Month: October 2014

A Short Life Remembered

Ta-Nehisi interviews Lucia McBath, mother of Jordan Davis:

It’s been almost two years since her son was murdered by a man who took offense to his music. The murderer was Michael Dunn. After shooting the boy, Dunn drove to a motel with his girlfriend. He ordered pizza. He mixed a few cocktails. Then, the next day, he turned himself in and claimed that he was defending himself against a shotgun-wielding Davis. No shotgun was ever found. In his first trial, Dunn was convicted of attempted murder, for shooting—unjustifiably—at Davis’s friends. He was not convicted of murdering Jordan Davis after the jury deadlocked. The state of Florida retried the case, and this time convicted Dunn of first-degree murder. …

Davis hailed from the striving class of America.

He grew up with all the comforts and possibilities that black people associate with Atlanta, where he was raised, and which Americans at large associate with middle-class life. And yet African Americans raised in such circumstances understand that in so many ways they are not that far removed from the block. Many of them are just a generation away, and they still have cousins, brothers, and uncles struggling. Their country cannot see this complexity, and thinks of the entire mass as the undeserving poor—which is to say, in the language of our country, criminal.

“For these people, The Cosby Show was just amusement,” McBath said. “They don’t know that in the black community the Cosbys exist. They don’t know that we educate our children, we train up our children, we have fathers, nurturing, and supporting. We have that. But that’s the America that a lot of people don’t know exists, and they don’t know because they don’t want to see it.”

Kansas Is Key

Earlier this week, Andrew Prokop observed that “Kansas independent Senate candidate Greg Orman is the sole candidate who’s actually risen in the estimate of his state’s voters in recent weeks”:

Orman

Sean Trende calls Orman’s opponent, Senator Pat Roberts, “the most vulnerable Republican incumbent”:

Orman does have real problems as a candidate, which, over the course of a full campaign, would probably drag him down. In particular, refusing to declare which party you will caucus with eventually invites people to fill in the blanks in their own minds as they focus in on the race. Given that most things in Orman’s past point toward him at least sympathizing with Democrats, it seems unlikely that people would conclude that he is a Republican. But in a short campaign, anything can happen.

Nate Cohn explains why the race is so important:

If Mr. Orman wins, it could deal a big blow to the G.O.P.’s overall chances. Think about it this way:

Well into August, most assumed that the Republicans had a 100 percent chance of winning Kansas. If the state were secure for the G.O.P., Leo, The Upshot’s Senate model, would give the Republicans a 78 percent chance of retaking the chamber. (Leo currently gives the Republicans a 61 percent chance of winning the Senate.)

Without Kansas, the Republicans would probably need to win both Alaska and Iowa. That’s certainly possible because the Republicans appear to lead in both states. Leo gives the Republicans only a 54 percent chance of taking the Senate if they lose Kansas, not much better than a coin flip.

But Harry Enten warns that Kansas voters are still making up their minds:

With Orman’s lead, why doesn’t the FiveThirtyEight model give him an even better chance of winning? The electorate in Kansas is unusually fluid for such a competitive race. We’re only a month into this campaign, and the race is still developing. We can see this by looking at the Marist poll. Only 43 percent of Kansas voters strongly supported their preferred candidate in Kansas. In Kansas’s gubernatorial race, it’s 55 percent. In Iowa’s Senate race, which Marist polled at the same time as the Kansas election, 57 percent of voters strongly supported their choice. In North Carolina’s Senate race, it’s 50 percent of voters.

The FiveThirtyEight model shows something similar. There are more voters unattached to major candidates in Kansas than in the average competitive race.

Cassidy provides background on Orman:

Orman, a private-equity investor with a net worth of somewhere between twenty million and eighty-six million dollars, according to campaign disclosures, looks, in some ways, like a moderate Republican along the lines of Bob Dole, the longtime senior senator from Kansas. Orman is a deficit hawk, he wants tax reform, and he’s very pro-business.

In other ways, though, he tilts towards the Democrats. He supports campaign-finance reform, abortion rights, (somewhat) stricter gun laws, and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented aliens. In 2008, he briefly entered the Kansas senate race as a Democrat, withdrawing before the party primary. “Let’s be honest—he’s a Democrat,” Senator John McCain said last month. “He walks like a duck and he quacks like a duck and he is a duck.”

