Category: The Dish

Meanwhile, Back In Ukraine

The country’s recently elected president, Petro Poroshenko, is trying to cobble together a deal to end the conflict with separatist rebels in the restive east:

In a meeting with the Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council on Monday, the newly elected president said that he will offer a ceasefire to separatists in the east “as early as this week,” but only on the condition that Ukrainian forces are first able to fully secure the Ukraine-Russia border. The thinking is that once the border is secured, separatists will be cut off from Russian resources and more likely to negotiate on the government’s terms. It will also afford Ukrainian troops some much-needed relief from the aggressive anti-terrorist operation, which killed 49 troops over the weekend when separatists shot down a Ukrainian plane near Luhansk.

Linda Kinstler goes on to give her assessment:

It’s not a bad plan, and it’s certainly a shrewd political move for Poroshenko, who is hoping that the peace plan’s emphasis on decentralization will drum up support for his government among eastern Ukrainians. But there are also a few serious problems that could compromise the entire effort, the first of which is that it is nearly impossible for Ukraine to secure the border at current capacity. …

Even if the border is adequately secured in the near future, it’s unlikely that the separatists will agree to a ceasefire. “That too is an aspirational goal, frankly, because there appear to be many factions, many actors who don’t seem to be reporting to one single controlling authority,” says [the Carnegie Endowment’s Eugene] Rumer. “A ceasefire accepted by one faction doesn’t mean that other factions will accept it.” The separatists already refused to cooperate with the creation of civilian corridors for the evacuation of civilians, despite the fact that both Russia and Ukraine endorsed the effort. There’s no reason to think they’ll agree this time around—unless, as the Ukrainian government hopes, they are forced to.

Peace can’t come soon enough, as the rebels are getting more and more deeply entrenched. Alec Luhn profiles the “emerging warlords” of eastern Ukraine, whose ultimate loyalties remain unclear:

When pro-Russian protesters first occupied the Donetsk regional administration building in April, different rebel groups and units staked out each of the 11 floors. Since then, these motley bands have been eclipsed by three powerful, armed factions: the Russian Orthodox Army, the Vostok Battalion, and Oplot. Each is built around an influential commander who spends his time not only waging the ongoing guerrilla war against Kiev’s forces, but also dispensing harsh justice and detaining civilians, sometimes for prisoner exchanges. Each group has several hundred men, including Russian volunteers, and heavy armaments. (During a recent visit to Vostok’s base, I saw four fighting vehicles, two anti-aircraft guns, numerous rocket-propelled grenades, and surface-to-air missiles.)

Are these commanders the backbone of an emerging independent East Ukraine, or are they burgeoning warlords staking out their turf for whatever comes next?

Dissent Of The Day

A reader, like many from the in-tray this week, sticks up for Hillary:

Like you, I’ve been kind of flabbergasted by the media’s (and most Democrats’) eternallyHillary Clinton Awarded The 2013 Lantos Human Rights Prize short memories on how awful the Clintons were on LGBT rights in the ’90s. Even as a kid (I was 16 when Bill left office), I thought the way these supposed liberals treated gays and lesbians was abominable – and I wasn’t even on the front lines the way you were.

But honestly, while I know you’re just reporting what’s going on, what’s being said about Hillary, I’d like a clarification: why do you hold the Clintons to so different a standard on this issue than any other politician – including President Obama?

I ask this not because I’m a big fan of Mrs. Clinton’s; in fact, I neither support her for the Democratic nomination nor for president, and it’s going to take a LOT for her to earn my vote. But Clinton’s reversal on marriage equality, while equally calculated, has been pretty much the same as Obama’s shift on the same. In fact, whereas I think that Clinton actually DID have to evolve on the marriage question, I think Obama’s reluctance to embrace it publicly was nothing short of political calculation. Having known the man and worked for him during his run for the Senate in 2004, I have a very hard time believing that he ever even needed to “evolve” on the issue, considering not only his personality but where his (former) denomination, the United Church of Christ, has long stood on gay marriage.

I mean, I get it: you don’t like the Clintons.

I don’t like them either. Well, I kind of like Bill, who could sell you rotten piss as liquid gold. But Hillary has always rubbed me the wrong way – something about her being too fake, too robotic, too Park Ridge (you have to grow up in the near northwest suburbs of Chicago to get that one). Even her soothing words of kindness often seem less than genuine (a characteristic she shares with Mitt Romney). There’s just something about her that makes me not want her to be president.

