“Just as we were all, potentially, in Adam when he fell, so we were all, potentially, in Jerusalem on that first Good Friday before there was an Easter, a Pentecost, a Christian, or a Church. It seems to me worth while asking ourselves who we should have been and what we should have been doing. None of us, I’m certain, will imagine himself as one of the Disciples, cowering in an agony of spiritual despair and physical terror. Very few of us are big wheels enough to see ourselves as Pilate, or good churchmen enough to see ourselves as a member of the Sanhedrin. In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all-too-familiar sight — three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say, ‘It’s disgusting the way the mob enjoy such things. Why can’t the authorities execute criminals humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?’ Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the nature of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful,” – W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book.
Your criticism of Jo Becker is hopelessly histrionic. I watched election returns at my then-boyfriend’s apartment in West Hollywood on November 4, 2008. I still recall the bewildering disorientation associated with feeling such enormous pride that our country had elected our first black president – while, at the same time, feeling such hopeless despair that my state didn’t care about making me a second-class citizen by approving Prop 8.
It was clear to me on that night that something in the marriage equality movement needed to change. The “No on Prop 8” advertisements that I had been watching and writing a series of small checks to fund were offensive in their banality. Rather than frame the issue in the manner that a majority have subsequently come to understand it – as a matter of fundamental human dignity, love, family, and fairness – the “No on 8” campaign relied on soundbites from Dianne Feinstein, overly defensive rebuttals of ads claiming that Proposition 8 would lead to the kids being converted to homosexuality, and a steadfast resistance to showing gay couples who were actually affected by the issue. The folks who Jo Becker write about are the folks who saw what a hopeless loser the No on Prop 8 was – and how laughably awful other similar campaigns opposing gay-marriage bans were.
Was Chad Griffin the first mover of the gay marriage revolution? No. Did Chad Griffin benefit from the intellectual foundations laid by you, Evan Wolfson, and others crying out in the wilderness in the 1990s? You bet your life they did. Does that mean that he and the others who Jo Becker discusses are not responsible for an important re-boot, re-messaging, and re-investment in the cause in the face of historic defeats in multiple states for the gay-marriage cause just as recently as 6 years ago? Certainly not.
Civil rights movements take stages, iterations, and generations. Griffin, or Dustin Lance Black, could not have done it on their own – but neither could Wolfson, Socarides, and Co. who signed on to a messaging and media strategy in the mid- to late 2000s that ran away from talking about and showing that gay couples wanted marriage because they simply wanted to declare commitment and enduring love in the same way that everyone does.
Jo Becker overstates her thesis. Of course, that’s what some authors, trying to sell books, ultimately do from time to time. (Malcom Gladwell seems to have made a comfortable living doing that for years.) This makes her book less accurate and certainly a heck of a lot less nuanced than it should be. However, it does not make her book, or her, “truly toxic and morally repellent.” Telling the story of how a new generation of gay leaders changed the message and changed the emphasis to change history is neither toxic nor repellent.
The fact that my reader puts Richard Socarides and Evan Wolfson in the same camp reveals the limits of his understanding. Socarides spent the 1990s defending the Clinton administration’s doubling the rate of gay dishonorable discharges from the military and signing of the Defense of Marriage Act. Wolfson spent the 1990s fighting the Clintons and Socarides on marriage day after day. Evan and I were just as critical of the milque-toast crap the Prop 8 campaign put out as Griffin or anyone else. Both of us had spent years arguing against any defensiveness, making exactly the case that my reader does.
It is also emphatically not true that the message or the emphasis changed after 2008. The messages that we gay conservatives honed in the 1990s and 2000s were repeated almost verbatim in the Prop 8 trial; the liberal legal arguments had been aired and analyzed exhaustively by liberals in the movement. There is nothing in the message since 2008 that wasn’t there from the early 1990s onward. The Prop 8 campaign was indeed a fiasco – but that tells us close to nothing about the marriage strategy charted in the 1990s and sustained with real, consistent message discipline even today.
