Scott Spiegel

With the news that Frank Rich and Bob Herbert have left The New York Times, the selection of my 20 free Times articles a month couldn’t be less strongly affected if Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd decided to quit.

Recently John Gruber of Daring Fireball deconstructed the imbecilic, overly complicated pricing structure the non-business-adept Times has spent a year-and-a-half and tens of millions of dollars devising to undergird its new digital subscription plan.

The Times’ business model, in addition to being extraordinarily confusing, includes the following giant loophole: “Readers who come to Times articles through links from search engines, blogs and social media will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit.”

So if you find a story on the Times site that looks worthwhile (suspend your disbelief for a moment), but you’ve reached your monthly limit, you can just copy the title, paste it in a search engine, and click on it from a site that links to it.

Admittedly, this is too much work for most people to bother to find out, say, Dowd’s opinion on the rise of Mormons in popular culture, but some tenacious fans will undoubtedly make the effort.

Perhaps The Times hopes its free backdoor policy will lead more social media outlets to link to their articles.  Maybe they’re afraid they won’t easily be able to regulate access from third-party sources.  But either way, doesn’t this aspect of their plan defeat the purpose of limiting content in order to make people buy subscriptions?

All articles from the Top News section will continue to be available for free via New York Times smartphone and tablet apps.

Also, purchasing just the Sunday print version will give you the most comprehensive tier of unlimited access to digital content, including online, smartphone, and tablet.  This leads Reuters’ Felix Salmon to wonder, “[I]f you get a Sunday-only subscription and then suspend delivery of the physical newspaper while you ‘go on vacation’ for a month or two at a time, how long can you drag out your free access to the website before the NYT gets wise to what you’re doing?”

I guess we shouldn’t expect a sterling business model from a paper whose editorial board believes the way to create wealth is to blow up federal spending and increase federal regulation of the economy by an order of magnitude.

Isn’t The Wall Street Journal’s model much more sensible: everyone has free access to most online content, but key articles require a subscription?  Isn’t it easier to tie access to content, rather than try to tabulate the ephemeral surfing activities of millions of users out there in the ether?

The Times and Journal’s payment plans seem to reflect their ideological worldviews: The Journal, which leans right, offers general content funded via advertising and charges for premium content readers are willing to pay for, a typical capitalist arrangement.  In contrast, The Times, which leans left, will rely on a cadre of loyal followers willing to donate the equivalent of welfare to keep the sputtering paper going, regardless of how frequently the journal offers specific content worth paying for.

In the same way that liberal celebrities frequently announce how much they love paying taxes, soon I can imagine New York elites sanctimoniously defending the Times’ plan by declaring how much they adore shelling out for its superlative content.

Given the astronomical cost of the Times’ plan, only rich liberals will be able to afford it anyway.

At least the new digital subscription plan is an improvement over the short-lived TimesSelect debacle, in which the paper charged for online access to the site’s premium content—which included such must-read material as the repetitive, stale-as-a-cigarette-butt columns of Krugman, Herbert, Rich, and Dowd.

Borrowing language from President Obama’s State of the Union address, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. announced in a letter to readers that the new subscription plan is an “investment in our future.”

In other words, Obama implied that taxpayers should subsidize inefficient, underused high-speed rail—so more people will be forced to use something they didn’t use when they didn’t have to pay for it, and other options hadn’t been driven from the market.  Similarly, Times readers will now have to pay for biased, slanted content so more people will be forced to read something they didn’t want to read when they didn’t have to pay for it, and other options hadn’t been driven from the market.

Except that The Times won’t continue to dominate the news market the way government-subsidized boondoggles like high-speed rail and ObamaCare will take over their markets.  Does The Times really think they’re the only game in town?  The Times is one of those papers everyone reads because everyone else reads it.  That won’t be true once people start getting charged hundreds of dollars a year to read it.

Unless the federal government steps in and gives The Times a giant bailout, consumers are going to wise up and start getting their content elsewhere.  Not only does the sclerotic, past-its-prime paper’s poorly conceived paywall fail to invest in its own future, it indirectly invests in its competitors’ futures.

Which is fine with me.

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Here’s a fun fact regarding President Obama’s Saturday announcement that the U.S. would finally be getting around to joining the international coalition to use military force against Libya’s Colonel Moammar Qaddafi in retaliation for his having unleashed government firepower against rebels.  Guess how many times Obama used any of the following words in his speech: victory, victorious, win, winning, defeat, right, just, moral, triumph, success, good, evil.  (Hint: it’s the same number of controversial NCAA Final Four picks he made last week.)  That’s right—0!

