Tag: Premium

Are Colleges Failing Their Mentally Ill Students? Ctd

Rachel Aviv reports on a Princeton undergraduate asked to leave the school following a suicide attempt:

In balancing the rights of students against the need for safety and order, many universities require suicidal students to leave campus. At Yale, Brown, George Washington University, Hunter College, Northwestern, and several other schools, students have protested these policies, by initiating litigation, submitting complaints to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, or writing columns in campus newspapers.

W.P. retained a lawyer, Julia Graff, an attorney at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, who said that she gets calls every month from students who were asked to withdraw after their universities became aware of their mental disorders. “Universities don’t seem to understand that mental-health disabilities are chronic illnesses, and it is not uncommon to have to be briefly hospitalized now and again,” she told me. “It doesn’t mean that you are not competent to be a student.”

Two weeks after being banned from his classes, W.P. appealed Princeton’s decision. In a long letter, he noted that the university prides itself on its diverse student body—he pointed out that his residential college called itself “a place where individuals could be accepted for who they are”—and students with mental disabilities, he wrote, contributed to that diversity. …

W.P.’s private psychiatrist, to whom he’d been referred by Princeton’s health center, submitted a letter that stated that W.P. did not pose a threat to himself. “An important aspect of W.P.’s recovery is a sense of purpose,” the psychiatrist wrote. “Requiring a leave of absence and excluding him from the university community at this time could be detrimental to his health and well-being.”

The appeal was denied.

Previous Dish on the topic here.

Getting Racists Fired, Ctd

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Sam Biddle updates us on the troubling tumblr:

The premise of [Racists Getting Fired] is simple, and a perfectly representative product of 2014 Internet: send screenshots of people saying racist shit on Facebook or Twitter to their employers, get them canned, and thus end American racism, or something. This is foolproof until someone uses the formula to frame someone who didn’t actually say anything racist. Take Brianna Rivera, who apparently said some terrible things on Facebook. But according to the operators of the RGF Tumblr, this turned out to in fact not be Brianna Rivera at all, but her ex-boyfriend, who changed his Facebook profile to resemble hers.

Freddie comments:

As with carceral feminism, this kind of thing seems to stem from the presumption that good outcomes flow naturally from good intentions, which just isn’t how the world works. Honestly, it reminds me of nothing more than the whole Lena Dunham “sexual abuse” fiasco.

It was mind-blowing to me to see someone like Kevin Williamson so easily able to whip up an old fashioned sex panic among leftists. But it’s an inevitable result of associating the work of progressive politics with having a hair trigger, with demonizing those who ask us to be careful and restrained, and of treating overwhelming digital character assassination as a useful political tool.

Beyond the obvious ugliness of situations like this, the problem with a site like Racists Getting Fired is that it reinforces the notion that fighting racism is easy and fun. Look, we’re fighting racism! All it takes is some screencaps and a Tumblr account!

Meanwhile, a reader calls me out:

Last week you said you “love this approach” when the vile comments of misogynists get forwarded to their moms, but if someone calls Obama a stupid nigger on Twitter and I pass it along to his coworkers, I’m part of the PC identity police.  Aren’t these the same thing?

I think a simple recourse to an abusive boy’s mom is a sane, non-flaming way to get the abuse to stop. That’s all. Trying to get an adult fired is something much more serious.

Jeb’s Plan To Lose The Primary

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush Speaks To Long Island Association Event

These comments by Jeb Bush have attracted attention:

“I don’t know if I’d be a good candidate or a bad one,” Bush told an audience of CEOs at a conference sponsored by the Wall Street Journal. “I kinda know how a Republican can win, whether it’s me or somebody else — and it has to be much more uplifting, much more positive, much more wiling to be, ‘lose the primary to win the general’ without violating your principles. It’s not an easy task, to be honest with you.”

Larison questions Jeb’s strategy

The problem with this isn’t that a relative moderate can’t win the Republican nomination. In fact, it is rarely the case that the relative moderate hasn’t won. Jeb Bush’s mistake here is in thinking that a candidate can run what the article calls “an unapologetically pragmatic bid” and still prevail. Most conservative voters are used to being taken for granted during the general election, and they’re usually willing to play along provided that they think that the nominee shares their priorities. However, the would-be nominee has to convince them first that he is mostly on their side on major issues. If Jeb Bush thinks there are a lot of Republican voters hungering for bland “centrism” with a dynastic name attached to it, he is in for an unpleasant surprise.

