The Fight for Unplanned Parenthood, Collins, Gail, Sep 19, 2015

Collins, Gail

Sep 19, 2015

 Planned Parenthood! Government shutdown!

Anti-abortion politicians are in an uproar over videos that supposedly show Planned Parenthood representatives negotiating on prices for tissue from aborted fetuses. Carly Fiorina was passionate about the subject in this week's Republican debate. Nothing she said was accurate, but nobody's perfect.

The House Judiciary Committee has been investigating the matter with lawyerly precision, starting with a hearing titled: "Planned Parenthood Exposed: Examining the Horrific Abortion Practices at the Nation's Largest Abortion Provider." In a further effort to offer balance and perspective, the committee did not invite Planned Parenthood to testify.

(Coming soon: The House Committee on Energy and Commerce prepares to welcome Pope Francis with a hearing on "Papal Fallibility: Why He's Totally, Completely and Utterly Off Base About Global Warming.")

Planned Parenthood gets about $500 million a year from the federal government, mainly in reimbursements for treating Medicaid patients. Now the House Freedom Caucus, which specializes in threatening to shut down the government, has announced that its members won't vote for any spending bill unless the money is eliminated.

At Wednesday's debate, Jeb Bush issued a popular Republican call for transferring the money to other "community-based organizations" that provide women's health services. "That's the way you do this is you improve the condition for people," he said. As only Jeb Bush can.

You may recall that Bush made a similar suggestion earlier in the campaign, in which he added -- to his lasting regret -- "although I'm not sure we need half a billion dollars for women's health issues."

"I misspoke," the former governor of Florida said later. Well, that does seem to happen a lot. But do you think it was really a slip of the tongue? Or are there other services Planned Parenthood provides that Bush would be happy to get rid of as well? He did once write a book that tackled the subject of how to reduce abortions without ever mentioning the word "contraception."

This leads us to an important question about the Planned Parenthood debate: Are the people who want to put it out of business just opposed to the abortions (which don't receive federal funds), or are they against family planning, period?

"I'm telling you, it's family planning," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a phone interview. "They decided that was their target long ago."

Let's look at the even larger question: Can Congress really just move the Planned Parenthood money to other health care providers? Besides family planning services, Planned Parenthood offers everything from breast exams to screening for sexually transmitted infections. Many of its patients live in poor or rural areas without a lot of other options.

Another move-the-money presidential candidate is Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana -- he's the one issuing round-the-clock insults to Donald Trump in the desperate hope of attracting a little attention.

Jindal cut off $730,000 in Medicaid reimbursements to his state's two Planned Parenthood clinics, even though neither offers abortion services. They do, however, provide thousands of women with health care, including screening for sexually transmitted infections -- a terrible problem in some parts of the state.

No big deal. When the issue went to court, Jindal's administration provided a list of more than 2,000 other places where Planned Parenthood's patients could get care.

"It strikes me as extremely odd that you have a dermatologist, an audiologist, a dentist who are billing for family planning services," responded the judge.

Whoops. It appeared that the list-makers had overestimated a tad, and the number of alternate providers was actually more like 29. None of which had the capacity to take on a flood of additional patients.

When Planned Parenthood leaves town, bad things follow. Ask the county in Indiana that drove out its clinic, which happened to be the only place in the area that offered H.I.V. testing. That was in 2013; in March the governor announced a "public health emergency" due to the spike in H.I.V. cases.

Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University, studied what happened when Texas blocked Planned Parenthood grants and tried to move the money to other providers. Even when there were other clinics in an area, she said, "they were overbooked with their own patients. What happened in Texas was the amount of family planning services dropped. And the next thing that happened, of course, was that unplanned pregnancies began to rise."

If an elected official wants to try to drive Planned Parenthood out of business, there are two honest options: Announce that first you're going to invest a ton of new taxpayer money in creating real substitutes, or shrug your shoulders and tell the world that you're fine with cutting off health services to some of your neediest constituents.

If you get heat, you can always say you misspoke.

Republicans Talk the Talk, Gail Collins, Sep 17, 2015

Collins, Gail

 Sep 17, 2015

 Our national attention span is ... short. The Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday was ... long. Really, if you throw in the earlier loser debate, it was the longest ever.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates would go on for three hours. But that was back when in many towns, the most exciting public activity of the year was pole-raising.

