Month: August 2014

Getting Rich Off Debt

by Dish Staff

In an excerpt of his forthcoming book, Bad Paper: Chasing Debt From Wall Street to the Underworld, Jake Halpern (NYT) explores the morally dubious consumer debt collection business:

[Aaron] Siegel struck out on his own, investing in distressed consumer debt — basically buying up the right to collect unpaid credit-card bills. When debtors stop paying those bills, the banks regard the balances as assets for 180 days. After that, they are of questionable worth. So banks “charge off” the accounts, taking a loss, and other creditors act similarly. These huge, routine sell-offs have created a vast market for unpaid debts — not just credit-card debts but also auto loans, medical loans, gym fees, payday loans, overdue cellphone tabs, old utility bills, delinquent book-club accounts. The scale is breathtaking. From 2006 to 2009, for example, the nation’s top nine debt buyers purchased almost 90 million consumer accounts with more than $140 billion in “face value.” And they bought at a steep discount. On average, they paid just 4.5 cents on the dollar. These debt buyers collect what they can and then sell the remaining accounts to other buyers, and so on. Those who trade in such debt call it “paper.” That was Aaron Siegel’s business.

It turned out to be a good one. Siegel quickly discovered that when he bought the right kind of paper, the profits were astronomical. He obtained one portfolio for $28,527, collected more than $90,000 on it in just six weeks and then sold the remaining uncollected accounts for $31,000. Siegel bought another portfolio of debt for $33,388, collected more than $147,000 on it in four months and sold the remaining accounts for $33,124. Even to a seasoned Wall Street man, the margins were jaw-dropping.

Responding to Halpern’s piece, McArdle offers some advice to those in debt:

In general, I think it’s a good idea to make good on debts you owe, unless doing so would pose an undue legal hardship. And remember that by the time you’re dealing with an elderly debt, you’re talking to a guy on the other end of the phone who probably bought your account for a few cents on the dollar. Which means that he makes a profit even if you only pay a small fraction of what you owe. Even if you don’t agree with me on the morality of it, it may be worth coming to a settlement just to end the hassle of further calls.

Adi Robertson flags Felix Salmon’s interactive debtor vs debt-collector game:

Journalist Felix Salmon has developed Bad Paper for Fusion, a TV channel and website that he joined earlier this year. It’s what he calls the first of his “post-text” projects, moving into different forms of digital storytelling. More practically, though, it’s a “choose your own adventure” story where you play either a debtor trying to beat the system or a debt collector trying to get paid.

Bad Paper sets up scenarios designed to explain what exactly debt collectors can legally do, what kind of tricks they use, and just how much they’re making when someone pays them thousands of dollars to settle a debt they bought for orders of magnitude less. In some ways, you can think of it as a much more fun and informative version of the PSA quizzes meant to teach you about things like safe driving and moderate alcohol consumption. “Winning” isn’t actually as interesting as changing up your answers and seeing what the game tells you. The flip side is that by its very nature, it feels almost falsely reassuring. There’s one very specific way to beat debt collection, and as far as I can tell from the accompanying article, it’s a pretty solid one. But the inherent limit of multiple-choice storytelling is that there is one story with a limited number of endings. There are no random calamities or special circumstances. Find a way to win once, and you’ll win every time.

Can Double-Blind Peer Review Be Reformed?, Ctd

by Freddie deBoer

Lots and lots of great reader responses to my post on peer review. Here’s a sample. Many readers ding me, correctly, for over-generalizing: much of academic peer review is not double-blind.

Interesting post, and thanks for the link to the Rossman piece. I don’t have a great story for you on peer review, but wanted to add that most natural science journals actually use single-blind. This may be changing, for example this article which also provides some support for my assertion.

