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If there is a singular skill that separates presidential contenders from presidential "also-rans" it is discipline. The ability to stay on message, to keep emotions in check, to avoid distractions, to understand that the long-game must take precedence over the daily news cycle and to dodge the inevitable political headaches that emerge is essential to political success on a national stage.
Obama has it; W had it; Nixon (at least in public) was practically the king. Here's who doesn't have it: Chris Christie, and it's the reason that his political career is on life support.
Even before the bombshell revelations that his top aides actively sought to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey by closing down on-ramps to the George Washington Bridge, it was fairly obvious that Christie was a man whose decisions were guided as much by impulse and emotion as political calculation.
There have been not one or two but repeated losses of his temper, even with his own constituents. This video of Christie yelling at a skeptic on the Jersey boardwalk while holding aloft an ice cream cone spoke to Christie's remarkable inability (particularly for a politician) to control his temper. He couldn't even prevent himself from yelling at a teacher who questioned his education policies only days before Election Day in November.
To be sure, lots of politicians are thin-skinned. But Christie is different, with his almost complete lack of impulse control. An article last month in the New York Times highlighted Christie's struggles. After John F McKeon, a New Jersey assemblyman, offered a mild critique of Christie's relationship with public sector employees, he received a handwritten note complaining about it. "What governor would take the time to write a personal note over a relatively innocuous comment?" asked McKeon.
But this behavior fits a regular pattern of reprisals and retaliation against anyone who even mildly crosses Christie.
A disciplined politician would understand the pitfalls of making so many political enemies and of acting so harshly in public. But not Christie, which leads us to this week's "Bridge-gate".
What is perhaps most striking about these actions is that they were directed at a small-town mayor who refused to endorse Christie in a gubernatorial race in 2013 that he had basically no chance of losing. Christie was always going to wallop his Democratic opponent Barbara Buono. The real subtext of the race was the governor's entrance onto the national stage as a Republican presidential contender. If there was ever a moment to let bygones be bygones or to turn the other cheek, it was here.
Of course, Christie has decided to use the Captain Renault defense, "'I'm shocked, shocked that my aides would do this." He even claimed (we can only assume with a straight face) that, "this behavior is not representative of me or my administration in any way." It's the rhetoric equivalent of a drone strike on irony.
We may never know for sure, but personally, I don't buy for a second the notion that Christie's deputy chief of staff and his hand-picked choice for the Port Authority were operating independently of Christie. That he has a long track record of personally striking back at political opponents who cross him – but sat this one out – stretches credibility. As the New York Times noted:
Even Republican lawmakers who have supported Mr Christie tell stories of being punished when he perceived them as not supporting him enough.
At this point, the New Jersey governor has lost any right to the benefit of the doubt.
Even if Christie wasn't involved, what does it say about the culture in the governor's office? What kind of shop is he running when one of his most trusted aides would feel comfortable conspiring with the Port Authority to use lane closures as a way to punish Christie's political opponents? Even if Christie was at arms length on the bridge closures, his fingerprints are all over this.
It's why that when the smoke clears not only will Christie no longer be the front-runner for the Republican nomination – there's a reasonable chance he'll no longer be Governor of New Jersey. To be sure, it was always going to be difficult for Christie to win over Republican primary voters – what with his willingness to shake hands with President Obama and his feint toward political moderation. But the bigger problem for Christie was cultural. Republicans voters like a tough guy, but there's toughness and then there's Jersey toughness. These aren't the same things.
Above all what today's revelations demonstrate is that he simply lacked the discipline to be a national figure, to undergo political scrutiny and to respond to political differences with something other than fury. He was a ticking time bomb as a politician. It was only a matter of time before he blew up.
Have you heard the one about the gay teacher who was being fired for marrying his male partner, then was told he could possibly stay on if he got a divorce? This may sound like a joke – in theory the church is equally opposed to both divorce and gay marriage – but it was an actual suggestion made to Mark Zmuda, a vice principal at the Eastside Catholic School in Seattle, Washington, who was being forced to resign from his job a few weeks ago when school administrators learned that he is both married and gay.
Zmuda didn't go for the divorce option and was terminated despite a barrage of protest led by the school's mostly Catholic student body. It's unlikely (since he has refused to stop being gay) that the teacher will be reinstated, but the incident has exposed, in a very public way, the church's willingness to be flexible on some of its principles (divorce sort of OK), while remaining totally rigid on others (gay marriage definitely not OK). More importantly, the ongoing protests surrounding Zmuda's dismissal should make it clear to the church that singling out gay people for special (mis)treatment is not something many Catholics are prepared to go on tolerating.
In fact, just yesterday Eastside Catholic School announced that freelance drama coach Stephanie Merrow, who is engaged to another woman, is "welcome" to continue working at the school. The school is now looking for ways to prevent the Zmuda controversy from happening again.
Zmuda married his long term partner last summer, just seven months after it became legal to do so in Washington state. He continued working without incident at the school until December, when some colleagues apparently alerted school administrators of his marriage. Almost immediately after this transgression was discovered (getting married to someone you love while gay counts as a pretty major transgression in Catholic land), Zmuda was out of a job. Legal experts say the school acted within their rights – as an administrator in the school, he was obliged to abide by Catholic teachings. But while his termination may satisfy doctrinal purists, it has caused distress and confusion to many Catholics (including Zmuda himself) who are unable to reconcile the so-called Christian ethos of the church with what they apparently see as a very un-Christian act.
