Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 132

Split Decisions On Voter ID

Opponents of voter ID requirements scored two court victories this week against controversial laws in Wisconsin and Texas:

On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued an emergency order blocking a voter ID law Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed in 2011. The court cited no reason for its move, which is common for emergency orders. Voting rights advocates challenging the law had charged that if it were in effect in November it would “virtually guarantee chaos at the polls,” the New York Times reported, as the state would not have enough time to issue IDs and train poll workers before the election. There are about 300,000 registered voters in Wisconsin who lack an ID. Most of them are black or Hispanic. Also on Thursday, a federal trial court in Texas struck down that state’s voter ID law, ruling that it overly burdened minority voters, who are less likely to have a government-issued ID, and as such violated the Voting Rights Act. More than 600,000 registered voters in Texas lack appropriate IDs.

But North Carolina voters weren’t as lucky:

Voters in North Carolina will not have access to same-day registration or out-of-precinct voting in this midterm election, after the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday blocked an appellant court order to stay parts of a sweeping voting law that voting-rights advocates say could leave many voters disenfranchised come November.

Richard L. Hasen make sense of these ruling:

Sometimes (as in Wisconsin) the Supreme Court has been protecting voters; at other times (as in Ohio and North Carolina) it appears to be protecting the ability of states to impose whatever voting rules they want.

But there is a consistent theme in the court’s actions, which we can call the “Purcell principle” after the 2006 Supreme Court case Purcell v. Gonzalez: Lower courts should be very reluctant to change the rules just before an election, because of the risk of voter confusion and chaos for election officials. The Texas case may raise the hardest issue under the Purcell principle, and how it gets resolved will matter a lot for these types of election challenges going forward.

Waldman tells Democrats not to count on the courts to strike down voter ID laws:

[W]e shouldn’t be encouraged by the Wisconsin ruling: it doesn’t imply that the Court believes these restrictions are unconstitutional, only that it would be a mess to have them take effect just a few weeks before the election. It’s a narrow question of election procedure.

It would be going too far to say that Democrats should just abandon all court challenges to these voting laws. You never know what might happen—by the time the next major case reaches the Supreme Court, one of the five conservatives could have retired. But the only real response is the much more difficult one: a sustained, state-by-state campaign to counter voting suppression laws by registering as many people as possible, helping them acquire the ID the state is demanding, and getting them to the polls. That’s incredibly hard, time-consuming, and resource-intensive work—much more so than filing lawsuits. But Democrats don’t have much choice.

Referring to the above chart, Philip Bump outlines the Government Accountability Office’s findings about the effects of the Kansas and Tennessee voter ID laws, which had significant impacts on turnout in 2012, especially among young and minority voters:

According to data from the states (here and here), turnout dropped 5.5 percentage points overall in Kansas and 4.5 percent in Tennessee. With registered voter pools of about 1.77 million and 4 million, respectively, that means that 34,000 Kansans and 88,000 Tennesseans likely would have voted if the new laws weren’t in place. The effects of the change weren’t evenly distributed. … Young people, black people, and newly registered voters were the groups that were more likely to see bigger drops in turnout. Sixteen percent of voters in Kansas in 2012 were under the age of 30, according to exit polls. In 2008, the group comprised 19 percent of the vote. That change wasn’t entirely due to voter ID, of course, but the GAO report suggests it played a part.

The Business Of War

Justine Drennan counts the costs of the campaign against ISIS so far:

[E]ach U.S. “strike” against the self-proclaimed Islamic State can involve several aircraft and munitions and cost up to $500,000, according to Todd Harrison, an expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based defense think tank. Harrison said the cheapest possible strike could cost roughly $50,000 — assuming a single plane dropping one of the cheaper types of bombs. … But using his $500,000 upper estimate, Saturday’s strike missions alone cost as much as $4.5 million. And those figures don’t even include the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance flights necessary to scope out targets ahead of strikes, which have helped make even the low-level campaign against the Islamic State hugely expensive. The Pentagon revealed on Monday that it has spent as much as $1.1 billion on military operations against the Islamic State since June.

