Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1082

Let's All Support John Boehner and His 'Really Cool' New Son-in-Law

The children of politicians are often not as cautious and conservative as we might expect, or as their parents might like them to be. And House Speaker John Boehner's 35-year-old daughter Lindsay is getting married next month in Florida to Dominic Lakhan, who doesn't seem like the boring blue blazer-wearing type you see so much in Washington. The National Enquirer, which is a tabloid but occasionally very reliable on marital matters, reported Wednesday that Lakhan was pulled over in Florida in 2006. "Upon making contact with the driver," the police report says, according to the Enquirer, "officer ob­served in plain view a 16 oz. Natural Lite beer can opened in the driver door." He also smelled weed, searched the car, and found 2 grams of cannabis. Lakhan was reportedly charged with a misdemeanor. The Enquirer writes, "Jamaican-born Lakhan, who resembles reggae leg­end Bob Marley..." and that is stupid, because he does not look like Bob Marley at all. 

Lindsay and Dominic are probably a lovely couple. You can see their registry at Macy's (the Williams Sonoma one is locked), and they are asking for lovely wedding gifts, such as an apple, a plastic honey bear, and a gas mask. Just kidding, they've asked for — and someone has purchased! — a pistachio-colored KitchenAid mixer, as well as an attractive modern tea kettle, some simple tableware, and other typical wedding stuff. Still available for purchase is a not-so-romantic steam mop with removable hand-held steamer. Sounds a little boring for a couple described by neighbors, according to the gossip site Gossip Extra, as "really cool."

       

Why Can't a Female Leader Be Celebrated Until She's Bullied?

A few weeks ago people were complaining that Sheryl Sandberg and her Lean In mantra are too elitist to be very valuable. And then today some of those very same people joined the chorus of outrage on behalf of Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of The New York Times and literally a case study for Leaning In, after some anonymous carping in her newsroom was published online.

That outrage was, of course, justified. But it also shows how it's a lot easier for people to muster solidarity with powerful women under duress than women exercising the perks of power.

In response to this Politoco "scoop" by Dylan Byers about a supposed mutiny brewing at the Times because of a testy Abramson who is "very, very unpopular," many journalists have come to the defense of the Times editor, calling the portrayal and the anonymous sources who created it "whiny and sexist." 

"Newsroom w/sexist, anonymous criticism of a woman? Wow, that never happens. Gnat on your shoulder @JillAbramson," tweeted Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz. But reviewing Sandberg's Lean In for the Washington Post review, she concluded: "It is impossible to forget that she, like many of the female friends she quotes, is a wealthy, white, married woman with a 'vast support system.'" Yet, it is somehow possible for this moment to forget that Abramson is also a wealthy, white, married woman with a vast support system. Lisa McIntire, a social media specialist who has worked for Emily's List, made a similar argument on Twitter about Sheryl Sandberg. "There is still a universe of difference between Sheryl's situation and that of most women in corporate America," she wrote. But today, she tweeted about Byers' piece, "I struggle to find any specific behavior of Abramson's that is critiqued here other than the tone of her voice."

Ann Friedman, the former executive editor of Good and columnist at The Cut, called Lean In a movement for "corporate-track moms" rather than everyone else in New York, today put up a defense of the Times leader called "If Jill Abramson were a man...." In it, she points out the double standards that men and women face. "She is condescending. He is the boss," she writes. Yet, she dismissed Sandberg's cause because she doesn't think it applies to her. "I know that most women, unlike me, want to become mothers, and that the dual demands of parenting and work have a disproportionately negative effect on them," she writes. "But I’m sick of every conversation about women and work subtly morphing into a conversation about corporate-track moms." Meanwhile, much of Sandberg's book is about getting ahead in the work place without coming off as an evil, agressive woman. 

