-Mohammedi often publicly plan the total subjugation of America — don’t call it a “clash of civilizations.” That’s hate speech.

Finally, under the guise of an interest in “advancing freedom of speech on campus,” the MSA recommends that someone whom they deem to have “representative scholarly qualifications” speak in Ms. Ali’s place. In other words: Yale is allowed an open conversation on the subject of Islam, as long as all participants and their viewpoints are vetted and pre-approved by the MSA.

These are flimsy attempts to legitimize a naked demand for censorship. There is one reason to make the untenable claim that Ms. Ali is anything close to hateful, and that is to shut her up. The MSA and its fellows are using the term “hate speech” to describe opinions with which they disagree and which they hope to frighten into silence. They are not the first to do so.

Liberal arts institutions — and the nations that establish them — are meant to be bastions of open discourse. They have no responsibility to protect their students from viewpoints that make them “uncomfortable.” But all over the supposedly tolerant West, radical leftists have used their distaste for Ali’s viewpoints to justify silencing her under the flexible and slanderous accusation of “hate speech.” They succeeded in the Netherlands. They succeeded at Brandeis. I’m proud to say they didn’t succeed at Yale — not this time, anyway. Ali did speak on Monday, to a packed house and a standing ovation. Free expression — the bedrock of academic inquiry — won the day. To that, I say, Boola Boola: this kind of victory is becoming all too rare.


Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/hate-speech-the-lefts-term-for-opposing-viewpoints/

Democrats Take the Low Road

Going all-negative, all the time against Tom Cotton.

Fred Barnes

September 8, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 48

Conway, Ark. 

"Tom Cotton voted against preparing America for pandemics like Ebola,” a TV ad in Arkansas declared last week. The ad came from Democrat Mark Pryor, who is running for reelection to the Senate. Cotton, a House member, is his Republican opponent in the November 4 election. The ad failed to mention that after voting against an early version of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act, Cotton voted for the bill once a provision he objected to was removed.

Last spring, Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s PAC said in an ad: “Before Congress, Cotton got paid handsomely working for insurance companies.” The claim was untrue, as was the ad’s insistence that Cotton “wants to end Medicare’s guarantee, giving billions in profits to insurance companies.” The Washington Post’s fact checker gave the ad “four Pinocchios,” calling it “as phony as a three-dollar bill.”

In June, a 30-second ad by the Arkansas Democratic party said Cotton opposes disaster relief. It featured a scene of damage caused by tornadoes in Arkansas on April 27, insinuating that Cotton was against aiding the victims. He wasn’t. His votes were against the pork-laden bills after Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast in 2012.

In August, the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee aired a TV spot accusing Cotton of having voted against federal funding for 

Arkansas Children’s Hospital. But Cotton’s opposition to the legislation didn’t cost the hospital any funding. On the contrary, he voted in favor of funding the two agencies that do aid the hospital.

By now, you should have gotten the drift: Democrats are going to extreme lengths to protect Pryor and demonize Cotton, his Republican challenger. And they’re taking nearly as combative an approach to defend Democratic incumbents in three other red states—North Carolina, Louisiana, and Alaska.

But there’s a special intensity to the attacks on Cotton, along with a glaring disregard for the truth. This is probably because Pryor, 51, has been viewed as the most vulnerable of the four incumbents.

Cotton, given his background, appears to strike fear in the heart of Democrats. He’s from Dardanelle, a small town an hour’s drive from 

Little Rock. And he not only is a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law, he joined the Army after 9/11, went to OCS, and served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s a conservative with a uniquely attractive set of skills and experience.

Six months ago, Cotton, 37, was the favorite in the race. But the attack ads have taken a toll, causing Cotton to fall narrowly behind Pryor in polls and briefly driving his approval rating into negative territory. He’s recovered since then, and today the race is essentially tied.

The truth-defying ads are only part of the TV assault on Cotton. Other ads consist of generic, if stale, criticism of Cotton as eager to slash Medicare and Social Security benefits. Cotton disputes this, but he’s aired TV rebuttals only to the palpably false ads.

The most captivating of his rebuttals stars the burly sheriff of Faulkner County, Andy Shock. When the tornado hit, “Tom Cotton stood with us every step of the way,” Shock says. “Shame on anyone who uses our tragedy for their own political gain. It’s just wrong. Senator Pryor, start focusing on the real issues. Leave our community and our tragedy out of your campaign.”

The Cotton campaign relies on a single theme: Pryor and Obama are one and the same, politically and ideologically. “I look for those elusive Arkansans who agree with President Obama 93 percent of the time,” Cotton says facetiously. “I can’t find them. I never can find them. I have to go to D.C. to find Mark Pryor, the only Arkansan who agrees with Obama 93 percent of the time.”

Since winning an open House seat in 2012, Cotton has improved as a candidate. His stump speech is a succinct 10 minutes, followed by handshaking and picture-taking. He travels the state in a van with his wife Anna—they were married in March—and their dog Cowboy. 

Cotton won a contested primary two years ago, then defeated Democrat Gene Jeffress, 60-37 percent. He was unopposed for the Senate nomination this year after two House colleagues, Tim Griffin and Steve Womack, declined to run.

Some Republicans are privately critical of Cotton for going his own way on some House votes. He voted against the farm bill, the 

Violence Against Women Act, and Sandy relief. Arkansas is an agricultural state, but Cotton thinks his opposition to the farm bill won’t hurt against Pryor. He says many Arkansans don’t like the farm bill.

John Goodson, a prominent Democrat from Texarkana, is a friend of Pryor and his father, David Pryor, a one-term governor and senator for 18 years. Goodson serves on the University of Arkansas board of trustees with the elder Pryor. He says the Pryors are “fine men.”

But the “people of Arkansas have changed a little to the Republican way of life,” he says. Obama has “hurt the Democratic party .  .  . and that’s got to be tough to turn around.” Goodson supports Cotton and thinks he’ll win. “What’s made the race as close as it is,” he says, are the Democratic ads against Cotton.

Yet Mark Pryor is hardly a lightning rod. Several of his TV commercials are personal. With his father at his side, he endorses two health care provisions without mentioning that they’re part of Obamacare. In another ad, he holds up a Bible.

“I’m not ashamed to say that I believe in God and I believe in His word,” he says. “This is my compass, my North Star. It gives me comfort and guidance to do what’s best for Arkansas. I’m Mark Pryor and I approve this message because this is who I am and what I believe.”

He hasn’t revealed if it was the Bible that led him to accuse Tom Cotton of leaving Arkansas vulnerable to the Ebola virus.

Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.

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‘CATALIST’: Obama’s Database For Fundamentally Transforming America

‘CATALIST’: Obama’s Database For Fundamentally Transforming America

             Posted By J. Christian Adams On September 17, 2014 

The Democrats and the institutional left have a new political tool that allows them virtually to ignore moderates yet still win elections.

This tool, the Catalist database, was employed in the 2012 election. That election defied conventional wisdom: Mitt Romney sought and won independent voters overwhelmingly, but still lost. If you wondered why the conventional wisdom about independents and moderates didn’t seem so wise in 2012, the answer is Catalist.

