Joel Wing outlines the likely results of yesterday’s general election in Iraq:
Most Iraq watchers now seem to believe that the prime minister [Nouri al-Maliki] will get the most seats in parliament, and then go through a very long process of negotiations that could drag out for up to a year, and ensure himself another four years in office. The premier is hoping that his Shiite base will come out for him out of fear of the growing insurgency, and give him a plurality of votes. He will then be able to play upon the splits within the Sunni parties to ally with Deputy Premier Salah al-Mutlaq. If that gives him momentum the history of Iraqi politics is for the other parties to jump on board to assure themselves positions within the new government.
An alternative scenario could play out however. Last year ISCI was able to cut into Maliki’s base, and are hoping to repeat that again. It has portrayed itself as a nationalist party that has the support of the religious establishment in Najaf. The Sadrists’ Ahrar bloc believes that it can maintain its alliance with the Supreme Council that it forged in the 2013 elections. If they get anything near the number of seats of Maliki it will be a free for all for to create the majority necessary for a new government.
Bob Dreyfuss recounts how Maliki has cemented himself in power since the last election:
Back in 2010, when an opposition party led by Ayad Allawi—a wily, nonsectarian, secular Shiite politician with a largely Sunni base—won the biggest share of the vote, both the United States and Iran weighed in to prop up Maliki and ensure that he was able to form a government that eventually excluded Allawi. A year later, in 2011, the remaining American troops departed, and within days Maliki went to war against Sunni politicians, the Sunni establishment and others who opposed his authoritarian style.
A reader challenges a part of Ehrman’s book we haven’t discussed yet:
Reading your thoughts and the reader responses so far, I’m surprised no one has mentioned Ehrman’s claim, in Chapter Four, that Jesus most likely wasn’t given a proper burial, meaning there was no tomb for his resurrection to leave empty – nor an actual body left to be resurrected, as theological orthodoxy would seem to demand. An excerpt from this chapter was recently featured on The Daily Beast, in which Ehrman makes this explicit: “Without an empty tomb, there would be no ground for saying that Jesus was physically raised.” And clearly, as Ehrman shows in his book, the “empty tomb” features prominently in Christian apologetics on this issue. The idea that Jesus really was buried allows Christians to ask, “Well, then what did happen to Jesus’ body?” If he wasn’t eaten by dogs, then we need to somehow account for his body, which people certainly would have been looking for after his followers started saying he was raised from the dead. Or so the argument goes.
As it happens, the chapter on this issue by Craig Evans in the evangelical response to Ehrman’s book was the one I actually found perhaps most persuasive, and your readers should be aware of it. Evans cites a variety of ancient texts – including passages from Philo, Josephus, and Roman legal documents – that give us good reasons to think Roman authorities were tolerant of Jewish religious customs. It would take too long to go through all of Evans’ evidence, but their cumulative force is striking, and he makes clear that his argument especially concerns what the Romans allowed in Jerusalem, the center of Jewish religious life, where religious demands for performing certain rites, like the burial of the dead, would have been especially forceful (Jews in other places, such as Alexandria, seemed to fare worse).
Even Ehrman’s own book unwittingly offers evidence for this. Recall the account he gives of Pontius Pilate erecting images of the Roman emperor in Jerusalem, which violated Jewish beliefs about “graven images.” What happened after the Jewish uproar over this? They were removed.
Evans also makes clear that tolerance for Jewish burial customs extended, in various circumstances, to those who were crucified. Most interestingly, in my view, is the archaeological evidence he marshals on this point.
A committee report by House Republicans claims it’s relatively few:
Only two-thirds of people signing up on Obamacare’s exchanges paid their premiums as of April 15, the US House Energy and Commerce Committee reported Wednesday. If true, that means one-third of people on the exchanges had not completed the final step to actually obtaining health insurance in time for the committee’s report.