S.V. Dáte wonders whether the GOP base will deny Jeb a shot at the nomination:

Of all the 2016 Republican names out there, Jeb Bush is uniquely positioned to make those connections with minority communities, particularly Latinos, while offering as conservative a policy agenda as can be imagined. He doesn’t have to make a production out of liking Hispanics—he for all intents and purposes is Hispanic. At the same time, his Florida record shows that he actually was the “severely conservative governor” that Mitt Romney told people he was.

And yet, because of the Republican activist base’s fixation with Common Core and illegal immigration, Jeb could find himself such a pariah in the early primary states that all the money and all the organization in the world cannot overcome it.

The far right doesn’t seem to be be taking Jeb seriously. Here’s Ace of Spades:

I wouldn’t worry too much about Jeb Bush. This is a vanity run. This is going nowhere. He will be laughed out of the race by South Carolina.

Powerline’s John Hinderaker also scoffs at Jeb:

Maybe Bush’s idea is that he can sneak through the primaries as the only moderate (or whatever he is) in a crowded field of conservatives. Well, why not? Look how well it worked for Jon Huntsman.

At the very least, Greg Sargent hopes a Jeb run will force the GOP to have a real debate over immigration:

Republicans know they are against Obama’s deportation relief, yet continue to dodge on what should be done with all these people instead. Should we deport them all? Republicanswon’tsay. Legalize them? Perhaps, but only at some unspecified point later, if we meet unspecified conditions. Which means they are farther than ever from engaging this issue’s core moral and policy dilemmas. A Bush candidacy would be interesting: Even as he’d be relentlessly criticized for selling out to Obama’s “amnesty,” perhaps the resulting debate might challenge that GOP non-engagement.

(Photo by Andy Jacobsohn/Getty Images)

Prepping For The Torture Report

CIA Report

I’m told we could finally have the definitive account (so far) of the Bush-Cheney torture program as soon as early next week. The Senators eventually had to cave to the Obama administration’s insistence on rendering large parts of the report unintelligible through redactions – or risk having the report buried for ever. That’s how hardball Obama was in protecting the war criminals he still employs. As a result, it will be very hard to follow how various CIA officials crafted, spun and lied about this barbarism over time. The result, ironically, is that the entire CIA is tarred with this brush, when so many in that agency did what they could to stop this brutal betrayal of this country’s core alleged values. But that is what Obama wanted: no actual accountability for any actual human being. When it comes to the gravest crimes, no perpetrator must be named, let alone punished. If you want one sign of how the CIA is a law unto itself, more powerful than any president, ponder Obama’s inaction over the last six years.

Dan Froomkin has a helpful guide today of what to look for in the report. I’d emphasize the following points.

It’s amazing that we managed even to get this. Obama has been determined, we now know, to protect the perpetrators of torture from the get-go, and to ensure that there was minimal transparency on such a vital issue. The Justice Department’s own investigation of some of the more astonishing acts of barbarity was, accordingly, a farce. The Durham report never interviewed a single victim of the torture, while finding that we should all move on, nothing to see here, etc. In fact, the only reason we have any transparency at all is because CIA honcho Jose Rodriguez destroyed the tapes of the waterboarding sessions in a brazen act of destroying potentially criminal evidence. When challenged on this, the CIA insisted that there was other evidence proving that the torture sessions were not, in fact, torture at all. And that’s how the Senate Committee started pulling at the threads.

We owe John McCain and Lindsay Graham some sincere thanks. I’ve had plenty to say about their unreconstructed neocon view of foreign policy, but on this core question of the rule of law and basic American principles, they have not wavered. They will give this report the bipartisan cover it needs, and which much of the GOP wants to deny it.

The report is very limited. What it details is drawn entirely from internal CIA documents, and nothing else. No one was interviewed – either torture victims or torturers or their enablers. GTMO is not in the report; the broader military is not in the report; only the CIA’s torture sessions in its own black sites are in the report – a tiny fraction of the vast apparatus of prisoner abuse that was set in motion by president Bush’s early and fateful decision to waive Geneva protections for terror suspects. So what we will read was just one small aspect of the barbarism this country inflicted on so many in its custody.

