Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 96

Walking On The Backs Of Poor Stoners

Making good on a base-baiting campaign promise, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker plans to push forward with a law that would impose stringent drug testing requirements on welfare recipients:

In Wisconsin, an estimated 836,000 people receive FoodShare benefits, about 40 percent of them children, according to the state Department of Health Services. As of last week, 39,958 people had filed weekly unemployment compensation claims, according to the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.

Gillespie calls Walker’s crusade morally repellent, but that’s not the half of it:

Walker is supposed to be tight with a penny, right? That’s part of his, er, charm. Yet his sort of drug-testing is not only repellent on ethical grounds, it’s a clear waste of money.

If a recent program in Missouri is any indication, Wisconsin will be collecting urine by the bucketful to catch very few bad actors (and that assumes smoking dope, say, should be a reason to pull somebody’s benefits). Last year, Missouri started testing suspected drug users (note: suspected, meaning there was at least some hypothetical reason to think a person was using drugs). The state ended up spending $500,000 to test 636 people, of which 20 were found to be using. So around 3 percent of suspects tested positive and each test cost around $786. Before courts ruled Florida’s drug-testing regime illegal, the Sunshine State spent $115,000 on piss tests and ended up coughing up $600,000 in reimbursements to applicants who had been denied benefits.

The Dish has previously covered why these drug testing laws are terrible ideas. Alan Pyke reviews further evidence that they have no basis in reality:

While food stamps recipients are a bit more likely to use drugs casually than the general population according to one study, age is a far better predictor of drug use than economic status or public assistance enrollment. And the raw numbers are too low to justify a dragnet policy of testing everyone who applies, according to critics at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Canada. Just 3.6 percent of welfare recipients qualify as having a drug abuse or dependence problem according to 2011 data. About 8 percent of Americans and 9 percent of Wisconsin residents used drugs in the past month, according to the National Survey of Drug Use and Health.

A federal judge struck down Florida’s infamous drug testing law in January on the grounds that it violated the Fourth Amendment. Even Noah Rothman admits that what Walker is proposing is likely unconstitutional:

Unlike Walker’s union reforms, which inspired a similar level of apoplexy in his Democratic opponents, these reforms may be a legitimate violation of constitutional rights. The state Supreme Court vindicated Walker’s collective bargaining reforms, but the conservative reformer may be setting himself up for a rebuke from the courts with his latest move. While states have slightly more freedom to experiment with similar reforms, federal law prohibits drug testing prospective beneficiaries. In September, Walker told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that he welcomes a fight with the federal government over his proposed reforms. “We believe that there will potentially be a fight with the federal government and in court,” Walker said.

Why would Scott Walker want to set up a fight with the courts and the federal government? The answer seems clear. These reforms are rather popular with base Republican voters, and the institutions which would oppose Walker’s reform are not. This is a pretty clear indication that Walker is interested in translating his successes in Wisconsin into the Republican presidential nomination.

Mental Health Break

A new take on wind-surfing:

Stirring The Pot

Justin Jones profiles pseudonymous edibles expert “Jeff the 420 Chef”:

Jeff, who began his foray into pot gastronomy as a hobby, is rapidly turning it into a full-time pot-repreneurial business. He’s been traveling from coast to coast since early 2013 catering to celebrities (he won’t say who) and the upper echelons with a penchant for delectable edibles. His cannabis-infused menus range from truffle tuna casserole and coconut chicken to French toast and omelets. Every meal is included, including desserts and yes, even wedding cakes. The possibilities of the types of cuisine that can be made are endless once you turn pot into butter (or oil) to cook with. …

I had one, small bite of a chocolate cupcake, and was on my ass in an hour. The presence of marijuana was almost unrecognizable. Had I never had an edible before, I wouldn’t have known it was baked with THC. Jeff had warned me that it was a strong batch—and I’m already a lightweight—so when it hit, I could only stay vertical for a short time before I had to call it a night.

Would I eat it again? Hell yes. The taste was that good.

The Internet Of Scraps

Nicholas Carr muses about the relationship between social media and scrapbooking:

Pinterest makes its scrapbooky nature most explicit, but, really, all social networking platforms are scrapbooks: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, Ello, YouTube, LinkedIn. … Blogs are scrapbooks. Medium’s a scrapbook. A tap of a Like button is nothing if not a quick scissoring. Scrapbooking and data-mining are the yang and the yin of the web: light and dark, aboveground and underground, exposed and hidden. Today’s scrapbooks serve both as a counterweight to the bureaucratic file and as part of the file’s contents. The Eloi’s pastime is fodder for the Morlocks.