Another:

I am a senior academic, so I have been on both sides of the peer review process, and I have counseled younger colleagues who have voiced complaints similar to those outlined by deBoer. Although some of the problems mentioned are insoluble, others could be remedied or at least reduced by clearer policies on the part of professional associations within various disciplines and academic journals.  These include:

1. The professional associations should establish and publicize standards governing professional conduct in undertaking and completing reviews. There may be no way to enforce these standards directly, but publicizing them might be helpful, in part in helping editors call wayward and/or tardy reviewers to account. The associations could also collect and publicize data on the period from submission to publication for various journals. These data might inform authors of what journals to seek out and which to avoid.

2. Academic journals should set a deadline for the completion of reviews, communicated to the authors and to the reviewers ahead of time. Six weeks seems a reasonable period to me, but I am not wedded to that. If the reviewer cannot guarantee a review within the prescribed period, another reviewer should be selected. Reviewers who fail to meet their obligations should not be asked by the journal to review future articles, and journal editors should be proactive in pressuring tardy reviewers. Those submitting articles should be free, after three months without a response from a journal, to submit his/her work to another journal as well.

3. Using the same reviewers for the “revise and resubmit” review as for the original review, so that new objections/concerns are less likely to be raised.  The reviewers should be asked simply as to whether the problems they identified have been adequately addressed or not, and a final determination should be made.  Multiple “revise and resubmits” should not occur. If the author’s work doesn’t merit publication after he/she has had a chance to revise it, the author should be told so (and be free to submit to another journal).

Similar thoughts:

Necessary background: I’m a research meteorologist, almost 21 years past my Ph.D.  I don’t have as many peer-reviewed papers published as anyone would like me to have but the ones I do have appear in 5 different journals published by the American Meteorological Society (AMS), 2 published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and another published by the European Geosciences Union (EGU).  Over the years I have served as a reviewer for most of the journals in which I’ve published, and for at least 1 AGU journal in which I have not yet published.  The AMS or the AGU are usually the primary professional society with which U.S. based meteorologists who are not forecasters are affiliated.  (The National Weather Association (NWA) is often the primary for forecasters.). …

I would take serious issue with your statement that “Peer review, at the vast majority of credible journals, is built on a double blind system.”  I have never run into a double-blind review system, either as a writer or a reviewer.  I do not think I have ever heard a colleague talk about being part of one, either.  So this may be very seriously field-specific.  The AMS & AGU journals have, to the best of my knowledge, very high credibility in the meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanographic, and related fields. I’ll leave exploration of metrics to you, if you’re interested; all that matters to me is the opinion of my colleagues & “bosses”.  I believe that I have heard of trouble with some editors once one starts getting into topics related to climate change, but as it’s well outside my direct experience I’d prefer to leave it at that.  I’d refer you to the blogs of Prof. Roger Pielke, Jr. or Prof. Judith Curry if you want to explore that further.

You have my sympathies! I just got a paper published after 4 revisions.  Round 1 came back, and we (thought we) revised reasonably based on the comments & concerns; we certainly took them seriously.  Round 2 came back; Reviewer 1 felt we’d blown off his comments, so insisted more forcefully and with more detail, while Reviewer 2 was satisfied.  We did a lot more work and rewrote.  Round 3 came back; Reviewer 1 was satisfied, but Reviewer 2 no longer believed us!  We did a lot more work and rewrote.  Round 4 came back; Reviewers 1 & 2 were now satisfied, and Reviewer 3 (who had been a supportive but rigorous presence throughout) had a few more suggestions and questions.  So we rewrote a little bit more, and finally were done.

Throughout this process we had the same non-anonymous editor, who was patient and understanding and did an awful lot of work IMO.  I’ve definitely had other editors go the extra mile, too.  (And some who weren’t so diligent, but <shrug> not everybody can be excellent at everything.)  With the AMS journals, you always know who your editor is, and I think editors may even stay with “open” papers after their term as editor ends.  That openness makes a big difference, I’m sure.  My most recent experiences with an AGU journal also involved anonymous reviewers but a known editor.  Furthermore, you *always* know what Reviewer 1 told you to do, what Reviewer 2 told you to do, and what the Editor told you to do.