As for more defeats occurring in the past than now: well duh! Our popular support was far lower in the past than now. Of course we would lose cases, just as all civil rights movements have, at the start and even in the middle. But the cases, as in all civil rights movements, could be leveraged into a broader and broader public discussion, which could move the polls, which would increase the chances of winning future cases. And that’s the pattern we saw. We had won legal cases for marriage equality in Hawaii and Vermont in the 1990s – neutralized by state legislatures – but helping us get the issue on the radar screen. Holland enacted marriage equality as early as 2001, Belgium in 2003. We won the breakthrough legal and then political struggle in Massachusetts in 2004. Canada and Spain joined the throng in 2005. We won in the courts in California in 2008 – after Gavin Newsom’s act of civil disobedience electrified the movement. We went on to win the nation’s capital and Iowa in 2009. How could any of that happened if it all depended on Griffin’s non-existent re-branding of the movement?
And by the way, I have had no beef with Griffin at any point in these past few years. Below is the entirely of our posts on him, including:
I have to say that the appointment of Chad Griffin to run the biggest gay lobby this coming June is a great sign of how far we’ve come. There was a time when HRC wanted nothing to do with marriage rights. Now it has selected a grass-roots, if highly networked, champion of them for its new head. Promising … and encouraging.
A fascinating story that bodes very well for Griffin’s assumption of leadership of the Human Rights Campaign. Griffin fought the usual caution to get the Boies-Olson lawsuit on the road.
And the only two mentions of Dustin Lance Black from the Dish archives praised his Oscar speech and featured his play based on the Prop 8 trial. I have no problem acknowledging their contributions. I only object to their campaign to make it seem as if they did this in spite of all we had done before, rather than because of it.
Update from a reader:
I just want to echo everything you’ve said in response to dissenters and about the Jo Becker book. I was a paid staffer of MassEquality (the coalition group founded to win the political fight for marriage in 2004) during the marriage fight and the tactics that Jo Becker lauds as inventions were ALL in play during that fight. As an anecdote you haven’t mentioned in detail: Pat Guerriero was called in to lobby Republican state legislators, other prominent R’s and donors were identified as possible switches. Massachusetts was where the tactical playbook was written, or at least fine-tuned – and that playbook was and still is being followed around the country to wide and now visible success.
And the leaders from that movement? Well, they’re the intellectual underpinning of today’s HRC and Freedom to Marry. Marty Rouse (who works for Chad Griffin, and has been at HRC as the Field Director for years) and Marc Solomon (who managed the failed Prop 8 campaign and is now doing amazing trail blazing work at Freedom to Marry) are examples of the many people who have guided the tactics of the movement … and they still guide it! But like most political campaigns, they’ve had wins and losses.
Even though I’m occasionally off-put by how strident you are on some issues, I’m glad to see that you’re sticking to your guns on this one. The facts are so solidly in your corner and Jo’s claims are so outrageous … I would just hate to have this movement’s history rewritten when I’ve spent so much of my life involved in it. I’m still just so shocked that she didn’t do real homework on this one. No digging. No depth. The movement she writes about just didn’t happen!
Vice captures a Ukrainian police station being overrun:
Mark Thompson explores the Russian military tradition of maskirovka in more depth:
Maskirovka (which is rooted in the English word, mask) is designed to sow confusion and frustration among opponents by denying them basic information.
The anonymous troops in eastern Ukraine say only that they’re “Cossacks,” but Ukrainian and Western officials believe many of them are led by Russian special forces. Yet the murkiness of their origin and sponsors inflates their menace, and makes it more difficult to figure out how to deal with them. Snipping puppet strings between Ukraine and Moscow may be easier than controlling indigenous separatists operating independently. A combination of both complicates matters still further.
Patrick Tucker reports that Ukrainians are taking the matter of separating real protesters from Russian infiltrators into their own hands:
Anti-Russian grassroots organizations such as the website Ukraine Investigation have employed a crowd-sourcing technique similar to the Reddit thread “findbostonbombers” that sprouted up after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
Ukraine Investigation founder Andriy Nurzhynskyy said that in many of the reports and user-uploaded photos that cross his desk, the “protesters” are armed with rifles like the Kalashnikov 103, a firearm that is unavailable in Ukraine. Conversely, authentic separatist protesters usually carry sticks. While Nurzhynskyy maintains that his site and others have been able to positively identify a small number of Russian military leaders in Ukraine, he said, “We understand that there are many unidentified persons and our work is not [finished].”
