Archives For: The Dish
From Jane Mayer’s write-up of Obama’s speech:
What kind of solution for indefinite detention can be arrived at, however, Obama left for later. It won’t be easy. As Joseph Margulies, clinical professor at Northwestern University Law School and lead counsel in the first Guantánamo case in the Supreme Court, noted, “The devil is in the details.” Obama’s speech has, at least, put the right questions on the table. Even Margulies, who has been critical of Obama for not doing more to close Guantánamo in the past, admitted he was “excited” by the speech. He said, “All the high-flying rhetoric about values and ‘who we are,’ and national identity is great.” But, he said, “Unless he follows up on it, it’ll all be for naught.” Much of the burden of moving forward, however, is not in Obama’s hands. Within minutes of his speech, conservatives on Capitol Hill had already begun jumping on him for having a “pre-9/11 mindset”—as if, somehow, the 9/11 mindset should last forever.
Daniel Klaidman reports on first steps the administration is taking:
So for many advocates of closing the detention facility, who Obama appoints inside the White House will be a key measure of his commitment [to closing Gitmo]. “The president has the authority to close Guantanamo,” says Thomas Wilner, a prominent Washington lawyer who has argued landmark cases at the Supreme Court on behalf of Gitmo detainees. “What he’s got to do is act and put the full authority of the White House behind getting the prison closed.”
Wilner and his allies may soon get some good news. A White House official confirmed to The Daily Beast that Obama has asked his chief counterterrorism adviser, Lisa Monaco, to handle the day-to-day responsibilities for Guantanamo. Monaco has daily access to the president and clout within the national-security bureaucracy. She also has deep experience dealing with the Guantanamo conundrum. When she first joined the administration in 2009 as a senior Justice Department official, she worked on Gitmo.
Fallows celebrates Obama’s call to wind down the War on Terror:
Hugo Schwyzer considers another aspect of the debate over onanism:
Masturbation feels really good. It also can feel really icky, when conditioned feelings of guilt wash over the masturbator as he or she comes down from a post-orgasmic high. That shame may or not be rooted in religion, but it is certainly grounded in the idea that the fundamental sexual unit should always be more than one person. The persistence of that shame serves as a reminder that our culture war isn’t just about who we have sex with, but about why we have it in the first place. Is sex solely about connecting with one other person in intimate relationship, or is it about delighting in something that first and foremost, belongs to us as individuals?
I’d hazard the following ill-advised answer to that question: both, as a matter of pure realism (as that fantastic French video explains). But if sex is never attached to relationship, if it is merely an act rather than an interaction, it will wither eventually in ways not true of all solitary pleasures, and miss something essential about sex. As Malcolm Muggeridge once said in defense of lust: it’s all give-give-give. It suffers in some profound way when there is no one else to give it to.
It’s the result of the latest annual Country Ratings Poll for the BBC World Service. Britain has been buoyed by the Olympics; China and India have sunk; Germany has also seen gains in approval, even in France! And then you notice the group of countries Greater Israel is now lumped in with: North Korea, Iran and Pakistan. Good going, Netanyahu! Just keep building those settlements.
Chait profiles Josh Barro:
The brief arc of Barro’s young career—at National Review, then Forbes, and now Bloomberg View—displays a man losing all patience with the Republican Party. Over time, Barro’s writing has fitfully evolved from muted, oblique criticism to polite, persistent criticism to, finally, firm opposition. His alienation crystallized in a widely read post declaring Romney’s infamous “47 percent” video as fatally defining the Republican candidate. Now Barro writes things like “The party’s economic agenda, as embodied in the latest Ryan budget, is simply terrible for the vast majority of Americans.”
I recently sent Barro his 2010 article praising Ryan’s plan. After rereading it, he ticked off its flaws: He had filled in every ambiguity by assuming the best faith on Ryan’s part, while ignoring Ryan’s punishing cuts to Medicaid. The budgetary weaknesses he had identified, he had framed as problems that “need to be fixed,” whereas he now recognizes that Ryan is unwilling to do what’s needed to fix them (primarily, raise taxes).
A reader quotes the president yesterday:
When a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America – and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot – his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team.
