Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1019

The Year 'Mad Men' Ate Itself

The sixth and penultimate season of Mad Men came to an end last night, bringing us the usual season finale ta-da of big moments and sudden, major changes. One year it was Betty leaving Don, then Don marrying Megan, and now Megan has seemingly left Don, at the same time that SC&P forced him to take a leave of absence. This episode's events weren't entirely out of the blue, of course — groundwork was being laid here and there all season — but we shouldn't let their bigness, their overarching significance, blind us to the fact that what came before the finale was sort of a muddle.

Plenty of people seemed to find this season as enthralling as ever; they enjoyed touring another dark pathway of Don Draper's soul, watching Peggy shakily ascend to new heights, reveled once again in the bluster and clipped desperation of the office. But I can't imagine I'm alone in thinking that something about this season was a little too too, as if Mad Men was almost playing at being Mad Men, giving us all the office intrigue we're supposed to want, all the somber Don psychology that once captivated us, and throwing in enough surprise and oddity to make us scratch our heads and dissect the symbolism for the rest of the week. In that most rudimentary of Mad Men ways, the sixth season was a success, a very Mad Men-y season indeed. But as part of a larger series, as part of the beginning of the end, it felt strangely like a regression, as if the show suddenly got simpler when it should have been growing wiser and richer.

[image error]I noticed a little of this back around the time of the premiere, sensing in the season's first two hours that themes and metaphors were more loudly and clearly stated than they used to be. There wasn't much investigation to be had, from Don reading about middle-aged Dante on the beach to the G.I.'s slapdash wedding service, it all felt very... on the nose, I guess you could say. Which is fine, the show was still sharply written and acted, but there was something more obvious — flatter — about it as well. Much of the season continued that way, going too far with plot lines that felt almost trite. Peggy and Ted, for example, gave Elisabeth Moss and Kevin Rahm some nice moments of barely buttoned-up lust and jealousy to play, but the whole boss-and-employee-falling-for-each-other thing was done, and done more thoughtfully, earlier on the show. The intricacies of Roger and Joan, and Don and Megan — even Don and Peggy in one excruciating scene in the first season — were far more eloquently stated, and more narratively satisfying, than Peggy and Ted's relatively simple problem this season.

Which raises another point of contention about this season. It was inconsistent, wasn't it? It frequently contradicted itself or jumped awkwardly in time to get around plot obstacles it had itself set up. When did Ted's adamant demand that Peggy not even look at him become them making goo-goo eyes at each other in the office and giggling at the movie theater? I get that Ted's defenses were worn down, but it would have been nice to see that happen more gradually, it would have given the fairly standard illicit office romance some depth and specificity.

[image error]Similarly, Don's disastrous relationship with the lady downstairs (an underused Linda Cardellini) provided some nice moments of tenderness and frailty, but we were thrown into it and then quickly dragged back out in a way that didn't let the audience really consider the affair, to glean much of anything from the story beyond the fact that Don, yet again, is a broken person trying to fill a void in all the wrong places, in all the wrong ways. We've seen that same theme handled better, more subtly, and more fruitfully in seasons past. (I'd say his affair with the Bowdoin nanny was one of the more effective examples.) I know that Don has to have an affair every season (except for last season, right?), but this one felt both familiar and disjointedly drawn, very "same old, same old" on a show that has up to this point been steadily maturing. Not that each season is necessarily "better" than the last, but the ball moves forward.

Again, I know lots of people will disagree with me. And that's fine. Mad Men is still a beguiling and exquisitely tailored show. But there used to be an air of mystery about it, a secret whispering under its surface that you had to lean in close to begin to understand. That alluring, oddly Chris Van Allsburgian magic left the show for me this season, Mad Men ossifying as just a Good Show, no longer an expression of something else, something intangible hovering in the aether. And that's fine. It just means that the show has been on for six seasons and I'm perhaps more susceptible to series fatigue than others. I'm still more than curious to see how Matthew Weiner and crew might end the show with next year's final season, I just think I'll be glad that it's done.

It's a strange thing to say as someone who does this for a living, but I think that Mad Men got to be, perhaps, a bit overanalyzed. Too much prodding makes the meat get tough. And it also, I'd have to imagine, makes Weiner and his other writers perilously conscious of what people want and expect their show to be. Weiner has always posed himself, admirably for the most part, as a principled and semi-autonomous auteur, but I can't imagine that none of the external pressures have seeped in. Knowing that the show is definitely ending next season is probably a blessing and something of a curse, now that the deadline has been set and the demand to end this thing right has become concrete. And thus, I think, we get a season like this, which felt very made in the style of how the audience talks about the show, giving us typical Don floundering and even a new guy with a secret past to wonder about in the way that we did once before, long ago. I think last night's season finale was lovely, and did push the show forward into somewhere new, but it got there on an old, and bumpy, road.

