There’s an interesting article on the battle between Republicans and Democrats for technological superiority:

If control of the upper chamber comes down to just a few close races like Arkansas’, then the party best able to leverage technological advances may well be the one that controls the upper chamber. Ultimately, the remainder of President Obama’s second term agenda may hinge on the relatively quiet war being fought between data and tech gurus of both parties.

As a way of leveraging scarce field resources, I think that micro-focusing and data mining are only prudent. As a substitute for field resources, I think they’re idiocy.

Well, the story of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is becoming stranger. Based on what we know now the Malaysian authorities are

1. Idiots
2. Embarrassed
3. Hiding something

or, possibly, all of the above. Rather than going to the north and east, the craft was apparently flying west as indicated by the map above:

(CNN) — More than four days since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared over Southeast Asia, Malaysian officials not only don’t know what happened to the plane, they don’t seem sure where to look.

On Wednesday, officials announced they had once again expanded the search area. It now covers 27,000 square miles, more than double the size of the area being searched just a day before.

Such a dramatic expansion at this stage of the investigation is troubling, said CNN aviation expert Richard Quest.

“At this stage in the investigation and search and rescue, I would have expected to see by now a much more defined understanding of what the route was, where the plane was headed and a narrowing of the search consequent upon that,” he said on CNN’s “New Day.”

There are all sorts of possibilities including catastrophic equipment malfunction, error, and hijacking. Right now it appears that they’re spinning their wheels.

I want to get it out of my system right at the get-go. I always have to chuckle when I read the words “Senate Intelligence Committee”. That having been said I think that California Sen. Dianne Feinstein is pretty good as California senators go and, if her allegations about the CIA spying on the committee are true, it’s very disturbing:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, took to the Senate floor and accused the CIA of spying on committee investigators tasked with probing the agency’s past use of harsh interrogation techniques (a.k.a. torture) and detention. Feinstein was responding to recent media stories reporting that the CIA had accessed computers used by intelligence committee staffers working on the committee’s investigation. The computers were set up by the CIA in a locked room in a secure facility separate from its headquarters, and CIA documents relevant to the inquiry were placed on these computers for the Senate investigators. But, it turns out, the Senate sleuths had also uncovered an internal CIA memo reviewing the interrogation program that had not been turned over by the agency. This document was far more critical of the interrogation program than the CIA’s official rebuttal to a still-classified, 6,300-page Senate intelligence committee report that slams it, and the CIA wanted to find out how the Senate investigators had gotten their mitts on this damaging memo.

See also here. As a mark of how much more restrained Sen. Feinstein and the other members of the committee are than I would be under the circumstances, if I were on the committee CIA Director John Brennan would be in the clink for contempt of Congress until the CIA had demonstrated to the satisfaction of the committee members that a) the CIA had not spied on them and b) the CIA was completely innocent of the charges that are being investigated, possibly for the rest of his life, rather than firing back bòns móts.

What’s necessary for the security of the United States is not up to the CIA to determine or even up to the president. It’s ultimately the Congress’s job with the cooperation of the president toilers in the vineyards of the executive branch should be aware of that.

Also, there is no offense greater than lèse-majesté and the Senate is about as close to majesté as it gets around here.

Update

Dana Milbank reacts:

If the White House wishes to repair the damage, it would declassify without further delay the report done by Feinstein’s committee — along with the Panetta Review. If the White House won’t, Feinstein’s panel and others would be justified in holding up CIA funding and nominations and conducting public hearings.

Obama also should remove those people involved in spying on the Senate panel and in harassing Senate staffers. First out should be Robert Eatinger, the CIA’s acting general counsel. Previously, Eatinger had been a lawyer in the unit that conducted the interrogation program at the heart of the Senate’s probe. Eatinger, Feinstein said, filed a “crimes report” with the Justice Department suggesting that congressional staffers had stolen the Panetta Review.

I still think they need some encouragement. Getting out of what we laughingly call “public service” into a high-paying lobbying job is not exactly the cat o’ nine tails.

Update 2

Peggy Noonan remarks:

If it is true it is very bad, but not a shock. We have been here before, as Ron Fournier notes. But this story will likely make a difference, and wake some people up on the Hill. Dianne Feinstein of California has been a U.S. senator for more than 21 years and has been a vocal defender of the U.S. surveillance apparatus since it came under attack with the emergence of Edward Snowden. She views surveillance from a national-security perspective. As chairman, for five years, of the Senate Intelligence Committee she is more aware than most of the security threats and challenges under which America operates. There is a sense she has viewed the alarms and warnings of antisurveillance forces as the yips and yaps of kids who aren’t aware of the brute realities she hears about in classified briefings. Over the past decades she has been exposed to a large number of intelligence professionals who are first rate, America-loving and full of integrity, and so worthy of reflexive respect. Her loyalty would be earned and understandable.

