Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 211

The Growing Partisan Gap On Israel

Although Americans’ sympathies remain broadly on the side of the Jewish state, our views on the conflict are becoming more politically polarized:

73 percent of Republicans favor the Israeli side, compared to 44 percent of Democrats, and 45 percent of Independents. Moreover, this partisan gap has widened considerably since 1978, when the gap between Republicans and Democrats was only 5 percentage points.

Flagging the same poll, Ed Morrissey remarks that the dramatic increase in Republican support “may end up being worrisome to Israel in the long run”:

The US has a long history of bipartisanship when it comes to our alliance with Israel, even though some members of both parties have criticized it for various reasons. If this becomes another issue of partisanship testing, that will not benefit Israel, nor would it benefit our own politics.

On the other hand, every demographic in the survey has a plurality sympathizing with Israel by a wide margin. Even among the lowest levels of sympathy for Israel — liberal Democrats and religiously unaffiliated — the margins are double-digit at 39/21 and 36/20. There are substantial differences about the level of sympathy in the age demos, but not the balance of sympathy. The youngest demo, 18-29YOs, favor Israel 2:1 at 44/22, while among seniors it rises to 60/9.

Philip Klein adds:

Some political reporters like to talk about the “Sheldon Adelson primary” — of Republican candidates seeking the approval of the pro-Israel casino magnate. As the Pew poll shows, however, the whole idea of of an “Adelson primary” is a sloppy description of what’s happening within the GOP. In reality, support for Israel among Republican primary voters is broad and deep. A 77-percent to 4-percent issue among predominantly Christian conservatives is not representative of the party platform being overtaken by a small cabal of Jews. No Republican has a chance at the nomination if he or she is perceived as anything but a staunch supporter of Israel, and this goes far beyond Adelson.

But that means, of course, further enabling of Greater Israel’s maximal goals, and an ever-spiraling antagonism with much of the Muslim world. And you wonder why I’m resigned to an endless war.

Running Without A Campaign

Lynn Vavreck sees it as hazardous for Hillary Clinton:

This is the danger for Mrs. Clinton in running a quasi-campaign instead of a real campaign and holding off on discussing the things she would do as president if she were to run and win. She risks campaigning in a low-information environment of her own making. And that means that instead of debating whether her tax policies would help the middle class, we are left to talk about whether her conception of herself as not “truly well-off” or “dead broke” means she cannot relate to the middle class. Instead of asking what qualities she would favor in nominating justices to the Supreme Court, we instead focus on whether she hid or changed her public position on gay equality over the decades because it was politically expedient.

My deeper worry is that this kind of blah blah tour is where Clinton is most comfortable. Because she does actually and rather aggressively suck at politics itself:

Consider that Clinton has run in three elections. Her two wins in New York are not all that impressive, really. Instead of facing the powerful and well-funded Rudy Giuliani in 2000, who withdrew for health reasons, she was up against Representative Rick Lazio. Lazio only entered the race five months before it ended. And in her re-election in 2006, the New York GOP let a Yonkers mayor, John Spencer, be the sacrificial lamb…

And of course she lost the only electoral race where she faced a credible opponent. In the 2008 race for the Democratic nomination she blew a massive early lead. One of the only reasons she did not get completely pasted by Barack Obama was his horrible off-the-record flub about rural voters “clinging to their guns and religion.” Clinton immediately invented a strategy later used by the Tea Party and Glenn Beck of trying to tar Obama as an alien and radical. In their April 16 debate in Pennsylvania, she tried to highlight Obama’s “relationship with Reverend Farrakhan” and portray him as a supporter of Hamas. This strategy failed utterly.

If I were a Democrat, I’d worry about her useless stump speeches, her increasingly regal and dynastic affect, her lack of any appreciable political instincts, and her propensity to regard herself as a beleaguered victim. Apart from all that, I couldn’t be more impressed.

Are We Abetting Central American Gangs?

Taking a hard look at the refugee crisis, Frum blames it primarily on US immigration policy, which has unwittingly strengthened the gangs from which these children are fleeing. “If you want to migrate to the United States from Central America,” he writes, “you will probably have to seek the aid of a criminal gang. That fact implies a few follow-on facts”:

First, for all the talk of the “desperation” of migrants, those who travel here from Central America are not the poorest of the poor.

