Tag: Premium

Excuse Me, Mr Coates

Some apologies for getting around to this so late. The torture report came out shortly after Ta-Nehisi’s excoriation of TNR as some kind of “neo-Dixiecrat” rag which had the equivalent of a “Whites Only” sign on it, and, well, first things first. Then I wasn’t blogging last week. So please don’t consider my recent silence some kind of tacit concession to TNC’s incendiary and hurtful critique. Au contraire.

A few brief points about his general argument. From the intensity of his rhetoric, you might infer that Ta-Nehisi was writing about National Review, an opponent of civil rights laws, or even about a neo-Confederate rag, as opposed to The New Republic, a longtime champion of the civil rights movement. But it appears he sees no difference. You’d think he were writing about a magazine filled with bigoted white Southerners, as opposed to an overwhelmingly Jewish set of writers and editors engaged in a long and internecine debate about what it means to be liberal. And the racial politics of TNR from the 1970s through the 1990s cannot be understood without grappling with the bitter and intense struggle between Jewish and African-American civil rights activists in the late 1960s and beyond. Surely Ta-Nehisi knows this. Screen Shot 2014-12-22 at 1.29.49 PMHe grew up in this atmosphere. Maybe he believes TNR’s deviations from the Black Power party line were even worse because of its proclaimed liberalism. But he should at least diagnose it with a modicum of the sophistication he usually applies to American racial history.

As for the case that there was a “Whites Only” sign on the door: Has Ta-Nehisi really never read the extraordinary coverage of black history, literature, intellectual life, and poetry that TNR routinely published? Leon’s back-of-the-book was filled with such essays and reviews. Has it even occurred to him either that the campaign for welfare reform in the front of the book, for example, was conceived by liberals who believed the existing system was hurting black America? That it was a good faith effort precisely to care about an underclass “beyond the barrier”? You can debate its effectiveness and rationale. (President Obama, for the record, has said it was one subject on which he had changed his mind. Is he a neo-Dixiecrat as well?) But to assume that it was not done in good faith – or fueled by cheap racism – is not an argument. It’s just a smear.

Did we fail to find and nurture and promote African-American staffers? We did – along with almost every other magazine and newspaper at the time. I regret this. I tried – but obviously not hard enough. I’m no believer in affirmative action, but I’m a deep believer in the importance of differing life experiences to inform a magazine’s coverage of the world. And I tried mightily hard to find young black writers to contribute to the magazine. Did we fail because we were racists? I’ll leave that up to others to judge. But did we try to include black writers and intellectuals in the magazine’s discourse? Of course we did.

Which brings me to the issue we published on Race & IQ, of which I remain deeply proud and which has been distorted over time to appear as something I don’t recognize at all. Some of this may simply be bad memory or insufficient research (the issue is not online). Ta-Nehisi, for example, hasn’t actually read the issue he excoriates in the two decades since it was published. He is writing about his “feelings” about his memories, which he is perfectly entitled to do. But allow me to explain, with the full issue in my hands, why I think his account is flawed.

The current story-line would lead you to believe that TNR published “The Bell Curve.” But of course we didn’t. It was published by the Free Press, with a huge publicity and marketing budget. TNR wasn’t even the first magazine to weigh in on the controversy. The New York Times Screen Shot 2014-12-22 at 1.47.24 PMMagazine had Charles Murray on its front cover before our issue came out – “The Most Dangerous Intellectual In America” – making the book even more of a hot topic. Every editor of every paper and magazine had to make a call about how to deal with the book. And as the editor of one of the country’s primary journals of opinion, which had already published Murray many times, I decided we should tackle it head on. We should air its most controversial argument and expose it to scrutiny and criticism. These were not, after all, marginal authors. One was a celebrated Harvard professor; the other was, at the time, the most influential social scientist in America. In my view, ducking this issue was not an option and even seemed cowardly. And I had read the entire book in great detail in manuscript to determine if there was a smidgen of eugenics in it, something that I, as a Catholic, find repellent in every way. This was my job as an editor. It passed my own test. Maybe I was wrong. But it was an honest call and one with which (unlike some others) I remain comfortable with today.

And look: I completely respect those who believed that the right approach was to ignore the book entirely and treat it as a pariah text; or to publish only definitive, devastating take-downs. But I hope that an issue-long, 28-page debate on the subject can also be seen as a legitimate alternative option, especially if you’re on the liberal part of the left. Several quick books were published on exactly that model – and no one is accusing those editors of favoring white supremacy. TNR, moreover, had a long history of this kind of diversity. It published, for example, Robert Bork’s early and famous critique of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, while simultaneously supporting its passage.

