Author: Dish Staff

They Got The Wrong Men

by Dish Staff

Yesterday, two men were freed after spending 30 years behind bars for a rape and murder they didn’t commit. Lauren Galik introduces us to the wrongly convicted:

The men, Henry Lee “Buddy” McCollum and Leon Brown, are stepbrothers. McCollum, 19 at the time of the crime, was sentenced to death and spent 30 years on North Carolina’s death row, making him one of the longest serving death row prisoners in the state. Brown, 15 at the time of the crime, was also sentenced to death but was later retried and sentenced to life in prison. Both men are considered mentally disabled—McCollum’s IQ is between 60 and 69 and Brown’s IQ is 49.

Alice Ollstein describes how the brothers were pressured into giving false confessions:

[C]ivil and legal rights advocates, including Vernetta Alston at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, have long argued the “process” has not worked at all for Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown. “At every juncture, the system failed Henry and Leon,” Alston told ThinkProgress. “They were coerced into giving false confessions. These two boys could hardly read. They were very intellectually disabled. They were manipulated and threatened, and only signed the statements because law enforcement told them they could go home. It’s unacceptable.”

The brothers were interrogated for hours with no attorney present in order to obtain the confessions, which they both later recanted. There was never any physical evidence against them.

Dahlia Lithwick looks at the bigger picture:

This case highlights the same well-known and extensively documented problems that can lead to false arrests and convictions: Police who are incentivized to find any suspect quickly, rather than the right one carefully; false confessions elicited after improper questioning; exculpatory evidence never turned over; the prosecution of vulnerable, mentally ill, or very young suspects in ways that take advantage of their innocence rather than protecting it; prosecutorial zeal that has far more to do with the pursuit of victories than the pursuit of truth; and a death penalty appeals system that treats this entire screwed-up process of investigation and conviction as both conclusive and unreviewable.

Map Of The Day

by Dish Staff

Screen Shot 2014-09-03 at 1.51.35 PM

Niraj Chokshi illustrates how the best states for female workers are in the Northeast:

Massachusetts had the highest score [for women’s earnings and employment] among states, according to the analysis of four factors conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. (D.C. scored even higher, though many argue it is better compared to other cities.) All but four of the 10 highest-scoring states – Maryland, Minnesota, Colorado and Virginia – were in the Northeast. Sixteen states earned a B- or higher. West Virginia ranked dead last and, along with Alabama, received an F. The composite scores, excluding D.C., ranged from 68.5 to 90.5, on a hundred-point scale.

The four factors analyzed to develop the composite scores were: median annual earnings (for full-time, year-round women workers); the earnings ratio between men and women (again, for full-time, year-round women workers); the share of women in the workforce; and the share of women in managerial or professional jobs.

Al-Qaeda’s Newest Franchise

by Dish Staff

In a video released today, Al-Qaeda international leader Ayman al-Zawahiri announced that the organization was establishing a branch in South Asia to wage jihad in India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Ishaan Tharoor examines the logic behind the decision:

Al-Qaeda’s desire for operational expansion eastward makes sense: There are roughly as many Muslims in South Asia as there are in the Arab world; there are more Muslims outside the Middle East than inside it. The history of the Mughal Empire allows al-Qaeda ideologues to invoke a narrative of lost Muslim preeminence, waiting for redemption, even though some Mughal emperors would have abhorred the terrorist organization’s brand of Islam. … But it’s hard to see how al-Qaeda can capitalize in South Asia if it hasn’t already. For all the tensions and enmities that exist in this diverse, overcrowded region, it’s a part of the world steeped in traditions of pluralism and tolerance. Al-Qaeda’s puritanical zeal, incubated in places such as Saudi Arabia, is wholly alien to the Indian subcontinent. And South Asian governments, particularly in India and Bangladesh, have stepped up cooperation on issues of counterterrorism.