The report doesn’t assign any blame either. It does not prove who in the political branch authorized this or who should be held responsible for it. It will therefore disappoint many who want to see proof of, say, Cheney’s or Addington’s direct responsibility – or any form of actual accountability. What it will show, rather, is far more shocking evidence of far worse torture than we have previously been aware of (so I am told), and proof that the CIA knew that the program was ineffective.

This is what will have to do the work: the internal deliberations of the war criminals, in their own notes and documents, about both the scale of the barbarity and the astonishing deception about it that the CIA kept perpetrating. That deception was not only of the public, but also, it appears, of the political branch. We may well find out that Bush and Cheney didn’t fully know what was going on, either because Bush did not want to know or because they were consistently misled about it. In other words, it might even exonerate the political branch in some limited ways.

We must not fall victim to the drip-drip-drip nature of the revelations over the last decade of the torture program. It can inure us to the shock we once felt after Abu Ghraib first revealed the nature of the abuse. Here, for example, is what NRO’s Jonah Goldberg said in the wake of the Abu Ghraib revelations:

The damage this does to the image of America is huge. How do we look when we denounce Saddam’s torture chambers now? How many more American soldiers will be shot because of the ill will and outrage this generates? How do we claim to be champions of the rule of law?

Well, there is one way. This needs to be investigated and prosecuted. If there’s more to the story — whatever that could conceivably be — let’s find out. But if the story is as it appears, there has to be accountability, punishment and disclosure. Indeed, even if this turned out to be a prank, too much damage has already been done and someone needs to be punished. Under Saddam torturers were rewarded and promoted. In America they must be held to account.

But no one has been held to account, except, shamefully, for a few powerless individuals at the very bottom of the chain of command as scapegoats. If what we now know is far worse than Abu Ghraib, then it will be interesting to see what Jonah’s response will be.

The Dish, of course, will throw every resource we have at explicating the report. So stay tuned.

(Photo: The CIA symbol is shown on the floor of CIA Headquarters, July 9, 2004 at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. By Charles Ommanney/Getty Images)

Britain Ties Up Pornographers In Red Tape

Mistresses And Fetishists Gather At Annual DomCon Convention

Christopher Hooton enumerates the sex acts recently banished from British porn:

The Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 requires that video-on-demand (VoD) online porn now adhere to the same guidelines laid out for DVD sex shop-type porn by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). Seemingly arbitrarily deciding what is nice sex and what is not nice sex, the board’s ruling on ‘content that is not acceptable’ (p.23) effectively bans the following acts from being depicted by British pornography producers:

Spanking

Caning

Aggressive whipping

Penetration by any object “associated with violence”

Physical or verbal abuse (regardless of  if consensual)

Urolagnia (known as “water sports”)

Role-playing as non-adults

Physical restraint

Humiliation

Female ejaculation

Strangulation

Facesitting

Fisting

The final three listed fall under acts the BBFC views as potentially “life-endangering”.

Hooton adds that the amendment “seems to take issue with acts from which women more traditionally derive pleasure than men.” Erika Lust makes that point even more adamantly:

With this legislation, the UK is in danger of finding itself back in an age where porn is simply the boring, unrealistic, male fantasy of bimbos eagerly pleasing men as if it is their duty, where women are submissive and lack ownership of their sexuality. Women in the industry will now fear the loss of their livelihoods as well as their sexual independence.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown offers a more general objection:

Both regulations disproportionately affect smaller, independent porn producers and websites. As Vice’s Frankie Mullin points out, the new censorship rules will have less effect on large porn producers and mainstream sites, “which tend to favour the strip, blowjob, fuck, cum-all-over-a-woman’s-face formula, but the UK’s smaller, independent producers,” specifically fetish producers. These include people like Ms Tytania, who makes feminist-tinged dominatrix porn, and pretty much anybody else whose products deviate from normative sexual practices. The rules really are a crazy infringement on freedom of artistic expression, not solely a commercial setback for someone who runs subscription rough-sex sites (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

And Jessica Roy alludes to the wide range of acts that list left off:

The ban doesn’t mean U.K. porn connoisseurs can’t watch porn that includes stuff like spanking, but simply that porn filmed in the U.K. can’t include those acts. Sounds like U.K. freaks will have to settle for some good ol’ fashioned Japanese tentacle porn.