Are people going to remember the shallow, sassy Donald Trump from the first half-hour? ("I wrote 'The Art of the Deal.' I say not in a braggadocio's way I've made billions and billions of dollars.")

Or the middle-section Trump who clearly didn't have a clue about how to critique President Obama's Syrian policy? ("Somehow he just doesn't have courage. There's something missing from our president.")

And then there was the completely, unbelievably irresponsible Trump of the finale who claimed he knew people whose daughter got autism from a vaccine shot. (This happened, he said, to "people that work for me just the other day.")

Remember when the vaccination issue destroyed Michele Bachmann's political career? One can only hope.

Of course everyone wanted to hear Jeb Bush take on the front-runner. Smackdown! Bush got his opportunity very early. Where would he go? Immigration? Taxes? Foreign affairs?

Bush accused Trump of giving him campaign donations in order to get casino gambling in Florida.

"Totally false," said Trump. "I promise if I wanted it, I would have gotten it."

Do you think that's what Bush was practicing over the last couple of weeks? There were six or seven people on the stage who sounded more forceful than he did. A recent poll in Florida suggested that only 52 percent of Florida Republicans want their former governor to continue running for president. At times on Wednesday, that seemed like overenthusiasm.

Bush perked up a little in the middle, when he volunteered that he'd smoked marijuana in his youth. Then at the end, when he was asked what woman he'd like to see on the 10-dollar bill, he said ... Margaret Thatcher.

Nobody wanted to deal with the global warming issue. Virtually everybody made up a Planned Parenthood scenario that never existed. Ah, Republicans ...

And in other activities, Carly Fiorina managed to yet again drop the name "my good friend ... Bibi Netanyahu." Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin repeated his previous debate trick of vanishing entirely into the scenery. Walker's poll numbers are vanishing, too, and it appears his only playing card is to remind people that he fought against public employee unions. Lately he's been desperately upping the anti-union ante so much that his next step would have to be demanding that federal employees be prohibited from talking with one another outside of work.

Marco Rubio -- remember Marco Rubio? The senator who vanished all summer except the time he hit the kid in the head with a football? He definitely looked rested.

Ben Carson, at one point, appeared to be accusing Trump of socialism.

Chris Christie did pretty well. Too bad he's such a terrible governor. New Jersey would rather have another traffic crisis at the George Washington Bridge than vote again for Chris Christie.

What do you think it is about governors in this race? Florida is deeply unenthusiastic about Jeb Bush, Wisconsin seems to hate Scott Walker, and if Louisiana had a chance to get its hands on Bobby Jindal, God knows what would happen.

The debate went on for so long it was a wonder no one fainted. And think about the viewers who made it all the way from the first segment -- the one where the CNN preview featured a zipper at the bottom of the screen announcing, "PATAKI ARRIVES AT DEBATE HALL."

"The first four questions are about Donald Trump!" former Gov. George Pataki complained. Senator Lindsey Graham repeatedly slid in the fact that his parents ran a bar and a poolroom. Graham insists he's really enjoying himself, although when someone keeps saying "I'm running because I think the world is falling apart," it's sort of a downer.

Former Senator Rick Santorum and Governor Jindal tried so hard to break through the barrier of national indifference they sounded like rabid otters.

Yes, some political junkies watched Republicans debating for almost five hours Wednesday. This should be a message to the Democrats. Right now the party is engaged in a fight about whether its schedule of three debates in 2015 is too puny. There are a number of democratic nations in the world where you could easily overcome this argument by pointing out that the election is not until 2016.

But the American people are fine with more debates. Honest, there can be one every night as long as the American people are not actually forced to watch them. It could be a kind of endurance contest. Last person standing gets the nomination.

Iran Deal Report Card, Friedman, Thomas L, Sep 16, 2015

Friedman, Thomas L

Sep 16, 2015

The Iran nuclear deal is now sealed -- from Washington's end. But since this has been one of America's most important foreign policy shifts in the last four decades, it's worth looking back and grading the performance of the key players.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Grade: A.