But this war, among others, is great news for the companies that make those planes and bombs:

Led by Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT), the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.

Investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq, said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Chicago-based BMO Private Bank. President Barack Obama approved open-ended airstrikes this month while ruling out ground combat.

“As we ramp up our military muscle in the Mideast, there’s a sense that demand for military equipment and weaponry will likely rise,” said Ablin, who oversees $66 billion including Northrop Grumman Corp. (NOC) and Boeing Co. (BA) shares. “To the extent we can shift away from relying on troops and rely more heavily on equipment — that could present an opportunity.”

Meanwhile, Julia Harte and R. Jeffrey Smith flag a report by Conflict Armament Research, which “indicates that the Islamic State’s relatively newly-formed force has had little difficulty tapping into the huge pool of armaments fueling the conflicts in Iraq and Syria.” The group, the report shows, has gotten its hands on arms and munitions manufactured in 21 different countries, including, of course, the American equipment taken from the retreating Iraqi army. Now that the Pentagon is preparing to send more arms to the Iraqis and Syrian rebels, the jihadists are licking their chops:

On Sept. 18, Congress passed a law authorizing the Defense Department not only to re-equip Iraqi forces that lost territory and abandoned their weaponry to IS, but also to provide arms to “appropriately vetted elements of the Syrian opposition.” …

The Islamic State, meanwhile, has said it welcomes fresh opportunities to get its hands on additional Western-supplied munitions. “Look how much money America spends to fight Islam, and it ends up just being in our pockets,” says Abu Safiyya, the narrator of an Islamic State propaganda video uploaded to YouTube on June 29. Gesturing at a Ford F-350 truck parked in an Iraqi police base captured by the extremist militants over the summer, Safiyya said, “They will lose in Syria also, God willing, when they come. We will be waiting for them, God willing, to take more money from them.”

Stalker Stories

Alyssa Rosenberg doubts that the new show Stalker is really, as its creator Kevin Williamson claims, about raising awareness of the problem:

It turns out that one of the main characters on the show, a new detective assigned to the Los Angeles police department’s stalking investigations unit (Dylan McDermott), likes to do a little extracurricular creeping around himself. The message of “Stalker” is split: Stalking can be a hideous, brutal crime, but it is also a spicy little detail that can be used to give a character an exciting frisson of darkness. The National Center for Victims of Crime was so outraged by the show that Michelle Garcia, director of the organization’s Stalking Resource Center, wrote to CBS president and CEO Les Moonves to express her dismay.

Meanwhile, Emily Maloney confesses to having been one of those rare female stalkers:

Not stalked. Researched, I preferred to say. I knew where [my psychiatrist] lived and how many children she had. When she got a divorce, and the kids’ names and ages appeared in the court records, I felt a tingle of glee, just for knowing, which made me feel a little sick. My heart sped up as I scrolled through those records or ones from the county recorder’s office online. Available for anyone to see, I told myself. Public records. …

According to Robert Muller, Ph.D., professor of psychology at York University, and the author of Trauma and the Avoidant Client, there are five kinds of stalkers.

They are overwhelmingly male, lack skills to negotiate basic social interaction, and frequently stalk their victims as an act of revenge. The victims are overwhelmingly female, like my psychiatrist. The types include, in order of ascending creepy magnitude: rejected suitors, intimacy seekers, socially incompetent stalkers, resentful or revenge seekers, and predatory stalkers. Most stalker fantasies include intimacy or violence. They’re mostly of average to above average intelligence, tend to be well-educated, and just over a fifth of them stalk due to mental illness or related factors; the rest do it for anger, retaliation, or control, and they are incredibly good at rationalizing away inappropriate behaviors. Women are far less likely to stalk; when they do, it’s with the hope of increased intimacy, erotomania, or a hope for friendship. Maybe that one was me.

Face Of The Day

(News) #Malala Yousafzai is the youngest #Nobel prize winner in history. http://t.co/AsNKmlS5Ox pic.twitter.com/GQWq2QYKO6

— The Express Tribune (@etribune) October 10, 2014

She’s still just 17. Previous Dish on the incredible young woman here and here.

How Do We Get On The Same Page?

