The Dish

by Jonah Shepp & Patrick Appel

It’s semi-official: Scott Brown is running for Senate again:

In a speech that threw out red meat to conservative activists—praising the late Ronald Reagan and ripping ObamaCare, the IRS, and the 2009 stimulus package—and a call for both parties to come together for the betterment of the country, Brown announced Friday that he has formed an exploratory committee to prepare a campaign for the U.S. Senate. “A big political wave is about to break in America, and the Obamacare Democrats are on the wrong side of it,” said Brown, while noting that “There has to be a time and place where we act as Americans first, putting our country first.”

Sean Sullivan calls Brown a potential game-changer:

New Hampshire instantly becomes more competitive by virtue of Brown’s decision. Up until now, no other Republican with a prayer of defeating Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) had entered the race. Brown’s name recognition and his ability to raise big money make him a potentially formidable foe.

Something similar happened in Colorado when Gardner, a sitting member of Congress, announced last month that he would take on Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.). And while Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) is still a substantial frontrunner in Virginia, Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman who announced his run in January, gives Republicans a glimmer of hope in Virginia that did not exist before he decided to run.

In short, Republicans now have more possible routes the the majority.

Molly Ball sizes up Brown’s chances:

The most recent public poll, released this week by Suffolk University, showed Brown losing to Shaheen by 13 percentage points; others have shown a closer race, though none has shown him winning. Still, New Hampshire, a state Obama won by about six points last time, is certainly friendlier territory for Brown than Massachusetts, which Obama won by 23.

A poll out today finds Brown behind by 12. Harry Enten bets against Brown:

[F]orget Shaheen’s strength; Brown is weak. His net favorability, an average -10 points in the two polls, shows that more Granite Staters dislike him than like him. In fact, Brown’s net favorable ratings are lower than every other GOP contender included in the January UNH poll. A less famous but more well-liked nominee might give Shaheen a stronger challenge.

 

Jazz Shaw chatted with a couple of New Hampshire GOP officials about the primary:

Both agreed that Brown seemed “like a very nice man” but expressed the same opinion that he isn’t really a New Hampshire guy. One went so far as to say, “Don’t get me wrong, Scott’s a good man. But he’s no Bob Smith.” (Smith, a former Senator, is also expected to get into the primary race.

The second official I spoke with brought up a different concern. After agreeing that Brown was a great guy, she leaned in a bit and said, “He’s really not right on guns, you know.” This is an issue which the media has already noted will likely dog Brown in his quest for the nomination.

Antle wonders if Brown’s Massachusetts baggage will hurt him:

The history of out-of-state political candidacies is decidedly mixed. Robert Kennedy, Jim Buckley, and Hillary Clinton all managed to parachute into New York and win Senate races. Former Tennessee Sen. Bill Brock was soundly defeated in Maryland, while Maryland transplant Alan Keyes failed even more spectacularly in Illinois.

John Fund doubts the carpetbagger attack with do much damage:

For now, Democrats are mostly tarring him as a carpetbagger, releasing a 48-second-video replete with Brown referencing his close ties to Massachusetts. But Brown is ready for the face-to-face campaigning New Hampshire demands and is quick to point out that he was born in New Hampshire, has owned property there and moved back in part to be close to his mother who lives there. His former “state of mind” isn’t likely to be a big issue, according to Andrew Cline, editorial page editor of the Union Leader, New Hampshire’s only statewide newspaper. “Over half of the state wasn’t born here,” he notes. “They root for Boston teams, watch Boston television and often work in Massachusetts, so it’s a porous border.

Bernstein entertains the idea that carpetbagging could catch on:

Politicians (and political operatives) are copycats: If Brown wins, then the odds are someone else will try something similar, and we’ll have another bit of evidence for the nationalization of U.S. politics. My guess is that although there is a chance he could win, Brown is more likely to become a punch line (like wannabe carpetbagger Harold Ford).