But as far as her alliance with the marriage equality movement, she may be sincere, or, as with most things Clintonian, she may be politically calculating. But why does it matter? Ken Mehlman used his political calculation of being “for traditional marriage” to take him all the way to the top post in the Republican Party – yet he was embraced when he finally came out. It took Senator Rob Portman having a gay son for him to understand how gays and lesbians feel when they’re denied the right to marry whomever they love – yet he was championed when he announced his support. And at each of these times, you have reiterated that the marriage equality movement should embrace converts, not shun them or try to pick apart whether their support is calculated or genuine.

But it seems to me that you’re talking (er, writing) out of both sides of your mouth. On the one hand, yeah, you’ve said the same thing about Clinton in the past. But I also don’t see others who have come around to supporting marriage equality grilled the way Clinton is about whether or not her support is genuine. Think about those who voted for DOMA, including Vice President Biden, Senate Majority Leader Reid, Senate Majority Whip Durbin, and House Minority Whip Hoyer – four of the six most powerful Democrats in Washington, all of whom now “supposedly” back marriage equality. In fact, so far as current Democratic Party leaders go, Nancy Pelosi alone had the balls to vote against DOMA, when all her colleagues were lining up to enshrine inequality into law.

Clinton, on the other hand, was a non-voting First Lady when DOMA was enacted in 1996 and was never in a position to repeal it. It’s really unfair to hold a grudge against her for something she has come out in support of just because her husband made things so much harder for you two decades ago. It’s logically inconsistent, and it undermines any good reasons you might ultimately have for not supporting her candidacy.

I’m not holding a grudge; I’m completely happy to move on, as I am with most pols, including Obama. Check out my Ask Anything on the subject. But I gave Obama hell for dilly-dallying in his first term on gay issues, and agree with my reader that he was not “evolving” so much as strategically bullshitting on marriage equality. But his bullshitting was at least calculated to increase the chances of our success, by getting out of the way, whereas the Clintons most definitely got in the way in the 1990s and did all they could to discredit and destroy the campaign for marriage equality. No Democratic politicians have that record or such ultimate responsibility for it. And yes, it is hard for me to believe that the people who signed both the HIV Travel Ban and DOMA are civil rights heroes or pioneers. They were not our allies. They were not even bystanders. They were the enemies of our civil rights when they held power.

But does this really matter now with respect to gay equality? Not much. Do I think Hillary will back gay equality in office? Yes. Do I think her influence on the Supreme Court if she gets to replace a Justice or two will be good? Yes. Does this issue offer a reason not to vote for her? Not any more. I just believe that her record illuminates her conniving, cynical political character. And that remains a perfectly legitimate worry.

Maliki Doubles Down On Sectarianism

Forty-four Sunni prisoners were killed in Baquba yesterday, quite possibly by Shiite militias fighting on behalf of the Baghdad government:

Iraq’s military spokesman, Lieutenant General Qassim al-Moussawi, told reporters that the men were killed when the police station where they were being held was shelled by the Sunni militants. However, three local policemen told the Associated Press that Shiite militiamen shot the detainees, who were suspected of having ties to ISIS, as the militants tried to free them. Meanwhile, a “police source” from Baquba told the New York Times that the prisoners were executed by the police when ISIS attacked. “Those people were detainees who were arrested in accordance with Article 4 terrorism offenses,” he said. “They were killed inside the jail by the policemen before they withdrew from the station last night.” Officials from the morgue in Baquba told both the Times and the AP that most of the dead prisoners had bullet wounds in their heads and chests.

This wouldn’t be surprising, considering that Maliki appears to show little interest in making nice with Sunnis or Kurds, despite warnings from both Washington and Tehran that he’d better do so and quickly (NYT):

President Obama has made it clear that the United States will not provide military support unless Mr. Maliki engineers a drastic change in policy, reaching out to Sunnis and Kurds in a show of national unity against the Sunni militants, whose shock troops are the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Without that, analysts say, the country is at risk of a renewed sectarian war in which Baghdad could lose control over nearly a third of the country for the foreseeable future. But Mr. Maliki is showing few signs of changing his ways.

