Making Cops Wear Cameras

by Dish Staff

New York City Public Advocate Displays Police Wearable Cameras

It’s happening:

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that two companies, Safety Visions and Digital Ally, donated about 50 cameras to the Ferguson Police Department a week ago. Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson said they are “still playing with them,” but officers started using the cameras at a protest march on Saturday. Jackson said the officers captured video of protesters taunting them.

More than 153,000 people have signed a“We the People” petition to create a “Mike Brown Law” that would require all police to wear cameras, and several police departments across the country have moved toward implementing them in the wake of Brown’s shooting. Police in Columbia, South Carolina just started testing the cameras, and last week the police chief in Houston, Texas requested $8 million to equip 3,500 officers over the next three years.

But Justin T. Ready and Jacob T.N. Young, who have done research on cop cameras and support their use, caution that “many assumptions people make about body-worn cameras simply aren’t true.” A big one:

The first myth is that video evidence is completely objective and free of interpretation. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth at least a million. Or is it? For example, we’ve been working on a study surveying residents in a large West Coast city about their experiences with police officers during traffic stops. One finding was surprising: When asked whether they observed the officer touch his gun when approaching the car, 50.9 percent of black motorists said yes. In contrast, only 11.5 percent of white motorists observed the officer touch his gun. What’s surprising is not the disparity but that police training and policy in this city required all officers to approach vehicles during traffic stops with their hand on their service weapon. Essentially, white motorists may not have been paying as much attention to where the officer was placing his or her hands when approaching the vehicle. What was a subtlety of behavior for whites was not a minor detail for blacks. The police in this city did not wear on-officer video cameras. It is possible that police were more likely to disregard their training with white motorists, but a 2007 study by the Rand Corp.found that when researchers matched stops involving black drivers with similarly situated white drivers (those stopped at the same time, place, etc.), officers were no more likely to disregard their training for white motorists. What do you think—was our finding due to a difference in police behavior or selective awareness of the officer touching his firearm?

The point is that two people observing the same police activity may see different things because each person will focus her attention on details that are most important to her own self-interest. A video clip from body cams is part of a larger story, some of which is not caught on camera.

Previous Dish on cop cameras here.

(Photo: New York City Public Advocate Letitia James displays a video camera that police officers could wear on patrol during a press conference on August 21, 2014 in New York City. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Celebrities: They Sext Like Us, Ctd

by Dish Staff

David Auerbach blames Apple for the photo hacking:

Apple is currently delighted that people are talking about how you shouldn’t take naked photos of yourself in the first place, but make no mistake: Apple has been provably irresponsible with users’ security. It is currently unclear how the naked photos were gathered—most likely through a number of different methods and different servers over a period of months if not years. What is clear is that Apple has had a known security vulnerability in its iCloud service for months and has been careless about protecting its users. Apple patched this vulnerability shortly after the leak, so even if we’re not sure of exactly how the photos got hacked, evidently Apple thinks it might have had something to do with it. Whether or not this particular vulnerability was used to gather some of the photos—Apple is not commenting, as usual, but the ubiquity and popularity of Apple’s products certainly points to the iCloud of being a likely source—its existence is reason enough for users to be deeply upset at their beloved company for not taking security seriously enough.

Yishai Schwartz points a finger at the private sector more generally:

[A]s this week’s photos scandal demonstrates, the threat to privacy comes from the private sector as much as from the government. Is another Nixon, and particularly one powerful enough to overcome layers of post-Watergate oversight and compliance mechanisms, really more likely than an iCloud or Gmail hacker? When corporations cannot even be relied upon to secure our content, it seems naïve to automatically entrust our privacy to the private sector rather than the government. And it seems odd to allow Verizon commercial access to the same information that we deny the NSA for the purpose of counterterrorism.

In the modern era, it is the large corporations that pose the greatest threat to privacy. Google, Amazon, and Facebook may know things about us that we have never written in an email or stored in a file. We may never even know what is included in the mosaics of our lives that corporations are already weaving. With the government, we can take comfort that layers of bureaucracy, minimization procedures, and oversight prevent tyranny and mitigates the damage from leaks. But with private corporations, we have no such assurances.