       

The Leaker, the Passport & Pizza Dinner: How & Why Hong Kong Let Snowden Go

We still don't know for sure what transpired behind the scenes this weekend that allowed Edward Snowden to escape Hong Kong, but piecing together the conflicting accounts today suggests the holed-up situation became an international headache nobody wanted to deal with, followed by a daring — if still mystifying — exodus..

The official claim from Hong Kong is that the American request to have Snowden arrested was incomplete and not thus not fully legal. Hong Kong officials also claimed that they did not receive notification from the United States that Snowden's passport had been revoked and therefore had no right to stop the NSA leaker when he boarded a plane for Moscow (or wherever he is). The White House disputed that claim on Monday, saying they were never informed of any problems with the request, and that even though the passport wasn't revoked until Saturday, HK officials were fully aware of the situation.

Why Snowden decided to leave when he did is another matter, and it may have swung on a pair of shadowy "intermediaries," serving as go-betweens for him and Hong Kong government. One is a lawyer named Albert Ho who was advising Snowden in Hong Kong and asking questions on his behalf.

According to Ho, he met with Snowden and other lawyers over a pizza dinner last week (after everyone put their cellphones in the fridge to avoid snooping) to discuss the fugitive's options. He suggested to Snowden that even if he were to fight extradition from Hong Kong, he would likely be placed under arrest while the proceedings played out. During that time — which could take months or even years — Snowden could have been held without bail and denied access to a computer, a situation he found unacceptable.

"He didn’t go out, he spent all his time inside a tiny space, but he said it was O.K. because he had his computer,” Mr. Ho said. “If you were to deprive him of his computer, that would be totally intolerable.”

So after learning that, Snowden asked Ho to reached out to the Hong Kong government to see if they would either; a) release him on bail while he fought extradition, or b) let him leave the country altogether. Ho, who is also a long-time legislator in Hong Kong, took Snowden's questions to government officials.

After he did so, however, Ho says that another, still unknown intermediary reached out to Snowden and told him that he should leave the city soon... and he would not be stopped at the airport if he did so. Ho believes that second middleman was actually working for Beijing and that Hong Kong's only role was to stay out of the way of his departure. Another source told the Times that Hong Kong simply went around Ho, because they didn't trust him and didn't want any government officials talking directly with Snowden. (Ho is a long-time critic of Beijing and has called for Hong Kong's full independence.) Another lawmaker, Charles Mok, says the U.S. arrest request was held up Hong Kong's Chief Executive, possibly at Beijing's request. While China has officially stayed out of it, both men may be trying to cast suspicion on Bejing and make Hong Kong look guiltless.

Either way, that encouragement to leave, plus the news on Friday that he had been formally indicted back in the United States, prompted Snowden to get out of town.

Whether or not it was Beijing or Hong Kong that showed Snowden the exit doesn't really matter since it seems neither government was interested in the potential difficulties that came with letting him stay. For both nations, a protracted legal fight would strain relations with the United States and with each other. And Snowden himself recognized the difficult of trying to navigate three different legal systems (the U.S., China, and Hong Kong) while likely being in jail the whole time. 

A continuous debate over what Hong Kong's "one nation, two systems" agreement with China actually means is not a fight either side was willing to have right now. (Hong Kong was also concerned that the U.S. generous no visa rule of their citizen would be in jeopardy, seriously hampering business relationships and tourism for both sides.) The short-term annoyance of being scolded by the U.S. over his escape, would have been nothing compared to years-long international incident. Snowden is Moscow's problem now.

Plus, whatever upside could be gleaned from having Snowden as a guest was already accomplished and used up. By announcing that U.S. spies routinely hacked into Chinese servers, Snowden gave Beijing a huge propaganda win, both at home and abroad, as it makes the Americans look like the abusive agressor in the cyberwars, and makes Chinese censors look like patriotic heroes for locking down their domestic internet. There is also unconfirmed speculation that if the Chinese wanted more secrets from Snowden computer files, they already took them.

It soon became obvious that the best solution for everyone was to find Snowden a place to fight his battle. All they had to do was look away long enough for him to get on a plane.

