Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 992

'The Daily Show' Doesn't See the Fun in Detroit's Bankruptcy

Detroit is bankrupt, and cable news anchors across the country are taking the situation a little too lightly for John Oliver's liking. After all, saying Motor City has run out of gas might just be in bad taste. "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Does that tone seem appropriate to anyone?" Oliver asked. "Maybe pump the breaks on the pun-mobile a little bit... if Houston had a devastating earthquake, would you start the story with 'Houston, we have a problem?'" There's really only room for one Detroit bankruptcy joke, Oliver said, and it's a "Chapter 9 Mile" pun on Eminem's 8 Mile. 

The real problem with the coverage of Detroit, however, is that there hasn't actually been much coverage from Detroit. As Oliver noted, most of the correspondents are reporting from Chicago: "So you'll embed reporters and have then take gunfire in war zones all over the world, you've had them teargassed during protests, you've forced them to take 200 mph winds to the face during storms, but apparently having them stand on a corner in Downtown Detroit, oh, that is just too dangerous an assignment."

 

 

       

Art World Now Just Confused About Romanian Mom

[image error]Everyone in the art world is confused: Are several world-class masterpieces just a pile of ash, or is the woman who claimed to have burned them, only to now deny the charges, finally telling the truth?

Last week, pretty much all of Western Civilization was upset when it looked like Olga Dogaru, the 50-year-old mother of one of the suspects in the multi-million euro Kunsthal museum heist, burned seven masterpieces her son allegedly stole. Those included works by Picasso, Monet and Matisse.

But then, yesterday, Dogaru told a panel of three judges that she was lying to investigators and that she really didn't burn the paintings in a panic. "I believed that what I said before was the best thing at the moment, that this was the right thing to do," she told the panel on Monday, adding "I did not burn them." 

Reports The Times:

Standing alongside her son, Radu, 29, who has admitted stealing the paintings in October from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam, Mrs. Dogaru, 50, told a panel of three judges that her earlier account of destroying the works in a stove at her house in the tiny village of Carcaliu was untrue. “I did not burn them,” she said in a soft voice.

But maybe her appreciation of the missing art was spurred by little more than a realization that she was going to spend a long time behind bars. Because, despite her recantation, a team of Romanian experts now says Dogaru did, in fact, destroy the art.

"We gathered overwhelming evidence that three (of the seven) paintings were destroyed by fire," Gheorghe Niculescu, head of the team from Romania's National Research Investigation Center in Physics and Chemistry, told Reuters on Monday:

Niculescu said he was now sufficiently confident that three had been destroyed that his department, a unit of the culture ministry, would be submitting a detailed report to prosecutors this week. 

It is not clear what Niculescu thinks happened to the other four paintings. The total worth of the seven paintings is estimated to be tens of millions of dollars.

For art optimists, however, there still is hope, which essentially relies on believing that Romanian forensic investigators — namely, Niculescu — are inept. Reuters notes that Niculescu's assertion has some holes in it:

[H]e could not say which of the seven paintings had been destroyed and did not explain how he was certain that the remains originated from works stolen from Rotterdam's Kunsthal museum last October, rather than other paintings. 

So maybe the paintings are still safely hidden away somewhere in the Romanian countryside. If you see them around, do give a shout. Rotterdam would like them back. 

The paintings stolen were: Pablo Picasso's 1971 Harlequin Head; Monet's 1901 Waterloo Bridge, London and Charing Cross Bridge, London; Henri Matisse's 1919 Reading Girl in White and Yellow; Paul Gauguin's 1898 Girl in Front of Open Window; Meyer de Haan's Self-Portrait, around 1890; and Lucian Freud's 2002 work Woman With Eyes Closed.

       

Ray Kelly Defends His Legacy of '7,383 Lives Saved'

With the clock ticking down on the Bloomberg administration, and his police commissioner possibly eyeing green pastures (or facing dismissal) Ray Kelly is trying to set the record straight on his record running New York City's police force. In an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, Kelly staunchly defends the controversial policies of stop-and-frisk and surveillance of Muslim groups, by breaking out his big number. He claims there were 7,383 fewer murders during the 11 years of Michael Bloomberg's term as mayor — which also happens to coincide with Kelly's most recent 11 years as NYPD commissioner — than there were in the previous 11 years, a decline of well over 50 percent from what had been historic highs.