In contrast, he managed to squeeze in all of these words and phrases: international (10 uses), allies (6), partners (6), community (5), United Nations (3), not acting alone (3), coalition (2), league (2), council (2), coordinate (2), agree, join, meet, part, and union.

With so little emphasis on what we’re actually doing in Libya, how we’re going to do it, and with what expected results, an alien visiting Earth might be forgiven for wondering why we need to engage in so much coalition-building to do it.

What kind of corporation launching a new product deemphasizes: the product, the technology required to develop it, the need for it in the market, and the projected sales; yet fills up their business plan with reams of details on which contractors they’re going to generously give business to, which stores they’re going to offer their product to, which companies’ toes they’re going to avoid stepping on, and which corporations they might someday merge with?

The message Obama has been sending the world is: we’re not necessarily going to do anything about Libya, and we’re definitely not going to take the lead on it, but if there are lots of others of you who are going to do something, then we’re right there with you.

There are good arguments for and against bombing Libya; a sane case can be made either way.  A surprising number of liberals have come out in favor (Hillary Clinton, John Kerry); a surprising number of conservatives have come out against (Andrew McCarthy, Haley Barbour).

I happen to favor air strikes, though not without being able to see the other side’s point.  The idea that we should butt out of Libya, Egypt, Iran, etc. is premised on the notion that no matter what we do, Middle Eastern dictators will be replaced by worse dictators of the hard-line Islamic variety.  I reject this idea, and I don’t care about the warning the do-nothing crowd has offered that radical Islamist groups favor removing these tyrants.  Just because those groups support toppling Ahmadinejad, Mubarak, and Qaddafi doesn’t mean we can’t support it, but for different reasons.  They support it because it’s their best chance to install Islamic leaders; we support it because it’s our best chance to install pro-liberty leaders.  The choice isn’t “Do nothing” or “Topple the dictator and let the chips fall where they may”—the missing alternative is “Topple the dictator, and make sure someone better gets in there.”

That said, if I were Leader of the Free World, I think I would have circulated an inkling to the globe what my position was one way or another, pretty early on, before any action were too late.

Instead, Obama has given the impression that he wanted to find out what the cool kids were doing so he could join them and be part of the crowd.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we could believe that Obama has been seriously, meticulously scrutinizing the situation in Libya, weighing his options, not committing until the exact right time.  (It wouldn’t be so bad, in other words, if Obama hadn’t been spending his time playing golf, announcing his bracket picks, and practicing his Brazilian Portuguese.)  But given his talk during the 2008 campaign about the necessity of international consensus and the arrogance of acting alone, odds are he was waiting until a critical mass of world players signed on before sticking his scrawny neck out.

There are three possibilities that explain Obama’s dithering on Libya, none reassuring.  First: he had no idea what to do, was being pushed back and forth by pro- and anti-invasion camps in his administration, and simply went with the international consensus once it coalesced.  Second: he favored invasion, but didn’t want to take action until there was international support.  Third, and most disturbing: he didn’t favor invasion, but decided to go with that option once the world’s players came out for it.

Given Obama’s hemming and hawing on Afghanistan, whereby private accounts suggest he didn’t want to initiate a troop surge in 2009 but did so anyway, and given his indirect ties to Qaddafi via Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan, I fear the third possibility most likely.

Behold a president who acts, not because he believes the United States has a unique historical and moral standing in the world and should take the lead on rectifying injustice, and possibly not even because he thinks it’s the right thing to do, but because… everyone else is doing it.



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In the wake of the horrific March 11 earthquake and subsequent nuclear power plant accidents in Japan, environmentalists have been chomping at the bit to use this opportunity to relegate nuclear power to the dustbin of history.

The Japanese earthquake and Fukushima Daiichi power plant explosions were a double propaganda victory for greens, because it allowed them to not only bash nuclear power but also blame the earthquake on global warming.

Cameramen captured a dramatic explosion at Fukushima Unit 1 on Saturday that left the top of the reactor building exposed.  A similar explosion took place at Unit 3 on Sunday.  Mainstream media news outlets have been tossing around the comparison of Fukushima to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant explosion and radiation leakage in 1986.