       

Tracy Flick Has Nothing on Stuyvesant's Elite NYC Student Government Scandal

It's not easy being a Stuy kid. In recent years, students at Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of New York City's Specialized High Schools, have grabbed national attention for cheating on tests with their cell phones, recording racist rap videos, and organizing an event called "Slutty Wednesday" to protest the school's dress code. The latest controversy to befall one of the nation's most elite public schools is a bit less flashy than organized cheating, however. On Monday The New York Times investigated the recent election  — and subsequent disqualification — of Stuyvesant junior Jack Cahn, who in early June won a school-wide race for President of the school's Student Union but was stripped of the title on June 11 by the school's Board of Elections. Comprising 19 of his peers, the Board accused Cahn of attaching too many campaign posters to a specific board and, more egregiously, "slandering" another student running against him in a private Facebook message. In response, Cahn's twin brother, David, uploaded a petition to reverse the decision to Change.org, where it has collected 356 signatures. "[It is] not Bush v. Gore," the Times notes.

No, it is not. Geoff Decker at GothamSchools, which first reported Cahn's ouster, noted on June 14: "The saga is decidedly low stakes. ... Many seemed only vaguely aware of the controversy and two teachers said they hadn’t heard about it at all." Discussing Cahn's predicament, a Stuyvesant sophomore told the Times: "It's very melodramatic and unnecessary. I’m surprised so many people even care." Indeed, there aren't a lot of lessons to draw from student government drama that cannot be gathered elsewhere and far more easily. Remember Election and Tracy Flick's antics? Teenagers have overestimated their own importance since the beginning of recorded history.

And yet Stuyvesant High School, which accepts just 3 percent of applicants based on notoriously rigorous standardized testing, presents a special case. Along with public peers like Hunter College High School (which administers its own test) and the upcoming Brooklyn Latin School, Stuyvesant serves to counterweigh New York's infamous collection of pricey private schools — anchored, on either side of Central Park, by Trinity and Dalton — and the city's massive public school bureaucracy. This unique status makes Stuyvesant an ideal target for tongue-wagging trend pieces, like the aforementioned "Slutty Wednesday" episode, a 2006 New York feature about the evolving sexual mores of Stuyvesant's female students (sample passage: "The Stuyvesant cuddle puddle is emblematic of the changing landscape of high-school sexuality across the country"), and, more recently, a serious look at the school's racial makeup. Being free, well-funded, and very hard to get into, Stuyvesant is one of those rare places where young people can freely grapple with ambition and intellect without being weighed down by questions of money and privilege. "Make Stuy your #1 choice. It will change your life," the school's official marketing materials read. (Stuyvesant alumni seem to agree.)

At the same time, Monday's Times investigation isn't really a trend story. There is no discernable trend here. (Besides, perhaps, teenage intransigence, plus the ever-amusing theatrics of political campaigns.) Instead, we have politics in its purest form: unproductive tantrums, imagined persecutions, sudden shifts of power. In the summer before New York chooses its next mayor, perhaps this city needs to be reminded that the democratic process, for all of its stated ideals, revolves around flawed human beings.

       

What Jeff Bauman Saw That Day in Boston

Jeff Bauman's life changed forever when the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon. What was at first a singular tragedy — the finish line, the man in the cowboy hat, the photo, the legs amputated, the wheelchair for the rest of his life — quickly became the double-sided story of a 27-year-old Costco deli guy turned terror-hunting hero, when we found out Bauman had given investigators some of the clearest information that led to the Tsarnaev brothers.

GQ just posted an exhaustively reported recreation of marathon day written by Sean Flynn from their June issue, which is currently on stands. In it, Flynn tracks people's experiences from the morning of April 15 to its end, in  on of the most emotional, most complete written portraits of that day so far from the victims and the onlookers, all in one place. Bauman's story, of course, was fairly well known: That picture of him was one of the first to emerge on the wires, and the cowboy hat and the wheelchair quickly became an early beacon of the "Boston Strong" movement, especially after an early profile in The New York Times and a quick recovery at Boston Medical Center. Bauman became an even bigger part of the larger narrative when, as first reported by Bloomberg News on the night the suspects were first ID'd by the FBI, it turned out he'd helped investigators positively ID Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

But Flynn's story paints in detail what went through Bauman's mind as he witnessed the suspects lurking that day — and that backpack left alone on the sidewalk:

Bauman sees a black backpack on the sidewalk. It occurs to him that at the airport a disembodied voice is forever telling people to be aware of unattended packages. He thinks he should tell a cop about this particular unattended package.

The day went on, disastrously, and permanently changed his life and so many others:

Then he's on the ground, a haze of smoke above him. He hears screaming, dull through his blown-out ears. He can see Michele in front of him. She's down, too, near the fence. Her leg is bleeding, and he can see the white of a bone in her lower leg where the flesh has been torn away. Oooo, Bauman thinks. That's not good.

