Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 72

Is Obama Radicalizing Republicans?

Looking over some new polling from Quinnipiac University and CNN, Aaron Blake concludes that Obama’s executive action on immigration has made the chances of a comprehensive reform bill getting through Congress even worse. Why? Because it has “exacerbated the real problem with getting comprehensive reform done: a very motivated opposition”:

The Q poll shows support for allowing illegal immigrants to apply for citizenship falling to its lowest point since the survey started asking the question two years ago. Fewer than half — 48 percent — now support a path to citizenship, down from 57 percent one year ago. The poll also shows that 35 percent say these immigrants should be required to leave (the word “deportation” is not mentioned). That’s a new high, and it’s up nine points from the last poll. And here’s the real kicker: The shift is almost completely among Republicans. Although they supported citizenship over deportation 43 to 38 percent in November 2013, today they support deportation/involuntary departure over citizenship, 54 to 27 percent.

That’s two to one — a stunning shift.

And if it’s even close to accurate, there are very few Republicans in Congress who will be eager to vote for comprehensive reform in the 114th Congress. … The CNN/Opinion Research poll tells a similar tale. Although 42 percent favored the policies that Obama announced and 46 percent opposed them, it was clear where the motivation remains: with the opposition.

Waldman remarks that the pro-deportation shift among Republicans in the Quinnipiac poll “provides an object lesson in a dynamic that has repeated itself many times during the Obama presidency”:

We’ve talked a lot about how the GOP in Congress has moved steadily to the right in recent years, but we haven’t paid as much attention to the movement of Republican voters. But the two feed off each other in a cycle.

Immigration is a perfect example. Before this latest immigration controversy, Republican voters were at least favorably inclined toward a path to citizenship. But then Barack Obama moves to grant temporary legal status to some undocumented people (and by the way, nothing he’s doing creates a path to citizenship for anyone, but that’s another story). It becomes a huge, headline-dominating story, in which every single prominent Republican denounces the move as one of the most vile offenses to which the Constitution has ever been subjected. Conservative media light up with condemnations. And because voters take cues from the elites on their own side, Republicans are naturally going to think the order was wrong while Democrats are going to think it was right.

Drum wonders how Obama compares to past presidents:

Bush polarized public opinion in the same way Obama does. Perhaps all presidents do. Still, it sure seems as if Obama polarizes more than any previous president. I can think of several reasons this might be true:

• Something to do with Obama himself. This could be anything from underlying racism to the nature of Obama’s rhetoric.

• Our media environment has become increasingly loud and partisan over time, and this naturally polarizes opinions more than in the past.

• The Republican Party has simply become more radicalized over the past decade or so.

• In the past, liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats acted as natural brakes on viewing everything through a purely partisan lens. But party and ideology have been converging for decades, and this naturally makes every issue more partisan.

Will Garner Replace Brown?

Some thoughts, now that I’ve calmed down a little.

How does a prohibited, aggressive choke-hold on an unarmed, peaceful man that leads to his death not constitute manslaughter in the second degree? How is such an act not even brought to trial? Unlike the Brown case, there is no doubt about what happened – we can see it with our own eyes.

This is a case that might – just might – bring people together to force some kind of change. I note Allahpundit’s dismay at this decision and expect many other conservatives and libertarians to speak up about this. The cop had no reason to fear anything, let alone his life; he acted outside approved police procedures; and the father and grandfather is dead – and all because he might have been selling cigarettes without taxes applied! All of it is caught on video – by a dude who was – yes! – later indicted on a gun charge! Nick Gillespie has more on the campaign to prohibit selling loosies in New York City, and the inability of police departments to apparently regulate how their beat cops interact with civilians.

The key now is for the protests to be bigger and calmer than Ferguson and across the political spectrum. And for the DOJ to take a look. If cops can get away with this kind of thing, even when there’s direct video evidence, why would body cams make any difference at all?

