A moving, real story about an elephant and her beloved canine friend:
Month: July 2013
When Is A Picture Sexual Harassment?
A Professor of Human Resource Management writes:
The Dish Scrotum-thread has so many confounded ideas occurring. Sexual harassment occurs when one person makes sexual advances, sexual propositions, or inappropriate sexual language toward another person inside of or under the auspices of an organization. The now famous Dish Scrotum photo wouldn’t fall under sexual harassment.
Some of your readers have concerns about how their coworkers or supervisors would react should they walk by at the same instance that the Dish Scrotum photo was on screen. This concern would fall under a hostile work environment claim. A hostile work environment, which does not necessarily include sexual advances/language, occurs when an event (action, situation, statement) would prohibit a reasonable person from completing his or her work duties. This typically implies persistence, not a one-off Dish Scrotum photo appearance. Does the Dish Scrotum photo rise to the level of creating a hostile work environment? Would seeing that photo cause a reasonable person to not be able to complete his or her job (or in the extreme cause someone not to come to work)? No on both counts.
This isn’t to say that your readers aren’t justified in their concerns. Employers, due to costly litigation, tend to act conservatively with these kinds of issues. Since the US is an “at will” employment country (i.e., terminated or quit at will without needing to give justification), employers might find it easier and cheaper to cut ties with an employee for (inadvertently) looking at the Dish Scrotum photo.
Nor does any of this have to do with the “Nanny State.” That was some misplaced hyperbole on your part.
The Superhero In The Machine
Alyssa observes that the “use of drones, and robots like them for war or for surveillance has turned up as a subject in a surprisingly large number of summer’s biggest blockbusters, including Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, and now Pacific Rim:
It would be easy to dismiss the trend as just another example of Hollywood’s liberalism. But there’s more at work here than political talking points. Progressive politics may govern how many celebrities vote at the ballot box and with their wallets, but they don’t always make it into action movies, which often devolve into celebrations of American military might, aided by liberal use of American military technology. Instead, superheroes and action heroes’ relationships to drones is about something rather more self-interested, reaffirming the primacy of man over machine in blockbusters.
Mental Health Break
Or Colbert bait. Take your pick. Or maybe Ann Althouse is moonlighting a little:
Can The GOP Double-Down On The White Vote? Ctd
Sean Trende has produced a series of posts urging the GOP to target the “missing” white voters who failed to show up on 2012. Alan I. Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira counter Trende:
In 2012, turnout declined by 3.4 percentage points according to Michael McDonald’s US Elections Project. Plugging in his figures on votes cast and using Census data on eligible voters plus exit poll data on shares of votes by race, we calculate that turnout went down by about equal amounts among white and minority voters (3.4 and 3.2 percentage points, respectively).
Not surprisingly then, Trende’s own data show a substantial number of missing minority voters — 2.3 million compared to 6.1 million whites. There are more missing white voters despite the roughly equal declines in turnout simply because they are a larger group and more voters are knocked out of the voting pool for any given decline in turnout.
Sean Trende responds:
The larger problem with the Teixeira-Abramowitz piece is that when you cut through the rhetoric, my core thesis still stands. Even taking every word in their piece as true, it remains the case that there were well over 5 million fewer white voters than would have been reasonably expected in 2012. This analysis is based on 2008 turnout and population growth. That’s not really in doubt.
Nor is it a mystery which type of white voter stayed home last year. These no-shows fit a profile. They turn out to be the downscale whites whom Teixeira has previously insisted Democrats must woo. If these voters had turned out, they probably would have improved Romney’s share of the vote. This is the crux of my argument, and the only real mystery is why some people find this conclusion so upsetting.
In a separate post, Abramowitz and Teixeira kick out another leg of Trende’s argument – that Republicans have done significantly better with white voters over time:
There is no question that in comparison with the overall electorate, white voters have become more Republican over time. But the interpretation of this result is not as straightforward as Trende suggests. That is because the [Partisan Voting Index (PVI)] for white voters reflects both the Democratic margin among white voters and the size of the nonwhite electorate.
In fact, the main reason that the gap between the Democratic margin in the overall electorate and the Democratic margin among white voters has increased over time is not because whites have become more Republican but because nonwhites, who are overwhelmingly Democratic, now make up a larger share of the overall electorate. As just one example, the PVI of the white vote in 2012 (-24) was far more negative than it was in 1988 (-13). Yet Democratic margins among both whites and nonwhites were essentially the same in each election. The real change: Nonwhites were just 15% of voters in 1988 compared to 28% in 2012. In other words, the rapid growth of the very Democratic nonwhite share of the electorate makes it seem like white voters are becoming more Republican than they actually are.
A Civil War Within A Civil War
Al Qaeda just killed one of the Free Syria Army’s top commanders. The Syrian opposition now has to defeat the Jihadist maniacs and the Assad machine. It reveals to me just how nuts it is to intervene in that almighty and intractable mess. But it also reveals a possibly positive dynamic we have seen in the past: giving al Qaeda enough rope to hang themselves with the resident population has often led to their defeat. It did in Anbar and in Jordan. And far better for Arabs to suppress al Qaeda than Westerners.
Meanwhile, a reminder of how quixotic the attempt is to reconcile the irreconcilable in the current Arab moment:
New attacks on Iraqi Shiites killed at least 24 people while assaults Friday against policemen killed five, officials said, as insurgents press their campaign to exacerbate the country’s renewed sectarian tensions.
And the beat goes on.