Nothing hurts. He tries to prop himself up, but he can't. Then he sees his own legs. His feet aren't there. His ankles, parts of his shins, gone. His legs end short in shreds of flesh and jagged bones.

He's hemorrhaging, and his clothes are smoldering, burning into his back, his sides, his right arm. He reaches for his cell phone, thinks he should call someone, but he can't find it.

He believes he is going to die.

Of course, thankfully, that never happened. He's still recovering — the magazine has a nice photo of Bauman sitting in a wheelchair, with very visible scars, but clearly on the right path to get some semblance of his old life back. Read the entire GQ piece here. 

       

What Rick Santorum's New Career as a Christian Movie Producer Looks Like

If there was someone out there who put $100 in Vegas on Rick Santorum someday becoming the CEO of a movie studio, that person is now a millionaire. In an appearance on Mike Huckabee's Fox show Saturday, the former presidential candidate and recently retired World Net Daily contributor announced that he's taking the helm of EchoLight Studios. If you want to place a bet on the type of movies the studio produces, you probably won't get as good of odds.

EchoLight, founded last year, focuses on producing and distributing "high-quality movies for families of faith." Its existing line-up of films features a number of professional-looking posters and trailers. And the studio has lined up some legitimate-if-not-quite-A-list names: Corbin Bernsen stars in 25 Hill; Seinfeld's David Puddy, Patrick Warburton, is in Hoovey, which is about a basketball player with a brain tumor. (Seinfeld is not listed in Warburton's prior credits, despite the frequent suggestion that EchoLight's new CEO resembles that show's star.)

Santorum's experience with the media appears to be fairly limited, including a brief stint as a Fox News contributor and a recurring role on the very popular show, 2012 Republican Presidential Candidate Debates. But he's long expressed an interest in film. In 2011, he spoke with the Heritage Foundation, describing his Hollywood ideal.

“The problem in the past is that you have these people who create these Christian films — great message, terrible acting, horrible editing,” Santorum said. “They are not entertaining, they’re preachy.”

So how can conservatives entertain an audience while still promoting a principled message? Send your children to Hollywood. “I want people who see the world the way conservatives see the world in Hollywood,” Santorum declared.

While Santorum won't be headed to Hollywood (EchoLight is based ion Dallas), at least part of Santorum's filmmaking vision is coming true. But it means giving something up: Santorum's only other post-campaign job, writing columns for the archconservative World Net Daily has come to an abrupt end after six months, given his new role. In his final column, he writes:

[R]ather than using our pen for this weekly column, we’re going to be using our feet and our voices more going forward. We’ll use our feet to cover as much of the country as we can to meet you and listen to you. And we’ll use our voices to take your message back to Washington and out into the media so that you too can be heard.

EchoLight appears to be a more substantive venture than the production house of another former 2012 candidate, Newt Gingrich. Gingrich's eponymous firm mixes its movie offerings with a broad sampling of Gingrichian politics. Which is probably for the best; in 2010, a company that tracks movie sales labeled Gingrich Productions' films as failures.

Santorum has a little more to work with. The studio's newest release is a Western called The Redemption of Henry Myers Trailer. It is about an outlaw who is somehow redeemed.

From the film's description:

Henry begins to question the choices he's made in his life. Just when things begin to make sense again, it's all ripped away from him when his old partners show up. Will he seek the revenge he desires or finally find his Redemption?

This is not intended as an allegory for Santorum's failed presidential bid, we don't think.

       

A Challenge to the Idea That Income Can Integrate America's Campuses

Affirmative action occupies a telling place in a nation painfully aware of its racial inequities yet painfully divided over how to solve them.

Great numbers of Americans support the overarching goals of assuring equal access to educational opportunity and maintaining racial diversity in the country's institutions of higher learning. At the same time, polls show Americans are deeply conflicted – often along racial lines – about policies that achieve those goals by allowing colleges to use race as a factor in their admissions decisions.

The latest chapter in this national struggle was supposed to come with the U.S. Supreme Court's consideration of an affirmative action involving a white student and the University of Texas. But the ruling – announced Monday amid much anticipation – merely sent the case back to the lower courts for reconsideration.

Affirmative action, in its threadbare form, lives for now. But there was enough in Monday's opinion to suspect it will be diminished further in time.

All of which makes it an opportune moment to think again about what some people think could be a fairer and more palatable way of ensuring diversity on America's campuses – affirmative action based on class. The idea seems simple enough: This approach would give poor students of any race a helping hand into college, and any policy that gives an admissions boost to lower-income students would naturally benefit significant numbers of black and Latino students.