Beyond winning elections, Catalist also allows the Democrats to turn the policy narrative upside down and suffer no political consequence for implementing radical policies which appeal to their base. The Obama administration’s lurch to the far left without consequence can be understood by understanding Catalist. Obama thrives politically by satisfying his base. Simply, Catalist is a game changer not just for politics, but for policy. It is the left’s machinery for fundamentally transforming America.

And candidates, organizations, strategists, and consultants who do not understand what they are up against in Catalist risk being overrun.

I’ll explain how it works in a moment. I had the opportunity to explore the functionality and architecture of Catalist in a way few — if any — others on the opposite side of Catalist have had, and what I discovered sure explains a lot about the last six years.

No longer are Democrats anchored to the preferences of Americans in the middle. Bill Clinton’s triangulation is as obsolete as color film and bag phones. Obama has pushed policies far outside the mainstream, and even far outside popular will, but succeeded in wringing out an Electoral College majority in 2012 because of Catalist.

Unfortunately, Republicans have no functioning counterpart data tool to Catalist. They have multiple and competing shells of Catalist, but they have nothing on the collaborative scale as Catalist, largely due to the fact that Republicans won’t collaborate and are fiercely territorial of their competing data sets. Democrats and the institutional left, in contrast, have created a collaborative and fully integrated system that allows them to ignore the middle while extracting unprecedented turnout from a micro-targeted, ideologically far-left base.

Catalist is an example of the consultant, profit-driven culture of the GOP being beaten by the messianic crusader culture of the left.

Next: two examples demonstrate the power of the institutional left’s data tools.

During the 2012 election, a producer for a conservative news network received a knock at his door in a key swing state. Two neighbors were standing on his stoop campaigning for Obama. They weren’t there to talk to him — they were there to talk to his wife. They knew that she was employed in a profession which the Obama campaign had decided to microtarget: folks who deliver services to special needs children. The two neighbors were already armed with this personalized information. The Obama campaign didn’t just send a direct mail piece to the target or make a telephone call. Instead, the campaign matched a microtargeted demographic (special needs service providers) with a highly motivated Obama volunteer in close neighborly proximity to the target. Then they armed the neighbor/volunteer with data to visit the target.

The best the GOP has done to mimic this event is to give “walk and knock” lists to volunteers who are not from the neighborhood, and certainly not armed with particular messaging. Or, the GOP bothers the target with telephone calls or a direct mail campaign containing at best a whiff of microtargeting.

The second example involves a recent statewide election. In a state where one Democrat and one Republican must be appointed to run each precinct, an election official described for me a problem encountered with the Democratic party. It seems the Democrat she nominated to run the polls wasn’t sufficiently ideologically pure. What evidence did the party have to object to her bona fides? A response to a telephone survey many years earlier in which the nominated poll official wasn’t supporting the Democratic nominee for United States Senate.

Republicans don’t have anything even close to this sort of data, where answers to poll questions in years past could be employed in future fights.

The development and use of Catalist by the left has serious political consequences for Republicans in Congress, consequences I fear consultants, candidates, and strategists haven’t even begun to contemplate. Consider the course charted by some GOP leaders: while they have sought to steer a middle course between Democrats and the Tea Party, Catalist is rendering moderation obsolete.

Steering a moderate cautious course made perfect sense before Catalist. But now, failing to appeal to an activated and motivated political base spells doom, as the last two presidential elections have demonstrated.
———————-
Catalist grew out of the 2004 presidential election, where the Bush campaign enjoyed success in part because of a microtargeting strategy. Magazine subscription lists and church directories, for example, provided a way to identify and contact broad subsets of voters through direct mail or other generic contact. This success led Harold Ickes and other progressives to attempt to build a better mousetrap that helps progressives. It was first used by Obama in 2008, and was used with devastating effectiveness in his 2012 reelection.
To understand the power of Catalist, you must understand the complex Catalist architecture, and how it is different than anything used by the GOP or conservative causes.

Imagine the Borg in Star Trek. Every Borg unit can see what all the other units see. They share data and react in unison.


Similarly, the data feeding the central Catalist database is coming from a wide swath of sources. Public records, pollsters, campaigns, non-profits, activist groups, unions, parties, commercial data. Scores and scores of sources are feeding the central database data.

For example, when an environmental group does neighborhood door knocking for cash, the results of those contacts are fed into Catalist.

You have your own individual voter file in Catalist. Everyone does. Under that file might be a massive amount of information about you — more than probably exists in any other database in the world. Who you work for, what car you might drive, donations you have made, assumptions based on your neighborhood, anything in a public government database about you, consumer preferences, partisan preferences, what licenses you have, what you might have said to pollsters on the phone, memberships, how you treated the young left-wing activist knocking on your door a few years ago, and on and on and on.

Each group working with Catalist feeds the central database. Different groups have different types of data about you. Some data relate to economics. Other data relate to politics. Either way, the Borg all work in unison to fill the database with a massive amount of information about every American — and all of it is perfectly legal.

From the Catalist website

In the vast central database, these data are organized, structured and housed by Catalist, a limited liability company with offices in Washington, D.C. If you contribute data to the database, you can also be a customer of the database. And the customer list is vast — including the effort to reelect President Obama. Customers receive tailored information to suit their needs and microtarget voters.

Catalist provides much more sophisticated and much more granular data about subsets of Americans. The degree of granularity was never possible before Catalist, and Republicans have nothing to match it, for now.

The most important thing Catalist allows the left to do is drive deeper into the pool of extreme left wing Americans who are otherwise unmotivated to actually vote.

Catalist allows customers to identify potential voters on the far ideological fringe, but who are usually unmotivated to vote. Catalist allows the left to then identify issues, concerns, or other lifestyle facts which would permit a customer to motivate the usually unmotivated on that fringe to vote.

Obama won reelection because he drove deeper into his ideological base than any Democrat ever had. His campaign largely ignored the middle and instead used Catalist data to wring out nearly every possible far left vote he could.

Consider this graph below. The x axis represents the ideological spectrum. The y axis represents the likelihood of a particular voter on that spectrum actually registering and turning out to vote. You can see where each campaign in 2012 roughly placed emphasis.

While Romney pivoted to the middle after the primaries and tried to attract moderate and independent voters, Obama used Catalist to create a bigger base. Obama’s message was a leftist message, even during the debates. The idea was to drive turnout on the far left (x axis) and to identify Americans on the far left who would usually be unmotivated to vote.

Catalist gave the campaign the tools to identify them, to understand what matters to them, to find them, and to motivate them. The far left campaign messaging of Obama was not a mistake. It was part of the plan.

Catalist allowed the Obama campaign to send a familiar neighbor knocking on the door of a teacher of special needs kids in a swing state, even if her husband works for one of the largest conservative news outlets.

