Author: Dish Staff

Robin Williams, RIP

by Dish Staff

When Admitting Your Sins Is Good For Business

by Dish Staff

According to Theodore Johnson’s fascinating study of three West African countries that formally apologized for their role in the slave trade, Ghana’s 2006 mea culpa was “largely a business decision”:

It formed part of a strategy to forge a stronger tourism economy, and closer ties to America, by making it easier for black Americans to visit, emigrate, own land, invest, and start businesses in Ghana. The initiative, called Project Joseph after the biblical character sold into slavery by his brothers, sought to portray Ghana to black Americans as Israel presents itself to the Jewish diaspora. Ghanaian tourism companies even offer “ceremony of apology” packages that black Americans can purchase to accompany visits to ancient slave castles.

Explaining that healing and reconciliation would play a prominent role in the 50th-anniversary celebrations of the country’s independence in 2007, Emanuel Hagan of Ghana’s Ministry of Tourism and Diasporean Relations told a local news organization that the history of slavery was “something that we have to look straight in the face because it exists. So, we will want to say something went wrong, people made mistakes, but we are sorry for whatever happened.” And Ghana’s efforts worked. Around 10,000 black Americans visit the country every year, and around 3,000 now live in Ghana’s capital—triple the number estimated to have lived in the entire country in 2007.

Face Of The Day

by Dish Staff

Yezidis trapped in the Sinjar mountains arrive in Syria's Haseki

Thousands of Yezidis trapped in the Sinjar mountains without food and water for days, due to the Islamic State (IS) violence, formerly known as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), arrive in Haseki city of Syria on August 10, 2014. By Feriq Ferec/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

Not Again

by Dish Staff

Mark Berman summarizes the big news out of Ferguson, Missouri:

An unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown was shot and killed Saturday by a police officer in suburban St. Louis. People protested Saturday and Sunday, with large crowds of protesters and police facing off multiple times since the shooting. Some rioting and looting also broke out late Sunday night. Federal authorities are monitoring the shooting as groups and officials call for investigations.

The circumstances surrounding the shooting appear to be somewhat unclear. Police said Saturday that the shooting followed an encounter involving a police officer, Brown and another person Saturday afternoon, but additional confirmed details are scarce. Jon Belmar, chief of the St. Louis County police, said that the episode began with “a physical confrontation.” Belmar did not explain what prompted the confrontation, but he said that the officer was pushed back into his squad car during the episode and that one shot was fired from the officer’s weapon inside the car. Brown was shot multiple times – “more than just a couple,” Belmar said – on the street nearby, and all shell casings matched the officer’s gun. It’s not known yet why the officer shot him, nor why lethal force was used.

Jonathan Capehart hears echoes of the Trayvon Martin shooting:

When I wrote first wrote about Martin’s killing, I said that one of the burdens of being a black male was bearing the heavy weight of other people’s suspicions. The McBride murder shows that such suspicion knows no gender. I also wrote about the lessons my mother taught me growing up. How I shouldn’t run in public, lest I arouse undue suspicion. How I most definitely should not run with anything in my hands, lest anyone think I stole something. The lesson included not talking back to the police, lest you give them a reason to take you to jail – or worse. …

When you’re black and especially male – in the United States – you have to go to these seemingly overboard, extra lengths in the off-chance they might save your life. But none of those things would have helped me if I were in the shoes of Michael Brown or Renisha McBride or Trayvon Martin. We don’t know yet if Brown was asked for identification, but we know the other two weren’t. Perhaps their assailants saw all they needed to know. What frightens me more than anything in the world is that the chances are very high that one day I might be in their shoes and might meet their tragic end. The so-called victims of the nonexistent “war on whites” have absolutely NO idea what living under that kind of siege, that kind of very real threat, is like.

Capehart also has some choice words for the looters:

This is not how you protest the shooting of an unarmed teenager. This is not how you show support for his grieving family. This is not how you make authorities understand your anger and concern. This is not how you get others to join your cause. Perhaps I’m being too generous when it comes to those knuckleheads who used a tragedy to trash businesses and scurry off with bottles of wine, among other things. Perhaps I’m giving the looters too much credit by presuming they actually care about what happened to Michael Brown and how to prevent it from happening again. But there are plenty of people who do care and want answers. The actions of selfish and opportunistic looters must not distract us from getting them.

Meanwhile, Bill Chappell examines the rise of #IfTheyGunnedMeDown:

The use of different photos to portray shooting victim Michael Brown, who was killed by a police officer Saturday, prompted an interesting phenomenon on Twitter Monday: Users are posting “dueling” photos of themselves – one where the subject looks wholesome, and another where the same person might look like a troublemaker – with the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. Behind the trend is the question of which photo the media would seize upon, if the posters had a run-in with police. For some, it’s another way this episode calls to mind the shooting death of Trayvon Martin – and the various photos used to portray both the teenager and his killer, George Zimmerman.

