An Indian Black Ibis feeds on an earthworm near Raisina hill in New Delhi, India on October 21, 2014. By Virendra Singh Gosain/Hindustan Times via Getty Images.
Why Are The Midterms So Meh?
Nate Cohn declares that “this is a great election. It’s way better than 2012. All around, it might be the best general election in a decade.”
There are a dozen competitive and close Senate contests and, for good measure, there are another dozen competitive governors’ contests. Better still, these close Senate races add up to something meaningful and important: control of the Senate.
But Americans are nevertheless losing interest in the midterms. How Suderman explains the lack of enthusiasm:
With just two weeks until election day, the most striking thing about the 2014 midterm may be how petty and substance-free it is. No major policy issue has defined this election; no major legislation is immediately at stake. It is possible to find candidates talking about a variety of policy issues—Obamacare, the minimum wage, immigration, the Export-Import bank, and more—but the implications are described almost entirely in political terms. For the most part, the focus for both parties is not on what they would do, but what they wouldn’t, not who they are, but who they aren’t. It’s an election about nothing, except, perhaps, who one hates the most. …
The result is an election in which Democrats cannot run on what they have done, and Republicans cannot run on what they will do. So petty squabbles and Twitter-friendly soundbites dominate the news as each side attempts to drive turnout by campaigning the notion that the other party is worse—for women or for struggling workers, for the economy or for America’s place in the world. It’s not an election about which side to vote for. It’s an election about which side to vote against.
Map Of The Day
Amanda Taub highlights the work data journos at The Guardian have been doing with Wikileaks’ Iraq War logs. Each red dot on the above map – the screenshot seen above only shows one corner of Baghdad, but the project covers the whole country – represents one of some 60,000 combat-related fatal incidents (mostly IEDs) between 2004 and 2009, representing more than 100,000 deaths. And that’s not even the whole story, as Taub points out:
[T]he true extent of the violence is much worse: the map likely only shows a small fraction of the attacks from that period. The database the map is drawn from does not include deaths from criminal activity, or those that were initiated by Coalition or Iraqi forces. And many deaths may not have been officially tallied. That means that the real total is almost certainly much higher. But even seeing the number of attacks recorded here shows how devastating this war has been to Baghdad’s civilians, who must now face even more attacks.
What Is The Surgeon General Good For?
Part of the liberal line in the political battle over Ebola is that we’d be much better placed to respond to the crisis if only Congressional Republicans would stop stonewalling the confirmation of Obama’s nominee Dr. Vivek Murthy to the post of surgeon general, which has been empty for over a year. But Mike Stobbe doubts this would really make much difference, considering how the role of the surgeon general has changed over time from front-lines crusader against disease to mere public health advocate:
[I]t was in the 1960s, during the Democratic presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, that things really started to go downhill for the surgeon general. Administration officials were pushing to enact Great Society programs, and increasingly viewed the surgeon general and his troops as foot-draggers reluctant to take on the new initiatives—especially Medicare and Medicaid. … Dr. Luther Terry became renowned in 1964 for releasing a report that finally convinced many Americans of the deadliness of cigarette smoking, but he was shown the door a year later, after only one term. By 1968, the HEW Secretary had stripped away the surgeon general’s administrative powers and redistributed them to others.
Since then, the surgeon general has been little more than a health educator—“a pathetic shadow of authority who traveled around the country lecturing high school students on the hazards of smoking,” as the political scientist Eric Redman once wrote.
McArdle takes a broader view, noting that “this is not your grandfather’s public health system”:
Public health experts were, in a way, too successful;
they beat back our infectious disease load to the point where most of us have never had anything more serious than Human papillomavirus or a bad case of the flu. This left them without that much to do. So they reinvented themselves as the overseers of everything that might make us unhealthy, from French Fries to work stress. As with the steel mills, these problems are not necessarily amenable to the organizational tools used to tackle tuberculosis. The more the public and private health system are focused on these problems, the less optimized they will be for fighting the war against infectious disease. It is less surprising to find that they didn’t know how to respond to a novel infectious disease than it would have been to discover that they botched a new campaign against texting and driving.