(Photo: A participant called SgChill is bound in rope at a dungeon party during the domination convention, DomConLA, in the early morning hours of May 11, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. By David McNew/Getty Images)

Carter In

To replace Hagel, the White House has reportedly picked Ashton Carter, a theoretical physicist and former Harvard prof who served as deputy defense secretary under both Hagel and Panetta. Andrew Prokop provides more context:

Carter has a great deal of mainstream and bipartisan credibility, and he’s clearly well-equipped to manage the Pentagon bureaucracy. But he’s not particularly known for strategic thinking about the Middle East, so his selection would likely indicate that the White House will continue to center its foreign policy development process in the National Security Council rather than the Cabinet.

Carter is respected by many on the right: he was unanimously confirmed by the Senate to be Panetta’s deputy in 2011, Sen. John McCain has called him “a hard-working, honest, and committed public servant,” and conservative commentator Jennifer Rubin wrote in 2013 that Carter’s appointment could “add some muscle to an administration that has too rarely backed up its rhetoric with action.”

This could give him a good chance at winning approval from the GOP-controlled Senate, and McCain’s Armed Services Committee, quickly next year. However, he may face some criticism from liberals for his hawkish leanings on certain issues — for instance, in 2006, he co-wrote an op-ed calling on the Bush administration to strike and destroy the long-range missile North Korea was then constructing.

McCain and other Republicans say they could see Carter as an ally of sorts, but they doubt the administration will grant him any more independence than his predecessors enjoyed:

McCain said he expected to work closely with Carter on issues that aren’t micromanaged by the White House, such as reforming the process by which the Pentagon develops and purchases weapons and cutting the Pentagon’s bloated civilian bureaucracy. On issues where the White House has taken a policy lead, such as the negotiations with Iran or the war in Syria, McCain predicted that even if he did cooperate with Carter, it would not make much of a difference. “He’s not going to have a say in it,” McCain said. “I certainly could work with him  — on Iran and Syria — but I guarantee that he would not have any influence on those decisions.”

That’s roughly Ed Morrissey’s take as well:

That makes sense on a political level, and perhaps an organizational level as well. It won’t help what really ails the Obama administration’s defense policy, though, which is that it’s being controlled by his inner circle rather than truly independent policymakers. Unlike George Bush’s decision to bring in Robert Gates in 2006, which helped change the strategy in Iraq and the approach to national-security policy, Carter’s appointment will mean the same incoherence that allowed the White House to float Johnson’s name last week as a trial balloon will continue. He won’t have the political clout to force an independent point of view within Obama’s inner circle, and Carter will just be another chess piece to sacrifice later when more failure results.

Loren Thompson calls Carter an inspired choice:

If cabinet members were picked purely on the basis of their resumes, Ash Carter would a compelling candidate for Secretary of Defense. The one facet of his credentials that does not come through in a resume or curriculum vitae, though, is that he is a smooth political operator — engaging, agreeable, and a good listener (which helps a lot on Capitol Hill). After decades of learning everything worth knowing about national defense, Carter usually finds himself the smartest person in the room and thus doesn’t have to strain to prove his expertise.

In other words, normal people tend to like Ash Carter — which is probably not something you could say about most defense wonks (or medieval history majors). That quality is very important in navigating Washington’s political culture, where relationships are crucial to success.

The Bloomberg View editors like Carter too:

He’s not on the right side of every procurement debate. He remains too fond of big-ticket items, such as the F-35 fighter, that need to be scaled back. He has been overly optimistic about the promise of saving money through smarter contracting. And in his stint as deputy secretary, he was timid about even minor, sensible changes in the biggest drain on military spending: the Tricare health plan and other benefits for veterans and their families.

On the plus side, Carter understands the importance of maintaining a robust nuclear arsenal, could play a strong role in shaping (and selling to Congress) a nuclear deal with Iran, and knows more about the reclusive and dangerous regime in North Korea than just about anyone outside the Hermit Kingdom.