James Poniewozik calls #IfTheyGunnedMeDown a “a simple, ingenious DIY form of media criticism”:

It was a brilliant media critique, and while Twitter and other platforms may have no magical power to stop shootings or catch warlords, one thing they are very good at is catching the attention of the media. Journalists pay attention to Twitter–disproportionate attention, maybe–and that makes it a very, very good place to deliver the modern version of a letter to the editor. You could say similar of #YesAllWomen, or of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag of earlier this year: no, it didn’t have the power to free the Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram, but it did put the story on homepages and newscasts often resistant to overseas news, especially from sub-Saharan Africa.

Yesha Callahan sighs:

It’s safe to say that Brown has become a victim of what I like to refer to as the “Trayvon Martin effect” in the media. Trayvon, who was killed by George Zimmerman, was depicted as a gold-grill-wearing, weed-smoking teenager in the photos used by the media. There were no photos of Trayvon smiling with his family members or being just your average happy teen, which his family members said he was. Similarly, the photos of Brown that have been picked up by the media included him throwing up a peace sign, which conservative media has translated into a “gang sign.” You’d be hard-pressed to find mainstream media showing Brown at his high school graduation or with members of his family. … Unfortunately, because of Ferguson police, we’ll never be able to see a photo of Brown attending his first day of college today.

The Corruption Of The Tea Party

by Dish Staff

Dougherty decries it:

It’s easy to write them off as just another bunch of opportunists. But the endemic corruption of this movement should trouble the American right, if not the American conscience. The conservative diagnosis of Washington’s brokenness is that Americans have outsourced the task of self-government to a managerial class in Washington, a corruption that has transformed our nation’s capital into “the Beltway,” a shorthand for D.C.’s toxic culture of cronyism.

The populist right’s instinctive response — the Tea Party — immediately became just another added layer of cronyism. A grassroots corruption. Really, a weed. If the American people have outsourced their self-government to Washington, the conservative movement made another dirty deal, allowing itself to be entertained in outrage carnivals run by for-profit activists. Excepting the exceptions, the populist right’s response to dishonesty and graft was to generate another set of swindlers who wear flag-lapel pins, lie to their faces, and help themselves to the cash.

Obama’s Iraq Strikes And Executive Power, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Republicans are making somewhat incoherent political hay out of Obama’s decision to carry out air strikes on ISIS targets in Iraq, arguing on the one hand that his objectives are too broad and on the other that they’re too narrow. But on the third hand – and you don’t read this very often on the Dish – Ted Cruz has a point here:

Cruz said he does not believe the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq or the War Power Act provide Obama the authority to continue airstrikes against ISIS. “I believe initiating new military hostilities in a sustained basis in Iraq obligates the president to go back to Congress and to make the case and to seek congressional authorization,” Cruz said. “I hope that if he intends to continue this that he does that.”

As Yishai Schwartz points out, however, the administration doesn’t think it has authority to re-intervene in Iraq under the AUMF either. Instead, as Jack Goldsmith observed last week, they appear to be claiming a constitutional power to do so. In Schwartz’s view, this is extremely dangerous:

The problem, however, with relying on the Constitution alone is that this constitutional power is vague and open-ended. What exactly can’t the president order under his authority as commander-in-chief?

Especially after the Bush presidency’s extreme claims of executive war powers, Obama and many of his legal advisors are wary of relying on this vague and unrestricted constitutional power. If anything, they would like to see it clearly limited and defined. So the administration is caught in a dilemma: as Islamists butcher minorities in Iraq, it sees a moral and humanitarian imperative to act. But without specific congressional permission, a purely humanitarian intervention would set a virtually open-ended precedent for an American president to act militarily anytime, anywhere.

Furthermore, Ilya Somin doesn’t buy the argument that the need for immediate action hindered Obama from seeking Congressional approval for the intervention:

[T]his case – like the 2011 Libya intervention – is not a situation where a crisis developed so quickly that the president had no time to seek congressional authorization for the use of force. ISIS has been gaining ground against Iraqi government and Kurdish forces for many weeks, and its murderous and genocidal intentions have also been clear for a long time. President Obama had plenty of time to seek congressional authorization during that period. To be sure, some specific aspects of the tactical situation have only emerged recently, such as ISIS’ siege of thousands of Yazidi civilians on a mountaintop. But the possibility that ISIS would threaten large numbers of civilians in a position where local forces could not save them was readily foreseeable long before then.

