Author: Andrew Sullivan

They’ve Shut Down Red Square!

Mass protests have broken out in Moscow following the show-trial conviction of opposition leader and Moscow mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny, whose final update on Twitter urged supporters to congregate at Manezhnaya Square. Tweets from the scene:

https://twitter.com/ilyamuz/status/357882813468512258

Of course, there have been indications of censorship:

https://twitter.com/ilyamuz/status/357859509856772096

And some ironies:

The situation is developing rapidly:

Within the last hour – and within hours of the start of the street protests – the regional prosecutor’s office announced that it had appealed Navalny’s detention. Navalny had announced earlier today that he would drop his mayoral campaign, but just minutes ago, RT reported that Navalny would in fact continue to run if released. It remains unclear how this news will affect the demonstrations, if at all.

Meanwhile, the European Union, the US ambassador to Russia, William Hague, and Mikhail Gorbachev have expressed concern about Navalny’s five-year sentence, and Russian stocks have tumbled following the news. Arrests have been reported in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Daniel Sandford reports that Navalny was defiant at the sentencing:

In his closing remarks to the judge, Alexei Navalny was unrepentant. “We will destroy this feudal society that is robbing all of us,” he raged. “If somebody thought that on hearing the threat of six years in prison I was going to run away abroad or hide somewhere, they were mistaken. I cannot run away from who I am. I have nothing else but this, and I don’t want to do anything else but to help my country. To work for my fellow citizens.”

Navalny supporters say the election campaign will continue even if he is jailed. “This can’t go on forever,” he added. “A situation in which 140 million people in one of the biggest and richest countries in the world are subjugated by a handful of worthless monsters. They are not even oligarchs, who built up their wealth through shrewdness or wisdom. They are a bunch of former Komsomol activists, turned democrats, turned patriots, who grabbed everything into their own hands.”

The Economist says the conviction likely won’t be the end for Navalny:

Although only half of the country knows anything about the case against Mr. Navalny, most of those who do see it as retribution for his anti-corruption campaign, not as a way to stop him running for election. Yet jailing him for five years will mean that Sergei Sobyanin, the incumbent mayor, wins a tainted vote on September 8th. As it happens, Mr. Sobyanin was ahead of Mr. Navalny in the polls, partly because Muscovites see the role of a mayor as administrative, not political. Indeed, from a political viewpoint Mr. Navalny could have been hurt more by an apparent defeat in a mayoral election than by being sent to jail. …Mikhail Khodorkovksy, a former oil tycoon who challenged Mr. Putin over corruption in 2003, has been in jail ever since and is unlikely to come out even when his second term expires next year. Mr. Navalny’s sentence is also unlikely to be his final one. But as he himself said, “If anyone thinks that I or my colleagues will cease our activity because of this trial…they are gravely mistaken.”

The Interpreter and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are live-blogging. Live-feed here.

When Can A Fetus Feel Pain?

A 19 weeks old fetal bone development is

Ronald Bailey reviews research on the subject. On the one hand:

[Dr. Maureen Condic, an associate professor of neurobiology and adjunct professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine] does acknowledge that the “long-range connections within the cortex that some believe to be required for consciousness do not arise until much later, around 22-24 weeks.” But she believes that the fetal neural structures needed to detect noxious stimuli are in place by 8 to 10 weeks of development. She further asserts: “There is universal agreement that pain is detected by the fetus in the first trimester. The debate concerns how pain is experienced, i.e., whether a fetus has the same pain experience as a newborn or an adult would have.”

As evidence that it is possible to feel pain without a cortex Condic cites the fact that children born without a cortex and animals whose cortices have been removed will withdraw from pinches, burns, and so forth. As further evidence for fetal pain, Condic cites studies showing that various medical treatments applied to fetuses in the womb boost their stress hormone levels.

On the basis of this evidence, Condic contends, “Direct experimental evidence from adult humans contradicts that the assertion…that mature pain perception requires cortical circuitry.”

On the other:

The RCOG’s report, Fetal Awareness: A Review of Research and Recommendations for Practice was issued in March 2010. “In reviewing the neuroanatomical and physiological evidence in the fetus,” it found, “it was apparent that connections from the periphery [of the fetal body] to the cortex are not intact before 24 weeks of gestation and, as most neuroscientists believe that the cortex is necessary for pain perception, it can be concluded that the fetus cannot experience pain in any sense prior to this gestation.” In other words, while fetuses can react to pain, at the 24-week stage of brain development there is no subject present that is capable of experiencing pain.

