The New York Times gives its take on the latest NSA controversy:
We are not reassured by the often-heard explanation that everyone spies on everyone else all the time. We are not advocating a return to 1929 when Secretary of State Henry Stimson banned the decryption of diplomatic cables because “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” But there has long been an understanding that international spying was done in pursuit of a concrete threat to national security.
That Chancellor Merkel’s cellphone conversations could fall under that umbrella is an outgrowth of the post-9/11 decision by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that everyone is the enemy, and that anyone’s rights may be degraded in the name of national security. That led to Abu Ghraib, torture at the secret C.I.A. prisons, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, grave harm to international relations, and the dragnet approach to surveillance revealed by the Snowden leaks.
Dana Milbank focuses on President Obama and the information he is (or isn't) getting from various agencies:
On Sunday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that he didn’t learn until this summer that the National Security Agency had been bugging the phones of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other world leaders for nearly five years. That followed by a few days a claim by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that Obama didn’t know about problems with the HealthCare.gov Web site before the rest of the world learned of them after the Oct. 1 launch.
It stretches credulity to think that the United States was spying on world leaders without the president’s knowledge, or that he was blissfully unaware of huge technical problems that threatened to undermine his main legislative achievement. But on issues including the IRS targeting flap and the Justice Department’s use of subpoenas against reporters, White House officials have frequently given a variation on this theme. [...]
On one level, it would be reassuring — and much more credible — if the White House admitted that Obama is more in the loop than he has let on. On another level, it would be disconcerting: Is it better that he didn’t know about his administration’s missteps — or that he knew about them and didn’t stop them?
Meanwhile,
Eugene Robinson focuses instead on the out-of-control NSA:
Let’s get this straight: The National Security Agency (NSA) snooped on the cellphone conversations of German Chancellor Angela Merkel? Perhaps for as long as a decade? And President Obama didn’t know a thing about it?
Either somebody’s lying or Obama needs to acknowledge that the NSA, in its quest for omniscience beyond anything Orwell could have imagined, is simply out of control. [...]
To me, all this is consistent with the NSA’s apparent goal of knowing, basically, everything. The agency collects information as massively and indiscriminately as possible on the theory that if you assemble a database of all the world’s communications, the few you seek — those involving terrorists — will be in there somewhere.
This is not just a massive invasion of privacy that the people of France, Spain and other countries understandably resent. It’s also a mistake.
On health insurance reform, Jonathan Chait takes apart a critique of Obamacare by Suzanne Sommers that appeared in the WSJ:
In addition to offering her “down and dirty” advice for retirees, Somers has strong views on socialism:
And then there is another consideration: It’s the dark underbelly of the Affordable Care Act reminiscent of what Lenin and Churchill both said. Lenin: “Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.” Churchill: “Control your citizens’ health care and you control your citizens.”
Unsurprisingly, Lenin never said that line — it’s a decades-old right-wing fabrication. The more curious line is the Churchill quote. It’s almost certainly fake, too; it does not appear in the LexisNexis database or in Google. Unless Somers has done original archival work on Churchill, she seems to have fabricated that quote on her own, or possibly received it via chain e-mail.
Erik Wemple cries foul on the news coverage of the Affordable Care Act, correctly pointing out that many of the stories claiming skyhigh jumps in insurance rates don't take into account the subsidies which make insurance affordable for most and the fact that those people are getting much better insurance when they switch over from catastrophic, rip-off plans:
[N]ews organizations that skim the country for cases-in-point on this health-care transition have an obligation to compare similar fruits. Even though Barrette would prefer to keep her current plan, more detail on what that plan provides vis-a-vis the offerings of the new plan is a non-optional component of coverage. A middling hospital stay could well have bankrupted Barrette under her current insurance. But don’t rely on “Fox & Friends” to belabor that dimension of the story.
Aaron E. Carroll, professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine and the director of its Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research, writes at CNN that the GOP attacks on the Affordable Care Act are hypocritical:
There have been books, webinars and meetings explaining how to sabotage the implementation of Obamacare. There have been campaigns trying to persuade young adults not to use the exchanges. It is, therefore, somewhat ironic that many of the same people who have been part of all of this obstructionism seem so "upset" by the fact that people can't easily use the exchanges. For goodness sake, the government was shut down just a few weeks ago because some of the same people who are now bemoaning poorly functioning websites were determined to see that not one dime went to Obamacare.
Lest you think I'm defending this month's rollout, I encourage you to review my last article here. I still maintain that the administration has had a failure in management in overseeing and reporting on progress towards October 1. But I'm also sympathetic that they've had a hard job to do. I would like to see this go better. I'd like to see millions more get insurance. I'd like to see the law of the land function as well as it can, and if it doesn't, I'd like to see Congress continue to amend it to make it work better. I'd like a better health care system.
What I cannot ignore, however, are the many people who actively worked to see implementation fail now get the vapors over its poor start. The truth is, they got what they wanted. A victory lap is somewhat warranted, not concern-trolling.