By Chas Danner

Shane Bauer is an investigative journalist and photographer who was one of the three American hikers imprisoned in Iran after being captured on the Iraqi border in 2009. He spent 26 months in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, four of them in solitary confinement. Following his release, he wrote a special report for Mother Jones about solitary in America’s prison system. (The Dish’s ongoing coverage of the subject is here.) Shane and his fellow former hostages, Sarah Shourd (now his wife) and Josh Fattal, have co-written the memoir, A Sliver of Light, which comes out tomorrow. You can read an excerpt here.

In our first video from Shane, he explains how hard it was to readjust to a life of freedom after being an Iranian hostage for two years:

Following up that answer, Shane admits that while he’ll never be glad he went through the experience of being imprisoned, he’s still grateful for the perspective it’s given him:

(Archive)

by Chris Bodenner

In case you missed Andrew’s sign-off post and are confused by the various bylines, he’s off the blog until Monday:

It’s ten years since Aaron and I met and we’re taking some time in the sun by ourselves to celebrate. The Dish crew will take care of the joint while I’m away, as they take care of the joint while I’m not. You know what I most crave? Not having to have an opinion about the world every day.

Speaking of joints, a reader wrote to Andrew late Saturday night:

My fiancée and I were always curious what pot was like, but we’re too “straight laced” and (connected to law enforcement) to actually try. Damn, that took a long time to type that because of how interesting the iPhone keypad is. Anyway, you get the point. I’m high right now. Baked I guess? Is that a thing we still say?

Fiancee’s asleep on the couch, so the only other person I thought to contact was you. After all, you’re the only person besides my fiancée with whom I’ve been able to share a mature and nuanced dialog about the ethics and legality of pot. Thank you for helping us build the confidence and understanding to see this as a recreational activity akin to social drinking. We deserved to be able to try this in relative comfort and know what all the fuss has been about. Honestly, I don’t think it’s for us, but I can’t believe it took me so many years to even feel like it was ethically, even religiously acceptable, to want to find that out for myself.

I can’t think of a good line to end on. The Princess Bride is sure funny.

Especially with lightsabers:

Our main email account at andrew@andrewsullivan.com is still very much active this week, so keep the emails coming. It’s your blog too, after all.

by Jonah Shepp

The story keeps getting weirder, but there are no answers yet:

Over the weekend, the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 became a criminal investigation as Malaysian officials said they had “conclusive” evidence that the flight had been hijacked. They also said that a final message had been received from the pilot after the plane’s signaling apparatus had been disabled, raising suspicion that the flight was intentionally diverted by crew. There have also been numerous reports this morning that plane may have flown as low as 5,000 feet, in order to avoid all radar detection, a maneuver that would require considerable skill from the pilots, while also putting the plane itself in considerable danger, as it is not designed for long travel at that altitude.

Passing along the map seen below, Derek Thompson notes that the clues about where the plane might be are still very broad:

The precise location of the flight at 8:11 AM is still a mystery. But officials provided a map (above) that shows the plane’s possible location along one of two red semi-circles, based on a “ping” from a satellite orbiting 35,800 kilometers above the Indian Ocean. As you can see, this final data point indicates two possible flight paths: one northwest stretching toward Kazakhstan and another southwest into the Indian Ocean.

The northern flight path is above land, which would raise the odds that officials find the plane or its remnants. But The New York Times points out that it’s unlikely that air-defense networks in India, Pakistan, or Afghanistan failed to pick up on a rogue 777. This makes the southern path more likely. Bloomberg‘s analysis of the last satellite “ping” tracked the plane’s last known location to about 1,000 miles west of Perth, Australia.

Patrick Smith addresses some misconceptions regarding the plane’s transponder:

The media is throwing this term around without a full understanding of how the equipment works. For position reporting and traffic sequencing purposes, transponders only work in areas of typical ATC radar coverage. Most of the world, including the oceans, does not have ATC radar coverage. Transponders are relevant to this story only when the missing plane was close to land. Once over the ocean, it didn’t matter anyway. Over oceans and non-radar areas, other means are used for position reports and tracking/communicating (satcomm, datalink, etc.), not transponders.

