The Dish

Brian Merchant examines the rise of poetry-writing computer programs like @Pentametron, which collects iambic pentameter tweets:

It’s especially interesting since Pentametron is artificially creating compelling poetry from explicitly human-authored sentiments. Yet Twitter bots like this only mark the entry point into what we might as well call roboetry. More sophisticated software can be put in service of writing poetry, too; like SwiftKey, a machine learning algorithm that typically teaches Android to adapt to users’ behavior and helps correct their touchscreen text entries. MIT phD candidate J. Nathan Matias taught it Shakespeare instead. …

Other examples abound: A bot that mines New York Times articles for haikus. Designed by the Times resident software architect, it spins haikus like this from articles like “The Fear of Surrendering Again” …

He has a mind as

fascinating to me as

the city itself.

The point is getting clearer: These are pretty good poems. They’re surprising, moving, weird, even a little touching; It’s actually good poetry.

Earlier Dish on Pentametron here. Recent Dish on robots taking over jobs here and here.

Earlier this week, Lauren Galik noted how Missouri and Louisiana, facing shortages of approved lethal injection drugs, are refusing to tell death row inmates what chemicals will be used to execute them or what pharmacies are supplying them:

Lawyers that represent both condemned prisoners [Herbert Smulls and Christopher Sepulvado] argue that states must answer questions about whether or not the execution will be humane and comport with the Constitution. Without information about the drugs, those questions have gone unanswered.

According to Megan McCracken, Eighth Amendment Resource Counsel at U.C. Berkeley School of Law’s Death Penalty Clinic, “If lawyers for the condemned prisoners can’t get the information [about the drugs], then they cannot meet their legal burden in court to show that there’s a substantial risk of harm.”

By keeping this information a closely guarded secret, states are asking condemned inmates to take their word for it that the source is legitimate and the drugs won’t result in cruel and unusual punishment when administered.

Smulls was executed on Wednesday using pentobarbital “manufactured by a compounding pharmacy whose identity has not been revealed.” Waldman scratches his head:

It’s the 21st century. We can build skyscrapers a kilometer high. We can send ships to Mars. We can put a powerful computer in the pockets of billions of people. Are you telling me that with all our technology, all our engineering knowledge, and all our good old-fashioned American ingenuity, we can’t come up with a quick, effective, and painless way to kill a man? …

Beyond these practical considerations is a moral one: the death penalty is a vestige of a more barbarous time, which is why most countries have done away with it, and why we should too. But if we’re going to do it, surely we can devise a method that doesn’t have all the uncertainty that lethal injection has brought.

Recent Dish on lethal injection here, here, and here.

Kilgore will miss Henry Waxman, who is retiring from Congress after 40 years as a Democratic party stalwart:

As a legislative craftsman, Waxman was sort of a rumpled, uncharismatic 5-foot-5-inch version of Ted Kennedy, and the comparison might actually slight (no pun intended) the Californian. There’s hardly any significant health or environmental legislation enacted during his long tenure in the House that doesn’t have his fingerprints all over it. But personally, I’ll always identify Waxman with his long, heroic effort to turn the twisted and inadequate federal-state Medicaid program into something that actually served as a safety net, particularly for kids. I’m sure the Affordable Care Act, and particularly its Medicaid expansion, were especially sweet accomplishments for Waxman.

Although he was a staunch liberal, Joshua Green points out that most of Waxman’s legislative achievements were bipartisan:

That Waxman’s most productive years occurred while the White House was controlled by the opposing party makes his example all the more notable today. It’s astonishing that Republicans don’t study him and emulate his methods.

Those methods are essentially the opposite of the ones that lawmakers such as Ted Cruz have employed—the refusal to compromise, the sweeping attempt to impose an entire agenda immediately through force. “You have to be willing to be at it, look for compromises, build coalitions, and get public opinion behind you so you can finally get to the point when legislation can be passed,” Waxman said.

Harold Meyerson recalls the congressman’s distinctive style:

Getting things done the Waxman way didn’t involve the bonhomie that politicians characteristically employ. He didn’t persuade his fellow congressmen by schmoozing. “Henry never entertains his colleagues,” his longtime aide Howard Ellison told me when I wrote a profile of Waxman for the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine in 1995. “He does no sports. His staff would say, ‘You should play golf with John Dingell [then chair of Waxman’s committee].’ Fat chance.”

Rather, as I wrote at the time, Waxman “persuades by argument, not by humor or force of personality. Where Ralph Nader unleashes a torrent of indignation, Barney Frank stings with wit and Tom Hayden still taps into a vein of adolescent anger, Waxman simply makes his case point by point. He is not liberalism’s man for all seasons. He is only its legislative genius.”