One interpretation is that Zawahiri is trying to recapture al-Qaeda’s relevance as it loses ground in the Islamic heartland to even more radical outfits like ISIS, but Dan Murphy doubts it will work:

Can Zawahiri turn the tide against the upstart jihadis? For now, it seems unlikely. The small percentage of Muslims that support such movements seem elated by Baghdadi’s caliphate declaration, and imagine they’re living in epoch-defining times that will see their dream of converting the whole world at the point of a sword realized. The old Al Qaeda approach – that world domination wasn’t possible until “far enemies” like the US were somehow destroyed – is being upended by the arguably more conventional ISIS approach of seizing territory. For the small group of misfits and loners and true-believers who view the chopping of heads and gunning down captives in their hundreds as heroic, rather than revolting, ISIS is the emerging brand name. When was the last time Joe Biden vowed to chase Al Qaeda to the gates of hell?

Andrew North observes that al-Qaeda has even been losing support in its traditional Af-Pak stronghold. He suggests the decision has something to do with that as well:

Several Pakistani-based militant groups previously allied to al-Qaeda have recently pledged allegiance to IS and its goal of an Islamic caliphate. The group has now reportedly launched a support and recruitment drive in border areas like Peshawar. Booklets in the name of the Dawlat-e-Islamia (Islamic State) have been circulating among the many Afghan refugees living there. Graffiti, or wall-talk, another guide to sentiments, is also going the group’s way, with pro-IS slogans now regularly appearing on Peshawar buildings. And while Zawahiri’s announcement seems primarily aimed at India, the man he named as the new leader of al-Qaeda’s South Asia wing, Asim Umar, is reportedly a Pakistani.

Katherine Zimmerman, on the other hand, argues that the video proves al-Qaeda is still alive and dangerous:

The split between al Qaeda and the Islamic State is very real, as is the contest for the global jihadist movement. The Islamic State’s unprecedented success in Iraq and Syria has energized the movement as a whole, which is why al Qaeda leaders have supported Sunni victories in Iraq. The Islamic State, and then al Qaeda, must both be defeated. Going after one and dismissing the other is short-sighted and leaves American interests vulnerable to attacks. Allying with so-called lesser enemies like Iran, or Syria, as Senator Rand Paul (and others) have suggested, to go after the Sunni threat is just as short-sighted. Just because the Islamic State and al Qaeda want to kill Americans doesn’t mean Assad and Khamenei don’t. Al Qaeda’s newest affiliate is proof of life for those who were questioning. There are still groups seeking to affiliate with al Qaeda, and some of them, such as Mokhtar Belmokhtar’s group in the Sahel, have killed Americans. Al Qaeda is not dead. It is still a threat to the United States, and Ayman al Zawahiri wants us to know it.

Decades Of Drought

by Dish Staff

Drought Map

The Southwest faces a surprisingly high risk of it:

A new study published as a joint effort by scientists at Cornell University, the University of Arizona, and the U.S. Geological Survey finds that the chances of the Southwest facing a “megadrought” are much higher than previously suspected. According to the new study, “the chances of the southwestern United States experiencing a decade-long drought is at least 50 percent, and the chances of a ‘megadrought’ – one that lasts up to 35 years – ranges from 20 to 50 percent over the next century.”  …  [Columbia climate scientist Richard] Seager says that the region hasn’t had a megadrought in several centuries; the Dust Bowl drought of The Grapes of Wrath, though incredibly severe, was not long enough to qualify.

Scott K. Johnson offers a sense of scale:

In the 1150s, for example, reconstructions tell us that the Southwest was in the midst of almost 25 years of below-average precipitation. For a solid decade, the Colorado River averaged about 85 percent of its normal flow. Arizona is allocated about 15 percent of the Colorado’s water, which now rarely makes it to the Gulf of California before drying up. That’s a decade without an Arizona’s share of water.

Bioclimatologist Park Williams, speaking with Doyle Rice, notes that more of the West has been in a state of drought over the past 15 years than in any other 15-year period since the 1150s era. Rice zooms in on California, which – while not as vulnerable to megadroughts as Arizona or New Mexico – has recently seen “the state’s worst consecutive three years for precipitation in 119 years of records”:

As of Aug. 28, 100 percent of the state of California was considered to be in a drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. More than 58 percent is in “exceptional” drought, the worst level. Record warmth has fueled the drought as the state sees its hottest year since records began in 1895, the National Climatic Data Center reports. Because of the dryness, Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown declared a statewide drought emergency this year. Since then, reservoir storage levels have continued to drop, and as of late August, they were down to about 59 percent of the historical average. Regulations restricting outdoor water use were put in place in late July for the entire state. … There are reports of wells running dry in central California.