Many readers have asked why the capability exists to switch off a transponder, as apparently happened aboard Malaysia flight 370. In fact very few of a plane’s components are hot-wired to be, as you might say, “always on.” In the interest of safety — namely, fire and electrical system protection — it’s important to have the ability to isolate a piece of equipment, either by a standard switch or, if need be, through a circuit breaker. Also transponders will occasionally malfunction and transmit erroneous or incomplete data, at which point a crew will recycle the device — switching it off, then on — or swap to another unit. Typically at least two transponders are onboard, and you can’t run both simultaneously. Bear in mind too that switching the unit “off” might refer to only one of the various subfunctions, or “modes” — for example, mode C, mode S — responsible for different data.

Previous Dish on the missing plane here, here, and here. Update from a reader, who ramps up the wild speculation:

Check this out.  It’s the most convincing thing I’ve read in the last ten days about the flight’s disappearance. He’s an aviation hobbyist who plotted times and air routes and came up with a theory that Flight 370 shadowed a scheduled flight (appearing with it as a single signal) over all the countries that should have picked it up on radar.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader makes an important point:

While I’m sympathetic to Andrew’s broader argument that liberals are far too quick to attack opponents with the sexist/racist/homophobic label, and am even sympathetic to his narrower argument that Paul Ryan’s statement wasn’t really all that exceptional or offensive, I think he’s missing the point of what gets liberals so riled up about statements like Ryan’s. It is not that he critiques the culture of the urban poor (a well-established code for black people); it is that Ryan does so to the exclusion of everyone else. Various reports (such as this one – pdf) track the poverty rates between urban and non-urban centers and tend to find a persistently higher poverty rate in non-urban areas:

A higher proportion of nonmetropolitan households (28.2 percent) are near poverty as compared to metropolitan households (24.0 percent).

Half of all rural African Americans (50.5 percent) live near poverty; rural Hispanics are at 47.0 percent, followed by whites at 23.5 percent, and Asians at 19.9 percent. In nonmetropolitan areas, 38.2 percent of children under the age of 18 live below 150 percent of the poverty line compared to 32.5 percent in metropolitan areas.  Over one quarter (26.2 percent) of elderly people live near poverty in nonmetropolitan areas, up by 1.5 percent from 2009. In metropolitan areas 20.6 percent of the elderly live near poverty.

Now, are poverty rates the whole story? Of course not. There are intersections of unemployment, family structure, race, and a whole host of other things to explain the difference. However, when you look at the statistics between urban and rural areas, you kind of have to ask yourself: “Why is Ryan only focusing on black people when the problems of poverty and poverty culture clearly impact millions of rural whites as well?”

Does he do that because he’s a racist? Probably not. However, it’s pretty clear he’s doing that because it’s “safe” for someone from his party to bash heavily-Democratic minorities like blacks. If he applied the same critique to rural whites, part of his party’s base, he would likely be losing votes and support from people he needs to win elections.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Scott Bixby tsk-tsks from his perch at McSorley’s, the venerable New York tavern:

On St. Patrick’s Day, everyone is Irish – except for the gays – but mostly, everyone is just drunk. In one hour, the East Village street that lays claim to McSorley’s saw three people vomiting, four young men belligerently insisting that every stranger within arm’s distance give them a high five, two public urinations, one apparent breakup, and two more young men losing their Lucky Charms behind parked cars. … Underneath the Irish pride and the excitement about the coming spring, St. Patrick’s Day is a childish spectacle of obnoxious behavior celebrated by inebriated manchildren who could use a few whacks with a shillelagh.

But not everyone is so sour on the revelry. Over at Next City, Jake Blumgart makes “the urbanist case for rowdy-ass bars”:

Let’s call it the Jane Jacobs Theory of Drinking:

It’s good to have eyes on the street, even if they are seeing double, and especially because many non-drinking businesses are closed after 9pm or 10pm on weeknights. Jacobs famously lived at 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village and wrote of the “sidewalk ballet” that made her block a joy to live on. One of the businesses she names as a neighbor in good standing is the White Horse Tavern, where according to literary legend Dylan Thomas drank himself to death (“I have had 18 straight whiskies, I think that’s the record”). In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs speaks highly of the influence of bars on her block:

Strangers become an enormous asset on the street on which l live … particularly at night when safety assets are most needed. We are fortunate enough, on the street, to be gifted not only with a locally supported bar and another around the corner, but also with a famous bar that draws continuous troops of strangers from adjoining neighborhoods and even from out of town … this continues until the early hours of the morning … The comings and goings from this bar do much to keep our street reasonably populated until three in the morning, and it is a street always safe to come home to.