Catalist is also devastating to Republicans because it sends them on an expensive goose chase to spend gobs of money to target moderates and independents while Democrats turn out their base cheaper, and with more certainty. A “moderate” voter costs more to persuade than a far fringe ideological leftist. Even a usually politically unmotivated welfare recipient is cheaper to get to the polls than a “moderate” and “thoughtful” undecided moderate who speaks in terms of “voting for the candidate on issues and not the party.”

Looking at the graph atop the next page, you can see how targeting the base instead of targeting the middle produces economic efficiencies.


A moderate/independent who is fairly likely to vote might require $1 of campaign spending to produce a successful outcome. Moderates are by their nature harder to persuade to vote a certain way. Yet a leftist with the same propensity to turnout might cost a dime to motivate them to vote, as long as that same voter thinks you share the priorities of the base.

Hence, Mitt Romney spent time and money trying to capture the contemplative middle while Obama used Catalist data to wring out more votes from the far left base. Even worse, at the same time, Romney distanced himself from his easier-to-motivate (and cheaper to get) base.

Romney wouldn’t even go on conservative talk radio, for free.

The graphs above explain why the left is so keen to implement federal laws like Motor Voter which seeks to automatically register voters populating the upper left of the graphs – unmotivated ideological leftists. Motor Voter has a disproportionate reach into the upper left corner of the graphs as compared to the upper right.  Automatic universal voter registration using government databases is the institutional left’s next agenda item.

The policy ramifications for Republicans should be obvious by now. Government policy is fully integrated into the Catalist-driven Obama politics. Instead of moderation, Obama pushes policies which appeal to his far left base. The era of big government and big deficits is back, deliberately.

Catalist gave Obama in 2012 the political tools to fundamentally transform America without electoral consequence. Obama’s opposition was stuck in the pre-Catalist era of less defined, less complete datasets. It was a prescription for political disaster, like horse-mounted soldiers facing tanks.

I came to learn intimately about Catalist through the course of election integrity litigation brought against the State of Indiana. Indiana has been characterized by having multiple counties with more voters on the rolls than people alive. Like Eric Holder before him, when Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller (R) needed an expert to fight against election integrity, he called on someone using Catalist data.

Enter Yale Political Science Professor Eitan D. Hersh. Hersh had been busy helping Eric Holder’s Justice Department attack voter ID in Texas and another state. But when the Indiana attorney general needed a left-leaning professor using the progressive movement’s top data tool to deflect our election integrity litigation, Hersh was the man. Never mind that the use of Catalist to attack Texas voter ID had become a laughingstock.

There is no telling what the taxpayers in Indiana paid Hersh to help keep voter rolls there dirty.

Eitan Hersh is a name every political strategist and GOP consultant should know — if for no other reason than to read his Harvard dissertation describing the internal functioning of Catalist. I did. Anyone can go read it.

If you don’t want to go to Harvard, you can access it online and buy a PDF version here, though I’d prefer Hersh not be enriched any further than Eric Holder and Indiana Attorney General Zoeller have already done.

Hersh was given unparalleled access to the Obama campaign operations and how Catalist was used. His dissertation abstract gives you a taste of what is inside the dissertation:

To understand the role of information in strategic decision-making, I investigate a database containing all registered voters in the United States that is used by actual campaigns for the purpose of voter contact. Three essays relay the findings from this database and from interviews with campaign operatives. The first essay explores strategies for identifying likely partisan supporters. … The second essay explores strategies for identifying persuadable voters. On account of data limitations, the voters that campaigns typically target with persuasion messages are a completely different set of individuals from those who would appear to be undecided, independent, or cross-pressured according to survey measures. The third essay explores the role of racial identifiers that are listed on the public record in eight southern states. When racial data is available, candidates sort the electorate by race, leading to the mobilization of voters whose races are identified and to racial polarization of voters into different parties. The role of information in guiding campaign strategy challenges extant models of political mobilization and identifies important political consequences of the recent and dramatic developments in data availability.

Simply put, Hersh’s deposition describes how to drive deeper into the left wing base, how to identify your unmotivated allies, sometimes with racial cues, and how to use new databases to fundamentally transform America.

Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, was also involved in the election integrity litigation against Indiana for corrupted voter rolls. He told me:

Catalist’s president is the notorious Harold Ickes who, while working at the Clinton White House, became known as Bill Clinton’s “garbage man” because of his involvement in the Clinton fundraising scandals. Nevertheless, he remains close to the Clinton machine and may be one of the most influential leftwing political operatives of the last 30 years. Given Catalist’s partisan and hard Left links, how could any Department of Justice — or, for that matter, Republicans officials in the state of Indiana — rely on it to attack election integrity efforts in federal court?

Fitton is right. Catalist will be fully deployed in the 2016 effort to keep the White House.

But why shouldn’t Republicans simply microtarget unmotivated independents in response? Why not push moderate policies to appeal to those moderate independents who don’t usually vote, and microtarget them?

Remember, getting those moderate voters to vote for you costs exponentially more than motivating ideologues. It will cost $10 to persuade an unmotivated independent while it might cost pennies to mobilize a cultural or ideological partisan.

Some of you reading this might think this is much ado about nothing, because the Republicans can match the power of Catalist. Think again.

When I first approached one political insider about how to dissect Hersh in his upcoming expert deposition some months ago, he understandably could not believe that the Obama campaign would have given an academic writing a dissertation insider access to their data tools and strategies to use them. And therein lies the central mind-block to why the GOP has not matched Catalist.

The power of Catalist is driven by left wing collaboration. All of the Borg-like groups work in unison to feed the database. Meanwhile, the Republicans don’t even have one single unified database. There are three or four separate conservative competitors, perhaps more if you count the RNC’s recent push to create yet another one.

Instead of unified data collaboration, the conservative response is competition between vendors to create their own marketable but inferior version of Catalist. Worse still, these vendors would never dream of consolidating their architecture or sharing their data. That would wreck their business model.

The strength and power of Catalist is based on the huge number of groups feeding it data. Leftist players sacrifice their egos for the larger messianic call of destroying Republicans, obliterating conservatives, and ultimately gutting the Constitution. Non-profit interest groups on the left gladly feed their internal data into Catalist because it helps progressives win, period. They don’t care about profit, glory, connections, or a new car.

As far as I can tell, conservative database models don’t capture anywhere near the level of inputs that Catalist does.

Catalist does not derive its power because it has the insiders imprimatur as the official party-sanctioned database. It derives its power because nobody feeding it data cares about who gets the glory. They have a country to transform.

So pay attention to whether or not the folks in Washington, D.C. understand Catalist, have read Hersh’s deposition, or figured out why Romney lost in 2012. Pay attention to whether Republican polices seemed designed to energize a base, or whether they sound like Democrat-lite. If Republicans and conservatives don’t come to understand Catalist and cooperate to create a credible competitor, we are likely to see more horsemen charging at tanks in the next few presidential elections.

Article printed from Rule of Law: http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams

Obama marks Constitution Day by calling referring to our constitutional rights as “privileges”

Obama marks Constitution Day by calling referring to our constitutional rights as “privileges”

                            Wed, 09/17/2014 - 5:57pm | posted by Jason Pye


Today, September 17, is Constitution Day. Spearheaded by the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), Congress passed a resolution in 2004 as rider to an omnibus spending bill setting aside this particular day to celebrate the ratification of the Constitution, the document that provides the framework of the federal government and the rights protected under the Bill of Rights.