His prediction last week that Israel won't be around in "25 years" was perfectly timed to complicate President Obama's effort to get the deal through Congress. Khamenei is a bad guy. When I asked a Middle East expert friend to explain Khamenei's behavior, he invoked a Yiddish curse on the Iranian: "May all his teeth fall out, except the ones that hurt."

But he's also a clever guy. Through this deal Khamenei gets Iran out from under crippling sanctions, which his people want, by pushing the breakout time for Iran to make a nuclear bomb from two months to a year -- for 15 years -- but getting the world to bless Iran's "peaceful" nuclear enrichment program, even though it cheated its way there. And he's done it all while giving his hard-line base the feeling that he's still actually against this deal and his negotiators the feeling that he's for it. So all his options are open, depending on how the deal goes.

Hat's off, Ali, you're good. When I sell my house, could I give you a call?

But here's a note to his parents: "Ali got an A, but he has a tendency to get cocky. He is confident that he can pull off this deal without any transformation in Iran's domestic politics. I suggest you buy him a good biography of Mikhail Gorbachev."

Dick Cheney. Grade: F.

I cite Cheney because his opposition to the deal, which he's been peddling along with a new book, was utterly dishonest, but in a way that summed up much of the knee-jerk Republican opposition: This is a bad deal because Obama was a wimp.

No, this deal is what it is because it reflects the balance of power, and the key factor in that balance is that the Iranians came to believe America would never use force to eliminate their nuclear program. But that's not all on Obama. Republicans, and Cheney personally, played a big role in the loss of U.S. credibility to threaten Iran with force.

After briefing Congress on Sept. 10, 2007, Gen. David Petraeus told Fox News that Iran was supporting and directing Iraqi Shiite insurgents who have "carried out violent acts against our forces, Iraqi forces and innocent civilians." Iran was cited for making specially shaped roadside bombs responsible for killing hundreds of U.S. troops. Yet, even though our commanders said that publicly, their bosses -- George W. Bush and Dick Cheney -- refused to ever order retaliation against Iranian targets. Iran noticed.

Ditto on nukes. As Peter Beinart wrote for The Atlantic last week, Cheney stopped by "Fox News Sunday" to bash Obama's nuclear deal, "but moderator Chris Wallace, to his credit, wanted to ask Cheney about his own failings on Iran. On the Bush administration's watch, Wallace noted, Iran's centrifuges for enriching uranium 'went from zero to 5,000.' Cheney protested, declaring that, 'That happened on Obama's watch and not on our watch.' But Wallace held his ground. 'No, no, no,' he insisted. 'By 2009, they were at 5,000.' Cheney paused for an instant, muttered, 'right,' and went back to his talking points."

Note to his parents: "Dick has a problem telling the truth, and he's not alone. Some G.O.P. critiques of this deal should be looked at, but they'll never be taken seriously if the party isn't straight about its own role in our loss of deterrence vis-à-vis Iran."

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Grade C.

No one had more impact in getting the world to impose sanctions and take Iran's nuclear threat seriously than Netanyahu. But his reckless spat with Obama, which went beyond substance to openly endorsing Obama's G.O.P. rivals and colluding with G.O.P. House leaders to address Congress -- without the president's support -- hurt him, Israel and the deal.

Had Bibi hugged Obama, he could have made Israel effectively the sixth party in the P-5 side of negotiations with Iran and stiffened every spine. Instead, Netanyahu marginalized Israel. And by calling elections in the middle of it all, and forming a far-right cabinet with extremist Jewish settlers, Netanyahu is playing right into Iran's hands: Iran wants a one-state solution, where Israel never leaves the West Bank and is in permanent conflict with Palestinians and Muslims, so Iran can better delegitimize and isolate Israel.

Note to Netanyahu's parents: "Bibi won't be punished for any of his mistakes; domestic U.S. politics will ensure that. But beware: That will only increase the odds that he'll lead Israel into a permanent, corrosive occupation of the West Bank, make support for Israel an increasingly Republican cause and lose the next generation of American Jews."

President Obama. Grade: I (Incomplete).

Note to Obama's parents: "This deal makes sense; it can keep Iran away from a bomb. But Barack should go to bed every night for the next 15 years worrying whether Iran is living up to it. That's the best way to ensure that he, his party and his successors will stay vigilant and put in place an effective deterrence to Iran ever building a bomb. I hope he gets an A, but only history can give it to him."