On the subject of Apple, a reader responds to Sue Halpern’s post last week on the upcoming release of the iPhone 6:

There are a lot of these anti-Apple articles written by people who claim to understand Apple products. But they don’t ever seem to discuss the real reasons that exist for owning one. Here are mine:

1. Top notch hardware – if you’ve compared the responsiveness between and Apple touch screen and another brand, there is a difference that matters to some people. Another example, the always amazing and always improving iPhone camera.

2. No malware – the threat of malware grows every year on Android-installed gadgets. Thanks to Apple‘s careful administration of their app store, there is virtually no threat on iOS.

3. Product support – Apple makes it easy for their owners to ALL have the latest version operating system. Many, many phone makers ignore new versions, or make their own versions. Their refusal to support the standards set forth by Google make it difficult sometimes to be sure the phone you’re buying now can run an app now, and even more unlikely, to be sure it will be able to run new apps a year from now. Which leads to #4:

4. Developer support – Developers have to test on dozens of different devices and operating systems if they want their app to work in the Android ecosystem. This is costly and often their app is made long after the iOS version, if they decide ever to make it at all.

5. Forward thinking – Apple introduces innovative features every year. This year they’re rumored to be implementing NFC payments. With their reputation and the strength of the usage of their products in the real world, things like NFC which failed before, are more likely to succeed. Meaning iPhone owners are prepared for the future already, while other brands follow suit. Same with 64 bit processing: most of us don’t know what that is, but perhaps our experience of the device will be improved thanks to this technology.

6. User experience – this is the top reason I use Apple devices. While nothing is perfect, Apple places an importance on how users interact with their products. Something like a 64 bit processor is a small part of the carefully-crafted ecosystem which makes the whole entirety a pleasure to use. Other manufacturers get this, but just as often as not, other aspects such as price or deadline take priority.

I’m an Apple fanboy for these reasons, and not because of some mystique that anti-Apple articles like the quoted one prefer to present. If I someday feel these are no longer Apple‘s priorities, I will certainly look elsewhere. Till then, it’s nice to buy a device and not have to worry about if I did enough research or made the right choice.

Putin’s “Peace” Plan

by Jonah Shepp

https://twitter.com/b_judah/statuses/505302225909190657

The Russian president has unveiled a seven-point plan to end the fighting in Eastern Ukraine, which he claims to have arrived at after consultations with his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko (NYT):

Mr. Putin said he and the president of Ukraine, Petro O. Poroshenko, had a similar understanding about what was needed, and he urged Ukraine and the pro-Russian separatists in the east to reach a settlement at talks scheduled for Friday in Belarus. The primary conditions on Mr. Putin’s list are that the separatists halt all offensive operations and that Ukrainian troops move their artillery back out of range of cities and large towns in the rebel-held area. Mr. Putin also called for Ukraine to cease airstrikes; the establishment of an international monitoring mission and humanitarian aid corridors; an “all for all” prisoner exchange; and “rebuilding brigades” to repair damaged roads, bridges, power lines and other infrastructure.

Or in other words, according to Armin Rosen’s interpretation, the plan is for Ukraine to retreat and Russia to invade:

The proposal would formalize the presence of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine while requiring the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from their internationally recognized territory in the Donbas region, where pro-Russian separatists have been fighting Kiev’s forces since February. This proposal, which both Ukraine and the international community are unlikely to accept, amounts to Russian annexation of eastern Ukraine — Putin would be able to secure and develop the region, and Ukraine would be forced to accept a new reality on the ground. This follows Moscow’s longstanding game plan from other conflicts on the Russian periphery. For instance, the Georgian separatists regions of South Ossetia and Abhkazia are secured with the help of “peacekeepers” from the Russian army, even though both areas are internationally recognized as part of Georgia.

Also, the plan notably omits any mention of the status of the territories in dispute. But Leonid Bershidsky argues that there is “nothing here to which Poroshenko might reasonably object”. He believes the plan should be implemented simply because the fighting needs to end before any other progress can be made. The tricky part, in Bershidsky’s view, is what comes after the peace:

Putin will not want to give up a measure of control over eastern Ukraine. Although it might be tempting for Poroshenko to declare it a Russian-occupied territory and wash his hands of it, he won the presidential election in May on a promise to keep Ukraine together. Hence, there will have to be further negotiations on issues that are much harder for both sides to agree on than Putin’s lenient cease-fire terms. There is every chance that the cease-fire will break down as the political talks fail, and that Poroshenko’s plan to hold a parliamentary election in October will fall through. For now, however, the steps Putin proposes must be taken.