Another:

I guess the norms of peer review differ somewhat by discipline. I’ve been writing papers for biomedical journals for a little over a decade now, and reviewing regularly for nearly as long, and the norm for me has been single-blind review: the reviewers know the authors, but not the other way around. I can only think of one journal for whom I’ve reviewed that was double blind.

Anyway, this may seem hopelessly idealistic, but the standard to which I hold myself when reviewing is really quite simple: I pretend it isn’t blinded at all. I don’t write anything in a review that I wouldn’t sign my name to and be willing to have published, nor anything I wouldn’t say to the authors in person at a conference, in a lab meeting, or over a beer. More importantly than keeping things civil, professional, and non-petty (though that is all very important!) it forces me to make sure that I have my own facts straight and that I can back whatever I say up.

As to my experience of being reviewed while it has been generally fair and constructive for me, it is very clear that my own standards are not universally applied.

Personally, I think doing away with anonymity in peer review altogether would be preferable.

Still another:

I’m a Ph.D candidate and I read your post, nodding my head along the whole time. In my limited experience, the process of peer-review (the depth of review, critique, and the ultimate decision to approve or project) is highly variable. You’ll get two reviews and one will ask for minor changes and the other reviewer will want the entire paper re-written so as to incorporate a topic you don’t even mention (“how could you not mention NGOs?”) “Well because this paper 1) isn’t about NGOs and 2) NGOs don’t apply here and 3) we don’t have the expertise to study or comment on NGOs”.

But for me, the time factor and the accessibility factor are the much bigger issues. Six months to two years to get something published. An adaptive institution this is not. As I’m writing, Ghostbusters (1984) is on TV and Egon just said “print is dead.” I laugh every time. I’m aware there are alternative outlets to traditional publication, but until we have a movement of young academics willing to challenge the norm, or academic institutions with the foresight to change the rules of the game, what are we supposed to do. I know I’m trying to get my stuff into regular ole high-ranked traditional journals. And what about when you have to settle for a lower-tiered journal. It still counts, but is anybody reading it?

More to come.

Anti-Zionism In Latin America

by Dish Staff

Daniel Lansberg-Rodríguez provides some background on anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in Venezuela:

Recently, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro organized a rally labeled the “March Against Israeli Genocide.” There, the Venezuelan president called upon “the Jews that live in our lands” to “stop the massacre, and the murder of those innocent boys and girls.” It’s a tall order. In the words of one community member: “When the president himself calls out Venezuelan Jews to rein in the ‘Zionist’ government and stop the Gazan genocide – as if we could even do that – you think to yourself, ‘How is it that the country I grew up in feels the need to single me out? When did the open society I used to live in turn into this?'”

According to Lansberg-Rodríguez, Venezuelan anti-Semitism results from the conflation of Zionism with a number of other ideologies with more direct relevance to the country itself:

In Venezuela’s pro-government rhetoric, both regime officials and state media often group together loaded terms that, in effect, become synonymous: “Imperialists,” “International Elites,” “Ultra-rightists,” “Fascists,” and “Zionists” can be used interchangeably, or paired together, to denote any enemy that criticizes or meddles in Venezuelan government affairs. The indistinctness of these terms can make them difficult to keep straight in practice. When an anchor on Venezuelan state television recently derided former Venezuelan Trade Minister (and former Foreign Policy editor) Moisés Naím for signing a letter condemning certain Venezuelan regime practices, he dismissed Naím’s perspective as that of “a believing Jew.” He probably meant to say “Zionist,” but no retraction or clarification was forthcoming.

At present, most Venezuelan Jews do not face open discrimination from their neighbors. Even so, a sense of dread and isolation is pervasive among much of the community, and some worry that, with diplomatic relations severed between the government and Israel, there may be nobody to protect them in a pinch. While researching this story, absolutely nobody I spoke with who still resides in Venezuela was willing to let me use their names.