So yes, there does seem to be a slight partisan aspect to racist attitudes in the Obama era. But it is not that big, and the general trend lines over the longer term are positive. What I’m grappling with is whether my own confirmation bias is blinding me to the persistence of truly base racism in American society. I can remember only two instances in my adult life when someone said something to me foully racist. One was when someone observed that in Provincetown, there was no crime because “there aren’t any blacks.” I ended that conversation at that point. Another was a long-ago one-night-stand which in the end lasted only a few minutes. We were back in this dude’s apartment and he was cussing the cable service he had. Then he started going off on the African-American men who had installed it. “Worthless niggers,” he said in a tone that stopped me dead. I left.
I remember those moments because they were so rare. But then I went to Harvard, a bastion of anti-racist liberalism, and live in a still-largely African-American city in what remains a very racially mixed neighborhood and over the years have obviously selected racists out of my life. No, I’m not saying racism is exhausted by the kinds of vile things I heard, and obviously milder forms can be much more pervasive (even in my own consciousness). What I’m saying is that I have been actually shocked by the baldness of Donald Sterling’s bigotry – and perhaps I shouldn’t be. Charles Blow has an excellent column today, unpacking its evil. One aspect:
Stiviano asks, “Do you know that I’m mixed?” Sterling responds, “No, I don’t know that.” She insists, “You know that I’m mixed.” Later he tells her, “You’re supposed to be a delicate white or a delicate Latina girl.”
The word “delicate” there hangs in the air like the smell of rotting flesh, because by omission and comparatively, it suggests that black women, or women who associate with black men, are somehow divested of their delicateness, which in this case, and the recess of this distorted mind, sounds a lot like a term of art for femininity, and by extension womanhood. This is a disturbing peek at the intersection of racism, misogyny and privilege. “I wish I could change the color of my skin,” Stiviano says. Sterling responds, “That’s not the issue.” He continues, “The issue is we don’t have to broadcast everything.”
Another disadvantage I have in grasping all this is that I wasn’t born in America and didn’t grow up here – and so the contours of America’s long and hideous conversation about race are not in my bones. All I can say is: I’m trying to fit all the new data points in my worldview, and haven’t reached a conclusion. Oh, and Ta-Nehisi could not have invented a series of revelations more likely to prove him right about the lingering power of white supremacy, in the shadows of our lives.
A couple of obvious things. The notion that the Ben Rhodes email was really about the broader situation in the Middle East and not about Benghazi – something actually peddled with a straight face by Jay Carney yesterday – is absurd. The email was specifically sent to prep Susan Rice for her Sunday morning talk show appearances after the attack on the US Consulate. It’s an obvious attempt to push back on the idea that the attack in Benghazi was a coordinated Jihadist effort which took the US by surprise and to present the infamous video as the real cause. I really can’t see any other viable interpretation:
The question is whether Rhodes was conveying the best spin on a confusing situation, or whether he knew full well that the video was unrelated to the attack and was providing political cover for the president.
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal poll on foreign policy made for a stark contrast with the growing consensus among the chattering classes about president Obama’s foreign policy. Here’s MoDo channeling the frustration of many and addressing herself directly to Obama:
You are the American president. And the American president should not perpetually use the word “eventually.” And he should not set a tone of resignation with references to this being a relay race and say he’s willing to take “a quarter of a loaf or half a loaf,” and muse that things may not come “to full fruition on your timetable.”
An American president should never say, as you did to the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, about presidents through history: “We’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” Mr. President, I am just trying to get my paragraph right. You need to think bigger.
A great line. Until you ask yourself what exactly does she mean by thinking bigger. The closest MoDo comes is the following:
Especially now that we have this scary World War III vibe with the Russians, we expect the president, especially one who ran as Babe Ruth, to hit home runs.