Must they? Those particular steps, in that order? Yes, the fighting must end first and foremost, but ending it on Putin’s terms could mean walking into a trap. Either way, Ukraine appears not to be taking the bait:

“This latest plan is another attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the international community ahead of the NATO summit and an attempt to avert the EU’s inevitable decision to unleash a new wave of sanctions against Russia,” [Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk] said in a statement. “The best plan for ending Russia’s war against Ukraine has only one single element — for Russia to withdraw its troops, its mercenaries and its terrorists from Ukrainian territory.” His comments come despite Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko saying he and Putin had agreed on the peace plan aimed at ending the near five-month conflict in eastern Ukraine.

That makes it sound like the Ukrainian leadership is divided over how to respond. That wouldn’t be surprising: after all, Poroshenko is known to be a bit friendlier to Russia than Yatsenyuk, and indeed that’s why some people think he’s the best man to make peace. But then there’s the question of whether Putin can actually get the rebels to stop fighting in the first place:

The insurgency clearly does not represent a unified organization with a central command, and furthermore Moscow’s interaction with its leaders is varied, according to Alexander Khramchikhin, deputy head of the Institute of Political and Military analysis, a Moscow-based think tank. “Following rebel advances, the Ukrainian government is ready to make certain concessions. Moscow sees this as a window of opportunity to exploit and come to terms, with the captured territories becoming autonomous within Ukraine. Hence, Purgin came up with the plan,” he told The Moscow Times in a phone interview. “The problem is that many insurgents do not want to settle anything now that they have got the upper hand in the military conflict. It is naive to believe that the Kremlin controls everything there,” he said.

Meanwhile, the West has finally shamed France into suspending a delivery of warships to Russia, and aggressive military posturing continues on all sides. The US and NATO allies are going ahead with a joint military exercise in western Ukraine later in September, while Russia’s defense ministry has announced a 4,000-soldier drill, also this month, by the forces in charge of the country’s nuclear arsenal:

RIA news agency quoted the ministry as saying the exercises would take place in Altai in south-central Russia and would also include around 400 technical units and extensive use of air power. The agency quoted Dmitry Andreyev, a major in the strategic rocket forces, as saying troops would practice countering irregular units and high-precision weapons, and “conducting combat missions in conditions of active radio-electronic jamming and intensive enemy actions in areas of troop deployment.” He said enemy forces would be represented in the exercises by spetsnaz (special forces) units.

Surely this is just in case the “peace plan” doesn’t work out.

Beheading, Baiting, Backfiring

by Dish Staff

In response to ISIS’s brutal murder of American journalist Steven Sotloff in a video released yesterday, the Obama administration is vowing justice for both Sotloff’s death and that of James Foley, with Obama announcing in Estonia this morning that “we will not be intimidated” and “justice will be served”. Bearing in mind that these atrocities against Americans makes an escalated US military operation against ISIS more likely, not less, Keating wonders what the group expects to accomplish by killing these hostages:

ISIS may be ruthless and fanatical, but it would be impossible to expand as quickly as it has thus far without an understanding of strategy. The group’s leaders surely know that they are likely drawing the U.S. military further into this conflict and believe this is to their advantage. Kurdish and Iraqi forces, with help from the U.S. and Iran, seem to be rolling back ISIS’s territorial gains in Iraq, so the group’s best hope of remaining a viable and prominent militant group may be to go underground and continue to inflict terror on its enemies. And those enemies aren’t just American. ISIS also recently released videos showing the beheading of a Kurdish peshmerga fighter and a Lebanese soldier. Hopefully this strategy will backfire before any more hostages are killed.

He follows up with some speculative answers, including the possibility that ISIS really thinks it can deter the US:

ISIS may believe that it can continue to demonstrate that it can strike the U.S. by executing these prisoners, and that the U.S. isn’t going to do anything about it. If this really is their thinking, they don’t have a very good grasp of history. Americans are traditionally reluctant to go to war right up until they do. Saddam Hussein didn’t think the U.S. would really attack him either.

