Vox Sentences: Why the Obama administration is leaking insults about Benjamin Netanyahu

1. Chickenshit diplomacy

President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet in the White House on October 1, 2014. (Win McNamee/Getty Images))

• A senior Obama administration official on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: "The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit."

  [The Atlantic / Jeffrey Goldberg]

• That's from a big new report from Jeffrey Goldberg, who continues the quote: "The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars. The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states. The only thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat."

  [The Atlantic / Jeffrey Goldberg]

• One weird part of the quote is that Netanyahu just this year launched a war that killed over 2,000 people.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Also, it's a good thing Netanyahu (who went to high school in a Philadelphia suburb) speaks English since "chickenshit" is actually rather difficult to translate to Hebrew.

  [Jewish Telegraphic Agency / Ben Sales]

• One pretty compelling theory for why the official said it: the point was to suggest that Netanyahu is too chicken to launch a strike on Iran, reassuring the Iranians and making a nuclear deal easier.

  [Washington Post / Daniel Drezner]

• The State Department has already started distancing itself from the quote (without revealing who said it).

  [State Department / Jen Psaki]

• The White House has been concentrating foreign policymaking in the National Security Council rather than State and Department, to which some critics attribute this incident and other diplomatic problems.

  [NYT / Mark Landler]

• Also this week, the administration denied the Israeli Defense Minister meetings with Joe Biden, John Kerry, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and an administration official told CNN the snub was due to the minister's past criticisms of Kerry and the rest of the administration.

  [CNN / Elise Labott]

• Probably a bigger problem for Israel at the moment: an attempted assassination of a prominent right-wing activist in Jerusalem, the last few days have seen a number of police clashes with Arab youth in East Jerusalem, and the assassination attempt could exacerbate tensions.

  [Haaretz / Nir Hasson]

2. The Fed gives up

Fed chair Janet Yellen shouldn't have taken her foot off the gas so fast. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

• It's official: the Fed has stopped quantitative easing (QE), its program of buying up tens of billions of dollars worth of bonds every month to boost the economy.

  [NYT / Binyamin Appelbaum]

• Minneapolis Fed chief Narayana Kocherlakota dissented, on the grounds that inflation was still lower than we need it to be for a strong recovery.

  [Federal Reserve]

• He's right: inflation's now around 1.5 percent, when we're aiming for 2 percent.

  [Vox / Danielle Kurtzleben]

• This Q&A is a fantastic explanation of how QE works.

  [Mike Konczal and Joe Gagnon / Roosevelt Institute]

• Vox's Matt Yglesias explained why canceling QE is a bad idea in June: "the fact that Europe has pursued a more cautious monetary policy than the USA which has pursued a more cautious monetary policy than Japan and that Japan is growing faster than the US which is growing faster than Europe is pretty suggestive."

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• GDP is still far below where it should have been, absent the recession.

  [NYT / Neil Irwin]

• Of course, if you don't like QE, there are other policies that would have also helped, like NGDP targeting. Here's a good explanation of that plan.

  [Vox / Tim Lee]

3. The latest on Ebola

President Obama honors returning Ebola workers at the White House. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

• The WHO thinks Ebola might be spreading more slowly in Liberia, one of the countries hardest hit by the outbreak.

  [NYT / Rick Gladstone]

• Mali still hasn't had another Ebola case after its first (fatal) one, but 116 people there are still being monitored.

  [The Guardian / Katarina Höije]

• Kaci Wilcox, a Doctors Without Borders nurse now under quarantine at home in Maine after days of detention at the Newark airport, has announced she's going to disobey the quarantine.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• She also says if the quarantine is not lifted by tomorrow, she'll go to court to fight it.

  [NYT / Dave Phillips]

• The state of Maine is filing a court order to make sure the quarantine stays in effect.

  [WABI / Terry Stackhouse]

• Ebola is causing significant stigma against health workers treating New York's first and only Ebola patient.

  [NYT / Anemona Hartocollis and Nate Schweber]

• Ebola fears lead a Connecticut public school to force a girl out of class for 21 days because she went to a wedding in Nigeria.

  [CNN / Ray Sanchez]

• In part to fight stigma against them, President Obama hosted a White House event honoring returning health workers who helped fight the outbreak in West Africa.

  [USA Today / David Jackson]

• The Defense Department is quarantining troops returning from Ebola-affected countries for 21 days — perhaps unnecessary, but at least with the military you don't have to worry about deterring people from going over again.

  [New Republic / Danny Vinik]

4. Misc.

• If you're considering going in blackface for Halloween: think about your life, think about your choices, do literally any other costume instead.

  [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris]

• Pollsters asked people what share of their country was Muslim, Christian, immigrants, etc. Basically everyone was wrong.

  [The Guardian / Alberto Nardelli and George Arnett]

• It looks like incumbents' advantage in elections is shrinking.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Dan Hopkins]

• Cellist Katinka Kleijn has started using her own brain waves as musical accompaniment.

  [Business Insider / Christina Sterbenz]

• Who Obamacare has helped, in maps and charts.

  [NYT / Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz]

• Obamacare is very effective at spreading the wealth around — unsurprisingly, given that it raises taxes on the rich and gives it to the poor.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• There's nothing wrong with political scientists running experiments during elections.

  [Washington Post / Dan Drezner]

• Student debt, rather than the bad economy, appears to be the main force driving people to live with their parents.

  [Slate / Jordan Weissmann]

• ATTN homeowners: If you don't like the noise the bar you live on top of is making, it's not okay to cut off their TV access as punishment.

  [CityLab / Kriston Capps]

• Young Fathers won Britain's top music prize, which is as good a reason as any to check out their debut album, which is fantastic. Here's "Low."

  [Stereogum / Michael Nelson]

5. Verbatim

• "Today, when I think back on it, I don’t wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer."

  [Vice / John Reed]

• "Professor Chandran Kukathas, the chair of political theory at the London School of Economics … said he is 'very sympathetic to anarchists' but is 'sorry to say Brand’s manifesto as it’s been reported is utterly incoherent.'"

  [BuzzFeed / Jamie Ross]

• "The deaths have equaled about one in 20 of the city's homeless population."

  [Al Jazeera America / Matt Sandy]

• "We learn that vintage electroshock-therapy machines and nineteenth-century replicas of Czechoslovakian mechanical toy banks are 'worth a lot.'"

  [Harper's / Alice Gregory]

• "In the real world, wages are set partially with regard to markets but with a large dose of power, culture and even social connectedness, or in the U.S. case, lack thereof."

  [Washington Post / Jared Bernstein]

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