And Dish readers know how comfortable I found myself in that liberal tradition. Airing taboo stuff and examining and critiquing it has been a running feature of this blog from its beginnings. It is an axiom of mine that anything can be examined and debated – and that the role of journalism is not to police the culture but to engage in it forthrightly and honestly. Again: I respect those who believe the role of a magazine is to bless certain opinions and to stigmatize others, to indicate what is a socially acceptable opinion and what is not. It’s just not the way I have ever rolled on anything. So I responded to the race and IQ controversy exactly as I would any other: put it all on the table and let the facts and arguments take us where they may. In fact, I couldn’t understand why those who loathed the book didn’t leap at the chance to debunk it. If it were so transparently dreck, why not go in for the kill?

As it was, several leading black writers and intellectuals, with ties to the magazine, were eager to. Among them: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Glenn Loury, and Randy Kennedy. They were among the finest African-American minds of the era; and they did not hold back. Henry Louis Gates Jr analogized Murray to a slavery-defender:

By making the enslaved a character fit only for slavery, they excuse themselves for refusing to make the slave a free man.

Hugh Pearson wrote:

Murray and Herrnstein sound like two people who have found a way for racists to rationalize their racism without losing sleep over it. One could call what they are facilitating Racist Chic.

Glenn Loury wrote:

Murray and Herrnstein’s declarations of intent notwithstanding, the fact is one cannot engage in such a discourse without simultaneously signaling other political and moral messages. These other messages bear on the worth of the disadvantaged “clans” and the legitimacy of collective ameliorative efforts undertaken on their behalf. … I would have thought, and have always supposed, that the inherent equality of human beings was an ethical axiom and not a psychologically contingent fact.

The white contributors were just as caustic. Andrew Hacker, whose racial politics echoes TNC’s and who wrote another cover-story on racial justice under my editorship, deconstructed the IQ argument by applying it to ethnic sub-populations among whites:

Yet no one really wants to discuss the question of inherited intelligence as it might apply, say, to individuals of Irish and Italian stock. And when Americans of Russian origins (who are predominantly Jewish) place a premium on higher education, it is attributed to cultural roots rather than an inborn aptitude for this kind of endeavor. Better, for white sensibilities. to focus on presumed black deficiencies. But this is neither surprising nor new.

Legendary psychologist Richard Nisbett wrote:

This is not dispassionate scholarship. It is advocacy of views that are not well supported by the evidence, that do not represent the consensus of scholars and that are likely to do substantial harm to individuals and the social fabric.

Here is a passage from Randy Kennedy’s piece in the same issue:

Those who strongly disagree, as I do, with [Murray’s] analysis and prescriptions should not attempt to prevent Murray from stating his and his late collaborator’s, views. Attempting to muzzle him will only give the book additional, bankable publicity. Nor should critics feel that they must disagree with everything the authors say. Sometimes the authors make good points, as when they discuss anxieties surrounding the question of environmental versus genetic determinants of alleged racial differences in intelligence. Readers interested in evaluating the Murray-Herrnstein enterprise should show patience by engaging in and waiting for careful siftings of its intellectual merits and demerits. They should resist having their agendas set and their minds made up on terms prescribed by cultural entrepreneurs who exploit controversiality for the purpose of financial and political profit.

Is that erudite neo-Dixiecratism? I simply refuse to feel ashamed for publishing this debate, for showing that liberals need not be afraid of any set of ideas or empirical claims, and for believing that the best response is to air all of it, confident that the truth will ultimately win. That, in my view, is the essence of liberalism and I make absolutely no apologies for it. And the space granted to the critiques of the book was almost twice the space given to Murray and Herrnstein, and laid out at the beginning of the magazine, with the extract at the very end. It doesn’t get any fairer than that, which was why it was no surprise that this electric, passion-filled issue sold more copies than any in the magazine’s history.

For Ta-Nehisi, none of this mattered or matters:

I knew that TNR’s much celebrated “heterodoxy” was built on a strain of erudite neo-Dixiecratism. When The Bell Curve excerpt was published, one of my professors handed out the issue to every interested student. This was not a compliment. This was knowing your enemy.

Kennedy and Loury and Gates were the enemy? Open, spirited debate was the enemy? That, it seems to me, tells you a lot more about Ta-Nehisi than them or me.

(For an update on this post, see here.)

Why Police Feel They’re Under Siege

Reflecting on the senseless murder of two officers, a reader passes along the disgusting video seen above:

I follow my local precinct on Twitter, to get neighborhood news. And a week or so before the murders, they posted a link to a video with protestors chanting for cops to be killed. I think it was going around in police circles.

