Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 909

Our National Nightmare Is Over: White House Tours Resume

In an announcement on Friday afternoon, the White House offered unexpected good news: Tours of the Executive Mansion, halted by sequestration in March, will resume early next month. Now there is nothing left to criticize in Washington whatsoever.

The tours, you will recall, became a pre-World-War-II-Memorial-closure rallying point for conservatives, who suggested that their cessation was meant to make the pain of the mandatory across-the-board cuts be felt by Average Americans. All of the A-List conservatives got in the game, as you may recall.

White House spend $27 million to help fund pottery classes in Morocco, but NO WHITE HOUSE TOURS! - http://t.co/JU5tMz8nd5

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 8, 2013

"Obama Spurns Trump Offer to Foot White House Tours" http://t.co/SRmOzoijSW via @Newsmax_Media

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2013

Canceling white house tours is childish and dishonest-the golf weekend in florida cost enough to keep the white house open for months

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) March 5, 2013

White House tours off, but robot squirrels live on. Priorities... http://t.co/exPMpHEpER #tcot

— Herman Cain (@THEHermanCain) March 8, 2013

With the government shutdown earlier this month, it proved hard not to revisit.

#governmentshutdown Oh, no. No more White House tours!!!! Oh, wait...

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) October 1, 2013

Does "shutdown" mean that Obama will somehow find a way to give DC visitors a tour of the White House?

— Resist Tyranny (@ResistTyranny) October 1, 2013

And so on. Here's Friday's announcement.

The White House is pleased to announce the resumption of a limited schedule of East Wing and Executive Residence tours, beginning on November 5th. Additionally, the White House will be opening its gardens and grounds to visitors on October 26th and 27th.

Why the tours are starting again isn't clear. Did the government find more money? Did Donald Trump make good on his offer? Did Herman Cain tweet something? We may never know, until Rep. Darrell Issa holds hearings in the House Oversight Committee.

If you want to sign up, you can head to the White House website. If you're curious, here's the quickest path between the World War II Memorial and the visitor's entrance for the mansion, if you want to do a Right Wing Fury Tour package, or something.

       

Bee-Filled North Korean Ship Finally Allowed to Return Home

A North Korean ship that was detained in Panama back in July will be allowed to sail home following its three-month ordeal. The ship was initially stopped on suspicion of drugs being transported, but instead, inspectors found missiles that had originated in Cuba.

While formal paperwork still has to be completed, Reuters reports that most of the crew—33 out of 35 members—likely did not know what cargo they were transporting and are not under suspicion. The ship's captain and his deputy, however, could still face charges since they refused to answers investigators' questions (the ship's captain also attempted to slit his own throat when the ship was initially seized).

After the ship was seized, Havana requested that Panama release it, claiming the vessel carried only the sugar cargo as a donation to the people of North Korea.

But once the arms were discovered beneath the sugar, the Cuban government acknowledged it was sending "obsolete" Soviet-era weapons, including two MiG jets, 15 MiG engines and nine anti-aircraft missiles, to be repaired in North Korea and returned.

Supplying arms to North Korea currently violates a seven-year-old UN ban on arms transfers to the country due to its nuclear program.

In addition, the sugar that failed to disguise the weapons cache also attracted so many bees to the boat, melting into a "molten brown" sludge that filled the ship's hold.

       

Warrantless Wiretaps Could Have Their Constitutionality Tested

Since 2008, warrantless wiretaps have been a part of the United States' counterterrorism efforts, but targets of those wiretaps were never informed where evidence against them originated. That may change in the next couple of weeks. According to The New York Times, prosecutors from the Justice Department plan to inform a defendant that the evidence being used again him originated from warrantless surveillance. A public admission such as this could potentially open the door for a judicial review of the surveillance law's constitutionality.

The shift comes following internal debate in the Justice Department, where Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. argued that there was no legal justification for withholding the sources of evidence. The Justice Department first acknowledged its intention to inform defendants back at the end of July.

The issue also came to Verrilli's attention after Senator Diane Feinstein, the Intelligence Committee Chair, cited examples of the surveillance program working. Lawyers for two of the cases Feinstein brought up asked for an explanation of where evidence against their clients had originated, but were rebuffed. Prosecutors have since made new court filings stating that they will not use any evidence gathered under the 2008 law.

