Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 817

Bernie’s endgame: No, he can’t win now — but his campaign has exposed Hillary as a “weak frontrunner” in a divided party

Early last week, leading figures in Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign hosted a conference call with political reporters to push the narrative that they still saw a tenuous “path to victory” over Hillary Clinton in the contest for the Democratic nomination. There was nothing so extraordinary in that: Losing candidates, like baseball teams who are 10 games back at the All-Star break, often claim they have a secret plan to win. (I’m looking at you, Marco Rubio.) It struck me, however, that this ritual exercise shone some light through the cloud of existential doubt enveloping the bizarre alternate universe of the 2016 campaign, and that it resembled the old Soviet-era joke about communism and capitalism: Everything the Sanders team had to say about their candidate’s strength was false; everything they said about their opponent’s weakness was true. In the wake of Sanders' big wins in the Alaska, Hawaii and Washington caucuses last weekend, campaign manager Jeff Weaver argued that the Vermont senator had recaptured the momentum and was on course to overcome Clinton's large lead in pledged delegates. Strategist Tad Devine asserted that Clinton’s delegate advantage has been whittled down to about 240 (the Guardian’s published count currently puts it at 263). Factor in the hundreds of unelected party apparatchiks known as superdelegates, who overwhelmingly support Clinton, and her lead is closer to 700. Devine hinted that some superdelegates are beginning to wobble in the face of Sanders’ superior poll numbers against Donald Trump, but declined to provide specifics. Clinton's victories in several large states on March 15 — when she realized a net gain of 104 pledged delegates, 68 of them in Florida alone — struck most people in the political and media castes as tolling the final bell on Sanders' realistic chances to win the nomination. But Bernie has been pronounced dead several times before and risen from the tomb, and Devine, a veteran Democratic operative who goes back to Jimmy Carter's re-election campaign in 1980 (which can't be a happy memory), has acquired the reputation of a necromancer in the occult operations of the 2016 campaign. So when he assured us that we had once again failed to perceive the true meaning of events, we listened attentively, suspending our disbelief as best we could. Whether Devine’s fanciful campaign narrative — which he was handsomely paid to construct, let us remember — has any merit is not the part that interests me. But I suppose it’s worth spinning out a little. In his telling, March 15 will soon have a much different meaning, as the “high-water mark” of the Clinton campaign, the apex of her delegate lead and the turning point that preceded the last and most unlikely of Bernie Sanders' unlikely comebacks. Here’s how the story goes: Clinton’s victories over Sanders almost don’t count, because they have largely come in states where Sanders lacked the resources and opportunity to compete with her on level terms. Where he’s had those things, he has done extremely well, and in the battleground states just ahead, her aura of inevitability will melt away like a papier-mâché tiger in the rain. This hypothesis or prophetic vision or whatever it is has been much debated and dissected over the last few days. It's fair to say that by the normal standards of political insider-baseball, its plausibility is near zero. Devine is blatantly cherry-picking favorable data and ignoring the other kind: The Sanders campaign sure looked like it was competing in Nevada and South Carolina and Massachusetts and Ohio and Illinois, and lost them all. (A different result in three of those five states, let’s say, and the entire complexion of the Democratic campaign is different today.) As Devine admitted during the call, Sanders would have to win most of the remaining states on the primary calendar to overtake Clinton, and essentially all the big ones. If he fails to win Wisconsin next week, and New York on April 19, and then Maryland and Pennsylvania a week after that, future conference calls of this type will become increasingly challenging, and may require a Santería priest and the sacrifice of live poultry. But as I say, Devine’s patently absurd claims about what is likely to happen are not the important part. First of all, “likely to happen” and “patently absurd” have not proven to be useful standards this year, when the aforementioned norms of political discourse have collapsed. One reason the thought-leaders of media groupthink listened so eagerly to Devine’s Gandalfian pronouncements is that we’ve been wrong about damn near everything in 2016 — wrong about Sanders, wrong about Trump, wrong about the enduring power of the “Republican establishment” and wrong about the stability of the two-party system. Who is to say we’re not wrong this time too? Who can imagine what new frontiers of wrongness lie ahead? But there’s more going on beneath the Democratic endgame than just widespread cognitive dissonance and epistemological uncertainty, although those are powerful forces that have turned American politics in 2016 into a delusional realm halfway between a dream state and a meth high. In all likelihood, Devine is doing what people like him always do: He’s playing out a losing hand to the best of his ability, he’s positioning himself for future employers and he’s pursuing a tactical short game aimed at the Clinton-Sanders peace treaty that lies in the not-too-distant future. Devine is also a genuine convert to the Sanders revolution, and another reason we all listened to him was because he has gotten ahold of an important truth, or at least half of one. In the most quoted line of that conference call, he told us that Hillary Clinton remains the “clear frontrunner” but “has emerged as a weak frontrunner.” As an argument that Sanders might still defeat her, that’s pretty feeble; it sounds more than a little like doublespeak or poor-mouthing, like a football coach saying, heck, we’re the underdogs but we like it that way. But Devine’s assessment of Clinton as a weakening frontrunner carried an irresistible resonance during a week when Clinton apparently accused a Greenpeace activist of being a Sanders operative for daring to mention her fund-raising ties to the fossil fuel industry, and by implication the larger question of who is funding her campaign and why. It was a week when her poll numbers continued to droop and her negatives continued to climb, a week when the background drip-drip-drip of suspicion around the email scandal refused to abate, and a week when Sanders reported another record-breaking month of small donations and drew a crowd of more than 18,000 people to a rally in the South Bronx. At a point in the cycle when leading candidates typically gain momentum, Clinton finds herself in the unusual position of holding an apparently insurmountable advantage even as her campaign begins to leak oil and emit strange clanking noises. A weakening frontrunner is not necessarily destined to lose, and it remains more likely than not that Clinton will be the Democratic nominee and take the presidential oath of office next January. Of course I don’t want Donald Trump to be president, or at least I don’t think I do. (On the level of pure nihilistic malice, as expressed recently by Susan Sarandon, one can argue that might lead to more change, more quickly, than any other result.) But I’m going to suggest, for about the 75th time, that the outcome of the 2016 presidential election is not the only important political question of the moment, and probably isn’t the most important question. Hillary Clinton was never the fundamental problem, and Bernie Sanders almost certainly isn’t the solution, and the endgame of their primary confrontation isn’t going to settle anything. If Democrats believe that Clinton’s likely nomination and election — presumably in a fall campaign against an incoherent sociopath — means that order has been restored to the political universe, and means that their party can march happily into the future, free of the chaos and darkness that has consumed the opposition party, they are deliberately ignoring the obvious. Milder mirror images of the internal contradictions and divisions found among Republicans can also be found among Democrats. It’s a striking and hilarious fact that both parties have arrived, via disparate routes, at probable nominees who are widely despised by the general public. If one of them is seen as far more loathsome than the other, that should hardly be seen as a glowing endorsement of the overall process. The divisions that have surfaced this year among Democrats, or between the institutional Democratic Party and the resurgent nonpartisan left, are latent or immanent rather than ugly and unavoidable -- at least for now. In the current campaign, those divisions have been papered over with forced and frayed politeness, or with the official fiction that Clinton and Sanders hold generally similar positions, although it has become increasingly clear that they represent different generations, different worldviews and profoundly different attitudes toward political and economic power. Tad Devine’s Magic 8-ball wisdom won’t be enough to drive Bernie Sanders on to victory now. The most striking aspects of Sanders’ campaign are how close he came, how difficult he has been to stop and how much passion he has continued to generate long after the battle was lost. As Devine reminded us this week, the X factor in the Democratic race all along has not been Sanders but his opponent, who has had every possible advantage yet seems almost fiercely determined to lose. Hillary Clinton embodies all the Democratic Party’s contradictions in one person, having held every possible position on every possible issue at one time or another, to go with her various accents and uncomfortable personas. She is simultaneously the most powerful and most self-destructive of candidates; sometimes she looks like the HMS Victory of politics and sometimes she looks like the Titanic, loaded with albatrosses and towing the Hindenburg. I can only see one scenario in which Sanders becomes the 2016 Democratic nominee: the total implosion or self-immolation or indictment of Hillary Clinton. Similarly, there is only one scenario in which Donald Trump is elected president. Unfortunately, it’s the same scenario. Sure, that would be a bizarre and outlandish turn of events, more like a plot twist on a bad TV show than reality. Have you been paying attention?

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What Donald Trump doesn’t know might save us: He’s unschooled, but at least he’s no American exceptionalist or neo-con ideologue

