Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 312

Walking the Line in Space

There are six people in space, according to this handy tracker. Two of them are really, really in space: Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren are conducting their first-ever spacewalks, dangling by cords from the International Space Station as it hurtles around the Earth at more than 17,000 miles per hour.

The pair of NASA astronauts will spend six and a half hours performing maintenance work outside of the orbital station on Wednesday. The agency says Kelly, the expedition commander, and Lindgren, a flight engineer, donned pressurized spacesuits this morning to, among other tasks, install a thermal cover over a particle physics detector that has been attached to the ISS since 2011. It is the 189th spacewalk for the station, and the 32nd for Americans.

NASA is broadcasting it live:

Earth is visible below the astronauts’ arms as they maneuver tools and equipment in zero-G. NASA staffers back at mission control in Houston advise the astronauts as they work. “You guys are doing great,” a voice from Earth can be heard.

Spacewalks are painstakingly scripted before astronauts even get to the ISS. They’re rehearsed over and over again in a pool big enough to fit two space shuttles. After all, one tiny deviation from the plan—one mistake—can spell disaster.

For the astronauts, spacewalks are, for lack of a better world, awesome. As Charles Fishman wrote for the magazine earlier this year:

Nothing captures the strange contradictions of modern spaceflight as well as spacewalking—shoving off into space with only your wits and training, sealed into your one-person spacecraft. An EVA (extravehicular activity) is, for almost all astronauts, the ultimate professional challenge and the ultimate thrill ride. When you’re outside the station, you are literally an independent astronomical body, a tiny moon of Earth, orbiting at 17,500 miles an hour. When you look at Earth between your boots, that first step is more than 1 million feet down.

The spacewalk is the latest milestone in Kelly’s historic mission aboard the ISS. The astronaut is halfway through a 342-day aboard the station, the longest for any American astronaut.

Another spacewalk for Kelly and Lindgren is scheduled for November 6.

Netflix and Hill

The advice site wikiHow.com offers several helpful tips for making conversation with someone you’ve just met. These include: “Try a bit of small talk,” “Be funny if you can,” “Ask the person what they do for a living,” and “Ask about their hobbies.”

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This is good advice. “Ask about their hobbies,” however, might at this point be rephrased to address a specific hobby, a hobby that many contemporary conversation-havers will have in common: TV-watching. And not just TV-watching, but passionate TV-watching. Binge-watching. In a climate when even that most failsafe of in-a-pinch conversational topics—the weather—has become politicized (“Don’t talk about the weather, whatever you do,” wikiHow advises), TV offers a safe space for finding common ground. As a result, “What are you watching right now?” or some version of that question will almost always achieve the unspoken goal of the introductory conversation: Even if one is unable, alas, to “be funny,” conversations about television will at least help one to be likable.

Which is probably why, on her appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton took full advantage of television watching’s lubricative banality. Deep into her humanization tour (“Fun is something I often have when amongst a group of people”), Clinton confided that she’d celebrated her birthday over the weekend by sleeping in, hanging out with her extremely humanizing baby granddaughter, Charlotte, and otherwise doing “as little as I could get away with.” And on the big day itself—Monday—she told Colbert, “I just sort of hung around. Bill and I just watched bad TV ... a little binge-watching, here and there.” Clinton went on to list some of her favorite shows for that watching: House of Cards, Madam Secretary, and The Good Wife.

This was not, strictly, news. Clinton has shared, many times before, her preference for those shows. She has also confessed, on previous occasions, to being a fan of HGTV’s Love It or List It. (“I find it very calming,” she told The New York Times.) She is also, according to emails obtained from that infamous private server, a fan of Parks and Recreation.

