Author: Dish Staff

Clinton Out-Hawks Obama, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Fallows is troubled by Clinton’s recent comments:

[I]n this interview—assuming it’s not “out of context”—she is often making the broad, lazy “do something” points and avoiding the harder ones. She appears to disdain the president for exactly the kind of slogan—”don’t do stupid shit”—that her husband would have been proud of for its apparent simplicity but potential breadth and depth. (Remember “It’s the economy, stupid”?) Meanwhile she offers her own radically simplified view of the Middle East—Netanyahu right, others wrong—that is at odds with what she did in the State Department and what she would likely have to do in the White House. David Brooks was heartened by this possible preview of a Hillary Clinton administration’s policy. I agree with Kevin Drum and John Cassidy, who were not.

Ezra thinks the interview demonstrates that Clinton’s nomination isn’t inevitable:

There is a pattern that has emerged in almost every recent interview Clinton has given: liberals walk away unnerved. She bumbled through a discussion of gay marriage with Terry Gross. She’s dodged questions about the Keystone XL pipeline. She’s had a lot of trouble discussing income inequality. I initially chalkedsome of this up to political rust. I am quickly revising that opinion.

 

Waldman sees Clinton’s disregard of the liberal base as a consequence of her not having a viable Democratic challenger:

Over the next two years there will probably be more situations in which Clinton winds up to the right of the median Democratic voter. That would be more of a political problem if she had a strong primary opponent positioned to her left who could provide a vehicle for whatever dissatisfaction the Democratic base might be feeling. But at the moment, there is no such opponent. Her dominance of the field may give her more latitude on foreign affairs — not to move to the right, but to be where she always was. Neither Democrats nor anyone else can say they didn’t see it coming.

Scott McConnell despairs:

George W. Bush once had the wit to joke about major financial elites being his “base”, but with Hillary the gap in attitudes between the major money people and the base of Democratic voters is substantial, and no joking matter.

As yet, amazingly, Hillary has no real opponent to the nomination. Centrist inside politics watchers have concluded her Goldberg interview means that she carefully calculated that she can run to the right and face no consequences. It’s probably true that most of the names floating about, Brian Schweitzer and Elizabeth Warren pose little threat to a Clinton coronation. But someone who could talk coherently about foreign policy—James Webb, for instance—might be a different matter, though no one besides Webb himself knows if he has the discipline and energy to take on what would a grueling, and probably losing campaign. The absence of the genuine challenger to a hawkish Hillary leaves one depressed about the state of American democracy.

However, Noam Scheiber thinks Clinton’s comments are risky:

Team Obama has calculated that it’s in the president’s interest to see Clinton succeed him. I suspect that will remain the case, Axelrod’s venting notwithstanding. But Obama’s advisers are not the same as Obama’s donors, many of whom have never loved the Clintons and still don’t to this day. A few more comments like this and many will be happy to ante up for Warren or some other challenger—perhaps even Biden, whose loyalty to the president many Obama donors consider his most important quality.

Tomasky agrees with Hillary brushing off the Democratic Party’s base. But, he writes, “I don’t think she’s a neocon hawk”:

[U]nlike McCain, who preens his way around Washington saying that that ISIS’s strength is entirely Obama’s fault, at least Clinton says, “I don’t think we can claim to know” what would’ve happened had the FSA been armed two years ago. That’s a humility the neocons lack. It’s a crucial distinction, and it’s a pretty damn important quality in a president.

How Philip Klein understands the game Clinton is playing:

Clinton is trying to strike a balance — she wants to distance herself from President Obama on foreign policy in areas in which he’s viewed as a failure, but she wants to preserve the veneer of experience that comes with having served as his Secretary of State. The problem she’s going to run into is that it’s easy to see how these two goals could conflict with one another. To the extent that Clinton touts her vast experience as Obama’s Secretary of State, it becomes more difficult to separate herself from the administration’s foreign policy.

Suderman gets the last word:

She wants to suggest some differences between herself and Obama, but not with any clarity, and not in a way that creates any real distance between them. And she’ll probably want to keep most of whatever differences she does reveal confined to the realm of foreign policy, partly because that’s where her experience is, and partly because the Democratic base isn’t likely to support major departures in domestic policy. Which means that unless there’s some big, unexpected break coming, she’ll essentially be running as a slightly more hawkish version of Obama. Inevitably, that means she’ll be tied to Obama’s less-than-popular presidency and controversial domestic agenda. Unless Obama’s current approval ratings improve—which of course they could over the next two years—that’s not great a place to be.