(Photo: An opposition fighter stands over seven year old Ahmad Jabir, who was injured alongside some his family members by a shell, as he lies on a X-Ray machine after he brought the boy to a hospital in the town of Al-Bara, in Syria’s northwestern province Idlib on July 8, 2013. The town of Al-Bara has been under regular shelling during the past few weeks after clashes between rebel forces and the Syrian army started around the highway that connects the Idlib and Latakia provinces. By Daniel Leal Olivas/AFP/Getty Images.)
The View From Your Window
Pohnpei, Micronesia, 1.35 pm
Israel’s Man In Washington
Beinart introduces us to Ron Dermer, the new Israeli ambassador to the US:
The problem isn’t that Dermer supported Romney. It’s why he supported Romney. Like Romney, and like Netanyahu himself, Dermer can barely contain his contempt for Palestinians, those who empathize with them and those who believe they deserve citizenship in a viable state. For years now, Bibi’s American defenders have claimed that he’s undergone an ideological transformation, that he’s no longer the man who in the 1990s regularly compared Palestinian control of the West Bank to Nazi control of Europe. It’s a bit dispiriting, therefore, that in the midst of what may prove America’s last real push for two states, Netanyahu has put the U.S. portfolio in the hands of someone who’s espoused all his old views.
Dermer brings to his job the one element most necessary to ensure that misunderstandings between Washington and Jerusalem are kept to a minimum in the coming years. As the person who is as close to Netanyahu as anyone currently working in the prime minister’s office, Dermer will be seen as a direct conduit to Israel’s leader thereby enabling him to play a vital role the U.S.-Israel relationship as efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program come to a head and Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempts to revive the peace process continue.
I suspect Dermer will do all he can to sabotage any peace process and force the US into a ruinous military attack on Iran. But we’ll see, won’t we? I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
The GOP Exposed
The House Republicans just pushed through a farm bill with extremely generous farm subsidies while scrapping the usual corollary food stamp aid. It doesn’t get clearer than that. There’s no small government consistency here – just an embrace of subsidizing Big Ag and a contempt for the needy in a long, protracted growth recession. Are they trying to make themselves look like total douchebags? Chait is unsurprised:
It’s no longer novel that conservative Republicans have positioned themselves to Obama’s left on domestic spending that benefits their own constituencies. We have seen three years of Republicans attacking Obama for robbing Grandma’s Medicare. But at least Medicare is a justifiable program. The existence of farm subsidies is insane, and the fact that a party that hates government so much it engages in a continuous guerilla war of shutdowns, manufactured currency crises, and outright sabotage can’t eliminate it may be the most telling indicator of the GOP’s venality. They only hate necessary government spending. Totally unjustifiable spending is fine with them.
Or they are simply acting out on deeper cultural fears and biases? Even Douthat takes the GOP to task this time:
This is egregious whatever you think of the food stamp program, and it’s indicative of why the endless, often-esoteric debates about the Republican future actually matter to our politics. Practically any conception of the common good, libertarian or communitarian or anywhere in between, would produce better policy than a factionally-driven approach of further subsidizing the rich while cutting programs for the poor. The compassionate-conservative G.O.P. of George W. Bush combined various forms of corporate welfare with expanded spending on social programs, which was obviously deeply problematic in various ways … but not as absurd and self-dealing as only doing welfare for the rich.
Bernstein wonders if Boehner should have killed the bill:
What’s not clear to me is whether John Boehner is better off with this thing passing. As Ed Kilgore notes, it’s not real likely that anything can come out of conference that can pass. It’s not really clear, right now, if the separate nutrition bill can pass. It’s not clear what Boehner had to promise to conservatives about conference to get them to stick on this vote. It’s not clear what the next step is.
It seems to me that Boehner did have another choice. If the GOP-only farm-only Farm Bill fails, then maybe he can push the mainstream of his conference to support a bipartisan bill, leaving the conservative fringe out entirely. It won’t work on everything, but on the Farm Bill, it really might. Maybe. And if it works on the Farm Bill and there’s little fallout, that might strengthen Boehner’s ability to gather different coalitions on the next tough one that comes up.
Good luck with that. Plumer foresees gridlock:
The Senate and House could try to reconcile their two very different bills in conference — and the final version could well include food-stamp money. But any reconciled bill would still need to pass the House again — and conservatives there don’t want to vote for the Senate’s food-stamp formula, which would cut spending by just $3.9 billion over the next 10 years. The House could pass its own food-stamp bill later this month. Alternatively, the House could approve its own separate bill to reauthorize the food-stamp program. Indeed, Robert Greenstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities thinks the GOP will eventually come up with “a still harsher SNAP bill designed to pass solely with Republican votes.”
What does he mean? Recall that the previous House farm bill would have cut food-stamp funding by $20.5 billion over 10 years. That legislation failed to pass because the cuts were too steep for many House Democrats and not steep enough for many House Republicans. If the next food-stamp bill made even sharper cuts, then Republicans might be able to pass it on their own. But, again, the final product would still have to get through the Democratic Senate. There’d still be an impasse.
(Photo: House Speaker John Boehner speaks to the media during his weekly news conference on Capitol Hill, July 11, 2013 in Washington, DC. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images.)
Totally Safe For Work
But not safe for a black man. It’s also one reason why we at the Dish have long had a policy of publishing photographs of reality: the corpse of Trayvon Martin:
This is worth seeing, as this man has no longer any ability to defend himself. It’s reality – a reality most media outlets want to protect you from, as if you were not capable of digesting all the facts about a story or subject, including visuals. These stories – whether the torture of prisoners, the genital mutilation of girls, the war crimes in Syria, the barbarism in Woolwich – cannot be told by words alone. The images force us closer to reality, which is where we need to be to understand our world a little better.
The Dish 