But that Clinton, last night, made a point of mentioning the delight she takes in “binge-watching, here and there” wasn’t (just) about the presidential candidate wikiHow-ing her way through her conversation with Colbert. She was also wikiHow-ing her way through contemporary campaigning, with all its demands of performative authenticity. Politicians’ various strategies for Spontaneity—campaign managers tend not to recognize the contradiction—have long included demonstrations of relatable humanity, among them singing on The View, dancing with Ellen, gnawing on stick-meat at the Iowa State Fair, etc. They have also included the divulging of candidates’ pop-cultural preferences, including favorite books and favorite movies and favorite music.

It’s humanity by way of Homeland.

As television has gained cultural cachet as a medium, though—and as options for shows have expanded far beyond what traditional networks could offer—TV shows have been included more and more often in those lists. The conversational reliability of TV Talk has made its way from everyday life to the life of the campaign trail. “What are you watching?” has become a default question not just within dinner parties, but within political ones.

And so: We know that Barack Obama watches Homeland, The Wire, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, and Sports Center. (And also that his favorite show is M*A*S*H.) And that Bill Clinton likes Scandal and 24. And that Nancy Pelosi likes Person of Interest. And that Kevin McCarthy likes House of Cards. And that Debbie Wasserman Schultz likes Scandal and HGTV’s Flea Market Flip. And on and on.

Do any of those preferences have any bearing at all on these leaders’ ability to do their leading? Not really. But, of course, the divulgence of those preferences isn’t about leadership, per se. It is simply meant to show what can be hard to highlight within the highly orchestrated settings of the campaign trail: that politicians are humble and relatable and just as likely as the rest of us to have a moment of existential anxiety when Netflix’s “Continue Playing” button pops onto the screen. It’s humanity by way of Homeland.

And yet. Even if these people really are binge-watching Game of Thrones in the company of Papa John and Ben and Jerry, just like the rest of us, politicians are not, in the end, just like the rest of us. And not just because of their chauffeured cars and marble-laden offices. Their power is political, sure, but it’s also cultural. These people don’t just watch TV shows; they also, occasionally, inform them. Take Kevin McCarthy, who isn’t just a fan of House of Cards, but also an adviser to it. (“I start watching this show and after the first couple of shows, his office starts to look like my office,” the House majority leader told The Sacramento Bee.)

And take, as well, Hillary Clinton, whose conversation with Colbert ignored the obvious irony in her binge-watching proclivities: Madame Secretary is, on some level, based on the experiences of one Hillary Clinton. So is, on some level, The Good Wife. So is, on some level, Parks and Rec. (So is, on some level—according to the Hillary haters—House of Cards.) For Clinton, even television—one of the few common denominators we have left as monoculture gives way to more fractured and atomized experiences—is fraught. She may well binge-watch TV after a hard day at work, just like the rest of us. The key difference is that, while she is watching television, she is also watching, in some sense, herself.

The Trope of the Evil Television Bisexual

Eight episodes into the first season of Netflix’s American reboot of House of Cards, the power-hungry congressman Frank Underwood returns to the Southern Carolina military academy he attended decades earlier. Hanging out with his college bros, it becomes clear to viewers that Frank, now married to a woman and carrying on a lusty affair with a young female reporter, once had an indeterminate relationship with one of those bros.

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This revelation, so far, has had little impact on the rest of the show. At one point, Frank has a threesome that involves his wife and a man; at another, he seems to hit on his biographer, who is male. In season three, he has a phone conversation with his college lover, and they vaguely allude to their past.

Maybe this will all add up to blackmail material later. But perhaps it’s just a detail meant to flesh out the inner life of a man who murders, betrays, and bribes to get what he wants. The showrunner Beau Willimon has rejected the use of labels to describe Frank’s sexuality, saying, “He’s a man with a large appetite,” a statement that suggests physical attractions are subsets of other personality traits.

The 2015 edition of GLAAD’s annual report on the state of minorities on TV mostly looks like progress to anyone who favors casting that reflects humanity’s diversity. About four percent of characters on broadcast primetime programming are identified as LGBT—a percentage that’s in line with what some studies show about the percentage of U.S. population identified as LGBT—and there are more women and more ethnic minorities on TV than ever before.