Whether that’s true or not, Harry Reid and his colleagues would much prefer to deal with Orman rather than have McConnell running things.

A Long, Ugly Primary

The GOP is hoping to avoid one:

The message from Republican officials has been crystal clear for two years: The 2016 Republican primary cannot be another prolonged pummeling of the eventual nominee. Only one person ultimately benefited from that last time — Barack Obama — and Republicans know they can’t afford to send a hobbled nominee up against Hillary Clinton.

Jonathan Bernstein tells Republicans not to fret:

Republicans who worry that Clinton will lock up the Democratic nomination easily while Republicans continue fighting among themselves should remember what happened to Vice President Al Gore. He was nominated practically by acclamation and then proceeded to fall short of projections by a greater degree than any modern candidate. By contrast, his Republican opponent, George W. Bush, fought an extended battle against John McCain.

Philip Klein deems it “silly for RNC officials to think they can orchestrate a process that will protect the eventual nominee from serious scrutiny during the primary season, and to the extent that they’re able to do so, to think that a reduced level of scrutiny is automatically a good thing”:

The RNC has also decided to make its 2016 convention earlier — as early as June — so the nominee can begin to spend general election funds earlier than in 2012, when the convention took place in late August. But again, there is no reason to think this will improve matters. In 2004, John Kerry effectively clinched the Democratic nomination in early March, when his main rival, John Edwards, dropped out. The Democratic National Convention that nominated Kerry was held in July, while the GOP convention that year extended into September. After Kerry lost, the popular conclusion was that the early convention hurt Kerry because the Swift Boat story dominated news in August and fed right into the Republican convention, and the Kerry campaign never was able to adequately respond.

Larison is in favor of a long primary:

Despite a lot of what was said and written at the time, the 2008 contest on the Democratic side was generally very beneficial to their party. What matters is that the party in question has a large number of high quality candidates with which it can start the winnowing process. That is where the GOP may have more concerns.

It has often been taken for granted that the 2012 Republican field was exceptionally weak and the 2016 field will be much stronger, but it has never been clear that the likely 2016 candidates will be that impressive as a group once they are actually declared and running their campaigns. The more that they are scrutinized and their competence as candidates (or lack thereof) becomes better-known, the more that we’ll start to hear how overrated this field was all along. People are able to claim the higher quality of the 2016 field for the same reasons that many people assumed that the fantasy candidates of 2012 would have been much better than the ones that declared: it easy to claim that the non-candidates would be more appealing/competent/interesting because no one is thinking about their weaknesses yet, and there is no way to prove the assertion wrong until they declare. Once the 2016 field starts to take shape, we can expect another round of the same complaints about the “strong” candidates that stayed on the sidelines.

Ukraine Is Still A Mess

Adam Chandler highlights a UN report revealing that at least 331 people have been killed in the Ukrainian conflict since the signing of a ceasefire on September 5:

“There is a total breakdown of law and order,” said Gianni Magazzeni, the United Nations human rights official who announced the release of the report in Geneva. Over the past month, grim developments have included the shelling of schools and city buses, the gutting of villages, the fierce battles for control of Donetsk’s Sergei Prokofiev Airport, and startling lists of locals who are believed to either be missing or held captive by pro-Russian rebels. An early October report estimated that nearly 400,000 Ukrainians are internally displaced, part of a seven-figure estimate for the total number of Ukrainians who have been displaced.

While the latest violence has largely been limited to the exchange of small-arms fire—a shift from this summer’s large-scale military offensives, which drove up death tolls and ultimately forced the warring sides to negotiate—there’s been little letup in fighting over the past month.

With a battle raging between Ukrainian and rebel forces over the Donetsk airport, the ceasefire appears to be going off the rails entirely, threatening to take the upcoming parliamentary elections with it:

As the shaky cease-fire has failed to quell the most intensive fighting in and around Donetsk, government officials fear the separatists are regrouping for a fresh offensive to take Mariupol and the rest of the seaside corridor that would connect mainland Russia with the Crimean peninsula that the Kremlin seized and annexed seven months ago.