These disparate reactions to Abramson and Sandberg point towards the tendency to celebrate power in general but criticize women in power specifically. Abramson's appointment at the top of The New York Times was roundly recognized as a milestone for women, but never with the kind of emotion as a powerful woman scorned by her underlings and a media reporter. It's far easier to defend a victim, like Abramson, thereby propping them up as a sympathetic character for your cause. But, a powerful person with all the successes of Sheryl Sandberg doesn't have the same appeal. We see the same thing with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, too. She looked like a quasi feminist hero when the pregnant all-star first arrived at Yahoo mainly because of why she was up for the job: she had been passed over for a senior position at Google. But, as she got comfortable in her seat of power, the criticisms have started coming in as she has tried to do her job and remodel her office.

In general, people in power aren't likable. (That's perhaps how Byers got so many anonymous people to complain about their leader: people like to bond by complaining about their bosses.) But feminists should start celebrating the success stories. Abramson overcame a lot of ingrained sexism in journalism to get where she is today, as did Sandberg and Mayer in the notoriously male-dominated tech space. The lesson from today's Politico story is that even women at the top face sexism and the feminists who want change for all women agree that this is a bad thing. These are familiar stances for everyone involved. Left undefined is how to respond to the woman who feels perfectly at home at the top of the corporate ladder.

       

Paul Ryan's Intern Was an Even More Calculating Cyberstalker Than Imagined

Twenty-one-year-old Adam Savader, the main operations intern for vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan on the Mitt Romney campaign last year, was charged last week with cyberstalking and extorting fifteen women by the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Michigan. After his much-discussed arrest on Tuesday, the charges against Savader were unsealed on Wednesday afternoon, and they are disturbing reflections of a young man with access to power, turned very pushy—and very sexually aggressive. Indeed, a copy of the criminal complaint against Savader (pictured with Ryan above) alleges that during the fall of 2012, he used a virtual toolbox of Google Voice numbers, fake Facebook profiles, and burner email accounts to threaten 15 women, including several of his college classmates, with distributing nude photos of them to their parents and friends. (Savader supposedly obtained the photos by hacking into some of the victims' email accounts at AOL and Gmail.) The charges carry a maximum punishment of five years in prison.

Before being charged today, Savader was making a name for himself in the Republican Party, taking jobs on the campaigns of Mitt Romney and, before him, Newt Gingrich. On his well-followed Twitter profile, Savader describes himself as a "Reagan Republican" and an "American Patriot." His public Facebook profile features hundreds of photos of conservative politicians and personalities — including Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, Steven Crowder, and Andrew Breitbart — smiling next to Savader. "Savader is/was one of those young D.C. go-getters — there are legion — who made sure to get photographed with as many famous people as possible," suggested Slate columnist David Weigel, who met Savader on the campaign trail in 2012.

It was a different story for the photographs of others, the complaint against Savader alleges. Over several episodes with more than a dozen women, Savader is charged with threatening to ruin his victims' reputations with compromising photographs if they did not comply with his various requests. In one exchange, Savader allegedly demanded that a woman accept his friend request on Facebook:

The writer threatened to send the photos to Victim 11's parents and friends unless she told him not to: "Do it from ur phone RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!! I swear to god don't be stupid. U don't want every1 [sic] including your parents seeing your tits ass and pussy. Accept it now!! This is what I will send ur mom with the pics unless u accept now "thought u would want to see these pics of your baby girl. They're very revealing. About to send them to every1 so she is a star"

(The FBI special agent who filed the complaint collected a total of five different Google Voice numbers, each of which was programmed to forward texts to a cell phone belonging to Savader.)

Savader appears to have been a dedicated staffer. According to Yahoo News, he enjoyed dressing up as 'Ellis the Elephant,' the protagonist of two children's books written by Newt Gingrich's wife, Callista. (The Wire's Elspeth Reeve reported in December 2011 on the number of similarities between Ellis and Newt Gingrich.) A February 2012 profile on the website of George Washington University, to which Savader transferred in 2010, detailed his dedication in even more detail:

Mr. Savader began working for the campaign last June after writing to Callista Gingrich, the candidate’s wife, who put him in touch with the national campaign director. As special assistant to the chief operating officer for the campaign, Mr. Savader works full time at the campaign headquarters and is responsible for sending Mr. Gingrich a daily report. Before primary season began, Mr. Savader was still in classes at GW full time, but this semester he’s only able to take two night classes – a sacrifice Mr. Savader says has definitely been worth it.

