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The Best Of The Dish Today

First up, this:

Next up, a reader sends this image:

And writes:

The ad in the attached screenshot popped up on the BBC site. My subconscious just assumed it was you all. Took a couple minutes before the reality registered.

And what exactly about a saving of $420 reminded you of us?

Anyways (big sigh), today we entered the final, depressing, brutal day of the midterms in a brutally polarized polity. Some thoughts: what it means for 2016 (not much); how the fear factor may be decisive; why Ted Cruz could spoil the GOP’s after-party; and how the one thing that really hangs in the balance is the composition of the judiciary in Obama’s last two years.

Plus: those moderate Syrian rebels? They just capitulated to al Qaeda. As Obama suspected they would (and McCain didn’t). And just in case the news was not completely dispiriting, remind yourself that we have probably passed the point of no return on climate change.

My personal favorite of today’s posts: another fascinating, colorful reader thread on cat-calling.

The most popular post of the day was The Significance Of A Smile; followed by New Feminism; Old Moralism.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 26 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here, including the new “Know Dope” shirts, which are detailed here.

See you in the morning.

We Might Be Over Ebola, But Ebola Isn’t Over

Eric Posner offers the above chart as evidence that the furore over Ebola is dying down. But risk-communication experts Jody Lanard and Peter Sandman fear that Americans underestimate the still-serious risk of the outbreak reaching pandemic proportions in the developing world:

The two of us are far less worried about sparks landing in Chicago or London than in Mumbai or Karachi. We wish Dallas had served as a teachable moment for what may be looming elsewhere in the world, instead of inspiring knee-jerk over-reassurance theater about our domestic ability to extinguish whatever Ebola sparks come our way. We are glad that Dallas at least led to improvements in CDC guidelines for personal protective equipment and contact tracing, and belatedly jump-started front-line medical and community planning and training. But it doesn’t seem to have sparked the broader concern that is so vitally needed.

Americans are having a failure of imagination – failing to imagine that the most serious Ebola threat to our country is not in Dallas, not in our country, not even on our borders. It is on the borders of other countries that lack our ability to extinguish sparks.

Maryn McKenna seconds that:

Being someone who has a professional specialty of covering epidemics (HIV, the anthrax attacks, SARS, H5N1, H1N1, lots of smaller outbreaks), I reluctantly have to conclude: Lanard and Sandman are not being alarmist here.

Imagine that Ebola cannot be contained; think back to the events of this weekend; and then imagine that reaction multiplied thousands of times. It isn’t a big leap to the suspicion, disruption and expense that will then be triggered in response to any travelers from the region. From there, it isn’t much of a further leap to closed borders, curbs on international movement, disruption in global trade, cuts in productivity, even civil unrest and the opportunities that unrest offers to extremist movements. None of that is far-fetched, if Ebola is not controlled.

Michele Barry reflects on the systemic failures that allowed the outbreak to spiral out of control. From her perspective, “the solution to this Ebola crisis is not drugs, mass quarantine, vaccines, or even airdrops of personal protective gear”:

The real reasons this outbreak has turned into an epidemic are weak health systems and lack of workforce; any real solution needs to address these structural issues. When one physician or nurse is caring for forty to fifty patients, mistakes happen. WHO’s legally binding International Health Regulations (2005) requires wealthier countries to mobilize financial and technical support to help contain an outbreak such as Ebola, for which the Director General has called an international public health emergency.

Yet workforce scale-up has been disturbingly slow. NGOs like Médicins Sans Frontières were not equipped to deal with Ebola, and have been overwhelmed by the outbreak. Workforce volunteers for these NGOs have been slow to mobilize and fearful US hospitals have set up barriers by insisting that their employees taking unpaid leave or vacation time and then return to mandatory 21-day quarantines, often without pay.

But the governor of New York, for his part, has pledged to compensate any lost pay. Perhaps the federal government should step in with actual financial incentives – cash money – to encourage health workers still on the fence to head to West Africa.

Faces Of The Day

A presidential photo-bombing in Arkansas, captured by a Redditor via a phone. Money quote: “She didn’t want to be there. It was really cold outside for what we’re used to and this was after the event.” The former president was in Arkansas, vacuuming up the crowds as usual.