Home-runs, please is not exactly a productive contribution to the discussion. What on earth would a “home-run” mean in Ukraine, for example? But this analysis misses one core fact: Americans, in polling, really do not want to be policing the world any more. Here’s one take-away from the WSJ poll:
That’s a record 47 percent favoring a less active foreign policy than Obama has conducted. As for the “scary World War III vibe” MoDo wants reassurance on, only 5 percent of Americans want the US out front alone on Ukraine. A quarter want to delegate the issue to the EU. And almost half want action only in cooperation with other countries. The decidedly non-interventionist public also strongly opposed a strike in Syria; wanted withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan; and still prefer, in record numbers, for the US president to focus on domestic affairs. More to the point, this non-interventionist consensus crosses party lines. Obama has, on most issues, stayed in line with popular opinion. That’s one key reason why Rand Paul has traction. And it’s one reason Hillary Clinton will be vulnerable if she appears to want to return to neocon reflexes.
The paradox, it seems to me, is that Americans also miss the glory days. They both want withdrawal from the world but feel nostalgic for the heady post-Cold War days of easy hegemony, a budget surplus and a global reputation not stained by military occupations and torture. Robert Kagan had a shrewd column a month ago on this strange confluence of a president pursuing popular policies and becoming unpopular as a result. Here’s the poll of polls on foreign policy for Obama:
David Cross’s genius and NSFW take on the subject:
I have to say I haven’t thought about this in a while, and since posting that promo for the documentary, I find myself a little paranoid. Maybe it applies to me. I have never been able to bear hearing myself or watching myself on TV. It creeps me out in visceral ways. I can’t even listen to a podcast for very long without wanting to coil up in a ball of self-loathing. (By self-loathing, I don’t mean merely because of my sexual orientation. My self-hatred is so much more extensive and varied than that.) Still, I doubt it has nothing to do with anxiety over the “gay voice.”
I actually had a dream not too long ago where I was listening to an interview I gave on the radio and I sounded like Princess Diana. Seriously, my voice was quite clearly a woman’s. And it wasn’t a pleasant dream. Occasionally, I’ll catch a whiff of an old clip from, say, Charlie Rose or Brian Lamb, and my gay voice sounds gayer then than it does now – or at least so it seems to me. And in fact, before I came out in my late teens, I was much more stereotypically gay than I am now. I wore dandy-esque clothes; I was in the theater; as president of the Oxford Union, my first debate included a drag queen (by my invitation); at Oxford, I gamely initiated the Poohsticks Club, and my nickname was Piglet! I wasn’t just into college drama, I played the lead role in Another Country, a play where my first line was “I want to pour honey all over him and lick it off again.” No wonder that I was outed by the college newspaper, even though I’d never touched another man.
Sometimes I wonder if the outwardly gay presentation, for me at least, was related to the closet. Because I could not be public and open about my sexual orientation, my psyche sought to express it in other ways. What is repressed up-front finds a way to express itself indirectly. That’s why when I see a priest all decked out in frills and lace and gold, I immediately think: another repressed gay. In fact, I doubt whether much of the more elaborate liturgy, ritual and drama of high Catholicism isn’t entirely a function of frustrated queens finding some outlet for their otherwise repressed nature.
But after I came out, and grew up as a gay man in the midst of a sobering, mind-concentrating plague, I found those external signals less necessary.
For several years, Obama and his allies had been crediting a slowdown in the rate of growth for health care to payment reforms imposed by the law. But other analysts predicted that spending would pick up as the economy improved and people started loosening the family purse strings. As I reported earlier this month, there were already signs of growing health care spending in the fourth quarter of 2013, when it jumped 5.6 percent, which had been the fastest clip since 2004.
But the 9.9 percent jump (on an annualized basis) came in the quarter from January through March, which was the first three months in which individuals who gaining coverage through the law were able to use it. That was the fastest rate recorded since health care spending grew at a 10 percent rate in the third quarter of 1980.
Chait reminds Klein that a temporary spike in spending was predicted for this year:
This has exposed yet another instance where the “machinery of death,” to use Justice Harry Blackmun’s immortal phrase, is incapable of running with the sort of precision necessary to work a capital regime. What happened [Tuesday] night to Clayton Lockett surely won’t convince lawmakers in Oklahoma or Texas or Missouri or Louisiana or Alabama to end their experiment with the death penalty. But if what happened last night in Oklahoma doesn’t cause our nation’s judges to stop the cycle of secrecy over lethal injections, it will be a scandal.