Kelly credits one of his most heavily criticized policies, stop-and-frisk, for contributing to the decline in violent crime. But he angrily dismisses critics who say that it unfairly targets minorities, by pointing out that most victims of violent crime are minorities, and that most of those lives saved were "young men of color."

Racial profiling is a disingenuous charge at best and an incendiary one at worst, particularly in the wake of the tragic death of Trayvon Martin. The effect is to obscure the rock-solid legal and constitutional foundation underpinning the police department's tactics and the painstaking analysis that determines how we employ them. 

Some of the candidates running for mayor, including one-time favorite Christine Quinn, have suggested that changes must be made to the stop-and-frisk program or Kelly could be dismissed from his job. She might not get the chance, however, since there have been rumblings that Kelly could be in line for the top job at the Department of Homeland Security, or might even be considering a run for office himself, once Bloomberg's term is over.

Kelly also defends the other most hated (and legally questionable) policy of his tenure, the heavy surveillance of Muslims inside and outside of New York, often using undercover agents and informants in the hopes of rooting out terror plots. He says that anyone who thinks the NYPD has broken the law has "either not read, misunderstood or intentionally obfuscated the meaning of the Handschu Guidelines," a 1980's law designed to protect those engaged in political speech. But he also admits in the piece that the NYPD changed those guidelines in 2002, as a specific response to the September 11 terrorists attacks.

Kelly isn't running for office yet and he may have enough critics to top his appointment to DHS, but the op-ed reads like someone who knows he won't be around much longer and isn't going to walk away without getting in the last word. No one disputes that Kelly and Bloomberg's NYPD has done a remarkable job at reducing crime, but that doesn't mean the debate about some of their tactics is settled.

       

Ryan Braun Is Suspended for the Rest of the Season

Major League Baseball has suspended Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun for the rest of this year, because of his involvement with a performance enhancing drug clinic. And Alex Rodriguez may be next.

Braun will miss 65 games and forfeit about $3.25 million in salary for violations of the league's anti-doping code. He will not appeal the suspension and released a statement saying, "I realize now that I have made some mistakes. I am willing to accept the consequences of those actions."

The slugger first became ensnared in PED controversy when he failed a drug test following the 2011 season; the same year he won the National League MVP with 33 home runs and 111 RBI. He avoided a mandatory 50-game suspension after successfully arguing that the sample (which had elevated levels of testosterone) was improperly handled and came back the next year to hit 41 home runs.

However, during this last offseason Braun and other athletes — including Alex Rodriguez and several other pro baseball players — were connected to a shady "anti-aging" clinic known as Biogenesis. An investigation by Miami New-Times found that the owner of the clinic was selling human growth hormone, steroids, and other drugs to the athletes and kept detailed records about it. The owner of that clinic has been cooperating with the MLB investigation and has been given evidence about the PEDs he supplied to Braun and other players.

That's why this suspension is merely the first shoe to drop. All indications are that more suspensions are coming and that Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees (who has already severed a previous 50-game suspension for drug violations) will be on the list. A second offense could result in a 100-game suspension without pay.

Braun's suspension was announced first because, according to ESPN, he essentially made a plea deal with league officials. After realizing the evidence against him was so strong, he reached an agreement with the league to ensure that his inevitable suspension would be limited to the 2013 season.

       

The White House Has the Approval It Needs to Arm Syrian Rebels

On the same day that the Pentagon provided Congress with a list of military options concerning Syria, reports emerged that the White House is pretty much ready to move forward with covert CIA-run plan to arm the Syrian rebels. 

Reuters, along with the New York Times, both cite Rep. Mike Rogers's on-the-record indication that the Intelligence committee he chairs is ready to give a stamp of approval to the President's plan, despite doubts about its probability for success. The committee meetings on the plan themselves are held in secret (as is the covert arms operation itself, which is going through the CIA), but according to Reuters there's been a tentative agreement on the table since mid-July that opened the way for Obama's plan for Syria to move forward: 

Part of the logjam was broken on July 12 when members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who had questioned the wisdom of arming the insurgents decided behind closed doors to tentatively agree that the administration could go ahead with its plans, but sought updates as the covert effort proceeded.