But now she, or rather her committee’s investigators, have, she believes, been spied upon. Which would focus the mind. She is probably about to come in for a great deal of derision. She should instead be welcomed into the growing group of those concerned about the actions and abilities of the surveillance state. It could not have been easy for her to say what she’s said. She is right to feel and share her intellectual alarm.

We can only hope. Too soon we get old. Too late we get smart.

In commenting prospectively on the special election in the Florida 13th Congressional District to replace deceased Republican Cong. Bill Young, Sean Trende predicts a victory for the Democrat, Alex Sink, notes the symbolic importance of the election as well as its limited significance as a predictor of nationwide electoral conditions. Obama political advisor David Axelrod, reacting to Republican David Jolly’s upset victory in the special election, conceding the headwinds that the PPACA provides for Democrats, attributes the win to Democrats’ problems in getting their voters out in off-year elections.

My conclusion is that politics remains local and in this election in this year David Jolly was a better candidate for FL-13 than Alex Sink. It might also be good to keep in mind that pundits, pollsters, and reporters in all likelihood aren’t very familiar with the district and have an unavoidable temptation to project their own preferences onto candidates and elections. Conditions might look very different on the ground in the district than they do from Washington, New York, or LA.

Update

E. J. Dionne is worried about the result of this election:

But Democrats should not fool themselves about this result. It is a huge disappointment for them, and an important Republican victory. It is a sign that Democrats need to retool their response on Obamacare and sharpen their economic arguments. In a race that cost some $12.7 million, outside conservative groups ran an aggressive and coordinated campaign to discredit Obamacare and Sink. This sort of thing will happen for the rest of the year in district after district, and state after state. If Democrats aren’t effective in discrediting the outside groups and their misleading ads against the health-care law, they will confront more results like Tuesday’s.

I know the prevailing wisdom is that negative advertising doesn’t depress turnout but I wonder if that’s true among all groups. The Democrats aren’t dependent on voter turnout, generally. They’re dependent on voter turnout among blacks, Hispanics, and younger voters. Among younger voters in particular I wonder if the sense of futility and frustration that have been found to be produced by negative advertising won’t depress their turnout more than it does among voters, generally. Taking Mr. Dionne’s advice might have a perverse result for the Democrats.

Update 2

Writing in the Tampa Times, Adam C. Smith makes a good point:

Don’t be surprised to see vulnerable Democrats across the country start distancing themselves from health care reform in a way that Sink did not.

Nobody seriously expected Democrats to win back a majority in the U.S. House in November, but Sink’s loss in a winnable swing district makes Democrats’ hold on the U.S. Senate majority look more tenuous than before the special election.

I think that’s right but I also think that he’s over-interpreting and over-reacting. If Democrats around the country start over-interpreting and over-reacting similarly, such political support as exists for the PPACA will be hard to maintain.

You know, I’m reading a lot of claims that this or that person is crazy these days. People who make that claim might want to reflect on the poor pedigree that such claims, leveled at political opponents, have.

The “reductio ad Hitlerum“, the attempt to refute an opponent’s view by attributing your opponent’s views to the Nazis, is probably one of the most commonly deployed fallacies in blogospheric comment threads and have leached into opinion pieces more generally. It seems to me that a reductio ad Stalinem, an attempt at discrediting your opponent’s views by pointing out that Stalin believed the same thing, is an as-yet inadequately exploited source of new fallacies.

It’s a lot easier to think of those with whom you disagree as crazy, evil, Nazis, racist or whatever than it is to assume they’re as well-intentioned as you, presumably, are and just make different assumptionsm are aware of different facts, or draw different conclusions than you do.

Sean Trende takes another look at the mid-term Senate election and concludes the Democrats are likely to lose the Senate:

Given the “bonus” that Democrats receive for potential Tea Party upsets and incumbent advantages, its unsurprising that they fare a bit better in each “bracket” than they did in the earlier iteration of this model. Again, even this may be a touch too generous to Republicans, given the strength of incumbents like Warner and (possibly) Jeanne Shaheen.

But because we’ve also downgraded Obama’s chances of scoring an unusually high job approval by using only data from his second term, the overall probabilities using randomized job approval scores look a lot like they did before: Republicans win the Senate about 80 percent of the time, they gain seven-to-nine seats about 45 percent of the time, more than that 25 percent of the time, and less than that 30 percent of the time…

In essence, he says that the greatest likelihood is that Republicans win 7 or 8 seats, taking the Senate.