President Obama (and you) may feel that way, but the Constitution says otherwise. There’s no “unless he’s a terrorist” exception anywhere in that document; if you’re a citizen, you’re entitled to due process. If you and the president find the Constitution to be inconvenient, I suggest that you petition your respective representatives to Congress and ask them to amend it. Due process isn’t a luxury; it’s the dividing line between being a nation of laws and a nation of presidential death squads. We are better than this.
Give me a break. If you have joined up with an army of the enemy and are involved in the planning and execution of mass murder and intimidation of American citizens, and you cowardly choose to launch such attacks from a foreign country where you cannot easily be captured, you have forfeited the rule of law for the rules of war.
When you take up war against your own country, you are a traitor. When you do so on the battlefield itself, and join the enemy’s army, and declare war on your fellow citizens, there is no reason on earth why, after careful sifting of the evidence, the US president shouldn’t fight back by the same means you have chosen. And, look, there is no constitutional question here. Ex parte Quirin (1942) has established the constitutionality of defending this country from traitors who have joined the enemy’s army abroad. Most of the traitors captured in that case were sentenced to death by military commission, as authorized by the executive branch. They were executed outside the civilian justice system. Another reader:
You criticized George W. Bush harshly and appropriately for his suspension of habeas corpus of suspected terrorists (American or not) during his administration and in fact revisited that criticism during the South Carolina Republican Presidential debate when you said, sarcastically, referring to the Republicans, ”Habeas corpus is no big deal because presidents don’t abuse power. Unlike monarchs, I suppose. This is the party of restoring the Constitution?” And yet, in a jaw dropping show of chutzpah, you defend Obama when he says referring to an American terrorist suspect, “his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team.”
So in your warped sense of government, it’s unthinkable to imprison a person indefinitely without judicial review under presidential fiat but killing a U.S. citizen without judicial review under presidential fiat is just prudent policy. This from a person who is against the death penalty, for heaven’s sake. Life imprisonment without judicial review sounds a lot better than getting killed via Hellfire missle.
Of a different variety:
Seattle-based [William] von Schneidau has been feeding marijuana scraps — leaves, stems, and root bulbs — to a stable of pigs. He’s a butcher in newly street-legal Washington; the weed feed comes from a medical marijuana co-op. Von Schneidau’s scheme is an of-the-moment novelty, allowing him to charge $120 for periodic Pot Pig Gig dinners. But he wants you to know: this isn’t about the money, or the PR avalanche (his story has gone semi-viral this week). Pot pigs are simply the latest iteration of his longtime passion — drawing connections between an animal’s diet and its meat. … Like blueberry quails, or the coveted acorn-fed pigs of Spain, von Schneidau believes meat’s flavor can be enhanced through a guided diet. Pot is the most recent of his off-template pig food, which has included spent vodka stillage, microbrew grains, and cantaloupes.
Unfortunately for the pigs, “eating raw marijuana doesn’t give mammals a high.”
It’s on the rise:
According to a new report put out by the Brookings Institute, more poor inhabitants of the U.S. now live in suburbs than in cities and rural areas. Between 2002 and 2011, the population of the suburban poor rose 67%. That’s over twice the number seen in urban areas.
Brad Plumer summarizes key points from the report:
The biggest driver is that suburbs simply grew faster than urban areas during the 2000s, particularly in the South. At the same time, jobs have been migrating to the suburbs for many years — and that includes low-paying jobs in retail and hospitality. As a result, many of the working poor have been moving to the suburbs, too.
Reihan’s perspective:
Ian Crouch reflects on his tendency to read voraciously, only to completely forget books shortly after:
This forgetting has serious consequences—but it has superficial ones as well, mostly having to do with vanity. It has led, at times, to a discomfiting situation, call it the Cocktail Party Trap (though this suggests that I go to many cocktail parties, which is itself a fib). Someone mentions a book with some cachet that I’ve read—a lesser-known work of a celebrated writer, say Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda,” to take an example from my shelf—and I smile knowingly, and maybe add, “It’s wonderful,” or some such thing. Great so far, I’m part of the in-crowd—and not lying; I did read it. But then there’s a moment of terror: What if the person summons up a question or comment with any kind of specificity at all? Basically, what if she aims to do anything other than merely brag about having read “Daniel Deronda”? Uh-oh. It’s about mining, right? Maybe blurt something about that. No, wait, that’s Gaskell’s “North and South.” I must either vaguely agree with what she says, hoping she isn’t somehow putting me on or lying herself, or else confess everything, with some version of the conversation killer: “I read that entire novel and now can tell you nothing of any consequence about it.” Or else slink away, muttering about needing to refill a drink.