 

 

Many Jobs, Few Hires

by Dish Staff

Jobs Market

Ben Casselman analyzes the latest job market numbers:

U.S. employers listed 4.7 million available jobs at the end of June, 700,000 more than a year earlier and the most since 2001, according to new data released Tuesday. Meanwhile, the number of unemployed workers has been falling steadily and is now below 10 million. As a result, the remaining job seekers face their best prospects of the recovery: There are now two unemployed workers for every job opening, down from about seven at the height of the unemployment crisis.

Matt Phillips throws cold water on the news. He proclaims that “American companies want workers—they just aren’t actually hiring them yet”:

 US job openings have been at highs not seen since early 2001. Openings touched 4.67 million in June, up 2.1% from May. So if there are job openings, and business owners intend to hire, surely they’re hiring, right? Well, not so fast. The [Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey] hiring rate is nowhere near as buoyant as the job opening rates.

Jared Bernstein’s take:

Here’s what I think is going on. The job market has in fact been tightening, but in a somewhat unusual way: through diminished layoffs more so than through robust hiring (see figure here and this important related work as well).  The former—fewer layoffs—is keeping the short-term unemployment rate nice and low. The latter—tepid hires—is keeping the long-term jobless rate high. That’s creating the illusion of decreased matching efficiency but it’s really just the result of the persistent slack and the unusually high share of long-term unemployment with which we’ve been stuck for years now.

Arming The Kurds, Ctd

by Dish Staff

The EU could not agree yesterday on whether to arm Kurdish fighters in Iraq, but gave member states permission to do so on their own. This morning, France announced that it would send an immediate shipment of weapons:

The sudden announcement that arms would begin to flow within hours underlined France’s alarm at the urgency of the situation in Iraq, where the Islamic State fighters are threatening the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. … French authorities have pushed other European Union members to do more to aid Christians and other minorities being targeted by the Islamic State group extremists. E.U. foreign ministers will hold an emergency meeting Friday to coordinate their approach to the crisis and to endorse the European arms shipments already announced, according to an E.U. diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity pending the official announcement later Wednesday.

Rick Noack notes that Germany is also considering sending weapons to Iraq, which might also entail arming the peshmerga directly. That would mark a major change in policy for the world’s third largest arms exporter:

“If Germany decides to arm the Kurds, this would be a watershed moment. Germany has so far refrained from delivering such aid to militants,” said journalist Thomas Wiegold, a leading authority on Germany’s defense industry.

In the past, Germany had always refused to deliver arms to rebel groups such as those fighting in Libya or Syria, although it did earlier approve the delivery of arms to Iraq. Iraqi Kurdistan, however, is a semi-autonomous region within Iraq, which makes it difficult for foreign governments to directly negotiate arms deliveries. Direct support would also contradict E.U. guidelines that rule out deliveries to warring parties that belong neither to the European Union nor NATO.

Meanwhile, the Kurds have sent the Pentagon their wish list of advanced weaponry, which, according to Eli Lake, includes armored personnel carriers, night vision equipment, and surveillance drones:

The Pentagon has yet to respond to the Kurdish request. But the list is an indication of the rapid expansion of the multi-pronged American campaign in Iraq. On Tuesday, the U.S. military announced it would be sending 130 more U.S. military advisers to northern Iraq, bringing the total number of troops to over a thousand in country. American boots on the ground will only be a small piece of the larger effort against ISIS, however.

The U.S. is scheduling up to 100 attack, surveillance, and humanitarian airdrop missions a day over Iraq.  Those flights are being carried out by drones and manned fighters, U.S. Navy and Air Force aircraft alike. But American forces are not the ones calling in those strikes, as has become commonplace in warzones throughout the world. Instead, Kurdish fighters are identifying targets for the American bombing runs, breaking with years of U.S. military practice meant to ensure that the right targets are hit—and civilians are not.

The No-Drama Doctrine

by Dish Staff

Cameron Hudson finds the Obama Doctrine of genocide prevention sensible, if not particularly satisfying to those who would have liked a more robust American response to the crisis in Syria:

In an interview Friday with Tom Friedman of The New York Times, Obama remarked, “When you have a unique circumstance in which genocide is threatened, and a country is willing to have us in there, you have a strong international consensus that these people need to be protected and we have a capacity to do so, then we have an obligation to do so.” Some would argue that this explanation walks back from the high-minded justification for the forceful response to the potential massacre in Benghazi, Libya, in late 2011 when Obama asserted that a failure to act “would have stained the conscience of the world.” More importantly, it sets a new and seemingly higher bar for taking action to prevent genocide—one that is unlikely to be replicated very often.