(Photo: A 19 weeks old fetal bone development is displayed in VAM Design Center of Budapest on April 2, 2012 during an exhibition of the ‘Bodies2’. This unique exhibit is a display of several authentic human specimens, including whole bodies, individual organs and transparent body slices preserved through a special process called plastination. By Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images.)

Not The Stupid Party: The Vicious One

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As I noted yesterday, these are wonderful days for gay people around the world. The view that gays deserve dignity and civil equality in their relationships, that they are not somehow subhuman or incapable of love and family and responsibility has gained ground everywhere. And after the last two Supreme Court cases, the far right’s reaction has been somewhat muted. They’re aware that although their arguments might still hold for them, and that they have every right to keep making them, there is not much point in reviling the self-evident joy of newly married gay couples. Who at this juncture would want to target gay couples again, to push arguments that imply their marriages are all frauds, or that they remain a predatory danger to children?

Alberto Gonzales and Ken Cuccinelli, that’s who. In a truly jaw-dropping piece today in the New York Times, the attorney-general who acquiesced in the suspension of basic rights such as habeas corpus and authorization of war crimes is nit-picking the history of court rulings on marriage to argue that bi-national gay couples have, unlike all straight couples, no inherent immigration rights.

The case he cites? One from 1982, a time when marriage equality was barely heard of, involving obvious fraud. Here’s Gonzales’ summary:

In a 1982 case, Adams v. Howerton, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that Congress intended to define a citizen’s “spouse,” in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, only as a person of the opposite sex.
The case involved a couple — Richard Adams, an American, and Anthony Sullivan, an Australian — who in 1975 obtained a marriage certificate from the clerk of Boulder County, Colo. The couple then attempted to have Mr. Sullivan classified as an immediate relative, as a route toward lawful immigration status. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (since reorganized) denied the petition. The Ninth Circuit held that even if the marriage was valid under Colorado law, the marriage nonetheless did not provide for immigration benefits.

The piece is so passive-aggressive and tediously written you might easily miss what it is doing. He’s using a case that was self-evidently fraudulent – because it was at a time when marriage equality was on the fringe of the fringe – and inferring from it that legally married couples  today – with no fraud involved at all – could be denied rights because of that ancient precedent.

Story about gay bi-national couples who are in a bind because their spouses cannot get visas under current immigration lawSCOTUS’s abolition of DOMA’s Section 3 makes this moot. So the point is obviously rhetorical, a way to raise the canard that gay bi-national gay couples are invitations to fraud in ways that straight couples aren’t. The truth is: all spousal green card applications have to go through serious USCIS investigation to prove they are genuine. And a fraudulent application for spousal green card status in 1982 has no ramifications whatever for gay bi-national couples today.

But you can see where the right is going. If they are going to have to acquiesce in living among gay people as equals, there are still a few classic tropes they can use to leverage fear against yet another minority. The image of gay spousal immigrants treated equally under the law is so repellent to them, they need to try and find some kind of legal loophole to keep bi-national gay couples in a separate and unequal place. And by fusing the immigration issue with the gay one, they get a Roger Ailes two-fer: fear of Homos as well as Hispanics, flooding into “their” nation.

One wonders: Do these people not see how vicious and callous they seem beneath the legalistic tedium? Maybe we could dismiss it as one bad lawyer and party hack waging cultural warfare if there were not also signs that the base’s hatred of the thought of gay people as their full equals is pushing the GOP further to the right.

In Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli is running for governor in part on a platform to reinstate the sodomy laws. Yes, you read that right.

Again, this seems completely insane, and then you realize that’s because the GOP base is in favor of it:

When Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II challenged a federal appeals court ruling that deemed the state’s anti-sodomy law unconstitutional, Democrats pounced, accusing the Republican of pursuing an anti-gay agenda. Now Cuccinelli’s campaign for governor is looking to turn the tables on opponent Terry McAuliffe, casting it as an issue of protecting children from predators and pushing the Democratic gubernatorial nominee to take a side.

