Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 225

Cooling Off With Compost, Ctd

A reader says the case for no-till farming is more complicated than it seems:

While the evaporation argument made by the Ars Technica article is valid, I don’t see the benefit from the change in albedo - the amount of sunlight reflected from the Earth’s surface. During most of the hot and sunny portion of the summer, for example, the crops we grow on our family farm in Missouri will have grown tall (corn) or canopied (soybeans) so that the residue is in shadow. Other crops like winter wheat are planted and harvested on a different cycle, so there might be more benefits from the effect on albedo.

Regarding carbon affects, there are drawbacks to no-till systems. Typically, more herbicide is required to kill weeds, and more nitrogen (which is produced with fossil energy) is required for fertilizer. Farmers argue about the comparative yields, but generally, flat land farmers still use conventional tillage. A recent USDA analysis shows that 35.5 percent of US cropland was planted with no tillage in 2009. No-till use has increased a great deal since it began to be adopted in the 1980s, but even in the US it’s still used on a minority of farms. There’s research under way at the Economic Research Service of the USDA on the potential of various methods to mitigate carbon dioxide additions to the atmosphere. Here‘s an example of their analysis [partly illustrated in the above graph].

Overall, higher temperatures and the greater risks and uncertainty of more extreme weather conditions are driving forecasts for 15- to 20-percent reductions in crop yields over the next 25 to 50 years. The implications of those forecasts are sobering.

The Past Is A Place You Can Visit

Susan Cheever, author of the recently-released e.e.cummings: A Life, reveals a mystery that haunted her while working on the poet’s biography: his father was killed and his mother injured in a 1926 car accident caused by driving over railroad tracks into the path of an oncoming train. How could the pair have missed it hurtling toward them? The incident, never fully explained in previous books about Cummings, made her think about the research methods available to biographers (NYT):

Three official types of research are the foundation of writing biography: Primary-source research uses original papers found in libraries, archives or occasionally an attic; secondary-source research uses the work of other writers and researchers; interviews can be with experts, people whose memories are useful or other writers and researchers. There is a fourth kind of research. It doesn’t have a fancy name; it is just going to the places where the story happened. Landscapes often speak, and houses hold ancient scenes and memories and secrets.

She reveals how this fourth research method helped her solve what happened that night in New Hampshire almost nine decades ago:

Once I saw the crossroads, the accident made perfect sense. The tracks were perfectly flush with the road and came toward it at a 45-degree angle from the right — Rebecca Cummings’s blind side in the driver’s seat, especially in the snow. I walked around a bit, noticing which of the trees were second growth and which might have been there in 1926. I could almost hear the screech of brakes from the locomotive and the dreadful sound of metal crushing the wooden frame of the Franklin and shattering the windshield. I could see the brakemen running through the snow and imagine Rebecca’s insistence that her husband’s body be covered. The Chevy engine ticked quietly. An occasional car passed going north. Then the dachshund began to whine. I was back in 2012. I said a small prayer for the soul of Edward Cummings and got in the car for the short drive up to Silver Lake.

(Image: self-portrait of e.e. cummings)

The Best Of The Dish Today

The emails on religious freedom keep pouring in, and I’d like to sleep on them before responding at length again. The arguments are dense and complex and I want some time to think them through some more and not get too defensive in response. So bear with me.

Today, I noted the astonishingly categorical dismissal of a ban on marriage equality by a Bush appointee judge in Kentucky, of all places. We mulled one response to the ACA fights: why not make all contraceptives over-the-counter medications? I argued that, in the context of the culture war, the religious right is actually losing – and not winning – most of its battles. We celebrated rap as poetry. And we said goodbye to pi.

The time-lapse above is of the recent massive pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong. I guess I needed cheering up a bit.

The most popular post of the day was KY Lubricates The Case (apologies for the headline); followed by Perspective, Please.

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. 17 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. One writes:

So, after 13 months of being unemployed (largely of my own doing … following my heart and all that), I have finally found meaningful employment in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, working on an environmental-public policy issue that I’d bet most of your readers care about.  After a few years in DC and NYC, I’m now living in the middle of the country, but still feel happily (albeit much more tangentially) connected to the freneticism of our nation’s public life – thanks largely to this blog, you and your readership.

Your daily posts on politics and culture and reading your readers’ sane and informed commentary during this rather destabilizing period in our country has helped me keep my political-moral compass. And your “View From Your Window” has kept me feeling happily in love with the beauty of this country – urban, rustic, autumn, summer, whatever.  VFYW was a small and symbolic, but integral part of what led me to Colorado.

