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Sandra Day O’Connor recently told the Chicago Tribune that “maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye,” referring to the case that decided the 2000 presidential election. Doug Mataconis argues that the Supreme Court refusing to take the case “would have hardly been the end of the chaos that surrounded the 2000 election”:

No matter how that process in Florida ended, there would have been a question of legitimacy hanging over whoever it was that ended up assuming the Presidency on January 20, 2001. By accepting the case, the Supreme Court brought some degree of certainty into the process and lent an air of legal legitimacy to the outcome of the election that was sorely lacking during the long period after Election Day. For that reason alone, I’d suggest that, in the end, history will judge that the Supreme Court did the right thing even if it did take a hit to its reputation in the short term.

My guess is that Doug is right in the long run. Megan McArdle agrees:

The original sin, in my view, was Gore’s attempt to recount just the votes in a few heavily Democratic counties.

I’m not saying that Bush would have done any different, had the positions been reversed.  But once that had happened–and Democrats on local election boards and the Florida Supreme Court had decided to go along–there was no longer even a pretense that this was about anything other than naked post-facto power grabs, using whatever political levers your party controlled.  “Count all the votes”, which most progressives now remember as the rallying cry, actually came very late in the process, and only after the Supreme Court of the United States told the Florida Supreme Court that no, it couldn’t just let Al Gore add in some new votes from Democratic Counties his team had personally selected.

Yes, Gore’s strategy was so clever it ended up being stupid. A full recount would have been better – but not as sure a thing from his point of view as a partial recount. It would also have added real legitimacy to the winner. And the further we get from that brutally polarizing few months, it’s worth recalling that this was the back-drop to 9/11 and what followed. I sometimes wonder if history would have been different if the president on 9/11 had been seen as clearly legitimate by all the country. It didn’t help that George W. Bush did not seem in any way sensitive to the precariousness of his presidency and instead of seeking a middle ground with polarized Democrats, acted as if he had won in a landslide. Compare his attitude with his successor’s who did have two clear victories, and followed through with moderation and compromise. Ian Millhiser, meanwhile, thinks the case reveals an important truth about the Court:

If nothing else, Bush v. Gore demonstrates how justices who are determined to reach a certain result are capable of bending both the law and their own prior jurisprudence in order to achieve it. In Bush, the five conservative justices held, in the words of Harvard’s Larry Tribe, that “equal protection of the laws required giving no protection of the laws to the thousands of still uncounted ballots.”

Balko reports from Bisbee, Arizona, whose officials recently generated a firestorm by passing an ordinance permitting civil unions:

“Both Councilman Conners and I live in the ward with the highest LGBT population,” says Bisbee Mayor Adriana Badal. “And proportionally, Bisbee itself has one of the highest gay and lesbian populations in the state. We decided we wanted to do something real. Not a resolution, but something that carries the force of law.”

The problem is that in the U.S., most legal protections for marriage are codified at the state level. Conners and Badal knew they couldn’t grant rights to same-sex couples that the state wouldn’t enforce, but they did come up with an ordinance that granted as many legal protections as a small town could.

Bisbee, for example, owns a cemetery, so the ordinance granted the same interment rights to same-sex couples and their families that the town gives to heterosexual families. The ordinance also granted same-sex families the right to get family passes at the public swimming pool, the right to the same land-use permits, and — perhaps most significantly — visitation rights and power of attorney to make medical decisions at the local hospital. …

Within 12 hours of the ordinance passing, Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne raised concerns that Bisbee had usurped some of the state’s powers, and possibly violated a constitutional amendment passed in 2008 that defined marriage as “only a union of one man and one woman.” Horne threatened to sue to have the new policy overturned.

Tom Prezelski wonders why the issue has become such a concern to state legislators:

It would be welcome if folks at the Capitol were to look at Bisbee to see what they could do to make sure that such towns have the resources to address issues of economic development and to keep their streets paved. Even though these things are well within the purview of the Legislature, they are hardly a priority for our state’s leadership. Instead, we get this needless meddling in local affairs. … The chest-thumping from Arizona’s political leadership about freedom rings a bit hollow when it becomes clear that they have little respect for the freedom of folks in communities that look different than their own.