Don’t get me wrong: Fighting infection is still one of the things that the public health infrastructure does, and though I hope it doesn’t come to that, I expect that our system will do a much better job next time. But the CDC did not botch the job because there’s something wrong with Barack Obama, or government, or the state of Texas, or private hospitals. They dropped the ball because the public health system no longer needs to work so many miracles, and consequently hasn’t had much practice.
The way Steven Malanga sees it, CDC Director Thomas Frieden’s embrace of that new role as nanny-in-chief is part of why he’s not really that good at his job:
As New York City’s health commissioner, Frieden engineered a law requiring food chains to post calorie counts on menus, though there was no evidence that the availability of such information has any effect on eating habits. Frieden also led a campaign to cut salt consumption despite studies that had shown, in fact, that some individuals fared poorly on a salt-restricted diet. Frieden’s campaign led one world-renown hypertension expert to proclaim that New York was attempting to engineer a giant uncontrolled experiment.
As time passed, Frieden’s practice of recommending sometimes outrageous solutions to health problems based on few facts grew more disconcerting. In 2007, he even proposed a campaign to persuade uncircumcised adult men in New York to get circumcised to reduce their risk to HIV; a study in Africa had concluded that the practice helped lower infections there. But Frieden’s proposal was widely derided and quickly dismissed because of the vast differences between the two populations and the preliminary nature of the research.
Ugh. Back to the issue at hand, Byron York blames the surgeon general vacancy on Democrats rather than Republicans:
[H]ere is the basic fact about charges that Republicans are blocking the surgeon general nominee: There are 55 Democrats in the Senate. Since Majority Leader Harry Reid changed the rules to kill filibusters for nominations, it would take just 51 votes to confirm Murthy. Democrats could do it all by themselves, even if every Republican opposed. But Democrats have not confirmed Murthy.
The reason has more to do with Murthy himself than anything else. As doctors go, he is a very political man, so it’s no surprise his politics have created political problems.
York notes that the NRA “took a strong stand against Murthy, a position that caught the attention not only of Republicans but of red-state Democrats seeking re-election.” Weigel adds context:
The NRA actually promised to score votes for Murthy – anyone who backed him would see a drop in his grade from the gun lobby. Among the horribles that made Murthy unacceptable were tweets like this (as York cites):
You can see why the NRA wanted to prevent such a doctor from becoming surgeon general. And you can sort of see why red state Democrats begged Harry Reid to prevent a vote on him.
Art And Ambiguity
Freddie considers the limits of art criticism in the Internet age, “a vast explosion in the analysis and examination of the art around us”:
These efforts to cast the brute emotional power of art into the conventions of thinking are necessary, natural, and fun. But they can result in, for example, the deep hatred for ambiguity in art, the effort to tease out of every creator what really happened. More, so many takes on art today, straining for political relevance, misunderstand that it is precisely the ability of art to express the indefensible and the disturbing that lends it enduring power.
If you are yet another person online to point out that the lyrics of “Run For Your Life” off of Rubber Soul are disturbing and misogynist, you are yet another to fail to understand that John Lennon didn’t kill anybody. He wrote a song about his impulses to kill — his scary, ugly, unmentionable impulse to kill, driven by the frightening irrationality at the heart of love and desire. He put those impulses into his art because that is where they could be acknowledged without danger. His music was where the unforgivable monster of his feelings could live and do no harm.
Desperately Seeking Moderates, Ctd
In a column from last week, Fareed Zakaria recommends limiting our Syria strategy to containment, emphasizing the unlikelihood that American power can resolve the country’s civil war. He stresses the difficulty of finding reliable partners among the Syrian rebels, a topic the Dish has covered repeatedly. Fareed concludes:
The crucial, underlying reason for the violence in Iraq and Syria is a Sunni revolt against governments in Baghdad and Damascus that they view as hostile, apostate regimes. That revolt, in turn, has been fueled by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, each supporting its own favorite Sunni groups, which has only added to the complexity. On the other side, Iran has supported the Shiite and Alawite regimes, ensuring that this sectarian struggle is also regional. The political solution, presumably, is some kind of power-sharing arrangement in those two capitals. But this is not something that the United States can engineer in Syria. It tried in Iraq, but despite 170,000 troops, tens of billions of dollars and David Petraeus’s skillful leadership, the deals Petraeus brokered started unraveling within months of his departure, well before American troops had left.