Gopal Ratnam and colleagues look over what the new SecDef will have on his plate:

Carter will take charge of a Pentagon in the midst of an intensifying battle against the Islamic State. The administration has flatly ruled out the use of ground troops to fight the group in Syria and Iraq, but months of American and allied airstrikes have done little to weaken the militants or dislodge them from the vast areas of the two countries that they control. Carter will also have to figure out how to continue withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan without allowing the Taliban to retake the country’s major cities amid a sharp spike of attacks inside Kabul. Russia’s continued aggression in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, as well as China’s assertive moves in its territorial waters, will also pose difficult and challenging questions for Carter and his staff.

The CDC vs Penises

The latest federal medical guidelines for circumcision are now out, and they emphatically want to return to the era in which infant boys are routinely subjected to the surgical removal of their foreskins – and even adolescent and adult men encouraged to cut their penises. A couple of things need to be emphasized, it seems to me. The core argument is about lowering the risk of HIV infection:

“The first thing it’s important to know is that male circumcision has been associated with a 50 to 60 percent reduction of H.I.V. transmission, as well as a reduction in sexually transmitted infections such as herpes, bacterial vaginosis and the human papilloma virus (H.P.V.), which causes penile and cervical cancer,” Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, told The New York Times.

The evidence for this is entirely with respect to heterosexual sex, and in sub-Saharan Africa, where, unlike in the US, heterosexual sex accounts for the vast majority of HIV infections. It refers, moreover, only to those cases where men are infected by HIV-positive women – a small fraction of the total HIV cases in the US. You wouldn’t know this from Mermin’s statement – which seems to me designed to scare parents with the HIV boogeyman, rather than present them with a clear sense of the tiny potential health benefits involved. (There’s no evidence that circumcision can reduce the chances of HIV infection in gay sex, which accounts for the big majority of US HIV infections.)

To flesh out its case, the CDC cites a statistic that estimates that 10 percent of HIV infections in men can be attributed to female-to-male transmission in the US. It’s worth reiterating that these statistics are estimates, not actual numbers. And the actual number of men estimated to be at risk from this kind of infection is a mere 4,000 a year. Around 2 million boys are born in the US every year. So the future risk of an infant boy getting infected with HIV by a woman, using the CDC’s own argument, is 0.2 percent, or two in a thousand baby boys. And remember, we cannot know that these men were infected by women – it’s an inference – and self-reporting on the matter is extremely unreliable.

We have some other circumstantial data with respect to HIV transmission and circumcision in the West. The AIDS epidemic was far worse in the US – with much higher rates of circumcision – than in Europe, where the infant mutilation was far less prevalent. We’ve also seen a major shift downward in circumcision rates in the US and no sudden upsurge in infection rates. Then there’s the simple fact that we now have a non-surgical preventative daily pill that prevents HIV infection, as well as condoms, providing a way for men to protect themselves from HIV without permanently scarring their dicks.

Somehow, none of this context is spelled out in the recommendations. Neither is any non-medical concern – such as not having your body permanently mutilated without your consent. The impact on sexual sensitivity is also unmentioned – because pleasure has no place in assessing mere medical costs and benefits. The reductions in the risk of getting herpes or HPV are also minimal. If I were to offer any recommendations for the final report on this, it would be for the real and minuscule potential medical benefits of circumcision to be spelled out more clearly, and the non-medical costs to be weighed at least in part. When the potential benefits of this are so marginal, the case for doing nothing – and doing no actual harm – seems to be a powerful one.

(Cropped sidebar image by Flickr user Shira Gal)

Will Any Real Change Come From Ferguson?

Douthat fears that “from the point of view of actual persuasion, as opposed to just mobilization — of reaching people who don’t follow these issues closely, or who might generally incline toward a different narrative, more pro-cop or just more pro-status quo — Ferguson is turning into a poor exhibit for the policy causes that it’s being used to elevate”:

My worry, therefore, which I tried to get at in the column, is that because the facts on the ground don’t clearly fit the policy narrative they’re being tied to, and may not fit at all, Ferguson and its aftermath are going to be too polarizing to effectively serve the kind of meliorist consensus — uniting a lot of religious conservatives and libertarians with liberals and the left — that’s been gradually emerging around criminal justice, drug policy, and related issues over the last five or ten years.