Since the dismissal became public, students at the school – at least some of whom must be practicing Catholics – have been staging protest rallies, sit-ins and started an online campaign to have their teacher reinstated. Even many faculty members, including the school's president, Sister Mary Tracy, were ambivalent about the need to let go a competent and popular teacher. In a video interview with a former student, Zmuda spoke of how his colleagues stood by him the day they were told he would be leaving his job, and spent over an hour trying to come up with options that would prevent his departure. It was Sister Mary Tracy who brought up the possibility of his getting a divorce, a suggestion she later regretted but "owned". As she explained to Seattle King5 News:
I suggested to dissolve the marriage to save his job. I was trying to hang onto him.
Ultimately, it was the Archdiocese, not the school, who made the decision that Zmuda had to go, so her efforts were in vain.
Sister Mary Tracy, most of the faculty at the school, and most of the student body are not the only local Catholics who are uncomfortable with how Zmuda was treated for being gay. Seattle's newly elected mayor, Ed Murray, who also happens to be Catholic, gay and married, has spoken out at the protest rallies. Two other Seattle-based Catholics, Barbara Guzzo and Kirby Brown penned an op-ed for the Seattle Times calling for the teacher's immediate reinstatement. In it, they pointed out that if the church were to fire every employee who failed to abide by Catholic doctrine (the more than 90% of practicing Catholics who use contraceptives for starters), it would be a very short-staffed institution.
In the past two years, more than 12 gay employees of Catholic institutions have lost their jobs for getting married or supporting marriage equality. One of these employees, Carla Hale, a teacher for 19 years at Bishop Watterson High School in Columbus, Ohio, was sacked shortly after her mother's funeral, when parents of one of her students objected to seeing her female partner's name listed in the obituary notice. The particularly unkind way in which Hale was subsequently dismissed sparked a literal "halestorm" of protest similar to the one currently brewing for Zmuda. But the church still refused to reinstate her (Hale has since announced a settlement with the diocese).
The church will continue to ignore the protests of many in its flock surrounding terminations of employees like Hale and Zmuda, but it will do so at its peril. One of Zmuda's former students summed up the growing discomfort among some Catholics regarding the unequal treatment of gay people in a tweet to his holiness Pope Francis, or as he is better known on twitter, @Pontifex:
Hey big guy, we need you over here in Washington. A teacher is being fired for love.
So far, the pope, who was named Man of the Year by Advocate, a prominent gay news magazine, has not weighed in on this particular situation or on any of the firings. This is a bit disappointing in light of his comments to reporters last year that "if a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge"? Francis also stated recently that the church had "locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules", and needed to start treating gay people with compassion and respect.
But the pope ought to know that words are meaningless if not followed by meaningful action, and none has yet been taken. For now at least, it's people like Zmuda who are burning while Rome continues to fiddle. As more Catholics turn up the heat in protest, someday soon, the churches unkind and outdated policies are bound to backfire.
There is a new vision of journalism – call it the auteur school – in which the business shifts from being organized by institutions to being organized around individual journalists with discrete followings.
The latest development is the announcement by Ezra Klein that he will leave the Washington Post and is looking for investors to back him – with a reported eight figure investment (ie more than $10m!) – in an independent enterprise. Last week Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who ran the Wall Street Journal tech conference AllThingsD, announced that, following the WSJ ending its relationship with them, they were setting up in business backed by NBC and other investors.
Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA-Edward Snowden story for the Guardian, is the headliner in a new left-oriented journalism venture backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
The former New York Times data wiz-kid, Nate Silver, has left the Times to set up a new site and vertical business under the auspice of ABC and its subsidiary ESPN. Andrew Sullivan, a blogger first at the Atlantic and then at the Daily Beast, may be the grandfather of the auteur school, leaving the Daily Beast a year ago to set up his own subscription site.
In fact, one might as well include here Tina Brown, who used the seemingly attractive economics of the web, along with her personal brand and the backing of Barry Diller, to claim journalistic independence with the Daily Beast – and in the process lost, I am reliably told, an astounding $100m.
And that leads to my cautionary question: is this all journalistic vanity and hubris, ending in certain tears, or is there plausible economic logic to individual journalistic fiefdoms?
Let me make a basic distinction. There are a set of personal brand journalism businesses that are now working at a self-sustaining level. Arianna Huffington's The Huffington Post, is the most successful of them. There is also Henry Blodget's Business Insider. And there is Buzzfeed which is fronted by the blogger Ben Smith, among a few others. In a sense, these all provide a model or inspiration for personal brand journalism. Except, that their accomplishment is less a personal journalism vision than it is the more specialized skill of traffic aggregation. That's the key attribute and asset of each of these sites, not the uniqueness of the journalism, but the back end deals, algorithms, and canny, proprietary, practices of drawing large amounts of traffic.
Klein, for his part, is a 29-year-old liberal blogger with a specialty in Washington policy issues, who has become well-known in liberal circles because of frequent appearances on MSNBC. And while it is possible that he could have a facility for the arcane arts of digital traffic pumping, that's not evident in his resume, nor, to say the least, a natural fit with the Washington policy beat. Klein, like all the new hopeful personal brands, seems less interested in the publishing business per se then in a kind of channel purity and deepness – and aggrandizement.