The Russians have long understood that words are actions. A linguist and literary critic prominent in the last century added to the thought by insisting that context is more important than text. The meaning of what one says, in other words, is relational: It can be understood only by way of when, how, to whom and even where one says it. There is no escaping the thought of words as actions as it applies to foreign policy. Washington has its “moderate opposition” in Syria, and the designation is an essential tool of U.S. strategy, even as these moderates include a consequential, maybe decisive, number of radical Islamist factions. It is almost frightening to carry this thought anywhere near Russia and the Ukraine crisis, where all that Russian “aggression” right out of the clear blue, no reason at all for it, now has Defense Secretary Carter sending NATO weaponry and rotating troops a matter of miles from the Russian border. Words as actions fly thick as mosquitoes in spring these days. Some of those I have in mind came from President Obama during his remarkable but problematic trip to Havana last week. Others came from Castro — Fidel, I mean — in reply to Obama’s. Then there are Donald Trump’s words in those lengthy interviews on foreign policy he just gave the New York Times and the Washington Post. The transcripts are here and here. The Don — better than “the Donald,” somehow — seems to have wowed the policy cliques and the media clerks: They have since had many words of their own. We have heard the words these past 10 days but now must look at them as actions, I urge. We need to see what is being done by way of what these people are saying, where, to whom and so on. Syria, Ukraine, all the Putin-bashing: It is easy to see the intended point (even if a surprising number of us are taken in). The media’s purposeful perversion of the truth is perfectly plain. But these other cases also deserve our attention; the points being made are subtler but not less important. We live in a modern-day imperial power in the last throes of its aggressions. This is my read of our moment in a single sentence. The expansion phase is over, as the Russians, Chinese and others are in the process of telling us. The aggressions are not, surely, but it grows more difficult to aggress, and when we do it is defensive in character now, if this is not too much a paradox. It is all about denying where we are in history, and this is mostly what we hear and see when we consider our words as actions. * Anyone who accomplished what Obama has in our relations with Cuba would have been as eager as he to travel to Havana, the first American president in nearly a century to cross the Straits of Florida. The opening is an achievement, and may we make good on it by lifting the trade embargo. You would have thought Obama understood something of the complexity, even delicacy, involved when an American leader sets foot on Cuban soil and speaks. But he seems not to have grasped this, or the predicament he was stepping into. I do not rate Obama’s speech at El Gran Teatro de Havana on March 22 anything like a complete failure. But it was not a success either, as the elder Castro made plain in his much-noted essay in Granma, the official newspaper, after Obama’s departure. What was Obama trying to get done when he addressed “the Cuban people” — if, indeed, they were his primary audience? Obama sounded some very good notes. I rank his stress on a shared identity high among these. “We both live in a New World, colonized by Europeans," he said as he got under way. “Cuba, like the United States, was built in part by slaves brought from Africa.” Then to the nature of the Cuban-American relationship. “I believe my visit here demonstrates that you do not need to fear a threat from the United States,” he said when he first touched on this topic. It is a spectacle, truly, when an American president is called upon to assure another nation we will not invade it, but given the history it had to be said. And later: “We are in a new era.” And later still: “It is time now for us to leave the past behind. It is time for us to look forward to the future together.” One could not ask for more in these assertions, so far as they went. But in between them our president said many very unwise things. No amount of sweetened coating obscures the blunt, discourteous lecture Obama delivered to the Castro government in the guise of his well-wishing address to its citizens. “Even if we lift the embargo tomorrow,” he said as he hit stride, “Cubans would not realize their potential without continued change here in Cuba.” His next sentence tells you all you need to know about where Obama was headed: “It should be easier to open a business in Cuba.” From there Obama was off and running. He praised the Internet, innovation, “entrepreneurship” and open markets, our 21st-century objects of idolatry. He leveled cleverly indirect but otherwise unsubtle insults as to liberty and equality under law in Cuba. Then a couple of doozies: “Every child deserves the dignity that comes with education, health care and food on the table, and a roof over their heads.” And later: “And I believe voters should be able to choose their governments in free and democratic elections.” One can scarcely believe the nerve, given Cuba’s famously superior record in several of these categories. As to liberty, absent in Obama’s remarks, per usual when American leaders interact with others, is any grasp of causality. No revolution can be judged fairly without reference to its counterrevolution, as I have argued previously. And Cuba’s survival after nearly six decades’ worth of attempted subversion is an accomplishment with costs most Cubans understand and pay without more than the everyday variety of complaint. On the subject of elections, in our splendid political season, I will simply let Obama’s remark sit without comment among my fellow Americans. What was Obama doing in this speech — what is the action buried in the words? A few things, in my read. The Havana visit being Obama’s punctuation mark, we should understand these things if we are to judge just what the president accomplished with the opening to Cuba. One, Obama's all-but-stated mission is perfectly congruent with the American mission the world over and varies only in method from the strategy in Cuba since the Castro revolution: It is to cultivate a neoliberal economic order conducive to foreign corporate investment. No second Bay of Pigs, no more exploding cigars for Fidel, no more covert counterintelligence operations — this last we must count a maybe at this point. But the campaign continues by other means, as it does elsewhere. One of these means is words. Two, Obama was attempting to transport to another country and people the peculiar bubble of unreality within which Americans now live. No president or secretary of state can escape this ideological imperative. A couple of examples will do. President Obama is surely smart enough to recognize that Cubans have a different idea of what constitutes liberty and freedom. They are as individual as anyone else — Obama’s offensive suggestion to the contrary notwithstanding. But like most people other than Americans and members of the British Conservative Party, Cubans understand that the individual achieves his or her fullest potential only when the social self is conscious and activated. Obama could go nowhere near this simple thought. When Obama spoke, he gave Cubans a demonstration of our ideological confinement. The take-home: We may never have a serious conversations with the Cubans, given we simply cannot speak to others in any idiom other than our own. The other example concerns remembering and forgetting. No Cuban forgets all that Americans did in our shared history. Read the speech. Consider Fidel’s anger on hearing it. Obama glossed every mention of the decades of ill America has done and the suffering this ill has caused so many Cubans. “Our governments became adversaries,” he said at one point. Deceptive syntax gets no cleverer: Hardly is that what happened. But it is typical of Obama’s language while in Havana. Four words cannot erase six decades of purposely destructive policy, but that is the action in Obama’s words. Third and final point. Obama did not apologize for any of the past, as anyone who reads the speech will notice. This is because of his intended audience. I noted earlier that while pretending to address the Cuban people, he was talking to the Castro government. True, but not the whole story. At the very bottom of the well, Obama was addressing us, we Americans. Liberty, health care, education, racial equality, equality under law. His mention of these things in Havana reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s supposedly dazzling assertion in Beijing a few years ago: “Women’s rights are human rights.” That remark had nothing to do with China — where women’s exceptional advances since 1949 are universally acknowledged — and would have no impact on China. Clinton was speaking to women voters back here, as the history Clinton’s comment has since accumulated should make plain. Same with Obama in Cuba. His lecture will make no iota of difference to any Cuban. The intent was to let us know there is no letting the ideological guard down. He wanted to tell us, against much evidence, how happy all our liberty and equality and elections and innovations and small businesses and information cultures and make us. What better way to put the point across than to show us, as a piece of political theater, how envied we are — supposedly — by other people, if not other governments? (My favorite remark in this line: A young Cuban woman interviewed on one of the American networks said, “We don’t want any Wal-Marts and Starbucks coming here, if that’s what you mean.”) These are the actions in Obama’s words. After I read the speech I was not the slightest surprised to read that Fidel came back with a ripping riposte. Its most quoted line echoed the young Cuban on television: “We do not need the empire to give us anything.” Truer and more plainly spoken than anything Obama had to say. His larger point was not to draw a line under this rapprochement — it has been there from the first, in my view — but to remind Americans of it: Do not count on disrupting what we have built over many decades and against odds that you stacked against us. This is Cuba’s punctuation mark. “My modest suggestion,” Castro wrote of Obama, “is that he reflects and doesn’t try to develop theories about Cuban politics.” On the first point, Mr. Castro, do not get your hopes up. Reflection is not part of our political culture. On the second, I do not think our political elites have any theories about Cuban politics worth worrying about. * Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Donald Trump gave those two foreign policy interviews to the Times and the Washington Post. And it has rained hard rain on him ever since. “Shocking ignorance.” “Dangerous folly.” “Ranting and schmoozing his way to the White House.” These, in all their complexity and analytic nuance, are typical of the commentary this week. Truly, this guy belched in chapel. This column is by no means an endorsement of the Trump candidacy, and if I could put that point in blinking neon, I would. But some interesting things are said in the interviews and what are, effectively, replies in the media. Again, what are the words and what is being done by way of them? Trump and those interviewing him ranged widely. They touched on how to treat the Saudis, Ukraine, competition with Beijing in the South China Sea, burden sharing, renegotiating faulty trade agreements, the accord governing Iran’s nuclear activities: The list is long. Trump’s positions on most of these questions riled one or another or all commentators. The Times report had a usefully succinct thumbnail summation of the Trump line on foreign policy. “In Mr. Trump’s view, the United States has become a diluted power, and the main mechanism by which he would re-establish its central role in the world is economic bargaining,” the two Times reporters who spoke with him wrote. “He approached almost every current international conflict through the prism of negotiation...” Interesting. I will come back to this shortly. Two questions seem to have stirred the nests more than any others. The most important of these concerns NATO. The Don being the Don, he put it this way to the Times reporters: “No. 1, it’s obsolete … and No. 1, we pay far too much.” Here is how Trump defended his position to Jonathan Karl on ABC's "This Week," the Sunday news program, a few hours after the Times interview was published:

NATO was done at a time you had the Soviet Union, which was obviously larger, much larger than Russia is today…. We have other threats. We have the threat of terrorism, and NATO doesn’t discuss terrorism, NATO’s not meant for terrorism. NATO doesn’t have the right countries in it for terrorism. And we pay… a totally disproportionate share of NATO. We’re spending the biggest, the lion share’s paid for by us, disproportionate to other countries…. So I look at that. I look at the fact that it was a long time ago. You know, there’s nothing wrong with saying that a concept was good but now it’s obsolete or now it’s outmoded. Now, it can be trimmed up and it can be—it can be reconfigured and you can call it NATO, but it’s got to be changed.

The second question had to do with relations across the Pacific. Trump asserted that he would renegotiate the American security treaty with Japan, which dates to 1952. And he would withdraw American troops from Japan and South Korea unless these two nations contribute more to their cost, while possibly allowing both to weaponize their longstanding civilian nuclear power programs. “I mean, that’s not a fair deal,” Trump said of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, a pact with a long and contentious history behind it. Asked if he was serious about removing U.S. troops from Washington’s longstanding Asian allies, Trump replied,

The answer is not happily but the answer is yes. We cannot afford to be losing vast amounts of billions of dollars on all of this. We just can’t do it anymore. Now there was a time when we could have done it. When we started doing it. But we can’t do it anymore. And I have a feeling that they’d up the ante very much. I think they would, and if they wouldn’t I would really have to say yes….

We had a warning several weeks ago that the national security and foreign policy cliques were inflamed by the Don’s positions. “Trump’s vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle,” 120 “experts”— quotation marks required in a lot of cases — wrote in a much-noted open letter. Read it here. Context and text: I read this week’s uproar over Trump’s two interviews with this as background. It is about one thing, and we can treat both of the above policy questions together because they are about the same thing, too. Trump has many, many indefensible, impractical positions, but this is not my point right now. Trump’s problem is the action in his words: He has put the projection of American power, with the military as the primary instrument of policy, on the table. He has shoved the truth of imperial overstretch in our faces. What you hear back is an effort in unison to stuff a cork in this bottle before any more wine spills. “Not a topic” is the common theme. “Now we know that Donald Trump would rip up the post-1945 world order,” Roger Cohen wrote on the Times opinion page at midweek. This is the problem, you see. I cannot think of a better idea, to be honest, although it is not at all clear this is Trump’s intention. Observe the resistance of power to any hint of change: This is my point. And note as you do that it does not matter what any American figure thinks, says, does or insists upon: History is shredding the postwar order as we speak and at considerable speed. NATO as obsolete? It is the mildest way to describe this trouble-making anachronism ever in search of whatever raison d’être it can conjure. Many people take this as prima facie obvious. We cannot afford the empire? Consider your town’s budget, your state’s budget, the local school or the condition of the nearest expressway and decide for yourself. The security pact with Japan is emphatically unfair, but for reasons other than Trump thinks: It is a victor’s intrusion 70 years after the fact. We should all be thinking about a new world order and about how we might contribute constructively to it, but — words are actions — this conversation is banned. I was musing the other day about how Trump stacks up next to Hillary Clinton on the foreign side. By way of a mirror image, some interesting contrasts became clear. Trump is not an exceptionalist: We have fallen far, and no providential hand will “make us great again.” That is up to us alone. He is not an ideologue: This dimension of the American policy discourse does not appear to interest him. He is into making deals: Talking comes first. And he speaks plainly to us and all others, never in code: He knows no other way. Think about these four things, separating out what you think of Trump as a political figure. The consciousness of exceptionalism, American ideology, the primacy of the military in American foreign policy, the incessant deceptions of the policy cliques (of which Clinton is a prominent member): These are all essential to maintaining “the postwar order,” such as it is. Trump is not my guy by a long way, but it is interesting to listen to what he says, and then to watch what happens because of what he says.  The Russians have long understood that words are actions. A linguist and literary critic prominent in the last century added to the thought by insisting that context is more important than text. The meaning of what one says, in other words, is relational: It can be understood only by way of when, how, to whom and even where one says it. There is no escaping the thought of words as actions as it applies to foreign policy. Washington has its “moderate opposition” in Syria, and the designation is an essential tool of U.S. strategy, even as these moderates include a consequential, maybe decisive, number of radical Islamist factions. It is almost frightening to carry this thought anywhere near Russia and the Ukraine crisis, where all that Russian “aggression” right out of the clear blue, no reason at all for it, now has Defense Secretary Carter sending NATO weaponry and rotating troops a matter of miles from the Russian border. Words as actions fly thick as mosquitoes in spring these days. Some of those I have in mind came from President Obama during his remarkable but problematic trip to Havana last week. Others came from Castro — Fidel, I mean — in reply to Obama’s. Then there are Donald Trump’s words in those lengthy interviews on foreign policy he just gave the New York Times and the Washington Post. The transcripts are here and here. The Don — better than “the Donald,” somehow — seems to have wowed the policy cliques and the media clerks: They have since had many words of their own. We have heard the words these past 10 days but now must look at them as actions, I urge. We need to see what is being done by way of what these people are saying, where, to whom and so on. Syria, Ukraine, all the Putin-bashing: It is easy to see the intended point (even if a surprising number of us are taken in). The media’s purposeful perversion of the truth is perfectly plain. But these other cases also deserve our attention; the points being made are subtler but not less important. We live in a modern-day imperial power in the last throes of its aggressions. This is my read of our moment in a single sentence. The expansion phase is over, as the Russians, Chinese and others are in the process of telling us. The aggressions are not, surely, but it grows more difficult to aggress, and when we do it is defensive in character now, if this is not too much a paradox. It is all about denying where we are in history, and this is mostly what we hear and see when we consider our words as actions. * Anyone who accomplished what Obama has in our relations with Cuba would have been as eager as he to travel to Havana, the first American president in nearly a century to cross the Straits of Florida. The opening is an achievement, and may we make good on it by lifting the trade embargo. You would have thought Obama understood something of the complexity, even delicacy, involved when an American leader sets foot on Cuban soil and speaks. But he seems not to have grasped this, or the predicament he was stepping into. I do not rate Obama’s speech at El Gran Teatro de Havana on March 22 anything like a complete failure. But it was not a success either, as the elder Castro made plain in his much-noted essay in Granma, the official newspaper, after Obama’s departure. What was Obama trying to get done when he addressed “the Cuban people” — if, indeed, they were his primary audience? Obama sounded some very good notes. I rank his stress on a shared identity high among these. “We both live in a New World, colonized by Europeans," he said as he got under way. “Cuba, like the United States, was built in part by slaves brought from Africa.” Then to the nature of the Cuban-American relationship. “I believe my visit here demonstrates that you do not need to fear a threat from the United States,” he said when he first touched on this topic. It is a spectacle, truly, when an American president is called upon to assure another nation we will not invade it, but given the history it had to be said. And later: “We are in a new era.” And later still: “It is time now for us to leave the past behind. It is time for us to look forward to the future together.” One could not ask for more in these assertions, so far as they went. But in between them our president said many very unwise things. No amount of sweetened coating obscures the blunt, discourteous lecture Obama delivered to the Castro government in the guise of his well-wishing address to its citizens. “Even if we lift the embargo tomorrow,” he said as he hit stride, “Cubans would not realize their potential without continued change here in Cuba.” His next sentence tells you all you need to know about where Obama was headed: “It should be easier to open a business in Cuba.” From there Obama was off and running. He praised the Internet, innovation, “entrepreneurship” and open markets, our 21st-century objects of idolatry. He leveled cleverly indirect but otherwise unsubtle insults as to liberty and equality under law in Cuba. Then a couple of doozies: “Every child deserves the dignity that comes with education, health care and food on the table, and a roof over their heads.” And later: “And I believe voters should be able to choose their governments in free and democratic elections.” One can scarcely believe the nerve, given Cuba’s famously superior record in several of these categories. As to liberty, absent in Obama’s remarks, per usual when American leaders interact with others, is any grasp of causality. No revolution can be judged fairly without reference to its counterrevolution, as I have argued previously. And Cuba’s survival after nearly six decades’ worth of attempted subversion is an accomplishment with costs most Cubans understand and pay without more than the everyday variety of complaint. On the subject of elections, in our splendid political season, I will simply let Obama’s remark sit without comment among my fellow Americans. What was Obama doing in this speech — what is the action buried in the words? A few things, in my read. The Havana visit being Obama’s punctuation mark, we should understand these things if we are to judge just what the president accomplished with the opening to Cuba. One, Obama's all-but-stated mission is perfectly congruent with the American mission the world over and varies only in method from the strategy in Cuba since the Castro revolution: It is to cultivate a neoliberal economic order conducive to foreign corporate investment. No second Bay of Pigs, no more exploding cigars for Fidel, no more covert counterintelligence operations — this last we must count a maybe at this point. But the campaign continues by other means, as it does elsewhere. One of these means is words. Two, Obama was attempting to transport to another country and people the peculiar bubble of unreality within which Americans now live. No president or secretary of state can escape this ideological imperative. A couple of examples will do. President Obama is surely smart enough to recognize that Cubans have a different idea of what constitutes liberty and freedom. They are as individual as anyone else — Obama’s offensive suggestion to the contrary notwithstanding. But like most people other than Americans and members of the British Conservative Party, Cubans understand that the individual achieves his or her fullest potential only when the social self is conscious and activated. Obama could go nowhere near this simple thought. When Obama spoke, he gave Cubans a demonstration of our ideological confinement. The take-home: We may never have a serious conversations with the Cubans, given we simply cannot speak to others in any idiom other than our own. The other example concerns remembering and forgetting. No Cuban forgets all that Americans did in our shared history. Read the speech. Consider Fidel’s anger on hearing it. Obama glossed every mention of the decades of ill America has done and the suffering this ill has caused so many Cubans. “Our governments became adversaries,” he said at one point. Deceptive syntax gets no cleverer: Hardly is that what happened. But it is typical of Obama’s language while in Havana. Four words cannot erase six decades of purposely destructive policy, but that is the action in Obama’s words. Third and final point. Obama did not apologize for any of the past, as anyone who reads the speech will notice. This is because of his intended audience. I noted earlier that while pretending to address the Cuban people, he was talking to the Castro government. True, but not the whole story. At the very bottom of the well, Obama was addressing us, we Americans. Liberty, health care, education, racial equality, equality under law. His mention of these things in Havana reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s supposedly dazzling assertion in Beijing a few years ago: “Women’s rights are human rights.” That remark had nothing to do with China — where women’s exceptional advances since 1949 are universally acknowledged — and would have no impact on China. Clinton was speaking to women voters back here, as the history Clinton’s comment has since accumulated should make plain. Same with Obama in Cuba. His lecture will make no iota of difference to any Cuban. The intent was to let us know there is no letting the ideological guard down. He wanted to tell us, against much evidence, how happy all our liberty and equality and elections and innovations and small businesses and information cultures and make us. What better way to put the point across than to show us, as a piece of political theater, how envied we are — supposedly — by other people, if not other governments? (My favorite remark in this line: A young Cuban woman interviewed on one of the American networks said, “We don’t want any Wal-Marts and Starbucks coming here, if that’s what you mean.”) These are the actions in Obama’s words. After I read the speech I was not the slightest surprised to read that Fidel came back with a ripping riposte. Its most quoted line echoed the young Cuban on television: “We do not need the empire to give us anything.” Truer and more plainly spoken than anything Obama had to say. His larger point was not to draw a line under this rapprochement — it has been there from the first, in my view — but to remind Americans of it: Do not count on disrupting what we have built over many decades and against odds that you stacked against us. This is Cuba’s punctuation mark. “My modest suggestion,” Castro wrote of Obama, “is that he reflects and doesn’t try to develop theories about Cuban politics.” On the first point, Mr. Castro, do not get your hopes up. Reflection is not part of our political culture. On the second, I do not think our political elites have any theories about Cuban politics worth worrying about. * Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Donald Trump gave those two foreign policy interviews to the Times and the Washington Post. And it has rained hard rain on him ever since. “Shocking ignorance.” “Dangerous folly.” “Ranting and schmoozing his way to the White House.” These, in all their complexity and analytic nuance, are typical of the commentary this week. Truly, this guy belched in chapel. This column is by no means an endorsement of the Trump candidacy, and if I could put that point in blinking neon, I would. But some interesting things are said in the interviews and what are, effectively, replies in the media. Again, what are the words and what is being done by way of them? Trump and those interviewing him ranged widely. They touched on how to treat the Saudis, Ukraine, competition with Beijing in the South China Sea, burden sharing, renegotiating faulty trade agreements, the accord governing Iran’s nuclear activities: The list is long. Trump’s positions on most of these questions riled one or another or all commentators. The Times report had a usefully succinct thumbnail summation of the Trump line on foreign policy. “In Mr. Trump’s view, the United States has become a diluted power, and the main mechanism by which he would re-establish its central role in the world is economic bargaining,” the two Times reporters who spoke with him wrote. “He approached almost every current international conflict through the prism of negotiation...” Interesting. I will come back to this shortly. Two questions seem to have stirred the nests more than any others. The most important of these concerns NATO. The Don being the Don, he put it this way to the Times reporters: “No. 1, it’s obsolete … and No. 1, we pay far too much.” Here is how Trump defended his position to Jonathan Karl on ABC's "This Week," the Sunday news program, a few hours after the Times interview was published:

NATO was done at a time you had the Soviet Union, which was obviously larger, much larger than Russia is today…. We have other threats. We have the threat of terrorism, and NATO doesn’t discuss terrorism, NATO’s not meant for terrorism. NATO doesn’t have the right countries in it for terrorism. And we pay… a totally disproportionate share of NATO. We’re spending the biggest, the lion share’s paid for by us, disproportionate to other countries…. So I look at that. I look at the fact that it was a long time ago. You know, there’s nothing wrong with saying that a concept was good but now it’s obsolete or now it’s outmoded. Now, it can be trimmed up and it can be—it can be reconfigured and you can call it NATO, but it’s got to be changed.

The second question had to do with relations across the Pacific. Trump asserted that he would renegotiate the American security treaty with Japan, which dates to 1952. And he would withdraw American troops from Japan and South Korea unless these two nations contribute more to their cost, while possibly allowing both to weaponize their longstanding civilian nuclear power programs. “I mean, that’s not a fair deal,” Trump said of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, a pact with a long and contentious history behind it. Asked if he was serious about removing U.S. troops from Washington’s longstanding Asian allies, Trump replied,

The answer is not happily but the answer is yes. We cannot afford to be losing vast amounts of billions of dollars on all of this. We just can’t do it anymore. Now there was a time when we could have done it. When we started doing it. But we can’t do it anymore. And I have a feeling that they’d up the ante very much. I think they would, and if they wouldn’t I would really have to say yes….

We had a warning several weeks ago that the national security and foreign policy cliques were inflamed by the Don’s positions. “Trump’s vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle,” 120 “experts”— quotation marks required in a lot of cases — wrote in a much-noted open letter. Read it here. Context and text: I read this week’s uproar over Trump’s two interviews with this as background. It is about one thing, and we can treat both of the above policy questions together because they are about the same thing, too. Trump has many, many indefensible, impractical positions, but this is not my point right now. Trump’s problem is the action in his words: He has put the projection of American power, with the military as the primary instrument of policy, on the table. He has shoved the truth of imperial overstretch in our faces. What you hear back is an effort in unison to stuff a cork in this bottle before any more wine spills. “Not a topic” is the common theme. “Now we know that Donald Trump would rip up the post-1945 world order,” Roger Cohen wrote on the Times opinion page at midweek. This is the problem, you see. I cannot think of a better idea, to be honest, although it is not at all clear this is Trump’s intention. Observe the resistance of power to any hint of change: This is my point. And note as you do that it does not matter what any American figure thinks, says, does or insists upon: History is shredding the postwar order as we speak and at considerable speed. NATO as obsolete? It is the mildest way to describe this trouble-making anachronism ever in search of whatever raison d’être it can conjure. Many people take this as prima facie obvious. We cannot afford the empire? Consider your town’s budget, your state’s budget, the local school or the condition of the nearest expressway and decide for yourself. The security pact with Japan is emphatically unfair, but for reasons other than Trump thinks: It is a victor’s intrusion 70 years after the fact. We should all be thinking about a new world order and about how we might contribute constructively to it, but — words are actions — this conversation is banned. I was musing the other day about how Trump stacks up next to Hillary Clinton on the foreign side. By way of a mirror image, some interesting contrasts became clear. Trump is not an exceptionalist: We have fallen far, and no providential hand will “make us great again.” That is up to us alone. He is not an ideologue: This dimension of the American policy discourse does not appear to interest him. He is into making deals: Talking comes first. And he speaks plainly to us and all others, never in code: He knows no other way. Think about these four things, separating out what you think of Trump as a political figure. The consciousness of exceptionalism, American ideology, the primacy of the military in American foreign policy, the incessant deceptions of the policy cliques (of which Clinton is a prominent member): These are all essential to maintaining “the postwar order,” such as it is. Trump is not my guy by a long way, but it is interesting to listen to what he says, and then to watch what happens because of what he says.  

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An osprey’s untimely demise: The sad tale of a raptor held for ransom