“It’s been a great opportunity,” said Mr. Savader. “I’m having a great experience, and I’m meeting lots of good people. It’s important to get hands-on experience in politics, and that’s what I’m getting.”

Savader remains in FBI custody in New York. The full complaint against him is embedded below:

       

Rand Paul Doesn't Want to Send Drones to Your Liquor Store After All

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said his position on using drones on Americans hasn't changed, clarifying an interview on Fox Business Network Tuesday that gave the impression he thought droning a liquor store robber might be OK. "My comments last night left the mistaken impression that my position on drones had changed. Let me be clear: it has not," Paul said in a statement Tuesday night. He thinks drones should be "considered in extraordinary, lethal situations," and "should not be used in normal crime situations."

In an nterview Tuesday, Paul said:

"I have never argued against any technology being used against having an imminent threat, an act of crime going on… If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don't care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him. But it's different if they want to come fly over your hot tub, or your yard just because they want to do surveillance on everyone, and they want to watch your activities."

That makes it sound like he's cool with a drone killing a small-time robber (or a police officer killing that robber!) after a crime is committed, and even if someone's life isn't in danger. But Paul instead that's not what he meant. Instead, he now says, "Armed drones should not be used in normal crime situations. They only may only be considered in extraordinary, lethal situations where there is an ongoing, imminent threat. I described that scenario previously during my Senate filibuster."

       

Americans Aren't That Mad Gun Control Failed

After senators filibustered a gun background checks bill, President Obama gave an angry speech, promising that "we can still bring about meaningful changes that reduce gun violence so long as the American people don't give up on it." But according to a new Washington Post/ Pew Research Center poll, the American people are kind of over it. Less than a majority -- 47 percent -- say they are "angry" or "disappointed" that gun legislation failed to pass after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn. That is a lot less than the frequently-cited 90 percent who supported the substance of the bill, universal background checks. A large minority, 39 percent, say they're "relieved" or "happy" that the bill did not advance.

But a closer look at that 47 percent — yes, it's that number again — who are disappointed or angry shows why it's going to be difficult to turn even that much outrage into electoral consequences for filibustering senators. First, who's mad about the bill's failure? According to the poll, 67 percent of Democrats said they are "angry." They are also postgrads (31 percent), followed by people in the Northeast (26 percent). A fifth of women say they're angry. And then take a look at who's on the other side and "very happy" the legislation died: 29 percent of Republicans, 28 percent of people from the West, and 26 percent of independents and white people without a college education.

Americans for Responsible Solutions, the group founded by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly, will start airing radio ads attacking Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell and New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte for their votes against the bill, Politico's Maggie Haberman reports. In Ayotte's New Hampshire, the 60-second ad will feature two women saying Ayotte had said "she's one of us," but "it sure didn’t take long for her to ‘go Washington." A woman says, "Are you serious? 89 percent of the people in New Hampshire support universal background checks. She just ignored us?

The Post poll numbers suggest the ads have a better chance of making people mad in Ayotte's New Hampshire than in McConnell's Kentucky. In a secretly taped meeting reported by Mother Jones, McConnell's aides indicated they were preparing opposition research on a potential primary challenger who was a Tea Partier. They noted they could attack a potential Democratic challenger for supporting an assault weapons ban. The Americans for Responsible Solutions ad says that "82 percent of Kentuckians support universal background checks." But the Post poll shows that 22 percent of southerners were "very happy" the bill failed, while only 15 percent of southerners were angry.

The New Republic's Alec MacGillis argues Wednesday  that "The Gun-Vote Backlash Has Only Just Begun," saying, "It is not at all hard to envision a Democrat running against Kelly Ayotte on a law-and-order-line—here she was, a former attorney general, voting to leave a huge loophole in our system for making sure that felons are unable to purchase guns." But since Ayotte isn't up for reelection till 2016, New Hampshire voters will have to get angrier and make that anger last three more years.