Indeed, Lockett now is a symbol of feckless judicial review by the federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court. The justices in Washington have had countless opportunities in the past year to stop the madness caused by the current generation of lethal-injection secrecy. They long ago could have and should have accepted one of those cases for review to establish standards that would require states like Oklahoma to share basic information about the drugs used to kill prisoners. What happened to Clayton Lockett last night is on them, too.
Sam Kleiner also hopes the courts will take action:
Today, there are a number of cases progressing through the federal courts that are challenging the secrecy laws surrounding lethal injections. Ultimately, the courts and potentially the Supreme Court itself will have to determine whether such secrecy violates the Constitution. The Court held in 2002 that the ban on cruel and unusual punishment “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” While there may be a legitimate interest in protecting the suppliers of these drugs, our interest in protecting the integrity of our society’s most severe punishment is far greater.
Lauren Galik reviews the series of events leading up to Lockett’s execution:
Obama’s special task force assigned to address sexual assault on campuses has released its first report (pdf), which includes recommendations for what colleges should do:
The report calls for prevention programs that “are sustained (not brief, one-shot educational programs), comprehensive, and address the root individual, relational and societal causes of sexual assault.” Bystander intervention is listed as a “promising prevention strateg[y].” The CDC is currently researching the best sexual violence prevention practices.
The Task Force recommends that schools train officials on how to best respond to sexual assault complaints, avoiding “insensitive or judgmental comments” that make the victim feel he or she is being blamed instead of the person accused. It also recommended that colleges do away with mandatory reporting policies that may make students hesitant to report assaults in the first place. Assault survivors should have a place to turn to where they know what they say will remain confidential unless they say otherwise. “This is, by far, the problem we heard most about,” the report says.
The PSA seen above was released with the report. Bazelon wants to know why it took so long:
As popular as Piketty is here all of a sudden, he’s pretty passéin his home country:
Although Amazon.fr now puts [Capital in the 21st Century] at the top of its current best-selling books, it did not feature at all in the top 100 in 2013 and did not grab headlines when the 970-page French version came out in August last year. Across all outlets, the French version of Capital is currently in 192nd place, according to Edistat, the French book-publishers’ ranking.
The French seem almost bemused by the sudden international fame of their home-grown economist. “Thomas Piketty, une star américaine,” ran the headline of an article in La Tribune, a business newspaper.
Tyler Cowen and Veronique de Rugy explain why Capital has been such a bigger deal in America:
Zionists are having to think of new, more subtle ways to defend the occupation and dispossession of Palestinians. A new battlefield has opened up in an unlikely place: BuzzFeed, the fast-growing soft news website that rose to prominence by disseminating videos of cute animals, but now has pretensions to serious journalism.
A group called reThink Israel has paid for eleven articles on BuzzFeed in the last two months. The content of the articles — all written in the typical BuzzFeed “listicle” style — is at first glance relatively harmless and apolitical. One is headlined “12 Neighborhoods That’ll Stop You In Your Tracks.” It features photos of trendy neighborhoods in such cities as London, Montreal and Melbourne, along with “Tel Aviv, Israel” and “Haifa, Israel.” Another article promises readers “12 Sounds From Israel You’ll Soon Be Obsessed With,” and then there is “17 reasons Jaffa is the Brooklyn of Israel.” …
The financier of reThink Israel is the American casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. At Yeshiva University last October, as reported by Philip Weiss for Mondoweiss, Adelson described reThink Israel as as “an NGO for hasbara” — the Hebrew word Israel uses to describe its official outreach and propaganda. He added: “We’re going to provide information, propaganda if you will. We also say that we’re cool. The beaches are cool, the clubs are cool.” Adelson wants Israel to be “cool” to distract young Americans from Israeli policy.