Shane Harris and Kate Brannen suspect that by threatening to kill a British hostage, the jihadists are baiting the UK into getting involved militarily:

At the end of the Sotloff video, the killer threatens to execute another captive, who, the killer claims, is British citizen David Cawthorne Haines. That claim couldn’t be immediately verified. But if true, it would show that the Islamic State is broadening its terrorism campaign to include British civilians, a move that could well prompt a military response by the United Kingdom. This week, British Prime Minister David Cameron said he is weighing whether to join the United States in carrying out airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq, and potentially in Syria. Without naming Cameron specifically, Sotloff’s killer warns “governments that enter this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State to back off and leave our people alone.” That threat seemed timed to coincide with deliberations in London.

Jamie Dettmer argues against suppressing reporting about ISIS hostages, saying it only amplifies the value of these videos:

Openness would take away some of the control the jihadists have to administer shock as they go on killing. The U.S. and U.K. with their blackouts are handing ISIS the propaganda initiative, leaving it to the jihadists to decide when captives should be named, allowing them to add to the drama of the unveiling when they first threaten hostages with execution on camera and then carrying out the brutal deed. At least this power of naming could be taken from the jihadists, who already are in the position to taunt their foes and turn their slaughtering of Westerners into a global spectacle.

But Dexter Filkins asks whether ISIS’s snuff films are about something other than propaganda:

It’s hard to watch the video of Steven Sotloff’s last moments and not conclude … the ostensible objective of securing an Islamic state is nowhere near as important as killing people. For the guys who signed up for ISIS—including, especially, the masked man with the English accent who wielded the knife—killing is the real point of being there. Last month, when ISIS forces overran a Syrian Army base in the city of Raqqa, they beheaded dozens of soldiers and displayed their trophies on bloody spikes. “Here are heads that have ripened, that were ready for the plucking,” an ISIS fighter said in narration. Two soldiers were crucified. This sounds less like a battle than like some kind of macabre party.

The Taking Of The Media

by Alex Pareene

The Awl’s John Herrman brings us his take on Takes, the online media phenomenon wherein nearly every single outlet that produces “content” finds itself compelled to produce some sort of content related to some sort of news (or pseudo-news), despite having no original reporting or intelligent analysis to add. The problem is that generating actual news is difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Writing incisive analysis requires time to process, reflect, and refine one’s arguments. But the Internet needs those Takes now, while the topic is trending:

Take creators might have caught themselves saying things like “that, my friends, is why you never take nude photos of yourself,” or “just a reminder that, actually, sex is natural.” There were Takes on privacy and gender and consent and free speech issued with and without conviction. Everyone with an outlet—or, really, everyone, since the great democratization of Take distribution tools coaxed previously private Takes out from bars and dining rooms and into the harsh sunlight—found themselves under the spell of that horrible force that newspaper columnists feel every week, the one that eventually ruins every last one: the dreadful pull of a guaranteed audience.

The “we need to have something on this” impulse leads to the worst (professional) writing on the web. We all learn this anew each time some poor 20-something content producer writes some exceptionally dumb take, and everyone spends a few hours piling on the outlet that published it. But the attention-grabbing Offensive Takes only obscure the fact that all the inoffensive takes – the ephemeral, aggregated, feather-light blog posts telling people who already know that something happened that something happened, produced solely in the hopes that the post will, through luck and a bit of dark magic, win the Facebook algorithm lottery – are the most depressing pieces of writing on the web, for the reader and the writer.

The Internet media is exploitative and unkind to its greenest employees. Most of the Takes are written by 20-somethings making a (comparative) pittance. The Take is barely, if at all, edited. The young Take-producer is given no time to learn to report, or to read anything other than Everyone Else’s Takes. Dozens of aspiring journalists now have clips files that consist of hundreds of these awful aggregated units of completely disposable Content. Here’s 80 words on something James Franco did. Here’s 100 words on ISIS. This is my link to a Daily Mail story about long-lost twins who married each other.

The Takes wouldn’t be produced if they weren’t profitable – or at least aspirationally, potentially profitable – to the publishers, but the defining feature of modern web publishing is that the Takes are ruining the Brands. When your worst, laziest, least-polished writing is also the most frequently published content at your publication, that writing defines the voice of your site. BuzzFeed would love to be known for its journalism, but the economics of journalism mean that there will simply always be more quizzes than reported stories. And BuzzFeed is actually an outlier: They have a lot of money and a massive editorial staff, meaning no one is holding a gun to anyone’s head forcing them to churn out lists. (In other words, the most alarming thing about BuzzFeed is that its dumbest material isn’t produced in haste out of necessity.)