Daniel Stuckey chats with Alex Gibney about his Wikileaks documentary:
I think the seeds of whom Assange has become today were always there: In his childhood, in the way he approached the world through the computer, in his kind of solitism, in the way he kind of took to himself and also imagined himself to always be a grander figure than he necessarily was, a kind of self-regarding narcissism. These were always there, but they were balanced with a healthy sense of idealism, and a self-deprecating humor. The Julian Assange that Mark Davis captured just before the Afghan War logs is a more interesting figure.
I think in the late scene, and through much of the more vicious attacks on Wikileaks, his character flew out of balance, and now he’s something that’s closer to a human megaphone. If you look at the Wikileaks’ twitter page, I think there’s something like 1.5 million followers. And then look at how many people that site is following. Two. And they’re both Wikileaks sites, so, you know (laughs), that’s kind of a grand metaphor. Lots to say, but not much to listen. Not much patience for listening, not much bandwidth for listening.
Reason also has an excellent new interview with Gibney about his film:
Ben Thomas compiles evidence that variances in young adulthood, early childhood, and even in utero nutrition set in motion the distinct personalities of genetically identical twins:
In short, Kempermann says, “Experience matters. Genes are clearly critically important – but even given identical genes and an identical environment, different experiences lead to different personalities, and to the individualization of the brain.” It’s a comforting thought, in its way: Even if DNA encodes the basic recipe for your personality; even if epigenetic changes started cooking up the ingredients months before you were born, your personal choices and experiences also define how those ingredients come together – and, to a certain extent, what sorts of recipes you pass on to your children.
It doesn’t seem reasonable, then, to claim that individuality is somehow innate at the moment of conception; or at any single point in anyone’s development. Rather, it’s a process – a series of changes that begin at the molecular level and add up over time, spurred on by the unbroken flow of unique accidents, triumphs, letdowns and challenges each individual faces every day, from pre-conscious prenatal development to the last gasping breaths of old age.
Alex Mayyasi summarizes a study (pdf) on the gap between perceived and actual learning:
One group saw a lecturer who presented with the skills of a TED speaker. The other watched the lecturer read haltingly from notes. Afterwards the students answered questions about how much they felt they had learned. As expected, students who had watched the lecturer with better presentation skills expected to remember more of the material, believed that they understood the material better, and rated their interest and motivation more highly than the students who watched the dud instructor.
But a test found that both groups had retained roughly the same amount of information:
The students who watched the skillful (or “fluent”) lecturer barely outperformed the students who watched the “disfluent speaker.” But they did much poorer than they expected to do, whereas the other group did about as well as they expected.
Drum adds:
If these results hold up, it means that flashy, TED-style lectures don’t actually impart any more knowledge than boring old-school lectures. But they do make you more confident that you learned something. Is that worthwhile all by itself? Or is it better to have a proper grasp of just how much you really know?
Bryan Schatz attends a “building party”, where gun enthusiasts privately collect and assemble pieces from various assault rifles:
Although US customs laws ban importing the weapons, parts kits—which include most original components of a Kalashnikov variant—are legal. So is reassembling them, as long as no more than 10 foreign-made components are used and they are mounted on a new receiver, the box-shaped central frame that holds the gun’s key mechanics. There are no fussy irritations like, say, passing a background check to buy a kit. And because we’re assembling the guns for our own “personal use,” whatever that may entail, we’re not required to stamp in serial numbers. These rifles are totally untraceable, and even under California’s stringent assault weapons ban, that’s perfectly within the law.
His takeaway:
Derek Thompson explains how “cable is still making more and more money every year, despite a structural decline in cable TV subs”:
Cable ≠ video, and nothing says it more clearly than the latest earnings reports from the Big Two: Comcast, the largest provider of pay-TV in the country; and Time Warner Cable, the second largest cable provider (but behind DirecTV and Dish in total video subs). Comcast’s total revenue is almost twice TWC’s, but their businesses are remarkably similar.