       

The Bird Flu Has Spread Beyond China, and It's 'One of the Most Lethal' Ever

The new strain of bird flu infecting and killing people in China is on the move. All of the reported cases had been contained to a relative few hotspots, but the first reported case of a human infection outside mainland China arrived Wednesday, and that's got the world's top scientists pretty worried about this H7N9 strain—even if it's not being transmitted from person to person.

A 53-year-old man from Taiwan recently returned from a trip to mainland China and showed signs of being infected with the new bird flu virus three days after landing home. (Taiwan is technically part of the larger Republic of China, but also its own country. It's complicated.) He's in critical condition and remains in quarantined at a Taiwanese hospital, where he's been since April 16. "This is the first confirmed H7N9 case in Taiwan who was infected abroad," Taiwan's Health Minister Chiu Wen-ta told reporters.

This is also very concerning because the World Health Organization just finished their own investigation into the H7N9 virus and they're worried it could be even worse than SARS or the H591 bird flu. Remember SARS and the first bird flu? They weren't fun. "This is one of the most lethal influenza viruses we have seen so far," the WHO's assistant director-general for health security, Dr. Keiji Fukuda, said at briefing Wednesday. "This is an unusually dangerous virus for humans," he added.

Despite those troubling words, the WHO said it's too soon to conclude that the H7N9 virus has been transmitted through human-to-human contact. Of the 108 infected and 22 killed in China since the virus emerged in March, the source has been traced to open poultry markets. WHO scientists believe the virus could be transmitted from birds to humans much easier than the H5N1 virus. Last week, China was worried recently about the disease spreading from human to human, but the WHO has shot that idea down, at least for now. "Evidence so far is not sufficient to conclude there is person-to-person transmission. Moreover, no sustained person-to-person transmission has been found," Fukuda said Wednesday. Still, some experts believe limited human-to-human transmission may have occurred.

Things were looking up for a few minutes, though: Infections seemed to drop after the Chinese government ordered the open poultry markets be closed until they can figure out what's going on with this latest bird flu virus. (Fukuda admitted they don't know much about the virus yet.) 

That the infected Taiwanese man says he never came in contact with any poultry while traveling in China, then, might be cause for concern. "To our best knowledge, the man has come in contact with 139 people and so far none has exhibited any symptoms of the virus," Chang Feng-yee, the director general at Taiwan's Center for Disease Control, said Wednesday.

       

The Rise of the Food-Tarians

Mark Bittman has a new column in The New York Times. It's about food, but also it's about the way we eat in these trying food times. "The moderate, conscious eater — the flexitarian — knows where the goal lies: a diet that’s higher in plants and lower in both animal products and hyperprocessed foods, the stuff that makes up something like three-quarters of what’s sold in supermarkets," he writes: "That’s the kind of cooking and eating I’ll be exploring in this monthly column," which is named The Flexitarian. He hopes to "marry the burning question 'What should I be eating?' with another: 'How do I cook it?'”

Flexitarian eating is not dieting, it's a way of life, he explains, and this will be an eating—not a diet—column. But what is this word flexitarian, which sounds like it was made up for comedic purposes? (It is in the dictionary: "one whose normally meatless diet occasionally includes meat or fish"; or more generally, one who eats flexibly.) Bittman explains that he picked the word in particular over omnivore for several reasons, including because it "suggests a regimen that includes more whole grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables than the Standard American Diet." Flexitarian has a healthier connotation, maybe, and we all want to eat "better." If calling ourselves flexitarian helps, so be it. And, he says, "at least the word flexitarian hasn’t been perverted, as has vegetarian," with offshoots like pescetarians or chicken-eating vegetarians (pollotarians), or people who eat chicken and fish but call themselves vegetarians anyway. 

But is this really true, semantically speaking? Linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer told me, "I find it odd that he says 'at least the word flexitarian hasn’t been perverted, as has vegetarian.' This 'perversion' of vegetarian has been going on for more than a century (fruitarian is in the OED from 1893 and nutarian from 1909). Flexitarian is just another variation on the -tarian theme. My favorite is breatharian, from the crackpot notion that you can get all the nutrients you need from breathing air."