Pushing back on Fareed’s claims, Michael Weiss and Faysal Itani make a forceful argument for greater engagement with the Free Syrian Army, pointing out that containment is what the Obama administration is already doing – and it isn’t working. They contest the “longstanding and intellectually disingenuous complaint” that the Syrian opposition has been taken over by al-Qaeda affiliates, leaving few “moderates” for the US to support:
All too often, observers of the Syria conflict employ a shallow, decontextualized approach to appraising fighters on the ground. YouTube video proclamations designed to drum up badly needed funds from Gulf Arab states, to pressure or blackmail the West into offering adequate support, or to triangulate between and amongst competitive rebel interests, are given to be copper-bottom proof of a brigade or battalion’s permanent ideological coloration. In reality, fighters migrate fluidly to and from ideologically divergent camps; we have spoken with rebels who have gone from nationalist to Islamist to outright jihadist alignments, all based on the need for ammunition, food or money. ISIL, for instance, pays its fighters $400 per month; most FSA units pay theirs around $100, according to FSA spokesman Hussam al-Marie. As a matter of simple economy, this disparity could be altered overnight. The perception, too, of who is “winning” versus who is “losing” on the battlefield also drives recruitment efforts, which is why, following ISIL’s seizure of Mosul last June, its numbers skyrocketed.
David Kenner focuses on the Syrian opposition coalition in exile in Turkey, which in theory would take responsibility for governing areas freed from both ISIS and the Assad regime. It’s currently having trouble holding itself together:
While the United States continues to describe the exiled Syrian opposition as a partner in its war against the Islamic State, former U.S. officials are more candid about the limits of its influence. Robert Ford, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Syria, said that his experience as a U.S. diplomat during the Iraq war made him skeptical of the exiled opposition body’s weight on the ground. “They need to get themselves out of Istanbul, and instead get themselves installed in Syria, with or without a no-fly zone,” he said. “And we’ve raised that with them.”
Other former U.S. officials, however, suggest the opposition’s ineffectiveness should have been expected after Syria’s long bout of authoritarianism. “Look, Syria and Syrians were coming out of a 50-plus-year political coma [when the opposition bodies were formed],” said Fred Hof, a former special advisor on Syria at the State Department and currently a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “Did we really expect opposition politics to be characterized by trust, openness, loyalty, and selfless teamwork?”
Mental Health Break
A clever new take on the cover song:
Ministers Jailed For Refusing To Marry Gays?
Todd Starnes contends it’s a real threat:
Two Christian ministers who own an Idaho wedding chapel were told they had to either perform same-sex weddings or face jail time and up to a $1,000 fine, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court. Alliance Defending Freedom is representing Donald and Evelyn Knapp, ordained ministers who own The Hitching Post Wedding Chapel in Coeur d’Alene. “Right now they are at risk of being prosecuted,” their ADF attorney, Jeremy Tedesco, told me. “The threat of enforcement is more than just credible.”
According to the lawsuit, the wedding chapel is registered with the state as a “religious corporation” limited to performing “one-man-one-woman marriages as defined by the Holy Bible.” But the chapel is also registered as a for-profit business – not as a church or place of worship – and city officials said that means the owners must comply with a local nondiscrimination ordinance.
Robert Tracinski is left breathless:
Heretics will be found out and forced to recant. No one ever expects the Secular Inquisition.
Dreher also freaks out. But Walter Olson cautions:
I will note that I have learned through hard experience not to run with stories from ADF (Alliance Defending Freedom) or Todd Starnes without seeking additional corroboration. As a libertarian, I oppose subjecting this family business to any legal compulsion whatsoever, but it’s also important (as in the Dallas pastors case) to get the facts straight before feeding a panic.
James Peron’s understanding of the facts:
What is at issue is that the Hitching Post has been a business, open to the public, with no religious requirements for almost a century, and for most of the time ceremonies were conducted by justices of the peace, until the state abolished that office. The Knapps purchased the business in 1989 and continued to run it as a business, never as a religious institution. They performed non-religious ceremonies and happily allowed ministers of other faiths to perform services whether they were employees or not.
Whether or not it should be the case, anti-discrimination laws–which the ADF loves when it protects fundamentalists–cover private businesses, including this one.