(H/T Pixable | Photo via bronayur/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)

“The Internet’s Ultimate Content Cannibal”

That’s how Marcus Wohlsen imagines the Facebook of the future, in light of David Carr’s revelations about the company’s recent overtures to publishers. Carr elaborates:

The social network has been eager to help publishers do a better job of servicing readers in the News Feed, including improving their approach to mobile in a variety of ways. One possibility it mentioned was for publishers to simply send pages to Facebook that would live inside the social network’s mobile app and be hosted by its servers; that way, they would load quickly with ads that Facebook sells. The revenue would be shared.

That kind of wholesale transfer of content sends a cold, dark chill down the collective spine of publishers, both traditional and digital insurgents alike. If Facebook’s mobile app hosted publishers’ pages, the relationship with customers, most of the data about what they did and the reading experience would all belong to the platform. Media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns.

I, for one, welcome our new Internet overlords. (Just kidding). Wohlsen looks at the big picture:

Publishers likely will balk at ceding so much control to Facebook. But in the end, they may not have much choice. The arrangement might sound like a partnership at first, but it could end up like Amazon and the book industry. Book publishers may hate dealing with Amazon and resent its influence over their sales. But the last thing they would do is pull their books from Amazon. Thanks to its outsized leverage, Facebook’s ability to dictate terms to online publishers could wind up much the same.

Robert Montenegro considers the implications:

Now that Facebook has mastered mobile ad revenue while other sites have struggled, there may soon come a time where much of the content you access via Facebook will all be hosted on Facebook. We’re already seeing Mark Zuckerberg’s push to include more content within the site itself. The relatively new trending topics feature is an example, as well as how the mythical algorithm favors on-site content such as Facebook-hosted videos over those hosted by competitors such as YouTube, which is owned by Google. If only a few popular sites decide to give in to Facebook’s offer, Zuckerberg could ignite a major ad revenue war.

A Poem For Monday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

From poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets, I learned that Amy Lowell from the grand Massachusetts family, whose brother Abbott Lawrence, would become president of Harvard College from 1909-1933, “secluded herself in the 7,000 book library” of her family’s estate in Brookline to study literature at the age of seventeen. She enjoyed early success, publishing in The Atlantic Monthly and other journals, and became a key figure in the Imagist movement spearheaded by Ezra Pound. She was also for many years a central figure at the Poetry Society of America in New York, the nation’s oldest organization devoted to the art.

“The Pike” by Amy Lowell:

In the brown water,

Thick and silver-sheened in the sunshine,

Liquid and cool in the shade of the reeds,

A pike dozed.

Lost among the shadows of stems

He lay unnoticed.

Suddenly he flicked his tail,

And a green-and-copper brightness

Ran under the water.

Out from under the reeds

Came the olive-green light,

And orange flashed up

Through the sun-thickened water.

So the fish passed across the pool,

Green and copper,

A darkness and a gleam,

And the blurred reflections of the willows on the opposite bank

Received it.

(From Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology © 2014 by Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press. Photo by Flickr user katdaned)

The Other Ukraine Votes

Not intimidating at all. Rebels stand guard as eastern #Ukraine votes in separatist election. http://t.co/6hwIUYg0BK pic.twitter.com/8Z8l2i048S

— Jim Roberts (@nycjim) November 2, 2014

Close on the heels of a parliamentary election that handed a decisive victory to pro-Europe parties, separatist rebels held elections of their own this weekend in the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk:

Election organizers declared that rebel leaders Alexander Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnitsky won sizable majorities in Donetsk and Luhansk respectively, reports Radio Free Europe. Both men have led rebel groups in the fight against the Ukrainian government in Kiev. But the elections have been controversial from the start, with Kiev and Western powers calling them a violation of a peace agreement drawn up in Minsk, Belarus, in early September. Under the Minsk agreement, Kiev would enact legislation that would grant Donetsk and Luhansk considerable autonomy, but under the auspices of Ukrainian law. Sunday’s elections do not comply with Ukrainian law, Kiev argues, and are therefore illegal.