He’s also deeply skeptical of the notion that air strikes don’t count as “war”:

To be sure, Obama also assures us that he will not deploy US ground forces against ISIS. During the 2011 Libya conflict, the administration argued that an intervention limited to air strikes alone does not require congressional authorization under the War Powers Act of 1973 if it does not “involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces.” Similar reasoning can be used to claim that such air strikes do not qualify as a “war” that requires congressional authorization under Article I of the Constitution. But such strained arguments did not pass the laugh test in 2011, and have not improved with age since then. The use of airpower in a “long-term campaign” clearly qualifies as warfare under any reasonable definition of the term.

P.M. Carpenter, on the other hand, wonders whether Obama promised a long-term campaign at all:

Perhaps my reception of Obama’s words was wildly imperfect, but what I heard in “we’re [not] going to solve this problem in weeks; this is going to be a long-term project” was this: untangling the political mess created by Maliki and his sectarian brutes is likely to span months. Not our military involvement, but rather the mess itself is the “long-term project.”  A months-long U.S. air campaign increases almost exponentially the odds of a downed, captive pilot, and I can’t see President Obama taking that risk.

There Goes The Neighborhood School

by Dish Staff

Former New Schools For New Orleans chief executive Neerav Kingsland applauds DC’s proposal to move away from traditional school zoning:

Historically, having neighborhood schools kept black students from learning alongside white students; poor students from attending school with wealthy students; immigrant students from studying with native-born students – and the list goes on. A city of neighborhood schools is a city that says where you live determines which schools you can attend. The implications are clear: Poor families will not have access to the schools of the wealthy. In this sense, predictability is code for “I want school choice based on my ability to buy a house rather than school choice based on an equitable process.”

Adam Ozimek seconds him:

As Kingsland argues, neighborhood schools are “bastions of exclusion, not inclusion.” This is ironic, given that the motivation of universal and free K-12 is that it should be a force for equalizing educational opportunity.

There is no other institution in the country where equality of access is more broadly supported, even if this agreement is limited to the abstract. While liberals want to turn more institutions and markets into forces for equality, we are currently failing to do so in K-12 education despite the near total government control and significant amount of agreement on the principle of equality. It’s surprising then that there isn’t more movement to make public schools truly public, and not just another housing amenity sold to the highest bidder.

Meanwhile, Linda Lutton notes that Chicago’s neighborhood schools are struggling with declining enrollment:

In 2000, 74 percent of Chicago’s elementary kids went to their assigned neighborhood grammar school. Today, just 62 percent do– and that number is falling. The figures show how much the system shifted over the decade that included Renaissance 2010, a program that gained national attention by opening dozens of new grammar schools and closing dozens of neighborhood schools deemed low-performing or under-enrolled. …

“Neighborhood schools in the traditional and historical sense are under pressure, and more in some places than others,” says Jeffrey Henig, who studies the politics of education reform at Teachers College in New York City. While the neighborhood school is still a strong concept in suburban America, it’s taken a “body blow” in cities like Chicago that are trying to improve their school systems through school choice, Henig says.

The Commander-In-Chief’s Code-Switching

by Dish Staff

McWhorter has met “more than a few who seem honestly to think that when Obama, who generally speaks in a vanilla standard way, uses some black inflection or slang with black audiences, he is being fake”:

Wrong. Obama is doing something most black Americans do: using a special repertoire that has a function, to connote warmth and connection. Linguists call it Black English. If Obama is phony in switching into it to strike a certain note, then millions of black people are spending their entire lives being linguistically inauthentic. Doubtful. And — we must be under no impression that Black English is simply the things generally thought of as slang (or, with less scientific justification, errors) such as ain’t and good old aks for ask. Black English is a whole spice rack beyond this.

Take “folks,” for example, which Obama used in his mentioning that, “We tortured some folks.” To many, it sounded like he was trivializing the gravest of issues. But black speakers (and many whites as well) tend to substitute “folks” for “people” to indicate a sense of affection for, or identification with, the people in question. Black academic types (such as Obama) are especially given to saying “black folks” as a way of indicating that they do not feel superior to ordinary black people despite their own success. Obama’s extension of it to discussing the war on terror was unsurprising.

Just Another Ceasefire, Or Something More?

by Dish Staff

Another three-day ceasefire went into effect in Gaza at midnight last night and appears to be holding for now, as negotiations resume in Cairo:

A senior Israeli government official had said on Sunday Israeli negotiators, who had left Cairo on Friday hours before a previous three-day ceasefire expired, would return to Egypt to resume the talks only if the new truce held. Hamas is demanding an end to Israeli and Egyptian blockades of the Gaza Strip and the opening of a seaport in the enclave – a project Israel says should be dealt with only in any future talks on a permanent peace deal with the Palestinians.