Zack Ford looks at how the business has changed recently:
[T]he Hitching Post is a for-profit business, but with help from ADF, the Knapps have been gearing up for this challenge for some time by redefining their business in more religious terms. In fact, Hitching Post completely reincorporated with an entirely new business certificate just last month, which was authorized by Michael S. Oswald, an ADF attorney. Along with the new business was a new Operating Agreement, dated October 6, 2014, which enshrines all of the religious values offered in the complaint as part of the business. They similarly added a new Employee Policy and Customer Agreement stipulating that the Hitching Post will only perform unions “between one biological male and one biological female.” …
The city’s ordinance does provide an exemption for “religious corporations,” but the Hitching Post is not run by a church. ADF’s complaint does not claim that it is such a corporation, but argues that because the exemption is “broad” and exists for churches and church-run corporations, “the City has no legitimate basis for refusing to extend a religious exemption to the Knapps who are Christian ministers engaged in a religious function.” Nevertheless, the Knapps are still running a for-profit business that is providing a service (weddings) to one group of people and not to others that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation in conflict with the ordinance.
Jeremy Hooper catches The Hitching Post changing their website:
Now that this business needs to make a case for “religious persecution,” they are pretending like they didn’t operate in the way that they totally used to operate. They are pretending like civil ceremonies and ceremonies outside of their own deeply held faith were never on the table so that they can make it seem like they have always been convicted in and committed to one specific kind of religious wedding. They have up and changed the rules that they themselves had laid out (i.e. no church, no faith, no problem) so that they can now make the case that they and their far-right spinmeisters are itching to make (i.e. only church, always church; we’re the victims).
One of several screenshots from Hooper:
Stephen Miller is uninterested in such details:
LGBT activists of a progressive bent are making much of the fact that the Hitching Post changed its services following the legalization of same-sex marriage in Idaho. To my way of thinking, it makes no difference. People should be free to marry, including same-sex couples, and the government should not be forcing businesses owners, whether they be ministers or not, to perform services for same-sex weddings.
Eugene Volokh argues that the ministers have the law on their side:
Friday, the Knapps moved for a temporary restraining order, arguing that applying the anti-discrimination ordinance to them would be unconstitutional and would also violate Idaho’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. I think that has to be right: compelling them to speak words in ceremonies that they think are immoral is an unconstitutional speech compulsion. Given that the Free Speech Clause bars the government from requiring public school students to say the pledge of allegiance, or even from requiring drivers to display a slogan on their license plates (Wooley v. Maynard [1977]), the government can’t require ministers – or other private citizens – to speak the words in a ceremony, on pain of either having to close their business or face fines and jail time. (If the minister is required to conduct a ceremony that contains religious language, that would violate the Establishment Clause as well.)
Burt Likko feels that we “really shouldn’t compel the Knapps to perform a ceremony that is contrary to their religion, even if it is in the context of a public accommodation”:
The level of intimacy involved in actually presiding over that ceremony is very high (as I know from having presided over weddings myself). I’m comfortable with a result that tells a same-sex couple, sorry, you can’t make this particular someone do this very thing, preside over a wedding ceremony, especially not if there are reasonable alternatives readily at hand, as I presume there are in a resort location like Coeur D’Alene.
My problem is that I don’t know where the line gets drawn. … The idea of, “If you’re open to the public, you’re open to the public so you have to serve the public” is a rule that I can get behind morally and intellectually, because a coherent rule can be made out of it. The idea of “If you have a personal religious objection to doing something you don’t have to do it” has moral appeal but I cannot conceive of how a non-arbitrary rule about what things are or aren’t included in a rule resulting from that concept. Maybe the rule just has to be arbitrary — but if that’s the case, then why not compel the Knapps to perform the wedding? Or, why not allow anyone to get away from any rule of any kind on the basis of claiming a religious objection?
Lawyers like it when there are coherent, understandable rules. Which is the principal reason why I don’t like the Knapps’ lawsuit — it makes the rules much blurrier, much less easy to understand.
I agree, and this case looks like a deliberate provocation. It’s relevant, I think, that the Knapps are perfectly willing to perform marriages for non-Christian faiths – which casts some doubt on the sincere religious belief argument. But in cases like these, I still favor maximal religious liberty – even for a public accommodation like this one because requiring individuals to perform a marriage ceremony against their beliefs is just something we don’t do in a liberal society. And look at the context: Idaho now has marriage equality. That’s huge – and our core goal must be to reassure those who disagree with us, that we’re seeking merely civil equality, and nothing else. These people were looking for a fight. Far preferable not to give them one.
