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The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Last week’s results are here. You can browse a gallery of all our previous contests here.

Where You Don’t Wanna Be A Dog

Iran:

Dog lovers in Iran could face up to 74 lashes under plans by hardline lawmakers that would ban keeping the pets at home or walking them in public. A draft bill, signed by 32 members of the country’s conservative-dominated parliament, would also authorise heavy fines for offenders, the reformist Shargh newspaper reported.

Dogs are regarded as unclean under Islamic custom and they are not common in Iran, although some families do keep them behind closed doors and, especially in more affluent areas, walk them outside. Iran’s morality police, who deploy in public places, have previously stopped dog walkers and either cautioned them or confiscated the animals. But if the new bill is passed by parliament then those guilty of dog-related offences could face lashes or fines ranging from 10 million rials to 100 million rials ($370 to $3,700 at official rates).

A Poem For Friday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell died last week. He loved the poems of his predecessors, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, whose line from “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” we post in his honor.

“I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter.”

“Blackberry Eating” by Galway Kinnell (1927-2014):

I love to go out in late September

among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries

to eat blackberries for breakfast,

the stalks very prickly, a penalty

they earn for knowing the black art

of blackberry making; and as I stand among them

lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries

fall almost unbidden to my tongue,

as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words

like strengths or squinched or broughamed,

many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,

which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well

in the silent, startled, icy, black language

of blackberry eating in late September.

(From A New Selected Poems © 2000 by Galway Kinnell. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Photo by Jared Smith)

The View From Your Window

Gaithersburg, Maryland, 11.04 am

Could Obama Close Gitmo?

Given that Obama has little to lose at this point in his presidency, Eric Posner dreams. On what legal authority?

[Obama] could cite his commander-in-chief power under the Constitution and argue that Congress cannot force him to detain enemy combatants he believes should be released. It was on that basis that he recently traded five Guantanamo detainees for Bowe Bergdahl, an American solider captured by the Taliban. There are also various statutory loopholes he could exploit. Indeed, the president could declare the war with al-Qaida over, and in this way remove the legal foundation for the remaining Guantanamo detentions. It is perhaps for this reason that the president has announced that he wants a statute from Congress that authorizes the use of force against ISIS.

Once that statute is in place, he could formally declare the war with al-Qaida, and would be able to drop the fiction that ISIS and al-Qaida are the same entity, which he used to justify relying on the statute that authorizes the use of military force against al-Qaida for hostilities with ISIS.

One major constraint on all these actions is that Obama can sustain them only as long as he remains in office. Since he can’t make law, the next president will not be bound to continue them. However, the practical significance of this constraint is nil. If Obama releases Guantanamo detainees, the next president will not be able to put them back in Guantanamo. He or she could reopen Guantanamo and repopulate it with a new batch of terrorists, but the Guantanamo experiment was a failure, and no future president will repeat it.

I’d argue that this is a legitimate use of the president’s wartime executive authority. Would Obama ever do it? Maybe as a final, irreversible act two years from now – like his power to pardon. But it does not seem to me to be likely given the president’s institutional conservatism and aversion to “any sudden moves.” But then, I have no idea what Obama is really like when his long game is done and he really does not have anything left to lose. It sure would be a high note to go out on – the mother of all meep meeps.

Comeback Christie?

So, here’s how NJ’s largest paper feels about @ChrisChristie coming home… pic.twitter.com/BqSFd7Fnso

— Mo Elleithee (@MoElleithee) November 7, 2014

In a radio segment yesterday, the New Jersey governor hinted that he’s still got his eye on 2016, calling the time he spent on the road stumping for other Republicans this campaign season “a good trial run” for himself and his family. Joseph Gallant casts Christie as the biggest off-the-ballot winner in this week’s elections:

Ben Dworkin, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University in Lawrenceville, says Christie, as he heads into a likely 2016 run for the GOP presidential nomination, stands to benefit in three significant ways: messaging, fundraising, and favor-trading. “First, he got to try out his message all across the nation,” Dworkin told the The American Prospect. “One question about Christie is whether his political style will play in Topeka. He’s now had a chance to travel everywhere across the country to see what works and what doesn’t, all on the RGA’s tab.” …

“He got to meet every major donor in the Republican Party and all of the key political operatives,” Dworkin continued. ”Running for president is a massive undertaking and you need to build a national team that already knows the battleground states. He’s gotten to do that.”