Enrique Krauze (NYT) examines the region’s Jewish history. Apparently, from “the earliest days of the Conquest in the 16th century until the middle of the 17th century, waves of Jewish immigrants from Spain and Portugal arrived in the New World”:

The scholar Jonathan Israel has described this early migration to the New World and its effects. These educated exiles established an impressive financial and commercial net that spanned continents. But when they were cut down in the 17th century by the Inquisition, these generations vanished from popular memory, leaving only a few cultural traces, like the many largely Portuguese Jewish names that are scattered across Latin America. Perhaps because of their rapid disappearance into the general population, no native variety of anti-Semitism toward them ever developed.

In Spain, the story is somewhat different. There were Jews in Spain before the birth of Christ and, though they were officially expelled in 1492, their presence had been so vital to the country that it continued to impress itself on Spain right down to the present. The old anti-Judaism is still alive in daily speech, in popular legend and among influential sectors of public opinion, but its positive counterpart is no less alive in a cult of respect for the heritage of the Sephardim (the ancient Spanish Jewish community) and a liberal tradition of interest in Jewish traditions.

What Is Obama Doing About Ferguson?

by Dish Staff

Serwer feels that Obama is trying to stand back from what’s happening in Ferguson:

Obama is renowned for speaking eloquently about America’s lingering racial divides and how to bridge them – but he has also come under attack from critics on the right, particularly when it comes to racial profiling. During the press conference Monday Obama seemed to prefer discussing the ongoing U.S. mission in Iraq, where large swaths of territory have been taken over by the Muslim extremist he referred to as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. ISIL has rampaged through the country, displacing and killing Iraqis in their pursuit of a fundamentalist state. There was perhaps better news about Iraq, where U.S. airstrikes and Kurdish fighters appear to have at least temporarily turned back ISIL, than Ferguson, where the conflict between protesters and police appears to be escalating.

Jazz Shaw, on the other hand, views the Obama administration as over-reaching by ordering another autopsy of Michael Brown:

We try not to leap to conclusions, but it seems there is a rather obvious case to be made that the Obama Administration (unless Holder took this upon himself without approval, which seems unlikely in the extreme) has decided to latch on to this incident and it has political fingerprints all over it. How else would you explain it? Yes, the Brown family attorney supposedly made the request, but I’d be willing to wager that most every family in the country – of any race, religion or otherwise – who lost a family member in violent, questionable circumstances would love to have big guns like this brought to bear. But they don’t get it. And that, again, is assuming that it’s even appropriate for the feds to be injecting themselves into an ongoing investigation to begin with. There haven’t even been any charges files, to say nothing of a trial being held which some might dispute after the outcome. I don’t care for the looks of this at all.

Similarly, Allahpundit uses the racial split on Ferguson to accuse Obama of acting politically:

[Holder and Obama are] going to do what they can to make black voters believe that someone they trust is conducting a serious inquiry, even if they think St. Louis County isn’t. Maybe Holder will end up prosecuting Darren Wilson for civil-rights violations if he’s acquitted in state court, a la the LAPD officers after the Rodney King beating 20+ years ago. Or maybe not: Holder tried to placate lefties last year by promising to look into civil-rights violations possibly committed by George Zimmerman against Trayvon Martin and then quietly let that slide down the memory hole as people moved on. They can worry about Wilson later.

Joshua Green, by contrast, wants Obama to get more involved:

It’s no accident that Brown’s family felt the need to hire its own pathologist to conduct an autopsy. It’s also no accident that the FBI and Justice Department are running their own investigations of what happened. Clearly, they lack confidence that local law enforcement officials will do a capable and honest job. But things are so far gone in Ferguson that only Obama himself can reassure the broader public and instill confidence that Brown’s case will be handled as it should be. All the more so, given his impressive track record of speaking to the country about race. Obama did the right thing by cutting short his summer vacation. But he should go to Ferguson before returning to Washington.