Stalker Stories, Ctd
During this relatively slow news week, a reader draws our attention to “the latest thing blowing up (a small corner of) the Internet”:
Kathleen Hale, YA author and fiancée of Simon Rich (Frank Rich’s son) wrote this article about her experience with a nasty review on Goodreads of her non-yet-published book. She became obsessed with the reviewer, who was also a book blogger. Hale eventually discovered that the reviewer was operating under a false identity, stolen photos, made-up job, faked vacation photos, etc. Against all advice, Hale decided to confront the reviewer, to find out why she had it in for her, going so far as to find her real name and address, pay for a background check on her, and go to her house.
What makes the story so interesting is the reaction to it. I don’t know if Hale thought she would get a sympathetic reaction to her confession, but she has instead set off a firestorm.
Her book now has hundreds of 1-star reviews on Goodreads, calling her a crazy stalker and vowing never to read any of her books. The book bloggers are out in force, determined to destroy her. No one cares that the reviewer faked her identity, equating what she did to J.K. Rowling using the Robert Galbraith pseudonym. Hale probably went too far, but I have tremendous sympathy for her frustration with having to sit back and silently take the mean-spirited reviews. (Goodreads strongly discourages authors from responding to reviews.) But I cringed when I read her article, because I knew she was going to make things much much worse for herself.
Along similar lines to Kathleen Hale’s obsession with her bad reviews is this article by Margo Howard, the daughter of Ann Landers, lamenting the reviews of pre-publication copies of her book by members of the Amazon Vine community. Ms. Howard’s article displays a not-entirely-surprising lack of awareness of the real world. I think her mother would have advised her to keep her mouth shut.
Writing requires thick skin, something that blogging out loud for years certainly gives you. Erin Gloria Ryan sounds off:
I sympathize with Hale’s feeling of helplessness in the face of what felt to her like people unfairly turning on her. And I’m sure most people who have ever written online understand the feeling of wanting to have a face-to-face conversation with a vitriolic critic. It’s that fantasy confrontation, where all of your stored l’esprit de l’escalier flows freely. I’ve even skimmed the Twitter feeds of professional and romantic rivals after a drink too many, an hour too late. I get that urge.
But you do not go to somebody’s house. You do not call somebody’s place of employment. You do not pose as a fact checker and demand personal information. You definitely don’t call a girl with an eating disorder fat while pouring hydrogen peroxide onto her head, and you do not run away laughing like a maniac after the fact. Hale’s thoughts are defensible; her actions are not.
About that, um, peroxide incident:
This weekend, a tipster sent us this piece Hale wrote for Thought Catalog two years ago, wherein she describes a chance run-in with Lori, a troubled girl with an eating disorder who had, years ago, accused Hale’s mother of sexual abuse. … A sympathetic judge let Hale off without punishment [after pouring the peroxide], but that didn’t stop her from doing what she referred to in her Guardian piece as “light stalking;” she says she followed Lori’s movements online. One day, she contacted her via AOL Instant Messenger, and within an hour, a police officer showed up to give her father a firm talking to about how his daughter shouldn’t stalk a girl she once assaulted.
Zooming out, Michelle Dean places Hale’s “nutso behavior” within a literary tradition of sorts:
Off the top of my head, I can think of the following nutty anecdotes […] of authors concerned that someone has been insufficiently admiring of their work:
1. Richard Ford spitting on Colson Whitehead at a party because Whitehead gave him a bad review;
2. Richard Ford (a theme emerges) sending a copy of Alice Hoffman’s book to Alice Hoffmanwith a bullet in it;
3. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal literally butting heads before their famous fight on the Dick Cavett Show;
4. Robert Frost setting a fire at Archibald MacLeish’s reading because, I guess, he did not care for MacLeish’s poetry;
5. After Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, again on the Dick Cavett show, that, “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the,'” Hellman proceeded to sue everyone involved for over $2 million; and
6. About eighty different stories about Hemingway fighting with literary rivals.
Previous Dish on stalking here. Update from a reader:
This kind of thing isn’t limited to just authors; this story from a few years back involves a bookstore owner in San Francisco.
The View From Your Window
Yupukari, Guyana, 11.49 am
The Dish 