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the progressive think-tank The Century Foundation, is one of the principal proponents of what has come to be called "the economic integration movement."

"My primary interest is in ensuring that we have a fair process that looks at the biggest disadvantages that people face today, which I see as class-based," Kahlenberg said in a recent interview. "That will end up helping low-income and working-class students of all races."

Kahlenberg knows that many dispute this belief. But he says skepticism directed at the class-based solution has to be weighed against its dim alternative: If race-based affirmative action disappears with no program to replace it, African Americans and Latinos on college campuses will disappear too. Studies show that African-American and Latino enrollment at the nation's top 200 colleges would plummet by two-thirds if colleges stopped considering race when deciding whom to accept.

Yet ignoring race does not wipe its effects away. A formula that uses class while disregarding race may be politically popular, but many scholars say race remains so powerful a factor that a class-based system would seriously reduce black and Latino representation at American colleges from their current levels.

At the heart of their argument: Poor white Americans are still privileged when compared to poor African Americans and Latinos. Use class as the basis for admissions preference, studies show, and the nation's colleges will be flush with poor white students. "There are disadvantages that accrue to African Americans and Latinos that are not explained by class," said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. "You simply cannot get race by using class."

* * *

The idea of abandoning race for an admissions system targeting those clinging to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder holds powerful sway for many who believe that in modern America race is no longer much of an obstacle to success.

There is no doubt that the greatest imbalance in American colleges is not white versus black or male versus female. It is the wealthy versus everybody else.

Kahlenberg asserts that affluent students – those whose families earn at least $123,000 a year – outnumber poor students by 25-1 on the campuses of the nation's most select schools. He said that while white Americans are twice as likely to earn a college degree as black Americans, the affluent are seven times as likely to earn one as the poor.

According to the most recent data available, about three-quarters of students at the nation's top 146 universities come from families in the upper quarter of the nation's economic scale. Just 3 percent come from the bottom quarter. A study released this year by The Brookings Institution documented how selective colleges enroll nearly all of the high-achieving high school seniors from families in the highest income quartile, but just one-third of the top low-income students.

Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor who filed an amicus brief in the Fisher case supporting race-based affirmative action, said all the focus on the unfairness of race preferences ignores the bigger problem.

"Students who are getting into institutions of higher education tend to be upper middle-class students and they are the ones who are getting a preference," Guinier said. "Their preference comes from their parents' ability to spend a lot of money preparing them for SAT's and other college entrance exams and even hiring coaches to help them draft their personal statements."

And it seems that Americans, when asked, think that inequity should be fixed. While divided about racial preferences, polls show that about 85 percent of Americans approve of policies that offer special advantages or treatment for the economically disadvantaged.

So what's the problem? Poverty does not produce an equal opportunity burden across racial lines.

Being poor simply does not sequester white and Asian Americans from opportunity in the same way as African Americans and Latinos.

The typical low-income white American lives in a neighborhood where just one in 10 of their neighbors is poor, according to U.S. Census data. Their children typically attend middle-class schools where they benefit from the same qualified teachers and rigorous college prep curricula as their wealthier classmates.

The experience of poor African Americans and Latinos is starkly different. The typical poor black family lives in a heavily segregated neighborhood with twice the poverty rate of their white counterparts. Their children largely attend racially isolated, high-poverty schools, which are often burdened further by substandard teachers and a dearth of college prep classes.

Even middle-class African Americans and Latinos – whom many Americans do not believe deserve affirmative action – often cannot gain entry to better neighborhoods and top-notch schools. Affluent African Americans and Latinos live in poorer neighborhoods on average than working-class white Americans, a Brown University analysis of 2010 U.S. Census data showed. As a result, most black children – regardless of their family's income – attend schools where two-thirds of their classmates are poor and resources and college prep courses are limited.

That poor white and Asian students are not generally consigned to deeply poor neighborhoods and their failing schools, experts say, helps explain why white and Asian students account for nearly all (84 percent) of the nation's low-income students who are considered high achievers – defined as students with an A-minus average who score in the top 10 percent on the SAT or the ACT. And under a strictly class-based system, these experts argue, these high-achieving low-income students would snap up the open spaces at top colleges.

For black and Latino students, then, a set of affirmative action programs that treat class preferentially could be disastrous. Some studies have shown that a college admissions system that favors the poor would indeed boost enrollment of working-class students – making them as much as 40 percent of the student body – but it would sink black and Latino enrollment. Representation of blacks and Latinos in college could fall from its current 16 percent into the single digits.