But larger pools of diverse characters make it easier to spot cliches about those kinds of characters. One observation: It appears that what the website TV Tropes calls “the Depraved Bisexual” is only getting more common. Bisexuality in general on TV is on the rise; among television’s regular and recurring LGBT characters, 28 percent are bisexual. But while gay and lesbian characters on TV increasingly are portrayed in a way that doesn’t make their sexuality into a large and dubious metaphor about their character, bisexuality often is portrayed as going hand-in-hand with moral flexibility. The tropes, as identified by GLAAD:   

• bisexual characters who are depicted as untrustworthy, prone to infidelity, and/or lacking a sense of morality;

• characters who use sex as a means of manipulation or who are lacking the ability to form genuine relationships;

• associations with self-destructive behavior;

• and treating a character’s attraction to more than one gender as a temporary plot device that is rarely addressed again.

These characteristics are surprisingly common among male bisexual characters on some of the most buzzed about new shows. GLAAD writes that the list includes “Cyrus Henstridge on E!’s The Royals who last season seduced a member of parliament and then blackmailed him into helping the Queen; Mr. Robot’s Tyrell who sleeps with a male office assistant to install spyware on the man’s phone; and the traitorous Chamberlain Milus Corbett on FX’s The Bastard Executioner, whose sexual liaisons have so far been depicted as a way for him to exert power.” The report also says that bisexual women don’t have it quite so bad, “with characters like Grey’s Anatomy’s Callie and Chasing Life’s Brenna whose sexuality is established as just part of their lives.” (Casey Quinlan had a nuanced look at the topic for The Atlantic in 2013.)

This all conforms with some larger trends in attitudes about bisexuality. Studies have revealed widespread stigma and disbelief facing people who identify as bisexual. Women are frequently seen as experimenting when they identify as bisexual; men have it arguably worse because they’re often seen as lying to themselves and others about just being gay. In both cases, the upshot is: untrustworthy. Which is certainly an adjective that applies to Frank Underwood, though probably not to an outsized number of bisexual people in real life.

As for why any of this matters, GLAAD’s Alexandra Bolles explains in the report, “Though bisexual people make up the majority of the LGBT community, they are less likely than their gay and lesbian peers to be out to the people they love, because their identity is constantly misconstrued as either a form of confusion, a lie, or a contrived and hypersexualized means to an end. Perpetuating these tropes undermines the truth that bisexuality is real and that bi people deserve to be treated equally and fairly.”

‘Guilty, Sir’: Dennis Hastert's Sad End

On the same day that Republicans will vote to elect a new speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert—who served in that position longer than any Republican in history—pleaded guilty Wednesday in Chicago to a felony charge of evading federal bank-reporting laws.

It’s a sad closing to Hastert’s public career, but the deal is about the best he could have hoped for. While Hastert could be fined $250,00 and sentenced to five years in prison on the charge, he’s expected to serve zero to six months instead, and a charge of lying to the FBI was dropped as part of his plea deal. And by pleading, Hastert avoids a messy, embarrassing trial over why he was working to evade bank laws: He was reportedly withdrawing large sums of money to pay hush money in a blackmail scheme involving sexual misconduct when Hastert was a high-school teacher and wrestling coach. (The indictment withheld details, apparently at Hastert’s lawyers’ request.)

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Hastert, of Illinois, was indicted in May. The plea has been expected. The exact details, including whether he will face jail or probation, remain unclear. Sentencing will not be until February 29.

Hastert served as speaker from 1999 to 2007. He ended up with the gavel thanks to the fall of two men who had their own sexual scandals. When Speaker Newt Gingrich was forced out by fellow Republicans in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky impeachment, Bob Livingston was tabbed as his replacement, but instead retired after admitting to an extramarital affair. Hastert’s reputation lives on in the House, where he is credited with the “rule” that he’d bring no bill to the floor without the support of a majority of the majority. Outgoing Speaker John Boehner’s willingness to pass some bills with Democratic support even when a majority of Republicans opposed them weakened his standing. But the presumptive Speaker Paul Ryan has vowed to respect the Hastert Rule—which continues to be referred to as such, despite its author’s downfall.