That's a new notion, this solipsistic brandedness. The old organizational notion in journalism was exactly the opposite. There were never enough readers interested in one subject or one writer so you created a package of many subjects and writers, sharing the attention and the rewards. This was an older method of traffic aggregation. Everybody benefited from the combined heft and influence.
Mossberg and Swisher's AllThingsD clearly benefited from, if not depended on, the influence of Mossberg's tech product review column in the Wall Street Journal. You paid $5,500 to go to the Mossberg and Swisher conference, or agreed to speak at it, in part to curry favor with Mossberg. Now, without that power, Mossberg, as an independent tech impresario, may well be much less of a draw. Conferences are a tough business, and it is hard to think of one that has succeeded merely because its moderators, lacking powerful leverage, are well informed.
On the other hand, Nate Silver, the New York Times election data blogger, could demonstrably show that a disproportionate amount of Times traffic came to him personally. The Times is famous for telling its staffers that they are nothing without the Times, and, after a while, that probably rankled Silver. Like a television star, he put himself out to bid. And, in fact, was bought by ABC, where he now, riskily, ties his future to his own profitability. In television, journalistic measures of prestige and influence and of the value of being right where others are wrong, are not worth that much. In television terms (whether digitally or on the screen), you have to expressly make more than they pay you – and it's a pretty precise calculation – or they quickly lose interest in you.
The flight from journalist institutions has much to do, obviously, with what everyone assumes to be bleak futures within them. But, curiously, the escape is to an even more difficult economic landscape. At a cost per thousand advertising rate on the web or in mobile of $1 or $2 – pretty standard – Ezra Klein will make, optimistically, $8,000 a month, before expenses, if he has a million readers (assuming four page view per unique visitor). Klein apparently has the idea to build out his brand to encompass much more policy coverage, perhaps attracting more visitors and offering more pages to view. Still, it's hard to think how the 8-figure investment he is reportedly seeking, could ever, in a million years, pay off.
Another model is the Greenwald one of partnering with a rich backer who believes in your journalistic mission as much as you do. The problem here is that no one believes as much in you as you. And, given the Tina Brown example, you can lose amounts of money in digital journalism that might make even the most devoted backer choke – and close you.
To date, Andrew Sullivan is the only branded journalist who has set up his own personal pay wall, deciding that selling ads is not just a distracting endeavor, but often a miserable one. His results are encouraging, but have not inspired anyone to follow him. He recently reported $800,000 in income for 2013. The site lists seven staffers, in addition to Sullivan himself, without mentioning tech or subscription, accounting, and administrative support, so probably half to two-thirds of what the site makes (and that assumes people are working from their homes) goes in overhead costs before Sullivan is paid. Of course, this is a living.
But probably not the future.
Conservatives are having a field day "sticking it" to liberals about the weather. They have no time for scientific theories like "Arctic amplification," which only perfectly models how general warming trends can lead to increasingly severe cold snaps. After all, like evolution, Arctic amplification is "just a theory."
The common refrain, in light of the "polar vortex" sweeping the country, reads a little something -- and just about as intelligently -- as this:
If you believe in global warming your an idiot
— andrew fitzgerald (@ajfitzzz) January 6, 2014So what happen to global warming??
— Donna Klimowicz (@housesdelaware) January 6, 2014Even fictional antagonists, like "Shooter McGavin" from Adam Sandler's magnum opus Happy Gilmore, are declaring global warming a dead issue:
BREAKING: Books on Global Warming being pulled from shelves today.
— Shooter McGavin (@ShooterMcGavin_) January 6, 2014Some conservatives are, however, attempting to take the high road:
@ToddCaddie @ESPNCaddie Come on TM, they now call it Climate Change since global warming has been proven false...
— Kyle Watson (@caddieKdub) January 6, 2014Of course, they fail to realize that they're talking not about the underlying theory, but what it's called in the popular press. Declaring that a theory's "named wrong" doesn't disprove it any more than the fact that the Obamacare website launch was a disaster "proves" that the Affordable Care Act will destroy America.
Given that the "polar vortex" engulfing the nation sounds like a plan masterminded by a mustache-twirling evil genius, the story requires a villain, and conservatives have found theirs:
Global warming my ass, Al Gore can suck one
— Mikey T (@MikeTreinen) January 6, 2014hey Al Gore where u at with your global warming bs?! too busy sleeping with youre Nobel Peas Price?? #Unbelievable
— Derek Grzeskowiak (@d_REk13) January 6, 2014got to work it was almost 50 now it's 36 and snowing. Once again, thanks a lot Al Gore. You and your global warming nonsense and manbearpig
— platypus billed duck (@woodcore22) January 6, 2014The larger conservative outlets are following suit, refusing to acknowledge that cold weather could be a cascade effect of global warming. For example, Red State's Erick Erickson designed what looks to him like a scientific study:
The difference between people who believe in the 2nd coming of Jesus and those who believe in global warming is that Jesus will return.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) January 2, 2014Rush Limbaugh, of course, just thinks liberals are making it all up:
RUSH LIMBAUGH: The media creating 'Polar Vortex' to try and blame 'cold' on global warming https://t.co/1Hw8eCmlK2
— The Right Scoop (@TheRightScoop) January 6, 2014Conservative radio host Bryan Fischer has issued a series of "catastrophic global warming alerts":
Catastrophic global warming alert: all schools in Chicago closed today. Wind chill of -45. https://t.co/kiFyV7T8OW
— Bryan Fischer (@BryanJFischer) January 6, 2014Catastrophic global warming alert: so cold in Canada, getting "frost quakes." Sound like gunfire. https://t.co/z5bj5mVXDk
— Bryan Fischer (@BryanJFischer) January 6, 2014But, of course, reason should win out in the end:
If you think snow disproves global warming, I'm going to assume you think jumping disproves gravity.