So the marriages of gay couples are inherently more fraudulent than those of straight couples, and the law is the only thing stopping them from molesting your kids. Yep: that’s the new mainstreaming message from the GOP. And Cuccinelli is making this a centerpiece of an aggressive campaign, demanding why McAuliffe wants to allow gay people to continue recruiting and raping children. It’s a position you’d expect from Vladimir Putin, not a would-be governor in the US. His argument is that sex offenders of various sorts, including child abuse, had been prosecuted under the sodomy laws until they were struck down. But the obvious remedy to that is to introduce new laws protecting children from predators, gay or straight, and not resurrect a broad anti-sodomy statute which would in any case be unconstitutional.

But that wouldn’t ratchet up the hatred and fear of homosexuals that can help Cuccinelli reach his Christianist base and motivate them to the polls. Cuccinelli has a long brutal record of persecution of gay people. He once tried to ban gay-straight organizations from state college campuses and urged removal of employment non-discrimination laws in state government for gays. More:

In 2004, when Cuccinelli served in the state Senate, he voted against a measure that would have altered the sodomy law to no longer cover private consensual acts among adults. In 2009, he said he believed “homosexual acts are wrong and should not be accommodated in government policy.”

I kept saying that things would get worse in the GOP before things got better. I didn’t fully realize how much worse it could get – and how unlikely it now seems that it will ever get better. They are in full-on rage in their cultural retreat. Their fear deepens and deepens into terror, terror of the other, even if that “other” is a member of their own family.

(Photos: GOP candidate for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli campaigning on election day in Northern, Virginia. By Marvin Joseph/TWP/Getty. Tim Coco (left) and his husband Genesio Oliveira pose for a photo at their home in Haverhill, Mass., Saturday, Feb. 2, 2013.  Oliveira is from Brazil. By Gretchen Ertl for The Washington Post via Getty Images.)

An Authoritarian Fanatic For Wyoming, Ctd

Ponnuru sizes up Liz Cheney’s Senate campaign:

It’s definitely not going to fly if people think of her as an outsider who’s just trying to establish a dynasty. She has to avoid any hint of that. But I do think she has at hand a critique of Enzi that might work with Wyoming Republicans. When he was running for the Senate, Ted Cruz said that he would consider himself a disappointment if all he did with his time in office was to compile a conservative voting record. He presented himself as someone who would be more of an activist than that. Enzi has a conservative voting record, but some Republicans in Wyoming might want someone who has done more to move the debate than he has. Cheney, if she wants to run that way, could find that Republicans agree.

But there’s one more wrinkle: She (presumably) favors same-sex marriage, while Enzi doesn’t — which would make this an interesting test of how important that issue is to Republicans.

Chait sees her visibility as a drawback for the GOP as a whole:

No. 1 problem here is that Cheney, if she wins, will become a high-profile spokesperson, and will join the Limbaughs, Palins, and Glenn Becks as defining the GOP as the party of crazy.

No. 2 problem is that she will make it hard for other Republicans to nudge their party to the center, or even to prevent it from moving even farther right. One of the problems faced by the pragmatic wing of the party is that its elected officials can’t say even mildly heterodox things without incurring the wrath of the true-believing faithful, and Cheney could become one more loud true believer flaying any colleagues who gesture in the direction of sanity.

Liz Cheney won’t cost the Republicans a seat in Wyoming. The real fear is that she’ll cost it seats elsewhere.

Francis Wilkinson’s view:

If she wins, which she well may, her victory may prove to be another dose of self-administered poison for Republicans. One lesson will be clear: No one is conservative enough to be safe from internal attack.

Earlier Dish on Cheney’s campaign here.

Greenwald-Bait

“The nation’s capital is in full spasm over Mark Leibovich’s cutting takedown of the city’s cozy culture in his new book, “This Town.” The fear: That it will send a chill through the elite after-hours social circuit — where the real business of this town often gets done between reporters and sources,” – Lois Romano.

You think any of these reporters want to do anything like cite their cocktail buddies for war crimes, or hack the government to get NSA files?

The Story Of “Nigger Jeff”

11-court-west-birmingham

Alan Jacobs tells it:

All I can say in my defense is that I never hurled a stone at him, or shouted abuse. But I stood by, many a time, as others did those things, and I neither walked away nor averted my eyes. I never held anyone’s cloak, but then I was never asked to. I watched it all, gripping a rock in my hand as though I were preparing to use it — so that no one would turn on me with anger or contempt — and I always stood a little behind them so they couldn’t see that I wasn’t throwing anything. I was smaller and younger than the rest of them, and they were smaller and younger than him. In my memory he seems almost a full-grown man; I suppose he was eleven or twelve.