Ezra Klein explains why that’s unlikely to happen:

Obama’s supporters aren’t asking for anything Obama can’t do — or even anything he hasn’t done before. Obama was elected president because he seemed, alone among American politicians, to be able to bridge the deep divides in American politics. The speech that rocketed him into national life was about bridging the red-blue divide. The speech that sealed his nomination was about bridging the racial divide. That speech, born of a crisis that could have ended Obama’s presidential campaign, is remembered by both his supporters and even many of his detractors as his finest moment. That was the speech where Obama seemed capable of something different, something more, than other politicians. In the White House, it’s simply called “the Race Speech.” And there are no plans to repeat it.

The problem is the White House no longer believes Obama can bridge divides. They believe — with good reason — that he widens them.

Reading Your Way Through Life: Readers Respond

by Matthew Sitman

Last night I asked readers what novels, poems, or stories have been their companions along life’s way – those texts you return to again and again, or that got you through a hard time, or helped you see life just a bit differently. The responses have been moving to read, and I was struck again and again by the beauty of what readers shared. I’m humbled and grateful. One reader wrote:

That line – “a flag planted in the dust: someone else has been here too” – immediately sent me back to one of my favorite books, Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net. As a 19 year old kid under the netreading along with the funny, confident, and adrift narrator, I was completely enthralled. I was thinking a lot about independence in those days, and friendships and relationships. I was primed for anyone who had something to say about how to relate to other people.

And then I got to this passage, and even though it was ten years ago, I remember sitting in a park, reading these lines, and chills running all over my body:

“I hate solitude, but I’m afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It’s already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.”

Another told this story:

This isn’t about a work of fiction, but it helped in a turbulent moment.

When I was an undergrad on 9/11/01 in New York City my Tuesday morning philosophy seminar started early. I was already at school when I learned of the plans attacking the World Trade Center. After contacting my friends who lived and worked downtown and meditationsmaking plans for them to meet me uptown to walk home across the 59th St bridge, I found myself wanting to pass the time in a more contemplative–if not relaxing–way than watching the news.

I decided to reread Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, a Stoic, philosophical treatise, written while the emperor was out on a wartime expeditions. I think Nietzsche once wrote that Stoicism is a philosophy for dire times, but times are never so dire to need Stoicism. But it seemed just right that morning.

The aphorisms certainly didn’t put me fully at ease, but Aurelius’s thoughts let me return to myself in a more composed manner. Struggling with death, with enemies, he was thinking not just about how to best understand injury and pain, but how to react to it. The opening book is dedicated to showing gratitude to his friends and family, something important when things are going terribly wrong.

But what struck me most at that moment as important and what has remained as prescient if unheeded, was his assertion that “The best way to avenge thyself is not to become like the enemy.”

A few readers noted short stories they loved. Here’s one:

A work of astonishing grace, “The Book of the Grotesque” is the most striking piece of writing I’ve ever encountered. In less than two dozen paragraphs Sherwood Anderson outlines a philosophy of belief systems, finds beauty in humanity, and paints curiously relatable portraits. So much of life in so few words. When I’m not admiring the elegance and truth within the work, I find myself relating to, amazed with, and humbled by Anderson himself. It is a poignant, self-critical short story that begs to be revisited often.

And another:

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to respond to Matthew Sitman’s post on texts that his readers cherish and return to again and again. For me, the evanescent short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, is that text. Aside from the lustrous prose, I find that its message of what we overlook when we contemplate with satisfaction our own lives, and the achievements of our society and country, is devastating, even in the remembering of the story, let alone in the moment of rereading.

Poetry, of course, was well-represented. A reader described Raymond Carver’s “Gravy” as “the poem that I come back to time and again”:

No other word will do. For that’s what it was.
Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure Gravy. And don’t forget it.”

Another wrote, “You asked about words that we have carried through our lives. For me, it would have to be Whitman. He’s my go-to when life doesn’t make sense,” and went on to point to Whitman’s “Beginning My Studies”:

Beginning my studies, the first step pleased me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least animal or insect, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step awed me and pleased me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wished to go any further,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

Keep the selections coming to dish@andrewsullivan.com, I’d love to hear from more of you.