I think we have to understand the police response in this context. They felt very much under attack by the mayor, who didn’t have their back against the protestors. And they saw this video, and many of them said someone was going to kill a cop. And then someone killed two cops.

My sympathies are very much with the protestors in general (though not these protestors). When I saw the video, I thought the cops were being hysterical. I thought, of course no one is going to do anything to the cops; no one ever does anything to the cops. And I was totally wrong.

Another reader is disappointed with our coverage of police issues:

I’ve been a cop since 2006 and will be the first to admit that some cops are evil and have no right wearing the badge, but good cops despise those cops. In the aftermath of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner deaths, a narrative was pushed painting all cops as racists bent on murdering black males. While you haven’t been as anti-cop as others, you have contributed to the narrative.

With every other topic you examine, you report or post emails from as many different points of view as possible. Most times you post emails from readers or professionals directly involved in the topic; however, I’ve yet to see a single point of view from a cop.

Additionally, after a grand jury failed to indict Darren Wilson, you published articles stating how rare it is for grand juries to not indict people. It gave the perception that police get away with murder because of their position. You completely ignored the fact that at the very same time in South Carolina, three white cops were indicted for shooting unarmed black men.

I have no issue with questioning police tactics or use of force policies. In fact, I believe it’s an important component of a free society. What I take issue with is not giving an equal voice to the overwhelming majority of cops who are good people. This leads me to my last point.

On Saturday, two NYPD cops were executed simply because of the uniform they wore. They were sitting in their patrol car when they were ambushed. The murderer, whose name doesn’t deserve mentioning, killed those cops to “avenge” Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

It had taken almost two days for you to post about the shooting. I read the post and realized it’s not a condemnation of the shooting; the deaths of two cops is almost secondary to its point. The article is a condemnation of Giuliani and Union President Lynch for suggesting an anti-cop attitude may have contributed to the murders. The rebuttals to Giuliani and Lynch argue that they have no right to feel that way because the protestors are just expressing themselves.

You referred to police turning their backs on de Blasio as “antics.” Lynch has been accused of smearing, ranting, and being divisive to the point of savagery. In one fell swoop, you and your fellow journalists defend de Blasio’s and the protestor’s right to free speech while condemning Giuliani’s and Lynch’s use of it. You haven’t taken a second to allow a cop or their representatives to explain why they feel the way they do. I can tell you for a fact that every cop I know feels there is an anti-cop movement taking place.

Update from a reader, “Are you SURE that video is real?”, pointing to another viral video of protesters allegedly chanting violent anti-cop messages:

A Fox affiliate in Baltimore aired a segment on Sunday showing footage from a “Justice For All” demonstration in Washington, D.C. in which it edited a chant to sound like protestors were shouting “kill a cop.”

“At this rally in Washington, D.C. protestors chanted, ‘we won’t stop, we can’t stop, so kill a cop,'” the WBFF broadcast said.

But the full footage, flagged by Gawker on Monday via C-SPAN, revealed that the chant was “we won’t stop, we can’t stop, ’til killer cops are in cell blocks.”

The Biggest State To Ban Fracking

New York’s ban was announced last week:

At a cabinet meeting Wednesday morning, acting state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker released the results of a years-long study into the public health implications of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Zucker said the benefits of tapping natural gas deposits in western New York did not outweigh the potential risk to public health.

Jay Michaelson reads through that report:

[T]he shortest summary of A Public Health Review of High Volume Hydraulic Fracturing for Shale Gas Development (PDF) is: We don’t know if it’s safe or not.

As the title implies, the New York report is not a study, but a review of existing studies—dozens of them, from around the country—as well as conversations with officials in other states who are also studying the issue. In addition to the tens of detailed studies, the report identifies 13 comprehensive, systematic ones that might settle the matter once and for all. “These major study initiatives may eventually reduce uncertainties regarding health impacts of HVHF [fracking] and could contribute to a much more complete knowledge base for managing HVHF risks,” the report says. “However, it will be years before most of these major initiatives are completed”

Sigh. Even the most eagerly anticipated study, the EPA’s analysis of fracking’s potential effects on drinking water, begun in 2011, is not due to be complete until 2016.

Chris Mooney compares New York’s actions to those of Maryland, which recently approved fracking. He concludes that the biggest difference “may be that unlike Maryland’s research, the New York health report pretty clearly hews to an approach known as the ‘precautionary principle‘”:

It is important to recognize that the precautionary principle is not a purely scientific position — nor is it an anti-scientific one. Rather, it represents a risk-aversive orientation towards scientific uncertainty — a conscious decision that unknown risks are too serious to ignore.