If that’s the intent, it is not necessarily a bad thing.

Genocide prevention, as a community of practice, is in need of bookending. In a world full of nails—or potential nails—the U.S. military is the literal hammer. Absent a clear understanding of the circumstances when force could be used to save lives, advocates and communities at risk hold out false hope that the cavalry is coming, when it so rarely is. Understanding when a military response is on the table and when it is not will focus our attention on the cheaper, more politically palatable non-military options that should always constitute the heart of genocide prevention.

Aaron David Miller argues that despite the decision to strike ISIS, Obama remains as risk-averse as ever:

The Friedman interview revealed another important reason why Obama’s risk aversion is likely to endure. The president raised the issue about the lack of follow-up to help Libya after Qaddafi’s overthrow. “Then it’s the day after Qaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying, ‘Thank you, America.’ At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions…. So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, ‘Should we intervene, militarily? Do we have an answer [for] the day after?'”

Even though he doesn’t come out and say it, you get the sense that if there was a chance to do it over again he’d be much more engaged. But there’s another way to read the president’s comment, too. And that’s this: Military action is only one step in a complex process that requires a huge investment to create a relatively stable and functional transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. And Obama understands that hitting the Islamic State (IS), as necessary as it may be, is hardly a panacea for rebuilding the new Iraq. More to the point, that’s not America’s job. And Obama isn’t going to correct his Libya mistake by getting bogged down in nation-building in Iraq.

But Micah Zenko expects the mission in Iraq to expand beyond Obama’s stated limits, because they all do:

The expansion of humanitarian interventions — beyond what presidents initially claim will be the intended scope and time of military and diplomatic missions — is completely normal. What is remarkable is how congressional members, media commentators, and citizens are newly surprised each time that this happens. In the near term, humanitarian interventions often save more lives than they cost: The University of Pittsburgh’s Taylor Seybolt’s 2008 review of 17 U.S.-led interventions found that nine had succeeded in saving lives. But they also potentially contain tremendous downsides — as recent history demonstrates.

On April 7, 1991, the United States began airdropping food, water, and blankets on the largest refugee camps along the Turkish-Iraqi border that were sheltering Kurds displaced by Iraqi Republican Guard divisions brutally putting down an uprising in northern Iraq. That same day, when asked how long the U.S. military would play a role within Iraq, President George H.W. Bush declared, “We’re talking about days, not weeks or months.” In support of the humanitarian mission in northern Iraq, the United States concurrently began enforcing a no-fly zone above that country’s 36th parallel. In August 1992, a U.S.-led no-fly zone south of the 32nd parallel of Iraq was formed by unilateral declaration to compel Saddam Hussein’s cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors and to protect the Shiite population caught in a counterinsurgency campaign in the southern marshlands. Bush was right about the U.S. military involvement not being weeks or months: The northern and southern no-fly zones lasted another 10 and a half years.

Painless Meat?

by Dish Staff

Rhys Southan suggests it’s possible to raise and slaughter animals “without causing them any more suffering than what we might expect a well-off human to experience”:

The first premise might seem hard to accept, given the brutal realities of modern animal farming. Most farm animals are raised on intensive factory farms where they suffer for the majority of their short lives. Even small, high-welfare farms tend to subject their animals to at least some painful procedures like castration without anesthetic, dehorning or the separation of mothers and their newborn children.

Yet ultra-high-welfare animal products are a possibility, not a fantasy. Consider the highest level of the “5-Step” animal-welfare rating program at Whole Foods Market. For beef, this prohibits branding, castration, ear notching, separating mothers from calves for early weaning and long trips to the slaughterhouse. For pigs, this ensures they are never separated from their littermates, which is important because of how social pigs are. For chickens, it means they have plenty of space and don’t have to endure physical alterations like debeaking.

Almost no farms meet these standards, but if more of us were willing to compromise on the price, taste, quantity and texture of the meat we eat, more farms like this could exist and thrive.