Digby highly doubts that bipartisan cooperation on criminal justice was ever in the cards:

The bill that seems to have everyone feeling so positive about bipartisan comity is the Smarter Sentencing Act, which has the backing of such disparate groups as the ACLU and the Heritage Foundation.

Ted Cruz says he’s for it too. It basically will give courts more discretion in sentencing and lower the daft mandatory sentences for drug crimes from 20-, 10- and five-year mandatory minimums to 10, five and two years. Considering the tremendous overcrowding in federal prisons this seems like a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, there are a few roadblocks. Sen. Chuck Grassley thinks mandatory minimums are an important crime-fighting tool. And for reasons of their own, Sens. John Cornyn and Jeff Sessions are likewise opposed. But perhaps the biggest obstacle to any kind of bipartisan criminal justice reform (that makes any sense) is the fact that the Republican base is not only strongly opposed to it, GOP political consultants would be deprived of one of their most potent lines of attack. (And, just as likely, Democratic challengers would cynically use it against them.)

When push comes to shove, this is the evergreen Republican go-to election attack. We saw it just recently in the fall campaign.

John Dickerson, meanwhile, wants a GOP presidential contender to give a speech about Ferguson:

As my colleague Jamelle Bouie pointed out on the Slate Political Gabfest, the most effective speech any politician could give in the wake of the Ferguson verdict might be one given by a Southern Republican. If a Republican, whose party benefits from the overwhelming support of white voters, could serve as a witness, at some level, to the feelings of distrust and anger within the black community, it might contribute to the conversation so many people say we should be having. It would not require abandoning values or offending their core constituency. Such a speech could even eclipse whatever President Obama says on a visit to Ferguson, given that he is hemmed in by the responsibilities of his office and the political crust of the past six years.

Of course, a potential GOP presidential candidate might choose an entirely different path. Instead of offering an example of bridge building, he might decide that the requirement after Ferguson is to defend the police force against a media that has convicted an officer trying to do his job in a brutal environment and speak up for the 61 percent of Republicans who in August thought race was getting more attention than it deserved, according to a Pew poll. Whichever route a candidate takes, such a speech would certainly distinguish him, and almost every future candidate wants that right now.

Enshrining Inequality In Israel, Ctd

J.J. Goldberg has a smart take on Israel’s “nation-state” bill. He begins by stressing how redundant it is for Israel to keep proclaiming itself a Jewish state when the UN recognized it as such in the 1947 partition vote, which the PLO ratified in 1998. The bill’s contribution, he concludes, “is not to define what Jewish statehood includes, but what it excludes: Arabic language, Palestinian national pride, a religion-neutral legal culture”:

It’s no accident that the legislation’s sponsors and main backers are the same right-wing factions, in the Likud and Jewish Home parties, that are fighting hardest against territorial compromise and Palestinian statehood. They’re not worried about international opinion. Their problem is the built-in flaw in their own blueprint for the future. Holding onto the territories, maintaining a single state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, means creating a binational state. The advocates face growing pressure — and anger — from the military, academic, arts and legal communities and other sectors, all demanding to know how Israel can absorb two million-plus West Bank Palestinians without losing the Zionist vision of a Jewish state.

Their answer is to ground the state’s Jewish character — its language, calendar, legal culture, national anthem — in a quasi-constitutional basic law that can’t be amended except by a Knesset super-majority. That’s how they intend to defend Jewish statehood: by relegating the culture and values of today’s non-Jewish minority to the sidelines and ensuring they stay there, even if and when they become a majority.

The messy political battle sparked by the bill came to a head yesterday when Netanyahu abruptly fired the bill’s main opponents, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and Finance Minister Yair Lapid, saying he would “no longer tolerate an opposition within the government”. The move effectively demolished his coalition, forcing new elections that could take place as soon as March. Zack Beauchamp believes the coalition’s collapse was inevitable:

The reason that Livni and Lapid, rather than Bennett and Lieberman, are being dismissed is simple enough:

Netanyahu is a right-wing prime minister leading the right-wing Likud party in a dominantly right-wing coalition. Together, Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, and Jewish Home control almost twice as many seats as Yesh Atid and Hatnua. This put Lapid and Livni’s parties in a bizarre situation. On the one hand, Netanyahu needed to please them, because his government couldn’t achieve a governing majority without their support. On the other hand, the right-wing parties had them so outnumbered that they had huge trouble getting their way on issues like West Bank settlements, taxes, or minority rights. Lapid and Livni ended up, in practice, being centrist fig leaves for a hardline right-wing government.