Russia, predictably, endorsed the elections as legitimate today. Bershidsky notes just what a farce they were:

In Donetsk and Luhansk, people bring submachine guns to restaurants and polling stations alike. Since the rebels did not have access to electoral rolls, it was laughably easy to register as a voter. One woman apparently filled in the requisite questionnaires for a cow, putting down “Ear Tag MOO-123321, issued on 01.01.1998 by shepherd Semyon Ivanovich,” as identifying document, and received a number allowing her to cast a vote online. When the OSCE refused to observe the elections, a group calling itself the Association (or Agency, to hear its different members talk) for Security and Cooperation in Europe popped up conveniently and gave a press conference in Donetsk, praising the votes. The delegation consisted of far-right politicians from Austria, Belgium, Italy, France and several eastern European nations, as well as two Greek Stalinists.

But Linda Kinstler isn’t laughing:

The rebels, of course, claim that the elections were entirely legal under the provisions of the Minsk agreement. “It was said there [in the Minsk protocol] that we have the right to hold our own elections. The date was not specified,” Zakharchenko said on Sunday, RIA Novosti reports. It is abundantly evident that the Ukrainians had no plan for how exactly “early local elections in accordance with the Law of Ukraine” could possibly be held in rebel territory, just like it is also painfully clear that the government has no plan for how that territory will ever be re-integrated into the rest of the country.

Glenn Kates worries that the vote will embolden the separatists to escalate their conflict with Kiev:

Large swaths of separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine both blame Kyiv for the violence and hope their votes will bring stability to the region. But for the self-proclaimed separatist leadership and their backers in Moscow these two thoughts may paradoxically be a signal to continue fighting. Ukraine is unlikely to restore pension payments or energy provisions, which were cut off in the summer. Meanwhile, separatists will now have to back up the claims that they can govern without Kyiv by providing some of the resources that have been so sorely lacking. If claiming territories is seen as a way to do so and they believe any violence will be blamed on Kyiv, fighting, in a purely political sense, may not have a downside.

Sebastian Smith weighs Kiev’s options for dealing with the separatists at this point. As he sees it, the government can either choose to write off the breakaway regions and let them be Russia’s problem, or wage a costly war to restore control over them. Neither option is terribly palatable to Ukrainians:

Not many Ukrainians are ready for all-out war, says Glib Vyshlinsky, deputy director of GfK Ukraine marketing company in Kiev. “If you’re talking about fighting, with thousands of casualties being lost in order to win back these regions, then there is not support. Ukrainians are not such an imperial people as Russians and consensus will be against this,” he said. …

A GfK poll in September showed that 31 percent support a “bad peace,” including giving up some territory to Russia. Fifty four percent were for fighting on. One concrete sign that Ukraine’s government is preparing to sever at least some ties with the east is the suggestion from top ranking officials in recent days that gas supplies may be ended to rebel territories — which would turn to Russia for help. “Those announcements are trial balloons to test Russia,” said Taras Berezovets, head of Berta Communications in Kiev. “Russia doesn’t want to have to pay for Donbass.”

Florida’s Pot Polarization

Michael Ames fears Florida’s medical marijuana measure will fail tomorrow:

Florida was supposed to change the way the South thinks about medical marijuana. In late July, a full 88 percent of the state supported legalizing medical cannabis, and in early October 67 percent supported Amendment 2 specifically.* Instead, that wide margin has all but disappeared, and rather than join the 23 other states with similar laws on the books, the amendment appears to be bleeding support by the hour.

The governor’s race has hurt the amendment’s prospects:

Since it launched, Florida Republicans have suspected that [Amendment 2 backer John] Morgan’s campaign is actually an effort to pump voter turnout in an off-year election and help Crist eke out a win against incumbent Gov. Rick Scott.

Morgan denies he’s playing politics, telling the Tampa Tribune that he’s “not as smart or devious as they think I am.” And yet, when he hired a campaign manager, he picked Ben Pollara, an operative who describes himself as “one of the premier Democratic fundraisers in Florida.” Pollara served on President Obama’s 2012 National Finance Committee, was the state finance director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, and has represented Democrats including Sen. Bill Nelson, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

“It has not been a bipartisan campaign,” says Pollara. “The opposition has been run entirely by Republican operatives and funded by Republican mega-donors.”

Ben Jacobs hears much the same:

Morgan has long been a power player in Florida politics and is closely tied to Crist, the former Republican governor now running as a Democrat to lead the state again. Despite Morgan’s deep pockets and political clout, the medical marijuana initiative, which was once considered a shoo-in to become law, looks increasingly less likely to pass the 60 percent threshold.