If there is a reason "flexitarian" is more pure or accurate as a descriptor than vegetarian, maybe it's because it's also infinitely more general, seeking to describe the flexible nature of one's eating rather than what one won't eat. "Semi-vegetarian" in contrast, sounds pretty mealy-mouthed. And flexitarian has a certain of-the-moment cache, maybe because it seems slightly less culturally saturated than vegetarian. But it's also just another of those food words that have sprung up to indicate a particular type of person eating a particular type of food. Like locavore (named the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year in 2007; someone who "seeks to consume only locally grown food"), opportunivore ("a person who eats whatever is around"), freegan ("eating food that's been discarded"), and all of the many "tarians," those who are eating flexibly are just eating in their own way. We're all a bunch of eat-tarians. We all eat food. 

Zimmer writes that the suffix tarian "has proved even more productive than -vore for naming new classes of eaters. Starting with vegetarians in the 19th century, there have been fruitarians (fruit eaters), nutarians (nut eaters), pescetarians (fish eaters), and flexitarians (flexible vegetarians). Lately there have also been plantarians, who promote a plant-based diet as a healthy lifestyle choice. If all of these X-tarians sound like religious sects (along the lines of Unitarians or Trinitarians), that’s only fitting: the advent of vegetarianism in the US and UK in the 1830s-40s was tied to ethical and religious movements to improve society."

Just don't call them "foodies." 

       

Why the FBI Didn't Catch Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Reports that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been added to the government's terror watch list seems to bolster the argument that the marathon bombing is the result of FBI error. But that revisionism fails to take into account the scale and complexity of how the government tracks terror suspects.

The terror watch list, as it's known, isn't really a watch list. For one thing, it isn't regularly watched. For another, it's not one list. It's more of a set of hierarchical, integrated databases which are checked under various circumstances, most notably when individuals want to travel. According to Reuters, after he was interviewed by the FBI in 2011, Tsarnaev was added to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, which is compiled by the National Counterterrorism Center. It's a list that comprises over half a million names. "Because of its huge size," Reuters reports, "U.S. investigators do not routinely monitor everyone registered there, said U.S. officials familiar with the database."

In other words, there's a sort of pyramid of terror investigation. At the bottom of the pyramid are hundreds of thousands of people who've come to the government's attention for some reason. As the FBI and other agencies look into behavior and patterns, people can move up the pyramid — fewer people evincing more suspicious behavior — winnowing to a point once held by Osama bin Laden. Or, after a determined time, people can drop out of the pyramid entirely if they don't behave in a way that raises suspicion. That's the track Tsarnaev was on.

It's worth reviewing how Tamerlan first came to the attention of the FBI. According to The New York Times:

[T]he Russian government expressed fear that he could be a risk “based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups,” the F.B.I. said in a statement.

The F.B.I. responded by checking government databases for any criminal records or immigration violations as well as activity on Web sites that promote extremist views and activities. The investigators found no derogatory information, officials said.

The FBI went back to their Russian contacts asking for more information that might prompt a more thorough search. The Russians didn't respond. At that point, the FBI sent agents to interview Tsarnaev and found no evidence of terror links.

But by looking into Tsarnaev at all, he entered that suspect pyramid. As National Journal reports, there are very specific rules dictating how the FBI can proceed with an investigation, established in the Domestic Investigations Operations Guide.

The guide allowed FBI agents to undertake an assessment of an individual, but it also spelled out how far that assessment could go and how long it could last if the trail of evidence ran cold or never existed in the first place. Agents had 90 days to keep a file open or close it. If there is no “derogatory information,” the file must be closed, and its very existence is not enough to subsequently prejudice the government against the individual.

The reason for this time limitation is simple: civil rights. The government cannot keep an open file on you forever, looking into everything you do. This is a feature, not a bug.

Though it can be buggy. So when Tsarnaev travelled to Russia last January, his status as a threat had already been set fairly low. In testimony before Congress yesterday, Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano outlined what happened at that point.