Tim Parks considers how the social function of novels has changed with the times:

How often have we been involved in conversations, at a party maybe, where four or five people ask what others think of this or that novel, only to find that no one else has read it? Even, or perhaps especially, among people who read a lot it is often difficult to find a single recently published book that we have all read. The conversation founders, literature fails to bring us together, no debate is provoked. Or to find a book to talk about we have turn to one of the blockbusters or media-hyped works of the day, something one almost feels authorized to talk about whether one has read it or not: Underworld, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Interview with a Vampire, My Struggle. Regardless of quality, regardless even of sales, since [Karl Ove] Knausgaard’s are nowhere near on a level with the others, these are books that have been as it were chosen for the conversation, perhaps precisely because it’s often embarrassingly difficult to find a book we’ve all read to settle on.

He goes on to speculate why people gravitate toward some titles over others:

The serialized novel has been replaced by serialized television fiction that has become so successful at generating discussion that those of us who didn’t follow The Sopranos or The Wire were often made to feel left out. Meantime, in the bookshops, readers choose from literally thousands of recently published titles. In the countries of western Europe a good 50 percent of those books will come from abroad; so people’s reading is not focused on the society they live in and the stories read are often set elsewhere.

In 2011 when I ran a little survey in a Dutch bookshop on the kind of novels people were reading, younger readers in particular said they often chose to read popular foreign, particularly American or English, authors—Dan Brown or Ian McEwan or Philip Roth or Zadie Smith—so that they would have a common subject of conversation when meeting other young people during their summer travels. Their choices seemed random and were taken regardless of quality. Rather than a situation where people are naturally finding themselves reading the same thing and then talking about it, some readers are responding to celebrity in the hope that what they read will enable them to join an international conversation.

The Best Of The Dish Today

A reader writes:

I have had to correct this misstatement numerous times with friends, and now I’m disappointed to see you parroting Kristof, who is parroting Allah-knows who else. The data from the Pew Report [pdf] showing majorities in many Muslim countries in favor of the death penalty for apostasy come only from those Muslims who believe Sharia law should be the law of the land.

So not all Muslims, by any means. What percentage of Muslims across the diverse Muslim world favor Sharia law? The key graph from Pew on executing apostates is below. And when you do the math (and yes, fair warning that I usually do it wrong), you find that 63 percent of Egypt’s Muslims, 58 percent of Jordanian Muslims, 78 percent of Pakistani Muslims, and 53 percent of Malaysian Muslims believe that if you decide you don’t believe in Islam any more, you should be executed. Think about that for a minute.

Central Asian and South-Eastern European Muslims are very different, as are Indonesians. You’ll notice also that in one of the least devout of the Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa, Tunisia, only 16 percent favor the death penalty for non-belief. It does not shock me that Tunisia’s democratic revolution is the only one that has survived.

The more devout you are, the more you tend to favor the state enforcing religious doctrine, Pew also finds. Not how poor you are, how devout you are.

But variety and diversity exists as well. And nowhere has Islam come closer to a reconciliation with modernity than in America. American Muslims are far more like American non-Muslims than Muslims in any other country. On the core question of religious liberty, 56% of American Muslims “believe that many religions can lead to eternal life … Across the world, a median of just 18% of Muslims worldwide think religions other than Islam can lead to eternal life.” Here’s another big difference between Islam in America, and Islam elsewhere:

About half of U.S. Muslims say that all (7%) or most (41%) of their close friends are followers of Islam, and half say that some (36%) or hardly any (14%) of their close friends are Muslim. By contrast, Muslims in other countries nearly universally report that all or most of their close friends are Muslim (global median of 95%). Even Muslims who also are religious minorities in their countries are less likely than U.S. Muslims to have friendships with non-Muslims. For example, 78% of Russian Muslims and 96% of Thai Muslims say most or all of their close friends are Muslim.

I think it’s essential that this is better known in America, and that dumb conflations of Islam here and around the world – leading to foul prejudice and discrimination and fear – be challenged at every point. At the same time, I just don’t think the extreme and barbaric views of so many Muslims around the world can be denied. They are dangerous for their own societies and for ours. No one should not be intimidated into silence about it.