Ukraine has scheduled parliamentary elections for Oct. 26, and the Moscow-backed separatists are suspected of aiming to control enough Ukrainian territory by then to prevent voting in the areas they hold in order to undermine the legitimacy of the election. Although hundreds of thousands of eastern Ukraine residents have fled the fighting, the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions were home to 8.5 million before the conflict, representing about 18% of the country’s population.

The Interpreter underscores a series of unsettling surveys showing that 70 percent of Ukrainians believe they are at war with Russia, while nearly 50 percent want the country to become a nuclear power again. At the same time, western Ukrainians are getting tired of supporting the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the fighting:

Attitudes toward IDPs in Ukraine appear to have shifted since the onset of the conflict pitting government forces against pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east. As displaced families continue to stream westward, the initial outpouring of solidarity — which once saw residents extend free accommodation to IDPs — is slowly giving way to impatience and distrust. “You can often see ads that say ‘Flat for rent, people from Donetsk, Luhansk, and Africa please abstain,'” says Ivan Kudoyar, a real estate lawyer in Kyiv.

Things like this aren’t just happening in Kyiv. Anastasia, a young woman who fled Donetsk two weeks ago, says she’s losing hope of finding a flat to rent in the western city of Lviv. “The main obstacle I’ve encountered during my search is my Donetsk registration,” she says. “I meet with the landlord, we agree on the rent, then he looks into my passport and says ‘Sorry, this is a matter of principle.”

Robots As Whistleblowers

Adam Waytz floats the idea:

What if every organization, particularly those in highly regulated industries, explicitly created a whistle-blower position? The job seems essential, yet applicants might be scant and coworkers might view them similarly to the childhood schoolmate who reminds the teacher about the homework assignment.

The position’s social, reputational, and emotional risks thus make whistle-blower the perfect job for a robot. Robots—and algorithms—largely lack the “hot” social and emotional attributes that commonly (and, often, unfairly) litter portrayals of many whistle-blowers—self-interest, revenge, spite, disloyalty, betrayal, and resentment. At the same time, robots are proficient at “cold” skills necessary for diligent evaluation and inspection of organizational errors—calculation, routinization, automation, and consistency.

The Resilient Success Of The Obama Presidency

Krugman makes the case:

[T]here’s a theme running through each of the areas of domestic policy I’ve covered. In each case, Obama delivered less than his supporters wanted, less than the country arguably deserved, but more than his current detractors acknowledge. The extent of his partial success ranges from the pretty good to the not-so-bad to the ugly. …

Am I damning with faint praise? Not at all. This is what a successful presidency looks like. No president gets to do everything his supporters expected him to. FDR left behind a reformed nation, but one in which the wealthy retained a lot of power and privilege. On the other side, for all his anti-government rhetoric, Reagan left the core institutions of the New Deal and the Great Society in place. I don’t care about the fact that Obama hasn’t lived up to the golden dreams of 2008, and I care even less about his approval rating. I do care that he has, when all is said and done, achieved a lot. That is, as Joe Biden didn’t quite say, a big deal.

wile_e_coyote_and_road_runner-cliffYes it is. The current indiscriminate pile-on about a “failed presidency” is just bandwagon bullshit. Unlike Krugman, I’ve long had confidence in Obama’s long game, even as I have had several conniptions in his term of office (his early prevarication on gay rights, that phoned-in first debate in 2012, his negligence with healthcare.gov, his caving into hysteria over ISIS). And I see little reason to question its broad thrust now.

Just a year ago, I had a conversation with a friend as the healthcare website was crashing. All that mattered, we agreed, was if, this time next year, the healthcare reform is working and the economy is doing better. Well, both those things have happened – Obamacare is actually a big success so far; the growth and unemployment rates are the envy of much of the Western world – and yet we are now told that he’s a failure. WTF? The architects of the Iraq War – like, yes, Clinton and McCain – somehow believe they have a better grasp of foreign affairs in the twenty-first century than he does. And the party that bankrupted this country in eight short years now has the gall to ignore the fastest reduction in the deficit ever, and a slow-down in healthcare costs that may well be the most important fiscal achievement of a generation.