This isn’t simply a problem for fast-and-cheap New Media – your Mediaites, Daily Callers, and (yes) Salons – it’s an issue at nearly every print publication with a regularly updated web site. Rolling Stone still produces a lot of Quality (expensive) journalism. Its politics page does its best to highlight it. But there, over in the siderail, are the aggregation and takes, published far more frequently than the actual magazine: “Watch George W. Bush Get Doused for ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.” “T.I. Writes Powerful Posts on Ferguson Aftermath.” “Kevin Spacey Pranks Clintons in ‘House of Cards’ Spoof.” “John Boehner Uses Billy Joel Pubs to Blast Obama’s Jobs Plan.” All of that stuff was already everywhere else before each of those posts was published (indeed, the fact that they were everywhere else is why they were published). Amusingly, it is all under the utterly dishonest rubric “BREAKING.”

A large number, if not a majority, of editors and publishers understand how untenable and embarrassing this is. But the Takes won’t stop until Facebook turns off the traffic fire-hose for good, at which point we’ll all be out of work anyway.

 

Update: Pareene’s Round Two on the subject is here.

Let The End Times Roll

by Dish Staff

Bob Marshall warns that in Louisiana, “one of the greatest environmental and economic disasters in the nation’s history is rushing toward a catastrophic conclusion over the next 50 years”:

At the current rates that the sea is rising and land is sinking, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists say by 2100 the Gulf of Mexico could rise as much as 4.3 feet across this landscape, which has an average elevation of about 3 feet. If that happens, everything outside the protective levees – most of Southeast Louisiana – would be underwater.

The effects would be felt far beyond bayou country. The region best known for its self-proclaimed motto “laissez les bons temps rouler” – let the good times roll – is one of the nation’s economic linchpins. This land being swallowed by the Gulf is home to half of the country’s oil refineries, a matrix of pipelines that serve 90 percent of the nation’s offshore energy production and 30 percent of its total oil and gas supply, a port vital to 31 states, and 2 million people who would need to find other places to live. The landscape on which all that is built is washing away at a rate of a football field every hour, 16 square miles per year.

Brad Plumer notes that climate change is only one of the environmental problems facing the region:

The land in southeast Louisiana was built up over thousands of years from sediment washed down by the Mississippi River and anchored by plant life in the marshes and wetlands. Without this replenishing, the soil would simply sink into the Gulf of Mexico. And over the past century, various human activities have disrupted this ecosystem. After the Great Flood of 1927, the US Army Corps of Engineers built up a series of levees along the Mississippi that controlled springtime flooding but also blocked sediment from washing down the river and replenishing the delta.

At the same time, the Louisiana coast became a major source of oil and gas during the 20th century. That meant two things. Energy companies dredged thousands of miles of canals through the wetlands to transport equipment through – and those canals allowed shoreline to crumble and saltwater to seep in, killing off plants. Meanwhile, some scientists argue that the land itself has sunk after companies extracted oil and gas from underground wells.

Can Burger Flippers Unionize?

by Dish Staff

Jonathan Cohn relays the latest on tomorrow’s fast food industry strikes:

On Thursday, fast food workers across the country are planning to walk off the job and, in at least a few places, engage in civil disobedience. It’s part of a two-year-old campaign, backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), to lift the wages of fast food workers and to make it possible for them to join unions. Presently, jobs in the fast food industry are the lowest paying in the country: The mean hourly salary for a cook is $9.07 an hour, which works out to a little less than $19,000 a year for full-time employment. But many people in fast food don’t work full time and, naturally, many of them make less than the mean.

He sees this as a fight worth fighting:

SEIU’s president, Mary Kay Henry, has apparently taken some grief for spending so much of the union’s money on an effort unlikely to swell the organization’s ranks anytime soon. But labor has always been at its best when it was an advocate for all working people, not just those paying dues.