Today, the debate about Islam continued – see the thread here. We have updates on the Senate races where the GOP is in some trouble – in South Dakota and Kansas. I pushed back against the Beltway bullshit that the Obama presidency is suddenly a failure – au contraire! The intervention in Syria is another almighty clusterfuck that the US should have avoided at all costs; and our experiment in new media is chugging along.

The most popular post of the day was my defense of Sam Harris and Bill Maher against Ben Affleck and Nick Kristof; followed by my defense of religious freedom in Gordon College.

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. 29 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. And drop us an email; we love hearing from new subscribers. The latest:

I’m another long-time holdout who finally subscribed. I’m glad I finally did – I’ve been a reader for many years and learned a great deal from you and your readers, for which I am grateful.

BTW, I was in the Dish once, in “The View From Your Recession” series. I was the corporate headhunter who dropped out and moved to Peru. I met my wife there, and our son was conceived and born there as well. Now that the economy has recovered in my industry (construction), we’re all back in the States, and I’m back at my old job! Business is better than ever, in fact.

Anyway, just wanted to say thanks for all the awesomeness over the years.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Sydney locals line up along the waters edge dressed in fluro costumes in an attempt to create Bondi’s largest fluro wave stretching from South Bondi to North Bondi at Bondi Beach on October 10, 2014 in Sydney, Australia. The event is to raise awareness on World Mental Day and show support for everyone who has ever suffered, or knows someone who has suffered with depression and other disorders including bi-polar and anxiety. By Ryan Pierse/Getty Images.)

Will “Tightening The Borders” Keep Ebola Out?

Thomas Eric Duncan, the first ebola patient diagnosed in the US, succumbed to the virus yesterday, as the Centers for Disease Control announced that five key airports would begin screening passengers arriving from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone for signs of illness. Amanda Taub outlines the new screening protocols:

According to the CDC, over 94 percent of travelers from those three affected countries enter the US through one of the five airports that will implement the screening measures: JFK in New York City, Newark, Washington-Dulles, Chicago-O’Hare, and Atlanta. JFK, which receives more than half of those passengers, will begin screening on Saturday, October 11. Travelers will be screened at the border, immediately after they go through passport control, in a special area of the airport. Customs and Border Protection officers will take passengers’ temperatures and ask them a series of questions about their health and possible Ebola exposure.

Passengers who do not have fevers or any history of exposure to Ebola will be given information about the virus and asked to complete a temperature monitoring chart at home. Those who do have fevers or who give answers that raise concerns about possible Ebola exposure will be referred to a CDC officer in the airport, and then to public health authorities if it is determined that further monitoring is necessary.

Jonathan Cohn expects that the main benefit of these screenings will be psychological:

Experts have generally been skeptical that increased screening would make a difference, in part because the new precautions rely on candor from foreign visitors. Remember, similar screenings already take place at the points of departure in West Africa. Duncan got out of Liberia by lying and stating that he’d had no contact with an Ebola patient.

But a secondary goal of the new steps is to calm the American psyche and there’s a case for that. If it takes some extra vigilance and a quick temperature check to make the American people feel safe, and if it doesn’t divert precious resources, it’s probably a price worth paying—in much the same way that security theater in the airports, following September 11, made it possible for the flying public and eventually the rest of the public to return to some form of normalcy.

And Maryn McKenna argues that emergency rooms, not airports, are the spaces we should be worrying about:

Screening passengers for fever makes it look like someone is doing something. (It’s also a surprisingly active area of engineering research; check these post-SARS papers from 2005, 2006, 2009, 2013 and this year.) But as Duncan’s case demonstrated, the critical point for “border control” of Ebola may be not the airport, but the emergency room. We already know — have known for years, in fact — that our emergency-care system is underfunded, overstressed, and asked to bear a larger burden for the health of the mass public than either hospital or outpatient care do. It is very disappointing that Duncan’s travel history was ignored in his first encounter with Texas Presbyterian — but as Texas health journalist Laura Beil pointed out on Twitter yesterday, not even slightly surprising given the churn of uninsured patients through the state’s big ERs.