So, one of the first decisions I made after getting the call that I’d been hired (after roughly 120 job applications) was doing my fair share to keep this blog going.  I feel bad that I skimped for as long as I have.  But now that I have a steady income, I’m trying to align my paycheck with my values.  So, you get $20.

See you in the morning.

This Is A Refugee Crisis

Amanda Taub illustrates how gang violence in Central America is driving thousands of unaccompanied children to seek refuge in the US:

Children are uniquely vulnerable to gang violence. The street gangs known as “maras” — M-18 and Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13 — target kids for forced recruitment, usually in their early teenage years, but sometimes as young as kindergarten. They also forcibly recruit girls as “girlfriends,” a euphemistic term for a non-consensual relationship that involves rape by one or more gang members.

If children defy the gang’s authority by refusing its demands, the punishment is harsh: rape, kidnapping, and murder are common forms of retaliation.  Even attending school can be tremendously dangerous, because gangs often target schools as recruitment sites and children may have to pass through different gangs’ territories, or ride on gang-controlled buses, during their daily commutes.

Why now? The Economist‘s take:

El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have had shockingly high murder rates for years, however. The reason so many of them have decided to leave at once is a widespread rumour that Mr Obama’s administration has relaxed the barriers against children—and their mothers if the children are young enough—entering the United States.

A leaked border-agency memo based on interviews with 230 women and children apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley concluded that they had crossed the border mainly because they expected to be allowed to stay. Migrants talk of a “permiso” (permit) to stay in the United States, although this may be a misunderstanding of the American immigration procedure in which many children are put in the care of family members while waiting for deportation hearings. Some Hondurans conspiratorially say they think America is preparing for war; that’s why they are letting more youngsters in. Others blame Facebook: it is easy for relatives in the United States to show the trappings of prosperity.

Julianne Hing disputes the notion that Obama’s policies are to blame for the influx:

Republican lawmakers are having a field day casting Obama administration policy, namely DACA—a program initiated in 2012 which gave a narrow class of undocumented youth short-term work authorization and protection from deportation—as responsible for the sudden uptick of new migrants. In early June, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions even called Obama “personally responsible” for the influx, Think Progress reported. It’s become popular political fodder for politicians with midterm elections on the mind.

However, humanitarian groups like the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Women’s Refugee Commission have noted the jump in unaccompanied minor border crossings since late 2011 (PDF), long before Obama announced DACA in June of 2012. What’s more, in interviews with hundreds of detained youth, multiple agencies and researchers have found that the vast majority have no idea about the existence of DACA, let alone the notion that they might take advantage of it for themselves.

Dara Lind accuses the administration of getting its response to the crisis backwards:

The Obama administration now believes that the government’s top priority should be swiftly returning a child to his or her home country if it’s not immediately clear that he or she deserves legal status here. That means the administration sees this as an immigration crisis — children coming to the United States because they can, for economic opportunity, family reunification, or to game the system. If that’s the case, a crackdown will deter families from sending their children, because the odds would no longer be in their favor.

It means they don’t see it as a refugee crisis — children will now be assumed not to be in danger unless they can prove otherwise. But if families are currently sending children because they’re genuinely convinced the children are in mortal danger, a crackdown won’t have as much of a deterrent effect.

(Photo: A policeman checks a man during the operation ‘safe house’ at the Maquilishuat neighborhood in San Salvador, El Salvador on January 15, 2014. Salvadorean police make ‘safe house’ operations to search for drugs and gang members in violent neighborhoods. By Jose Cabezas/AFP/Getty Images)

Getting Along, In Concert

In an interview, Andrew Bowie, a jazz-playing philosopher, claims that what we can learn about politics from the symphony has to do with practice rather than theory. He points to Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said’s East-West Divan Orchestra, along with jazz, as examples of what he means:

The Barenboim-Said Orchestra offers an example of communication between people whose political views are often totally opposed. Barenboim cites two musicians from the orchestra on opposed sides of the Arab-Israeli disputes who cannot agree at all on issues of justice and politics, but who can agree on the importance of getting the phrasing in a Beethoven symphony right. Philosophers also hardly ever agree on anything, but they have to coexist, so finding modes of communication and interaction which circumvent inevitable differences should be crucial. The point of something like music, where participation is essential, is that what happens in successful participation cannot be fully cashed out in discursive terms. Our political judgements, on the other hand, should have to be publicly cashed out, and this means we often arrive at irreconcilable conflicts, where both sides’ judgements may, of course, anyway be mistaken. …

[T]he world of music is … actually notorious for being riven by conflict – but it does also offer examples of cooperation and communication beyond everyday antagonisms in other domains. That is one of the things I love about the jazz scene, where people from wildly different backgrounds, with very different levels of experience and skill, and very different musical conceptions, can play together successfully.

