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A reader writes:

The issue with the Tsarnaev burial is not whether he should be buried, but whether he should be buried in the community he terrorized. Yvonne Abraham conveniently leaves this out of her predictable screed. I agree that local leaders should have done a better job of locating a burial site outside the metropolitan area, but this is also relatively uncharted waters if I’m not mistaken – burying a domestic terrorist (we never classified Lanza as such) in the weeks following the attack.

The mayors of Cambridge and Boston are absolutely correct in acknowledging that a burial site located within their respective city limits would become a significant distraction and public safety/health issue. Buying Tsarnaev locally would undoubtedly lead to the resting site becoming public. What then? An armed guard patrolling a 50-square foot area from now until forever?

Another:

I want to offer one instructive historical example for burying terrorists. In the fall of 1977, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe all committed suicide (though this fact is self is still highly debated) in Stuttgart’s Stammhein Prison.

At the time these were the most notorious terrorists in the world have killed or maimed dozens of Americans and German in their effort to bring about Revolution. Far from being like the Tsarnaev brothers, these folks were more akin to Osama bin Laden in the German public’s mind.

So when they died, all the surrounding cities scrambled to tell the media that there was no way that the terrorists would be buried in their city, in their cemetery. Finally, the mayor of Stuttgart stepped in. A great man (and the son of an even greater man), Manfred Rommel said “Enough! In death all enmity must cease.” And he ordered them buried in a Stuttgart public cemetery.

If you go to New York’s Museum of Modern Art you can see Gerhard Richter’s massive painting depicting their funeral (see above). The gravesite did become a bit of a shrine at first, but that went away. I visited it 10 years ago and no one else was around and it clearly hadn’t been visited much that day at least. Just a quiet little gravesite in the corner of a giant cemetery.

Dave Gilson describes a series of government photos from the Gitmo hunger strike:

Though they do not show any of these frantic scenes, recently released military photos offer a window onto how Guantanamo has been dealing with the unprecedented protest: A “feeding chair” where detainees are force-fed sits next to a tray of feeding tubes and a bottle of butter pecan Ensure; guards deliver meals through “bean holes” in detainees’ cells, only to throw away the uneaten food; hospital beds behind chain-link fences with rings for shackles beside them. Other images in the series, taken in early April by Sgt. Brian Godette of the Army 138th Public Affairs Detachment, depict scenes from Camps V and VI, where most prisoners are held: a sign asking soldiers to respect praying detainees, a stuffed recliner in the “media room” that looks almost normal until you notice the ankle restraints.

A professor from the Naval Academy Anne-Marie Drew visited and penned her reflections in the Jesuit magazine, America. What struck her most was the epistemic closure of the guards there:

The staff is not sadistic. They are not Nurse Ratched. Rather they fiercely believe in the American ideals of justice and fairness and decent treatment of those in our custody. They want to change the public view of the camps, a view the staff believes is distorted.

Nowhere was this belief more apparent than outside the medical bay when a medical staffer explained force-feedings. With professional calm and compassion, she explained that when we force-feed the detainees, we are taking care of them. We cannot let them starve. The tacit subtext was clear: we are, after all, the United States of America, founded on a Judeo-Christian culture. Inmates are not being mistreated during the procedure, for we are not a country that mistreats others.

She gets to the core of the problem in America, as the country still refuses to look what it is doing and has done clearly in the eye:

Because we think of ourselves as benevolent, as Christian, we cannot conceive of ourselves as cruel. As individuals, we make up stories we can live with. As a nation, we do the same. Thus, we try to convince ourselves that force-feeding reflects benevolence and our role as caretakers. We think of force-feeding as one more safeguard for the detainees… But force-feeding is not such a safeguard. It is a violation of a fundamental human dignity, a dignity these detainees do not abdicate when we incarcerate them.

It’s the same mindset that believes that when Americans torture prisoners, it somehow isn’t torture. Because we have internalized our moral superiority – indeed all but turned it into a national religion – we can do no wrong. What would be torture if authorized by Khamenei is somehow not torture if authorized by Cheney. As Rudy Giuliani – perhaps the most unreflective of all American exceptionalists – put it, waterboarding isn’t always torture, even though it has been designated such by every legal ruling ever made on it. Why? Because

It depends on who does it.