Just as he did in a similar, though not nearly as threatening, crisis in 2008 in Basra, he is pinning his hopes on the military option. He is determined to use the Shiite fighters he trusts to stabilize the country and, he hopes, rout the Sunni insurgents and reimpose the government’s control over its territory.

Mataconis comments that this is the “worst way possible” of responding to the crisis:

The way forward from here is unclear. Even if al-Maliki did enact the reforms that Obama and others are suggesting, it’s not clear that it would be enough to make up for years of what Sunnis and Kurds view as repression. It’s going to take a lot more than just appointing a few Sunnis to the Cabinet to make up for what has happened in the past, for example. At the moment, though, it doesn’t seem as though al-Maliki is at all interested in political reform in Iraq. Reports are indicating that he and his advisers have taken to wearing military uniforms and rallying the Shiites against what is seen as impending attack on Baghdad. This morning on MSNBC, Richard Engel suggested that al-Maliki may end up responding to the uprising in Iraq in a manner similar to the way that Bashar Assad responded to the uprising in Syria in 2011. If that happens, then we’d be facing the possibility of an Iraq headed into ethnic civil war on a scope that would make Syria look like a picnic. At that point, we may have no choice but to respond.

Frederic Wehrey argues that fanning sectarianism only helps ISIS remain cohesive, when by rights it ought to collapse under the weight of its own extremism:

Already, fissures are developing over its uncompromising vision and imposition of sharia law. For every Tweet of trash collection, vaccinations, and children’s toy drives, there are corresponding images of mass executions, crucifixions, and beheadings. Add to this is its longstanding policy of extortion. And its recent killings of captured Iraqi soldiers countermands injunctions by its Sunni tribal allies, such as the emir of the Dulaym, to spare the security forces for their “brave decision” to surrender. A leader of one of its Baathist allies in Mosul recently accused it of being made up of “barbarians.” Tensions could also develop between its Syrian cohort and its overstretched Iraqi branch, which has swelled in the recent campaign, about goals and priorities.

But one thing is sure to make ISIS consolidate and flourish: a slide to sectarian war, spurred by a heavy-handed response by al-Maliki’s army and its allied Shiite militias. The tribes, ex-Saddamists, and other aggrieved Sunnis will endure its draconian mores if they see in it a useful umbrella in an existential fight for their people’s survival. Like Zarqawi, this is precisely what ISIS is aiming for by killing Shiites.

Previous Dish on the sectarian dimension of the Iraq crisis here.

The Psychology Of Clickbait

Derek Thompson explains why readers tend to prefer light fare to hard news:

The culprit isn’t Millennials, or Facebook, or analytics software like Chartbeat. The problem is our brains. The more attention-starved we feel, the more we thirst for stimuli that are familiar. We like ice cream when we’re sad, old songs when we’re tired, and easy listicles when we’re busy and ego-depleted. The Internet shorthand for this fact is “cat pictures.” Psychologists prefer the term fluency. Fluency isn’t how we think: It’s how we feel while Screen Shot 2014-06-18 at 11.28.15 AMwe’re thinking. We prefer thoughts that come easily: Faces that are symmetrical, colors that are clear, and sentences with parallelisms. In this light, there are two problems with hard news: It’s hard and it’s new. (Parallelism!) Fluency also explains one of the truisms of political news: That most liberals prefer to read and watch liberals (because it feels easy), while conservatives prefer to read and watch conservatives (because it feels easy).

Maybe the Dish is an anomaly: Of yesterday’s five most-read posts, three were about Iraq and two were about Hillary Clinton. In the last month, the top posts were about transgender politics, the right’s response to Bowe Bergdahl’s capture, and increasing polarization. And judging by the inbox response, we’re not massaging anyone’s biases.

Why do we buck the trend? One reason may be that in the last year and a half, we are not trawling for pageviews as our core metric of success. Our subscription-based model both helps us avoid dumb clickbait tricks and to cultivate a readership that actually does want an oasis of some seriousness online. Not that we don’t beard-blog and beagle-blog and host a weekly contest. It’s just that the many mental health breaks we provide don’t drive our traffic – or undergird our financial stability.

(Insert: from Clickhole)

No Airstrikes, For Now

This is a relief:

Obama has opted not to conduct airstrikes in the immediate future partly because ISIS targets are difficult to identify, and it’s unclear if they would significantly alter the situation on the ground. U.S. military action has not been ruled out entirely, and in addition to the roughly 275 U.S. troops sent to Iraq to secure the American embassy, special forces soldiers may be deployed to assist the Iraqi army.