Add to this two massive social shifts that Obama has coaxed, helped or gotten out the way: marriage equality and the legalization of cannabis. These are not minor cultural shifts. They are sane reforms, change we can absolutely believe in and have accomplished on his watch. Jihadist terrorism? It has murdered an infinitesimal number of Americans in the past six years, compared with almost any other threat. Yes, Americans are still capable of PTSD-driven panic and hysteria over it, and Obama has failed to counter that more aggressively, but to be where we are in 2014 is something few expected after 9/11.

The idea that he has “lost Iraq” is preposterous. We “lost” Iraq the minute we unseated the Sunnis, disbanded the Baathist army and unleashed the dogs of sectarian warfare.

The only sane response to continuing unrest there is to cut our losses, act as an off-shore balancing power, and protect ourselves. And one reason we have this capability is that Obama managed to pivot nimbly last fall to ensure the destruction of Assad’s WMDs. The Panettas and McCains and usual suspects still seem to believe that it would have been better to have bombed Assad, let him keep his WMDs, and … what exactly? Can you imagine ISIS with its hands on those weapons in a failed state with a deposed leader? Think Libya today with poison gas. Who prevented this? Obama. And he is still pilloried for it.

And over six long years, Obama has made it possible – still possible – to put Iran’s nuclear program in a safe box, and avoid another polarizing war in the region. If Obama ends his two terms having rid the Middle East of the threat of nuclear and chemical and biological warfare, he will have advanced our security almost as significantly as Bush and Cheney degraded it. Yes, he failed on Israel. But he has no real power over that. That tail has been madly wagging the dog for a long time now – and in some ways, Obama tried to restrain it more than any president since the first Bush. As long as fundamentalist Christians and even liberal Jews continue to support the ethnic cleansing and de facto apartheid on the West Bank, and do so with a fervor that reaches apoplectic proportions, no president will be able to establish a sane foreign policy with respect to the Jewish state.

Financial reform? Well, if even Krugman says it’s working better than he expected, chalk another one up. Torture? He has acted with more restraint than I would have and deferred far too much to the CIA, but the end-game has yet to be played. It is not unreasonable to believe that we will have established, by the end of his term, a clear and definitive account of the war crimes the last administration perpetrated. That is something. Maybe about as much as a democracy can handle in the time since the atrocities were committed.

Forget the media-click-bait pile-on. Just watch the economic data after the worst depression in many decades (and look at Europe or japan for comparison). Follow the progress in universal health insurance (itself a huge positive change in American life). Measure the greater security from WMDs. And observe the tectonic cultural shifts.

I’m not going to stop bashing him when I think he deserves it. But have I reason to question the long-term achievements of his long game? Fuck no. And we have two years to go.

Obama’s Syrian Quagmire

Clashes between ISIL and Kurdish armed groups

Fred Kaplan gets real:

The Syrian part of Obama’s anti-ISIS strategy was always a deferral. He seems not to have thought it through, perhaps because he didn’t think he’d have to. It would be hard, and take long, enough to “degrade and destroy” ISIS before he’d have to deal once more with Assad. He didn’t count on two factors. First, ISIS-in-Iraq and ISIS-in-Syria turn out to be inseparable; it’s hard to fight one without contending with the other. Second, America’s allies in the region—on whom Obama’s strategy depends—have interests that are at times at odds with American interests. This becomes a problem in coalition warfare. ISIS, in fact, gains much of its strength from the fact that the countries arrayed against it—which, together, could win in short order—can’t get their act together; they have too many conflicting interests tearing them apart.

He zooms out to conclude:

The international system in which we all grew up, the system of the Cold War, has shattered, and nothing has taken its place. There are no real power centers. Nations, even small and medium-sized ones, are freer to pursue their own interests, which often collide with ours. Large nations have less leverage than they once did, and it’s harder to coerce or persuade other nations to put our interests above their own. Obama is in a tight position (and future presidents should take note, because they will be, too): He may have to succumb to mission creep—or slowly, carefully, creep away.