Jason Millman checks in with some ER doctors:

One ER doctor in Denver, Eric Lavonas, said there was no Ebola panic yet, while another in the Bronx, Dan Murphy, said several patients came in on Tuesday fearing they were infected. Sudip Bose, an ER physician working in Chicago and Texas, said he’s seen an increase in visits after an inbound flight scare in Dallas this week. Hamad Husainy, an ER physician in Alabama, said two people who were recently hired as “scribes” to document patient visits quit those jobs because they feared being exposed to Ebola.

New York-based physician Bob Glatter said he thinks people are still being reasonable about the extremely low risk of contracting the disease in the United States. However, he thinks Ebola fears may start to pick up after Duncan’s death on Wednesday and with flu season rapidly approaching.

Pointing to a series of polls suggesting that a significant number of Americans are worried that they or their loved ones might get the disease, Waldman comments on the hysteria:

We’ve had only one case in America, and while there may be a few more like him—people who went to a place where the disease was spreading and returned before becoming symptomatic, all while evading the precautions that were in place—it won’t be more than a few. You aren’t going to get it. But fear always wins. Fear sure wins on TV, where they’re actually asking questions like “Could the virus mutate and become airborne?” And we’re all hard-wired for fear, because fear is highly adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint. The australopithecine who’s terrified of every bump in the night is the one who survives to pass on his genes.

Meanwhile, the totally-not-a-race-baiter Rush Limbaugh is telling his listeners that Barack Obama wants to let white Americans get Ebola as revenge for slavery. So of course we can all stay rational.

Meanwhile, Spanish ebola patient Teresa Romero Ramos’s dog Excalibur was put down yesterday. Barbie Latza Nadeau reports:

Despite an online petition that garnered more than 400,000 signatures and half a million tweets to try to save the dog’s life, a campaign launched by Romero’s husband Javier Limón from his quarantined quarters in the Carlos III hospital, the dog was euthanized on Wednesday evening in the couple’s apartment in suburban Madrid. Armed guards kept animal rights activists shouting “assassins” at bay. The dog, which was never tested for the Ebola virus, was put to sleep before being removed from the locked-down apartment. The body will be incinerated at a medical waste plant in Madrid. According to Spanish press reports, the dog’s corpse will not be tested for the virus, so no one will ever know whether or not Excalibur had the lethal disease.

Marc Champion puzzles over the outcry to save Excalibur:

I don’t remember people clashing with police to persuade their governments to do more to help stop the spread of Ebola in Africa, where more than 3,400 human beings have died from the disease. Indeed, an online petition to persuade the U.S. government to fast-track research for an Ebola drug has so far received 152,534 signatures. By that measure, we care half as much about finding a cure for Ebola as saving a dog.

Either way, Amy Davidson points out, neither mercy for Excalibur nor security theater at airports addresses the actual problem:

If it takes a dog to remind people to not be senselessly fearful in the face of a disease—not to just smother everything that’s frightening—Excalibur will have a real legacy. But that’s only true if the perspective he opens is broad: we can’t just deal with Ebola by looking at dog pictures while trying to close airports and banish images of Africa. There’s another set of scenes, the ones that we have been looking away from for months, in West Africa, where children orphaned by Ebola are fending for themselves. In Sierra Leone, gravediggers have gone on strike; it’s dangerous work, and they say that they haven’t been paid.

(Photo: A member of Bellevue’s Hospital staff wears protective clothing during a demonstration on how they would receive a suspected Ebola patient on October 8, 2014 in New York City. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Face Of The Day

U.S. Air Force personnel put up tents to house a 25-bed hospital for sick Liberian health workers as part of Operation United Assistance in Monrovia, Liberia on October 9, 2014. U.S. President Barack Obama has committed up to 4,000 troops in West Africa to combat the Ebola epidemic, which has killed at least 3,400 people. By John Moore/Getty Images.