In early February as Haitians took to the streets of the capital city of Port-au-Prince in violent protest against the government, a quieter political drama of international consequence unfolded in a far away village in the Central Plateau where a man held a migrating raptor for ransom hoping it would be his ticket out of the country. The osprey's captor initially mistook it for an eagle — a well-known symbol associated with the United States, and hoped to use it as his ticket out of Haiti. The man and his neighbors mistook the bird, an osprey, for an eagle — a well-known symbol associated with the United States even in this remote village. The bird carried particular weight because it had a metal band on its leg that listed an eight-digit number — 788-10910 — and had “Washington, D.C.” inscribed on it. “They’d assigned guards to this bird. Everyone wanted a piece of this bird and thought they were going to get a reward because it was a bald eagle,” said Kelly Crowdis, a Port-au-Prince-based American veterinarian who traveled from the capital — driving for hours, taking two boats, and walking more than two-and-a half miles — to examine the bird after she heard about it. Local police and politicians, representatives from Haiti’s Ministry of Agriculture  and many others tried to no avail to take custody of the bird, but the villagers and the bird’s captor would not surrender the bird. “They thought because the bird had a band on it that it had a specific owner,” Crowdis told me over the phone from Port-au-Prince. “You can’t blame them. We tried to explain to the people and the entire community that this was a migratory bird.” The osprey did not have an owner, exactly, but the number on its band did lead to clues about its origin. It was banded in 2001 as a nestling in Massachusetts under a federal permit belonging to one Norman Smith, who works for Mass Audubon. Reached by phone, Smith said the osprey belonged to an ongoing study begun 35 years ago in which more than 6,000 birds were given unique tracking numbers. This particular bird was banded in the last week of June of 2001 at two weeks old, just two months before it would make its first solo journey to South America. (The average lifespan of an osprey is 15 to 20 years.) Ornithologists, biologist and other researchers have been tracking and studying birds for about a hundred years, primarily through a federally mandated program that has been in operation since the signing of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. An estimated 2 to 3 million birds have been banded as part of the North American Banding Program, explained Jo Lutmerding, a biologist with the USGS Bird Banding Laboratory, which operates in partnership with the Canadian Wildlife Service. The bird lab maintains a database receiving some 85,000 “recovery” reports annually — mostly from hunters who have killed geese and ducks. The lab forwards this information to biologists and others who have tagged birds for studies on issues such as population dynamics, species longevity, spread of disease, and migration. Raptors, which include osprey, peregrine falcons, eagles, and other meat-eating birds that share hooked beaks, keen eye-sight and eight sharp talons, came close to extinction in the 1960s and ‘70s because of pesticides, including DDT, which was banned in 1972. “That’s what stopped the use of DDT,” said Smith, adding that since then raptors’ numbers have rebounded. (These birds of prey, however, are still at risk from widely used, second-generation rat poisons.) The ospreys tagged in Smith’s study began arriving back in Massachusetts last week, where between 200 and 300 nesting platforms have been constructed along the coast. The ospreys return annually to nest and breed, typically with the same mate. Sadly, this year, No. 788-10910, or “TenTen” as it the captured bird was nicknamed by another American veterinarian, Myriam Kaplan-Pasternak, who tried to negotiate for its release, will not make it back. Kaplan-Pasternak, a California-based veterinarian who has worked as an agricultural development consultant in Haiti for nine years, heard about the bird via social media. Stranded in her hotel in Port-au-Prince because of the political protests, Kaplan-Pasternak saw a photo of the bird when it was posted to a group on WhatsApp (a mobile messaging platform) and immediately fired off emails to a number of people in Haiti and the US, including Kelly Crowdis and Rob Bierregaard, who maintains an osprey tracking website that includes interactive maps that chart the birds’ routes through the Caribbean.  Kaplan-Pasternak entered the bird’s ID number into the bird lab’s reporting system and Bierregaard determined where it had been banded. Studying the bird’s migration routes and patterns has led to an understanding of the importance of the Cuba-Hispaniola osprey “highway to the tropics,” said Bierregaard, who also happens to be an associate of Smith’s. “This is an important bottleneck for all the East Coast ospreys and quite a few from the Midwest,” Bierregaard said via email. “Anywhere from 40,000 to maybe two or three times that migrate through the Caribbean each year.” Bierregaard estimates that 90 to 95 percent of the East Coast ospreys winter in South America.  “A few stop in the southeast US and some stop in Cuba, but almost all go on to South America,” he said. “They rarely linger in Cuba or Hispaniola. Cuba can be crossed in five days or so, but they’ll stop and fish at reservoirs if the weather’s bad for migrating.” How and who exactly captured TenTen remains a bit of a mystery. The prevailing version begins with an eight-year-old boy swimming in a river, catching the bird as it fished and surrendering it to the man. “It isn’t easy to catch these birds,” said Smith, adding that the osprey that survive into adulthood are tough and, when healthy, not likely to fall into the hands of people. It’s not the first time an osprey has been caught and held for ransom in Haiti. In a video posted to YouTube in October 2014, a bird is shown with thin ropes tied to each talon and a boy holding the tips of its wings in each hand stretching them out to show its wingspan. A man, speaking in Creole, asks that a ransom be paid to build a bridge and a school for the area. In this case, people are asked to contact a Jorgenson Pierre Balsan via email for telephone. When Crowdis visited TenTen, she was concerned by the number of people who were coming to see it and urged its captor to get the bird off the ground and to give it some privacy. Before she left, she also advised them to feed the bird live fish in a bucket so it could kill the fish itself if possible. TenTen’s captor gave it a perch. Meanwhile, Kaplan-Pasternak, who as a child once rescued a male raptor who stood in traffic alongside its mate that had been killed, texted furiously with the host of a national, nature-based radio program in Haiti, sharing information about TenTen, its whereabouts and health, and offering a reward for its release. Unfortunately, before the osprey’s release could be negotiated, it fell off its perch and strangled itself in the rope it was tied down with. The death of TenTen marked the third time Smith learned about the demise of birds from his study while crossing the Caribbean. Two other birds his team had banded died in Cuba, one of them shot by a man who claimed to have eaten it.In early February as Haitians took to the streets of the capital city of Port-au-Prince in violent protest against the government, a quieter political drama of international consequence unfolded in a far away village in the Central Plateau where a man held a migrating raptor for ransom hoping it would be his ticket out of the country. The osprey's captor initially mistook it for an eagle — a well-known symbol associated with the United States, and hoped to use it as his ticket out of Haiti. The man and his neighbors mistook the bird, an osprey, for an eagle — a well-known symbol associated with the United States even in this remote village. The bird carried particular weight because it had a metal band on its leg that listed an eight-digit number — 788-10910 — and had “Washington, D.C.” inscribed on it. “They’d assigned guards to this bird. Everyone wanted a piece of this bird and thought they were going to get a reward because it was a bald eagle,” said Kelly Crowdis, a Port-au-Prince-based American veterinarian who traveled from the capital — driving for hours, taking two boats, and walking more than two-and-a half miles — to examine the bird after she heard about it. Local police and politicians, representatives from Haiti’s Ministry of Agriculture  and many others tried to no avail to take custody of the bird, but the villagers and the bird’s captor would not surrender the bird. “They thought because the bird had a band on it that it had a specific owner,” Crowdis told me over the phone from Port-au-Prince. “You can’t blame them. We tried to explain to the people and the entire community that this was a migratory bird.” The osprey did not have an owner, exactly, but the number on its band did lead to clues about its origin. It was banded in 2001 as a nestling in Massachusetts under a federal permit belonging to one Norman Smith, who works for Mass Audubon. Reached by phone, Smith said the osprey belonged to an ongoing study begun 35 years ago in which more than 6,000 birds were given unique tracking numbers. This particular bird was banded in the last week of June of 2001 at two weeks old, just two months before it would make its first solo journey to South America. (The average lifespan of an osprey is 15 to 20 years.) Ornithologists, biologist and other researchers have been tracking and studying birds for about a hundred years, primarily through a federally mandated program that has been in operation since the signing of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. An estimated 2 to 3 million birds have been banded as part of the North American Banding Program, explained Jo Lutmerding, a biologist with the USGS Bird Banding Laboratory, which operates in partnership with the Canadian Wildlife Service. The bird lab maintains a database receiving some 85,000 “recovery” reports annually — mostly from hunters who have killed geese and ducks. The lab forwards this information to biologists and others who have tagged birds for studies on issues such as population dynamics, species longevity, spread of disease, and migration. Raptors, which include osprey, peregrine falcons, eagles, and other meat-eating birds that share hooked beaks, keen eye-sight and eight sharp talons, came close to extinction in the 1960s and ‘70s because of pesticides, including DDT, which was banned in 1972. “That’s what stopped the use of DDT,” said Smith, adding that since then raptors’ numbers have rebounded. (These birds of prey, however, are still at risk from widely used, second-generation rat poisons.) The ospreys tagged in Smith’s study began arriving back in Massachusetts last week, where between 200 and 300 nesting platforms have been constructed along the coast. The ospreys return annually to nest and breed, typically with the same mate. Sadly, this year, No. 788-10910, or “TenTen” as it the captured bird was nicknamed by another American veterinarian, Myriam Kaplan-Pasternak, who tried to negotiate for its release, will not make it back. Kaplan-Pasternak, a California-based veterinarian who has worked as an agricultural development consultant in Haiti for nine years, heard about the bird via social media. Stranded in her hotel in Port-au-Prince because of the political protests, Kaplan-Pasternak saw a photo of the bird when it was posted to a group on WhatsApp (a mobile messaging platform) and immediately fired off emails to a number of people in Haiti and the US, including Kelly Crowdis and Rob Bierregaard, who maintains an osprey tracking website that includes interactive maps that chart the birds’ routes through the Caribbean.  Kaplan-Pasternak entered the bird’s ID number into the bird lab’s reporting system and Bierregaard determined where it had been banded. Studying the bird’s migration routes and patterns has led to an understanding of the importance of the Cuba-Hispaniola osprey “highway to the tropics,” said Bierregaard, who also happens to be an associate of Smith’s. “This is an important bottleneck for all the East Coast ospreys and quite a few from the Midwest,” Bierregaard said via email. “Anywhere from 40,000 to maybe two or three times that migrate through the Caribbean each year.” Bierregaard estimates that 90 to 95 percent of the East Coast ospreys winter in South America.  “A few stop in the southeast US and some stop in Cuba, but almost all go on to South America,” he said. “They rarely linger in Cuba or Hispaniola. Cuba can be crossed in five days or so, but they’ll stop and fish at reservoirs if the weather’s bad for migrating.” How and who exactly captured TenTen remains a bit of a mystery. The prevailing version begins with an eight-year-old boy swimming in a river, catching the bird as it fished and surrendering it to the man. “It isn’t easy to catch these birds,” said Smith, adding that the osprey that survive into adulthood are tough and, when healthy, not likely to fall into the hands of people. It’s not the first time an osprey has been caught and held for ransom in Haiti. In a video posted to YouTube in October 2014, a bird is shown with thin ropes tied to each talon and a boy holding the tips of its wings in each hand stretching them out to show its wingspan. A man, speaking in Creole, asks that a ransom be paid to build a bridge and a school for the area. In this case, people are asked to contact a Jorgenson Pierre Balsan via email for telephone. When Crowdis visited TenTen, she was concerned by the number of people who were coming to see it and urged its captor to get the bird off the ground and to give it some privacy. Before she left, she also advised them to feed the bird live fish in a bucket so it could kill the fish itself if possible. TenTen’s captor gave it a perch. Meanwhile, Kaplan-Pasternak, who as a child once rescued a male raptor who stood in traffic alongside its mate that had been killed, texted furiously with the host of a national, nature-based radio program in Haiti, sharing information about TenTen, its whereabouts and health, and offering a reward for its release. Unfortunately, before the osprey’s release could be negotiated, it fell off its perch and strangled itself in the rope it was tied down with. The death of TenTen marked the third time Smith learned about the demise of birds from his study while crossing the Caribbean. Two other birds his team had banded died in Cuba, one of them shot by a man who claimed to have eaten it.

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Your affair might be illegal: Inside the complicated world — and 21 states — where adultery remains against the law

In 2004, John Bushey, a sixty-six-year-old attorney for the town of Luray, Virginia, pled guilty to adultery and lost his job as a consequence. His infidelity was never in doubt. After his extramarital affair ended badly, the woman involved went to the police. The assistant commonwealth attorney later defended the decision to prosecute: “We’re not out beating bushes and certainly we’re not peeking in windows. However, in this case, it was thrown in our face.” Initially it looked like Bushey might challenge the law; instead, he ended up accepting a deal that required twenty hours of community service in exchange for having the charges dropped and his record cleared. Bushey is an isolated case. But it could arise in any of the twenty-one states that still have criminal prohibitions on adultery. Adultery also figures as a basis for demotions, as a ground for tort liability in cases alleging criminal conversation and alienation of affection, and as a factor in allocating property and custody in divorce cases. This chapter explores the lingering legal role for adultery in the United States and argues for reform. Enforcement of criminal prohibitions has been infrequent, intrusive, idiosyncratic, and ineffectual, and should be unconstitutional. In employment cases, courts should not permit dismissals or demotions based on private sexual conduct, absent some demonstrable impairment of job performance. Nor should courts tolerate speculative and vexatious actions for criminal conversation and alienation of affection. Adultery should not influence alimony and custody awards, nor should it serve to reduce the punishment for deadly violence. None of these reforms should be seen as diminishing societal respect for marriage as an institution. Rather, they simply recognize the limits of law in policing fidelity, and the excessive costs of ineffectual attempts to do so. Criminal Prosecutions Criminal prosecutions for adultery are rare, but they should be rarer still, given the arbitrary and idiosyncratic nature in which prohibitions are enforced, and the invasions of privacy that they entail. In the states that make adultery a crime, the majority classify it as misdemeanor, but some punish it as a felony. Penalties range from a ten-dollar fine (Maryland) to life imprisonment (Michigan). Definitions also vary. Some make paramours guilty of adultery only if they are married; otherwise they are guilty of fornication. Some states require the conduct to be open and notorious. Several allow for prosecution only on complaint of the offended spouse, partly due to concerns about jeopardizing a still-salvageable marriage. As the commentary to the Model Penal Code noted, these statutes are generally unenforced. Even where spouses admit their adultery in divorce cases, they are virtually never prosecuted. The infrequent circumstances in which individuals have been charged with adultery suggest the selective and somewhat random nature of enforcement. Typically the cases involve some public behavior or a complaint by a spouse. In 2010, a forty-one-year-old New York woman became the thirteenth individual in the state’s history to be arrested for adultery. She was caught having sex on a picnic table in a park near Buffalo but denied that her action was in plain sight or that any children were around. In explaining his decision to bring charges, the local district attorney emphasized that the police were “not out conducting investigations looking for people committing adultery.” However, in this case there were witnesses to the act, and “no basis not . . . [to] file the charge.” It is unclear why the prosecutor chose adultery rather than some other offense, such as one involving public indecency. If convicted, the defendant would have been subject to ninety days in jail or a $500 fine. Although she vowed to fight the constitutionality of the charge, it does not appear that the case ever got that far. In 1989, in South Carolina, an appellate court affirmed a conviction of a man found parking at night in a remote location with a woman other than his wife. When pressed to explain his conduct, the man declined. He told his wife, “If I tell you the truth I know you won’t ever stay with me again.” This admission, coupled with the other circumstantial evidence, was enough to convince the appellate court that the parties were “romantically disposed toward each other. . . . The trial judge, not having been born yesterday, was convinced that [the defendant] had committed adultery. So are we.” Most contemporary adultery prosecutions have involved complaints by an aggrieved spouse. In 2005, the wife of Lucius James Penn, a twenty-nine-year-old North Dakota air force engineer, complained to police that her husband was having an affair with a sixteen-year-old. In 1991, a New York handyman's wife accused him of having had sexual intercourse on several occasions with another woman. The case attracted notice because the last case on record in New York had been brought in 1940. In 1989, Donna Carroll's husband brought a charge of adultery during an acrimonious custody battle over the couple’s young son. That charge made her the first person to be accused of the crime in Wisconsin since 1888. Although the husband also admitted having adulterous affairs, prosecutors said they could not press a complaint against him because his affairs took place while he was trucker on out-of-state hauls. If convicted, Mrs. Carroll could have been sentenced to two years in jail and a $10,000 fine. The district attorney agreed to dismiss the charge in exchange for her participation in community service and parental counseling. The most well-publicized of these criminal charges involved an Arizona man’s 2010 complaint that his wife of seventeen years had cheated on him at least seven or eight times. As the aggrieved husband, Dave Banks, explained to a national news network reporter, “If they used . . . [the adultery statute] all the time, maybe women or men would think twice about going and jumping in the sack and throwing away their marriage.” The police did not appear sympathetic. Banks claimed that it took two years for the department even to take his report, and a detective then told him that “it’s about time she got on with her life and you get on with yours.” Banks was unconvinced. “How do they get to pick and choose which laws they can and can’t enforce? They got somebody readily admitting guilt. Seems to me that’s a rubber stamp right through the court system,” he told a reporter. Prosecutors apparently did not agree; there is no record of a case being filed. Occasionally, however, prosecutors claim that they are obligated to bring charges. In Wisconsin in 1989, the husband in an acrimonious divorce and custody proceeding filed a criminal complaint against his wife, who had admitted adultery in a family court hearing. In defending his decision to prosecute, the local district attorney claimed that he had no choice. “The law is on the books. There was strong evidence presented to me of a violation. For me to decide not to prosecute would be, in effect, to declare the statute null and void. And that is not my role as district attorney.” In fact, prosecutors frequently decide not to prosecute for a wide variety of reasons. Even more newsworthy than the cases of prosecution are notorious cases in which adultery charges are not brought. For example, in 2008, Governor David Paterson of New York announced at a news conference that he had had several extramarital relationships but “didn’t break the law.” The New York Times followed up with a report that began, “Well, actually . . .” Adultery is a misdemeanor in New York, punishable by a fine of $500 or ninety days in jail. Rarely has it been invoked since the 1970s, and when it has, the charges are usually dropped. When asked about the prospect of a criminal prosecution of Paterson, a New York family lawyer responded, “Absent a Christian fundamentalist replacing [the local district attorney], I doubt it.” There are many other celebrated cases involving adulterous politicians who faced no criminal liability. This is in keeping with public attitudes. Only a third of Americans believe that adultery should be a crime. Given these views, it is somewhat surprising that so many statutes remain on the books and that several have survived recent attempts at repeal. No one thinks the fight to preserve these statutes has much practical significance: the issue is symbolic. As Thurman W. Arnold observed three-quarters of a century ago, “Most unenforced criminal laws survive in order to satisfy moral objections to our established modes of conduct. They are unenforced because we want to continue our conduct, and unrepealed because we want to preserve our morals.” The president of the Minnesota Family Council similarly explained his group’s support for such laws on the grounds that “they send a message. . . . When you are dealing with a marriage, it’s not just a private activity or a private institution. . . . It has enormous consequences for the rest of society.” In New Hampshire, opponents of adultery prohibitions disagreed. In their view, “Who we love and how we love is not something . . . the state has much business meddling in.” By contrast, the executive director of Cornerstone Policy Research opposed repeal of the state’s criminal statute because it would “diminish . . . the harmful effects of adultery.” According to state senator Robert Preston, the message would be that “anything goes in New Hampshire.” This would be misleading because “we do cherish some traditional values up here.” One of his colleagues agreed. State senator John Chandler felt that the “moral standards of the country are going downhill fast” and the legislature shouldn’t encourage the trend. “If it says in the Ten Commandments ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’ it still ought to stay in the statute.” But the current of public opinion is running in the opposite direction. In 1991, in Connecticut, efforts by wronged spouses to launch criminal prosecutions convinced both houses of the state legislature to decriminalize adultery, despite claims that this would turn the state into a “moral wasteland.” And in Colorado in 2013, a bill to repeal adultery prohibitions was successfully packaged as a way to keep the government out of people’s bedrooms. Where the statutes survive, it is because state legislators worry that sponsoring repeal would “border on political suicide.” As Walter Wadlington, a professor of family law at the University of Virginia put it, “If people don’t think anybody can be prosecuted under it anyway, why alienate a constituent by taking it off the books?” Many legislators may also share the views of Georgetown Law professor Paul Rothstein, who told a reporter,