The approval, as the Washington Post explains, will allow the CIA to shift some money already allotted to the agency into the covert arms program. And while no one's saying specifically how much the covert program will cost, the Post says that officials believe it's cheaper for the CIA to take it on than it would be for the military to carry out the same operation (it also, you know, allows the administration to side step international restrictions on overthrowing a government, and minimizes the congressional approval needed to move forward). There's still no timeline for the start of delivery, however. Meanwhile, as the Times notes, the president has been emphasizing in recent weeks just how hard his plan will be to pull off, indicating that the administration believes that Obama's successor will likely inherit their policy on Syria. 

As for the military's possible involvement, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outlined the cost of various military operations available for Syria on Monday. Sending troops to help train the rebels outside of Syria, he estimates, would cost $500 million a year. The Post explains further: 

Dempsey said that more robust options, including establishing no-fly or buffer zones inside Syria, or containing Syria’s government-held chemical weapons, would cost at least a billion dollars a month and require ships, aircraft and up to several thousand troops.

Congress's main concern on the CIA plan for Syria arguably hasn't been the length or strength of the plan: it's been whether the arms promised to Syrian rebels could fall into the hands of extremists. That's something the President himself has addressed before, claiming that the administration has enough intelligence on the Syrian rebels to determine who to arm. Senator John McCain, one of the top Syria hawks, also thinks he knows how to tell the "good" and "bad" guys apart here, after one covert visit to the country in May. 

       

Edward Snowden Has Everything and Nothing

Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker who has been formally charged with espionage by the U.S. government, was the subject of an anonymously sourced story at CNN on Monday that, among other things, pushes back it the idea that Snowden was able to obtain the inner secrets of the surveillance agency. It's apparently in direct response to journalist Glenn Greenwald's earlier claim that Snowden had the "blueprint" for the agency at his fingertips. "Just because you have the blueprints doesn't mean you have the manual," the anonymous official told CNN, while floating the idea that the former contractor for the agency might not know what to do with what he has. 

Earlier this month, Greenwald outlined the scope of Snowden's NSA stash, indicating that the whistleblower had refused to release some of the most sensitive information in his hands, based on what he described as Snowden's "careful and judicious journalistic test weighing public interest versus harm." That information includes the "blueprint" for the NSA, (which, contra the anonymous CNN source's zing, Greenwald also described as an "instruction manual"). So now that Greenwald and Snowden's version of events are out there, the U.S. is pushing back. 

To be clear, it doesn't seem like either agency is denying that Snowden's data grab contains sensitive information. Citing an internal review, the official said that first, Snowden didn't access something called ECI, or "extremely compartmentalized information," but instead pulled a whole bunch of information at once from an area of the NSA's computer system in which a large amount of sensitive information was concentrated. And second, the official apparently insinuated that Snowden might not know what to do with the information he has, or as CNN put it, "A key question is whether Snowden, a former NSA contractor, really knows how the programs work at a detailed technical level." 

While Snowden has previously been described as highly skilled — hence his ability to access the information he leaked to Greenwald et al. — the incompetency argument seen here isn't new. Rep. Mike Rogers, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, raised doubts about Snowden's abilities back in June: 

"He clearly has over-inflated his position, he has over-inflated his access and he's even over-inflated what the actually technology of the programs would allow one to do. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do."

Meanwhile, the fallout from the leaks might speak for themselves. Snowden, seen in the CNN piece as overstating his reach and, by doing so, giving sensitive information to terrorists, has also started to usefully change the way some Americans look at and use the internet. But the point addressed by the anonymous official — whether Snowden has the agency's deepest secrets, and whether he knows what to do with them — is in a way moot, assuming his previous promise not to release the most sensitive stuff he has stands. But it's clear that Snowden (and now, some lawmakers) knows way more than what we've seen so far. At this point, the NSA, just like everyone else, may just have to wait else he ends up making public. 