Masket highlights his role in building the Democratic power base in West LA:

To some, at least, the Waxman-[Howard] Berman machine would represent a form of political corruption. That is, they used money, influence, and technical skills to limit voters choices in elections and advance issues they felt were important. And they could certainly be competitive and cutthroat in their approaches, doing as much to hurt their opponents as help their friends. But it’s hard to find much evidence of graft or pettiness in their efforts. As much for his other accomplishments, Waxman deserves to be praised for building a serious political organization that affected dozens of political careers and literally millions of constituents.

Ben Adler explores Waxman’s environmental legacy:

Environmental advocates point to one major legislative accomplishment in particular: his role in writing the powerful 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. As the Times explains, “He is also credited with laying the foundation for many of the executive actions that Mr. Obama, during his State of the Union address on Tuesday, pledged to pursue. One involves the Clean Air Act, which Mr. Waxman helped write and which gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority it is now exercising to regulate power plant emissions of greenhouse gases. Mr. Waxman saw to it that the bill would allow the president, on his own, to order improvements in automobile fuel efficiency and other energy saving efforts.”

Reflecting on Waxman and George Miller, who both entered the legislature as young men, Bernstein considers what a geezer Congress we have today:

There’s nothing wrong with people coming to politics, and Congress, later in life. But if we don’t get 30-somethings (and some 20-somethings) in the mix, we are going to have an overly geriatric legislature. That is increasingly the case.

I’m not sure exactly why it’s happening. It could be because more individual wealth is needed for House campaigns these days. It could be, in part, because the field of candidates has opened up to include women, and maybe others who were excluded in the past and take a little longer to stake their political claim. So there may be good and bad reasons. Still, we could use a few more House careers like those of George Miller and Henry Waxman.

And Sam Baker notes that Waxman’s retirement is just the latest in an exodus of Obamacare architects and Democratic health care experts from Congress:

Including Waxman, four of the five committee chairmen who helped write the law are gone or leaving. Democratic leaders and committed liberals can and will still defend Obamacare politically, along with the basic idea of universal coverage. But there aren’t many Democrats left who—like Waxman and some of his departing Congressional colleagues—are truly invested in the ins and outs of the Affordable Care Act as well as other nitty-gritty health care issues. (Waxman, along with Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, essentially created the generic-drug industry.)

(Photo: House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) prepares to hear testimony from Obama Administration cabinet members on Capitol Hill April 22, 2009. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

In his latest evolution on drug policy, Obama suggests that he wouldn’t oppose changing marijuana’s Schedule 1 designation – but he’s leaving that to Congress:

“First of all, what is and isn’t a Schedule I narcotic is a job for Congress,” Obama said. … The DEA is required to make determinations, Obama said, but based on laws passed by Congress. A spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy tweeted Wednesday that the attorney general can reclassify marijuana after a scientific review, but that it was “not likely given current science.” But Obama said he would support congressional action to remove the schedule I classification for marijuana.

Sullum calls out Obama for acting like he doesn’t have to power to make that change himself:

While Congress can amend the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to increase or reduce restrictions on particular drugs, the statute also gives that power to the attorney general, who has delegated it to the Drug Enforcement Administration (a division of the Justice Department). In fact, the DEA has repeatedly rejected petitions to reschedule marijuana, most recently in 2011. I forget: Who was president then?

Apparently Obama forgot too. Obama often speaks as if he is an outside observer of his own administration—condemning excessively long prison sentences while hardly ever using his clemency power to shorten them, sounding the alarm about his own abuses of executive power in the name of fighting terrorism, worrying about the threat to privacy posed by surveillance programs he authorized. Now here he is, trying to distance himself from his own administration’s refusal to reclassify marijuana.

Nicole Flatow points out that the state of “current science” on marijuana is subject to a catch-22, courtesy of the federal government:

[T]here have been many peer-reviewed studies, but very few of sufficient size and scope to satisfy the government, particularly about the drug’s medical benefits. Ironically, this dearth of research is perpetuated by the federal government’s position on marijuana. Federal funding, the lifeblood of academic research, is severely curtailed for large-scale studies of pot, particularly those that aim to study the plant’s potential benefits rather than its potential for abuse, because of the drug’s Schedule I designation. Perhaps even more significantly, the legal access to a supply of marijuana for conducting this research is controlled by one federal agency with a mission to combat drug abuse. And the panel that controls access to the marijuana has delayed and rejected academics’ FDA-approved requests to research some of the most pressing medical marijuana issues, including treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.