The problem, according to some Morgan detractors, is that the vote has been less a referendum on cannabis and more a referendum on Morgan, who is funding the ballot measure.

Christopher Ingraham is unsure what will happen:

Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has poured $5 million of his own money into the opposition campaign, fueling it almost single-handedly. On the other hand supporters have raised about $8 million, roughly half of it from attorney John Morgan. While the fate of the other marijuana initiatives rests largely in the hands of young voters, Florida’s seniors may be the lynchpin here. Given the volatility of the polls it’s very difficult to predict how things will play out, but the 60 percent supermajority requirement represents a high bar for supporters of the measure.

Jon Walker looks at the latest polls:

The worst result is from the Tampa Bay Times/Bay News 9/UF Graham Center poll. It found 46 percent of likely voters planning to vote for Amendment 2 and 43 percent planning to vote against it.

The PPP poll found the measure will win majority support but below the threshold. Their final poll had the ballot measure getting 53 percent of likely voters and 41 percent planning to vote against it. The remaining 6 percent is undecided. Even if all the undecided in this poll decided to vote for it the measure would still come up just short of 60 percent.

The best final poll was from the Florida Chamber of Commerce Political Institute poll, but even that found the measure with 55 percent support to 40 percent opposed. Again just short of the very high threshold needed.

Lose Some, Win Some

No, this is not a story from the Onion: a monument to Steve Jobs in St Petersburg has been taken down in the wake of Tim Cook’s acknowledgment that he is gay. That’s how psychotic Russia’s state-sanctioned homophobia is:

Citing the need to abide by a law combating “gay propaganda,” the companies called ZEFS [who built the monument] said in a statement on Monday that the memorial had been removed on Friday — the day after Apple CEO Tim Cook penned a piece about being gay. “In Russia, gay propaganda and other sexual perversions among minors are prohibited by law,” ZEFS said, noting that the memorial had been “in an area of direct access for young students and scholars … After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy, the monument was taken down to abide to the Russian federal law protecting children from information promoting denial of traditional family values,” ZEFS statement said.

Meanwhile, in the US, a thaw between some gay Christians and the Southern Baptists is detectable. At a recent SBC conference, a small group from both sides actually had a conversation in person:

“What’s significant is not the content of the meetings, but that there were meetings at all,” said Justin Lee, executive director of The Gay Christian Network. “It allowed us to humanize one another and form relationships.” Mr. Walker and more than a dozen Southern Baptists and gay-rights advocates gathered in a suite to have a conversation. The meeting “exceeded both sides’ expectations as far as cheerfulness, friendliness and authenticity of the conversation,” Walker said. “There’s greater respect all around. We disagreed, but we disagreed very well.” The personal meetings “help defy caricature,” he added.

Pete Wehner also points to a friendly meeting between SBC macher Al Mohler and the wonderful Matthew Vines. Put this together with the unprecedented outreach to gay Catholics by Pope Francis and there’s real reason to hope.

The Fly In The GOP Ointment

There have been lots of predictions about what a Republican take-over of the Senate would mean, but I think it’s safe to say that Ted Cruz will continue to be a raging asshole – both with respect to his own party and, of course, to the president. He’s already making noises:

Piggybacking on what House leaders have done, Cruz said the first order of business should be a series of hearings on President Obama, “looking at the abuse of power, the executive abuse, the regulatory abuse, the lawlessness that sadly has pervaded this administration.” … And when asked whether he would back Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky for Republican leader, Cruz would not pledge his support — an indication that there are limits to how much of a partner he’s willing to be.

At the heart of Cruz’s shift from the insular approach that defined his first year in office is a belief that he can use his popularity with conservatives to expand his influence in the Senate and improve his standing as he considers a 2016 presidential campaign.

Somehow, I don’t think the American public is hoping for another round of scorched earth partisan warfare after this election (some may even be gamely hoping for, you know, some kind of governance). And I doubt the establishment GOP heading into 2016 will want to alienate Latinos even more profoundly, ramp up its culture war rhetoric, and push for a new war in the Middle East (either against ISIS or Iran – they’ll take either, as long as Obama has to fight it).