Ed Morrissey likes former Shin Bet chief Yaakov Perry’s proposal to turn the Gaza ceasefire negotiations into regional talks on a permanent peace deal:

Israel has to find a way to push Hamas aside without opening up a vacuum that will allow a worse alternative to take its place. Voila: the Arab League. The neighboring Arab nations hate Hamas too, and would love to see it expelled or at least marginalized in the region. A comprehensive regional peace plan would lock Iran out of Palestinian politics entirely and allow for a greater focus on the threat coming from Tehran rather than the constant irritation of Palestinian uprisings. They’ll never get the “right of return,” but the Arabs could gain some other concessions, especially on the West Bank wall and some of the settlements in exchange for purging Hamas from Gaza and getting the Palestinian Authority to take over its governance.

At least, that’ll be the theory.

And even if the talks can’t pull off the improbable, at least the effort will be a little more productive than listening to Hamas demand that Israel commit national suicide by reopening the border crossings under Hamas leadership.

Gershon Baskin thinks this might actually work, if the Arab states and Israel play their parts:

If King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia would issue an invitation to Netanyahu, Abbas, President El-Sisi of Egypt, and King Abdullah of Jordan to come immediately to Riyadh with Gaza on the table, it could very easily lead to the acceptance of the Arab Peace Initiative.  The current war is a dead end; we need a brave initiative and a courageous Arab leader (and Israeli one) to get beyond the current lose-lose scenario in progress.

There is more Israel can do to move things in the right direction, without giving an inch to Hamas. Netanyahu’s government should reach out to the Palestinian population in Gaza with messages that move from the current language of threats to the language of promise and hope. Israel needs to articulate to Gazans what a peaceful Gaza could look like with an airport, economic development, and jobs. Gazans desperately want to hear concrete plans for how their basic needs for a normal life could be met, and Israeli officials should be the ones to tell them.

But Omar Robert Hamilton considers the trope that Hamas can’t be negotiated with preposterous:

Of course, a central tenet of Israeli spin is to always refer to “Hamas” and not  to “Palestinians” (Americans are sympathetic to Palestinians, but not to Hamas), to hit the word “terrorist” as often as possible and to stress that Hamas is “committed to the destruction of Israel.” It is never mentioned that in their 2006 election manifesto, Hamas dropped their call for the destruction of Israel and simply reaffirmed their right to armed resistance. Hamas is a political player that, like all others, is primarily interested in the acquisition of power and influence – they are very far removed from the theocratic death cult that Israel strains to see in its dark mirror. In 2006, as Hamas was engaging in the democratic process, it announced it would stop using suicide bombers. There has not been a bomb since. Israel claimed that the (still-incomplete) Wall was to thank. Again and again, Hamas have tried to play by the rules of the game as they are set by Israel, America and the International Community. Democracy is embraced and brings with it a siege. Israel’s existence is recognized but this goes unmentioned. Military resistance is halted and the siege deepens. Truces are agreed to and Israel violates them.

Whichever way this tentative new peace effort goes, Judis observes that the US isn’t leading it. That’s because, he asserts, it’s no longer in our interests to do so:

The pressure from surrounding Arab states to resolve the conflict has eased, particularly in the wake of the failure of the Arab Spring. Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq are preoccupied with their own internal problems. Egypt’s el-Sisi is more sympathetic to Netanyahu than to Hamas’s Khalid Mishal. The Saudis are still committed to their own initiative for resolving the conflict, but like el-Sisi, have no affection for Hamas. And the threat of terrorism in the region—typified by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria—is no longer so clearly tied to the continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So while the surrounding Arab states are always under public pressure to end Israeli attacks against Palestinians, Arab leaders have not displayed the same urgency.

The pressure that existed in 1975 or even 2005 doesn’t exist. As a result, Obama and Kerry do not feel the same urgency to act.

Gangsters As Go-Getters

by Dish Staff

Malcolm Gladwell mines the anthropologist Francis Ianni’s 1972 book A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime for insights into social mobility in the underworld:

By 1970, Ianni calculated, there were 42 fourth-generation members of the Lupollo-Salemi-Alcamo-Tucci family – of which only four were involved in the family’s crime businesses. The rest were firmly planted in the American upper middle class. A handful of the younger members of that generation were in private schools or in college. One was married to a judge’s son, another to a dentist. One was completing a master’s degree in psychology; another was a member of the English department at a liberal-arts college. There were several lawyers, a physician, and a stockbroker.  …

The moral of the Godfather movies was that the Corleone family, conceived in crime, could never escape it. “Just when I thought I was out,” Michael Corleone says, “they pull me back in.” The moral of A Family Business was the opposite: that for the Lupollos and the Tuccis and the Salemis and the Alcamos – and, by extension, many other families just like them – crime was the means by which a group of immigrants could transcend their humble origins. It was, as the sociologist James O’Kane put it, the “crooked ladder” of social mobility.