Butch Is Beautiful

by Dish Staff

Kingsporch

And Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart wants the world to know it:

Sometimes a rude question is also a sincere one. Take, for example, an inquiry I hear quite often: Do lesbians really find butch women attractive? As a butch woman, it is impossible to ignore the implication that, for certain people, women like me are the least attractive creatures on the planet. Umbrage-taking aside, however, the question raises the issue of whose standards of beauty apply in a queer female context. And sorry, hetero guys, but they’re not yours.

In fact, butch lesbians often do quite well when it comes to attracting female attention… I myself have felt a strong attraction to some of my fellow butch dykes. There’s a uniquely butch self-confidence, an insouciant swagger that draws my eye when I see butches out in public. This distinctive attitude and its charms may be due, in part, to the fact that every butch knows full well that she doesn’t look the way most people expect women to look, and yet she’s found the confidence to persevere in spite of the side-eyes and the disapproving thin-lipped faces of people marching past, eyes averted.

Previous Dish on butch lesbians here and here.

(Image of the Boston drag troupe All The Kings Men via Wikimedia Commons)

Your Coffee Is Being Cut

by Dish Staff

John Metcalfe shares the grim news:

No doubt about it: there is trouble in coffee land. Drought and the spread of “leaf rust,” a plant disease, has left growers suffering in Brazil, the source of roughly a third of the world’s coffee supply. This one-two punch to the java industry has kicked prices up to their highest point in years and fanned fears of a global shortage (though those worries seem to have been premature). With the future uncertain, some unscrupulous folks in the supply chain have decided to get sneaky. They’re increasing profits by padding ground coffee with filler ingredients, say researchers. These adulterants range from relatively harmless things like chicory and brown sugar to more eyebrow-raising stuff like acai berries, soybeans, and peanuts, which could be problematic for those with allergies. …

Coffee fillers have become visible enough that they’ve attracted the attention of scientists at Brazil’s Universidade Estadual de Londrina, who [Monday] announced they’ve developed a new test to detect non-coffee ingredients. Standard methods now involve peeking at grounds under a microscope or simply tasting the brew; this updated technique, however, uses liquid chromatography and statistical analysis. The researchers believe this way provides a comprehensive view of the coffee’s chemical makeup, while removing any potential biases held by human taste-testers.

It’s OK Not To Feel Anything When A Celebrity Dies, Ctd

by Dish Staff

A reader writes:

Thanks to Elizabeth Nolan Brown for her eloquent essay on Robin Williams.  This reminds me of when Princess Diana died. I found out when I walked to the corner store to buy the newspaper. I read the headline and thought “Shit, that’s too bad” and didn’t give it another thought. Then the worldwide hysteria erupted and it was all Diana, all the time.  I just didn’t understand what the big deal was.  My wife, friends and family thought I was incredibly callous to have almost no reaction to Diana’s death.

Same thing with Robin Williams. I liked him and more than once busted a gut listening to him, but he was an entertainer with no connection to me.  Why should I grieve? It sucks that his demons took him down and I understand why some people are sad, but I just can’t muster it.

A like-minded reader adds:

It is as if Facebook and Twitter reactions to celebrity deaths and tragedies have supplanted going to church as the cultural litmus test for letting the greater community know you are a good person and people are compelled against all reason to participate.

But another relates to Robin:

“If you’re that depressed, reach out to someone. And remember: Suicide is a permanent solution to temporary problems,” – Robin Williams, World’s Greatest Dad (2009)

I was diagnosed with postpartum depression not that long ago.

I reached out, got help, and feel a million time better already. But it took along time. Depression makes you believe that you can’t dig yourself out of the hole you find yourself in. It makes it feel like if you reach out and talk to you someone, they’ll think you’re crazy. One of the main reasons I didn’t talk about my PPD was because I thought my doctor or husband would try to take away my son for fear that I’d hurt him. And that’s where depression twists the knife that is guilt. I felt guilty because I’m a mother! I should love this period of my life! I should be thrilled to have this amazing, perfect, healthy human being that looks at me with such love. But it’s a chemical imbalance. It’s not something I could control.

Mr Williams suicide is the second I’ve heard of in less then two weeks, the first being a former acquittance. We really do need to work on having a more open and honest dialogue about depression in this country.