But Dworkin’s third point could be the clincher for the Garden State governor. “Christie was at the helm when Republicans won huge victories around the country. Not only will he be able to take credit for those wins, but he will have the invaluable resource of governors ‘owing him’ for all the help he provided.”

His actions on Ebola also scored him some points with constituents:

A new poll from Monmouth University shows New Jerseyans approve of his handling of the Ebola situation 53 percent to 27 percent — about two-to-one. The federal government’s response, by contrast, earns negative marks at 37 percent approval and 46 percent disapproval. In addition, Christie’s constituents approve 67-19 of quarantining Hickox after she landed at Newark Airport. Where Christie gets more mixed results is in his decision to release Hickox, amid pressure, to a quarantine in her home in Maine — a quarantine that she later flouted. Thirty-eight percent approve of Christie’s decision here, while 40 percent disapprove. … A recent poll showed 80 percent of Americans supported the concept of some kind of quarantine. So, quelle surprise.

Still, Kilgore just doesn’t see Christie’s tough-guy persona winning over anyone who isn’t already into it:

Here and elsewhere, we’re given the impression that Christie’s now “over” Bridgegate, and back to being the big brawling dominant force the MSM and Republican elites have always loved. … Let me ask you, though: does anyone think being a figurehead for the RGA in a good year is going to cut a lot of ice with the actual on-the-ground activists and voters who will determine the Republican presidential nomination? Is anyone impressed by this other than the people who never stopped loving him? I’ll believe it when Christie no longer has by far the worst approval/disapproval ratio among likely Caucus-goers in Iowa.

A Volunteer You Wouldn’t Have A Beer With

Derek Willis flags research showing that a “mismatch between volunteers and voters could be a problem for today’s data-driven campaigns, which are having more direct conversations with more voters”:

In a forthcoming paper in the American Political Science Review, Ryan D. Enos, an assistant government professor at Harvard, and Eitan D. Hersh, an assistant professor of political science at Yale, describe how they surveyed more than 3,000 Obama campaign volunteers in the midst of the 2012 election. They found that “individuals who were interacting with swing voters on the campaign’s behalf were demographically unrepresentative, ideologically extreme, cared about atypical issues, and misunderstood the voters’ priorities.”…

When campaigns were mostly focused on television advertising, they could present a single message to voters on air, one that was typically less extreme than that espoused by its most fervent supporters. But the increased emphasis during the last two elections on directly contacting voters makes it more important for campaigns to send not just the right message but one delivered by the right messenger.

Mental Health Break

You’ll need this after a depressing week of politics:

The hathetic source video is here. Taylor Swift’s video here.

Kale Juice Will Remain Unaffected

Berkeley just passed the nation’s first soda tax. Roberto A. Ferdman puts it in context:

The beverage industry’s fixation on Berkeley is a testament to its growing nervousness that America is falling out of love with sodas and other sugary drinks. Per capita consumption of soda is down almost 30 percent since its peak in 1998, according to data market research firm IBIS World. And the fight in Berkeley underscores the lengths to which soda makers are willing to go to block soda tax measures. The industry has spent more than $100 million in the past five years to stop dozens of similar taxes in other cities and states across the United States.

Jazz Shaw considers the disproportionate class impact the law may have:

I do appreciate the fact that the coverage is at least honest enough to refer to it as a punitive tax, which is exactly what it is. But who is being punished with this action? The obvious answer is the poor, who are probably the most likely to be drinking Big Gulps in the first place. The wealthy professors and cocktail party crew don’t need to worry about a ten percent hike in costs, but the people who tend their lawns and gardens, clean their pools and empty their trash might.

The Dish thread on Bloomberg’s attempts at a soda tax is here.

A British Tory Is An American Democrat

Here’s an indication of just how far to the right the American political discourse is, compared with Britain – the developed country most in tune with American neo-liberalism:

That’s why David Cameron and Barack Obama have long had such an easy relationship. Either one could fit easily into the other’s cabinet. And maybe it does help explain why I still consider myself a conservative. I am, as a Brit.