That’s why criticisms of New York’s move on “scientific grounds” don’t make much sense. For instance, one blog post at the pro-fracking site Energy in Depth sought to individually critique some of the health-related studies that fed into the New York report. But that’s kind of missing the point: These studies don’t need to be the unassailable “truth” in order for New York to justify its precautionary position. Rather, the state simply needs to be able to point to a body of evidence that, on the whole, raises concern.

Ronald Bailey rejects this reasoning:

A simpler formulation of the precautionary principle is: Never do anything for the first time. Basically, ignorance can be used as an excuse to stop anything of which one disapproves.

Bloomberg View’s editors also argue that “answer isn’t to ban fracking”:

It’s to regulate it more carefully and intelligently. Stronger casing requirements for wells, for example, can prevent wastewater from escaping into the ground, and there must be strict rules about how to dispose of the wastewater that reaches the surface. Companies that don’t follow the rules should face meaningful fines.

These principles haven’t always been applied in other states that allow fracking, which is why the practice has a mixed reputation. If Cuomo believes that current best practices in other states aren’t sufficient to protect public health, he would do more good by issuing rules that are — and then challenging drillers to meet them.

Sean Collins points out that that the “areas of New York with the most potential for fracking, such as those in the ‘southern tier’, are also among the most economically depressed regions in the entire United States”:

The question of moving forward with fracking, as with other forms of industrial development, is not simply a technical, scientific one. People’s livelihoods and prosperity are at stake, and the science doesn’t tell us what value we should place on lifting people out of poverty. The decision to ban fracking in upstate New York is based on flimsy ‘it’s possible something bad could happen’ grounds, at a time when such drilling is being deployed successfully and safely elsewhere. The decision was made in the context of grinding poverty and over the heads of the local people who want it.

But Philip Bump found that even regions which might benefit economically from fracking were divided:

The Finger Lakes region, a bit further north, depends heavily on tourism. In 2012, I spoke with the Chamber of Commerce in Penn Yan, N.Y., at the tip of Keuka Lake, to gauge how the business community felt about the possibility of fracking. A representative said they were split: businesses that depended on tourism were worried about pollution in the lake, other businesses supported the possibility of job growth (which is very real; three cities in North Dakota were among the fastest-growing in the country in 2013, thanks to the boom in the Bakken shale formation in that state).

That was 2012. Over the past year, unemployment rates in the state have fallen, just as they have broadly across the country. Where the Finger Lakes were peppered with pro- and anti-fracking signs two years ago, this year, the signs dealt more often with Cuomo’s also-contentious gun control bill. While a lot of people upstate are still out of work, the urgency has faded a bit.

Americans Learn To Stop Worrying And Love Torture

12.20.14

Those are tough statistics to absorb:

A majority of Americans think that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half of the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. By a margin of almost 2 to 1 — 59 percent to 31 percent — those interviewed said that they support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying that they produced valuable intelligence. In general, 58 percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”

This is neoconservatism’s biggest victory since the invasion of Iraq. It means, first of all, a culture immune to fact. The Senate Report concludes from a mountain of CIA documents that no good intelligence was procured through torture – and yet by 2 – 1, Americans prefer to believe a fantasy, peddled only by the torturers themselves. The only fantasy many are prepared to abandon is that the CIA’s program was not somehow “torture”. For that admission, those of us who have tried to exhume and explain the grisly facts can receive some credit. But that credit is instantly wiped out by the fact that even when it is torture, most Americans support it.

In this struggle, we always knew we could never undo the horrors of the past. What we were trying to do was to expose a criminal conspiracy at the heart of the American government to subvert the law and adopt the tactics of totalitarian states toward prisoners – in order to prevent any of it ever happening again. We achieved the one at the expense of the other. No one can seriously doubt that there was a conspiracy, that it involved the knowing subversion of the rule of law, that it committed acts of absolute evil, and that it sunk America’s international reputation to unprecedented lows. Yet a majority of Americans endorse all of it. Because 9/11.

And the staggering levels of support for torture by Christians merely reveals that very few of them are Christians at all. Torture is not a gray area for Christians. It is the darkest stain there is. And the fact that 65 percent of white Catholics back torture tells you a lot about the terribly weak leadership of the bishops on this core and central issue. They were more interested in how to stop women getting contraceptives than standing up and being counted on torture.

Several factors play into this: the shameless and relentless campaign by the torturers to insist they did nothing wrong and even, against all the evidence, “saved lives”; the impact of CIA-blessed popular culture fantasies like “24” or “Zero Dark Thirty” which made torture seem heroic; the fathomless pragmatism of president Obama, utterly in hock to the CIA; the bureaucratic skills and sabotaging of the report by John Brennan; the broader polarization that meant that if one political party endorsed war crimes as a policy, roughly half the population would fall in line; the paranoia and panic that Bush and Cheney spread after 9/11; and the underlying American propensity for rationalizing revenge and violence, especially against anyone with dark skin and a funny name.