Tom Philpott gulps:

This (paradoxically) chilling assessment comes on the heels of another study (study; my summary), this one released in early August by University of California-Irvine and NASA researchers, on the Colorado River, the lifeblood of a vast chunk of the Southwest. As many as 40 million people rely on the Colorado for drinking water, including residents of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, and San Diego. … The researchers analyzed satellite measurements of the Earth’s mass and found that the region’s aquifers had undergone a much-larger-than-expected drawdown over the past decade – the region’s farms and municipalities responded to drought-reduced flows from the Colorado River by dropping wells and tapping almost 53 million acre-feet of underground water between December 2004 and November 2013 – equal to about 1.5 full Lake Meads drained off in just nine years, a rate the study’s lead researcher, Jay Famiglietti, calls “alarming.”

Considering how much of the Colorado River Basin, which encompasses swaths of Utah, Colorado, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, are desert, it’s probably not wise to rapidly drain aquifers, since there’s little prospect that they’ll refill anytime soon. And when you consider that that the region faces high odds of a coming megadrought, the results are even more frightening.

Meanwhile, B. Lynn Ingram, coauthor of The West Without Water, warns of “cautionary parallels between our modern society and past societies that were forced into mass migration and in some cases collapsed under prolonged periods of drought”:

A particularly dry stretch occurred between 900 and 1400 AD, during the so-called Medieval Climate Anomaly, when two 100-year long droughts descended on the West. These droughts caused large lakes to shrink or dry out completely, more frequent wildfires, and extreme hardship for native populations as natural water sources shrank and other resources declined.  … Like these past societies, our modern society experienced rapid population growth throughout the relatively wet 20th century. Today, California has 38 million people, a number that may double by 2050, made possible by developing all available sources of water, including underground aquifers that took thousands of years to accumulate. We are not only using all available surface waters, we are drawing down our “water in the bank.” The drilling of these aquifers is currently unmonitored and unregulated, providing free water Central Valley farmers, increasingly only to those who are willing and able to drill deeper and deeper wells. Over the past year, the companies that install these wells and pumps are working round the clock, often deepening wells by 1,000 to 2,000 feet.

(Map from the U.S. National Drought Monitor)

Joan Rivers, RIP

by Dish Staff

The Healthcare Spending Trend

by Dish Staff

Health Care Costs

Yesterday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a report on projected healthcare spending. What Jonathan Cohn sees as the “main takeaway”:

We’re making progress on controlling the cost of health care. We might even be making a lot of progress, although it’s too soon to tell.

Why the report may be too pessimistic:

Keep in mind that CMS actuaries are famously conservative. In the past, they’ve tended to overestimate how much spending will rise—not because they’re imprecise or biased, but because they tend to err on the side of caution. In a conference call Wednesday, several actuaries made clear they weren’t discounting the possibility that the health care industry is becoming more efficient. One actuary said “Right now it is still too early determine” how much the health industry has changed. Others expressed similar sentiments.

“If the payment reforms have the kind of effect advocates of them expect, these projections could turn out to be conservative,” Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me later via e-mail. “The actuaries tend to take a wait and see approach to new developments where there is little evidence as to what effect they’ll have. We are in somewhat unchartered territory here.”

Jason Millman adds important caveats:

A few points worth noting about the actuary’s projections: Taking a cue from the trustees overseeing Medicare, the actuary’s office assumes that Congress will once again approve a “doc fix” to avoid the scheduled 21 percent cut to Medicare physician payments. The actuary also assumes that the Affordable Care Act’s temporary bump in federal reimbursement to Medicaid doctors will go away at the end of the year as planned, though some Democrats and physician groups are pushing for an extension of the policy to encourage more doctors to take Medicaid patients as the program expands.