His flight reservation set off a security alert to customs authorities when he departed, Ms. Napolitano said, in spite of a “mismatch” in the spelling of his name on his airline ticket, his travel document and the passenger manifest of his flight.

As a result of “redundancies” in the system, the error was detected, the secretary said, and “there was a ping on the outbound to customs.”

But when Mr. Tsarnaev returned, more than a year had gone by since the F.B.I. closed a background review of his possible links to extremist groups that had been requested by the Russian government in January 2011. It was determined that he posed no threat. The security alert “at that point was more than a year old and had expired,” Ms. Napolitano said.

In other words, Tsarnaev's trip overlapped with the expiration date of the FBI's ability to look into him as a threat. He'd dropped out of the pyramid.

Late last year, Tsarnaev applied for his citizenship. As we outlined last week, this prompted a thorough review of his history. The Times reports that Homeland Security, which was conducting the review, found his 2009 domestic violence arrest and the FBI's review of any terror links, which found "no derogatory information." Nonetheless, Homeland Security put a hold on his application.

Which suggests that there was very little reason for the government to think that this particular person, one of half a million floating around in the terror watch system, posed more of a threat than others. Yes, when Tsarnaev returned from his Russia trip, he created a YouTube page featuring jihadist videos. Citing counterterrorism specialists, The Times notes that "[p]osting such videos alone, without overt threats of violence, should not necessarily sound alarms." It's easy to see this as a warning sign after the fact, but allocating FBI resources to investigate every person with a suspect YouTube page is hardly feasible.

This has long been a fear of government officials, the threat of a "lone wolf" lacking traditional indicators of terror links. Well before last week's bombing, The Hill reports, Congress was assessing how such a threat — one person acting essentially alone — could be curtailed. Senator Angus King of Maine asked that question of James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence.

“We won’t know what we’ve missed until something blows up?” King asked Clapper during an April 19 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Clapper replied quickly, “Yes, sir.”

There are just too many people displaying too many variants of suspicious behavior. Sometimes, one of those people who is a legitimate threat isn't detected.

       

Bangladesh Workers Sent Back into Crumbling Building Before It Collapsed

Another garment factory disaster has killed dozens in Bangladesh, but this tragedy might have been avoided if employers had not ignored warning signs that the building was in trouble. An eight-story building in the city of Savar collapsed on Wednesday morning, killing at least 87 people and trapping many more inside the massive pile of rubble. More than 700 others are reported to be injured. 

On Tuesday, workers at the factory noticed that large cracks had begun to develop in the building's structure. The cracks were so severe that they were even reported on the local news. When workers returned on Wednesday morning they were hesitant to return, but they say they were ordered back into the building by managers who assured them the building was safe. Only an hour into the morning shift, the upper floors collapsed without warning. At any given time, as many as 2,000 people work in the building, which holds five separate garment companies working on a 24-hour schedule.

It was just last November that 112 workers were killed in a deadly fire a similar factory. Bangladesh is home to thousands of garment factories that supply inexpensive goods to major U.S. retailers, like Wal-Mart. (One of the companies in the building that collapsed today is a Wal-Mart supplier.) The industry is also rife with safety violations, poorly constructed workplaces, and illegal outlets that violate the already lax regulations on hours, pay, and workers safety. Many of the deaths in the November fire occurred because employees were locked inside the building, in a painful repeat of other notorious workplace tragedies. 

       

Jon Stewart Puts His Profane Golden Touch on Dirty Congress Deals

When talking about regulations of Congressional insider trading, Jon Stewart had some fun with acronyms. You see, Obama signed the STOCK Act. That's the "Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge" Act. Stewart said: "It was passed I guess because the Fiscal Use of Congressional Knowledge is Expressly Restricted Act is...too on the nose." Yes, that becomes the acronym "F*CKER." Stewart them deemed himself "the Midas of profanity."

Later on Stewart shows his vulgarity prowess with some language that would make a DG sorority girl proud. 

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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