But what’s been absent in this campaign – see the Democrats’ usual incompetence – is the extremism and divisiveness of the Republican right, which is now better seen as the Republican center. We could have another budget meltdown, or the now-familiar an impeachment move for a second-term Democratic president. And all this will serve to divide a party now easily united in opposition to Obama.

If this is their version of 2006, they have yet to find an Obama figure to make it their 2008. And the more divided and fractious and extreme their period in the sun the likelier it is that the Clinton machine will roll smoothly back into power.

(Photo: U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks during the final day of the 2014 Republican Leadership Conference on May 31, 2014 in New Orleans, Louisiana. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Ouagadoucoup d’Etat, Ctd

Burkina Faso’s military, which seized power after President Compaoré stepped down on Friday, is forming a transitional government and pledging not to cling to power. The announcement came after protesters had returned to the streets to demand a speedy restoration of civilian rule:

The army named Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Zida as the leader of a transitional government on Saturday. However, thousands of protesters gathered on Sunday in the capital Ouagadougou, demonstrating against the army. On Sunday evening, following a meeting with key opposition figures, a military spokesman said the army would put in place “a transition body… with all the components to be adopted by a broad consensus”. … It had been necessary to disperse protesters to “restore order”, the statement said, adding that one demonstrator outside the state TV station had died.

Overall, Ken Opalo predicts that Compaoré’s departure will be good for democracy, both in Burkina Faso and Africa writ large:

Although the outcome of this week’s turmoil in Burkina Faso was an extra-constitutional transfer of power, the events leading up to it were a reminder of the continued entrenchment of constitutional rule in much of Africa.

It is instructive that even as he plotted to violate the country’s constitution, Compaore resorted to institutional means to do so. He did not issue a decree or name himself president for life, but instead asked parliament to ratify the amendment to Article 37. This is an indication of the growing importance of institutions, even in non-democratic regimes. It is also a reminder to global democracy advocates that presidential elections alone do not make democracies, and that legislative elections also deserve attention. As the norm of institutionalized rule consolidates in Africa, legislatures will become the new arena of political contestation. This means that the manner in which legislatures are constituted and the rules that govern them will become just as important as whether presidential elections are free and fair.

Zachariah Mampilly insists that the Burkinabe uprising is part of a continent-wide trend that hasn’t gotten nearly as much press as it deserves:

We document more than 90 popular uprisings in more than 40 African states since 2005. By our measure, the heralded North African protests of 2011 represented not the first ripple of a wave, but rather its crest, with 26 African countries (including Burkina Faso) experiencing popular protests that year. Since then, protests have continued but have rarely generated the sort of attention devoted to the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. Why? Political change in the rest of Africa is often thought to result from violent conflict or external intervention. Africans themselves are presumed to be too rural, too ethnic or too poor for popular politics to lead to political transformation. Even today, as protests increasingly shake up ossified regimes and de facto one-party states, little attention is paid to the broader wave of protests unfolding across Africa and what it portends for the future of the continent.

He, too, is cautiously optimistic about the outcome:

The fact that the army has stepped in is not necessarily a harbinger of military rule. In many African protests, it is the military that can play a decisive role by intervening on behalf of the protesters, as was the case during the 1964 and 1985 protests in Sudan, in which junior officers stepped in against the regime to prevent what would probably have been bloody crackdowns. If progressive voices in the military can come to the fore and turn power quickly over to a civilian leader, there is hope.

World powers, particularly the US and France, are watching the situation closely:

In the last decade, Burkina Faso has become a central node in the new security apparatus that France and the U.S. are building, separately but in coordination, in the Sahel region, to combat jihadi movements and buttress their other interests. Ouagadougou is a base for U.S. drones as well as French special forces. As fluid as the current situation may be, nothing in the power struggle under way appears to threaten Burkina Faso’s fundamental alignment with France and the U.S., and both powers are likely actively working to shape an outcome they can work with.

In recent weeks, France had already signaled readiness to see Compaoré exit the scene (a letter from François Hollande promised Compaoré French support should he seek to exercise his talents in some international organization); reporter Nicolas Germain of France 24 told me today on Twitter that French diplomatic sources had commented to him that Burkina “unlike some countries, has a credible opposition.” As Germain commented: “that says everything.”