If the maskirovka tactics are meant to sow doubt about the identity of the “protesters,” they are not fooling Gen. Philip Breedlove, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe:
The pro-Russian “activists” in eastern Ukraine exhibit tell-tale military training and equipment and work together in a way that is consistent with troops who are part of a long-standing unit, not spontaneously stood up from a local militia.
The weapon handling discipline and professional behavior of these forces is consistent with a trained military force. Rifle muzzles are pointed down, fingers not on triggers, but rather laid across trigger mechanisms.
Coordinated use of tear gas and stun grenades against targeted buildings indicates a level of training that exceeds a recently formed militia.
Video of these forces at checkpoints shows they are attentive, on their feet, focused on their security tasks, and under control of an apparent leader. This contrasts with typical militia or mob checkpoints, where it’s common to see people sitting, smoking, and so forth.
The way these forces target government buildings, hit them in coordinated strikes and quickly secure the surrounding area with roadblocks and barricades is similar to what we’ve seen in Crimea. Again, indicative of a professional military force, acting under direction and leadership, not a spontaneous militia.
Finally, the weapons and equipment they carry are primarily Russian army issue. This is not the kind of equipment that civilians would be likely to be able to get their hands on in large numbers.
Any one of the points above taken alone would not be enough to come to a conclusion on this issue, but taken in the aggregate, the story is clear.
John Sides calculates that the GOP’s House majority could grow significantly larger:
[B]ased on the current model and current conditions, there is a real chance that the 2014 election could give the GOP as many or more seats as it had after the wave election of 2010. There is less of a chance, though still a chance, that the GOP could command a majority as large as its post-WWII high-water mark. But, as of now, 2014 appears unlikely to give the GOP the unprecedented majorities it had after 1928 (or after 1920 for that matter, when it controlled 302 seats).
Sean Trende, meanwhile, wonders about the Democrats picking up Senate seats:
Don’t get me wrong: For Democrats to gain seats this cycle would be the equivalent of drawing a straight flush. With that said, straight flushes do occur, so it’s worth examining how it might occur here.
The first thing that would have to happen is that the playing field would have to improve for Democrats. Of the 11 Democratic seats that RCP currently rates as leans Democratic or worse, Democrats are probably at least slightly favored in Michigan, Iowa, New Hampshire, and perhaps Colorado. If the political dynamic were to shift toward the party, these seats would probably be out of the GOP’s reach on Election Day.
The way this could occur is fairly straightforward: The Affordable Care Act improves; there’s no massive rate shock for premiums in September or October; and the economy slowly gains ground. This should propel President Obama’s job approval upward, lifting the collective Democratic boat.
With NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s asylum in Russia still technically temporary, he’s doing his best to fit in. [Yesterday], that included a special appearance — or bizarre PR stunt — during a televised Q&A with Vladimir Putin, in which Snowden served up a chance for Putin to tell the world that Russia doesn’t spy on its citizens like the big bad U.S. does. “I’ve seen little public discussion of Russia’s policy of mass surveillance,” said Snowden. “So I’d like to ask you: Does Russia intercept, store, or analyze the communication of millions?”
Putin, it’s safe to say, was not caught off guard by the line of inquiry.
For Allahpundit, this proves that Snowden is a tool of the Kremlin:
Only two possibilities here. One: There’s an FSB agent out of frame with a gun pointed at Snowden’s head, just to make sure that he reads the cue card as written. In that case, decide for yourself how likely it is that Snowden’s refused to share any U.S. state secrets with Russian intel. Two: He’s doing this cheerfully, either at Putin’s request as a condition of his asylum or at his own request, to exploit a Putin press conference as a way to further needle the NSA.
Whatever the answer, the stark fact is that he’s asking a question here which he knows — absolutely knows — will generate a self-serving lie told by a guy who embodies the type of fascism that Snowden claims to abhor. For your information, the name of Russia’s mass surveillance program, a.k.a. “PRISM on steroids,” is the System of Operative-Investigative Measures, or SORM. Via Joshua Foust, they’ve been using it for years but lately, as in so many other ways, they’ve gotten more aggressive with it.