The Constitution has experienced somewhat of a resurgence in the last several years, perhaps because of the polarization of political opinions in the United States as well as attempts by presidents from both parties attempts consume more power for the executive branch. The revelations about the National Security Agency, efforts to censor speech, expand gun control laws are just the tip of the iceberg of attempts to trample the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

In his presidential proclamation marking Constitution Day, President Barack Obama offered some insight into how he views the Bill of Rights. “Our Constitution reflects the values we cherish as a people and the ideals we strive for as a society,” Obama said in the release. “It secures the privileges we enjoy as citizens, but also demands participation, responsibility, and service to our country and to one another.”

Given that this White House is known for its expansive view of executive power, the assertion that the rights guaranteed and protected under the Bill of Rights, the fact that President Obama views these fundamental liberties to be “privileges” isn’t too terribly surprising. After all, President Obama treats the legislative branch — which, again, is supposed to be a co-equal branch of the federal government — as an afterthought as it arbitrarily changes statues and even refuses to enforce laws.

But words matter. To say the rights secured by the Constitution are “privileges” implies that they can be revoked. Let’s put this another way: a high school-aged kid is given the privilege of taking their father’s car out to go hang out with friends, that is until they abuse it by getting caught speeding or into a car accident. The disappointed father would, no doubt, take away the privilege.

Rights and liberties, however, are based on a solid foundation. They can’t be taken away by some paternalistic president. The view of the framers was that the rights protected under the Bill of Rights existed before the formation of the federal government under the Constitution. In short, they were natural rights.

In fact, James Madison believed that a list of specific rights was unnecessary. Thankfully, George Mason and others, to ensure ratification, convinced Madison to come up with proposals, ten of which were passed by Congress and approved by at least three-fifths of the states.

While Obama is the first president (and he won’t be the last) to try to run roughshod over the Constitution and Bill of Rights, his comments are dangerous. They offer much insight into how progressives view your rights, which is to say they’re just privileges that can be revoked at any time some purported emergency arises.

It’s true that Congress and the federal courts have the responsibility to keep the executive branch in check, but, unless Americans begin to take a strong stand against these abuses, thus preventing presidents from treating their rights as mere privileges, they are ostensibly endorsing the slow deconstruction of the very document that makes the United States such a unique experiment.

From the Author of Obamacare (Truely Scary)

Why I Hope to Die at 75

An argument that society and families—and you—will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly

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Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Photos by Jake Chessum

September 17, 2014

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Seventy-five.
That’s how long I want to live: 75 years.
This preference drives my daughters crazy. It drives my brothers crazy. My loving friends think I am crazy. They think that I can’t mean what I say; that I haven’t thought clearly about this, because there is so much in the world to see and do. To convince me of my errors, they enumerate the myriad people I know who are over 75 and doing quite well. They are certain that as I get closer to 75, I will push the desired age back to 80, then 85, maybe even 90.
I am sure of my position. Doubtless, death is a loss. It deprives us of experiences and milestones, of time spent with our spouse and children. In short, it deprives us of all the things we value.
But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.
By the time I reach 75, I will have lived a complete life. I will have loved and been loved. My children will be grown and in the midst of their own rich lives. I will have seen my grandchildren born and beginning their lives. I will have pursued my life’s projects and made whatever contributions, important or not, I am going to make. And hopefully, I will not have too many mental and physical limitations. Dying at 75 will not be a tragedy. Indeed, I plan to have my memorial service before I die. And I don’t want any crying or wailing, but a warm gathering filled with fun reminiscences, stories of my awkwardness, and celebrations of a good life. After I die, my survivors can have their own memorial service if they want—that is not my business.
Let me be clear about my wish. I’m neither asking for more time than is likely nor foreshortening my life. Today I am, as far as my physician and I know, very healthy, with no chronic illness. I just climbed Kilimanjaro with two of my nephews. So I am not talking about bargaining with God to live to 75 because I have a terminal illness. Nor am I talking about waking up one morning 18 years from now and ending my life through euthanasia or suicide. Since the 1990s, I have actively opposed legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. People who want to die in one of these ways tend to suffer not from unremitting pain but from depression, hopelessness, and fear of losing their dignity and control. The people they leave behind inevitably feel they have somehow failed. The answer to these symptoms is not ending a life but getting help. I have long argued that we should focus on giving all terminally ill people a good, compassionate death—not euthanasia or assisted suicide for a tiny minority.
I am talking about how long I want to live and the kind and amount of health care I will consent to after 75. Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible. This has become so pervasive that it now defines a cultural type: what I call the American immortal.
I reject this aspiration. I think this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive. For many reasons, 75 is a pretty good age to aim to stop.

Americans may live longer than their parents, but they are likely to be more incapacitated. Does that sound very desirable? Not to me.

What are those reasons? Let’s begin with demography. We are growing old, and our older years are not of high quality. Since the mid-19th century, Americans have been living longer. In 1900, the life expectancy of an average American at birth was approximately 47 years. By 1930, it was 59.7; by 1960, 69.7; by 1990, 75.4. Today, a newborn can expect to live about 79 years. (On average, women live longer than men. In the United States, the gap is about five years. According to the National Vital Statistics Report, life expectancy for American males born in 2011 is 76.3, and for females it is 81.1.)
In the early part of the 20th century, life expectancy increased as vaccines, antibiotics, and better medical care saved more children from premature death and effectively treated infections. Once cured, people who had been sick largely returned to their normal, healthy lives without residual disabilities. Since 1960, however, increases in longevity have been achieved mainly by extending the lives of people over 60. Rather than saving more young people, we are stretching out old age.
The American immortal desperately wants to believe in the “compression of morbidity.” Developed in 1980 by James F. Fries, now a professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford, this theory postulates that as we extend our life spans into the 80s and 90s, we will be living healthier lives—more time before we have disabilities, and fewer disabilities overall. The claim is that with longer life, an ever smaller proportion of our lives will be spent in a state of decline.
Compression of morbidity is a quintessentially American idea. It tells us exactly what we want to believe: that we will live longer lives and then abruptly die with hardly any aches, pains, or physical deterioration—the morbidity traditionally associated with growing old. It promises a kind of fountain of youth until the ever-receding time of death. It is this dream—or fantasy—that drives the American immortal and has fueled interest and investment in regenerative medicine and replacement organs.
But as life has gotten longer, has it gotten healthier? Is 70 the new 50?

The author at his desk at the University of Pennsylvania. “I think this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive.”

