Category: The Dish

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.

Mental Health Break

by Chris Bodenner

One of the top nominees from our cover-song contest that hasn’t been aired yet is José Gonzalez’s acoustic rendition of “Heartbeats” by the Swedish synth-pop band The Knife. Gonzalez’s austere video is here, but the Sony Bravia version is far more visually stunning:

The Knife’s version – with its vintage footage of suburban kids on skateboards and trippy digital crows – is probably even better. And for another great video from the Swedes, don’t miss their drag queen-led performance for “Pass This On”:

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.

Consent, California Style

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

5822104430_411775c541_bLawmakers can get it wrong in the most staid of circumstances, but throw a little sexual activity into the mix and things just get really bizarre. And leading the pack on bizarro sexual paternalism lately has been California. This summer, the state legislature has been trying to force condoms on porn performers and redefine rape for college students. The latter effort coincides with a nationwide push to address sexual assault at schools, one focal point of which has been consent.

In some ways this is great – feminists have long been stressing the need to teach young men not to rape over teaching young women how to avoid rape. A central tenet of this is cutting through the bullshit that leads to genuine confusion over consent (myths like women say no in bed because they want to be talked into it or that pursuing a love interest despite her repeated rejections is romantic and not annoying/scary). And the fact that lawmakers and mainstream media outlets are even discussing consent is a testament to how well this push has worked. I’m not sure I ever heard the term consent (in a sexual context) in college; now it’s a buzzword.

Of course, consent has always played a central role in our legal definitions of sexual assault and rape – though not necessarily as central a role as you might think. In many states, criminal code defines rape as sexual penetration using force or the threat of force, according to George Washington University law professor John F. Banzhaf III. If force isn’t an element, “the act would not be rape even if the woman had not consented, or, indeed, even if she had in fact said ‘no.’ Moreover, even if her judgment were significantly impaired by alcohol, the action would not constitute rape if she were able to move or speak at the time.”

California is not one of these states – it already employs a pretty broad and comprehensive definition of rape. The proposed consent law currently under debate in the Assembly (it passed the Senate in May) seeks to impose affirmative consent as a requirement – not for all sexual activity, but for sex between college students at universities that accept state funding.

An affirmative consent standard, also supported by the Department of Education, says that any sexual act counts as rape or assault unless the other person affirmatively consents – that is, specifically gives a yes, not merely refrains from saying no. Under the California consent bill, consent requires “an affirmative, unambiguous and conscious decision” by each party; this consent must be “ongoing” and “can be revoked at any time.”

Unless we presume that rape only occurs between men and women, and only with men as the perpetrator, this standard is on its face a little bit nuts.

In a world where any party – male or female, gay or straight – is capable of committing rape, hookups would have to involve a constant stream of back-and-forth consent (“do you consent to me doing this?” “yes – do you consent to me doing this?”). In reality, affirmative consent proponents tend to talk about it as matter of men getting women’s permission to proceed.

But my main objection to California’s consent bill is that it creates one definition of consent and rape for some college students and one for everyone else in the state. This seems a strange proposition, and one likely to create confusion for the folks of California as well as the courts. It merely muddies up the waters of consent.

“California needs to provide our students with education, resources, consistent policies and justice so that the system is not stacked against survivors,” said state Sen. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles) in promoting the bill. But a consistent system wouldn’t set one standard of sexual consent for college students and one for everyone else.

If college rape is real rape – and, uh, obviously it is – we should stick to one legal definition of consent for all adults and then try those accused of violating it in the same judicial system. No means no, and rape means the same thing regardless of whether you’re enrolled in school – and comes with the same legal penalties.

(The Dish’s extensive coverage of sexual assault on college campuses is here. The above photo is by Chris Brown.)

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.

How To Make Friends And Influence People: Spambot Edition

by Dish Staff

When researcher Luca Maria Aiello and colleagues at the University of Turin began to map out aNobii.com, an Italian social network similar to Goodreads, they created a user account for an automated crawler. They watched as the bot, named lajello, built social cred simply by “visiting” pages of other members, prompting the team to investigate the question, “Can an individual with no trust gain popularity and influence?”