But Elias Groll points out that nobody was talking about SORM yesterday:
Putin’s answer was comical on its face — and that should give us doubts about the extent to which Snowden is a really a “pawn” in some grand propaganda scheme. Does anyone actually think that Putin doesn’t aggressively use surveillance to go after his opponents and that Russian surveillance is strictly governed by the law? After all, the Russian intelligence services have spent the last few weeks leaking intercepted phone calls between Western officials.
So thanks to Snowden, here we are talking about how Putin is a liar and a skilled user of aggressive surveillance tactics. That probably isn’t the response the Russian strongman was hoping for.
[Agentara.ru editor Andrei] Soldatov argues that there were three key points made by Putin, each of which was a half-truth or a lie. First, Soldatov says, Putin argued that the FSB, the successor agency to the Soviet era’s KGB, needs to get a warrant from a court before surveillance can begin. This is true in theory, Soldatov admits, but in practice the warrants are not required to be shown: Telecoms agencies and Internet providers do not have the necessary security clearance to view the warrants, in any case.
Secondly, Putin seemed to suggest that the Russian legislature, the Duma, has oversight over the FSB. This is not true, Soldatov says, arguing that while the State Duma does have a Special Committee for Security, it has no actual oversight for secret services.
Finally, Putin argued that Russia doesn’t have the “hardware and money the United States has.” Soldatov says this is “not entirely correct.”
Snowden quickly came out with an op-ed claiming he was actually trying to catch Putin in a lie and start a debate over surveillance in Russia:
I expected that some would object to my participation in an annual forum that is largely comprised of softball questions to a leader unaccustomed to being challenged. But to me, the rare opportunity to lift a taboo on discussion of state surveillance before an audience that primarily views state media outweighed that risk. Moreover, I hoped that Putin’s answer – whatever it was – would provide opportunities for serious journalists and civil society to push the discussion further.
When this event comes around next year, I hope we’ll see more questions on surveillance programs and other controversial policies. But we don’t have to wait until then. For example, journalists might ask for clarification as to how millions of individuals’ communications are not being intercepted, analysed or stored, when, at least on a technical level, the systems that are in place must do precisely that in order to function. They might ask whether the social media companies reporting that they have received bulk collection requests from the Russian government are telling the truth.
[T]his latest response suggests that Snowden is (once again) playing a game where he’s several moves ahead of many folks. The question may have set up a propaganda answer, but it appears there was a bigger strategy behind it — and one that remains entirely consistent with what Snowden has claimed his position has been since the beginning. Frankly, while this possibility was raised about his original question to Putin, many people (myself included) thought it was unlikely that Snowden would so directly go after his current hosts (who only became his hosts thanks to the US pulling his passport). Putin is not known for gracefully handling those who directly challenge him, and I don’t think it would be surprise anyone if Snowden had continued to stay out of the question of Russian surveillance, simply out of basic necessity.
I’m not sure why this grotesque display does not move Snowden’s many admirers. Perhaps people may rationalize what he did and say that he’s posing the same question to the Russian leader about which he forced a debate in this country—and that he is thus being consistent. But they can’t actually believe that. These are sophisticated people, after all, many of whom are journalists. They must know the difference between a scripted set-piece appearance with an authoritarian strong man on state controlled television and asking the tough questions in the context of democratic dialog. They must know that Snowden either played that role willingly or was, in one way or another, encouraged to do by authorities who have enormous leverage and control over him. They must know, in other words, that at this point at least, Snowden—by his own volition or against his will—is very clearly working for the Russians.