As a Catholic, Giuliani should know that it doesn’t. Evil knows no geographic boundaries. And Americans are not somehow super-humans. So where are the bishops? Michael Shaw reflects on the photos:

Although photos from Gitmo have typically excluded the prisoners themselves, not seeing them and knowing they are wasting away makes their absence here that much more palpable. …

Scenes of olives being delivered that will never be eaten, or full Styrofoam containers getting chucked in the trash, or bottles of Ensure on patient trays next to surgical tubes (to make sure you don’t die on us while the world is watching) can’t help but prompt us to see the prisoners in our own minds (or even imagine we’re getting the treatment).

While the government and the military pretend these photos maintain an adequate level of abstraction, however,  to me they do the opposite. In waging a war of wills at the most primitive level, these photos, if highly institutional, somehow take me back to Abu Ghraib. Torturing a man for information, or out of sadism or to keep him alive, is still torture. And as for breaking the will, well, martyrdom is martyrdom, whether it’s by jetliner or by leaving us with rotting containers full of bananas.

My take on the morality of force-feeding here.

(Photos by Sgt. Brian Godette, Army 138th Public Affairs Detachment)

Ben Yagoda applauds Obama’s executive wit at this year’s Correspondents’ Dinner:

He’s got impressive comedy chops to start with: the poker face, the sense of the proper cadence of a line, the willingness to pause for a long beat while he looks off into the middle distance, in the manner of Hope or Benny. He has a trademark delivery, the way he barks out a huh! after setting down a premise. And nothing but God-given talent can explain his skill at milking or playing off a bit. The only wall this president wants to tear down is the fourth one, as he deftly riffs on the joke he’s just made:

I’m also hard at work on plans for the Obama Library. And some have suggested that we put it in my birthplace, but I’d rather keep it in the United States. (Laughter.) Did anybody not see that joke coming? (Laughter.) Show of hands. Only Gallup? Maybe Dick Morris? (Laughter and applause.)

Then, at another point:

Of course, everybody has got plenty of advice. Maureen Dowd said I could solve all my problems if I were just more like Michael Douglas in “The American President.” (Laughter.) And I know Michael is here tonight. Michael, what’s your secret, man? (Laughter.) Could it be that you were an actor in an Aaron Sorkin liberal fantasy? (Laughter.) Might that have something to do with it? (Applause.) I don’t know. Check in with me. Maybe it’s something else. (Laughter.)

Now, note the Dick-Vitalesque “second term, baby” in his opening bit, the “what’s your secret, man?” and “check in with me” in the one above. The truly remarkable thing about Obama as standup is that he really is the coolest guy in the room. This may be the nerd prom, but he is no nerd. Hearing him deliver jokes, you sense he’s actually listened to his teenage daughters talk (“I was like … “) and paid attention to what they’re interested in. (“Take the sequester. Republicans fell in love with this thing, and now they can’t stop talking about how much they hate it. It’s like we’re trapped in a Taylor Swift album. [Laughter.]“)

Ezra Klein doesn’t believe that limits on the size of campaign contributions will be a panacea for our political woes:

We tend to assume “small donors” hail from that mythical, much-beloved class of people known as “ordinary Americans.” They’re not. Even if tens of millions of Americans are donating, hundreds of millions of other Americans aren’t. The tiny minority that donates is different from the vast majority that doesn’t: They’re much, much more ideologically polarized. What individual donors tend to want, [senator Chris] Murphy [D-CT] said, is partisanship. “When I send out a fundraising e-mail talking about how bad Republicans are, I raise three times as much as when I send out an e-mail talking about how good I am. People are motivated to give based on their fear of the other side rather than on their belief in their side.” …

Just as big money is corrupting, small money is polarizing. And it’s polarization that probably poses the bigger threat to American politics right now. Big money, for example, generally wants to raise the debt ceiling. Small money is one reason Republicans in Congress came close to breaching it.

Mijin Cha pushes back:

Where to start? Well, how about with the most recent election, in which highly ideological big donors played a critical role in moving the GOP to the right —  both during the primaries and the general election.