Jia Lynn Yang explains why the pharma giant is trying to acquire its British rival AstraZeneca:
It’s no secret that one of Pfizer’s motivations in its $100 billion bid for AstraZeneca is to save big on U.S. taxes. By purchasing a foreign company with company cash being held overseas, the pharmaceutical giant avoids getting hit by the U.S. federal corporate tax rate of 35 percent.
As part of the deal, Pfizer is also seeking to incorporate in Britain, a break from the company’s American roots — and the American corporate tax rate. But Pfizer isn’t picking just any country as a potential new home for incorporation. The British government has been tweaking its tax code in recent years to make it easier for businesses to lower their tax bills — especially for multinationals with byzantine accounting structures. And in the pantheon of companies that do this, few are more adept than tech and pharmaceutical companies. Companies exactly like Pfizer.
Peter Waldman describes how Pfizer could finagle the acquisition, which AstraZeneca has so far rebuffed, to avoid US taxes entirely:
Stephanie Simon reports that the high-school graduation rate in the US has topped 80 percent for the first time in history, and that “if states can keep up their rapid pace of improvement, the rate could hit 90 percent by 2020”:
The improvement has been driven by steep gains among African-American and Hispanic students and by progress in shutting down hundreds of troubled urban schools dubbed “dropout factories.” And it’s not confined to one region of the country. Rural states such as Iowa, Vermont and Nebraska are among the best at keeping kids in school until graduation – but other top performers include Texas, Tennessee and Missouri, all of which serve large numbers of low-income students in densely populated cities. The practical result: Over the past decade, 1.7 million more students received diplomas than would have been expected if graduation rates had remained flat.
You wrote, “When you are a long-term HIV survivor, that kind of health security and independence is, well, priceless.” Take out “long-term HIV” and replace it with “person with diabetes” or “person with a seizure disorder” or “person with a heart condition” and all of us feel that same security and independence and relief that you describe. I’ve had well-controlled diabetes for almost 30 years, which includes my entire working life. And for my entire life, I’ve known that I had to get and keep a job that offered a group insurance plan (or be married to someone who had that) in order to take care of myself and be financially stable (i.e., in the middle-class).
So that’s what I’ve done; I worked when my ex-husband was in graduate school (his school coverage didn’t cover pre-existing conditions); I put off having children until he had a job with group insurance; I worked at in the most toxic law firm environment I can imagine for 6 1/2 years because I was divorced and had to provide my own coverage; I finally left when I was hired by the federal government (admittedly, a lot of benefits came with that move, not just good health coverage).
But in the last few months, another sense of freedom has crept up on me and I realize that NEVER AGAIN will I feel trapped by my job as I have for my entire working life.
If I decide to leave the law, I can. If I want to piece together several part-time jobs that that allow me to use my other skills and would provide me with the minimum income, I can do it. It’s all up to me. I have no more excuses. It almost feels like personal responsibility and freedom and adult behavior all wrapped up together. But that doesn’t make sense, because then the Republicans would be all for it, right? I am so thrilled that Obamacare exists and I use the name proudly whenever I can. Another meep-meep for the ages!
[The ACA's] assurance of a stable insurance market that does not screen out someone with a pre-existing condition made me far more comfortable starting my own business. It gave me a baseline of security that simply didn’t exist before. It helped make entrepreneurialism possible.
Neurologist Patrick McNamara believes our nighttime reveries are “directly related to long-term sexual strategies”:
If dreaming somehow reflects our sexual wish-fulfillment, then dream recall, dream content and dream sharing should be relatively lower in those who are satisfied with their current attachment orientation (secure, dismissive, and avoidant) and relatively higher among those who want to change their status (the preoccupied/anxious group). To test this idea, my team at Boston University recruited hundreds of volunteers until we had enough in each attachment category. We asked them about their dreams, and coders who were blind to the purpose of the study painstakingly analyzed them.
When we collated the results, we were startled by what we found.