In fact, Fukushima is nothing like Chernobyl, for the same reason modern-day Japan is nothing like the late Soviet Union.  The former is far more technologically advanced and better run, thus capable of anticipating and mitigating the effects of high-tech disasters.

The level of uninformed hysteria over Fukushima recalls the ignorant cries bandied about after 9/11 that terrorists in this country might try to set off a nuclear explosion at a power plant (which is physically impossible).

According to scientists who understand the physics of nuclear power generation, the construction of the Fukushima plants, and the nature of the explosion, there has not and will never be any harmful level of radioactivity released into the environment.

The reactors at Fukushima Daiichi and the neighboring Daini plant were programmed to go into automatic shutdown at the first sign of an earthquake 1/5 the size of the one that happened, which is exactly what they did.  The plants were designed to withstand high seismicity zones, due to the prevalence of earthquakes in Japan.

The type of radioactive isotopes that were manually released in a cloud of steam prior to the explosions to help cool the reactors have a half-life of seconds, meaning that by the time they hit the air around the plant they had broken into benign, virtually non-radioactive particles far less dangerous than the radiation you would get from, say, being full body scanned by the TSA.  In addition, the prevailing winds have been blowing any minute bits of extant radiation out to sea.

The external shell of the plant whose top was blown off was not a containment device for radiation, which means that the only thing workers will have to worry about from not having a roof is rain failing on their bento boxes.

Japan’s nuclear power plants are so advanced, so thoroughly designed to accommodate any level of unexpected disturbance, so replete with backup capacities to compensate for one failed system after another, that there were several layers of components that could have failed but didn’t—and the plants’ security measures still would have prevented a catastrophe.

Japanese authorities evacuated residents within a two-kilometer radius, then three kilometers, then 10, then 20, all well before the manual release of radiation and explosions.

On the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) scale, which ranges from 0 (deviation) to 7 (major accident), authorities rated Fukushima only a 4 or “accident with local consequences”—which puts me in mind of the crazy driver who overturned a World Wide Tours bus on a Bronx freeway last weekend and killed 14 people.  (No, wait—that’s far more people than were killed at Fukushima.  The Bronx accident was much worse.)

The Fukushima accidents have more in common with the Three Mile Island non-disaster of 1979, which liberals used to cripple nuclear power production for the next three decades, than it does with Chernobyl.  Three Mile Island was rated a 5 on the INES scale; Chernobyl was a 7.

In the case of Chernobyl, the problem was not the existence of a competently run nuclear power plant, but the ineptitude and dishonesty of the Soviet system, which prefigured the plant’s sloppy design and incompetent management, and the cover-up that delayed damage containment.  In addition, the type of severe explosion that happened at Chernobyl did not happen at Fukushima.

In contrast to the frantic, appalled coverage of lethal floods, fires, and chaos resulting from the earthquake and its aftershocks, there is no evidence of a hair being harmed on the head of a single Japanese person not working in the plants.

The expected death toll from earthquake-related damage is 10,000.  The expected death toll from radioactivity released from Fukushima is 0.

About a dozen workers were injured by the explosions at Fukushima Units 1 and 3; one died indirectly as a result of a crane accident.  But hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide are injured by explosions, malfunctioning machinery, and construction accidents every year, in all kinds of industries from building to drilling to mining.  There is nothing uniquely monstrous about a pair of nuclear power plants wounding a handful of unfortunate workers in a rare incident.

Far more people have died in Japan as a result of the earthquake’s causing buildings to collapse, bridges to crumble, and tsunami waves to wipe out beachside resorts.  Should we ban buildings, bridges, and beachside resorts?

Nuclear power remains—notwithstanding poorly designed and managed plants like Chernobyl—the safest, cleanest, most efficient method of power production mankind has ever devised.  Fukushima does not change that fact.



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On Monday President Obama offered a creative, efficient method for prosecuting terrorists affiliated with the 9/11 attacks or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: namely, military tribunals in a secure island compound you may not have heard of called “Guantanamo Bay.”

Back on the home front, Representative Peter King, Homeland Security Committee Chair, has planned a hearing for Thursday on whether al-Qaeda is trying to recruit young Muslims in the U.S. and whether Muslim Americans are sufficiently cooperating with federal officials to ensnare would-be domestic terrorists such as American-born Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.

The most infamous failed attack on American soil in the past several years was U.S. citizen Faisal Shahzad’s attempted car bombing in Times Square, which was thwarted only because a suspicious hot dog vendor happened to be looking in the right direction at the right time.