I still believe that all politics is local and, consequently, I don’t believe that House or Senate elections are particularly amenable to this sort of “view from 50,000 feet” analysis. However, I’ll agree with him to the extent that unless President Obama’s job approval ratings rise substantially, Democrats will face headwinds in the mid-terms. As of right now I’m sticking with my prediction that the Republicans pick up 5 seats in Senate, allowing Democrats to retain control of that house.

As long as Angus King continues to caucus with the Democrats, that is.

I was thunderstruck when I read a comment at OTB to the effect that Hitler had no grand strategy. I think precisely the opposite is quite evident. Here’s one blogger’s thoughts on the subject:

Given the overwhelming coalition formed to thwart German ambition not twenty years before 1933, was Hitler mad to think that he had a shot at gaining mastery in Europe? Was his grand-strategy fatally flawed? Here are the salient facts about the German decision to go to war. Documentary evidence overwhelmingly shows that Hitler was firmly in control of German foreign policy; that he wanted to go to war to ensure German supremacy on the continent; that he made his plans clear to the Wehrmacht as soon as he assumed power in 1933; that the military brass shared his strategic vision (despite what they claimed at Nuremberg); and that Germany immediately began war preparations in earnest.

So the evidence supports the ‘intentionalist’ school – the Second World War was single-handedly precipitated by Adolf Hitler. However, it is one thing for a statesman to seize opportunities afforded by the system structure and geopolitical reality, and quite another to do so in defiance of the same. Did the structure of the system “shove” the Third Reich to act aggressively on the world scene? Did Hitler’s grand-strategy make sense? Could the Nazis have won the Second World War?

I argue that Hitler’s grand-strategy was firmly grounded in geopolitical realism, his war-plans were realistic, and mastery in Europe was an achievable goal for Germany. Moreover, the Second World War was a very close thing. Germany came within a hair’s breadth of achieving supremacy. Furthermore, I argue that the system structure “shoved” Germany towards making a run on the system. That is, instability was inherent in the inter-war system.

“How did you do it?” was the question asked Dallas Seavey by a videographer as he crossed the finish line in Nome at 4:04 this morning, winning the 2014 Iditarod.

“What’d I do?” responded a puzzled Seavey.

“You just won the Iditarod.”

“What? I thought that was my dad behind me. Where’s Jeff and Aliy?”

Dallas Seavey came from behind to capture his second Iditarod championship in three years early Tuesday morning, mushing his team of seven dogs through a wind storm that knocked Jeff King out of the race and prompted Aliy Zirkle to hole up in Safety for more than two hours.

Seavey, 26, jogged beside his sled down Nome’s Front Street to help his dogs, one hand on the sled and the other on a ski pole.

After crossing the finish line he sat down on the back of his sled and leaned his head on his handlebar, exhausted.

[…]

Seavey and his team broke the race speed record, finishing the 1,000-mile race from Willow to Nome in 8 days, 13 hours, 4 minutes, 19 seconds. He shaved more than five hours off John Baker’s 2011 record of 8 days, 18 hours, 46 minutes, 39 seconds.

He beat Zirkle by less than three minutes, ending a frenzied night of racing that saw the lead go from King to Zirkle to Seavey in less than three hours.

High winds, strong enough to overturn sleds and bring progress to a halt, caused Jeff King to scratch and Aliy Zirkle to hunker down for two hours, giving Dallas Seavey the opportunity to pull ahead and win the race.

The Gallup Organization is reporting that the percentage of Americans who don’t have healthcare insurance is at the lowest level since 2008:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The percentage of Americans without health insurance continues to fall, measuring 15.9% so far in 2014 compared with 17.1% in the fourth quarter of 2013.

These data are based on more than 28,000 interviews with Americans from Jan. 2-Feb. 28, 2014, as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. With only a few weeks remaining in the first quarter, the uninsured rate is on track to be the lowest quarterly level that Gallup and Healthways have measured since 2008.

The uninsured rate has been declining since the fourth quarter of 2013, after hitting an all-time high of 18.0% in the third quarter. The uninsured rate for the first quarter of 2014 so far includes a 16.2% reading for January and 15.6% for February.

That’s good news, if true.

There’s still cause for concern. For example, increases in those with insurance are nearly equally divided between two groups: those who are paying for their own insurance and those enrolled in Medicaid. There are a lot of unknowns. We don’t know how many of those previously uninsured have actually enrolled for healthcare insurance. We don’t know how many of those who enrolled are actually covered.

We don’t know how many of those who are newly enrolled for Medicaid qualified under the old rules (which means that the states are responsible for paying their tabs). And we don’t know if the states’ revenues will increase before they’re responsible for paying the full freight of those covered under Medicaid under the new rules.

Still, it’s good news.