As an immigrant to America, this is a bit of a gut-check, to say the least. A reader channels some of what I’m feeling:

I’m a naturalized US citizen, as is my wife and kids. My wife and I were born and raised in Ireland, our kids born in London but we moved to US when they were very young. Even before this thoroughly depressing week of news on torture and politics in general, both my kids (now in college) made uncoordinated separate comments that they are now not sure if they see any future in staying in the US. My son has even opted to go to college in Canada, he feels so strongly about it.

As I read more and more of your coverage on the torture debate and the denials, it is starting to feel like I have been thrown into a dark dank pit and left to rot.

We’ve chosen this country at a moment when it has chosen to embrace torture as an instrument of policy. And that all but inverts the meaning of America.

For me, America has always been about freedom. You can criticize this country all you want, and of course it has its flaws. But that it gives countless millions a new chance at life, that it embraces hard work and new voices, that it values experimentation and exploration, that it churns with an individualism and a vibrancy found almost nowhere else is indisputable. It’s why I fell in love with America almost as soon as I got here.

But the embrace of state-enforced torture against prisoners is not just a flaw in that freedom; it is its utter negation. If a state can torture anyone – including an American citizen like Jose Padilla – limited government is over. Torture gives the torturer the ability to create fact and evidence, to enable further torture and further new “facts” to perpetuate whatever public line a government wants to propagate. It is the most extreme example of how the power of the state can utterly destroy the agency of a human being. It is tyranny in its most concentrated and totalist form. It is the negation of the Constitution. The expulsion of it from Western Europe over the last few centuries was a sine qua non for the emergence of democratic life and culture. And yet America has now reinstated it as a core part of the republic. If we ever allow a Republican to be president again, it could well return.

Despair is one option. But it is a weak one. Becoming or being an American seems to me to be to embrace a struggle, not to bask in perfection. What we have to do now is very hard. It is not to allow this to be put in the rear-view mirror, as president Obama shamelessly wants us to do; it is not to acquiesce to a government which has no effective way to regulate or control its own deep state; it is not to wallow in cheap contempt for most Americans’ comfort with barbarism, as long as it is their barbarism. It is, quite simply, to keep pursuing the facts and to keep pursuing the war criminals. What we need is a careful strategy for first firing and then prosecuting these criminals still walking the halls at Langley. There are no statutes of limitations on these grave crimes against humanity. The only limit to securing justice in this is our patience and fortitude. And we need to have copious supplies of both.

ISIS Suffers A Defeat

IRAQ-CONFLICT-KURDS

The Kurds have beat them back:

Kurdish forces in northern Iraq celebrated their biggest victory yet over ISIS on Friday after breaking, with U.S. air support, the lengthy jihadi siege of Mount Sinjar and freeing hundreds of trapped members of the Yazidi religious sect. The Kurds claimed at least 100 Islamic militants were killed in the two-day battle to lift the siege. The victory by about 8,000 Peshmerga fighters will boost the Kurds’ confidence in their efforts to roll back the territorial gains made in northern Iraq by the fighters for the so-called Islamic State.

But the fighting isn’t over:

While Kurdish fighters in Iraq have pushed deeper into the town of Sinjar, held by ISIS group, they are facing stiff resistance from the Sunni militants who captured it in August, the Associated Press reported.  One of the fighters, Bakhil Elias, described the overnight clashes which continued till Monday as “fierce” and that ISIS militants are using snipers.

Dexter Filkins puts the news in context:

For the Kurds, regaining control of Sinjar would restore most of the territories they lost to the ISIS summer offensive. And while that would place them in control of the highway that runs into western Mosul, it’s unclear whether the Kurds would send troops there. Western Mosul, like the rest of the areas under ISIS control, are overwhelmingly Arab; the Kurds, who ultimately have independence on their minds, may be reluctant to try to take control of non-Kurdish lands.

Eli Lake observes that “the question of a Kurdish state is getting harder to avoid”:

The peshmerga own some tanks, some rifles and have in the past worked very closely with American special-operations forces in Iraq. But they are still organized like a militia, with various commanders more loyal to local Kurdish political leaders than to the Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG. Between 1994 and 1997, forces loyal to the two major Kurdish parties fought one another in a civil war.