A Short Life Remembered

Ta-Nehisi interviews Lucia McBath, mother of Jordan Davis:

It’s been almost two years since her son was murdered by a man who took offense to his music. The murderer was Michael Dunn. After shooting the boy, Dunn drove to a motel with his girlfriend. He ordered pizza. He mixed a few cocktails. Then, the next day, he turned himself in and claimed that he was defending himself against a shotgun-wielding Davis. No shotgun was ever found. In his first trial, Dunn was convicted of attempted murder, for shooting—unjustifiably—at Davis’s friends. He was not convicted of murdering Jordan Davis after the jury deadlocked. The state of Florida retried the case, and this time convicted Dunn of first-degree murder. …

Davis hailed from the striving class of America.

He grew up with all the comforts and possibilities that black people associate with Atlanta, where he was raised, and which Americans at large associate with middle-class life. And yet African Americans raised in such circumstances understand that in so many ways they are not that far removed from the block. Many of them are just a generation away, and they still have cousins, brothers, and uncles struggling. Their country cannot see this complexity, and thinks of the entire mass as the undeserving poor—which is to say, in the language of our country, criminal.

“For these people, The Cosby Show was just amusement,” McBath said. “They don’t know that in the black community the Cosbys exist. They don’t know that we educate our children, we train up our children, we have fathers, nurturing, and supporting. We have that. But that’s the America that a lot of people don’t know exists, and they don’t know because they don’t want to see it.”

Kansas Is Key

Earlier this week, Andrew Prokop observed that “Kansas independent Senate candidate Greg Orman is the sole candidate who’s actually risen in the estimate of his state’s voters in recent weeks”:

Sean Trende calls Orman’s opponent, Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, “the most vulnerable Republican incumbent”:

Orman does have real problems as a candidate, which, over the course of a full campaign, would probably drag him down. In particular, refusing to declare which party you will caucus with eventually invites people to fill in the blanks in their own minds as they focus in on the race. Given that most things in Orman’s past point toward him at least sympathizing with Democrats, it seems unlikely that people would conclude that he is a Republican. But in a short campaign, anything can happen.

Nate Cohn explains why the race is so important:

If Mr. Orman wins, it could deal a big blow to the G.O.P.’s overall chances.

Think about it this way: Well into August, most assumed that the Republicans had a 100 percent chance of winning Kansas. If the state were secure for the G.O.P., Leo, The Upshot’s Senate model, would give the Republicans a 78 percent chance of retaking the chamber. (Leo currently gives the Republicans a 61 percent chance of winning the Senate.)

Without Kansas, the Republicans would probably need to win both Alaska and Iowa. That’s certainly possible because the Republicans appear to lead in both states. Leo gives the Republicans only a 54 percent chance of taking the Senate if they lose Kansas, not much better than a coin flip.

But Harry Enten warns that Kansas voters are still making up their minds:

With Orman’s lead, why doesn’t the FiveThirtyEight model give him an even better chance of winning? The electorate in Kansas is unusually fluid for such a competitive race. We’re only a month into this campaign, and the race is still developing. We can see this by looking at the Marist poll. Only 43 percent of Kansas voters strongly supported their preferred candidate in Kansas. In Kansas’s gubernatorial race, it’s 55 percent. In Iowa’s Senate race, which Marist polled at the same time as the Kansas election, 57 percent of voters strongly supported their choice. In North Carolina’s Senate race, it’s 50 percent of voters.

The FiveThirtyEight model shows something similar. There are more voters unattached to major candidates in Kansas than in the average competitive race.

Cassidy provides some background on Orman:

Orman, a private-equity investor with a net worth of somewhere between twenty million and eighty-six million dollars, according to campaign disclosures, looks, in some ways, like a moderate Republican along the lines of Bob Dole, the longtime senior senator from Kansas. Orman is a deficit hawk, he wants tax reform, and he’s very pro-business. In other ways, though, he tilts towards the Democrats. He supports campaign-finance reform, abortion rights, (somewhat) stricter gun laws, and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented aliens. In 2008, he briefly entered the Kansas senate race as a Democrat, withdrawing before the party primary. “Let’s be honest—he’s a Democrat,” Senator John McCain said last month. “He walks like a duck and he quacks like a duck and he is a duck.”

Whether that’s true or not, Harry Reid and his colleagues would much prefer to deal with Orman rather than have McConnell running things.