— Grand Old Parody (@GrandOldParody1) January 6, 2014Re: global warming and the cold weather
"Liberals keep telling me the Titanic is sinking but my side of the ship is 500 feet in the air."
— justine (@nerdyjewishgirl) January 4, 2014Some liberals are, however, incapable of responding to rightwing stupidity on the subject anymore:
I’m fed up with answering about warming & all that cold+ snowstorm RT @ClimateDesk #Newsflash: Weather isn't climate https://t.co/AatepalUla
— Sergio Abranches (@abranches) January 6, 2014[Image via AFP]
Popular opinion is moving towards more progressive policies, though Republicans won't go down without a fight
Oh to be a liberal in America today. In New York City, a Democrat has finally been elected mayor after a 24-year absence from City Hall – and he's a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. Gay marriage is legal in 18 states including, most bizarrely, Utah, one of the most conservative states. The minimum wage is going up around the country and you can even smoke a joint in Colorado. Obamacare, for all its speedbumps over the past few weeks, is the law of the land; the Senate filibuster just took a big hit (and along with it Republican obstructionism); a nuclear deal with Iran is in the works and even Obama is talking about the scourge of income inequality.
Everything, it seems, is coming up roses.
But before progressives start donning their Che Guevera T-shirts and popping their artisanal champagne corks the liberal moment is coming face to face with a difficult reality: conservatives are not going down without a fight.
In fact, just over a year since President Obama was re-elected and it seemed the country was moving in a more progressive direction, Republicans have thwarted much of his agenda and 2014 (as well as 2015 and 2016) promises more of the same.
Immigration reform, which was at the forefront of Obama's re-election bid, is on life support; gun control was blocked in the Senate (and never would have made it through the House anyway). The harsh budget cuts from sequestration remain largely intact as government spending is growing at anaemically low rates.
In the states, the story isn't much better. Twenty-three of the Republican ones have rejected Medicaid expansion, which is leaving more than 5 million Americans on the outside looking in on Obamacare. Emboldened by the Supreme Court decision to overturn a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, states across the country are enacting new and onerous voting restrictions; perhaps worst of all, 2013 was the culmination of a three-year period in which more state restrictions on abortion were enacted than in the entire previous decade.
Quite simply, as the country has taken a giant step forward on a number of progressive goals, it has also taken a major step back. Indeed, in key regards, while Obamacare represents an enormous victory for American progressives and is perhaps the most important piece of social policy in more than four decades, so many liberal priorities remain unfulfilled. And nowhere is that more true than on fiscal policy. While Democrats were finally able to wring tax increases out of the Republican party they've been unable to get conservatives to agree to the sort of government spending that is key not only to the country's economic recovery but to creating new jobs and reducing income inequality.
While New York City's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, ran on a platform of universal pre-kindergarten, the president's own plan along these lines is dead on arrival in Congress. The same is probably true for his $50bn proposal for infrastructure spending. At the end of December, unemployment insurance expired for more than a million Americans and there seems to be little impetus in Congress to restore the funding. This comes only months after the Republicans ruthlessly cut food stamp benefits for poor Americans.
The reason for this is not surprising or new. Republicans have, since Obama took office in 2009, made it their number one goal to obstruct practically every piece of legislation that the president and his party supporters favour. With the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives this year – and for the foreseeable future – that is unlikely to change soon.
This speaks to a larger challenge of American democracy: it was constructed to be a bulwark against progress. Whether it's the three branches of the US government, the separate legislative bodies, the 50 individual state governments or a court system with the power to strike down laws, the number of obstacles in the American political system are far greater than the number of glide points. This has always given conservatives a political advantage – it's much easier to stop reform (or water it down) than it is to enact new laws. If anything, the liberal moment may find its greatest opportunities in the same places it did during the civil rights era – in the court system (as has been the case on the issue of gay marriage). Although even there it may have to wait for President Obama to get his court picks through the Senate before significant progress can be made.
But liberals shouldn't lose all hope. On a range of issues, progressive goals have never been so strongly supported by the American people. From gay marriage and marijuana legalisation to raising the minimum wage, immigration reform, background checks for gun buyers and even the specifics of government spending, public opinion is strongly in their favour. Americans are more supportive of activist government, populist politics and socially liberal policies than at any time in recent memory. In addition, millennials (or those in their 20s and early 30s) are decidedly liberal, even going so far in a recent poll to prefer socialism to capitalism.