I don’t want to be a nut case about this, but keeping the laws on the books is not such an off the wall idea. Just because something is done doesn’t mean that people want the law to reflect the baseness of human nature. They want the law to be aspirational and set forth our finest ideals. If we believe in marriage, and if the cement of that is loyalty and fidelity within a unit, then adultery does threaten that.

But occasional, idiosyncratic enforcement does little to express those ideals, and it compromises public respect for the rule of law. There is no principled basis on which to distinguish adultery cases that are prosecuted from the vast majority that are not. Nor does the rare enforcement effort constitute an effective deterrent to infidelity. Moreover, recent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court suggest a strong basis for claiming that adultery prosecutions are unconstitutional. Constitutional Challenges In 1977, in a case involving minors’ access to contraceptives, the Supreme Court disclaimed any intention to answer “the difficult question whether and to what extent the Constitution prohibits state statutes regulating [private, consensual sexual] behavior among adults.” A year later, the Court again declined to address that question in the context of adultery. Hollenbaugh v. Carnegie Free Library involved a librarian and a married janitor who were dismissed for “living together in open adultery” with their illegitimate child. In affirming their dismissal, a federal trial court rejected the couple’s claims that the library had infringed on their fundamental right to privacy, and that there was no “rational connection between their conduct and their fitness to perform their jobs.” The Court noted that the library had received complaints about the couple’s living arrangement. “As employees of a library in a relatively small community, plaintiffs were frequently called on to deal directly with the community,” so the library’s concern for their reputation was not, in the trial judge’s view, “arbitrary, unreasonable or capricious.” The U.S. Supreme Court denied review. Justice Thurgood Marshall dissented, and wrote separately to protest an “unwarranted governmental intrusion into the privacy of public employees.” From his perspective, the trial court’s decision allowed a public employer “to dictate the sexual conduct and family living arrangements of its employees, without a meaningful showing that these private choices have any relation to job performance.” As he noted, the state had decriminalized adultery, and the library board members did not demand that the couple end their relationship. They insisted, rather, that the couple normalize it through marriage or stop living together. Thus, the library board “apparently did not object to furtive adultery, but only to petitioners’ refusal to hide their relationship. In essence, [the board] sought to force a standard of hypocrisy on their employees and fired those who declined to abide by it.” Such discrimination seemed to Marshall “particularly invidious.” The petitioners’ “rights to pursue an open rather than a clandestine personal relationship and to rear their child together in this environment closely resemble the other aspects of personal privacy to which [the Court has] . . . extended constitutional protection.” To Marshall, the library board’s action could not even satisfy rational basis review because it never showed that community disapproval of the couple’s living arrangements affected use of the library or compromised the librarian’s ability to discharge her duties. Nor was there any indication that the custodian’s job called for contacts with the community or that his performance was affected in any way by his extramarital relationship. Hollenbaugh is the closest the Supreme Court has come to passing on adultery issues. In dicta in two cases involving access to contraception, concurring or dissenting justices suggested that adultery prohibitions were constitutionally permissible. In lower court decisions, constitutional challenges have been unsuccessful. In 1983, the Massachusetts state supreme court upheld the state’s adultery statute. The case involved a defendant arrested for having sexual intercourse with a woman not his wife in a van parked in a secluded wooded area. The court held that there was no “fundamental personal privacy right implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” protecting extramarital sex. Rather, the state has a legitimate interest in prohibiting conduct which may threaten that institution [of marriage]. . . . We take judicial notice that the act of adultery frequently has a destructive impact on the marital relationship and is a factor in many divorces.” If lack of prosecution of the crime “indicates a general public disfavor with the statute,” then the court believed that the appropriate response rested with the legislature, which had the power to repeal that statute. Another unsuccessful constitutional challenge arose in 1982, when a federal trial court in Illinois held that the associational and privacy interests of a “swingers” club were not infringed by police harassment. Police officers had instructions to record the license plate numbers of club patrons and, where possible, to ticket them for minor traffic and vehicle violations. Because the patrons had not been dissuaded from attending meetings, the court held that their First Amendment interests had not been impaired. Interestingly, the court held that the club was not in violation of the state’s adultery law, which prohibited sexual activities that were “open and notorious.” Although the adulterous activities of the swingers’ club were well known, they took place behind closed doors, which was enough to shield them from criminal prosecution. However, a more recent Supreme Court pronouncement on privacy raises questions about whether adultery prohibitions could withstand constitutional challenge. In 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court overruled its prior decision in Bowers v. Hardwick and struck down a criminal sodomy statute. According to the majority, decisions concerning intimate relationships are a form of liberty deserving constitutional protection. The Court also disagreed with Bowers’s conclusion that sodomy prohibitions were deeply rooted in the nation’s history; rather, the Lawrence court stressed that such statutes were rarely enforced and had been abolished in many states. That trend reflected “an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.” In the Court’s view, the Texas statute “further[ed] no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual.” Lawrence was not a conventional due process decision. As Harvard professor Cass Sunstein notes, such a decision would have taken one of two approaches. First, the Court might have declared that engaging in private, consensual sexual activity constitutes a fundamental right and the state cannot interfere with that right absent a compelling justification. Alternatively, the Court might have said that the state lacks a rational basis for prohibiting private, consensual sexual activity. The Court did neither. Nowhere in its analysis did the Court use the terms “fundamental interest” or “rational basis.” Nor did it explain the implications of its holding beyond sodomy laws. In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia criticized the majority’s decision as signaling the “end of all morals legislation, such as prohibitions on fornication, bigamy, adultery and incest.” Of all those statutes, Sunstein believes that adultery prohibitions present the hardest case. On the one hand, adultery involves an intimate, consensual, sexual relationship analogous to the ones in Lawrence and other cases involving procreation and sexuality that have received constitutional protection. And, as in Lawrence, the infrequency of prosecution reflects a broad consensus that the practice at issue should not be punished. On the other hand, the state has a legitimate interest in prohibiting adultery that is not present in cases involving sodomy, namely, protection of the institution of marriage and the interests of the innocent spouse. The Court has traditionally held marriage in the highest esteem; indeed, the right to privacy originated in cases concerned with marital privacy. The seminal case in constitutional privacy law, Griswold v. Connecticut, struck down a state’s ban on contraceptives on the ground that it intruded on the “sacred precincts of the marital bedroom.” And in Loving v. Virginia, which invalidated bans on interracial marriage, the Court called marriage “fundamental to our very existence and survival.” However, the frequency with which adultery occurs, and the infrequency with which adultery statutes are enforced, suggests that criminal prohibitions are an ineffective means of shoring up marital relationships. Only one federal case since Lawrence has involved an adultery prosecution. In the North Dakota case noted earlier, the defendant air force engineer objected that the prosecution violated equal protection guarantees. The trial court agreed. It held that the state had the right to protect the institution of marriage and criminalize adultery but that the statute unlawfully discriminated by exempting those who disclosed adultery during a divorce or separation proceeding and by requiring a complaint by a spouse. Another post-Lawrence decision arose in a somewhat odd factual context. In a 2009 District of Columbia case, a former hair salon employee sued her employer for sexual harassment and alleged as damages the loss of desire for intimacy with her husband. However, she was not legally married at the time. Although she thought she had divorced her prior husband, the divorce was not finalized until after the harassment occurred. This was relevant because any intimate relations in which she engaged with her second husband would technically constitute adultery, a criminal act under Virginia law. And, as the defendant noted, the “impairment of the ability to do something you do not have the legal right to do is not an actionable damage.” The federal trial court, however, rejected this defense on the ground that the Virginia Supreme Court had struck down the state’s fornication statute, and language in that decision suggested that the adultery prohibition was also invalid. In effect, the Virginia court had suggested that it considered “statutes criminalizing private consensual sexual intercourse irrelevant for the purposes of civil litigation.” Taken together, intermittent enforcement of adultery prohibitions does little to enforce marital fidelity or reinforce confidence in the rule of law. Given the lack of public support for criminal prohibitions, legislatures should repeal them. Where legislatures decline to act, courts should strike down adultery prohibitions as an infringement of constitutionally protected rights of privacy. There is no rational basis for believing that infrequently and arbitrarily enforced prohibitions on adultery are an effective way of advancing the state’s interest in protecting innocent spouses and the institution of marriage. There are better ways to signal respect for that institution and better uses of law enforcement resources than policing private, consensual sexual activity. Excerpted from "ADULTERY: INFIDELITY AND THE LAW" by Deborah L. Rhode, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2016 Deborah L. Rhode. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Andrew Bird gets confessional, at last: “I really wanted to make a less whimsical, more visceral, grab-you-in-the-gut kind of record”