Inherently retrospective — a means of preemptively packaging the present as memory — the scrapbook is a melancholy form. Pressed insistently forward, we spend our time arranging the bits and pieces of our lives into something we think looks something like us. If the material scrapbook of old was familial and semiprivate, the new scrapbook is social and altogether public. It’s still a melancholy form, but now it’s an anxious one, too. It’s one thing to construct an idealized life, a “best self,” for your own consumption; it’s another thing to construct one for all to see.

(Image collage from the Instagram account of Zoe Di Novi, beloved Dish alum: “Hat inspiration BFF selfie Saturday.”)

Gruberism And Our Democracy, Ctd

A reader writes:

The faux outrage you are drumming up is ridiculous. People are ignorant because Gruber (and Bill Maher) are right: the American public is stupid. All you have to do is look at Jimmy Kimmel’s skit about Obamacare vs the Affordable Care Act or “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Why do the individual pieces of the ACA poll so well, but the overall law does not? It makes no sense, and no the answer is not the Dems didn’t educate; the answer is people are too effing lazy to learn the truth and are too easily manipulated by nihilists and liars because they choose to remain uneducated. The only thing stupid here was Gruber deciding to pull back the curtain; it would have been better keeping the rubes in the dark.

America should be run by elites. No, that does not mean rich or wealthy, but it does mean smarter and more knowledgeable. It is beyond reason why I, as someone who takes pride in my thirst for knowledge (see reading your blog daily), have to deal with morons who are intellectually lazy yet have the ability to thwart basic and good things that would help me, people I care about, and worse, the people too stupid to understand they are actually being helped. I hate liberal paternalism as much as you do, but sometimes you just need to get shit done.

Another shares that disdain for most Americans’ intelligence:

I would say the fact that the elite journalists treat America as smarter than they are is a big problem. At this point, if the American people don’t understand Obamacare, it is on them. You have the following statistics coming from your gloriously under-appreciated smart public:

According to a survey by the Kaiser Foundation just last year (April), 42 percent of Americans didn’t even know Obamacare was still a law on the books. Some (12 percent) thought it was already repealed by Congress while others (7 percent) believe the Supreme Court overturned it. So why even lie about something that many likely still believe doesn’t exist in the first place? Here’s a few more fun yet disturbing findings to chew on:

- 65 percent can’t name a single Supreme Court justice (Annenberg Public Policy Center). Best part: 27 percent knew Randy Jackson was a judge on American Idol.

- 36 percent of Americans can’t name all three branches of government. Best part: 35 percent can’t name a single branch, period (Annenberg)

But I guess Obama holding a joint session of Congress to explain Obamacare while being called a liar in public is just him not explaining it right.

The point of messaging on this kind of thing is that it should be constant, clear and endlessly repeated. You can’t just give one big speech and expect people with busy lives to keep it in their heads. It can be done – and must be done if this democracy is to mean anything. Another is a bit more nuanced:

Voters are stupid. I would have used the word irrational, but stupid gets the point across. I’m stupid, you’re stupid, most everyone is stupid. One common example of the particular brand of stupidity that economists love to ridicule is loss aversion; if I gave you ten dollars then demanded five back, you would be much less happy then if I just gave you five dollars. If you ask people if they’d rather have a mortgage rebate (free money for owning a house!), or a tax penalty for those people that do not own a home, there would be a pretty clear split. But as long as the government’s books eventually balance, those are the same thing.

Gruber seemed to be saying that people respond irrationally to how things are phrased, so the ACA decided not to raise everyone’s taxes and then give people a rebate for having insurance, even though that would be completely equivalent to the mandate. They also chose not to just tax healthy people and send checks to the less healthy, even though that would have some of the same effects as ending preexisting conditions. You could argue that one way is more or less honest (personally I think the mandate makes sense to the extent that having insurance is a social obligation), but it’s fine to choose the way that most people are comfortable with.

Another reviews some recent history:

One point, somewhat cynical, that I see no one making about the Gruber statement is the fact that whatever misleading arguments were trotted out in support of the ACA while it was being debated in Congress, at least as many misleading arguments were proffered in opposition. The Politifact page for health care is illuminating on this subject, and a good refresher if you fail to recollect how disingenuous the campaign against the bill was.