The Bomber for the Next 50 Years

The Pentagon on Tuesday picked the plane that will be a core component of its fleet for the next half century, and it will be built by Northrop Grumman.

In one of the most hotly anticipated military contract announcements in years, the Air Force selected the Virginia-based defense firm to build the first 21 long-range strike bombers in a contract estimated to total $80 billion. Northrop Grumman won out over a joint bid from Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The planes won’t debut until 2025, but when they do, the Air Force says they’ll be able to fly undetected through Russia and China with the capability of launching an airstrike—either conventional or nuclear—from the continental United States to any point on the globe.

“Building this bomber is a strategic investment in the next 50 years,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter said in an announcement that was made after markets closed, in an indication of how important it was for the defense industry. The new long-range strike bomber, he said, would form “the backbone of our future strike and deterrent capabilities.”

While the Pentagon is initially buying 21 planes, it is planning for an eventual fleet of 100. Each of the first bombers will cost $564 million, according to independent cost estimates.

The announcement had been a long time coming.

For more than a decade, the Air Force has been looking for a new plane that can eventually replace the B-1s, which debuted in the 1980s, the B-2s, which date to the ‘90s, and in particular the B-52s, which have flown three generations of U.S. soldiers. As William LaPlante, the assistant secretary for acquisitions, told reporters last week, the Air Force is aware of grandfathers, fathers, and sons who have flown the very same aircraft, decades apart. “They’re used today operationally,” he said. And they will be in use until 2040, more than a decade after the Pentagon hopes to have its new fleet of bombers.

While the current fleet remains useful, the Air Force wants a bomber that can evade the advancing air defenses of Russia and China—if ever the need arises. The long-range bomber would act as a deterrent against actions designed to keep U.S. forces out of a designated area—what the military calls “anti-access aerial denial.” “I’m talking about our ability to put effects on targets anywhere in the world,” LaPlante said in his briefing last week. “That’s being challenged. It’s degrading.” And although the military is planning more than a decade into the future, it is already seeing evidence of that challenge as the U.S. fights the Islamic State—and eyes Russian military intervention—in Syria. "We need to provide national command authorities an option to strike any target, any time, and that's what this platform is designed to be able to provide,” said Lieutenant General Arnold Bunch, LaPlante’s deputy.

The Defense Department began planning for a new bomber contract in 2004, but former Defense Secretary Robert Gates put the project on hold in 2009 because of money concerns. The long-delayed, over-budget F-35 procurement played a role, as did concerns from Capitol Hill. Officials had previously announced that the planes would be built using existing technology in a bid to keep costs down and make it easier to upgrade the fleet in future years. In another important departure from previous contracts, the Pentagon plans to open the competition for future parts and upgrades to other firms, a move designed to maximize affordability and speed the production process.

The planning process had also been cloaked in secrecy. The acquisition was run out of the Pentagon’s Rapid Capabilities Office, which is used for urgent and classified projects. Officials wouldn’t disclose many details about the plane on Tuesday, nor did the Defense Department release an image of what it would look like.

What’s Missing from the New Ridiculous 6 Trailer

There are many things to behold in the trailer for Adam Sandler’s new Netflix movie, The Ridiculous 6, coming in mid-December to a computer screen near you. Guns! Gun fights! Knives! Knife fights! A character named “White Knife”! A man kicked by a horse through a wooden wall! Explosions! More guns! More knives! Even more explosions!