Not quite. It is true that compared with their counterparts 50 years ago, seniors today are less disabled and more mobile. But over recent decades, increases in longevity seem to have been accompanied by increases in disability—not decreases. For instance, using data from the National Health Interview Survey, Eileen Crimmins, a researcher at the University of Southern California, and a colleague assessed physical functioning in adults, analyzing whether people could walk a quarter of a mile; climb 10 stairs; stand or sit for two hours; and stand up, bend, or kneel without using special equipment. The results show that as people age, there is a progressive erosion of physical functioning. More important, Crimmins found that between 1998 and 2006, the loss of functional mobility in the elderly increased. In 1998, about 28 percent of American men 80 and older had a functional limitation; by 2006, that figure was nearly 42 percent. And for women the result was even worse: more than half of women 80 and older had a functional limitation. Crimmins’s conclusion: There was an “increase in the life expectancy with disease and a decrease in the years without disease. The same is true for functioning loss, an increase in expected years unable to function.”

This was confirmed by a recent worldwide assessment of “healthy life expectancy” conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The researchers included not just physical but also mental disabilities such as depression and dementia. They found not a compression of morbidity but in fact an expansion—an “increase in the absolute number of years lost to disability as life expectancy rises.”
How can this be? My father illustrates the situation well. About a decade ago, just shy of his 77th birthday, he began having pain in his abdomen. Like every good doctor, he kept denying that it was anything important. But after three weeks with no improvement, he was persuaded to see his physician. He had in fact had a heart attack, which led to a cardiac catheterization and ultimately a bypass. Since then, he has not been the same. Once the prototype of a hyperactive Emanuel, suddenly his walking, his talking, his humor got slower. Today he can swim, read the newspaper, needle his kids on the phone, and still live with my mother in their own house. But everything seems sluggish. Although he didn’t die from the heart attack, no one would say he is living a vibrant life. When he discussed it with me, my father said, “I have slowed down tremendously. That is a fact. I no longer make rounds at the hospital or teach.” Despite this, he also said he was happy.
As Crimmins puts it, over the past 50 years, health care hasn’t slowed the aging process so much as it has slowed the dying process. And, as my father demonstrates, the contemporary dying process has been elongated. Death usually results from the complications of chronic illness—heart disease, cancer, emphysema, stroke, Alzheimer’s, diabetes.
Take the example of stroke. The good news is that we have made major strides in reducing mortality from strokes. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of deaths from stroke declined by more than 20 percent. The bad news is that many of the roughly 6.8 million Americans who have survived a stroke suffer from paralysis or an inability to speak. And many of the estimated 13 million more Americans who have survived a “silent” stroke suffer from more-subtle brain dysfunction such as aberrations in thought processes, mood regulation, and cognitive functioning. Worse, it is projected that over the next 15 years there will be a 50 percent increase in the number of Americans suffering from stroke-induced disabilities. Unfortunately, the same phenomenon is repeated with many other diseases.
So American immortals may live longer than their parents, but they are likely to be more incapacitated. Does that sound very desirable? Not to me.
The situation becomes of even greater concern when we confront the most dreadful of all possibilities: living with dementia and other acquired mental disabilities. Right now approximately 5 million Americans over 65 have Alzheimer’s; one in three Americans 85 and older has Alzheimer’s. And the prospect of that changing in the next few decades is not good. Numerous recent trials of drugs that were supposed to stall Alzheimer’s—much less reverse or prevent it—have failed so miserably that researchers are rethinking the whole disease paradigm that informed much of the research over the past few decades. Instead of predicting a cure in the foreseeable future, many are warning of a tsunami of dementia—a nearly 300 percent increase in the number of older Americans with dementia by 2050.

The average age at which Nobel Prize–winning physicists make their discovery is 48.

Half of people 80 and older with functional limitations. A third of people 85 and older with Alzheimer’s. That still leaves many, many elderly people who have escaped physical and mental disability. If we are among the lucky ones, then why stop at 75? Why not live as long as possible?
Even if we aren’t demented, our mental functioning deteriorates as we grow older. Age-associated declines in mental-processing speed, working and long-term memory, and problem-solving are well established. Conversely, distractibility increases. We cannot focus and stay with a project as well as we could when we were young. As we move slower with age, we also think slower.
It is not just mental slowing. We literally lose our creativity. About a decade ago, I began working with a prominent health economist who was about to turn 80. Our collaboration was incredibly productive. We published numerous papers that influenced the evolving debates around health-care reform. My colleague is brilliant and continues to be a major contributor, and he celebrated his 90th birthday this year. But he is an outlier—a very rare individual.

American immortals operate on the assumption that they will be precisely such outliers. But the fact is that by 75, creativity, originality, and productivity are pretty much gone for the vast, vast majority of us. Einstein famously said, “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.” He was extreme in his assessment. And wrong. Dean Keith Simonton, at the University of California at Davis, a luminary among researchers on age and creativity, synthesized numerous studies to demonstrate a typical age-creativity curve: creativity rises rapidly as a career commences, peaks about 20 years into the career, at about age 40 or 45, and then enters a slow, age-related decline. There are some, but not huge, variations among disciplines. Currently, the average age at which Nobel Prize–winning physicists make their discovery—not get the prize—is 48. Theoretical chemists and physicists make their major contribution slightly earlier than empirical researchers do. Similarly, poets tend to peak earlier than novelists do. Simonton’s own study of classical composers shows that the typical composer writes his first major work at age 26, peaks at about age 40 with both his best work and maximum output, and then declines, writing his last significant musical composition at 52. (All the composers studied were male.)

This age-creativity relationship is a statistical association, the product of averages; individuals vary from this trajectory. Indeed, everyone in a creative profession thinks they will be, like my collaborator, in the long tail of the curve. There are late bloomers. As my friends who enumerate them do, we hold on to them for hope. It is true, people can continue to be productive past 75—to write and publish, to draw, carve, and sculpt, to compose. But there is no getting around the data. By definition, few of us can be exceptions. Moreover, we need to ask how much of what “Old Thinkers,” as Harvey C. Lehman called them in his 1953 Age and Achievement, produce is novel rather than reiterative and repetitive of previous ideas. The age-creativity curve—especially the decline—endures across cultures and throughout history, suggesting some deep underlying biological determinism probably related to brain plasticity.
We can only speculate about the biology. The connections between neurons are subject to an intense process of natural selection. The neural connections that are most heavily used are reinforced and retained, while those that are rarely, if ever, used atrophy and disappear over time. Although brain plasticity persists throughout life, we do not get totally rewired. As we age, we forge a very extensive network of connections established through a lifetime of experiences, thoughts, feelings, actions, and memories. We are subject to who we have been. It is difficult, if not impossible, to generate new, creative thoughts, because we don’t develop a new set of neural connections that can supersede the existing network. It is much more difficult for older people to learn new languages. All of those mental puzzles are an effort to slow the erosion of the neural connections we have. Once you squeeze the creativity out of the neural networks established over your initial career, they are not likely to develop strong new brain connections to generate innovative ideas—except maybe in those Old Thinkers like my outlier colleague, who happen to be in the minority endowed with superior plasticity.

Maybe mental functions—processing, memory, problem-solving—slow at 75. Maybe creating something novel is very rare after that age. But isn’t this a peculiar obsession? Isn’t there more to life than being totally physically fit and continuing to add to one’s creative legacy?