There was all sorts of general talk about socialized medicine and a government takeover of a sixth of the American economy that is deeply misleading, much more so in my opinion than the esoteric debate over what is a tax and what is a mandate. But beyond generalizations, there were a number of VERY SPECIFIC claims made about the bill, from the notion that it contained “death panels” set up to deny care to elderly patients deemed no longer useful to society, to the assertion that abortions would be directly paid for by tax dollars in contravention of the Hyde Amendment, to Allen West’s bizarre claim that the health care law allowed the federal government to take over education. My favorite of course is the lie that the bill covered the healthcare of undocumented workers, so pervasive that President Obama had to reference and deny it in a speech to a joint session of Congress, only to have a Congressman, falsely, shout “You Lie!” on national television.

These statements did not come from policy experts not directly connected to the ACA or Congress. They came from elected representatives, party officials, and others who should be held to a much higher standard than Jonathen Gruber.

Look, I would have loved nothing more than to have an honest debate in this country about the benefits and trade-offs of the ACA. I would have loved to have had a serious discussion of alternatives, either the ephemeral conservative version or even actual, single-payer socialized medicine. I believe the country would have been much better served, and much less divided, by an honest assessment of the existing situation and exploration of various policy fixes, but that was just never, ever in the cards.

Since the opposition to the bill was ideological, rather than pragmatic, there was just no constructive discussion to be had. And you can’t have that kind of debate when only one side is engaged. You can’t have one side saying “LARGEST TAX INCREASE IN AMERICAN HISTORY” while the other side says, “well, technically not the largest, but in the top dozen or so, if you count the mandate, which isn’t quite right but probably fair, and hey, it’s not like you get nothing in return. Listen…” That’s just lousy politics.

So yes, the President and his allies, Gruber included, sold the best possible (self-serving) narrative to the American voter. This was at at times misleading. The most prominent examples are the “if you like it, you can keep it” fib and the repeated Gruber Gaffes, but in a political environment where much of the oxygen was spent debating ludicrous, unhinged assertions about jack-booted thugs, a sober cost-benefit analysis just wasn’t going to cut it, if the goal was to improve the lives of uninsured Americans, rather than winning on points in Debate Club.

ISIS And Al-Qaeda, Together At Last?

.@TheStudyofWar why Jabhat al-Nusra inroads in #Syria is defeat for rebel “moderates” http://t.co/38w04P05cG @syriahr pic.twitter.com/L9fRAeoUjZ

— David Feeney (@Feeney4Batman) November 11, 2014

The AP reported yesterday that leaders of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, have agreed to set aside their intra-jihadi feuds and cooperate against their enemies:

According to [a source], two decisions were reached: First, to halt infighting between Nusra and IS and second, for the groups together to open up fronts against Kurdish fighters in a couple of new areas of northern Syria.

Keating reads the cards:

This merger, along with growing signs that Washington is resigning itself to Bashar al-Assad’s long-term presence, could be an indication that the overlapping and intersecting battle lines in Syria are starting to clarify themselves. At the moment, the U.S., the Kurds, Iraqi Shiites, and—whether the Obama administration will admit it or not—the Syrian government are on one side, and ISIS and al-Qaida are on the other. The big loser in all of this is likely to be the U.S.-backed rebels.

In addition to ISIS and Nusra finding common cause, there are reports this week that the White House is considering revamping a Syria strategy many senior officials have come to see as unworkable. That strategy, which involved focusing primarily on rolling back ISIS in Iraq and didn’t involve strikes against Assad, never sat well with the rebels. A new one, which could involve a new diplomatic push for a cease-fire deal whose terms would likely be very disadvantageous to the Syrian opposition, would be even worse.

But Aymenn al-Tamimi recommends taking these reports with a grain of salt:

The rift between JN and IS is too great to heal at this point beyond the highly localized alliance between IS and JN in Qalamoun that reflects an exceptional situation where neither group can hold territory alone and both contingents are geographically isolated from members of their groups elsewhere in Syria, in addition to being preoccupied with constant fighting with regime forces and Hezbollah. At the broader level, IS still believes that JN is guilty of “defection” (‘inshiqāq) from IS in refusing to be subsumed under what was then the Islamic State of Iraq [ISI] to form the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham [ISIS] back in April 2013. The zero-sum demands of IS have only solidified with the claimed Caliphate status since 29 June demanding the allegiance of all the world’s Muslims. In turn, JN refuses even to recognize IS’ claim to be an actual state, let alone a Caliphate.