Face Of The Day

Palestinian youths clash with Israeli police near to the house of murdered Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdair in Jerusalem on July 2, 2014. Police found a burnt body in a forest west of Jerusalem early Wednesday morning in what appears to have been a revenge kidnapping and murder carried out by right-wing Israeli extremists after three Israeli teenage boys were found dead on Monday north of the Palestinian town Halhul, near Hebron. By Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images.

Quote For The Day

“Stern fathers often make the mistake of believing that their children will not defend the home or the values of the family if martial discipline is not instilled. But turning the homestead into a garrison then drives the children to go AWOL. Instead, all the father has to do is make his home a place of love and, yes, comfort. Having done that, his sons will defend it from any real threat with fire in their eyes.

Ideologues prefer the idea of an ideological nation, a crusader state. Crusader states inspire great battle poetry. But a democratic republic like America needs no purpose, no mission civilisatrice. It needs no poetry. America just needs to be our home — that will require sacrifice enough,” – Michael Brendan Dougherty, taking on David Brooks.

The Intensifying Immigration Wars

Waldman analyzes the president’s Rose Garden speech from Monday, calling it “a pretty blatant thumb in the opposition’s eye”:

Obama is basically accurate in his characterization of Republican arguments, even if he portrays them in an uncomplimentary way. They do indeed argue that they won’t pass an immigration bill because they don’t trust the president to enforce it properly. Which is just an invitation for him to take executive action, making them more angry, to which he can respond, I’m only doing this because you won’t pass a bill. And since Democrats have worked just as hard to convince the public that Republicans are insanely obstructionist as Republicans have to convince the public that Obama is a tyrant, the president’s response isn’t hard to explain to people; they understand by now that Republicans are opposed to passing immigration reform. So the places where Republicans have been the most recalcitrant are those where Obama is most likely to be emboldened to move aggressively.

Vinik outlines some ways the president could tackle immigration without Congress. But rather than making an end run around the House GOP, Connor Simpson suggests Obama might actually be trying to force their hand:

Earlier Monday, the President sent a surprise request to Congress asking for roughly $2 billion to deal with the influx of children attempting to cross the border illegally from South America. While children from Mexico can be deported fairly easily, immigrants who travel from as far as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are much more difficult and expensive. The move will likely cause chaos on Capitol Hill, but could potentially force the House to finally deal with immigration reform.

It’s a catch-22 for politicians:

vote to deport a bunch of children and solve a very real problem, or vote to deport a bunch of children and look heartless in the eyes of your constituents. Hard line immigration reform opponents will love it regardless.

Chait calls the House failure to act on immigration reform “a fascinating case study of a party unable to act on its recognized political self-interest”:

The GOP’s worst problem is that Obama’s unilateral relaxation of immigration enforcement will add a newer and more potent dimension to the immigration issue. No longer will Republicans merely have to promise to oppose reform legislation. They will have to promise to undo what Obama has done. …

And so Republicans may well find themselves in the position of watching their nominee pledging to prosecute or deport immigrant families or children pardoned or left alone by Obama. The only way their friends, neighbors, or relatives who happen to be legal citizens can spare them will be to vote for Clinton. It may have seemed that the Republicans’ standing with immigrant communities had sunk to a new low in 2012, but in 2016, things could actually get worse.

Jonathan Bernstein, on the other hand, argues that the stakes are not so dire for the Republicans in 2016 – or so they seem to believe, at least:

In the long run, the electoral danger of keeping immigration reform high on the agenda is that it could keep Hispanics in the Democratic camp for generations, in part by encouraging them to use ethnicity as their primary political identification. And if that happens, Republicans will risk turning into a long-term minority party. But the electoral effects are much murkier in 2016. That makes it even more difficult for pro-reform Republicans to make the case, particularly as politicians generally aren’t known for their long-term electoral thinking.

Now, on the policy merits, Chait (and Obama) have it right: the possibility of White House action has always made a compromise the best choice for Republicans if what they care about is policy substance. But this set of House Republicans, and the party they represent, isn’t known for putting policy substance over symbolism.

But Francis Wilkinson notes that this could all blow up in Obama’s face:

Obama is in a bind, and he won’t be escaping it soon. He promised that if the House didn’t act on immigration, he would. But if he eases deportations while thousands of alien kids are entering U.S. custody, he may well inspire a ferocity from House Republicans that we haven’t seen since the days of the debt-ceiling fiasco. Only this time, Republicans will point to Obama’s tardy response to a genuine crisis, rather than their own ideological make-believe, as the proximate cause. … By setting himself up as the alternative when and if legislation failed, Obama made himself a target of immigrant desires that he is almost certainly incapable of satisfying. He now faces a backlash from foes and friends alike.