One university professor told me that as he has aged (he is 70) he has published less frequently, but he now contributes in other ways. He mentors students, helping them translate their passions into research projects and advising them on the balance of career and family. And people in other fields can do the same: mentor the next generation.
Mentorship is hugely important. It lets us transmit our collective memory and draw on the wisdom of elders. It is too often undervalued, dismissed as a way to occupy seniors who refuse to retire and who keep repeating the same stories. But it also illuminates a key issue with aging: the constricting of our ambitions and expectations.
We accommodate our physical and mental limitations. Our expectations shrink. Aware of our diminishing capacities, we choose ever more restricted activities and projects, to ensure we can fulfill them. Indeed, this constriction happens almost imperceptibly. Over time, and without our conscious choice, we transform our lives. We don’t notice that we are aspiring to and doing less and less. And so we remain content, but the canvas is now tiny. The American immortal, once a vital figure in his or her profession and community, is happy to cultivate avocational interests, to take up bird watching, bicycle riding, pottery, and the like. And then, as walking becomes harder and the pain of arthritis limits the fingers’ mobility, life comes to center around sitting in the den reading or listening to books on tape and doing crossword puzzles. And then …
Maybe this is too dismissive. There is more to life than youthful passions focused on career and creating. There is posterity: children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
But here, too, living as long as possible has drawbacks we often won’t admit to ourselves. I will leave aside the very real and oppressive financial and caregiving burdens that many, if not most, adults in the so-called sandwich generation are now experiencing, caught between the care of children and parents. Our living too long places real emotional weights on our progeny.

Mentorship is hugely important. But it also illuminates a key issue with aging: the constricting of our ambitions and expectations.

Unless there has been terrible abuse, no child wants his or her parents to die. It is a huge loss at any age. It creates a tremendous, unfillable hole. But parents also cast a big shadow for most children. Whether estranged, disengaged, or deeply loving, they set expectations, render judgments, impose their opinions, interfere, and are generally a looming presence for even adult children. This can be wonderful. It can be annoying. It can be destructive. But it is inescapable as long as the parent is alive. Examples abound in life and literature: Lear, the quintessential Jewish mother, the Tiger Mom. And while children can never fully escape this weight even after a parent dies, there is much less pressure to conform to parental expectations and demands after they are gone.
Living parents also occupy the role of head of the family. They make it hard for grown children to become the patriarch or matriarch. When parents routinely live to 95, children must caretake into their own retirement. That doesn’t leave them much time on their own—and it is all old age. When parents live to 75, children have had the joys of a rich relationship with their parents, but also have enough time for their own lives, out of their parents’ shadows.
But there is something even more important than parental shadowing: memories. How do we want to be remembered by our children and grandchildren? We wish our children to remember us in our prime. Active, vigorous, engaged, animated, astute, enthusiastic, funny, warm, loving. Not stooped and sluggish, forgetful and repetitive, constantly asking “What did she say?” We want to be remembered as independent, not experienced as burdens.
At age 75 we reach that unique, albeit somewhat arbitrarily chosen, moment when we have lived a rich and complete life, and have hopefully imparted the right memories to our children. Living the American immortal’s dream dramatically increases the chances that we will not get our wish—that memories of vitality will be crowded out by the agonies of decline. Yes, with effort our children will be able to recall that great family vacation, that funny scene at Thanksgiving, that embarrassing faux pas at a wedding. But the most-recent years—the years with progressing disabilities and the need to make caregiving arrangements—will inevitably become the predominant and salient memories. The old joys have to be actively conjured up.
Of course, our children won’t admit it. They love us and fear the loss that will be created by our death. And a loss it will be. A huge loss. They don’t want to confront our mortality, and they certainly don’t want to wish for our death. But even if we manage not to become burdens to them, our shadowing them until their old age is also a loss. And leaving them—and our grandchildren—with memories framed not by our vivacity but by our frailty is the ultimate tragedy.

The author at base camp with two nephews this summer, as the three climbed Mount Kilimanjaro (Courtesy of Ezekiel J. Emanuel)

Seventy-five. That is all I want to live. But if I am not going to engage in euthanasia or suicide, and I won’t, is this all just idle chatter? Don’t I lack the courage of my convictions?

No. My view does have important practical implications. One is personal and two involve policy.
Once I have lived to 75, my approach to my health care will completely change. I won’t actively end my life. But I won’t try to prolong it, either. Today, when the doctor recommends a test or treatment, especially one that will extend our lives, it becomes incumbent upon us to give a good reason why we don’t want it. The momentum of medicine and family means we will almost invariably get it.
My attitude flips this default on its head. I take guidance from what Sir William Osler wrote in his classic turn-of-the-century medical textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine: “Pneumonia may well be called the friend of the aged. Taken off by it in an acute, short, not often painful illness, the old man escapes those ‘cold gradations of decay’ so distressing to himself and to his friends.”
My Osler-inspired philosophy is this: At 75 and beyond, I will need a good reason to even visit the doctor and take any medical test or treatment, no matter how routine and painless. And that good reason is not “It will prolong your life.” I will stop getting any regular preventive tests, screenings, or interventions. I will accept only palliative—not curative—treatments if I am suffering pain or other disability.

Once I have lived to 75, my approach to my health care will completely change. I won’t actively end my life. But I won’t try to prolong it, either.

This means colonoscopies and other cancer-screening tests are out—and before 75. If I were diagnosed with cancer now, at 57, I would probably be treated, unless the prognosis was very poor. But 65 will be my last colonoscopy. No screening for prostate cancer at any age. (When a urologist gave me a PSA test even after I said I wasn’t interested and called me with the results, I hung up before he could tell me. He ordered the test for himself, I told him, not for me.) After 75, if I develop cancer, I will refuse treatment. Similarly, no cardiac stress test. No pacemaker and certainly no implantable defibrillator. No heart-valve replacement or bypass surgery. If I develop emphysema or some similar disease that involves frequent exacerbations that would, normally, land me in the hospital, I will accept treatment to ameliorate the discomfort caused by the feeling of suffocation, but will refuse to be hauled off.
What about simple stuff? Flu shots are out. Certainly if there were to be a flu pandemic, a younger person who has yet to live a complete life ought to get the vaccine or any antiviral drugs. A big challenge is antibiotics for pneumonia or skin and urinary infections. Antibiotics are cheap and largely effective in curing infections. It is really hard for us to say no. Indeed, even people who are sure they don’t want life-extending treatments find it hard to refuse antibiotics. But, as Osler reminds us, unlike the decays associated with chronic conditions, death from these infections is quick and relatively painless. So, no to antibiotics.
Obviously, a do-not-resuscitate order and a complete advance directive indicating no ventilators, dialysis, surgery, antibiotics, or any other medication—nothing except palliative care even if I am conscious but not mentally competent—have been written and recorded. In short, no life-sustaining interventions. I will die when whatever comes first takes me.
As for the two policy implications, one relates to using life expectancy as a measure of the quality of health care. Japan has the third-highest life expectancy, at 84.4 years (behind Monaco and Macau), while the United States is a disappointing No. 42, at 79.5 years. But we should not care about catching up with—or measure ourselves against—Japan. Once a country has a life expectancy past 75 for both men and women, this measure should be ignored. (The one exception is increasing the life expectancy of some subgroups, such as black males, who have a life expectancy of just 72.1 years. That is dreadful, and should be a major focus of attention.) Instead, we should look much more carefully at children’s health measures, where the U.S. lags, and shamefully: in preterm deliveries before 37 weeks (currently one in eight U.S. births), which are correlated with poor outcomes in vision, with cerebral palsy, and with various problems related to brain development; in infant mortality (the U.S. is at 6.17 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, while Japan is at 2.13 and Norway is at 2.48); and in adolescent mortality (where the U.S. has an appalling record—at the bottom among high-income countries).
A second policy implication relates to biomedical research. We need more research on Alzheimer’s, the growing disabilities of old age, and chronic conditions—not on prolonging the dying process.
Many people, especially those sympathetic to the American immortal, will recoil and reject my view. They will think of every exception, as if these prove that the central theory is wrong. Like my friends, they will think me crazy, posturing—or worse. They might condemn me as being against the elderly.
Again, let me be clear: I am not saying that those who want to live as long as possible are unethical or wrong. I am certainly not scorning or dismissing people who want to live on despite their physical and mental limitations. I’m not even trying to convince anyone I’m right. Indeed, I often advise people in this age group on how to get the best medical care available in the United States for their ailments. That is their choice, and I want to support them.