(Photo: People stand around the beauty salon where Eric Garner was killed on July 17 by a police officer who put him in a choke hold on December 3, 2014 in the Staten Island borough of New York City. A grand jury announced today that they decided to not indict New York Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo in Garner’s death. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images.)

Are Colleges Failing Their Mentally Ill Students? Ctd

Rachel Aviv reports on a Princeton undergraduate asked to leave the school following a suicide attempt:

In balancing the rights of students against the need for safety and order, many universities require suicidal students to leave campus. At Yale, Brown, George Washington University, Hunter College, Northwestern, and several other schools, students have protested these policies, by initiating litigation, submitting complaints to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, or writing columns in campus newspapers.

W.P. retained a lawyer, Julia Graff, an attorney at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, who said that she gets calls every month from students who were asked to withdraw after their universities became aware of their mental disorders. “Universities don’t seem to understand that mental-health disabilities are chronic illnesses, and it is not uncommon to have to be briefly hospitalized now and again,” she told me. “It doesn’t mean that you are not competent to be a student.”

Two weeks after being banned from his classes, W.P. appealed Princeton’s decision. In a long letter, he noted that the university prides itself on its diverse student body—he pointed out that his residential college called itself “a place where individuals could be accepted for who they are”—and students with mental disabilities, he wrote, contributed to that diversity. …

W.P.’s private psychiatrist, to whom he’d been referred by Princeton’s health center, submitted a letter that stated that W.P. did not pose a threat to himself. “An important aspect of W.P.’s recovery is a sense of purpose,” the psychiatrist wrote. “Requiring a leave of absence and excluding him from the university community at this time could be detrimental to his health and well-being.”

The appeal was denied.

Previous Dish on the topic here.

“I Can’t Breathe”

Here again is the key video of the assault on Eric Garner, an asthmatic subjected to an illegal choke-hold:

I’m honestly too upset to write anything else at this point.

Quote For The Day

“In all my time studying fraternity rapes for my own essay, I didn’t come across a single report of anything like this. I did find reports of women who were raped by multiple men on one night—but those always involved incapacitation, either by alcohol or a drugged drink. And I did also find accounts of violent, push-down rape of the kind in the essay—but those were always by one member, not a bunch of members. (In fact, many of that kind—now that I think about it—were committed by non-members, or by visiting former members). But a planned gang rape, without alcohol or drugs, and keyed to initiation—I have never seen a case like that. Nor have I seen penetration with a foreign object—I’ve seen plenty of that committed by brothers to pledges as hazing, but I haven’t seen it in sexual assault cases. I’m sure it’s happened, but again—as part of a ritualized gang rape … Never anything like it,” – Caitlin Flanagan, author of the definitive piece on frat house culture, to Slate‘s Hanna Rosin and Allison Benedikt.

Getting Racists Fired, Ctd

Sam Biddle updates us on the troubling tumblr:

The premise of [Racists Getting Fired] is simple, and a perfectly representative product of 2014 Internet: send screenshots of people saying racist shit on Facebook or Twitter to their employers, get them canned, and thus end American racism, or something. This is foolproof until someone uses the formula to frame someone who didn’t actually say anything racist. Take Brianna Rivera, who apparently said some terrible things on Facebook. But according to the operators of the RGF Tumblr, this turned out to in fact not be Brianna Rivera at all, but her ex-boyfriend, who changed his Facebook profile to resemble hers.

Freddie comments:

As with carceral feminism, this kind of thing seems to stem from the presumption that good outcomes flow naturally from good intentions, which just isn’t how the world works. Honestly, it reminds me of nothing more than the whole Lena Dunham “sexual abuse” fiasco.

It was mind-blowing to me to see someone like Kevin Williamson so easily able to whip up an old fashioned sex panic among leftists. But it’s an inevitable result of associating the work of progressive politics with having a hair trigger, with demonizing those who ask us to be careful and restrained, and of treating overwhelming digital character assassination as a useful political tool.