Carnevale and his Georgetown colleague, Stephen Rose, have studied the degree to which affirmative action programs targeting class can produce a more economically diverse student body while maintaining current levels of black and Latino enrollment.

Rose said colleges would have to recruit seven to eight poor white students to get one black or Latino student. Unless colleges set aside close to half of their seats for class preferences, Rose said, black and Latino enrollment would decline severely. And, he said, class preferences that look only at the poor would also disadvantage middle-class black students trapped in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods and struggling schools.

"The common view is that it's really not race, it's class – you get that from left, right, black, white," Carnevale said. "It is true that higher education has all but ignored class. But that doesn't change the fact that African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately excluded from selective colleges and college in general. It isn't either/or."

* * *

Both Kahlenberg, the champion of economic integration, and Carnevale and Rose, the skeptics, agree that an effective way forward would be to use both class and race in the admissions calculus.

Kahlenberg, for his part, would like to target race without being explicit about it. He is against a narrow, income-based admissions program that only looks at how much a student's parents earn in their jobs because it would be "unfair to African Americans and Latinos students who on average face substantial obstacles that whites of similar income do not face." He proposes an elaborate array of tools admissions officers could use. Universities should determine the wealth, net worth, education and occupations of a student's parents, he said, and consider as well whether applicants live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and come from single-parent homes.

"Under that program, you will take up lots of African Americans and Latino students," he said. "But that is different than a program that says, 'Check a racial box.'"

Rose and Carnevale say that Kahlenberg's approach might appeal to Americans ready to embrace a post-racial American ideal, but it still won't work. They spent years working as researchers at the standardized testing giant, Educational Testing Service, trying to find the "holy grail" – the class dynamics that could negate the role of race in educational opportunity. They looked at the factors Kahlenberg suggested and then some.

"We were trying to prove that you get race by getting the right socioeconomic factor," Carnevale said. "We can never do it."

Carnevale said the only way colleges can maintain black and Latino enrollment in a nation where soon half of all school children will be of color is to continue the unpopular but successful practice of explicitly taking race into account.

"We want to figure out ways to get race without using race – if it weren't so tragic it would be funny," said Carnevale. "The bottom line is race and class are not the same thing. There are a lot of ways to be unequal but race is still the worst – it is still the one you don't want to be."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

       

Knock-Knock Jokes, Cussing & a Serious Nancy Grace: Trayvon Day 1 Gets Weird

With 25 years in jail for their client at stake, with the most watched criminal trial of the year already off to a profane opening day, and with the mother of Trayvon Martin escorted out in tears, George Zimmerman's lead attorney, Don West, the high-powered new public face of a legal team that received over $315,000 to help build a not-guilty argument for one of the most hated men in America, opened up his defense — and the latest chapter in a national conversation on race — with ... a "knock-knock" joke. We're not kidding.

Again, that's:

Knock knock. Who's there? George Zimmerman. George Zimmerman who? All right. Good. You're on the jury.

Sure, jury selection in the trial focused on finding those few people in the pool who hadn't followed the killing of Martin as closely as the rest of the nation. So it's an inside joke on a national stage. But the defense got the jury it wanted. And, yes, Mr. West, it did sound a little bit weird to begin opening arguments in a major televised murder trial with a joke. Even Nancy Grace is getting more serious than that! Still, the joke did not appear to go over well with the jury, so maybe Zimmerman should stick with Mark O'Mara, who was trying to paint Martin as a "violent" drug user — although that didn't go over so well with the judge.

West's bad joke was just one of the dramatic events of the opening statements, which were preceded by Martin's family in tears after an emotional opening statement and a subsequent escorting from the courtroom. The prosecution's arguments started with prosecutor John Guy saying the words "fucking punks," to quote Zimmerman himself and take the hyperbole up a notch on Day One. If you weren't ready for a spectacle of the absurd, this case, with very serious implications, may be well on its way.

       

Snowden Went to Booz Allen to Steal Files, but Didn't He Already Have Some?

Edward Snowden took a job at the intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton specifically to steal American intelligence information, according to a report today in the South China Morning Post quoting the NSA leaker's last major interview before his current international manhunt. But instead of settling the question of where Snowden got the files he eventually leaked, the Morning Post's vague revelation raises important questions about his previous employers, and might provide subtle answers on his Chinese exit strategy.

The report from Hong Kong's English-langugage paper isn't specific in its details. It reads, in part:

For the first time, Snowden has admitted he sought a position at Booz Allen Hamilton so he could collect proof about the US National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programmes ahead of planned leaks to the media.