Think of a mega donor like Foster Friess, a hard right Christian conservative, who single-handledly kept Rick Santorum in the race and helped foster a climate in which Mitt Romney tacked right. Or think of the role played by the Club for Growth, which spent over $20 million to help knock off moderate GOP Senate and House candidates in the primaries. Or how about those Koch brothers, the life-long libertarians, who spent tens of millions of dollars in the last election cycle.

One reason the Republican Party finds it so hard to move in a more moderate direction is because deep-pocked groups like the the Club for Growth and NRA threaten to primary any congressional member who steps out of line. It’s these well-financed enforcers that are the main problem, not Michele Bachman’s small donors.

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Marc Tracy unloads on Joel Stein’s new cover-story (paywalled), which tries to take millennials down a peg:

[W]here it does say things, Time and Stein reveal themselves to be guilty of taking culturally and ethically specific ideas about how people should live their lives as normative facts. …

[F]rom Stein’s opening litany: “[Millennials’] development is stunted: more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse, according to the 2012 Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults.” For one thing: it’s the economy, stupid! Thousands of words on, Stein dutifully nods toward other possible valid reasons for this development, such as greater, technologically enabled control over fertility. But that is not even the point. “Stunted” is one of those words that linguist Paul Roberts would have called “colorful.” Stein is making not only a forensic observation, but also a moral judgment. Millennials are delaying maturity, leaving home, marriage, having children, and the rest—and that is wrong of them. Thank God Joel Stein is here to set us right!

And from later on:

“They’re financially responsible; although student loans have hit record highs, they have less household and credit-card debt than any previous generation on record—which, admittedly, isn’t that hard when you’re living at home and using your parents’ credit card.” “Responsible,” too, is a moral word masquerading as an empirical one. To write an article about young people that minimizes student debt at a time when it, indeed, is at a record high, is astonishing enough. To imply that, in contrast to low household and credit-card debt, all of this student debt is not “responsible” betrays an incredibly poor understanding of how student debt has gotten as high as it has.

One of the most popular Dish threads from last year was “Letters from Millennial Voters” – read it all here.

A reader writes:

It would be nice if what your reader said was true: that the nearly 40 percent increase in rape occurred because victims now feel more comfortable reporting it. (I said “victims” and not “women” because more than half of rapes in the military are done to men.) The nearly 40 percent jump was for cases of sexual assault reported in an anonymous survey. The number of reported rapes has stayed about the same. This shows the opposite of what the reader said – that no progress is being made in making victims feel that reporting their rape will lead to anything positive.

Another:

The most surprising thing about the public discussion of military sexual assault is that no one has said “duh.” Think about it – the military:

Is composed largely of men in their sexual prime;
who are in peak physical condition;
who are trained to be aggressive and violent;
who are deprived of the opportunity for normal sexual relationships for months at a time;
who are subjected to enormous stress and fear of death.

Take a lot of guys in their horniest ages, whip their bodies into prime shape, teach them aggression and violence, show them they might not live much longer, and deprive them of most opportunities for sex. What the hell do we think is going to happen?

This is not to excuse sexual assault at all. It is, rather, to indict the military establishment’s unpreparedness or unwillingness to deal with it. They should have seen it coming a mile away.

[Re-posted from earlier today]

Responding to the idiotic conventional wisdom that Obama just doesn’t have the schmoozing skills to be an effective president, Norm Ornstein loses it:

“Didn’t any of you ever read Richard Neustadt’s classic Presidential Leadership? Haven’t any of you taken Politics 101 and read about the limits of presidential power in a separation-of-powers system?”

No, it seems, they haven’t. It’s a terrific piece, because it grapples with actual history:

No one schmoozed more or better with legislators in both parties than Clinton. How many Republican votes did it get him on his signature initial priority, an economic plan? Zero in both houses. And it took eight months to get enough Democrats to limp over the finish line. How did things work out on his health care plan? How about his impeachment in the House?

No one knew Congress, or the buttons to push with every key lawmaker, better than LBJ. It worked like a charm in his famous 89th, Great Society Congress, largely because he had overwhelming majorities of his own party in both houses. But after the awful midterms in 1966, when those swollen majorities receded, LBJ’s mastery of Congress didn’t mean squat.