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It’s hard to tell what The Ridiculous 6 is actually about based on the trailer—contra Orr’s Law, this trailer does the very opposite of summarizing the movie it’s based on. Most of what we learn is that Ridiculous 6 is a Happy Madison—i.e., Adam Sandler—production, that it is set in the time and place shorthanded today as the “Wild West,” and that it will either co-star or cameo a long list of celebrities and semi-celebrities. (Among them, per the surnames listed at the end of the trailer: Harvey Keitel, John Turturro, Nick Nolte, Blake Shelton, Whitney Cummings, Steve Buscemi, Rob Schneider, Dan Aykroyd, Will Forte, Nick Swardson, Terry Crews, Jon Lovitz, Vanilla Ice [Vanilla Ice!], Luke Wilson, Steve Zahn, Danny Trejo, Chris Parnell, and Lavell Crawford.)

What is mostly left out of all this, however, are the many other actors who don’t have surname recognition among Netflix audiences, or the reason you might know about The Ridiculous 6 in the first place. This spring, several members of The Ridiculous 6’s cast walked off the set in protest of the film’s treatment of its Native American characters. They were protesting names like Beaver Breath, No Bra, and Sits-on-Face. They were protesting costumes that didn’t bother to distinguish between the Apache and the Comanche. They were protesting a script that involved the direction, “Sits-on-Face squats down behind the teepee and pees, while lighting up a peace pipe.” They were protesting lines like, “Say, honey: How about after this, we go someplace and I put my peepee in your teepee?”

As Allison Young, a Navajo actor who quit, specifically, after being asked to do a scene that required her “to fall down drunk, surrounded by jeering white men who rouse her by dousing her with more alcohol,” noted: “We talked to the producers about our concerns. They just told us, ‘If you guys are so sensitive, you should leave.’”

Leave they did. And news of their quitting spread. The whole thing became a reminder not just of the power that protest can have in the age of Facebook and Instagram, but also of the severe limitations of Happy Madison’s particular brand of comedy. Which isn’t based so much on “slapstick” as it is on a kind of aggressively childish incuriosity. How about we go someplace and I put my peepee in your teepee.

Given all that, it’s unsurprising that the film’s trailer only vaguely references the roles that Native Americans play in its plot. The trailer mentions the fact that Sandler’s character is “an orphan, raised by an Indian.” It features an older man who looks to be Native American saying, with no context whatsoever, “Ohhhh, I like that!” Beyond that, though, all that’s left is a merry band of gun-toting, chaps-wearing mischief-makers set to the most rousing parts of Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown.” There is no Sits-on-Face. There is no Beaver Breath. The film itself may well feature a typically Sandlerian mix of peepees and teepees; these, however, are mostly missing from the trailer.

Also missing, however, is any notion at all of the thing that Netflix had used to justify all the stereotypes in The Ridiculous 6: satire. When the controversy about the set walk-offs was playing out this spring, Netflix issued the following statement:

The movie has ridiculous in the title for a reason: because it is ridiculous. It is a broad satire of Western movies and the stereotypes they popularized, featuring a diverse cast that is not only part of—but in on—the joke.

But what, exactly, is being satirized here? The trailer isn’t at all clear about that. The only thing audiences learn from watching this bit of movie marketing is that there will be, if not blood, then guns and knives and explosions. There will be violence. There will be absurdity. There will be stereotypes. There will be Adam Sandler uttering the line, “Let’s saddle up; we’re burning daylight.” Which: Ridiculous? Certainly. Satire? From the looks of things, not so much.

Obama: Police Are 'Scapegoats' for Broader Failures of Society

President Obama’s speech to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Chicago was always going to require some careful political balancing, but the math got a little trickier over the last few days. Last week, the president voiced some carefully measured support for the Black Lives Matter movement, saying, “There is a specific problem that is happening in African American communities that is not happening in other communities. And that is a legitimate issue that we’ve got to address.”

A day later, FBI Director James Comey argued in a speech in Chicago that one reason for a spike in violent crime in some cities was the “Ferguson effect,” in which police were reluctant to arrest people for fear of being filmed. (On Monday, Comey said at the IACP conference that he had no hard proof for the idea.) His remarks reportedly irritated Justice Department officials.