I hope it’s the latter. There’s no way this clusterfuck can do anything coherent over the longer term. The Turks’ ambivalence – even with ISIS controlling a hefty chunk of their border with Syria – tells you everything you need to know. I agree with this reader:

1) In 1983, antecedents of Hezbollah bombed the shit out of military barracks in Lebanon, murdering over 200 US Marines. US officials made a bunch of noise about how they won’t be deterred. Less than 6 months later, Reagan had us get the fuck out of Lebanon. The Lebanese proceeded to murder each other for another 7 years before they got tired of it and stopped.

2) In 2014, two American journalists are murdered by a bunch of guys in the desert. Obama responds by having us get the fuck inside Iraq and Syria, two countries mired in slow burning civil wars.

And by publicly engaging with these idiots on the battlefield, Obama and every other US politician raises ISIS’s profile, drawing more recruits and terrorist funding to their cause.

I despair at how few Americans understand the psychology of power and lose their collective shit and demand engagement when a group — that is so self-destructive it would otherwise burn out on its own — cuts off a couple American heads. I also despair at the American politicians who understand the psychology of power intimately well, but (a) are too ignorant to understand it applies to foreigners as well, or (b) are too singleminded in their power games against Obama to care.

And finally, I despair at Obama, who I assume knows better.

I know it would have been tough to counter the politics of hysteria and fear this summer. But Obama should have been tougher in pushing back an unreconstructed neocon narrative that has now taken hold. God knows the Democrats are useless in articulating a policy of minimalism in confronting this kind of terror – but without a president leading with the case, actually proudly defending his reluctance to get mired in quag again, there’s no hope at all. He was just too weak.

Fredrik Logevall and Gordon Goldstein fear that Syria will become for Obama what Vietnam was for Lyndon Johnson:

War has a forward motion of its own. Most of Johnson’s major steps in the escalation in Vietnam were in response to unforeseen obstacles, setbacks and shortcomings. There’s no reason the same dynamic couldn’t repeat itself in 2014.

And there is a political logic, too: Then as now, the president faced unrelenting pressure from various quarters to do more, to fight the fight, to intensify the battle. Then as now, the alarmist rhetoric by the president and senior officials served to reduce their perceived maneuverability, not least in domestic political terms. Johnson was no warmonger, and he feared, rightly, that Vietnam would be his undoing. Nonetheless, he took his nation into a protracted struggle that ended in bitter defeat.

Larison holds the president responsible for setting the self-fulfilling logic of escalation on its course:

Presidents trap themselves into pursuing unwise escalation in foreign wars because their earlier decisions and past rhetorical overkill seem to compel it. Unfortunately, the administration has repeatedly combined careless rhetoric with a tendency to yield sooner or later to hawkish pressure. By indulging in the former (e.g., talk of “destroying” ISIS or claiming it is an “imminent threat to every interest we have”), Obama and his officials give hawks the opening they need to demand more aggressive measures. Having already endorsed most of the hawks’ assumptions about the conflict, the administration makes it very difficult for itself politically not to give in to those demands. At best, Obama has created an open-ended conflict that his successor will be forced to continue. Given Washington’s bias in favor of throwing more resources at a problem when a policy hasn’t succeeded, it is quite likely that the next administration will conclude that Obama’s policy didn’t “work” because it was insufficiently aggressive.

Waldman throws up his hands at the lessons America clearly hasn’t learned from our experience in the Middle East over the past 13 years:

It would be wonderful if the current campaign renders ISIS impotent. It would also be wonderful if the Syrian civil war wrapped up soon, with the Assad regime replaced by an inclusive democracy in which everyone’s human and civil rights are honored. But realistically, chances are that in two years time Barack Obama will bequeath to his successor a situation that is still unresolved and still bad (though perhaps in ways we haven’t even yet imagined). And no matter who that successor is, the answer he or she offers to the question of Syria and Iraq — and whatever questions follow — is likely to be more military actions. That president will either be Hillary Clinton, who throughout her career has been one of the most hawkish Democrats around, or it will be a Republican who is even more hawkish.