Upshot: If you equate “cable” with TV, you are literally getting only half the story. Cable providers are in the business of communications transport. They’re still in business because selling communications access is still a pretty good business, with high barriers to entry and voracious demand.
A reader responds to our latest reality check:
I would argue that the average amount people spend on their pets is significantly higher than those figures suggest. The $500/year average is a bit misleading; it was calculated across all households and is not limited to those with pets. In addition, the survey doesn’t capture the largest cost I incur: higher rent overall and additional monthly pet rent. I live in DC, where housing choices are limited for those with dogs, so my rent is higher than what it would be if I didn’t have an animal. Second, most apartments require a non-refundable deposit upon move-in ($300 in my case, often more) and charge a monthly pet rent ($25-75/month).
Second, I’m not sure the comparison to the poverty threshold is fair. Spending $2,000/year on my dog is perhaps more ethical than spending it on entertainment or other alternatives, and the high cost of pet ownership here is simply a function of location. I adopted my dog when I was living in Sierra Leone and her standard of living there was equivalent to what it is now, and it cost very little to provide for her.
Another provides a different reality check:
There are a vast number of vain and luxurious things that Americans spend way more than $61.4 million a year on: 14.6 million cosmetic surgeries a year (that is surgeries, not dollars!), Starbuck’s net revenues for 2012 were $13.3 billion (at least 11 billion from U.S. sales), Netflix had $3.61 billion in sales in 2012. There are no shortage of these kinds of spending statistics that show the obscene wealth gap between Westerners and the rest of the world. Pet ownership hardly scratches the surface!
[Re-posted from earlier today. Blogosphere response to the pivotal speech here.]
The challenges that Barack Obama faced upon taking office were, even his critics would admit, daunting: an economy tail-spinning toward a second Great Depression, two continuing, draining and tragically self-defeating wars, and an apparatus of vastly expanded executive power (including torture) which had only just begun to be checked by the judiciary. More to the point, the United States was formally at war in a conflict which seemed to have no conceivable end.
And so easily the most important thing the presidents said today, it seems to me, was the following:
We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us, mindful of James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” … The AUMF [Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists] is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States.
Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.
“Ultimately repeal the AUMF’s mandate”. I wish the word “ultimately” were not there. But the announcement of an eventual, discrete, concrete end to this war may have been a step enough for now. For my part, I think it should be a critical goal of this administration to repeal that AUMF by the end of its second term. Our goal must not be an endlessly ratcheting of terrorist and counter-terrorist violence that creates more enemies than friends. Our goal must be normalcy and freedom, even as we continue strong counter-terrorism strategies outside of the context for warfare.
I’m glad the president defended the strike against Anwar al-Awlaki as forcefully as he should:
When a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America – and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot – his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team.
My view entirely. I’m struck too by his Niebuhrian grasp of the inherent tragedy of wielding power in an age of terror – a perspective his more jejune and purist critics simply fail to understand. This seems like a heart-felt expression of Christian realism to me:
Here’s a just-released but gripping video showing one of the Woolwich religious maniacs rushing pell-pell toward the police as if he were on PCP or something. There was something truly unhinged about this disturbing incident.
A reader writes:
If only Americans appreciated how hard this was to do, given the institutional resistance, and how singularly the President himself, within the government, actually understands this in its broader context. I was there at the speech, and moved to tears. Even the interruption by the Code Pink woman turned out to be a blessing in disguise — instead of the usual bromides about the virtues of free speech, after a full minute or two of interruption, in one of the most important speeches of his tenure, he responded: “the voice of that woman is worth paying attention to.” Can you imagine any other chief of state extemporizing with that line in those circumstances? — acknowledging the power of her concerns and honoring them?
And then at the end, it occurred to him to incorporate the incident again, once more because he realized it helped make his point:
Now, we need a strategy – and a politics –that reflects this resilient spirit. Our victory against terrorism won’t be measured in a surrender ceremony on a battleship, or a statue being pulled to the ground. Victory will be measured in parents taking their kids to school; immigrants coming to our shores; fans taking in a ballgame; a veteran starting a business; a bustling city street; a citizen shouting her concerns to her President.
Wow.
I’m with my reader who was there. We remain lucky to have him, as we long have been.
Back to top