The poorest of the poor can’t afford it. Illegal migrants either have the funds to pay for the journey—or can at least receive credit against their expected future earnings. The traffickers don’t only move people. They also connect them to the illegal labor market in North America, and then act as debt collectors once the migrants have settled in their new homes. Salvadorans in the United States are less likely to be poor than other Hispanics are: illegal migration networks don’t have any use for people who can’t generate an income. On the other hand, Salvadorans are also less likely to own a home—their smugglers have first claim on their earnings.

Second, if these latest migrants gain residency rights in the United States, the gangs who brought them to the country will be enriched and strengthened. Gangs, like any business, ultimately depend on their customers. If too many people find that their $5,000 to $8,000 investments in border-crossing are not paying off, the illegal-migration business will dwindle. If, on the other hand, the gangs succeed in exploiting the opportunity Obama created, they’ll attract more business in the future.

Third, each wave of illegal settlement induces and produces the opportunities for the next. The unaccompanied minors smuggled into the United States this year all have relatives back home. If resettled in the United States, they’ll acquire the wherewithal to pay for the transit of those relatives. And, of course, many of these minors either currently belong to the gangs carrying out the smuggling or will soon be recruited by them. That’s another way to pay the cost of the trip.

Recent Dish on the sources of the crisis here and here.

Mental Health Break

Far more entertaining than butter melting:

An Archbishop Heightens The Contradictions, Ctd

Yesterday, we got a glimpse of the actual affidavit filed by the former chancellor of the archdiocese of St Paul and Minneapolis that charges the Archbishop and others of continuing to ignore child sex abusers in their midst. Jennifer Haselberger appears to be a rare figure who actually cared about the safety and welfare of children in the archdiocese and tried to keep the entire place operating professionally and legally. And failed on both counts. What makes this case different is that the cover-up of child-abuse is occurring long after new rules were put in place to prevent it, and we have in Haselberger an unprecedented whistle-blower from the inside:

Most clergy abuse lawsuits rely on decades-old documents, testimony from a handful of experts on church law, and depositions from recalcitrant church officials and abusive priests. Top chancery officials rarely come forward to disclose the church’s secrets. [Attorney Jeff] Anderson called the affidavit “historically important” in the history of the clergy sexual abuse scandal in the U.S. Catholic Church.

Haselberger resigned in April 2013 in protest over the archdiocese’s handling of abuse cases. She contacted MPR News in July 2013 and disclosed how Nienstedt and other top officials gave special payments to abusive priests, failed to report alleged sex crimes to police and kept some abusers in ministry. Her account was especially stunning because it involved decisions made by church leaders as recently as April 2013.

To add to this toxic stew, Nienstedt is fighting back against “multiple allegations” of inappropriate sexual encounters with seminarians, priests and other men – including one accused of child abuse. He is also – surprise! – an almost fanatical opponent of marriage equality and a constant, obsessive voice against the evils of homosexuality. Dreher flips out at the prospect of another theocon revealed as a fucked-up fraud:

Haselberger says what drove her to quit in anger was realizing how little the archdiocese cared about protecting children, only protecting priests — even priests they knew were guilty — and how vulnerable children were. She says that Archbishop Nienstedt was such a micromanager that he would send stern notes (“nastygrams”) to chancery employees for such petty offenses as leaving the lights on, or not wearing a tie — but when it came to dealing with clerical sexual misconduct, he was seemingly indifferent … If Haselberger is telling the truth, it staggers the mind to think that Pope Francis — who has the right to remove Nienstedt — tolerates this man remaining in charge a single day longer.

It will and should be another acid test for this Pope on child abuse. This is about enforcing rules that have now long been implemented; it’s about retaining even a sliver of moral credibility; and it’s about protecting children from psychologically damaged products of the church’s incoherent and impossible teachings on sex. I wish I were more hopeful. But who can be, at this point?

Criminally Bad Parenting

Lenore Skenazy defends Debra Harrell, a mother who was imprisoned for sending her nine-year-old daughter to a park alone:

Just because something happened on Law & Order doesn’t mean it’s happening all the time in real life. Make “what if?” thinking the basis for an arrest and the cops can collar anyone. “You let your son play in the front yard? What if a man drove up and kidnapped him?” “You let your daughter sleep in her own room? What if a man climbed through the window?” etc.