Beyond the obvious ugliness of situations like this, the problem with a site like Racists Getting Fired is that it reinforces the notion that fighting racism is easy and fun. Look, we’re fighting racism! All it takes is some screencaps and a Tumblr account!

Meanwhile, a reader calls me out:

Last week you said you “love this approach” when the vile comments of misogynists get forwarded to their moms, but if someone calls Obama a stupid nigger on Twitter and I pass it along to his coworkers, I’m part of the PC identity police. Aren’t these the same thing?

I think a simple recourse to an abusive boy’s mom is a sane, non-flaming way to get the abuse to stop. That’s all. Trying to get an adult fired is something much more serious.

Ugh

Latest updates on a grand jury's decision not to indict a NYC police officer in the death of Eric Garner nyti.ms/1FOXXmh

—
The New York Times (@nytimes) December 03, 2014

This is an illegal NYPD choke-hold. A man is dead. "Who do you believe? Me or your lying eyes?" #justiceforericgarner pic.twitter.com/o9GZl6Uf06

— Khary Lazarre-White (@KLWspeaks) December 3, 2014

Officer uses illegal chokehold. #EricGarner dies. NYC Coroner rules it a homicide. Grand jury does not indict. That sounds like justice?

— Mo Ivory, Esq. (@moivory) December 3, 2014

Part 1 of Eric gardener chokehold http://t.co/BRR9LgkJfN

— Jacc Move Johnny (@The_LBCarter) December 3, 2014

Noteworthy that the cops here were more concerned with being videotaped than they were with a man dying. http://t.co/X99lNqe3G3

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) December 3, 2014

Eric Garner is 180 from Mike Brown. Choke hold, guy was just selling cigs.

Hate to disappoint the Left, but I'm with them on this one.

— John Nolte (@NolteNC) December 3, 2014

Eric Garner, we will fight for you brother. We will fight for you. The system has failed you, but we will fight. pic.twitter.com/j9eD6U0Lxp

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) December 3, 2014

Loretta Lynch, Obama's choice for Attorney General, is currently the local US Attorney for Staten Island. Let's see what she does now.

— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) December 3, 2014

Jeb’s Plan To Lose The Primary

These comments by Jeb Bush have attracted attention:

“I don’t know if I’d be a good candidate or a bad one,” Bush told an audience of CEOs at a conference sponsored by the Wall Street Journal. “I kinda know how a Republican can win, whether it’s me or somebody else — and it has to be much more uplifting, much more positive, much more wiling to be, ‘lose the primary to win the general’ without violating your principles. It’s not an easy task, to be honest with you.”

Larison questions Jeb’s strategy

The problem with this isn’t that a relative moderate can’t win the Republican nomination. In fact, it is rarely the case that the relative moderate hasn’t won. Jeb Bush’s mistake here is in thinking that a candidate can run what the article calls “an unapologetically pragmatic bid” and still prevail. Most conservative voters are used to being taken for granted during the general election, and they’re usually willing to play along provided that they think that the nominee shares their priorities. However, the would-be nominee has to convince them first that he is mostly on their side on major issues. If Jeb Bush thinks there are a lot of Republican voters hungering for bland “centrism” with a dynastic name attached to it, he is in for an unpleasant surprise.

S.V. Dáte wonders whether the GOP base will deny Jeb a shot at the nomination:

Of all the 2016 Republican names out there, Jeb Bush is uniquely positioned to make those connections with minority communities, particularly Latinos, while offering as conservative a policy agenda as can be imagined. He doesn’t have to make a production out of liking Hispanics—he for all intents and purposes is Hispanic. At the same time, his Florida record shows that he actually was the “severely conservative governor” that Mitt Romney told people he was.

And yet, because of the Republican activist base’s fixation with Common Core and illegal immigration, Jeb could find himself such a pariah in the early primary states that all the money and all the organization in the world cannot overcome it.