On a visit to Washington last month, Fuad Hussein, Barzani’s chief of staff, told reporters that his government was now beginning the process of creating a centralized Kurdish army. And this is where U.S. training of three Kurdish brigades could make a major difference. If the peshmerga transforms from a localized guerilla militia into a modern army, then one of the remaining pieces necessary for Kurdish independence will fall into place.

And Walter Russell Mead recommends that, “for now at least, keep our gloating in check”:

ISIS has so far demonstrated a knack for repeatedly solving problems that others assumed were insoluble. It has conquered much more territory much more quickly than anyone expected, it has established a global presence and a successful brand, it has attracted and organized huge numbers of foreign fighters and has made inroads among rival Sunni tribes in both Syria and Iraq. We can hope that the stresses under which it now labors will cause it to fragment and fail, but we should certainly not count on it. This is an extremely dangerous organization, and the problems it now faces are, we should not forget, the results of its startling successes.

(Photo: Fighters of Kurdish Peshmerga forces get ready for an operation in the town of Sinjar on December 20, 2014 at Mount Sinjar, west of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. By Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images)

For Richer, For Poorer

Philip Cohen explains the impact of the recession on US marriages:

In the case of divorce, the pattern is counter-intuitive. Although economic hardship and insecurity adds stress to relationships and increases the risk of divorce, the overall divorce rate usually drops when unemployment rates rise. Researchers believe that, like births, people postpone divorces during economic crises because of the costs of divorcing—not just legal fees, but also housing transitions (which were especially difficult in the Great Recession) and employment disruptions. My own research found that there was a sharp drop in the divorce rate in 2009 that can reasonably be attributed to the recession. But, as is suspected will be the case with births, there appears to have been a divorce-rate rebound in the years that followed.

Meanwhile, Andrew Gelman flags a “recent research report from M.V. Lee Badgett and Christy Mallory,” indicating that divorce is less of a threat to same-sex couples:

The first wave of same-sex marriage is not necessarily typical of what will happen in future years, and in other states. So it will be interesting to see this go forward. It would also be interesting to see the age distribution of the newlyweds. I’d expect that in the first years of same-sex marriage we’d see a lot of older couples and then the average age of marriage would settle down to a lower level, comparable to that of traditional wives and husbands.

Finally, Aran reports that “female couples make up 51% of all same-sex relationships, but 64% of legally formalized relationships” but the data in the linked report does not separate out the dissolution rate by sex (a data partition that can be done with same-sex marriage but not, of course, with traditional marriage data). Many more interesting things to look at.

What Does Cuba Mean For 2016? Ctd

Last week, Rand Paul voiced his support for normalizing relations with Cuba. Harry Enten expects Paul to pay a price for doing so:

In [Florida International University]’s 2008 survey — which had similar overall results to their 2014 poll — John McCain supporters favored the embargo 73 percent to 27 percent. Obama voters were almost exactly the opposite: 70 percent against and 30 percent for. The embargo’s biggest supporters are older Cuban-Americans, who are quite Republican-leaning, compared to younger Cuban-Americans, who are quite Democratic-leaning.

These Cuban-American Republicans could easily swing a relatively close Florida Republican primary. Cuban-Americans make up a sizable 8 percent of the primary vote in Florida, which is greater than the 6 percent Cuban-Americans make up in the general election. More importantly, though, Cuban-Americans have voted in a bloc in the past two presidential primaries.

Allahpundit agrees that Rand is in dangerous territory:

It’s not even Cuba per se that’s risky for Paul; it’s the perception that he’s so much different from other Republican candidates on foreign policy that he’s more inclined to agree with — gasp — Barack Obama than he is with Marco Rubio and the rest of his own party’s candidates. Opposing the Cuba embargo might please libertarians but it probably won’t him many extra conservative votes, especially in the primaries. Being seen as simpatico with Obama’s approach to international relations could hurt him, though, with exactly the sort of righties he’s targeting for votes.

Larison differs:

Paul’s position may not help him with that many voters in the Florida Republican primary electorate, but it’s the obvious position that he would have been expected to take. It’s also the obvious move for anyone who identifies as a conservative realist as Paul does. Had he not come out in favor of normalization, it would have given would-be supporters a new reason to doubt him, and he would have missed an easy opportunity to distinguish himself from the rest of the party’s likely 2016 field on an important new foreign policy issue. And Paul is far from being the only Republican inclined to support normalization. Not only are there other members of Congress that take the same view, including Jeff Flake and Justin Amash, but according to at least one survey taken this year more Republicans nationally support this position than oppose it. Republicans are far from monolithic on this question, and most don’t share Rubio’s hard-line views.

 

What’s Kim Jong Un’s Game?