The failure of liberalism to enact the types of reforms that are essential to their vision of America does not come from an inability to move popular opinion in their favour – it comes from their failure to find a way around last-gasp conservative rejectionism. But as Republicans have taken increasingly extreme positions on a host of issues – from abortion to taxes and, most damagingly, immigration – they've marginalised themselves and diminished the appeal of conservatism, particularly to young Americans, women and Hispanics (the fastest growing demographic group in the country).
Indeed, the success of Republicans in blocking reform is more of a desperate rearguard action to hold back progress than it is an indication of conservative success or even political ascendancy. If anything, it is making the realisation of the liberal moment that much more likely by making conservatism that much more unpopular.
The problem is: that's not much good for the woman today who is seeking an abortion in a Republican state or the person looking for a job who is about to lose his unemployment benefits or the next victim of gun violence.
In the near term, American politics is likely to look like an extreme version of the gridlock and dysfunction to which Americans have become all too accustomed. The question then is not will liberals get their day in the sun – it's when. Unfortunately for them – and the voters who support them – 2014 is unlikely to be the year it happens.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Does religious liberty extend to the right to not have to fill out paperwork? That's the latest position religious organizations are taking against the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It's crazy, yes. But, welcome to the future of "religious freedom" litigation.
On New Years Eve, supreme court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued an injunction blocking the Obama administration from implementing the aspect of the ACA known as the "contraception mandate", which requires employee insurance plans to cover a range of preventative women's health needs. The government has until today to respond. The injunction itself is standard legal procedure, and says little about how Sotomayor or the rest of the court will rule on the merits of the case. But the lawsuit itself, and the related suits challenging the contraception mandate, offer an increasingly troubling look at just how far peddlers of far-right ideology will go not just to claim their own right to live according to their beliefs, but to mandate that you and I do the same.
The ACA has a series of outs for religious employers who say medication like contraception violates their moral beliefs. It's essentially three-tied: for-profit organizations have to cover contraception in their health plans; explicitly religious organizations like churches don't have to provide contraception if they believe birth control is morally wrong; and religiously-affiliated non-profits that are neither owned nor controlled by religious groups do not have to provide contraception either, but they have to fill out a form certifying that they are religiously-affiliated, and then a third party administrator makes sure that employees can get contraception if they need it. The third-party administrator, and not the employer, pays for contraception coverage.
In the case that led Sotomayor to issue the injunction, an organization called the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged objected to the ACA's contraception requirement. All the Little Sisters have to do is fill out a form and the organization will be under no obligation to pay for birth control for its many employees – which include home health aides, nurses, administrators and a variety of women who may not be Catholic or, like 98% of sexually active Catholic women, may choose to use a birth control method other than natural family planning – but apparently a form is too great an intrusion on their religious liberty.
Worth noting: the Little Sisters and other groups opposing the ACA contraception mandate claim that the hormonal contraceptives covered function as "abortifacients", preventing an embryo from implanting in the uterus. That may be their sincerely-held belief, but it's not a scientific one. In fact, studies indicate that the methods at issue prevent fertilization, not implantation. But facts and science are no match for faith.
The Becket Fund, a conservative organization representing the Little Sisters, claims (pdf) that the ACA restricts the religious freedom of the Sisters because the Sisters rely on a Catholic insurance company, the Christian Brothers Trust, for their company health insurance. The Christian Brothers Trust doesn't provide coverage for hormonal birth control, IUDs or sterilization.
According to the Becket Fund, the Sisters are stuck between a rock and a hard place: they could continue to participate in the Christian Brothers Trust insurance coverage and refuse to designate the Christian Brothers as a contraception provider, which the Becket Fund says would result in ACA-related fines, or they could designate the Christian Brothers Trust to provide contraception coverage, violating both groups' deeply-held religious beliefs. Alternately, they could drop health coverage all together, which would also put them at risk for fines. Or, they could ditch the Christian Brothers Trust and designate new group insurance coverage, which would cover contraception for employees without making the Sisters pay for or negotiate a single thing, but would again require them to fill out a form that supposedly violates their belief that employees shouldn't be allowed to get contraception.
The Little Sisters aren't paying for contraception even through a third-party-secured insurance plan; they certainly aren't being asked to distribute it, and Catholic nuns aren't being force-fed birth control pills. They simply have to sign a piece of paper saying they're a religious group, and then turn to a third party to negotiate all the details.
Their claim that even this accommodation violates their religious liberty is telling. These ACA-related "religious liberty" arguments aren't actually about the freedom to exercise your own religion, or the right to be free of doing something that violates your conscience. These assertions are about an overwhelming sense of entitlement on behalf of religious organizations to force anyone within their reach to adhere to their beliefs.
After all, the religious groups that oppose contraception have lost the cultural battle – overwhelming numbers of women rely on methods that these groups deem immoral. It's not enough to simply encourage religious adherents to take sexual health advice from celibate old men. They have to use coercion and force.
The Little Sisters case is extra rich because, as it turns out, the Christian Brothers Trust insurance group can refuse to provide contraception and will face no fines or consequences. That's because the Trust is a self-insured "church plan", which means that the Little Sisters can designate the Christian Brothers as the third-party administrators, and if the Brothers still refuse to provide contraception coverage, the government can't fine them (pdf). In other words: the Little Sisters can continue operating exactly as before, and nothing will happen.