       

Nose Gear Collapses After Southwest Flight Lands at LaGuardia

Update 10:50 p.m.: And, here's a (very grainy) video of the skidding plane, thanks to NBC New York:

Update 9:00 p.m.: Here's Southwest's statement on the landing gear incident. The statement was posted to their site earlier on Monday, after which they promptly suffered some technical difficulties: 

Southwest Airlines flight 345 landed at New York's LaGuardia at 5:40 PM Eastern Monday evening from Nashville. The aircraft is a Boeing 737-700. Eyewitness reports indicate the aircraft's nose gear collapsed upon landing. There were 150 people on board including Customers and Crew. All Customers have been deplaned and transferred to the terminal. Initial reports indicate local responders are caring for five Customers and three flight attendants who have reported injuries at this time. Southwest is cooperating with local authorities, and the NTSB has been notified. 

The chronology of events here still isn't quite clear, but from reports emerging in the hours after the crash, there's a slightly more detail picture of what happened: it looks like the nose gear of the flight collapsed just after the plane landed safely on the ground.

As for operations at LaGuardia, at least some flights headed to the airport have started boarding passengers, after a delay. 

Original Post: LaGuardia Airport in New York City stopped accepting flights on Monday evening after a Boeing 737 landed at the airport without its front landing gear. The Southwest flight 345, from Nashville, had previously reported possible issues with its landing gear. 

Investigators are gathering info on this evening's Southwest flight 345 incident while landing at LaGuardia.

— NTSB (@NTSB) July 22, 2013

According to a New York-based ABC affiliate, there were 143 passengers and 6 crew on the plane. Port Authority told the station that four passengers were treated for anxiety attacks at the scene, and "several" were hospitalized with neck and back injuries. There are no reports of serious injuries or fatalities. Every passenger made it off the flight OK, according to multiple reports. 

Standby for more information regarding #Flight345 BNA-LGA. We are gathering details and will post a statement soon.

— Southwest Airlines (@SouthwestAir) July 22, 2013

#PlaneCrash https://t.co/9OmoUKYKv3

— contog (@contog) July 22, 2013

RT @NathanEnglander: Southwest Air flight next to our plane just lost front wheel. Slides are out and our runway. pic.twitter.com/eyf75il247

— NYCAviation (@NYCAviation) July 22, 2013

LaGuardia, meanwhile, is not closed, despite earlier reports. But it's not accepting incoming flights. Initial reports indicate that the front landing gear collapsed after landing. 

       

'Bunheads' Is No More

Impassioned pleas from TV writers to keep Bunheads on the air could not stop ABC Family from canceling the show, which the network announced Monday evening.  

Amy Sherman-Palladino's creation, which told the story of a Vegas showgirl teaching a group of teenage ballet dancers in a quirky California town, was a critics' darling that hovered on the brink of cancellation essentially since the show ended its first season run in February. 

Bunheads stood out from the crowd of shows currently on the air by just being about people—both young and old—figuring out their lives. As BuzzFeed's Kate Aurthur wrote today: "If your standards for plot are Game of Thrones or Homeland, not that much happened on Bunheads. Yet if you value the pleasures of watching someone rebuild her life and screw it up again sometimes, all while talking very quickly, then every episode of Bunheads was the Red Wedding of witty, warm, quirky emotional connection."It also made an excellent use of dance in telling its stories, using beautiful choreography to convey characters' emotions with little cheese. 

The show is already being mourned in the annals of Twitter.

NOOOOO RT @KateAurthur: #Bunheads has been canceled. Story TK....

— Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) July 22, 2013

Noooooo, RIP Bunheads…..

— Margaret Lyons (@margeincharge) July 22, 2013

CRY HAVOC AND LET SLIP THE DOGS OF WAR. RT @KateAurthur #Bunheads has been canceled.

— Louis Peitzman (@LouisPeitzman) July 22, 2013

Depending on your emotions, here are some Bunheads dances for you to watch. If you are angry, here's "Istanbul:"

If you are sad, here's "You, Sailor."

       

Long Live King Jayden: Handicapping Possible Baby Names

We don't yet know what the name of the likely future king of England will be. (Or maybe we do, and you've read this article between its announcement and our updating. Congratulations to you!) But we do know what the child would be named if it weren't up to Will and Kate. The most likely: Edward, Mohammed, George, and Jacob.