Josh Rogin tries to understand North Korea’s reasons for hacking Sony:

For Kim, it’s all about himself and his ongoing effort to consolidate power. Therefore, his image is the one thing he cannot afford to take chances on.

“This is a signal of the fragility of Kim Jong Un’s rule,” said James A. Lewis, a senior fellow and long time North Korea watcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We can take a joke, Kim can’t because he doesn’t want his people to get any ideas. The last thing he wants is his subjects to see him as an object of ridicule, much less able to be assassinated.”

Max Fisher, on the other hand, contends that North Korea “wants us to see them as crazy, irrational, volatile — and dangerous”:

Kim Jong Un isn’t stupid: he knows that his weak, impoverished state is much weaker than the US and South Korea and Japan, all of whom would just love to see his government collapse. North Korea can only deter those enemies by being more threatening and dangerous; it will never be stronger, so it has to be crazier instead, always more willing to escalate. This convinces the US and other countries, even if they see through Kim’s game, that it’s just easier to stay away from North Korea than to risk provoking the country into another flamboyant attack. …

This strategy of portraying itself as crazy is remarkably effective at securing North Korea’s strategic goals. But it is also quite dangerous. By design, the risk of escalation is high, so as to make the situation just dangerous enough that foreign leaders will want to deescalate. And it puts pressure on American, South Korean, and Japanese leaders to decide how to respond — knowing that any punishment will only serve to bolster North Korean propaganda and encourage further belligerence. In this sense, the attacks are calibrated to be just severe enough to demand our attention, but not so bad as to lead to all-out war.

The Sony hack certainly demanded out attention. Though he fully admits that the hack was “a far smaller thing” that 9/11, Drum sees some similarities in terms of “bang for the buck”:

Despite what press reports say, it wasn’t really all that sophisticated. It was, to be sure, a step up from box cutters, but it’s not like North Korea tried to hack into a nuclear power plant or the Pentagon. They picked a soft target. In fact, based on press reports, it sounds like even in the vast sea of crappy IT security that we call America, Sony Pictures was unusually lax. Hacking into their network was something that probably dozens of groups around the world could have done if they had thought about it. And like al-Qaeda before them, North Korea thought about it. And they realized that a Sony Pictures hack, done right, could have an outsized emotional impact. Like 9/11, it was a brilliant example of using a relatively crude tool to produce a gigantic payoff.

The Slain Officers In Brooklyn

Brooklyn Officers

Two NYC police officers were shot and killed on Saturday while sitting in their patrol car:

[Ismaaiyl Abdulah Brinsley] approached a marked police vehicle parked in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood around 2:45 p.m. He “took a shooting stance” and fired a handgun several times through the window, New York Police Commissioner William Bratton said at a news conference.

Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were struck in the head, and taken to a hospital, where they were pronounced dead. Police said Brinsley, 28, ran into a subway station, where he shot himself in the head.

Caroline Bankoff runs through what we know about the shooter. Rudy Giuliani was quick to blame the recent protests against police abuse:

Giuliani went out of his way to be clear that he’s not blaming a handful of bad apples. He thinks the culprits are everyone protesting police misconduct everywhere. “The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence — a lot of them lead to violence — all of them lead to a conclusion: The police are bad. The police are racist,” said Giuliani. “That is completely wrong. Actually, the people who do the most for the black community in America are the police.”

Along the same lines, NYPD union president Pat Lynch ranted about the mayor having “blood on the hands” and officers turned their backs on de Blasio at a presser. Bouie pushes back on such antics:

Despite what these police organizations and their allies allege, there isn’t an anti-police movement in this country, or at least, none of any significance.

The people demonstrating for Eric Garner and Michael Brown aren’t against police, they are for better policing. They want departments to treat their communities with respect, and they want accountability for officers who kill their neighbors without justification. When criminals kill law-abiding citizens, they’re punished. When criminals kill cops, they’re punished. But when cops kill citizens, the system breaks down and no one is held accountable. That is what people are protesting. …

The idea that citizens can’t criticize police—that free speech excludes scrutiny of state violence—is disturbing. Since, if free speech doesn’t include the right to challenge the official use of force, then it isn’t really free speech.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar argues along the same lines:

In a Dec. 21, 2014 article about the shooting, the Los Angeles Times referred to the New York City protests as “anti-police marches,” which is grossly inaccurate and illustrates the problem of perception the protestors are battling. The marches are meant to raise awareness of double standards, lack of adequate police candidate screening, and insufficient training that have resulted in unnecessary killings. Police are not under attack, institutionalized racism is. Trying to remove sexually abusive priests is not an attack on Catholicism, nor is removing ineffective teachers an attack on education. Bad apples, bad training, and bad officials who blindly protect them, are the enemy. And any institution worth saving should want to eliminate them, too.