State and local officials were able to resolve the issue, however:

Lawyers working with the city council from the pro-gay marriage group Lambda Legal said the city will omit the “spouse” reference in favor of “family partnership” or “registered partnership.” Other references to rights prohibited under the state constitution will be dropped. Instead, the city will work with gays and lesbians to help them enter into civil contracts such as wills and healthcare proxies — already available to any citizen — when they apply for civil union status.

The compromise provides a template for other municipalities in the state seeking to offer some form of legal recognition for same-sex couples. Officials in Tempe, Ariz., said they are considering adopting a similar law in that city.

Mutually conflicting conspiracy theories often coexist:

[W]hile it has been known for some time that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are also likely to believe in other conspiracy theories, we would expect contradictory conspiracy theories to be negatively correlated.

Yet, this is not what psychologists Micheal Wood, Karen Douglas and Robbie Suton found in a recent study. Instead, the research team, based at the University of Kent in England, found that many participants believed in contradictory conspiracy theories. For example, the conspiracy-belief that Osama Bin Laden is still alive was positively correlated with the conspiracy-belief that he was already dead before the military raid took place. This makes little sense, logically: Bin Laden cannot be both dead and alive at the same time. An important conclusion that the authors draw from their analysis is that people don’t tend to believe in a conspiracy theory because of the specifics, but rather because of higher-order beliefs that support conspiracy-like thinking more generally. A popular example of such higher-order beliefs is a severe “distrust of authority.”

In the shadow of her own family history of schizophrenia, Mac McClelland investigates the neglect of mental health treatment across the US, “where the three largest de facto psychiatric facilities are jails.” In San Francisco’s impoverished Tenderloin neighborhood:

The majority of [community center director Cindy] Gyori’s clients are suffering afflictions like PTSD, anxiety, depression, and the associated addiction issues. That is: With treatment, they’re theoretically capable of recovery and (nonsubsidized) functioning. But Gyori’s staff is short, underpaid. New clients can’t be seen for initial risk assessment for a month. The city’s public-housing shortage is so severe that it closed the list to new applicants. “This society is set up to create Tenderloins,” she says.

“We’re dealing with the most stigmatized and misunderstood population. You can scream outside my window,” she says, turning her face in the direction of the guy screaming outside her window—something about “dinner”—”and I’m not gonna make assumptions that it’s your fault. As long as a person is disabled, and income is limited, you have to help them. Destigmatization is a big part of it.”

Sure.

When I leave the clinic, it is admittedly difficult not to judge the strung-out-looking fellow lunging through the crosswalk hollering a song about monkeys, the refrain of which is a monkey call, or the parties responsible for the two piles of human shit I sidestep in as many blocks. Though an estimated 1 in 5 families contains someone with a mental illness, even families of the mentally ill aren’t always sympathetic. “We have families who aren’t willing to work with us or do anything,” says my Aunt Terri’s caseworker, Eleanor. “Your family was so willing; everybody was there to do whatever.” But she’s certainly not talking about my great-grandmother, who pronounced Terri lazy, and not even so much my grandfather, who thought his daughter was a spoiled brat who just wanted attention. And she wasn’t talking about me, whose total uselessness in Terri’s transportation and other needs earned me the resentment of at least one cousin.

Maria Godoy admires the work of Brendan O’Connell, painter of Walmart tableaux:

Wal-Mart stores, he notes, are “probably one of the most trafficked interior spaces in the world.” In the tall, open, cathedral-like ceilings of Wal-Mart’s big-box stores, he sees parallels to church interiors of old. “There is something in us that aspires to some kind of transcendence,” he told me back in February. “And as we’ve culturally turned from religious things, we’ve turned our transcendence to acquisition and satisfying desires.”

He says it’s not his most expensive paintings that are selling:

Media reports have lingered over the fact that some of his largest paintings — those 8 feet by 9 feet or so — can fetch $40,000 or more. But O’Connell says it’s the small works in the $1,000-$1,200 range that have been selling. And the people doing the buying, he says, come from all over the country. “What I’m struck by is this relationship to brands,” he says, noting that buyers have called to inquire about specific paintings: ” ‘Do you still have the Corn Flakes? … I want the Maxwell House.’ Whatever brand it is that they have a personal relationship with. And that, to me, is fascinating.”