And the GOP Obama faces is arguably the most partisan, factional and deranged that it has been since I started observing it in the mid-1980s. Zero votes for a modest stimulus in the worst recession since the 1930s right after a new president’s astounding electoral victory? Total, hysterical and futile opposition to healthcare reform – rather than working to make it better? Mitch McConnell’s entire strategy of simply denying Obama a second term, regardless of what he did or did not do (and failing)?

If you want to be obstructionist douches in the American system, oppose everything and anything Obama wants in the House, and demand a 60 vote super-majority to pass anything in the Senate, then that is your prerogative. But the GOP is offering nothing constructive on healthcare, nothing that can seriously be accomplished in a two-party system on the debt and entitlements, nothing but Captain Hindsight on Syria, and nothing on climate change, or gay rights. Nothing. The few of them who have championed immigration reform are going to face a storm of hostility from their base – and will endure a media hazing from the “conservative” media industrial complex.

Nonetheless, Obama is schmoozing on.

And nonetheless, he has guided the economy to a sustainable recovery – unlike any other developed nation. He got his stimulus through; and he got universal healthcare. He ended two draining, bankrupting, failed wars. He presided over a civil rights revolution – and played a key role in nudging it to fruition. He has created a coalition that, without gerrymandering, would command majorities in both Houses, and may well become a durable realignment to his party’s favor. If immigration reform passes, the substantive legislative achievements will be huge.

This is how to make sense of the over-coverage of Benghazi on the right. Some, like Butters, just want to save themselves from primary challenges; others see this as an early opportunity to bloody the woman who might crush them in 2016. But all of it is a sign of desperation. I keep asking myself: this is all they’ve got? This is what they want to place in front of the public in a time of great challenges at home and abroad? This?

You don’t need to turn a lamentable piece of government incompetence and some weak, shifting talking points into Watergate and Iran-Contra combined if you actually have a popular and constructive set of proposals for Americans to weigh. They have already derailed four careers (Susan Rice’s and three State Dept officials) and ended one entirely at the State Dept. And yet they are still breathless for more accountability, even as they are running on fumes.

Some Republicans seem to think this kind of negative nihilism is a way back to power. They need to remind themselves that Roger Ailes’ need for ratings is not the same thing as the GOP’s need for votes.

(Photo: Getty Images).

Laura June has a long and fascinating look at how technology is changing the geneology game, from DNA testing to the advanced algorithms of sites like Ancestry.com:

A generic search engine such as Google can’t distinguish between, say, a first and last name, which can mean all the difference in this kind of work, especially if your ancestor’s first name was something common like “Smith” or “Taylor.” But Ancestry.com (and other companies like it) has built a search engine with a specific, single-minded purpose. It can handle, in one request: a first name associated with a last name (including a vast array of alternate spellings); a range of dates; a specific or broad range of documents to search; a geographic location as broad as a country or as specific as a town; a number of birth dates; a birth location; and additional names such as those of a relative’s children. The engine — which processes around 45 million searches a day (Google sees around three billion) — isn’t perfect, but it is very powerful, and it’s constantly being tweaked and upgraded.

Another key resource? The Family History Library, “the largest library in the world dedicated to genealogy,” founded by the Mormons in 1894:

Donald Anderson, the senior vice president of patron and partner services at the Family History Library, says that the Mormon church believes in “eternal families,” and in the ability of those families to “continue beyond this life.” So identifying ancestors, is, he says, a “significant part of the doctrine of the church.” Standing in-between giant banks of filed microfilms, he says, “We’re all God’s children.”

One of the Church’s fundamental tenets is doing genealogical research because its members believe that Mormons can baptize ancestors in their absence. The act of baptizing family by proxy — i.e., without the knowledge or permission of the ancestor, usually because they’re deceased — has been fairly controversial, but it’s not a focus for most genealogists. FamilySearch and The Family History Library’s staff welcome Mormons and non-Mormons alike. That’s because the library’s usefulness reaches far beyond its own religious goals, and the Latter-day Saints believe in spreading their information far and wide, all free of charge.