Viewed in that light, it wasn’t a question of whether this inherently unstable government would collapse: it was a question of when. It turns out the answer was 18 months after forming.

Looking at the latest poll numbers, J.J. observes that Netanyahu could well emerge from these elections with a stronger hand – as is his intention, of course:

The latest opinion poll, published Sunday by Haaretz, showed that if elections were held today for a new Knesset, Likud would rise from 18 seats to 24 in the 120-member body, while Yesh Atid would drop from 19 seats to 11. The party to the right of Likud, Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home, would rise from 12 to 16. Labor would drop from 15 to 13, Livni’s Hatnuah from 6 to 4 and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu from 13 to 11 and Shas from 11 to 6. …

In all, according to the pollsters, the Dialog group, parties on the right would rise from 61 seats in the current Knesset to 77 seats, while the center, left and Arab-backed parties would drop from 59 to 43. That calculation counts the two Haredi parties, Shas and Torah Judaism, as part of the right, even though they were members of the last two Labor led coalitions under Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. In response to the question of who was “most fit” to be Israel’s next prime minister, 35% named Netanyahu and 17% named Labor leader Yitzhak Herzog, while Lieberman, Lapid and Bennett received 8%, 7% and 6% respectively.

Aaron David Miller sees Israel’s diminishing center-left parties as being too weak to pose much of a challenge to the prime minister:

There’s little doubt that Israelis are tired of hapless governance and failed politicians. The very fact that campaigns and elections are being scheduled at a cost of billions of shekels for reasons that are hard to divine or that appear to focus on petty politics and personal rivalries instead of big issues only reinforces the public’s cynicism. At the same time, however, there’s little doubt that Israel’s public has moved to the right (look at the last two elections) and that the current security environment and terrorism threat in Jerusalem will only highlight that anger and concern. If you had a pragmatic, security-credentialed, electable hawk, that is to say a Rabin-like figure whom Israelis trusted, you might even have a real election on some important issues. But right now you don’t.

Meanwhile, in another noteworthy analysis of the controversy over the nation-state bill, Bernard Avishai links it to Israel’s evolution from colony to state:

One should think of Israel as having two competing legal structures: a gradually evolving democratic state and the remnants of the old Zionist settler colony. Think of a nearly completed building encased in scaffolding that was never taken down—that, in effect, has become a rival structure. To incubate Hebrew, and provide refuge, Israel once needed Jewish collectives, whose land was purchased and owned by the Jewish National Fund. It needed to enforce strict regulations against selling J.N.F. property to non-Jews. It needed a Jewish Agency to qualify immigrants—a precursor of the Law of Return—and fund their assimilation into the Yishuv, while building settlements to house them. It needed a paid, official rabbinate to preside over the religious rites of marriage, burial, and divorce. And, given these material privileges, Israel needed an immanently legal definition of a Jewish person.

All of these fixes made sense for an insurgent Zionist colony in the nineteen-thirties. They are grotesque sources of discrimination within a Jewish democracy in 2014.

Texas Prepares To Execute A Mentally Ill Man

It’s scheduled for tonight:

First diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1978, [Scott] Panetti was hospitalized over a dozen times by 1992 and involuntarily committed to a mental hospital at least twice. On one such occasion in 1986, Panetti had buried his furniture in the backyard because he believed the devil was inside it.

In 1992, shortly after Panetti stopped taking his medication, he shaved his head, dressed in army fatigues, and killed his in-laws with a hunting rifle in front of his wife and three-year-old-daughter. He turned himself in shortly after, and told police officers that “Sarge” was responsible for the killings.