Susan Orleans’ recent profile of O’Connoll touched on the company’s reaction:

[O’Connell] had never had any official communication with Walmart beyond the local managers inviting him to leave. A dealer who was interested in his work had once approached the company about acquiring one of the paintings but was told that Walmart didn’t buy art. Then, by chance, the Globe article was forwarded to Suraya Bliss, a senior director of digital strategy at the company. Bliss says that she has always been interested in visual things, and collects art herself, and she liked what O’Connell was doing. Instead of interpreting the paintings as arch commentary, she thought he was speaking to the company’s mission. “I got in touch with him and said, ‘Let’s talk and get to know each other,'” Bliss told me. After their conversation, she was convinced that his work was ‘very pure and very genuine.’ She arranged for him to take pictures in stores whenever he wanted, and offered to let him photograph from a cherry picker in one of the New Jersey superstores.

O’Connell is also working on a project, Everyartist.me, which hopes to engage millions of  kids in art.

A reader writes:

I volunteer with the juvenile court in my county. As a result, I work with many parents who are unfortunate enough to have an opiate addiction. I also have a relative with an opiate addiction. My county is not quite as poor as Oxyana, but the demographics are much the same. As a result, we have a lot of opiate addiction here (SW Ohio) and I would say it is the number one drug problem by a large margin. Of the three articles you reference, Warren Jason Street comes the closest to depicting the reality of this problem. But, in my mind, the key quote in his article is not the one you excerpted. It is, rather:

First of all, there is a massive difference between recreational drugs and prescription drugs. In the case of Oceana, West Virginia, the difference couldn’t be more stark–doctors and pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies have profited handsomely at the expense of the citizens who were handed Oxycontin prescriptions to help them deal with “pain.” This is a case of for-profit exploitation, and a tragic one at that.

I attend continuing education conferences every year as part of my volunteer  work. Last year I participated in a seminar given by a drug treatment counselor in southern Ohio. After listening to him talk about opiate addiction and what contributes to it, it’s very clear to me that certain communities are most definitely targeted by “pain” clinic operators.

They set up the pill mills to reach a certain audience, predominately poor/working-class white folks. They staff them with doctors who are ethically challenged (at best!), hang out a shingle, and then proceed to carpet the area with prescription opiates. The drug stores turn their heads and fill the prescriptions.

It’s a massive problem in Florida as well. As a matter of fact, a trip down I-75 will expose you to large billboards advertising pain clinics. My point? These folks addicted to pain killers aren’t just weak-willed hedonists who can’t stop; they have been deliberately and evilly targeted – and only Warren Jason Street seems to understand this.

It’s not clear that any of the authors you cite realize that the manufacturers of Oxycontin were fined by the FDA for deceptive marketing practices. They claimed that Oxy wasn’t addictive and marketed it to doctors that way. It’s clear that Frum doesn’t understand diddly squat about this problem. But perhaps he only objects to street drug dealers, not corporate drug dealers?

There’s much much more evil to the opiate addiction problem. I would love to see some investigative journalism that was able to tie together the collusion of the large drug companies, the large drug store chains like CVS, and the pain clinic operators. I realize that I sound like a foaming at the mouth conspiracy theorist, but I think there’s a lot more to this story than even the documentary shows.

Paul Myers spotlights Our Nixon, a documentary composed of Super 8 footage shot by H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chapin, three top Nixon aides who were convicted in the cover-up:

Super 8 was the iPhone camera of the day, so it’s not difficult to see these reels as sort of extended Vines from inside what was arguably the most secretive presidency ever. They also raise questions of privacy and presidential transparency that are as relevant in our post-Wikileaks times as they were in the Daniel Ellsberg era depicted here. “These guys were the original over-sharers,” says [filmmaker] Penny Lane, “And of course, there’s an irony to that, because that’s ultimately why they all had to resign and go to prison. But over-sharing is a completely natural impulse when you’re part of this really cool thing [the White House], so they wanted to document it and show people what it was like.”