Megan McArdle is skeptical:

I would like to believe in the possible success of this effort. But I find it hard to suspend my disbelief. The classic union successes were in mass industries that enjoyed large economies of scale and few ready substitutes for their products. That meant a union only had to organize a handful of firms with workers concentrated in a few large plants. Once they had unionized those plants, it was easy to extract wage and benefit gains for the workers, because when economies of scale are high, so is worker productivity. The average auto worker generates hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of output; the average fast food worker, much less. That matters a lot. …

If unions want to turn fast-food operations into “good union jobs,” there may be a way through the government: getting the National Labor Relations Board to help them unionize McDonald’s rather than picking away at its franchisees, or pushing governments at various levels to pass a much higher minimum wage. I’m skeptical of either plan, for reasons I have outlined before. But they seem much more likely to work than another high-publicity, low-participation walkout.

Michael Sam Joins America’s Team

by Dish Staff

He snagged a spot on the Cowboys’ practice squad. Sam Laird approves:

Why the Cowboys are an ideal fit for Sam’s quest to build an NFL career is simple: They suck, especially on defense. If Sam is going to work his way from a practice squad to a regular 53-man roster, Dallas is as good a place as any to do so. Their defensive line is full of holes, and the loss of highly touted rookie DeMarcus Lawrence for at least six weeks creates another. Lawrence’s replacement, Jack Crawford, is no great shakes either, having been cut by the lowly Oakland Raiders just last week.

Other reasons to cheer the news:

You don’t get much more #America than Dallas, a red state where the steak is rare, the whiskey’s strong and the dudes sure as hell don’t kiss other dudes. The Cowboys are even nicknamed “America’s Team,” for crying out loud. … [H]aving America’s first gay NFL player in the middle of conservative Texas, on America’s Team, amid the league’s brightest media spotlight is pretty amazing.

Jay Caspian Kang also sees the logic of the move:

In many ways, Dallas is a perfect fit—the team has enough problems to be too worried about a practice-squad player. Aside from the on-field problems—and there are many—owner Jerry Jones has become a big-tent circus unto himself, with an alleged tampering scandal involving Adrian Peterson, of the Vikings, and a set of leaked photos—which are, frankly, bizarre—that showed Jones cavorting with two younger women. The Cowboys are a big-tent show, and if Sam indeed has a circus around him, it shouldn’t be more than a sideshow.

But Scott Shackford points out that Sam could get cut again:

Whether he eventually gets elevated to the roster and actually take to the field of a game, or even lasts on the practice squad, is a whole other question. For those who want to read the technical analysis of how Sam does and doesn’t fit in NFL play with only minor emphasis on Sam’s pioneering identity, ESPN’s Kevin Seifert has some explanations here.

Recent Dish on Sam losing his spot on the Rams here. Update from a reader:

While the Dallas Cowboys marketing team has done a great job of trying to brand them as “America’s Team,” the rest of the country hasn’t seen fit to go along with it. The most recent polling data seems to indicate they are the most hated team in the league.

Another:

In your post, Sam Laird writes, “You don’t get much more #America than Dallas, a red state where the steak is rare, the whiskey’s strong and the dudes sure as hell don’t kiss other dudes.” Gracefully, I would like to protest. As a resident of Dallas I like rare steaks and strong whiskey. But, I sure as hell like to kiss other dudes. There’s a saying of what Texas is really like: “Nothing but steers and queers.”

Gridlock Deflated The Democrats

by Dish Staff

Senate Chances

Steinglass assesses the damage:

In the face of the far right’s effective veto over the congressional GOP, Democrats have given up on passing any significant legislation either until they regain control of the House, an impossibly remote prospect, or until the Tea Party somehow withers away, which shows no signs of happening. The Democrats’ acceptance of their inability to accomplish anything significant has left them unable to campaign on big themes. The party feels exhausted, still convinced of the need for immigration reform, climate change legislation and expanded benefits for the middle class, but unable to imagine a political pathway to get there. If the Democrats lose the Senate this fall, it may be technically due to an unlucky roster of elections and the traditional midterm setback for the party in power. But it will also be a verdict on the party’s inability to conjure a sense of élan or vision in the face of the political paralysis tea-party Republicans have induced.

Tomasky agrees that, thus far, DC’s dysfunction has harmed Democrats more than Republicans:

Too much of Obama’s America is just too worn down. In that sense, the scorched-earth campaign has won. But Republicans should remember that in 2016, that America will be back, and bigger by a few percentage points than before, and still hungry to win the fights the obstructionists have blocked.

In other midterm analysis, Bernstein recommends taking Senate forecasts with a big pinch of salt:

I’ll continue to emphasize that the headline numbers suggest unearned precision. Most of these modelers, most of the time, don’t really make unsupported claims – but the numbers often suggest more certainty than the prose claims, and both the headline writers and the chart designers rarely include important caveats.