The New York Times reports that one option still under consideration is a “targeted, highly selective campaign of airstrikes” against ISIS, probably using drones. The campaign probably wouldn’t be launched for days or longer, and would depend on whether the U.S. can find a suitable target.

Zack updates us on possible US plans:

What the American response to the crisis in Iraq will look like still isn’t clear. The leading option appears to involve three planks. First, the deployment of US special forces to gather intelligence, provide battlefield guidance to Iraqi combat units, and possibly train Iraqi soldiers. Second, securing commitment to political reform from the Iraqi government, whose favoring of the Shia majority over the Sunni minority has exacerbated the conflict. Third, look for some avenue to cooperate with other countries in the region to support the anti-ISIS campaign (how that would be accomplished isn’t specified).

That said, airstrikes aren’t permanently ruled out. “U.S. strikes are still actively under discussion,” the Journal reports, “but [senior administration] officials cautioned Tuesday that they don’t expect Mr. Obama to put military action back on the table quickly.”

Robert Farley is against an aerial campaign:

Thinking of air power as a tool to simplify war and avoid its difficult complications is, tragically, a characteristic of the American strategic set, but there’s no reason we should continue to indulge it.

Wolfowitz’s Noble Lies

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I tend not to hold the somewhat conspiratorial view that followers of Leo Strauss, the guru of the neocon intelligentsia, actively believe in deceiving the American people in the pursuit of statecraft. Strauss argued that many critical texts in Western civilization were written with an esoteric teaching for the intelligent few, while presenting a less radical and palatable public doctrine for the masses. Hence the Straussian penchant for a noble lie – one that is good for the people to believe but which the elite knows is bullshit. Perhaps the classic example of this is the Straussian support for public religion, while the bulk of them are atheists. For them, religious faith is entirely instrumental – a way to lie your way to social order and cohesion.

In the case of the Iraq war, several untruths were told. Among them: there is no sectarianism in Iraq; it will cost next to nothing; it will be over in months; there are WMDs everywhere; Saddam and al Qaeda are joined at the hip. It’s hard to tell which of these untruths were sincerely believed by men like Wolfowitz and Kristol, longtime Straussians both, and which were a function of them not knowing anything about the country that was to be their text-book case of “creating reality”. But when a disgraced architect of that war goes on television to argue that the public needs to be told now that ISIS is al Qaeda, even though he knows that they are separate organizations with separate ambitions, I tend to withdraw whatever benefit of the doubt I give these men with the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands.

Here’s the money quote from Wolfowitz:

We should say al Qaeda. ISIS sounds like some obscure thing; it’s even more obscure when you say Shia and Sunni … It means nothing to Americans whereas al Qaeda means everything to Americans … My point is that these are the same people, they are affiliated with the same people, who attacked the United States on 9/11 and still have an intention of attacking the United States and attacking Europe …

This is a rare moment in which a Straussian actually comes out and says: yes, we’re deliberately lying by conflating all sorts of different things in the Middle East – the Sunni-Shia divide; the hostility between ISIS and al Qaeda – in order to concoct a simple and terrifying message to the American people that will enable us to get into another war in order to advance our goals in the Middle East.

Yes, we know this is a lie – just as our insinuation that Saddam and al Qaeda were in cahoots before 2003 was also a lie. But it’s a noble one, and that’s all that counts. That Wolfowitz was revealed as grotesquely incompetent in getting his war to achieve anything for the United States or Iraq but catastrophe is not something this smug propagandist has to worry about. We should not go into recriminations about the past, see. All of that is wiped from the ledger, and anything that went awry was always someone else’s responsibility.

It’s not just that these people refuse to be held accountable for their incompetence, war crimes and catastrophic foreign policy. It is that they are still prepared to go on television and brazenly lie to the American people and to use fear to whip up another war in the Middle East. They are trying to do this again. It’s not just that they are shameless; they are actively dangerous in their ability to manipulate and lie this country into another disastrous war.