Philip Klein, as he does with most ACA-related news, puts a negative spin on the report:

As the economy improves, Obamacare continues to expand, and the Medicare age population explodes, health spending is expected to rise by an average of 6 percent a year over the 2015 to 2023 time period. Though this would be lower than the 7.2 percent average over the 1990 to 2008 span, it would still outpace the growth of the economy.

Because of this, health spending as a share of gross domestic product is expected to increase from 17.2 percent in 2012 to 19.3 percent in 2023 – representing nearly one in five dollars of the economy.

Kliff frames the numbers differently:

Medicare actuaries expect that health care costs will outpace economic growth by 1.1 percent. That’s not ideal; most health economists would like to see the two numbers grow at the exact same pace. But it’s still a smaller gap than what has existed historically. Between 1990 and 2008, health cost growth outpaced the economy by 2 percent.

This is big. The Medicare actuaries are saying that, while they do expect a slight rebound in medical spending post-recession, they don’t think we’re headed back to the super-fast growth that, for decades, has been a hallmark of the health care industry. And when health care eats up a smaller chunk of the economy (and the federal budget) that leaves more money to spend on other important things like education and infrastructure.

The War Over The Core, Ctd

by Dish Staff

One-time Common Core supporter Bobby Jindal found himself squaring off against his former allies once more last week, when he filed a lawsuit against the Department of Ed alleging that the standards “effectively nationalize [the] education curriculum” and are “patently incompatible with the Tenth Amendment.” Although many view the move as political theater ahead of the ’16 elections and few expect the suit to succeed on its merits, Max Ehrenfreund characterizes it as “an escalation” of the campaign against the standards. In a lengthy article about the conservative backlash against the Core, Tim Murphy notes that its drafters “always anticipated a learning curve – just not a political insurgency intent on destroying the program before it had a chance to produce results”:

The trajectory of Common Core just might wind up resembling that of the Affordable Care Act.

Once the hysteria passes, it’s likely to be viewed as a genuine improvement to the education system– even if the vision of a national standard isn’t fully realized. “The [original] promise was, ‘Wow, this is nearly every state in the country!'” the New America Foundation’s [Anne] Hyslop says. “We may not have that moving forward, but we’re at least going to have a good 25 or 30 states.” From the perspective of the policymakers who pushed for Common Core seven years ago, that would still be a success story.

But it came at a heavy cost: The grand bipartisan consensus has been cut clean to the bone, offering a preview of the obstacles facing future reform efforts. If you thought math and reading standards were a hard sell, try biology. And activists are already taking aim at [Common Core co-drafter David] Coleman’s new Advanced Placement tests, administered by the College Board—tests they fear have been infected with the ills of Common Core.

The political consequences are still unfolding. In June, the Pew Research Center released new evidence that the gap within the GOP had closed: self-identified “business” conservatives opposed Common Core at the same rate as “steadfast conservatives” (61 percent). If that holds true, the 2014 midterms, where many candidates have staked out anti-Core positions, just might determine the standards’ fate in many states. Common Core now faces the highest-stakes test of all—the ballot box.

All Dish coverage of Common Core here.

The PC Police?

by Dish Staff

Margaret Talbot examines the role of political correctness in the sexual exploitation scandal taking place in Rotherham, England:

One explanation for why these crimes went on for so long, more or less unchecked, is that police officers didn’t believe what they were hearing: they thought that the social workers who reported a pattern of sexual abuse involving Pakistani gangs and young girls were exaggerating or misinterpreting. The scale of it could have seemed implausible—an understandable human response, perhaps, though not the most useful one for law enforcement.

The other leading explanation is that, because most of the perpetrators were Pakistani and most of the victims were white, local officials were reluctant to proceed, worried about inflaming ethnic tensions. Last week, the British Home Secretary, Theresa May, denounced what she called “an institutionalized political correctness” at work in this case.

Though this might sound like a rhetorical flourish, there seems to be some truth to this claim.