Bryan Walsh spotlights a study on the correlation between traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) and homelessness:
Jane Topolovec-Vranic, a researcher in trauma and neurosurgery at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, surveyed 111 homeless men recruited from a city shelter to see whether they had suffered a TBI sometime in their past. She found that 45% of them had experienced a traumatic brain injury at some point in their life. (Sadly, most of her subjects’ TBIs resulted from assault.)
“You could see how it would happen,” she says. “You have a concussion, and you can’t concentrate or focus. Their thinking abilities and personalities change. They can’t manage at work, and they may lose their job, and eventually lose their families. And then it’s a negative spiral” — a spiral that, for the men in Topolovec-Vranic’s study, ends up in a homeless shelter.
The findings are important in demonstrating that homelessness can often be created by medical—as opposed to lifestyle—deviations. “Recognition that a TBI sustained in childhood or early teenage years could predispose someone to homelessness may challenge some assumptions that homelessness is a conscious choice made by these individuals, or just the result of their addictions or mental illness,” Dr. Topolovec-Vranic explains.
First up: our monthly update on the independent Dish. We’re now at 28,532 subscribers, edging toward 30,000. In the twelve months since last April 30, we have had revenue of $900K for the first time. So we hit our target four months’ late, if you’re not counting affiliate income. The merch moment is looming fast, so stay tuned for t-shirts and mugs. And we’re moving toward putting some form of video ads on the site for non-subscribers, even as we remain completely committed to an ad-free site for subscribers. So if you want to avoid seeing any ads ever, you know what to do. Subscribe!
Here’s a graph of our revenue for the past three months:
The big hump is the second wave of newly subscribed Dishheads, renewing after one year. The red line is for recurring payments, either monthly or annually, and April’s total intake was a little over $34,000. Over time, the red proportion should grow and grow. As for traffic, well over a million individual people read something on the Dish in April, our third best month in the past year. The two most popular posts in April were “The Hounding Of A Heretic” and “Jo Becker’s Troubling Travesty Of Gay History.“
As you can see, our revenue remains comfortably above last year’s – but not by much. As a consequence, we simply don’t have the budget to commission, edit and nurture long-form journalism by non-staffers just yet. So the full potential of Deep Dish will have to wait a bit. But with our extra revenue, we have been able to hire two interns as staffers, Tracy and Jonah, and use their skills to deepen the regular Dish. You may have noticed that our aggregation has become much more comprehensive of late. Take a post from today on Donald Sterling. It has eleven separate voices adding to the debate, a majority of them after the jump, both from the blogosphere and the in-tray. That follows a post with seven voices; and a personal grilling on the comparison with the Eich case. Our reader threads are also longer and deeper than in the past – again, primarily visible after the jump. Our thread on Truvada and the potential of a pill to prevent HIV-transmission was in many ways more informative than a long essay – with eight separate posts, including my views, Dave Cullen’s input, and many readers. Also, rather than let small reader comments – ones that wouldn’t necessitate a new post – fall by the wayside, we’ve been adding them as updates more and more, in order to feature as much of your input as possible. Even the window contest is getting beefed up. And don’t forget the resuscitated Book Club, which adds another layer of depth to the Dish experience – and the affiliate revenue helps pay for it.
So we’re focusing on making the Dish itself deeper until our budget grows to accommodate more commissioned pieces. But I’m still at work on one long-form essay and planning more. More podcasts are scheduled. Our goal is to do more and more to reward subscribers. But we remain committed to gradual evolution rather than big sudden leaps. It has served us well over the last fourteen years, and we see no reason to change course now.
Updates you might have missed: readers debated the fairness of Sterling getting fined $2.5 million dollars for his bigotry, more readers in the banking industry provided their expert take on the crackdown on porn-star accounts, and yet more readers added to the debate over Jesus’ apocalyptic views.
Thanks again for being the best readership any bloggers could ask for – and sustaining this enterprise unlike any other on the web. Thanks to you, we are truly independent, and our business model is not aiming for a future moment when we will (somehow) break even. We are breaking even. And we’re doing that without ads yet! That’s something we’re proud of. As you should be too.