Back in February, the Supreme Court halted a challenge to the law led by the ACLU in a 5-4 decision, and concluded, "that, because the eavesdropping is done secretly, the American Civil Liberties Union, journalists and human-rights groups that sued to nullify the law have no legal standing to sue — because they have no evidence they are being targeted by the FISA Amendments Act." Now that the warrantless surveillance activities may be disclosed to defendants, a challenge to the program's constitutionality could once again make its way to the Supreme Court.

       

House Stenographer Explains Last Night's Outburst

Dianne Reidy, a stenographer for the House of Representatives, managed to steal a bit of the spotlight from Congress's narrow avoidance of financial ruin last night when she took to the mic to give a short but impassioned speech about how the Constitution was written by Freemasons. Now, she appears to be feeling better.

Reidy's husband, Dan, attributed her outburst to a lack of sleep during the hectic negotiations in the legislature. He told The New York Post, "God was preparing her for this vote last night, because this was kind of the culmination of everything … This was the big one. Everybody’s there. And Dianne didn’t know what she was sharing, she didn’t know when — but she just sensed in her spirit."

Reidy herself said that, "I’m glad that I fulfilled God’s mission for me, absolutely. It lifted a tremendous burden." Despite working in the House chamber for eight years, she said that the "toxic" events of the past few weeks have disillusioned her about the political process.

In addition, Fox News obtained a statement from the couple. Dianne wrote:

“For the past 2 and 1/2 weeks, the Holy Spirit has been waking me up in the
middle of the night and preparing me (through my reluctance and doubt) to deliver
a message in the House Chamber.
That is what I did last night”

Her husband has denied that she drinks, smokes or is on any medication.

       

San Francisco's BART Workers Are Hours from a Transit Strike

Barring a last-minute deal, workers for San Francisco's commuter BART rail system will go on strike Friday morning after negotiations between employee unions and BART management broke down. "Unfortunately, yes -- we are on strike as of midnight," Amalgamated Transit Union president Antonette Bryant told the San Jose Mercury News after a nonstop 30-hour negotiating session, from which many negotiators emerged wearing day-old clothes. 

At stake are the pay and benefits for about 2,000 union workers for the transit system. Those workers are asking for pay increases in exchange for a new requirement to pay into their pensions, and to pay higher health care premiums. BART management reportedly offered a 12 percent pay raise, while unions wanted a raise of 15.9 percent. But as the midnight deadline approaches, it looks like the main issue is a disagreement over a number of safety proposals and job perks that BART management would like to toss, rather than over the pay disparity. 

While some progress was made during this week's negotiations, especially on the pensions and salary front, it wasn't enough. The federal government mediator working with both sides to come to some sort of agreement said that "Our mediation process has come to an end" as he left negotiations on Thursday ahead of the deadline. Mediator George Cohen added to Mercury News, "Unfortunately, regrettably, we were not able to bring them the result we all want to achieve: a voluntary collective bargaining agreement." For management's part, BART General Manager Grace Crunican told reporters that "It’s not management that asked for a strike, it’s the unions." 

The BART system handles about  400,000 daily rides from commuters in the San Francisco Bay area. The impending strike, which one union rep said would take a "miracle" to prevent, follows a four-and-a-half day BART strike in July. 

       

Fox Guest on Maryville Rape Case: 'What Did She Expect to Happen at 1 am?'

Following news that the Maryville rape case will get a second chance in the Missouri justice system, a Fox News guest jumped on air to explain why he thought the allegations of rape from Daisy Coleman and Paige Parkhurst aren't true. Defense attorney Joseph DiBenedetto's take on the case on Thursday involved the phrase "I’m not saying she deserved to be raped," which for some will be enough to get where he's going with this. For everyone else, here's more: "there are telltale signs of this girl actually lying," DiBenedetto said of one of the girls in question. What were those signs? "She is leaving her home at 1 a.m. in the morning and nobody forced her to drink...what did she expect to happen at 1 a.m. after sneaking out." 

Here's the transcript of that opening bit: 

There’s no denying that from the surface it appears to be some sort of cover-up. But when you look at the finer details, there are telltale signs of this girl actually lying. She is leaving her home at 1 a.m. in the morning and nobody forced her to drink. And what happens? She gets caught by her mom, she’s embarrassed and the easy way out here is, ‘Mom, someone took advantage of me.’ But what did she expect to happen at 1 a.m. in the morning after sneaking out? I’m not saying — assuming that these facts are accurate and this did happen — I’m not saying she deserved to be raped, but knowing the facts as we do here including what the prosecutor has set forth, this case is going nowhere and it’s going nowhere quick. 