Yglesias Award Nominee

“In spite of the things I felt at the time when we went into war, liberals said: We shouldn’t get involved. We shouldn’t nation-build. And there was no indication the people of Iraq had the will to be free. I thought that was insulting at the time. Everybody wants to be free. They said we couldn’t force freedom on people. Let me lead with my mistakes. You are right. Liberals, you were right. We shouldn’t have,” – Glenn Beck.

Obama Caught Another Terrorist And The Right Can’t Handle It

The reaction of the Fox News right to the capture of the ringleader of the attack on the Benghazi consulate/CIA base tells you a huge amount. If their concern at the attack on the compound were genuine, they would have taken a moment to celebrate. Here, after all, is the fanatic they’ve wanted to get for two years now. He could help answer more questions than dozens of Congressional hearings. The truth of what occurred could be fleshed out much more definitively, as long as we use civilized methods of interrogation; and justice can be better served by trying him in a civilian courts rather than military commissions, since the courts have an exponentially better record at prosecuting terrorists.

But no. The FNC right is not interested in the actual facts of the case or the pursuit of justice. It is merely a weapon with which to bludgeon their partisan opponents. So good news like yesterday’s will have to be instantly dismissed in order to maintain the crusade against the president. And when I say instantly, I mean instantly. Here’s  Paul Waldman:

I just turned on Fox News and heard one commentator say “We all have questions about the timing” of the arrest, and another chimed in to say, “You have the former Secretary of State who is in the middle of a high-profile book tour, and I think this is convenient for her to shift the talking points from some of the things she’s been discussing.” If you aren’t a regular Fox viewer, you’d react to that by saying, “Are these people insane?” But if you are a Fox viewer, it makes perfect sense. Because you’ve been hearing for almost two years that Benghazi isn’t a story about an attack on an American consulate, it’s a story about the Obama administration’s cover-ups and lies and betrayal.

Morrissey scrambles for something disparaging to say:

So yes, this is a win for the US, but it’s still going to raise questions about how much effort the US put into capturing Khattala until now. At the time of Calderone’s piece, the White House insisted that they couldn’t act without destabilizing the government in Tripoli. What’s changed since then? Last week, incoming PM Ahmad Maiteeq offered his resignation after a court ruled his election was unconstitutional and current PM Abdullah Al Thani refused to recognize his legitimacy.  This hardly seems like a propitious time for a Special Forces raid if the previous delays were taken to promote stability.

The big fish still remains to be found. Abu Safian bin Qumu has long been suspected of commanding the attack, despite an inexplicable New York Times claim to the contrary. The US had bin Qumu in custody, too — until the Bush administration released him from Gitmo in 2007. This good news will serve as a reminder of the dangers of releasing terrorists back into the war, a reminder that the White House probably would prefer to avoid at the moment.

Eli Lake and Kimberly Dozier explain why the Khatallah operation was a year in the making:

The Obama administration has come under withering criticism because the whereabouts of abu Khatallah have been generally known. Journalists in Libya were able to interview him, critics asked, so why couldn’t American special operators track him down, too?

But other U.S. officials, who spoke to The Daily Beast anonymously because they were not authorized to talk to the press, said the mission to grab abu Khatallah had been planned for more than a year. Indeed, the Benghazi ringleader had been in the sights of Delta Force operators at the end of August, according to these sources, but no order was given at the time. A senior administration official told The Daily Beast that the delay in apprehending the suspect was due in part to requests from the Justice Department to gather appropriate evidence to prosecute him in criminal court.

Erika Eichelberger and David Corn look back at all the nasty things Republican leaders had to say about the president as he calmly and quietly went about planning to capture the Benghazi terrorists:

[F]or a long stretch, maybe a year or more, the Obama administration had been trying to figure out how best to grab Abu Khattala, who was identified as a possible Benghazi ringleader soon after the September 11, 2012, assault. Yet for much of that time, Republican critics of the president have repeatedly criticized Obama for not capturing the Benghazi perps. Even though it took a decade to nab Osama bin Laden, GOPers have depicted Obama as feckless on the Benghazi front, with some even saying that he was not truly interested in bringing the Benghazi killers to justice.

… It can take a while—even years—to capture a suspected terrorist overseas. (Ruqai, the embassy bombings suspect, was apprehended 15 years after the attacks.) Yet that didn’t stop these Republicans and other conservatives from slamming the president and suggesting publicly—in a real underhanded dig—that Obama was not seeking the murderers of Benghazi. Now what will they say? That his heart wasn’t really in it?