“My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked,” he told the Post on June 12. “That is why I accepted that position about three months ago.”

This has been reported as though to suggest that Snowden applied for and got his job at Booz in order to pilfer the cache of files he ended up leaking. But it's unclear if Snowden accepted the position to collect all of the information he subsequently leaked or merely some of it. It's quite possible that he had some documents prior to that employment, given that his relationship with reporters from the Guardian predates his Booz employment.

Snowden's admission above (and one later in the Morning Post article) imply that he may have sought employment at Booz to gather information primarily about foreign places in which the United States was conducting hacking operations. In other words, Snowden may have been collecting precisely the insurance policy that he ended up using to escape extradition from Hong Kong. Its statement announcing Snowden's departure has a very pointed reference to the hacking of Hong Kong computer systems revealed by Snowden.

So where did the rest of the files come from, if not Booz? It's clear that Snowden's information-collection could have started no earlier than 2011, which was the point at which a contract agency called USIS conducted the background check that gave the leaker his top-secret clearance. Talking Points Memo has a good rundown of Snowden's known work history, which includes a cloudy stretch between 2009 and the present. In 2009, he left the employ of the CIA to work for contractors, including, at some point, a subsidiary of Dell Computers. Why he left that employer (or those multiple employers) isn't clear, but, in conversation with the Guardian, Snowden has indicated that it was a period during which he grew increasingly disaffected with security work.

When Booz hired him this spring, it "found possible discrepancies in his resume," according to Reuters.

[Snowden] was hired this spring after he convinced his screeners that his description of his education was truthful, said the source, who is not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

It is unclear precisely which element of Snowden's resume caused personnel officials at Booz Allen Hamilton to raise questions about his background. Also unclear is how he satisfied their concerns.

It's unlikely that the discrepancies included Snowden papering over his having been fired from a previous employer for, say, suspicious behavior. But, again, it isn't clear how he spent 2012. A spokesperson for Dell declined comment to Reuters on Snowden. In 2009, it acquired a security firm (once owned by Ross Perot) that did contract work for the government.

It is possible that Snowden got all of his files from Booz. Initial reports detailing the use of a thumb drive to exfiltrate the information from Booz suggest that the government therefore had a good sense of what was taken. But it would mean that he had no files when he first contacted the press. Snowden reached out to the Washington Post's Barton Gellman     

'World War Z' Isn't Dead Yet

Welcome to the Box Office Report, where we'd argue monsters and zombies are just as hairy and dead-eyed than the regular movie stars you're used to. 

1. Monsters U (Pixar): $82 million in 4,004 theaters

This might come as a surprise, but Mike and Scully actually took the top spot this weekend with Pixar's second highest opening weekend ever behind Toy Story 3. The House That Woody Built can really do no wrong at the box office. Excitement has waned after duds like Cars proved Pixar was mortal -- or, capable of making a bad movie -- but people have stood by the studio with their wallets, at least. 

2. World War Z (Paramount): $66 million in 3,607 theaters

The weekend's big story, though, is that Brad Pitt's actually good but supposed to be a disaster zombie epic World War Z didn't completely completely fail. It's Brad Pitt's biggest box office opening since 2005's Mr. and Mrs. Smith. (Ha! Remember that movie?) World War Z is also the "top launch for an original live-action tentpole since Avatar," according to Paramount, whatever that means. A translation, for those who speak English: World War Z made a lot of money and now no one will their job. In fact, they're already pushing for a sequel, because of course they are. 

3. Man of Steel (Warner): $41.2 million in 4,207 million [Week 2]

So Man of Steel is still making a whole lot of money, right? No one is arguing that $41 million isn't a huge amount of money. Warner should be thankful their Superman movie has made $200 million domestically and over $400 million worldwide. But this is actually a 65 percent decline over last week's total so it's being seen as a disappointment. Hollywood is really weird, you guys. 

4. This Is The End (Sony): $13 million in 3,055 theaters [Week 2]

Oh, this movie is actually quite funny! All the funny people you know and love make a bunch of dick jokes, learn to not be a jerk to each other, make more dick jokes and then you go home happy. Oh, and Michael Cera dies a sudden, bloody and violent death. What's not to love? 

5. Now You See Me (Lionsgate): $7.9 million in 2,823 theaters [Week 4]

Some day magic movies will disappear and the Box Office Report will be sad. Everyone loves Gob Bluth? Why can't more people love Jesse Eisenberg playing Gob Bluth. There is no justice in the world. 