To his credit, Fox News's Shepard Smith didn't allow his guest's victim blaming to go out into the world totally unquestioned. "What you’ve done, Joseph, is taken an alleged victim of rape and turned her into a liar and a crime committer,” Smith said at the end of the interview. He continued: “that’s a far jump from a 1,000 miles away.”

To be sure, the Maryville rape case has raised a lot of questions — mainly about the manner in which it was investigated in 2012, and why Missouri Prosecutor Robert Rice dropped the charges at the time against the 17-year-old boy accused in the first place. Whether Rice reconsidered those questions, or whether he's just reacting to the widespread media scrutiny directed at Maryville since an in-depth profile of the case was published in the Kansas City Star, the case itself now goes to a special prosecutor for investigation. 

       

Snowden Says He No Longer Has Any Secret NSA Documents

Edward Snowden no longer has a copy of the secret NSA files he leaked to a handful of journalists, according to a new interview with the whistleblower published in the New York Times on Thursday. Snowden, still living in Moscow, gave the Times's James Risen an outline of how he decided to become a whistleblower in the first place, and what's happened to those documents since then. The former NSA contractor faces three felony charges, including two under the Espionage Act, for his disclosures. 

"What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of the materials onward?” Snowden said of his decision to distribute all of his documents to journalists, without retaining copies of the documents himself. That hand-off, which apparently happened in Hong Kong, would mean that Russian officials can't access the secret documents through Snowden. "There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents,” he added, noting that he's familiar enough with Chinese intelligence from his work at the NSA to know how to counter their attacks. Snowden believes the NSA knows the documents were secure from the Chinese, too: his final target while working for the NSA was China. He had "access to every target, every active operation” against the Chinese through his work there, he argued. 

Risen is an interesting choice to interview Snowden, in part because the journalist is currently mired in his own legal proceedings pertaining to a federal whistleblower. Risen has refused to testify against CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling, who is charged with leaking information on a secret CIA program later reported on by Risen. That case could go all the way to the Supreme Court after a federal appeals court refused to reconsider its opinion against him. 

Snowden told Risen that he finally decided to disclose classified NSA materials to the public after stumbling upon a classified 2009 Inspector General's report on the agency's warrantless wiretapping program. According to his account, the document surfaced during a search designed to identify improperly placed files in the agency's database:

“It was too highly classified to be where it was,” he said of the report. He opened the document to make certain that it did not belong there, and after seeing what it revealed, “curiosity prevailed,” he said. After reading about the program, which skirted the existing surveillance laws, he concluded that it had been illegal, he said. “If the highest officials in government can break the law without fearing punishment or even any repercussions at all,” he said, “secret powers become tremendously dangerous.” 

Snowden didn't give the Times a thorough timeline of when he read the document. Other reports have indicated that the whistleblower began accessing subsequently leaked documents as early as April 2012.

The whistleblower also disputed a recent report from the Times on a negative entry in his CIA personnel file from 2009. Snowden interpreted the incident, during which he was reprimanded for trying to access files without authorization, as an early warning against trying to work internally for reform in the U.S. intelligence community. Snowden says that the reported black mark in his file was the result of a petty dispute with a senior manager, rather than a malicious act on his part. That encounter, Snowden says, is evidence that he had to go outside of the agency with what he knew in order to bring about any concrete changes there: “you have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it,” he told Risen. Incidentally, the lack of outside oversight on the NSA is a major theme of the reports from Snowden's leaks. 

       

No One Should Be More Excited About a New Third Party Than Democrats

This is the rumble that rolls through American politics every time issues voters suffer a defeat: We will form a new party! It's percolating among the far-right in the aftermath of Republicans' unsurprising loss in the budget fight. No one should be more enthusiastic about that idea than Democrats.

The Atlantic's Molly Ball reports that the idea of an actual Tea Party is very much in vogue among the not-usually-in-vogue set.

The calls for a split mark a new, more acrimonious chapter in the long-simmering conflict between the Tea Party and the Republican establishment. Steve Deace, an Iowa-based talk-radio host, said his audience has never been angrier. “They’re tired of electing a bunch of Republicans who care more about what the media thinks about them than what the people who elected them think,” he told me. … To Deace, “political-party disintegration” is on the horizon.