And the last resort of the partisans is to insist that the captive be sent to the torture and detention camp at Gitmo, where no one is successfully convicted of any crime and where they can become instant martyrs in the eyes of their followers – if they don’t go on hunger strike. Sargent asks a good question: will Rand Paul stand up to the pro-Gitmo crowd?

We are frequently told there are genuine tensions within the GOP over foreign policy and national security, with libertarian and isolationist Republicans like Rand Paul sparring with mainstream conservatives or neocons on a range of issues. Benghazi has kind of papered over such divisions by giving Republicans a common target (Obama) and a ripe scandal narrative to focus on. But the question of where to detain the first apprehended Benghazi suspect will provide a good test of just how deep these civil liberties differences among Republicans really run.

My bet is that partisanship will defeat principle every time in this GOP. But let’s see if Paul can come through. It’s an interesting test.

All Hail The Halophytes

dish_saltplants

With climate changing leading to a rise in sea levels and an increase in droughts and floods, Mark Anderson worries that “the acreage available for conventional, freshwater agriculture is shrinking rapidly.” Which leads him to this thought:

More than 97 per cent of the water on Earth is saline. Wouldn’t it be cruel if nature had locked up the vast bulk of the planet’s vital fluids in a form that no plant could drink? Well, as it happens nature is not quite that cruel. Of the 400,000 flowering plant species around the world, 2,600 do drink seawater. They are halophytes, meaning ‘salt-plant’, and they might just be the answer to a question surprisingly few governments have yet asked: namely, how can we put our planet’s practically infinite volumes of saltwater to good use?

Among the halophytes he believes holds promise is a perennial species called “seashore mallow,” a plant that “can grow in salty soil, using saltwater irrigation” and has been championed by the University of Delaware researchers John Gallagher and Denise Seliskar:

Last year they published a paper in the journal Renewable Energy, co-written with a group from the US Department of Agriculture, that analysed the plant’s potential as a biodiesel and ethanol source. By their calculations, it comes out roughly on par with soybeans, one of the commonest sources of biofuel now in use. A second paper, in Biomass and Bioenergy, examined the perennial’s stems’ absorbency, revealing commercial potential as mulch, erosion control and even kitty litter and animal bedding.

That variety of applications is important. ‘The thing that became apparent to us is it wasn’t going to run economically just on the oil you squeezed out of it,’ Gallagher says. ‘It’s taken 8,000 years to evolve corn from the teosinte [wild grass] found in the Mexican highlands to the Iowa cornfields. I just don’t have that long. So we thought we’d try to come up with an array of things we can get from the plant.’ Gallagher and Seliskar estimate that the entire crop can be harvested for products that could compete with existing markets of conventionally farmed commodities. The absorbency of its inner stem makes it attractive for animal bedding, while the outer bark has been developed into a thread for cloth. The seed, as noted, is a promising stock for ethanol and biodiesel. And the seedmeal offers a spread of amino acids that make it attractive as animal feed. Roots, spent flowers and the biopolymers in the plant are also being investigated for everything from gums to industrial chemicals.

(Photo of Salicornia, a genus of halophyte plants, by Rusty Clark)

You’re Working Too Much

And it’s contributing to the wage gap:

The proportion of Americans who work long hours has increased substantially over the past 30 years. In the early 1980s, fewer than 9 percent of workers (13 percent of men, 3 percent of women) worked 50 hours per week or more. By 2000, over 14 percent of workers (19 percent of men and 7 percent of women) worked 50 hours per week or more. Overwork began to decline in the mid-2000s, but it remains widespread today. The slowdown in women’s wage gains was especially notable in professional and managerial careers, just the ones where women’s educational advantages should have paid off, but where the stall in pay equality was most evident. …

Expansion in “overwork” – net of other changes since 1979 – could have affected the gender gap in two ways: Men could be overworking increasingly more often than women, or the financial payoff to overworking could have increased, or both. In their statistical analysis, [researchers Youngjoo] Cha and [Kim] Weeden identify the second factor as critical. In 1979, workers who put in long hours tended to make less per each hour than those who worked full-time; by 2009, that had reversed. Putting in the extra hours now pays off more. Or phrased another way, working “only” full-time now pays off relatively less.

Previous Dish on the wage gap here, here, here, here, and here.