The religious cases against the ACA pit two different interests against each other: the desire of religious organizations to have their employees adhere to a set of religious principles, and the interest of women to obtain a full range of basic healthcare. Contraception is one of the most commonly prescribed medications, and the consequences of denying it are stark – lack of contraception access can mean everything from serious health complications to economic hardship to death.
Religious liberty is also of fundamental importance. But religious liberty should end at your own nose, and not entitle you to demand that anyone within your reach adhere to your same principles. It certainly should not give any religiously affiliated organization carte blanche to argue that filling out a form is a substantial burden, and the form requirement itself is tantamount to religious discrimination. The American legal system privileges religious belief over many other kinds of deeply-held moral values, so while this line of argument wouldn't hold up in court, it's still worth asking: how is filling out a form a more substantial burden than, say, having to pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket for birth control, or having to travel a substantial distance and spend thousands on an abortion, or raising a child?
All the Little Sisters and religiously affiliated groups like them have to do is fill out a piece of paper. They will not have to pay for or in any way facilitate contraception access to their employees. That's at least less of a burden than a lawsuit.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
[Strict nun via Shutterstock]
Documents released by the National Archives show just how well the former prime minister was served by the spin machine
One can look at today's disclosures about the doings in the office of Margaret Thatcher and wonder whether poor Gordon Brown got the roughest end of a very rough stick. The Labour premier ran his ill-fated administration in the harsh glare of the information age. We followed him forensically in real time. His failings were laid bare, his tantrums leaked, inconsistencies pulled apart on the front pages and on the evening news.
In comparison, Thatcher was able to do what she did in an agreeably closed bubble. There were mutterings of dissent from her 'Wets' but nothing to take the shine off an administration that even now is held up as one that heralded renewal and political renaissance in Britain.
The newly declassified government archives from 1984 paint a different picture and may in time prompt meaningful re-assessment.
From the files we learn new things about Thatcher and the miners' strike. It was the well-rehearsed case of the government and the National Coal Board that they wanted to close 20 pits. When the miners' leader, Arthur Scargill, said that was the thin end of the wedge, he was variously depicted as wicked or soft in the head. But the documents reveal a plan to shut 75 mines over three years. Her reputation, finely honed and widely circulated, was for straight-talking. Was she straight with the electorate over the mines?
We now know that for all the claims made by supporters and apologists who say she hassled the apartheid regime for the release of Nelson Mandela, she actually made little or no effort to raise the issue during talks with the hardline South African president PW Botha at Chequers on 2 June 1984.
She could not have stopped the assassin's bullet that killed PC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in 1984. But we now know that prior to the shooting, warnings of atrocity should anti-Gadaffi protests be allowed to go ahead outside the London embassy were made to British diplomats. Imagine that sequence of events on Gordon's watch. Later, according to the classified documents, the Iron Lady – resolute, principled, unflinching – accepted that the government would have to allow "a murderer to go free".
Even the poll tax, the measure that would send her into that fatal downward spiral, was avoidable calamity. The files reveal a memo from a minister warning that her local government reforms are "going to cause the government lots of trouble over the next few years". Still, the lady was not for turning.
She is fortunate that we discuss her administrations in terms of theatre; her relationships with Reagan and Gorbachev, or hand-bagging of faint-hearted leaders in Europe; her defence of the Falklands. But what of the omissions? What did she do of significance to address Britain's main problem of postwar economic restructuring? Or the hollowing out of the industrial base that she accelerated and what the people or communities affected would do without the industries that once sustained them? She did little or nothing about our international decline in terms of skills or schooling or to settle the debate about our place in Europe. Indeed she was not even able to settle the debate within her own party – which suffers from that legacy still.
We assert that in this modern era, the skills of political science and practice are more pronounced and persuasive than they have ever been, but as information seeps out about the reign of Margaret Thatcher, the facts give lie to that. She was served by the most formidable spin machine we have seen and aided by outriders who were happy to overlook the ruinous effect of many of her policies because they admired her style and ideology.
It's all too late now; she has gone and the era has passed, although its ill-effects are still to be seen in communities that have never recovered from her wilful sledgehammer assault upon them. As the veil lifts further, the BBC should have a care. Don't be surprised if the protest ditty Ding Dong the Witch is Dead starts selling enough to chart again.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
We are comforted by his ability to solve intractable problems, but our love of Sherlock, and science, is tinged with apprehension
More than 75 different actors have taken him on, making him the most portrayed character on film and television ever. Ian McKellen will be the latest to add his name to the roster, playing an elderly Sherlock Holmes in a film set in 1947. The BBC's Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, is back on New Year's Day for a third season, and there are rumours of a third film in the Robert Downey Jr franchise.
We can't get enough of Sherlock Holmes. But why? On paper, Holmes is an unlikely hero. He is callous, arrogant, bad tempered, never has love affairs and shuns society. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle described his character as "a calculating machine". Perhaps this is his appeal – Holmes is not just a solver of mysteries, but a mystery himself.
Countless reinventions have played with every aspect of Holmes's character and world – costume, setting, time period, gender, sexuality – but one thing never changes: he is a scientist. His character is a mashup of every stereotype we have ever had about scientists – solitary, introverted, daring, reckless, slightly inhuman, cruel, obsessive, imaginative and brilliant.