Sally Satel insists that it is “wrong to execute, even to punish, people who are so floridly psychotic when they commit their crimes that they are incapable of correcting the errors by logic or evidence”:

Yet Texas, like many other states, considers a defendant sane as long as he knows, factually, that murder is wrong. Indeed, Panetti’s jury, which was instructed to apply this narrow standard, may have been legally correct to reject his insanity defense because he may have known that the murders were technically wrong.

Nancy Leong and Justin Marceau review the relevant law:

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 1986 case called Ford v. Wainwright, prohibited the execution of people who are so out of touch with reality that they do not know right from wrong and cannot understand their punishment or the purpose of it. Panetti’s attorneys argue that this holding applies to him. His severe mental illness causes him to believe that Satan, working through the state of Texas, is seeking to execute him for preaching the Gospel—and, therefore, he cannot possess a rational understanding of the link between his crime and his punishment. To most people, Panetti’s lengthy history of mental illness and his bizarre behavior strongly suggest that Ford should prevent his execution. Yet in practice, Ford’s guarantee is often compromised when courts refuse to order mental health evaluations in a timely fashion, as Panetti’s seven years without a competency evaluation illustrate all too clearly.

Ian Millhiser argues that, by “the Supreme Court’s own reasoning, he fits the criteria of a man who should be constitutionally ineligible for execution”:

And yet, the Supreme Court has not extended this rule to severely mentally ill individuals like Panetti. The justices have said that he should not be executed if he suffers from “gross delusions preventing him from comprehending the meaning and purpose of the punishment to which he has been sentenced,” but this is a much weaker protection from execution than the absolute bar the Court announced in cases involving people with intellectual disabilities. Among other things, it hinges upon Panetti’s present state of mind, giving Texas the opportunity to argue that he is currently lucid enough to be killed.

Rob Smith and Charles Ogletree weigh in:

One could point to a formalistic legal distinction to justify this inequity; some state legislatures banned capital punishment for juveniles and the mentally disabled well before the court stepped in, while no state — other than the 18 states with no death penalty — formally bars the death penalty for the seriously mentally ill. But this line of thinking is overly simplistic.

In its most recent Eighth Amendment decisions, the court has eschewed such formality and replaced it with a more holistic approach that looks at a number of different factors in order to gauge whether a punishment is excessive, and therefore cruel and unusual. For instance, it questions how often the punishment is imposed and carried out in practice; whether the punishment serves any penological purpose; and whether the administration of a punishment to a particular class of people elevates the risk of wrongful execution. This broader, and far more sensible inquiry, leaves little doubt that it would be cruel and unusual to execute someone as mentally ill as Scott Panetti.

Katie Halper points out that “a diverse group of individuals and organizations—beyond the usual prison-reform suspects—are calling for clemency”:

These in​cl​ude 55 prominent Evangelical Christians and seven retired and active bishops from the United Methodist Church; former US Representative Ron​ Paul; former Texas Governor Mark White; ten Texas state legislators; nearly 30 former prosecutors and US attorneys general; Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation, the American Bar Association, and the European Union.

Brent Bozell, Pat Nolan, and Richard Viguerie also speak out:

We are leaders in the conservative movement, and no one could accuse us of being soft on crime. There is much debate about the effectiveness and the morality of the death penalty. Some crimes are so terrible, and committed with such clear malice, that some believe execution is the only appropriate and proportional response. But Scott Panetti’s is no such case. He is one of the most seriously mentally ill prisoners on death row in the United States. Rather than serving as a measured response to murder, the execution of Panetti would only serve to undermine the public’s faith in a fair and moral justice system.

And Stephanie Mencimer looks at the bigger picture:

The Supreme Court hasn’t been especially sympathetic lately to arguments about mental illness and the death penalty. Last year, it refused to block the execution of another seriously mentally ill inmate in Florida, John Ferguson, who went to his death believing he was the prince of God. But Panetti’s pro bono lawyers, Kathryn Kase and Greg Wiercioch, argue that public opinion on the issue is changing, and that the law needs to change with it. They cite a new poll showing that nearly 60 percent of Americans oppose executing someone with a serious mental illness. They also reference new research showing that juries and judges today are far less likely to choose death for a mentally ill defendant than they were 20 or 30 years ago. In 11 former and current death penalty states that allow for a “guilty but mentally ill” verdict, there hasn’t been a death sentence imposed on a mentally ill person in at least 20 years.