Douthat declares that “the most striking thing about the public polling on the 2016 Republican nomination isn’t just the absence of a clear frontrunner: It’s the absence of a clear pair or trio or even a quartet of frontrunners.” He wonders if we are deviating from “the path that every post-1970s Republican primary campaign has ultimately taken, in which a candidate who seems reasonably electable, performs well with “moderate conservative” primary voters … and wins the blessing of the party’s donor class successfully fends off a more right-wing challenger”:
I believe that the party decides, and I know that party establishments basically exist to keep figures like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee from the nomination. But sometimes the party can’t make up it’s mind, and sometimes, just sometimes, the establishment fractures, fails, loses. Because of history I don’t look at Paul and Cruz and Huckabee and see likely Republican presidential nominees. But history is what’s happening now as well as what’s happened back then, and with where the field is at the moment, it seems like a mistake to look at any of them and just say, “no, they can’t.”
As for the age mix, you may have heard that about 40 percent of the population eligible for coverage in the marketplaces is between the ages of 18 and 34. That’s true and, obviously, 28 percent is a lot less than 40 percent. The worry has always been that older and sicker people would sign up in unusually high numbers, forcing insurers to raise their prices next year and beyond.
But insurance companies didn’t expect young people to sign up in proportion to their numbers in the population. They knew participation would be a bit lower and they set premiums accordingly. Only company officials know exactly what they were projecting—that’s proprietary information—but one good metric is the signup rate in Massachusetts, in 2007, when that state had open enrollment for its version of the same reforms. According to information provided by Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist and reform architect, 28.3 percent of Massachusetts enrollees were ages 19 to 34, a comparable age group.
Suderman puts those numbers is a less favorable light:
The administration’s goal, based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, was for 39 percent of the final tally to be between the ages of 18 and 34. The “worst-case scenario,” according to a Kaiser Foundation analysis cited by the administration was if only 25 percent of the final tally was in that age cohort. As it turns out, we do have information about sign-ups in that age group, and the demographic mix is much closer to the worst-case scenario than it is to the administration’s target.
There are still key details that the White House hasn’t included in past enrollment announcements, and it didn’t this time either. The numbers still don’t say how many of the 8 million people have paid their premiums, because they’re not officially enrolled until they’ve paid. The best estimates from the insurance industry have suggested that anywhere from 15 percent to 20 percent haven’t paid yet, though at least some of those have been trying and some will likely settle their bills. And the numbers still don’t tell us how many of the new customers were uninsured before, and how many were just swapping out one health insurance plan for another.
Meanwhile, Sarah Kliff explains why so many pundits underestimated enrollment:
Being uninsured is horrible. But the political conversation over Obamacare was driven almost entirely by people who had, and knew they would be able to keep, their health insurance. It was filled with a lot of assumptions, theories, and speculations about what people who didn’t have good insurance, or any insurance, would do. And after Obamacare’s disastrous launch, the theory took hold that these people wouldn’t find this untested program worth the trouble. It was the permanently insured speculating about the uninsured and the barely insured – and, unsurprisingly, they got it wrong.
Talks in Geneva between Ukraine, Russia, the US, and the EU produced an agreement last night:
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry outlined the terms of the deal during a press conference in Geneva, Switzerland. All parties agreed that all sides refrain from violence. All illegal groups must be disarmed. All illegally seized buildings in eastern Ukraine must be returned to their legitimate owners. All illegally occupied streets and squares must be vacated.
The deal also calls for amnesty to all protesters who have left their public places and surrendered their weapons, providing they are not accused of crimes. “None of us leave here with a sense that the job is done because these words are on the paper,” Kerry said. “If we’re not able to see immediate progress, we’ll have no other choice than impose further costs on Russia.”
Kerry obtained a Russian commitment to a quick de-escalation in coming days without quite knowing how to prevent new outbursts or to sustain the peace. Lavrov got a foot in the door of a constitutional revision that might turn Ukraine into a federation in which Kiev, the capital, does not have administrative control over the east and south. If things go Lavrov’s way, Putin will have got Crimea plus loyal autonomous Russian-speaking cohorts in Ukraine without having to occupy new territory.
President Barack Obama would be left with a fait accompli in Putin’s favor because the Kiev government is in no position to disarm or control the pro-Russian elements in the east and south. In any case, Putin will continue to help them covertly since he already has the Russian parliament’s support for such actions. Perhaps, today was a good day for Ukraine’s independence and domestic peace but much depends on whether the interim government in Kiev fully understands the power equation within the country and makes it compromises with Moscow.