Despite going through conservatory and getting a degree in violin performance, Andrew Bird has always felt like an outsider in the world of classical music. Yet, as alternative acts were blooming around him in 1990s Chicago, he quickly realized he also didn’t belong in the world of confessional music that emphasized emotion over technical songcraft. Rather than give up, Bird built property on this seeming no-man’s land — a career based on his trademark violin, whistling and witty lyrics. With those career hallmarks in place, Bird is setting out now on his new record, "Are You Serious," to deliver a sound that is more consciously polished and produced. Along the way, he’s finding that he has a bit more in common with the confessional cadre than he once thought — and that he’s more worried about democracy and guns than ever before. This is a very strange time to be an American and to consider what democracy means with the election progressing, and I wondered if you had found any understanding of that for yourself. I am searching for understanding. It's interesting; I was just looking at Salon last night, and there was an article that used the words I'd been searching for about Donald Trump, using the word "strongman" and "authoritarian," and that's what I'd been thinking. Like, wow, this is maybe one of the greatest risks to our democracy we've encountered. And that's all — who knows what's gonna happen? And I'm hearing from my friends, "Oh, if he gets elected, I'm leaving the country." I always have a problem with that one. Well, good for you. Save your own skin. Leave us all to deal with it. These are the things that are going through my mind. I read that you're donating profits from your concert ticket sales to enrich gun control, and I was wondering specifically what organizations you're working with and how they're going about their efforts. It's Everytown For Gun Safety, which is — I'm pretty impressed by them. They've got a really sensible message, which is kind of a voice that's needed, 'cause everything's so super-polarized on the issue. They're trying really hard to speak to the gun owners out there and not coming out with any threats to take away their guns or anything. Which is always the way I think. That kind of sensible voice is not always very popular, or, some would say, not always very effective. I just gotta believe that common sense can prevail sometimes. So we're doing these [donations] through the concerts and then we're working on a video based on my song called "Pulaski at Night," which is about Chicago. Not written specifically about gun violence, but, as is the case with a lot of my songs, could be taken in many different ways. We're hoping that some of the imagery — it's gonna be shot in Chicago — and we're working on some concepts that will hopefully draw attention to the issue. What do you think it will take to get us to a place where we have gun-related equilibrium? Or at least, we're not constantly having mass shootings? Personally, I think it comes down to alienation and also kind of a warrior sensibility in our culture. It pervades a lot of aspects of American life, the need to project strength and control. Guns are very symbolic for Americans, I guess. 'Cause what are they, other than these things that shoot these projectiles? They're mechanical devices that throw something very fast through the air. I try to think of it in those terms. It's just this thing that does this thing; why is it such an obsession? And it comes down to symbolism and control. Security and strength, and all these things Americans seem to be pretty fixated on. I think that the mass shootings — most of them, I don't know the statistics — but school shootings, that comes down to an amplified version of what we all probably went through in junior high and high school. Just taken to the extreme. When I was in sixth grade, I went through all sorts of vengeance scenarios to get back at the kids who were beating the crap out of me every day. None of them involved guns. The availability of guns certainly is a part of that. But I think the root cause is more about alienation and some of our social structures and institutional education — it's just too easy for a kid to get lost. There's more and more of us on the planet every day; there's more and more molecules rubbing against others, creating more friction and more scrapes out there. So it's just reaching a fever pitch. But certainly it is epidemic, more in America than other places. We gotta look at the way we have our whole society structured, really. Did you go into making "Are You Serious" with any sort of goal or mission for yourself? The previous couple of records were very scrappy by design. They were not very produced. I wanted them to be honest and just people in a room making music, and I wanted the sound to be natural, unproduced. This one, I wanted to embrace production for good rather than evil and really try to nail something. I wanted the process to be more rigorous than it's been in the past, and that involved reaching out to people and trusting more people around me. I really wanted to make a less whimsical, more visceral, grab-you-in-the-gut kind of record. I have all these grand schemes before I make a record. Usually, it's the antidote to whatever I'd done before. But I think in — I don't know how many records, ten, thirteen, it's arguable —I've never gone for it like this. On the single, "Left Handed Kisses," hearing you and Fiona Apple singing together seems like it unlocks things in both of you that I don't usually hear in your music. How did that collaboration come about? Was it just done in a couple takes or did it take longer? Well, the life of that song is really strange. Four years ago, I started writing this song where I challenged myself to write a simple love song, knowing that I was going to fail. But I wanted to prove to myself that I can write this love song, and I'm going to put "baby" in the chorus just to make it extra hard for myself. It's from the point of view of this skeptic, who nonetheless is trying to say, "Well, if I don't believe in these things, star-crossed lovers, that there's a right one out there for you, then how did I manage to find you in the multitudes?" Then I had this other line in my head, this "left-handed kisses" line just popped into my head randomly and left-handed, back-handed, this voice in my own head sort of saying, "This isn't gonna fly; you sound a little [insincere]. If you really loved me, you'd take more risks." I do that a lot; I have a critique of my own song, and it becomes part of the song. It's a question of if it's strong enough of another voice to become another person and be a duet. I have a history of doing this. I knew that the person with that voice would have to be really indicting and strong, and Fiona was at the top of a very short list. Next thing I know, we're in the studio recording it, and then a couple months later we're on daytime television doing it on "Ellen." Kind of a trip, that a song that complex and strange that doesn't push all your pop buttons and relies simply on the rawness of the dialogue. It really is like a short play. I watched your TED Talk again last night and also thought about the pieces on songwriting you'd written for "Measure for Measure." You don't consider yourself a confessional songwriter, but you're willing to expose these parts of your process to your audience. What makes you feel comfortable inviting people in behind the scenes? I don't know what it is about me. I like to take the myths out of things. I know people say "You're gonna demystify it or take the mystery out of it," but I don't think there's any risk of coming close to doing that. I like the dialogue with the audience. I often debut songs before they're finished and say, "I don't know if it should go this way or that way. What do you think?" And it's not like I'm gonna have people leaving comment cards on the way out or anything like that, but it's just the idea of being open because I don't like to come onstage with attitude or the feeling that I've got it all dialed in. I always walk onstage thinking, "Oh my god, what's going to happen? I don't know what I'm doing." It's not lack of confidence. I totally do know what I'm doing. It's just that's something that works for me, the shoulder-to-shoulder, the connection to the audience somehow. You got your start in Chicago in the '90s, and I was thinking how Liz Phair, Smashing Pumpkins, Urge Overkill and Material Issue were all also part of the Chicago scene of that decade. How much of that did you soak up, or was it totally separate from what you were doing? I was definitely around it, but I felt like a total outsider in that scene. I would go to Lounge Acts and Empty Bottle and see these bands, and that's kind of where the title for this record comes from. I was coming from this — I guess "trained" is not the right word because I was never a good student — but I did go through conservatory and got a degree in violin performance, so that kind of qualifies me as not-your-DIY musician. But I was fascinated by that scene because it was so determined to be "It's not about how well we play; it's all about the emotion." Despite my background, I identified with that. I never fit into the classical world. But I also had a little disconnect because I was into comparatively more fancy music than this raw, post-rock, or the Liz Phair confessional thing. I would think, sometimes, as I'd see someone singing about their pain, I would think, "Man, are you serious? Are you serious? If you're serious, you're gonna have to back this up every night, night after night." And I just couldn't identify with that sort of confessional thing that was going on, that still goes on. Then I named this record that because, after all these years, I find myself doing that or some version of that. It's still done on my own terms, but it's still processing some crazy, heavy stuff that happened to me. That was a very foreign idea to me when I was younger. What do you think you would be if you weren't a musician? I'm not good at much else. It's always been my job, though I was broke for many, many years. When I was younger I wanted to be a psychiatrist because I liked the idea of having a wood-paneled office. I liked the furniture. I was interested in listening to people. I might have been good at that, but I didn't do well in academia either. I'm just not a methodical person, so I'm just a bit haphazard. That question came from listening to you talk about loops in the TED Talk — I wondered if you had any scientific leanings. My theories are a bit more in the crackpot realm. I like to get to the big, big idea, even if my science is reckless. Like the TED thing I talked about, what is feedback? What is a feedback loop in nature, talking about mad cow disease and all these fascinating things that are kind of gross that we aren't really discussing as a people. I'm interested in those things where there's something there that we haven't gotten to the bottom of, but there's something there that tells us what we're made of.Despite going through conservatory and getting a degree in violin performance, Andrew Bird has always felt like an outsider in the world of classical music. Yet, as alternative acts were blooming around him in 1990s Chicago, he quickly realized he also didn’t belong in the world of confessional music that emphasized emotion over technical songcraft. Rather than give up, Bird built property on this seeming no-man’s land — a career based on his trademark violin, whistling and witty lyrics. With those career hallmarks in place, Bird is setting out now on his new record, "Are You Serious," to deliver a sound that is more consciously polished and produced. Along the way, he’s finding that he has a bit more in common with the confessional cadre than he once thought — and that he’s more worried about democracy and guns than ever before. This is a very strange time to be an American and to consider what democracy means with the election progressing, and I wondered if you had found any understanding of that for yourself. I am searching for understanding. It's interesting; I was just looking at Salon last night, and there was an article that used the words I'd been searching for about Donald Trump, using the word "strongman" and "authoritarian," and that's what I'd been thinking. Like, wow, this is maybe one of the greatest risks to our democracy we've encountered. And that's all — who knows what's gonna happen? And I'm hearing from my friends, "Oh, if he gets elected, I'm leaving the country." I always have a problem with that one. Well, good for you. Save your own skin. Leave us all to deal with it. These are the things that are going through my mind. I read that you're donating profits from your concert ticket sales to enrich gun control, and I was wondering specifically what organizations you're working with and how they're going about their efforts. It's Everytown For Gun Safety, which is — I'm pretty impressed by them. They've got a really sensible message, which is kind of a voice that's needed, 'cause everything's so super-polarized on the issue. They're trying really hard to speak to the gun owners out there and not coming out with any threats to take away their guns or anything. Which is always the way I think. That kind of sensible voice is not always very popular, or, some would say, not always very effective. I just gotta believe that common sense can prevail sometimes. So we're doing these [donations] through the concerts and then we're working on a video based on my song called "Pulaski at Night," which is about Chicago. Not written specifically about gun violence, but, as is the case with a lot of my songs, could be taken in many different ways. We're hoping that some of the imagery — it's gonna be shot in Chicago — and we're working on some concepts that will hopefully draw attention to the issue. What do you think it will take to get us to a place where we have gun-related equilibrium? Or at least, we're not constantly having mass shootings? Personally, I think it comes down to alienation and also kind of a warrior sensibility in our culture. It pervades a lot of aspects of American life, the need to project strength and control. Guns are very symbolic for Americans, I guess. 'Cause what are they, other than these things that shoot these projectiles? They're mechanical devices that throw something very fast through the air. I try to think of it in those terms. It's just this thing that does this thing; why is it such an obsession? And it comes down to symbolism and control. Security and strength, and all these things Americans seem to be pretty fixated on. I think that the mass shootings — most of them, I don't know the statistics — but school shootings, that comes down to an amplified version of what we all probably went through in junior high and high school. Just taken to the extreme. When I was in sixth grade, I went through all sorts of vengeance scenarios to get back at the kids who were beating the crap out of me every day. None of them involved guns. The availability of guns certainly is a part of that. But I think the root cause is more about alienation and some of our social structures and institutional education — it's just too easy for a kid to get lost. There's more and more of us on the planet every day; there's more and more molecules rubbing against others, creating more friction and more scrapes out there. So it's just reaching a fever pitch. But certainly it is epidemic, more in America than other places. We gotta look at the way we have our whole society structured, really. Did you go into making "Are You Serious" with any sort of goal or mission for yourself? The previous couple of records were very scrappy by design. They were not very produced. I wanted them to be honest and just people in a room making music, and I wanted the sound to be natural, unproduced. This one, I wanted to embrace production for good rather than evil and really try to nail something. I wanted the process to be more rigorous than it's been in the past, and that involved reaching out to people and trusting more people around me. I really wanted to make a less whimsical, more visceral, grab-you-in-the-gut kind of record. I have all these grand schemes before I make a record. Usually, it's the antidote to whatever I'd done before. But I think in — I don't know how many records, ten, thirteen, it's arguable —I've never gone for it like this. On the single, "Left Handed Kisses," hearing you and Fiona Apple singing together seems like it unlocks things in both of you that I don't usually hear in your music. How did that collaboration come about? Was it just done in a couple takes or did it take longer? Well, the life of that song is really strange. Four years ago, I started writing this song where I challenged myself to write a simple love song, knowing that I was going to fail. But I wanted to prove to myself that I can write this love song, and I'm going to put "baby" in the chorus just to make it extra hard for myself. It's from the point of view of this skeptic, who nonetheless is trying to say, "Well, if I don't believe in these things, star-crossed lovers, that there's a right one out there for you, then how did I manage to find you in the multitudes?" Then I had this other line in my head, this "left-handed kisses" line just popped into my head randomly and left-handed, back-handed, this voice in my own head sort of saying, "This isn't gonna fly; you sound a little [insincere]. If you really loved me, you'd take more risks." I do that a lot; I have a critique of my own song, and it becomes part of the song. It's a question of if it's strong enough of another voice to become another person and be a duet. I have a history of doing this. I knew that the person with that voice would have to be really indicting and strong, and Fiona was at the top of a very short list. Next thing I know, we're in the studio recording it, and then a couple months later we're on daytime television doing it on "Ellen." Kind of a trip, that a song that complex and strange that doesn't push all your pop buttons and relies simply on the rawness of the dialogue. It really is like a short play. I watched your TED Talk again last night and also thought about the pieces on songwriting you'd written for "Measure for Measure." You don't consider yourself a confessional songwriter, but you're willing to expose these parts of your process to your audience. What makes you feel comfortable inviting people in behind the scenes? I don't know what it is about me. I like to take the myths out of things. I know people say "You're gonna demystify it or take the mystery out of it," but I don't think there's any risk of coming close to doing that. I like the dialogue with the audience. I often debut songs before they're finished and say, "I don't know if it should go this way or that way. What do you think?" And it's not like I'm gonna have people leaving comment cards on the way out or anything like that, but it's just the idea of being open because I don't like to come onstage with attitude or the feeling that I've got it all dialed in. I always walk onstage thinking, "Oh my god, what's going to happen? I don't know what I'm doing." It's not lack of confidence. I totally do know what I'm doing. It's just that's something that works for me, the shoulder-to-shoulder, the connection to the audience somehow. You got your start in Chicago in the '90s, and I was thinking how Liz Phair, Smashing Pumpkins, Urge Overkill and Material Issue were all also part of the Chicago scene of that decade. How much of that did you soak up, or was it totally separate from what you were doing? I was definitely around it, but I felt like a total outsider in that scene. I would go to Lounge Acts and Empty Bottle and see these bands, and that's kind of where the title for this record comes from. I was coming from this — I guess "trained" is not the right word because I was never a good student — but I did go through conservatory and got a degree in violin performance, so that kind of qualifies me as not-your-DIY musician. But I was fascinated by that scene because it was so determined to be "It's not about how well we play; it's all about the emotion." Despite my background, I identified with that. I never fit into the classical world. But I also had a little disconnect because I was into comparatively more fancy music than this raw, post-rock, or the Liz Phair confessional thing. I would think, sometimes, as I'd see someone singing about their pain, I would think, "Man, are you serious? Are you serious? If you're serious, you're gonna have to back this up every night, night after night." And I just couldn't identify with that sort of confessional thing that was going on, that still goes on. Then I named this record that because, after all these years, I find myself doing that or some version of that. It's still done on my own terms, but it's still processing some crazy, heavy stuff that happened to me. That was a very foreign idea to me when I was younger. What do you think you would be if you weren't a musician? I'm not good at much else. It's always been my job, though I was broke for many, many years. When I was younger I wanted to be a psychiatrist because I liked the idea of having a wood-paneled office. I liked the furniture. I was interested in listening to people. I might have been good at that, but I didn't do well in academia either. I'm just not a methodical person, so I'm just a bit haphazard. That question came from listening to you talk about loops in the TED Talk — I wondered if you had any scientific leanings. My theories are a bit more in the crackpot realm. I like to get to the big, big idea, even if my science is reckless. Like the TED thing I talked about, what is feedback? What is a feedback loop in nature, talking about mad cow disease and all these fascinating things that are kind of gross that we aren't really discussing as a people. I'm interested in those things where there's something there that we haven't gotten to the bottom of, but there's something there that tells us what we're made of.