These fears pop into our brains so easily, they seem almost real. But they’re not. Our crime rate today is back to what it was when gas was 29 cents a gallon, according to The Christian Science Monitor. It may feel like kids are in constant danger, but they are as safe (if not safer) than we were when our parents let us enjoy the summer outside, on our own, without fear of being arrested.

Friedersdorf throws his hands up:

Statistically speaking, the South Carolina mother would almost certainly be putting her daughter in more danger if she strapped her into the car beside her for a hypothetical one-hour daily commute.

No one would arrest her for that. It wouldn’t surprise me if the child would more likely suffer harm sitting in a McDonald’s in front of a laptop, presumably eating fast food at least reasonably often, rather than spending summer days playing outdoors in a park with lots of parents. I can’t say with certainty that she’d be statistically safer. But neither have the South Carolina officials who arrested this woman.

Jessica Grose asked law professor Dorothy Roberts “if state laws give any specifics about how parents should behave.” Her response:

The short answer is that every state has its own child maltreatment laws and definitions of neglect—and they are all very vague with no specifics. Most include within neglect failure to provide adequate supervision. South Carolina’s child welfare law is actually more specific than most, but still doesn’t specify the age—”supervision appropriate to the child’s age and development.” But how does the judge/jury determine what’s appropriate? I don’t know of any law that specifies the age or the precise nature of failure to supervise.

Chait is disturbed how “reporters and onlookers alike are united in disgust at Harrell”:

America has decided to punish Harrell if she fails to acquire full-time employment; her employment does not provide her with adequate child care; and the community punishes her for failing to live up to unobtainable middle-class child-care standards. There are many perpetrators in this story. Debra Harrell was not one of them.

Balko connects Harrell’s arrest with recent stories about parents getting in trouble with the law for behavior such as leaving children in cars, as well as a recent case in which a mother was arrested for using narcotics while pregnant. Katie McDonough provides some context on the latter:

The Tennessee law is the first in the nation to charge a pregnant woman with criminal assault if she uses certain drugs, but remains part of a national trend that makes women vulnerable to detention and incarceration because of their pregnancies. An additional 17 states currently consider prenatal drug use a civil offense, South Carolina law handles drug use during pregnancy as child abuse, Alabama prosecutes pregnant women using a law intended to protect children from explosive meth labs and several statutes across the country have been used to the same ends.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee is currently seeking plaintiffs to challenge the law, and released a statement calling it “dangerous” and noting that the law “unconstitutionally singles out new mothers struggling with addiction for criminal assault charges.”

And Art Carden goes into more detail on the risks of leaving kids in cars:

According to this site, 623 kids have died from heatstroke from being left in cars since 1998. From the bar graph in the middle of the page, there doesn’t appear to be a clear upward or downward trend. The total from 1998-present is only about 3/4 of the number of kids who died from poisonings in 2010 alone. As tragic as these deaths are, it’s a mistake to say “if it saves one life, it’s worth it.” I wasn’t able to find data with a quick Google search, but my guess is that the risk of injury or death from a kid getting hit while walking in the parking lot–even while holding hands and looking both ways and all that–is as great or greater than the risk of a kid being injured while being left in the car.

“Kids dying in hot cars” looks to me like the 2014 version of the 2001 “Summer of the Shark” hysteria. It plays to some of our worst fears. It could happen to anyone. It ranks pretty low on the list of mortality risks, though.

A Failed Index

The Fund For Peace released the 2014 edition of its Failed States Index late last month, changing its name to the less pejorative “Fragile States Index.” Reviewing the extensive criticism the index attracts from academics and policymakers, Lionel Beehner and Joseph Young discuss some ways in which it could be improved:

For the tool to be useful, it should be predictive. Can we sort countries based on their susceptibility to certain undesirable outcomes? Yes, and probably better than just doing back-of-the-envelope guesses, which is what this arbitrary ranking essentially is. A look back at Ukraine’s 2013 score, for instance, gives no evidence that the country was about to be carved up. In 2010, states like Syria, Libya, Egypt and Tunisia fell into the same bracket as Brazil, Turkey, and Russia.