Ferguson In Black And White

by Dish Staff

YouGov registers an immense racial split regarding views on Ferguson:

Ferguson YouGov

Pew’s numbers are in the same ballpark:

Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to say that the shooting of Michael Brown “raises important issues about race that need to be discussed.” Wide racial differences also are evident in opinions about of whether local police went too far in the aftermath of Brown’s death, and in confidence in the investigations into the shooting.

But Aaron Blake is most interested in Pew finding that, “that even at this very early juncture, Americans as a whole see the shooting of Brown as more of a racial issue than the shooting of Martin by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman.” Annie Lowrey and Jesse Singal provide context for the racial split:

The idea of “two Americas” is a cliché by now, but here it’s apt.

White Americans are much less likely to be the victim of a crime, and much more likely to trust the police to act on their behalf when they are. Black Americans, who are on average much more likely to require police assistance than whites, often don’t trust that when officers arrive, they will be a helpful presence. This lack of trust can erode a nation’s basic functions. Judith Levine, a sociologist at Temple, has researched trust in the context of low-income women, and she makes a strong case that when people don’t trust institutions, it makes it a lot harder for those institutions to do their jobs, even when they have the best intentions.

Ambinder asks whites to mentally put themselves in the shoes of blacks:

Imagine you are black, and you, and your friends, and your family, are regularly stopped, delayed, accosted by the police, simply because of your proximity to something else; imagine having to fear being stopped by police on the street where you live. Feel what that must be like. Don’t try to rationalize it. Just feel it for a moment.

Now you might understand what Ferguson is really about, and why, even as you take the side of police in these types of American tragedies, you might want to sympathize with those who are protesting. They’re not protesting the fact of policing; they very much want the police to briefly militarize their neighborhood if their friend gets robbed. But what they really want is to be able to trust the police. And they can’t, because their first and continuing experiences with law enforcement are often brutal, beyond proportion.

How Far Will Obama’s Iraq War Expand?

by Dish Staff

Zack Beauchamp makes much of the recent escalation of American involvement in the Iraq conflict, embodied in Obama’s Sunday authorization of airstrikes to support the Kurds in recapturing the Mosul Dam from ISIS:

By explicitly authorizing airstrikes supporting Iraqi government forces, and not just the Kurdish peshmerga, Obama crossed an informal line he had previously held: don’t help the Iraqi government until there’s major political reform in Baghdad. That standard, it seems, no longer holds. This is a point Obama has been clear on since June. He’d authorized strikes only in defense of Kurdish territory in northeastern Iraq and to save the members of the Yazidi minority trapped on a mountain by ISIS forces. “The US is not simply going to involve itself in a military action in the absence of a political plan by the Iraqis,” Obama said in a June 13 address. He was more blunt in an August 8th statement, saying “the nature of this problem is not one our military can solve.”

Michael Crowley smells mission creep:

The worry is that Obama’s rationale of “protecting Americans in Iraq” can be stretched to justify almost any kind of military action — especially now that he has more than doubled the U.S. presence in Iraq to nearly 2000 personnel since June. (A key stage of mission creep in Vietnam involved sending troops to protect U.S. air bases in that country.) But Obama has given himself even broader license than that. When he announced the dispatch of 300 military advisors to Iraq back on June 19, Obama wrote himself something like a blank check.

“[W]e will be prepared to take targeted and precise military action,” Obama said, “if and when we determine that the situation on the ground requires it.” That language covers even more action that Obama’s protect-Americans vow. ISIS is little too close to Baghdad? Boom. Intel about suicide bombers eyeing Erbil? Boom. Imminent slaughter somewhere? Boom, boom, boom.

And Benjamin Friedman sees that “creep” accelerating into a sprint:

Only the speed of this slide down a slippery slope is surprising. As I recently noted, the humanitarian case for protecting the Yazidi easily becomes a case for continual bombing of ISIL and resumed counterinsurgency war in Iraq. Their danger to civilians was never limited to Sinjar. And as in Syria, the major humanitarian threat in Iraq is civil war.Americans, the president included, need to admit being out of Iraq potentially means letting it burn. The collapse of the fiction that U.S. forces stabilized Iraq before exiting forces us to confront the unpleasant contradictions in U.S. goals there. We want to avoid the tragic costs of U.S. forces trying to suppress Iraq’s violence. We want a stable Iraqi federal government and we want Iraqis to live peacefully. Each of those goals conflicts with the others.