That kind of over-sharing is definitely over:

After Nixon, Congress and the private lawyers of subsequent administrations debated the nature of public and private ownership of such materials. That climate has created an air of self-consciousness affecting everything from White House emails to Barack Obama’s personal Blackberry, taken from him on his first day as president.

“Prior to the Nixon Presidency,” says [co-filmmaker Brian L.] Frye, “the standard practice had been to assume that any papers or materials produced by the president or any member of the president’s staff in the White House were treated as the personal property of that president. That changed after Watergate. Now, as you can imagine, knowing that the materials will eventually go into the public record alters what they do and don’t record and or choose to preserve.”

Frum passes along some good news:

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development reported that the number of the chronically homeless declined by 30% between 2005 and 2007. You might have expected the numbers to spike again when the financial crisis hit but no. Since 2007, the number of chronic homeless has dropped another 19%.

He gives Bush’s “housing first” program credit:

In 2002, Bush appointed a new national homeless policy czar, Philip Mangano. A former music agent imbued with the religious philosophy of St. Francis of Assisi, Mangano was seized by an idea pioneered by New York University psychiatrist Sam Tsemberis: “housing first.” The “housing first” concept urges authorities to concentrate resources on the hardest cases — to move them into housing immediately — and only to worry about the other problems of the homeless after they first have a roof over their heads. A 2004 profile in The Atlantic nicely summarized Tsemberis’ ideas: “Offer them (the homeless) the apartment first, he believes, and you don’t need to spend years, and service dollars, winning their trust.” …

“Housing first” worked. It worked from the start, and it worked fast. It worked so well that the Obama administration has now claimed the approach as its own…

Tom Stafford revisits the work of psychologist Henri Tajfel, who devised an experiment to see “what it took to turn the average fair-minded human into their prejudiced cousin.” He arbitrarily divided subjects into groups, maybe by “eye-colour, maybe what kind of paintings they like, or even by tossing a coin”:

Every participant knows which group he or she is in, but they also know that they weren’t in this group before they started the experiment, that their assignment was arbitrary or completely random, and that the groups aren’t going to exist in any meaningful way after the experiment. They also know that their choices won’t directly affect them (they are explicitly told that they won’t be given any choices to make about themselves). Even so, this situation is enough to evoke favouritism.

So, it seems we’ll take the most minimal of signs as a cue to treat people differently according to which group they are in. Tajfel’s work suggests that in-group bias is as fundamental to thinking as the act of categorisations itself. If we want to contribute to a fairer world we need to be perpetually on guard to avoid letting this instinct run away with itself.

And not engage in quixotic, legal attempts to coerce it away.

Scholarly writers, William Germano argues, should count on readers’ collaboration, just like a blogger does:

I’m advocating for a riskier, less tidy mode of scholarly production, but not for sloppiness. I’m convinced, though, that the scholarly book that keeps you awake at night thinking through ideas and possibilities unarticulated in the text itself is the book worth reading. It may be that the best form a book can take—even an academic book—is as a never-ending story, a kind of radically unfinished scholarly inquiry for which the reader’s own intelligence can alone provide the unwritten chapters.

Let every writer reflect on Rilke’s famous line: “Du musst dein Leben ändern.” You must change your life. Books are life-changing for writers­—but often only for the scholars who write them. In the new order of scholarly production, let’s double down on Rilke’s dictum: You must change their lives, too.

Alan Jacobs’ recommendation on how to accomplish this:

Even in my most theoretical work, I’ve tried to think of my task as that of attracting and keeping the attention of thoughtful readers, telling them stories, doling out fascinating details that make them want to read more, keeping them to some degree in suspense until the end of any given tale. Storytelling is, for me, the fundamental mode of writing; it’s the foundation on which everything else is built. In that sense I don’t think of writing works of literary theory as being different altogether in kind from writing a personal narrative. It’s all about trying to reach human readers, writing to them as their fellow human being. Insofar as I have had any success as a writer, I really do think that it is primarily due to my keeping that goal in mind.