Another way perhaps to avoid its perennial failure at anticipating events is for the index to examine provinces, given the vast amount of sub-variation within countries. That might require a messier map of the world, but at least it would be more accurate (and account for what anthropologists call “alternatively governed” spaces).

A better a way forward might be to think about clustering countries.

The differences among countries may be ordered but any kind of exact ranking obscures the reality of the situation as the South Sudan/Somalia example demonstrates. Most reasonable people would say both states have serious internal (and external) threats, but ranking them reminds us of the obscure debates historians have over who was worse: Hitler or Stalin. Those dictators might be in a category or cluster, which includes Pol Pot or Idi Amin, but ranking them is nonsensical.

Miles Evers argues that the FSI’s ahistorical, quantitative approach “misleads policymakers to believe that external intervention can be a proper reaction to rather than a cause of state fragility”:

The flaw with the FSI isn’t terminology. It is that its methodology masks the painful lessons of the past in a stale, numerical ranking of present circumstance. Claire Leigh rightly criticizes, “It gives us no clue why certain countries have the dubious distinction of topping the chart. It offers no policy prognoses or prescriptions.” With recent crises like the current ISIS incursion into Iraq putting the issue of unilateral intervention back on the table and giving think tanks greater currency in policy circles, this lacuna threatens to repeat history to the detriment of our own national interests, regardless of whether or not we call it a Failed or Fragile State. FSI’s name change serves as a reminder of how incomplete analyses can lead us to strategic blunders of the Vietnam and Iraq-type.

Psyched About CBT, Ctd

Headline at @sullydish today: “Psyched About CBT.” Not what you’re thinking, kinksters. http://t.co/yK84nrN9F5

— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) July 12, 2014

Judging by our inbox, Dan was not the only one to notice the other meaning. On a more serious note, a reader writes:

I realize you’re trying to be balanced here, but Jenny Diski’s article makes it pretty clear she’s never actually tried cognitive behavioral therapy and is in fact just opposed to a political philosophy. I’ve been in and out of talk therapy for anxiety and depression all of my life, and my last therapist (not one specifically trained in CBT, as far as I know) pointed me toward The Feeling Good Handbook by David Burns, which is a do-it-yourself CBT manual. It helped to make me realize what I was thinking and which parts were really just in my head, and now at least some of the time I can short-circuit my own worst-case-scenario thinking. It has made me happier.

Diski dismissively says that “CBT aims to get the patient symptom-free, back to work and paying her taxes” – as though that weren’t the goal of other forms of therapy. Maybe I’m odd in that I’m happiest when I’m feeling productive, but that sounds like a pretty excellent goal to me.

Another also shares his story:

I’m a 30-year-old who just finished my 16th week of CBT after a suicide attempt in March.

I have found that working with my therapist on identifying thought patterns and behaviors surrounding my depression and anxiety to be of tremendous help. One of the best things to which I can compare my thought pattern when I begin to feel anxious or depressed is sliding down an icy hill in a car. Having the skills from CBT is like having just come out of a driving class and knowing that while you might not be able to stop the slide completely, you can control it and avoid the crash. The ability to pull back and distinguish what-I-know from what-my-mind-is-projecting is a skill that I lacked before therapy.

But as well as it does work for some of us, it’s not a silver bullet either. In addition to the CBT I am also taking a daily antidepressant and the occasional anti-anxiety pill when I can anticipate that certain situations are too much to handle on my own. My therapist is terrific, and we’ve adjusted the antidepressants when the first prescription wasn’t working as planned.

Another:

As the guy who wrote this reader email long ago, I thought I’d discuss my experience with cognitive behavioral therapy.

I have OCD, with an emphasis on the obsessive thoughts. To put it bluntly, CBT is the most effective treatment for obsessive thoughts that I have had. The counselor I had was a Buddhist and definitely not a “I’m going to make everything happy and great for you” kind of guy. In fact, one of the key elements of the CBT I had was acceptance of the obsessive thoughts. This is counterintuitive, because if you have OCD the number-one thing you want to do is get rid of the obsessive thought.