The far right doesn’t seem to be be taking Jeb seriously. Here’s Ace of Spades:

I wouldn’t worry too much about Jeb Bush. This is a vanity run. This is going nowhere. He will be laughed out of the race by South Carolina.

Powerline’s John Hinderaker also scoffs at Jeb:

Maybe Bush’s idea is that he can sneak through the primaries as the only moderate (or whatever he is) in a crowded field of conservatives. Well, why not? Look how well it worked for Jon Huntsman.

At the very least, Greg Sargent hopes a Jeb run will force the GOP to have a real debate over immigration:

Republicans know they are against Obama’s deportation relief, yet continue to dodge on what should be done with all these people instead. Should we deport them all? Republicanswon’tsay. Legalize them? Perhaps, but only at some unspecified point later, if we meet unspecified conditions. Which means they are farther than ever from engaging this issue’s core moral and policy dilemmas. A Bush candidacy would be interesting: Even as he’d be relentlessly criticized for selling out to Obama’s “amnesty,” perhaps the resulting debate might challenge that GOP non-engagement.

(Photo by Andy Jacobsohn/Getty Images)

Prepping For The Torture Report

I’m told we could finally have the definitive account (so far) of the Bush-Cheney torture program as soon as early next week. The Senators eventually had to cave to the Obama administration’s insistence on rendering large parts of the report unintelligible through redactions – or risk having the report buried for ever. That’s how hardball Obama was in protecting the war criminals he still employs. As a result, it will be very hard to follow how various CIA officials crafted, spun and lied about this barbarism over time. The result, ironically, is that the entire CIA is tarred with this brush, when so many in that agency did what they could to stop this brutal betrayal of this country’s core alleged values. But that is what Obama wanted: no actual accountability for any actual human being. When it comes to the gravest crimes, no perpetrator must be named, let alone punished. If you want one sign of how the CIA is a law unto itself, more powerful than any president, ponder Obama’s inaction over the last six years.

Dan Froomkin has a helpful guide today of what to look for in the report. I’d emphasize the following points.

It’s amazing that we managed even to get this. Obama has been determined, we now know, to protect the perpetrators of torture from the get-go, and to ensure that there was minimal transparency on such a vital issue. The Justice Department’s own investigation of some of the more astonishing acts of barbarity was, accordingly, a farce. The Durham report never interviewed a single victim of the torture, while finding that we should all move on, nothing to see here, etc. In fact, the only reason we have any transparency at all is because CIA honcho Jose Rodriguez destroyed the tapes of the waterboarding sessions in a brazen act of destroying potentially criminal evidence. When challenged on this, the CIA insisted that there was other evidence proving that the torture sessions were not, in fact, torture at all. And that’s how the Senate Committee started pulling at the threads.

We owe John McCain and Lindsay Graham some sincere thanks. I’ve had plenty to say about their unreconstructed neocon view of foreign policy, but on this core question of the rule of law and basic American principles, they have not wavered. They will give this report the bipartisan cover it needs, and which much of the GOP wants to deny it.

The report is very limited. What it details is drawn entirely from internal CIA documents, and nothing else. No one was interviewed – either torture victims or torturers or their enablers. GTMO is not in the report; the broader military is not in the report; only the CIA’s torture sessions in its own black sites are in the report – a tiny fraction of the vast apparatus of prisoner abuse that was set in motion by president Bush’s early and fateful decision to waive Geneva protections for terror suspects. So what we will read was just one small aspect of the barbarism this country inflicted on so many in its custody.

The report doesn’t assign any blame either. It does not prove who in the political branch authorized this or who should be held responsible for it. It will therefore disappoint many who want to see proof of, say, Cheney’s or Addington’s direct responsibility – or any form of actual accountability. What it will show, rather, is far more shocking evidence of far worse torture than we have previously been aware of (so I am told), and proof that the CIA knew that the program was ineffective.