Another gets honest:

If someone were to die at the age of 63 after a lifelong battle with MS or Sickle Cell, we’d all say they were a “fighter” or an “inspiration.” But when someone dies after a lifelong battle with severe mental illness and drug addiction, we say it was a tragedy and tell everyone “don’t be like him, please seek help.” That’s bullshit. Robin Williams sought help his entire life. He saw a psychiatrist. He quit drinking. He went to rehab. He did this for decades. That’s HOW he made it to 63. For some people, 63 is a fucking miracle. I know several people who didn’t make it past 23 and I’d do anything to have 40 more years with them.

Another gets open:

With regards to the death by apparent suicide of Robin Williams, I want to draw a clear line between Feeling and Mourning in this particular situation. I agree completely with the sort of Yeah, No Duh thesis of your post, and I found myself in the Facebook poster’s camp when, say, that guy from The Fast and the Furious movies died in a fiery car crash. It was tragic and ironic and awful, and I “felt” for his fans and family, I suppose; but I didn’t mourn.

I am deeply mourning the loss of Robin Williams.

I was born in 1969, so I grew up with Mr. Williams on my teevee machine. I obsessed over Dead Poets Society in my early 20s, around the time I realized I would suffer the rest of my life with depression. Aladdin and Mrs. Doubtfire helped me through the miserably dark early ’90s, when my diagnosis shifted to Bipolar Disorder, and I laughed and cried at the tail end of that rotten decade with Good Will Hunting and The Birdcage, both of which I sat up all night last night watching.

And somewhere in there, between Williams as a fat blue cartoon genie and a gay Miami nightclub owner, I laid down in my grungy apartment’s bathtub and made a pitiful, half-assed and obviously unsuccessful attempt at opening my wrists. I didn’t want it enough, so I failed. I still bear the small, pale scars of that day as reminders of what the end might look like. But I made it over. That time.

I am deeply mourning the loss of Robin Williams, because he felt like a friend and fellow-sufferer. He was the classic Crying-on-the-Inside Clown; a man who had everything and an almost universal acclimation as one of the greatest living comics. And yet he didn’t make it over. With all his fame and celebrity and the deep respect of his peers and fans, Robin Williams couldn’t make it over. I mourn for him; I mourn for that inescapable pain that not even his wife and children could help him overcome. I was inconsolable last night not because I’d never see another Robin Williams stand-up act or another in a long line of his mediocre late-career comedies, but because if he couldn’t make it over, what chance do I have?

Yes, it’s fine to feel nothing about this. Be my guest; the last thing the world needs is more faux-sentimentality and rootless hero-worship Because Celebrity. But when you’ve loved a performer since you were 9 years old, and suffered with him and laughed with him and watched him grow and rise and fall and fail and get back up and start all over again, all the while laughing most loudly at himself, you owe yourself a moment of true mourning.

Go here for all our coverage of Robin Williams’ death.

When Bellow Went Green

by Dish Staff

dish_melvilleberkshires

Saul Bellow’s classic novel, Herzog, turns fifty this year. Revisiting the book, Andrew Furman notices an aspect of the plot that had escaped him before – Bellow’s “sensitive evocations of place, particularly green places both within and without the city,” an unexpected turn for a Jewish writer associated with the urban landscapes of Chicago:

The novel opens with Herzog at his dilapidated Berkshires property at the peak of summer, contemplating all that has recently befallen him, primarily the collapse of his second marriage and his academic career. Bellow takes pains during this opening section, and throughout, to dramatize Herzog’s receptivity to the natural world. He sleeps outside many nights, surrounded by “tall bearded grass and locust and maple seedlings.” And “when he opened his eyes in the night, the stars were near like spiritual bodies. Fires, of course; gases—minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning to a man lying in a hammock, wrapped in his overcoat.”

Critics have generally paid short shrift to such moments of heightened perception, moments that don’t directly involve the people in Herzog’s life, or his big ideas.

But now it seems wrong to separate Herzog’s receptivity to the external world from his insights about his impoverished upbringing, his failures as a father, husband, and son, and his scholarly views. It seems worthwhile, instead, to examine whether he finds, through nature, the exalted state of human perception envisioned by another Massachusetts resident, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Bellow at least holds out the possibility that Herzog, like Emerson’s scholar or poet, might tap into his highest intuitive powers and realize true insight through his close observations of the animals, plants, and nighttime sky in the New England countryside. “Nature (itself) and I are alone together, in the Berkshires,” Herzog muses late in the novel, “and this is my chance to understand.”

(Photo of Herman Melville’s studio in the Berkshires, where he wrote Moby Dick, via Pablo Sanchez)