Allow us to explain.

If it were up to former monarchs

Most of the past monarchs of Great Britain/England were named by the reigning monarch. Not always, of course; the transition process between monarchs has not always been a matter of simple inheritance. But by compiling the past names of the nation's kings and queens, we can get a sense for what the current child might be named.

In order of frequency (and via this list), the most likely names chosen by former monarchs would be:

1. Edward (11) 2. Henry (8) 3. George (6) 4. Richard (4) 4. William (4)

Caveats: King Henry IX might have a difficult time finding a wife.

If it were up to regular Britons

Each year, the British Home Office compiles     

Barack Obama and Ray Kelly Have the Exact Opposite Views on Racial Profiling

Well this is awkward.

If you missed Barack Obama's impromptu speech last Friday on the realities of growing up black in the same country as Trayvon Martin, this is the passage that's most essential for understanding why New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly would make a baffling choice to become the country's top domestic security official:

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that -- that doesn’t go away.

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

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Stop-and-frisk, the deeply controversial policing tactic that Kelly has led and defended in New York City, is essentially the institutional version of everything that Obama describes above. The only difference is that the people following blacks in New York, eying them with distrust and suspecting them of being up to no good, are police officers. And they have the power to pat people down and detain them, one indignity piled onto another.

Obama was explicitly trying to bring "context" to the outpouring of anger following last week's ruling in Florida. But his words also offer the best context imaginable for why the architect of stop-and-frisk would be a bizarre nominee to become Obama's head of the Department of Homeland Security, a move that would implicitly endorse at the federal level the tactic of preemptively profiling minorities in massive numbers to head off crime.

Obama himself is the source of all this speculation. Janet Napolitano announced earlier this month that she was stepping down from Homeland Security. And there's wide speculation that Kelly will no longer have a job in New York after this fall's mayoral election. Asked last week what he thought of Kelly as a potential replacement, Obama lauded his record and said this: "Mr. Kelly might be very happy where he is. But if he’s not, I’d want to know about it.”

And yet, if you parse out their public statements on this subject, it's almost as if these two men have been having an ongoing conversation about racial profiling from opposing podiums at the same rally. Here is Obama, again, last Friday:

... the fact that a lot of African-American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African-American boys are more violent -- using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.

Compare that to Kelly, last year, citing those very statistics in defense of stop-and-frisk:

Ninety-six percent of the shooting victims in this city are people of color, 90 percent of the murder victims are people of color. Who do you think's lives are being saved?

Here is Obama on Friday acknowledging that the black community knows and talks about these statistics:

… Now, this isn’t to say that the African-American community is naive about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact, although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration.

And here is Kelly, in the same diatribe... not acknowledging that:

What I haven’t heard is any solution to the violence problem in these communities.

People are upset about being stopped, yet what is the answer? What have you said about how do we stop this violence? What have leaders of the communities of color said? What is their strategy to get guns off the street?

Here is Obama on Friday proposing that we might soothe the fear and anger in the minority community by training local police officers on how not to racially profile:

Number one, precisely because law enforcement is often determined at the state and local level, I think it’d be productive for the Justice Department -- governors, mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists.

You know, when I was in Illinois I passed racial profiling legislation. And it actually did just two simple things. One, it collected data on traffic stops and the race of the person who was stopped. But the other thing was it resourced us training police departments across the state on how to think about potential racial bias and ways to further professionalize what they were doing.

And here is Kelly seeming to argue on the television show Nightline this spring that, in fact, New York's stop-and-frisk program doesn't profile minorities enough:

The stark reality is that crime happens in communities of color. About 70% to 75% of the people described as committing violent crimes — assault, robbery, shootings, grand larceny — are described as being African-American.

The percentage of people who are stopped is 53% African-American. So really, African-Americans are being understopped in relation to the percentage of people being described as being the perpetrators of violent crime.

None of this even touches on the NYPD's policies of surveilling Muslims. That program is equally troubling to many Kelly critics. But given Obama's own powerful articulation of what it's like to be on the other end of racial profiling as a black man, the discordant comments from Kelly on the very same topic would seem to disqualify him from expanding his ideas beyond New York.