The world he was originally created for was one obsessed with science. The Victorian era saw the birth of Charles Babbage's own "calculating machine", a forerunner of modern computers. Many early fictional detectives – Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin, Jacques Futrelle's "Thinking Machine" – were characters who prided themselves on their systematic, unemotional approach to solving mysteries.
Holmes, too, boasts of his lack of emotions – "I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix" – and his ability to separate fact from theory. "I make a point of never having any prejudices," he tells Inspector Forrester in The Adventure of the Reigate Squires, "and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me." Like Babbage's Difference Engine, there is no personality involved, only the application of a method. "He was," says Watson, "the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen."
But as Conan Doyle well knew, no scientist, let alone a commercial literary character, could survive on cold, mechanical logic alone. The dogged, unimaginative fact collector – a role in which Doyle rather unkindly casts the whole professional police force – is not our only stereotype of scientists. Holmes is also a reclusive, eccentric bohemian, relying on intuition and mysterious flashes of insight.
"See the value of imagination," he tells Watson in Silver Blaze, having conjured a scene in his head and found evidence to justify it. "We imagined what might have happened, acted on the supposition, and find ourselves justified."
In The Red Headed League, he pauses mid-investigation to visit "violin land", where he "sat in the stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness, gently waving his long, thin fingers in time to the music." He solves the puzzle of The Man with the Twisted Lip by spending a whole night sitting on a pile of pillows built up in "a sort of Eastern divan", smoking, "his eyes fixed vacantly upon the corner of the ceiling".
At other times, he abandons his cerebral methods altogether and opts for good old fashioned fisticuffs. "The next few minutes were delicious," he tells Watson in The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist. "It was a straight left against a slogging ruffian." At other times, he claims to be "the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather".
In bringing together these seemingly contradictory characteristics, Holmes is a more realistic scientist, and human being, than any of his fictional rivals. He also lends himself well to adaptation – each new Holmes has a whole suite of personality traits to choose from. Some highlight the narcotics abuse, others the violin playing, some the cutting wit. Downey Jr focuses on his physicality, Jeremy Brett was quietly mysterious, Basil Rathbone outgoing. Cumberbatch's Holmes is brilliantly clever, to the point of madness. But they are all scientists, because what never changes is the method, and the goal.
As Holmes says in A Study in Scarlet, "There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."
That, perhaps, is at the heart of our fascination with Holmes, and with science. We are comforted by the thought that, however baffling the mystery, there is a solution to be found, and someone capable of finding it. It is reassuring that Holmes uses nothing more than logic, imagination and the occasional street urchin to solve problems, rather than implausible gadgets and superpowers. But our love of Holmes, like science, is tinged with apprehension. We're never quite sure how far he might go in the pursuit of truth.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
The 'How to Win the Class War' satirist tells Claire Provost about the 'shadowy plot' to claw back working-class gains
In a discreet villa in Switzerland, carefully chosen experts have been assembled by a shadowy group of wealthy and powerful commissioners and tasked with answering a single big question: how, amid the global financial crisis, can a renaissance of western capitalism be best ensured?
This is the Machiavellian scene that opens the latest book from Susan George, the prolific Franco-American political scientist and global justice activist. While perhaps best known for her work on world hunger, poverty and debt, George has turned to Europe and the US in How to Win the Class War, a satire of the 1%, or the "Davos class", as she puts it, in reference to the elite annual gatherings of the World Economic Forum.
Tongue-in-cheek and at times bizarre, the book is likely to strike a chord with those involved in movements such as Occupy and others increasingly suspicious of political parties and elite institutions. "I don't think preachy books work," says George, who was in London this month. "I think sometimes people are more moved by [satire] and black humour … God knows there's plenty to satirise out there."
George, 79, has spent decades studying and critiquing mainstream economic policy and is a key figure in alter-globalisation circles. Born in Ohio during the Great Depression, she moved to France in the 1950s and never left, joining activist movements against France's colonial war in Algeria and America's war in Vietnam. Today, she is honorary president of Attac-France, a group founded to push for taxes on foreign exchange transactions but which now works on a range of issues, and heads the board of the Transnational Institute network of "scholar-activists".
Satire is an ancient political tool and George has turned to it before; her latest book is a sequel to The Lugano Report, published in 1999 and sold as a secret report drafted by researchers hired to advise on whether global capitalism could survive the next millennium.
International in scope, The Lugano Report concluded that the four horsemen of the apocalypse (conquest, war, famine and pestilence) should be set loose to help rid the planet of its many "useless" people. Brutal enough to earn comparisons with the 18th-century satirical essay A Modest Proposal – in which Jonathan Swift suggested that the impoverished Irish should sell their children as food to rich people – The Lugano Report flew off the shelves in France and has since been published in more than a dozen languages.
While she has spent much of her life thinking globally and writing about challenges facing developing countries, George says European governments' commitments to push through austerity policies despite their social costs has given her a new focus. "We are very preoccupied with our own situation and that's where the militant strength is going now, it's not going into fighting hunger or debt," she says.
George is quick to argue, however, that there are important links to be drawn between European austerity policies and the structural adjustment programmes that poor countries adopted in the 1970s and 1980s.