[image error]As Ball points out, Tea Partiers have long seen themselves as distinct from the GOP establishment — and enthusiastically so. While more self-identified Tea Party supporters see themselves as Republicans than in 2011, according to Pew Research, such people are still in the minority. Tea Party leaders like Deace are all for branching out: Sarah Palin gestured wanly at third party primaries over at Facebook; Erick Erickson was more direct both with Ball and in a post at his blog, RedState. Oh, and who can forget Mr. Ted Cruz of Texas, who's already leading his own party before it's been created.

You may have noticed however that we don't already have a bunch of robust third parties. There are a number of reasons for that — institutionalized bias to two parties, electoral systems that make new parties tricky. Historically, America reverts to two parties even when there is a new party that has a decent showing. But no third party has had a decent showing in quite some time. text { font-size: 11px; }

Let's start by looking at Congress, where it is obviously easier — though not much easier — to elect someone from a third party to office. Below graphs showing the make-up of each chamber of Congress over the past 60 years. (Data source.)

Over the past six decades, the most non-major-party representatives that have been in the Senate or the House during any Congress is two. Two. Two of the 100 senators; two of the 435 representatives. Again: State parties do a great job of locking out third parties, setting difficult-to-surmount barriers to getting on the ballot and leveraging strong institutional systems. But those barriers have existed for a long time without being swept away, despite the earnest efforts of lots of people. Beating the system is hard.

But what Tea Partiers really have their eye on is the big prize — the presidency. And, to be sure, the track record of success for third parties is much better on the national stage. Below is a chart of every presidential election since 1952, showing the percent of the vote for the Democrat, Republican, best showing third party, and everyone else. (Data source.)

In four of the 16 elections over the past 60 years — one quarter of them! — a third party candidate has gotten more than 6 percent of the vote. That's significant! Until you consider the following graph. It shows the equivalent electoral vote tally in each election.

The last time a candidate got a significant number of electoral votes was 1968, when George Wallace ran on an explicitly racist platform to take several Southern states. As we all know, the electoral college is the stumbling block. Even winning a decent percentage in a number of states doesn't do you any good if you can't cobble together electoral votes. You could siphon 33 percent of the vote in all 50 states and not win a single electoral vote.

What happens with third parties, and the main reason why the Democrats and Republicans want to crush them, is that votes are zero sum. Those votes have to come from somewhere, and with only two parties to pick from, it's going to be either the Democrats or Republicans. People of a certain age will remember Ross Perot's quixotic-but-not-unsuccessful bids for the presidency, giving the Republican Party its lowest presidential vote percentage in decades. Perot and his Reform Party gobbled up votes from George H. W. Bush, the incumbent, helping Bill Clinton win in 1992. Perot tried again in 1996, winning 19 and 8 percent of the vote in the two races. He won zero electoral votes — but may have cost Bush a second term.

If there were a Tea Party, it's again the Republicans that would suffer. That Pew poll cited above showed that there was far more overlap between Tea Party supporters and Republicans than with Democrats. Not surprising, of course, but still. So what could an actual Tea Party candidate do in 2016?

Without easy access to party registration data and Tea Party support levels per state, we can only estimate. Let's say you took the 2012 presidential election results and split those voters up based on how likely Democrats and Republicans are to support the Tea Party. Any third party voters in 2012, we'll give to the Tea Party, too. An example. In 2012, 44.6 percent of the vote in Arizona went for Obama. 53.7 percent went for Romney. Nationally, 2 percent of Democrats support the Tea Party and 41 percent of Republicans do. So if we take 2 percent of the Obama 44.6 percent and 41 percent of the Romney 53.7 — and then add the 1.76 percent for voted for someone else — Arizona no longer is a red state. The percentage becomes 31.7 percent Republican, 24.6 percent Tea Party — and the plurality, 43.7 percent, votes for the Dems. Not the outcome conservative voters want. Applying that math to the whole country, we get an electoral map that looks like this:

The electoral vote total is 510 for the Democrats, 25 for the GOP, and nada for the new guys. Those are Reagan-in-1984 level numbers, but almost certainly with a non-Reagan-like president.

And that's a generous formulation! The Tea Party is not gaining strength, it's flat. Could it win some local or state races? Certainly. Could it win a Senate or House seat? Yes — it already has some representatives, as we learned this month. But the long term effect would be to damage the Republicans to the benefit of the Democrats, exactly what Tea Party candidates did in Senate races multiple times over the last four years. Which, of course, is why the Republicans let the Tea Partiers stage the insurgency that led to the shutdown. Keep your enemies as close as you can, unless you want America to vote Democratic for a very, very long time.