In response to this and other recent developments, Gopal Ratnam hints that the Obama administration is “edging closer to establishing a safe zone in northern Syria” for our “moderate” rebel allies:

Setting up such safe zones inside Syria will also address a key demand by Turkey, which sees the Assad regime as a greater threat than the self-proclaimed Islamic State, and has been pushing the United States to set up such areas as a condition for fuller participation in the coalition against the Sunni militant group that is also known as ISIS and ISIL. “If these safe havens are not established in northern Syria, the rebels will be effectively squeezed out by the Assad regime in a short time,” said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “So this is a last call to maintain and preserve rebel presence in northern Syria.”

Meanwhile, rumors that “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been injured or even killed in an airstrike were thrown into doubt with the release of a new audio recording of Baghdadi that refers to recent events:

The timing of the recording was unclear, but it referred to Barack Obama’s recent decision to send a further 1,500 US military advisers to train the Iraqi army and to a pledge of allegiance by Egyptian jihadis to the Islamic State last weekend.

In a triumphant survey of what he described as the group’s growing influence, the speaker also mentioned support from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. In Saudi Arabia, singled out in the message as the “head of the snake and stronghold of disease”, people were urged to “draw their swords” to fight and to kill Shia Muslims – referred to in pejorative sectarian terms as “rafidah”. Shia worshippers were indeed attacked in a terrorist shooting in the country’s Eastern Province 10 days ago.

The War To End All Progress?

Wilfred McClay interrogates the common notion that “the Great War’s chief accomplishment was its wanton destruction of an entire political and social order and, with it of a certain blithe European optimism about the future.” Not so fast, he argues – it’s more complicated than that:

[O]ne of its lasting consequences has been to make us uneasy with the very concept of progress. We are not prepared to give up that concept entirely. That would be nearly inconceivable. … [O]ur culture is borne along by the flow of enormous progressive inertia. It does not necessarily have to affirm its earlier commitments, or even be aware of them, in order to be propelled or guided by them for a very long time. We teach our children that it is good, nay imperative, that they should want “to make a difference.” But there is no doubt that we do not feel quite as ready as we once were to endorse explicitly the idea of progress, without always employing the protective mechanisms of qualifiers or quotation marks. We live with a certain split-mindedness in that regard.

To further explain his point, McClay describes going to an academic conference on moral progress in history – timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. He was surprised to find himself the only participant overtly defending progress, though upon closer inspection he noticed even his colleagues hadn’t quite let go of the concept:

That said, the opposition to the idea of progress that I saw in my colleagues did not seem to me to go very deep. It seemed almost entirely professional and notional, without any echo in the conduct of their busy, well-organized, ambitious, and purposeful lives. No such thing as progress? Seriously? Who actually lives with such an assumption? Even our occasional efforts to sound fatalistic in our speech betray all the things that such speech silently presumes: that, as free and purposeful beings, we cannot help projecting certain ideals or goals, if even only short-range or proximate ones, into the inchoate future. This is particularly so in the United States, where every lamentation has a way of turning into a jeremiad, and thereby into a form of moral exhortation and a call to improvement, and thus to become the polar opposite of fatalism. The language of true fatalism would be stony and resigned silence, and that is not what we see or hear. There is a difference between what we think, and what we think we think.

(Image: British 55th Infantry Division soldiers, blinded by tear gas during the Battle of Estaires, 10 April 1918, via Wikimedia Commons)

“Suspended” In Translation

Adam Kirsch reviews a collection of novellas by Nobel winner Patrick Modiano now available in an English translation:

The first to arrive is Suspended Sentences, which Yale University Press was already scheduled to publish, but is now rushing into print thanks to the Nobel announcement. For almost all American readers curious about Modiano, it will be their first introduction to his work. What sort of writer does it reveal?

First of all, a dedicated Parisian. Of the three novellas that make up this short volume, two take place in Paris and one in the suburbs; and Modiano writes about the French capital with a possessive affection that feels almost erotic. The narrator—who is always a version of the author—thinks back to the Paris of his teenage years, in the 1960s (Modiano was born in 1945), as to a shadowy paradise lost. He dwells on the changes time has brought to the city—the destruction of a neighborhood to make way for a highway, the disappearance of old haunts and old friends. Like Walter Benjamin, who believed that a whole civilization could be conjured from scraps of the Parisian past, Modiano seizes on even the smallest scraps of history. …

These novellas were originally published separately, but the decision to group them together makes perfect sense. In mood and often in subject matter, they read like variations on a theme: the missing man, the absent parents, the ravages of time, keeping coming back under different names. In each tale, the narrator remains bewildered by history, his own and his family’s, trying to make a coherent narrative out of the fragments he inherited.