       

Glenn Greenwald Spars with David Gregory

Glenn Greenwald and David Gregory got into a bit of a row on NBC's Meet the Press after Gregory asked whether Greenwald should maybe be prosecuted for "aiding and abetting" National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. Surprisingly, Greenwald did not appreciate being called a criminal by a fellow journalist! "I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies," he said. Greenwald said "the assumption" he did anything to help Snowden, besides act as the vessel for his classified leaks, "completely without evidence." Greenwald cited the Justice Department investigations of the Associated Press and Fox News as evidence the administration is trying to "criminalize investigative journalism" and accusing reporters of "being co-conspirator in felonies for working with sources." But Greenwald wasn't done there: "If you want to embrace that theory it means that every investigative journalist in the United States who works with their sources, who receives classified information, is a criminal." Gregory responded to Greenwald's dressing down by questioning whether or not he counts as a journalist. "The question of who's a journalist may be up to a debate with regard to what you're doing," he said, before adding that he was just "asking a question that has been raised by lawmakers," and "not embracing anything." Fun times! 

Aiding and abetting were the words of the day, apparently, as Sen. Chuck Schumer fired a similar accusation towards Russian president Vladimir Putin during his appearance on CNN's State of the Union. It seems Schumer doesn't think Putin's been a great friend recently. "The bottom line is very simple: allies are supposed to treat each other in decent ways and Putin always seems almost eager to put a finger in the eye of the United States, whether it is Syria, Iran and now of course with Snowden," Schumer said. "That's not how allies should treat each other and I think it will have serious consequences for the United States-Russia relationship." Schumer said Putin had to be aware of Snowden's movement plans and accused him of aiding and abetting the fugitive. "The fact that [Russian officials] allowed him to land, indicates that we are not in a place of cooperation," Schumer said. 

Sen. Lindsay Graham said he hopes the U.S. chases Edward Snowden to "the ends of the earth" during his appearance on Fox News Sunday. "I believe he hurt our nation," Graham said.  "He compromised our national security program. The freedom trail is not exactly China-Russia-Cuba-Venezuela, so I hope we’ll chase him to the ends of the Earth, bring him to justice and let the Russians know there’ll be consequences if they harbor this guy." Snowden was the topic of the morning, but Graham was originally booked to talk about the bipartisan immigration deal currently facing the Senate. "I think we’re on the verge of getting 70 votes ... We’re very, very close to getting 70 votes," Graham said hopefully. The South Carolina Senator said the border was sufficient and the terms of the bill are something both sides can agree on. But, more importantly, if this bill fails it could be fatal for the Republican party. "If it fails and we are blamed for its failure, we're in trouble as a party," he said. "We need to grow this party."

Sen. Rand Paul cautioned Edward Snowden against getting close with China and Russia. "I do think for Mr. Snowden, if he cozies up to the Russian government, it will be nothing but bad for his name in history," Paul told Candy Crowley on CNN's State of the Union. "If he goes to an independent third country like Iceland and if he refuses to talk to any sort of formal government about this, I think there's a chance he'll be seen as an advocate of privacy. If he cozies up to either the Russian government, Chinese government or any of these governments perceived still as enemies of ours, I think that will be a real problem for him in history." Paul, who has defended Snowden in the past, was reacting to the news Snowden had flew to Russia Sunday morning. He also mentioned during his appearance that he will not be supporting the bipartisan immigration reform bill. "I'm all in favor of immigration reform but I'm like most conservatives in the country, that I think reform should be dependent on border security first," he said. "So I introduced an amendment that would have done just that, border security first and then immigration reform with congressional checks on whether that’s occurring. That wasn’t voted on favorably and so, without some congressional authority, without border security first, I can't support the final bill." Paul also seems to think the House won't support the immigration bill despite strong urges from their Republican counterparts in the Senate. "The House is much closer to me, and I think they think border security has to come first, before you get immigration reform," he said.

Gen. Keith Alexander said he didn't believe Snowden is acting "with noble intent" during his interview on ABC's This Week. Alexander was asked whether he understood why alarms didn't sound whenever Snowden left the country for Hong Kong. "No, I don't," Alexander said. "It's clearly an individual who's betrayed the trust and confidence we had in him. This is an individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent." Alexander said they're going to keep an eye on people who performed the same duties Snowden had when he still worked as an NSA contractor. "We are now putting in place actions that would give us the ability to track our system administrators, what they're doing, what they're taking, a two-man rule," he said. "We've changed the passwords.  But at the end of the day, we have to trust that our people are going to do the right thing.  This is an extremely important mission defending our country."

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