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That set the stage for Obama’s speech Tuesday afternoon, in which he tried to strike a balance between those two perspectives: those of the activists, and those of law-enforcement officers like Comey. “This is ... a hard conversation—but if you don't mind, I’m going to go ahead and have it,” he said. “This is one of the benefits of not having to run for office again.”

But the conversation was fairly soft. It was classic Obama: Admitting that every side had something to offer, steering a moderate path, and calling on all sides to step up and compromise.

The president was strongly supportive of law enforcement: “In you, we often see America at its best. You don’t just protect us from each other, you build a foundation so that we can trust each other and rely on each other.” He said that falling crime rates did not mean that minority concerns about the police could be brushed aside, but he said that police should not receive nearly so much blame.

“Too often, law enforcement gets scapegoated for broader failures of our society and our criminal-justice system,” he said. “You do your job with distinction no matter the challenges you face. But we can’t expect you to contain and control problems that the rest of us aren’t willing to face or do anything about‚ problems ranging from substandard education to a shortage of jobs and opportunity, an absence of drug-treatment programs, and laws that result in it being easier in too many neighborhoods for a young person to purchase a gun than a book.”

Obama also blamed the media for focusing on “the sensational and the controversial.” He added: “The countless acts of effective police work rarely make it on the evening news.” And he said that every profession has bad actors, not just law enforcement, though he criticized the impulse to “close ranks” when police come under scrutiny.

Even the harsher parts of the speech were fairly tame. “We’ve got to resist the false trap that says either there should be no accountability for police, or that every police officer is suspect, no matter what they do,” he said, delivering to the coup de grace to what must be a straw man: “Neither of these things can be right.” Indeed.

Obama joked that “before I had a motorcade,” he would sometimes get pulled over by the police. “Most of the time I got a ticket, I deserved it. I knew why I was pulled over. But there were times when I didn’t,” he said, adding that many African Americans felt the same way. “The data shows that this is not an aberration. It doesn’t mean each case is a problem. It means that when you aggregate all the cases and you look at it, you've got to say that there’s some racial bias in the system.”

Nor did Obama shy away from discussing the high rates of crime in black communities—“black-on-black crime” and issues in African American communities that he is sometimes (unconvincingly) accused of overlooking. Chicago, where black communities have seen extremely high violent crime in the last few years, was a natural place to discuss this. “Our divides are not as deep as some would suggest,” he said. “I don’t know anyone in the minority community who doesn’t want strong effective law enforcement.”

“Too often, law enforcement gets scapegoated for broader failures of our society and our criminal-justice system.”

For much of the rest of the speech, Obama was able to speak on issues where many police chiefs agree with him. He renewed calls for stronger gun laws, including background checks and banning the sale of military-style weapons to civilians. He called for reducing prison populations and working to better retrain prisoners for reentry into street life. (“I can’t thank the chiefs enough here, because a lot of you are out front on this issue.”) He applauded some signs of progress on a bipartisan criminal-justice reform bill on Capitol Hill. (“This is something I don’t get to say very often: I am encouraged by what Congress is doing,” he joked.) He also called for better funding for police to try crime-fighting strategies that are proven to work.

Obama’s positive comments about police are in some measure a factor of knowing his audience. His insistence on emphasizing what police do right and pointing a finger elsewhere will likely upset some police-reform activists. In this way, they fit a classic Obama conciliator pattern: When he gives something to one group, he is careful to give to another soon after. In January, for example, he both delighted and enraged environmentalists by banning oil drilling in some parts of the Arctic while opening parts of the Atlantic Coast to exploration. When Obama gave to Black Lives Matter from one hand with his approving comment, it practically foretold that he would give to police chiefs from the other Tuesday.

Apple Did Better Than Investors Expected—Again

On Tuesday, Apple announced its fourth-quarter earnings. The company beat investor expectations, reporting $11.1 billion in profit—up 31 percent from last year. Its revenue was $51.5 billion, with international sales accounting for 62 percent of that sum.