Naturally, last Sunday hundreds of willfully naïve, politically correct New Yorkers gathered in Times Square, steps from where Shahzad tried to kill hundreds of New Yorkers, to protest King’s hearing as racist and Islamophobic.

In an effort to dilute the impact of King’s investigation and make it harder for the nation to ask honest questions about the threat of Muslim youth recruitment, Obama had his national security advisor speak at a mosque in northern Virginia to assure Muslims that the federal government was not disproportionately examining Islamic groups.

Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. House, declared on Sunday that focusing on one religion more than any other was wrong, though he graciously allowed that it was OK for us to scrutinize “radicalization.”  Radicalization of what?  Lady Gaga’s fashion sense?

According to Ellison, “To say we’re going to investigate a religious minority… is the wrong course of action to take.  I don’t want [al-Qaeda] to be able to stand up and claim… ‘America is at war with Islam.’  That’s one of their main recruiting arguments.”

Actually, one of their main recruiting arguments is, “The infidel is wicked, and his self-imposed weakness and inability to consistently stand up to us prove that our cause is just.”  An argument that would hurt recruiting would be, “America is at war with Islam, and you are going to get blown to smithereens if you continue to fight for our side.”

Ellison insisted that in order to stop recruitment of domestic terrorists, we need to engage Muslim-Americans rather than frighten them.

In fact, there are two kinds of Muslim-Americans: those who would never dream of getting involved in terrorism, and those who might in their wildest fantasies toy with the notion.  The former have nothing to fear, and the latter need to be frightened out of their wits at the consequences of taking up arms against their fellow citizens.

Why is this controversial?  What if we said that there are two kinds of Americans: those who would never dream of committing mass murder, and those who might contemplate it in their wildest fantasies, and that the latter need to be frightened out of their wits via correctional deterrents and police presence at the possibility of carrying out their plans?  Would that be an “anti-American” policy because it deterred potential mass murderers who happened to be American?

Our intelligence shows that Muslim-Americans have become more, not less, radicalized since 9/11.  Aren’t we allowed to even ask why that might be happening?

Immediately after 9/11, liberals were hysterical about the possibility of a never-to-materialize spike in anti-Muslim “hate crimes.”  Why are we still, 10 years later, bending over backwards not to offend members of Muslim communities?  Why aren’t Muslim Americans going out of their way to dispel stereotypes and prove what a spectacularly helpful resource they are in deterring terror?

One obtuse protestor stationed outside Representative King’s office last week declared, “A bomb doesn’t differentiate between a Muslim and a non-Muslim.  We are just as afraid of extremists as anybody else.”  Yes, but is a bomb planter differentiated by being disproportionately Muslim vs. non-Muslim?

While we’re on the subject of differentiation, is al-Qaeda so quick to avoid “demonizing” the U.S. and obliterating nuances among Americans’ political ideologies?  Do they distinguish between “radicals” and innocents when choosing targets for their bombings and shootings?  “The Great Satan” is not exactly a paragon of subtlety.

Here’s a glossary of by-now-meaningless terms liberals should be banned from using in the conversation over King’s hearings: alienating Muslims, at war with Islam, demonizing, hijacking a peaceful religion, inflammatory rhetoric, Islamophobia, McCarthyism, singling out, witch hunt, and xenophobia.  Hey, liberals, let’s play a giant game of Taboo: can you explain why it’s wrong to demand greater cooperation from Muslim communities in helping catch terrorists and greater condemnation against acts of terror without using any of the above words?

Instead of our endless back-and-forth, advance-and-retreat, catch-and-release, shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot, Tom and Jerry farce of a policy, let’s set our traps right where we need them and stop liberals’ cat-and-Muslim game once and for all.



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Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

President Obama announced last week that his Attorney General Eric Holder would no longer be defending the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which Congress passed in 1996.

His declaration may have had something to do with the fact that Ninth Circuit Court Justice Stephen Reinhardt and federal trial judge Joseph Tauro of Massachusetts ruled across three separate cases in 2009 and 2010 that DOMA was unconstitutional.

Obama’s Justice Department will be submitting its official response next week to two fresh lawsuits against DOMA filed last year in New York and Connecticut.  The Department is not expected to argue in favor of the law’s constitutionality.