The results surprised them. Every time lajello began its round of visits, it triggered a burst of comments on its public wall. When it finished its round, people quickly stopped sending messages but resumed at the same intensity when the bot started visiting again. By December 2011, lajello’s profile had become one of the most popular on the entire social network. It had received more than 66,000 visits as well as 2435 messages from more than 1200 different people.  In terms of the number of different message received, a well-known writer was the most popular on this network but lajello was second.

“Our experiment gives strong support to the thesis that popularity can be gained just with continuous “social probing”,” conclude Aiello and co. “We have shown that a very simple spambot can attract great interest even without emulating any aspects of typical human behaviour.”

The researchers then tested whether the bot had any influence over real people:

[T]hey started using the bot to send recommendations to users on who else to connect to. The spam bot could either make a recommendation chosen at random or one that was carefully selected by a recommendation engine. It then made its recommendations to users that had already linked to lajello and to other users chosen at random. Again, the results were eye-opening. “Among the 361 users who created at least one social connection in the 36 hours after the recommendation, 52 per cent followed suggestion given by the bot,” they say. …

It is not hard to see the significance of this work. Social bots are a fact of life on almost every social network and many have become so sophisticated they are hard to distinguish from humans. If the simplest of bots created by Aiello and co can have this kind of impact, it is anybody’s guess how more advanced bots could influence everything from movie reviews and Wikipedia entries to stock prices and presidential elections.

The Nanny State Shouldn’t Baby Working Parents

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Can family leave policies be too generous?” asked Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times yesterday. Cue the eye-rolling from a certain sort of feminist – expanding America’s paid parental-leave policies has long been on many gender-progress wish lists. European countries such as the U.K., with its generous 39 weeks paid time off for new mothers (plus an additional 13 weeks unpaid leave available), are often cited as the holy grail of family- and women-friendly policies.

Last month, the White House Council of Economic Advisers blamed slow economic recovery on women’s declining labor force participation, suggesting that expanding mandatory maternity-leave policies could help rivet all these women back into the job market. But Miller points to evidence that longer leave mandates aren’t the panacea they might seem. In countries with extensive maternity-leave guarantees, women’s total labor force participation is higher, but their professional status relative to men is lower.

In one study, published last year in the American Economic Review (an earlier copy is available here), two Cornell University economists looked at family-leave policies in 22 countries. The researchers, Francie D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn, were attempting to understand why U.S. women’s workforce participation – one of the highest among Western countries in 1990 – had become one of the lowest in this cohort by 2010:

We find that the expansion of “family-friendly” policies including parental leave and part-time work entitlements in other OECD countries explains about 29% of the decrease in US women’s labor force participation relative to these other countries. However, these policies also appear to encourage part-time work and employment in lower level positions: US women are more likely than women in other countries to have full time jobs and to work as managers or professionals.

Knowing that younger female workers could legally take up to a year off work and require a part-time schedule thereafter could lead to “statistical discrimination against women as a group,” Blau and Kahn concluded. “Thus, while the (labor force participation rates) of women in other countries have risen relative to the United States, such increases may have come at the expense of advancement once they are in the labor force.”

Is this a tradeoff we want to make? I don’t think so. But that doesn’t mean we’re resigned to the status quo on family leave, either. Miller notes that “pulling levers in both policy and culture” could make a difference, and I would argue that the latter is the place to start. Even a small change in daddy-leave norms could benefit families, reduce the career penalty on mothers, and lead to a positive shift in our gendered view of caregiving. But if the U.S. government simply stepped in and mandated that men be allowed paid parental leave too, few would probably take it. Employer expectations and bullshit masculinity codes aren’t going to shift just because the state says they can.

As with maternal leave policies, there is only so much you can accomplish by legislative fiat here. Without getting women, men, and employers on board with expanding or shifting family leave policies, laws mandating such will only limit women’s wages and advancement potential in the workforce. And low wages and dead-end careers are the very things that make women more likely to drop out of the labor force when they become moms.

(Lots of recent Dish on paternity leave here)