The Pyramid Problem

Nocera, Joe

Sep 15, 2015

"I have nothing for you," said Frank Dorman, a spokesman for the Federal Trade Commission. "Lots of reporters have asked that question. Our final response is, We're not going to answer it."

What had I asked that was so sensitive that the F.T.C. wouldn't respond? I had requested that the agency explain what distinguished an illegal "pyramid scheme" from a legal multilevel marketing company.

What had prompted my question were two recent events. In late August, the F.T.C. had gotten an injunction issued against a multilevel marketing company called Vemma Nutrition, claiming it was in fact a pyramid scheme.

And last week, Fortune magazine published a lengthy story by Roger Parloff about William Ackman's nearly three-year battle to force the government to make the same declaration about Herbalife. The company, of course, has fought back hard against the hedge fund manager's allegations, insisting that its business practices are above board.

Indeed, the F.T.C.'s move against Vemma has caused both sides in the Herbalife battle to claim vindication. Although the F.T.C. has been investigating Herbalife for some 17 months, Timothy S. Ramey, a stock analyst and Herbalife bull, raised his price target for the company, saying Vemma's business model was clearly different from Herbalife's. Meanwhile, Ackman prepared a 29-slide deck with side-by-side comparisons of all the ways, in his view at least, Herbalife's business model was exactly like Vemma's.

So which is it?

As Parloff notes in his article, "The Siege of Herbalife," there is no law defining a pyramid scheme, nor are there even any regulations on the books. The simple common-sense definition is that a pyramid scheme is a business in which recruits make a payment for the right to recruit others into the network, and whose revenues are more dependent on recruitment than on selling a product.

But it turns out to be so much more complicated. In 1979, the F.T.C., after investigating Amway, a multilevel marketing company with a vast product line, decided that the company's business model passed muster -- even though recruitment was at the heart of it -- because it claimed to take certain steps that (among other things) supposedly showed that its recruits were selling the company's products to real customers, not just to other recruits. Very quickly, other multilevel marketing companies adopted the "Amway rules" to stay on the right side of the F.T.C.

Yet the Amway rules have never been codified into regulation -- they're really more like suggestions -- nor have they ever been proved to mitigate the harm pyramid schemes do in taking advantage of recruits or lying to them about the potential to get rich. (A vast majority of those who sign up for pyramid schemes lose money, sometimes lots of money.)

For a while, the courts and the F.T.C. seemed to say that a truer test of a pyramid scheme was how much of its products was bought outside its recruitment network (meaning they had real customers who were not involved in the pyramid) versus how much was bought by those inside the network, who were buying precisely to remain part of the network.

But in a recent court decision involving a pyramid scheme called BurnLounge, the appeals court ruled that it didn't really matter whether the customer was inside or outside the network, and that the test was actually whether a company's "primary" purpose involved recruiting rather than "meaningful opportunities for retail sales."

William Keep, dean of the College of New Jersey's School of Business, and a pyramid scheme critic, told Bloomberg earlier this year that "in terms of sending clear signals to the industry, the F.T.C. has done worse than nothing since 1979. It sends confusing signals that have in no way helped us understand how to identify a multilevel marketing company that may be a pyramid scheme."

In the Herbalife dispute, this lack of federal guidelines animates much of the controversy.

Ackman says Herbalife is a pyramid scheme because the only way people can make any money is by recruiting others, not by selling the company's protein shakes. Herbalife says its business model is on the up and up because it is selling a real product to consumers who sign up more to get product discounts than to become part of a recruiting network. Parloff, after months of investigation, came down more on Herbalife's side than Ackman's, though in truth, that's just his best guess. The F.T.C. wouldn't talk to him, either.

"Here we are three years into [the Herbalife battle] and it's no clearer than it was at the beginning," Keep told me when we spoke. If the government had rules about where the line was between an illegal pyramid scheme and a legal multilevel marketing company, there wouldn't be any such dispute. It's ridiculous that we have to guess what's illegal.

The F.T.C.'s refusal to define a pyramid scheme -- and to act aggressively on that definition -- is a dereliction of duty.