Jonathan Gibbs recommends the collection, calling the author “as accessible as he is engrossing”. He gives a more detailed overview of the three novellas:

In “Afterimage” we have the narrator’s memories of lapsed photographer Francis Jensen, whom he knew as a young man, and whose personal archive he undertook to catalogue, while trying to work out why he had turned so resolutely away from life. The other two stories, “Suspended Sentences” and “Flowers of Ruin”, circle around “the Rue Lauriston gang”, a set of criminals whose black market dealings, during the Occupation, bled into dirtier work on behalf of the Gestapo.

“Suspended Sentences” is the liveliest offering, a childhood memoir in which young Patoche is palmed off by his parents onto a surrogate family of loveable freaks in a town outside Paris. Life there is immeasurably enlivened by the strange “friends of the family” who swing by in expensive American cars for clandestine meetings, or to whisk them all off for suspicious jaunts around Paris.

“Flowers of Ruin” is darker, and starts from an anecdote about a young married couple, living in Paris, who committed suicide “for no apparent reason” in 1933, after an evening partying with two other, more dubious couples. The narrator, thinking back to his own teenage years in Paris in the 1960s, wonders if the people he knew then might offer some connection back to that “tragic orgy”.

Sam Sacks provides a broader context:

Each of these sketches is framed as the narrator’s search through his imperfect recollections for telling clues that might somehow illuminate periods of time “whose very reality I sometimes doubted.” A strange and affecting feeling of guilt pervades the narrator’s investigations, drawing obscurely from the unknowns surrounding his estranged Jewish father, “who had weathered all the contradictions of the Occupation period, and who had told me practically nothing about it before we parted forever.” In all three novellas the author-narrator explains that his father was a black-market profiteer who may have been saved from deportation by his connection to the Rue Lauriston gang, the French branch of the Gestapo. Mr. Modiano was born in 1945 (“a product of the dunghill of the Occupation,” in his words), and he portrays the taint of collaboration as an inherited trait, oppressing a postwar generation who never fully understood the nature of their parents’ crimes.

Such themes give this autobiographical fiction a broader national significance. But Mr. Modiano is also profoundly regionalist. For all his stories’ ambiguities, Paris’s streets and sights are transcribed with emphatic specificity: “That Sunday evening in November, I was on Rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Epée. I was skirting the high wall around the Institut des Sourds-Muets. To the left rises the bell tower of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. I could still recall a café at the corner of Rue Saint-Jacques” and on.

Face Of The Day

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, looks on as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid speaks during a news conference following a private meeting at the U.S. Capitol Building on November 13, 2014. Senate Democrats plan to elevate first-term Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to their leadership ranks on an expanded communications and policy committee led by third-ranking Democrat Charles Schumer. By Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

The Mistake Of Fighting Ebola Like A War

The US government’s response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa has relied primarily on the Pentagon, whose resources and logistical capabilities would seem to make it a good choice to lead such an operation. Alex de Waal, however, argues that military-run relief projects are less efficient and more costly than civilian efforts led by humanitarian professionals:

When Air Force planes carry out airdrops of emergency relief, they are invariably much more expensive and less effective than their humanitarian counterparts. Army engineers have the equipment to construct flood defenses or temporary accommodation for people displaced by fire or water, but there is invariably much wastage and learning on the job (by definition, too late). Experienced relief professionals can list many of the downsides of bringing in the military:

they utilize vast amounts of oversized equipment, clogging up scarce airport facilities, docks and roads; their heavy machinery damages local infrastructure; they use more equipment and personnel in building their own bases and protecting themselves than in doing the job; their militarized attitudes offend local sensibilities and generate resentment; and they override the decision-making of people who actually know what they are doing.

In the days after the Haitian earthquake in January 2010, the U.S. Army was efficient at clearing debris, setting up an air traffic control system, and getting Haiti’s ports and airport functional. One third of the emergency spending in Haiti was costs incurred by the military. (The costing includes only additional or marginal costs for the deployment.) When the army moved into other relief activities, such as general health and relief programs, even those marginal costs were disproportionately high. Trained for battlefield injuries, army surgeons weren’t skilled at treating the crush injuries common in an earthquake zone. In West Africa today, militaries are providing an important air bridge, given that commercial airlines have stopped flying. But the United Nations could do the job more cheaply and efficiently—if it had the resources.