We called him Nigger Jeff. I have never doubted that Jeff was indeed his name, though as I write this account I find myself asking, for the first time, how we could have known: I never heard any of the boys speak to him except in cries of hatred, and I never knew anyone else who knew him. It occurs to me now that, if his name was Jeff, there had to have been at least a brief moment of human contact and exchange — perhaps not even involving Jeff, perhaps one of the boys’ mothers talked to Jeff’s mother. But we grasp what’s available for support or stability. It’s bad to call a boy Nigger Jeff, but worse still to call him just Nigger. A name counts for something.

Continued here. Update from a reader:

I read the story about “Nigger Jeff” and it brought back a memory from almost 62 years ago.

I was raised in a small coal mining town in Southern Illinois.  My dad owned a grocery store that served everyone in town, the black population included.  We all, of course, knew each other anyway (how can you not know everyone when there are only 350 people in town?) and as a young child, I remember our black neighbors as well as our white ones.  One in particular was a woman of generous size who made the best barbeque in the world.  Every year, twice a year, like clockwork, the smell of barbecue roasting on her outdoor huge grill would permeate the town and everyone would run to her house to buy ribs, pork for sandwiches, etc.  I can still taste it and have found nothing to compare.

She shopped at my dad’s store and one January she came into the store when I was there.  I had gotten a black doll from Santa that year and I ran to her and said so proudly…”look at my nigger baby”.  She sat down in the one chair in my dad’s store, said “come here baby” and sat me on her ample lap.  I’m not sure what the words she used but she made it clear to my five-year-old brain that that word was just not acceptable. I still have trouble saying it (writing it is hard enough).

I suppose if more of us had those kinds of connections with people who are not like us and who were willing to educate a five-year-old little white girl about the harm that a word can cause, the world would be a better place …

Quote For The Day

“The toad will not remove itself from the oil pipeline,” – the last voice of genuine political opposition in Russia, Aleksei A. Navalny, describing Putin’s petro-state.

This was a great line as well:

The current power — is not a healthy big fish, but a puffer fish or a Latin American toad, which puffs itself up when it senses danger, using TV to spread lies from prostitute TV hosts.

The snark in the face of a jackboot is the sign of a man without fear – as he faces five years in jail. Stay tuned for more coverage

Dope Dealing Doctors

Obama Admin. Unveils New Policy Easing Medical Marijuana ProsecutionsThe Colorado State Auditor checks in (pdf) on Colorado’s medical marijuana industry:

As of October 2012, a total of 903 physicians had recommended medical marijuana for the 108,000 patients holding valid red cards. Twelve physicians recommended medical marijuana for 50 percent of those patients, including one physician with more than 8,400 patients on the Registry.

Mark Kleiman is uncomfortable with how medical marijuana laws have been exploited by such doctors:

The strategy of using quasi-medical legalization as a means of normalizing consumption and moving the political acceptability of full commercial legalization has been a great success; apparently most voters either have short memories (of when they were being assured that “medical marijuana” was all about the patients and had nothing to do with full-on legalization) or don’t mind being bullshat in a good cause. And I’m not unhappy with the outcome. Nor am I naive about political tactics: Bismarck was right about laws and sausages.

Still, the whole deal – and especially the role of the “kush docs” – makes me a little sick to my stomach.

So smoke some weed, dude. It’s great for nausea. If that is the worst that can happen – fee-for-service medicine capturing yet another simple medication – I’m not so downcast. Peter Guither responds:

Yes, many legalizers came to the issue without much knowledge about the medical benefits of marijuana. And yes, they discovered that medical marijuana was also good for the legalization movement. They realized that the mass public would be less likely to be scared by a product that was used by grandmothers with cancer, which could defang the decades of government propaganda. And so they learned more about medical marijuana. And, lo and behold, they discovered it was really true. And they met inspirational people whose illness was transformed by using medical marijuana. And so they became legalizers who also cared about medical marijuana. It was not incompatible at all. Sure, they were “using” medical marijuana as a foot in the door for legalization, but only because that was the best way to also insure that sick people would be able to get their medicine.

(Photo: Dave Warden, a bud tender at Private Organic Therapy (P.O.T.), a non-profit co-operative medical marijuana dispensary, displays various types of marijuana available to patients on October 19, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. By David McNew/Getty.)