This is what will have to do the work: the internal deliberations of the war criminals, in their own notes and documents, about both the scale of the barbarity and the astonishing deception about it that the CIA kept perpetrating. That deception was not only of the public, but also, it appears, of the political branch. We may well find out that Bush and Cheney didn’t fully know what was going on, either because Bush did not want to know or because they were consistently misled about it. In other words, it might even exonerate the political branch in some limited ways.

We must not fall victim to the drip-drip-drip nature of the revelations over the last decade of the torture program. It can inure us to the shock we once felt after Abu Ghraib first revealed the nature of the abuse. Here, for example, is what NRO’s Jonah Goldberg said in the wake of the Abu Ghraib revelations:

The damage this does to the image of America is huge. How do we look when we denounce Saddam’s torture chambers now? How many more American soldiers will be shot because of the ill will and outrage this generates? How do we claim to be champions of the rule of law?

Well, there is one way. This needs to be investigated and prosecuted. If there’s more to the story — whatever that could conceivably be — let’s find out. But if the story is as it appears, there has to be accountability, punishment and disclosure. Indeed, even if this turned out to be a prank, too much damage has already been done and someone needs to be punished. Under Saddam torturers were rewarded and promoted. In America they must be held to account.

But no one has been held to account, except, shamefully, for a few powerless individuals at the very bottom of the chain of command as scapegoats. If what we now know is far worse than Abu Ghraib, then it will be interesting to see what Jonah’s response will be.

The Dish, of course, will throw every resource we have at explicating the report. So stay tuned.

(Photo: The CIA symbol is shown on the floor of CIA Headquarters, July 9, 2004 at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. By Charles Ommanney/Getty Images)

Britain Ties Up Pornographers In Red Tape

Christopher Hooton enumerates the sex acts recently banished from British porn:

The Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 requires that video-on-demand (VoD) online porn now adhere to the same guidelines laid out for DVD sex shop-type porn by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). Seemingly arbitrarily deciding what is nice sex and what is not nice sex, the board’s ruling on ‘content that is not acceptable’ (p.23) effectively bans the following acts from being depicted by British pornography producers:

Spanking

Caning

Aggressive whipping

Penetration by any object “associated with violence”

Physical or verbal abuse (regardless of if consensual)

Urolagnia (known as “water sports”)

Role-playing as non-adults

Physical restraint

Humiliation

Female ejaculation

Strangulation

Facesitting

Fisting

The final three listed fall under acts the BBFC views as potentially “life-endangering”.

Hooton adds that the amendment “seems to take issue with acts from which women more traditionally derive pleasure than men.” Erika Lust makes that point even more adamantly:

With this legislation, the UK is in danger of finding itself back in an age where porn is simply the boring, unrealistic, male fantasy of bimbos eagerly pleasing men as if it is their duty, where women are submissive and lack ownership of their sexuality. Women in the industry will now fear the loss of their livelihoods as well as their sexual independence.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown offers a more general objection:

Both regulations disproportionately affect smaller, independent porn producers and websites. As Vice’s Frankie Mullin points out, the new censorship rules will have less effect on large porn producers and mainstream sites, “which tend to favour the strip, blowjob, fuck, cum-all-over-a-woman’s-face formula, but the UK’s smaller, independent producers,” specifically fetish producers. These include people like Ms Tytania, who makes feminist-tinged dominatrix porn, and pretty much anybody else whose products deviate from normative sexual practices. The rules really are a crazy infringement on freedom of artistic expression, not solely a commercial setback for someone who runs subscription rough-sex sites (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

And Jessica Roy alludes to the wide range of acts that list left off:

The ban doesn’t mean U.K. porn connoisseurs can’t watch porn that includes stuff like spanking, but simply that porn filmed in the U.K. can’t include those acts. Sounds like U.K. freaks will have to settle for some good ol’ fashioned Japanese tentacle porn.

(Photo: A participant called SgChill is bound in rope at a dungeon party during the domination convention, DomConLA, in the early morning hours of May 11, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. By David McNew/Getty Images)