(Photo: Smoke rises from the clashes between Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) and Kurdish armed troops in Kobane (Ayn al-arab), Syria, on October 9, 2014. By Ibrahim Erikan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)

The Trouble With Islam, Ctd

I cede the floor to Hitch, peace be upon him:

It’s well worth twelve minutes of your time. And I think Hitch’s arguments about what must follow from a religious text still regarded as perfect and pristine and utterly unquestionable, and a caliph or Shi’a theocrat regarded as a “supreme leader”, and a politics saturated in apocalypticism, and a culture marinated in absurd levels of sexual repression, and an endemic suppression of blasphemy and apostasy as unthinkable offenses, stand the test of time.

The totalism of Islam is as dangerous as any other totalism – and liberals better understand that about it.

Yes, it is vital to make distinctions between the various ways in which Islam is practised across the world – which reveals some potential for reform, in the way that Christianity and Judaism have reformed and examined themselves over the past century. But the resilient absence of a collective understanding that religious violence simply is not worth it – the realization that most Christians came to after the Thirty Years War or, as Hitch has it, definitively after the First World War – is a real problem. It is the West’s problem in so far as we have badly mishandled our relation with that part of the world; but in the end, it is Middle Eastern Islam’s problem. Until the Shi’a and Sunni love the future more than they hate each other, until the Koran can be discussed and debated there and around the world the way any other religious text is discussed, until apostasy is respected and not criminalized, we will have more trouble in store.

Does this explain everything? Of course not. Culture, history, politics matter just as powerfully and can lead to different manifestations in time and place. Certainly there was a time in which Islam was far more tolerant than Christianity; and in the Middle East too. But that is no more, and central elements in the doctrine of Islam are all too easily compatible with its modern intolerance, and now post-modern virulence. The defanging of fundamentalism is the duty, in my view, of every person who claims to have faith. I see no reason why that shouldn’t apply to Islam as to an other religion. And it sure hasn’t been defanged enough.

The Pill’s Guinea Pigs

Ann Friedman reviews Jonathan Eig’s The Birth of the Pill. The book doesn’t shy away from the ethically dubious parts of the pill’s development:

Initially, [fertility expert John Rock and researcher Goody Pincus] sought out healthy American women for the hormone trials but didn’t tell them they were testing a possible contraceptive, or what the risks were. (At the time, there were no rules governing medical testing.) Nurses at the city hospital refused to participate. Inmates at a women’s prison refused.

Rock and Pincus finally found a couple of takers—women who hoped their participation would contribute to fertility research—but due to side effects like nausea, dizziness, and breast tenderness, as well as a demanding schedule of invasive checkups, most of those women dropped out of the study. And so Pincus and Rock decided to take their trials to Puerto Rico, where contraception was entirely legal and abortion readily available (wealthy American women with unwanted pregnancies would fly there for a “San Juan weekend”), due in large part to concerns about overpopulation on the island. McCormick worried that Puerto Ricans couldn’t be trusted to follow the testing regimen, and Rock was concerned he wouldn’t find “ovulating intelligent” women there. But, the researchers assumed, women there would be more compliant test subjects.

Their racist paternalism had real consequences, arguably hindering the development of the pill. Women in Puerto Rico dropped out of the study, too, and so they started looking for women they could force to participate, both at home and in Puerto Rico. Women locked up at a Massachusetts mental asylum were signed up. Women enrolled in medical school in San Juan were told they had to take part in the medical test or face expulsion. Many dropped out rather than comply.

Eig explains how the researchers got FDA approval:

This is the first pill ever created for healthy women to take every day. There’s never been anything like this and the idea of seeking FDA approval for something women are going to take every day without studying it for years and years and checking out the long-term side effects, this is scary stuff! But Pincus also feels like he’s racing the clock, that if the word gets out about this and the Catholic Church and the federal government realize what they’re doing, the opposition will mount and he’ll have no chance of getting it through. …

In 1955, when they’ve really only tested the pill on maybe 60 women for more than say, six months or a year, Pincus goes to a conference and declares victory. He declares that we’ve invented the pill. The media picks up on this and it becomes this huge story. … Thousands of women are writing to their doctors and writing directly to [Pincus and Rock] saying, “I’ve heard about this pill and I need it, I need it now!” … There was this huge outpouring and it had a huge effect on Pincus and on the other scientist working on this because they began to see there was an enormous demand for this and they began to see they had to push harder, they had to go fast.