And Tomasky defends de Blasio against the NYPD’s smears:

Pat Lynch, by speaking of officers’ blood on the steps of City Hall and urging his cops to sign an online petition that de Blasio not attend their funerals should they be killed in the line of duty, is doing… what? His behavior is divisive to the point of savagery. He is actively trying to make the people who follow him not only despise de Blasio but despise and oppose any acknowledgement that police can be faulted in any way, that black fear of police has any basis in reality. If Al Sharpton did the same with regard to police departments tout suite, which he does not anymore—he denounced the murder of the two cops immediately—he’d be drummed out of society.

Still, de Blasio should find ways to rise above all this. That’s part of the responsibility that comes with being mayor. But he should not back down from what he said.

(Photo: Officer Wenjian Liu (left) and Officer Rafael Ramos (Right). From the NYPD.)

We’ll Meet Again

 

So I arrived at the usual spot on 54th Street without knowing quite what to expect (and not for the first time). The clue – we were told to memorize the tune and lyrics of “We’ll Meet Again” – didn’t require much prep on my part. The song is close to a national anthem in England – which may be why Samantha Power and I seemed to be the only ones really belting it. So I arrived a little lubricated and was assigned to “Group 4” in an office on the second floor. Meandering up the stairs, I stumbled in and realized, the way you do, that since all my fellow Group 4’s were sitting in a row and not saying much, that I was going to have to shake hands with every single one of them, and introduce myself. Like some strange dream set in someone else’s office, Charlie Rose, Katie Couric, Mark Cuban, Peter Frampton, and Jeff Bridges were the openers. Eventually I said hi to the dude sitting on the desk nearby – Michael Stipe. Then, just like at Studio 54, Kissinger, the tiny, reptilian war criminal, showed up, merging into the cocktail hour like a lizard on a sun-drenched rock. Next door, I could see the “face” of Barry Manilow. Around the corner, I saw a woman get out of a Big Bird costume. And what do you say exactly when Terry Gross just wanders up and says hi? That you’re busy hiding from Paul Krugman?

I had one obvious option – the beautiful and long-limbed ballet dancer, David Hallberg. Maybe I could talk to him. Even though an injury had robbed us all of the sight of him in tights, at least I could talk with him. And so we made jokes most of the night, and bonded in the face of so much celebrity wattage. It is, in case you’re wondering, impossible to interact with any of these people in any natural way. What on earth am I going to say to Mark Cuban, for Pete’s sake? Meeting the super-famous, in a context where you have nothing in common but a very gifted booker, is at first bewildering and then really boring. A reader writes:

Andrew, you were on the spot: did David Hallberg ever take his hands off Katie Couric? I’m sure she was cool with it, but I’m curious. :)

My impression was that Couric couldn’t take her hands of Hallberg. But I got the last dance.

And, of course, I choked up a little in the rehearsal. I fell in love with Colbert the first night of the show. Even blogged it:

Pure Genius: Last night’s Colbert Report, of course. O’Reilly fileted. My only worry is: how can he keep it up?

But he did, of course, and then some. Which is worth noting in and of itself. This was an unprecedentedly sustained act of character improvisation. I wasn’t crazy to doubt he would pull it off. I just didn’t realize how deeply brilliant and able he is. No one interviewed a politician as freshly as he did, or took down a pretentious author with more finesse. His writers were and are the best on television – deeply read, darkly funny. His professionalism was staggering. Nothing was ever phoned in – night after night. I saw him meticulously prepare performances, tweaking props, finessing green screens, hitting every note (he re-taped his final song before we left the studio that night), and almost never flubbing a line – while making sure to compliment you if you got yours right.

I was a part of Colbert nation in two ways: his most frequent guest but also a pathological viewer. The show lasted almost as long as I’ve been together with Aaron, and it became part of our married life. We’d watch it without fail – and it became an act of adultery for either of us to watch it without the other. Even last week, I waited to get home to watch the last four shows (Aaron gets a pass for shows I’m actually on). I joked to Stephen that we would soon see if my marriage could survive the end of his show. I guess there’s always South Park.

I also have to say Colbert remains a Catholic role model for me – a deeply humane and kind man, a generous soul, someone so totally at peace with this modern cacophony, and yet also committed to a way of life that could not be more opposed to it. For so many who regard our faith as a cramped anachronism, he was a real beacon of what a modern Catholic can be: open, funny, decent, humble. He helped keep my faith alive in a dark decade. And made me laugh at the same time. Of whom else on television could I say such a thing?