Last month, Apple saw record sales on the opening weekend of the latest model of the iPhone. In the fourth quarter, the company sold a total of 48 million iPhones. But the company also attributed strong sales numbers to the Apple Watch, all-time record sales of its personal computers, and revenues from its iTunes Store, App Store, and other services.

“Fiscal 2015 was Apple’s most successful year ever, with revenue growing 28 percent to nearly $234 billion,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO in a press release. It’s yet to be seen how this holiday season will shake out for Apple sales. Last year, the iPhone 6 launch gave Apple its best quarter in corporate history in the first quarter of 2015; the company posted nearly $75 billion in sales with $18 billion in profit.

U.S. ‘Direct Action’ Against the Islamic State

Defense Secretary Ash Carter says the U.S. will step up its operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, including through “direct action on the ground."

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carter said the changed policy against the Islamic State would focus on what he called the three Rs: Raqaa, Ramadi, and raids.

He said the U.S. will support moderate Syrian rebels who have made territorial gains near the Raqaa, the Islamic State’s stronghold and administrative capital. In the Iraqi city of Ramadi, meanwhile, he said, the Iraqi government has worked with the local Sunni community to retake ground from the Islamic State and will move north toward the city of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city that is held by the group. Outlining the strategy on raids, the third R, Carter said:

We won’t hold back from supporting capable partners in opportunistic attacks against ISIL, or conducting such missions directly whether by strikes from the air or direct action on the ground.

ISIL is another name for the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS.

The comments appear to signal acknowledgment by the Obama administration that its strategy against the Islamic State has had limited success. Last month, General Lloyd Austin, the head of U.S. Central Command, said the $500 million American effort to train 5,400 troops had resulted in some “four or five” fighters still in the field.  Carter announced this month the U.S. was looking at other ways to train support the rebels.

Carter’s remarks Tuesday appear to reflect a change in strategy by the Obama administration whose national-security advisers have recommended that U.S. troops be moved closer to the front lines in Iraq and Syria, according to The Washington Post. Here’s more:

The debate over the proposed steps, which would for the first time position a limited number of Special Operations forces on the ground in Syria and put U.S. advisers closer to the firefights in Iraq, comes as Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter presses the military to deliver new options for greater military involvement in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

The changes would represent a significant escalation of the American role in Iraq and Syria. They still require formal approval from Obama, who could make a decision as soon as this week and could decide not to alter the current course, said U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are still ongoing. It’s unclear how many additional troops would be required to implement the changes being considered by the president, but the number for now is likely to be relatively small, these officials said.

On Friday, commenting on an operation in Iraq to rescue dozens of prisoners held by the Islamic State that resulted in the death of an American serviceman, Carter said: “I expect we’ll do more of this sort of thing,” he said, before adding: “It doesn’t represent us entering the combat role.”

U.S. troops left Iraq in 2011, and remain there in an advisory role.

On Tuesday, Carter told lawmakers U.S. operations against the Islamic State will focus on the group’s oil infrastructure, a major source of revenue for the group.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina criticized the U.S. strategy in Syria, pointing out that it appeared to be focused solely on the Islamic State and not President Bashar Assad, who the U.S. says must step down from power. Assad is fighting several rebel groups, including the Islamic State, in a nearly five-year-long civil war that has killed tens of thousands of civilians and created more than 4 million refugees.

Assad is now supported by Russian airstrikes against the Islamic State and other groups opposed to his regime, including those supported by the West.

“If I’m Assad this is a good day for me because the American government has just said, without saying it, that they are not going to fight to replace me,” Graham said.

At the State Department, spokesman John Kirby signaled a shift in the diplomatic track, too, saying Iran—a key Assad ally—had been invited to international talks over Syria’s future.