She may have felt differently if the shop below her apartment sold shots and not lollipops, but from a utilitarian perspective the point is good.

Update from a reader:

Check out what happened in 24 hours this past weekend on Chicago’s north side, from Wrigley Field to Lincoln Park, the “safe” part of town.

The title of that play-by-play post: “St. Pat’s Festivities Rack Up 21 Arrests, 17 Ambulance Runs In Wrigleyville”.

(Photo: Revelers lead the Pedal Hopper ‘party bike’ down Denver’s Blake Street during the city’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade. By Craig F. Walker/Denver Post)

by Patrick Appel

Russell Saunders blames anti-vaxxers for the measles outbreak in NYC:

This is not some inconvenience to be laughed off. Measles is a highly-contagious illness caused by a virus. It usually presents with a combination of rash, fevers, cough and runny nose, as well as characteristic spots in the mouth. Most patients recover after an unpleasant but relatively uneventful period of sickness.  Unfortunately, about one patient in every 1,000 develops inflammation of the brain, and one to three cases per 1000 in the United States result in death. …

Just over a dozen years ago this illness was considered eliminated in our country, and this year people are being hospitalized for it. All due to the hysteria about a safe, effective vaccine. All based on nothing.

Brian Palmer fears such outbreaks could get more serious:

Falling vaccination rates are now an urgent concern in public health. Measles incidence dropped 99 percent after the vaccine was introduced in 1963. Between 2000 and 2007, the United States saw an average of just 63 measles cases per year, and almost all of those victims brought the disease into the United States from abroad. In 2013, however, the incidence of measles tripled. Unlike in previous years, the majority of the victims contracted the disease here in the United States, meaning that measles outbreaks are now a serious national problem. It could get worse. Vaccination rates in the United States remain at about 90 percent, but in the United Kingdom, where vaccination has fallen below 80 percent, the disease is once again endemic.

Tara C. Smith spells out why she vaccinates:

I’ve spent almost 20 years of my life studying infectious diseases up-close and personal, not from random websites on Google. I’ve worked with viruses and bacteria in the lab. I respect what germs are capable of. I worry about vaccine-preventable diseases coming back because oflow levels of herd immunity. I cry over stories of babies lost to pertussis and other vaccine-preventable diseases. As I’ve noted before, chicken pox has played a role in the deaths of two family members, so I don’t view that as just a “harmless childhood disease.” Vaccines have eradicated or severely reduced many of the deadliest diseases from the past: smallpox, polio, measles, diptheria.

But that’s not the only reason I vaccinate. I vaccinate because I’m all too aware of the nasty diseases out there that still don’t have an effective vaccine. My current work focuses on a germ called methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (“MRSA”), a “superbug” which kills about 11,000 people every year in the United States. We have no vaccine. I previously worked on two different types of Streptococcus: group A and group B. Group B is mainly a problem for babies, and kills about 2,000 of them every year. It leaves many others with permanent brain damage after infection. We have no vaccine. Group A kills about 1,500 people each year in the U.S. and can cause nasty (and deadly) infections like necrotizing fasciitis (the “flesh-eating disease”). We  have no vaccine. These are all despite the fact that we still have antibiotics to treat most of these infections (though untreatable infections are increasing). Infectious diseases still injure and kill, despite our nutritional status, despite appropriate vitamin D levels, despite sanitation improvements, despite breastfeeding, despite handwashing, despite everything we do to keep our kids healthy. This is why protection via vaccination is so important for the diseases where it’s available. If vaccines were available for the diseases I listed above, I’d have my kids get them in a heartbeat.