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Joy is a feminist (comedy) act: With her playful, dirty swagger, “Broad City”’s Ilana is breaking the mold

In her now famous skit, “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer,” Schumer spoofs the iconic film “12 Angry Men” by depicting a jury of 12, whose job is to decide whether she is attractive enough to be on T.V. “It’s an undisputed fact that a woman’s value is mostly determined by her looks,” one man says, the others concurring seriously. Since "Inside Amy Schumer" debuted on Comedy Central in 2013, Schumer has consistently lampooned sexism in American culture, from the way that the military treats sexual assault, to the ways that Hollywood reduces women to sex objects. Her increasingly political skits have ushered in an era where it’s simply become impossible to argue that feminists of the world lack a sense of humor; indeed, Schumer’s brand of comedy has managed to do what many critics have historically thought was impossible — getting a huge male audience to laugh about what have historically been seen as “women’s issues.” Certainly, talented female comedians like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Wanda Sykes and Sarah Silverman have been making us laugh for years, but Schumer’s spin on women’s comedy is unique in its sheer insistence in forcing viewers to contend with American misogyny head-on. Her incisive look at how women are bullied and belittled, cajoled into losing weight, and, time after time, have horrible, unfulfilling sexual experiences has become the backbone of the entire series. In an age of #YesAllWomen, Schumer’s comedy taps into a kind of feminist cultural zeitgeist, which isn’t afraid to depict the reality that being a woman in 21st century America society is awful, rather than empowering. Many other feminist comedians in recent years have also criticized a culture that constantly tells women how they should think, feel, eat and fuck. It’s a powerful and intelligent message of female solidarity, but it’s also one that is predicated on a flattened experience of being female. With few exceptions, the high-profile female comedians of today paint being a woman as an experience of fear, bullying and debasement — from Jessica William’s sharp take on catcalling and street harassment for "The Daily Show," titled "Jessica’s Feminized Atmosphere,” to "Full Frontal with Samantha Bee," which promises an escape from the “sausage fest” of late night television. Heck, even chipper Kimmy Schmidt’s coming- of-age story involves being kidnapped and held against her will in a bunker. If #YesAllWomen is this generation’s feminist rallying cry, it points to a generation of women who aren’t just railing against the patriarchy; they are intrinsically distressed at what it means to be a girl in the world. With one meaningful exception: "Broad City"’s bold, beautiful, and seriously high Ilana Wexler. Ilana (played by co-creator Ilana Glazer), who is concisely described by New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum as a “horndog narcissist.” Ilana, whose email is ilanawexler@mindmyvagina.com. Ilana, who refuses to shave. Ilana, who twerks at the thought of best friend Abbi Abrams (co-creator Abbi Jacobson) pegging her sexual partner (“All throughout college, I slept with a strap-on on, just in case the opportunity came along…”). Ilana, whose cries of “YAS KWEEN” exalt powerful women, from a deeply admired boss to Hillary Rodham Clinton. One of the greatest pleasures of watching "Broad City" is seeing a staunchly feminist show with a major protagonist who just enjoys the hell out of being a woman in her 20s. Ilana is brazen, frankly sexual, often selfish and immature, but also loveable and an incredibly good friend. While I love both the characters of Abbi and Ilana, Ilana’s dirty swagger is especially vibrant and joyful and comes out of left field in a culture where girls and women aren’t expected to be particularly happy at being a woman. But while Ilana often bemoans sexism, calling out rape culture, and literally attacking a catcaller who dares to make remarks at her best friend, she is clearly delighted at being fiercely femme — from her sexually revealing outfits and make-up to her joyfully polyamorous bisexual brand of sexual empowerment. While Schumer depicts “porn from a women’s POV” as close-ups of a sweaty armpit and a clear view of the nightstand, Ilana’s hunt for porn involves eating oysters (despite her shellfish allergy) and wearing sultry green lipstick, as she casually searches for something she wants to watch. Ilana’s self-love stands out against a landscape of female protagonists who are presented as being at the mercy of a misogynistic culture. While shows like "Inside Amy Schumer" hold a mirror up to patriarchal America by focusing on the life of a self-deprecating and insecure “Amy” who eagerly washes off and then puts back on her makeup when an imaginary boy band tells her to, Ilana is cramming a bag of weed into her vagina, which she fondly refers to as “nature’s pocket,” and getting off with a guy who offers to go down on her for 45 minutes (she later dumps him for his crappy improv act). Ilana’s Kanye-level confidence is more than just delightfully absurd — in a sea of smart, beautiful female comics who mine self-deprecation for laughs, Ilana Wexler presents a vision of female comedy that both fiercely feminist and genuinely hopeful. None of this is to say that Ilana is a “role model.” After all, in many ways, Ilana is completely off-the-wall and foolish. She harasses her co-workers, is often sexually inappropriate and is so wrapped up in her own “woke” identity that she often says racially and culturally insensitive things. (When reflecting on her preference for black as opposed to pink penises, Abbi sharply points out to Ilana that, “You’re so anti-racist sometimes that you’re actually really racist.”) The show often smartly calls attention to this fact. In one episode this season, Ilana’s roommate gently suggests that her gold hoop earrings with the word “Latina” written on them are simply appropriating other cultures, as Ilana sits on the bed next to him sobbing white feminist tears. Ilana’s humor generally comes from this type of willful misinterpretation of the world around her. In some cases (like in the aforementioned one) the joke is very clearly on her, but in others, the joke is clearly on a sexist society. In Season 2, Episode 10, for example, she spies a “Female Body Inspector” shirt at a store and excitedly tells Abbi she has to get it. “I’m a female and I love to inspect bodies!” Of course, Ilana is wrong. On a show like "Inside Amy Schumer," the character “Amy” would be going on a date with a guy who wears this kind of shirt on a first date and we’d laugh at how tacky and offensive it is. After all, in reality, we know that no amount of feminist rebranding is going to reclaim the meaning of a sexist piece of swag. But the wonderful thing about watching "Broad City" is getting to cheer for Ilana as she joyfully tries to do it anyway.In her now famous skit, “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer,” Schumer spoofs the iconic film “12 Angry Men” by depicting a jury of 12, whose job is to decide whether she is attractive enough to be on T.V. “It’s an undisputed fact that a woman’s value is mostly determined by her looks,” one man says, the others concurring seriously. Since "Inside Amy Schumer" debuted on Comedy Central in 2013, Schumer has consistently lampooned sexism in American culture, from the way that the military treats sexual assault, to the ways that Hollywood reduces women to sex objects. Her increasingly political skits have ushered in an era where it’s simply become impossible to argue that feminists of the world lack a sense of humor; indeed, Schumer’s brand of comedy has managed to do what many critics have historically thought was impossible — getting a huge male audience to laugh about what have historically been seen as “women’s issues.” Certainly, talented female comedians like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Wanda Sykes and Sarah Silverman have been making us laugh for years, but Schumer’s spin on women’s comedy is unique in its sheer insistence in forcing viewers to contend with American misogyny head-on. Her incisive look at how women are bullied and belittled, cajoled into losing weight, and, time after time, have horrible, unfulfilling sexual experiences has become the backbone of the entire series. In an age of #YesAllWomen, Schumer’s comedy taps into a kind of feminist cultural zeitgeist, which isn’t afraid to depict the reality that being a woman in 21st century America society is awful, rather than empowering. Many other feminist comedians in recent years have also criticized a culture that constantly tells women how they should think, feel, eat and fuck. It’s a powerful and intelligent message of female solidarity, but it’s also one that is predicated on a flattened experience of being female. With few exceptions, the high-profile female comedians of today paint being a woman as an experience of fear, bullying and debasement — from Jessica William’s sharp take on catcalling and street harassment for "The Daily Show," titled "Jessica’s Feminized Atmosphere,” to "Full Frontal with Samantha Bee," which promises an escape from the “sausage fest” of late night television. Heck, even chipper Kimmy Schmidt’s coming- of-age story involves being kidnapped and held against her will in a bunker. If #YesAllWomen is this generation’s feminist rallying cry, it points to a generation of women who aren’t just railing against the patriarchy; they are intrinsically distressed at what it means to be a girl in the world. With one meaningful exception: "Broad City"’s bold, beautiful, and seriously high Ilana Wexler. Ilana (played by co-creator Ilana Glazer), who is concisely described by New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum as a “horndog narcissist.” Ilana, whose email is ilanawexler@mindmyvagina.com. Ilana, who refuses to shave. Ilana, who twerks at the thought of best friend Abbi Abrams (co-creator Abbi Jacobson) pegging her sexual partner (“All throughout college, I slept with a strap-on on, just in case the opportunity came along…”). Ilana, whose cries of “YAS KWEEN” exalt powerful women, from a deeply admired boss to Hillary Rodham Clinton. One of the greatest pleasures of watching "Broad City" is seeing a staunchly feminist show with a major protagonist who just enjoys the hell out of being a woman in her 20s. Ilana is brazen, frankly sexual, often selfish and immature, but also loveable and an incredibly good friend. While I love both the characters of Abbi and Ilana, Ilana’s dirty swagger is especially vibrant and joyful and comes out of left field in a culture where girls and women aren’t expected to be particularly happy at being a woman. But while Ilana often bemoans sexism, calling out rape culture, and literally attacking a catcaller who dares to make remarks at her best friend, she is clearly delighted at being fiercely femme — from her sexually revealing outfits and make-up to her joyfully polyamorous bisexual brand of sexual empowerment. While Schumer depicts “porn from a women’s POV” as close-ups of a sweaty armpit and a clear view of the nightstand, Ilana’s hunt for porn involves eating oysters (despite her shellfish allergy) and wearing sultry green lipstick, as she casually searches for something she wants to watch. Ilana’s self-love stands out against a landscape of female protagonists who are presented as being at the mercy of a misogynistic culture. While shows like "Inside Amy Schumer" hold a mirror up to patriarchal America by focusing on the life of a self-deprecating and insecure “Amy” who eagerly washes off and then puts back on her makeup when an imaginary boy band tells her to, Ilana is cramming a bag of weed into her vagina, which she fondly refers to as “nature’s pocket,” and getting off with a guy who offers to go down on her for 45 minutes (she later dumps him for his crappy improv act). Ilana’s Kanye-level confidence is more than just delightfully absurd — in a sea of smart, beautiful female comics who mine self-deprecation for laughs, Ilana Wexler presents a vision of female comedy that both fiercely feminist and genuinely hopeful. None of this is to say that Ilana is a “role model.” After all, in many ways, Ilana is completely off-the-wall and foolish. She harasses her co-workers, is often sexually inappropriate and is so wrapped up in her own “woke” identity that she often says racially and culturally insensitive things. (When reflecting on her preference for black as opposed to pink penises, Abbi sharply points out to Ilana that, “You’re so anti-racist sometimes that you’re actually really racist.”) The show often smartly calls attention to this fact. In one episode this season, Ilana’s roommate gently suggests that her gold hoop earrings with the word “Latina” written on them are simply appropriating other cultures, as Ilana sits on the bed next to him sobbing white feminist tears. Ilana’s humor generally comes from this type of willful misinterpretation of the world around her. In some cases (like in the aforementioned one) the joke is very clearly on her, but in others, the joke is clearly on a sexist society. In Season 2, Episode 10, for example, she spies a “Female Body Inspector” shirt at a store and excitedly tells Abbi she has to get it. “I’m a female and I love to inspect bodies!” Of course, Ilana is wrong. On a show like "Inside Amy Schumer," the character “Amy” would be going on a date with a guy who wears this kind of shirt on a first date and we’d laugh at how tacky and offensive it is. After all, in reality, we know that no amount of feminist rebranding is going to reclaim the meaning of a sexist piece of swag. But the wonderful thing about watching "Broad City" is getting to cheer for Ilana as she joyfully tries to do it anyway.