“The ultimate goal that everyone wants to get to … is to come up with a framework for a successful political transition in Syria which leads to a government not led by Bashar al-Assad and that is representative of and responsive to the Syrian people,” Kirby said.

Paul Ryan Trashes His Budget Gift

The budget deal that John Boehner struck in his final days as House speaker is certainly a political gift to Paul Ryan, but you’ll have to forgive Ryan for showing a lack of appreciation.

“I think this process stinks,” the speaker-in-waiting reportedly harrumphed as he walked into a meeting where Republicans were briefed about the 11th-hour agreement. “Under new management, we are not going to run the House this way.”

Well played, congressman.

Ryan offered no opinion on the substance of the two-year pact, which increases federal spending by $80 billion and raises the debt ceiling, but his harsh assessment of how it came together was a necessary bit of political theater aimed at the group of conservatives who have been most wary of his ascension to the speakership. The members of the suddenly renowned House Freedom Caucus have spent months railing against just this type of deal—a bipartisan accord negotiated entirely in secret by party leaders and then presented, as if by fiat, to rank-and-file lawmakers for their immediate approval. Before agreeing to support Ryan last week, the hard-line caucus met with him to make sure he was open to the rules changes they were seeking that would make these types of top-down, last-minute agreements less likely.

Yet Ryan finds himself in an awkward position because he is the reason why Boehner wants to rush the budget deal. After all, Congress doesn’t need to pass a spending bill until December, and the debt ceiling won’t be breached for another week, which means Capitol Hill has a few more days before panic erupts. But Boehner has said since he announced his resignation last month that he wanted to “clean the barn up” before he goes. “I didn’t want him to walk into a dirty barn full of you-know-what,” the departing speaker explained again on Tuesday.

Passage of the budget deal offers Ryan a fresh start and removes a major headache that likely would have severely shortened whatever political honeymoon he will have as of Thursday, when the House is expected to formally elect him as speaker. But that doesn’t mean he has to embrace it. Republicans won’t officially nominate Ryan until Wednesday, and after seeing the swift backlash that forced Kevin McCarthy to abandon his bid earlier this month, he can’t afford to risk angering conservatives before he has the gavel in hand.

“I think this process stinks. Under new management, we are not going to run the House this way.”

Will Ryan actually oppose the deal when it comes up for a vote on Wednesday? That’s unclear, but on substance he doesn’t have much reason to. The structure of the agreement is remarkably similar to the two-year budget that Ryan himself negotiated with Democratic Senator Patty Murray two years ago. Both accords brought relief from sequestration spending caps for defense and domestic programs, paid for with a hodgepodge of cuts to other initiatives and relatively minor changes to entitlements. “Frankly, if you look at this, it isn’t a whole lot different than what he and Senator Murray put together two years ago,” Boehner said, in a statement that would hinder Ryan if it wasn’t so obvious. He added that he was “in total agreement” with Ryan’s criticism of the process, but he said that “when you look at the alternative”—a clean debt-ceiling increase or a damaging default—“it starts to look a whole lot better.” Nonetheless, the departing speaker said he was unconcerned by the prospect that his agreement would draw opposition from his successor. “It’s irrelevant,” Boehner said. “It’s going to pass with a bipartisan majority, and I’ll be really happy."

Conservatives quickly denounced the deal and began pressuring Ryan to oppose it. Senator Ted Cruz deemed it “complete and utter surrender,” while a few House members called on Ryan to state his position on it before Republicans vote on his candidacy Wednesday.

Ryan has tried to appeal to conservatives in other ways over the last few days. He backed down, at least for the moment, on his demand that Republicans modify a procedural tool allowing dissidents to oust a speaker in a floor vote. He assured hard-liners that he would not pursue “comprehensive immigration reform” while Obama remains in office. And on Tuesday, he spoke out against a move by a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank by going around the leadership.

After the reluctant candidate bowed to pressure from party leaders to get in the speaker’s race, Ryan looks like a shoo-in to win on Thursday. But he’s playing it safe just in case.