Yglesias declares immigration reform no longer a “special” issue meriting bipartisan action. Now, he believes, “like other liberal priorities it’ll happen if Democrats win a sweep election but not otherwise”:

The more interesting question is what happens to Republicans. Will they simply cede the faction of the business community that’s hungry for immigrant labor to the Democratic coalition? Or will they push harder for a new formula — something like the SKILLS Act that would allow in more highly-skilled workers in exchange for slamming the door on family reunification for less-skilled (mostly Latin American) migrants even tighter — that would try to split up the existing interest group coalition for reform.

But whatever happens, it won’t be special. We’ll see continued trench warfare through executive action and judicial decisions as long as the legislative branches are divided. And then when one party or the other gains a breakthrough, some kind of reform will pass largely on a party-line vote.

Which is a bit odd, given the growing public consensus around liberalizing immigration policy. Although a Gallup poll last week found anti-immigration sentiment on the rise, Aaron Blake examines the long-term trends to find that this increase “looks more like a blip on the screen than a significant and lasting shift.” Two data points:

1) A May poll from the New York Times showed 46 percent of Americans thought all immigrants should be welcomed to the United States. That’s up from 33 percent in 2010, 24 percent in 2007 (the last time immigration reform failed) and around 20 percent in the mid-1990s. The percentage who say there should be no immigration has also dropped to 19 percent.

2) The same poll showed the percentage of Americans who say immigrants contribute to this country has risen significantly over the past three decades. While Americans in the 1980s and 1990s said immigrants were more likely to cause problems than contribute, it’s now 66-21 in favor of contributing. And the numbers continue to rise to this day.

KY Lubricates The Case

I’ve been waiting a long time to write that headline. But seriously, folks, the ruling in Kentucky by a GHW Bush appointee is not just a victory for marriage equality; it’s the equivalent of a knock-out. It effectively says that there is no need to worry at all about the level of judicial protection applied to the gay minority – rational basis? heightened scrutiny? strict scrutiny? – because the case for banning gay marriage is so devoid of any logic it should merely be laughed out of court. Money quote:

These arguments are not those of serious people. Though it seems almost unnecessary to explain, here are the reasons why. Even assuming the state has a legitimate interest in promoting procreation, the Court fails to see, and Defendant never explains, how the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage has any effect whatsoever on procreation among heterosexual spouses.

Excluding same-sex couples from marriage does not change the number of heterosexual couples who choose to get married, the number who choose to have children, or the number of children they have … The state’s attempts to connect the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage to its interest in economic stability and in “ensuring humanity’s continued existence” are at best illogical and even bewildering.

That, of course, was also the damning conclusion of the Prop 8 trial. If you actually put the logical arguments for banning marriage equality to a rational test, they don’t actually exist. There are no apparent costs to this reform at all:

Those opposed by and large simply believe that the state has the right to adopt a particular religious or traditional view of marriage regardless of how it may affect gay and lesbian persons. But, as this Court has respectfully explained, in America even sincere and long-held religious views do not trump the constitutional rights of those who happen to have been out-voted …

Lyle Deniston notes:

In February, in an earlier phase of the judge’s review of the Kentucky ban, he ruled in February that it was unconstitutional for the state to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages of Kentuckians that were performed in other states. That ruling is now under review by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

So this is not over in Kentucky. But the fact that every single marriage ban challenged since Windsor has been struck down is telling. Allahpundit continues to make the following flawed point:

We’ve gone from this issue being a fringe preoccupation of the left 20 years ago to the federal bench slam-dunking it today, thanks in large part to Kennedy and Windsor.

Marriage equality was absolutely not a “fringe preoccupation of the left” 20 years ago. It was a fringe preoccupation of the gay right and a handful of gay liberals – and largely opposed by the gay left. It was then and is today a centrist reform that any sane and reasonable conservative would support – as many have in America and around the world. Which is why it gives me particular pleasure to note that this particular judge was nominated by one other than Mitch McConnell. It is a victory for conservatism and reason – two things the current GOP has sadly a rather loose grip on.

Chart Of The Day

German Lopez illustrates the racial breakdown for recreational drugs – always a helpful reminder:

White and black people report using drugs at similar rates, according to the latest data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. There’s some variance from drug to drug: White people report more often using cocaine, heroin, and hallucinogens, while black people report more marijuana and crack cocaine use. These statistics underline why critics decry the war on drugs as racist. Although black people are much more likely to be sent to jail for drug possession, they’re not more likely to use drugs.