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Judge won’t put brakes on Uber case: Price-fixing lawsuit against car service still alive

Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, who is being sued over alleged price-fixing by his popular ride-sharing service, has failed in his effort to have the suit against him dismissed, Gothamist reports. The class-action suit, brought by Spencer Meyer, of Connecticut, in December 2015, claims that Uber's pricing algorithm violates antitrust laws. Uber has gone to great lengths to classify its drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, a distinction of significant financial importance for the company. Meyer's suit argues that this very classification places Uber on the wrong side of the law. Because the company's drivers are independent contractors, the suit says, they are all technically in competition with one another, which makes Uber's pricing system an illegal, competition-eliminating price-fixing mechanism. "Uber has a simple but illegal business plan: to fix prices among competitors and take a cut of the profits," the lawsuit claims. "Kalanick is the proud architect of that business plan." U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled Tuesday that Kalanick will have to face the lawsuit. The case is set to go to court in for November. "The advancement of technological means for the orchestration of large-scale price-fixing conspiracies need not leave antitrust law behind," Rakoff wrote in his ruling, declining to dismiss the suit. "The fact that Uber goes to such great lengths to portray itself—one might even say disguise itself—as the mere purveyor of an 'app' cannot shield it from the consequences of it operating as much more." Meyer's suit also claims that Uber encourages drivers to artificially manipulate its pricing algorithm by logging out of the app during non-peak hours to trigger higher surge pricing. The lawsuit is seeking class-action status on behalf of all American Uber customers and a subset who have paid for surge pricing. "We disagree with this ruling," a spokesperson for Uber, which is not named in the suit, told Reuters. "These claims are unwarranted and have no basis in fact."Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, who is being sued over alleged price-fixing by his popular ride-sharing service, has failed in his effort to have the suit against him dismissed, Gothamist reports. The class-action suit, brought by Spencer Meyer, of Connecticut, in December 2015, claims that Uber's pricing algorithm violates antitrust laws. Uber has gone to great lengths to classify its drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, a distinction of significant financial importance for the company. Meyer's suit argues that this very classification places Uber on the wrong side of the law. Because the company's drivers are independent contractors, the suit says, they are all technically in competition with one another, which makes Uber's pricing system an illegal, competition-eliminating price-fixing mechanism. "Uber has a simple but illegal business plan: to fix prices among competitors and take a cut of the profits," the lawsuit claims. "Kalanick is the proud architect of that business plan." U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled Tuesday that Kalanick will have to face the lawsuit. The case is set to go to court in for November. "The advancement of technological means for the orchestration of large-scale price-fixing conspiracies need not leave antitrust law behind," Rakoff wrote in his ruling, declining to dismiss the suit. "The fact that Uber goes to such great lengths to portray itself—one might even say disguise itself—as the mere purveyor of an 'app' cannot shield it from the consequences of it operating as much more." Meyer's suit also claims that Uber encourages drivers to artificially manipulate its pricing algorithm by logging out of the app during non-peak hours to trigger higher surge pricing. The lawsuit is seeking class-action status on behalf of all American Uber customers and a subset who have paid for surge pricing. "We disagree with this ruling," a spokesperson for Uber, which is not named in the suit, told Reuters. "These claims are unwarranted and have no basis in fact."

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Mississippi vs. Everyone: State’s pushing obscene law that’s not only anti-LGBT, it could also force women to wear makeup

The 2016 legislative session has been a competition between red states to see who can pass the most hateful anti-LGBT bills under the guise of "religious freedom,' but Mississippi state Republicans look like they're going to emerge the winner. Friday, the state house passed the final version of a bill meant to protect and encourage business owners in the state to discriminate against LGBT people, while simultaneously enshrining, in violation of the constitution, the idea that conservative Christianity is the only legitimate religion. But, because they have to win the war of the Bible-thumpers, Mississippi Republicans went a step further than other states that have passed similar anti-gay bills. This law not only protects discrimination against LGBT people, but against any person who has sex outside of marriage. It also makes it easier for employers and schools to strictly police the way you dress to make sure it's masculine or feminine enough. If your boss thinks proper ladies wear make-up, he can cite "religious freedom" as a reason to force you to do so, and the law will protect him for it. The state laid out three religious beliefs that give business owners broad permission to discriminate against people on the basis of:

The sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions protected by this act are the belief or conviction that: (a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman; (b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and (c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.

These are, to be clear, the only religious beliefs the state deems worthy of extra-special protection. If you belong to a church that doesn't preach hate — and there are many faiths, both Christian and otherwise, that accept LGBT people and don't think premarital sex is a sin — too bad, so sad. The state of Mississippi doesn't think your religion is a legitimate one. The only faith deemed worthy of this kind of legislation is the kind that teaches that religion's purpose is in policing other people's sexual behaviors. The bill then goes on to offer two levels of protection for bigots who want to discriminate, with religious organizations getting broad rights and private persons and business owners getting somewhat less expansive, but still terrifying rights. Religious organizations are allowed to deny employment, housing, and other services. Private businesses are allowed to deny any marriage-related services (including jewelry selling) to anyone who meets the three criteria. State employees can refuse marriage licenses, as well, and they are offered special protections to "express" the above religious beliefs. Which means that if you work for the state and enjoy haranguing gay coworkers or single women about how they're going to hell, it will be close to impossible to fire you for it. To be clear, being able to discriminate against gay people, transgender people and fornicators is already legal, to one extent or another, in Mississippi. What this law does is deny the state the right to "discriminate" against anyone who would do so. That might seem minor, but in reality, removing any threat of losing government money or contracts for forcing your bigoted religious beliefs on others is actually a pretty strong check on a lot of this behavior. For instance, a lot of this bill would make it easier to discriminate against people who are seeking social services. As the ACLU of Mississippi points out, homeless shelters, food banks, and day cares who call themselves "religious organizations" — i.e., many to most of them — would be able to turn away a single mother and her children on the grounds that she's a sinful fornicator. Religious charter schools who get government money could expel students who are believed to be having sex. Adoption agencies can discriminate not just against gay couples and single people, but against any couple they believe had sex before they were married. The law also offers broad protections to those who would deny medical care to people. If you work for hospital or clinic that gets government money, you can deny transgender people treatments related to their transition or "psychological, counseling, or fertility services" to anyone in the official list of naughty people. If a counseling service kicks you out for being gay or having sex outside of marriage, they can't lose their government contract over it under this bill. As the ACLU points out, this also allows foster parents to force kids into "conversion therapy" run by quacks who believe you can pray the gay away, and the state cannot do anything about it. The bill also grants broad rights to businesses and organizations to play the gender police: "The state government shall not take any discriminatory action against a person wholly or partially on the basis that the person establishes sex-specific standards or policies concerning employee or student dress or grooming." So if a school decided to punish a girl or a trans boy for getting a short haircut or for refusing to wear skirts or make-up, then the state couldn't do anything about it. Beyond just the specific threats, this bill is troubling because it's about building up legal precedent for two repugnant ideas: That discriminating against people on the basis of sexuality and gender is acceptable and that the state should be flagging certain religious beliefs as better than others. In a sane world, both notions would be seen as flagrant violations of the constitution, which forbids establishment of religion and upholds equal protection under the law. But with the Supreme Court in disarray, it appears that Republicans are feeling feistier than ever in stomping all over the foundational principles of this country. On top of all that, this bill violates some pretty important federal regulations and could lead to the federal government stripping the state of education funding. Hopefully, Gov. Phil Bryant will realize this kind of radical bigotry against not just LGBT people but the 95% of Americans who have had premarital sex  is a step way to far, and will veto it.

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Donald Trump truthers: Theories spread he’s trying to sabotage campaign after his disastrous week from hell

Even by Donald Trump's standards, this has been a bad week. The Donald's foot is permanently planted in his mouth, so it's not unusual for him to say something egregious or stupid. But he's on quite a roll lately. First, he cavalierly dismissed the Geneva Conventions, the foundation of international laws concerning the humane treatment of all soldiers. “The problem,” Trump said, “is we have the Geneva Conventions, all sorts of rules and regulations, so the soldiers are afraid to fight. We can't waterboard, but they can chop off heads. I think we've got to make some changes.” To even suggest this is both absurd and an indication of how ill-prepared Trump is for the job. Trump then went on a conservative Wisconsin radio show (a crucial state in the primary race) and courageously told the truth about Gov. Scott Walker's neoliberal nightmare: “But you had a $2.2 billion budget deficit and the schools were going begging and everything was going begging because he [Walker] didn't want to raise taxes because he was going to run for president. So instead of raising taxes he cut back on schools, he cut back on highways, cut back on a lot of things. And that's why...Wisconsin has a problem.” This isn't wrong, but telling inconvenient truths to a Republican audience never ends well. To challenge the no-tax Gospel in this way is pure heresy in conservative circles – it's as dangerous as professing belief in science. Yet Trump did just that, knowing it would alienate this wing of the party. Trump also fumbled his attempts to neutralize the story about his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who was charged with simple battery for an altercation with a reporter earlier this month. The wise move is to dismiss Lewandowski. At the very least, though, Trump could've remained impartial while the process played itself out. Instead, he questioned the character of the reporter who was roughed up by Lewandowski. The biggest blunder of the week was Trump's exchange with MSNBC's Chris Matthews. Asked whether abortion should be punished, Trump initially dodged the question, saying “it's a very serious problem and it's a problem we should decide on.” But then he promptly reinserted foot in mouth and added that “There has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. Even in the Republican Party, this is a preposterous position. It's the kind of remark that ensures he has no chance of winning a general election. The largest demographic in the country is women – there is no pathway to the nomination without their support. According to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, three-quarters of women now view Trump unfavorably. That number alone all but guarantees a landslide defeat for Trump in November. To threaten women with punishment in this way will only exacerbate his problem. Trump's week of follies has led some to question whether he's a self-saboteur. “To all outward appearances,” John Fund writes in The National Review, “Trump seems to be engaged in a form of self-sabotaging behavior in which people both move toward a goal and then from deep within do things to defeat themselves.” This is a perfectly legitimate question. It's very likely the Donald never intended to become president at all, that this whole thing is a ruse, a publicity stunt. Indeed, we received confirmation of this in the form of an open letter to Trump supporters from Stephanie Cegielski, who formerly served as communications director of the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again. Cegielski wrote: “I don't think even Trump thought he would go this far. And I don't even know that he wanted to, which is perhaps the scariest prospect of all...What was once his desire to rank second place to send a message to America and increase his power as a businessman has nightmarishly morphed into a charade that is poised to do irreparable damage to this country.” Cheri Jacobus, a Republican strategist who met with Trump about the communications director position, echoed Cegielski's statement: “I believe Trump senses he is in over his head and doesn't really want the nomination. He wanted to help his brand and have fun, but not to be savaged by the Clintons if he's the candidate. He wouldn't mind falling short of a delegate majority, losing the nomination, and then playing angry celebrity victim in the coming years.” In the months ahead, I suspect Trump's real intent will become increasingly obvious. There is no reason to think he wants to be president. It's an unspeakably complicated job and Trump's defiant ignorance suggests he has no desire to learn what is required. This was always about Trump – his brand, his image, his profile. It should surprise no one if he finds a way to undermine his own campaign. At this point, the best possible outcome for him is to lose without appearing to quit. Then, as Jacobus pointed out, he can expand his celebrity, broaden his influence, and avoid the trouble of actually serving in public office.

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“Was TotalF*ckingTrainWreck.com already taken?”: Matt Bai’s spot-on jab to pollster Frank Luntz about new Republican Convention web page

Conservative strategist Frank Luntz announced on his Twitter Friday that the Republican National Convention created a page on its website to "prepare voters for a contested convention" in July: https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz/status... The "new web site" is simply an added page on the GOP's already existing site, and acts to inform voters of the electoral process rather than "prepare" them for a contested convention. That said, the info seems implicitly geared toward voters who mistakenly thought their primary vote factored into the majority decision of convention delegates. The RNC's move is in direct conflict with the primary process, through which voters have expressed overwhelming support for Donald Trump, much to the GOP establishment's chagrin. It also indicates a potentially crippling unrest between Republican voters and party leaders — something Yahoo! political columnist, Matt Bai, encapsulated quite perfectly in his response: https://twitter.com/mattbai/status/71... This subsequently sparking a delightful back-and-forth: https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz/status... https://twitter.com/mattbai/status/71... https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz/status... https://twitter.com/mattbai/status/71... strategist Frank Luntz announced on his Twitter Friday that the Republican National Convention created a page on its website to "prepare voters for a contested convention" in July: https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz/status... The "new web site" is simply an added page on the GOP's already existing site, and acts to inform voters of the electoral process rather than "prepare" them for a contested convention. That said, the info seems implicitly geared toward voters who mistakenly thought their primary vote factored into the majority decision of convention delegates. The RNC's move is in direct conflict with the primary process, through which voters have expressed overwhelming support for Donald Trump, much to the GOP establishment's chagrin. It also indicates a potentially crippling unrest between Republican voters and party leaders — something Yahoo! political columnist, Matt Bai, encapsulated quite perfectly in his response: https://twitter.com/mattbai/status/71... This subsequently sparking a delightful back-and-forth: https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz/status... https://twitter.com/mattbai/status/71... https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz/status... https://twitter.com/mattbai/status/71...

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