We avoid constantly thinking about the purpose of our lives and the mark we will leave. Is making money, chasing the dream, all worth it?

And I am not advocating 75 as the official statistic of a complete, good life in order to save resources, ration health care, or address public-policy issues arising from the increases in life expectancy. What I am trying to do is delineate my views for a good life and make my friends and others think about how they want to live as they grow older. I want them to think of an alternative to succumbing to that slow constriction of activities and aspirations imperceptibly imposed by aging. Are we to embrace the “American immortal” or my “75 and no more” view?
I think the rejection of my view is literally natural. After all, evolution has inculcated in us a drive to live as long as possible. We are programmed to struggle to survive. Consequently, most people feel there is something vaguely wrong with saying 75 and no more. We are eternally optimistic Americans who chafe at limits, especially limits imposed on our own lives. We are sure we are exceptional.
I also think my view conjures up spiritual and existential reasons for people to scorn and reject it. Many of us have suppressed, actively or passively, thinking about God, heaven and hell, and whether we return to the worms. We are agnostics or atheists, or just don’t think about whether there is a God and why she should care at all about mere mortals. We also avoid constantly thinking about the purpose of our lives and the mark we will leave. Is making money, chasing the dream, all worth it? Indeed, most of us have found a way to live our lives comfortably without acknowledging, much less answering, these big questions on a regular basis. We have gotten into a productive routine that helps us ignore them. And I don’t purport to have the answers.
But 75 defines a clear point in time: for me, 2032. It removes the fuzziness of trying to live as long as possible. Its specificity forces us to think about the end of our lives and engage with the deepest existential questions and ponder what we want to leave our children and grandchildren, our community, our fellow Americans, the world. The deadline also forces each of us to ask whether our consumption is worth our contribution. As most of us learned in college during late-night bull sessions, these questions foster deep anxiety and discomfort. The specificity of 75 means we can no longer just continue to ignore them and maintain our easy, socially acceptable agnosticism. For me, 18 more years with which to wade through these questions is preferable to years of trying to hang on to every additional day and forget the psychic pain they bring up, while enduring the physical pain of an elongated dying process.
Seventy-five years is all I want to live. I want to celebrate my life while I am still in my prime. My daughters and dear friends will continue to try to convince me that I am wrong and can live a valuable life much longer. And I retain the right to change my mind and offer a vigorous and reasoned defense of living as long as possible. That, after all, would mean still being creative after 75.

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Ezekie

Maxwell’s Benghazi Document Story ‘Ring True’

Former State Dept. Official: Details of Maxwell’s Benghazi Document Story ‘Ring True’

Sharyl Attkisson / September 19, 2014



A State Department whistleblower has come forward  to say the details of a former colleague’s account of the sifting of Benghazi-related documents to identify damaging material “ring true.”



The Daily Signal reported Monday on Raymond Maxwell, a former deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who says he observed an unusual after-hours session in a basement operations room of the agency’s headquarters in Washington in October 2012.



Maxwell said a State Department office director told him those present were ordered to separate out any documents related to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on Americans in Benghazi that could prove damaging to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. While he was present, Maxwell said, Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan stopped by.




“Document reviews at State following a significant event are not unheard of,” writes department veteran Peter Van Buren in The American Conservative,  adding that “an affected office needs to recap how it got to where it is.”



Van Buren continues:

Conducting such a review in secret, on a Sunday, with some of the Secretary’s most senior advisors personally overseeing things, is in fact unheard of. The details of Maxwell’s story ring true, the place, the procedures.

In short, he concludes, “I think Ray Maxwell is credible.”

Van Buren, an author and 24-year veteran of the State Department, was himself a whistleblower. He weighs in on Maxwell’s allegations—and the subsequent attempts to discredit him—in a commentary published today.



“People will claim [Maxwell] is nothing more than a disgruntled employee with an agenda. I don’t think that’s true. Because I was once in his place,” Van Buren writes.



Van Buren also addresses efforts to disparage Maxwell and his story by those who point to the fact that he did not go public sooner:

For whistleblowers to go public, there is a calculus of pain and gain, and working it out takes time. You try to go through channels: Congressman Jason Chaffetz [R-Utah] says Maxwell first told lawmakers his full story privately some time ago. Then you wait in hopes the information will come out without you, that someone else might speak up first; you hint at the truth, hoping someone will take the bait, but instead see faux investigations and bleats about ‘it’s just politics’ further bury it.

Van Buren spent a year leading Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq. He blew the whistle on “incompetence and waste of taxpayer money” as well as “near-complete lack of interest by the [State] Department.”



“In my case, I was ignorant of what would happen once I blew the whistle,” Van Buren adds. “Ray Maxwell had examples to learn from. He likely calculated he needed to securely retire from State before taking Team Clinton head-on.”



After he wrote a book exposing what he saw, Van Buren recalls, “my security clearance was pulled; my case was sent to the Department of Justice for prosecution; I was frog-marched out of my office and forbidden to enter any State Department facility; I was placed on a Secret Service watch list as a potential threat to Mrs. Clinton; the pension I earned over a long career was threatened.”



He continues:

There was a two-year gap between much of what I saw in Iraq and my public coming out. The same was true for [Edward] Snowden and other whistleblowers. You don’t just wake up one morning and decide to turn your own life, and that of your family, upside down, risking financial ruin, public shaming and possibly jail time. It is a process, not an event. You have to wonder what your fate will be once the media grows bored with your story, how far your actions will follow you. Fear travels with you on your journey of conscience.