Hopefully the deal leads to the de-escalation of a situation that appeared to be on the verge of spiraling into mass violence, but there are a lot of unresolved questions, including how the regional governments of eastern Ukraine will interact with Kiev going forward, particularly on the issue of EU integration, which sparked this crisis in the first place. I’ll also be curious to see what a referendum on the future status of eastern Ukraine will actually look like.
The agreement also doesn’t address the 40,000 Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border, meaning that Kiev could essentially be negotiating with a gun to its head in the weeks to come. The U.S. sanctions on Russian officials will presumably remain in place and could complicate other areas of cooperation for Washington and Moscow. Then, of course, there’s Crimea, which Ukraine is almost certainly not going to recognize as Russian territory and which Russia will almost certainly not give up.
Julia Ioffe points out that there’s no feasible mechanism for implementing the deal:
[W]ho’s going to enforce this disarmament? As we’ve seen in the last few days, the provisional Ukrainian government has been utterly unable to dislodge anybody from just about anywhere. Now they may have the added confidence of this agreement, but not much ability to follow through.
Moreover, points out, Masha Lipman, a political analyst and editor with the Moscow Carnegie Center, “who speaks on behalf of these men in the east? Who can tell them to disarm?” Same with the broad national discourse and inclusive constitutional reform: with whom would Kiev be speaking?
There’s another problem, and no other way to put it: Putin lies. He lied about the role of Russian troops and infiltrators in Crimea (which he now acknowledges) and he’s lying about their role in eastern Ukraine. Putin’s shamelessness in this regard makes Ronald Reagan’s borrowed Russian injunction of “trust but verify” seem downright quaint.
Putin is likely to betray these latest commitments unless he’s convinced that doing so will have consequences. That’s why stiffer sanctions before today’s negotiations would have helped. Today’s agreement works the other way: by raising false hopes it will encourage Europeans opposed to new sanctions to resist all the harder. It’s exactly what Putin wanted.
NASA has announced that its Kepler telescope has uncovered a new solar system about 500 light years away, currently dubbed Kepler 186. Circling that star are five planets, and the outermost planet, Kepler-186f, is about the size of Earth and within the star’s habitable zone. “The discovery of Kepler-186f is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth,” NASA’s Paul Hertz said in a statement. The star Kepler 186 is a “red dwarf” star, about half the size and mass of our own Sun. It’s about 500 light years away from Earth, near the constellation Cygnus in the night sky. The planet itself orbits its sun once every 130 days.
Kepler-186f is about 10 percent larger than Earth and it orbits a sun that is cooler, dimmer, and about half the size of our own. The effects of gravity would be “slightly” more apparent there, so “you would feel heavier,” Meadows said. Our cousin avoids many of the problems that reduce the likelihood of life on other Earth-like planets. Some are too big, too cold, too gaseous, or have gravity problems that scorch oceans. So far, Kepler-186f appears almost to be a Goldilocks — not too big, not too far from its star, maybe just right.
Phil Plait calls this “potentially the most Earth-like planet we’ve yet found”
I say potentially because honestly we don’t know all that much about it besides its size and distance from its star (and its year—it takes 130 days to orbit the star once). The next things we’d need to know about it are the mass, what its atmosphere is like, and the surface temperature. The gravity of the planet depends on its mass, and in many ways the atmosphere depends on the gravity. Unfortunately, we don’t know either, and we’re unlikely to. The techniques used to find planet masses aren’t up to the task for this planet—the star is too dim to get reliable data. The same is true for any air the planet might have as well. And without that, we don’t really know its surface temperature.
This is more of a stepping stone in the search for earth-like planets and extraterrestrial life than a destination. Because the star is so far away, we can’t really tell if it has an atmosphere or learn much more about it, and definitely can’t visit it.
So astronomers like Barclay and the hundreds of others looking for exoplanets will use this as evidence that earth-sized planets can form in their star’s habitable zones, and search for others closer to us. The discovery is particularly exciting because the majority of stars in our galaxy are red dwarves like Kepler-186, so there may be many more exoplanets similar to this one out there.
(Image: Artist’s concept depicts Kepler-186f, the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone. By NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech.)
The Dish 