Even if the new Prime Minister is amenable to Sunni demands, U.S. bombing is unlikely to allow Iraqis to destroy ISIL and its allies. Large-scale violence will likely continue. Suppressing insurgency will likely require resumption of U.S. ground operations. And even that, we know, may not help much.

The American public appears to support the air campaign, with a new poll putting that support at 54 percent, but the poll also reveals some anxiety about getting bogged down in Iraq again:

Thirty-one percent said they disapproved of the strikes, while 15 percent of the 1,000 randomly selected respondents who took part in the survey, which was carried out between Thursday and Sunday, declined to give an opinion. The poll found major partisan differences, with self-described Republicans markedly more hawkish than Democrats or independents, although a majority of Democratic respondents said they also supported the airstrikes.

However, a majority (57 percent) of Republicans said they were concerned that Obama was not prepared to go “far enough to stop” the Islamic State, while majorities of Democrats (62 percent) and independents (56 percent) said they worried that he may go too far in re-inserting the military into Iraq three years after the last US combat troops were withdrawn. Overall, 51 percent of respondents expressed the latter fear.

No, Israel And Hamas Can’t Work Out A Deal

by Dish Staff

The Gaza ceasefire ended today with a fresh exchange of fire and the calling off of negotiations in Cairo. Netanyahu –shock– was quick to blame Hamas:

After reportedly coming close to an agreement, the parties appear to be back at square one:

Netanyahu’s right-wing Minister of Economy, Naftali Bennett, said after the renewed fire Tuesday that it was impossible to negotiate with Hamas. “When you hold negotiations with a terror organization, you get more terror,” he said. “Hamas thinks that firing rockets helps in securing achievement in negotiations, therefore it is firing at Israel even during a cease-fire. Rockets are not a mistake [for Hamas], they are a method.”

A Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, accused Israel of dragging out the talks and of not being serious about reaching an agreement. “Israel’s foot-dragging proves it has no will to reach a truce deal,” Abu Zuhri said. “The Palestinian factions are ready to all possibilities,” he added, presaging the likelihood of a return to further conflict.

Though the fighting drags on, Israel seems to believe it has already won. Eli Lake watches the victory lap:

On Monday [Israel’s deputy minister of foreign affairs Tzachi] Hanegbi told a handful of reporters that Israel’s campaign in Gaza this summer would deter Hamas for years. “I think Hamas is going to be much more restrained in the coming years,” he said. “It will be very careful before being so adventurous.” Hanegbi went even further. He said there was a chance that this time around, Hamas would reconsider its strategy of building up its arsenal, and instead reconsider exactly what it had achieved after eight years in charge of a strip of land Israel removed its soldiers and settlers from at the end of 2005. The suggestion was that Hamas would know it was beaten and want to discuss a more permanent peace with Israel.

Michele Dunne and Nathan Brown criticize Egypt’s approach to mediating between Israel and Hamas, accusing Cairo of prolonging the conflict and empowering radicals:

Cairo is presiding over a process that follows the priorities of Hamas, which has always rejected the diplomatic process that began with the 1993 Oslo Accords. The current state of negotiations reflects Hamas’s position that only talks about interim arrangements and truces are acceptable; conflict-ending diplomacy is not. The Israeli right can also feel vindicated, as the talks suggest that the conflict might be managed, but that it will not be resolved anytime soon.

The Palestinian Islamist camp and the Israeli right, however, should take little joy in this accomplishment. The diplomatic efforts led by Egypt will likely give Hamas little, and the new Egypt-Israel alliance is based on a short-term coincidence of interests rather than any strategic consideration. Israeli and Palestinian societies, meanwhile, are already paying a high price for the continuing failure to reach a lasting peace accord.