If I have a thought that I’m like Hitler, CBT teaches me to accept it like a leaf that passes over me as I lie in a stream. This is bitter medicine, because one’s instinct with a thought like that is to fight it over and over and try to rationalize it and thus rid yourself of it. But one of the key insights of CBT is that you cannot rationalize or “defeat” the obsessive thought. In fact, the only way I’ve found that you even move past the obsessive thought is if you allow it to exist within you. It will bother you immensely while it’s there. But when you mindfully acknowledge it rather than try to get rid of it, you do find that your mind moves on to more pleasant things.

My one criticism of CBT is the limited number of sessions. It’s admirable not to want to charge people money for endless counseling, but I have found it valuable to get a “tune up” once in awhile. Talking to a CBT counselor is helpful, and I don’t think should be cut off forever after just a couple of months.

My experience, of course, may not be universal for others with OCD. But I thought it was worth sharing.

Songs Of Love And Money

Joshua Clover argues that the “world of country music is structured by two cycles; one we might call the cycle of life, the other the cycle of money”:

If the former sounds saccharine, it nonetheless moves us. It travels an infinite loop whose signposts are birth, the (oft-coded) entry into sexuality, marriage, childbirth, death. Sometimes divorce appears, without much interrupting the orbit. It recalls Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, which shows that even the most fantastic tales are snapped together from repetitive units, always in the same order. The great formalization is Lorrie Morgan’s “Something in Red,” assigning inflection points between birth and death to various dress colors—from the red of sexual adventure to the maternity blues—after which the child commences its own cycle.

It is a story of generations and repetitions, in short. Its signal moment comes when we discover that a tale of crazy kids is being told by their parents, once crazy kids themselves. Thus the reveal of Trisha Yearwood’s “She’s in Love With the Boy” [seen above]: “My daddy said you wasn’t worth a lick / When it came to brains you got the short end of the stick / But he was wrong and, honey, you are too / Katie looks at Tommy like I still look at you.” Lather, rinse, repeat.

The other cycle is much shorter, but no less prevalent. Punching in on Monday, it trudges toward the Friday whistle; the weekend runs from paycheck to the local bar, the working man’s church. Maybe a moment of romantic or domestic happiness, maybe just a hangover; then Monday coffee sings its bittersweet song as all begins again.

Paying For The Chill

Iced coffee was already more expensive than hot coffee back in 2012, but prices keep climbing. Gabrielle Sierra explains why the cold brew can cost as much as a cocktail:

Iced coffee costs come from all sides, with the most obvious also being the easiest to overlook: the ice. “People think ice is free,” says Michael Pollack of Brooklyn Roasting Company, where a 24 oz iced coffee is currently $4.50. “Ice is a fortune. If you think we go through coffee fast, double that for ice. We actually store ten gallon refrigerator boxes of ice, because our needs are so tremendous.”

But the rising cost of beans – more of which are needed for cold coffee than hot - is also to blame:

In May, the New York Times went into detail about a coffee fungus that attacked fields in Central America, leaving less product to purchase. And fungus isn’t the only way mother nature is striking back at coffee lovers. According to Forbes.com, “The price of Arabica coffee beans has surged almost 100% from a level of 106 cents per pound to around 220 cents in mid April, due to tight supply as a result of prolonged drought in Brazil, followed by recent floods.”

And no doubt baristas are able to get away with charging more for iced coffee during the hot summer months. So if you need to save money on the surging price of coffee, you could always join the half of the world population that prefers the instant kind:

Americans have proved pretty exceptional in their utter disinterest in warming up to the most convenient method of coffee-making. “The U.S. is entirely unique in its aversion to instant coffee,” [industry analyist Dana] LaMendola said. “Even in Europe, where fresh coffee is preferred, instant coffee is still seen as acceptable for at home and on the go consumption. In the U.S. the view is just much more negative,” she said.

Instant coffee sales in the U.S. have barely budged since 2008, and even fell marginally last year to just over $960 million. While that might sound like a lot, it’s actually a paltry fraction of the $30-plus billion U.S. coffee market. Instant coffee accounts for a smaller percentage of all retail brewed coffee by volume in North America (barely 10 percent) than in any other region. By comparison, it accounts for over 60 percent in Asia Pacific, over 50 percent in Eastern Europe, over 40 percent in the Middle East and Africa, over 30 percent in Latin America, and over 25 percent in Western Europe. …

Americans might like their coffee fast, but that doesn’t mean they want it instant.