Rotherham is an economically stressed city of two hundred and fifty-eight thousand people, with an ethnic minority population of about eight per cent. The Labour Party has long controlled the town council, but, in recent years, the Party has been joined by a few members of the populist right-wing faction U.K.I.P. When investigating individual cases, the Rotherham report found no evidence that ethnic consideration had determined outcomes for children. But, when it came to setting policy, a certain skittishness seems to have played a role. According to the report, “Several councillors interviewed believed that by opening up these issues they could be ‘giving oxygen’ to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion.” Perhaps that, too, is a concern that deserves some sympathy—though because its immediate result was a failure to rescue children from brutal circumstances, the sympathy only goes so far.

A few days ago, Hugh Muir challenged that interpretation:

[C]an it really be true – as the tabloids and the right robustly claim – that a significant contributor truly was political correctness; the fear of officials that by intervening appropriately in cases where the suspects were Pakistani Muslims, they themselves would be castigated as racist? If it is, it is outrageous. It is also ludicrous.

Political correctness – if we are to persist with that hackneyed term – required members of a diverse society to accord to others the level of dignity they would want for themselves. The right conflated its meaning so as to describe any prescription on its behaviour that it didn’t like. Everything, from the description of coffee to adoption policy, became “political correctness gone mad”. Perhaps the idea was to discredit the concept by hoisting it into the realm of absurdity. But even then, the concept never, ever required anyone to turn a blind eye to the mass abuse of the vulnerable by criminals. And anyway, to do so on grounds of political correctness would never have made sense.

If a backlash was feared, where would it have come from? There is no minority lobby for criminals and paedophiles. So long as communities knew the issue was one of law enforcement rather than an assault on those communities themselves, they would have supported tough action by the authorities.

Moore Award Nominee

by Dish Staff

“Scott Walker has given women the back of his hand. I know that is stark. I know that is direct, But that is reality. … What Republican tea party extremists like Scott Walker are doing is they are grabbing us by the hair and pulling us back,” – Debbie Wasserman Schultz, DNC chair.  (Award glossary here.)

NATO Has Issues

by Dish Staff

As the NATO summit gets underway in Wales, David Francis highlights the alliance’s major challenges, chief among which is getting members to pay their fair share of collective defense spending:

[E]ven with open combat in a country bordering several NATO members, the summit is likely to be dominated by dollars and cents. For years, top officials in the Bush and Obama administrations have angrily called on Europe to spend more on defense so Washington wouldn’t be responsible for the lion’s share of the alliance’s funding. Taken as a whole, the defense budgets of NATO members are down some 20 percent in the last five years. Only three European NATO members — the United Kingdom, Greece, and Estonia — meet the alliance’s threshold of spending 2 percent or more of their GDP on defense. … In 2011, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the alliance faced “collective military irrelevance” without an increase in European defense spending. In June, as the Ukraine crisis raged on, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned that Europe had to stop playing lip service to defense spending and upgrade out-of-date equipment.

Yet Gordon Adams argues that NATO’s weaknesses can’t be papered over with more euros:

What is at issue in Europe is capability. If the Europeans ever actually reached the 2 percent defense spending threshold across the Alliance, they would still produce an excess of the kind of defense capability that is not needed (heavy ground combat units or very small air forces) that do not work together well), and militaries that duplicate, rather than complement each other. They spend enough to create up-to-date, deployable forces, but the ones too many of them build are nationally based and static. And they do not build them to a common, trans-European, integrated plan.

And Robin Wright observes that despite having a combined troop strength of over 3.3 million and accounting for well over half the world’s defense spending, “NATO seems to have less nerve and energy than it once did”:

It has focussed more on preventing or containing new fires than on putting out existing blazes raging in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. Its recent stats aren’t encouraging, either. Since 2001, NATO has spread its wings beyond the European theatre (its original mandate), into the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The first of these deployments was in Afghanistan, after the September 11th attacks, when NATO invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. (“An attack on one is an attack on all,” as Obama put it in a speech in Tallinn this morning.) In 2004, NATO formed a training mission for Iraqi security forces. And in 2011 it authorized warplanes to intervene in Libya. That air campaign was pivotal in ousting Muammar Qaddafi. But today Afghanistan teeters. Iraq and its military are in a shambles. Libya is a virtual failed state.