Constitution-revering conservatives have responded to Obama’s announcement by howling that there is no precedent for his declaration in all of American history, that Obama is overturning DOMA just because he doesn’t like it, and that his actions may be grounds for impeachment.

Jonah Goldberg of National Review claimed Obama has “thrown in the towel on the Constitution.”  On her radio show, Monica Crowley stooped to the level of Wisconsin pro-union protestors by labeling the president “Oba-Mubarak.”

Newt Gingrich declared that Obama’s actions could lead to a constitutional crisis.  He offered the hypothetical counterexample of President Sarah Palin declaring that she doesn’t like Roe v. Wade, thinks it’s unconstitutional, and will no longer allow the executive to enforce the right to an abortion.

There’s just one little difference between the Obama and Gingrich scenarios: no court has ever ruled Roe v. Wade unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, had the last word on that matter in 1973, and no lower court or the Supreme Court has declared the unconstitutionality of the fundamental right to an abortion since then.  State courts have chipped away at the edges of the ruling and allowed restrictions on abortion, some of which the Supreme Court has upheld, but no court has ever reversed the Supreme Court’s ruling on the basic right to an abortion.  In fact, because the Supreme Court has already ruled on the matter, only that court would be able to reverse its 1973 ruling.

In the Gingrich scenario, Palin would indeed be imposing her preference on the nation illegally.

In the Obama scenario, in contrast, his Justice Department would be upholding the interpretation of the law offered by two members of the judiciary in three different court cases.

Obama hasn’t even said his Justice Department isn’t going to enforce the law—only that it will not be arguing in court that the law is constitutional.  Which, you may remember, is what two of the highest courts in the land to rule on the constitutionality of DOMA have found in three separate cases.

Even after Obama’s announcement, courts will still be able to rule on DOMA, regardless of the arguments Eric Holder declines to proffer in support of it.  Outside parties, including Congressmen who support the law, will still be able to file friend-of-the-court briefs outlining the exact same by-now-familiar arguments the Justice Department will no longer be citing.

Other conservatives who are upset with Obama’s actions have argued that Florida District Court Justice Roger Vinson recently found ObamaCare unconstitutional, yet Obama is still implementing that law.

Well, yes—clearly Obama is ideologically disposed toward overturning DOMA and not Roe v. Wade or ObamaCare.  But that doesn’t mean he does not have the prerogative to disavow the identified-as-unconstitutional DOMA, or the obligation to uphold the never-identified-as-unconstitutional Roe v. Wade.

As for ObamaCare, two justices had already (ludicrously) upheld the constitutionality of ObamaCare before Virginia District Justice Henry Hudson ruled the individual mandate component of the bill unconstitutional last December, and before Justice Vinson ruled the entire bill unconstitutional in January.  So while one would hope for Obama to take Hudson and Vinson’s cues once their rulings came down, one wouldn’t hold one’s breath.  A third justice has since found ObamaCare constitutional, which sadly gives liberals more cover for continuing to defend ObamaCare until the Supreme Court rules on it.

In the same interview in which he claimed Obama couldn’t decline to enforce DOMA, Gingrich declared that Justice Vinson’s ruling represented “solid grounds for the House to cut off all funding for implementation.”  Apparently the link between Gingrich’s stances on DOMA and ObamaCare was that both criticized supposedly unconstitutional actions of Obama’s.  Yet evidently Justice Reinhardt and Tauro’s rulings on the unconstitutionality of DOMA didn’t figure into Gingrich’s equation.

Other conservatives have questioned the timing of Obama’s announcement, suggesting that it was made to distract voters from the economy or set a trap for Republicans—as though this determined the propriety of Obama’s non-enforcement of a law.  Gingrich noted that Obama had campaigned for president in opposition to gay marriage and promised to uphold DOMA, and is therefore breaking a campaign pledge—again, as though this has anything to do with the legality of Obama’s decision not to defend the law.

Without trying to read Obama’s mind, I can say only that his motives for no longer defending DOMA have absolutely nothing to do with the constitutional appropriateness of his decision.

Here are some hypothetical actions that would be unconstitutional if Obama actually took them: Not enforcing DOMA after the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional.  Enforcing DOMA after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.  Implementing ObamaCare after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.  Implementing ObamaCare after Congress cut off funding for implementing it.

But deciding not to defend an argument behind one section of a law while still enforcing it, when two of the highest courts in the land have deemed the law unconstitutional in three cases—sorry, but that is not unconstitutional.



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