The Pope's Marriage Endgame

Douthat, Ross

Sep 13, 2015

IT'S been 18 months since Pope Francis invited Cardinal Walter Kasper to raise anew the argument that divorced and remarried Catholics should be allowed to receive communion. That invitation touched off a civil war within the church's hierarchy, pitting cardinal against cardinal, theologian against theologian; the conflict has reverberated across books, speeches, and op-ed pages, and it's dominated the church's synod on the family, whose second meeting looms this fall.

It's clear that this was all intentional: That Francis wanted a big internal argument over marriage and communion, that he deliberately started this civil war.

The question that remains unanswered, though, is how the pope intends to finish it.

Ever since last fall, Vatican tea-leaf readers have been busy, looking for signs that Kasper might be falling out of favor, or alternatively, for evidence that Francis might be stacking the synod's deck in favor of communion for the remarried.

Now, though, the pope has actually made a major move on marriage. He's changing canon law governing annulments, making it much easier for divorced Catholics to have their first marriage declared invalid, null and void.

The changes do not merely streamline the existing annulment process, as many expected, by removing a mandatory review of each decision. They promise a fast-track option, to be implemented at the discretion of local bishops, that would allow annulments to be granted in no more than 45 days if both parties consent and certain personal factors are involved. Since that list of factors seems capacious and varied, in effect the pope is offering bishops the chance to expedite most annulment petitions involving consenting ex-spouses, without fear of rebuke from Rome.

This is a major liberalization of the church's rules, probably the most significant of Francis' pontificate to date. In the United States, home to about half the world's annulments, the process already errs on the side of the petitioners, but even in the U.S. the path is lengthy and rigorous; it's just that the American Catholic Church has the resources and personnel to keep the wheels moving. Whereas the new policy might actually make the process easier than secular divorce, depending on what individual bishops choose to do.

What the new rules do not do, however, is explicitly change the church's teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, in the way that admitting the remarried to communion absent an annulment would. This may seem like theological hair-splitting, but from the point of view of Catholic unity it's crucial. Fast-tracking annulments weakens the credibility of Catholic doctrine, in both implication and effect. But it does not formally reverse the church's teaching about the nature of marriage and communion.

Which is why annulment reform has long been seen as a possible compromise between the two sides of this Catholic civil war. What Francis has done is clearly a liberal move, more liberal than I expected. But it's still not the wider opening on sex and marriage that many progressive Catholics sought, since it doesn't imply (as Kasper's proposal does) that cohabiting and same-sex couples -- and, in African societies, the polygamous -- might also be welcomed to communion. And while it gives conservative Catholics grounds for dismay and critique, it doesn't directly undercut belief in the pope's infallibility or the permanence of doctrine.

But what does it mean that Francis has made this move pre-emptively, before the next half of the synod begins? Perhaps, as the veteran Vaticanista John Allen suggests, he wants to dial down the synod's temperature, avoid more pitched battles over Kasper's proposal, and create "space for other issues to emerge." This seems plausible, especially since the new rules address many of the cases that presumably made the Kasper proposal appealing in the first place.

At the same time, advocates of opening communion more directly aren't obviously giving up the fight -- and their ranks still include many of Francis' friends and allies, in his own Jesuit order and the hierarchy. From the liberal perspective, the new annulment rules may simply move the goal posts farther in their direction, setting up a future settlement that's even more favorable to their ambitions.

For instance: They might hope the annulment ruling's emphasis on the local bishop's authority would be extended to issues of sexuality generally -- that Francis, in a post-synod document, would avoid overtly endorsing communion for people in irregular situations, but use language that makes it clear to bishops that they need fear no repercussions if they go the liberal way. (Indeed, by tolerating a German hierarchy in open revolt on these issues, the pope is effectively doing this already. )

What this liberal-friendly settlement wouldn't do, however, is actually settle anything for the church. Instead, it would harden the church's existing divisions, with increasingly divergent Catholicisms in different parishes, dioceses, and countries.

Which remains the great danger of Francis' current course. He may have planned to start a civil war and then cleverly resolve it. But he could end up making that conflict more enduring, a split that widens and a wound that doesn't heal.