Mills, Sullivan and Clinton offered no comment on Maxwell’s allegations. The State Department this week did not interview Maxwell to investigate details, and instead responded by saying the Accountability Review Board had unfettered and direct access to State Department people and documents.



Van Buren concludes his commentary:

Checks of State Department entry and exit records and room use requests should establish the basic facts. Proving what happened at that document review will be much, much harder and will focus in large part on Maxwell’s own credibility.

Is Maxwell a disgruntled employee with an agenda? Possibly, but whistleblowers act on conscience, not revenge; the cost is too high for that, and in this day revenge is available much cheaper via a leak or as an unnamed source. Going public and disgruntlement often coincide but are not necessarily causally connected. Knowing the right thing to do is easier than summoning the courage and aligning one’s life to step up and do it.

I think Ray Maxwell is credible. I don’t think his timing suggests he is not. We’ll see, paraphrasing Clinton’s own words on Benghazi, if it really matters anymore, and what difference it does make.

Our Troops Have Work To Do Before Acting As Red Cross

September 16, 2014

Our Troops Have Work To Do Before Acting As Red Cross

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Boots On The Ground: The president declares that ground troops are a non-option against the Islamic State, then orders 3,000 troops to Africa as a surrogate Red Cross. The U.S. military should be too busy for that.



Operation United Assistance — that's the big new war effort against, um, Ebola. Ayatollah Ebola? Who is that, IS's chief mullah?



Radical Islam may be a disease that must be eradicated, but the president who promised the Democratic Party's base he would end wars has decided we can't even consider committing ground forces to combat the latest, terrifying outbreak of it in Iraq and Syria.



We can, however, have our men and women in uniform coordinate international relief efforts in the Third World against a virus.



Ebola is a serious threat, and our military can and often has engaged in humanitarian activities abroad. But with our forces spread thin and under strain in the Mideast, and with this president shrinking the U.S. Army to pre-World War II levels and even scrapping a whole class of Air Force attack jets, one wonders if the commander in chief is demoting the U.S. military to a global EMT squad.



The decision to send thousands of troops to Liberia to combat Ebola comes after public pressure from Doctors Without Borders and other groups.



But the president should be more concerned with America's superpower status and ability to wield power than our image as globetrotting do-gooder. Otherwise there will ultimately be a lot more corpses than even the hundreds of thousands in Africa now at risk of succumbing to the deadly virus.

The so-called coalition we are depending on to "degrade and ultimately destroy" IS may well let us down in the end, if not sooner. Syrian rebels, for instance, have reportedly made a cease-fire deal with IS, and Islamofascist Iran — surprise, surprise — hasn't accepted under-the-table U.S. overtures to help us, even though they're Shiite and the IS is Sunni.



So our forces may very well have a very big, ugly job to do in Iraq and Syria. Are they going to have their hands full instead airlifting medical supplies?



This president, who claims to hate theatricality and photo-ops, visited the Centers For Disease Control to be briefed by medical experts.



Why not just read the briefing, as he usually does in the case of his Daily Intelligence Briefing?



Obama doesn't seem to like the personal presence of military experts wearing medals and brass, who might throw some informed disagreement at him about his approach against U.S. adversaries around the world.



But he's apparently all too happy to fly to Atlanta and hear a bunch of global health bureaucrats outline how to spend billions more dollars of U.S. taxpayer money on the other side of the world.



This president seems to believe his own myth.



Osama may be dead, but that doesn't mean our military's next job should be Ebola on the assumption the global war on terror has been won. The emergence of the Islamic State was a consequence of withdrawn U.S. power, and that is where that power is needed the most now. Not in Africa as a Red Cross auxiliary.

The Great Unraveling

SEPT. 15, 2014



It was the time of unraveling. Long afterward, in the ruins, people asked: How could it happen?



It was a time of beheadings. With a left-handed sawing motion, against a desert backdrop, in bright sunlight, a Muslim with a British accent cut off the heads of two American journalists and a British aid worker. The jihadi seemed comfortable in his work, unhurried. His victims were broken. Terror is theater. Burning skyscrapers, severed heads: The terrorist takes movie images of unbearable lightness and gives them weight enough to embed themselves in the psyche.



It was a time of aggression. The leader of the largest nation on earth pronounced his country encircled, even humiliated. He annexed part of a neighboring country, the first such act in Europe since 1945, and stirred up a war on further land he coveted. His surrogates shot down a civilian passenger plane. The victims, many of them Europeans, were left to rot in the sun for days. He denied any part in the violence, like a puppeteer denying that his puppets’ movements have any connection to his. He invoked the law the better to trample on it. He invoked history the better to turn it into farce. He reminded humankind that the idiom fascism knows best is untruth so grotesque it begets unreason.






It was a time of breakup. The most successful union in history, forged on an island in the North Sea in 1707, headed toward possible dissolution — not because it had failed (refugees from across the seas still clamored to get into it), nor even because of new hatreds between its peoples. The northernmost citizens were bored. They were disgruntled. They were irked, in some insidious way, by the south and its moneyed capital, an emblem to them of globalization and inequality. They imagined they had to control their National Health Service in order to save it even though they already controlled it through devolution and might well have less money for its preservation (not that it was threatened in the first place) as an independent state. The fact that the currency, the debt, the revenue, the defense, the solvency and the European Union membership of such a newborn state were all in doubt did not appear to weigh much on a decision driven by emotion, by urges, by a longing to be heard in the modern cacophony — and to heck with the day after. If all else failed, oil would come to the rescue (unless somebody else owned it or it just ran out).

It was a time of weakness. The most powerful nation on earth was tired of far-flung wars, its will and treasury depleted by absence of victory. An ungrateful world could damn well police itself. The nation had bridges to build and education systems to fix. Civil wars between Arabs could fester. Enemies might even kill other enemies, a low-cost gain. Middle Eastern borders could fade; they were artificial colonial lines on a map. Shiite could battle Sunni, and Sunni Shiite, there was no stopping them. Like Europe’s decades-long religious wars, these wars had to run their course. The nation’s leader mockingly derided his own “wan, diffident, professorial” approach to the world, implying he was none of these things, even if he gave that appearance. He set objectives for which he had no plan. He made commitments he did not keep. In the way of the world these things were noticed. Enemies probed. Allies were neglected, until they were needed to face the decapitators who talked of a Caliphate and called themselves a state. Words like “strength” and “resolve” returned to the leader’s vocabulary. But the world was already adrift, unmoored by the retreat of its ordering power. The rule book had been ripped up.



It was a time of hatred. Anti-Semitic slogans were heard in the land that invented industrialized mass murder for Europe’s Jews. Frightened European Jews removed mezuzahs from their homes. Europe’s Muslims felt the ugly backlash from the depravity of the decapitators, who were adept at Facebooking their message. The fabric of society frayed. Democracy looked quaint or outmoded beside new authoritarianisms. Politicians, haunted by their incapacity, played on the fears of their populations, who were device-distracted or under device-driven stress. Dystopia was a vogue word, like utopia in the 20th century. The great rising nations of vast populations held the fate of the world in their hands but hardly seemed to care.