"Ordinary people in the [global] south from the late 1970s until today have had to pay for the crimes and the greed and the odious debts of the dictators of their own governments, of their own upper classes, and they know very well what this means for the population: it means deep cuts in housing, education, culture, health," she says.
"Now it's our turn. Now it's called austerity. Call it what you like, but it's the same policy – it's socialise losses, privatise profits … [and] this has been pushed to a point where, although we began richer than the countries of the south … we are really creating now a situation where there are desperately poor people in Europe, in Britain, in normally wealthy countries."
The question for George is whether the austerity programmes pushed by European governments despite their social costs are mistakes, or deliberate policies. She is convinced of the latter and argues there is a class in Europe that has never accepted the gains working people have made since the second world war and has decided that this is the perfect moment to try to claw them back.
In her latest book, George's imagined working group of experts give their benefactors the good news first: that they (the 1%) are winning and are "even more firmly in control of economic, political and even social developments than was the case before the crisis struck". The bad news is that the situation remains precarious.
Her tips for the rich include exploiting divisions among peoples' movements and exercising restraint in public displays of wealth. Above all, the working group argues that "to persuade is to win", and for the relentless repetition of lines such as: "the private sector will always outperform the public"; "a truly free society cannot exist without a free market"; "inequality is not a so-called problem but is intrinsic to society and could be genetic".
If George can seem obsessed with secret cabals hatching grand plans for world domination, she's quick to say she does not believe in conspiracies – only interests and well-thought-out strategies to further them. She also has retorts ready for anyone who suggests she's pessimistic about the future. "I think that when things get to such a point, everyone is disgusted with how the politicians are behaving, that we can innovate and bring new ideas and policies to the fore."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
The billionaire mayor is a series of pluses and minuses that never quite add up. Let's hope some of the city's funky grit returns now
It's the eve of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's exodus from New York City's top office after three terms, and I have such mixed feelings about him. For me, the billionaire mayor is a series of pluses and minuses that never add up to a cohesive whole.
On the one hand, he's the man behind one of the few news outlets that's still pumping money into journalism. On the other hand, he seems to delight in dodging reporters' questions – or insulting them. I'm happy he snuffed out indoor smoking in the city, and as a health nut, I have to admit that I agree with him when it comes to trans fats and supersized sodas. I really appreciate Bloomberg's work lobbying for gun control, but I really, really loathe his unflagging endorsement of the stop-and-frisk police policy.
Sure, he built bike paths, erected shiny new skyscrapers and rocked out the High Line park on a refurbished railway track. Crime is down. Tourism is thriving. Small business got a boost from some of his initiatives.
But at the same time, close to half of New Yorkers are living at or below the poverty line. During Bloomberg's tenure, the homeless rates skyrocketed, creating what the New York Times has called "the most unequal metropolis in America". There are over 22,000 homeless children in the city, the highest number since the Great Depression. Walk through the city's Union Square early on a Sunday morning, and you have to tiptoe over rows upon rows of sleeping bodies.
I'm an on-again, off again New Yorker. I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Staten Island, came back to the city for a stretch in college and lived through the worst of New York's crack era when I was in my 20s, eventually leaving for grad school. Over the years, I've come back again and again, on business trips, to see family, to hang out, to work. I can't quit New York.
Members of my extended family, teachers and principals and union vets, rail against Bloomberg and what they see as his "tone-deaf" attitude towards schools and parents, particularly parents of color. My cousin, Peter Goodman, a veteran educator, put it this way:
He managed to alienate everybody. He seemed to take pleasure in denigrating anyone who disagreed with him.
Parachuting into New York as I now do, I'm encountering a radically changed city. Back in the day, I remember getting off the subway at 125th and Lenox Avenue in Harlem and literally having to step over a fresh corpse – a man had just been shot. Now, Harlem is high-priced and fancy, with chichi cafes and high-end beauty chains.
Don't get me wrong, no one wants to return to those days of crack and crime. And I love a good restaurant and am no stranger to beauty chains like Sephora. But I can't help but feel like something's missing from the city that I love. It's gone from gritty to gourmet with no stop in between. Harlem was famously the home of a fabulous renaissance in African-American literature, but could today's Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston or Claude McKay or WEB DuBois afford to live there now?
As a young dancer, I gobbled up everything that the city's cultural life had to offer: Broadway, off-Broadway, Mikhail Baryshnikov with American Ballet Theatre, Alvin Ailey concerts at City Center, weird post-post-modern dance performances in rickety lofts, outdoor concerts. Art was available and accessible to everyone. Now, not so much.
I've lived all over Manhattan, from the East Side to the Upper West Side to Harlem to Washington Heights. Sure, it helped to be rich if you were living in Manhattan. But I also saw that middle and lower class families could raise their children, too, social workers and classical musicians and teachers and dockworkers. There was room for everybody. Today? I'm not so sure. Manhattan has become a playground for the rich – a sterile playground – and Brooklyn's not far behind.
I'm heartened to hear Mayor-elect Bill De Blasio talk about how New York has become a "tale of two cities" with an ever-widening gap between those who have and those who don't. Let's hope he can bring back some of New York's funky grit. After a decade plus of the Bloombergian years, it's time for a change.
As my friend Tracey Mendelsohn, a lifelong New Yorker put it, "I'm not even mad, I just want him to go. He took a bit of New York's soul."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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