       

Brie Larson: Movie Star?

Today in showbiz news: An up-and-coming young actress books a big role, E! indulges some more rich kids, and Vince Vaughn has had the plug pulled.

Actress Brie Larson, from United States of Tara and 21 Jump Street (and Hoot), had something of a breakout summer with the well-reviewed indie Short Term 12. And now she is reaping the rewards. She's in talks to star opposite Mark Wahlberg in a remake of the crime drama The Gambler, to be directed by the guy who did Rise of the Planet of the Apes. So that's a big deal! The guy who wrote The Departed wrote the script! This is a plum role to land. Is Brie Larson on her way to becoming a big-time movie star? She might be. Those kids from Hoot are actually doing pretty well. Brie Larson's got this, Logan Lerman's in a Darren Aronofsky film and a movie with Brad Pitt, and Cody Linley, well, y'know, placed fourth on Dancing with the Stars five years ago! So, everything's comin' up Hoot. [Deadline]

Oh dear god. E! has ordered the reality show Rich Kids of Beverly Hills to series. That's the show that's sorta based on the Rich Kids of Instagram Tumblr account. It's just a bunch of brats taking photos of champagne and fancy cars. And private jets, and a lot of feet in exotic places. Like, "Chilling in St. Tropez" and then it's a photo of their feet on a chaise lounge or something. The show officially has no relation to the Tumblr, but come on, the show is about "five well-funded L.A. friends who have already achieved 'social media infamy' by advertising their lifestyles on Instagram and Twitter." The idea had to come from somewhere. The show will premiere in January and only run eight episodes initially. So, be prepared for a bunch of fools flashing garish watches that don't look good on anyone. Should be fun! [The Hollywood Reporter]

"Universal Cancels Vince Vaughn" you read, and you start to think, "What? Has someone finally said 'enough'?" But then you keep reading and you see "Drama 'Term Life.'" Oh. They cancelled one of his movies. That's all. I don't usually associate the word cancelled with movies, but whatever. That's what it says, and it's what they did. So, no drama with Vince Vaughn and Hailee Steinfeld as his daughter, as was the plan. Well, I think it's a drama. The URL on the Deadline post says comedy, but the headline says drama, so it would seem they changed their minds at some point. Whatever the movie is, it doesn't matter. It's over. Not gonna happen. Done. Cancelled. That's it. [Deadline]

Amanda Seyfried will star alongside Russell Crowe in the drama Fathers and Daughters. Russell Crowe will play the father and Amanda Seyfried will play the daughter. In case that wasn't clear. Would that it were the other way around, we'd have a real wild time on our hands, but no. It's the regular way. The way you'd expect. Which is fine. Whatever. It's just that the other way would have been a lot more fun. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Warner Bros. officially owns Ben McKenzie now. He is theirs to do with as they please. They will probably put him in television shows, but they really could do whatever they want. Get creative, Warner Bros. Just look at that shayna punim. [Deadline]

       

Tokyo's New 'Smart Restaurant' Is a Little Bit Creepy

Glance at any 1970s or '80s futurist predictions of life in the twenty-first century (here's a particularly fun one) and you'll spot one consistent theme: robots everywhere, taking swift charge of domestic life in their metal humanoid claws.

A new "smart restaurant" in Tokyo seems determined to make this vision a vaguely dystopian reality (albeit without the sci-fi-movie humanoids), letting customers swipe menu options on tablets, receive their meals via high-speed conveyor belt, and dispose of their waste in a slot for automated cleaning.

In brief, it redefines the modern restaurant by offering a virtually waiterless experience. It does to food service what, say, Netflix has done to the video rental process. And there's more: the kitchen computer actively keeps track of how many customers are eating, what they are eating, and which new dishes should be placed on the conveyer belt. Here's a glimpse at what that process actually looks like, via the BBC technology show Click:

As Geek.com points out, "for every five plates of food you empty, a game appears on the tablet that if you beat sees a prize sent to the table in the form of a small toy."

The whole thing feels vaguely dystopian and unnerving, and, as a certain breed of romantics are bound to point out, does away with the crucial waiter-to-customer interactions that make going out to eat an inherently social experience. But then, you're not so likely to complain about that when the conveyor belt never confuses your order or expects a hefty tip—and anyway, this will probably all seem terribly retro in 20 or so years.