So we shouldn’t trust any single model, or even a single average of the various models. Instead, the best way to read all of this is to focus on the range, both in individual models when supplied by the authors, and across models. That’s going to give smart readers uncertainty, and that’s exactly what we all should be experiencing right now. If you want certainty, try the U.S. House: It’s going to stay Republican. But we don’t know who is going to win the Senate, and there’s a very good chance we won’t on Election Day morning, or on Election Day night – until Alaska comes in, and even then we may have to wait for Louisiana to hold a runoff to really know.

(Image: the latest Senate forecast from The Upshot.)

Celebrities: They Sext Like Us, Ctd

by Dish Staff

The photo leak scandal wages on. Alyssa Rosenberg raises an eyebrow at some of the advice these celebrities have received:

The theft and release of the photos are callous enough. These periodic violations suggest a sense of extreme entitlement to famous people’s bodies, a contempt for the idea that people in public life have the right to define any zone of privacy and a sense of glee about the possibility of exposing famous individuals as human and vulnerable.

But the response to these sorts of leaks comes with its own sort of cruelty. Rather than casting a jaundiced eye at large corporations that fail to keep their clients’ data safe or railing against the impulse to pry into other people’s intimate lives, we see sentiments such as the one expressed by New York Times technology columnist Nick Bilton. “Put together a list of tips for celebs after latest leaks: 1. Don’t take nude selfies 2. Don’t take nude selfies 3. Don’t take nude selfies,” Bilton tweeted on Monday.

As tech reporter Kashmir Hill pointed out in Forbes, this kind of response is the digital equivalent of abstinence-only sex education, which is divorced from the realities and expectations of contemporary relationships. And it shares a smug moralism with that sort of thinking: Anyone who experiences a bad outcome from bowing to a partner’s request (much less acting for his or her own pleasure) deserves it and ought to be held up as a cautionary lesson for everyone else.

Amanda Hess compares the controversy to one of an earlier era:

…BuzzFeed‘s Anne Helen Petersen has proposed that Lawrence should counter the incident by laughing off the violation and acting as if she’s so devoid of hangups that it’s impossible for anyone to truly embarrass her. Petersen—author of the forthcoming Hollywood history Scandals of Classic Hollywood—advises Lawrence to hew to the example of Marilyn Monroe, who was affronted with a similar “scandal” when topless photographs she had posed for pre-stardom in exchange for a flat $50 fee were later republished without her consent in a 1952 pinup calendar.

Petersen notes that, in the face of the puritanical Hollywood climate of the early 1950s, Monroe was able to overcome the potential stigma of the photos by not “denouncing the images” but instead taking “control” of the narrative by facing them with her trademark sexy giggle and wink. Monroe told the press that she was “not ashamed” of the photos and had “done nothing wrong.” Then, she flipped the incident into a self-deprecating joke: “I’ve only autographed a few copies of it, mostly for sick people,” she told the the Saturday Evening Post. “On one I wrote, ‘This might not be my best angle.’ ” By laughing it off, Monroe contributed to “what came to be known as the ‘Playboy philosophy,’ that sex is only dirty when suppressed,” Petersen writes. …

What Petersen doesn’t mention is that Monroe never agreed to be the face of Playboy’s ostensible revolution—in 1953, Hugh Hefner bought photos of Monroe from that same old nude shoot and published them in his magazine’s first issue without her consent, and without paying her a dime. (With his Playboy fortune, Hefner later bought the funeral plot next to Monroe’s crypt, ensuring that they’d be laid side by side forever—again, not her call.) Similarly, Lawrence never agreed to share these images of her “beautiful body” with the world. Why would anyone want her to shrug that off?

Update from a dissenting reader:

Alyssa Rosenberg calling the advice to “just say no” to sexting the same as abstinence-only education is laughable. A better example is unsafe sex, which (at least in my book) is poor judgement and not the result of some act of shaming by society. Really, nobody is telling these narcissists celebrities to not Instagram, Tweet, etc. Just use some reasonable judgment. Be aware that you’re going to be a target for this kind of thing. I mean, is your life really going to start to suck if you can’t take nude pics on your telephone?  ’80s me is puzzled.